Micro Mention "American Prometheus"

 

J. Robert Oppenheimer is a tragic figure of American history whose accomplishments were all overshadowed by one thing; he was the father of the atomic bomb. Once a hero, then painted a villain and torn down by his own. “American Prometheus” by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin captures that narrative.

I talk about that idea in more detail in my full review. 

What I want to point out, though, for this little piece is, isn't it amazing how like in this book, when the conservative political party froths its way up into a moral panic, lives are ruined, and careers are destroyed.

But when a right-wing politician straight up breaks the law, they fly away in their helicopter with no consequences. Or fights an entire debacle shadow war with no consequences. Or an actual conventional war, twice, with little to no plan with no consequences. Or, finally, continues to be president after seriously suggesting protestors be shot in the legs or to cure a virus with bleach injections.

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"The Epitome of Grace" by Sharon Liotus--Play Review

This is unusual for me because I don’t normally review anything other than books on this blog. Still, here we are, and today I’m talking about “The Epitome of Grace,” a one-woman play featuring Cindy Swanson as Chief Therese Rocco. The playwright & producer is Sharon Liotus, who is a personal friend of mine—full disclosure—and it was directed by Dan Kirk, with Al Marschke as Technical Director.

As for why I’m reviewing a play out of the blue—there are many reasons—certainly, because I was asked to and because I went to see it for myself last Saturday, April 30. 

Most of all, I agreed to do this review because I’ve met Chief Rocco, who is a real person by-the-by for you non-Pittsburgh natives. She’s an amazing woman. Therese Rocco started her career in law enforcement in the middle of the 20th century, and it stretched all the way to the new millennium. By the end of that illustrious career, she was Pittsburgh’s first female assistant chief of police—and the first in the nation, according to at least one local newspaper that I’ve not rigorously fact-checked on that point.

That, however, is straying from what I want to discuss. 

I want to talk about what it was like to experience this play. As a one-woman show, it’s cleverly written from the perspective of and very much in the voice of Chief Rocco herself, telling us the story of her life. Liotus achieved this through her own friendship with Therese and through exhaustive interviews with those who knew and worked with the Chief.

At the performance I was at, Chief Rocco was in attendance. So it was a bit of a sight gag to see her in the crowd watching a woman on stage portraying a younger version of her. Like everyone else in attendance, Chief Rocco laughed when the play was funny. The vignette about how she caught the fleeing theater pervert by pulling down his pants as he tried to run away comes to mind, which has a certain amount of poetic irony about it when you think about it.

Alas, though, like with all true stories about police work, there are always the more sorrowful moments. It would be cliché if it weren’t so heartbreakingly true that every detective, given sufficient time on the job, inevitably has that one case that doesn’t get solved and haunts them—even long into retirement. The case of Mary Ann Verdecchia is that case for Chief Rocco, and the pathos that Swanson infuses into her performance describing that hole in time and space where Mary Ann disappeared walking home one day rends the soul. Mary Ann didn’t have a traditional family—her mother and father weren’t around, and she was being raised by a relative. The world took even more from her, and so far, the quest for justice has been left unfulfilled. Still, hope holds out that answers will be forthcoming one day.

Watching and experiencing—however vicariously and fleeting—Therese Rocco’s rise through the ranks in the police department is an absolute joy that this play captures. It was a journey with its ups, the promotions, and support—and downs, the constant roadblocks put in her path by those who had no motivation other than they didn’t like the idea of a woman being in her role. When Chief Rocco was tapped to be on the shortlist of candidates to be recruited for the U.S. Marshals and then ultimately betrayed for craven political reasons and blocked, again, because she was a woman, the indignity was palpable in the theater.

The concluding implicit message of the play, however, I think is its most powerful; that you can’t control the world and how it reacts to you, only how you respond to it in turn, and even if speaking for the truth is the losing position it’s still the correct one. There were many times throughout her long life and long career where Chief Rocco could have given up, thought of giving up, and had doubts—because that’s human.

In the end, though, what makes her legendary around here isn’t that she never had doubts or always succeeded. No, it’s that despite those doubts, she took what life threw at her on the chin and kept fighting for what was right, no matter how hard. 

That’s grace. 

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Additionally, Chief Rocco also wrote her memoir "Therese Rocco: Pittsburgh's First Female Assistant Police Chief," which inspired the play. I plan to review it here on WIO at a later date when I finish reading the book. So far, I'm loving it as much as I enjoyed the play.

Micro Mention "The Finest Hours"

I always love a good nautical adventure—be it fiction or nonfiction—but this story by Michael J. Tougias and Casey Sherman, "The Finest Hours," is more a nautical horror story—a nightmare that really happened. Never underestimate the power of the sea.

I've talked about this before on this blog, but I have experience working on the water. Certainly nothing like this; I worked on riverboats that did day cruises, but anyone who has worked around any body of water knows that when the weather changes, the water changes, and it can easily be dramatic. Water on the move, in a storm, can feel like a vindictive and malevolent force. That's why this book reads like a horror story to me.

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Author's Website: https://www.michaeltougias.com/

Micro Mention "Hamilton: The Revolution"

I loved "Hamilton" the musical, so I was over the moon to listen to this book, "Hamilton The Revolution," by Lin-Manuel Miranda and Jeremy McCarter, to get all the background information about it that any obsessive nerd could possibly want.

It's incredible how this show managed to revitalize my interest in this period of American history and underline values from all the way back to the founding of the union that still persist today. Though, I sometimes worry that not every American values the principles of democracy as much as they should today.

Plus, despite listening to the whole show numerous times, beyond counting, I find myself listening to the songs today as if I hadn't heard them all a million times before. I still pick up subtle things I hadn't appreciated before, but this book is also a bit of a cheat sheet. So if nothing else, I'd suggest picking it up for that reason if you're a fan of the musical.

Micro Mention "Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant"

So, soon after starting Chernow's excellent biography, I decided that I wanted to get the story of Ulysses S. Grant straight from the man himself. "The Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant" are startlingly intimate and powerful, and every American should read them. 

Anyway, fun fact, the "S" in Ulysses S. Grant doesn't stand for anything. It certainly doesn't stand for Simpson, making it weird that this audiobook edition proudly displays it as his full name. How do I know this? I read Chernow's book. In fact, his name was actually Hiram Ulysses Grant, but he went by his middle name. When he was accepted to West Point, the military academy dubbed him U. S. Grant through a clerical error.

Also, of all weird things, the terrible movie "Wild Wild West" gets it right that President Grant went to West Point when Will Smith's character realizes that he's talking to Kevin Kline's character in disguise by noticing him wearing the wrong school ring. Quite a clever moment for an otherwise stupid movie. Of course, it loses all cleverness points because earlier in the scene, Kline's master of disguise character costumed as Grant offers Smith's character whiskey. Grant was incredibly sensitive about his drinking and the perception that he was an alcoholic. As president, he would have never been caught dead drinking in front of anyone in the White House.

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"The Federalist Papers" by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, John Jay--Nonfiction Review

Set phasers to maximum pretentious, Obscurists, as today I’m going to talk about a keystone document or rather documents supporting the constitution of the United States of America. Yep, I’m talking about “The Federalist Papers” by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay—and all because I read them that one time after watching the musical “Hamilton” more times than I’ve gone outside in the last two years.

You’re probably asking yourself, “wait, isn’t this Kevin guy a recluse? Does that mean like, five?” No, it does not. I’ve been outside tens of tens of times.

What I love about this book:

I talked about this recently on Twitter—it’s also why I’m writing this review—but Federalist number 6 is one of my favorites. It goes into ancient history and Medieval-ish European history, but mainly what it talks about is human nature, avarice, war, and insurrection. It’s a strange but illuminating experience to read something written in the distant past and see today’s problems. 

This brings me to my next point of what I love about “The Federalist Papers,” the authors were idealistic men but also intensely practical—and I value both of those traits. They didn’t seek to fix the human condition or change the person as more religious or purely philosophical schools of thought tend to fixate on as their chief concern.

What the Federalists believed in, in my opinion, is that a strong and carefully tuned government can channel the collective will and wisdom for the aggregate betterment of all. But the mechanisms that make that possible also include an ever-present sword of Damocles. It comes in the form that a small syndicate—or an individual—of an unscrupulous bent might hijack the components of our government to wield outsized influence over their fellow citizens.

And that’s why so much of our governmental system in the United States is dedicated to frustrating itself via checks and balances. It wasn’t a bug. It was always baked in as a feature all the way back in the day.

What I don’t love about this book:

As the song goes—John Jay got sick after writing five, which was a shame because I thought he had made some interesting points. I would have liked to get more of his thoughts in this collection.

There is a bit of historical controversy over exactly who wrote which essays. Also, it’s disputed how many were written by Hamilton and how many were written by Madison. It really underscores the point that we were always fractious and argumentative, even all the way back to the beginning.

It’s wearying because there is a theme that runs through human history that if we all were just a bit better—not even a lot better as individuals—the collective improvement would be immense. I believe you can pick up on that frustration, reading these essays. But like I eluded to above, you work with the clay you have, not the clay you wish you had.

“The Federalist Papers,” and this is really Hamilton’s doing, which is disappointing, comes out hard against the idea of a Bill of Rights. That turned out to be dead wrong, and I hate agreeing with Madison over Hamilton on something—but I’m on Madison’s side of this argument.

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Parting thoughts:

Returning to a theme from the previous section—let’s imagine for a moment that better clay. Think about what might have been if Hamilton was a slightly better version of himself.

He was a towering intellect of his day, and after reading his work, even by today’s standards. He fought incredibly hard for the birth of my home country and worked his mind and pen to superhuman levels. In terms of sheer ability, there is no reason he couldn’t have one day risen to be President of the United States. And what would that have looked like?

Instead, he ended up dead from a bullet shot by, at the time, the third sitting vice-president of the United States. What a way to go out, I guess—stupid—but memorable. Pretty ironic for a guy who tried to define himself as the smartest man in any room.

But it’s really the little character flaws that wore him down and put him in front of that gun. It was his arrogance, his propensity to make enemies when he didn’t need to, and his pride is no small part of his downfall too.

I think his most tragic character flaw is how he cheated on his wife—and through some childlike delusion—concluded if he just wrote enough about his infidelity, he could somehow make it all better. Because that’s what he did, to achieve everything he did in his life. 

It’s sad to watch someone’s favorite tool fail them at their greatest moment of crisis—but there are just some things you don’t get to come back from, and that’s one of them. 

Or, well, it used to be—kinda different now.

"Hidden Figures" by Margot Lee Shetterly--Nonfiction Review

We're doing another space book, Obscurists. Well, sort of, it is more a history of NASA and some of the most talented women to ever work there whose contributions were sadly mostly forgotten until recently. Today's book is "Hidden Figures" by Margot Lee Shetterly.

What I love about this book:

So I'm a big lover of all things space—I'm not so crazy that it's become the playground of billionaires—but still, I love the history of the space race and the ambition and talent that drove NASA forward. I love this book because it shines a light on the contributions of black women who participated, immensely, it turns out, to our success in space.

"Hidden Figures" isn't just a history of NASA's earliest days during the Mercury missions but primarily a biography of Katherine Johnson, Mary Jackson, and Dorothy Vaughan. It shows how all three black women—and more like them—contributed mathematical prowess in the computing departments and engineering expertise in Jackson's case. All of this was at a time when women, in general, were typically discriminated against in the workplace.

Racial prejudice is focused on in far greater intensity in the movie based on this book than the book itself. I'm in no way trying to suggest that it didn't exist back then or that it didn't exist at NASA, and I'm sure these women were faced with that ugly truth. After all, black people don't get to stop being black ever, not for one moment. We should live in a world where color doesn't matter, but that goal has yet to be achieved. 

What I mean is this book reaffirms NASA's core value of excellent research above all else. Any skilled person can describe a good idea or the truth about nature, regardless of uterus status or skin color. That is and always was, most important at NASA. While admitting there were still segregation laws in force at NASA, Katherine Johnson even said that she personally didn't feel it during her time there because the mission was most important at work. I'm paraphrasing from this quote: "... didn't feel the segregation at NASA, because everybody there was doing research. You had a mission and you worked on it, and it was important to you to do your job ... and play bridge at lunch." She added: "I didn't feel any segregation. I knew it was there, but I didn't feel it."

1.  "Katherine Johnson Interview: NASA's Human Computer" HistoryvsHollywood.com. CTF Media. 2016. Archived from the original on March 3, 2017. Retrieved March 2, 2017.

What I don't love about this book:

The movie focuses on the racial element of the story pretty hard because it's a reliable story beat to gain audience support—at least a certain non-racist audience—but in doing so, it miss characterizes this book, in my opinion. Sure, generally, the past in the late '50s and the early '60s overall had a more in-your-face sort of race problem. However, telling the story of these women as a way of saying they succeeded despite the old racists at NASA is kind of disingenuous and lazy. NASA was a pretty progressive place back then, maybe not to our standards today, but still, the Mercury missions took place on the tail end of the Jim Crow era. The idea that black people and women, too to boot, were trusted with genuine, hard, and necessary—life or death work was radical for the day. 

So the actual shameful thing—the real no-joke insidious racism—that this book points out is how we just forgot these women, who they were, and what they did. It's insidious because of its banality. Women like Johnson, Jackson, and Vaughan were always there up to the modern era. They just weren't given any sort of visibility to the public, in either the media or in popular movies—movies I like which saddens me to no end.

The Hollywood movie is the way that it is, in my opinion, because we like to see the past being somehow less enlightened on this front—across the board—and that we, the wise non-racists, have grown and transcended this problem. Except that's bullshit, and we haven't. We're just much more sensitive to being called out for when we're doing some racist shit. Ignoring the contributions of some, belittling them, denying them representation or just plain apathy toward an ethnic group is, in fact, racist.

Where I am going with this point is that this book's quality that makes it feel like a revelation isn't a good thing as the movie version supposes. It isn't a breath of fresh air, some grand rediscovery—it's a goddamn American tragedy. The idea that we as a society tacitly allowed the perception that NASA employed nothing but exclusively white dudes with pocket protectors from the flight director all the way down to the janitor and no one else—is as tragic as it is wrong.

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Author's Website: http://margotleeshetterly.com/

Parting thoughts:

So for my parting thoughts, I'd like to shift gears here. Recently, it has become fashionable, we'll say, for some groups of Americans to vocally and stupidly claim that we never landed on the moon—and also that the Earth is flat. I don't know, probably.

This is one of those things like Mr. McConaughey's character in "Interstellar" that instantly gets under my skin and annoys me. On the face of it, not only is it wrong, with nearly every country verifying that our radio signals from the Apollo missions came from the moon. Countries including Russia, who was famously competing with us at the time to do just that. Not only is it a denial of the single greatest technological feat we as Americans have ever accomplished, including the atomic bomb, and that there are literal mirrors on the moon that we still use in experiments today left by the Apollo astronauts. It is a slap in the face of every brilliant American astronaut, scientist, engineer, mathematician, and physicist who sacrificed so much, sometimes their very lives, to accomplish that dream.

This insult typically comes from the same group of people who can't even spell algebra, let alone pass it in high school. So why do they insist on their factually wrong position and that we take their non-expertise as valid? I've meditated on this point for a long time, and I believe the answer is actually quite simple.

They are Americans who hate America.

That is a loaded and admittedly inflammatory statement that requires qualification—which I will provide. More precisely, they hate America as it is, and as it always has been, which is a broad land of immigrants from all corners of the Earth, with different skins, beliefs, religions, and languages cohering together as one society. They do, however, love their imaginary America that they've constructed in their mind. An America that was somehow uniformly white, Christian (whichever brand they subscribed to), and the reason that there are literally any problems whatsoever is that we've gotten away from that.

There is this sick love for conspiracy where there is no conspiracy. Instead of admitting that maybe their lives are mediocre because they are, in fact, mediocre. They've never taken the time or effort to change that about themselves. Instead, they invent cabals of satan worshiping pedophiles that somehow hold back their natural all-white awesome American-ness.

The denial of the moon landing stems from the same poisoned fruit that we couldn't possibly have succeeded at such a challenge because the people who did it weren't pure as defined by some wackjob. The people who did the work, the math, the planning, and took the risks to make it possible were diverse in ethnicity, gender, and religion.

And that has no place in their imaginary America. So it didn't happen.

Micro Mention "The Ten-Cent Plague"

You know, oddly enough, even though this book isn't specifically about this, but it wasn't until I read "The Ten-Cent Plague" by David Hajdu did it crystalize for me how in the '50s we went from the people who fought fascism in the '40s to become the fascists.

Primarily, "The Ten-Cent Plague" is focused on how the comic-book industry got scapegoated by moralizing, holier-than-thou types, who convinced the government to assist them in their censorship. A flagrant disregard and disdain for the very first amendment to the constitution of the United States.

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Which protects the freedom of speech from the government. This is off-topic, but again, it only protects censorship from the government, not consequences from private citizens or entities. Back on topic, the so-called conservative forces like to tell us a little story about themselves, that they are and always have been the party of the constitution, law, and order. Except, if you read books like this when one of those pesky amendments, such as the first one, gets in the way back in the '50s. 

It's amazing, according to them, how it's always the artists who are corrupting the youth. It's never the manufacturers of instruments of death—be they weapons or be they poison destroying the environment. People go on like the GOP has suddenly gone crazy with Trump-ism, but they have always been this way ever since WW2. With their power at its zenith, they blackballed anyone back then left of center—to fight communism, of course, which leads in a straight line all the way to today. They talk about how much they respect the police right up until they get in the way on the steps to the Capitol. Then it's apparently OK to beat them to death because, after all, we need to stop the non-existent cult in Hollyweird because it's always the artists' fault.

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Micro Mention "Hidden Figures"

I recall many an idiotic conversation where it was positioned to me that black men and women just don’t contribute as much. An immediate refutation to that is Margot Lee Shetterly’s “Hidden Figures,” the book that inspired the excellent movie.

These women did their jobs as part of our fledgling space program, not just as good as white men and women but often better. The pressure to be accepted at the table was incredibly immense because not only were they women when women were treated as inferiors but also black when a lot of whites didn't consider them even people.

The truth of the matter is we wouldn't have just been poorer as a nation without the contributions and insight of people like Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan, and Mary Jackson—but poorer as a species. A fine mind can rest in the skull of any person, of any race, gender, or sexual preference. To pretend otherwise is as childish as it is willfully stupid.

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Author's Website: http://margotleeshetterly.com/

"American Prometheus" by Kai Bird & Martin J. Sherwin--Nonfiction Review

In this review, we’re talking about the Pulitzer Prize-winning biography “American Prometheus” by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin. It tells the story of J. Robert Oppenheimer—father of the atomic bomb.

What I love about this book:

As someone interested in technology, physics, and history, this book satisfies all of those interests in one fell swoop. At first, I assumed it would be strictly a biography of Oppenheimer during his time with The Manhattan Project and shortly after that because that’s when he was the director at Los Alamos, where we all know him for his work—the building of the first nuclear weapons. “American Prometheus” is actually the entire story of J. Robert Oppenheimer’s life from the cradle to the grave. As such, it provides us with great context for how and why he became the father of the atom bomb. 

Oppenheimer was someone whose life straddles two sides of a pivotal moment in history. I enjoyed vicariously seeing the world—as best you can imagine through books like these—through his eyes and perceptions. It has been growing in my mind this idea that while we may have been on the winning side of World War Two, we won at a significant cost to our nation’s soul and character. 

The World Wars are often expressed in numbers—number of dead—number of planes, tanks, and ships lost—number of dollars spent. So the intangibles get left by the wayside because they’re impossible to quantify. What I mean by our national character and soul is that when we fought against Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and Imperial Japan, we were morally in the right and superior to our foes. 

But then we won, and things change. An ugly thing started to creep into America, the presumption that we would always be morally right and superior to our adversaries—no matter what we did because we dubbed ourselves the good guys. It stood to reason that any actions done by the good guys would have to ex post facto be good and justified for the greater good. Even when objectively it wasn’t true. This book shows in the latter half how our paranoia caused us to turn on our own, seeing traitors and communists everywhere in our midst, including our national luminaries such as Oppenheimer.

This is not the focus of this book but is given context through Oppenheimer’s life that it occurred to me when reading “American Prometheus” that there is a kind of repetitive beat to the American character. We fought the American Civil war, and the crux of it was that all people are people and should be able to partake and enjoy the fruits of freedom, against a foe who, based on an odious theory of race, disagreed. Then after we won, we backslid with the death of reconstruction. In World War Two, something similar happened, and after we won, we backslid again. 

The argument could be made that this has always been our central conflict. It’s been with us even all the way back to the Revolutionary War against Britain because our founding fathers pointed out, as a central justifying point for our rebellion, the question; what is a King? Is he not but a man? And as just a man, how could he be any more than merely equal to his fellow-men?

What I don’t love about this book:

So this book won a Pulitzer Prize in biography in 2006—and that’s great, don’t get me wrong—but my complaint is for such an esteemed book, and it’s a great book, how is it the audiobook version is produced so poorly? 

The narrator isn’t totally to blame. He’s fine. But somewhere along the line, the editing got sloppy, and the sound levels are all over the place. In one sentence, it’ll sound like Jeff Cummings is right next to you. The next, he’ll sound like he’s across the room, and then right back next to you a heartbeat later. I get it’s an older audiobook, but—holy hell—it’s not like 2007 when the audiobook was released was the dark ages. For a ninety-five percent exclusive audiobook reader, it was beyond distracting for me.

My chief complaint about the content of this book is that the authors will state a point, share a quote, and then make sure to repeat it again. This typically happens at the beginning of one of their usually very long chapters—my feelings about that topic are well documented—and then rehammer that point or quote later in the chapter. It isn’t clever. It just adds to a whole circular repetitive feel to the whole book. You might have noticed I just did something similar with nearly every sentence in this paragraph, and it was annoying then too!

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Author's Website: https://kaibird.com/

Parting thoughts:

One of the most terrible things about American culture over great periods seems to be our proclivity to vacillate back and forth on our beliefs. It’s uncomfortable—to me at least—how many times we defeat a foe either ideologically, on the battlefield, or both only to then cede ground to them. Then some of our number spontaneously decide something like, “well, maybe those objectively terrible people had a point!”

Again calling back to the civil war period, we did it with the Confederacy, then the Ku Klux Klan, and now some people openly call themselves Nazis. All of those original groups engaged in slavery and genocide to varying degrees. It does a disservice to the men and women who sacrificed so much to put them down that we now allow them a seat at the table as though they had something legitimate to add to the conversation. Now I get this is starting to sound like an anti-free speech argument, and that isn’t my intention. I believe in free speech. I believe you should be allowed to say nearly anything you want without censorship from the government, as defined in the first amendment.

What I don’t believe in is immunity to consequences because of your words or a guaranteed platform provided by privately or publicly owned companies. The first amendment protects you from the government, but any other entity which isn’t the government is free to decide not to do business with you because you went on a racist tirade on Youtube. I cannot begin to tell you how much it makes me grind my teeth when people get this wrong still when they accuse Youtube or Facebook, their job, or whatever else that isn’t part of the government of violating their first amendment rights.

I digress—and I’m straying from my original point—I can’t help but be horribly conflicted with what happened in Afghanistan. On the one hand, I never agreed with the war. I didn’t think we should have invaded in the first place. To continue to pour blood and treasure into the cause decades on, intellectually, I understand, would be folly. But it smacks a lot of what I was saying earlier. It kind of smells like the age-old American tradition to cede ground because we’re tired of the fight—and maybe this fight wasn’t worth fighting in the first place. I thought so and still think so.

But watching people cling to the outside of American planes in takeoff—people who fought with us, people who believed in us, only to fall to their deaths—how did it come to this? 

There had to be a better way.

"The Devil in the White City" by Erik Larson--Nonfiction Review

Time for something light and fun, like the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893, oh and murder—mustn’t forget the murder. Okay, so maybe not so, light and fun, but Erik Larson’s “The Devil in the White City” is still a good read.

What I love about this book:

So this book was recommended to me by way of; it’s about an early American serial killer who built his own “Murder Castle” while the Chicago World Fair was happening. The biography Larson writes up about H. H. Holmes is chilling. Certainly, the man was the kind of sociopath with absolutely no scruples, and on top of being a murderer, he was also a petty thief and fraudster.

What took me by surprise is that a considerable amount of this book is wholly devoted to just describing the Chicago World’s Fair’s history. Larson tells you about the fair’s organizers, the architects, setting up the fair, running the fair—and far more. He even sketches out the lives of many people directly involved with the fair with a historian’s attention to detail.

I found the bits of this book about the Ferris Wheel, which made its debut as an attraction at the World Fair of 1893, riveting. I’m generally not one to even think about Ferris Wheels in the first place—to me, they’ve always just been a vertical carousel—a somewhat amusing but ultimately bland ride. I did not realize that the original Ferris Wheel was nothing like your local small-town fair Ferris Wheel. It was 264 feet tall and had a capacity of over two thousand riders—simultaneously! This was built and operated in the 19th century, maybe near the end of but firmly still in the era of “hope this steam boiler we barely understand doesn’t explode and kill us all.”

What I don’t love about this book:

While I may like both parts of this book, it feels a whole lot like two books fused together. On one side, we’re learning about the murderous H. H. Holmes, and that’s fascinating. On the other, we’re learning about the Chicago World Fair of 1893, which I didn’t even know I wanted—but I never found myself loving the ping-ponging back and forth between the two. Holmes used the World Fair as cover for his murderous activities—to be sure—but it isn’t like he wasn’t a murderer before and after the fair.

Related to the issue of bouncing back and forth between these two topics—there didn’t feel like there was a logical flow. The reason why Larson would be talking about certain events in the murder side of the book alongside whatever interesting bit of history he would next tell you about regarding the fair never clicked for me. The only impression I got was maybe he was following a loose chronological association between events.

After the World Fair portion of this book, and we return to the premise that brought me to this book in the first place, I found myself missing the fair. Because we’re really just into the depressing details about the end of Holmes’s murder spree, which I was now no longer in the mood for because I personally was in a much lighter mindset. That’s in a nutshell why I think this should have been two books, tell the story of Holmes, sure talk about the World Fair going on around that time, but I felt it should have focused mainly on him. Certainly, there’s a contrasting element between the two sides of this book, playing off the title, but the why of it—other than for its own sake—eluded me.

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Author's Website: https://eriklarsonbooks.com/

Parting thoughts:

There is a prevailing thought that the world was somehow safer in the past, more wholesome—especially in the United States in my experience. People just didn’t do that sort of thing back then, no sir. It’s usually followed up by a statement of “we never even locked our doors in our neighborhood and nobody worried about their kids playing outside.”

I am here to tell you that the nostalgia-drenched, sanitized view of the past is bullshit. The world is and always has been a dangerous place. Prior generations may have been less cautious than we are today, but not because the world was a safer, more loving place, crack open a history book—or hell, use this book as an example. Serial killers, rapists, genocidal maniacs—oh my—have always been with us, making prey out of the unwary when least expected.

It isn’t unusual for me to go on about how astounding our technological improvements have been over the last century on this blog—but you want to know what hasn’t changed nearly as much over the previous one hundred years? People—and to steal a Scrubs reference—they were bastard coated bastards with bastard filling back then, and they are bastard coated bastards with bastard filling today.

Sure, that’s a bit cynical, but here is my argument, people—just like any other life form on this planet change slowly over generations, which isn’t so with technology. I’m old enough to remember when the “internet” was a thing that came in over a physical phone line, and to connect to it, you first had to sit there and let it scream at you for a couple minutes. That statement has no meaning to people born not generations later than me but just a decade or so younger than me.

So why is the past perceived to be so much safer than today? Because we were just less aware of the dangers around us. Think about it—it was a world with no social media, no networked databases, far less social mobility, telecommunications, or surveillance. People got their news nearly exclusively from the radio, the newspaper, a guy on tv, and neighbors. This was all compounded by the fact that people back then were far less likely to talk about icky subjects like, say—cousin Tom was accused of trafficking sex slaves. Tom could just move to the other side of the Rocky Mountains and start calling himself Jerry, and that was a viable option for disappearing. You didn’t even have to pretend to learn Spanish and fuck off to Mexico if you don’t make the national news—just cut your hair differently, go work at some gas station in Oregon for a while, and get that trafficking ring back in business.

Sorry, Tom(s). I’m just using your name as an example here. I’m sure you’re lovely people and hardly own any sex slaves… I mean, don’t own any sex slaves. Stop owning people, Tom(s). You have a real problem!

To bring this back to a more positive note—if anything—if crime statistics are believed, we’re actually safer today than ever before precisely because we’re so aware of the potential dangers out there. There are far fewer predators per capita because it’s so much more likely we’re going to catch the Tom(s) of the world. It might not seem like it, but I do believe people, despite being prickly at times, self-centered, and selfish—are for the most part good, at about 95 percent. But let me remind you that a beverage that’s 5 percent arsenic will probably kill you. So—caution is vital in life.

Micro Mention "Too Much and Never Enough"

This is a kind of book that I never thought I would read a decade ago. I had never been too interested in politics of any kind for a long, long time—too long. But ignorance is no defense, and in 2016, I went from being a mildly disinterested independent with a spotty voting record to a zealously voting registered democrat. The thing is, as a centrist at heart—I know a dirty word—on most things, I don't think that I moved politically. 

I feel like the center moved away from me. The gravity from the right, whose event horizon envelopes the former President, is just so extreme that centrist politicians today debate with the subtext of "are we sure all people are, in fact, people? And even if so, is it really worth spending so much money to keep them alive? I mean, taxing the rich might cause them to forgo that third mansion."

This book, "Too Much and Never Enough," is an excellent dive into the family history which generated the 45th president of the United States and the origins of the cult of personality that grew around him to become mainstream modern conservatism. Where members such as neo-nazis, the clan, and admirers of the Confederate States of America all feel welcome. Never forget that the army of Northern Virginia never managed to wave their battle flag in the rotunda of the Capitol building, but these people did on January 6th, 2021.

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Micro Mention "Ancient Civilizations of North America"

"Ancient Civilizations of North America" by the great courses taught by Edwin Barnhart is eye-opening in how little indigenous peoples' culture makes it into the modern zeitgeist. People lived on this land for thousands of years before us, and no, they didn't all live in Tipis and hunt buffalo.

My favorite part of this course was learning about the complex cities that were built and ultimately lost in antiquity. Most ancient cities and ruins of the Americas were thought of as being exclusively in South America, but it isn't true. 

The depressing side of all this is, most of the evidence and artifacts of the ancient civilizations in the north were just obliterated by uncaring European peoples who were "settling" the land and "reeducating" the indigenous populace. So, it isn't that there weren't just as vital and interesting cultures and civilizations in North America as South America. It's just that their annihilation was far more complete in the continental United States, making the story of who they were far more patchy and remembered by smaller, and smaller groups of people living today.