Knight's Reading List XIII: January 2008

Reading List:

Buhler, Patricia. Streetwise Human Resources Management.
Church, Forrest. So Help Me God: The Founding Fathers and the First Great Battle Over Church and State.
Gladwell, Malcolm. Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking.
Keegan, John, editor. The Book of War.
Keyssar, Alexander. The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States.
Mann, Thomas. The Magic Mountain.

Non-Fiction:

Buhler, Patricia. Streetwise Human Resources Management. 2002. xiii + 367 pages. I read this book as part of an effort to expand my project management skills. Buhler is sensitive to the legal environment of human resources work in this “politically correct” age, so her practical tips on interviewing and selecting candidates are particularly helpful. While she exaggerates the importance of the personnel function in management, it is a matter of importance, and one which too many managers neglect at their peril.

Church, Forrest. So Help Me God: The Founding Fathers and the First Great Battle Over Church and State. New York: Harcourt, 2007. 530 pages. Index.
I really liked this book by the son of the late Idaho Senator Frank Church. For one thing, a book on religion by a man named “Church” is just irresistible, isn’t it? For another, Church is the pastor of a large church, of a mainstream denomination, in Manhattan, and he knows something about the content of the religious positions he describes.

This book covers church-state relations during the first five presidential administrations in the United States, 1789-1825. Washington’s term was largely uncontroversial. Adams, who believed himself to be a man of broad tolerance, was, in fact, constrained by his Puritan upbringing to offend people in this area, as he did in so many others. Jefferson, who was mistrusted, even hated, by the religious establishment, especially in New England, maintained enough of an appearance of respect for religion to deprive his enemies of ammunition. By the administrations of Madison and Monroe, the religious establishment was passing from the scene, and institutional interference in politics was a thing of the past. This is one reason why the Monroe administration was known as the “Era of Good Feelings.”

The most interesting theme, for me, was that the more the churches, as churches, tried to interfere directly in politics, the less influential they were, in politics and in society at large. Thus, the Congregational Church in New England was explicitly political, especially in opposing Jefferson, but Jefferson had a successful presidency, and the church was eventually disestablished. In fact, Church makes a good case that, once churches stopped trying to be the “second estate,” they became much more successful as churches, and their indirect influence on politics became stronger than their direct influence had ever been.

It has been noted that one reason for low church attendance in Europe is that the churches are supported by the several governments. Therefore, the ministers don’t need to fill the pews in order to feed their families and fix their roofs. The origins of churches in the United States as marketing organizations lies in the end of their status as government bureaucracies. Church tells that story, and he tells it well.

Gladwell, Malcolm. Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking. Boston: Little, Brown & Company, 2005. vii + 277 pages. Gladwell investigates the manner in which we come to know things without knowing that we are learning them. This provides a basis for what is loosely known as “intuition.” Gladwell is also concerned with the cases in which such immediate impressions turn out to be wrong. What I see as most interesting is the possibility that one could train oneself, or be trained, to make accurate, intuitive judgments, by-passing a lot of reflection and calculation. The point is that intuitive judgments are often reached in five or six seconds, while a reasoned justification of them could take days, if it were possible at all. (See the novel Tactics of Mistake (1971), by Gordon R. Dickson, for a speculative exploration of intuition and the possibility for its development and training.)

Keegan, John, editor. The Book of War. New York: Penguin Books, 2000. Copyright 1999. xix + 492 pages. Sources and Acknowledgements. Index of Authors. Index. This is a large collection of writings about war, from excerpts of Thucydides and Xenophon, to accounts of the Gulf War in 1990. The “Sources and Acknowledgements” provides one with a splendid bibliography of first-person accounts and original sources on the history of warfare.

Alexander Stahlberg gives a unique account of the Prussian cavalry before and during the Hitler years. Lieutenant-Colonel Fremantle’s diary describes the Battle of Gettysburg through the eyes of an English observer. One of the most interesting documents collected here is the obituary of David Stirling, founder of the Special Air Service Regiment (SAS), the model for special forces units in various countries, including the United States.

Keegan’s book does what a really good anthology ought to do; it makes you want to go out and read more of the works of these authors, and others, on the subject at hand.

Keyssar, Alexander. The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States. New York: Basic Books, 2000. xxiv + 467 pages. Notes. Index. A good and thorough academic study of the expansion, and occasional contraction, of the right to vote in America. Keyssar’s main point is that the right to vote has not expanded steadily and inexorably since about 2.5% of the population elected George Washington. Rather, there has always been a tension between groups wanting to expand the right to vote, and groups wanting to restrict it. The current battle between Republicans who see voter fraud in every polling place, and Democrats who see any attempt to validate a voter’s credentials as “voter suppression,” is typical, not unusual, in American politics.

One of the four components of the Republican Party at its founding was the Know-Nothing bloc, the old American Party, which was anti-immigrant, and which sponsored laws to prevent non-citizens from voting. (Yes, at one time, and in some states, citizenship was not a requirement for voting in the United States.) That strain, as well as forces opposed to the enfranchisement of non-whites, women, migrants, and many other groups, has been around since 1800, and, after 208 years, is still going strong.

A good corrective for anyone who thinks that such rights as voting “naturally” or “inevitably” expand their reach.

Fiction:

Mann, Thomas. The Magic Mountain. Translated from the German by John E. Woods. New York: Vintage Books, 1995 [1924]. xii + 706 pages. Someone has certainly published a list of the 100 best novels ever written. I suspect that there are many such lists. One short list I saw included The Grapes of Wrath, To Kill a Mockingbird, Madame Bovary, From Here to Eternity, The Pearl, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, and Tom Jones. One list I found online had Pride and Prejudice at the top. Another featured Don Quixote and included The Brothers Karamazov. I’ve read those, as well as Hemingway, Faulkner, Tolstoy, and Hugo. I would place The Magic Mountain near the top of the list. It isn’t very popular these days, and the only “action sequence” is at the very end. But it explores profound questions of the health of men and nations, and the relations among people, individually and collectively. Taking tuberculosis as a metaphor for the political sickness of Europe that resulted in the First World War, Mann constructs a masterpiece around the story of Hans Castorp, whose life has just come to mean something when it is thrown away.

Knight's Reading List I: January 2007

I read quite a lot, and quite a variety, as well. Some of the books I read are well-known - some are even regarded as classics. On the other hand, some are pretty obscure, and many of those deserve their obscurity. Still, I get something out of almost every work I read, and I'd be happy to share my impressions of any book with others who find the title of interest. In these reading lists, I provide basic information on books which I finished in the month in question.

In January, 2007, I finished reading the following works:

Nevins, Allan. The Emergence of Lincoln, Volume II: Prologue to Civil War 1859-1861. 1950. viii + 524 pages, including Appendices, Bibliography, and Index.

Melville, Herman. Billy Budd and the Piazza Tales. 2006. xliv + 338 pages.

O'Brian, Patrick. Post Captain. 1972. 496 pages

Appleyard, Dennis R. and Alfred J. Field, Jr. International Economics. xxvi + 822 pages, including Index.

Not my most productive month, January, though I could note that I was also reading four other books, which, however, I did not finish. (In fact, I have yet to finish The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann.) I read a total of 1272 pages in eight books during the month.

Now, which would I recommend? On the fictional side of the ledger, Post Captain is an expertly composed and very entertaining, as well as thoroughly-researched, novel of the British Navy during the Napoleonic Wars. Melville's style, on the other hand, is not likely to be to everyone's taste, and some of the stories miss the mark. "Bartleby the Scrivener" makes very little sense, but "Benito Cereno" is pretty good. Unfortunately, Melville uses the denseness of his viewpoint characters to build suspense (but Conan Doyle has the same fault.)

International Economics is a textbook, and I would only recommend it to someone who really wants to gain a technical understanding of that field. Economics is a subject matter which relies on recent examples to demonstrate its currency (no pun intended.) I would buy something newer if I wanted to begin study of this subject.

Allan Nevins is, I think, one of the great historians of the 20th century, who wrote a long, multi-volume history of the origins of the Civil War and the war itself. (I have four of the volumes and have read three; I need to read the volume that comes before this one.) He tends to stress the economic side of the conflict and, with regard to the war, the North's advantage in material factors. This book provides really wonderful background to two others I'll mention later: Doris Kearns Goodwin's Team of Rivals and Gore Vidal's Lincoln.