Book Review: Robin DiAngelo - White Fragility

Imagine a guy arguing with his girlfriend by simply repeating "you're too emotional" at her for a few hours, and that's DiAngelo's book in a nutshell. One of the most depressing things about racism, apart from its immorality, injustice, etc., is how stupid it makes us all. I don't know how else to explain the popularity of this cynical, predatory cash-in, other than that emotionally-charged subjects like race remove our ability to think critically. Scam artists like DiAngelo claiming to palliate racism through word games, sophistry, bad history, and gimmick corporate seminars should remind us of medieval physicians waving leeches at us to treat an imbalance of the humours, but here we are sending her book up the charts in a desperate effort to avoid real work about racism and systemic inequalities

A rational society would think twice about the incentive structure behind DiAngelo's business model - a white person paid thousands of dollars an hour to tell other white people what the correct opinions about minorities to have are - but an increasingly bureaucratized America addicted to rebranding its social problems as HR issues will naturally turn to familiar corporate solutions like this. Anyone who's had to sit through mandatory training knows that it's easier to just turn off your brain, let this stuff wash over you, and check the box marked Training Complete at the end: who wouldn't rather do that than real work? This book is short, repetitive, and written at bozo level, so if you are a white American who's feeling lazy, then buying and reading it might be a fairly cost- and time-effective alternative to activism, independent thought, self-education, or, god forbid, actually talking to a person of color.

Like many people, I came across this book just after the George Floyd protests. I think active anti-racism is incredibly important, and anyone with a conscience should be disgusted and outraged not only by specific instances of police brutality, but about the entire social system behind events like that. We have an obligation to each other and ourselves to speak up when something is wrong, and there's absolutely no shortage of work to be done. Part of that work is self-education, which is why I have such a viscerally negative reaction to this vile little tract, which DiAngelo frankly admits is not designed to convince open or even closet racists to be less racist. Quite the opposite - its goal is to convince well-meaning white people trying to be not-racist that in fact they were actually racist all along without them having known it. This is a strange tactic if your goal is to reduce the overall goal of racism in a society, but DiAngelo's real goal is to maintain her lifetime sinecure of bullying hapless victims in corporate workshops with carefully constructed trap-door arguments about privilege that are impossible to engage in good-faith dialogue with. 

A great example of how poisonous DiAngelo's approach is comes in chapter 5, which begins with the banal observation that the world is not neatly divided between bad racism and good anti-racism, and ends concluding that thinking some more about anti-racism is the best thing to do (or something; it's often hard to tell what her point is, especially when she starts "conceptualizing myself on an active continuum"). DiAngelo shares a story from one of her workshops where a participant related an interaction she had with some parents protesting against the black-white achievement gap in schoolchildren. In retelling the incident, which concludes with the teacher admitting that one particular protestor was correct to point out that she didn't understand the schoolchildren and so she needed to do some further thinking, the participant imitated the protestor in a way that was "bordering on racial mockery".

DiAngelo heroically points out the participant's problematic racism-adjacency, the particpant gets a bad case of white fragility and quits the workshop, and DiAngelo is acclaimed by the rest of the participants, white and black alike, for her virtue (no, DiAngelo is not being a white savior, how dare you even think that). To DiAngelo, all that matters is that one white person might have told a difficult personal story of vulnerability and growth, in a workshop theoretically designed for that very purpose, in a problematic way; to anyone else, this is a near-criminal exercise in missing the point. What about the black-white achievement gap in schoolchildren? How is DiAngelo helping those children via her terrible facilitation skills? Is DiAngelo actually accomplishing anything at all here?

This book is a master class on how not to run a seminar, in particular chapter 10, where she systematically explains why normal rules for facilitators like Don't judge, Don't make assumptions, Assume good intentions, and Respect don't apply to her. Throughout the book, DiAngelo takes advantage of the fact that an effective debate tactic is to choose your terms so that it's definitionally impossible to respond to you. This makes you come off like an asshole, but in scenarios where you don't actually care about having a real dialogue - you're in high school debate club, or you don't care if your girlfriend breaks up with you, or you're leading a mandatory corporate seminar and your audience effectively isn't allowed to disagree with you - it works great. The classic example is accusing your opponent of being "disagreeable", which gives your victim 3 basic options to respond:

1. Disagree, which means they prove your point
2. Agree, which means they concede your point
3. Try to deny the premise indirectly, which is usually too difficult to do on the fly and makes them look like they're dodging the question

This kind of vague character-based attack often works because it's very difficult to instantly refute, and partially because if you do it right it's undeniably true, up to a point: of course every single person disagrees with at least something at some point in their life. We all know people who genuinely are disagreeable, in the sense that they are exceptionally quarrelsome or disputatious, but there isn't a bright line between those people and you or I, because basically all interesting human behavior exists on a spectrum. This means that the term usually isn't very meaningful as an insult, and so we need to reserve it for exceptions; throwing out the accusation "disagreeable" in an argument with the goal of scoring a point will serve only to shut down discussion and annoy most people, who correctly recognize it as a cheap debate trick, while paradoxically making the actual disagreeable people delighted - after all, they love to disagree! Apparently the fancy term for this is "Kafka trap", from his novel The Trial, and it works similarly with any other charge where your only real goal is to wrong-foot your opponent (accusing someone of being "defensive" is another classic). Heads DiAngelo wins, tails you lose!

This rhetorical snare is DiAngelo's entire shtick with "white fragility", a term she invented herself and which she finds everywhere she looks. (Does the term "white fragility" logically imply related terms like "white robustness" or "black fragility"? It's better not to ask.) Maybe it's impolite to notice that DiAngelo makes a lot of money off of her white fragility concept (in 2019 she charged the University of Kentucky $12,000 for a 2 hour workshop, and she does plenty of these events), but you just can't help but be skeptical about the convenience of her circular logic as she continuously diagnoses everyone who questions her premises as exhibiting more white fragility. She writes about the idea of white fragility at great length, yet for much of the book there is no simple handy definition for the reader to be able to know it when we see it as we page through her muddled sociology and examples of her victims getting reacting poorly whenever she lobs the term at them. As far as the reader is concerned, "white fragility" seems to boil down to "doesn't like to be called a racist", but much like with calling someone "disagreeable" this isn't very helpful: yes, you would expect a racist to react poorly to being called out, but you would also expect that from a non-racist. The closest intelligible definition of white fragility we get is a bullet point list in chapter 4, which she says is the "foundation" of white fragility:

• Preference for racial segregation, and a lack of a sense of loss about segregation
• Lack of understanding about what racism is
• Seeing ourselves as individuals, exempt from the forces of racial socialization
• Failure to understand that we bring our group's history with us, that history matters
• Assuming everyone is having or can have our experience
• Lack of racial humility, and unwillingness to listen
• Dismissing what we don't understand
• Lack of authentic interest in the perspectives of people of color
• Wanting to jump over the hard, personal work and get to "solutions"
• Confusing disagreement with not understanding
• Need to maintain white solidarity, to save face, to look good
• Guilt that paralyzes or allows inaction
• Defensiveness about any suggestion that we are connected to racism
• A focus on intentions over impact

There are a handful of bullet points in this list that DiAngelo is unambiguously correct about: yes, someone who prefers racial segregation is definitely a racist. Most of this list, though, has less to do with racism and more to do with "doesn't react well to DiAngelo". This conceptual slipperiness behind the title concept should bother a fair-minded person in any setting, but DiAngelo leads workshops, which is where much of the book is focused. She spends a lot of time gleefully recounting the confusion and hostility of her workshop participants, yet it genuinely seems not to occur to her that vulnerable employees in a workplace setting might react poorly to being accused of any amount of racial insensitivity in front of people they have to see and work with the next day, or that she could simply be wrong.

DiAngelo is Seymour Skinner in that immortal Simpsons meme, wondering "Am I so out of touch? No, it's the recipients of my incredibly correct racial insights who are wrong". Only a liar or an idiot would deny that workplace racism is a serious problem in America, but only a grifter like DiAngelo would conclude that the best way to address discrimination at places of employment is to hire an academic to facilitate struggle sessions for non-unionized workers when the wrong word could be the kiss of death. She only barely alludes to and doesn't discuss in detail any of the countless actual instances of explicit racial discrimination in hiring, promotion, retention, or salary structure that have come up over the entire history of the United States and persist today, all she's interested in are vague thoughtcrime sentiments, because word games are her bread and butter.

For anyone hoping to actually learn anything from this book, that's probably the single biggest obstacle. She's using terms like "racism", "white supremacy", etc differently than normal people, in classic academic jargon fashion, so that you can then hire her to explain it to you. There are thousands of books debating race as biological vs sociological vs legal construct, but most people have converged on basic common understandings of words like "racism" as "an act of discrimination based on someone's race", or "white supremacy" as "the belief that white people are inherently superior to other races", and so forth.

That's not enough for DiAngelo, who is trying to ensure a broader market for her services by connecting racism to as many other concepts as possible, even theoretically neutral ones. It's one thing to point out (correctly) that in practice, America's rhetoric of individualism, meritocracy, and so forth has not matched its practice, or that racists have often couched their appeals in the seemingly neutral language of small government, low taxes, and neighborhood character. It's quite another to identify those very concepts themselves with white people, because that leads her to say weird things like this:

Whiteness rests upon a foundational premise: the definition of whites as the norm or standard for human, and people of color as a deviation from that norm. Whiteness is not acknowledged by white people, and the white reference point is assumed to be universal and is imposed on everyone. White people find it very difficult to think about whiteness as a specific state of being that could have an impact on one's life and perceptions.

The reason that it's difficult to think that way is because the only people who take thought patterns like that seriously are white supremacists! DiAngelo is almost too interested in getting white people to explicitly think of themselves as white people, in a manner that should set off alarm bells in your head. Hitler jokes aside ("You know who else really wanted white people to think about whiteness as a specific state of being?"), reading this book is to discover that DiAngelo actually sees the world very similarly to white supremacists, just with the sign reversed. In anecdote after anecdote, DiAngelo is incapable of understanding the world through any frame but one: white people are history's protagonists and everyone else is sort of along for the ride, forever outsiders, incapable of agency or defining their terms of their existence on their own, caught in a web of white supremacy that they can never escape (unless someone pays DiAngelo a lot of money, presumably). 

DiAngelo can get away with this because, as she says, her primary audience is white people, specifically white people in the Anglophere, but really just the United States. So if you are among the more than 95% of the planet who is not a white American, this book is basically just a testament to the true force of white narcissism at maximum intensity. This extends to her scholarship: a few nonwhite people get quoted from time to time, but never in a manner that indicates that DiAngelo is actually in dialogue with them, only that she's willing to appropriate their words for her own project. Let's not even discuss her historical inaccuracies, which a less polite person might term "lies".

I will try to find some good things to say about the book, because DiAngelo does at least mention many true facts: it is possible for well-meaning people to be complicit in or promoters of racism; there are massive racial disparities in power, wealth, health, and social status in America; American history is littered with criminal racial violence from the beginning up to this very day; racism hurts everyone, including white people; white people could stand to consider the impact their thoughts and actions have on others even if they didn't think they were being offensive; white people often artificially separate elements of non-white American culture like food, dress, music, and history from "mainstream" American culture into special non-white ethnic categories; patterns of racism and segregation are frequently maintained using carefully-chosen neutral phrases and legal regimes to disguise disparate impacts; merely to live your life in America as a white person can mean taking much for granted without even realizing it (white privilege is absolutely real); all of us could do more to make the America and the world a gentler and kinder place.

But you solve no problems by giving DiAngelo a single penny, whether by buying this book (I didn't) or ponying up for one of her seminars. When you get right down to it, DiAngelo's efforts to focus all attention on your individual thoughts and behaviors and none on America's broken laws are exactly identical to all the tedious debates you hear about whether it's fair to force people to not use plastic straws, when meanwhile fossil fuel plants are burning billions of tons of CO2 a year. If you actually care about climate change, then it's a complete waste of time to guilt-trip people about straws - you should be helping to get clean energy laws passed (and given that people of color are disproportionately affected by climate change, you'd be doing even more good). Go donate money to sustainable energy groups! Support the Green New Deal! But then there wouldn't be any money left to pay a straw fragility consultant thousands of dollars an hour to lecture you about how even if you don't use straws at all you're still destroying the planet, and as it turns out strawmen, are DiAngelo's entire business model.

Book Review: Inga Clendinnen - Aztecs: An Interpretation

The pre-Columbian Aztecs are a tough people to really know, not only given their own tendencies towards self-glorification, but also because the systematic Spanish attempt to eliminate the existing structure and memory of Aztec society in order to replace it with something more palatable and familiar was successful, and therefore scattered records and summarized codices are in large part all we have. Clendinnen has written a very sympathetic, very detailed attempt to capture what Aztec society felt like for the average person - warriors, priests, merchants, women - and to recreate as much as possible of the world that was lost. This means that her interpretive efforts are therefore more than a little speculative in many parts, yet she does a magnificent job of conveying the appeal of the culture while not downplaying the miserable relationship the Aztecs had with their neighbors, in particular the grim horrors of their most infamous ritual practice.

One of the interesting things about the Aztecs is how different their attitude towards empire was than that of natural comparisons like the Romans. From their founding as the "Triple Alliance" union of the city-states Tenochtitlan, Texcoco, and Tlateloco in 1428, they fought nearly continuous wars against nearby cities until the Spanish conquest in 1521, but instead of aggressive expansion and incorporation of subject peoples in order to increase their strength for the next war, they preferred to merely acquire fealty from the enemy nobility and exact regular tribute. There might be several reasons why the Aztecs did not have the same urge to imperiogenesis as other civilizations: James Scott's book Against the Grain argues in part that grain cultivation is uniquely well-suited to despotism, and perhaps corn is less so; or perhaps the mountainous terrain in central Mexico is more similar to Greece, which also remained hard to consolidate for a long time, than the easy plains of Italy, making lasting conquest more difficult (though compare against the Incas to the south). There was a good chapter in Peter Turchin's Ultrasociety that explored how the nearly impassable mountains of Papua New Guinea allowed just enough contact between tribes to permit warfare, but not enough to make lasting conquest feasible. This did not encourage peaceful coexistence: the near-constant low-level warfare was less deadly in any given clash than in, say, a typical Roman battle, but there were far more of them, and so overall mortality in war was higher in a society of small-scale villages then in large-scale complex societies. Clendinnen emphasizes the almost nonexistent unifying forces at work in the imperial hierarchy:

It is worth taking time over this oddly based polity, crucial as it is for an understanding of the city's workings, as for the process of its final destruction. Tenochtitlan was no Rome, despite the magnificence of its monuments, the steady inflow of tribute goods, and their spectacular consumption in a state-financed theatre. Subjugation did not mean incorporation. There was no significant bureaucracy in the Mexica 'empire', and few garrisons either. Marriage alliances linked the leading dynasties, while lesser local rulers were typically left in place and effectively autonomous, at least for as long as their towns delivered the agreed tribute to the imperial city. Even in those rare cases when the defeated ruler was killed, the dynasty was usually allowed to survive. But if local rulers spent months in the Mexica capital, they did not thereby become Mexica, and when their military contingents were called on to fight for the Triple Alliance they did so under their own leaders and banners. The 'empire' was an acrobats' pyramid, a precarious structure of the more privileged lording it over the less, with those poised on the highest level triumphant, but nervously attentive to any premonitory shift or shuffle from below.

The human sacrifice is of course the most famous form of tribute the Aztecs demanded, like Theseus and the Minotaur on a much larger scale. Sacrifices were done as triumphs after a successful military campaign, as commemorations of important events like the ascension of a new ruler or the completion of a major temple, or to propitiate the rain god Tlaloc as part of the regular rotation of harvest festivals like Tlacaxipeualiztli, Etzalqualiztli, Ochpaniztli, and Panquetzaliztli. About this practice of human sacrifice, which is rightly the become the main thing people know about Aztec culture, perhaps the only thing that can be said is that those unhappy victims had plenty of company, as Aztec culture was pretty brutal even for Aztecs:

When the spoils of war and the tribute from other towns subject to the conquered overlord city came into the hands of the Mexica ruler, he chose to distribute them not to the collectivities of the calpullis, but to specially distinguished warriors in the form of offices and titles, with attendant privileges and worked lands, so, it is said, creating a nobility and a bureaucracy at a blow.
Warrior arrogance always commanded a wide social space in the city. Given their reward-by-privilege expectations and their systematic elevation over lesser men, extortion was always a tempting possibility. From time to time it was discovered that warriors had levied an unofficial tribute on the town, 'perchance of chocolate (cacao), or food'. Such gross invasion of the prerogative of the state invoked the punitive violence of the state, and Mexica state justice was summary, brutal, public, and often enough lethal. Most offenders against Moctezoma's laws died most publicly, with the marketplace the favoured venue, where adulterers were stoned or strangled and habitual drunkards had their heads beaten in by Moctezoma's executioners.

Fun stuff. Clendinnen is careful to note that, as with all societies, vicious cruelty lived alongside warmth and humanity, and she works as hard as she can to convey the magnificent grandeur of the Aztecs. The reader can judge for themselves which aspects of Aztec culture were most affecting, but by the end of the book, as the Aztec's neighbors and subjects joined with the Spanish to destroy their vampiric clench, I still felt for them, though not too much. The Spanish had plenty of admiration for the Aztecs as builders and administrators, and indeed as Clendinnen points out, it is telling that one of the laments written after the Spanish conquest is really mourning for the city more than it is for the people:

Broken spears lie in the roads;
we have torn our hair in our grief.
The houses are roofless now, and their walls
are red with blood.
Worms are swarming in the streets and plazas,
and the walls are splattered with gore.
the water has turned red, as if it were dyed,
and when we drink it,
it has the taste of brine.
We have pounded our hands in despair
against the adobe walls,
for our inheritance, our city, is lost and dead.
The shields of our warriors were its defence,
but they could not save it.

Book Review: Upton Sinclair - Oil!

The Jungle will always be Sinclair's most acclaimed work, and rightly so given its impact, but I believe that Oil! has just as much relevance to contemporary life, if not more so, and deserves to be as well-known as its more venerable sibling even if it did not spur the same reforms of the oil industry that The Jungle did for food preparation and handling. I was spurred to read it after a rewatch of Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood, and the novel is so different from, and more complex than, the film adaptation that they probably should not be considered strictly related. Anderson's film is a small, close study, with Daniel Day-Lewis' oil tycoon patriarch a cryptic, amoral madman, whereas Sinclair's sprawling epic of ambition and capitalism has the son as its vastly subtler and more complex protagonist, arguing for and against several political philosophies against the backdrop of World War 1, the Teapot Dome scandal, evangelical religious revivalism, the film industry, and the generally explosive growth of Southern California. As always with books vs movie questions, one should decide how much the snappier running time and enhanced aesthetic experience of a film outweighs the greater richness and depth of a novel, but there is so much great stuff in Oil! that isn't the film that it deserves to be experienced as its own masterwork, particularly its exploration of how internal leftist debates interact with public opinion and the forces of big business.

In fairness to Anderson, ones of Sinclair's weaknesses as an author is that it can be difficult to tell his digressions from his details, which is probably why the movie really only uses the plot from about the first 100 pages and then does its own thing. The very first chapter is a lengthy, floridly overwritten dramatization of J. Arnold Ross Sr. and Jr. driving into California to investigate some oil leases, but the story picks up rapidly and Senior, a small-time oilman, begins gradually making it big through smart investments and some cunning. He's a tough negotiator, and not averse to greasing the palms of public officials when necessary, but he's not at all like his movie depiction; he's always fair to his workers and generally supportive though skeptical of his son's ideological meanderings. His son, nicknamed Bunny, is the real main character, and over the course of the book he loyally defends his father's line of work to the various leftists and socialists he encounters as he gets continually more and more involved in the world of radical politics, especially after he meets Paul Watkins, a tough-minded worker, and his brother Eli, a religious charlatan (both played by Paul Dano in the movie). Like any good class traitor, Bunny feels guilty about the increasing wealth and privilege he accumulates as his father's business continues to expand, but that doesn't stop him from dating actresses and "reluctantly" enjoying the F. Scott Fitzgerald high society lifestyle while at the same time attempting to use his wealth for good. Eventually the brutal repression of socialists and anarchists after World War 1 in the Palmer Raids leads to Paul's being beaten to death at the hands of the authorities, and the novel ends with a solemn resignation at the unstoppable power of the impersonal capitalist juggernaut.

What's interesting is that the novel is for the most part quite nuanced and almost sympathetic in its explorations of industry and power. The Jungle, written 20 years before, was much more stridently anti-capitalist, but Oil! portrays the the struggle between large businesses and small for market share with real enthusiasm, and Sinclair openly admires the mix of guile, dedication, and vision it takes for an entrepreneur to grow from a small operator to a major political player. Ross and his operation in "Beach City" is an only barely fictionalized depiction of the real-life Edward Doheny's development of Huntington Beach in Orange County, and Sinclair's melancholy illustration of all levels of government as corrupt, feckless, and reactionary fits into a long tradition of California-as-American-microcosm, like in Chinatown, Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, etc. At various points Bunny attempts to stand up to Vernon Roscoe, his father's much more ruthless business partner and the bad cop of capitalism to his father's good cop, and Roscoe's powerful defenses of the inexorable logic of capitalism are right in line with the famous monologues in Wall Street, Other People's Money, etc. By the end of the book the triumph of capitalism is taken as practically unavoidable, but at many points the characters are given room to portray this as an actual good thing, which Sinclair did not do in The Jungle. The oil industry has many casualties over the course of the novel, but Sinclair leaves it up to the reader to picture what if anything would change under a socialist system. With the hindsight of a hundred years, we can see that real-life socialist countries don't seem to have discovered a clearly superior method for resource extraction, but that doesn't make the imperial cruelty of the oil barons at the incredibly modest demands of the workers for simple wage increases any easier to swallow.

It's notable that all of the radicals Bunny encounters are well-meaning but ultimately doomed, whether by pointless factionalism, naivete, or government hostility via strike-breaking and state-sanctioned brutality. Sinclair spends a good deal of time on how the cannibalistic disputes between the various flavors of socialists, communists, anarchists, and leftists were unavoidable but ultimately meaningless, as the real powers operated with impunity on a plane far above them, and one does not have to think very hard to see how the equivalent forces of oligarchy ensure that the same system operates today. I was reminded of Steinbeck's In Dubious Battle, set a decade later, and how how liberal reformers in the FDR administration defused much of this kind of radical pressure with pro-union policy as part of the New Deal, but Sinclair can't bring himself to write anything close to the redemptive ending that Steinbeck was so fond of, and Paul's ultimate death at the hands of an anti-union goon squad is nothing but a fatalistic reminder of the power of unchecked greed. Even worse, Eli is able to cynically use his brother's death to advance his immense evangelist movement, making one long for the violent comeuppance Anderson gave him in the film. And even though Bunny and his new wife Rachel dedicate his inheritance to establishing institutions of reform, Sinclair doesn't have any illusions that they will matter greatly; all of the antagonists (and even Bunny's father) not only escape any consequences for their corruption in the Teapot Dome scandal, they successfully install Coolidge as president in a landslide.

Since this is historical fiction, it's easy to take the gloomy irrelevance of the American socialist movement as inevitable (though it is curious that Eugene Debs' surprisingly successful campaigns for president go unmentioned during the discussions about the viability of electoralism), I think the book raises a lot of excellent questions about how leftists should proceed when history is in motion. It goes without saying that none of the warmongering, nativist, plutocratic, petroleum-obsessed, reactionary impulses on display in the novel have left the American political landscape, yet it remains to be seen whether the current resurgence of socialism in the US is authentic or permanent. Oil! vastly improves on There Will Be Blood in its understand of how systems are far more powerful than individual men and women, and though Sinclair's own experience with electoral politics - he ran for governor of California less than a decade after Oil! was published and was crushed - does not provide a particularly inspiring example of how to challenge entrenched interests, perhaps now that even greater challenges like climate change are no longer quite so ignorable, a politics of kindness will be more successful now than it was back in his era.

Book Review: Jin Yong - Legends of the Condor Heroes Vol. 1

This is the first volume of one of the most popular Chinese martial arts novel series ever written, and it reads like an excellent novelization of a kung fu film, although of course it's really the other way around given how influential this series has been on depictions of martial arts in all forms of media ever since it was first published in the 50s. If you've ever seen a kung fu movie, chances are it borrows heavily from Yong's work in tone, setting, or spirit. Naturally wuxia/martial arts novels have had a long tradition dating back centuries before these books were written (in a pleasing fan-fiction-y touch it's revealed that the protagonist Guo Jing is a distant descendant of one of the characters in Water Margin, one of the Four Great Novels), but Yong's work is fully its own despite inhabiting the well-trodden, familiar universe of medieval China. Yong evidently didn't set out to reinvent the wheel in terms of wuxia tropes, but in much the same way that a genre classic like Harry Potter outshone a whole host of similar young wizard adventure novels by being the best version of that genre, Yong's work hits the optimal sweet spot of family drama, political turmoil, patriotism, and of course plenty of incredibly-named kung fu action.

Sometimes it occurs to me to describe novels as "comic-book-ish". Even the most resolutely naturalistic novels involve a certain amount of exaggeration and poetic license, but there's a particular way of simplifying the messiness of reality while simultaneously presenting complicated narratives with exaggerated human nature and (especially) physical traits that some authors use in their works which reminds me of comic books. Stories of noble, innocent heroes with mysterious dramatic backgrounds fighting sinister, irredeemable villains for life and death stakes while continuously threatened with various forms of supernatural peril will always be popular no matter the delivery format, and this fits that archetype to a T. Guo Jing is pure of heart but a little dim, naturally clumsy but willing to train hard, and as such practically the ideal protagonist, especially once the Seven Freaks begin to train him in the martial arts, each move more hilariously named than the last. The novel's setting during the Song Dynasty's struggles with the Jurchens on one hand and the Mongols on the other (a young, up-and-coming Genghis Khan is a major and sympathetic main character) also lends itself well to action, as the horrors unleashed by the collapse of central authority and the evils of foreign domination have been staples in Chinese fiction since forever. There's also plenty of humor, as the plot is full of farcical contrivances (everyone is related to someone else, there's tons of convenient coincidences, many scenes are done with a perfect comic sensibility). This volume ends on a cliffhanger, after Guo Jing has just discovered important details about his heritage, and even though I've seen some complaints about the translation, I found this a whole lot of fun.

Book Review: David Forbes - The Old Iron Dream

I first encountered Forbes as a guest on Radio War Nerd episode #64, discussing the recurring strains of right-wing thought inherent to science fiction dating back to the Golden Age. That sci-fi isn't immune from fascism should be obvious, but it's surprisingly underappreciated, especially if, like me, you don't follow the contemporary science fiction scene very closely. Despite the genre's often-promoted public image as an inclusive outpost of forward thinking, many of its most famous practitioners have used it to advocate for hard-right viewpoints that wouldn't be out of place in the 1930s (or now, come to think of it). This short work is an extension of Forbes' argument in that episode which adds a bit more historical context, particularly around major figures like Robert Heinlein and John Campbell, explaining how a theoretically progressive genre can so comfortably accommodate extremely reactionary views. Science fiction is less a vessel for delivering a specific point of view than a vocabulary for expressing any point of view you could think of, so while it's unfortunate that an aspirationally utopian genre is still saddled with all the anxieties, resentments, and hangups of the present day, it's worth exploring what right-wing science fiction says about right-wingers, as well as the rest of us.

I grew up reading Golden Age authors like Clarke, Heinlein, and especially Asimov, but as a politically naive child I wasn't really aware enough pick up on most political subtext other than as a "neutral" grounding for the immediate story being told. Truth be told, I'm still not always aware of what's lurking behind the pages - I just read John Betancourt's publication of the extended edition of John Campbell's "Who Goes There?" earlier this year without thinking much about Campbell as a person other than "man, what a great suspense writer". I also don't follow contemporary debates over the politics of science fiction very closely, like the Sad Puppies vs N. K. Jemisin controversy that Forbes opens the book with (it's the tiresomely familiar outrage from conservatives that women and minorities expect their viewpoints to be treated fairly). Forbes explains that there's nothing really new about these debates, and that this is just the latest iteration of a very old battle with people who want to express in science fiction the worldview that Corey Robin so aptly chronicled in his book The Reactionary Mind:

From its beginnings, science fiction has harbored a powerful far-right constituency, not as a fringe element, not as a cultural offshoot, but as some of its most revered figures, who have incorporated right-wing ideas and assumptions into some of its classic works. Advocates for everything from eugenics to poll taxes to militaristic authoritarianism have found a home in science fiction, where such ideas have enjoyed a far longer political life than they have in the country's mainstream (not lacking in bigotry itself). Nor has this faction limited its espousal of these beliefs to fiction; many have engaged in political activism over the decades, playing a surprisingly influential role in the larger culture.... Its dream, increasingly archaic and made of brittle iron, is of a world where the social hierarchies of the past are preserved and extended out into the stars, forever.

To be overly simplistic, you might say that this debate is Star Trek versus Starship Troopers. The former posits that, in the absence of economic scarcity, humanity will no longer need many of the zero-sum, us-vs-them, competitive instincts that have played such a huge role in human cultural evolution; the latter posits that this is an illusion, and human societies will always need the whole complex of warlike hierarchical authoritarianism no matter how far in the future you extend our species' lifespan. Is it a mistake to think that we can ever leave our conditioned hatred of the outgroup behind, or is the real mistake in thinking that that hatred was ever truly necessary to begin with? Anyone who's seen Paul Verhoeven's brilliant film adaptation of Starship Troopers knows how easy it is to satirize, but the vast reach of Heinlein's novel should give a non-fascist reader pause. It's one thing to find Heinlein's reduction of humanity's potential down to the level of brute animals (competing strains of bacteria, really) depressing and wonder what would even be the point of recapitulating the endless genocides in our history on alien worlds; it's another to ponder where exactly the line between objectionable and non-objectionable content should be drawn. There's an important line in Starship Troopers that "All correct moral rules derive from the instinct to survive; moral behavior is survival behavior above the individual level, as in a father who dies to save his children." How should a liberal respond to that?

Heinlein the person is also a perfect case study for this investigation, since he was ideologically eclectic even in his mature phase: Starship Troopers might be an endorsement of the logic of fascism, but it's hard to argue that The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress or Stranger In a Strange Land, among many of his other novels, share its politics at all, even at the most abstract level. I would have liked to see more about Heinlein's political evolution, since, as Forbes says, "In his early stories, he doesn't come across as the most obvious candidate for a far-right writer. He was fascinated by New Deal social engineering and the Social Credit movement, and helped organize Upton Sinclair's EPIC campaign for a more left-wing government in California." But Forbes discusses "Coventry", one of his earlier short stories I haven't read, that's essentially a refutation of libertarianism, and makes an intriguing comparison:

It's interesting then, to note a similarity between 'Coventry' and Starship Troopers, tales that at first seem very different. Even though the society in Starship Troopers was founded in a coup d'état and does not allow citizens to vote, it is otherwise pretty similar to the sane state of Coventry: 'Many complain but none rebel; personal freedom for all is greatest in history, laws are few, taxes are low, living standards are as high as productivity permits, crime is at its lowest ebb.' But now, rather than societal progress occurring by democratic means, only veterans, who have 'demonstrated that [they place] the welfare of the group ahead of personal advantage,' get a role in decision-making.

It's that part about group welfare that got me thinking. Fascism is of course a famously complicated cluster of concepts, like Umberto Eco pointed out 25 years ago, and it's not possible, especially in a book review, to define once and for all a bright line between "good" sacrifice for the collective and "bad". But it's uncomfortable to look at Forbes' description of Heinlein as a New Deal enthusiast and then criticize Starship Troopers, because most other contemporary New Deal enthusiasts probably would not have found much to object to about it, and in fact in many ways Starship Troopers is actually more progressive than the world around it (especially the movie, with its seamless racial and gender equality). Even today many 21st century liberals have an idealized vision of the Roosevelt administration, and I at least have a tough time accommodating the nobler parts of the New Deal with its extensive reliance on Starship Troopers-style rhetoric and even worse policy (Japanese internment is one example, but see also Ira Katznelson's excellent Fear Itself for a fuller treatment of how Southern racism shaped the foundations of the New Deal). Ideologies are often at their most interesting and revealing when they're in flux, so perhaps there isn't much point in demanding consistency between ideologies over the centuries, but Heinlein is only one of many liberals/progressives/leftists who veered right later in life, so it's worth wondering what the trigger points were for him and others.

Because, as Forbes shows, some of Heinlein's fellow right-wingers like Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle had the trigger points of the Great Society. I read The Mote In God's Eye and The Gripping Hand, and younger me thought it was merely "an interesting thought experiment" about humanity dealing with an alien race which went through explosive demographic cycles. Then I read about their politics, and it's depressing to read these talented writers arguing obliquely in novels like Lucifer's Hammer that liberals trying to give black people the vote will demographically destroy American civilization. If we think of conservatism as responding to liberalism rather than the other way around, then it's easier to fit anti-New Deal right-wingers and anti-Great Society right-wingers into the same reactionary continuum, but for me the anti-communism of the 40s is less troubling than the anti-civil rights movement of the 60s. Forbes has a very revealing quote from Norman Spinrad, author of the excellent anti-fascist satire The Iron Dream, who "considers Pournelle a friend despite their drastically different politics. 'Jerry's a complicated guy,' he says, with a chuckle. 'He once described himself as a 14th-century liberal.'" Whatever that means, while it might be comforting to recognize in Pournelle's statement the implicit admission that he's knowingly backward, it doesn't make his ideology less objectionable.

I wish that Forbes had spent more time discussing how or if the non-fascist contemporaries of these authors responded to reactionary ideas in their own works. To name only two, Isaac Asimov's Foundation series and Frank Herbert's Dune series were able to handle feudalism, theocracies, militarism, progress, freedom, demographics, social change, and so on without ever delivering even an implicit hint of conservatism (the first 3 books of Dune are essentially a total rejection of the masturbatory teenage power trip fantasy that Spinrad's anti-fascism essay "The Emperor of Everything" describes as critical to the young proto-reactionary's embrace of right-wing ideas). What was their approach, and is there anything that modern authors can learn from it when they face what Jemisin did? Is it a good strategy to just read, say, the better of Orson Scott Card's novels and then ignore everything else about him? Since Asimov etc were just as unable to finally exorcise the fascist ghosts of science fiction as authors in every other genre at the time were, it's probably wrong to think that the problem lies with the genre itself instead of with what ideologies people find attractive, but it's good to be reminded all the same that modern authors seem to be fighting back, and perhaps that at least some of the individualist, progressive, emancipatory elements of Star Trek could come to pass, bit by bit.

Book Review: Tom Shippey - The Road to Middle-Earth

J. R. R. Tolkien was better at transporting readers into a living, breathing, fully-realized fictional reality than almost any other author who has ever lived. While for most readers the pleasure of the stories themselves is sufficient alone, more hardcore aficionados like myself want to see the deep roots of such a remarkable creation. How did he do it? Shippey's work delves deeply into Tolkien's inspirations, artistic obsessions, and creative process. It will greatly satisfy the sort of person who finds the LOTR appendices as interesting as the plot they've just finished. There's an infamous dropoff in readership from The Hobbit, to The Lord of the Rings, to The Silmarillion, and then to the likes of Unfinished Tales, but for the small group of fans who not only sympathize with but valorize Tolkien's decades of effort with his legendarium simply to create plausible settings for his artificial languages, this book provides an incredibly interesting account of how Tolkien's attitudes toward the power of words shaped his characters, stories, settings, and indeed his entire thematic repertoire. I thought I was a dedicated fan (although to my shame I have not read any of the 12 posthumous volumes of The History of Middle-Earth), but Shippey has read every one of Tolkien's works so many times that he enhanced my appreciation for the under-the-hood craftsmanship in the Tolkienverse more than I thought possible.

The short answer to "why is Tolkien so great?" is that he had a clear vision (or rather a series of visions), he made sure his plots and his themes lined up, and he put a ton of work into what for most authors would seem like irrelevant background details. Tolkien really loved a lot of old epic poetry that his fellow linguists were lukewarm about, but that turned out to provide excellent templates for modern stories even across the vast cultural gap between modern England and its millennium-old antecedents. Shippey doesn't use any film analogies, but as he was discussing how Tolkien studied Beowulf carefully in order to produce similar effects with his own works, I was reminded how a lot of the better genre films put modern material atop older structures in order to take advantage of people's love of both the familiar and the new. So, for example, successful science fiction films mix the genre with noir as in Blade Runner, with Westerns as in Star Trek, with samurai/swashbuckers as in Star Wars, etc. Tolkien used the format of the children's adventure story in the The Hobbit as a comforting framework for his "modern mythology", upgrading to a more adult literary style in The Lord of the Rings, and then dispensing entirely with contemporary narrative formats in his drafts for The Silmarillion, which would have been nearly impenetrable to lightweights and casuals even if he'd been able to finish it.

While Shippey does use Tolkien's own writings as primary sources, and his acknowledged inspirations as secondary material, the book is mainly concerned with tracing Tolkien's own attitudes towards his work; not merely wondering why Tolkien dedicated so much of his life to this fantasy world, but how he made it so convincing to others. The storytelling urge is nearly universal in young children, but most people's fantasies are not very interesting to other people, and nearly all of us eventually turn our mental narrative generation machinery over to more prosaic concerns due to the pressures of adulthood. One of the things that made Tolkien unique was his determination to maintain his creative processes for his whole life; there have of course been countless novelists in history, but Tolkien's novels stand apart from most other writers by his decision to ground them in linguistics, to most people perhaps the dullest soil possible to sprout a fantasy world from. Even his colleagues, who may have been fellow linguists but not true philologists ("philology" = "love of learning"), certainly did not appreciate languages aesthetically to the same degree, and were often skeptical or dismissive of the power of words, leaving Tolkien as one of the very few linguists who appreciated the ancient epic poetry as poetry. Shippey quotes a letter from Tolkien to his son Christopher:

Nobody believes me when I say that my long book is an attempt to create a world in which a form of language agreeable to my personal aesthetic might seem real. But it is true. An enquirer (among many) asked what (The Lord of the Rings) was all about, and whether it was an 'allegory.' And I said it was an effort to create a situation in which a common greeting would be elen síla lúmenn' omentielmo, and that the phrase long antedated the book. I never heard any more.

Even today, Tolkien's works seem to stand above the obligatory constellations of fanfiction that always surround seemingly similar media franchises like Harry Potter or Game of Thrones. This is because fanfiction authors, even the most talented ones, naturally tend to focus on the appeal of the characters, and in Tolkien's works the interactions of the characters are only one of the things going on. The chapter "The Bourgeois Burglar" in particular is a fascinating exploration of just how hard Tolkien worked to ensure that the language and vocabulary of the hobbits, men, dwarves, and so on was congruent with their nature, which complemented the alternately comic and dramatic tone of their interactions with each other, and how the broader thematic concerns then are revealed by the plot in turn (see Adam Roberts' thoughtful review in the July 2017 Strange Horizons contrasting Tolkien's approach with that of with a modern author like Patrick Rothfuss). In the chapter "Interlacements and the Ring" Shippey extends this deep alignment to Tolkien's religious explorations, handled far more subtly here than in C. S. Lewis' otherwise comparable Narnia series. Is evil active or passive, Manichean or Boethian, a force unto itself or a mere turning away from the good? Is the Ring a pagan symbol, and the cosmology of Middle-Earth therefore heretical? Tolkien spent a huge amount of time ensuring that his creation worked consistently within itself and with the pre-Christian heroic motifs underneath it without openly contradicting Christian doctrine, to the extent possible. He was not immune to the problems of internal contradiction, which partially explains his immense difficulties finishing his later works, but perhaps any truly great work inevitably expands beyond the point where all its pieces can fully harmonize together. Just look at any of the more modern "epic" properties with teams of writers and all the money in the world, and Tolkien's accomplishments seem all the greater.

On the subject of consistency, one of the more unexpectedly moving chapters is "Visions and Revisions", when Shippey discusses the meaning that the story of Beren and Lúthien had to Tolkien. It's only one part of the Silmarillion, but Tolkien rewrote it so many times that even though it's hardly known, its story of a grand quest undertaken for a powerful yet ultimately doomed love was clearly more dear to him than any other part of his whole creation (Tolkien and his wife's gravestones read 'Beren' and 'Lúthien', respectively). This obsessive dedication made me think of other works that get compared to his, for example Wagner's operas, which Shippey doesn't discuss until the first appendix (as always with Tolkien, read the appendices!), and how idiosyncratic Tolkien's vision often was. Tolkien evidently did not think highly of Wagner as a dramatist, which somewhat surprised me, but it makes more sense when you realize that, as with all great artists, he hated basically everything, particularly artistic works seemingly very similar to his own:

Tolkien was irritated all his life by modern attempts to rewrite or interpret old material, almost all of which he thought led to failures of tone and spirit. Wagner is the most obvious example. People were always connecting The Lord of the Rings with Der Ring des Nibelungen, and Tolkien did not like it. 'Both rings were round', he snarled, 'and there the resemblance ceases' (Letters, p. 306). This is not entirely true. The motifs of the riddle-contest, the cleansing fire, the broken weapon preserved for an heir, all occur in both works, as of course does the theme of 'the lord of the Ring as the slave of the Ring', des Ringes Herr als des Ringes Knecht. But what upset Tolkien was the fact that Wagner was working, at second-hand, from material which he knew at first-hand, primarily the heroic poems of the Elder Edda and the later Middle High German Nibelungenlied. Once again he saw difference where other people saw similarity. Wagner was one of several authors with whom Tolkien had a relationship of intimate dislike: Shakespeare, Spenser, George MacDonald, Hans Christian Andersen. All, he thought, had got something very important not quite right. It is especially necessary, then, for followers of Tolkien to pick out the true from the heretical, and to avoid snatching at surface similarities.

Now, I personally love Wagner, and rank the Ring Cycle as an incredible artistic achievement, but Tolkien of course has a point about how he and all those other authors are not really playing the same game (though read George Orwell's "Lear, Tolstoy, and the Fool" essay on Shakespeare to see how differently even great writers can rank artistic merit). This is another reason why I think comparisons of Tolkien to people like George Lucas, or (especially) George R. R. Martin can only go so far; Martin might have excellent points about flaws in Tolkien's models of political economy (the infamous "What was Aragorn's tax policy?") and so forth, but it's like comparing a Balzac novel to the Epic of Gilgamesh solely because they both have prostitutes in them. Shippey extends this point further in another book called Author of the Century, which I haven't read, but even if you don't agree with Shippey that Tolkien will eventually represent the entirety of 20th century literature the way that Shakespeare epitomizes the 16th, it's enough to note that Tolkien invented an entire literary genre just to give his mock-Welsh and faux-Finnish artificial languages a playground, and no one else has done anything even close since. Tanner Greer's essay "On the Tolkienic Hero" notes that Tolkien seems untouched by irony, and even though it seems strange that it took a fussy and incredibly opinionated academic, one who wrote entire poems about how misguided oak trees (his critics) couldn't understand the pure love of learning natural to birch trees (philologists like himself), to create one of the greatest adventure stories of all time, perhaps the only conclusion is that the genius and genesis of literature might remain as forever mysterious to us as the Undying Lands, or as the power of words themselves.

Book Review: Hugh Ferriss - The Metropolis of Tomorrow

Nothing ages faster than yesterday's vision of the future, as the saying goes, and this Roaring Twenties-vintage gallery of skyscraper sketches and design philosophy makes for a neat time capsule of what people deep in the neo-gothic era thought cities would look like if you extended the trendlines of Art Deco out into the future. Ferris' many drawings of real and imaginary buildings are the highlight - very ghostly and nebulous, suggestive of vast Coruscant/Metropolis/Blade Runner-type grandeur even alongside his always poetic and thought-provoking essays about the importance of the human scale. He's perhaps too enamored of the automobile, but he was hardly alone in his Robert Moses-like enthusiasm for the science fictional possibilities they would bring; arguably this car-centric philosophy has permanently shifted the debate in America and should therefore be studied as science fact whether you agree with it or not. Alongside his discussions of then-new concepts like zoning and setbacks are some enjoyably dated prognostications on how tomorrow's cities would be organized; one can only imagine Jane Jacobs' horror over Ferriss rhapsodizing over monolithic pyramidal structures like the Power Plant, the Religious Tower, and the Business Center studding endless plains of lesser anthills. Here is his poem about the aesthetics of the Science Zone:

Buildings like crystals.
Walls of translucent glass.
Sheer glass blocks sheathing a steel grill.
No Gothic branch: no Acanthus leaf: no recollection of the plant world.
A mineral kingdom.
Gleaming stalagmites.
Forms as cold as ice.
Mathematics.
Night in the Science Zone.

This is both a horrible plan for a city and an excellent setting for a series of cyperpunk thriller novels. It's too short to be more than a glorified picture book, but recommended if you're a fan of historic architecture in New York, Chicago, St Louis, Detroit, etc, or of how modern urbanism inherits elements of the intellectual lineage of both these pharaonic megaliths and, say, Frank Lloyd Wright's Broadacre City proposals.

Book Review: Luo Guanzhong - Romance of the Three Kingdoms Volume 2

This second volume of Romance of the Three Kingdoms, covering chapters 33 to 63, was just as awesome as the first. The breathlless pace of the action seems to move faster than the story, as each chapter is still crammed with detail, and so it's often hard to judge how much time is passing within or between scenes, but the expansion of the storyline to include the real beginnings of the infamous division into three kingdoms unfolds in a logical and seemingly inevitable way, one stratagem, double-cross, and blood oath at a time. Despite the inclusion of the most epic battles yet, it's a study in decision and indecision as well, as more powerful warlords like Liu Biao and Sun Quan risk repeating the fate of Yuan Shao in the face of Cao Cao's relentless ambition. It starts off with Cao Cao consolidating the north, his son Cao Pi marrying Yuan Shao's widow Lady Zhen, and ends with Liu Bei riding off west into the Riverlands to found his own kingdom, but there's seemingly entire books in between.

This volume made me think more about the problem of leadership, specifically of how the characters attempt to enforce or encourage loyalty. This has been one of the underlying themes of the book from the very beginning, of course, but it's in this stretch of the story that the Emperor fades into the background and the three kingdoms begin to solidify, and loyalty is no less important in the destruction of one regime than in the creation of another. In an environment like the collapse of the Han dynasty, where there's a nominally all-powerful Emperor but in practice a nearly unlimited amount of autonomy for essentially independent petty warlords, individuals are confronted by an extra layer of moral choice that informs their actions. How should one balance allegiance to the sovereign with filial duties, and obedience to liege lords against an oath sworn to brothers? Watching the many characters grapple with their moral compasses in the face of all the momentous decisions they make in life-or-death situations each chapter is a real pleasure, even if they're unsure of the right course themselves, and even through Luo's determined editorializing between the Big Two. Liu Bei, the hero who, we're continually told, draws men to him through his virtuous nature and noble deeds, has the same problem of winning his own place in the world as his duplicitous antagonist Cao Cao, who's universally derided as a crafty yet corrosive force, yet it's often difficult to see a principled difference between them.

For example, towards the end of the volume, at a crucial moment in the balance of power between the north and the south, Zhang Song travels to Cao Cao near the end to offer him the vitally strategic area of the Riverlands, but he gives up because they're each too stubborn and prideful, and he simply offers the territory to Liu Bei instead. This momentous decision is presented as right and proper, a result of the magnetic attraction of Liu Bei and repulsion of Cao Cao, yet it's not so different than Pang Tong's disagreement and reconciliation with Zhang Fei, and in fact it's also quite similar to the many minor instances where a governor will surrender a town, or a general will defect at the end of a battle, and the decision to reward or execute them for their shift in fealty seems arbitrary rather than appropriate. There's probably literature out there on how Confucianist or Legalist ethics, or prestige and dominance leadership styles, could be formulated in game-theoretic terms, and how each individual conundrum of whether to keep an oath or do the most expedient thing fits into a coherent framework of morality; ultimately I decided to just sit back and enjoy my suspense and outrage cycles as the two decided whether the latest hapless provincial commander would be rewarded for switching sides or beheaded for his treachery as the circumstances above and beyond him shifted.

The real breakout star of this volume isn't Liu Bei or Cao Cao, however, but Kongming. The legends of his sagacity are so great that Liu Bei travels three times to convince him to come work for him, to the consternation of Guan Yu and Zhang Fei, whose jealousy at Kongming seeming to supplant them in Liu Bei's heart is a nice bit of character development. And the legends are true! If ever there was a character calculated to delight and entertain audiences, it would be the Sleeping Dragon, an impossibly clever advisor who can concoct ruses subtle enough to fool even Cao Cao and has a handy ability to summon up powerful winds to aid in battle. My favorite example of his ridiculous skill was the scene where Sun Quan's henchman Zhou Yu wants to offer Liu Bei a sham marriage to Lady Sun in order to take him hostage and force him to surrender the strategic province of Jingzhou, which Liu Bei was dragging his heels on relinquishing after the death of his kinsman Liu Biao. This is a dangerous trip for Liu Bei, but no worry: Kongming not only arranges matters so that Liu Bei keeps Jingzhou, but that he successfully marries Lady Sun for real, via the hilarious mechanism of literally giving general Zhao Zilong three sacks with instructions to open each one at the right time to get Liu Bei out of each of Zhou Yu's traps. The buddy comedy friendship between Kongming and fellow wizard Pang Tong is also a real highlight, as each occasionally drops in to make fun of the other before revealing their latest scheme.

Of course, Kongming is far more famous for his deceptive prowess at the Battle of Red Cliffs, which takes up a substantial portion of this volume. Once again I was left marveling at the skillful pacing and ingenious plotting: almost more space is devoted to the feints, deceptions, and betrayals leading up to the battle than to the action itself, and yet as Cao Cao's ill-fated expedition to conquer the south is left routed and shattered, thanks to Kongming's wheels-within-wheels ploys and last-minute conjuration of an east wind, you are never lacking for excitement. You're almost spoiled, too, since right before that is an equally-exciting chapters-long running fight as Liu Bei's retreating army and mass of villagers try to cross the Yangtze for safety in the south, and Cao Cao's forces are only barely held off in the Battle of Changban, where the (in my opinion underrated) Zhang Zilong makes one of his many clutch saves by rescuing Liu Bei's son against great odds (and not for the last time). The heroism and dramatic tension don't let up for a bit, and while there are many points where the ratio of clearly fictional "how could he have known?" strokes of impossible genius against more plausible Nth dimensional chess moves that real people might make gets a bit much, it's all so much fun you don't mind for a minute.

Now's no time to stop reading.

Book Review: Austin to ATX

Quite where the boundary is between love for your hometown and simple narcissism is I don't know, but while the majority of the market for this book is probably limited to hardcore Austin navel-gazers like myself, since it does not attempt to provide a Grand Unified Theory of why Austin made the transition from small/poor/weird to big/rich/cool while other cities did not, it's certainly the best general cultural history of Austin that I've read. Patoski has really done his homework, digging deep into the archives for informed historical context and then leavening that research with revealing interviews of luminaries like Lance Armstrong, Richard Linklater, Liz Lambert, and a bunch more. Austin has always seemed to me like a large small town where everyone was only a few degrees away from everyone else, so I got a lot of pleasure out of learning more about the incredible web of connections between the people who turned Austin into a hotspot in food, music, film, tech, and so on. If you live here, even if you only showed up yesterday, you're participating in one of the fastest demographic and economic transitions in modern American history, and while I freely admit that there's almost no Austin-themed book that's too self-indulgent for my tastes, I think even a non-Austinite could enjoy this, if only for Patoski's real affection for the city. That, and the fact that you could construct quite a few great playlists out of the musicians he discusses.

Each chapter is immensely absorbing and offers a lot to ponder, but several recurring themes finally converged in my mind during the antepenultimate chapter "Keeping Austin Weird (The Looky-Loos)", which discusses how tourism has become an essential part of Austin's economy, and the complex reactions that that shift has engendered among us locals in an era when it seems like the city has been changing faster than ever. Everywhere that draws large numbers of tourists, or "looky-loos", has a basic dilemma: visitors bring in a great deal of revenue for businesses, often far more than locals do, and so selling Austin-ness to willing non-Austinites is not only a perfectly valid economic strategy for many entrepreneurs, tourism might as well be synonymous with being a "real city". The more people have a good time in Austin, the better off Austin is for it. This also cements Austin's place as a tastemaker, and one of the best places in the country to be a fan, broadly defined (Alamo is a movie fan's theater, bands of the world flock to our music festivals, Whole Foods redefines grocery stores, etc). However, even if the concentrated benefits to businesses handily outweigh the cumulative congestion and infrastructure costs to the city at large as our enterprises rake in hundreds of million of dollars, the distribution can be sufficiently out of whack to breed resentment and anger among the natives.

These concerns about growth and equity are also tied into the diversity paradox, which Patoski doesn't explicitly identify but which I think longtime residents feel implicitly, and which is also probably inevitable in any city that makes the parochial-cosmopolitan transition. Put simply, cultural exchange with other cities makes Austin more diverse yet less special at the same time. As Austin gets more diverse by exchanging stuff with other cities, we also start to resemble those places ever more closely, until the things that made us distinct are now universal because diversity increases on a local level at the same time as it decreases on a local level. We import NYC pizza, Hawaiian poke joints, and San Diego burritos, and export breakfast tacos, barbecue, and outlaw country artists right back. We're just not quite as special anymore, to the extent that we ever were, and yet people continue to arrive, because as an economist will point out, specialization increases with the extent of the market, and so size and variety combine in a virtuous cycle even as there are seemingly ever fewer "authentic" local experiences, however you want to define that. It also goes without saying that much of this bounty hasn't trickled down to the less fortunate sectors of the city either, who find their influence shrinking as the rest of the city seemingly leaves them behind.

Austin is hardly the first city to experience these dynamics, and one can only imagine a resident of Venice, New Orleans, or Paris rolling their eyes at our quaint complaints that there's an inherent difficulty in keeping yourself unique while the world wanders slowly up the sidewalk in front of you trying to take too many selfies. But even if the irritation someone feels at a tourist treating their city like a big Instagram backdrop is only natural (the chapter opens with a discussion of the infamous "I love you so much" graffiti wall at Jo's, which frequently causes traffic backups that I have personally had to endure), that peeving is ultimately self-defeating. A steady stream of people is enlarging Austin from a small pond to a big pond, and what kind of awful fish tries to build a dam upstream just to monopolize a particular riparium? Who would be helped if someone had discouraged you, or your parents, from moving here? If, as Patoski so copiously documents, the "good old days" of Austin consistently seem to have been just about 20 years ago, then right now is as good as time as any to live here. "Weird" might not be glamorous to everyone, particularly in bumper sticker form, but evidently the spirit that the word represents continues to charm.

Lame marketing slogans aside, the city we live in was built by a parade of self-described misfits coming to Austin, finding that they were home, and then doing something cool that even people outside of Austin liked. Creativity is the only thing that has a permanent place here. To the extent that Austin continues to enable that same ability to flourish and grow it will have preserved its spirit, and likewise it will have failed to the extent that the modern slacker finds that here is no place to dream. Seen in that light, while Austin has in no way been perfect in its past, the explosive growth that surrounds us is just a continuation of the trend that began with our founding, and while we might not be heaven on earth, we're pretty damn great, and the the more like-minded people who fall in love with the hills, the springs, and the river that provide our habitat, the better the future will be for us all. Austin is the kind of city that inspires this kind of passionate prolixity that strikes outsiders as so tedious yet so bewitching, and while far be it from me to tell anyone else the "right way" to be an Austinite, a failure to welcome the future is one of the surest ways to be wrong.

Book Review: Melanie Haupt - Historic Austin Restaurants

Billed as a "cultural history of Austin through its restaurants", I was primed to like this book before even reading it, since I'm a big fan of both Austin's history and its modern food scene, and I agree with her entirely that food is one of the best entrypoints into a city, region, people, or society's culture there is. Haupt wrote this in 2013, but it's not out of date in any way that matters, and though sadly many of its more dire prophecies have been fulfilled since its 2013 publication (RIP Players and Hill's, at least for now), most of the restaurants that Haupt profiles are still alive and serving. Haupt currently writes restaurant reviews for the Chronicle, which makes sense, because her union of individual restaurant profiles, broader cultural connection, interviews with important Austinites, and discussion of what food meant to people blends both interesting reporting and thoughtful analysis. I once maintained a blog about Sixth Street similar to Haupt's one-time plan to blog about restaurants until she decided to repackage her project as this book, and so her work here was both fun to read on its own terms as well as a bit inspirational. You can read through the whole thing pretty quickly, but people who have grown up with these places, like me, will find many items of sociological interest in these stories, and lots to ponder.

The book is divided into five chapters corresponding to various eras of the city, although each jumps around a little in time in order to accommodate the vicissitudes of the restaurant industry and the nonlinear nature of trends. The first chapter wisely begins with Austin's creation as the capital city that no one but its founder wanted to exist. Back then the concept of a "restaurant scene" didn't really exist either - whatever jokes about I-35 traffic you'd like to make, the difficulty of travel in the poorly-paved village of the 1800s meant that dining out was pretty rare even if you didn't live that far away from downtown, especially if like most residents you weren't wealthy, and so instead dinner parties at individual homes played a more prominent role. It's fun to ponder the sociological consequences of their decline, as easier travel, more affordable restaurants, and changing social relations have combined to essentially eliminate the past cultural power of fancy home parties over meals. It's not a coincidence that many of the eateries that survive from that period were either former boardinghouses like Scholz (1881) or hotels like The Driskill (1886) (as a side note, hotel restaurants and bars innovate far less in food and drink than they used to - hotels used to invent dishes like eggs benedict or brownies, and drinks like the piña colada or the martini, but that has mostly ceased), so that was a big conduit for German and Czech immigrants to add their traditions of sausage and kolaches to early Austin cuisine.

Austin was still small in the early part of the 20th century up through Prohibition, so restaurants like The Tavern (1916), Dirty Martin's (1926), and Hut's (1939) often had fairly unadventurous menus. Austin wasn't very cosmopolitan, so outliers like Hoffbrau Steakhouse (1934), whose menu has actually gotten much simpler over time, could easily stand out, especially if their food was good. It's a truism that even though greater affluence drives wider tastes, cuisines are still fundamentally based around cheap staple dishes, so the steaks, burgers, and Southern cuisine that were perfected then still define many of the older Austin restaurants from that period like Hill's (1941), with Quality Seafood (1938) being the outlier as basically the only source of seafood in town. Even the surviving places from the postwar era, like Sandy's (1946), Mrs. Johnson's (1948), Nau's (1951), Dart Bowl (1958), or The Salt Lick (1969), are known for their consistency and unpretentiousness rather than their daring. This is also true of many of the Tex-Mex restaurants from that period like Cisco's (1948), Matt's El Rancho (1952), El Patio (1954), Joe's (1969), and Tamale House (1977), although to be fair, after the popularization of the breakfast taco I'd rest on my laurels too; that's the kind of thing you only need to do once to live forever. I enjoyed reading about Green Pastures (1946) - founder Mary Faulk Koock was the sister of John Henry Faulk, who lent his name to the old central library branch, and in addition to managing that restaurant, she wrote The Texas Cookbook in 1965 with James Beard, of food award fame. It was also neat to learn that integration pioneer Harry Akin, who ran Night Hawk Diner (1932) eventually became mayor in addition to his restaurants spawning not only the Frisco (1953 - 2018) but also Hoover's (1998).

The hippie through Slacker era was pretty good for Austin, as we slowly transformed from a sleepy state capital and college town into a thinkfluencer factory. Many of the cultural tropes that define Austin today - live music, a relaxed attitude, vegetarianism - crystallized during this period. Thus you have the well-known close symbiosis between the music of the legendary Armadillo World Headquarters and the food of Threadgill's (1979), but I had never known the personal connections between the well-known Austin all-hours restaurants: Kenny Carpenter opened the Omelettry in 1978 at its old location on Burnet (they moved east to Airport Boulevard in 2015), partnered with Kent Cole and Patricia Atkinson in 1979, and opened another location on Lake Austin that same year. Kent and Patricia divorced soon after, and in 1986 Kenny sold off his ownership. Cole immediately renamed the west location Magnolia Cafe and opened the South Congress location in 1988; meanwhile Patricia had remarried and opened a little joint called Kerbey Lane in 1980, which went on to dominate everything in its path (the similar romantic/business journey of Dan and Fran from founding Dan's in 1973 to their split in 1990 is interesting too). I've never been to Mother's (1980), and it was hardly the first vegetarian restaurant here, but Austin's image as a city firmly committed to vegetarianism/veganism with a local flavor has been indelibly fixed. The influence of Quack's (1983) on local coffeeshop culture presents an interesting counterpoint, however - could a more entrepreneurial Austin have produced a Starbucks? Would we have wanted to?

There isn't a neat line between the end of the cheap Slacker period and the beginning of the modern gentrification period (from Drag to Brag?), as plenty of high-end restaurants like Jeffrey's (1975), Fonda San Miguel (1975), Texas French Bread (1981), or Chez Nous (1982) opened in those halcyon days of impecunity, but one might say that the current era is defined as much by closings as by openings, at least in the popular consciousness. So the losses of Les Amis (1970 - 1997), Players (1981 - 2016), or Las Manitas (1981 - 2008), each a ringing death knell of "old Austin", loom as large in the discourse as the fact that never in Austin's history has it been easier to eat as well, with as great a variety, as today. Austin is more diverse than ever, which I think is a good thing, since new Austinites have brought a fresh perspective and quite frankly higher standards in many cases. Food trailers have opened a world of possibilities, and the success of Torchy's, East Side Kings, and Franklin is something to be proud of, since the seemingly daily openings of restaurants with new cuisines, and improved versions of old cuisines, are something that previous generations would only envy. Not to say that abundance hasn't brought Austin its own set of problems, but can you imagine going back to the pre-Franklin/Titaya's/Ramen Tatsu-Ya era? I do feel that restaurants like Uchi are not really made "for Austinites" in the same way that, say, Torchy's can fit into just about anyone's budget. Then again, it's not like The Driskill was meant for the common man when it opened (or even now) either, and often it's just a matter of time before a new blight becomes an old classic.

When I was growing up (I graduated high school in 2002), it felt like it was possible for the average Austinite to go everywhere in town and do essentially everything there was to do. I don't think that's the case anymore. A city of a million people is too large for anyone to have the kind of comprehensive experience of the city you could have in the 90s, and as the city's identity becomes larger than any one person's capacity, it means that you have to get used to the idea of multiple Austins, other cities outside your comprehension, coterminous with your own city but forever beyond your ability to reach. In some ways that makes the surviving restaurants of previous decades even more valuable, as they represent a shrinking pool of links to the past. The average lifespan of a restaurant is something like five years, so when you sit down at Dirty Martin's you have the rare privilege of participating in a ritual nearly a century old. However, each restaurant closing also brings home the idea of change and impermanence in a way that's important to learn, because you have to think of all the new rituals being formed all around you. Even though I fully shared the collective sense of loss as I stood in line for Player's on its last day in business, the next day I had the choice to eat at any of the new restaurants that had sprung up around it, any of which could become a future classic. The pancakes at Kerbey Lane are not as good as they were when I was a kid, but who knows, perhaps in 30 years someone will be complaining about how a now-beloved joint in the Domain has really gone downhill from back in the day when only real Austinites went there, not like all the outsiders these days.

Book Review: Luo Guanzhong - Romance of the Three Kingdoms Volume 1

I'm not sure if the term "epic fantasy" applies to this work, since the standard line is that it's "70% history, 30% fiction", but whether it's shelved in "epic fantasy", "historical fiction", or even "magical realism", it's undoubtedly one of the masterpieces of literature. It's almost overwhelming in how full of everything it is: the whirlwind of characters, the unyielding pace of the action, and the seamless integration of so many little human details and emotions that give the many side-plots and minor characters a resonance far out of proportion to their brief page time. Like with all great literature, even those diversions are pure pleasure thanks to clever storytelling. Every chapter ends on a cliffhanger, each analeptic or proleptic excursion adds valuable depth and context to the main narrative, and the consistent treatment of the ways that individual honor, personal loyalty, and political duty overlap and conflict continuously give each and every decision by the main characters a real weight. Luo's account of the struggle to build a new world out of the decay of the old is as powerful as any modern work I can think of.

My edition of the Moss Roberts translation is split into 4 volumes for ease of reading. This volume begins with the immortal incipit "Here begins our tale. The empire, long divided, must unite; long united, must divide. Thus it has ever been." and the oath in the peach orchard between Liu Bei, Guan Yu, and Zhang Fei, and ends with Cao Cao's defeat of Yuan Shao at the battle of Jizhou (chapter 32 out of 120). You could spend a long, long time exegizing every aspect of the novel - its elastic grounding in the historical record and subsequent authorial "improvements"; its biases of heroism and colorations of personality that turn these real people into Homeric archetypes; the slight supernatural touches like the summoning of convenient storms, fatal hauntings of vengeful ghosts, or complex portents and astrological divinations; the way the actions of individuals recapitulate the recurrent patterns of imperiogenesis and imperiopathosis in Chinese history - but a few specific observations came most readily to mind as I finished the first quarter of the tale.

First, imperial power is a fascinating contradiction here. As the saying goes, "civilizations die from suicide, not by murder", and the slow disintegration of the Han dynasty amid the famines and religious fervor of the Yellow Scarves movement (interestingly, this colored clothing rebellion will be echoed several times more at similarly turbulent junctures in Chinese history) is reminiscent of a hollow, gradually rotting tree. While the Emperor's authority is nominally unlimited and he commands (nearly) universal respect, in practice the various warlords, rogue generals, and aristocrats seem to rule with complete independence, and the actual personage of the Emperor is treated somewhat like the puppet Roman Emperors after the Crisis of the Third Century (which by historical happenstance took place only a few decades after the events here), meaning that control of the military is paramount, and to be a successful general is almost synonymous with being a potential imperial claimant yourself. Many years later during the Yuan dynasty, in fact just as Luo was writing the collection of plays that this novel was compiled out of, someone coined the saying that "the mountains are high and the emperor is far away" as a way of highlighting how notional autocracy and practical independence can coexist simultaneously in the vastness of the Chinese landscape when a failing dynasty surrenders power to the court bureaucracy and a succession of generals.

Military strategy is also pretty thought-provoking, both for its realism and for its more whimsical moments. Many novels, even ones that make real efforts at military realism, often skimp on mundane details, like the importance of supply line logistics, the need to post sentries at night, how important the disposition of your troops are in pitched battles, or the finer points of besieging cities. Often lazy authors will describe their heroes as strategic geniuses, but leave the actual demonstrations of their acuity up to the reader's imagination. Not here! All the ingredients of military prowess are on full display, with Cao Cao in particular shown as a true mastermind of deception and consistently able to turn seemingly any setback into an opportunity thanks to his cleverness and willingness to listen to sound advice. The sheer quantity of his cunning feints and countermoves would be truly impressive even if they weren't (mostly) based on real history; both his wit and his opponents' foolishness are very convincingly rendered, as Luo also faithfully depicts the many ways that superior forces can be defeated by a leader's ill-timed vacillation, inconvenient bouts of drunkenness, stubbornness and inflexibility, or by just plain better tactics and superior hustle.

The flip side is that all of the major characters are all invincible superheroes with plot armor that would make the most hack fanfiction writers blush. Take a drink every time one of the protagonists kills an opponent with a single mighty blow, or fights through a crowd of enemies miraculously unscathed, or gets out of a jam by the impossibly convenient arrival of reinforcements just in the nick of time, and in just a few chapters you will be drunker than Zhang Fei himself! It's one of the fictional scenes, but when Guan Yu slays a series of six generals on a single journey to reunite with Liu Bei, it feels like you're reading a novelization of the Dynasty Warriors video games, which are based on this material, and not the other way around. Even when a main character finally dies, it's invariably in a protracted, grandiose boss battle. And yet somehow the comic book-like action sequences, or the occasional appearances of magic, never feel out of place or untrue to the broader story, as malefactors like Dong Zhou appear and then are vanquished according to the inscrutable dictates of the heavens as well as the familiar laws of villainous peril and heroic resolution.

And thanks to Luo's consistent editorializing to let you know who's good and who's bad, the main characters are all memorable and sympathetic to the point where you can't help but get emotionally invested in their fates like the worst kind of nerd fanboy. Luo's obvious cheerleading for Liu Bei and his oath-brothers Guan Yu and Zhang Fei comes off as almost charming, even though I can't be the only person who got a bit sick over how exaggeratedly noble and virtuous Luo makes him appear at every opportunity. And by the same token, Cao Cao really doesn't seem like as bad a guy as Luo tries to paint him; not only is he the smartest guy around and sincerely reluctant to seize the throne illegitimately, he consistently tries to persuade his enemies over to his side and forgive their past enmities whenever possible. His occasional ruthlessness is of the "it's all in the game" variety, and his "big transgression" of honestly taking credit for killing the deer on the royal hunt when the Emperor missed it is so laughably petty that, when the rest of the imperial court flipped out, I wanted him to just take power right then and there. We're reminded that the Han dynasty is rotten and corrupt every single chapter; might as well let someone with some talent take the reins. I'm firmly on Team Cao Cao, for now at least.

I can't imagine anyone reading this far and not continuing to the next volume as quickly as humanly possible.

Book Review: Jeffrey Kerr - Lamar's Folly

I'd previously read Seat of Empire, one of Kerr's several non-fiction works, which recounted the acrimonious debate between Sam Houston and Mirabeau Lamar over where the capital of the new nation of Texas was to be located. Happily for me, an Austinite, it ended up being here, but beyond the incredible wealth of historical detail Kerr revealed in that book lay a fascinating human story of a clash of personalities and ambitions - the grandiose visions of Lamar the poet for Texas to be its own sovereign empire stretching out to the Pacific, and the more hardheaded plans of Houston the politician for Texas to take its place alongside the other states as just another part of America. This novel is a (heavily) fictionalized exploration of that deep-seated personal enmity between the two men and conflict between different destinies for Texas. While I disagreed with several of Kerr's artistic decisions, I also read the whole thing straight through in a day; he is a skillful storyteller as well as an excellent historian.

Most of the novel is told in narrative form from the perspective of Edward Fontaine, a real person who was Lamar's personal secretary, and who also eventually built and became the pastor at the church that became St. David's Episcopal Church (which is where I had my christening!). There are also brief passages in each chapter from the perspective of his slave Jacob, another real person who founded several Baptist churches in Central Texas. In each chapter Edward recounts his relationship with Lamar, from their meeting during the battle of San Jacinto to their eventual parting after the end of Lamar's tenure as President of Texas, as Lamar does everything in his power, and a bit beyond, to forge Texas into an imperial nation while simultaneously feuding with Houston on both a political level and a personal one, as the less-charismatic Lamar is often upstaged by the more flamboyant Houston, with Jacob adding additional context and a non-Anglo perspective that's often an ironic counterpoint to Edward's version of events. Eventually Lamar's career is wrecked by the confluence of two scandals - his not-quite-legal dispatch of an ill-fated expedition to conquer Santa Fe and thus enrich and enlarge Texas, and the Kerr-invented affair he carries on with the wife of a blacksmith he sent along with it. The novel ends with both Edward and Jacob reflecting on Lamar's hubris, the confluence of personal tragedy and underlying character flaws that might have contributed to it, and nods toward their respective post-Lamar lives in a Texas where Houston's vision predominates (with the obvious exception of the location of the capital!), even though many Texans have unconsciously adopted Lamar's attitude of a Texas apart from the rest of the country.

I had very mixed feelings about the David-and-Bathsheba affair (surprisingly, no one in the novel mentions the obvious Biblical parallel) between Lamar and Mrs. Tucker that Kerr concocted for the novel, which plays a big role in Edward's gradual disillusionment with Lamar. It adds a very human element to Lamar's outsized personality, and is actually believable given Lamar's real-life tragic loss of his wife and brother, and it also gives its title a nice double meaning when combined with the ultimate disaster of the Santa Fe Expedition (interestingly, I learned in a KUT interview with Kerr that "Lamar's folly" was a real-life contemporaneous reference to a comically inadequate defensive palisade that Lamar had built around the Capitol; for some reason this is not referenced within the novel itself). However, I wasn't ever able to fully relax and just roll with it. Obviously just about anything is fair game when it comes to historical fiction, and Kerr does quite well with his other flourishes, but given that Lamar is the central axis around which the entire novel revolves, and the quality of his character most of all, I wasn't quite sure what I was supposed to take away from his affair, especially because Kerr doesn't really need it for any ruminations on "the perils of hubris" or "power inevitably corrupts" or "sin destroys even the mighty" or what have you. Imagine a historical fiction along the lines of the Broadway play Hamilton, except that Jefferson is also given an extra mistress for some reason and ends up fighting a duel of his own, or Steven Spielberg's movie Lincoln but Lincoln is given a fictitious brother fighting for the South. It just violated my suspension of disbelief, whereas Kerr's other liberties, such as not mentioning Edward's wife or side career as a politician himself, didn't for whatever reason. It's interesting that he didn't substantially alter Sam Houston, a much more sympathetic person, to the same degree.

But if that doesn't bother you, then otherwise this is quite good. Kerr very convincingly represents the way that secondhand reports and personal loyalties can forever taint your perceptions of someone, as Edward despises Houston solely due to loyalty to Lamar and the rumors of Houston's drinking and infidelities despite Houston's unfailing courtesy towards him. Jacob throughout provides a more level-headed perspective on the two men, continually preferring Houston due to his kindness towards slaves and Indians versus Lamar's more typical Southern white supremacist views (though there is one curious scene in the book where, just prior to a scouting expedition reaching the settlement of Waterloo, Jacob states that Lamar scalps an Indian he and Edward have both shot and offers the scalp to Edward, which is supposed to illustrate his dislike of Indians, though Edward does not mention the scalping at all; otherwise their two narrations agree entirely on actual events). Lamar's own personal transition from an opponent of the genocide of the Indians to a strong proponent is also given a firm grounding in his own character, and how his desire for Texas as he saw it to become a great nation led him to pursue whatever means necessary to make that happen, including dispatching the Santa Fe expedition despite Houston convincing the Texas Congress not to authorize it. And of course the initial battle over the location of the capital plays a large role in the book, although not the infamous Angelina Eberly cannon incident later on (in that same KUT interview with Kerr he reveals that Lamar was the only President of Texas inaugurated in Houston, and that Houston was the only President inaugurated in Austin; this historical irony also for some reason wasn't mentioned here and was not really emphasized in Seat of Empire either).

As a lover of Austin history in general and of Kerr's previous book in particular I was predisposed to like it, but anyone who enjoys Texas-themed historical fiction will enjoy it as well.