I wouldn’t call it a suspenseful book. And yet Two Years Before the Mast kept me in suspense. I wouldn’t call it a book that’s hard to put down, and yet I read it in great chunks, reluctant to stop.

It’s an old book, and it’s written in the manner of an old book. And yet this reader felt the living presence of an intelligent, brave-hearted and sympathetic narrator at his elbow, one he is glad to have become acquainted with.

In 1834, Richard Henry Dana was a Harvard undergraduate. Stricken with the measles, he recovered with his sight damaged, unable to read much. He chose a radical form of therapy.

…a two or three year voyage, which I had undertaken from a determination to cure, if possible, by an entire change of life, and by a long absence from books and study, a weakness of the eyes, which had obliged me to give up my pursuits, and which no medical aid seemed likely to cure.

This was no pleasure cruise. “Before the mast” is a nautical term meaning the forecastle area, the place where common seamen bunked, where officers went seldom, and the captain almost never. Life before the mast meant constant labor, little sleep, unvaried food, and much danger. One crew member is lost overboard before the brig “Pilgrim” has rounded Cape Horn. Continue reading Two Years Before the Mast, by Richard Henry Dana →

Another public domain book I downloaded to my Kindle is An Autobiography of Buffalo Bill. I’d call it a pretty good acquisition for anyone interested in the Wild West. It’s not too long, and it reads pretty well for a Victorian memoir.

I personally have always viewed Buffalo Bill as a sort of supporting character to his more dangerous friend, Wild Bill Hickok. This is unfair, as Cody’s lasting achievement, both in terms of his influence on the opening of the West, and on American culture in general, far outstrips Hickok’s. One wouldn’t be far off in calling Cody America’s first great media celebrity. (Why he states in this book, without explanation, that Wild Bill ended up an “outlaw” is a mystery. But I understand they parted on bad terms.)

There’s some dispute as to how much one may trust Cody’s own account of his life. Some historians dispute, for instance, whether he ever rode for the Pony Express as he claims here (the documentary evidence is incomplete). But even adjusting for a showman’s self-promotion, it’s quite a life story. Left fatherless at an early age (his father was murdered by pro-slavery ruffians in Kansas), he provided for his mother and siblings by hunting and taking odd jobs as a wagon driver. Eventually his specialized skills and knowledge of the country made him a famous scout and buffalo hunter. This introduced him to influential men and to the press, opening doors to his ultimate career as a showman.

It’s an exciting tale, full of adventures, chases, escapes, and battles. Much is left unsaid (such as his drinking problem and his marital problems), but nobody wrote tell-alls in those days.

He ends the book with a tribute to the American Indians, expressing his respect for them as friends and enemies. He recognizes their legitimate complaints, but sees it as self-evident that the white man could make better use of the land, and so was right to take it.

Young readers should be cautioned about racial depictions common at the time, but unacceptable today. Still, they ought to read it simply as a multicultural exercise.

I downloaded John Ross Browne’s book on his travels in Russia and Scandinavia, The Land of Thor, because it was an old account of those regions that I’d never heard of (such accounts can be invaluable for the historical writer), and because I could get it free as a Kindle e-book. Now that I know better, I recommend going to The Guttenberg Project instead, and downloading the illustrated version, as the author’s drawings are half the point.

John Ross Browne was born in Ireland, but raised in the United States. He eventually became a proud—nay, arrogant—citizen of the state of California. He was a frequent contributor of both stories and illustrations to Harper’s Weekly Magazine. For a period of his life around the Civil War he moved to Germany and took the opportunity to travel extensively, sending reports to Harper’s and compiling them into books when he was finished. The Land of Thor is one of those. Continue reading The Land of Thor, by J. R. Browne →

Despite my tremendous and unfeigned admiration for, and enjoyment of, the writings of G. K. Chesterton, I’ve raised some people’s ire in the past by giving my opinion that, on the basis of my own reading of his work, I consider him an antisemite within a reasonable definition of the term. Perhaps I need to clarify that I don’t mean—as many people would—to suggest that he was a Nazi, or sympathetic to Nazism. His antisemitism was of an older and arguably more benign sort—the antisemitism of the Christian peasant who truly believes that the Jews are hoarding all the gold in the realm, and using it to manipulate the rulers.

That Chesterton was not by any stretch of the imagination a Nazi can be demonstrated by a single reading of Eugenics and Other Evils : An Argument Against the Scientifically Organized State.

In Chesterton’s time, those pre-World War II years that seem comparatively gracious to us today, Eugenics was a massively popular movement. Some of the most eminent social reformers in the world, people of unquestioned philanthropy and integrity, thought it self-evident that the government ought to be given the power to “improve” the race through selective breeding and the sterilization of “inferiors.”

To all of this Chesterton, out of his “medieval” mindset, cried “Infamy!” To deny a basic right like marriage and procreation to any human soul, simply because someone in authority judges him unfit, was to him a denial of basic human dignity—dignity which, he believed, sprang from the image of God, not from some biologist’s checklist of desirable traits.

Further, Chesterton was deeply concerned that such a program would place in the hands of the state a power that would destroy liberty—power that no human being deserves or is capable of exercising innocently.

The first half of the book contains a wealth of quotations just as apt for our own time as for Chesterton’s:

Say to them “The persuasive and even coercive powers of the citizen should enable him to make sure that the burden of longevity in the previous generation does not become disproportionate and intolerable, especially to the females”; say this to them and they will sway slightly to and fro like babies sent to sleep in cradles. Say to them “Murder your mother,” and they sit up quite suddenly. Yet the two sentences, in cold logic, are exactly the same.

The thing that really is trying to tyrannise through government is Science. The thing that really does use the secular arm is Science. And the creed that really is levying tithes and capturing schools, the creed that really is enforced by fine and imprisonment, the creed that really is proclaimed not in sermons but in statutes, and spread not by pilgrims but by policemen—that creed is the great but disputed system of thought which began with Evolution and has ended in Eugenics. Materialism is really our established Church; for the Government will really help it to persecute its heretics.

A remarkable element of this book is that Chesterton warns in particular that Germany is likely to be the source of great Eugenic evil.

I liked the second half of the book less than the first, because I’m a reactionary capitalist and less poetic-minded than Chesterton. Chesterton hated Socialism, but he hated Capitalism (I think) more, and in the second section he traces all the evils of Eugenics back to the Capitalists and their presumed plan to organize society in such a way as to produce a more efficient source of labor. I don’t know if that’s true. It certainly is no longer the case, for today’s great Eugenists (Chesterton’s name for them) are overwhelmingly Socialists and Leftists.

But the first half made it all worthwhile. I highly recommend Eugenics and Other Evils.