Stephen Laniel’s Unspecified Bunker

Do I want to read Nicolay and Hay’s 9,000,000-volume biography of Lincoln? I need someone to tell me whether it gives me anything that I didn’t already get from, say, David Herbert Donald’s masterful bio of Lincoln. Maybe Nicolay and Hay narrate — in gripping detail — every breakfast that Lincoln ate. (“The Toasts Of The President: Day 1”: “And then the president, seeing as how the wheat had not agreed with his fragile constitution that morning, resolved to order white from then on. Thus was the Emancipation Proclamation born. Our beloved president has always been mysterious to us, and nothing about the president more than his toasts.”)

The Hay-Adams Hotel is just down the street from where I work:

The Hay-Adams Hotel is a luxury hotel in Washington, D.C., located at 800 16th Street, NW, across Lafayette Park from the White House, and across the street from St. John’s Episcopal Church. The homes of John Hay and Henry Adams were formerly located at this site, on the corner of 16th Street and H Street NW. In 1927, Harry Wardman bought the property and razed the homes. The hotel, designed by Mihran Mesrobian, was built on the site in 1928, in an Italian Renaissance style.

How cynical and depressing is that? The same guy who flattened the homes of great Americans and then built a hotel named after the flattened homes is probably the same guy responsible for all the neighborhoods named after trees and rivers that used to be there. (“Oak Lane”, “Fox Run”, “Oaken Foxhole Lane Run Hole.”)

Speaking of Adams, I intend to read both his books about the Jefferson and Madison administrations, and his own autobiography. Because I know you guys are keeping track.

I just read in the EPIC-Alert that ChoicePoint paid $15 million to settle an FTC suit against it.

Using the most conservative estimate I could find, it looks like ChoicePoint’s profits amounted to $152 million last year — or last quarter; I can’t tell what time period the financials refer to. If that’s $152 million per quarter, then the following stands all the more strongly. My simple question is: does $15 million really hurt a company whose profits are that high?

I’d have to suspect that financial penalties have a deterrent effect on corporations, in a probably highly predictable way: in a way that many criminals are not, it seems reasonable to suppose that corporations are nearly perfectly rational actors — with very precise knowledge of how much a particular legal violation will cost them, and how shareholders will react. The appropriately configured penalties would stop companies like ChoicePoint dead in their tracks, but $15 million hardly seems like an appropriately configured penalty.

Of course, another way to set the penalties would be to look at how much consumers were actually injured by the violations. This is going to be a very hard number to determine, not least because the corporation will have every incentive to minimize knowledge of that number. By contrast, there’s at least already a large body of settled policy to establish corporations’ annual profits and losses.

P.S. (30 Jan 2006): Appositely . . . .

Congress is considering a bll that would mandate the use of a technology whose spec is not public, and which you must pay $10,000 to see. You can only see it if you promise that you won’t show it to others.

This is such terrible law that I can’t even fathom how anyone would support it. Talk to your senators and Congressmen as soon as possible, tell them to support open laws, and tell them to reject H.R. 4569. I would tell my Congressfolks but  . . .  uh  . . .  I don’t have any.

(Via the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s EFFector)

I felt guilty a little while back for being underwhelmed by Kramerbooks and Politics & Prose, the canonical bookstores around here. I’m also deeply underwhelmed by the public libraries. So I’ve found myself buying quite a few more books than I had anticipated, and moreover buying them all from the Harvard Book Store. I want to support local bookstores, but only good local bookstores. So I buy books over the web from the HBS, and I feel good about my purchases. And HBS has been wonderful in response. It didn’t even occur to me to use my Frequent Buyer Card with an online purchase, though I should have. But within a day of submitting the order, I got an email from a nice person at HBS, who had checked in her computer to see whether I have such a membership. I do, and one of my purchases qualified me for 20% off my next purchase — which I promptly sent their way. A few friendly emails with a real live person have cemented our long-distance relationship.

I’m looking forward to finding local bookstores in D.C. that I can sit and chill out in, like I could in the HBS or the Harvard Coop. Likewise, I’m looking for good local music stores. In the absence of any knowledge about such things, I’ve been buying from my favorite local Boston music store, namely Newbury Comics.

If others know the local scene in books and music, I’d love to hear some suggestions.

I took a nice long walk around D.C. today: into the 14th & T post office for a few minutes, until I realized just how much I hate that place (I will go UPS or FedEx from now on), then downtown to the library, and from there to the Jefferson Memorial. At first I went to the wrong place, though, ambling over to the Lincoln Memorial before I realized my error. It’s not a difficult walk to fix the mistake, though, and moreover it’s quite beautiful:

That there body of water that would be on the walker’s left as he walked from the green marker to the red one is the Tidal Basin, by the way — not the Potomac. Thanks to Adam Gerard for making that clear.

The Jefferson Memorial is quite beautiful, and in its own way awe inspiring — particularly little phrases like “I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man” which are inscribed on its walls. And the view out the front of the Memorial is magnificent. I spent a pleasant hour reading about Lyndon Johnson while periodically looking at the tourists and the Washington Monument. It’s a relaxing place.

On the way back home, though, I was considerably less happy with the architecture. As my friend Jason Smith has pointed out, there’s something remarkably fascist about most of the federal buildings in downtown D.C. They are much more about the naked exercise of power than about any sense of beauty. They mean to convey that the institution standing behind them is immobile and businesslike. When they display Greek columns, they manage to convey militarism more than adherence to classical form. They are monuments to bureaucracy, and to the enormity of institutions, rather than to beauty.

Walk through Paris, by contrast, and you can’t help but feel relaxed by the architecture. But then Paris is a much different kind of city from D.C. Even if the architecture may have been conceived for the playgrounds of royalty, or as baubles to toss to the proles, the result is something that people can live in. The Jardins de Luxembourg are a luxurious way to pass the day; they may have previously been a luxurious way for royalty or government to pass the day, so they may represent the same love of power that lies behind D.C.’s buildings. But they’re more human. And more care was put into their creation; they weren’t an obvious mid-World War 2 construction, as so much of D.C. appears to have been.

Speaking of World War 2, I have a hypothesis about the Jefferson Memorial. It’s oddly comical the parts of the Declaration of Independence that the Memorial decides to skip. The wall of the Memorial includes the words “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.—That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed” and then passes straight over the part about the rights of the people to “alter or abolish” their Government when it “becomes destructive of these ends”. It skips right to the end, where Jefferson writes, “And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.”

Granted, those are stunning lines, and they’ve always brought a tear to my eye. It’s hard for me to imagine an official memorial of the United States Government, run by the Park Service, including any exhortation to the violent overthrow of that government. So perhaps I shouldn’t even bother to smirk when the Memorial ellipses over those parts.

The Memorial also spends more than a little time playing up Jefferson’s religiosity. I need to reread, say, David McCullough’s bio of John Adams, but my memory says that Jefferson was actually an atheist. If memory serves, he objected to any talk of a “Creator” in the Declaration, and thought that any talk about the equality of all humans in the eyes of their Creator was so much chin music. I’m sure it’s more nuanced than this. But in any case, the Memorial makes much of Jefferson The Religious Man, and I’m inclined to believe that this was another deliberate touch by the same people who put “under God” into the Pledge of Allegiance. I’ll dig around and see if I can find anything about the Memorial’s construction.

This third volume of the Johnson bio is by far the best of the three. (Forgive me, but there will be little else I’ll want to talk about until I’m done this book — which I will be within a few days, at which point I will be deeply sad that the Caro Experience is over — for now.) The first two are fantastic, and fantastically well-written, investigations into the inner workings of Lyndon Johnson’s mind, scrupulously supported by interviews and previously unread documents. They are also — more importantly — studies of how institutions give power and take it away, and how humans exploit their peers and their employers for maximum advantage. They follow alongside a master politician at work, and they thereby help us to understand political power generally.

Master of the Senate is the payoff for the previous two volumes, just as Johnson’s Senate career is his payoff for almost 30 years of politicking. We see him in a political institution whose potential has gone unexploited. We see him understand the structure of the place better than anyone alive at the time or, possibly, alive before him. We see him take the job of majority whip when no one wanted it, because no one understood the power that was available from that position, and watch him mercilessly exercise that power on those around him. It is, I suggest, impossible for anyone — or at least any male — to read Caro’s books and root against Johnson. It’s the story of a man harnessing power, spiced up every now and again by stories about the sex that that power bought him — in particular with Alice Glass, whom many people in the books describe as the most beautiful woman they have ever seen. Which male could resist smiling and feeling envious? (An exception: I think it would be very hard for anyone, male or female, to support Johnson against Coke Stevenson while reading Means of Ascent.)

But these books aren’t just the story of one man; if that wasn’t clear in the first two books, it’s certainly clear in Master of the Senate. This is an institution that had, for nearly 150 years, been a joke: old, doddering men arguing endlessly and deciding on nothing, stalling all forward progress on civil rights as the South dominated, and occasionally calling into question the entire basis of our republican system of government; if the Executive Branch is the branch that does all the work, and a bunch of sleepy octogenarians kill all progress, then perhaps we’ve got this democracy thing all wrong. I now understand that the Senate’s label of the “World’s Greatest Deliberative Body” was probably not intended as a compliment.

The basis of this (intentional) slowness in governance, Caro notes, is its tradition of unlimited debate. The Framers intended the Senate to be a check on the passions of the grimy masses, with all the positive and negative connotations that go along with that. Caro’s pervasive fairness brings out both the benefits and the harms that this endless deliberation delivers. The tradition of filibustering — only possible in the Senate, and only then possible because unlimited debate is allowed — killed civil-rights legislation for 100 years. But unlimited debate also cooled the public’s desire for blood when Douglas MacArthur returned from Korea. And it’s here that Caro delivers his best punches.

Through careful, plodding deliberation, the Senate managed to convince the American people that even their hero MacArthur may not have understood the dangers he was getting into by provoking the Chinese. MacArthur attacked President Truman quite publicly for following a policy of “appeasement” in Korea, but prolonged questioning revealed that MacArthur — by his own admission — wasn’t thinking outside of the immediate theatre of war in which he was fighting. When asked whether intervention in China would lead to Russian advances on Europe, or a Russian invasion of Japan, MacArthur gave no satisfactory answer. Into this vacuum moved George Marshall and Dean Acheson to present the Truman Administration’s case that they were thinking of the wider world, and MacArthur simply wasn’t. They won the battle of ideas, and Caro makes the case brilliantly that this battle could only have been fought in the U.S. Senate. For all its failings, it’s filling a role that the House could never hope to fill.

Caro’s understanding of legislative power fills a vacuum, as he points out: everyone understands viscerally how executive power works (this is the power of guns, and of individual men pounding out policies), but few have studied legislative processes. Caro’s study is brilliant, and should be required reading for anyone who wants to understand American history or power politics.

I had no idea who Robert Moses was. I knew that he was associated with New York somehow — possibly as its mayor — and that Robert Caro wrote a biography of him which I’ll almost certainly read soon after I finish Master of the Senate. Digging around for information about him, I found the Wikipedia entry on him (linked above), which compares him to Baron Haussmann, who designed modern Paris. Somehow it never occurred to me to ask how long Paris has been the way it is, with all the boulevards radiating out of the Arc de Triomphe; somehow modern Paris just feels like it must have been that way since time immemorial. But indeed it wasn’t. I certainly knew that the Arc itself was an homage to Napoléon’s troops, but  . . .  I dunno, it never occurred to me to wonder about the streets themselves. Apparently they were an earlier century’s “urban renewal,” clearing out Paris’s medieval slums.

Which is fascinating as hell to me. Now I want to read all about Baron Haussmann. There are at least a few books on Amazon about him, but I’ll see what else I can dig up.

Should you be curious about the fourth and ostensibly last volume of Robert Caro’s Johnson bio, the Times interviewed him in 2002. Just in case that’s behind some kind of paywall (I’m using a friend’s Times Select account), I include the text below the fold.

(more…)

I found the New York Times’s review of Master of the Senate, and I’m kind of amazed by how silly a review it is. This is a review that says of Caro’s earlier work,

The second volume, ”Means of Ascent,” was so harsh on Johnson that Caro seemed an anti-biographer. He even made a saint of Coke Stevenson, the far from saintly Texas politician who was Johnson’s opponent in his 1948 Senate race.

Caro takes a good bit of time at the end of Means of Ascent to point out that he thought badly of Coke Stevenson too — before he bothered to research him. As Caro studied him more, he realized that Johnson and his henchmen had even managed to smear the history books.

Means of Ascent is about the seven years between Johnson’s first, failed run for the U.S. Senate, and his successful theft of the election in 1948 that finally elevated him to the Senate. Caro documents in excruciating — but still unfairly captivating — detail how Johnson stole it, and how everything in his life up to that point was about to be destroyed, and his lifelong ambition for the U.S. presidency ended, if he didn’t steal it. So he stole it. It’s not a pretty story, but neither is it unnecessarily bitter. Caro tells the story of the theft with all the fairness of a good scholar.

The first two volumes of this biography detail Johnson’s ambition, his secrecy, and the obvious plans he was always hatching to run for the presidency. I’m sure that it was the publisher’s decision to separate Means of Ascent from The Path To Power, not Caro’s; there’s no reason in the content of the books why they should be cut there.

So then the Times reviewer drops bits like this as though they were revelations:

How can his empathy with blacks be squared with his racist talk? Caro’s compelling insight is that two forces competed in Johnson: compassion and ambition. And ”whenever those two forces collided, it was the ambition that won.” He needed support and money from rich Texans who were vicious racists, so he talked to them in their terms, and they were convinced to the end that he shared their views.

Anyone who had read both of the first two volumes would have seen very little compassion. The reader sees moments where Johnson helps the people from the dirt-poor country in which he grew up (a country that Caro spends ample time documenting), but in large part he is constantly grasping his way upward, and the power itself appears to be the goal. Johnson rarely speaks on the floor of the House, rarely introduces a bill, almost never enters a bill of national scope, and almost never helps his people. These are all documentable facts. The Times reviewer seems to think that pointing out these facts — as Caro did in Means of Ascent — is anti-biographical, when in fact it’s just painting the truth.

If, by the time we enter Master of the Senate, Johnson has gained a measure of compassion, those who’ve read the first two volumes are not surprised: he’s nearly reached his goal, and he may have time to use that power to do some good. In Means of Ascent, Johnson is virtually at the nadir of his power, so he’s spending most of his time trying to get more.

As an aside, Caro’s story of how Johnson financed his long-shot 1948 Senate campaign is fascinating. He built his Congressional career out of money from the construction firm of Brown and Root, to whom he gave massive construction projects (dams, military bases) in Texas by exercising his connections to Sam Rayburn and FDR. He forever altered Texas politics with his 1941 Senate campaign, which was extravagant and was funded almost entirely by Brown and Root — and specifically, by illegal contributions from them. Johnson and Brown only avoided IRS sanctions because Johnson had some sway with Roosevelt. So by the time the 1948 election came around, Brown had no choice but to give Johnson whatever he needed: if Coke Stevenson were elected, Brown’s goose would be cooked. Not only would the flood of contracts stop, but the IRS would probably put someone in jail. So they gave him whatever he wanted, and he won.

Anyone who thinks he or she has the patience for 2,000 pages of tight storytelling, and who wants to understand why 20th-century American politics worked the way it did, should read all three of Caro’s books. They won’t let you down.

P.S. (27 Jan 2006): Reading more of Master of the Senate, I come to Caro’s description of Johnson’s hat tip to the Texas oil industry, namely his smear of Truman’s candidate for a federal energy-regulatory position. It is at least the equal of any of the damning material in Means of Ascent. I don’t understand why the Times would have such an easy time with this new book but not the older one.

All right, so my friend Jon Sung rocks, is what he does. I just got a CD in the mail from him containing large quantities of awesome, much of which helps me in my quest of listening. Plus there is Decemberists stuff, of which I was heretofore basically ignorant. Jon, by contrast, played kickball with the band, ferchristssake.

They are  . . .  tight, epic, pirate music? I don’t know. I’ll let you know. Thanks to Jon, though. He rocks very hard.

P.S.: Right, it was “On The Bus Mall” that I loved so much before. What a great song.

P.P.S.: “The Mariner’s Revenge Song” is, uh, really friggin’ good.

Just because I find myself occasionally consulting lists of which books I read when, I include below the books I’ve read in the past few years. I’ve kept detailed records since 2004; before that, I’ve had to reconstruct records from emails sent and blog posts written.

2008

Rushdie, Salman

Enchantress of Florence, The (finished 15 June)

Posner, Richard A.

How Judges Think (finished 11 June)

Galbraith, John Kenneth

Money: Whence It Came, Where It Went (finished 3 June)

Krugman, Paul

Return of Depression Economics, The (finished 25 May — counts as 1/3 of a book for the purposes of this accounting)

Roth, Philip

Dying Animal, The (finished 24 May — counts as 1/4 of a book for the purposes of this accounting)

Michaels, David

Doubt is Their Product: How Industry’s Assault on Science Threatens Your Health (finished 23 May)

Schlesinger, Arthur M. Jr.

Crisis of the Old Order, The: 1919-1933, The Age of Roosevelt, Volume I (finished 12 May)

Pamuk, Orhan

Istanbul: Memories and the City (finished 6 May)

Shirky, Clay

Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations (finished 29 April)

Bartels, Larry M.

Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age (finished 26 April)

Thaler, Richard H. and Sunstein, Cass R.

Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness (finished 21 April)

Armendáriz, Beatriz and Morduch, Jonathan

Economics of Microfinance, The (finished 18 April)

Medawar, Peter

Pluto’s Republic: Incorporating The Art of the Soluble and Induction and Intuition in Scientific Thought (finished 14 April)

Bellow, Saul

Ravelstein (finished 4 April)

Bessen, James and Meurer, Michael J.

Patent Failure: How Judges, Bureaucrats, and Lawyers Put Innovators at Risk (finished 30 March)

Farmer, Paul

Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights, and the New War on the Poor (finished 22 March)

Bellow, Saul

Henderson the Rain King (finished 16 March)

Shapiro, Carl and Varian, Hal R.

Information Rules: A Strategic Guide to the Network Economy (finished 5 March)

Mantegna, Rosario N. and Stanley, H. Eugene

Introduction to Econophysics, An (finished 2 March — counts as 1/3 of a book for the purposes of this accounting)

Miller, Gary J.

Managerial Dilemmas: The Political Economy of Hierarchy (finished 29 February)

García Márquez, Gabriel

One Hundred Years of Solitude (translated by Gregory Rabassa) (finished 20 February)

Bowles, Samuel and Gintis, Herbert

Recasting Egalitarianism: New Rules For Markets, States And Communities (finished 15 February)

Mankell, Henning

Sidetracked (finished 30 January)

Dosal, Paul Jaime

Doing Business with the Dictators: A Political History of United Fruit in Guatemala, 1899-1944 (finished 27 January)

Krugman, Paul

Conscience of a Liberal, The (finished 25 January)

McKibben, Bill

Age of Missing Information, The (finished 16 January)

Nestle, Marion

What To Eat (finished 13 January)

Nestle, Marion

Food Politics: How The Food Industry Influences Nutrition And Health (finished 9 January)

2007

Hacker, Jacob

The great risk shift: the assault on American jobs, families, health care, and retirement and how you can fight back. (finished 27 December)

Wolff, Robert Paul

In Defense of Anarchism (only 80-some pages, so it counts as 1/4 of a book; finished 23 December)

Scott, James C.

Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (finished 22 December)

Heilbroner, Robert

Worldly Philosophers, The (finished 16 December)

Russell, Bertrand

Proposed Roads To Freedom: Socialism, Anarchism and Syndicalism (finished 9 December)

Keynes, John Maynard

Economic Consequences of the Peace, The (finished 7 December)

McDonough, William and Braungart, Michael

Cradle to Cradle: Remaking The Way We Make Things (finished 3 December)

Skidelsky, Robert

John Maynard Keynes Volume 2: The Economist As Saviour 1920-1937 (finished 2 December)

Schelling, Thomas C.

Micromotives and Macrobehavior (finished 17 November)

Eggertsson, Thráinn

Economic Behavior and Institutions (finished 8 November)

Marsh, Charles

Wayward Christian Soldiers: Freeing the Gospel from Political Captivity (finished 30 October)

Krugman, Paul

Development, Geography, and Economic Theory (finished 26 October)

Krugman, Paul

Self-Organizing Economy, The (finished 24 October)

Skidelsky, Robert

John Maynard Keynes: A Biography. Hopes Betrayed, 1883-1920 (finished 20 October)

Pollan, Michael

Omnivore’s Dilemma, The (finished 5 October)

Slee, Tom

No One Makes You Shop At Wal-Mart: The Surprising Deceptions of Individual Choice (finished 29 September)

Roth, Philip

Exit Ghost (finished 22 September)

Ishiguro, Kazuo

Remains of the Day, The (finished 20 September)

Gellner, Ernest

Legitimation of Belief (finished 15 September)

Homer

Odyssey, The (tr. Robert Fagles) (finished 7 September)

Niffenegger, Audrey

Time Traveler’s Wife, The (finished 29 August)

Maynard Smith, John and Szathmáry, Eörs

Origins of Life, The: From the Birth of Life to the Origin of Language (finished 26 August)

Toulmin, Stephen Edelston

Human Understanding: The Collective Use and Evolution of Concepts (finished 23 August)

Fromkin, David

Peace To End All Peace, A: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East (finished 9 August)

Caro, Robert A.

Power Broker, The: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (finished 2 August)

Packer, George

Central Square (finished 19 July)

Packer, George

The Assassins’ Gate: America In Iraq (finished 15 July)

Barber, Paul

Vampires, Burial, and Death: Folklore and Reality (finished 7 July)

Jacobs, Jane

Cities and the Wealth of Nations (finished 2 July)

Cohn, Jonathan

Sick: The Untold Story of Amerca’s Health Care Crisis — and the People Who Pay the Price (finished 1 July)

Forrest, Barbara and Gross, Paul R.

Creationism’s Trojan Horse: The Wedge of Intelligent Design (finished 28 June)

Powers, Bob

Happy Cruelty Day!: Daily Celebrations of Quiet Desperation (finished 23 June)

Nabokov, Vladimir

Invitation to a Beheading (finished 20 June)

Weschler, Lawrence

Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet Of Wonder: Pronged Ants, Horned Humans, Mice on Toast, and Other Marvels of Jurassic Technology (finished 15 June)

Roth, Henry

Call It Sleep (finished 13 June)

Egan, Greg

Permutation City (finished 3 June)

Maynard Smith, John

Evolution and the Theory of Games (finished 2 June)

Niebuhr, H. Richard

Social Sources of Denominationalism, The (finished 26 May)

Bowles, Samuel

Microeconomics: Behavior, Institutions, and Evolution (finished 22 May)

Weiner, Jonathan

Beak of the Finch, The: A Story of Evolution in Our Time (finished 15 May)

Brooks, Max

World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War (finished 5 May)

Frank, Robert H.

Passions Within Reason: The Strategic Role of the Emotions (finished 2 May)

Roemer, John

Future for Socialism, A (finished 14 Apr)

Gawande, Atul

Complications: A Surgeon’s Notes on an Imperfect Science (finished 8 Apr)

Lindblom, Charles E.

The Market System: What It Is, How It Works, and What To Make of It (finished 8 Apr)

Gawande, Atul

Better: A Surgeon’s Notes On Performance (finished 7 Apr)

Kleiman, Mark A.R.

Against Excess: Drug Policy For Results (finished 6 Apr)

Thaler, Richard H.

The Winner’s Curse: Paradoxes and Anomalies of Economic Life (finished 18 March)

Petzinger, Thomas Jr.

Hard Landing: The Epic Contest for Power and Profits That Plunged the Airlines into Chaos (finished 11 March)

Krugman, Paul

Pop Internationalism (finished 3 March)

Hobsbawm, Eric

Age of Capital, The, 1848-1875 (finished 17 February)

Hobsbawm, Eric

Age of Revolution, The, 1789-1848 (finished 4 February)

Iraq Study Group

The Iraq Study Group Report: The Way Forward — a New Approach (finished 10 January)

Greene, Graham

Our Man In Havana (finished 5 January)

Davies, Brian

The Thought of Thomas Aquinas (finished 3 January)

2006

Ruskin, John

Unto This Last And Other Writings (finished 22 December)

Brown, Peter.

Augustine of Hippo: A Biography (finished 7 December)

Chesterton, G.K.

“Saint Thomas Aquinas:[book: The Dumb Ox] (finished 22 November)

Augustine of Hippo

Confessions (finished 19 November)

Frend, W.H.C.

Rise of Christianity, The (finished 7 November)

Jacobs, Jane

Death and Life of Great American Cities, The (finished 18 October)

Shakespeare, William

Coriolanus (finished 9 October)

Shakespeare, William

Julius Caesar (finished 8 October)

Kissinger, Henry Alfred

World Restored, A: Metternich, Castlereagh and the Problems of Peace, 1812-22 (finished 8 October)

Kaufmann, Walter Arnold

From Shakespeare to Existentialism (finished 5 October)

Eisenstein, Elizabeth L.

Printing Press as an Agent of Change, The (finished 25 September)

Jefferson, Thomas

Notes on the State of Virginia (finished 9 September)

Burckhardt, Jacob

Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, The (finished 4 September)

Pocock, John Greville Agard

Machiavellian Moment, The: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (finished 26 August)

Wood, Gordon S.

Creation of the American Republic, The: 1776-1787 (finished 3 August)

Hofstadter, Richard

Age of Reform, The (finished 24 July)

Peterson, Merrill D.

Jefferson Image in the American Mind, The (finished 18 July)

Kingsolver, Barbara

Poisonwood Bible, The (finished 9 July)

Boyle, T. Coraghessan

World’s End (finished 29 June)

Foner, Eric

Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877 (finished 25 June)

Roth, Philip

Plot Against America, The (finished 13 June)

Potter, David M.

Impending Crisis, The: 1848-1861 (finished 3 June)

Hofstadter, Richard

Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (finished 24 May)

Calvin, William H. and Ojemann, George A.

Conversations with Neil’s Brain: The Neural Nature of Thought and Language (finished 14 May)

Donald, David Herbert (ed.)

Why The North Won The Civil War (finished 13 May)

Haddawy, Husain (Translator); Mahdi, Muhsin (Editor)

Arabian Nights, The (finished 8 May)

Benkler, Yochai

Wealth of Networks, The: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom (finished 1 May)

Carter, Dan T.

Politics of Rage, The: George Wallace, The Origins of the New Conservatism, and the Transformation of American Politics (finished 19 Apr)

James, William

Will To Believe, The; Human Immortality; and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy (finished 5 Apr)

Dennett, Daniel C.

Elbow Room: The Varieties of Free Will Worth Wanting (finished 9 Mar)

Mazower, Mark

Dark Continent: Europe’s Twentieth Century (finished 20 Feb)

Rushdie, Salman

Shalimar the Clown (finished 13 Feb)

Caro, Robert

Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson, Volume 3 (finished 5 Feb)

Caro, Robert

Means of Ascent: The Years of Lyndon Johnson, Volume 2 (finished 22 Jan)

Caro, Robert

Path To Power, The: The Years of Lyndon Johnson, Volume 1 (finished 16 Jan)

2005

Didion, Joan

Year of Magical Thinking, The (finished 28 Dec)

Packer, George

Blood of the Liberals (finished 26 Dec)

Didion, Joan

Political Fictions (finished 4 Dec)

Didion, Joan

After Henry (finished 3 Dec)

Didion, Joan

White Album, The (finished 27 Nov)

Didion, Joan

Slouching Towards Bethlehem (finished 24 Nov)

Woodward, Bob and Bernstein, Carl

Final Days, The (finished 20 Nov)

Joyce, James

Ulysses (finished 13 Nov)

Frey, James

Million Little Pieces, A (finished 7 Nov)

Shakespeare, William

Macbeth (finished 5 Nov)

Bellow, Saul

More Die Of Heartbreak (finished 5 Nov)

Auster, Paul

Book of Illusions, The (finished 3 Oct)

Auster, Paul

Oracle Night (finished 2 Oct)

Nabokov, Vladimir

Pnin (finished 23 Sept)

Nabokov, Vladimir

Defense, The (finished 20 Sept)

Vowell, Sarah

Asssassination Vacation (finished 2 Sept)

Ridley, Matt

Red Queen, The: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature (finished 1 Sept)

Nabokov, Vladimir

Pale Fire (finished 28 August)

Dennett, Daniel C.

Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life (finished 25 August)

Barzun, Jacques

Science: The Glorious Entertainment (finished 17 Aug)

Pullman, Philip

Amber Spyglass, The (finished 7 Aug)

Pullman, Philip

Subtle Knife, The (finished 2 Aug)

Dawkins, Richard

Blind Watchmaker, The: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design (finished 31 July)

Deffeyes, Kenneth S.

Beyond Oil: The View From Hubbert’s Peak (finished 29 July)

Gandhi, Mohandas K.

An Autobiography: The Story Of My Experiments With Truth (finished 24 July)

Mitchell, David

Cloud Atlas (finished 17 July)

Potter, Stephen

Complete Upmanship, The; Including Gamesmanship, Lifemanship, One-Upmanship, and Supermanship (finished 8 July)

Laudan, Larry

Beyond Positivism and Relativism: Theory, Method, and Evidence (finished 6 July)

Kitcher, Philip

Advancement of Science, The: Science without Legend, Objectivity without Illusions (finished 25 June)

Butterfield, Herbert

Origins of Modern Science, The (finished 26 May)

Haldane, J.B.S.

On Being The Right Size and other Essays (finished 17 May)

Haldane, J.B.S.

Causes of Evolution, The (finished 12 May)

Poincaré, Henri

Science and Hypothesis (finished 10 May)

Kuhn, Thomas S.

Copernican Revolution, The: Planetary Astronomy in the Development of Western Thought (finished 6 May)

McLean, Bethany and Elkind, Peter

Smartest Guys In The Room, The: The Amazing Rise and Scandalous Fall of Enron (finished 6 Apr)

Hafner, Katie and Lyon, Matthew

Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins Of The Internet (finished 31 Mar)

Kidder, Tracy

Soul of a New Machine, The (finished 26 Mar)

Lessig, Lawrence

Free Culture (finished 20 Mar)

Tanenbaum, Andrew

Computer Networks (finished 15 Mar)

Pullman, Philip

Golden Compass, The (finished 4 Mar)

Clarke, Susanna

Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell (finished 15 Jan)

2004

Lewis, Anthony

Gideon’s Trumpet (finished 29 Dec)

Krugman, Paul

Great Unraveling, The: Losing Our Way In The New Century (finished 26 Dec)

Nafisi, Azar

Reading Lolita in Tehran (finished 22 Dec)

Hollinghurst, Alan

The Line Of Beauty (finished 11 Dec)

Wilczek, Frank and Devine, Betsy

Longing for the Harmonies: Themes and Variations from Modern Physics (finished 8 Dec)

von Hayek, Friedrich August

Road to Serfdom, The (finished 30 Nov)

Weinberg, Steven

First Three Minutes, The: A Modern View Of The Origin Of The Universe (finished 13 Nov)

Nove, Alec

Economics of Feasible Socialism Revisited, The (finished 12 Nov)

Sigmund, Karl

Games of Life: Explorations in Ecology, Evolution, and Behaviour (finished 29 Oct)

Eggers, Dave

You Shall Know Our Velocity! (finished 13 Oct)

Kidder, Tracy

Mountains Beyond Mountains: Healing the World: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer (finished 8 Oct)

Huxley, Aldous

Brave New World (finished 21 Sep)

Murdoch, Iris

Severed Head, A (finished 19 Sep)

Remy, Jerry

Watching Baseball (finished 17 Sep)

Becker, Jasper

Hungry Ghosts: Mao’s Secret Famine (finished 11 Sep)

Kidd, Chip

Cheese Monkeys, The: A Novel In Two Semesters (finished 6 Sep)

Saari, Donald G.

Chaotic Elections! A Mathematician Looks At Voting (finished 4 Sep)

Chernow, Ron

Alexander Hamilton (finished 31 Aug)

Ghosh, Amitav

Glass Palace, The (finished 5 Aug)

Landes, William M. and Posner, Richard A.

Economic Structure of Intellectual Property Law, The (finished 28 July)

Woodward, Bob and Armstrong, Scott

Brethren, The: Inside the Supreme Court (finished 10 July)

Allende, Isabel

House of the Spirits, The (finished 2 July)

Patchett, Ann

Bel Canto (finished 20 June)

Pinker, Steven

How The Mind Works (finished 16 June)

Gigerenzer, Gerd; Todd, Peter M.; and the ABC Research Group

Simple Heuristics That Make Us Smart (finished 8 June)

Simon, Herbert A.

Administrative Behavior (finished 26 May)

Rhodes, Richard

Making Of The Atomic Bomb, The (finished 19 May)

Dyer, Geoff

But Beautiful: A Book About Jazz (finished 8 May)

von Baeyer, Hans Christian

Maxwell’s Demon: Why Warmth Disperses and Time Passes (finished 7 May)

Coase, Ronald H.

The Firm, the Market, and the Law (finished 4 May)

Lewis, Michael

Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game (finished 1 May)

Adair, Robert K.

The Physics of Baseball (finished 30 Apr)

Thorn, John and Palmer, Pete

The Hidden Game Of Baseball (finished 28 Apr)

Bakalar, Nick

Baseball Fan’s Companion, The (finished 21 Apr)

Shakespeare, William

Othello (finished 5 Apr)

Wilson, Edmund

To the Finland Station: A Study in the Writing and Acting of History (finished 3 Apr)

Rushdie, Salman

Satanic Verses, The (finished 25 Mar)

Shakespeare, William

Hamlet (finished 19 Mar)

Lahiri, Jhumpa

The Namesake (finished 17 Mar)

Applbaum, Arthur

Ethics for Adversaries: the Morality of Roles in Public and Professional Life (finished 14 Mar)

Bellow, Saul

Mr. Sammler’s Planet (finished 7 Mar)

Martel, Yann

Life of Pi (finished 4 Mar)

Roth, Philip

The Human Stain (finished 28 Feb)

Achebe, Chinua

Things Fall Apart (finished 23 Feb)

Gourevitch, Philip

We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families: Stories from Rwanda (finished 19 Feb)

Philip Roth

I Married A Communist (finished 8 Feb)

Jonathan Franzen

How To Be Alone: Essays (finished 4 Feb)

Herbert Simon

The Sciences of the Artificial (finished 1 Feb)

Salman Rushdie

The Moor’s Last Sigh (finished 30 Jan)

Erich Maria Remarque

All Quiet On The Western Front (finished 19 Jan)

Homer

Iliad (finished 17 Jan)

Cory Doctorow

Down And Out In The Magic Kingdom (finished c. 11 Jan)

2003 (very incomplete records)

Steingarten, Jeffrey.

It Must’ve Been Something I Ate (finished 29 Dec)

Ellickson, Robert C.

Order Without Law: How Neighbors Settle Disputes (finished 25 Dec)

Posner, Richard.

Frontiers of Legal Theory (finished 15 Dec)

Posner, Richard.

Economics of Justice, The (finished 24 Nov)

Bellow, Saul.

Adventures of Augie March, The (finished c. 10 Nov)

Sacks, Oliver.

Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, The (finished c. 13 May)

de Botton, Alain.

On Love (finished c. 3 May)

Murakami, Haruki.

Wind-Up Bird Chronicles, The (finished c. 11 March)

Bailyn, Bernard.

Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, The (finished c. 1 March)

Sinclair, Upton.

Jungle, The (finished c. 11 Feb)

Amis, Martin.

Information, The (finished c. 31 Jan)

Perelman, S.

J. Most of the Most of S.J. Perelman (finished c. 15 Jan)

Tolstoy, Leo.

Anna Karenina (finished c. 9 Jan)

2002 (even less complete)

Morrow, James

Towing Jehovah (finished 5 Dec)

Russell, Mary Doria

Sparrow, The (finished 1 Dec)

Alighieri, Dante

“Inferno” (translated by Robert Pinsky) (finished 11 Nov)

Plato

Republic, The (finished 10 Oct)

Bloom, Allan

Closing of the American Mind, The (finished 10 Sept)

Monaco, James

How To Read A Film (finished 3 Sept)

Frank, Thomas

Commodify Your Dissent: Salvos from The Baffler (finished 16 July)

Atwan, Robert and Oates, Joyce Carol (eds.)

Best American Essays of the Century, The (finished 4 June)

García Márquez, Gabriel

Love in the Time of Cholera (finished 23 May)

Foster Wallace, David

Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments, A (finished 23 May)

Golden, Arthur

Memoirs of a Geisha (finished 10 May)

Simon, James F.

What Kind of Nation: Thomas Jefferson, John Marshall, and the Epic Struggle to Create a United States (finished 8 April)

Zinn, Howard

People’s History of the United States (finished 31 March)

Roy, Arundhati

God of Small Things, The (finished 22 March)

McCullough, David

Truman (finished 13 March)

Morris, Edmund

Theodore Rex (finished 7 Feb)

Roth, Philip

American Pastoral (finished 29 Jan)

Lessig, Lawrence

Future of Ideas, The: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World (finished 23 Jan)

DeLillo, Don

White Noise (finished 23 Jan)

Donald, David Herbert

Lincoln (finished 23 Jan)

McCullough, David

John Adams (finished 13 Jan)

2001 (still less complete)

Wallace, David Foster

Infinite Jest (finished 12 Dec)

Rushdie, Salman

Midnight’s Children (finished 10 Sept)

Farrell, John Aloysius

Tip O’Neill and the Democratic Century (finished 21 Aug)

Sunstein, Cass

Republic.com (finished 15 July)

I’m speeding through Means of Ascent just as quickly as I possibly can, pulled along by how effortlessly gripping a storyteller Robert Caro is. Just a few observations, then back to the book:

• Down to the level of very detailed specifics, Lyndon Johnson’s campaign against Coke Stevenson for one of the Texas Senate seats mimics George Bush’s smear campaign against John Kerry in the 2004 election: find your opponent’s biggest strength, then undermine it in ways that you know your opponent won’t bother to rebut. The Swift Boat smear was just an updated version of Johnson’s charge that Stevenson was an old man (60 years old) who cared only about the wealthy. Everyone in the state knew this was false, and Stevenson had built a reputation as the most respected man in Texas. He had run — against his will — for half a dozen positions in the Texas state legislature and Governor’s mansion over the years, and had consistently refused to be political. He never made a campaign promise, instead telling the people of Texas that they should pay attention to what he had done. Johnson knew that Stevenson would never respond to scurrilous personal attacks, and he was right.

• The New York Times’s review of Master of the Senate, as I recall, said that it was much improved over Means of Ascent, which the Times (or that reviewer, anyway) thought was vicious and at some level tasteless. It’s certainly not possible to assert that MoA is tasteless if you don’t assert the same thing about the first volume, The Path To Power. They are both just telling the story of Lyndon Johnson; both emphasize the man’s relentless drive to be president, with all the hard work, passion, greed and dirty politics that that involved. Means of Ascent and The Path To Power really could be one book.

• Every now and again one of the people whom Caro interviews in Means of Ascent will mention The Path To Power — because apparently there was enough of a gap between the publication of the two books for his subjects to read the first one. This is interesting at a few levels. First, it’s weird to see the author inject his own works (often needlessly) into other works, though it’s not really a big deal. But secondly, I wonder whether Caro’s extensive interviews with Johnson’s intimates in his first book led other people to come out of the woodwork for his second book.

• It wouldn’t surprise me at all if, in the fourth volume of Caro’s work, he speculates that Lyndon Johnson had John F. Kennedy killed. I’d say the probability of this happening is .2 or so, which is still well above the normal statistical thresholds for surprise. After 2,000 pages of biography preceding the fourth volume (which hasn’t been published yet), two Book Critics Circle Awards and a Pulitzer, such an assertion would seem much more plausible than coming from some random conspiracy theorist. To this reader, anyway, it seems as though nothing would stand in the way of Johnson’s desire to be president.

Lots more to say. Caro’s basic premise is that twentieth-century politics is impossible to understand without understanding Lyndon Johnson, in all the good and bad senses of that description. The politics of race; the politics of Vietnam (hence Watergate); campaigns based around glitter and flash and personality rather than around issues; smearing other candidates; the rise of the South (Johnson being the first Southern president)  . . .  it was all there in Johnson. I can’t imagine anyone else telling the story as well as Caro does.

Now back to the book.

I was absolutely in love with Ann Patchett’s novel Bel Canto; it’s probably the best novel that I’ve read in the last five years (though my experience with other people is that they either love it like I did, or they think, “Eh”).

Consequently, and maybe counter-intuitively, I’ve been extremely hesitant to read any other books by her. She has quite a few, including The Magician’s Assistant; that one, in particular, has always caught my eye in bookstores. But I worry that nothing Patchett puts out could ever match the wonder of Bel Canto, so I’ve avoided reading anything else by her. As far as I know, none of my friends who loved Bel Canto have gone on to read other books by Patchett.

So: if anyone out there has read and loved anything else by Patchett, do let me know. I’d like to read more of her stuff, but I don’t want to spoil Bel Canto retrospectively.

No one ever writes about how Bertrand Russell reacted when Gödel published his proof that any formal system which is strong enough to prove its own consistency is incomplete. I suspect that by that point in Russell’s career he’d moved away from the philosophy of mathematics and more into his political philosophy  . . .  then again, Gödel published his paper in 1931. Does anyone know Russell’s reaction?

Try explaining this to your friendly Comcast drone: you get a perfectly fine IP address from Comcast’s head-ends (68.49.x.y). Reverse DNS on that IP address works fine (you get pcp[lotsa numbers]pcs.flrdav01.dc.comcast.net). But then you try to do a DNS lookup on that hostname, and you get

(22:15) slaniel@TheloniousMonk:~$ host pcp[lotsa numbers]pcs.flrdav01.dc.comcast.net Host pcp[lotsa numbers]pcs.flrdav01.dc.comcast.net not found: 2(SERVFAIL) 

You suspect that this double-reverse-DNS lookup (which may also involve a triple Salchow; you’re not sure) is causing connection problems for particular websites.

So. Now go ahead and try to explain this to someone who is clearly unqualified for the job. Try to explain that someone at Comcast didn’t set up the appropriate DNS record. You will not get far.

The tech guy tonight was nice enough, and he seemed aware that there are things in the world called DNS servers; he even knew that those DNS servers were run out of Philadelphia. But he was positively amused at the thought of my trying to get in touch with the people who run them.

I’ve dealt with, say, colos, all of which seem to put you within a phone call or two of someone whose hand is actually on the router. Anyone know how to get in touch with the right people at Comcast?

P.S. (21 Jan 2006): I just sent them the following email:

My current IP address is This IP reverse-resolves to In turn, that hostname doesn’t resolve to an IP address: if you use ‘dig #8217;, you’ll see that there’s no IP listed in the DNS entry for that hostname.

This lack of a DNS entry is causing problems when I connect to various websites, because they try to do a reverse lookup on the IP, and then a forward-lookup on the hostname to validate that I’m who I say I am. Since my IP doesn’t match the double-reverse IP, I can’t connect.

I need Comcast to fix the DNS entry. I’ve had bad luck getting customer service to understand what I mean, so I need to speak with someone who handles DNS for Comcast. Could you please give me the phone number for such a person? Thank you.

Oh . . . kay. So Theo Epstein’s somehow back with the Sox. After some sort of behind-the-scenes scuffle that no one has really explained. Weird. Maybe it’s that the organization seems totally in disarray, and they offered Theo John Henry’s spleen if he’d come back.

Amazing: black really is white, up really is down, Oceania really has always been at war with Eurasia, and somehow Scott McClellan really did forget about the U.S. exporting terror suspects to other countries to be tortured.

I don’t really have the time to defend the point right now, but it just occurred to me: Richard Posner’s defense of the Bush administration’s violations of the law are completely of a piece with the man’s instrumentalism. By instrumentalism, I mean his belief that fundamental human rights are merely tools for achieving something else — in Posner’s case, maximizing overall social wealth. Here “social wealth”, in order to hack together a solution to utilitarianism’s well-known failings, is basically defined to be maximized when people are engaged in uncoerced, voluntary transactions.

It’s interesting to see Posner’s principles — nearly contentless as they are — painted with such self-parody. I’ve complained for a while that Posner smacks hard against fundamental human rights. No matter how much cash someone gives you, the conscience recoils at the thought of their being able to deny your human rights. The government shouldn’t be allowed to, say, pay the American public $1,000 apiece to repeal the right against self-incrimination. Yes, citizens have entered into this transaction willingly (by stipulation), but these are basic human rights. We’ve fought for them for at least 800 years, and we should think long and hard before we throw them away. Posner would have no problem with our committing moral suicide, so long as we signed a contract first.

And now Posner insists that the government has the right to break the law in the service of the greater good. It all fits very well together, doesn’t it?

The White House has been falsely reporting that Clinton allowed warrantless physical searches, and ThinkProgress is on the case to catch the smear.  . . .  As it turns out, Clinton didn’t allow such things, but the law was eventually changed to allow them. So Clinton didn’t break the law when the government investigated CIA double agent Aldrich Ames.

The rule of law is something we all should stand by, but really: think about how much of a loser this case could turn out to be if all we have to show for it is the above. We have the following two realities:

1. We’re talking about searching a convicted spy for an enemy power.
2. “Clearly these searches weren’t so bad,” a lot of people will say, “because the law came around soon thereafter.”

Now, I don’t agree, as I hope is obvious. However, I’m making a political point here, rather than a moral one. Politically, I think the FISA violations are a non-starter unless

1. We can convince a lot of people that their own well-being is threatened by the government’s lawlessness; or
2. Someone ends up in jail. Americans may now believe that lawbreaking by a government official isn’t such a bad thing when they’re investigating terrorists, but someone landing behind bars changes the story considerably. And not someone penny ante like “Scooter” Libby. The VP has to resign or go to jail before this will get any traction.

I wrapped up Robert Caro’s The Path To Power last night — the first volume in his frankly obsessive bio of Lyndon Johnson, which is now up to the third volume and which hasn’t, I believe, reached the presidency (the third volume is called Master of the Senate; it follows Means of Ascent, about Johnson’s theft of the 1948 Senate election).

Path To Power is extraordinary. It is one of only two books I’ve read — the other being The Making of the Atomic Bomb — which manages to pack incredible detail while still telling a brisk story. And as far as I can tell, Caro is telling a story that has never been told before, because of Johnson’s obsession with secrecy; at times during college, Johnson wrote letters to friends and instructed them to burn them immediately. This is one of the supporting bits of information — one of many — to Caro’s thesis that Johnson knew from very early on what he wanted (namely the presidency), mapped out how he would get there, and pursued the path mercilessly.

There are so many great stories in this book that I don’t know where to begin. My favorite is probably Johnson’s betrayal of House Majority Leader (and later Speaker of the House) Sam Rayburn, who had been Johnson’s mentor and who loved Johnson like a son. After setting up the backstory and all the political intriguing over perhaps 200 pages, Caro delivers the payoff: Johnson maneuvers Rayburn into signing a letter to FDR that strongly suggests that Rayburn is a member of the Anti-Roosevelt crowd. Because Johnson knew how much FDR prized loyalty, he knew that this would shut Rayburn out of all dealings with the president. He had gone through the rest of the Texas delegation in his head, and realized that with Rayburn out, Johnson would be FDR’s Texas man in the House; when Roosevelt wanted to know what Texas was doing behind closed doors, he would have to come to Johnson. And he did. As a result, Johnson got power well beyond his mediocre seniority. Caro spends most of the rest of the book tracking what he did with this power — brilliantly parlaying it into financial backing from wealthy Texas investors, getting them to fund his failed 1941 Senate campaign, and so on.

A brief note on that Senate campaign: the whole process was corrupt beyond recognition. Johnson lost the campaign because he didn’t buy as many votes as the winner. But not even the winner bought those votes; for reasons that Caro maps out, the winner in the 1941 Senate race attained office not because he won, but because the alcohol lobby didn’t want him to keep his current position as governor of Texas. So they bought out enough votes to send him to the Senate, where he wouldn’t do any damage to Texas’s own business interests.

There’s so much to say about this book and not nearly enough time to say it. I’ve got the next volume in the series — Means of Ascent, which I understand is a vicious attack on Johnson. If the first volume is any indication, Johnson deserves every attack that could possibly be slung at him.