Capitalism in America: A History by Alan Greenspan and Adrian Wooldridge—Goodreads Book Review

Originally posted on Goodreads.com and Reedsy.com.

“America prospered, in large part, because it accepted that destruction is the price for creation. The world’s most liberal bankruptcy laws allowed companies to go out of business. The world’s biggest internal market allowed people to move to places where their skills would be more generously rewarded. The United States accepted that ghost towns and shuttered factories are the price of progress.”

As its title says, Capitalism in America covers the history of the United states with a focus on its economic setting and growth. From the joint stock companies of the English colonists (which they identify as a wholly new invention in a world where mercantilism was taken for granted) to the entrepreneurs of Silicon Valley, Greenspan and Wooldridge lay out the circumstances leading to, the benefits produced by, and the reactions against the free (and at many times not-so-free) market of the United States. I listened to the audiobook version read excellently by Ray Porter.

One of the unifying themes of the book is the necessity of creative destruction for growth. As great as the major leaps of the market were—spurred on by the mutually reinforcing and liberating inventions of like the Lowell Mills, the Bessemer Process, the steam engine, the telegraph, and many others—they meant that investments in previous processes, industries, locations, and jobs were and had to be liquidated, adjusted, or left behind. The authors, thus, also follow the growth of reactionary movements such as the populist Grange Movement and the unionization and regulation of the Progressives—all the while citing the benefits and, more often than not, economic drawbacks and ironies of such things.

However, being a general history, the book does not focus only on the turn of the 19th – 20th century (though the surrounding events and precedents set the stage for later discussion). Honestly elaborating on the dreadful economic impact of plans like the New Deal, the authors nonetheless lay out the social and presidential merits of actions by presidents like FDR to slow or stave off the destructive elements of the market (and give that president, perhaps, more credit than one might expect, or is due). The authors also go through the rest of the 20th century and early 21st, describing the relative economic plans of the Cold War and post-Cold War presidents, which many times diverged from their respective executive’s party affiliation or persona. The book ends at 2019, noting the various economic benefits of President Trump’s deregulation agenda, as well as the looming effects of his administration’s declining to cut entitlement spending. While the fact that the authors could not foresee the sudden economic downturn caused by the 2020 lockdowns, etc, or the inflation of the 2020-2024 administration lends a bit of irony to the final chapters, such events do fit within the book’s final prediction of recession, as well as within the broader themes of economic cycles.

As an AP US History teacher, I plan to recommend this book to my students, if not use it in class. Besides some parts which discuss elements of market economics (e.g. when the 2008 mortgage loan bubble is discussed), the book is clear enough in its language and consistent enough with its themes to be readable by non-economists (and even those aforementioned parts are manageable and made clear within context). While Greenspan takes a generally conservative view of America’s economic history, he is, nonetheless, quite even-handed in his treatment, which may be what some readers are looking for. I was tempted to give four stars because of a few minor gripes, but I decided those were due to my own differing views on some of the book’s topics and not due to any deficiency in the book, itself.

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Dostoevsky: The Years of Ordeal, 1850-1859 by Joseph Frank—Goodreads Book Review

Originally posted on Goodreads.com.

The second in Joseph Frank’s biography on Dostoevsky, The Years of Ordeal, 1850-1859 picks up where The Seeds of Revolt leaves off. After being arrested for his participation in a printing scheme whose socialist literature was judged seditious by Tsarist censors, Dostoevsky waits in prison for his summary execution. However, in a staged act of magnanimity, the Tsar pardons Dostoevsky et al. at the last moment, sending them instead to different Siberian prison camps.

Dostoevsky’s experiences and revelations in his four-year term in Siberia and his subsequent service in the military following it are the focus of The Years of Ordeal. In prison the still young (late twenties) Dostoevsky meets many peasant convicts, who he learns are nothing like what he and other upper-class intelligentsia assumed, neither needing nor wanting liberation by the Western liberal elite. In his process of discovering the psychology of those around him, Dostoevsky discovers that such things as private property, clear social hierarchy, and the moral metaphysics established by Russian Orthodox Christianity are serious needs that make the peasant convicts stronger, more resilient, and more at peace than those in his own class. Throughout the book, and pointing forward to works like Crime and Punishment and The Devils, Frank tracks Dostoevsky’s growing realization of the revolutionary socialist perspective as both naive and self-destructive.

Following Dostoevsky’s time in prison, Frank depicts the man’s attempts to reestablish himself on the literary scene while fulfilling his obligations as a soldier in the provincial town of Semipalatinsk. Bringing in writing from the time and more recent diagnoses, Frank also examines Dostoevsky’s nascent epilepsy, which runs parallel to the writer’s relationship with his first wife, Marya Dimitrievna. Married to a drunk when Dostoevsky first meets her, Dimitrievna consumes the man and establishes many identifiable themes for in his later female characters.

As in The Seeds of Revolt, Frank follows the biographical chapters with an examination of Dostoevsky’s literature during the respective years. Articulating how the literary scene (often the only place to avoid censors and discuss politics in Tsarist Russia) had developed since Dostevsky’s arrest, Frank describes the ascent of men such as Alexander Herzen, who now occupied the place in Russian culture previously held by Vissarion Belinsky, and seminarian socialist N. G. Chernyshevsky. Dostoevsky finds that the upper class values and self-doubt he previously depicted and lampooned in The Double and other works now under full attack, with a growing divide between “weak” upper class deference to tradition and “strong” willfulness to disregard it. Into this divide (which places the previously gauche Dostoevsky among such writers as Turgenev and Tolstoy, who welcome him) Dostoevsky brings his recent prison realizations about human psychology and ideology, and one can see the development of such ideas as would inform his later works.

Frank ends the book with an examination of Dostoevsky’s writing during the time, namely Uncle’s Dream and The Village of Stepanchikovo. (Because Dostoevsky would not write The House of the Dead until later years, Frank defers examining it, though he has quoted passages throughout to inform the reading of Dostevsky’s prison years.) Summarizing the books, Frank articulates how Dostoevsky’s ideas and themes have grown since Poor Folk and The Double, and he shows how time in prison has tested and nuanced Dostoevsky’s relationship with Romanticism and Naturalism (a major theme in The Seeds of Revolt), consistently hinting forward to Dostoevsky’s larger works.

Covering what Frank argues is the most formative decade of Dostoevsky’s life, The Years of Ordeal provides a fascinating look at not only how Dostoevsky became the writer he did, but also how Russia changed during these years. The work, thus, provides invaluable insight on the cultural, ideological, and political changes that would foreground Dostoevsky’s later masterpieces, as well as the later revolutions in later 19th and early 20th century Russia.

Dostoevsky: The Seeds of Revolt, 1821-1849 by Joseph Frank—Goodreads Book Review

Originally posted on Goodreads.com.

Not for the faint of heart, Joseph Frank’s series on Dostoevsky reverses the “examine the work to understand the man” approach to biography and instead examines themes in Dostoevsky’s life that might inform our understanding of his work.

The first of Frank’s five-volume biography, The Seeds of Revolt examines elements of Dostoevsky’s childhood, family, early religious life, and initial presence in the literary scene of 19th-century St. Petersburg to inform his earliest works, such as Poor Folk, The Double, The Landlady, White Nights, and others. Leading up to Dostoevsky’s 1849 arrest, Frank identifies the cultural and political conflicts in Russian society at the time—among which are the move in Russian interests from German Romanticism to French Naturalism and the question of whether reform (specifically, the end of serfdom) should come from the Tsar or from the people.

Amidst these conflicts, a young Fyodor Dostoevsky developed his own ideas of Naturalistic social consciousness while maintaining (often to his social detriment) a conviction that Romanticism was not completely meritless. Recounting Dostoevsky’s moves between different social and literary circles, Frank deftly shows how he eventually embroiled himself in a plot to print subversive materials advocating that the liberation of the serfs should come from below. While presenting Dostoevsky honestly as a revolutionary, Frank never removes his eye from the implicit, abstract themes in the man’s work that show his psychological and literary progression as more than those of a simple social radical.

Despite the work’s length and weight of subject, Frank’s prose is eminently readable and his organization compelling. Prefacing Dostoevsky’s St. Petersburg life (the bulk of the book) with chapters about his childhood and then ending the book with a focused look at the early works he has mentioned throughout, Joseph Frank offers a biography that does not read as a simply chronological biography, and he provides a context and jumping-off point that can easily prompt one to read not only Dostoevsky’s early work but also the next volume of the biography.

The Hammer And The Cross: A New History Of The Vikings by Robert Ferguson—Goodreads Book Review

Originally posted on Goodreads.com.

As the title implies, Robert Ferguson’s The Hammer and the Cross tracks the earliest interactions of Scandinavian and Danish vikings with the usually Christian post-Roman Europe. Following events from the 8th century attack on the Lindisfarne monastery in what would become NE England to the founding of Normandy in NW France, from viking expeditions to Spain and northern Africa to their establishment as the Varingian Guard in Kiev, Ferguson shows how the vikings shaped much of what became medieval and Renaissance Europe.

Presenting viking paganism and post-Roman Christianity in a cultural, often political, back-and-forth, Ferguson follows the eventual acceptance (and often full embrace) of Christianity by viking leaders from Denmark to Norway to Sweden. Taking the perspective that such oral cultures–usually written of by both antagonistic and, more often than not, sympathetic Christian writers–often carry more myth in their history than literal event. While he seeks to cut through the exaggerated stories of viking legends to describe the real men and women in them, Ferguson nonetheless sees a poetic value and usefulness in such legends, and he by no means attempts to reduce the size such figures have in the stories, then or now.

I had some idea of the influence the vikings had on European history, but I did not know that influence was so extensive and, after reading Ferguson’s book, so visible. One cannot study medieval history without studying the vikings, and whether one is a history buff or merely a fan of “Vikings” the show (which, though taking liberties with time and interpretation, ends up being quite based in the culture’s history and key figures over the centuries), Ferguson’s The Hammer and the Cross is an excellent read.

Debunking Howard Zinn by Mary Grabar—Goodreads Book Review

Originally posted on Goodreads.com.

Mary Grabar’s book Debunking Howard Zinn explores the biographical, political, and historiographical aspects of Zinn’s life and writing to provide a greater context for understanding Zinn’s writing and advocacy for historical revisionism. Beginning with a biographical chapter examining Zinn’s early socialist convictions and engagement with the Communist Party of America, Grabar proceeds through each chapter of The People’s History of the United States, revealing omissions, misleading implications, and inaccuracies in Zinn’s work. At times she checks Zinn’s book against primary documents (such as Jefferson’s reviling slavery in his rough draft of the Declaration of Independence, Alexis de Tocqueville’s evaluations of mid-19th century America, and military documents and personal accounts regarding the wars of the 20th century), other historians (such as Gordon Wood and David McCullough, and several historians sympathetic to Zinn’s explicitly communist aims), and even Zinn’s own work outside of the book that contradicts its claims.

Grabar’s overall aim and effect, of course, is to deflate the aura of profundity that has surrounded Zinn’s work in American political and educational culture. Citing examples of public educators basing curricula on Zinn’s work throughout, Grabar tracks how the assumptions of The People’s History became so ubiquitous in American society, even to the point of influencing local and nationwide politics in recent decades. She also pinpoints key leaders who have based their agendas and platforms on Zinn’s “view from the bottom” interpretation (and, Grabar argues, re/misinterpretation) of history. Linking the dismantling of different social institutions and cultural assumptions in recent years, Grabar argues for the rejection of Zinn’s ahistorical influence on our culture.

As the title suggests, this book is not a history but, rather, an expose. It provides part biography, part summary, and part reference for contextualizing Zinn against historians. Grabar is open about the book’s aim. Having personally heard much of Zinn’s perspective growing up and becoming an educator in English and US history, I found the biographical timeline about Zinn most interesting and informative, as well as most effective in establishing Zinn as a political agitator and polemicist for the Left instead of a historian. I have used several sources Grabar references when teaching on the US founding, and I plan to look into other historical sources in the future.