AS THE WORLD TURNS.

It takes forty-eight hours for a calendar day to be ticked off all the world's calendar pages, from 12.01 am immediately west of the International Date Line to 11.59 pm immediately east of that line.  The Santa Tracker we hear about at Christmas only has to be active for twenty-four hours, as Santa is delivering those toys in the midnight hours of each time zone.

Historian Stanley Weintraub uses that concept, and borrows from Eugene O'Neill to create Long Day's Journey into War: December 7, 1941.  Yes, Book Review N^o. 9 might have better been offered yesterday, but per his logic, it was already December 8 in Tokyo when the first air strikes reached Oahu.

CHARLIE BROWN'S REAL LIFE ENCOUNTER WITH THE RED BARON.

Snoopy flies a Sopwith Camel in the comic strip.  In real life, Charlie Brown, of West Virginia, piloted B-17 The Pub, and on the cover of Adam Makos's A Higher Call: An Incredible True Story of Combat and Chivalry in the War-Torn Skies of World War II, you'll see The Pub with a Messerschmitt fighter tucked in off the starboard wing.  Mr Makos acknowledges the assistance of Larry Alexander.

Book Review N^o. 8 can tell you, dear reader, that the "combat and chivalry" part of the subtitle is accurate.  Recall, for instance, that Hermann Göring surrendered to an Army Air Force unit which treated him as a distinguished guest (as Hauptmann Göring in the first war, he was a pretty good fighter pilot) until higher command authority ordered he be remanded to Allied custody.  Fighter pilots on both sides considered themselves heirs to the knightly tradition and so conducted themselves, as pilots and as captors, and much of Higher Call relates that through the eyes of Franz Stigler, the Messerschmitt pilot whose plane is on the cover.  It's fair to use the Red Baron reference given the missions he flew during the war, particularly as the correlation of forces turned against his country.

I will not reveal here either why the Messerschmitt was flying formation (confirming a shoot-down? escorting to a safe place to land?) or whether the pilots had a chance, as many veterans of the War did, to compare notes late in life.  Why spoil a good war yarn, which this book is, by telling all of it?

(Cross-posted to 50 Book Challenge.)

MONEY-HEMORRHAGING JOKES RUN BY IDIOTS.

That's Margaret "University Diaries" Soltan referring to Ohio University's Richard Vedder calling attention to the money-suck that College Sports has become.  Some of those links might now be gone to the Happy Linking Grounds, but the self-destruction and self-beclowning of higher education, and the money-hemorrhaging, goes on and on.

Professor Vedder has continued to call attention, most recently in Let Colleges Fail: The Power of Creative Destruction in Higher Education, which is a follow-on-if-only-you-had-listened to his Going Broke by Degree: Why College Costs too Much of two decades ago.

I'm able to keep Book Review N^o. 7 brief as the "Ten Cardinal Sins" he enumerates to open Let Colleges Fail are the kind of thing regular readers of Cold Spring Shops have been hearing from me for years.  It's much easier sometimes to simply agree, and then sigh as we have been fighting it out along these lines for years and the craziness goes on and on and on.

INSIDERS INTERVIEWING INSIDERS DEVOID OF INSIGHTS.

By any normal standards, Donald Trump should never have come anywhere near the White House again.  Pick your transgression: claiming victory before the absentee votes came in, injecting himself into the Georgia senate runoffs of 2020-2021 in such a way as to destroy the last opportunity to gridlock the Biden presidency, then there was that futile and stupid gesture at the Federal Capitol; and in the 2022 Congressional elections, almost all of the aspiring senators he endorsed (Herschel Walker???  Mehmet Oz???) lost, and the Democrats didn't have to keep a bottle of bourbon at the head desk in case the vice-president had to break a tie.  And yet, here he is, and the analyses of "What on earth just happened" are coming out.

Book Reviews N^o. 4, N^o. 5, and N^o. 6 cover Fight: Inside the Wildest Battle for the White House, written by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes, who previously collaborated on Shattered and Lucky after, respectively, the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections; Uncharted: How Trump Beat Biden, Harris, and the Odds in the Wildest Campaign in History, by Chris Whipple; and 2024: How Trump Retook the White House and the Democrats Lost America, by Josh Dawsey, Tyler Pager, and Isaac Arnsdorf.

In these reviews of the after-action reviews, I frequently lament the absence of a writer working in the style of Theodore H. "The Making of the President" White, wherein the author attempts to get beyond the insiders and their machinations to consider what might be going on in the minds of voters.  If anything, those three books only make the absence of reasoned thought more plain to see.  Consider how Fight opens.  "The former House Speaker, still in perpetual motion at eighty-four, fixed her wide brown eyes on a rarely used television screen.  If not for the vanishing supply of chocolate ice cream in the freezer, and the quick naps she caught between busy days, there was usually little evidence that anyone lived in her posh Washington crash pad at all."  If you're writing for Vanity Fair, yes, you do want to tell readers who designed political reporter Kaitlan Collins's fuchsia dress and let readers figure out how much money she spent.  Fashion reporting in a political story, not so much.  But when you later introduce future chief of staff Suzy Wiles, at page 24, as "Soft-spoken and grandmotherly in appearance, she cut a striking contrast in a Trumpworld stocked with men who looked like bouncers and women whose surgical enhancements were as garish as their clothing."  And Beltway reporters and pundits still cannot figure out why Donald Trump's "fake news" digs register so well with his voters.  Authors Allen and Parnes only confirmed that potty-mouthed Democrats were sounding off that way long before somebody suggested that to do so made them sound more authentic, or perhaps more angry.  Uncharted?  Look for copies on the cheap in the remainder bins and used book stores.  Author Whipple (Please don't squeeze my Schumer) writes, page 163, how "Tampon Tim," which resonated at Trump rallies, reflected "his support of women's reproductive rights."  No, the governor was all-in on the vanishingly small number of mentally disturbed women who claimed to be men having the men's room stocked with ... tampons.  The authors of 2024 are establishment writers, Mr Dawsey at The Wall Street Journal, Mr Pager a White House correspondent with New York's Times, and Mr Arnsdorf having that portfolio with Washington's Post.  And their biases show.  Penguin continue the annoying practice, in 2024, of using numbered endnotes to cite sources, while using reference marks to introduce asides as footnotes, such as, at page 213, calling attention to Hillbilly Elegy as a case study in victim-blaming; and the authors suggest campaign operative Corey Lewandowski and South Dakota governor Kristi Noem were an item, later extending the insinuation to suggest that it was he who recommended the governor, rather than Stephen Miller head Homeland Security, and that doing so, see page 338, offers a "gentler face for deportation."

THE FOLLY OF MANAGING EMERGENCE.

Wes Marshall suggests that "88 chapters about road safety does seem like a lot."  Think of those chapters of Killed by a Traffic Engineer: Shattering the Delusion that Science Underlies Our Transportation System as analogous to the 150 Psalms.  A good clergyman can produce several year's worth of messages off of each of those Psalms; and a good professor of any of the disciplines dealing with land use and urban form, including but not limited to civil engineering, might be able to structure a class meeting around one or a selected small set of those chapters, each of which is short.

In Book Review N^o. 3 I argue that Professor Marshall is offering a more general indictment of the Technocratic Vision; the traffic engineers have run afoul of the same problem that trips up any gathering of Wise Experts, to wit: Complex Adaptive Systems Do Whatever They D**n Well Please.  His chapters focus on traffic engineering, and yet, traffic engineering involves at least five levels of analysis, working from the foundational to the systemic.

VOICE IS A PROXY FOR GRIDLOCK.

Robert Caro chronicled the lives of two fallen icons of High Modern Authoritarianism, Lyndon Johnson in four volumes, and Robert Moses in The Power Broker.  Marc J. Dunkelman was reading Power Broker on the train from Washington to New York, where he scuttled in like a rat, and what he knew of attempts to turn The Pennsylvania Station into a proper station bothered him.  His research led to "This Is Why Your Holiday Travel Is Awful," which proved to be a preliminary sketch of Why Nothing Works: Who Killed Progress - and How to Bring it Back.

Mr Dunkelman offers Why Nothing Works as advice to the self-styled progressives among Democrat politicians, which is to say, to the people who "have an affirmative view of government and its effectiveness," to quote the very effective as mayor of Chicago Rahm Emanuel.  His thesis, plainly stated, is that progressivism, as he understands the term, "is undermining itself."  Why?  First, although the "affirmative view of government" is as old as the Republic itself, in policy form it might be the Supervision of Wise Experts, which begins with Alexander Hamilton and the American System, or it might be Skepticism of Overweening Authority, which begins with Thomas Jefferson and those unalienable rights, with the small platoons checking the powerful.  Second, the Hamiltonian and Jeffersonian impulses wax and wane, both among the political classes and the people.  Third, he argues, nothing works because the Jeffersonian impulses among the self-styled progressives of today, who mostly argue with but vote for Democrats, are currently too strong.  To borrow from Archie Bunker, in the course of Mr Dunkelman's investigation of why The Pennsylvania Station remained a rat-run despite efforts from everywhere to fix it, more than one of his interlocutors noted, "Mister, we could use a man like Robert Moses again."

Book Review N^o. 2 will note both strengths and weaknesses in his argument.  It is hard not to like a book that often validates my "process, nuance, failure" lament over the procedural politics whether of the academy or of government.  It's encouraging to read a younger man who has an understanding of how Congress delegated its power first to the independent regulatory commissions and latterly to the administrative state and administrative law and Chevron deference.  It's also encouraging when a younger man sees the way in which the values regime that allegedly tamed the Depression and then won the War took a shape well-suited to taming the Depression and winning the War: and proved unsuited to the peace and prosperity that followed.  And yet, his fear that an excess of Jeffersonian dispersal of powers to the groups is what midwived populism fails to convince.

SUBURBAN SPRAWL WAS A LONG TIME IN THE MAKING.

I'll start 2025's attempt to post fifty book reviews with John Stilgoe's Metropolitan Corridor: Railroads and the American Scene.  Although the book features a train on the dust jacket, and railroads in the subtitle, it's not ferroequinology.  Nor is it urban planning, although I intend to argue that amateur or professional urbanists will gain a great deal from a close reading.

Professor Stilgoe served the faculty of landscape architecture at Harvard at the time Metropolitan Corridor was published.  He also has experience in military intelligence and an affinity for vintage O Scale modelling.  The preface to Metropolitan Corridor engages in a great deal of product differentiation, concluding with "This book offers only an introduction, an addition to the vocabulary of visual analysis of the built environment."  That follows a disclaimer, "The following pages look as closely as possible at the physical presence of the railroad industry and its infrastructure and seek to interpret the public attitude toward them.  Dividing object from creating system may be unwise, but to research the origin, growth, and place of corporate finance in this period is to produce another book."  Presumably inter alia Alfred Chandler and Ken Galbraith had that covered.

I intend to focus Book Review N^o. 1 on supporting the outrageous claim of the post's title.  First, though, let me note that there's a lot in Metropolitan Corridor for culture-studies and assorted humanities types to learn from.  My elaborations will come after the jump.

First, where do you find the metropolitan corridor?  Do you look in Lionel catalogs?  Do you read pulp magazines?  Perhaps today's "theorists" might rediscover inductive pattern-recognition rather than arguing, on the basis of tight and empirically empty priors, that Sir Topham Hatt is a tyrant, or that there's too much sex-stereotyping in the toy department at Christmas.

Second, how do you describe the metropolitan corridor?  Do you paint it "with mixed emotions"?  Depict it as a smoky despoiler of all that is beautiful?  Sneak a pickpocket into the Gare St-Lazare?  Or show the giant conquerors of space, time, and drudgery?  Most of the artistic establishment might accentuate the despoilation, although there is enough celebration of the accomplishments to fill Milwaukee's Grohmann Museum with such paintings.  Do you write of it as soul-crushing, or do you affirm it?  Yes, the high school American Literature curriculum is a heavy dose of Upton Sinclair and Sinclair Lewis and general "bourgeois bland sucks" and yet, concurrent with the publication of Babbitt, p. 77, came civic boosters establishing "Babbitt clubs."  Les deplorables, an echo in time.

EMERGENCE CAN'T BE NUDGED.

I've enjoyed Malcolm Gladwell's work, alluding previously to his The Tipping Point whilst offering reviews of Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking and of Outliers: The Story of Success.  Thus, when his Revenge of the Tipping Point: Overstories, Superspreaders, and the Rise of Social Engineering turned up at a railway station bookstore on the cheap, I bought it, and got it read, mostly during the ensuing train rides.

The short form of Book Review N^o. 12 is Hasty Generalization Fails to Convince.  Let me start with the Very Serious Story with which Revenge concludes: the anomaly of serious opioid abuse in some states but not neighboring states.  His overstory involves a California narcotics enforcer who requires physicians and pharmacists to write prescriptions in triplicate, which makes abusive prescription of pain killers more difficult, physicians in states where prescriptions in triplicate are not required differing in their willingness to prescribe stronger pain-killers, and detail men who identify the physicians more willing to prescribe those pain-killers.  Now, introduce a complication, one with the best of intentions, making the manufacture of pain-killers that can be ground up and snorted more difficult, and now ... the people hooked on prescription pain-killers become ... customers for pushers of heroin or illicit fentanyl.

EMERGENCE CANNOT BE PLANNED.

The planned economy has long been a desired outcome by the men of system, and arrangers of the human chess pieces have long pointed to large businesses, making comparisons of their sales with the gross domestic products of small countries.  That thinking got Leigh Phillips and Michal Rozworski to write People's Republic of Walmart: How the World's Biggest Corporations are Laying the Foundations for Socialism.  They open with "We're just intrigued by how this epitome of capitalism is also, paradoxically, a vast planned economy."  The argument they attempt to update goes back to that passage in Das Kapital about the expropriators being expropriated.  That expropriation does not have to be the violent seizure of the means of production, rather it might be the working out of the socialization of labor in such a way that the operatives are able to operate the machinery without the supervision of private owners.  Their conclusion?  "Planning works, just not yet for us."

I could keep Book Review N^o. 11 to two words.  Nice try.

JIHADIS, BETTER NOT TANGLE WITH NORMIES.

A year ago, Hamas terrorists decided that paragliding into a concert and shooting up kibbutzes was a good way to call attention to something.  The aftermath has been causing all sorts of consternation among Democrats, particularly civil-rights era Jews, and on campuses run by people who should know better.

That attack also prompted Kurt Schlichter to wonder about how such an event might play out in the United States, and he wrote The Attack as a work of fiction from the perspective of participants in preparing, carrying out, being affected by, responding to, or settling accounts with the organizers.  Today seems as good a day as any to offer a brief Book Review N^o. 10 taking stock.

The Attack has in common with the Kelly Turnbull novels Mr Schlichter's jaundiced view of many of his fellow citizens, particularly those who would push Democrat politicians further left.  That comes with the territory: expect the affluent white female urban liberals, assorted sensitive civilians, and senior Democrat officials to be presented in the worst possible light, perhaps even beyond parody, and expect the people who own firearms and know how to use them to offer a lot of information on the nomenclature of their shootin' irons.  And yet, when law enforcement is overwhelmed and National Command Authority dithering, the people who know how to use them deliver the message of my post title.

It also has in common with the Colonel's People's Republic series the message that maybe regular order and bourgeois norms ought not be lightly questioned or deconstructed.  Once National Command Authority is restored, martial law, military tribunals, hunter teams armed with .45 pistols, and assorted things that fly and go boom get to work.  Those responses might have been logical, but perhaps the book is in our hands in order that we reflect carefully on what we do.

Furthermore, there are references throughout Attack to other state actors who might be at work intending to ruin infrastructure, sabotage military bases, and perhaps pit citizen against citizen, and otherwise disrupt our on-balance-OK-despite-the-political-noise existence, and perhaps it's worth asking our elected officials if they are aware of those possibilities and what they intend to do to preempt or contain them.

(Cross-posted to Fifty Book Challenge.) 

BETTERING MANKIND BY ENSLAVING IT.

Do we understand freedom as individual agency leading to an emergent social order, or does the social order provide the material conditions and impose the constraints within which individuals exercise their agency?  That's one of the more contested topics in political philosophy, and Victor Hanson, in The Dying Citizen: How Progressive Elites, Tribalism, and Globalization Are Destroying the Idea of America, lays down a marker in support of the former concept, with a denunciation of the latter concept as being contrary to freedom.

Yes, that title is polemical and engages in more than a little question-begging, and I could keep Book Review N^o. 9 brief by noting much of the argument is about Donald Trump's tussles with the administrative state, with the role of citizenship being tangential to his argument.  Perhaps, though, that is the point: if freedom is, see p. 41, the Life of Julia, "proudly and perennially a ward of the state ... unable to become autonomous and independent without federal help," which might be the working out of Franklin Roosevelt's freedom from fear and freedom from want, that Julia is in effect a serf, only "dependent on the Washington bureaucracy" rather than the benevolence of the local earl, well, Mr Hanson would argue that she is neither free nor a citizen.

Along the way, Mr Hanson touches on a number of familiar themes, including approaches to immigration, where his position is close to mine in that assimilation is a two way street;  the political aggregation problem in that gridlock takes one form in presidential governments and another in parliamentary governments; the punishment cycles of a grim strategy outcome, with non-enforcement of immigration laws or non-enforcement of gun laws being a contemporary form of nullification; and suspicion of expert opinion, where a quarter century of expert failure of all sorts is the background music of our lives.

The review excerpts in the book and at Amazon tend to come from the populist right and the Militant Normals.  Dying Citizen provides intellectual ammunition for those inclined to diagnose what has gone wrong from the populist or Militant Normal perspective.  Understanding the arguments might prove productive in conversations with persuadable voters as the election approaches.  Whether someone inclined to be skeptical of the populist right or the Militant Normals will be convinced is another matter.  It is difficult to square "Millions of American citizens are, more than ever, determined not merely to stop the erosion of their rights and influences but to regain all that they have lost" as the closing sentence with "The Dying Citizen is a clarion call to rebuild our collective national identity," from the back cover blurb, as those differing beliefs about freedom and rights suggest a, singular noun, "collective national identity," does not exist.

Cross-posted to 50 Book Challenge.

GIVE LOGIC A CHANCE.

It's been my custom not to post reviews of Regnery books because too often the editing turns what might be solid arguments into polemics more effective at shoring up people already convinced than it is in persuading persuadable minds.  It is for that reason that I offer former representative Tulsi Gabbard's For Love of Country: Leave the Democrat Party Behind as Book Review N^o. 8.

It's particularly unproductive for Regnery to have done its usual polemical work on For Love of Country as the representative was for a while active in the Bernie Sanders campaign, and has the honor of being called a "Russian asset" by Hillary Clinton while continuing her commission in the Reserves even after leaving both Congress and the Democrats.

As such, she might bring a novel perspective to both the usual Regnery ditto-heads and to voters leaning toward the Democrats or hoping to keep their independence.  The chapter headings are surely provocative.

1. The End of Our Democracy?
2. Fading Light of Freedom.
3. No Free Speech.
4. They See God as the Enemy.
5. The Elitist Cabal of Warmongers.
6. Fomenting Racism.
7. What's True?  The Powerful Decide.
8. Families Under Fire.

She concludes, "Elite politicians from both parties are terrified of our freedom and that we, the people, may actually begin to use our power."  Yes, there's an element of both-sides-ism in that observation, and yet, although she invokes a conversation with the late Daniel Ellsberg, yes, he of the Pentagon Papers, the topics and the people she brings in as anecdotes and experts are more often those familiar on the populist right rather than as onetime colleagues in the Sanders campaign.  That's unfortunate, as the Wise Experts in the age of Trump tend to either agree with or argue with and then vote for Democrats, but that second cohort includes populists of the left or in the so-called rainbow coalition who are not yet ready to write for Fox News or Pajamas Media.

Cross-posted to 50 Book Challenge.

YOUR MIDWAY RESEARCH COMPENDIUM.

Today marks the eighty-second commemoration of the Battle of Midway, which has provided material for lots of authors, whether as participants, reporters, or serious scholars.  We've called attention to a number of those books over the years: Midway, The Midway Campaign, The Unknown Battle of Midway, Shattered Sword, No Right to Win, and Never Call Me a Hero.

This reviewing season's Book Review N^o. 7 is Peter C. Smith's Midway, Dauntless Victory: Fresh Perspectives on America's Seminal Naval Victory of World War II (on the cover it looks like subtitles en echelon, fitting either for a combined air operation or an academician) and the book is clearly in the academic style.  If you prefer your footnotes on the same page as the text, that is what Mr Smith and Pen and Sword Maritime, a British publisher, serves.  The first appearance of each major figure, whether warrior, writer, or public official, comes with a footnote offering a biographical sketch including, as applicable, postings or engagements of relevance.  There are some pages that evoke the legendary Torah scrolls with one verse at the top of the page and commentary filling the rest of the space.  I approve!

Dauntless Victory might be more useful to an experienced student of the Navy and the battle.  It's written by a professor (of health policy, no less) and the writing style is not always sparkling.  On the other hand, it's as good a round-up of revisions to the historical record, of which there are many, and it includes, in addition to the commentary on the existing written record in English, summaries of reaction of the era from the other military powers, including, for what it's worth, a few kopeks and Pfennigs from the landlubbers embroiled in Middle Europe at the time.  A concluding appendix calls attention to the many errors in popular reporting and in film (the 1976 Midway has a "pathetic politically correct and totally irrelevant love-story sub-plot," for instance) which is useful to know.  That noted, if you're watching that movie, it had pretty good Sensurround and when it premiered, audiences were prone to applause as each of the Kido Butai carriers had their close encounters with those victorious Dauntlesses.  A more recent Midway movie appeared after Dauntless Victory was published.  There might be elements of that movie to fact-check once you've finished your reading.

Cross-posted to 50 Book Challenge.

IF YOU WERE THERE, YOU WEREN'T THERE.

It might be better for historians without any lived experience of the 1960s to attempt to come to terms with them.  Me?  I was there and I didn't like it.  "The America of the 1950s was an America that worked. The counterculture that followed did not. It's more accurate to describe aspects of it as alien, immoral, and destructive."

Let's yield the floor to Chapman historian Luke Nichter, who is probably young enough to have pored through the newspapers and scholarly writings without attempting to square what he found with his own experience.  In The Year that Broke Politics: Collusion and Chaos in the Presidential Election of 1968 he presents a few surprises, which he obtained in conversations with people who were there, and have since crossed the final summit.

Let me open Book Review N^o. 6 by noting that, unlike depressingly many recent political histories, Year that Broke is not a hair-on-fire reaction to Donald Trump's 2016 win, or to the strength he seems to be showing again this election season. That concentration on the year, and the events of that year, are even more commendable given the opportunities to foreshadow the various forms of populism, the Summer of Rage, and futile nation building wars that still seem to structure an impossible politics.  Nor is it the focus of Year that Broke to point out how Reliance on National Politics to Solve Problems is never going to end well.  It's going to take each of us to figure that out.

A MAN, A PLAN, A CANAL.

David McCullough wrote The Path Between the Seas: The Creation of the Panama Canal: 1870-1914 (and isn't that a veritable Gatún Locks of subtitles, dear reader?) in time for the Bicentennial.  My Francis Parkman Prize edition dates to 2002, during which time Ronald Reagan made an issue out of Jimmy Carter offering to return sovereignty over the Canal Zone to Panama, Panama regained that sovereignty, and Operation Just Cause ousted Manuel Noriega, all of which Peter Winn notes in his Parkman Prize foreword; and yet publication preceded the expansion of the canal with larger locks.  He notes that Path, as written, provides sufficient background for someone interested in the more recent naval and geopolitical history.

I will open Book Review N^o. 5 with one spoiler.  The man with the plan is not Theodore Roosevelt.  Recall that the French first essayed a canal, and in their way (the French having perfected the Forms of Governance by Wise Experts long before Herbert Croly or Woodrow Wilson or Tony Fauci was born) they called a conference of a Technical Committee to do all the planning.  To this meeting came Adolphe Godin de Lépinay of the Corps des Ponts et Chaussées and he observed that attempting to dig a sea-level canal through the flood-plain and watershed of the Chagres River, which meanders through a tropical rain-forest, with all that implies, on the Atlantic side, would come to all sorts of grief.  Better, he suggested, to build a lock and dam, create a reservoir, make a cut through the top of the low cordillera at the continental divide, using that ridge as a natural levee, with another lock and dam along the Rio Grande leading to the Pacific side.  The resulting freshwater lakes would also allow the port cities to have running water, although that gets ahead of my story, or rather the several stories, in Path, each of which merits several shelves in a proper library.  Dear reader, with as many sea stories as follow, it might take as much time to read this post as it does to fill a lock.

The first such story is France itself in the closing decades of the Nineteenth Century.  The Second Empire gives way to the Third Republic; Ferdinand de Lesseps manages the successful construction of the Suez Canal; the Prussians with steel cannon in World War II: The Prequel overwhelm the French with their bronze cannon and der Kaiser demands an indemnity he hopes will keep the French humble for a generation.  The French pay off the indemnity in a short time, then launch the Panama Canal project, and decide to write the book on International Expositions (literally, the commission on world's fairs subsequently set up in Paris) complete with the Eiffel Tower.  And somehow the Third Republic survived both an attempt at restoring the Empire and the Communists.

GOVERNMENT IS NOT THE SOLUTION TO OUR PROBLEMS.

The Washington Monthly of Charles Peters rejected the premise of that title, and yet, eleven out of twelve months they'd publish articles, many of them useful and instructive, seeking to make government less of a problem than it was.  Reason had company, for instance, objecting to occupational licensing for African hair braiders and similar specialists who might cater to a niche population.

Unfortunately, in his valedictory We Do Our Part: Toward a Fairer and More Equal America, he simply wrote another of the depressingly predictable laments common among the pundit class after Donald Trump's surprise presidential win.  Such books are always full of foreboding, retrograde attitudes are loose in the land, and Somebody Has to Do Something.  But Something almost never means acknowledging that maybe the people who preferred Mr Trump to Mrs Clinton might have been sending the pundit class a message.  You won't get that in We Do Our Part: the foreword is by the smarmy Jon Meacham and that, dear reader, is a tell, even though he advises the Professional Managerial Class types to be more respectful of the voters away from the coasts and the tony coffee houses.

In Book Review N^o. 4, I will use Mr Peters's words to refute his argument.  We might want to cut him some slack; he is of that cohort of Silent Generation relics for whom "New Deal" is to the conservative as the Rosary is to the Devil, and for whom "We Had to Do Something" is a rhetorical argument-ender.  Yes, he recognizes the snobbery, when it is convenient to do so, that emerged in Official Washington and among the Coastal Elites as an ongoing affront to Normal Americans.  But he continues to reveal that unthinking faith in Big Government, slagging at page 99 on Ronald Reagan for grousing, "Since the beginning of this country the gross national product has increased by 33 time.  In the same period the cost of government has increased 234 times."  He continues with classic question begging.  "Of course, what Reagan failed to discuss was what the federal government was doing that needed doing to justify its growth."  We Had to Do Something, didn't We?

THE POLITICAL BUNDLES ARE TOO DARNED BIG.

What better way to demonstrate that than to bundle two political books from authors with differing perspectives as Book Reviews N^o. 2 and N^o. 3?

There are plenty of books who have argued that one of the major parties is in the position of developing a lasting presidential, and perhaps governing, majority.  There was Kevin Phillips's The Emerging Republican Majority, years ago, and he, after events overtook his analysis, filled the bookstores with volumes explaining why the correlation of forces was not favorable.  Never mind, as late as 2004, there were Republican court intellectuals suggesting that a coalition of compassionate conservatives and security moms could coalesce as a majority.  Oops.

Democratic strategists John Judis and Ruy Teixeira offered a nod to Mr Phillips with their The Emerging Democratic Majority, only when that failed to materialize they had the opportunity to wrote Where Have All the Democrats Gone? (The Soul of the Party in the Age of Extremes), and that pretty well suggests where their argument will go.  Patrick Ruffini, who argues with but mostly votes for Republicans covered similar ground in Party of the People: Inside the Multiracial Populist Coalition Remaking the GOP.  (Right now, dear reader, Amazon is offering a bundle including these two books, and the authors have filed mutually complimentary reviews!)

The fault lines within the major parties have been visible for a long time, perhaps beginning when the industrialized countries devastated after the War started to recover, while the United States looked strong enough to do anything (Interstate highways!  Voyage to the Moon!  Win in Vietnam!  Abolish poverty!), and it was bye, bye, Ms American Pie, and she took the Victory Dividend with her.

Welcome to the reality check.  "I'm a big fan of separation of powers, in part because I'm not persuaded elections, no matter what rules determine the winners, are useful for revelation of preferences, particularly among large policy bundles being voted on by large electorates."

PLAYING RAIL BARON IN THE GREAT PLAINS.

Fred W. Frailey, retired railroad journalist with experience at U. S. News, recently published Seldom Willing; A Novel of Railroading.  There's a lot of heavy reading in the reviewing backlog to be worked off, all the more reason to feature railway fiction as Book Review N^o. 1.

"Seldom Willing" refers to the South West Kansas Railway, one of the components of a fictitious Central Pacific Railroad with Chicago - Omaha - Denver and Chicago - St. Louis - Kansas City main lines; the South West Kansas and the Omaha & El Paso provided Omaha - Kansas City - Denver service.  Mr Frailey is coy about how Central Pacific came to be, the railway mania of the Gilded Age not turning in reality into all manner of superfluous lines west of the Missouri River the way it was east of there; and in this fictional world, Union Pacific and Burlington have their Omaha - Denver service, whilst the Santa Fe thwarted promoters of the South West Kansas at every turn, with Seldom Willing's promoters giving up any hopes of reaching Santa Fe and turning toward Denver instead.

Those tracks are still in operation in the 1970s as the promoter of the South West Kansas was more successful than the promoters of the New York and Ontario Midland were in getting potential online communities to subscribe to their stock sales; whilst the Omaha & El Paso made it as far as McPherson, Kansas before investors thought better of it.

So much for the transportation history lesson.  Seldom Willing might be the first novel since Fiddle Hill to use the railroad as the setting for the business and political machinations and human interactions that distinguish a novel from a picture book.  And any story that begins with a train wreck in the Marais des Cygnes River has the requisite drama.  Would you, dear reader, film a vodka commercial in the Swamp of Swans?

PILING DEFERENTS UPON EPICYCLES UPON SAECULA.

We'll close this year of reading with Neil Howe's The Fourth Turning is Here: What the Seasons of History Tell Us about How and When This Crisis Will End.  We're all the way to Book Review N^o. 16 and I really should rethink how much energy to devote to what areas of venting and ranting I engage in in 2024.

If popular books were presented and sold like college textbooks, The Fourth Turning is Here would more likely be presented as Generations 3^e, with some acknowledgement of the passing of coauthor William Strauss since the publication of Generations 2^e, er, The Fourth Turning.

SEPARATING FOR LIGHT AND TRANSIENT CAUSES?

I'm going to combine observations on Kurt Schlichter's Inferno and Overlord, the two most recent Kelly Turnbull novels, now the seventh and eighth of a series, into a combined post.  The post therefore comprises Book Reviews N^o. 14 and N^o. 15, although we might view it as revising and extending a previous omnibus post dealing with the fourth through sixth novels.  In that post, I noted, "It's difficult to write speculative fiction in the middle of events, and I suspect that turning Kelly Turnbull loose to frustrate the wokies and kill people, whilst mocking the coastal cosmopolitans and their pronoun protocols and other manifestations of effete snobbery might sell more books than, oh, tackling the substantive political economy of separation, which was hinted at in Conservative Insurgency, and which calls for more concreteness as the Jarrett regency continues to flail."  That series of reviews concluded with the liberation of part of the West Coast in Collapse to prevent the Chinese from turning California into a colony.  Afterwards, the People's Republic fragmented further, with a west coast capital somewhere in Washington, er, Hillaryia, and another either in the Douglass Commonwealth or somewhere around New York.  The details don't matter; neither does the involvement of Russia on the side of the eastern half, nor an apparent European war and English civil war going on at the same time.  And, as with the previous books, the Colonel concludes, "Don't let this fiction become nonfiction."