Spirit of Generosity

"The purpose of a book review is to show that you are smarter than the person who wrote the book."

- an unnamed professor of my acquaintance

This week, I have been unable to avoid the subject of book reviews: my writing workshop is spending the week on Criticism and another of my professors spent part of our fortnightly meeting informing us of his philosophy regarding reviews (noted above).

I enjoy a good mauling as much as the next person, but I was somewhat horrified to hear my professor tell us that he not only saw it as his duty to rip apart books sent to him for review, but that he saves up one-liners to deploy against hapless victims whose books are not even written yet. What good does that do? I suppose his reviews are fun to read (certainly moreso than his other prose), but why not deliver criticism in a spirit of generosity? No book is perfect and most are far from it, but I quake at the prospect of sending a well-researched, painstakingly-written manuscript out into the world knowing that there are reviewers who will delight in its faults.

On the other hand, I don't like timidity in reviewers. My peers in my writing workshop are a bit too wishy-washy so far (except A, bless her opinionated little heart). When I spend ten hours writing and revising a thousand-word essay, I want them to spend at least 20 minutes marking it up and commenting. Last week, I handed back manuscripts covered in comments, suggestions, and edits, but received mostly blank copies of my own work. If they don't put a little more effort in this week, I won't bother taking so many pains in writing for them.

Perhaps I'm just hard to please. I want tough criticism of my work, but not for toughness' own sake. I try to give what hope to receive — thorough, fair comments based on the quality of the ideas and the writing, expressed respectfully, and offered in the spirit of colleagial cooperation. Too naive?

Stones and Bones of New England

Today, I read Lisa Rogak's Stones and Bones of New England: A Guide to Unusual, Historic, and Otherwise Notable Cemeteries. In this skimpy volume, Rogak profiles several notable cemeteries in each of the six New England states, offering directions, brief descriptions, and amusing anecdotes.  Each chapter is frustratingly short and offers very little historical information.

I will read (and recommend) pretty much any book about graveyards. Still, I found this book disappointing. The author's focus is much more on curiosities than on really investigating the burying places or their histories. If that's what you're looking for, you might enjoy this book, but it wasn't for me.

Even worse, there are very few pictures. For example, there are 15 cemeteries in the Rhode Island section, but only five (small, not very compelling) photographs. At times, the only gravestone pictured is not the one that is most discussed in the chapter.

If you buy this book, be prepared for breathless descriptions like this one (for the "Spider Gates" Cemetery in Leicester, MA):

Spider Gates Cemetery is notorious for being among the most haunted cemeteries in Massachusetts . . . If you do decide to visit Spider Gates, you should know what others have reported from previous visits: peculiar noises and screams out of nowhere in the middle of the day, cold spots — a phenomenon frequently associated with a ghost passing by — and unexplained smoky, cloudlike images seen in photographs taken at the site.

So, if you're into that sort of stuff, this is the book for you. I'm not, so I found it moderately irritating.

This review is turning into more of a pan than I had originally intended. There are certainly some gems in this book. For example, I had never heard of the Ben & Jerry's Flavor Graveyard before, so I enjoyed that chapter. A few of the quoted epitaphs are genuinely interesting and I'm looking forward to tracking them down on my own. Like Ms. Rogak, I am a taphophile, and criticizing her book makes me feel like a traitor. It isn't that it was worthless — it just wasn't what I was looking for.

The Bloody Shirt

I'm currently listening to the unabridged audio version of Stephen Budiansky's The Bloody Shirt: Terror After Appomattox. I'm ambivalent about it. The prologue had me all psyched up for a ripping expose of reconstruction-era violence, but the rest of the book is falling a bit flat for me.

Most of this book is made up of primary sources (letters, newspaper accounts, journals, etc.). After the prologue, Budiansky steps back, offering very little analysis of his sources. What authorial presence exists takes the form of omniscient narration. The sources are quoted at great length, often in their entirety, and are left to speak for themselves.

I found this style to be more than a little annoying. Budianskyhas found some amazingly revealing documents, but he does not provide much context, leaving the reader wondering whether these anecdotes are universal or local. In addition, Budiansky treats the Northerners who produced much of this material (Adelbert Ames, Albert Morgan, John Dennett, Lewis Merrill, etc.) as neutral observers, rather than as men who were constructing their own narratives. He basically treats them as unbiased reporters of fact, which doesn't do much to help his argument.

But what an argument it is. No one could possibly read the virulent, aggressive, racist words written and spoken by white Southerners and maintain that these were men of honor and character. The documents that Budiansky has assembled are shocking in their brazen contempt for the equality of all citizens, their horror at the idea of freedmen voting, and their hatred for due process in all its forms. These are not hints and subtle, coded messages. The shameless vitriol of the Southern newspaper writers will shock even those readers who were already acquainted with the rhetoric of the period. Budiansky ably demolishes the idea that the KKK and its allies were marginal or honorable by reproducing their indignant arguments against the stirring guarantees of the Declaration of Independence.

One criticism I expect to hear from the few neo-confederates who bother to read this book is that it paints Northerners in an all-to-heroic light. Budiansky is not attempting to take on the issue of racism or anti-equality movements in the North, but that does not mean that the North was a utopia of progressive racial harmony. Since the Northerners in this book are generally abolitionists, progressive reformers, and liberal Republicans who voluntarily traveled to the South in order to guide the process of Reconstruction, they do come out of this looking pretty good. Budiansky acknowledges that there was corruption and incompetence among the military and civilian authorities during Reconstruction, but his main Northern characters call to mind innocent, idealistic college students of the 1960s. I don't think there's anything wrong with making African-American elected officials, white Republicans (including some Southerners, such as James Longstreet), and ordinary freedmen/women the heroes of this story — in fact, I think that that is an angle that is too often undersold. Still, Budiansky's choices may make him vulnerable to attacks by those who choose to ignore his core evidence.

As much as I applaud the aim of this book, there are several things that grated on me. First, even though "colored" and "negro" were considered respectful terms in the 1870s, that doesn't mean that it is appropriate for historians to use them without quotation marks. Second, Budiansky never met a dramatic rhetorical flourish he didn't like. Third, see above complaint about his not being critical of the sources he presents. Fourth, the chapter breaks often seem random. Fifth (audiobook specific complaint), the narrator does voices for all of the different authors, and some of them make me a little uncomfortable because they sound like something out of Song of the South. I think that this is an important piece of work, but I think it might have been better in documentary movie form than in book form.

I disagree with William Grimes of the New York Times, who thinks that the myth of the oppressed South "surely expired a generation ago." It's probably true that academics no longer ascribe to a narrative of Yankee tyranny, but this book is not written for academics. The old idea that white Southerners were a noble people who were outrageously abused and harassed during reconstruction still thrives in the public imagination, and the value of Budiansky's work lies in its relentless presentation of an alternative narrative in which freedmen and their Republican allies are the true heroes of Reconstruction.

This Republic of Suffering

Today, I finished Drew Gilpin Faust's This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (2007). I won't say I finished "reading" it because, technically, I listened to the audiobook, but that shouldn't matter. I like having nice, long audiobooks on my iPod as I walk around Cambridge — in the past few months, I've listened to The Killer Angels, Al Gore's The Assault on Reason, Simon Schama's A History of Britain, The Red Tent, The Ghost Map, Fred Anderson's The War that Made America, Uncle Tom's Cabin, and my weekly "This American Life" podcasts.

Many others have reviewed this book in recent months, and I won't rehash what they have said. I'll just say that I enjoyed this book well enough, though it wasn't life changing. I'm glad to see that a good book about 19th-century cultural history is so popular, even if that probably has more to do with Faust's position than her research skills and lucid writing.

I was also glad that the argument was Am-Civ friendly, by which I mean Faust used a lot of popular culture sources, particularly songs, rather than relying entirely on letters, speeches, and other staples of straight-up history. Professional historians are becoming more and more friendly to a wide range of sources all the time (though many of my fellow students over in the history dept are still skeptical of material culture). Sensible people in local historical societies, museums, and high schools have long understood that popular sources (songs, cartoons, advertisements) are both enlightening and engaging, but there's still a subtle prejudice against historians who devote themselves to studying women's magazines or photography as somehow being "soft." Hopefully, that attitude's on its way out, but there are still a lot of people who confuse "smart" with "abstruse."

I am happy to report that Drew Gilpin Faust is not one of those people. Her book will appeal to professional historians and interested amateurs alike. I wish she had gone a little more into memorialization, but her work is excellent background for anyone interested in Civil War memory.