Romanticism vs. Snark vs. History

Period dramas – especially those from the BBC – have never really resonated with me. There’s a great deal of Victorian or Edwardian television and film out there, and many people love it. Friends can rail on about the beautiful clothing and the lifestyles, sometimes imagining that it truly was a golden age. I’m keen on history, but I’ve never thought that things were all that wonderful 120 years ago. As it turns out, there’s good reason for my skepticism – and it’s shared by at least one witty author.

Therese Oneill tackles the topic in a very funny and interesting book, Unmentionable: The Victorian Lady’s Guide to Sex, Marriage and Manners. It’s driven by a brilliantly simple concept: what were the basics of female life like for upper middle class women in around 1900? Oneill readily admits up front that she is not exploring the lives of women workers or the poor. Instead, she zeroes in on the women of some means who had maids, help, and lots of clothes. These might be the heroines of those popular films and novels. She’s writing to inform and to have some fun. Oneill, too, has wondered about the romantic nostalgia for the period.

Oneill looks at daily living for upper class women. What does one wear? How does one go to the bathroom? How do you clean yourself? Do you eat a lot or a little? How did women deal with menstruation, make up, courtship and married life? She draws from academic history, popular history, and primary sources. These topics may have been “unmentionable” in polite society, but they matter. They also reflected deeper issues about health, society, and the role of women. Oneill writes about it with a healthy degree of snark.

Victorian life was dirty and smelly, even for the well to do. What we now consider as normal hygiene (fresh running water, toilets, toilet paper, showers, clean towels, shampoo and soap) was far from normal. It’s hard to romanticize thirty-plus pounds of clothing without underwear to allow for easier trips to a commode. And while it may look for familiar through photographs and the media, life then was shorter and difficult.

Oneill’s jokes and narrative asides work well when it comes to topics such as peeing and cleaning up. They are much less effective when it comes to what’s dangerous, like arsenic in make up. And they do not work at all when she references slavery, or the extraordinary thorough misogyny that was woven through virtually all aspects of life. Women simply did not not have the rights, opportunities, protections or agency that they do today – and that is not the appropriate topic for a quip. In fact, the book’s message underscores the hard fact that women had very little agency.

Unmentionable is a quick and entertaining read. I learned from reading it and it made me smile. It also made me wish that the author had not spent so much time looking for a laugh and had instead been comfortable being serious every now and then. Oneill did her homework. I think that she could have trusted her readers to follow her to some more uncomfortable realizations – as well as to appreciate what has and has not changed in the decades since.

David Potash

October 6, 2019 Reviews

An Unblinking, Forward Looking Eye

There’s a hard and provocative edge to Jennifer Egan’s award-winning novel, Look at Me. Not quite clinical, the book nevertheless possesses a clarity of focus that makes one think. The book came out in 2001 and it has an eerie ability to zero in on trends and directions. Egan forecast many important features of our twenty-first century lives, from undercover terrorists to reality television to the web’s troubled relationship with authenticity. It is not a book about the future, but this many years on, it is difficult not to be aware of its prescience.

Look at Me is a novel of several moving pieces. At its center is Charlotte, a thirty-something model from Rockford, Illinois, whose face was destroyed in an automobile crash. Surgery gives her a new appearance and raises many questions. Charlotte had long been somewhat disassociative and her choices often complicated, if not downright self-destructive. She fled her childhood home and her life as a model had been all about, unsurprisingly, appearance. Charlotte’s new face calls her identity into question, as does an extended recuperative stay in Illinois.

This theme – identity and its power to define and confuse – are traced through several other characters: childhood friends of Charlotte’s, children and relatives, an alcoholic detective, and a fugitive who adopts a new persona. The characters interact in a complicated dance that at times feels just a tiny bit too pat, but nonetheless is satisfying.

Egan casts a wide net of social commentary throughout. There are some mild moves into farce or satire, but it is not the focus. Egan’s deeper instincts are more philosophical. She is, at heart, a novelist keen on telling a story and explaining something important about modern life, alienation and identity. Even as she cares about her characters, Egan maintains a discipline throughout.

Egan is a very smart writer. This novel is engaging, but engaging from a distance. Reading it felt a bit like pulling things up through binoculars. Everything is a little sharper, a little more clear – and without a strong sense of knowing exactly where we are. We cannot really trust what is just outside the frame. I enjoyed Look At Me even as I found it disconcerting. It is a good novel.

David Potash

October 3, 2019 Reviews

Comanches & Popular History

S.C. Gwynne, a journalist who has written for Time, Texas Monthly, The Dallas Morning News and other publications, as well as authored several books, wrote Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History in 2010. A best-seller, Empire was a Pulitzer Prize finalist and was optioned. It is now being made into a movie. The book contains several stories that are fascinating, compelling, and have “legs” as they say in the film industry. It draws people in over a long period of time – even if they pick it up knowing something about the subject.

My knowledge of Native American history is thin. I do know enough, however, to know that I cannot speak with real authority. I’m also very aware that working in the field can be very challenging on a host of levels, from sourcing to audience to genre. Historians can be contentious. Further, it is difficult, if not impossible, to write history without moral awareness and judgments. What can one do with the story of US expansion and the destruction of native American lives and culture? All that said, the histories and the stories of the frontier can be extraordinarily gripping.

S.G. Gwynne, I would wager, was cognizant of this and more when he tackled Empire. It appears to be thoroughly researched. Gwynne’s arguments, too, are more journalistic than historical. In other words, he looks more to the traditional “Who? What? Where? When? Why?” questions than issues of continuity and change, which often trouble historians. He does not care much about trying to unpack what is contingent and what is causal. The outcome – a very strong book – makes for engaging reading and perhaps something less than a long, fully developed argument.

What Gwynne does tell us about the Comanches, their role within that larger environment, and the US settlers and government to remove and/or control them, is fascinating. It’s a heroic and brutal history, with endurance, bravery, violence, murder, rape, torture and horror. The Comanches and other neighboring peoples fought to the death. There was no surrender. That kind of finality found its way to Spanish, Texan and American fighters, too, leading to a culture of courage and cruelty. The Comanches, however, seemed to do it better – and more effectively – than anyone else. Gwynne’s account of their horsemanship and battle techniques left me amazed. Life was extremely tough for everyone on the frontier.

Quanah Parker embodies those contradictions. The child of a Comanche leader and an Anglo woman who was captured as a child (as her family was slaughtered), Quanah was a brilliant military commander, a take-no-holds fighter, and eventually, after a full surrender, an effective spokesman for his people. He was also very popular with key white American figures. Gwynne works hard at making sense of Quanah’s world and the world of his mother. Everyone faced difficult choices and multiple constraints. At the same time, many also were able to carve paths for themselves that were truly extraordinary.

Read the book. Watch for the movie. And consider reading more widely and investigating more deeply similar scholarship. I think that I will – it’s extremely interesting.

David Potash

August 21, 2019 Reviews

The Devil’s Highway Remains Relevant

The border between Mexico and the United States has been a cruel space for many decades. The pull northward for opportunity is enticing, but the journey can be deadly, especially for undocumented immigrants. In 2001, twenty-six such Mexicans attempted the crossing. They had the great misfortune to have the wrong guides at the wrong time who chose the wrong path. Fourteen of them died of the terrible heat of the desert.

Luis Alberto Urrea, an award-winning author and professor of English at the University of Illinois Chicago, learned about the tragedy in 2004. He decided to investigate. Urrea’s background informed his approach to the project. His father is Hispanic, his mother Anglo, and he grew up in San Diego, where the border is a significant presence. He researched the story thoroughly, talking with as many of the participants as he could, from immigrants to border patrol agents. The result, The Devil’s Highway: A True Story, is a gripping and harrowing account of the event. Also an examination of the border and the many people who live and work around it, the book became a best-seller, a Pulitzer prize finalist, and the recipient of many awards. The book is regularly taught and read today.

The Devil’s Highway is lyrically written. Urrea’s prose is dramatic and compelling. The people in the book are described with compassion and understanding. There are no cartoon villains – even the coyotes who led the immigrants to their death are treated with empathy. Unfortunately, there are also no heroes who were able to erase the suffering or to stop future tragedies. The broader situation, the gross inequity, and poor policy, practice and culture doomed these immigrants – and many more before and after. It’s a haunting book.

I wish that I could say that things are better now at the border. Clearly, they are not. Urrea’s The Devil’s Highway remains as relevant as ever. It’s a difficult story and an amazingly good read.

David Potash

July 8, 2019 American Culture Today, Reviews

Chicana Activists

A vitally important book in understanding Latinx Studies and history, Chicanas of 18th Street: Narratives of a Movement from Latino Chicago, looks at the Chicana/o movement of the 1960s and 1970s through the first-person perspectives of six activists from the Pilsen neighborhood of Chicago. Written by Leonard G. Ramirez and the six women activists, the book is a interesting mixture of big-picture policy and theory with “on-the-ground” accounts of what it was like for the participants.

The voices and histories of the women are compelling. They did not push for change because of theory. Instead, they were motivated by direct issues of injustice, opportunity, and the possibility of seeing improvements in their lives and the lives of their family and community. There is an immediacy to their account that compresses conceptions of history, giving the reader a sense of how they – and others – might be swept along. It also was not all that long ago that the very idea of civil rights for all was considered by some to be “radical.” Racism, sexism, and a host of other forces pushed these women and their communities down. They fought back.

Chicanas of 18th Street would be an outstanding book to teach. It makes clear that heroism is not just for the battlefield or distant history. These women were courageous, brave, and heroic – and they did it while juggling day to day challenges and more than their fair share of problems. It shows how change can happen and does happen, a powerful message for students.

David Potash

July 1, 2019 Chicago, Reviews

An Optimistic Call for Religious Diversity

Eboo Patel is a champion of religious diversity and interfaith cooperation. A Chicago based organizer and author, he founded the Interfaith Youth Core and advised President Obama on faith based neighborhood partnerships. In Out of Many Faiths: Religious Diversity and the American Promise, Patel makes a compelling case for the enduring importance of religious diversity to our nation’s values. The book is an extension of the mission of the Interfaith Youth Core, which aims to develop ongoing critical dialogues about faith to America’s colleges through participation of religious leaders.

Patel brings his personal history as a Muslim-American to Out of Many Faiths. He notes local and national prejudice, but remains resolutely optimistic about the ways that America can and has built positive religious identities. Of particular interest is Patel’s reading of the creation of “Judeo-Christian” as a national theme. It is a concept that simply did not exist in the early part of the 1900s and was developed to meet the needs of a particular time.

Out of Many Faiths is not a work of history, religious scholarship or policy. Instead, it is a few lengthy essays with a common theme, followed by commentary by three academics. Patel is strongest when weaving together philosophical and values-based arguments. He uses contemporary events, such as the attempt by American Muslims to build the Cordoba House by the World Trade Center, as a means of exploring tolerance and intolerance. He charts, at high level, the rise and use of Islamophobia as a political tool. The chapter on the development of the Inner-City Muslim Action Network in Chicago explains how change can take place, ground up. Patel also gives voice to different issues and perspectives within the Muslim-American community.

Out of Many Faiths is the kind of book that might be assigned in undergraduate religious studies course. It is accessible, inclusive and moderately left of center. Patel’s book gives substance and direction to those who are interested in fostering interfaith work.

David Potash

June 11, 2019 American Culture Today, Reviews

Cruel Injustice

Gilbert King’s Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New America won the Pulitzer Prize in 2013. It’s an extraordinarily gripping and enraging historical account of racism, injustice, and hatred in Florida. I had trouble putting it down – it is that well-written and that upsetting.

The book charts a rape claim by a 17 year old white woman in Lake County, Florida, in 1949, and the horrific miscarriages of justice that resulted. The county sheriff, a violent and racist villain, arrested four young African-American men. They were tortured and evidence was fabricated – all while the Ku Klux Klan sought a lynching and was burning black-owned property and terrorizing the black community.

King balances that horrific narrative with the story of Thurgood Marshall, the NAACP, and the actions of the Legal Defense Fund to fight racism using the courts and the legal system. When Marshall did get involved, one of the arrested men had been already been shot “legally” while supposedly trying to escape. The other three were convicted through patently false claims and racism that was woven throughout the entire legal system. Marshall led the fight to get the convictions overturned. The Supreme Court ordered a new trial – but justice was far from served. The sheriff murdered one of the defendants and came very close to killing another in a faked escape attempt. The remaining two were convicted – again – and they served 12 and 19 years in prison.

Violence and racism faced Marshall, his team and the black community throughout. Harry Moore, who founded the NAACP branch in Broward County, Florida, worked heroically to support that wrongfully convicted men. Moore and his wife Marietta were killed in 1951 when their house was bombed. No one was every charged with their murder. In the 1980s, the bombing was linked to the Klan.

Devil in the Grove is not ancient history. It is recent – and an essential reminder about the pervasiveness of racism and the evil that it represents. Reading it leads to reflection and – if I can be optimistic – action to fight racism. It is haunting and a book that I very much recommend.

David Potash

June 10, 2019 Reviews

Real Lives, Real History

Literature is not what we tend to think of when considering “reality.” Nonfiction has the facts, right? Good literature, though, can convey much more than a story, an article, or a work of history. It carries with it a truth that helps the reader understand more.

History – and understanding – are powerful themes in Pat Barker’s 1986 novel, The Century’s Daughter. It’s the third novel Barker published and it builds off the close study of working class women in northern England from her two previous works, Union Street and Blow Your House Down. The key characters here are Liza Jarrett Wright, who was born at the start of the century, and Stephen, a young social worker. The novel’s protagonist is the power of poverty, war and hardship – along with violence and the lack of love – and its impact on human lives. Women’s lives take center stage. This is a novel of blood, phlegm, constraints and tears.

Liza’s lot in life was hard, but not without impact or meaning. Her parents never loved her and she married poorly because of an unplanned pregnancy. The world wars killed many of those important to her, altering lives and living circumstances. She struggled for self and family, and through it all maintained hope and dignity. Barker never sentimentalizes. Even with some tenderness and empathy, there is little soft in Liza’s story.

Stephen, who is charged with moving Liza from her soon to be demolished home, faces a different set of challenges. He’s estranged from his family. He is gay, uncomfortable with himself and his choices. Stephen’s father dies of cancer, and it is in his death that Stephen gains a greater sense of humanity and need. Stephen and Liza become friends and through their interactions, thoughts and lives, we gain a broader sense of themselves, their histories, and their communities. Stephen at times, though, seems more of a lens than a fully realized person.

It’s neither easy nor pretty. Barker makes it all compelling, though. Her prose is unfailingly sharp and clear. Her insights are deftly delivered. It is compassionate and hard. Century’s Daughter is a haunting novel.

David Potash

May 24, 2019 Reviews

Wrights’ Special Genius

Few Americans are as famous – and perhaps less well-known – than the Wright brothers. Wilbur and Orville’s discovery of controlled flight is an extraordinarily inspirational tale, told in schools and popular history. We all know that the brothers were close, that they had a bicycle shop, were engineers and tinkerers, and that their first controlled flight was in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. It’s so ingrained in our culture that it is on North Carolina’s license plate. The Wright brothers achieved something that has truly transformed the world.

But what do we know about them as people? And just how, exactly, did these two self-taught inventors from Dayton, Ohio, pull it off?

David McCullough, perhaps the nation’s most widely-read non-fiction writer of history, tackles the question in The Wright Brothers. McCullough is an extremely skilled writer who has been authoring best-selling prize-winning books for decades. His prose flows beautifully and he has an innate sense of when to move things along and when to linger. His work is accessible and grounded in meticulous research.

In The Wright Brothers, McCullough humanizes the brothers, along with their father and sister Katherine. They were driven, intense, and private – and quite unusual people. Wilbur was the more cerebral and controlling. Orville was more entrepreneurial. Brilliant, smart and obsessed, they lived their lives with a discipline and work ethic that was off the charts. McCullough cannot explain why, but he can show us how. He also highlights circumstances that directed the brothers’ path.

Wilbur was an outstanding student in high school with plans to attend Yale. That all changed when he was hit with a hockey stick and badly disfigured. The culprit was a fellow student who later murdered his family and was executed by the state of Ohio. The event altered Wilbur’s life, who remained at home for three years after the incident, reading and studying – all on his own.

Orville’s direction was also changed by a life-threatening illness. In his mid-twenties, as the brothers were building their bicycle business, Orville fell ill with typhoid. He nearly died. As he recovered, Wilbur read to him – and they spent a great deal of time discussing the works of Otto Lilienthal, a German aerialist. The experience bonded the brothers in conquering the challenge of controlled flight.

McCullough does outstanding work clarifying the methodical manner in which the brothers pursued their passion. He explains how they experimented, their research, their teamwork, and sheer persistence. The setbacks were many and the brothers did not seek, nor receive, much external support. Their success was a triumph of brains, dedication, and deliberation. The Wright brothers were quintessential engineers.

The Wright Brothers is a very good book. It is pleasure to read and I gained a new appreciation of the Wright brothers. The leadership of the City of Chicago made a very good call in 1934 naming a new community college after Wilbur Wright. He and Orville are well-deserving of many honors and our continued attention.

David Potash

May 16, 2019 Reviews

Development – Personal, Professional, International

Miles Wortman, an economist, Latin American historian, and expert in international development, recently published a fascinating memoir, roman a clef, and field guide to the tangled world of international development and aid. Leaves: Tales of Development is a mixture of optimism and nostalgia, fact and fiction, and both a reflective summing up and elegiac, cautionary tale for those interested in international development. Wortman spent decades around the globe, in Latin America, Asia and Africa, working for the Peace Corps, the World Ban, the UN, USAID, and corporations.

Do not expect a straightforward memoir. Instead, Wortman jumps from field posting to field posting, adventure to adventure. He paints pictures of local communities and the disconnects (and connections) between those on the ground and those from afar. Translation of language, culture and purposes is a common theme across countries and years. And like most translation, you make think that you “have it” only to find out that something is missing.

Leaves is particularly strong on teasing out the multiple levels of ethical challenges that accompanies the work of international development. Degrees of agency are always constrained. Who is, or can even be, a true “friend.” Overlaying lines of authority and influence complicate even the most simple of exchanges. Added to this are stories of relationships, almost all of which are tangled and destined for failure. It’s difficult to maintain an optimistic romantic outlook – and at heart, Wortman is a romantic – in such environs.

Wortman also points out ways that aid has helped, has made lives better, and has created opportunity.

All in all, a very interesting take on an extraordinarily interesting life.

David Potash

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April 25, 2019 Reviews