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Age of Revolutions: Progress and Backlash from 1600 to the Present by Fareed Zakaria

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If you’re still on the prowl for this summer’s beach read, Fareed Zakaria has your back with his latest book, Age of Revolutions: Progress and Backlash from 1600 to the Present. It’s a book for those with, shall we say, divergent beach-reading preferences. Using his Harvard-trained political scientist background along with his current role as a CNN political commentator, Zakaria expertly combines both breadth and accessibility to lay out how studying five centuries of revolutions can add context to our current challenges.

This was an ambitious project, to be sure. Zakaria’s targeted audience here is wide, including both the Foreign Affairs reader and the more casual news consumer. To start, Zakaria contends that liberal democratic capitalism has been a basic good. We’re looking at classical liberalism, where democracies are not about outcomes, but norms: rule of law, individual and economic freedom, checked power. The revolutions he explores fall under a fairly traditional social science definition. They are revolutions that embodied profound structural changes: social, political, and economic. Zakaria excludes the American Revolution as it was more or less a civil war among Englishmen. After American independence, life in the former colonies looked pretty much as it had before. The Founders certainly did much to further Enlightenment thinking regarding liberalism, nevertheless, as evidenced in the Federalist Papers.

Zakaria credits the Dutch with the building of liberalism’s foundation. They rejected absolute monarchy and promoted free trade. Separating themselves from the Hapsburg Empire, a national identity was established. To themselves, they were the Dutch, distinct and unique. In 1688, the Glorious Revolution—in which a Dutchman and his wife, William and Mary, were invited to assume the English throne—solidified Parliament as the ruling power of England. In other words, a social contract was made. According to Zakaria, “the moment Dutch commercialism was wedded to English power can be seen as the moment the medieval world came to a close.”

Any discussion of revolutions must include the quintessence of failed revolutions: the French Revolution. Given the calcified state of French society in 1789, Zakaria notes that there was an early liberal movement during the nascent stages of the revolution. But when the Reign of Terror commenced, the French republic became, in reality, a dictatorship. The illiberal movements that followed were so seismic, their effects are still with us. Are you a liberal or are you a conservative? Are you a friend of the republic or are you an enemy?

This is why Zakaria’s book title is the plural of revolution. A revolution begets a counter-revolution. The French Revolution undoubtedly rattled Europe, especially within the German states. There was “a ferocious backlash to the cold rationalism of the Enlightenment, and its monstrous child, the revolution.” So, the Right turned to a new movement: Romanticism. Modernity had so shaken the elites, there was a pining for some bygone yesteryear.

The Industrial Revolution is covered along with the 19th century U.S. industrialization boom, what Zakaria calls America’s real revolution. He points out that the British government leveled the same accusations against Americans as today’s American government levels against the Chinese. Ostensibly, such practices as product dumping and intellectual property theft are not new. Nonetheless, massive change spurred massive disruption. The reaction in Europe came in the form of socialism; in the U.S., it was populism.

In the 20th century, liberalism’s greatest threat was communism. Zakaria details how the Washington Consensus encouraged developing countries to privatize and embrace the market economy via free trade. It was seen by President Reagan and Prime Minister Thatcher as a win-win: good for defeating the Soviets and good for the respective nation. Neoliberalism was so prevalent that when the Tories finally lost in the 1990s, Labour’s new leader, Tony Blair, embraced this globalist view. In fact, when Thatcher was asked to name her greatest achievement, she said, “Tony Blair.” The message was clear. Labour espousing Tory economic practices meant that, to her, the matter had been settled.

After the Soviet Union fell, political scientist Francis Fukuyama famously wrote that the event marked “the end of history.” To Fukuyama, political evolution had reached its highest state. Liberal democracy had, in essence, won. But history wasn’t quite finished, for a democratic backsliding—a move to autocracy—commenced in some countries. This shouldn’t be a surprise, says Zakaria. Market reforms may open a nation, but the foundation of a democratic system takes time to develop. Napoleon may have dismissed England as a “nation of shopkeepers.” But those shopkeepers point to a dynamic nation of staked interests. In other words, there’s a vigorous Parliament precisely because it took centuries to mature.

As the second half of Zakaria’s book moves us to the present, we see continued constructive and disruptive changes by way of modernity. He goes through the numbers, and they are striking. China and India essentially “come online.” Just think of the sheer volume of people now participating in this global economy. Additionally, technological changes continue to disrupt just as much as they contribute. Nothing new here. The printing press played a part in a century of European religious wars. In so many ways, life is now easier and safer. But it’s also more isolating. As a rather benign but consequential example, Amazon.com has replaced your local bookshop.

The “red state vs. blue state” debate is now part of the zeitgeist. But urban vs. rural seems more to the point. We have, more or less, self-sorted ourselves. This is further exacerbated when one siloes news sources. If you so choose, you don’t have to worry about working through any complex national or global issue. You can find plenty of outlets telling you that the answers are simple, and that others are to blame for the problems, always. These are business models disguised as news organizations.

Abroad, the European Union has been an economic success, yet many Europeans feel alienated from its largesse, says Zakaria. Farther east, revanchist Russia is in the throes of its own curious grappling with identity. To add further complexity, we (in the West) tend to think of Enlightenment precepts as universal. But many countries tend to view them as a “legacy of Western dominance.”

Zakaria seems to take a rather sanguine view of our global economic interdependence. He wants the reader to consider the rather long relative peace that’s been in place among the great powers. But, he of course understands the challenges. He quotes Kierkegaard: “Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.” The book’s epigraph includes a famous Marx and Engels passage from The Communist Manifesto: “All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned…”

Anxiety and constant change are certainly a part of our modern political economy. In response, there are individuals who claim to be the vanguard of a movement to cure the ills that they have diagnosed, asserting that they are the only ones who can offer stability. Tribalism is often signaled over reality. Historically, followers of such individuals are willing to tolerate (or even advocate) realpolitik actions, thus eschewing institutions and democratic norms. In other words, such actions are illiberal. What happens when illiberal means are used in an attempt to restore some atavistic sense of national strength? Can liberal democracy survive when rules, procedures, and compromise are tossed aside? Perhaps we will see.

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Reviewed by Jason Sullivan

You Dreamed of Empires by Álvaro Enrigue

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Hernán Cortés meeting Moctezuma in 1519 holds some space in our North American imagination. Two trajectories of human development—long separated by time and distance—crossed in Tenochtitlan, modern-day Mexico City. For many, it symbolizes the beginning of the end, the Old World commencing its dominion in the New World. Imagine the meeting: European steel and gunpowder entering the dominant empire in Mesoamerica. We can almost feel the tension five centuries later.

In You Dreamed of Empires, Álvaro Enrigue has a reimagining for the ages. Yes, it foretells the eventual clash between Spanish conquistadors and a sophisticated city. But most of the novel reads like the most awkward of weekend getaways between two groups of people trying to understand what in the blazes is going on. It’s often comedic, taking the reader on a delightful, almost hallucinogenic flight.

We first find Cortés and a few of his men as dinner guests of Moctezuma’s retinue. One conquistador, never having experienced the deliciousness of chocolate, wants to down the frothy cacao drink that was served. However, the Tenochtitlan priest seated next to him—”his teeth filed sharp as a cat’s”—has him more than a little unnerved. More than anything, it’s the nauseating stench of coagulated blood from the priest’s cape made of human skin.

The fact that the Spaniard is not eating his soup is becoming an issue. Moctezuma’s priests are whispering. Cortés shoots the soldier a reproachful look, like a parent silently scolding a child with a flash of the eyes: Eat! The soldier finally imbibes, prompting a comrade to raise his cup of chocolate at his countrymen, as if to say, “Looking good, Spain.”

Moctezuma leaves others to deal with the Spaniards. He’s deep within the palace complex, self-medicating with psychedelic mushrooms. His depressed malaise is crippling. He’s always having to solidify power and find opposing warriors to sacrifice in the temples. If it’s not one thing, it’s another. And it’s not as though the “testy gods” are appreciative, what with their “blithely doling out droughts, earthquakes, defeats, and invasions.” Now, here are these Spaniards, these “bearded ones.” So Moctezuma lies down. “The Silence his nap demanded was imperial.” All things within the palace become hushed. When he wakes, he rings a royal bell, its peal waking “a whole world” just before he returns to sleep.

The conquistadors are left to wander the impressive and disorienting palace complex. With its many canals, one soldier remarks that it’s like Venice. Another responds, “It’s like Venice, but in hell.” The palace is so silent and empty it feels as though they’re “strolling along the seafloor.” Every day is like a Sunday, says another. Meanwhile, the soldier charged with stabling the horses is having some difficulty in finding suitable accommodations. The problem, of course, is that horses are just as new to the area as the Spanish.

Are they guests, or are they prisoners? They don’t know. There is, nevertheless, the feeling that they are getting away with something. Could they ever get this close to the Spanish crown? Of course not. But look at them now, even if they do feel idiotic marching through this heat and humidity in helmets and breastplates. In fact, when comparing their attire with Moctezuma’s warriors’ headdresses representing their guardian animals, the Spanish crested helmets seem “about as majestic now as a bagpiper’s bonnet.”

Tlilpotonqui, the mayor of Tenochtitlan, at times comes across as an overworked concierge. When Moctezuma beacons, go he must. He’s had it up to here with everyone and everything. We can imagine him trying not to get caught rolling his eyes when has to listen to He Who Looses the Rain of Words and Governs the Songs Lest We Be Like the Flowers and Bees That Last But a Few Days sing—once again —the “interminable” Legend of the Suns.

Excessive rumination is not something that burdens Cortés. We know from history that Cortés was positively awful. And he’s dreadful here too. If there is one thing that burns inside Cortés, it’s his quest for gold. It’s purported that Cortés said to Moctezuma’s representatives, “I and my companions suffer from a disease of the heart which can be cured only with gold.”

Eventually, Moctezuma—fully sated on magic mushrooms—emerges. Here he is, the mighty ruler of the “fear-producing machine” that is Tenochtitlan. And what happens? He and one of his priests hear a T.Rex song from the 1970s and start dancing about.

Absurd? Yes, of course. But there’s Borgesian magical realism in play here, especially toward the end of the novel. If that’s not exactly your literary bag, perhaps it may help to know that this novel is rather svelte, coming in at just over 200 pages. And, really, when capturing the peculiarity of this time and place, magical realism offers its own illuminative qualities.

Cortés and his men weren’t the first Spaniards to reach Mesoamerica. It was already known among many Mesoamericans that these “foreigners were ordinary men, but when there were many of them they became terrifying.” So it’s no wonder that in Enrigue’s incantatory novel, he has Moctezuma asking Cortés to just stop, to join him, and to “dream now.” It all “doesn’t last, like flowers.”

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Reviewed by Jason Sullivan

Crook Manifesto by Colson Whitehead

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In Crook Manifesto, the always excellent Colson Whitehead takes us back to the world he devised in his previous novel, Harlem Shuffle. Ray Carney still has his Harlem furniture store. Becoming more prosperous, he and his family have settled into an apartment on the coveted Strivers’ Row. We’re in the 1970s, where “the flamboyant quotient in Harlem” is high, filled with all sorts of “groovy plumage.”

But the New York of the 1970s is also one of decline, with “the apprehension that things were not as they had been and it would be a long time before they were right again.” In the decade of America’s Bicentennial, this current volatility seems fitting to Carney, where America is both “melting pot and powder keg.” And to Carney, the powder keg is besting any harmonious melting together. When it comes time for him to conjure up his Bicentennial furniture ad for the newspaper, he can’t think of anything jingoistic. He can think only of such cutting things as “200 years but it feels like more–Ask the Indians. This July 4th, Salute Truth, Justice & 3-Position Adjustable Recliners.”

Still, even though Carney tends to “weave private dread into the universal condition,” life is pretty good. He’s no longer a part of the secondary economy, where he helped fence (move) stolen goods. His underworld contacts have stepped back into the shadows, leaving Ray Carney to live the straight-and-narrow life.

That is until his teenage daughter wants tickets to see the Jackson 5 at Madison Square Garden. As any father will tell you, just about anything will be done to avoid disappointing your daughter. So as the concert date approaches, Carney does what he has to do to score tickets to the sold-out show: He steps back into the shadows.

Carney contacts Munson, a white cop who shakes down the neighborhood crooks. He’s a crook with a badge, a streetwise tough from Hell’s Kitchen who long ago realized he could work both sides of the law. He’ll get Carney those tickets, but Carney must go on a ride with him. And what a wild ride it is.

It’s an open question whether Carney was looking for an excuse to re-enter the underworld. Either way, he quickly realizes he’s made a big mistake. “Slip once and everybody is glad to help you slip hard. Crooked stays crooked and bent hates straight.” Munson’s world is collapsing, so he enlists Carney to act as wheelman on one final run of extortions.

Whitehead demonstrates why he’s won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, twice. He could be describing anything and I’m pretty sure I would be regaled. During moments of grand intensity, there’s still some observational levity that underscores the absurdity of what’s transpiring. For example, there’s the old-timer crook who forms perfectly articulated sentences even with an active cigarette affixed in his mouth. “Shakespeare monologues couldn’t budge it.” Soon after this thought, someone is shot three times. And on it goes.

There are quite a few recurring characters from Harlem Shuffle (such as Munson), most notably Pepper, an aging bruiser whose entire adult life has been one heist after another. (Note: Crook Manifesto can be read as a stand-alone novel.) When a blaxploitation shoot is set to be filmed in the neighborhood, Carney sees to it that Pepper works its security. To the taciturn Pepper, “filmmaking was a heist, same animal.” In fact, Pepper sees most human activity through a criminal’s lens. To wit: The men on the street signs didn’t get there “by being decent, that’s for damn sure.”

Whitehead is known for his meticulous research to set a scene. Pick any era, allow Whitehead some time to research it, and he’ll pen a story that will place you right in that period. In 1970s New York City, arson was ubiquitous. The reasons for it are varied, but we already know the drill: debilitated buildings being burned not only for insurance payouts but also for kickbacks to those who will choose just who in fact gets to rebuild them. It was common enough for some tenants to sleep with their shoes on. Then there were the willing arsonists, or “firebugs”—blokes who just wanted to see the world burn.

Pepper can be violent, but the crime he sees now goes beyond the pale. In addition to the wildness of repeated arsons, there’s such things as the mother of four who’s stabbed over a few dollars and a pastrami sandwich, and the Juilliard student who’s pushed onto the subway tracks. To Pepper, “a man has a hierarchy of crime, of what is morally acceptable and what is not, a crook manifesto, and those who subscribe to lesser codes are cockroaches.”

Nonetheless, both Carney and Pepper know that in a “city like this, it behooves you to embrace the… contradictions.” And, really, it’s not as though there was some “good old days of crime” epoch, even though it often feels like it, a wanting for it to be so. Take Alexander Oakes, a rising politician and a childhood friend of Carney’s wife, Elizabeth. Both Alexander and Elizabeth come from the monied Harlem community, with Alexander acting as an interlocutor between the old and new power structures. To Elizabeth’s father, Alexander “would have been his son-in-law if the world made any kind of sense, if Elizabeth had any sense.” Without giving anything away, Carney and Pepper learn how this other set operates, and, once again, it gets fierce.

The world—as it does—changes fast for Carney. His kids are growing, doing their own thing, and on their way to leaving. His wife has her own busy career. Other than an occasional meet-up with Pepper and a few others, he’s essentially a loner, with an uneasy foot in both the crooked and straight worlds. Things come back hard on Carney, leaving him somewhat bewildered and struggling with what he should be thinking about. He’s like the city where he lives. “The city is being tested. It was always being tested and emerging on the other side in a newer, stronger version for having been laid low.”

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Reviewed by Jason Sullivan

The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder by David Grann

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Just when you think you’ve already heard the most daring of castaway sea voyages from the historical record, comes now author David Grann to regale us with a remarkable chronicle of woe. In The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder, Grann weaves together a myriad of sources, recounting events with such vibrant prose they unfurl before the mind’s eye. These events, however, happened over 280 years ago. As revealed by his previous book, Killers of the Flower Moon, Grann’s talent is not just in narration, but also in finding historical narratives that turn the looking glass back around on us.

Mark Twain purportedly said, “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.” During the 18th century, naval warfare was one such rhyme. In 1740, the Royal Navy dispatched a squadron from Portsmouth on a mission to seize the treasure aboard a Spanish galleon. Grann does capital work in describing the socio-economic profile of the crew, ranging from striving officers to men pressed into service against their will. Aboard these warships, pitiless hierarchy is the name of the game. For a ship to slice through the ocean, each crew member has to work with machine-like precision. Any dereliction is met with the lash—or worse. As we already knew, democratic these ships are not, for any glint of mutiny portends chaos.

On this voyage, typhus takes its toll. Also, as the squadron sails around Cape Horn, scurvy ravages the crew, rendering them near useless. Traversing the Cape’s furious waters is certainly an inauspicious time for a weakened crew. For centuries it bedeviled sailors. Grann notes that those who experienced it “strained to find a fitting name for this watery graveyard”: “Blind Horn’s hate,” “Dead Men’s Road,” or just simply “Terrible.”

Some of the squadron’s ships make it. Some turn back. One ship, a former merchant vessel (an East Indiaman) retrofitted into a warship, decidedly does not make it: the HMS Wager. Grann lays out, with great drama, how the ship runs hard aground just off a Chilean island. Water floods in, rats scurry up from the holds, and those well enough to flee scramble into smaller boats. Then there are those who break into the ship’s store of alcohol and go berserk in a mixture of revelry and fighting.

On that speck of land, later named Wager Island, commences the rest of the book’s subtitle. There is scant food on the island to sustain life. Celery grass, however, does alleviate the scurvy. A potential lifeline also manifests with the appearance of the Kawésqar.

Inhabiting the Patagonian archipelago for thousands of years, the Kawésqar people marvel the Wager’s crew with how they keep warm in constant near-freezing conditions, lathering their exposed skin with animal fat and tending small fires in their canoes. They extract sustenance from the sea and share it with the castaways. Eventually, an entire Kawésqar village relocates to the island. And then—and you knew this was coming—some of the crew promptly ruin it all. Quite often a group is only as good as its worst members. The worst of the Wager’s crew would, on occasion, take a boat to the ship’s wreckage, drink their fill of spirits, and then return to harass those on the island. One night, as the crew slept, the Kawésqar quietly gather their belongings and disappear.

Two crewmen’s journals supply much of the content on which Grann draws. One is John Bulkeley, a gunner. The other is from John Byron, a young midshipman and future grandfather to poet Lord Byron. Bulkeley is a savvy scribe, for he knows his journals need to reinforce the narrative he’s going to relay to the English admiralty.

Of course any relay is subject to a big-time fact conditional: getting off the blasted island. How this transpires is best left to the reader. But when the mutiny comes, the language used by the mutineers is similar in spirit to what American colonists will argue in the Declaration of Independence some 30 years later. Just as the mutineers name their despot, Captain Cheap, so will the Declaration’s signers name theirs: King George III. In essence, Enlightenment precepts were used, arguing that it’s not they who were in rebellion but their disgraced leaders, men who failed those they were charged to lead.

One faction makes it back to England before the other, commencing the race to peddle a narrative. There are plenty of London broadsheets more than willing to print the various stories from those on the Wager. For the crew, it’s more than an abstract winning of hearts and minds. It’s about solidifying a narrative that will be told to Royal Navy authorities. Under naval codes, punishment for dereliction of duty was already greatly feared by officers and sailors alike. Grann quotes Voltaire’s “Candide,” saying “that the English believed it proper to ‘kill an admiral from time to time in order to encourage the others.’” The admiralty’s ultimate decision is both unexpected and telling.

The Wager is every bit the historical thriller, deserving of the praise it’s garnered. But Grann is also asking the reader to consider larger questions. Why was it necessary to send out warships at all? The events happened under the auspices of the War for Jenkins’ Ear. And if—just by name alone—this sounds like a ridiculous undertaking, you’re not far off. Lives were lost, all in service of…what exactly? Quite a few of the Wager’s crew disappear from the historical record. Grann also mentions the many slaves lost (read: killed) in the Middle Passage during this time period. It’s no accident these nameless lives rarely entered any record at all, except perhaps as a ledger expense. Those responsible certainly had no interest in highlighting such barbarity. Says Grann: “Empires preserve their power with the stories that they tell, but just as critical are the stories they don’t—the dark silences they impose, the pages they tear out.”

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Reviewed by Jason Sullivan

The Vaster Wilds by Lauren Groff

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We meet “the girl” as she runs through a land that’s “innocent of story.” She thinks not of what‘s being left behind, lest she “die of grief.” She’s fleeing a settlement where even the good have become awful. Through snow and ice she runs, “speed and fear” constituting her sails.

We never learn of the girl’s name. The girl doesn’t know it either. In The Vaster Wilds, Lauren Groff’s harrowing new novel, there’s plenty left unnamed. Though the settlement from which she flees is unidentified, think of Jamestown during “the starving time” to provide some orientation. And just as the Old World meeting the New World provides an overriding theme of disorientation, so too does the struggle of the immediate. The girl is in trouble, and we are with her every step of the way.

Wise beyond her years, she seems to know that survival requires her to suppress any emotion that may lead to a loss of control, thus hastening her demise. “O do not cry, girl,” she tells herself upon meeting the dead eye of a frozen fish that’s just below the river’s ice, “its blue lips pressed in a kiss to the surface,” a fish she subsequently devours. Being of such a low station does truck one advantage: there’s scant much to her past she wishes to hold. “A nothing is no thing, a nothing is a thing with no past.”

Nonetheless, she’s ghosted by the few individuals who extended her kindness. And she aches when thinking of the toddler with whom she was charged, it being not a “labor of serving but rather a labor of adoration, and thus almost no work at all.” What she clings to now are the few inanimate objects vital for survival, personifying them in turn. “The hatchet was blunt but faithful, the knife was two-faced and angry but always ready…”

Wilderness survival is new to the girl, but basic survival is not. For it’s not just the natural world that’s red in tooth and claw. Predators, she knows, live among the civilized as well. Still, it’s civilization she again seeks. She has a vague sense that there are French to the north and a great ocean to the west that may harbor an English ship. (She’s already experienced the ocean to the east.) Until then, it’s the monotony of daily survival along with moments of abject terror.

It’s not only man and beast she fears (more so the former than the latter), but also her “own small starved feverish self.” Onward she plods, equating nature’s vulnerabilities as her own: the exposed roots of an overturned tree, “tender as toothaches.” And she knows that those who dwell on this land should fear her too, as she carries the scourge of her civilization: disease.

There are fleeting moments of levity such as when the girl watches “a huge porpentine walk his bristles through the undergrowth with the weary pomp of a crowned prince.” But this is not a Robinson Crusoe tale. Nor is the girl becoming physically stronger like Buck in The Call of the Wild.

The reader can ponder much about the book’s themes. The story’s premise essentially has them jumping off the page. At times, Groff is pretty much stating them. Ordinarily this would be a touch annoying. Themes are good, stating them less so. But it works here because the reality of the unnamed girl out in the unnamed wild is such a stark one. The girl can’t help but think of the nature of dominion, what it meant back in England and the settlement, and what it means now out in the wild.

Or don’t ponder any of this at all and just follow the girl. Groff’s writing is vibrant. So it’s reason enough to join in, even if this beautiful writing is being used to describe horrible things.

The girl is deep into the woods. Because of her sporadic delirium, she often views herself as the keeper of civilization. But the urgencies of the moment are becoming too much, and the only thing that’s real is what’s upon her. As a result, what’s unnecessary starts to leave her concern. It’s through her struggles she’s learning to let go. The Sun becomes her benediction. And even though she’s heretofore been pious, yearning for another life beyond death, a deliverance from hardship, there is—right now—“no angels, no harps, no gates, no fires singeing the sins back into the sinner.” No, “there was only wind drawing itself endlessly over the dark crowns of the pines… And feel it now, so soft, so eternal, this wind against your good and living skin.”

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Reviewed by Jason Sullivan

His Majesty’s Airship: The Life and Tragic Death of the World’s Largest Flying Machine by S.C. Gwynne

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Word association with “airship” probably yields responses ranging from “Goodyear Blimp” to “Hindenburg.” Perhaps there’s also a vague sense that airships had their greatest run in popularity during the early 20th century, transatlantic crossings and all. In His Majesty’s Airship: The Life and Tragic Death of the World’s Largest Flying Machine, S.C. Gwynne unfurls this period with a white-knuckled briskness. Entertaining as it is edifying, it recounts many moments that left me in near disbelief.

An early chapter entitled “Brief History of a Bad Idea” pretty much sums up airships in the main. First, they were filled with an explosive gas: hydrogen. Helium was a known alternative, but its extraction was in the nascent stages. Case in point, in 1905 the “world’s supply of helium…remained on a shelf at the University of Kansas in three small flasks.” Second, airships were notoriously difficult to fly. Wind speeds, along with constant gas expansions and contractions, required constant ballast and lift adjustments.

Even with these substantial detriments, Gwynne notes that lighter-than-air travel was still seen as a viable consideration, especially since heavier-than-air travel (the airplane) was literally just getting off the ground. In the early 1900s, Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin ushered in the era of rigid airships (dirigibles, or “big rigids”), eventually captivating the German public. His Zeppelins must have been a grand sight, all eyes on the cigar-shaped airships floating overhead, each over 400 hundred feet in length.

Gwynne says that Count Zeppelin’s worldview was “more feudal kingdom than Europe of La Belle Époque.” This is telling in that World War I looms, with Germany growing increasingly militaristic. These new airships were seen less as travel vessels and more as a means to drop munitions in times of war. In fact, German schoolchildren were taught a song that included the verse “Fly, Zeppelin! Fly to England! England shall be destroyed by fire!”

Still, Zeppelin’s company wanted to showcase its airships’ travel capabilities. In 1910, a handful of passengers embarked on what was supposed to be a three-hour luxury flight. What the flight actually did was underscore the unavoidable problem with airships: navigating through storms is harrowing, if not impossible. A storm tripled the flight’s duration, often sending it flying backward, with the crew finally admitting to passengers that they had no idea what to do.

German airships decidedly did not destroy England by fire during World War I. Quite the opposite. They were easily shot down. Given this, it’s somewhat puzzling that Great Britain would vigorously pursue its own airship program. Yet it didn’t take long before its own airship program would astound, for in 1919 a British airship crossed the Atlantic Ocean (twice). To add perspective, Lindbergh made his famous solo flight in 1927.

Gwynne provides many tales of derring-do associated with these airship flights, all with the backdrop that a mere spark from static electricity could send the ship ablaze. The flights included wild altitude spikes that left most crew members scrambling for footing, let alone controlling the ship. Given the vast catalog of mechanical errors, it’s amazing that the ocean’s vastness was traversed at all. Regardless, to many a Brit, the successful to and fro flights were evidence of English pluck and resourcefulness.

Ten years later, Lord Christopher Thomson, holding the fantastic title of Secretary of State for Air, sought to navigate Britain’s immense imperial skies via airship. In Cardington, England, he spearheaded the building of the R101. At 777 feet it was the world’s longest airship to date. Millions of cubic feet of hydrogen were held within gasbags made of cattle intestines. Riggers working within the cavernous hangar would either sing or hum as a safety precaution. If workers on the ground noticed that the riggers above were carrying on with high-pitched voices, they knew to alert them that they were slowly being asphyxiated by an odorless gas leak.

The whole enterprise was a boozy affair. Workers of all stripes consumed vast amounts of spirits throughout the building process. When R101 was brought out for test flights, it was docked atop a mooring mast, over one hundred feet high. One night, selected guests were invited aboard for drinks and a tour of the ship. As the drinks flowed, winds tussled the moored ship. At the end of the night, some of the more intoxicated guests believed that they had actually flown.

Thomson, a Savile Row-clad chap, pushed R101’s designers and builders to be ready for a 1930 flight to India. As the date neared, both engineers and crew alike knew the ship was not ready. It was too heavy to sustain lift for such a long flight. There were precious few mooring masts between England and India, so it had to stay aloft. Thomson pushed ahead anyway. He had a schedule to keep. A state dinner in India was timed in conjunction with his landing in India, plus one in London upon his return.

It’s unclear why he forged ahead in the face of these concerns. Thomson had spent so much of his career striving. Would a successful flight lead to his becoming viceroy of India? He had also spent so much of his adult life trying to impress a Romanian princess: Marthe Bebesco. Would a post in India bring them closer? Even Thomson’s best friend, Prime Minister Ramsey MacDonald, was confused as to why the flight went forth.

In 1930, Thomson and 47 others perished aboard R101 en route to India. They didn’t even make it to Paris. The growing popularity of radio made the fiery crash a world-wide mass media event. Gwynne provides a thorough investigation of the R101 crash, piecing together what little is known and making a convincing case as to why it crashed then and there. What was known at the time of the crash: no amount of future swashbuckling was in store for the British airship program.

Upon seeing R101 just outside its hangar, Gwynne notes that one British observer stated that it looked like an “ambitious toy.” I thought something similar years ago when I saw the Goodyear Blimp, remarking that it looked like an overgrown party favor. But it’s also a reminder that history is full of ambition and folly. Thomson’s predecessor remarked that Thomson possessed the “sin of impatience.” Hard to argue against that. He will be forever tied to the R101 disaster. Yet we also learn in Gwynne’s fine book that Thomson was also instrumental in bolstering the Royal Air Force, an entity that would prove essential in thwarting Nazi attempts to destroy England by fire.

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Review by Jason Sullivan

Trust by Hernan Diaz

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How vast individual wealth is amassed often hits its mark in biographies. We know the usual suspects: Carnegie, Rockefeller, Jobs. Within each is a story of a commodity or a manufactured good, something tangible for the mind’s eye. Concentrated wealth by way of finance capital is a more nebulous biographic endeavor. Rarer still are novelizations about finance capitalists.

If such a novel sounds beyond dull and has you mentally placing it back on the shelf, then this year’s co-winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction should have you reconsidering. I’ll take it even further: If there’s one novel I would recommend, here and now, it would be Trust by Hernan Diaz, the aforementioned winner. It’s a brilliant work told in four parts, each with a different narrator. As such, it’s tempting to label all narrators as unreliable. Fair enough, yet some narratives appear truer than others, with each casting doubt on what you think you’ve already learned. Throughout, the reader is putting together an intriguing narrative puzzle: Who are Benjamin and Helen Rask?

The novel begins with a novella that reads like a biography that’s essentially free of dialogue. Written by a man named Harold Vanner, he pens as his first sentence: “Because he had enjoyed every advantage since birth, one of the few privileges denied Benjamin Rask was that of a heroic rise.” Bookish and solitary, a young Rask enters the 20th century with “no appetites to repress.” When his father dies during his senior year of high school, “relatives and acquaintances alike were impressed by Benjamin’s composure, but the truth was that mourning simply had given the natural dispositions of this character a socially recognizable form.”

To say that he’s without appetite is somewhat of a misnomer. True, the tobacco business that yields great generational wealth within the Rask family bores him. Using that wealth to buy and sell securities decidedly does not bore him. In fact, as he moves through early adulthood, the New York financial community is awed by his ability to capitalize on the market.

But Rask has a problem. His localized fame works against his need for solitude. Continuing his monastic life carries the risk of being labeled, understatedly, “a character.” Rask is cognizant enough to know “there was nothing more conspicuous than anonymity.” He finds the remedy in Helen Brevoort, his future wife. It’s more than a marriage of convenience. They both share ravenous intellectual curiosities. Helen, too, craves a life of the mind. Yet she’s more adroit in crafting their image, understanding that “privacy requires a public facade.” She and Benjamin host numerous gatherings at their New York City mansion, notably chamber orchestra performances.

Throughout their marriage, the Rask fortune grows to levels that leave other financiers wondering exactly how this was achieved. Helen, in turn, uses this wealth to become the nation’s leading benefactor of the arts. Then comes the stock market crash of 1929.

Rather than being ruined, the Rasks inexplicably profit from the crash. They are vilified in the newspapers, Benjamin accused of orchestrating the calamity for personal gain. The Rasks become social pariahs before a brutal illness takes Helen’s life. In the end, despite their lavish parties, no one can say that they really knew the Rasks.

The novel’s second narrator is a financier who worked during the time in question. The novel’s third narrator is Ida Partenza, a woman who’s recalling—many decades later—her employment by the second narrator. And the final narrator’s diary entries completely change the novel’s tone, revealing and answering much. To expound on these narrations here would steal some of the novel’s thunder.

I say “some” because even if someone had disclosed what was to come, I would have devoured the novel nonetheless. Diaz’s writing is exquisite. He captures the voices of the learned, ranging from securities traders to cultural elites. He can also jettison any high-mindedness and share the musings of someone—regardless of socioeconomic class—who’s nearing the great equalizer: death. “Is the strawberry in my mouth alive? Or is its flesh, speckled with the unborn, already dead?”

Partenza’s narration also reveals a life outside the rarefied air of the wealthy. She and her Italian immigrant father are barely surviving the Great Depression in their Brooklyn apartment. It doesn’t help that her father is a self-styled anarchist who detests the very concept of money, a quasi-Marxist who can’t stand the Marxists in power. Still, he and the financier who employs Ida have something in common. They both see the economic depression as a corrective, but for vastly different reasons.

Ida loves her father and doesn’t necessarily disagree with some of his views; yet she finds his dogma insufferable, bordering on fascistic. She can’t help but take some pleasure in knowing that her father must accept that her income comes from a finance capitalist, money that keeps them housed. This period of her long life is short, but a certain person and event within it will also become the standard by which she will forever “measure hatred.”

The stories within Trust surround how paper capital begets more paper capital. But it’s also a story about how views on money bleed into all interactions, whether someone realizes it or not. It’s a story about how reality can be made to fit mistakes, about the “bizarre sort of violence in having…memories plagiarized.” Some of life’s narratives are born of deceit, becoming earnestly told and believed with each retelling.

Reviewed by Jason Sullivan

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Small Mercies by Dennis Lehane

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There’s a refrain that spans time and distance. When circumstances are what they are, someone will shrug and say, “It is what it is.” In Dennis Lehane’s gritty new novel, Small Mercies, the residents of 1970s South Boston say this, along with such things as “Whatta ya gonna do.” It’s not a question, of course, because it’s a given that, with some things, there’s nothing you can do. The Irish American inhabitants of South Boston embrace both pride and defeat. They proudly call their neighborhood Southie, yet they know that no matter how hard they work, being poor is a lifelong reality. It is what it is.

Mary Pat Fennessy’s first husband died and her second husband walked out on her. After her son returned from the Vietnam War, he became hooked on heroin and overdosed. So that leaves just her and her teenage daughter, Julia (or Jules), sharing an apartment in Southie’s Commonwealth housing project.

Mary Pat “looks like she came off a conveyor belt for tough Irish broads.” She’s small, but—as with so many other Southie kids who grew up in “Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots” households—she’s ready to fight. Her mother once told her, “You’re either a fighter or a runner. And runners always run out of road.” Not that Mary Pat needed to be told that, really. It’s not as though there was anywhere to run within the cramped household.

Jules is different. There’s a softness to her that Mary Pat has never known but nevertheless tries to foster. Once, when walking with Mary Pat, Jules explodes into tears on a Southie sidewalk, prompting stares from others. Mary Pat, in turn, holds her daughter, proud “of this weak child she’s borne.”

Still, it’s Southie after all, where “most kids come out of the womb clutching a Schlitz and a pack of Luckies.” Here, Jules is no different, which Mary Pat accepts. And if Jules can stay away from some harsher influences (such as the heroin that killed her brother), she might be okay, Mary Pat thinks.

There’s something else raising May Pat’s ire. It’s 1974 and a court-ordered mandate to desegregate public schools is galvanizing Southie. Some white students from South Boston High School are to be bused to Roxbury High School, a predominately African American school. Jules is going into her senior year assigned to Roxbury. Mary Pat is having none of this. Nor are Southie residents accepting that some Roxbury students will attend South Boston High.

It’s in this charged environment that a young black man is found murdered in Southie. On the same night, Jules goes missing. A homicide detective, Bobby Coyne, investigates the murder as Mary Pat desperately tries to find her daughter. Are the murder and disappearance related? Bobby knows that he has a tall order in trying to solve a murder in Southie, its residents an “unknowable tribe.” Mary Pat, part of that tribe, must cross boundaries within her own neighborhood, which takes her into the world of Marty Butler, a neighborhood mobster who’s clearly a stand-in for real-life mobster Whitey Bulger.

Lehane not only keeps the plot rolling, his characters have depth. And throughout, there are nuances that place you right in the scene. When Mary Pat’s niece, for example, is described as “a girl who’s always managed to be twitchy and listless at the same time,” we see her, know her a little already. And, trust, Mary Pat certainly doesn’t stand apart from her neighbors when it comes to prejudices.

The Southie in this novel is not unlike other enclave neighborhoods. It possesses both benevolence and hate. It has a mobster who claims to protect his neighborhood, his people. But in reality, it’s “his people” he hurts the most. It, like neighboring Roxbury, has parents willing to do anything to protect their children from harm. But they know that, in the end, they can’t.

“It is what it is” may seem like a throwaway line. Frequently it is, to be sure. But it also embodies the heartbreaking reality that we, at times, live in an unjust world that metes out punishment for the simple audacity of being alive. The poet Charles Bukowski said there’s often “pain without reason.” Sure, you can unpack the events. But as Bobby says to Mary Pat: “This life. You know? Try and make sense of it.” Well, she does see how it is. And she’s done with anything resembling “Whatta ya gonna do.” She’s rendering judgments. And those on the receiving end had better watch out.

Reviewed by Jason Sullivan

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Rikers: An Oral History by Graham Rayman and Reuven Blau

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A perk of landing at New York City’s LaGuardia Airport is the resplendent rollout of the Manhattan skyline. As you descend into the maw of a great city, you’ll find it outside your left window. Taking off from LaGuardia, you’ll find another famous—albeit grimmer—NYC scene, this time just outside your right window: Rikers Island.
There’s exactly one narrow bridge leading to the East River island. And if you’re on it, leaving Queens, it means you’re heading to New York City’s largest jail complex. It’s been in operation for almost a hundred years and has, over the decades, become known by its prisoners as the “House of Dead Men.”
In Rikers: An Oral History, journalists Graham Rayman and Reuven Blau show what life is like inside the jail by sharing the experiences of both prisoners and staff. While the inmate population is constantly in flux, the average prisoner staying around four months, violence is a constant. Regardless, whether the account is via a prisoner, a correctional officer, or a warden, taken all together, it’s a tale of horror.
Before a new prisoner is sorted into a specific jail (there are ten jails total for men, women, and adolescents), joining a total prison population of around 5,000, there’s the intake process. A recurring theme for new arrivals, including staff, is noticing the abject filth. Prisoners are placed in “holding pins” that are filled to capacity and then some. If you actually get a seat, consider yourself lucky. One former inmate states that “it’s crazy,” a pin filled with 60 prisoners, some of them on their third day of waiting for a jail assignment; plus, some are dope sick in a jammed-pack pin where the plumbing has long since stopped working.
Once in a jail, it—as with any jail—is a world unto itself. If you happen to be a member of a gang that has number superiority on a tier, life will be easier for you than for someone who’s not similarly gang affiliated. This is especially true when it comes to phone access. Throughout the book there’s a consistent theme: gangs control who gets to use the phones, not the officers. In fact, historically, some of the officers have been gang members themselves. In the summer, there’s the risk of heat exposure in some cells. (One inmate died from the heat, a jail official actually saying, “He basically baked to death.”) There’s a chapter on the prison’s food, which I wish I had skipped.
This book is supposed to be a tough read, forcing us to face what incarceration actually looks like. And when it comes to reading about the treatment of the adolescents (and the mentally ill) inside Rikers, it almost shatters your belief in humanity. According to accounts, incarcerated teens were often forced to fight each other, which was unofficially sanctioned, if not outright encouraged, by guards. The adolescent jail became known as “gladiator school.”
One teen was held in Rikers for three years without a trial. (His parents couldn’t afford to make his bail.) Once released, the trauma of the experience was the stated reason for his suicide. What was the alleged offense that led to his lengthy incarceration? He stole a backpack.
It’s important to keep in mind that most of the prisoners in Rikers have yet to have their day in court. In fact, many wait so long for a court date, it’s faster to plead guilty, whereby credit for time served allows for an expedited release. Of course, doing so means they now have a record that will absolutely be used against them in the future. On the revolving-door nature of the system, one judge says, “I feel like I’m handing out a life sentence to these people, but I’m doing it thirty days at a time.”
One older ex-cop from Barbados refused to plead guilty, stating that he was charged with “steering.” His arrest went like this. While sitting on his stoop in Brooklyn, a man approached him asking to buy drugs. The ex-cop told him that such activity did not happen on his corner, that he would have to go down to a different corner. Thus, “steering” the man to an illegal drug purchase. He refused to admit that he did anything of the sort, sitting in Rikers for two years before the charges were dropped.
Humanity is a scarce resource behind prison walls. But educational programs, especially theater and poetry courses (not surprisingly, humanities courses both) are often brief lifelines to inmates, guilty or innocent. One inmate says, “the most horrible thing about being locked up is that you are dehumanized on a daily basis. In order to navigate the experience, you have to normalize the dehumanization. You have to buy into it in order to survive. Once you internalize it, you project it outward. If you are being dehumanized, that’s how you treat other people. That to me is the essence of incarceration: having to buy into the dehumanization.”
The New York City Council voted to close Rikers by 2026. The experiences in this book certainly seem to underscore that decision. But there’s still the question: Then what? That’s where opinions diverge dramatically.
Until then, Rikers is a reality, and there’s still one piece of advice older inmates sometimes dispense to younger inmates. When it’s time to leave Rikers and you’re on that narrow bridge out, don’t look back. “Don’t ever look back or else you’ll come back.”

Reviewed by Jason Sullivan

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Rogues: True Stories of Grifters, Killers, Rebels and Crooks by Patrick Radden Keefe

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If you peruse a public library’s nonfiction section, you’ll eventually wander into a grizzly sector: true crime. Chances are you won’t bump into me there. While “understanding” the psychoses of serial killers is laudable, I can’t shake the horrid end that came to their victims. So, I’ll usually find something else to read, thanks. Still, true crime as a subject encompasses much, and there are some gripping tales out there.

Patrick Radden Keefe knows his way through the genre, writing about political murder in Northern Ireland as well as chronicling one family’s machinations in pushing painkiller drugs that fueled an opioid crisis. His latest book, Rogues: True Stories of Grifters, Killers, Rebels and Crooks, a collection of articles that originally ran in The New Yorker, hooked me straight away.

Wine fraud is a given in the wine-collecting market. Rare wine attracts wealthy collectors, which in turn begets swindlers. Keefe tells us of what happened when one billionaire was duped into buying wine that was purported to belong to Thomas Jefferson. The billionaire, Bill Koch (of Koch brothers fame), made it his mission to seek retribution, spending more for this satisfaction than what he spent on the bogus wine. Entertaining, to be sure. But, to me, Keefe’s exploration of the wine market, where fakes often best originals in tastings, is where the essay thrives.

Also, judging by his wine ledgers, Thomas Jefferson certainly liked to lean into a bottle. According to Keefe, Jefferson “might also have been America’s first great wine bore,” as evidenced from John Quincy Adams’ diary. After one dinner with Jefferson in 1807, Adams noted, “There was, as usual, a dissertation upon wines. Not very edifying.”

There’s an article on Mark Burnett, the man who brought us such television shows as “Survivor” and “The Apprentice,” the latter styling Donald Trump as an icon of business success. It’s yet another stark reminder that there are those who underscore what can be promoted and sold over what is fact. Nothing new there. However, when one assumes the presidency on this marketed foundation, we should all take pause.

Keefe writes of a Swiss bank heist and of an international arms broker. Financial scandals are unpacked, as well as an account of a man seeking justice for his brother, a victim of the Lockerbie bombing. There’s an article on a criminal defense attorney who defends some of the most heinous criminals. Her representation is not to prove their innocence; she’s trying to keep them off death row by humanizing them in the eyes of the jury. Not an easy job, that.

There’s the Dutch gangster who kidnapped Freddy Heineken (of the beer dynasty) for ransom. A more violent gangster is profiled in Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, the former leader of a brutal Mexican drug and money-laundering cartel. Despite their fame, the daily lives of both gangsters read as positively banal, with Guzmán having to change up residences every few days to evade capture. It’s the opposite of glamorous. He and his family tediously schlep their belongings from house to house. (There is, however, an occasional mad dash through a sewer.)

Perhaps the most chilling article concerns Amy Bishop, a neurobiologist who was denied tenure at the University of Alabama. At the next faculty meeting, she shot and killed three coworkers. At first, the story appears to highlight the pressures of academic life. But there is so much more to Bishop’s life story. As dangerous as, say, Guzmán is, his violence emerged from a violent upbringing. With Bishop, however, the source of her murderous ways is not so easily explained.

The last article features Anthony Bourdain, the chef turned writer (a talented one) and television travel host. Keefe states that part of Bourdain’s popularity springs from his circumventing “homogenized tourism.” As viewers, Keefe notes that we are given a “communion with a foreign culture so unmitigated that it feels practically intravenous.” In spite of Bourdain’s image as a rebel, Keefe found him to be “controlled to the point of neurosis…He is Apollo in drag as Dionysus.”

Since these articles were published over a span of 15 years, there are addendums at the end of each. Doubtless, many readers already know that Bourdain committed suicide and that Guzmán is serving time at the supermax prison in Colorado. With each article, Keefe’s writing is a reminder of the value of longform journalism: giving complex stories the space to be thoroughly told and appreciated.

Reviewed by Jason Sullivan

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