drneutron's 2012 Nonfiction

Back again for another year. I'm really glad to see the group taking off!

I think the first one for me in 2012 will be The Question of Hu, the story of a devout Chinese Catholic who traveled with a Jesuit to France in 1772 and wound up in a lunatic asylum.

The Question of Hu by Jonathan D. Spence

Back in 1721, a Jesuit missionary in Canton, China named Jean-Francois Foucquet was ordered to report back to Rome to see the Pope. Now, Foucquet had spent the last 25 or so years studying Chinese, and especially ancient Chinese writings like the I Ching and he had this theory that these works were really based on a knowledge - incomplete as it might be - of the one true Christian God. As one might imagine, this wasn't a generally accepted theory, and his Jesuit superiors wanted to put a lid on it. He just wanted to keep studying. The Pope wanted to hear him out. As part of deal, Foucquet was able to get permission of sorts to bring back a Chinese scholar who had converted to Christianity to help him decode these texts and make his case. But those who didn't want him to do so managed to convince those planning to go with him to back out at the last minute.

Enter Hu Ruowang (AKA John Hu), a Chinese convert and gatekeeper at the residence in Canton where Foucquet was temporarily staying. Foucquet was assured that while Hu wasn't a scholar, he could read an write well enough to help with Foucquet's studies. Hu wanted to see the Europe - and especially meet the Pope - and was able to go. So they entered into a work contract where Hu would be paid a relatively small salary and Roucquet would pick up traveling expenses in exchange for translation and copyist services. And off they went.

Almost from the beginning of the trip, Hu's behavior was odd. Foucquet had been in China for decades, and was familiar with Chinese custom, so was surprised by Hu's violent responses to the ship's crew and on arriving in Europe, those around them. Hu, on the other hand, had no sense of how long the trip would take, how much trouble they would run into , or just how isolated he would be without knowledge of French. On the third hand, it appears Foucquet made no attempt, at least until it was too late to try to teach Hu French so that he could communicate (although he did initially try to teach Hu European customs). As a result, Hu behaved in ways that was more and more often interpreted as bizarre - and it didn't help that Foucquet left Hu on several occasions to make side trips. Eventually, the French officials and Foucquet had Hu committed to Charendon, an asylum caring for the mentally ill, when he violently refused to go on to Rome with Foucquet. Eventually, the Jesuits were able to get Hu back to China, but not before he spent about 2 years in the asylum in pretty horrific conditions.

The Question of Hu is a short book, but is packed with information about the people and places of the time. Spence's work is rather episodic in that there's not a huge amount of source material - only one letter from Hu to Foucquet exists, and the rest of the material is essentially Foucquet's letters and papers - so there's little in the way to trying to get into Hu's thinking. And since the source material is so one-sided, I get the sense that Hu is pictured as more bizarre and inscrutable than he really was. After all, Foucquet's opponents used this episode against him, and much was written in by him in his own defense. In fairness, Spense believes that Foucquet was unusually honest in his depiction of the situation.

All in all, The Question of Hu is a great little book about a time and place I didn't know much about, and I enjoyed it very much. It's only about 150 pages long, so isn't a difficult read by any means. Recommended!

Sacred Trash: The Lost and Found World of the Cairo Geniza by Adina Hoffman

In 1898, Solomon Schecter brought an entire room full of scraps and pieces of manuscripts from a synagogue in Cairo back to Cambridge in a major coup for the university. He didn't just find a bunch of old parchments, though. He found a large, and largely unexplored world of writings from the Cairo Jewish community in ninth through eleventh centuries. Out of this treasure came unknown poetry, religious works, and the minutia of everyday life - allowing for more than a hundred years of research to understand that time and place.

Sacred Trash tells the story. Unfortunately, the authors have chosen to tell the story topically, rather than chronologically. So intstead of a narrative, we get a mix of modern biography and the findings of each researcher on a topic. It's confusing, and I kept having to flip back and forth to keep up.

Sorry, not one I'd recommend. There's good stuff here - it's just a bit too hard to get to.

Finally on to the third NF of the year!

The Teapot Dome Scandal: How Big Oil Bought the Harding White House and Tried to Steal the Country by Laton McCartney

You think modern politics is bad? You ain't seen nothing yet. Warren Harding, not known as our most capable President, appointed some decent Cabinet members. Andrew Mellon, for instance, was one of the better Treasury Secretaries we've had. He also appointed a few real doozys - Albert Fall, in particular, for Interior. Fall was owned lock, stock and barrel by Big Oil, especially Harry Sinclair of Sinclair Oil. The ensuing scandal over illegal oil contracts in the Teapot Dome oil reserve took over 10 years to resolve, ruined politicians and businessmen, and even resulted in a murder/suicide.

McCartney's book is a fascinating account of the scandal and subsequent investigations. The situation was complex, and at times the story is a bit difficult to follow. But in whole, it's a good book about a nearly unbelievable story.

4: Added to the wishlist so I won't forget it, though at the moment it feels more like a book I ought to read than one I want to read.

I always find political shenanigans much more interesting in historical context than in full bloom...I suppose it's the context" part, as one can see how it all came out instead of just having that dreadful feeling that it's all going to come crashing down on one's own wee head.

The Instant Economist by Timothy Taylor

You might have seen The Great Courses advertised in recent years. DVDs of college lectures on a variety of topics. Well now they've published a line of introductory texts as well. I saw the book on economics at the library and thought I'd give it a try. Turns out it was a decent non-technical intro to the field. I wish it had a Further Reading list, though!

7: Seems a useful sort of series, but yes, does kinda leave one hanging with no recommendations for further reading.

I've found the Oxford Press series _____ : Very Short Introduction (Example: Anglo-Saxon Age: a very short introduction) to be of similar quality and to provide excellent further sources.

Odd the Teaching Company ones don't as all the courses include excellent bibliographies.

Hmmm...my cynical self says they want you to buy the advanced course from them to get the list for additional reading.

22. Calvin Coolidge by David Greenberg

Silent Cal is usually lumped with Harding and Hoover as the low-ranked gap between activists Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt. But there's more to him than meets the eye. He was the first US President to make extensive use of the broadcast medium - in this case, radio - to reach out to the American public as a whole. Following Harding, Coolidge increased the use of the burgeoning advertising industry to manage his public image. His approach to governing - lowering taxes, cutting spending, deregulating business - foreshadowed Reagan, and was occasionally cited by Reagan as an inspiration.

Coolidge governed during one of the strongest boom times, the Roaring Twenties, and left office just a few months before the crash of '29 and the start of the Great Depression. Looking back from the other side of those bad times, it's clear that things were about to go so wrong. But as Greenberg points out, seeing Coolidge only from that perspective gives a skewed picture of the man. A fuller picture, says Greenberg, is one of a man bridging the gap between 19th century values and 20th century culture.

Recommended. This is a pretty good entry in the American Presidents series.

The Power of Babel by John McWhorter

Languages change in ways much like biological evolution - they adapt, mutate, form new languages, even die. McWhorter's book discusses the processes by which these changes take place. Generally, the discussions of mechanisms and anthropology were good, but for some reason I had difficulty focusing on McWhorter's prose. These are some dense sentences! In the end I rated this one a little lower because I felt the struggle to keep going was more than it should have been.

12: Hmm, too bad re the "struggle"; that one's on my wishlist.

London Under by Peter Ackroyd

Ackroyd's got a way with words. His sentences are beautiful, and the pictures he draws with his prose are vivid. And there's plenty of these in London Under. Unfortunately, this musing on what's under London just isn't that interesting. His choices of topics - rivers, sewers, the Underground - had potential, but the follow-through isn't there. Mostly I wish that the topics were deeper instead of barely scratching the surface.

Watching Baseball Smarter by Zack Hample

Read for bdb's Spring Training reading list. Hample has put together a nice little book to explain what to watch for, how to enjoy a baseball game. There's discussion of strategy, a bit of history, and some great quotes from great baseball characters. Highly recommended for anybody wanting to learn a bit more about the game.

Herbert Hoover by William E. Leuchtenburg

Herbert Hoover is consistently ranked very low with the likes of James Buchanan on the list of US Presidents. After all, he began office in good economic times. And just a few months later, the country fell hard into the Great Depression. Now, that in itself didn't give him such a bad reputation, but his response to the economic times certainly did. And yet this is the man who made millions in the mining business prior to World War I and organized the feeding of millions of refugees afterward in Europe - mostly on contributions from big donors and governments like the US. So how did that successful man fail so miserably? Leuchtenburg's contribution to The American Presidents series tries to give some insight.

Hoover was the classic Horatio Alger success story. After a miserable childhood, he worked his way into the mining industry as an engineer who specialized in operations efficiency. By the time he was forty, he was partner in a major mining firm and had made millions. As luck would have it, he was in London when Germany invaded Belgium, and pretty much singlehandedly got the combatants to agree to allow food relief shipments into Belgium and organized the effort. This gave him a world-wide reputation and translated into stints in the Wilson, Harding and Coolidge cabinets in areas such as Commerce Secretary. And in 1928, he cruised easily into the Republican nomination and the Presidency.

He wasn't an easy man, by any stretch of the imagination. He was driven and any sense of humor he had was deeply buried. He was hard on everyone around him, but was right an awful lot, so people put up with it. He was the classic small government politician, with the idea that local benevolence should be used to solve pretty much every social problem. And that's what got him into trouble when the Depression hit. His response was to encourage backs and businesses to deal with the crises through their own largess - a solution that was clearly inadequate and had no hope of working. So when Roosevelt challenged him by offering up the New Deal, it was no contest - ushering in one of the most significant Presidencies in US history.

Is it fair for Hoover to get the blame for the Great Depression? Well, in some sense no. The economic problems in the US were deeply structural and there's little that anyone could have done to stop it. After all, in spite of FDR's big changes, no real economic progress was made until the start of World War II. Having said that, early action might have made a difference, and certainly Hoover didn't act.

So how's the book? Pretty good - one of the better in a series that's generally pretty good anyway.As with all of them, this volume is slim, but well organized and well written. Leuchtenburg is about as fair with the subject as he could be given the history. Recommended!