Hüsker Dü: The Story of the Noise-Pop Pioneers Who Launched Modern Rock by Andrew Earles

A non-tell-all career retrospective

Minneapolis rock band Hüsker Dü existed from 1979 to 1988. Within that short tenure, they managed to have a profound influence on alternative music. Combining the raw power of hardcore punk with the catchy melodies and harmonies of pop, Hüsker Dü rose from Midwest indie band to big-label signees who flirted with Nirvana-level mainstream stardom. Music journalist Andrew Earles examines the band’s career in his 2010 book Hüsker Dü: The Story of the Noise-Pop Pioneers Who Launched Modern Rock.

In the introduction, Earles does his best to dissuade you from reading this book by telling you everything it’s not: It’s not a biography of the musicians’ personal lives. It’s not a behind-the-scenes tell-all. It’s not about the conflicts within the band, drug use, love lives, or the musicians’ post–Hüsker Dü solo careers. Earles states his intention in writing this book is to make a case for Hüsker Dü’s importance in music history. Luckily, however, the book is a little bit of all those things that Earles says it’s not. There are, in fact, elements of an exposé here, so it’s more than merely Earles’s critical opinion of their music. What biography there is, however, is very much a music-business narrative about recording, touring, and selling records. If one of the band members fell in love or got busted for drugs, Earles isn’t going to tell you about it.

Sometimes the Hüskers (as Earles repeatedly refers to them) seem like supporting characters in their own book. There are lengthy passages that chart out a history of the Minneapolis punk and post-punk scene, or the history of various indie record labels, in particular Los Angeles’s SST Records. Like music fans of all genres are wont to do, Earles demonstrates himself an aficionado of punk and post-punk by naming as many obscure bands as he can cram into the text. More annoying, however, is the great lengths to which Earles goes to define the genre of “hardcore.” At least a few chapters are spent belaboring that term, decreeing what is hardcore and what isn’t, and obsessing over exactly when Hüsker Dü stopped being hardcore and started being something else. Such hair-splitting of labels becomes tiresome.

Earles interviewed Hüsker Dü band members Grant Hart and Greg Norton for this book. Bob Mould declined to participate because he was in the process of writing his own memoir, See a Little Light (2011). The Hart and Norton interviews are the most valuable aspect of the book. You learn the most from what comes straight out of Grant and Greg’s mouths. Not surprisingly, Hart gets some digs in on Mould, declaring him an egomaniac and a control freak. Have no fear, however, Mould had much worse to say about Hart and Norton in his book. Reading Mould’s autobiography actually lessened my appreciation for Hüsker Dü’s music, because it revealed his personality to be everything Hart says it is—off-puttingly arrogant, pretentious, and vindictive. On the other hand, I’ve grown to have more respect for Hart’s work over the years. Outside of the band, Earles interviewed a few dozen other music industry figures, including their sound technician Lou Giordano, audio engineer Steve Albini, and colleague Mike Watt of the Minutemen. The book ends with a comprehensive discography of Hüsker Dü recordings that delves deeply into rarities beyond their eight albums.

As a fan of Hüsker Dü, I didn’t learn as much about the band as I had hoped, but I did learn some. Earles does a good job of making a case for Hüsker Dü’s historical importance and musical influence, but is that really necessary? If you’re reading this book, chances are you already know that. It would be hard to find an “alternative” band these days that doesn’t claim to have been influenced by Hüsker Dü. If you’ve never heard Hüsker Dü’s music, this book might make you want to listen, but you’re probably not going to want to know about all the minor punk bands that Earles discusses here. This would have been a better book if Earles hadn’t been so reluctant to just tell the story of the band, warts and all. Isn’t that really what most Hüsker Dü fans would want to read?

Black Caesars and Foxy Cleopatras: A History of Blaxploitation Cinema by Odie Henderson

From Harlem to Hollywood, and vice versa

Black Caesars and Foxy Cleopatras: A History of Blaxploitation Cinema was published in 2024. The author is Odie Henderson, film critic for the Boston Globe, who I think is probably right around my age. While I, however, grew up watching Burt Reynolds and Clint Eastwood movies in a small town in Wisconsin, Henderson grew up watching Pam Grier and Fred Williamson movies in Jersey City and Times Square. Henderson brings to this history a nostalgic enthusiasm for the genre but also an extensive knowledge of the film industry. For each movie he discusses, Henderson provides a wealth of behind-the-scenes stories about the making of the picture and the careers of those involved in its production.

In the first chapter, Henderson provides an overview of Black American cinema, pre-Blaxploitation. The bulk of the book then covers the years 1970 to 1978. Henderson considers Cotton Comes to Harlem to be the birth of the Blaxploitation genre (when Hollywood realized they could make money off of Black films) and The Wiz to be the nail in its coffin. In between, he highlights every major Blaxploitation film, as well as some lesser-known obscurities. Along the way, a number of subgenres are examined, such as horror films, westerns, rom-coms, high school dramas, women in prison, and of course, gangster/crime movies, like those starring the aforementioned Grier and Williamson.

I’ve seen at least half of the films discussed here, and after reading this book, I’d like to see the rest. Henderson provides plot summaries of all the movies he covers in the book. His synopses include spoilers, and they do often give away the endings of the films. By the time you get to the end of this information-rich genre survey, however, it’s unlikely you’re going to remember the difference between the conclusions of Uptown Saturday Night versus Let’s Do It Again or Hammer versus Bucktown. There is so much film criticism, film history, and film trivia crammed into this book. Throughout, Henderson’s prose is a joy to read, delivering a wealth of information in an addictively fun narrative, with just enough period slang to keep things cool while maintaining film-critic dignity and avoiding overly ostentatious cleverness. He intersperses the film-talk with a few stories of his youth, how he grew up watching these movies, but this is definitely not a memoir. It’s closer to an encyclopedia of the genre, although arranged chronologically. Henderson also includes a few brief interviews with a movie producer and a couple of fellow film critics.

My interest in Blaxploitation films springs mainly from their soundtracks, an important aspect of any film in this genre. Artists like Isaac Hayes (Shaft), Curtis Mayfield (Super Fly), Marvin Gaye (Trouble Man), James Brown (Black Caesar), Willie Hutch (The Mack), Bobby Womack and J. J. Johnson (Across 110th Street), Roy Ayers (Coffy), the Staples Singers (Let’s Do It Again), and The Impressions (Three the Hard Way) created some of the best soul music of the ‘70s in their scores and soundtracks. Although this is primarily a film book, Henderson does cover the music that accompanies the films he discusses. Perhaps as much as fifteen percent of the text might be concerned with music. There’s an entire chapter on Black concert films, and a sidebar on “The Top Ten Best Blaxploitation Songs.”

As a fan of 1970s cinema, I really enjoyed Black Caesars and Foxy Cleopatras. The only way to make this book better would be to make it bigger by adding more lesser-known films. Henderson has certainly got the biggest and best movies of the era well-covered. Inspired by this fun and fascinating study of the genre, I’ll be hunting down many of these movies on streaming services and YouTube.

The Enlightenment: The Pursuit of Happiness, 1680–1790 by Ritchie Robertson

An erudite, pan-European survey of the era

Ritchie Robertson is a British academic who has published several books on German literature. With his most recent book, however, Robertson has broadened his scope to encompass the pan-European movement known as the Age of Enlightenment. Published in 2021, Robertson’s book The Enlightenment is a sweeping synthesis that attempts to, and in my opinion succeeds in, providing a comprehensive summary of the era that encapsulates the intellectual and social landscape of the period.

Not surprisingly, Robertson focuses primarily on France, Britain, and Germany, but he does often reach farther afield into many other European nations, demonstrating that this was a truly continent-wide phenomenon. The United States doesn’t get a great deal of coverage. Jefferson and Franklin are occasionally discussed, and there’s a brief section on the American Revolution. Rather than examining specific nations or specific thinkers in turn, this book is organized thematically by issue or discipline. The result is much rapid jumping around among diverse locations and historical personages, but this approach helps in gaining an understanding of the overall zeitgeist and important debates in Enlightenment thought. Figures like Immanuel Kant, David Hume, or Voltaire are mentioned in almost every subchapter. If you wanted to get an overall picture of Kant’s thought, for example, you’d have to search around for two sentences here and three sentences there, but if you did so, you’d get a very good understanding of what Kant was all about.

The one thread that tied the myriad endeavors of the Enlightenment together was a striving for an improvement in the happiness of the human race, whether it be through technology, philosophy, politics, law, or some other means. That may seem like an obvious and simplistic answer. Hasn’t mankind always striven for happiness? Well, no, not really. For much of the past two thousand years the prevailing view (at least in the Western world) was that life is an ordeal to be endured so that one could be rewarded with happiness in the afterlife. The Enlightenment is often thought of as a period of extreme secularization and rising atheism, and there definitely was some turning away from prior superstitions and religious dogma, but Robertson asserts that the religious landscape of the Enlightenment was far more complex and heterogenous than widely assumed. The trend of the age was not necessarily antireligious but rather an effort to reconcile religion with reason, to question religion and theology in order to clarify them, so that religion is the product of active thought rather than passive acceptance.

Robertson’s study is not only through but also well-balanced. This isn’t just a book about how great certain Enlightenment thinkers were and what important political and scientific advances were made. Robertson also pays attention to the prejudices, superstitions, and ignorances active during this period. He presents the progress of Enlightenment thought as a series of debates, or exercises in trial and error, and gives as much consideration to those in the wrong as those in the right.

I takes a very skilled writer and researcher to encapsulate an era in one volume like this. Robertson’s book is comprehensive enough to serve as a textbook for an undergraduate course, but it doesn’t read like a textbook. The prose is accessible to general readers, and history buffs will find much food for fascination here. Robertson’s breadth of knowledge is impressive. He seems to have read just about everything published between the two dates in the subtitle, as well as the scholarly literature of recent years. For anyone interested in this period, the notes and bibliography are a treasure trove of further readings. Though I thought I had a good idea of what the Enlightenment was all about, Robertson really broadened my understanding and heightened my interest in this pivotal age in history.

Understanding History and Other Essays by Bertrand Russell

Three unrelated articles from the 1940s

British philosopher and mathematician Bertrand Russell won the 1950 Nobel Prize in Literature, back when philosophers used to be considered for that award. Understanding History and Other Essays was originally published in 1957 by the Philosophical Library, whose books have been recently rereleased as ebooks by Open Road Media. This volume consists of three of Russell’s previously published essays: “How to Read and Understand History” (1943), “The Value of Free Thought” (1944), and “Mentalism vs. Materialism” (1945). I believe the first two essays were originally published as Little Blue Books by the Haldeman-Julius publishing company. “Mentalism vs. Materialism” is from The Rationalist Annual of 1945. Although the history essay is the title selection, I was attracted more by the subject matter of the latter two essays.

The essay “How to Read and Understand History” is nothing special, probably because Russell is not a historian. He starts by stating that a study of history is useless to most people’s daily lives, and the only reason to read history is if you simply enjoy doing so. He briefly discusses the works of some notable historians, such as Herodotus, Thucydides, Plutarch, and a few modern scholars. Russell criticizes philosophers like Hegel and Marx who attempt to come up with a unified theory of history, characterizing them as “mythologizers,” and offers some thoughts on how he thinks history should be written and taught.

In “The Value of Free Thought,” Russell begins by defining what exactly is “free thought.” The term is not synonymous with atheism or agnosticism, as some might think, but rather with scepticism. A freethinker can believe whatever he chooses to believe, but to be a freethinker, that choice must be based on evidence and rational inquiry. The antithesis of free thought, as Russell asserts, would be William James’s argument: Why not believe in religion when believing is more convenient, comfortable, and who’s to say you’re wrong? Russell goes on to critique religion because of its denial of rational inquiry. Like many atheist writers (Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens), Russell sometimes lapses into smugness. I agree with the message, but not always the tone. Also, if you’re already a free thinker, then this primer on free thought tells you much of what you already know. Overall, however, “The Value of Free Thought” is a good concise manifesto of sorts for the modern freethinker.

“Mentalism vs. Materialism” is exactly what it sounds, contrasting dualism (matter and mind or spirit) with monism (just matter). Russell, as one might expect, is on the side of the materialists, or “physicalists,” the label he prefers. He starts with an explanation of physics that is forgivably outdated and unforgivably confusing. Once he gets into the epistemology of consciousness, however, his argument is well-stated. This essay is very brief, only about half the length of either of the other two selections.

I bought this ebook as a Kindle Daily Deal. Whenever possible, I look over the table of contents before I purchase an ebook. In this case, the table of contents makes it look like there are 18 essays in this ebook. In fact, however, there are only three, the longest of which is maybe a 45-minute read. The remaining 15 lines of the table of contents are just subheads within the last essay. Open Road could have done a better job formatting that. Had I paid more than a couple bucks for this ebook, I would have been a little disgruntled by the discrepancy between what I thought I was buying and what I actually got. Given that these writings are not in the public domain, a few bucks for a few essays is reasonable. These are not earth-shatteringly revolutionary essays, but those sympathetic to Russell’s atheist, materialist, and skeptical views will appreciate his eloquent and intelligently reasoned discourses.

Essays in this collection

How to Read and Understand History

The Value of Free Thought

Mentalism vs. Materialism

Beasts, Men, and Gods by Ferdynand Ossendowski

War memoir and Mongolian travelogue

Ferdynand Ossendowski (1876–1945) was a Polish scientist, explorer, and political activist who led a complicated and adventurous life. He was born in what is now Latvia. Sometime around his teen years, he moved to St. Petersburg, Russia, with his father. He taught science courses at a university in Tomsk and traveled to many different parts of Asia. Around 1905, he was sentenced to death for organizing communist activities in opposition to the tsar, but his sentence was commuted, and after some years of hard labor, he was released. Much like the French Revolution and the Reign of Terror that followed, the Russian Revolutions of 1917 were followed by a period of political extremism, persecution, and executions. This led to the Russian Civil War, in which Ossendowski fought on the side of the Whites (conservative nationalists) against the Reds (Bolsheviks, Communists, Soviets). In 1920, Ossendowski was living in Krasnoyarsk, Siberia. This is where his memoir Beasts, Men, and Gods begins. The Bolsheviks consider him a counterrevolutionary and set out to capture and likely execute him. Ossendowski gets wind of their coming, however, and escapes. He decides to flee Russia through Mongolia, hoping to eventually reach a port city where he can emigrate to a safe place in Western Europe.

The danger doesn’t end, however, when Ossendowski crosses into Mongolia. Whites and Reds are active on that side of the border as well, where the Mongolians are also fighting for their independence from Chinese occupation. Ossendowski joins up with a band of Whites consisting of other “foreigners” (Ossendowski identifies as a Pole) who, while still hoping to make their exit from the region, engage in military battles against the Reds and Chinese. The landscape is littered with corpses, and torture and atrocities are ubiquitous. In an environment of rampant paranoia where spies are found everywhere, Ossendowski is equally in danger of being killed by White officers who suspect him of leaning towards the Reds.

Beasts, Men, and Gods was published in 1922. While Ossendowski’s life was certainly exciting, the way he tells his story here does not make for easy reading. This account reads as if it were written for an Eastern European audience who would have been intimately familiar with the events of the Russian Civil War. To those not in the know, the text often reads like a confusing barrage of unfamiliar proper nouns: geographical place names, various Red and White factions, government agencies and military units, the names of Russian generals, and various Chinese and Mongolian ethnic groups. At times it’s difficult to keep straight which groups are fighting for which side. In order to fully appreciate this book, I think I would first have to read a comprehensive overview of the Russian Civil War and another volume on the history of Mongolia.

While the war narrative is difficult to get through, the book is more successful as a study of Mongolian culture. While in Mongolia, Ossendowski spent much time in Buddhist monasteries. He met the Living Buddha, the highest Buddhist personage in Mongolia, distinct from the Dalai Lama in Tibet. The most vividly drawn character in the book is the White general Baron Ungern von Sternberg (1886–1921), a German aristocrat who has “gone native” and embraced the Buddhist religion. Ossendowski himself does not profess to having adopted Buddhism, but he relates Buddhist teachings and history with respect and an attention to detail. Fortune telling was a common practice in Mongolia, and Ossendowski writes about prophecies as if they were real and accurate. After the travel narrative ends, another eight chapters are solely devoted to the religion, myths, and legends of Mongolian Buddhism. As Beasts, Men, and Gods progresses, and becomes less about Russia and more about Mongolia, I found it more interesting and accessible. I felt lost for much of the first half of Ossendowski’s memoir, but I came to like it more towards the end.

The Great Divide: Nature and Human Nature in the Old World and the New by Peter Watson

Long-lost cousins with vastly different upbringings

When Europeans first discovered the Americas, it was the meeting of two vastly different cultures, two populations that were entirely alien to one another. In his 2012 book, The Great Divide, British intellectual historian Peter Watson investigates how and why the peoples of the Old and New Worlds developed so differently. Watson makes the case that differing environmental conditions in the two hemispheres—climate, topography, flora and fauna—forged two diverging trajectories of civilization and culture. In The Great Divide, he has compiled compelling evidence to that effect into a sweeping overview of human history. Some factors that he considers are the role that natural disasters played in the creation of gods and religions, how different flora and fauna affected the rates at which agriculture and cities developed, how the use of psychotropic plants influenced cultural ideologies, and why was human sacrifice such a widespread practice in the Americas?

As I’ve come to learn from previously reading his books Ideas and The Modern Mind, Watson is a master generalist who can pull together concepts and data from a wide variety of fields in the sciences, humanities, and the arts and unify them into a remarkably cohesive whole. The Great Divide, however, is pretty much all about archeology, anthropology, and paleontology. I thought this book would have something to say about the cultures of the Old World and the New after the first transatlantic contact, but with the exception of some brief coverage of the Spanish Conquest, it is entirely concerned with events prior to 1492. Watson’s investigation begins with the dawn of humans and spends a lot of time in the Ice Age. Socrates, Buddha, and Confucius don’t show up until chapter 18, and the Spaniards don’t reach America until the 23rd and final chapter. The Great Divide is basically a comprehensive summary of world archaeology, as much as we knew in 2012. I enjoy reading about archaeology, but because I read quite a bit on that subject, a lot of this was review for me. Nevertheless, as is always the case with Watson’s books, he enriches the general narrative with plenty of interesting facts and connections that will be new and intriguing to most general readers.

If the purpose of this book is to compare and contrast the pre-1492 trajectories of the Old and New Worlds, it is not entirely successful. Watson presents a few chapters on the history of the Old World, followed by a couple chapters on the history of the New World, and back and forth, and back and forth. Only in the conclusion of the book, when recapping all the evidence presented, does Watson really take the time to make side-by-side comparisons between the two domains and draw generalizations and theories from their differences. The two hemispheres, not surprisingly, do not get equal time and consideration. It seems like the book is about two-thirds Old World and one-third New World, simply because there’s so much more pre-16th-century information available on Eurasia than there is on the Americas.

The Great Divide is an excellent synthesis of human history that draws interesting parallels and deviations between the peoples of the Eastern and Western hemispheres. This book will not, however, captivate the general reader to the same extent as Charles Mann’s excellent 1491 or perhaps Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel (which I haven’t read, but it was a popular bestseller). Although Watson does generate similar wow-factor by delivering insightful revelations to curious readers, The Great Divide has more of a textbook execution to it, rather than the more investigative science journalism feel of Mann’s work. Notwithstanding, if you are at all interested in the ancient history of world cultures, this book’s breadth and depth make it a must-read.

The ebook claims that an Appendix 2 is available online at the Harper Collins website, but it’s not there, and that’s really annoying.  

Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time by Dava Sobel

My kingdom for a clock!

Long before the days of ubiquitous GPS devices, when sailors first started voyaging to distant parts of the world, it was very difficult to determine just exactly where one was. While latitude could be determined by measuring the height of the midday sun above the horizon, longitude was quite a bit trickier. Without an accurate determination of longitude, ships could not only get lost aimlessly at sea but also wrecked on the shorelines of unforeseen islands and continents. This was such a costly and frustrating problem that in the early 18th century, England, the world’s leading maritime power, established a Board of Longitude to encourage efforts to find a solution to the longitude puzzle. The Board promised a large cash prize to whomever could come up with a reliable and accurate method for determining longitude. The book entitled Longitude by science writer Dava Sobel, published in 1995, recounts the story of the long and arduous quest to solve the longitude problem and claim the prize.

The surest method for finding longitude is to compare the solar time (noon, for example, the point when the sun is highest in the sky) of a known point (usually the port of departure) with that of your present location. Just as modern time zones tell us that New York is roughly an hour ahead of Chicago, the difference in minutes and seconds between point A and point B can be converted to a measurement of degrees indicating how far east or west you’ve traveled. The only way it is possible to measure this, however, is if you have an accurate timepiece that can remain synchronized to the exact solar time of your home port. Up to the early 1700s, this was not possible because there weren’t any clocks that could keep sufficiently accurate time when subjected to shipboard motion and temperature changes. What was needed was something we take for granted these days: a reliable timepiece. An English carpenter and self-taught clockmaker named John Harrison (1693–1776) set about to create such a marine chronometer that could withstand seaborne conditions and allow for accurate and reliable navigation. Harrison would end up devoting decades of his life to the project. 

Longitude was a New York Times bestseller and won several prestigious book awards. It is deliberately written for an audience of general readers, perhaps too deliberately at times. This is a very small and short book that one can read in a day or two. It’s written at about a high school vocabulary level. Wherever possible, complex scientific concepts are explained in layman’s terms, and there are no footnotes or endnotes. Longitude is at its best when it’s discussing the biography of Harrison and all of the politics behind the awarding of the coveted prize. It’s not so great, however, at explaining how exactly geographical coordinates are measured or what mechanical advancements made Harrison’s clocks so special. In the interest of simplification, such topics are glossed over in a sentence or two so as not to strain the brains of casual readers. Some simple black and white diagrams might have been helpful, but the book has no illustrations. Perhaps such diagrams would intimidate prospective readers by being too “sciency.” The result of too much popularizing is that the science and mathematics behind this story get inadequate and what feels like half-baked coverage. This is science history that succeeds as history; it’s about scientists but not so much about science.

The story of John Harrison is really fascinating, and this book made me want to learn more. Longitude is much like a National Geographic article (albeit a long one). You know you’re not getting quite the full story because the account has been condensed for reasons of space and accessibility. Nevertheless, you still learn a lot, enough to satisfy most curious general readers and pique the interest of those willing to pursue the subject further.

The Fate of the Corps: What Became of the Lewis and Clark Explorers After the Expedition by Larry E. Morris

The later lives and deaths of America’s intrepid explorers

I’ve read a few books recounting the 1804–1806 expedition of Lewis and Clark and their Corps of Discovery across America to the Pacific Coast and back. Stephen Ambrose’s Undaunted Courage is an excellent summation of the voyage, and the original 1814 published account of the journey, edited by Nicholas Biddle and Paul Allen, certainly yields many interesting details. The most complete account to date would be the 13-volume edition of the Journals of the Lewis & Clark Expedition edited by Gary E. Moulton, which you can either buy for a few hundred dollars or read online for free. Following up on all of these accounts of the expedition, Larry E. Morris’s 2004 book The Fate of the Corps takes a unique and interesting look at the Corps of Discovery by asking what happened to all these guys after the expedition was over?

In addition to Meriwether Lewis, William Clark, and the men they assembled for the journey, the scope of Morris’s study includes Clark’s slave York, as well as Native American guide and interpreter Sacagawea and her French-Canadian husband Toussaint Charbonneau, both of whom joined the expedition in midstream. Morris considers 34 people to be the core of the Corps, and he investigates each of their post–expedition lives. Along the way, many other recognizable historical figures who associated with Corps members are brought into the narrative, including Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett, Stephen Austin, Sam Houston, and about a half dozen U.S. Presidents. Lewis and Clark’s team members took up a variety of roles after the Corps split up—fur trappers, farmers, soldiers in the War of 1812 and the Mexican-American War, lawyers, politicians, and more. In learning about the lives of these Corps members, one learns quite a bit about the broader history of 19th-century America, Western expansion, and Native American relations.

While the lives many of these figures led were quite fascinating, their deaths are often equally intriguing and sometimes poignantly tragic. The best-known case is the death of Lewis himself, who exhibited signs of mental illness and committed suicide (or, as some argue, may have been murdered). Clark, on the other hand, lived a longer life in which he held important political positions in the West and also served as the guardian of Sacagawea’s children. Morris examines Clark’s attitude toward Native Americans (somewhat progressive for his day) and his problematic relationship with his slave York (not the least bit progressive).

I recently read Robert M. Utley’s 1997 book A Life Wild and Perilous, a history of “mountain men” that covers similar subject matter and several of the same individuals as Morris’s book. I found Utley’s storytelling very confusing and rather boring. Morris, on the other hand, really brings these characters to life. The biographical scenes are lively, often exciting, and sometimes moving. Morris’s accounts are grounded in fact, but they don’t read as simply a relentless barrage of facts. Morris does jump around quite a bit, chronologically and geographically. There a lot of life threads intertwined here, which can sometimes be disorienting. Unlike Utley, however, Morris assists the reader by providing a useful chronology up front and an appendix that recaps the pertinent details of each member of the Corps. As a result, you come away from this book knowing exactly what happened to these men and woman (except in cases where nobody knows exactly what happened to these men and woman). When there are conflicting views among historians about the ultimate fates of, for example, Lewis and Sacagawea, Morris explains the pros and cons of each side’s arguments.

If you want a history of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, this isn’t it. Read Ambrose or Biddle’s books. If that’s not enough to satisfy your interest, however, and you’d like to follow the ripple effects of that landmark journey through subsequent American history, then Morris’s The Fate of the Corps is a great read that will tell you everything you want to know and more.

The Atlas of Atlases: Exploring the Most Important Atlases in History and the Cartographers Who Made Them by Philip Parker

Can’t decide if it’s a coffee-table book or a textbook

Ivy Press publishes a series of books on bibliographic history called Liber Historica, which as of now consists of seven volumes. I have previously read and reviewed two books from this series, Scientifica Historica and The Philosopher’s Library, about the history of science and philosophy books, respectively. Having an avid interest in book history, I liked this series enough to come back for more, and as a map enthusiast I was eager to lay my hands on The Atlas of Atlases, published in 2022. Although the title indicates that this book is about the history of atlases (because Atlas of Atlases sounds cool), the book actually covers the entire history of cartography, not just maps bound into book form. Book-length atlases didn’t really exist before the mid-16th century. This book, however, starts with the first topographical lines scratched into a prehistoric rock and ends with Google Maps and other online geographic information systems.

All of the books in the Liber Historica series are in a mini-coffee-table size (8" x 9.5") and loaded with scores of color illustrations. It’s not just a series of picture books, however. Each volume also contains a full-length scholarly monograph on its subject. In the case of The Atlas of Atlases, the text by Philip Parker is a long and difficult slog. While Parker certainly provides a sufficient history of maps an atlases, he tries too hard to sum up practically the entire history of the Western World in 270 pages. Each map presented gets a paragraph or two of description crammed with names and dates—not just who made the atlas but who financed it, to whom it was dedicated, who was king or pope at the time, and what wars were going on. There’s nothing wrong with what Parker has to say (unlike The Philosopher’s Library, where I thought there were plenty of problems with the text). The way he says it, however, often put me to sleep. This is a case where I definitely would have preferred less text and more images. A chronological list of important maps and atlases with some pertinent facts about each would have been enough for me, rather than this dense prose narrative in paragraph form. John Noble Wilford’s The Mapmakers is a better history of cartography—more comprehensive and more pleasant to read—but that book doesn’t have all of the beautiful color illustrations that adorn The Atlas of Atlases.

The 8" x 9.5" page size was fine for Liber Historica’s other books, but it doesn’t really do justice to many of these maps. Because there’s so much text, most of the illustrations aren’t even full page size. The reproduction quality is very good, but the images are just too small to make out much detail. The best use of this book is to bring your attention to landmark maps and atlases that you can then look up elsewhere. Everything prior to the 20th century is probably digitized online somewhere (Try the David Rumsey Map Collection).

From what I’ve seen so far of the Liber Historica series, the initial flagship volume, Scientifica Historica, is still the best book in the bunch. I do like the Atlas of Atlases, however, more than The Philosopher’s Library. In general, if you like books about books, these volumes will make nice additions to your shelves, and they are rather inexpensive for the production quality that you’re getting. Recent additions to the series include The Botanist’s Library, The Astronomer’s Library, and The Mathematician’s Library.

Imperial Nature: Joseph Hooker and the Practices of Victorian Science by Jim Endersby

How natural science was conducted in Darwin’s day

Joseph Dalton Hooker (1817–1911) was an important figure in the history of botany and in British science in general. He was a close friend and supporter of Charles Darwin, and the two exchanged over 1300 letters. In a career move similar to Darwin’s Voyage of the Beagle, young Hooker served as naturalist on the ship Erebus in its exploration of the Antarctic and many Southern islands. Joseph’s father, William Hooker, was the founding director of the Kew Gardens, and Joseph succeeded his father in that post in 1865. Although he may have started out as a nepo baby, Joseph’s accomplishments in botany eventually surpassed those of his father. In his 2008 book Imperial Nature, science historian Jim Endersby looks at Hooker’s life and what it reveals about science and scientists in Victorian England.

As Endersby soon admits in his introduction, this is not a full biography of Joseph Hooker. Rather, it focuses on a specific period in Hooker’s early career, from the late 1830s to the mid-1860s. Endersby’s research is drawn largely from letters and publications of that period. Though he focuses primarily on Hooker, Endersby provides a broader view of how natural science was conducted in Britain in the mid-nineteenth century. What he reveals on this subject could be applied to just about any of Hooker’s British contemporaries studying biology at this time, including his father William Hooker, Darwin, George Bentham, Robert Brown, Edward Forbes, Asa Gray, John Lindley, Richard Owen, and Hewett Cottrell Watson—all of whom are discussed frequently in the book.

Endersby provides much interesting insight into how these botanists practiced their profession—collecting, preserving, classifying, drawing, writing, and publishing—but he also reveals much about the social status of science and scientists at this time. During this period in history, science was largely the domain of independently wealthy “gentlemen.” Conducting science for money was considered crass and menial. Even medical doctors were looked down on as lowly blue-collar laborers. Hooker, however, needed to earn a living, so he had to navigate the difficult transition from aristocratic “men of science” to professional “scientists” that took place in the 19th century. Even the word “professional” was considered derogatory; Hooker and his colleagues preferred to be called “philosophical” botanists.

In his leadership role at Kew, with its extensive herbarium (collection of plants), Hooker was the foremost authority on botanical matters, such as naming plant species, in the British empire, if not the world. As Endersby describes him, Hooker was somewhat of a dictator over his domain. Endersby closely examines the relationships between metropolitan (London) and colonial (e.g. Australia, India) botanists. During his Erebus voyage, Hooker met two skilled amateur plant collectors, William Colenso in New Zealand and Ronald Campbell Gunn in Tasmania. For decades thereafter, these two men supplied Hooker and Kew with dried and preserved plants from these islands, which Hooker then analyzed, classified, and described in his botanical books. Through a deep dive into their correspondence, Endersby shows how Hooker was dependent on these colonial collectors but also strove to keep them in their place, asserting himself as the real botanist and big-city authority while condescendingly quashing their ideas.

I enjoy reading biographies and histories about the glory days of the naturalist explorer, so I found Endersby’s book quite interesting and informative. I will caution the reader, however, that Imperial Nature reads very much like a dissertation or a scholarly treatise intended to win over fellow historians or a tenure committee, not a general audience. There is much repetition in the text, frequent hair-splitting, and a lot of cross-referencing from one chapter to another. Endersby cites nine examples to defend a point he’s making, when three would have sufficed for the general reader. It’s very workmanlike prose, but Endersby delivers the goods. Those who are interested in the way these nineteenth-century scientists plied their trade will certainly learn plenty here.

A Life Wild and Perilous: Mountain Men and the Paths to the Pacific by Robert M. Utley

Exciting adventures of the American West rendered confusing and dull

I’m a frequent tourist visitor to the state of Wyoming, where many locations are named after legendary mountain men: Colter Bay, Sublette County, Hoback Junction, Bridger-Teton National Forest, and even Jedediah’s House of Sourdough. Over the past two decades of venturing out that way, I had gleaned a few details about these historical characters. I was really looking for an authoritative history to provide a more comprehensive education on the lives and accomplishments of these intrepid adventurers, when I came across A Life Wild and Perilous, a history of mountain men by Robert M. Utley, former historian for the National Park Service.

Utley begins his history with the Lewis and Clark expedition. He focuses not on the two captains, however, but rather on two members of their crew: John Colter and George Drouillard, who remained in the West to become pioneering fur trappers in the Rocky Mountains. Utley then charts the profession of mountain man from the beaver-trapping industry to wagon train trail guides to government-commissioned explorers and cartographers. The book closes with the annexation of the West Coast territories into the United States, which some of these mountain men helped bring about. Even though you root for and admire these bold explorers, it is quite depressing to realize that much of this history was inspired by the pointless extermination of the beaver species just to make fashionable hats. Published in 1997, this book probably isn’t “woke” enough for today’s standards in the field of history, but any book on mountain men is going to glorify manifest destiny to some extent. Utley doesn’t treat Native Americans as evil villains in this book, but rather as obstacles that needed to be overcome. Critics might scold Utley for not telling the Indian side of the story, but really that would belong in another and different book than this.

Though eager to learn about this subject, I found A Life Wild and Perilous frequently confusing and consistently dull. Utley is a highly respected historian, so I’m sure the book is well-researched­. He has drawn widely and deeply from the diaries and published exploits of many historical figures. I don’t doubt the accuracy of his facts, but his storytelling leaves a lot to be desired. While no doubt these mountain men had some exciting adventures, the text is mostly, “This guy went here. That guy went there,” over and over again in an exhausting morass of detail. The table of contents makes you think that Utley will be focusing on one or two famous mountain men in each chapter, but that’s not the case. In each chapter, he’ll drop the names of forty or fifty of these trappers, their stories all jumbled up together, and you’re expected to keep them all straight. As a prose stylist, Utley has a way of phrasing a sentence that makes you think, “What exactly did he just say?” and requires frequent backtracks and rereads.

It’s also difficult for the reader to orient himself geographically. There are very few maps in the ebook, and they are pretty useless when reading on the Kindle. (The print edition might have more maps; I don’t know.) In keeping with the frontier times he’s discussing, when state boundaries and most towns as we know them today had not yet been established, Utley denotes locations by rivers and mountain ranges. The result is that the reader better have a very firm knowledge of the topography of the American West, or you’re going to get lost. It would have been quite helpful if once in a while Utley threw the reader a bone with a comment like, “near present-day Driggs, Idaho,” but no; he never does.

A Life Wild and Perilous is packed with data, particularly on who was where and when, but because of Utley’s confusing way of relating these facts, I’d be hard-pressed to remember much. All the information is there, it’s just difficult to process. This would be a fine reference work for looking up specific historical details, and that’s pretty much how it reads. As a linear narrative, it’s not very user-friendly at all.

Ideas: A History of Thought and Invention, from Fire to Freud by Peter Watson

The book about everything by the man who’s read everything

I had previously read Peter Watson’s book The Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the 20th Century and liked it very much. His follow-up to that book, Ideas: A History of Thought and Invention, from Fire to Freud is a prequel in the same vein that covers everything before the 20th century. The Modern Mind opened with Sigmund Freud, and Ideas ends with him. In both cases, Watson deliveries sweeping world histories comprised not of wars, monarchs, and governments, but rather of important developments in the arts, sciences, and humanities. Both books are eminently fascinating and enlightening works, but Ideas is even more impressive and captivating than The Modern Mind.

According to Amazon, the print edition of this book is 850 pages. According to my ebook copy, however, it’s 1850 pages, which seems more accurate when one contemplates just how much content is crammed into this volume. Yet crammed it never feels. Watson has to be one of the all-time greatest summarizers in history. Our grandparents had Will Durant to provide them with an overview of the world’s knowledge. We’ve got Watson, and I think we win. When you look at the sources that Watson cites for this book, typically he’s not going back to the original texts written in ancient Greece, Renaissance Italy, or 19th-century Germany. Rather, he is drawing on the most recent scholarship—histories, biographies, critical studies—that have been published by eminent scholars about the people, -isms, and -ologies that he’s discussing. He doesn’t limit himself to Western civilization either, but includes contributions from Islamic, Indian, Chinese, Japanese, and Native American thought as well. Watson seems to have read everything, and he miraculously assimilates it all into a coherent whole. He demonstrates an encyclopedic knowledge in a variety of fields: history, science, literature, art, music, sociology, psychology, archaeology, and more. The task of assembling such a synthesis must have been herculean, yet Watson glides seamlessly from one topic to the next, explaining complex concepts in clear and accessible prose. That’s not to say that the text is dumbed down for a popular audience. The intelligent reader walks away from this book having acquired a great deal of knowledge.

What surprised me most about this history of ideas is that, for the most part, it’s also a history of religion. Metaphysical and mythological conjectures on God and the universe are just as much ideas as any scientific theory, and religious thought has dominated mankind’s intellectual development for most of homo sapiens’ existence. (Look at the pre-Enlightenment selections in any art museum or library, for example.) The history of human knowledge, as Watson tells it, is a history of overcoming religious superstition. Watson is not an atheist with an axe to grind like Richard Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens. He just tells it like it is with a very objective account of how religion has stifled intellectual progress since ancient times. It seems like every major discovery had to go through a centuries-long probationary period during which it was repudiated, prohibited, and persecuted by religious authorities—the punishments of Galileo, for example, or the arduous process of establishing (via fossils) that the real world is older than literal Biblical time. The Catholic popes are famous for this sort of anti-intellectualism, but Watson shows that all faiths to some degree have worked to hold back the progress of learning: ancient polytheists, Buddhists, Muslims, Protestants, and others are all guilty of this crime. Reading this book really makes you wonder what mankind could have accomplished by now if we hadn’t wasted so much time fighting over theology. Of course, as Watson shows, ideas don’t always mean good ideas: White supremacy, social Darwinism, and eugenics are just a few examples of very wrong ideas that have nonetheless proven too influential in human history, and Watson covers such fallacies as well.

Watson is so good at kindling your curiosity, one walks away from his books with an extensive list of topics and readings for further study. Watson himself has written more narrowly focused intellectual histories on The French Mind, The German Genius, and The Great Divide between the cultures of the Old World and the New. Regardless of where and when he might take you, with Watson as your guide you are bound to be fascinated, amazed, enlightened, and entertained.

Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History by Stephen Jay Gould

A fascinating biological saga somewhat tediously presented

Paleontologist and evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002) wrote many books on natural history and evolution for a popular audience. His book Wonderful Life, published in 1989, focuses on fossils collected from the Burgess Shale, a geological formation in British Columbia, Canada. The remarkably preserved fossils of the Burgess Shale (I saw some in a Toronto museum last week) comprise the best illustration of the Cambrian explosion, when early invertebrate life exhibited a wide diversity of anatomical forms. Eminent paleontologist Charles Doolittle Walcott (1850–1927) discovered the Burgess Shale and for several decades monopolized the interpretation of the fossils. In the 1970s, however, three British paleontologists—Harry Whittington, Simon Conway Morris, and Derek Briggs—re-examined the Burgess Shale fossil record and ascertained that many of Walcott’s findings were erroneous. Walcott “shoehorned” several unique creatures into existing phyla, thus shortchanging the biological diversity and anatomical disparity of the Cambrian explosion. The three Brits revealed that many of the Burgess Shale arthropods belong to newly discovered phyla that led to evolutionary dead ends. Gould uses this scientific saga to illustrate his own theories of evolution and natural historiography.

The centerpiece of the book is a step-by-step recounting of Whittington, Briggs, and Conway Morris’s work with the Burgess Shale fossils. The reader follows along and joins in the excitement as they make new scientific discoveries. One thing Wonderful Life does very well is it really gives laymen like me an idea of what exactly paleontologists do and how they do it. I also learned quite a bit about the anatomy, evolution, and taxonomy of prehistoric arthropods, topics I surprisingly found fascinating.

What I didn’t like about Wonderful Life is the way that Gould continually hammers home his thesis. It reads as if he’s saying: “These three scientists discovered something marvelous, and I discovered them! Now wonder at the revelations I’m about to impart to you!” Gould keeps stressing how groundbreaking this interpretation of the Burgess fossils is, but I never fully grasped the big deal. I never really thought that our present world was any more biodiverse than earlier eras, so in my case that’s one myth Gould didn’t have to bust. Gould does make a good point that evolutionary trees are often drawn in a way that makes it seem like homo sapiens were the teleological god-given foregone conclusion in the process, but it’s not like intelligent science-minded people can’t see around that. Anyone who’s ever done any genealogical research knows that family trees are more like unruly bushes than neatly pruned trees. The same holds true for taxonomical cladograms.

The other half of Gould’s argument is his assertion that contingency plays a big role in evolution. Again, I met this hypothesis with a resounding “Duh!” Contingency, as Gould vaguely defines it, is something like what most of us might call “the butterfly effect.” Small random or haphazard incidents amount to big changes over the course of hundreds of millions of years. Gould states over and over that if we “played back the tape” of evolution with different random catastrophes, then humankind would have never evolved. That seems like a no-brainer, at least to an atheist. What Gould fails to point out is that if humanity never evolved, then there wouldn’t be any humans around to contemplate evolution. Intelligent human life may have been a one-in-a-million chance, but it’s a prerequisite for the very discussion we’re having.

Some other scientists have taken issue with Gould’s arguments here, in whole or in part, such as Richard Dawkins and Richard Fortey. Obviously, I’m not in a position to argue evolution with the late great Stephen Jay Gould. I can, however, say that Fortey is the best writer of the three, while Gould and Dawkins are rather full of themselves. I like the science that Gould presented in Wonderful Life. I just got tired of him telling me how amazed I should be at his conclusions.

The Producer: John Hammond and the Soul of American Music by Dunstan Prial

One of jazz and rock’s most influential tastemakers

As a fan of classic rock music, I know of John Hammond as the record producer and Columbia executive who discovered Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, and Stevie Ray Vaughan. (It’s Hammond’s grinning visage, looking like he could be Stevie Ray’s dad, that graces the back cover of Vaughan’s debut album Texas Flood.) Journalist Dunstan Prial’s 2006 Hammond biography The Producer, however, has taught me that there was much more to Hammond’s long and influential career in the recording industry.

The bulk of this book is concerned not with the history of rock but with jazz. In fact, Hammond’s first encounter with Dylan in the early 1960s doesn’t occur until chapter 12 of 16. Hammond’s career started way back in the 1930s working with artists like Benny Goodman (who eventually became his brother-in-law), Billie Holiday, and Count Basie. Through his work as a critic for DownBeat magazine, a talent scout and producer for record companies, and an all-around jazz impresario, Hammond helped launch some of the biggest stars of the swing era. On the tail end of the jazz age, he also discovered Aretha Franklin and produced her first two albums.

John Henry Hammond Jr. decided at a young age that he wanted to work in the music industry. One of the reasons he was able to make that dream a reality is that he was independently wealthy, being a great-great-grandson of railroad and shipping tycoon Cornelius Vanderbilt. (Gloria Vanderbilt, more famous in recent years, was his first cousin.) To establish himself in the music business, Hammond often worked for free or for little pay, just for the joy of making music. He would often use his own money to finance a record, a concert, or to keep a hungry musician afloat. He had no musical talent himself (at least none is discussed in this book), but he had great taste and a keen eye for spotting future superstars. In The Producer, Prial argues convincingly that Hammond’s taste was instrumental in shaping American popular music in the 20th century.

In addition to his contributions to the music industry and popular culture, Hammond was active in the civil rights movement. Seeing jazz music as a means to further the integration of Blacks into American society, Hammond was the first music producer/promoter to put Black and White musicians together on the same stage. When, at Hammond’s urging, Benny Goodman added Black musicians Teddy Wilson and Lionel Hampton to his band, it was a milestone moment in racial integration that preceded Jackie Robinson’s debut in Major League Baseball by a decade. Hammond was also a long-time board member of the NAACP before resigning in protest over the organization’s disagreements with Martin Luther King Jr.

Prial interviewed Hammond’s sister and sister-in-law, some industry associates like Atlantic Records’ Ahmet Ertegun, and a few musicians such as Hampton, Springsteen, and the surviving members of Vaughan’s band Double Trouble. Most of Prial’s research, however, comes from previously published biographies, interviews, and some archival documents—sources into which he has dug admirably deep and wide. Springsteen’s vivid and exuberant recollections of Hammond’s benevolent guidance are really the highlight of the book for rock fans. Much of the Dylan material comes from Dylan’s Chronicles memoir. Prial’s narrative highlights about ten or twelve big stars that Hammond discovered and/or championed. There is much praise here for Hammond’s major accomplishments, but this is not a unilaterally positive, hero-worshipping biography. Hammond had his faults and difficulties as well. The reader gets a balanced and comprehensive sense of Hammond’s personality from Prial’s well-researched and well-written account.

Sound Man by Glyn Johns

Career retrospective of a record producer extraordinaire

Though I appreciate all kinds of music, the bulk of my listening time tends to be devoted to rock music of the 1960s and ‘70s (I was born in the middle of that period). With few exceptions, I generally don’t pay a whole lot of attention to who produces or engineers a recording. I have come to learn over the years, however, that if the name Glyn Johns is attached to an album, I’m probably going to like it and maybe even love it. Through his work as producer or sound engineer on such landmark albums as Who’s Next, Abbey Road, Let It Bleed, Led Zeppelin I, Slowhand, The Eagles, and many more, Johns did much to shape the sound of rock and roll during its formative and peak years. In his 2014 autobiography Sound Man, Johns recalls his stellar career recording some of the biggest names in popular music. If, like me, you’re a fan of Johns’s work, you’ll want to read this.

In Sound Man, Johns offers up a little bit of information about a lot of different people he’s worked with, so the approach could be characterized as broad in scope but shallow in depth. Johns has contributed his production, engineering, and/or mixing skills to hundreds of albums over the course of his career, and here he discusses about fifty of the most important projects and artists with whom he’s worked, so you get a few pages on each. As a result, the chapters are short, and the reading is brisk. At times, Johns seems to have compiled the narrative from his old appointment calendars. It’s not unusual for him to rattle off the names of a half dozen artists in a single paragraph: I worked on this, this, and this project; hopped on a plane to somewhere; had a meeting with so-and-so; than went back to mixing that album.

If you’re a fan of classic rock of the ‘60s and ‘70s, you will enjoy Johns’s perspective on the music business. His narrative does extend to 2014, but the bulk of the book deals with the classic bands of rock’s glory days. Johns has interesting stories to tell about the artists with whom he’s worked, but there aren’t really any major revelations here. This is very much a career memoir about the recording industry. Most of Johns’s anecdotes of his interactions with rock stars take place within the recording studio. There aren’t a lot of personal stories here. Johns never did any drugs, which probably kept him from penetrating the inner circle of many rock artists. The exception might be his relationship to the Rolling Stones. He worked on several of their records, accompanied them on tour, and formed a close friendship with Bill Wyman. Johns gives you a behind-the-scenes look at the personality dynamics within the band. If you’re a big fan of the Rolling Stones, however, you’ve probably read other books about them, so what Johns has to say here won’t surprise you. Beyond the Stones, Johns gives a fair amount of coverage to the Beatles, the Steve Miller Band, and the Eagles. Many of the moments that Johns recalls have since become familiar nuggets of rock-and-roll lore that most fans are already aware of, but Johns was actually present at these important turning points in music history.

In addition to the Hall of Fame-level artists that Johns discusses, he also mentions many musicians and bands that will be unfamiliar to those who aren’t British and didn’t grow up in the 1960s. That’s part of the fun of this sort of book, however—discovering previously unknown bands and nuggets of music history. Knowing Johns was behind the helm of their recordings makes me want to look up some of these artists who were previously unknown to me. I may not have learned a whole lot about the Rolling Stones or the Beatles from reading this book, but I did learn a lot about Johns and about how rock records were made in the good ol’ days. That, for me, made Sound Man a worthwhile read.

Balkan Ghosts: A Journey Through History by Robert D. Kaplan

Eye-opening political history of Southeastern Europe

Robert D. Kaplan is an American journalist who writes on foreign affairs. In his book Balkan Ghosts, first published in 1993, Kaplan relates his experiences working and traveling in Romania, Bulgaria, and Greece, and the former Yugoslavia. Kaplan wrote Balkan Ghosts after the fall of the Berlin Wall and before the Bosnian War. The 2005 ebook contains some supplemental material that Kaplan wrote more recently, but the book is largely about the state of the Balkans circa 1990.

To fully understand the state of affairs in the 1990s, however, Kaplan looks much farther back in history, sometimes as far as the Middle Ages, and provides a quite comprehensive overview of the 19th and 20th century history of the region. This historical background goes far in explaining how the Balkans ended up at the end of the 20th century. This region didn’t just become an explosive powder keg in the 1990s. The fire of sectarian hatred and violence has been simmering for centuries. It is common knowledge that World War I started with the Balkans (a Serbian assassin). Kaplan also makes the case that the Balkans influenced the origins of Nazism and World War II. His examination of recent dictators in Serbia, Romania, Greece, and elsewhere should serve as a cautionary tale of where America might be headed if we continue to dispense with our constitutional system of checks and balances.

Though Balkan Ghosts is advertised as a travel memoir, the bulk of the book is really history rather than travel writing. A travel writer would try to convince you to visit these places. As a journalist, Kaplan seems set on convincing you to stay away from them. He does want you to understand them, however, and does a very good job of helping you do so. Kaplan is a journalist and a war correspondent with the knowledge base of a geographer in Balkan Studies. His look at these Balkan nations is deeper than what you’d get in say, National Geographic, which would give you an inkling of the political climate, war trauma, and societal woes interspersed with scenes of hopeful resilience like a wedding ceremony or a newly opened museum. Kaplan, on the other hand, takes a more journalistic “if it bleeds, it leads” view that writing about anything other than politics and war would be frivolous. With the exception of visits to a few medieval monasteries, the text focuses almost entirely on ethnic violence, fascism, anti-Semitism, genocide, torture, and other atrocities. His perspective on the Balkans is more real and visceral than what you’d get in any popular media venue. Kaplan has almost nothing good to say about Romania, which from his account sounds like a horror show. He expresses a bit more warmth for Bulgaria and Greece.

In addition to his own observations and research, Kaplan gives the reader a literature review into the Western writers who traveled the region before him. In particular, he frequently makes reference to John Reed’s The War in Eastern Europe (1916) and Rebecca West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (1941), and even delves as far back as Byzantine historians Procopius (AD 500-565) and Michael Psellus (c. 1018-c. 1096). While you feel like you’re getting a pretty thorough study of the Balkans from Kaplan, he also makes you want to seek out some of these earlier writings on the region.

This region of the world is not covered much in the American news media or our modern history books. Understanding the Balkans, however, is necessary to forming a compete picture of European history in recent centuries. Those looking for a travel memoir of the region might be disappointed in Kaplan’s approach to the subject, but those looking for an education in world history and politics will find Balkan Ghosts to be an eye-opening and rewarding read.