Jill Lepore

Lepore has written an amazing book, one that is as carefully non-partisan as anything can be in these days of an unfettered Internet, fake news, and polarized politics. She’s quite young to have such a fundamental grasp of large issues – 52 – and I admire her scholarship and synthesis of facts, movements, philosophies, wars, and issues into such a powerful book.

Her starting the history in 1492 startled me at first, but as I read her reasons, citations, and justifications, I came to see show more that the rise of nation-states dated to the collision of the Americas and Europe, the deliberate setting of this early date, of inevitability, of the United States. To ignore this date, manipulated as it was, would have ignored the fact that “the idea of equality came out of a resolute rejection of the idea of inequality; a dedication to liberty emerged out of bitter protest against slavery; and the right to self-government was fought for, by sword, and still more fiercely, by pen. Against conquest, slaughter and slavery came the urgent and abiding question, “By what right?”’ p 10

And then she relentlessly and amazingly lays out a history driven by the reaction to slavery and power, to freedom and inequality, to responsibility and abdication of responsibility.

It is profoundly depressing, frankly. It is beautifully written, intricately built one fact at a time, and basically says that nothing has changed. The forces that divide us haven’t gone away, haven’t been ameliorated. They have gained strength then waned, been newly motivated with new generations then gone out of style.

They are racism, sexism, and religious intolerance. They are power, control, and money.

If anybody can find a better way to interpret this book I’d love to hear it. show less

Summary: Stewart Jameson flees his debts in his native Scotland, and settles himself in colonial Boston. Jameson is a painter, a portraitist, who has an uncanny knack for capturing not only people's faces but their true selves. He advertises for an apprentice, and on his doorstep lands one Francis Weston - neé Fanny Easton - a young woman who has been cast out by her father, one of the luminaries of Boston politics, and has disguised herself as a boy in order to pursue her love of painting. show more Politics is much on the mind of the town, as Parliment is increasing taxation on goods to the colonies, and there is a growing sentiment in favor of freedom. But the same people cheering for freedom from Britain are not necessarily in favor of freedom for all, and when a notable anti-slavery advocate is murdered, tensions come to a head. But can Jameson and Weston see the truth of the situation when they can't clearly see what is happening in their own lives?

Review: I had a ton of fun with this book. It's a total mish-mash of a novel, part historical fiction and part romance and part murder mystery; the tone falls somewhere between picaresque, satire, and epistolary. One thing it never is, though, is self-serious: practically every page is full of wordplay and bad puns and bawdy jokes and riddles. Kamensky & Lepore can tone it down when needed, for the more serious and poignant scenes, but I should have known from the fact that the back cover of the book contains blurbs from Benjamin Franklin, Samuel Johnson, and Henry Fielding, among others, that this book was going to be more than a little tongue-in-cheek. And the excellent thing was, that no matter how difficult the mish-mash of story elements and genres makes this book to describe, they are all woven together well, making this book feel full and rich, if occasionally a little overstuffed. (But, y'know, comfortably so.)

The other great thing about this book was how well it brought 1760s Boston to life. Kamensky and Lepore are both professional historians, so perhaps it's no surprise that they got the details right. But they really captured the tone of the time in Stewart's writings and Fanny's letters, not to mention the newspaper articles, pamplets, legislation, etc. that were sprinkled throughout. And, what's more, they caught the tone of the time yet still kept it readable to a modern audience: pretty impressive. There were a few things that I thought were a little anachronistic: Fanny's personality and decisions, for sure, and also some of the wordplay also struck me as rather modern... but on that latter point, based on the authors' note, I think it's my perception of eighteenth century that's wrong, rather than the book. They also do a really nice job of working with their main theme - of looking so hard at one thing that you completely miss something else - and watching the title play itself out on multiple levels was really fascinating.

Overall, this book was by turns funny, sexy, sad, witty, and thought-provoking. But mostly just a total blast to read. 4.5 out of 5 stars.

Recommendation: Definitely recommended if you like Revolutionary War-era literature, or historical fiction set in that time frame. show less

Wonder Woman has been a comic series, a TV show and a couple of movies. However, the history behind this character is stranger than anything that could be dreamed up in the mind of a novelist. Conceived by William Moulton Marston (coincidentally the inventor of the lie detector), a Harvard educated psychologist and self-proclaimed champion of women’s rights who had a very peculiar personal life of his own.

Marston was married to Sadie Holloway, a graduate of Mount Holyoke college, but also show more lived in a menage a trois with Olive Byrne, the niece of Margaret Sanger, the crusader for women’s reproductive rights. He had children with both women and somehow managed to keep this outré living arrangement secret from the rest of the outside world.

LePore explores this living dynamic, Marston’s strange theories on the empowerment of women, along with his other psychological theories and spins an engaging and highly readable tale. show less

This book is getting the highest possible rating, despite going off-topic at points, because of the importance of the story. I had actually heard of Simulatics before, in the context of the intelligence analysis follies of the Vietnam War, so I felt the need to read it sooner than later. It turns out that strategic analysis was not really the original mission of the company; advertising executive Ed Greenfield was fascinated with the potential of computer simulation in regards to show more salesmanship, and what he really wanted to sell to the American public was an Adlai Stevenson presidency. Adlai didn't bite, but JFK did, and the firm made a contribution to Kennedy's wafer-thin victory over Nixon; mostly in making a substantive argument that JFK really had to pursue the support of Black voters if he really wanted to have a chance.

Here's the problem: Even at the time, thoughtful insiders suspected that this trial run of "big data" was ethically and morally dubious, and considering the performance of firms such as Cambridge Analytica and Facebook, this turns out to be prescient. It certainly prevented the firm from receiving a wider embrace in the political world; particularly after the Kennedy brothers soured on the self-promotion of the founders of the firm.

The next issue is that Greenfield and his merry men often seemed to be better at padding their expense accounts, rather than offering useful analysis. Part of this is a commentary on the limitations of the behavioral sciences of the time (a topic which Lepore describes with cold venom), and part is that these men might have thought that they were masters of universe (a precursor of Silicon Valley arrogance), but Greenfield could never collect enough resources to really make his vision work. Even before American debate over the value of the Vietnam War turned incandescent, damn few social-science practitioners were prepared to go to Saigon, and those that did seemed to be mediocrities.

In the end, the firm collapsed due to mismanagement, and basically wrecked Ed Greenfield's life. While the firm showed the way to the future, about the only person to come well out of the experience was the political scientist, and commentator on technology, Ithiel de Sola Pool, and even he probably wanted to live down his participation. Pool spent quality time dodging the hatred of anti-war protestors at MIT during the late '60s.

Besides being an examination of the roots of a controversial major industry, there is also a life and times quality about this book. Some readers are going to be uncomfortable with this, as Lepore writes with real anger about the inadequacies of period, particularly in regards to the irony of how a group of men who proposed to analyze human behavior couldn't even understand their own wives. There's a lot of sadness that acts as the mortar to the building blocks of this story. To Lepore, the glamor of the "New Frontier" was just toxic froth on roiling waters. If Lepore had the right angle, I'd enjoy seeing her write about Talcott Parsons and the vision of the social sciences being as predictive as actual science; in part, I received my undergraduate and graduate education from professors who still bore the scars of that experience. show less