Nathaniel Philbrick. Bunker Hill. New York: Viking, 2013. Print.

Do not be misled by the title. Bunker Hill is about the beginnings of the American Revolution in the Boston area. It is divided into nearly equal thirds.

The first third of Bunker Hill is about the events leading up to the battle. It begins, after a little background (e.g., the 1761 Writs of Assistance), with the arrival of occupying troops to Boston in 1768. It reminds us that the American Revolution was not a Rousseauvian romantic re-structuring of society, but a genuine attempt to regain the governments and rights that had gradually been taken away. We are reminded of the 1676 Massachusetts constitution. I was reminded of Ben Franklin’s reaction to a British Lord’s view of the king in 1757.

Bunker Hill includes the Boston Massacre, the Boston Tea Party, the March on Salem, Lexington, Concord, Paul Revere, and Chelsea Creek. If the reader has never heard of these things, this is a good place to start. Philbrick makes these events come alive and helps us understand both sides.

The provincials (Philbrick’s preferred term) of Massachusetts began meeting secretly in a ruling body outside of Boston after the King closed the legislature and set up martial law. Philbrick records some of the deliberations. The provincials did not keep written records of the meetings to help avoid any English reprisals. We only know about them because in the 1930s the correspondence of General Gage, the military governor, was rediscovered. A spy had passed the deliberations on to him. (For a detailed history of the independent Massachusetts legislatures and county conventions see Ray Raphael’s The First American Revolution.)

While Bunker Hill tells us a lot about many of the patriot leaders like John and Samuel Adams, John Hancock, Paul Revere, Israel Putnam, Artemas Ward, William Prescott, Henry Knox, and others, it devotes more of the first two thirds of the book to Dr. Joseph Warren. He seemed to be everywhere, and he was the leader that nearly everyone in Boston, including the British hierarchy, respected. John Quincy Adams, seven years old in 1775, would recall the doctor fondly for saving his right hand through his medical skills. At least one person who lived in Boston during the siege and observed both sides said that if Warren had lived, Washington would have been “an obscurity.” (248)

The details concerning the politics and the fighting before Bunker Hill really show us how the British occupiers and New England “Yankees” came to such an impasse.

I had never made the connection that the British General Hugh Percy, who led one of the units to Concord and back in April 1775, was the 31-year-old Duke of Northumberland and a direct descendant of Hotspur and the rebels of Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part I. Because I grew up in a small suburb of Boston (still semi-rural at the time), I recognized family names of many of the provincials in Bunker Hill. Most of the schools in our town were named after Revolutionary War soldiers who had lived there—some appear in this book. The book also mentions Nathaniel Ames of Dedham, Massachusetts, a key figure in Charles Slack’s book reviewed here recently.

Philbrick notes that many of the most capable provincial soldiers like Washington and Putnam were veterans of the French and Indian War. They knew about fighting in their own territory, and that is likely a major cause of the English underestimating the opposition. Henry Knox was too young to have fought in that war, but as a bookseller he had read many military manuals and would prove to be an effective engineer and artilleryman.

The middle third or so of the book is about the actual Battle of Bunker Hill. It notes the actions leading up to the attack, Gage’s decision to fight the militias camped in Charlestown, and how it took three attacks for the British regulars to take the hills. We are reminded the actual battle took place on Breed’s Hill. Bunker Hill was the taller hill that overlooked it.

We are told how New Hampshire’s John Stark, a veteran of Rogers’ Rangers, and Connecticut’s Thomas Knowlton built fortifications and led men on the provincial left that completely prevented the elite Welsh Fusiliers from making a flank attack. Philbrick also reconstructs as best he can the death of Dr. Warren—shot in the head at close range by an officer’s pistol.

The last third of the book, then, describes the siege of Boston. Though the British won Charlestown and Bunker Hill in this battle, they had so many casualties that they could go no farther. They also had burned most of the houses in Charlestown, so there was not much left for their martial law to rule over.

A few weeks after Bunker Hill, George Washington arrived in Cambridge with a commission to organize an army under the auspices of the Continental Congress. Washington, Ward, and others would construct siege fortifications surrounding Boston and Charlestown. Back then both towns were on peninsulas that had very narrow necks connecting them to the mainland. By early winter provincial privateers had successfully kept even most shipping out of Boston Harbor.

Colonel Knox ably transported sixty-odd British cannon from Fort Ticonderoga in New York to Dorchester Heights, a third peninsula south of Boston overlooking the city at such a height that artillery from Boston could not reach it. The whole time Washington wanted to attack Boston, but his other generals who were mostly New Englanders did not want to see Boston destroyed. Besides, even Washington admitted that they were low on gunpowder.

On the evening of March 4 into the morning of March 5, 1776, Knox, Quartermaster Thomas Mifflin, French and Indian War veteran John Thomas, and 800 soldiers constructed a fort with cannon on Dorchester Heights. The British in Boston could not believe what they saw when they awoke the next morning. One British officer wrote that it was “and expedition equal to that of the Genii belonging to Aladdin’s wonderful lamp.” (280) General Howe thought the provincials did more in one night “than his whole army would have done in six months.” (280) The British estimated that the Continental Army must have had 15 to 20 thousand men just to build the fort.

Though this reviewer never knew the details, he knew enough of Boston tradition to know that this was the beginning of the end for England in Boston. They were suffering. They were nearly completely cut off by land and sea. Sunday, March 17, 1776, is celebrated to this day not only as St. Patrick’s Day (Philbrick tells us that there were enough Irish Protestants in Boston to celebrate this holiday since 1737) but also as Evacuation Day.

In passing, Philbrick notes that while Washington was in Massachusetts, Phillis Wheatley wrote her poem “To His Excellency George Washington” and mailed it to him. (“Your Excellency” was the standard way to address generals.) Washington let a lot of personal correspondence unopened for months. When he finally read her poem in February of 1776, he wrote back complimenting her and telling her that if she were ever near his headquarters, “I shall be happy to see a person so favored by the muses.” (278)

There is a very moving epilogue, just a few pages, that tells of June 17, 1843, when the Bunker Hill Monument was dedicated. We see it from the perspective of a now-aged John Quincy Adams who had heard the fighting from his home in Quincy when he was seven and could now hear the pomp and circumstance from the same vantage point.

The Battle of Bunker Hill’s casualty list was high. The Americans had 115 killed and 305 wounded. General Howe would say of Dr. Warren’s death, “This victim was worth five hundred of their men.” Philbrick notes that this is “high praise indeed.” (230) Of the 2,200 British regulars involved, 1,054 had been killed or wounded. General Howe would write, “The success is too dearly bought.” (230) It would be the bloodiest battle of the entire Revolutionary War—and independence had not even been declared!

Several people over the years had recommended books by Nathaniel Philbrick to me. I believe his The Mayflower was the last book my father read (on tape, by then he was unable to hold books for any length of time) before he passed away, a patriot to the end. Bunker Hill was so well done in so many way, I am sure that it will not be the not be the last book by him that I will read, God willing.

Denise Kiernan and Joseph D’Agnese. Signing Their Lives Away. Philadelphia: Quirk Books, 2009. Print.

Signing Their Lives Away is subtitled The Fame and Misfortune of the Men Who Signed the Declaration of Independence. It contains brief biographies of each of the fifty-six signers arranged by state north to south. It tells its stories with a certain amount of history and lots of trivia.

It is clear that one of the authors’ motivations is to set the record straight. Other similar accounts, they claim, either said things that were mistake or unproven. If anything, Signing Their Lives Away goes in the opposite direction by denying things that were recorded by reliable sources.

So some have said that New Hampshire’s Josiah Bartlett had his home burned by the British during the war. Actually, it was burned by a Tory mob in1774. Although the authors at times seem almost pro-British, we do note that yes, there were sometimes Tory mobs in the colonies, too.

The authors suggest that Ben Franklin really never conducted his kite experiment. It was simply an untested hypothesis he got credit for. It makes this writer wonder why Franklin invented the lightning rod, then, on an untested hypothesis.

They even question whether Delaware’s Caesar Rodney made his overnight ride to Philadelphia to cast the vote which approved the Declaration. As proof to the authors that this event did occur, I will use the Miracle on 34th Street argument. The United States Postal Service issued a postage stamp commemorating the event. Would the Postal Service celebrate something that did not happen?

Two signers, though, really did have a rough time of it during the war. Both were from New Jersey, where the king’s troops were stationed for many years. Abraham Clark had at least two sons captured by the British with at least one dying on a prison hulk. John Hart was on the run, even spending time in caves, when British soldiers were in his neck of the woods.

We also learn that Francis Hopkinson of New Jersey designed the American flag. Betsy Ross, wife of signer George Ross’s nephew, may have sewn a flag and likely does get credit for cutting the five-pointed stars. Hopkinson’s stars had six points.

I always wondered about Richard Stockton, who has a New Jersey Turnpike rest area named after him. Since a couple other Jersey rest areas are named after writers (viz., Walt Whitman and Joyce Kilmer) for a long time I thought that rest area was named after the author of “The Lady or the Tiger” until they put up a plaque explaining who their Richard Stockton was.

We are reminded that the Declaration of Independence, while largely written by Thomas Jefferson, was officially drafted by a committee which included Jefferson, Ben Franklin, Roger Sherman, Robert Livingston, and John Adams. Signing Their Lives Away tells us that Franklin actually suggested the adjective self-evident to describe the truths of natural law named in the Declaration. That makes sense from what he said about the Bible in his Autobiography—that, in so many words, many of the Bible’s truths are self-evident also.

The library where I found Signing Their Lives Away files it with Young Adult books. That is appropriate for the reading level. It would be accessible for short reports on many of the Founders. Most of the entries are three to five page sketches.

The book contains some curiosities. It has a list of the men who presided over the United States in Congress under the Articles of Confederation. These ten men technically were presidents of the United States before George Washington. It has a quotation from King George III in reaction to the Declaration.

It also notes that six men signed both the Declaration and the Constitution; three signed those two documents plus the Articles of Confederation; and Roger Sherman of Connecticut signed those three plus the Articles of Association, which established the Continental Congress in 1774. The book calls him the Über-Signer.

There are a few minor questions or quibbles. At one point Signing Their Lives Away speaks of “some British soldiers who fired into an angy mob, killing five colonists.” (26, 27) For some reason—political correctness? pro-Tory sympathies?—it does not name this incident by what history books usually call it: the Boston Massacre. It is also not clear that the authors were aware that the British Empire did not change from the Julian to the Gregorian Calendar until 1752. A few times when Signing Their Lives Away notes that a date of an event is uncertain, it may because it occurred before 1752 and different accounts use different calendars.

Signing Their Lives Away is a light read, but it does help us appreciate our founders in spite of personal shortcomings that the book seems all too happy to point out. Back in 1965 Bob Dylan sang, “I got nothing, Ma, to live up to.” Signing Their Lives Away demonstrates that his lament still applies.

Rachel Anne Ridge. Flash. Carol Stream IL: Tyndale, 2015. Print.

Flash is subtitled The Homeless Donkey Who Taught Me about Life, Faith, and Second Chances. The book has a kind of cutesy cover of a donkey holding a daisy in its mouth—like Ferdinand, the bull with the delicate ego? The donkey itself is not especially cute, nor is the book named after him. As I was reading Flash, I was not thinking of the typical adopted animal book. Such books can be sentimental and entertaining. For example, I still think Old Yeller is one of the saddest movies ever made.

For one thing, Flash is not really a chronological tale—at least, not after the first chapter which tells us how the Ridge family from the same Texas country town as American sniper Chris Kyle took in an abandoned young donkey and named it Flash. It is not even like Wesley the Owl (a personal favorite) which, like this book, deals with some hard questions. It may sound odd, but Flash the book reminded me of Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

As Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance examined the question of what it means to do something well, so Flash examines what it means to live life well. The donkey Flash seemed to know how to get the most out of the circumstances of his life, and with the author’s help we can learn to make the most of ours. One chapter compares the thousands who turned out for Chris Kyle’s funeral procession with the services for a lonely old lady who died with no family and only a hospice nurse in attendance. How can we make our life count? It is not by being rich or famous. Jesus called it an abundant life. (John 10:10)

Flash is not especially didactic or preachy. Indeed, my favorite line from the book is actually a quotation from C. S. Lewis: “Isn’t it funny how day by day nothing changes, but when you look back, everything is different.” (178) That is one of Ridge’s main themes. We do change. But if we head in the direction of the life well lived, changes will happen, and the important changes will be good. We might not always be aware of them, but we will be able to look back and say, “What a journey! Isn’t life most interesting?”

I should mention, too, that while the book does mention a few deaths as already noted, the donkey lives. According to the author’s blog, Flash is still alive. So, no, this is not like Old Yeller or The Yearling or countless cat and dog tales where the pet dies at the end. Flash does not ignore the reality of death, but it is primarily a celebration of life…with hints on how to enjoy your own.

Dave Barry. The Worst Class Trip Ever. New York: Disney, 2015. Print.

I confess I have not entirely forgiven Dave Barry for giving up his newspaper column. His articles/stories/fairy tales were lots of fun. Many a Sunday they cheered me up. I once wrote him a letter, to which he kindly replied. Now he has come out with a YA book in the style which made him famous.

The Worst Class Trip Ever tells of Wyatt and Matt and a few other friends on their eighth grade class trip to Washington DC. The school where I teach took eighth graders to Washington for many years, and some years wild stories would circulate afterwards. This book looked like it could be fun. It was.

Wyatt tells the story. Right from the beginning we get a sense of what the story is going to be like. Eighth graders are canny. Some would argue that they are the smartest people in the world. But eighth graders also tend to be hyperactive and rarely consider the consequences of their actions. One teacher at my school said that if schools were smart, they would just give eighth graders a sabbatical. It is about time they had one anyhow.

Wyatt tells us right at the beginning:

Don’t get me wrong: Matt is my best friend. But he can be an idiot. But when we were in kindergarten, pretty much all the boys were idiots, so he did not stand out so much, and we became best friends. So now, even though we’re in eighth grade, and he’s sometimes unbelievably annoying, I’m kind of stuck with him.(3)

Another friend is Cameron, a boy whose personal hygiene is erratic and who has the enviable skill (at least to eighth grade boys) of being able to pass gas on demand. Yeah, and Wyatt has a crush on the beautiful Suzana, who, like most eighth grade girls, is a head taller than the boys, so she goes out with one of the few tall boys in the class.

(I recall one year an opposing coach challenged our school’s junior high girls’ basketball team. He claimed that the girls were too tall to be in junior high—the opposite of Chinese gymnastics, I guess. But all the girls were indeed in seventh or eighth grade.)

The eighth grade boys, of course, can’t stay still or keep their mouths shut on the airplane and pretty soon find themselves at odds with a couple of foreigners on the same flight from Miami to Washington. One is a big, burly guy with tattooed arms. His companion is a slight, long-haired man with a very unusual-looking electronic device. The boys’ imaginations go wild, and they begin to think these guys are terrorists.

The story gets wilder and funnier. Dave Barry does have a highly developed sense of humor. As the story comes to a climax, though, it is almost like something from Tony Abbot’s Danger Guys stories—breathless action that is barely believable but quite entertaining.

Some of the humor is straight from a textbook on how to be an eighth grader. A friend is not on the bus? When the teacher is doing the head count, ask for help in opening a window. While the teacher is helping, have someone in front sneak to the back. He gets counted twice, but the teacher thinks everyone is on board.

Only someone in middle school would think that a cigarette lighter shaped like a pistol is a cool souvenir. How will they get it past airport security? Well, they don’t, but…

Lots of fun. Especially if you know eighth graders. Love them or hate them, the world would be a perfect place if it were ruled by them.

Harper Lee. Go Set a Watchman. New York: Harper, 2015. Print.

 For thus hath the LORD said unto me, Go, set a watchman, let him declare what he seeth. (Isaiah 21:6 KJV)

It appears that some reviewers are trying to compare Go Set a Watchman to To Kill a Mockingbird. They truly are different stories even if they involve many of the same characters.

Harper Lee has an engaging manner of telling a story. Readers of To Kill a Mockingbird recall that the frame of the novel was the trial of Tom Robinson. Yet there were many other episodes that had little to do with the main plot but gave insight into the Finch family and Maycomb, Alabama. Among those were Scout’s first days of school and its Deweyism, Calpurnia’s church, the roly-poly bugs, and the mysteries of the Radley family.

Go Set a Watchman is like that, too. Now Scout goes by Jean Louise and is twenty-six. She lives and works in New York and has returned to Maycomb for a two-week visit. Many of the episodes seem unrelated to the frame (if there is one): a visit to the now-retired Calpurnia, the attempts to theologically “modernize” the Methodist Church, and some humorous reminiscences of Jean Louise’s teen years.

It is indeed difficult to tell what the frame of Go Set a Watchman exactly is. Is it the Jean Louise Finch and Hank Clinton romance? Is it Jean Louise’s discovery that both Hank and Atticus attended a White Citizens’ Council meeting? Or is the tale really a collection of vignettes held together by Jean Louise’s visit to her home?

Hank was Jem’s best friend. Since Jem died of the same congenital problem that killed their mother at an early age, Atticus has taken Hank under his wing and is grooming him to take over his law practice. Hank has had a crush on Jean Louise since high school, but his family is not a socially prominent as the Finches, and Jean Louise has doubts about marrying him or even staying in Maycomb.

Atticus Finch is much more in the background. Jean Louise realizes that her father has become her idol and it is time to get a grip on reality. Instead of Atticus, the person who really plays grown-up in Go Set a Watchman is Uncle Jack Finch. He is the one who tells her that “every man’s watchman is his conscience,” and till then she had leaned on Atticus “assuming that your answers would always be his answers.” (325)

While this kind of Erik Erikson identity crisis is universal, Go Set a Watchman is distinctly Southern. In a way, it is dealing with problems or at least situations that are normally gone nowadays. Did Atticus attend the Citizens’ Council meeting because he was a racist (well, he is condescending) or because he was a watchman who wanted to make sure the WCC did not get out of hand as it had in other places?

Unless you count Tidewater Virginia when I was in the service, and that is more military than Southern, I have not lived in the South. I am no expert on Southern women. I just think of what the Beach Boys sang:

The Southern girls with the way they talk
They knock me out when I’m down there.

However, it does strike me that three well-known Southern writers all bring up details of female figure enhancement in their writing. Scarlett O’Hara is very serious about Melanie being too flat-chested and not doing anything about it in Gone With the Wind. Amanda Wingfield in The Glass Menagerie embarrassed her daughter Laura when she tries to get her to wear a pair of “gay deceivers.” Jean Louise tells a hilarious story of her attempt to wear them at a school dance. Hank, with a suggestion from Atticus, gets her out of trouble.

Even in that example, we can see a change in the generations. Margaret Mitchell never questions the variety of techniques women used to make themselves more attractive to men. Tennessee Williams sees that as being somewhat old-fashioned, but modesty forbids really discussing the subject. Harper Lee is able to laugh at it. Southern women are changing. Does Jean Louise even have to have a man?

Lee lets us know that such changes take time. Jean Louise rightly questions her father’s attendance at the meeting. “One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh: but the earth abideth for ever.” (Ecclesiastes 1:4 KJV) Her generation is growing up. Her generation will raise up new watchmen, and they will be different. At the very least the language of the ladies will be saltier.

Maybe some things will change too much. The questions Go Set a Watchman notes as an undercurrent in mainline churches “notoriously short on theology” (114) in the 1950s have well nigh destroyed some of them—at least in terms of membership, attendance, and core beliefs.

Perhaps, though, some things will not change enough for Jean Louise’s generation. She is no racist, nor is she an Aunt Alexandra, but Jean Louise is enough of a Finch to admit that Uncle Jack is probably right about Hank. As appealing as Hank is to her, he was raised by a single mother and still seen socially as “trash” in spite of his education and tutelage under Atticus. It would be another generation or so before a Southern lawyer raised by a single mother of low social standing would marry a Wellesley grad and go on to be elected President. His name was Clinton, too. Is that a coincidence?

Civil War Memories: Lost Tales of the Civil War. Ed. S. T. Joshi. Nashville TN: Nelson, 2000. Print.

This collection of nineteen short stories and two poems is an eclectic representation of stories about the American Civil War written by people who lived through it or were born shortly afterwards. It does give varied views of the war. While some are war stories, more are about the effects of the war on the civilian population or the war’s aftermath. A few are classics, others are long forgotten, and in one or two cases, deserve to remain so.

Although the subtitle of Civil War Memories calls these “lost tales,” a good number are fairly well known to students of the Civil War or of American Literature. Stephen Crane’s “Three Miraculous Soldiers,” Ambrose Bierce’s “Three and Three Are One,” and Louisa May Alcott’s “My Contraband” have all been anthologized and are fairly well known. Mark Twain’s “Lucretia Smith’s Soldier” was hardly lost.

Still, some stories are interesting to note. Possibly the earliest piece of fiction to come out of the war, published in 1862, is “John Lamar” by Rebecca Harding Davis. It is a tightly written story with a solid symbolic quality to it. Davis was a Southerner, but this story has echoes of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” or Lincoln’s Second Inaugural. Davis subtly suggests that God is somehow behind this war, and He is using it to bring justice.

It came as no surprise to me that the longest story in this collection was authored by Henry James. “The Story of a Year” reminded me of his Portrait of a Lady. The tale focuses on a woman whose beau goes off to war and her psychological reaction to things, including another man, in the year he is gone. It has a touch of humor and no small amount of irony. If you like James, you’ll like “The Story of a Year.”

Some stories were very touching. “Bayou L’Ombre” by Grace King and “The Eve of the Fourth” were moving stories about to reactions to war events on the home front, one in the South, and one in the North. “A Wizard from Gettysburg” is a fascinating story by Kate Chopin. Chopin is known today mostly for her proto-feminist The Awakening. “A Wizard from Gettysburg” is very different, though it is also set among the postwar upper class of Louisiana. I believe this story could make a good film, or, perhaps like Bierce’s “Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” a great Twilight Zone episode.

A few stories may be curiosities. “The Bloodhounds” by W. C. Morrow is an intense story of a typical deserter who returns to work on his family farm, but in this case he is tracked down by patrollers looking for AWOL soldiers. Ironically, before the war, the “paterollers” would have been looking for escaped slaves.

John William De Forest’s “An Independent Ku-Klux” may be worth skipping. The editor admits he included it as a curiosity. It is supposed to funny—except that it isn’t. De Forest was a Northern carpetbagger who worked hard for the rights of freed slaves, but one might read his story and dismiss him as a racist except that the white people in it are crudely venal.

One of the most moving and optimistic stories here is Sarah Orne Jewett’s “A War Debt.” This story has also been fairly widely anthologized. It indirectly involves a “slender girl, pale and spirited, with a look of care beyond her years” (264) representing the South and Thomas Burton IV who believed “his grandmother was the most charming woman in the world” (259) representing the Yankees. On a symbolic level, it looks to a final reconciliation between North and South. We are all, after all, Americans. E pluribus Unum and illegitimi non carborundum.

Blaize and John Clement. The Cat Sitter’s Whiskers. New York: St. Martin’s, 2015. Print.

This is approximately the tenth Dixie Hemingway mystery. I may have read one a long time ago because the main character is vaguely familiar. Ms. Hemingway is a pet sitter in Sarasota, Florida. She is a former sheriff’s deputy, and like amateur sleuths from Father Brown to the Hardy Boys, she always seems to find herself in the middle of a mystery. (How I envied those Hardy Boys when I was a kid—how did they keep finding mysteries? I would have been happy with one!)

Early one morning as she is making her first stop to check on various pets, she is knocked out while observing a strange ritual being acted out by a masked intruder. The police do not honestly believe her unusual tale, especially since nothing is missing from her clients’ house.

The only potential witness is the paper delivery man, Levi, someone she has known from town since grammar school. His car passed her on the road right near the house where she was attacked. When she goes to look him up at his place—she finds his body. The plot thickens. The blood coagulates.

There are a lot of curious characters in The Cat Sitter’s Whiskers. We have Detective McKenzie who investigates such crimes and appears to be scatterbrained and OCD at the same time. There is Levi’s stridently jealous fiancée. We discover a mysterious woman who claims Levi picked her up at a club and abused her a few hours before he was murdered. There are the politically correct gay brother and Dixie’s “almost boyfriend” who is a Seminole lawyer.

The Cat Sitter’s Whiskers is a humorous diversion. It makes Florida appealing—beaches, fragrant flowers, beautiful sunsets—and maybe a bit rough—murders, beatings, drug dealers, criminal syndicates. There are worse ways to spend a couple of hours.

Though all the Dixie Hemingway stories have something about cats in the title, our protagonist is a pet sitter, so there are dogs and few other creatures as well. Unlike the Chet and Bernie series, the animals are incidental to the story. They are mostly used to introduce us to characters in the mystery. I am definitely a dog person—many cats make me sneeze—but that makes little difference in these books.

Carl Hiaasen. Scat. New York: Knopf, 2009. Print.

Scat is one of Carl Hiaasen’s Florida eco-adventures for young adults. It is not as funny as Chomp or Skink—No Surrender, but it is still an engaging tale with some crazy characters.

Nick Waters and Marta Gonzalez are about the only somewhat normal characters in Scat—typical Hiaasen, down-to-earth kids with wacko grown-ups. Their biology teacher Mrs. Starch disappeared on a field trip to Black Vine Swamp. Her substitute, Dr. Waxmo, chooses random pages for the students to memorize instead of attempting to teach a lesson.

Mrs. Starch is a little unusual herself. She has a collection of stuffed animals in her house—that is, real animals mounted by a taxidermist, not Teddy bears—including a stuffed rat named after a former student. She lives alone. Her husband left her years ago. Rumors about her abound.

Then there is Duane Scrod, Jr., another student in the biology class. He likes to be called Smoke. His mother left his father and him one day and flew to Paris where she has lived ever since. He and his father live in a rundown cabin with a pet Macaw that speaks three languages. His father likes guns, hates, the government, and comes across initially as a stereotyped redneck. However, Mr. Scrod listens to classical music.

Twilly Spree is a little like Clinton Tyree from Skink—No Surrender. He lives away from other people, usually in a tent in the wilderness. He has inherited a lot of money, so he is free to do what he wants. He lives simply and devotes his life to wilderness preservation. Let us just say that he is not always careful about discerning the difference between activism and eco-terrorism.

And there are the bad guys. Drake McBride, the owner of a wildcat oil company, pretends to be a Texas cowboy though he has never ridden a horse in his life and mangles the cowboy slang. His business partner Jimmy Lee Bayliss actually knows about oil drilling, but the two men get greedy when they discover oil in a part of the Black Vine Swamp that is owned by the state.

The title Scat has a double meaning here. It is common expression used to shoo away cats. In Scat the cat of concern is the endangered Florida panther. Scat is also digestive matter which animals leave behind, and finding panther scat helps Twilly and Smoke track a panther through the swamps.

There is a lot more, but even these details show how the action will all come together in Hiaasen’s usual wild style.

N.B.: If this reviewer ever moves to Florida, Carl Hiaasen will be partly to blame.

Kevin Kwan. Crazy Rich Asians. New York: Doubleday, 2013. Print.

Crazy Rich Asians reminded me of something by Kingsley Amis like Lucky Jim. It is over the top British humor. The author lives in New York but was raised in Singapore which has strong British roots. People should have a lot of fun with it.

Nick and Rachel are university junior faculty in New York City who have developed a very happy mutual relationship. Nick is beginning to think about popping the question. Rachel Chu’s mother and other relatives live in California, and Nick has visited them a few times. Nick Young is from Singapore and because his best friend Colin is getting married there, Rachel is finally going to meet his family and see how and where he grew up.

Little does she realize that the Youngs are one of the richest families in the world. So a lot of the humor and conflict is of the fish out of water variety. As an undergrad at Stanford, Rachel had a Singaporean roommate, Peik Lin Goh, who was from a millionaire family. But even her family was not in the same league, and she was not aware of the reputation of the Youngs.

At one point Peik Lin brings Rachel in an hour’s notice to a “wardrobe intervention” at a very exclusive couturier. So, yes, Rachel knows how to live like the upper crust. But when she saw the Young estate on Singapore—it is blocked on Google Earth as if it were a military site—even Peik Lin exclaims: “I have no idea who these people are. But I can tell you one thing—these people are richer than God.” (123, italics in original)

When we finally get to the wedding celebration, it makes Princess Di’s look like an elopement. The Vienna Boys’ Choir is flown in to Singapore for the service. One of several performing acts besides Asian pop stars is Cirque du Soleil. For this, even the children would not be caught dead in anything but designer exclusives.

Some of the conflict is predictable. Rachel does not feel like she fits in. A few women are very kind and helpful to her—Nick’s cousin Astrid, whose own husband is having doubts about marrying such wealth, and, of course, Peik Lin. Others are quite cruel, assuming that she is a gold digger, they do their best to make her feel unwelcome. American “mean girls” could learn a few things from them.

There is an amusing cast of minor characters. The gossipy Cassandra keeps family members and the media informed about what the upper crust Asian socialites are up to. The jocular Oliver has a clever rejoinder to and about nearly everyone. The salacious Kitty, a Hong Kong actress, is trying to get her claws (a coincidence in her name?) into the richest guy she can find. And Nick’s mother Eleanor Young—is she evil or does she have her son’s best interests at heart?

There is a lot of name-dropping. Some names are fictional like certain Chinese millionaires or Singaporean real estate tycoons. Some like the Sultan of Brunei are not. Singaporean Kwan writes as if he is familiar with the jet set in his home. The prep schools are important. So is belonging to the right church. The socially conscious Singaporean Chinese may be Buddhist or Taoist, but they send their kids to the Methodist Sunday School. The reader quickly loses track of all the couturier clothes, chartered aircraft, yachts, and private islands in the story.

Apart from the crazy rich Asians (Rachel’s term), Kwan makes Singapore sound like a great place to visit. The unique culture is a mix of Malay, British, Chinese (Min Nan, Cantonese, and Mandarin), with some Indian, Burmese, Thai, Filipino, and Indonesian thrown in. The descriptions of even the ordinary food there makes it sound like every Singaporean is a foodie.

While the reader can be in awe or laughing out loud at some of the excesses, the theme of Crazy Rich Asians is one that runs through British literature. Beowulf, The Canterbury Tales, Shakespeare, Scott, Dickens, Tennyson, and many others raise the question of what is true nobility. Some of the people have Malay honorifics or spouses from the Thai royal family (a rather extensive pool to draw from if you think about it), and like many wealthy Americans they act like royalty even if they are not. The real question, though, is not one of status but who among the crazy rich Asians are truly noble in character.

We do meet a few. There are reasons why Nick and Colin are good friends. We learn of a doctor who during the Japanese occupation was able to save the lives of some Singaporeans singled out for slave labor camps or firing squads. We see the selflessness of Charlie Wu who goes out of his way for an old friend.

Will Nick and Rachel’s relationship last or will wicked mama Eleanor and host of jealous young socialites destroy it? Does Rachel even fit in?

I attended a prestigious college. It is even mentioned favorably in Crazy Rich Asians. Once I had been invited to a socially prominent fancy ball. I was invited to join a couple of the exclusive campus clubs. I admit that the guys at the clubs were quite friendly and on the surface not at all pretentious, but I just knew that they were not for me. A few friends were jealous that I had been invited, but even then I suppose I was listening to a beat of a different drummer.

Do I have any regret of not aspiring to more money and status? Only when sometimes I wish I were rich enough to own or boat or travel more—like to go to Singapore to sample some of those tempting dishes.

There may be two caveats about Crazy Rich Asians. The author himself is Chinese from Singapore, but the novel still might fit in with Western stereotypes of wily oriental gentlemen. As in America, there is both the old wealth and the new wealth. We have the Youngs whose old wealth is preserved in banking and real estate and Charlie Wu whose fortune comes from computers and electronics. Some are modest, some are flamboyant. This could be read as a contemporary version of a Fitzgerald novel. It was F. Scott Fitzgerald who wrote, “The rich are different from you and me.” Of course, Ernest Hemingway’s rejoinder was simply. “Yes, they have money.”

The second caveat is the Crazy Rich Asians does have some salty language. Most of it is used by characters who are not sympathetic, but some readers may find it offensive.

At times whenever we mere peons read about the wealthy, we can get envious. What was that song Lucky Jim? “Oh, Lucky Jim, how I envy him”? Some things in their lives are easier or nicer, but they are no happier. The Bible reminds us that when wealth increases, so do they who try to take it away. (Ecclesiastes 5:11) God has something better. That hope is an anchor (Hebrews 6:19)—perhaps we cannot see it now, but Jesus has gone before us to prepare a place for us. (John 14:2) Yes, we can be impressed with extravagance, but if someone were really richer than God, would it make any difference?

One slight surprise: I have noted in previous reviews that sometimes self-published works have misspellings. It may be the writer did not know the spelling or it may have been overlooked or missed during editing. This novel is published by a well-known and reputable publisher, and it also contains a couple of misspellings such as confusion over peel and peal. It is a little surprising, but this may also let us know that the book publishing business is not what it used to be.

Charles Slack. Liberty’s First Crisis. New York: Atlantic, 2015. Print.

The subtitle of Liberty’s First Crisis is Adams, Jefferson, and the Misfits Who Saved Free Speech. It is truly about the first crisis in the brand-new United States of America involving one of the basic liberties suggested in the Declaration of Independence and enumerated in the Bill of Rights. This book is about the fortunately brief record of the Sedition Act and especially about its victims.

The Sedition Act was passed by a Federalist Congress and signed into law by President John Adams. One interesting detail, which proved that its intent was to silence political opposition, is that it had a built-in expiration date, namely the day after Adams’ term would end.

Slack has written a few biographies and is a very good story teller. Liberty’s First Crisis is no exception. Fortunately, at least looking at the big picture, there were relatively few people who were arrested or harassed by the enforcement of the law. And they were a mixed bunch.

In some ways, the most outrageous was a sitting United Congressman who criticized the president and was jailed for nearly two years. He was actually re-elected by the people in his Vermont district while he was in jail. Ironically, he had originally emigrated from Ireland to America for the promise of freedom.

Matthew Lyon continued to write and speak while in jail. When he was released, two months into his new congressional term, he took his time going to Philadelphia. He knew he could not be rearrested because the Constitution protected senators and representatives while en route to the national capital.

One man who had had too much to drink at a tavern was fined for sedition when he made a joke about firing a gun at the president’s backside. Another, in Massachusetts, who was arrested and served jail time, had erected a liberty pole, trying to resurrect a patriotic symbol specifically to protest the Act.

Three men arrested or harassed by the law were printers or publishers and had significant connections. Both Thomas Jefferson and James Madison were aroused by the injustice of the Sedition Act. J. T. Callender was a friend of Thomas Jefferson. Later they would have a falling out and Callender would write editorials attacking President Jefferson.

While Jefferson ignored the attacks, one of the accusations Callender made was that Jefferson had had children by one of his slaves. That was the only contemporary account which survived making such an accusation, and it may have been a politically motivated lie, but nearly two hundred years later it did result in a genetic investigation into the descendants of Sally Hemings.

Another person arrested under the Act was a close associate of scientist Joseph Priestly. Both men had come to America, partly because of the influence of Benjamin Franklin, and they, too, found that their freedom would be limited, at least for a while.

One person who perhaps struggled most valiantly against government censorship under the Sedition Act was Benjamin Franklin Bache, Franklin’s grandson who continued to operate Franklin’s Philadelphia newspaper. Bache died prematurely in a yellow fever epidemic, and his wife would continue the cause.

One very striking thing about articles and other publications on both sides of the aisle was their very strong language. A lot of the rhetoric is very crass and crude. Thirty years ago it would have sounded extreme, but nowadays it would fit in seamlessly on many Internet sites.

While the stories of these men makes for great reading, this reviewer makes one recommendation. Even if the reader is not interested in the book as a whole, I believe every American ought to read the last chapter. This makes the case that we still have to be wary and be wise about attempts to stifle free speech and the free press today.

Slack cites, for example, Cass Sunstein, a law professor who was President Obama’s chief regulatory advisor. Sunstein has proposed that “free speech ought to be regulated” and the new government regulations on the Internet appear to be headed in that direction. (266) An article in a recent issue of Harvard Magazine (issued after Liberty’s First Crisis had been accepted for publication) quotes Sunstein saying that the idea that “individuals are in the best position to know what is good for them” is wrong. Instead, individuals need a strong government to tell them how to behave!

I am reminded when I attended college and had a discussion with a fellow student. I expressed concern about political movements that would restrict freedom of religion and freedom of speech. His response — “So what?” — sounded just like Mr. Sunstein.

You’ve got to read Chapter 31 of Liberty’s First Crisis!

What follows is more of a rant than a review, but this is written in reaction to Slack’s book.

Liberty’s First Crisis tells the sad story of Col. Algernon Sidney, who was arrested in England in 1683 and convicted of treason against King Charles II. Although it was not published until 1698, he was found in possession of a manuscript he had written advocating freedom of speech. He would be executed by hanging for the “crime.” Jefferson would cite Sidney’s Discourses Concerning Government as the best primer on government and natural rights. (97)

Since the book went back to the time of Charles II, I was a little surprised and perhaps disappointed that it did not mention John Milton’s Areopagitica. This is the seminal work on freedom of speech and freedom of the press. Indeed, Sidney quoted quite freely from Areopagitica in his Discourses. Milton would be tried in 1660 when the royalists first took over from the Puritans for being a regicide. He wrote several works defending the trial and execution of King Charles I by the Puritan Parliament.

Though Milton’s crime was punishable by death, some prominent Cavalier poets interceded on his behalf, and his sentence was modified. He lost all his money and extensive real estate holdings except one country cottage to the government. He had already been blind for a dozen years. Though he wrote political tracts up to the time he was arrested, afterwards he became best known for writing the epic Paradise Lost.

Slack’s last chapter expresses a valid concern that freedom of the press and speech could be endangered in the United States, not by laws, but by regulations such as those proposed concerning the Internet or the now-defunct Fairness Doctrine for broadcast media.

Liberty’s First Crisis, though, fails to mention the very strident ongoing censorship initiated not by legislation but by court rulings. Since 1963 all kinds of discussions have been censored or prohibited by court order, especially those in government schools and government facilities.

In Adams’ day, if you did not like what someone said or wrote, you could get a law passed. Now, it is really easier. Just hire an elitist lawyer and the threat of lawsuit silences most people, and those who continue get thrown before a judge who is a friend of the lawyer, and they are also effectively silenced or threatened with prison if they do not comply. We saw this with anti-abortion protestors and especially in the schools.

Let me give some examples.

The half life of Carbon-14 is about 5700 years. If you do the math, after 100,000 years there would only be less than 2¹⁷ or 1/131,000 of the original Carbon-14 atoms left, making them very rare. If we are talking a million years, then this would be 2¹⁷⁵ or about 479 followed by fifty zeroes. In other words if the universe were a million years old, Carbon-14 would be extinct or impossible to find. So if the universe is 12-14 billion years old, why can we even measure Carbon-14? (We could ask the same question about numerous unstable isotopes with measurable half-lives).

The loss of energy in the earth’s magnetic field is measurable over time. If we accept the current rate of loss as being uniform, when we extrapolate back 10,000 years, the magnetic field would have been more powerful than that of a star. The earth itself would have been so hot it would have been molten. How did all this come about in less than 10,000 years if the solid earth is supposed to be 4 billion years old?

Similarly, the salinity of the oceans is measurable and continue to increase as the world’s rivers continue to empty dissolved minerals into the seas. The changes are measurable, and if we measure the increase of sodium over time and extrapolate back, the seas would have had no sodium at all 10,000 years ago. For nearly all other elements, the numbers are smaller than that. If the seas are no older than 10,000 years, how then did life emerge from the seas 400 million years ago?

When human population is extrapolated back, it usually reaches its “zero” point or place of no growth at some time between 2500 and 3000 BC, depending on the model. If humans have been on the earth 40,000 to 200,000 years, where were they before 3000 BC?

Soft tissues have been found in fossil worms, sea scorpions, and dinosaurs (even a T-rex) some of which are said to be older than half a billion years. How is this possible?

The moon is said to be approximately 4 billion years old. It has no atmosphere and is subject to a “bombardment” of particles and meteors, especially during times of meteor showers. When NASA designed its fist lunar vehicle, it was given large, wide wheels like a dune buggy because it was assumed that the moon would be covered with a deep layer of dust from the billions of years of cosmic particles breaking its surface and adding to it. When man landed on the moon in 1969, there was a less than an inch of dust on the surface. How could that be if the moon is so old?

Darwin and other hypothesized that human races appeared at different times from different primates. Recent DNA studies have shown that all mankind had its origin with a single DNA type. Was Darwin wrong?

Scientists estimate that the average mutation rate in human mitochondria is about 0.5 per generation. This “genetic clock” dates the time when humans would have been “new,” i.e. free of mutations at some time between 5,115 and 8,892 years ago. This is a lot closer to what Moses said than was Darwin hypothesized.

Sadly, it is against court rulings to even raise these questions or discuss them publicly in schools and other government institutions. These are just samples. There are many others.

The First Amendment of the Constitution does say “Congress shall make no law…” and Congress has made no law restricting such things. But the courts have. Notice, too, that there is nothing specifically religious in what I wrote above, but such questions and observations are still banned, as are prayers and other types of directly religious references.

A Chinese scientist who was in the United States presenting some information about a fossil feathered dinosaur with soft tissue intact he had found, if I recall correctly, was surprised when after his presentation he received no questions or comments. When he asked his host about this, his host said no one in the audience wanted to appear as if he were questioning Darwinism.

The scientist said, “I see. In China we can criticize Darwin but get in trouble if we criticize our government. In the United States you may criticize your government but you get in trouble if you criticize Darwin.”

As the elites in American become more secularized, those who are even suspect of harboring beliefs in God or the supernatural are becoming more marginalized. It is not Congress, but the courts that have been leading the modern American march towards greater censorship in the last fifty years. Though, in fairness, it was the courts that overturned recent laws restricting speech during elections. Like the original Sedition Act, those had the effect of protecting incumbents even more than they already are protected.

Thank you, Liberty’s First Crisis, for making us more aware, but there is a lot more out there to bring in. As Slack himself wrote:

Still, the Bill of Rights is not the source of our rights but a reflection of them, a mechanism for protecting them. This, of course, is what the Founders meant by unalienable rights being derived from nature or the Creator, as distinct from privileges, which can be granted (or revoked) by men. (171)

Let freedom ring!