Losing Battles by Eudora Welty

The four hundred plus pages of Eudora Welty's Losing Battles (quotes from the Random House edition of 1970) is dedicated to a little over a day, the Sunday of the Renfro-Beecham family reunion in Banner, Mississippi, at family matriarch Granny Vaughan's old farm homestead. The day also marks Granny's ninetieth birthday. Meticulously detailed by Eudora Welty, much of the day is given over to the family's telling stories of themselves. Gathered together physically by a comically woebegone set of vehicles, the Renfro-Beecham clan is brought together spiritually through the telling of their stories.

The Beecham-Renfros number enough for a good church choir. Granny's daughter and son-in-law died young in a flood, but not before bringing forth a brood of Beechams: Nathan, Noah,Percy, Dolphus, Curtis, and Beulah. Beulah, Mr. Renfro her husband, and four of their five children live with Granny Vaughan at the Banner homestead. Beulah's brothers, their voluble spouses and, in some cases, considerable families, have journeyed from near and far (Southern Mississippi) for what is an annual reunion. The Beechams are joined by Mr. Renfro's two sisters, old-maid Lexie and Auntie Fay who's married to Homer Champion. Homer's the county sheriff and thus a figure of some suspicion to this often times unruly family. The Beecham children seem to harbor a residue of suspicion about every single one of their in-laws, but Homer comes in for special scrutiny owing to his position as a law enforcer. With considerable pride, the Beecham-Renfros refer to the number gathered for their reunion as hundreds. This might be true if one were to include the dogs. Every guest seems to bring at least one, if not several. There's also a veritable tribe of dogs at this reunion.

Everyone attending anxiously awaits the appearance of Jack Renfro, Beulah's eldest boy. Jack is the pride of the family despite the fact he's returning from a stint in Parchman Penitentiary. Beulah tells Granny that Jack's returning on her birthday will be the ultimate gift of her day, "the joy of your life's coming home!"(5). Even though the family is in debt and the farm is suffering, Mr. Renfro has furnished the family home with a brand-new tin roof to welcome this prodigal son home. Likewise, Jack's wife Gloria has donned her wedding dress and sits facing the road with their child Lady May, who was born while he was away. Only Jack's little brother Vaughan, continually eclipsed by Jack, seems less than eager to see him.

At the outset, Jack's absence is left unexplained. There's no indication as to when, or more importantly, why he's expected back and from where. We gradually glean that he's been in the penitentiary in Parchman, Mississippi. Many stories later, we learn why he's been sent there. The family seems to have but a foggy notion of his doings in Parchman. With the exception of Lexie, no one seems to have any idea as to the length of his sentence. Yet, they have faith he's coming. They are certain that the family gathering itself at the homestead, like some kind of force of nature, will magically draw him back.

The waiting for Jack starts early. Shortly after sun-rise, before the reader is even aware of Jack as a character, the elderly Granny tells Beulah, "He can come right now,"(5) and the reader could be forgiven for believing the reference is to God. Later, when family arrives, Uncle Dolphus greets Granny, his mother, with a kiss and the reassurance, "we'll help you wait on him"(10).

While waiting for him, prompted by a newcomer sister-in-law Cleo, the family begins to tell stories. The first relates how Jack managed to find himself in the pen. Uncle Percy with his thready voice relates the main-line of the story but all interrupt and add to it. The Beecham-Renfros tell stories in a communal fashion. It doesn't take long to realize that the Beecham-Renfros have a limited interest in the facts. Their stories are a mix of history, entertainment, poetry and legend. In telling stories, they are fashioning a family portrait with love and pride. Their stories provide a window on the truths that matter to the tellers. The stories stake out the family, mirror it, love and honor it.

The Beecham-Renfros are salt-of-the-earth, country folk. They are insular, clannish and at war against a range of threats: poor harvest, droughts, and debt. However, their chief enemy seems to be education. One time school teacher Gloria sketches out the dimensions of the threat in a brief elegy she offers Julia Mortimer, a legendary school teacher in Banner who adopted and mentored her in the profession she dropped upon marriage into the Renfro-Beechams. According to Gloria, Miss Julia "didn't want anybody left in the dark, not about anything. She wanted everything brought out in the wide open, to see and be known. She wanted people to spread out their minds and their hearts to other people, so they could be read like books." A doorstep child ignorant of her past, Gloria concludes "people don't want to be read like books"(432). Although opposed to them in many ways, Gloria proves to be of like heart with her adopted family in this sentiment. The Beecham-Renfros are about the pleasures and strengths of the irregular and unexpected. Deep down, Welty's novel seems convinced such treasures don't survive the scrutiny and observation brought by education.

The family is in a pitched battle with all forms of regulation and government. This comes through to comic effect in the family's retelling of Jack's "crime" and trial. Jack suspects his longtime nemesis,shopkeeper/local sheriff Curly Stovall, has taken a family wedding ring from Jack's sister in lieu of overdue bills. Suspecting Stovall's hidden it in his locked safe, Jack roughs Curly and steals his safe, hoisting it up on his shoulders like Atlas shouldering the world. It is later we learn that Jack's sister has a sweet spot for Curly and may have given the ring to him. But, that's a later story.

Jack's arrest for stealing the safe puzzles the family. I never could quite determine what the safe actually did contain. Regardless or its contents, according to Uncle Curtis, "Jack had acted the only way a brother and son could act, and done what any other good Mississippi boy would have done in his place" and, recalling the trail, he claims, "I fully expected'em to throw the case right out the window"(43). In court, Judge Moody asks Jack if he's planning to plead innocent and Jack replies, "Yes sir, I'm needed"(52).

The Renfro-Beecham logic proves alien to the court's. Jack is sent to the penitentiary. Ultimately, by the family's sights, what the court lacks is a proper knowledge. His mother argues, "that judge never got it through his head what it was all about! Born and bred in Ludlow, most likely in the very shadow of the courthouse! A man never spend a day of his life in Banner, never heard of a one of us!"(62). The law is suspect because of it inability to account for circumstance and context, to account for the individual.

The judge Beulah refers to is Judge Moody. Recalling the trial, Uncle Percy says, "Judge Moody's whole battle cry was respect"(56). Judge Moody reads Jack's attack on and theft of Curly as an attack on authority, both the authority of money and law. He concludes, "'You folks around Banner trade at Stovall's store, vote him into office, and raise the roof when you feel like it'"(56). He warns, "You can't go knocking the law down if it gets in your way, you can't keep on packing up the law in the nearest crate big enough to hold it [to steal the safe, Jack ties up Curly in an empty coffin]...and go skipping out the store with a safe, so called....and all without offering this court any better reason than "He's [Curly is] aggravating." Aggravating!'"(56). Still, Jack responds with more of the same family logic: "'Judge, I reckon to do justice to Curly, you got to see him in Banner'"(57). Truth and law must be based on knowledge, and all three are dependent on context. To rule justly, you got to be and know where you're ruling.

Jack gets two years. To make his grandmother's birthday and the reunion, he leaves jail a few days shy of two years. However, outside of maiden Aunt Lexie, few question him when he arrives home like an idol to a wandering people. The family worships Jack. They surround him, pamper him, pepper him with questions, feed him. They break the bad news of his grandfather's passing. They prepare to tell him he has a daughter, although later we learn Gloria has told him this without informing the family she has done so. And, much to his chagrin, Jack learns from a late arriving Homer Champion that a man Jack helped out of a ditch earlier in the day, near Banner, was the same Judge Moody who'd sentenced him to the pen. Jack has acted as a good Samaritan to a man he considers an enemy and this perturbs Jack and his family. Various retributive options are bandied about till Gloria, anxious to keep her husband out of the pen for a spell, takes control and leads him away from his family.

In effect, Gloria, Jack and the baby Lady May go off for a walk. Gloria is anxious to be with Jack alone, both now and in the future and both figuratively and literally. She wishes to peel him from his family. Most immediately, she hopes to deter Jack from his desire to "meet that Judge....sing him my name out loud and clear, and leave him in as good a ditch as the one he had before I saved him. That's all." To which, Gloria replies, "Then it's up to your wife to pit her common sense against you"(112).

Gloria occupies a peculiar place in the family's battle against law, authority and education. While married in to the family via Jack, Gloria wishes for some distance from the Beecham clan. Abandoned at birth, Gloria was taken in by life-long school teacher Miss Julia who groomed her as a school-teacher. Gloria's career as a school teacher in Banner was brought to a sudden end when she fell in love and married Jack while boarding at his parent's.

Yet, all Gloria's efforts to extract Jack from his family and its continual troubles prove fruitless. Trouble finds Jack. While he and Gloria are getting reacquainted on a local outcrop, Banner Top, they hear the Judge's car coming along the road. Jack prepares to descend Banner Top to the road below and to shoo the Judge's car into a ditch nearby. Hoping to stop him, Gloria makes worse the situation by sticking Lady May in Jack's hands just as he's getting ready to descend, warning him, "If you can't be a better example to Lady May-hold her"(119). Jack does so but also begins his ragged descent down the outcrop, Lady May in hand. Gloria follows, and is unable to stop her descent until she ends up across the road. Lady May gets free when Jack gets to the bottom and tries to get to her mother on the other side of the road. Crossing it, she goes right into the path of the Judge's oncoming car. Gloria frantically runs to her and falls on top the baby in the middle of the road. Coming upon them, the Judge's swerves his car off the road to avoid them and runs the vehicle up the outcrop and almost off the edge on the other side. It comes to rest hanging half off of the "jumping-off place" on the side of Banner Top that fronts the Bywee River running below. It hangs precariously, anchored ultimately by Jack's best friend Aycock Comfort who somehow managed to get in the back seat of the car while it swerved off the road to avoid the baby. It's a crazy scene that apparently defies both explanation and the laws of physics.

Jack comes away convinced that the Judge has saved his baby and his wife. Grateful, he feel compelled to help the Moody's get their car down from the precipice, despite the Moody's reservations about his doing so. While Jack eagerly contemplates how he might do so, the judge tells his wife, "I reckon I better go on up there and put the quietus on that boy"(126). They ultimately resort to Gloria to put a stop to Jack's efforts to rescue the car on his own by driving it down the outcrop. Judge Moody asks him, "'have you been made to understand to keep hands off of that car?'" and Jack concedes "Yes sir...My wife's done passed a law'"(127).

While determined to resist Jack's offers of help, Mrs. Moody is clearly interested in getting the Moody car down soon. Yet, events conspire against this. When Curly Stovall happens by soon after, he is inclined to help till the mysterious appearance of events leads him to believe that Jack has set up the entire event to wreak vengeance upon him. He tells Mrs. Moody that he can't help her on a Sunday but promises to come back the following morning. Irritated, she commands her husband to "'shanghai the next thing on wheels that dares to come along here and make'em carry you back to civilization where you can beat somebody over the head till they come and haul us'"(155). Clearly, the civilization and regulation represented by the Moody's can be a thin veneer which washes away under distress.

The next potential Moody savior is a busload of teachers headed to Alliance, across the river from Banner. They're headed their to attend the funeral of Miss Julia Mortimer, a legendary school teacher in the region and a woman who acted as mentor/guardian/scold to Gloria when she was abandoned as a baby. The news of Ms. Julia's death hits Gloria as he she'd been "struck in the forehead by a stone out of a slingshot"(157), a curious Bible allusion which, in a bit of reverse casting, presents Gloria as the philistine. The teachers have headed this way to pick up Gloria on the way to Miss Julia's wake and funeral. As in other of Welty's depictions of small town life, the teachers have come to watch/experience/enjoy her mourning, her grief.

The teachers invite Gloria aboard their bus, reminding her "You're still one of us, Gloria Short. Even though you didn't wear too well or last as long as we did"(158). Finally, in a manipulative fashion, they remind her that "she owes [Miss Julia] the most of all...She loved you the best and prized you the most"(158). But, Gloria resist joining the schoolteachers, arguing that she must look after Lady May, who then comically happens to appear perched high above them on the top of Banner Top overlooking the road. Jack recovers the child. While she might be doing a poor job of looking after Lady May, Gloria protests she can't come along because she's got her hands full. With self-damning words in accord with the anti-education bent of the book, the school teachers add in agreement "'of the living'"(162). They head off without her. Gloria is a woman without a country, neither country nor city, neither civilized or of the land, neither schoolteacher nor Renfro.

With their car stuck on Banner Top with no help in sight, Jack invites the Moody's to come on home with him and Gloria. They accept. Atop a series of tables set up in the front yard of the Vaughn homestead, dinner is getting underway under a large tree. Granny Vaughn has been brought to the table like an icon, "lifted high and carried through the crowd. Little clouds of fragrance seemed to go with her"(175). Taking the place of her deceased minister husband, Brother Bethune, a Baptist minister with "his stand were wedged in to the tree roots by her side"(176). Brother Bethune doesn't simply offer a simple grace or blessing before the meal. Instead, he launches into a a sermon that is one part blessing, one part grace, and one solid part family history. Like the meal itself, it is without seeming boundaries and of prodigious length. He recalls Granny's marriage to Preacher Vaughn who "came here to this beautiful old house to live on their wedding day, and I believe he'd just surrendered to the ministry too, both at the age of eighteen"(182). His choice of the word "surrendered" suggests religion's potential to control. His sermon shows it's potential to ennoble, comfort and entertain.

During the course of the conversation that punctuates Bethune's sermon, Jack reveals that he has actually escaped from Parchman a day before his sentence was up. He does so within earshot of the Judge, attempting to explain his action by telling him, "Our reunion is one that don't wait, sir"(195).

Judge Moody is truly in an odd position at this reunion. Viewed as the villain who unjustly sentenced Jack, Judge Moody has been invited rather suddenly to dinner by the man he harmed. Brother Bethune tries to defuse the situation by introducing the Judge and his wife and by then informing them that the clan gathered is "going to forgive you"(208). The Moodys seem genuinely puzzled as to why the're being forgiven. Mrs. Moody assumes they're being forgiven for having walked in on the dinner and objects that they were invited to dinner by Jack. Uncle Noah replies such an invitation is "plain hospitality...That ain't no guarantee you ain't going to be forgiven when you get here"(208). Feeling he's done nothing wrong, Judge Moody refuses to be forgiven. Pointing to the reciprocal benefits of forgiveness, Brother Bethune implores, "Judge Moody, you do like the majority begs and be forgiven...Don't you want to come back and hear yourself be forgiven?" In the moral economy of common folk of the book, forgiveness addresses equally the needs of both the forgiven and the forgiver. One can satisfactorily forgive even if the action is not recognized by the recipient.

The family is angered by Judge Moody's refusal to accept their forgiveness. They are upset that he can't see he needs their forgiveness. They see Jack and his actions through the eyes of familial love while the Judge viewed him in the considerably cooler eyes of the law and its insistence on facts.

Reasons for and Advantages of Breathing: stories by Lydia Peelle

Nostalgia and loss permeate the stories in Lydia Peelle's debut collection, Reasons For and Advantages of Breathing. Perhaps due to their rural, often Southern settings, her stories have the feel of sad country songs. Like many sad, country songs, they court and celebrate the woebegone and hopeless but in a wry way, offering up dollops of consolation along the way.

Something I read described Peelle as a Southern writer. Self-transplanted to the South about two years ago, still curious about it, I picked up this book in hopes of gaining insight. Peelle sprinkles her stories with good regional details: people reading the penny-saver, F-350's ticking in parking lots, "new families plant spindly dogwoods" in a new subdivision, the obsession with fireworks. Yet, those are just outward trappings. I'm not sure that Pelle aims or hits on any deeper, defining spirit or ethos, nor am I certain that can be done.

The South as place figures largest in the provocatively titled story This Is Not a Love Story. The narrator is a mother who stumbles across old photos while packing her daughter off to college. The photos recall a lost, romantic summer from her youth. That summer, naively fashioning herself an artist and photographer, she'd headed South because she "had never been and [it] seemed so mysterious: raw and dangerous and full of relics of a long-gone era." She believed "this mystery...would more than make up for my lack of talent, because any photograph I took could not help but capture it"(116). The mystery she butts up against is Tommy, a charming but alcoholic good-old-boy nearly twice her age. The two spend the best part of a year living on a houseboat, celebrating a carefree, careless summer of riot that goes bad.

The narrator of this story insists that in the South, "it's not the places that are haunted, it's the people. They are trapped by all the stories of the past, wandering a long hallway lined with locked doors, knocking and knocking, with no one ever answering"(121). Peelle's people are haunted by the past in various ways. The photographer-want-to-be tells her daughter that until she came across the photos, she'd never recalled this reckless episode from her youth. Yet, the memory is clearly there, suppressed bec because too sad, too dear, making what came after too pale. After retelling it, her daughter quips, "It sounds like those were the days."

Similarly riven by a rich time in her past, the narrator of the lovely story Sweethearts of the Rodeo, recalls the time she and a girlhood friend spent working on a run-down, poorly-supervised horse-farm. Central to her memory are two ponies the girls rode daily: for work, play and fantasy. She ends her telling, "Lately I've been thinking someone should write an elegy for those ponies. But not me"(63).

Memory can suffer worse ends. In Phantom Pain, taxidermist Jack Well's craft is all about capturing the quick of life. He criticizes the work of his lackluster and younger assistant as "graceless, stiff, hastily and sloppily done." To get it right, to "capture" the animal, "at some point in the process....you have to let the animal lead you. After all, it's not clay or paint or iron you're working with. What you're working with has....been a living breathing thing, for years has been blinking, snorting, sleeping, grazing, scanning the horizon"(31).

Old, despairing, Jack looks over his shop and notes, "some of the [his] early work has already gone, popped at the seams, mice long since eaten the glue and made nests out of the stuffing. How long will the restof it last? Longer. But not forever"(44). Likewise, Jack's lost even the memory of a more vital time. Silently, to himself, he warns a group of young people he observes: "you'll grow tired of everything....that's when you'll start regretting that tattoo. Not because you see it every day. But because you don't even notice it anymore. Because you thought it would last forever, and remind you of something forever. And it doesn't"(34).

Peelle's collection is wisely bookended by the two most engaging stories. Capping the collection, Shadow On a Weary Land features three feckless, social misfits who watch helplessly as their home in rural Brown's Ridge, a Southern everyplace, is gradually turned into urban sprawl. All three had sought refuge here and had come to find the comfort of home here in this once rural place. Now, as the bulldozers and construction crews arrive, he and his buddies helplessly mourn. They also pass their time searching for mythic hidden treasure that, according to local lore, Jesse James and his brother Frank buried in Brown's Ridge when the two outlaws lived there incognito, masquerading as solid citizens.

While mourning the loss of a place that approached home, the narrator admits, "None of us can claim to belong here"(162). He also throws into question the idea of the pristine, or perfect moment, that needs to or can be restored. The narrator rejects the prophetic announcements of his zoned out buddy who walks around with a copy of Isaiah torn from the Bible. Turning his back on the assumptions of such narrative, he confesses, "I'm not sure what I believe in at all, save the law of the conservation of matter, which means everything is made of what came before"(176).

While engaging and moving, this story gets a bit chatty. Peelle sometimes lets her characters muse a little too much and do a little too little. They are prone to offering nice, tidy aphoristic thoughts that come acros a little false at times.

Her best story, the opener Mule Killers avoids excessive introspection and philosophizing. In it, the narrator recalls how his mom and dad came "together" while living on a tobacco farm. They meet the year when "big trucks loaded with mules rumbled steadily to the slaughterhouses" as farmers moved to tractors in the interest of making money.

The field hands miss the mules. They are "used to sleeping all down the length of a tobacco row until the mules stop, waking just long enough to swing the team and start on back up the next"(2-3). The narrator's grandfather who owns the farm misses the mules. The narrator recalls "My grandfather understood mule power. He celebrated it. He reveled in it. ....When his wife died young of a fever, it was not a horse but Orphan Lad who pulled her coffin slowly to the burying grounds"(5).

His father harbors a love for the mules. During the last summer with mules on the farm, the narrator's father "has become secretive about the things he loves. His love is fierce and full, but edged in guilt. He loves Orphan Lad: Orphan's sharp shoulders and soft ears, the mealy tuck of his lower lip. Music. Books and the smell of books, sun-warmed stones, and Eula Parker"(3).

Eula is "a slippery and myetrious girl, and my father's poor heart is constantly bewildered by her fickle ways"(5). To provoke Eula's jealousy, the father takes up with her drab best friend. Eula's hair "swept up off her neck, thick purple-black and shining," while the nameless friend has "onion-pale hair"(7). The nameless girl with onion-pale hair is the narrator's mother. For her, the attention from the narrator's father is a dream come true. When he takes her out for a soda, "she has trouble "believing that she is sitting here at this counter, having a soda with a boy"(8).

However, his pursuit is simply a gambit and it fails; Eula doesn't care that the father has taken up with her friend with onion-pale hair. Stung by her indifference, the narrator's father takes up with the girl with onion-pale hair. He takes her "to the hayloft, a back field, the mule barn, the spring house: anyplace that was dark and quiet for long enough that my father could desperately try to summon Eula's face, or else hope to forever blot it from his mind. Long enought that I, like a flashbulb, could snap into existence"(10).

There's mystery to this story. The mother, like the mules, seems a thing of the past, unappreciated and dismissed. We never discover if the narrator's father ever grew to appreciate or love the mother, or whether he continued to see through her, forever wounded by his unrequited desire for Eula. It's a strange story. It creates compassion for a character who remains a cipher. Everyone around her is drawn with some detail, but she's left largely untold, in keeping with what would seem a perfect humility that comes from being plain.

Animals are prominently featured in almost every story. They are presented as mysterious, virtuous, and humble. She uses them to evoke a consciousness and virtue we as humans may have left or evolved from to our own loss.

In Phantom Pain, the residents of the town where Jack Wells has his taxidermy shop keep sighting a panther despite the fact that such animals haven't lived in the area in living memory. Wells skeptically mutters:

If a panther really is up there, sniffing out an ancient path its great-great ancestors once followed, is at this very moment twitching its great muscular tail and arching its back to run tis claws down the trunk of a tree, dropping to all fours to nose at a beef jerky wrapper filled with dirty rainwater and picking around rusted old tin cans and television sets to make its way into one of thsoe hollers, meowing a lonely meow, well-Jack thinks, pulling in his driveway and stopping to check the empty mailbox in front of his trailer-then I pity the old bastard.(37)

Yet, loss and pity aren't the only two strains in this collection. If it doesn't offer concrete hope, it does suggest that within the natural, in the presence of animals, it's still possible to regain a sense of anticipation and wonder.

The Magicians by Lev Grossman

In Narnia or at the Dursleys, you're always cleaning the sink, or poking about a wardrobe, when your turn comes to be transported to a magical realm where you've been selected to battle against the forces of evil. Beats five nights in Cancun? Or, if your Quentin Coldwater, the lead character in Lev Grossman's The Magicians, your not cleaning the sink or poking about the wardrobe when the call comes but on your way to an admissions interview for Princeton when...

Quentin's interview never takes place. When Quentin and his friends arrive at the interviewer's home, they find him dead. Next, a mysterious paramedic passes along a mysterious envelope to Quentin and sends him on his way. The envelope contains a rough start/sketch of a rumored but never discovered sixth book in a series of fantasy novels set in the fantastical world of Fillory. Like many of his peers, Quentin adores these books. Eagerly starting on the manuscript, he discovers a ltter tucked into it which the wind tears from his hand before he has a chance to read it. Quentin pursues the note into a tangled community garden, right up to a fence the note temporarily gets blown against, and then, presto-chango, he enters another dimension and finds himself at the Brakebills Academy, a school for magicians.

So opens Lev Grossman's fantasy novelThe Magicians, a surreal book that often seems a grab-bag of every fantasy cliche and trope ever employed. Yet, it collects to examine. It's a fantasy novel written to question the writer's obvious love of fantasy novels. I come to it as an outsider, a person who hasn't and doesn't read fantasy novels. In fact, I come to it as somebody who generally doesn't read in the genres, those areas of fiction that insist on and a driven by story and pacing.

Grossman is a pretty good story-teller.I grew a bit bored at Brakebills, especially near the end of Quentin and his college chums' five year stay there. I couldn't quite figure out where or how they were to reenter the world; as the director quips to the recently admitted Quentin, magician "is not the obvious career path"(38). At Brakebills, Quentin and his friends acquire truly awesome powers; this isn't card-trick magic. This is the kind of magic that can change the weather, affect time and unleash natural forces as weapons.

Of course, magic is just a tool. As one of his professors offers "magic is not a science, it is not an art, and it is not a religion. Magic is a craft...We rely upon our will and our knowledge and our skill to make a specific change o the world"(48). Neither Quentin nor the novel seems overly curious or in a hurry to discover why he's been recruited and to learn such a craft. Quentin is thrilled to be learning such a craft, even though it's not clear he has any long-desired "specific change to the world" in mind. Only with time, and the opening of new possibility made possible by magic, do we learn that Quentin hopes for a world like Fillory; a world full of spectacle, adventure and quest in which there are clear goods, bads, and noble ends.

As you might guess, that magic is real is not exactly a secret and folks with darker ends have learned the craft. Shortly after Quentin and his love interest and fellow student Alice enter their second chronological (and third academic) year at the academy, their class is attacked during a lecture in a class-room by a malevolent, magical force. After Quentin distracts a professor while he is in the midst of executing an ornate spell-cast, this force suddenly enters the room and stops time, literally. Or, more precisely, turns everyone in the classroom into statutes, leaving their consciousness intact. Grossman renders the buried-alive feeling in chilling detail. While the class sits in statuesque terror, the force enters: a small man in a a grey suit who seems chillingly non-plussed by the harm he's caused and who wanders about the room of terrified and paralyzed students like a cat toying with mice. The man holds the class in this death-lock for a good part of a day before suddenly vanishing, driven away apparently by the combined spell-casting power of the Brakebill's faculty working away all day outside the class-room.

Afterwards, contradicting the quaint, suited man who appeared to them, a professor of Quentin's refers to what attacked as "the beast" and inform "what we saw would have been a small part of it, an extremity it chose to push into our sphere of being, like a toddler groping around in a tide pool"(115). They learn that this beast, in the guise of a grey suited man had eaten the class leader for a snack. Afterward, classes resumes, study continues and the last two years of Quentin's sojourn at Brakebills contains some of the most beautifully rendered and imaginative incidents in the book, episodes that bring to mind Poe in their sublime beauty (the transformation of the class into a herd of Canadian Geese, a strange trek to the South Pole). Quentin and Alice's relationship progresses. But, all of it under the pall cast by this incident with the beast, this sudden burst of black magic which raises the central question of the book: what does one do with the power to alter the world to one's liking?

Brakebills magicians apparently graduate to various callings. Some "spent their time at suborbital altitudes keeping a weather eye out for stray asteroids and oversize solar flares and other potential planetary-scale disasters. Plenty went in for academic research"(210). Others "infiltrate governments and think tanks and NGOs, even the military, in order to get oneself into a position to influence real-world affairs magically from behind the scenes." There are "a few...[who] undertook massive art projects, manipulating the northern lights and things like that, decades-long enchantments that might only ever have an audience of one"(210). And, there are war-gamers which raises the question whether magic in pursuit of evil ends is actually worse than magic put to innocuous and silly ends. Quentin decides on a less exalted path. After graduation, he and a circle of Brakebills buddies move to New York, and realizing "they had all the power in the world, and no work to do, and nobody to stop them. They ran riot through the city"(227).

Of course, riot quickly turns sour for Quentin and his Brakebills gang, and soon everyone's just as miserable as a yuppy, master-of-the-universe can be in the big apple. They have power but lack wisdom. Quentin seems incapable of love, and filled with a withering lack of self-esteem he lashes out at Alice with a vulgar act of infidelity.

All turns to the better with the arrival of Quentin's nemesis and rival from Brakebills, Penny who announces that he's discovered a magic button. According to the fictional Fillory books that Quentin adores, the central characters in those books, the young Chatwin children, travel back and forth between Fillory and reality at the behest of those in Fillory. They are called to Fillory to fulfill missions.

Throughout the series, the Chatwin children are never able to get to Fillory when they wish to go there, only when called. With one exception: Martin Chatwin, in a fit of pique at not being chosen for one of the adventures, takes off for Fillory, complains to the Chatwins chosen for the adventure and then, in a tantrum, heads off into Fillory vowing to never leave. And, Martin never shows up again in the Fillroy books.

At the end of the last Fillory book, two of the Chatwin children, Helen and Jane, are offered a similar future. They are given five magical buttons which will allow them to travel back and forth to Fillory when they want and as they please. Howver, Helen rejects the offer and tries to hide the buttons. She believes that "a trip to Fillory had to be earned, that had always been the way. It was a reward for the worthy...the buttons were a perversion of this divine grace, a usurping of it"(247). Penny has discovered one of the buttons...and everyone is going to Fillory.

Recently, at a lecture presented at the University of South Carolina's Caught in the Creative Act series, the author of The Magicians claimed that he had the idea for a story taking place at a magicians' school prior to Harry Potter but only got down to serious work on it after Rowling's phenomenally popular books came out. In writing his book, he deliberately attempted to create a Harry Potter for adults. He wanted a book that included magic and fantasy but wanted his characters to be adults living in a world that is in every way like our own. He wanted his Harry to be an alienated smartest kid in his class who was pained by the world and sought escape through fiction. He wanted to create a novel that explored the boundaries between fiction and reality.

Ironically, when Quentin, Grossman's alienated, older and grittier version of Harry, experiences his greatest disillusionment, he doesn't escape figuratively into books. Instead he escapes literally into a landscape from a fiction. He discovers that a long beloved fictional landscape of his, Fillory, is real and escapes to it. Yet, Fillory is real to a point. It is real in that Quentin and his friends go their bodily and live and breath and interact with a physical world. It remains a fictional, fantasy world in one important respect. Good and evil are much more clearly demarcated in Fillory than they normally appear in my world and this makes action potentially clearer and less confusing.

There is genuine mystery and adventure in Fillory; nothing is virtual, nothing needs to be pretended. Early on in the novel, Quentin succinctly defines life as it inheres in this prototypic fantasy world: in Fillory, people "have adventures and explore magical lands and defend the gentle creatures who live there against the various forces that menace them"(6). So defined, it is the ideal and proper venue for magic.

Magic is about power and the desire to know magic is born of narcissism and powerlessness. At one point in the book, Richard, a Brakebill's graduate with a Christian bent, describes magic as "the tools" left behind by a maker, "a Person who built the house, and then He left"(233). Quentin and his friends dismiss Richard's implied chronology but his theory asks Quentin and his friends a question: " If magic was created for a purpose, or if they could do whatever they wanted with it?" and not surprisingly, "Something like a panic attack came over him. They were really in trouble out there"(236). The trouble is they lack the wherewithal to define an end other than escaping their own vague discontent and ennui.

Quick to reject Richard's God, they are keen on adventuring in Fillory, an improved and more stimulating version of reality. Fillory bests earth for Quentin and his magic cohorts in its presenting a clearly defined good and evil. This strongly demarcated good and evil gives rise to the quests and adventures that Fillory, like many fantasy lands, seems to provide by its makeup. Of course, what often underlies clear good and evil is a God. In the case of Fillory, there are a pair of twin God-rams, Ember and Umber.

Quentin and his friends desire to go adventuring without holding any ends or values of which they are conscious. At best, they possess a wavering faith in the reality of value itself, of unalloyed good and evil, an underlying order. Thus, encouraging his friends to join him in Fillory,Penny suggests "I think they'll probably give us a quest." The cowardly-cool Quentin cautions, "It's not like the rams summoned us. It might not even be like the books. Maybe there never were any quests"(267). Cynical Eliot mockingly asks, "So what do you think....we're going to meet a damsel in distress?"(267). Penny persists in believing; they will find an end in Fillory. Out of his hopelessness, Quentin suggests that maybe they could find the Questing Beast, an animal that can't be caught, to which Eliot again mockingly asks, "What do you do with it if you do catch it? Eat it?"(267). Quentin confesses he doesn't know but implies that simply having something you want but can't catch may be in itself end enough.

Once in Fillory, Quentin and his fellow students bumble around a bit before encountering a half-frozen nymph. This stereotypic, Fantasy book figure made real so thrills them that they hardly heed the nymph when she warns, "I fear for you here, human children. This is not your war"(292). She tosses them a horn to blow when all hope is lost and then disappears. Quickly, Quentin's gang realizes Fillory may be cursed and, regardless, is going through a rough spell. When they encounter malevolent beings, they realize that "this isn't a story! It's just one fucking thing after another!"(299) and someone's liable to get hurt.

Eventually, they encounter Humbledrum the bear and Farvel the birch at a tavern in a Fillory forest. Around drinks, this odd duo insists the Brakebills gang needs to save Fillory. To do so, they will need to go to Ember's Tomb, find and "wear the crown," assume the throne at Whitespire. According to these two, this will bring a new era of peace and justice to Fillory. The bear and the birch add that they will "have help"(311). So missioned, they set out, fight there way through the underground tomb/labyrinth complex and come to an underground chamber where they meet Ember.

Even if it's a God from a fantasy novel, what does one do when one comes face to face with a God? Penny "knew what to do. He dropped his backpack and walked over to stand in front of the ram. He got down on his knees in the sand and bowed his head"(346). Yet, Ember is not a God in being all-powerful; he admits there are "Higher Laws...the power to to create order is one thing. The power to destroy is another"(348). Ember calls them to bear the crown and roll back an upsurge in an ongoing swell of evil.

Although impelled by desire, Quentin can't follow Penny in his religious impulse/desire; "He stayed standing...For some reason he wasn't ready to kneel down, not yet. He would in a minue, but somehow this didn't feel like the moment.Though it would have been nice-he'd been walking for so long"(346). Quentin's reaction to meeting God in-the-flesh/wool captures the novel's continually vacillation between honoring and mocking tease of the religious impulse.

Quentin's brain conquers his heart and he asks Ember how he could have allowed Fillory to fall on hard times. He inquires, "Ember, how come You're down here in this dungeon, and not up there on the surface helping people?"(348). Ember tries to explain and seems genuinely pained by the suffering of Fillory, of Quentin and his classmates. Of course, Quentin and his gang are a pretty self-centered crew. Janet complains to Ember: "We human beings are unhappy all the time. We hate ourselves and each other sometimes we wish You or Whoever had never created us or this shit-ass world. Do you realize that?"(349). This comic prayer of sorts brings a tear to Ember, and Quentin, in his and Grossman's inevitable resort to the smart-ass, can't help but compare it to the tear of the pollution-ad Indian from the seventies.

It doesn't take this cold-hearted crew long to suss out that Ember is not ruling here but is captive. Not long after that, the beast appears and deals Ember what looks like a death-blow. The beast this time identifies himself. He is Martin Chatwin.

Like Quentin and his gang, Martin too was enamored of Fillory and wanted to never leave it. This desire to never leave is corrupting. At some level, Martin's desire to never leave Fillory, his use of magic, all speak to a more basic desire: to be God. Martin boasts, "I wasn't going to go back to Earth after I'd seen Fillory. I mean, you can't show a man paradise and then snatch it back again. That's what gods do. But I say: down with gods"(354). Martin has become God-like in his powers, but has lost his humanity in the process. Unlike Ember and Umber, he refuses to accept and submit to any laws. He views Quentin and his gang as a threat to him and demands their button. A battle royal ensues and Alice sacrifices herself to kill the Beast.

In the battle, Quentin is gravely wounded. He wakes up recovering in a hospital run by centaurs and to an overwhelming guilt, regret and despair over his loss of Alice. While recovering, he discovers again the manuscript presumably containing the sixth, and final Fillory novel he'd been give at the chaotic scene of the interview which opened the novel. He reads of Jane Chatwin's desire to travel to Fillory, her search to discover where Helen hid the buttons, her hope that they might still find and save Martin. When he finishes, the mysterious paramedic woman from the beginning of the novel appears in his room. It is Jane Chatwin who reveals to Quentin that she eventually lost her hope to save Martin and decided that, monster-grown, he must be killed and that she enlisted Quentin and his friends in that project without their knowledge or consent. Irony of ironies, Quentin discovers that Jane has been quietly controlling Quentin and his friends from the start and, in the end, successfully used them as a tool to kill Martin.

Jane has a magical watch that allows her to time-travel and Quentin begs her to reverse time in an effort to save Alice. But, Jane refuses. She has tried numerous times to kill Martin, often reversing time to achieve that end, and this is the only time she's succeeded. She tells Quentin, "Don't make me lecture you on the practicalities of chronological manipulation....Change one variable and you change them all. Did you think you were the first one to face Martin in that room? Do you think that was even the first time you faced him?...Ive tried it so many different ways. Everyone always died...As bas as it was, as bad as it is, this is by far the best outcome I've ever achieved"(380-381). Quentin tries to get the watch. Jane smashes it against the wall, and utters perhaps a bit of temporary wisdom in this restless, broken-hearted book: "It's time to live with what we have and mourn what we lost"(381).

The book turns even more mystical at this point with the arrival of the Questing Beast. Quentin pursues this mythic stag, and, after an epic pursuit, earns three wishes by wounding the beast with an arrow. He wishes for Alice but is denied; magic can only operate on what is in the world. Down to one wish, in direct contradiction to all his youthful yearning, he wishes to return home. Once home, he swears off magic for a long period, convinced that the urge to and use of magic is corrupting and dehumanizing. However, he can't live in a world without it, and at the end of the novel, he literally flies off when his Brakebill friends appear outside the glass of his office high-up in a skyscraper.

Fantasy novels assume their readers find the world mundane and boring and yearn for a better, more colorful world, one more complex in terms of its creatures but simpler in terms of its goods and evils. Quentin is typical in this regard. When he discovers Brakebills (after being secretly recruited) and is told "magic is real," he has a hard time believing it at first, "he checked himself. He'd spent too long being disappointed by the world-he'd spent so many years pining for something like this, some proof that the real world wasn't the only world, and coping with the overwhelming evidence that it in fact was"(37).

Yet, if magic can change the world, it can't change the heart. In fact, Grossman suggests magic is more likely to corrupt it than anything else. At the heart of the urge to magic lies a desire for power and control. Can one assume a virtually limitless power and yet restrain one's self and use it for altruistic purpose? At some level, there's a therapeutic value to limits but can one impose one by agreement, by choice. Although I'm sure Grossman and Quentin would scoff, The Magicians asks if it is possible to live without immutable boundaries or Gods. And, if we realize/know they don't exist, is it possible to replace them, via some imaginative and communal way, with an equally potent check on human desire. For, it seems we need our Gods, to lend us purpose and desire.

"Read My Heart: A Love Story in England's Age of Revolution" by Jane Dunn

The much-admired, 17th Century, English literary letter-writer Dorothy Osborne asked her lover and husband-to-be, the diplomat William Temple, "Can there be a more romance story than ours?"(3) Nearly three and a half centuries after, Jane Dunn answers with "Read My Heart," a moving account of their marriage of true minds. While others have chronicled their lives individually, Dunn sets out to write a dual biography with a focus on their relationship. She claims theirs "one of the greatest love stories of the seventeenth century, with timeless elements that all of us....recognise and share"(3).

Befitting a romance, William and Dorothy's love happened against the odds, pursued against their parents' wishes in a period of revolution, war and political turmoil. Dunn argues that it would not likely have occurred without the social disruptions brought by the Civil Wars. While the English Civil Wars divided families and wrecked fortunes (making restorative marriages into dire necesssity), they also provided new opportunities and experiences, especially for women like Dorothy Osborne. In a time of peace, a woman of Dorothy Osborne's background would have been all but sentenced to a secluded life governed by a code of "silence, obedience and humility"(128). The war literally and figuratively "displaced"(9) Dorothy to her eventual benefit.

She was the youngest daughter of Sir Peter Osborne, a wealthy member of the gentry and Charles I's Remembrancer of the Treasury. Osborne's fortunes took a hit during the war thanks to his steadfast Royalist loyalties, shrinking from an income of 4,000 pounds (1/2 a million dollars) to 400 pounds a year. The family also lost two sons and was driven into exile in France for a brief period. Lightly supervised by an immature older brother, Dorothy was traveling to join her father in France in 1648.

William Temple's doting sister, Martha, notes that the year they met, 1648, "'[was] a time so dismal to England, that none but those who were the occasion of those disorders in their country, could have bee sorry to leave it'"(14). William was leaving to go on the proverbial Grand Tour when he encountered Dorothy and her brother on the Isle of Wight. He was smitten, delaying his tour for a month to be near her, and only starting out again when his irate father ordered him to do so. Before leaving each other, Dorothy and William had pledged their love to each other.

As with all romance stories, their families opposed their choice. Surprisingly, politics didn't seem to play a role in their families' opposition. While Dorothy's family were die-hard Royalists, for many individuals, like William's father John, sides seemed less than hard and fast. John Temple served Charles I as Master of the Rolls in Ireland till he was imprisoned for opposing Charles plans to settle with Irish rebels so as to concentrate on opponents at home. The King eventually forgave him but with time Temple gradually moved to the Parliamentarian side. He survived the overthrow of Charles and Oliver Cromwell eventually gave him back his old job in Ireland as Master of the Rolls, a Secretary of State position and assistant to the lord chancellor.

Money was the issue. From their parents' perspective, both William and Dorothy needed to marry someone wealthier to shore up or increase their families' fortune. Dorothy and William gently defied their parents wishes. Dunn summarizes: "In order for their love to defy the world and finally triumph, they endured years of subterfuge, secret communication, reliance on go-betweens, stand-up arguments against familial authority, subtle evasions and downright refusals of alternative suitors"(87).

Neither William or Dorothy were flaming rebels by any means. They were both raised at a time when parent's exercised a god-like authority over their children. Dunn speculates "Dorothy felt trapped by the expectations of her family and society, and yet she did not actively wish to break the accepted filial contract"(108). In fact, Dorothy did not necessarily approve of love matches made without consideration of fortunes. Writing William her opinion of such matches, she warns, "'the whole world (without any reserve) shall pronounce they did it merely to satisfy their giddy humour...In earnest I believe it would be an injury to you'"(105). However, ultimately, both justified pursuing their love against the wishes of their families because they felt their love was "extraordinary and outside the usual bounds of experience"(106).

They maintained their bonds via letter. Dorothy's letters are candid, flirtatious, elegant yet conversational. By these letters, she aimed to remain very much present to William. While aspects of them have a manipulative aspect, as when she details the suitors her family brings her way. Ultimately they aim to charm and entertain by their perceptions and vignettes, their grace, humor and wit. They did the trick. Dorothy reported that William told her "'that I write better then [sic] the most extraordinary person in the kingdom'"(127).

Dorothy was under a close watch while clandestinely pursuing William; most particularly from her older brother, Henry, a closeted (so Dunn suggests), jealous brother who was particularly opposed to William. As a consequence, sh may have been compelled to destroy William's letters to her. Admiring their eloquence and literary dazzle, The British Library owns them today thanks to William's doting younger sister Martha, who admired their eloquence and literary dazzle. She managed to preserve 57 of Dorothy's charming letters to William. This correspondence has gained notable new admirers since, ranging from Thomas Macaulay to Virginia Woolf.

Dorothy's letters provided her not only with a means of presenting herself to William and bonding him to her, but also as an avenue to display and perfect her literary skills at a time when women were discouraged from public, literary expression. Women wrote in letters and diaries and some circulated romances and novels among friends. With few exceptions, they did not publish. Margaret Lucas was maid of honor to Charles II's sister Henrietta Maria who ended up marrying William of Cavendish and becoming Duchess of Newcastle. She was a flamboyant, larger than life character who with her husbands backing insisted on on a writing career. She published a book of poems that Dorothy asked William to get for her. While Dorothy was "obviously intrigued" by the published Cavendish, she also joined "the chorus of disparagement and rejection" which responded. Dorothy believed that "the author of these poems was obviously mad and her friends should have prevented her from making such a fool of herself"(126-127).

When Dorothy's friend Katherine Philip's poems were published in an unauthorized edition in 1664, she was mortified. In a letter to Dorothy, s he wrote, "'this has so extremely disturbed me...that I have been on a rack ever since I heard it"(198) and enlisted Dorothy's aid in establishing that she had not authorized the publication. For Philips, it was enough to write for the applause of a small circle of family and female confidants. Dunn claims that Dorothy was content with a similarly modest audience, receiving " a more intimate validation of her talents and character within the circle of the friends and family who received [her letters] and valued them"(198).

With the exception of one, William's letters to Dorothy are lost. In addition to these now lost letters, William endeared himself to Dorothy by sending her his re-workings of French Romances. In his re-tellings, William managed to communicate his feelings for her. Indeed, the indirection involved may have provided him a particularly secure forum in which he could most honestly express his true feelings.

Dorothy's letters are beautiful, but she fades a bit in this dual biography after she and William marry and the letters between them stop. William had a noteworthy career as a diplomat and public intellectual of sorts. He was involved in forging alliances and treaties and served as a friend and mentor to William of Orange, the future king of England. He advised kings and spoke his mind publicly; he wrote a number of books, an admiring portrait of the Netherlands and the Dutch, a collections of essays on various topics, a memoir. No less a figure than Jonathon Swift served as his secretary in his later years when he assembled his papers.

Dorothy's had a much less public life which Dunn goes to great lengths to recapture. William apparently relied upon her advice as well as her companionship and the Dutch even suspected that she had a hand in shaping the prose of his public correspondence. When William made inquiries into the personality of Mary Stuart, his future wife, it was Dorothy who went back to England to vet her and prepare a report. It was Dorothy who did the heavy lifting of collecting what the Crown owed William for his services overseas. Apparently, ambassadors often picked up the expenses of their embassies initially and then sought repayment after the fact with varying success. Dunn argues that "Dorothy's curiosity, rational intellect and acuity about human nature would have been of the greatest help to her more credulous and romantic husband"(263).

Dorothy wished for a marriage of equals and Dunn attempts to treat the two as equals with varying success. In perhaps too eager a leveling, Dunn goes to great lengths to emphasize the literary quality of Dorothy's letters while making less mention of William's considerable skills in this area. Yet Swift, who served as William's secretary in later years, eulogized his former employer as "'universally esteemed the most accomplished writer of his time'"(367).

While Dorothy is indeed the more famous literary figure, I was again and again struck by particular instances of William's writing. As a young man, he wrote:

"my thoughts....take such airy paths and are so light themselves....this I speak of is a crowd of restless capering antique fancies, bounding hear[sic] and there, fixing no where, building in one half hour castes in Ireland, monasteries in France, palaces in Virginia, dancing at a wedding, weeping at a burial, enthroned like a King, inragged like a beggar, a lover, a friend, an indifferent person and sometimes things of as little relation one to another as the great Turk and a red herring, to say the truth it's at least a painless posture of mind if not something more, and why not?'"(120).

William seemed ahead of his time, libertarian and almost cosmopolitan. His moderate and public spirited bent comes out most clearly in his praise of the Dutch. He admired them for

"'the beauty and strength of their towns, the commodiousness of travelling in their country by their canals, bridges, and cawseys; the pleasantness of their walks, and their grafts [streets on either side of the canal] in and near all their cities: and, in short, the beauty, convenience, and sometimes magnificence, of all public works, to which every man pays as willingly, and takes as much pleasure and vanity in them as those of other countries do in the same circumstances, among the possessions of their families, or private inheritance'"(265).

As extraordinarily talented and learned as he was, William was not ambitious, nor did his natural honesty particularly suit itself to the intrigue that was part and parcel of a 17th century diplomat's trade. He retired relatively early, in his early fifties, to his beloved Manor house at Moor Park in Surrey, and surrounded himself by his family. Yet, this wasn't a retirement. Temple believed

"'[gardening] and building being a sort of creation, that raise beautiful fabrics and figures out of nothing, that make the convenience and pleasure of all private habitations, that employ many hands, and circulate much money among the poorer sort and artisans, that are a public service to one's country, by the example as well as effect, which adorn the scene, improve the earth, and even the air itself to some degree'"(337).

"Manhunt:The 12-Day Chase for Lincoln's Killer" by James L. Swanson

This is a detailed and surprisingly suspenseful account of John Wilkes Booth's assassination of Lincoln, his twelve-day flight, and the Federal government's pursuit of him. Like many, I'd encountered the basic outline of this story before, much in Swanson's account surprised me. What shocked me was how lacking the security around Lincoln was considering the vehemence of feelings at the time. Petitioners could visit the President without going through any kind of security check. This was a far from peaceful world; There were certainly of guns and armed men in the neighborhood of The White House. Swanson mentions "numerous" assassination attempts on Lincoln prior to Booth's successful one. There was also no dearth of available weapons; Booth used a single-shot pistol to assassinate Lincoln, despite the fact that in wartime Washington "thousands of guns, including small, lightweight pocket-sized revolvers, were for sale"(21).

Booth is difficult to figure. All who encountered him noted his good looks, especially his piercing eyes. He was an accomplished actor and widely recognized. He was well-off and popular with women. And yet, he was "crushed by the fall of Richmond, and by the fire that consumed much of the rebel capital" and when the South surrendered, "Booth wandered the streets in despair,"(5) seeking the quickest means to "'drive away the blues'"(5). His loving sister, Asia Booth Clarke, slanted the picture a bit but captures the mystery of the man when she elegized "'granting that he died in vain, yet he gave his all on earth, youth, beauty, manhood, a great human love, the certainty of excellence in his profession, a powerful brain, the strength of an athelte, health and great wealth, for his cause'"(368-369).

Swanson doesn't deviate from the tight focus of his book to detail the reasons why Booth was so strongly attached to the Southern cause. He simply relates the effects of that attachment. Booth had organized a failed attempt to kidnap the president in the fall of 1864 which was a failure. On the morning of April fifteenth, hungover, he heard the news that the president was going to attend a play at Ford's Theater that night. He decided then and there to not only assassinate the president at the theater, but quickly organized his accomplices and set them on missions to simultaneously assassinate Secretary of State William Seward and Vice President Andrew Johnson.

Swanson provides accounts of all three assassination attempts. The central one, Booth's, succeeded in part thanks in part to the usual dumb luck. It was concocted on the spur of the moment. Booth only heard of Lincoln's visit the morning of and put the event in works over the course of an afternoon. It succeeded despite the fact that Booth was poorly armed. For reasons unexplained, Booth insisted on using an unreliable single-shot pistol rather than a revolver. Half-prepared, he had a hard time finding someone to watch his horse outside the back door of Ford's while he went inside to do the deed. Also, and it's hard to know how anyone knows this, but apparently, just as Booth fired, Lincoln "jerked his head away from Booth"(43). But, not far enough away.

The Seward assassination was a desperate and ugly bungled job undertaken by the 21-year old "loyal, obedient, and hard-fighting" confederate veteran Lewis Powell. Gaining entry surreptitiously as a pharmacy delivery boy, once inside Seward's home, Powell ended up wildly flailing about with a knife as he engaged Seward's army nurse, Seward's two sons, and Seward himself in a vicious, hand-to-hand combat.

Booth threatened to expose the third assassin, a carriage painter named George Atzerodt, when he initially expressed an unwillingness to participate by assassinating Johnson. The coerced Atzerodt never did finished his assigned task, backing off at the last minute. Most likely, he could have easily assassinated Johnson, who occupied a room directly above Atzerodt's at the

Late in the book, Swanson notes the tendency in later times to romanticize Booth: "...his image morphed from evil murderer of a president into fascinating antihero- the brooding, misguided, romantic, and tragic assassin." Observing the use of Booth's image in banners around present day Ford's theater, he rightly observes "the display of Lee Harvey Oswald banners in Dallas, or James Earl Ray banners in Memphis, would be obscene"(383).

Is this romanticizing, this de-fanging, simply a matter or time? Or do writers like Swanson play a part by continuing to paint him as a tragic, romantic anti-hero? Describing Booth's escape from Washington, Swanson goes for Biblical rhetoric: "Like Lot's wife, who paused, turned, and dared look upon the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, Booth could see the sleeping city from which he fled, and he knew it would awaken soon and hear of the destruction he had wrought. He had done it. And he had escaped"(68).

None of this proves true. Booth did receive some of the fame he sought. Years afterward, all sorts of "Booth is alive and living in..." stories emerged, such "survival myths...evok[ing] the traditional fate of the damned, of a cursed spirit who can find no rest"(385). Also, Booth wrought considerable destruction. However, he failed to reverse the verdict of the war as he most likely hoped: the war was over and Lincoln's assassination failed to reignite it. Indeed, Lincoln's assassination served to make Lincoln a folk-hero, cementing his image as Father Abraham, deliverer of the nation. And, ultimately Booth did not escape.

It did take 12 days to capture him. The twists and turns of the hunt as rendered by Swanson's telling provide suspense, but this isn't a pursuit and capture that reflects particularly well on the strength, bravery and ingenuity of either the hunter or the hunted. A good portion of Booth's days on "the run" were spent starving, in pain, and holed up in a pine woods. With the aid of the Confederate agent who had arranged the pine woods hidey-hole, Booth eventually secured a boat to take him across the Potomac to Virginia and what he hoped would be a sympathetic and sheltering South. Unfortunately, he and his side-kick, the sycophantic, immature David Herold, got lost on the river and ended up pretty much where they started back in Maryland, albeit a little further North. For reasons unknown, at this point, they stayed an extra day in yet another hiding spot in a swampy woods. Ultimately, they ended up again staying one day too long at their final stop, the Garrett farm house in Virginia. On April 25th, a cavalry patrol surrounded the barn in which the Garret's had locked Booth and Herold after they tricked them into entering.

Swanson's portrays Booth as an actor who was always on stage and casts Booth's assassination as a self-concious performance by which Booth hoped to cement his reputation as a hero for the ages. Swanson argues, "Booth had not only committed murder, he had performed it, fully staged before a packed house...[he] broke the fourth wall between artist and audience by creating a new, dark art-performance assassination"(327). However, at times he comes across as a bit of a diva. While in the piney woods, he insists on getting the papers to read his reviews. When a confederate sympathizer turns him away from his door with just a parcel of food, Booth is incensed by what he views a a breach of hospitality. With time pressing, Booth takes a moment to pen the sympathizer a nasty letter calling him on "the ultimate sin in genteel Virginia society-inhospitality"(268). He not only writes a note, he writes it twice, not satisfied with his first version.

How Booth hoped to escape capture remains a mystery. Booth was a public figure, a member of the well-known Booth theatrical family. According to Swanson, "handsome and charismatic, [Booth] was instantly recognizable to thousands of fans in both the North and the South"(10). Although outside the purview of a book like this, celebrity and public exposure in the early days of photography, prior to the advent of film, warrants a book. Of course, his pursuers were not all Sherlock Holmes. The cavalry troop that eventually captured him only launched their investigation into Virginia on the strenght of an incorrect tip. Once they had Booth and Herold cornered in Garret's tobacco barn, they dithered and negotiated for almost half-a-day rather than take the initiative.

Swanson delivers his tale in melodramatic prose that echoes the style of the 19th century's penny presses. He's fond of perils-of-Pauline reverses and surprises and, at crucial moments in his story, he slows and nearly stops time for dramatic effects. Swanson sometimes lays it on thick: of Lincoln's deathbed, he writes "Death hovered near, impatient to claim the president and escort him on the voyage to that dark and distant shore that had beckoned Lincoln so often in his dreams"(77).

For all his attempts to capture the melodramatic prose style of the period, his quoting from actual period prose make his pale in comparison. Thomas T. Jones was a confederate agent who aided Booth and his side-kick David Herold. For five days, he offered them sustenance while they hid out in a pine grove near his home. He provided them with the boat by which they crossed the Potomac. At one point, while hiding Booth, he became aware of a $100,000 reward for Booth's capture, but, despite the fact that he was not financially well off, he didn't turn in Booth. He rationalizes:

Had I, for MONEY, betrayed the man whose hand I had taken, whose confidence I had won, and to whom I promised succor, I would have been, of all traitors, the most abject and despicable. Money won by such vile means would have been accursed and the pale face of the man whose life I had sold, whold have haunted me to my grave. True, the hopes of the Confederacy WERE like autumn leaves when the blast has swept by. True, the little I had accumulated through twenty years of unremitting toil WAS irrevocably lost. But, thank God, there was something I still possessed-something I could still call my own, and its name was Honor." (210)

Or, Asia Booth's description of a night in the woods with her brother: "It was a cold, dark night...with large fiery stars set far up in the black clouds. A perfect starry floor was the heaven that night, and the smell of the earth-which may be the odor of good men's bones rotting, it is so pleasurable and sanctifying-the aroma of pines, and the rapturous snese of a solemn silence, made us feel happy enough to sing 'Te Deum Laudamus'"(188). Whew!

Sometimes, his point-of-view gets kind of confusing. For instance, Swanson lauds Jones as "a man of true Southern feeling who could not be bought"(210). A confederate soldier, William Jett, informed on Booth after briefly abetting his escape. Swanson describes him repeatedly as "a Judas"(312). At times, he comes across as rooting for Booth. Booth was eventually arrested at Garret's farm on where he seemed to dawdle, enjoying socializing, speaking about Lincoln's assassin in the third person. Swanson loses his distance at one point and erupts "Booth shouldn't be there at all. The manhunters could appear at any moment without warning. He should leave at once; he dare not remain there any longer than one more night"(295). This might not be intended as a work of scholarship, but still, a little more distance seems fitting?

Although I'm not a Lincoln buff and have little interest in true-crime, I read this fast and to the end. In his acknowledgements, Swanson thanks his sister whose "animated spirit and taste for bizarre historical tales encouraged me from the start"(396). Swanson has a good eye for the bizarre and strange and Booth's tale is full of these elements. Whenever my interest started to fail, Swanson would produce a fact or incident that caught my attention. Such as, the man who actually ended up shooting Booth, cavalryman Boston Corbett, was a religious fanatic who castrated himself to avoid sin. Such as, assassin Lewis Powell's head was somehow separated from his body and given a ceremonial burial by sympathizers back in the nineties. Not the 1890's but the 1990's. I checked that again. It's true! Swanson finishes this story: "so Seward's violent assassin rests, if not in peace, then in pieces"(380). This is truly a fun but strange book.

Annette Gordon-Reed: "The Hemingses of Monticello"

History involves a good deal of detective and guess work, particularly when reconstructing the history of people with limited access to power and literacy. In The Hemings of Monticello, Annette Gordon-Reed "seek[s] to know" the enslaved Hemings family of Virginia.

What we know thanks to history heretofore. We know that the Hemings were enslaved. Or perhaps more accurately, the Hemings family members covered by this book were born and most died as slaves: legally speaking (at least according to the perverse legal structure of the antebellum South), the Hemings were the property of Thomas Jefferson. He inherited them from his wife's family. Also, thanks to history, most of us know with a great deal of certainty that Jefferson and Hemings had a long term and intimate relationship leading to the birth of seven children, four of whom lived to adulthood.

Gordon-Reed's book is ambitious. It seeks to know more. Gordon-Reed gives Sally and Thomas's relationship and story it's rightful due, but also wants to see that story within the story of the families that surround these individuals. She "seeks to know" Heming's family in all its particularity and breadth. And, although it occupies a distinctly secondary position in her story, Gordon-Reed also places Sally and Jefferson by offering insight into Jefferson's relationship with his far more documented and written about family. Most daringly, she seeks to guess at the psychologies of slavery, owners and enslaved. What could it possibly feel like to live in a family where certain members were known but not acknowledged as family. How did one justify owning, selling, and controlling a slave who was also your half-sister, your son?

Gordon-Reed's chronicle of the Hemings begins with Sally's mother Elizabeth Hemings, who was born enslaved on the holdings of the wealthy and socially prominent Virgina planter Francis Eppes IV in "abt 1735"(50). Elizabeth was a mulatto according to a contemporary witness(47)and the memoir of her grandson Madison Hemings(49). She had twelve, possibly fourteen, children altogether, six with Wayles. As with the precise number of Elizabeth's children, many facts surrounding the lives of enslaved people remain murky and hard to get at other than by inference and indirect conjecture.

Elizabeth Heming's family was not a "typical" enslaved family by any means. They were inter-racial. This doesn't make them super-unusual. In the 18th and 19th century South, miscegenation was a fact of life, a winked-at, looked-away-from byproduct of the slave system under-girding the economy. The Hemings's true distinction was their two-fold biological connections to a famous and powerful man, Thomas Jefferson. They were connected first via Jefferson's father-in-law, John Wayles, who was father to Sally Hemings and several of her siblings. Jefferson inherited the Hemings from his father-in-law, who was literally a rag-to-riches story. At an even more intimate level, the Hemings were connected to Jefferson via his children with Sally Hemings.

Long before he took up with Sally, Jefferson, like his father-in-law before him, subtly and unintentionally indicated the connection in a number of ways. The Hemings routinely received special treatment. Sally, her mother, and many of her siblings, nieces and nephews were given unusual amounts of freedom. Jefferson excepted the Hemings women from field work. Many of the Hemings men received training in marketable crafts and skills. The often times emotionally vulnerable Jefferson definitely wanted the family to love him and see him as kind.

Jefferson early on took a special interest in the training of Elizabeth's sons and grandsons. Evidence exists that James and Robert were literate, although it is not clear that Jefferson was directly responsible for this. Jefferson arranged for many of her sons and grandsons to pursue trades, albeit often within the orbit of his holdings. The eldest, Martin, served for many years as Jefferson's chief butler at Monticello. Elizabeth's two oldest sons by Wayles, James and Robert, were groomed from an early age to be his carriage driver and manservant. Her youngest son, John was apprenticed to several white carpenters at Monticello; Jefferson placed an especially high value on trades that "made" things like carpentry. Grandson Burwell Colbert was trained as a manservant and his cousin Wormley served as the gardener at Monticello. Eventually, he apprenticed his own sons by Sally to their uncle John.

The book spends a great deal of time detailing the particularly close and peculiar relationships that existed between Jefferson and Robert and James Hemings. These two lived very close to him from a young age and all established affectionate if limited and peculiar bonds with him. Later, when Jefferson served as U.S. Minister to France, James accompanied him and was trained at some expense as a French chef in the hopes that he would eventually serve as such at Monticello. When he was not making use of their services, Jefferson gave both men a large measure of freedom, allowing them to work for themselves and keep their wages. Both could move about with considerable freedom for their time and legal status.

As to the Hemings women, Gordon-Reed offers a lot less in the way of detail. Whenever he left Monticello (and he left for long periods), he would lease out many of his slaves or give directions as to how they were to be employed while he was away. He never left many such explicit directions for the Hemings women. Apparently, they were left to themselves pretty much during these down times (237).

In 1787, at the age of fourteen, Sally accompanied Jefferson's youngest daughter, Polly, to Paris. Jefferson had originally left Polly and his youngest daughter Lucy with their Aunt when he took up a temporary mission to France. Lucy died while he was in France. When his return was postponed by his being appointed Ambassador to France, he sent for his daughter. Originally, Jefferson had requested that an older woman accompany Polly. With nobody fitting that bill available, Jefferson's in-laws sent Polly over with Sally. Landing in London for a way-stop stay, their host, Abigail Adams suggested that Jefferson send Hemings back now that Polly was ashore. For whatever reason, Jefferson did not act on her suggestion.

Polly and her older sister, Martha (Patsy), attended a convent school in France. James was busy learning to chef. That left Sally apparently by herself with little to do. Hemings is convinced that the relationship between Hemings and Jefferson occurred while Jefferson was serving as Ambassador. This paints Jefferson in a less than flattering light. Beyond the power inequity necessarily existing between a master and slave, the difference in their ages adds to modern eyes a second layer of inequality. In addition, Hemings was basically alone, unchaperoned and unsupervised, without recourse to any other adult who might truly protect her.

Gordon-Reed's construction of the events surrounding the relationship that ensued and Heming's possible role in it is fascinating. Of course, her construction is dependent in part on the relationship orginating in France. She traces the origins of the relationship to France based upon her contention that Hemings had her first child in 1790, shortly after she, Jefferson, and her brother James, returned from France. Apparently that child died in delivery or shortly after and their is little documentary evidence for its existence.

The bulk of Gordon-Reed's contention that Jefferson and Hemings began their affair in France in the late 1780's, rests on Jefferson and Sally's son Madison Heming's account of his life which he offered in 1873 when he was 68 years old. He claimed that "'when [Jefferson] was called back home [Sally] was enciente by him'"(326). In this same memoir, he also recalls the child died. Other than this account, there is no direct evidence that Sally and Thomas had a relationship this far back. Gordon-Reed finds testimony backing Madison's account by noting a one-sided exchange of letters between Jefferson and his daughter and her aunt as to Martha's need for a maid. Gordon-Reed believes that Sally would quite naturally been Martha's lady's maid, and without any exchange of letters, but for the fact that she was pregnant at the time and Jefferson intended her as his own afterward. The creative manner in which she reads and assemble evidence in this instance is characterstic and one is left both admiring the skill of her arguments while the depth of her conviction in her conclusions.

I also admire and applaud her willingness to take on questions that many would avoid as impossible to answer. Gordon-Reed wonders whether the Jefferson-Hemings affair may have begun in violence or coercion? Perhaps more provocatively, given the inherently coercive nature of all master-slave relationships, she asks if the two harbored some kind of genuine love, affection and passion for each other. She presents evidence in the affirmative on this latter question while humbly admitting we will never ultimately know. Gordon-Reed is intent on walking a tight-rope of sorts. In limning the possible affective dimensions of their affair, she never discounts the brutal and coercive aspects of even the best possible master-slave relationship; for Gordon-Reed, slavery always involved a simmering battle. Yet, she insists if we don't allow for exceptions and anamolies within that war, if we insist that all slaves acted and reacted to a uniform manner to a uniform condition, we are distorting history and denying the marginal figures in history, like slaves, an essential element of their humanity.

The crux of Sally Hemings story occurs in the late summer of 1789 when ambassador Jefferson begins to make plans to return to America. At this time in France, Sally and her brother James could have sued the French Admiralty court for their freedom and likely won it. Plenty of evidence suggests the two Hemings siblings would have been aware of this. Madison Jefferson's 1873 account of his mother's life indicates that Sally approached Jefferson seeking her freedom and that the two came to a "bargain" or treaty. According to her son Madison's much later account, his mother Sally Hemings "'promised...extraordinary privileges'"(326) secured the eventual freedom of her children if she agreed to return to Jefferson. Although the timing of the bargaining in relation to Jefferson's plans for leaving France are unclear, Sally may have been bargaining with him while cognizant that she was pregnant.

Gordon-Reed reads deeply into Madison's account of his mother's treaty-making with her master. In it, she sees a woman who must have had good reason to trust a man. She sees a man who must have loved a woman; Jefferson apparently bargained with her hoping she would return with him. By Gordon-Reed's lights, if he didn't care, he could have just as easily left her behind. More intriguingly, Gordon-Reed's construction presents a woman who truly loved the man she bargained with; Sally returning with Jefferson basically brought her back to a world of second-hand citizenship and insecurity. At any time prior to her actually attaining her children's freedom, Jefferson could have died suddenly and thrown Sally and her children's fate into the far less friendly hands of his daughter Martha.

In framing Sally's decision to return, Gordon-Reed acknowledges again the difficulty of interpreting a relationship between a man and a woman who also happen to be master and slave. With great eloquence, Gordon-Reed writes, "[Sally Hemings] is ineligible for the mantles of respectable womanhood, conqueror, or rebel, there is no ready vocabulary to describe the young Hemings in Paris who decided to return to America with Jefferson beyond that of presumptive rape victim-so traumatized beyond the power of reason that she did not know better than to negotiate with and trust her rapist-or collaborating whore"(331).

Rectifying this lack, Sally Hemings is reinscribed with this book as a woman who pursued an avenue of resistance by forwarding her interests as a mother. And not only reinscribed as such. Gordon-Reed still insists on Sally as the lover; acknowledging that "the idea of their love has no power to change the basic reality of slavery's essential inhumanity"(365), Gordon-Reed rightfully maintains that to ignore the evidence of their love guided by an assumption of its impossiblity seems an equally dehumanizing interpretive turn.

Slavery certainly dehumanized Jefferson. Jefferson was a man who wanted people to love him and confrontation and coercion were anathema to him. As a slave-owner, he seemed continually torn between his desire to control and his desire to be loved. We really know little about the everyday, intimate give-and-take that characterized his and Sally's relationship over the years. Gordon-Reed surmises "One might say that the lack of information about her was a function of American slavery, an institution that forced most enslaved people into anonymity. Even with that there is something strange about [Sally's] near-invisibility in Jefferson family exchanges"(242). Seconding Fawn Brodies contention that the Jefferson family censored his letters to create a flattering portrait of Jefferson for posterity, she seems convinced that letters with reference to Sally were largely destroyed (243).

Sally's siblings figure more often in Jefferson's documents. One can only hope Sally was treated better than her brothers and sisters. While Jefferson treated her brothers Robert, James and Martin well in many respects, there was ultimately a great deal of strain in the relationship. He often treated him with what almost seems a calculated dose of disrespect. Jefferson let the brothers pursue their own economic agendas but on the condition that they were to come back to him as soon as he needed them. Although at least both James and Robert could read, Jefferson never sent them letters directly but instead directed all his messages to them orally, via third parties. Even after he had granted James his freedom, he attempted to summon him orally when he sought his services to fill the White House chef position. James was apparently quite offended.

The Hemings who were not Wayles (not related to Martha, Jefferson's wife) were often treated in an even more inhumane manner. Sally's half-sister Nancy and her children were given away as a wedding present to Jefferson's sister Anna and her husband Hastings Marks. When Marks decided to sell the family later, Jefferson bought Nancy back and arranged for his son-in-law to buy Nancy's daughter Critta. However, he refused to purchase or arrange a family purchase for Nancy's fifteen year old son who was sold to persons outside the family (519-520).

Sometimes, Jefferson would act humanely but express sentiments that spoke far differently. After Jefferson and Sally's half-brother Martin had a terrible falling out over something that remains a mystery to this day, Martin asked Jefferson to sell him. Jefferson readily agreed. After twenty years of service to him as a butler, Jefferson directed a son-in-law to sell James quickly, to a buyer that would be agreeable to him, regardless of price. Writing to his daughter of various matters Jefferson placed in the hands of her husband, he reminds "'There remains on his hands Martin and the Chariot'"(489), equating Martin with a chariot with a telling swoop of a phrase. What possible affective bond could survive what must have been the recurrent surfacing of such thoughts, assumptions and conceptions.

Yet, Jefferson felt some kind of tangled bond. These tangles were most involved in his relations with Sally and her children. Her two oldest children, William Beverly and Harriet, left Monticello to live as whites, never to return. With great poignancy and condemnation, Gordon-Reed deadpans, (597)"Jefferson arranged to have Harriet put on a stagecoach with fifty dollars when her time came to depart"(643). He legally freed his youngest sons, Madison and Eston. Gordon-Reed alludes to Madison's memories of a father was was "'not in the habit..;[of] partiality or fatherly affection'"(595). As Gordon-Reed wisely points out, Martha Jefferson and children had moved back to Monticello while Madison was young, effectively precluding Jefferson from fathering him or his younger brother Eston in an open and affectionate manner.

We have perhaps no better indication of Jefferson's conflicted feelings about the Hemings than the names he gave his Hemings children. Evidence clearly points to the fact that Jefferson named these children. He wanted to claim them at a certain level. Hemings claims, [the Hemings-Jefferson children] certainly knew they carried the names of people important to their father and had some thoughts on what this meant"(595).

Slavery debases and distorts its practitioners. Jefferson could not put it aside, even when it caused him and those close to him tremendous pain. And, it must have. Gordon-Reed makes this clear when she discusses the names of the Jefferson-Hemings children. She writes, "Names signify identity. Jefferson did not mind that the Hemings children bore names that signaled their identity to anyone knowledgeable about his family and associations. He evidently wanted that. Neither he nor his family, however, wanted to carry that signal of identity into posterity by indiscriminately putting the Hemings children's names into their letters"(620-621). The hurt can never be assuaged. Gordon-Reed's book begins to right the wrong.

Vince Cannato's "American Passage: The History of Ellis Island"

National myths like Ellis Island or Washington's crossing of the Delaware invite the debunking of historians. Ellis Island is an especially inviting target in that it is such a resonant symbol. UMass historian Vincent Cannato attempts to clear away the myth wrapping the famed island in his lively new history American Passage: The History of Ellis Island.

Established as an immigration checkpoint in 1892, Ellis Island was part of the federal government's effort to regulate immigration. Prior to the 1880s,immigration had been loosely policed by the states and various philanthropic agencies; for the most part, only "criminals, paupers, or those with contagious diseases"(35). According to Cannato's reading, this laissez-faire attitude came increasingly under attack in the last quarter of the nineteenth century.

Throughout the 1880s, there was a growing concern about the size, nature and effects of immigration. There were numerous investigations: two by the Treasury department, in 1887 and 1889, a Congressional investigation in the intervening year, and several newspaper exposes. As with anything much investigated, Congress passed numerous laws in response to the pressure created by findings. There was The Immigration Act of 1882 (imposing a 50 cent head tax and excluding any "'convict, lunatic, idiot or person unable to take care of himself or herself without becoming a public charge'"(43)), the Foran Act in 1885 (prohibiting immigration under contract), The Immigration Act of 1891 (making immigration a federal matter and creating a federal immigration service under the direction of the Treasury Department).

For the purposes of creating a federal immigration depot, Congress appropriated $75,000 (later, Cannato claims, Congress appropriated $250,000 and spent $360,000) in 1890 to make improvement to a five acre "scratch of land"(60) being used as a munitions depot: Ellis island. It opened on New Years Day 1892; controversy surrounds how Annie Moore became the first woman down the gangplank that day with some suggesting that she'd been chosen thanks to her healthy and wholesome appearance. It wasn't long after that the investigations and legislation resumed. Senator Chandler, head of the new Senate Immigration Committee, launched an investigation after a boat load of immigrants came ashore with Typhus. Appropriately, following on the heels of this investigation, another law was passed in 1893 setting up boards of inspection to hear the cases of suspect immigrants.

And, this was just the start of the numerous, almost continuous, Congressional and Executive Branch investigations of Ellis Island. There was a Treasury Department investigation in 1899, another in 1903, and a massive three year investigation in 1911. The latter generated a 41 volume final report, running 29,000 pages (229). When it came to immigration and the administering of Ellis Island, there was endless fine-tuning.

Cannato argues that Ellis Island and the new approach to immigration which it represented was born of the Progressive impulse to regulate the economy in the interest of the nation as a whole. He stresses that reformers and restrictionists rarely sought to outright prohibit immigration altogether but instead were motivated by a desire to rationally regulate it in the interest of public order and the common good.

While this may be technically true, just surveying the voices Cannato's gathered here incline me to suspect many critics would have been glad to outlawed if that had been politically possible. Among the critics of immigration who kept a close eye on Ellis Island, Cannato gives prominence to the Immigration Restriction League and it's patrician founder Prescott Hall. Hall believed that immigration posed "'a danger that the race which has made our country great will pass away, and that the ideals and instituions which it chas cherished will also pass'"(98). He spent his entire life railing against immigration policy and Ellis Island. The IRL was not a large group but it was a powerful one, working closely with politicians like Henry Cabot Lodge to legislate further restrictions on

Often, their effort didn't come to much. While Congress would pass laws intending to restrict immigration, those laws were dependent upon the people in charge of executing them. Depending on the political winds and their own bents, Commissioners of Ellis Island interpreted the immigration laws variously.

Occasionally, the IRL would have a friend at Ellis Island like two term commissioner William B. Williams (1903 and 1909-1913). Williams read the law strictly in the hopes of cutting down on the influx, especially the influx of certain ethnic groups (Jews, Italians and Eastern Europeans). Williams paid special attention to language in the 1891 Immigration Act advising the exclusion of those "likely" to become a public charge. He defined this as anyone who came into the country with less than $25 ($570 in 2007 dollars, see 196)and without immediate job prospects. The 1907 Immigration Law expanded exclusions to include individuals with mental and physical defects that might result in their becoming public charges. Williams used this to deport people with "'poor physiques'" and "'low vitality'"(204).

Williams enlisted physicians,scientists and recently conceived intelligence tests to aid him in finding out immigrants that were intellectually deficient. With the rise of eugenics in the 20's, the attention to immigrants with mental defects grew. Yet, ultimately, even with increased scrutiny, the number of those deemed "idiots, imbeciles and feebleminded"(258) was never significant. While the number grew from between an average of 160-190 in the years from 1908-1912 and briefly to 890 in 1914, this was a relative drop in the bucket of nearly a million people seeking to come into the country during those years.

Williams effort and determination was rarely matched by his predecessors or successors. George Howe, who succeeded Williams in 1913 exercised a decidedly lighter hand. Howe's Assistant Commissioner, Bryan Uhl, testified that under Howe the admission process became "'largely a matter of checking names'"(316). Howe was a progressive with "an idealistic temperament and a restless curiousity"(297), a reformer who believed in "'sentimentality, the dreaming of dreams'"(298). Uncomfortable with the policing aspects of his job and possessing a "tin ear for politics" Howe continually butted heads with Congress and the press over his handling of women detained for immoral conduct and radical wobblies that the government sought to deport in the late teens.

Howe grew cynical about the powers of government. Speaking of goverment workers, he tellingly complained "'the government was their government'"(305). He came to feel that his job at Ellis Island "was not just irrelevant, but unnecessary" and came to believe that there was "little need to weed out the desirable from the undesirable"(305).

Cannato provides figures that suggest Howe may have had a point. For all the money spent on it, for all the investigations and consternation it generated, Ellis Island kept out relatively few. In the year prior to the opening of Ellis Island, .2% of 472,000 immigrants were refused entry (79). In 1906, 880,000 immigrants were "processed" at Ellis Island(168). Between 1906-1908, during a high tide of immigrants, less than 1% were denied entry (168, 221). Despite the efforts of Congress and rigid Ellis Island czar Williams to make entry more difficult thereafter, the rate of exclusion would never exceed 2%.

Cannato claims "this speaks to the powerful legal, political, social, economic, and ideological consensus that allowed America to accept millions of new immigrants despite the grumbling of those made uneasy by the disruptions that this human wave brought"(221). There was certainly a dollar to be made. In addition to the $4 million dollars a year the immigrant head tax brought to Federal coffers, immigrants came with $46 million dollars in 1910 and sent back $154 million. Most astoundingly, from 1890 to 1922, GNP increased nearly %400 (229).

Theodore Roosevelt claimed "we can not have too much immigration of the right kind, and we should have none at all of the wrong kind"(103). Cannato argues that Ellis Island was part of an effort to achieve "the right kind." However, if so, it didn't often seem a success to people at the time. Ellis Island Commissioner William Williams complained in 1903 that "at least two hundred thousand of the immigrants arriving that year 'will be of no benefit to the country.' Had they all stayed home...nobody 'would have missed them,' except of course the stezamship companies that made money on their passage"(154).

Williams was a hard-line restrictionist and his harsh estimate must be read in that light. One suspects that the endless controversy occasioned by Ellis Island was inevitable given the vague and difficlt task assigned it; what is the right kind of immigration? Is it something to be regulated according to the national interest, or is it to be regulated in the interest of the people immigrating?

The latter would be considered in a humane immigration policy. It wasn't a high priority for immigration officials throughout Ellis Island's history. To the extent they took any interest, immigration officials were looking for people capable of doing "the manual labor that fueled the factories and mines of industrial America"(8) and on the lookout for people who "would not be able to take care of themselves"(8). More disturbingly, they worried that mentally and physically defective immigrants would weaken the gene pool. Yet, that being the goal, how do you test for such undesirables?

In pursuit of that goal, Congress perpetually fine-tuned the list of excludables. When immigration was a state matter, "criminals, paupers, or those with contagious diseases"(35) were excluded. In 1875, Congress added "prostitutes..and Chinese laborers" to the list. In 1882, an immigration law passed barring any "'convict, lunatic, idiot, or person unable to take care of himself or herself without becoming a public charge'"(43). And, it is worth mentioning, in 1882, The Chinese Exclusion Act prohibited all Chinese from entering, the only outright racial exclusion in the nation's immigration history. In 1885, contract laborers were banned, with the exception of skilled workers, artists, actors, singers and domestic servants"(43). The exclusions from the 1882 law were repeated and modified slightly but importantly with The Immigration Act of 1891. It forbid the entry of "'idiots, insane persons, paupers or persons likely to become public charges, persons suffering from a loathsome or a dangerous disease, persons who have been convicted of a felony or other infamous crime or misdemeanor involving moral turpitude, polygamists"(52). Anarchists were added in 1903 as a result of McKinley's death at the hand of one.

Restrictionists placed most hope in implementing a requirement that immigrants be literate in their native language. After numerous failed attempts to pass such a requirement, Congress eventually did so over Wilson's veto in 1916. According to Survey, ("the nation's leading periodical for social workers"(251)), "122,735 immigrants would have been excluded if the law had been in effect in 1911" (231). Yet, restrictionist hopes were not answered by the literacy test; in the first five year of the test, a little over 6,000 were stopped from entering.

All these efforts to restrict immigration seemed to achieve little; deportation was relatively rare, on average less than 2% of arriving immigrants. Cannato presents Ellis Island as a successful attempt to rationally regulate immigration. However, the restrictions implemented in the first 30 years of Ellis Island did not have much effect. One could argue that the regulation served as window dressing; the political/legislative process allowed regulation but only so much. Prior to 1922, laws restricting immigration seem to placate immigration opponents while keeping the gates pretty much open. Frightened by the war and a red scare, Congress would eventually get serious about restricting immigration in the early 20's by implementing relatively harsh quotas and moving the inspection process overseas to consulates. The blunt force that the quotas represented were successful, more than halving the high rates during immigration's heyday in the early decades of the early twentieth century.

Cannato claims that he wished to avoid creating a "usable past"(417) with his book: "if history teaches anything, it is that the past was filled with imperfect people who made imperfect decision in dealin with an imperfect world"(417). Yet, Cannato does seem fixated on Ellis Island as an institution that was part of a rational policy, even when his evidence doesn't entirely support it. A lot of expense and effort was thrown at restricting entry to a relatively small number of folks.

On a minor note, Cannato's account suffers by failing to present a picture of the facilities at Ellis island; how was it designed and how did that design reflect the mission of the institution? Early on, he compares and contrasts Ellis Island with it's predecessor from 1855-1890, Castle Rock, an old musical hall that sat on "a rocky outcropping"(31)off the battery. Yet, in doing so, he never compares the sites as places: how many buildings, beds, offices were at each site? How did this reflect the intentions and activities of the people who built and operated the two sites?