Glock: The Rise of America’s Gun

I heard about this book from a good friend who heard about it from NPR. It is the story of how a handgun that was developed in Austria by a curtain rod manufacturer came to dominate the U.S. market and, more salaciously, of the various scandals that have rocked the company in the past three decades. Hit men, alcoholism, domestic violence, tax evasion, and embezzlement have never been more intriguing.

Paul Barrett did a phenomenal amount of research for this book, speaking with any number of characters – upstanding and shady, alike – on both sides of the pond to put together a comprehensive and relatively unbiased look at how Glock has grown and prospered in the 25 years since the guns first entered the American market. (Unbiased except for the tax evasion bit – it’s clear he thinks evading Uncle Sam is bad, and also that he is pretty incredulous about some of the poor management practices at the company. In fact, at times this reads as a case study, but a very, very good one.) Although it seems clear at times that he does not agree with the NRA, he does nevertheless articulate their arguments in accessible language so that even a gun-control advocate such as myself can say, “well, I never thought of it that way,” even if thinking of it that way still doesn’t bring me around to their side.

Overall, Glock, read like a book-length journalism feature story, which is high praise from a WSJ or Washington Post geek like me. I am very glad this book was recommended to me, as it’s unlikely I would have found it on my own and, at the end of the day, it really checked all of the boxes for me: thoroughly researched, well-written, engaging, and on a topic which I didn’t know much about and would otherwise be completely ignorant. Also, the scandals are about as much fun as you can have in high finance and international business…

To Conquer the Air

To be honest, I found this book a bit boring. James Tobin certainly deserves credit for his utter thoroughness in documenting the race to flight. While certainly concentrating the most attention on Wilbur and Orville Wright, he examines the earliest attempts at flight in Europe (which, to a man, ended with the death of the would-be pilot/inventor in his craft), the attempts of lesser known Americans to achieve flight (Samuel Langley, anyone? Octave Chanute?), as well as one of the country's best known and most beloved inventor's efforts: Alexander Graham Bell. And yet, by and large the book simply didn't hold a candle to Jim Rasenberger's America, 1908. (Even Thomas Selfridge's death as Orville's passenger is better told in the latter book, with Rasenberger foreshadowing the man's demise  - and Orville's later feelings of guilt - by quoting from correspondence between the brothers in which they lament how it would be better if Selfridge were out of the way.)

I did come away with a deep admiration and greater understand of what the Wright Brothers accomplished (beyond the end result of flying, that is). Tobin devotes great chunks of text to the many, many iterations of the "aeroplane," as the brothers called it, as well as the rather horrendous conditions at Kitty Hawk, where they frequently battled either sweltering or freezing temperatures and swarms of biting and stinging insects in addition to the obvious hardships of life in rural America 100+ years ago: the need to find, shoot, and skin your dinner before eating it, the necessity of building every structure by hand, and the lack of showers, toilets, and other conveniences. Clearly no one smelled fresh as a daisy or sweet as a rose. I was also struck by the clear-sighted view they had of their invention and it's capabilities. Tobin quotes relatively early correspondence from Wilbur in which he writes, "We stand ready to furnish a practical machine for use in war at once." Similarly, when witnesses of early flights asked what the machine would be good for, they received a single word response: war. Indeed.

Several times I considered abandoning the book as too dry, too slow or, as when Tobin were veer off to explore the efforts of some other unknown would-be inventor, too choppy. Yet, had I done so, I would have missed the descriptions of the flights over New York, the first time the masses saw an airplane fly. The following paragraph especially struck me, capturing the awe of a people and an age:

"On the Jersey shore, people saw the machine bank and sweep into a tight half-circle, then head away, back over the harbor. Now every skipper in the harbor opened his steam whistle. ... Just ahead lay a far greater hulk in the harbor. It was the Cunard liner Lusitania, outbound for Liverpool. ... The flying machine came on and flew just overhead, and the liner let loose with a volcanic blast of steam. A hundred feet up, the roar and the heat enveloped Will."

It seems fitting that it was the Lusitania in the harbor, saluting one new weapon of war and soon to be sunk by another.

The Food of a Younger Land

The Food of a Younger Land provides a fascinating glimpse back in time to the American of the 1930s (and earlier). The book, which is comprised primarily of original, unpublished manuscripts collected as part of a WPA project in the late 1930s and early 1940s (last submissions: December 11, 1941) is essentially a glimpse of what and how Americans ate in the opening decades of the 20th century. The impetus for the government collecting this information - and the project lasted for nearly a decade, beyond the whole Great Depression thing, was the appearance of bottled salad dressings in grocery aisles. As Mark Kurlansky, who really did a wonderful job of stitching piles of 70-year-old papers into a highly readable book, writes in his introduction: “What could better spell the beginning of the end than the manufacture of bottled salad dressing, a product that was so easy to make at home?”

In 1930s America, Italians ate ravioli and Mexicans ate tacos and these foods needed to be described in detail for anyone else. Ravioli, by the way, are “diminutive derbies of pastry, the crowns stuffed with a well-seasoned meat paste,” or at least that is how the WPA writer described them in the late 1930s. Also, tourists in Virginia who do not find the “Virginian foods” along the highway are advised to “knock at some farmhouse door, register [their] complaint against American standardization, and be served after a manner that conforms to the ancient rules of hospitality.” As Kurlansky notes, if that instruction isn’t evidence that this book is about a different country as much as different foods, I don’t know what is.

Given what people in this earlier version of America ate, it’s amazing they didn’t all die of coronary disease at age 35 (of course, I suppose one could make the same argument today)... Primarily, they ate meat and they ate corn. Baked, fried, broiled, and barbecued, they started with hearty helpings of country ham in the morning, plates of fried chicken at noontime, and slabs of beef at night. That, of course, is when they weren’t eating squirrel, possum, rabbit, bison, duck, venison, the intestines of any and all animal, or my personal favorite, beaver tails. Also beans, biscuits, and the omnipresent corn, as a vegetable, a bread, or often a gruel. Whatever Oregon Trail taught me, I wouldn’t have made a good pioneer.

If you’re curious about an earlier era in American history or how cuisine has evolved, I definitely recommend this book. The heartiest might even try a recipe or two (potato salad or breads most likely, unless you fancy trying your hand at pheasant or beaver, though I personally recommend against it). Seeing that I’m not much better in the kitchen than I would have been as a pioneer, I’ll stick to reading the recipes myself.

Flyboys

War is hell. These three words summarize Flyboys, James Bradley’s extraordinary book on the Pacific air war with Japan. In turns gruesome (I skipped entire pages more than once) and mesmerizing, this book is consistently a page turner. Bradley does an excellent job of setting the stage for Pearl Harbor and the United States’ subsequent war with Japan by providing a history of (largely antagonistic) relations between the two nations dating from their first “meeting” in 1853. In doing so, he tackles the issues of expansionism and racism head-on, providing a balanced perspective on the atrocities nations – including the U.S. – had long perpetuated on one another well before World War II. The history of the American experience in the Philippines is especially harrowing and one I’m quite certain I never learned in school. (In short, we “facilitated” the Spanish exist from the archipelago owing to their brutal treatment of the native population, then employed equally brutal methods against these same people, including an official policy to kill every man, woman, and child over the age of ten.)

Bradley uses this history to explain the particular animosity the Japanese felt towards America on the eve of World War II, while also providing a rather fascinating picture of the early air forces. Ultimately, this book is the story of eight American fly boys who were captured and killed by the Japanese after being shot down over Chichi Jima. (A ninth was rescued by a U.S. submarine – that pilot, famously, was George H.W. Bush, who is portrayed warmly in the book by Bradley.) The fate that befell these eight men was so startling that the post-war war crimes prosecutor opened the trial by warning that what befell these men was “so revolting to the human mind that man long ago decided it unnecessary to legislate directly against” such treatment (p. 317). It is shocking.

Yet, in many ways, it is less shocking than Japan’s treatment of its own soldiers (poor provisioning meant cannibalism became de rigeur during the war), and in many ways it is no more shocking that the acts committed by American soldiers against the Japanese (strafing the shipwrecked survivors of a torpedoed transport carrier, for example). Or the napalming of dozens of Japanese cities, leading to the deaths of hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of Japanese civilians. In the context of the widespread firebombing campaign that was designed to bring Japan to its knees, but which was still insufficient to convince the country to surrender, the atomic bomb seems the only possible way for the war to end. As Bradley notes, in a perverse way, the atomic bombed actually saved far more lives than it extinguished, a fact that many of the Japanese survivors whose testimony is a strength of the book, acknowledge. War is hell. I think I’m done with war books for awhile.

1812: The War That Forged A Nation

Meticulously researched, 1812 is as much a primer on early American history as a text on the War of 1812. Walter Borneman covers a broad sweep of American history, from the Revolutionary War, where the older generals cut their teeth, to the Civil War where the younger men (or their sons and nephews) would make their own mark. In doing so Borneman's research passes through the Mexican War and the Indian Wars and, of course, focusing on the events of 1812-1814.

This book drove home for me how many years it has been since I have studied American history. (Did I once know that many of the early War of 1812 battles occurred in Canada? That the Americans burned York - now Toronto - in a fit of pique that provoked the British to turn Washington to ash? That "don't give up the ship" was first uttered by a mortally wounded captain in this war? I hope so, of course, but I can't say.) In fact, despite having visited such places as the Constitution in Boston, Mackinac Island, and even Andrew Jackson's plantation the Hermitage, to say nothing of living for two years in Baltimore, my recent knowledge of this war could only be reliably counted on to produce that it resulted in that most mangled of national anthems, The Star Spangled Banner. (On second thought, it may be because of and not in spite of my brief residency in Baltimore that I can reliably recall this last fact.)

Admittedly, the book occasionally became mired in the same details that are a strength. I found myself frequently flipping back a page or two in an attempt to fit a general and regiment together - or even to remember on what side a particular man fought. And his regiment, by the way: was is Kentucky or Tennessee? 44th or 78th? Fusilier or Highlander? You get the idea. The best written chapters to my mind are those that focus on the naval battles, particularly that of the Battle of Lake Erie. ("We have met the enemy and they are ours" can be credited to Oliver Hazard Perry in his victorious dispatch to future president William Henry Harrison following a decisive American victory in this battle.) I also thought the chapter on Andrew Jackson at New Orleans was a real page turner, but, yes, I am a total nerd.

Finally, I will add that I was amazed again by the number of key officers, politicians, and frankly heroes, who hadn't yet reached their 30th birthdays. It's well and fine to remember that in 1812, 30 was already middle-aged, but their heroics still left me feeling old and unaccomplished. Then again, we can't all found a nation.

Bringing Up Bébé

At the risk of incurring the ire of friends who have children, and therefore might be more qualified to comment on a parenting book than I, I’ve decided to share my thoughts on Pamela Druckerman’s Bringing Up Bébé. Now the first thing to say about this book, that is the style and the writing – is that I really liked it. Not only is it written in the voice that I prefer and in which I often tend to write (sorry, but try as they might my dissertation committee could not beat the matter-of-fact, conversational quality out of my writing), but it actually made me laugh out loud more than once. This is rare, but then lately I seem to have read a lot about war, and a bit about mental illness, and often both at once. I suppose neither of those topics is particularly funny. So, this book gets points for making me laugh. It also earns high points for providing an excellent, inside look at life in France, from the schools to the hospitals to the bureaucracies. (It also loses points for this, as at various points I was tempted to ditch a life in America for one in Paris, until I remembered that France isn’t entirely the rose garden Druckerman portrays. Child care, healthcare, and college tuition may be heavily subsidized by the state, but the VAT is nearly 20% and most French people I know certainly have as many cost-/quality-of-life concerns as Americans.) I digress.  

As far as the comparisons between French parenting and American parenting, I quickly grew weary. So much of what the author identifies as 'French parenting' I would label as 'common sense.' For example, she bemoans the highly limited diets of American toddlers and children while delighting in the way French children eat a tremendous variety of foods. Now, this may not be a fair comparison for a number of reasons, not least because France is the land of brie and baguettes while America is home to Wonder Bread and Cheez Whiz. But, her case is not helped by showcasing an American toddler who refuses to eat anything except foil wrapped Santa Clauses; his parents buy out the stores at Christmas lest they run out and he go hungry after the holidays. They believe they are being good parents. I believe they should be investigated for child abuse. She attributes the wider palate of  French children to parents refusing to indulge in this behavior and requiring their children to sample all foods at least once and generally eat the same meals as the parents. Brilliant! Who ever would have thought? Other than my own parents, I suppose, and most every other family I knew growing up.

Likewise, we learn that all American children are unruly little wildebeests because their parents have yet to harness the power of the word ‘no.’ She even devotes several pages to how she had to learn to say this word with conviction so that her young son would listen and obey. It never occurred to me that parents would not use this word (and use it often). Clearly the wildebeests belong to the people who cannot say no. I mean, she tells horror story of restaurant meals with her own one-year-old, who cannot be made to sit at the table while the parents eat. Having recently enjoyed a long and lovely brunch with good friends and their adorably well-behaved, one-year-old daughter, I can definitely say that not all American toddlers behave this way.

Toward the end of the book she discusses the differences in baby-proofing philosophies: she wishes to replace the bathroom floors with something entirely rubber in order to reduce (eliminate?) the risk of a child slipping and falling. The French people who learn of this idea think it is madness. So do I. We simply used a bath mat and my mother would say, ‘be careful not to fall.’ I suppose if I had, I would have been more careful the next time.  I’d continue, but I’m sure you get the idea.  

Coco Chanel: An Intimate Life

Coco Chanel, whose real name was Gabrielle, was one fascinating broad. Born to peasants, she would be orphaned by her mother's death and father's abandonment before she was 12, when she was sent to the Aubazine convent. Such beginnings contrast starkly with her later life when she would figure among the wealthiest, most influential women in France, if not beyond - and also bed half of Europe, at least the wealthy half (men and women alike). At various times her lovers included the Duke of Westminster (then himself the richest man in England), Stravinsky, Picasso, Dali, the Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich, and a high ranking German official during World War II - in addition to countless others whose names are far less known or impressive (Etienne Balsan? Arthur Capel? Antoinette d'Harcourt?). Also, she had a serious morphine habit. Most impressively is not simply the way Chanel revolutionized fashion, however, but that she continued working at it and being a force within the fashion world until she the day she died at the age of 87, some 60 years after she opened her first little shop.

So, yes, Chanel is fascinating. Coco Chanel: An Intimate Life, however, is a bit dry. In fact, as I read I couldn't help but feel that it could have been written as a dissertation, something to the effect of the "The Life and Times of Coco Chanel: One Woman's Impact on a Century." It's incredibly well researched and painstakingly thorough but, unlike some books which manage to be this without the reader constantly realizing it. In this book, the research can sometimes drag down each dense paragraph, threatening to crush them under its weight. I will say, though, that when it comes to descriptions of Europe - particularly life in France in the 19th century when peasants still spoke patois, or in either of the pre-/post- war periods - the research does pay dividends.

On a separate note, the author (Lisa Chaney), had what was for me the terribly annoying habit of referring to and describing various photos of Chanel or others, sometimes in great detail, which were then not included in any of the photo insert pages. I felt cheated! If the photographs couldn't be reproduced for the book, she should have said so in the text; if they could have been and she chose not to, then shame on her.

The final verdict: Coco Chanel was almost certainly one of the most remarkable figures of the 20th century. She gets 4 stars just for surviving and thriving, let alone being a quiet revolutionary in her own way. (Also, I couldn't help but think that she should have just married Etienne Balsan when he asked - twice - but that really is beside the point.) The book, however, gets 2 stars because at the end of the day the reader often has to work to keep Chanel in focus and not be overcome by the words on the page.