SUNDAY, AUGUST 8, 2010 HISTORY REVIEW BY JAN ELLEN LEWIS “ S Rebel yells, followed by hard work
AMERICAN INSURGENTS, AMERICAN PATRIOTS The Revolution of the People By T.H. Breen Hill and Wang. 337 pp. $27
REVOLUTIONARIES A New History of the Invention of America By Jack Rakove Houghton Mifflin. 487 pp. $30
o tied up is American identity in the American Revolution that popular histories of it are inescap- ably children’s books, bedtime stories that tell us how we came
to be: “Mommy, Daddy, tell me about when I was born.” The newest additions to this literature are by two distinguished historians, T.H. Breen of Northwestern and Jack Rakove of Stanford. Each will ap- peal to a different segment of the history- reading public.
Although this is surely not Breen’s in- tent, modern-day “tea partiers” who look in his book may see their own flattering re- flections: an essentially all-white group of angry men and women, guided more by the Bible than political philosophy, con- vinced that a distant government is out to enslave them, eager to suppress dissent, ready to pick up arms at the first rumor — and described as a brave insurgency that had “spoken truth to power.” Breen wants to evoke comparisons to other worldwide anti-imperialist insurgencies, but his fo-
cus on the “raw anger” of a people who “surged forward in the name of rights and liberty” can’t help calling to mind today’s tea party movement as well. Focusing on the two years after the Bos-
ton Tea Party of 1773, Breen argues that the driving force behind the revolution was an American populace enraged by the punish- ment meted out by Parliament, which shut the port of Boston and took the right of self-government away from Massachu- setts. “Without bothering to consult with a single Founding Father,” he writes, “the people took up arms en masse against the empire.” He goes on to describe the popu- lar mobilization that drew thousands of colonists, especially in New England, into the patriot ranks by collecting donations of money and supplies for Boston but also by censoring the press, burning offensive pub- lications, staging “show trials”and creating “extralegal bodies fully prepared to intimi- date, even terrorize those who dared to criticize the American cause.” Although contemporary Americans might be chilled by this piece of their history, Breen makes excuses for it. “Considering the atrocities that have occurred in other revolutions over the last two centuries,” he says, “we might wonder at such restraint.” Breen writes with the zeal of a partisan, and it is hard to distinguish his thoughts and feelings from those of his subjects. He quotes uncritically the many colonists who were convinced that they faced a choice be- tween “LIFE & DEATH, or what is more, FREEDOM & SLAVERY,” as if so emotional a response to the Coercive Acts were per-
fectly understandable. Yet the pervasive- ness of such paranoid rhetoric, from the outset of the imperial crisis more than a decade earlier, has led some historians to look for explanations of the revolution not so much in the series of events that led up to it as in the theories used by the colonists to make sense of those events: the “ideolog- ical origins” of the American Revolution. Breen’s insurgents are motivated, however, not by “political theory” but by “spontane- ous rage against the imperial state.” Like the insurgents who took up arms and rushed off to Boston on the rumor that the British had fired on the city, Breen is sometimes a little quick on the draw. He warns against exaggerating John Locke’s in- fluence on revolutionary thought: “Many Americans had never read Locke’s work; quite a few would not have even recognized his name.” Three pages later, however, he explains the source of the motto on a popu- lar flag: “Ordinary Americans had encoun- tered the phrase in the pages of John Locke’s Second Treatise.” In one chapter, Breen excuses the insurgents’ censorship of the press, but in another the Parliament that considers censorship has “mistaken a tough response for political wisdom.” Confining himself to the two years of popular mobilization after 1773, Breen ef- fectively dismisses the decade of organiz- ing by radicals that led to the Boston Tea Party and the subsequent decades of unbe- lievably hard work, often by moderates, that transformed rebellion against the British into the foundation for an inde- pendent nation. This hard work is Ra-
kove’s chief interest. He structures his nar- rative of the revolutionary era as a series of portraits of the Founding Fathers, some better known than others, but each mak- ing his mark. Each chapter has its heroes who push their sometimes-reluctant col- leagues forward: John Dickinson de- nouncing British taxes in 1767; Sam and John Adams pushing the Continental Congress toward independence; George Mason writing Virginia’s Declaration of Rights; George Washington holding an underfed, underfunded and outnumbered army together; James Madison pulling off the feat of getting the Constitution written
Adams “sometimes, and in some things, is absolutely out of his senses.” Madison worked closely with Hamilton to get the Constitution ratified — and then even more closely with Jefferson to undermine Hamilton in Washington’s Cabinet. Rakove’s attentiveness to the Founders’ foibles humanizes them at the same time that it underscores their collective achieve- ment. No one revolutionary got everything right, but together “they carried the Amer- ican colonies from resistance to revolution, held their own against the premier imperial power of the day, and then capped their vi- sionary experiment by framing a Constitu-
Modern-day tea partiers who look in Breen’s book may see their own reflections.
and ratified; and Alexander Hamilton put- ting the nation’s economy on a sound foot- ing.
But one chapter’s hero is the next chap-
ter’s pain in the posterior. Dickinson re- fused to sign the Declaration of Independ- ence, and Mason, the Constitution. In Par- is, the three men sent to negotiate the treaty to end the war seemed to spend more time complaining about each other than actually working on a treaty. John Ad- ams griped about Benjamin Franklin’s “Sordid Envy” and warned John Jay about those, like Franklin, “who will use all the Arts of the Devil to breed Misunderstand- ings between us,” while Franklin said that
tion whose origins and interpretation still preoccupy us over two centuries later.” Although scholars will find little new in
Rakove’s book, he tells his story well, with a Madisonian appreciation for human frailty. And if Breen’s book may please the tea party crowd, Rakove’s offers a consola- tion to modern liberals: that no matter how serious the crises, we will somehow find what we need to make it through. His is a bedtime story for grown-ups.
bookworld@washpost.com
Jan Ellen Lewis is a professor of history at Rutgers University at Newark.
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Is Justin Bieber’s upcoming memoir going to have better first-week sales than George W. Bush’s this fall?” — A question from
Predicto.com, a vote-by-text polling site. The answer, so far, is yes. Read more at Political Bookworm
6voices.washingtonpost.com/political-bookworm
3 books about surfing
The U.S. Open of Surfing, the sport’s biggest event, ends its nine- day competition today in Huntington Beach, Calif. For those who didn’t qualify to compete this time around or couldn’t get there to mingle with the nearly half-million spectators, several new books have washed ashore to provide a much-needed jolt of surfing ethos.
1
Sweetness and Blood: How Surfing Spread From Hawaii and California to the Rest of the
World, With Some Unexpected Results, by Michael Scott Moore (Rodale, $25.99). The Berlin-based journalist and avid surfer ad- mits in his introduction that this travelogue is not meant to be a definitive history of the sport. Only passing mention is made of its ancient Polyne- sian roots or how the Hawaiians refined the act of “surf riding” to include standing upright on the board— what we recognize as surfing today. Rather, he explores how this modern form of surfing became a huge American cultural ex- port, taking root in some unlikely places. And it’s those very places that he visits, from Moroc- co to the U.K., Cuba to the Gaza Strip. It’s a live- ly global jaunt that will offer some surprises even for the heartiest of wave-riding experts.
2
The Surf Guru: Stories, by Doug Dorst (Riverhead, $25.95). In this book of fiction, only one story focuses on surfing: It’s a poignant tale of a former surf- ing champion, who rides his success into the business world to become a surfwear impresa- rio, while reflecting on his uncertain future as a new crop of young surfers hit the waves out- side his beachfront home. The other stories present characters facing internal struggles and a yearning for something new. Dorst’s de- but novel, “Alive in Necropolis,” was a genre- bending coming-of-age tale that elicited com- parisons to Haruki Murakami and Denis John- son. The book was named San Francisco’s “One City, One Book” read for 2009. Not bad for a former “Jeopardy” champ and Austin pro- fessor.
3
Surfer Magazine: 50 Years, edited by Sam George (Chronicle, $40).
You read that correctly: fifty years! This sumptuous book of stunning photography and pithy essays tells the tale of a magazine that evolved from a 36-page, black-and-white movie program to an arbiter of taste, style and adventure that would come to define the surfer lifestyle. John Severson was the film- maker whose 16mm film, “Surf Fever,” in- spired that original companion booklet, and he went on to edit the magazine in the mode of Martha Stewart, marshalling all of his tal- ents (artist, filmmaker, writer, photographer) to launch his vision. Many editors since have added their own spin to the publication, along with countless writers, photographers and art directors, and this book is very much a paean to them and the devoted surfers who reli- giously read every copy and then tucked away those dog-eared issues for posterity. A terrific intro for the surfing world novice, even if all you know about surfing is the name of uber wave rider Laird Hamilton. — Christopher Schoppa
schoppac@washpost.com
JOHN MOORE/ASSOCIATED PRESS MIDDLE EAST REVIEW BY SUSIE LINFIELD No Middle Eastern romance
EVERY MAN IN THIS VILLAGE IS A LIAR An Education in War By Megan K. Stack
Doubleday. 255 pp. $26.95 T
he title of Megan K. Stack’s book of dispatches from the war zones of the Muslim world is de- liberately provocative. It also il- lustrates the bracing forthright- ness of her approach — along with its equally real shortcomings. In the post-9/11 period, Stack, a foreign correspondent for the Los Angeles Times, was stationed in the world’s most conten- tious lands. If there was a war, she was there — in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Lebanon and Yemen. She stopped off, too, in Saudi Arabia and Libya, both of which she found repellent. She is clearly, refresh- ingly intent on conveying unsentimental- ized observations about these dysfunction- al countries. (The secular-religious rhetoric of martyrdom that pervades the Mideast is, she observes, “the cave art of political dis- course.”) Yet Stack is equally critical of the U.S. interventions under the “war on ter- ror” rubric, and of the political repressions that characterize our presumed allies. In a supposedly rehabilitated Libya, she
finds a dictatorship both ruthless and ridic- ulous; the people appear “locked in the basement of an asylum,” and “even the waves seemed exhausted.” In Egypt, she at- tends an energetic Muslim Brotherhood demonstration — far larger, her interpreter glumly notes, than anything the secular democrats could pull off — and watches the government blatantly steal an election. Her description of our comrades in Afghanistan will offer scant comfort to American read- ers: “The mujahideen prowled the moun- tains underfed and shivering, clad in tat- tered tennis shoes and old sweaters....
BIGSTOCKPHOTO
They didn’t know how to read.... The mu- jahideen mooned around, stroking one an- other lovingly and dreaming of their next meal.” She loves living in Israel — except for the fact that it is “rotten underneath.” She is deeply, presciently suspicious of Lebanon’s supposed revival and reconciliation after the assassination of former prime minister Rafik Hariri, noting that the regeneration seems based on a repression of, rather than a realistic reckoning with, the country’s sec- tarian, murderous past. And all over the re- gion, she observes the grotesque margin- alization of women, which transforms them into noncitizens, nonactors, nonpeople. Stack can be an astute observer of politi- cal complications; indeed, I wish she had paused longer to flesh them out, rather than construct her book as a series of short, stac- cato chapters that cater to a kind of atten- tion-deficit disorder. In Iraq, for instance, she notices the Iraqis’ delicate, convoluted sense of shame and self-hatred for having colluded in Saddam Hussein’s brutal dicta- torship. Her book’s most moving section is an homage to a young Iraqi journalist named Atwar Bahjat, who passionately in- sisted on a democratic, nonsectarian Iraq; for this, she was assassinated by a death squad. “Her aspirations were the finest hopes of a broken country.... She lived as a symbol of mad hope for an impossible, al- ternative Iraq,” Stark mourns. But when it comes to Stark’s own “educa- tion in war,” she comes up short. She learns two main things. One is existential: that war is “dark and dangerous, that you could sur- vive and not survive, both at the same time.” The other is political: that America’s war on terror was “hollow, it was essentially noth- ing but a unifying myth.... Mostly, I think, it was fear.” These insights don’t stretch very far, nor are they original or profound. And they are radically incomplete. For Stark must know that even if the United States withdrew all its forces from the Mideast, the
vicious war within the Muslim world — the attacks on secularists, women, democrats, dissidents, writers, teachers, mosques, mov- ie theaters, hospitals, schools, marketplaces, Shias and Sunnis — would continue. Forget about democracy, pluralism and human rights: This is a war that — as Atwar Bahjat and so many others have learned — has ne- gated the very concept of civilian. But the biggest flaw here is Stark’s writing
style, which repeatedly undermines her sub- stance. She is addicted to ornate, often in- comprehensible, metaphors; they are irri- tating, confusing and strikingly inappropri- ate given the soberness of her subject. What are “carbonated eyes”? How can death get “stuck in the glue of itself”? What does it mean for farms to be “convulsed with ca- tharsis”? In the midst of the 2006 war be- tween Israel and Hezbollah, Stark comes to this: “The smell [of death] is perverted and cold, like a creeping creature of mist, clamp- ing clammy hands over the flowering shrubs.” These phrases and sentences — and many more like them — bespeak a terrible evasiveness; Stark is hiding behind words rather than using them to illuminate or ex- plain. (She should have read George Orwell on the function of metaphor — and, for that matter, should have read his less-is-more war reportage.) In the book’s epilogue, she promises that she has “given up on pulling poetry out of war.” But by then it is too late. As for that title: Stark never tells us who
actually made the statement about liars, which makes it difficult to assess. And her book is peopled both by those who dis- semble and those who offer us unsettling truths.
bookworld@washpost.com
Susie Linfield directs the Cultural Reporting and Criticism program at New York University. Her book “The Cruel Radiance: Photography and Political Violence” will be published this fall.
A Libyan plainclothes policeman, center, watches the entrance to the old quarter of Tripoli.
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