26 Books

Now that the United States has a president who has a respect for and understanding of the republic’s “founding documents”, my interest in the early years of the country is at an all time high. Here, Joseph J. Ellis gives us six vignettes from the the lives of seven of the US’s most prominent early politicians.

Founding Brothers

Joseph J. Ellis
Vintage Books USA 2002, Paperback, 304 pages, £9.69

Having passed my fortieth birthday, I’m fully entitled to get my grouchy on, and nothing is likely to make that happen than the facile notion that history needs to be narrated as though it were a drama sketched out in advance. Ellis takes this approach for his opening chapter, which concerns the duel between Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr that resulted in the former’s death and the latter’s disgrace.

I’m not naive – at least not about this – I know that this is what publishers think readers want, but it’s painful to have to be told a familiar story as though it were a thriller, and this approach does a disservice to Ellis’s frequently telling insights. The same plague affects his telling of the Jefferson/Adams friendship, feud and reconciliation, with its improbable and all-American ending. It’s the written equivalent of TV documentaries that dramatise events in case our imaginations are too sluggish to be able to grasp the nature of the events.

The rest of the book is much better, in particular the chapter in which Ellis considers the long term impact of Washington’s Farewell Address. Similarly interesting is his discussion of the political manoeuvring around the selection of the location for the nation’s capital. As with so many issues of the time, the result was a compromise that smoothed over differences on the slavery issue that would lead directly to the Civil War. Despite his other great accomplishments, Jefferson comes out of this episode badly, as he does whenever his role vis-a-vis slavery, and even more especially when his double-dealing as John Adams’s vice-president come up.

It’s a short book, and it can’t, doesn’t seek to, match the depth of investigation that a longer book could achieve. Despite its sometimes clumsy dramatisation of events, it contains many fascinating details and much useful analysis.

Oh, how I wish I could put this book in the fiction category. It chronicles in sometimes mind-numbing detail how some of the world’s largest financial institutions brought the global financial system to the brink of collapse and how the US government narrowly averted this disaster with an almost unimaginably large bailout.

Too Big to Fail

Andrew Ross Sorkin
Allen Lane 2009, Paperback, 640 pages, £14.99

What’s most breathtaking about this book – and there are many such things – is the speed with which embattled CEOs go from being free market zealots to morally outraged supplicants with an expectation that they should be bailed out on the best possible terms by the taxpayer. Of course it’s no surprise that such morally compromised men should be hypocrites; that goes hand-in-hand with what they do. But that they would be prepared to argue for a doctrine that so opposes the logic of their entire working lives is pretty stunning.

This very funny book is hard to categorise. Is it fiction or non-fiction? Is it a biography or a book about not writing a biography? Having read it, I still don’t know the answer but I’m tempted to say that’s it’s all of those things.

Out of Sheer Rage

Geoff Dyer
Abacus 2003, Paperback, 242 pages, £8.99

Geoff Dyer, or a fictionalised version of him, wants to write a book about DH Lawrence. However, he alternates between being paralysed by procrastination and restless to the point that he can barely stay in one country. He’s in Paris when the book begins but believes he can’t write there and gives up his apartment with the intention of moving to Rome. Having given up his apartment, he becomes convinced that he can’t write anywhere else but Paris but it’s too late.

Jeannette Walls’ memoir is the story of a childhood spent moving from town to town and hovel to hovel, propelled along an increasingly unhinged adventure by her father and hero, Rex.

Dreamer, drinker, and erstwhile architect of the titular house of sand, Rex Walls has charisma to burn. That he does so, to the ground, is written in the stars from the outset. Just how he does it and who he takes down with him are what make this memoir so readable.

The Glass Castle

Jeannette Walls
Scribner Book Compan 2006, Paperback, 288 pages, £10.71

Times columnist Sathnam Sanghera bookends his memoir on life growing up in Wolverhampton with a letter he’s battling to write to his protective, ultra-traditional Punjabi mother. We don’t know what this letter contains, beyond the fact that it’s going to break her heart and it’s got Sanghera swigging neat vodka while he tries to write it. Good start.

The Boy with the Topknot

Sathnam Sanghera
Penguin 2009, Paperback, 336 pages, £9.99

What starts out as a memoir of growing up as a beloved younger son in a Punjabi family and then building a media life with white London friends as an adult soon zig-zags into family investigation. This isn’t a neatly arced story: we stumble across new developments with no real notice. Far from being an all-knowing observer dropped hints by Sanghera’s narration in some kind of Christmas Carol guided travel through his life, we come across things at the same time as he does, making it a far more accurate depiction of how surprises happen in real life. Bang! Surprise one. Bang! Surprise two. We flit from time to time (all held together easily, you don’t lose track) but you feel engaged rather than distanced. No Joanna Trolloping here.

Although Susan Sontag and Annie Leibovtiz were famously romantically involved towards the end of the former’s life, the essays in this collection were written before the pair met, which leaves the fascinating question of how intimacy with one of the world’s most famous practitioners of the art modulated Sontag’s views, if at all.

On Photography (Penguin Modern Classics)

Susan Sontag
Penguin Classics 2008, Paperback, 224 pages, £9.99

As they are, Sontag veers between the wilfully obfuscated prose that academics love and the statement of complete banalities presented as riveting insight.

I’ve read several books about American football this year. The others were about specific aspects of the game but this one is an overview of its history. MacCambridge rejects the common view that the modern NFL was born with the 1958 championship game. Instead he goes back to the 1940s and looks at how the owners of the teams back then laid the foundations for what has become the most popular spectator sport in the US and one of the richest sports in the world.

America’s Game

Michael MacCambridge
Anchor Books 2005, Paperback, 608 pages, £12.17

MacCambridge details the backroom deals that made it possible for the league to flourish as well as the action on the field that made the game so compelling to spectators. Often the two are linked – whenever the popularity of their sport waned or the popularity of baseball grew, the NFL owners would tweak the rules to increase the excitement of the game.

The Facts is subtitled ‘A Novelist’s Autobiography’. It opens with Roth writing a letter to his fictional alter ego Nathan Zuckerman. Even when he says he’s writing his biography, he can’t do it straight. As a nod to this, I’ve categorised The Facts in both the Fiction and Non-Fiction categories.

Novels and Other Narratives 1986-1991 (Library of America)

Ross Miller (Editor)
Library of America 2008, Hardcover, 800 pages, £30.00

In The Facts, Roth covers the years leading up to the publication of Portnoy’s Complaint, including some scenes from his childhood and college years. The most compelling passages cover Roth’s first marriage, its breakdown and the death of his first wife, and his frank admission that he was glad she had died.

This is a horrifying book. It gets painfully close to the innermost machinations of the handful of politicians close to Stalin from his accession to undisputed power following Lenin’s death to his urine-soaked death more than a quarter of a century later. It is based on extensive research in the recently opened archives, and contains voluminous quotes from correspondence between Stalin and members of his entourage.

Stalin

Simon Sebag Montefiore
Phoenix 2004, Paperback, 852 pages, £9.99

For all those reasons, it’s a very welcome book. But, regrettably, it suffers from being massively overwritten. Far from being the sober, scholarly narrative that one has come to expect from modern British historians such as Richard J. Evans, Ian Kershaw, Richard Overy, Orlando Figes and Robert Service, it is written in a ghoulish prose that sets out to judge the protagonists at every turn. Make no mistake, these are historical figures who need to be judged, but such judgement should be considered not sound like it has come from the pen of an airport thriller writer.

I’ll be honest: I bought The Eitingons because of the cover, which is a beautiful modernist composition in red, black and cream. I didn’t know anything about it, whether it was a novel or even who the author was. It turns out that it is a family history by Mary-Kay Wilmers, who is the editor of the London Review of Books. It also just so happens that her family history provides a fascinating journey through the 20th century.

The Eitingons

Mary-Kay Wilmers
Faber and Faber 2009, Hardcover, 496 pages, £20.00

There are three major figures in Wilmers’ family tree whose stories are covered here, as well as a supporting cast of several more. The first is Motty Eitingon, a refugee from the Ukraine who somehow managed to build an enormous fur import business in New York. The second is Max Eitingon, who became a disciple of Freud, and the third and most interesting is Leonid Eitingon, who was a member of the KGB in its various guises (Cheka, OGPU, NKVD, etc) from the revolution until the late 1950s.