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Writers should be wary of trying to change the world. Too often such pretensions lead to stultifying prose, self-righteous bloviating or empty propaganda.” — Bruce Feiler. Read more at
voices.washingtonpost.com/political-bookworm.
3 books about the tea party
Make no mistake: Tea party anger is shaking up the political landscape. You need look no further than the white-hot glow lingering in the sky over Del- aware after the latest primary elections. But where did this siege mentality come from, why is it so fer- vent, how long will it last — and the biggest question of all: Will the movement self-immolate, or will it keep spreading its scorched-earth rebellion? Here are three books that, lacking the benefit of hind- sight, are banking on the luck of foresight.
1
HISTORY REVIEW BY KIRK DAVIS SWINEHART I. W. HUTCHISON/THE BRIDGEMAN ART LIBRARY
A country built on skins
FUR, FORTUNE, AND EMPIRE The Epic History of the Fur Trade in America By Eric Jay Dolin Norton. 442 pp. $29.95
E
ven among historians of colonial America — who should know and care about such things — the fur trade tends to elicit
groans of boredom. The subject is so blandly ubiquitous that it seems to demand little explanation even as it remains, at heart, a confounding mystery to anyone but the most nar- rowly focused specialists. Like the transatlantic slave trade, the fur trade exists more as a nebulous con- cept than as a richly complex indus- try populated by some of the most colorful and nefarious personalities in world history. And that’s because it is rendered unrecognizable by its powerful association with a primi- tive, far-distant past. Yet the fur trade remains very much alive: a multi-billion-dollar global business with discernible ties to its earlier incarnation. In “Fur, Fortune, and Empire,” Eric Jay Dolin ranges far and wide over land and sea, searching for the beating heart of a gargantuan industry touched by almost every aspect of human society and human nature: war, power, money, faith, desireand ambition. Dolin concerns himself primarily with the trade’s North American theater between the 17th and late 19th centuries, from Euro- pean colonization to post-Revolu- tionary America’s colonization of its own Western interior. But he keeps a close eye on the wider world, too. As in “Leviathan,” his highly praised book on U.S. whaling, he re- stores what most of us regard as an American institution to its rightful place on the international stage. The result is easily the finest tale of the trade in recent memory, a crisp-
ly written tale unburdened by ex- cessive detail or homespun pro- vincialism.
One of the great virtues of “Fur,
Fortune, and Empire” is its em- phasis on continuity. The Amer- ican trade ebbed and flowed over its first 150 years, often dramat- ically. But contrary to what histori- ans of the trade’s earliest days sug- gest, the storied American pursuit of fur didn’t cease with Britain’s disruptive wartime invasion of the rebelling colonies or even with the near extinction of certain fur-bear- ing animals in the Northeastern colonies. If anything, the trade ex- panded and flourished as never before in the wake of decoloniza- tion — when American traders were forced to seek pelts well be- yond familiar shores. The craze for furs inaugurated by Henry Hud- son’s abortive search for the Northwest Passage, in 1609, had waned for numerous reasons by the time George Washington as- sumed office nearly 200 years lat- er. But it came vigorously to life again in the Pacific Northwest, when Americans eventually learned of Capt. James Cook’s lu- crative trade in sea otter skins. The colonists were probably too
busy fighting Britain in the late 1770s to follow Cook’s machinations in the Pacific, much less in Canton, where his sea otter pelts fetched un- heard-of sums. Although word of Cook’s success in China ultimately “sparked one of the biggest rushes of the American fur trade,” the man’s place in the history of the American trade is easily overlooked. After all, he wasn’t American. Dolin claims too much when he
says, “In time, the fur trade deter- mined the course of empire” and “spurred the colonization of eastern North America.” Imperial policy and colonial settlement never hewed to a starkly economic course. What about those elaborate
Elizabethan schemes for the trans- plant of social undesirables, or those starry-eyed French Jesuits an- gling for martyrdom? Yet there is no disputing the fur trade’s deep implication in the clash of empires that embroiled the continent in vi- cious warfare throughout the co- lonial period and in the tumultuous wake of independence. The Nether- lands, England, France, Sweden and Russia all engaged in the 250- year contest for domination of North America and control of its natural resources. Dolin’s cast is suitably polyglot — a welcome re- minder that ethnic discord among traders ran deeper than animosity between Indians and whites. If any theme dominates, it’s vio-
lence. As supermodel Naomi Camp- bell has surely learned from her blood-diamond imbroglio, the Earth’s bounty isn’t always as un- spoiled as it appears. No doubt Campbell would take little consola- tion in the knowledge that she’s hardly the first person to divest a natural wonder of its weight in hu- man misery. But from Dolin’s book she might acquire a deeper under- standing of why her critics have judged her so harshly. To be sure, the international legal uproar over blood diamonds owes at least part of its intensity to the 20th-century conservationist movement that grew up in opposi- tion to fur. Like Campbell’s lovely stones, America’s precious beaver, sea otter and buffalo pelts drew people across the globe into sinister relationships with the natural envi- ronment. They, too, enriched and adorned people separated by thou- sands of miles from a world of hurt.
bookworld@washpost.com
Kirk Davis Swinehart teaches history at Wesleyan University. He is at work on a book about a family undone by the American Revolution.
“Boiling Mad: Inside Tea Party America,” by Kate Zernike (Times, $25)
What is this movement if not contradictory? asks
Kate Zernike, a national correspondent for the New York Times. But contradictory is not necessarily pe- jorative; the movement embodies the contradictions that have energized Americans for more than 200 years. As Zernike points out, tea partiers often don’t want to talk about their conservative positions on social issues such as abortion and same-sex mar- riage, preferring to keep the conversation focused on economic change. But, as we have seen, some- how those explosive issues keep rearing up. Tea par- tiers want a smaller government but are more de- pendent than ever on programs created and admin- istered in Washington, as one adherent admitted: “I guess I want smaller government and my Social Se- curity.” Zernike doesn’t see the tea party’s issues going away — big government is here to stay — and she expects that its members will “always be a vocal opposition.” But amassing enough power to legis- late its agenda may be another matter altogether. The tea party’s concerns are not new, Zernike writes, but “no one [has] ever been able to get a win- ning coalition behind them.”
2
“The Whites of Their Eyes: The Tea Party’s Revolution and the Battle Over American His-
tory,” by Jill Lepore (Princeton Univ., $19.95) Harvard historian and New Yorker staff writer Jill
Lepore takes a jaundiced view of the tea party, call- ing it “a scattered, diffuse and confused movement” using “the echo of the Revolution” in pursuit of “a degree of legitimacy and the appearance, almost, of
coherence.” Even worse, in Lepore’s estimation, is the tea partiers’ disregard for history. Lepore ele- gantly blends the past and present to highlight the use and abuse of history by the movement’s propo- nents: “Historical scholarship is taken for a con- spiracy and the founding of the United States has become a religion.” What she finds particularly gall- ing is the tea partiers’ oft-repeated revolutionary cry of taxation without representation, despite the elec- tion of a president on the highest voter turnout since 1968. “The citizenry could hardly be said to lack rep- resentation,” she writes. Juxtaposing the real patriots of yore (Adams, Franklin, Paine) with the faux patriots of today (Beck, Hannity, Palin), Lepore concludes that “the Tea Party’s version of American history bore almost no resemblance to the Revolu- tion I study and teach.” It is something worse — it is “anti-history.”
3
“Mad as Hell: How the Tea Party Movement Is Fundamentally Remaking Our Two-Party Sys-
tem,” by Scott Rasmussen and Douglas Schoen (Harper, $27.99)
Boldly, perhaps intemperately, Scott Rasmussen and Douglas Schoen assert that the tea party move- ment “is here to stay, and that represents a funda- mental and generational transformation of Ameri- can politics.” They argue that fire-breathing rebels are driving a populist revolt that is “fundamentally different than what has come before it in size, scope, influence, and future impact.” The authors, both pollsters, will either win plaudits in future years or be forgotten like many hyperbolic, wrong-headed forecasters through the eons. Yet they do win laurels for enthusiasm — if only for repeating ad nauseum that the movement is “unprecedented,” “irrevers- ible,” “underappreciated” and “misunderstood.” It takes one back to Jeffrey Gayner’s proclamation in a 1995 lecture for the Heritage Foundation: “Decades from now, historians quite likely will reflect back upon the Contract With America as one of the most significant developments in the political history of the United States.” Sure.
— Steven Levingston
levingstons@washpost.com
PSYCHOLOGY
MY LIE A True Story of False Memory By Meredith Maran Jossey-Bass. 260 pp. $24.95
One of the more bizarre sto- ries of the 1980s and ’90s was the widespread conviction that day-care centers had become hotbeds of sexual abuse, all memory of which the young vic-
tims suppressed until prompted by therapists to break down the walls of resistance. A related phenomenon was the one Meredith Maran writes about in “My Lie”: accusations of incest against family members, in this case her father, with — again — memory of the incidents needing to be awakened by therapy. Maran had originally taken an interest in child abuse as a journalist. Soon she became fascinated by the McMartin case, in which therapists “used hand puppets and anatomically correct dolls to help the children de- scribe what had happened to them.” Reading about this and similar cases caused Maran to fret about her un- easy relationship with her dad: He hadn’t just tried to
TRAVEL
101 PLACES NOT TO SEE BEFORE YOU DIE By Catherine Price Harper. 249 pp. Paperback. $13.99
Catherine Price, a blogger,
traveler and freelance writer, realized a little while ago that “the last thing I need to read is a book that pits my desire for adventure against the time
pressure of mortality.” Books such as “100 Places to See in Your Lifetime” and “101 Places to Have Sex Be- fore You Die,” she concluded, stressed her out. Her so- lution was to write an antithesis, a compilation of expe- riences and situations readers never need relish:
control her life, she came to think; he had abused her sexually. She let him know of her belief via her mother and refused even to speak with him for 10 years. “It is natural that you have periodic doubts of your experi- ence,” reassured one of the many books she read on the subject. “But that’s because accepting memories is painful, not because you weren’t abused.” Yet even so Maran did have doubts, which became
stronger the more she looked into the issue. For in- stance, according to a 2007 news article, “A team of psy- chiatrists and literary scholars reports that it could not find a single account of repressed memory, fictional or not, before the year 1800.” The study team suggested that repressed memory is “a culture-bound syndrome and not a natural process of human memory.” In other words, the alleged victims had been coached. Finally, Maran sought out her old therapist, who explained: “There was so much pressure during those years to try and find incest memories in every client. In the thera- peutic community in the late 1980s and early 1990s, in- cest was this cookie-cutter answer to every woman’s problems.” Fortunately, Maran explains, “When I came to my senses, my father was still alive and relatively well. I still had time to make amends.”
—Dennis Drabelle
drabelled@washpost.com
hence “101 Places Not to See Before You Die.” Much-visited entries on her avoid list include Euro Disney, Times Square on New Year’s Eve, Ireland’s Blarney Stone, Stonehenge and the entire state of Ne- vada. Many of the entries are weird and funny (“Any Place Whose Primary Claim to Fame Is a Large Fiber- glass Thing”), but some aren’t, such as Hell, an AA Meeting When You’re Drunk and the Inside of a Spot- ted Hyena’s Birth Canal. The book is seemingly well researched, so you can
take her word for it when Price says you can skip a Gi- ant Room Filled With Human Crap (a sludge-recycling plant in Southern California); the Testicle Festival, where revelers chow down on Rocky Mountain Oysters, which, Price clarifies, are not a “high-altitude mollusk”; and Your Boss’s Bedroom.
— T. Rees Shapiro
shapirot@washpost.com
WHERE IS THE JUSTICE? ...when the media incites public outrage against a private citizen who has not broken the law?
WHERE IS THE JUSTICE? ...when overzealous, unscrupulous prosecutors rely on abusive interrogation tactics to force a confession?
WHERE IS THE JUSTICE? ...when a leading figure in Japan’s post-war business community is pushed out of the company he founded and built, based on false evidence?
Now for the first time, Hiromasa Ezoe is able to tell the inside story of Japan’s Recruit Scandal, an affair that revealed widespread corruption and collusion reaching to the highest levels of the country’s political, legal, and media worlds.
Kodansha International Available in hardcover where books are sold Also available as an eBook Visit us at
www.kodansha-intl.com and
www.facebook.com/kodanshaamerica
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