stumbling virtue

The 9 Best Books I Read During 2009

 

The one, the only, the eagerly awaited, highly controversial, and incredibly...uninfluential 9 Best Books I Read During 2009, by me. Not a critic, not an expert, just a girl with a library card and no fear of using it.

When I went back through my book posts to look at my options for this list, I was surprised at how many books I either had little feeling for or outright bored me. This was not a banner year for my book selections by any means. To be honest, at first I had trouble coming up with more than four titles. But I did.

Here are the rules, for those of you who are new to my list (and really, how did that happen? where have you been?): this is not a list made up of books published in 2009, just the ones I read in 2009. Some are new, some are older, all are recommended for one reason or another. Titles are linked to my original write up.

9. Furious Improvisation: How the WPA and a Cast of Thousands Made High Art Out of Desperate Times, by Susan Quinn
A history of the Federal Theater Project, a source of fascination for anyone with an interest in the Depression, the WPA, and of course American theater. More informative than thrilling, but still always readable, Quinn's book is clear, comprehensive, and full of the stories and characters that made this venture such a rare and exciting time in theater.

8. The Murder of Helen Jewett, by Patricia Cline Cohen
Cohen's book tells the story of Helen Jewett, a prostitute who was murdered in New York City in the early nineteenth century. The murder trial that followed. The trial became the blueprint for all the sensational "trials of the century" that have since followed, and arguably gave birth to the tabloid press in America. Cohen's research is awe-inspiring--she digs through the layers of exaggeration and fiction that have covered the case over the last one hundred years, and manages to find some truths. The result is the reclamation of Helen Jewett as a person, rather than a victim in a penny dreadful.

7. The Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes and Why, by Amanda Ripley
An entertaining--and helpful--look at the history of people and their behavior during disasters, and what you can do to help yourself if you are (hopefully not) ever caught in some kind of catastrophe. You wouldn't expect this book to be a page turner, but trust me, it is.

6. Dancing to the Precipice, by Caroline Moorehead
Moorehead's book details the eventful story of Lucie de La Tour du Pin, a French noble woman who came of age right before the Revolution, and spent the rest of her life alternately running from one regime and winning favor with another. Paris, Bordeaux, London, Rome, and of course, Troy, New York, were just some of the places where Lucie landed. Moorehead works off of Lucie's own memoir, but also puts it in context with plenty of background about the period; if you need a clear, thumbnail history of the French Revolution and years after, this is a great place to start (provided you don't have the version I wrote for an AP European History Exam study guide, ha ha).

5. Wedlock, by Wendy Moore
This is the harrowing story of Mary Eleanor Bowes, an 18th century English heiress--indeed, one of the wealthiest women in the country at the time--and her (almost) fatal marriage to the manipulative and abusive fortune hunter Andrew Robinson Stoney. Moore's description of Stoney's horrifying treatment of Mary--everything from starving her to beating her to blatantly flaunting his mistresses in front of her (he got the nursemaid pregnant and wanted to move her into their bedroom)--makes you marvel that she survived. And not only survived, but successfully sued for divorce in an era when that was almost impossible for women. If someone wrote a romance novel that used the story of Mary's kidnapping and escape from Stoney after she finally left him and took him to court, that author would be laughed at for being too melodramatic. Moore tells this almost unbelievable story with just the right amount of drama and coolheaded evidence.

4. The Forger's Spell, by Edward Dolnick
A book about one of the greatest art forgery scams of the twentieth century--the manufacture of a bunch of fake Vermeers by a hack Dutch artist during World War II that were sold to great museums and taken by greedy Nazi collectors. How did Han Van Meegeren fool so many people, including some of the world's best known art experts? Dolnick explains everything. The lesson is how easy it is to convince people that they are seeing one thing when the evidence so glaringly says something else. We do see what we want to see.

3. The Judgement of Paris, by Ross King
King's book mostly focuses on two artists who meet at the turning point of art in 19th century France: traditionalist Ernest Meissonier and Impressionist pioneer Edouard Manet. I know little about art, but learned a great deal from King's always entertaining book--especially about how art was as discussed and debated in France in that period as any episode of American Idol. Different times, indeed.

2. The Lost City of Z, by David Grann
Grann not only writes about Percy Fawcett, the English explorer who disappeared into the Amazon jungle in the 1920s while searching for El Dorado, but also of the multitudes of people ever since who have obsessively followed him, hoping both to find Fawcett or El Dorado--including eventually, reluctantly, the author himself. Grann does an excellent job of interweaving the stories of Fawcett, the building of his legend after his disappearance, and his own adventure in the Amazon. You won't be able to put it down--it's the kind of book that will make you miss your stop on the train. Like I did. 

1. River of Doubt, by Candice Millard
I actually found this book courtesy of Mr. Grann, who referenced it in his book about Amazon adventurers (always check the bibliography of a book that you enjoy). Millard tells about Theodore Roosevelt's dangerous journey through the Brazilian rain forest, another attempt by him to quench the restlessness he felt after his early and unwanted exit from American politics. Roosevelt originally was scheduled to voyage down a known and manageable river, but when, after arriving in South Americ, he was offered the chance to navigate the unexplored Rio da Dúvida (River of Doubt), he leapt at the chance. The expedition was already living dangerously, thanks to Roosevelt's choice of a completely incompetent provisioner, who overloaded the travelers with useless, fancy goods; they were even more poorly prepared for the newer, more difficult route. There was danger, privation, and death at almost every bend of the river (Roosevelt himself nearly died from an infection). In the lengthy history of disaster expedition literature, this story stands out because so many of the problems were preventable, caused by pride and carelessness.

This book isn't just about the jaw-dropping story of the journey, though--it's also about the Amazon and the rain forest and the horrible and amazing flora and fauna that live there, rulers and survivors of their own strange world, unknowing and uncaring of us. Millard shows how the trees, plants, fish, birds, and insects all combine to make the jungle a heaving, living, seething entity, where the only thing more terrifying than the strange sounds that come from nowhere is silence itself. Millard creates this place with such color and economy that it makes me think I should just give up writing.

Honorable Mention:
The Last Duel, by James Landale 
Charles Fort: The Man Who Invented the Supernatural, by Jim Steinmeyer 
The House of Wittgenstein: A Family at War, by Alexander Waugh

Previous Years' Lists
2008
2007 
2006 (this is my favorite list, by the way) 

Seeds of Glory

 
Henry Wickham in Ceylon in 1905, with a tree grown from one of his stolen hevea seeds. 

There are so many things we use everyday without a thought that once were earthshaking wonders--electricity, for example, or cars or airplanes. And of course, rubber.

Yes, humble rubber. Without rubber, electrical wires were a live danger that regularly shocked or even killed people. Without rubber, all kinds of vehicles, from bicycles to airplanes, would never have been able to handle the usage we put them through. Rubber made machinery work more smoothly and longer. Rubber was once so valuable that there were rubber barons that built palatial estates and a glittering opera house in the middle of the Brazilian jungle. The report on rubber stock prices was the most important news of the day for traders.

When the market for Brazilian rubber crashed, all this disappeared along with it. The estates and opera house were swallowed by the jungle. The rubber barons were ruined, and their Brazilian workers abandoned (in some cases for the better). This didn't happen by accident, though.

In 1876, Henry Wickham, a British adventurer, whose adventures were more often failures than successes, committed one of the great acts of biopiracy of his age. He loaded a steamer with 70,000 hevea seeds and brought them back to England, where they were planted, and the sprouts shipped around the British Empire: India, Malay, Singapore. It took almost three decades for the little plants to make an impact, but when they did, it was huge. Hevea, a Brazilian rubber plant, grew even better in Southeast Asia than it did in its native countries, where it was at risk from a number of local pests and diseases. By the beginning of the 20th century, rubber grown in outposts of the British Empire had taken over the world, effectively destroying the Brazilian rubber industry.

In The Thief at the End of the World: Rubber, Power, and the Seeds of Empire, Joe Jackson tells the story of Wickham, and how his one great success was a success for everyone but him. Wickham was born into a middle-class family that became genteelly poor when Henry's father died, leaving his mother to raise the children alone. When Henry came of age, he did what many poor young men in Victorian England did--set off into one of the great unknown places in the world in the hopes of making a fortune and moving up in the world, something that would be almost impossible to do in rigid, class-conscious London. Wickham went to Nicaragua, with the idea of collecting feathers from exotic birds for his mother to use on the hats she sold. Really, though, he hoped to find something that would bring him a bigger fortune and of course he hoped to sell the account of his travels; this was the period when explorers' memoirs were best-sellers.

The Girl Can't Help It

 
Canova's sculpture of Pauline Bonaparte (the Princess Borghese) as Venus. It is far too appropriate that she is reclining. 

For once, when I say this will be brief, I sincerely mean it.

After reading "Dancing to the Precipice," a wonderful book that covered both the French Revolution and life under Napoleon, I decided I should read more about the latter period. The first book I stumbled upon was Pauline Bonaparte: Venus of Empire, by Flora Fraser. I had read a pretty good review of it, so thought I'd give it a try.

I can't say I'm sorry I did, because it didn't take that much time to read. I can say, however, that I wish I had chosen something else. There's nothing wrong with Ms. Fraser's organization of the book, or solid research and workmanlike writing. It's just, well, Pauline.

In short, Pauline Bonaparte, one of Napoleon's younger sisters, was a great beauty. She married General Charles Leclerc when she was seventeen, and had a son with him, Dermide. She accompanied Leclerc when he was sent to the island of Saint-Domingue (now Haiti) to get the rebellion led by Toussaint L'Ouverture, under control. Leclerc never could put the rebels down completely, and died of yellow fever on the island. Pauline and Dermide returned to France. She soon married Prince Camillo Borghese, an apparently ridiculously handsome man who was also flat out dumb. Early on in their marriage, Dermide died. Pauline never had any more children; it's likely that she contracted an infection while giving birth to Dermide that made it impossible for her to get pregnant.

Pauline probably considered this a lucky break because her main occupation in life was sleeping around. You could call her a sexually empowered woman, or you could call her a slut. I call her boring. Her lovers weren't anyone particularly interesting and it doesn't seem that her affairs led her to any places of importance, or gave her any insight on anything. Her habits were widely known, and probably, fairly or not, exaggerated. There were rumors in Saint-Domingue that she had native lovers, plus lesbian encounters. Then there was a persistent story that she and her brother Napoleon had incestuous relations (Fraser seems to believe this was true). None of which made her anymore interesting to me. She spent most of her life having sex and behaving like a spoiled child. When she was first told that she and Leclerc were going to Saint-Domingue, she complained until someone suggested that she would look very pretty in the summery island fashions. That perked her right up, and that's about how deep she was her entire life.

Pauline spent most of her life lying on sofas or in bed. She demanded to be carried everywhere, and regularly made men and women act as her footstools. I'm not kidding, Fraser's book includes several anecdotes describing how people arrived to visit Pauline and found her using some unfortunate lady-in-waiting's neck as a footstool. She constantly complained about how her titles, homes, jewels, and carriages compared with her sisters' things, always pestering Napoleon to give her something else; the sisters complained right back. At Napoleon's coronation, where Josephine was crowned empress, the three sisters pouted about her having a higher rank than them. They were supposed to carry Josephine's train, but pulled on it instead, making it impossible for her to walk, until Napoleon glared at them and made them behave. Yes, they were all adults in their twenties when they pulled this stunt. The main thing I got out of this book was pity for Napoleon that he was saddled with so many bickering, bratty siblings. If Europe had really wanted to punish him, they would have banished him to Elba and St. Helene's with his extended family. Seriously, if you plan to ascend to any kind of powerful position some day, I recommend you take careful stock of your family first, and if you're not an only child, reconsider your plans.

And that's pretty much all I have to say about this book.

Children of the Revolution

 

The Storming of the Bastille. Then everything changed.

 I once asked my dad what he has seen in his life that surprised him the most. Space travel? I tossed out? No, he was always a big science fiction reader, so he was always confident that people would fly into space someday (though he's still waiting for his turn). Instead he said that what surprised him the most was the speed of communication--the Internet and email, that he could write something or send a picture and have someone else receive it instantly.

I suppose if you live long enough, you will see things you never expected to see, and most likely will exit a world very different from the one you entered. Lucie de La Tour du Pin was born in 1770 in Paris and died at age 83 in Pisa, and in-between lived a life of almost uninterrupted drama as she struggled to survive through the constant upheaval of France in the late eighteenth to mid-nineteenth century. In a time when no one knew when the winning side was going to be overturned into the losing side, it is remarkable that she escaped as often as she did.

A young Lucie de la Tour du Pin

  Luckily for us, de La Tour du Pin was a keen observer of the events going on around us, and even luckier, she started to write her memoirs at age fifty so we know her story. Luckiest of all we have author Caroline Moorehead to put it all in context and finish what Lucie did not complete (her memoirs trail off when she gets to 1815--and yes, I am going to defy etiquette and refer to her as "Lucie" for the rest of the way) in her book, "Dancing to the Precipice."

Americana

 
Henry Ford's American suburb, transplanted into the depths of the Brazilian jungle. 

In the early years of the twentieth century, Henry Ford seemed to know how to do everything better and faster. He built cars that got Americans moving faster than ever before, and he built them in a way that people could afford. Year after year, he was able to increase the number of cars he built while also reducing the number of workers needed to build them. Whatever he tried, worked. Ford was a man who knew he was right, and knew that his way of doing things was the best way, and he saw no reason why those ideas shouldn't apply everywhere to everyone. He was wrong.

In Fordlandia, Greg Grandin tells the story of Ford's misbegotten attempt to build a rubber plantation in Brazil in the late 1920s. This is one of those little pieces of history that can best be described as "rolling disaster," as in people making mistake after mistake at every turn. The choice of site was wrong; the Americans didn't get how to do business in Brazil; Ford didn't hire experts of any sort (botanists, people who knew how to run a plantation, people experienced with working in the Amazon). And of course, the rubber boom in Brazil had ended decades before; the British had realized that they could grow rubber trees on their plantations in Southeast Asia, where a pest that killed the trees in South America didn't exist.

Motion Pictures

 

A study of a horse in motion, by Eadweard Muybridge's.
 

Did you ever find yourself lying in bed, late at night, thinking about some odd topic and wondering how you got there? Then you count back, trying to find the steps that linked one thought to another, strange leaps that don't seem naturally aligned but have some tie to each other, until you find where you started. Sometimes writing about history isn't so much about telling a linear story as it is about making connections.

In River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West, Rebecca Solnit tells the story of the life of photographer Eadweard Muybridge (the tortured spelling of his name was his own invention, or re-invention, one might say). For Solnit, though, Muybridge's life and work is really just a jumping off point for  meditations on the West and the inventions that propelled America into the age we think of as modern--a time of telephones, phonographs, electric lights, trains, cars, airplanes, and eventually computers and instant worldwide communication through the Internet.

The story of Eadweard Muybridge isn't a bad place to hang all these ideas. Born Edward James Muggeridge in England in 1830, he decided he was meant to seek his fortune in the New World. He made his way to San Francisco and after trying a few different jobs, and a few different spellings of his name, settled on photography and, eventually, Eadweard Muybridge. It took a number of years to get to that name, and in between, he sold his photographs under the name Helios.

Family Ties

A bunch of Wittgensteins, just hanging out.

Someone once said to me, "Siblings are your proof," meaning that your brothers and sisters are witnesses to what happened in your childhood. You know, the ones who will back up the story as the kids saw it, not the parents' version. The ones who know what really happened on that vacation, or that family party.

I agreed, but that's because I've always gotten along with my sisters. I imagine that there must be many families where siblings aren't proof, but rather those liars who don't really remember what happened, or who are just trying to make me look bad, or are sucking up to mom and dad. No matter which it is, though--love, hate, resentment, jealousy--you're tired to your siblings like you are to no one else, even your parents.

Alexander Waugh's "The House of Wittgenstein: A Family at War" tells the story of the Wittgenstein family (hence the title), meaning the philosopher Ludwig and his three sisters and four brothers. One brother definitely committed suicide,while two others died in murky ways that suggest suicide; in fact, there were an inordinate number of suicides in the family. If you ever had any doubt that that turn of mind is hereditary, this book might sway you to the yes side.

Heroes

 

James Agee's screenplay for Chaplin wistfully featured the actor's long-abandoned Tramp character.

I read a book. I don't have much to say about it.

(Update: I was wrong. Consider yourself warned.)

That's not to say that I didn't learn anything from Chaplin and Agee: The Untold Story of the Tramp, the Writer, and the Lost Screenplay by John Wranovics. For starters, I had known nothing about James Agee other than that he was a film critic, wrote "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men" (which I haven't read) and that he and Whittaker Chambers had worked together at Time magazine and admired each other's work. Now, though, I know that he was close to a saint, everyone loved him, and he worshipped Charlie Chaplin.

Let's get to that first item, the sainthood thing. I'm not going to write a biography of Agee here--there are many better ones out there than anything I could sketch out here and even after reading this book, I don't feel like I've gotten the whole story .What I do know, though, is that Wranovics is a very diligent researcher who quotes from Agee's correspondence and his friends at great length, with all of the quotes being of an extremely positive nature. My point is that this isn't the place to find a full-out, critical biography of Agee, nor is that the intent. It's just the story of how Agee left film criticism to go to Hollywood and work as a screenwriter, an action that--in Wranovics's version--seems to be almost solely motivated by Agee's desire to get a screenplay he'd written to Charlie Chaplin.

Nightingale's Song

 

Florence Nightingale meeting wounded soldiers at Scutari. No doubt they were awed by her.

When it comes to writing for educational publishers, there are certain topics that are off limits. Most of them are disallowed because they deal with things like sex, drugs, violence, death, magic, witchcraft, etc.--the usual taboos for children as dictated by the most reserved and careful of parents and marketing execs. Then there are topics that are out because they are considered "done to death," as in any kid over grade 4 has probably seen them already a number of times. If you're going to write a little book for a reading program about Abraham Lincoln or George Washington, you better have a new take on the subject. The same goes for people like Ben Franklin (though you can often get by with him because he had such a long, multifaceted life ), Harriet Tubman, Lewis & Clark and Sacagawea, Thomas Edison, Amelia Earheart, and alas, my favorites, the Wright Brothers. In other words, pretty much any of the stalwarts of history in the 18th-19th century. This includes Florence Nightingale.

Seeing is Believing

 

Real Vermeer: "Christ at the House of Martha and Mary"

 

Fake Vermeer: Han Van Meegeren's Vermeer forgery "Christ at Emmaus"

I don't know much about art, but I like to think that I could tell the difference between a painting by a great master, and an awkward piece by an amateur. However, the art of the forger depends not so much on skill or a copyist's talent, but on viewers' willingness to see only what they want to see. Edward Dolnick's The Forger's Spell is about one of the most successful art forgery scams of all time--at least that we know about. The most successful art forgeries are, of course, the ones no one knows about except for the artist who collected the money.

I am not going to be able to do justice to this book. I finished it about two weeks ago, didn't have time to write about it, and then had to return it to the library. Sadly (and perhaps scarily) my grasp of the details have faded during that time, and rather than say something wrong, I'm afraid I may have to be rather vague.