Dee Brown (1970)

The history of Manifest Destiny written from the perspective of its victims.

This isn’t an easy read. The central characters are all doomed from the start by their weakness and lack of understanding of what is motivating their other side. However, what comes through clearly is both the nobility of the Native Americans in the face of their own destruction, but also the cruelty and capriciousness that led the new settlers to misunderstand their motivations and desires.

Stronger than this, though, is the Victorian hypocrisy of the settlers and weakness of the US government during the period. As soon as there’s any value perceived in Indian lands, treaties are torn up and “re-negotiated” to their detriment. These depredations are all accompanied by the most suffocating cant about what’s good for the tribes, or how much value they’ll obtain for giving up their “worthless” land. This is what makes the story resonate, for me. It’s not that the Native Americans were dispossessed of their lands: that’s normal practice in an invasion and, while possibly deplorable, is at least commonplace in history. What isn’t common is to assert, apparently sincerely on some people’s parts, that the dispossession is happening for the good of, or to the benefit of, the dispossessed. It shows the settlers as unable to conceive of the Indians as partners with whom one treats seriously — never mind as equals — and provides a fig leaf behind which to hide their direct or indirect destruction.

The government also comes through as weak, in the power of vested interests and cabals of plotters, and unable to enforce its decisions over space or time. The people on the ground almost always have a different perception — sometimes better, sometimes worse — of the situation, but the lack of control means that these perceptions are of no use in improving in the long term how the Native Americans are treated. Perhaps this was inevitable at the time: reading in our own time, however, it’s hard to think of the federal government being so helpless against the States or even its own agents.

I think the question of whether it was even conceivable that Indians and settlers could have lived together peacefully remains largely unanswered and subject to too many imponderables: if the Indians had been left enough reservations, if the central government could have prevented settlements from encroaching, if the railroads could have gone through without conflict, then perhaps. The fact that none of these approaches were ever tried with any seriousness does no credit to those involved either locally or nationally.

5/5. Finished Saturday 5 October, 2013.

(Originally published on Goodreads.)

Sam Kean (2010)

A romp through the lesser-known facts of the periodic table. I think anyone with even a basic interest in science would find this book entertaining and at times fascinating. It has a broad spread that includes scientific facts, the processes of discovery, biography and human rivalry — often in the same paragraph.

I can’t say I like the author’s style, though: it’s too “bouncy”, too frantic to entertain, and the content is sufficiently absorbing not to need such a treatment. That’s purely a personal preference, of course, and another reader might find it exhilarating.

3/5. Finished Saturday 5 October, 2013.

(Originally published on Goodreads.)

George Packer (2013)

This is a fascinating book that somehow fails to satisfy. It consists of a series of biographical sketches — some short, some extended, of people and places — that catalogue the “unwinding” of America’s social contract over the decades since 1970: how the decline of well-paying, stable, blue-collars jobs and the rise of big-box retainers has destabilised society.

Some of the details are extraordinary, such as the evolution of a community activist in Youngstown, Ohio, in response to the collapse of local industry, or the travails of Tampa, Florida, in the face of a housing bubble. As a whole, however, the book doesn’t make its point very clearly. The addition of a descriptive or analytic conclusion might have helped, and indeed I was led to read the book by an interview with the author on Irish radio in which he provided exactly this additional analysis.

3/5. Finished Sunday 8 September, 2013.

(Originally published on Goodreads.)

H.R. McMaster (1997)

4/5. Finished Tuesday 3 September, 2013.

(Originally published on Goodreads.)