La Sheila recently raved about it, and since the things she praises tend to be well done, I went for another look.

All I can think of is a perfect swan dive - there is a pleasure that comes from watching simple (perhaps even formula) material, executed wonderfully well. This is great execution.

I went in expecting to be impressed by Ben Kingsley and Laurence Fishburne. I went in knowing that Sheila RAVED about a moment where Joe Mantegna just BRINGS IT.

What suprised me was that Joan Allen stole the picture as the mom.

Good movie, much enjoyment, and I strongly recommend.

This is book 5 in Modesitt's Cadmian Chronicles.

It felt familiar - we have the talented and smart hero (two of them this time) working wtih life force, order, and power while working against a conspiracy. The heros are variations on his standard hero. The world and magic are variations on his standard world. He is ringing the changes on a theme, which is fine because it is a good theme.

I found myself basically NOT trying to keep track of the conspiracy and actors. I could not remember who was who, who was where, who was allied with whom, and who was betraying whome. There was a serious case of Russian Novel Syndrome going on with the off-stage characters.

Instead I just followed the moment-by-moment decision making of the two heros.

And it was enough.

This is the sequel to Tinker telling what happened next.

I can see why Spencer claims to love writing about Tinker - she is a great character.

Highly entertaining - I lost sleep to finish it.

I was reading it while tired, and much of the book takes place while Tinker is short of sleep and having trouble with people messing with her dreams.

I am not sure if Spencer successfully wrote Tinker into that fatigue-fugue where it is hard to tell dream from reality, or if my own fatigue just took me there.

Good stuff.

I want to re-read it.

I have fallen behind on my log entries, so I am going to put in a batch of stubs.

I read it, I liked it.

Brock explains how he got sucked into the right-wing anti-Clinton movement of the 1990s. He then apologizes for his actions, and points out some dangers for the future once this gang of self-indulgent moralists and fulminating haters got control of the government.

I liked it.

I was amused to read a gay Republican writing a conversion narrative about his recovery from right-wing politics. Jonathan Edwards' literary form has traveled a strange path to get to this book.

Good stuff.

Kevin Phillips writes a lot of books, and it shows.

This is a tripartate narrative that first explains the relationship between the modern Republican party and oil, religion, and debt, and then combines the three into a indictment of the policies and coalitions that support George W. Bush.

It is one of those books that are very hard to read carefully. I found that when Phillips was writing about the things I knew nothing about, his story seemed to make sense. But when he wrote about material I knew well, I suddenly saw shallow research, a reliance on synecdote rather than analysis, and a presentation of the past that was, while not wrong, not complete either.

I have noticed this tendency in other big sweeping tales, and especially in big sweeping tales of the rise and fall of great powers.

As a result I found it a fun book to read, and a book that opens up some very interesting questions. But, because I can't buy the parts of the story that I know, I also can not quite buy the parts that I do not know.

I agree with Phillips that the modern Republican party is fundamentally dangerous because of the way that it combines theological correctness (I love that term!) to combine religious followers with big-business leaders to support ruinous financial structures and dangerously misconceived and mismanaged foreign policy.

I don't agree that Phillips book supports the accurate gut sense that it is based on.

Interesting and worth reading, but not compelling.

Wen Spencer's Tinker is a joy to read. It is literate, fast-paced, compelling and smart. While there are times when the pace gets a little too fast, those are also the moments where our impatient heroine is getting flustered and, in pop military parlance, has let someone get inside her decision curve.

Tinker lives in the American city of Pittsburgh, which has been transferred to the alien planet of elfhome as a side-effect of a stargate in orbit over China. Well, alien is not quite the right word, alternate reality of elfhome might be better.

Spencer ends up tying together some of the cliches from the urban elf sub-genre with the more traditional tales of sidhe and oni and things that go bump in the night to create a coherent and compelling world.

Within this world we meet Tinker, a young lady who is very smart, very charismatic, not quite emotionally mature, and yet combines all of those traits into a compelling and very real character. She gets horny; she flirts; she invents things; she breaks the heart of one of her friends by accident; she is a highly effective person who is not a perfect person. The combination makes for good reading and a compelling lead character.

I could go on, but that would lead to even more spoilers than I have given here.

Highly recommended, and I am off to read more by Wen Spencer.

This is about as good as popular history gets, which is pretty darn good indeed.

Traxel takes a single, important year and tells its story chronologically. He is more interested in telling a story than in engaging other historians. He does cite other people in the text from time to time - he is no David McCullogh that way - but his primary purpose is synthesis and narrative. The narrative that he tells is one of a nation becoming modern, a coming of age story for a large, complex body of people.

The cover does an absolutely brilliant job of depicting the way that the events inside have been framed. The front cover is the famous picture of Cuba reconciling the North and the South, a staged picture with two old men in Civil War uniforms shaking hands under the blessing of a girl in a white dress wearing a tiara marked "Cuba." The back is the National Biscuit Company's iconic advertisement of a boy in a yellow slicker holding an equally waterproof box of Uneeda Biscuits. Empire, reunification, and the second industrial revolution all combined in a single powerful year.

Traxel puts most of his attention on the United States' emergence as an imperial power, first with the Spanish American War and then with the decision to annex the Philippines after that war. The second large story that he tells is of the rise of Theodore Roosevelt from hyper-energetic assistant secretary of the navy to war hero to Governor of New York and future vice president. Both of these stories are told against the backdrop of the second industrial revolution - we see violent labor strikes, crippling industrial accidents, and the emergence of the National Biscuit Company and its antidote to the old-fashioned cracker barrel. The final part of the story is that of race in the United States, for 1898 saw both the Wilmington NC race riot and the charge of the 9th and 10th Cavalry up San Juan Hill. The Progressive Era marked the nadir of race relations in the modern United States, and 1898 is after Plessy v. Ferguson but before Woodrow Wilson would segregate the federal government.

The prose is simple and powerful, the events compelling the coverage complete. Traxel accommodates his tight chronological focus by letting his story break free of the 1898 at the point where he introduces and says farewell to each character. So when we meet Teddy Roosevelt we get his backstory, we then follow Roosevelt through a chronological narrative of the year, and it is only after his last moment on the stage that Traxel tells us the trajectory of Roosevelt's later political career. He follows the same pattern for other people, other institutions, and the net effect emphasizes his contention that 1898 was the crucial year that the universe changed.

There are a few places where the narrative falters - we learn about the murder of President McKinley's brother in law in the month when McKinley found out about it, and we learn how that murder altered his campaign plans during the mid-term Congressional elections, but after that we never go back to the small town in Ohio. Events appear and disappear from the narrative, just as they would have from the perspective of someone who lived through the year, but many of the threads feel unwoven and unresolved. That may have been intentional - we don't learn the answers to many stories - but it leads to a few jarring transitions. In addition, it emphasizes the extent to which this is popular and not analytical history. Traxel tells us what happens, and he tells us what happened next, but he does not spend a lot of foreground time and energy explaining why most of the events he chronicles actually matter. The reader is left to speculate about the importance of a storm off the coast of New England, because that storm does not really connect to either the growth of big business or the expansion of empire. Still, it happened and so we are told about it.

Those are quibbles. This was a great book great fun to read, and heartily recommended!

This is a nice light and readable book about the experiences of women during the American Revolution. Berkin has several intentions here, including pointing out that the American Revolution was not a mere matter of a couple of bloody noses but was instead very much a destructive war, especially along the Canadian border and in the South.

She tells her story through anecdote piled on anecdote, all of them compelling, some detailed and others a simple harrowing paragraph - like the woman who fled British foragers only to watch her infant daughter die in her arms from exposure as they hid in the woods.

Berkin takes care to mention both patriot and loyalist, white, black and indian women, to tell stories of heroism and deprivation together, and especially, to focus on the marked class difference between the camp followers who did the armys' laundry and the officers wives who provided moments of gentility and refinement during winter camp.

This is a great book for undergraduate or even for high school students. I know that I found a heck of a lot of great details that I will work into my classes in the future. Berkin hides her scholarship - no notes, no visible impedimentia of theory or structure other than an introduction that explains why she chose to arrange her chapters as she did. This makes it a very accessible book for the students, and we professional types can always go digging until we find the footnotes.

Good stuff!

This started out as a fantasy that took the traditional elements and worked some nice changes on them. We start out in a city ruled by a guild of female bureaucrats who have institutionalized state atheism, covered over the magical relics of the past, and are trying to manage a succession crisis when their old mother superior dies. So far, so good.

But from there the execution does not live up to the premise. To make it worse, about half-way through it feels like Fallon ran out of words for her plot outline, and so action on action, double-cross on double cross, decision on decision all pile together to the point where we have no good sense why anyone is acting as they do, believing the statements of the other characters, or even coming up with or accepting basically stupid plans. In fact, that is a good condemnation of the entire book: it starts out as an interesting variation on familiar themes, but dies of stupidity before the story ends.

There was a sequel. I got ten pages in before deciding that the stupid quotient had not improved, and dropped it.

There are better things to read. Skip this one.

I think I have been reading this book for a year.

And that is a compliment. The book was both interesting enough to keep me from chucking it into the "did not finish" bin and long enough that it took a mighty lot of reading to get through it. (I also put it aside several times to read other more pressing books.)

Fehrenbacher does a wonderful job of digging deeply into a single complex historical moment, explaining the events, the actors, and the consequences of their actions. It is a book about a court case, and mostly about the meaning that people assigned to the court case. Fehrenbacher suggests that the real impact of the case came not when it was decided but about 18 months later. Southern Democrats who had other reasons for disliking and distrusting Stephen Douglas used the case to attack him for his actions during the Lecompton controversy, while Republicans both claimed that the case was full of inadmissable dicta and argued that the case was yet another crucial step in the slave power conspiracy intended to use the federal government to make slavery legal across the nation regardless of the wishes of local inhabitants.

The book is older, but still holds together well. Good stuff, and I got at least 20 minutes of class time out of it.

Yet another story in his Jack Ryan v China wish-fulfillment/war story.

I have read it before. I felt the urge to dive back into Clancy-world. I disagree with many of the guys positions, but he can turn a page-turner and, unlike say John Ringo, he hides the fundamental stupidities of his books.

Toddler stirring, so no Clancy-rant today. Lets just say that cardboard characters, systematic partisan mis-readings of the American governmental system, and stereotyped (STUPID) villains get tedious after a while.

Mostly focused on current events, but one very good insight.
"Before we begin, however, let me make one important observation. To designate our general discussion area as that of church and state can be misleading. The problem as it exists in America is not so much a relationship between two institutions as one between two outlooks of the individual, his outlook as a citizen and his outlook as a member of a religious denomination. For in a democracy, where soveriegnty resides in the people, the struggle between God and Caesar must necessarily be internalized. To porject it outward, to deal with it as wholly objective, is to miss its key dimension. What we are really dealing with in America is a competition between two religions, the one civil, the other denominational. It is up to the individual citizen to balance these tow sets of claims, to decide upon the extent of his allegiance to each. 2 Historically our nation has attempted through its ideals and goals to bind the people together under God, giving them, however unsuccessfully at times, a genuine apprehension of God's transcendent reality. Americans have thust ended to find the symbols of ultimate meaning not only in their churches but also in their country. Hence the so-called 'conflict between church and state' is basically an attempt by citizens with allegiance to both institutions to evaluate and criticize the one by criteria received from the other. We should not be surprised, then, to find tensions in this area which are perennial, built as they are into the whole fabric of our society. . . . " 21-22
[Note 2 cites Mead "The Fact of Pluralism and the Persistence of Sectarianism" in Ewyn Smith [ed] The Religion of the Republic. Also Loren Beth The American Theory of Church and State, 141-2.]

"Religious pluralism was a fact in America long before it became an object of belief." 22

Rest is not so useful for me.

This is a call to arms for (conservative) Christians to combat the "religious cleansing" of schools and secular society. Very political, very contemporary, not very useful to me.

Semonche's summary of origins of religious liberty
"The religious differences of the American people gave rise to a pluralist society. Any talk of a Protestant America not only neglects those who were not of that faith, but also obscures the vital and important differences among Protestants in colonial society. More than anything else, these differences ensured religious liberty in the new nation."1

Discussing the lack of a Quaker clause to the right to bear arms, in fact the deletion of such language before the amendment passed congress, Semonche comments "Apparently the idea that a person had a right to interpose his religion between himself and a civil obligation had little acceptance in American soceity in the late eighteenth century." 21

Begin Blockquote:
I certainly, Mr. Speaker, know not the deisgn of the Declaration of Rights made by te people of this State in the year 1776, if it was not to consecrate cerain great and fundamental rights and principles which even the Constitution cannot impair, . . . if, then, a belief in the Protestant religion is required by the Constitution, to qualify a man for a seat in this house, and such qualification is dispensed with by the Decalration of Rights, the provision of the Constitution must be altogether inoperative; as the language of the Bill of Rights is, "that all men hav ea natural and inalienable right to worship ALMIGHTY GOD according to the dictates oftheir own consciences." It is undoubtedly a natural right, and when it is declared to be an inalienable one by the people in their sovereign and original capacity, any attempt to alienate either by the Cosntitution or by law, must be vain and fruitless.
"It is difficult to conceive how such a provision crept into the Constitution, unless it is from the difficulty the human mid feels in suddenly emancipating itself from fetters by which it has long been enchained: . . .
If a man should hold religious principles incompatible with the freedom and safety of the State, I do not hesitate to pronounce that he should be excluded from the public councils of the same; and I trust if I know myself, no one would be more ready to aid and assist than myself. But I should really be at a loss to specify any known religious principles which are thus dangerous. It is surely a question between man and his Maker, and requires more than human attributes to pronounce which of the numerous sects prevailing in the world is most acceptable to the Deity. If a man fulfills the duties of that religion, which his education of his conscience has pointed to [110] him as the true one, no merson, I hold, in this our land of liberty, as a right toa rraign him at the bar of any inquisition: and the day , I trust, has long passed, when principles merely sepculative were propagated byforce; when the sincere and pious were made victims and the light-minded bribed into hypocrites.
The purest homage man could render to the Almighty was the sacrifice of his passions and the performance of his duties. That the ruler of the universe would receive with equal benignity the various offerings of man's adoration, if they proceeded from the heart. Governments only concern the actions and conduct of man, and not his speculative notions. Who among us feels himself so exalted above his fellows as to have a right to dictate to them any mode of belief? Will you bind the conscience in chains, and fasten convictions upon the mind in spite of the conclusions of reason and of those ties and habitudes which are blended with every pulsation of the heart? Are you prepared to plunge atonce from the sublime heights of mroal legislation into the dark and gloomy caverns of superstitious ignorance? Will you drive from your shors and from the shelter of you constituion, all who do not lay their oblations on the same altar, observe the same rutual, and subscribe to the same dogmas? If so, which, among the various sects into which we are divided, shall be the favored one?
I should insult the understanding of this House to suppose it posible that they could ever assent to such absurdities; for all know that persecution in all its shapes and modifications, is contrary to the genious of our government and the spirit of our laws, and that it can never prduce any other efect than to render menn hypocrites or martyrs. . . .
Nothin is more easily demonstrated than that the conduct alone is the subject of human laws, and that man ought to suffer civil disqualification for what he does, and not for what he thinks. The midn can receive laws only from Him, of whose divine essence it is a portion; He alone can punish disobedience; for who else can know it smovement,s or estimate ther merits? The religion I rpofess,inculcates every duty which man oes to his fellow men; it enouns upon its votaries the practice of every virtue, and the detestation of every vice; it teaches them to hope for the favor of heaven exactly in proportion as their lives have been directed by just, honorable,and benevolent maxims. This, then, gentlement, is my creed, -- it was impressed upon my infant mind; it has been the director of my youth, the monitor of my manhood, and will, I trust, be the consolation of my old age. At any rate, Mr. Speaker, I am sure that you cannot see antying in this Religion, to deprive me of my seat in this house. So far as related to my life and conduct, the examination of thsee I submit with cheerfulness to your candid and liberal construciton. What may be the religion of him who made this objection against me, or whether he has any religion or not I am unable to say. I have never considered it my duty to pry into the belief of other members of [111] this house. If their actions are upright and conduct just, the rest is for their own consideration, not for mine. I do not seek to make converts to my faith, whatever it may be esteemed in the eyes of my ofificous friend, nor do I exclude any one from my esteem or friendship, because he and I differ in that respect. The same charity, therefore, it is not unreasonable to expect, will be extended to myself, because in all things that relate to the State and to the duties of civil life, I am bound by the same obligations with my fellow-citizens, nor does any man subscribe more sincerely than myself to the maxim, "whatever ye would that men should do unto you do ye so even unto them, for such is the law and the prophets."
End blockquote, pp 109-111

Maryland's test act barred Jews from both the legislature and the legal profession. Campaign to overturn the test began 1797, did not succeed until 1826. Quotes Brackenridge speech on the Jew Bill, 1809. Not quoting because it was a losing bill.

Phoco 111-135
Some useful stuff, not quite worth commonplacing.

This is the Jesse Lee Prize Essay for 1979.

Jones examines the Northern Methodists after the Civil War. He has a good review of civil religion as it applies to mid-century Americans, but his primary focus is on the 1860s and 1870s.

Not useful for the dissertation, but if I ever write a second volume on civil religion then I will have to read this.