LZ-'75 (BY) STEPHEN DAVIS

Published 2010, 215 pages
Characters: n/a
Writing: C+
Plot: n/a
Pacing: B
Poignancy: B-

Fact: Led Zeppelin is the greatest band of all time. There are very few bands that I would be interested in reading a book-length account of, much less a book focused specifically on one tour, but I would read just about anything detailing Zeppelin's zany shenanigans. At the peak of their power, they weren't just the most popular, highest-selling band in the world — they crafted a cult-like mystique around themselves, birthing bizarre urban legends, rumors of black magic and deals with the devil.  The mass media hated them, journalists feared them, and interviews were rare.  It didn't matter that Rolling Stone refused to acknowledge their existence for six years — Zeppelin had no trouble selling out massive coliseums in a matter of minutes.

By the release of Physical Graffiti in 1975, however, it was hard to ignore Zeppelin's dominating presence, and the American media started paying attention.  Stephen Davis — a music journalist who, by his own admission, was only passingly familiar with Zeppelin at the time — wanted in.  He got in, of course, flying around with Zeppelin in the Starship on their rocky-but-pivotal American 1975 winter tour.  Unfortunately, LZ-'75 isn't the first thing he's written as a result of those experiences. In fact, it's the third, but after churning out an article and another book, he somehow managed to lose most of his notes from the tour.  When Davis rediscovered them a few years ago (and obviously, realized how much money he could make by milking another book out of them), he decided to turn them into LZ-'75.

Judging by the reviews on Amazon, there's not much here that isn't covered by other Zeppelin biographies, or even in Davis' other pieces.  I haven't read any other Zeppelin accounts, so that wasn't a dealbreaker for me, but LZ-'75 is certainly on the anemic side.  Davis was granted fairly extensive backstage access, and writes about the band with appropriate reverence and knowledge.  Yet it's clear that Davis was never really an insider.  He writes like a journalist, and only ever had the access of a journalist.  Though he adds some personal backstory, musings and scant analysis, most of the narrative is taken up by descriptions of Zeppelin's performances.  Reading about shows is nowhere near as exciting as experiencing them, however, and after some early-tour drama and set-backs, each performance begins to sound fairly redundant.  Davis delves deep into his thesaurus and does an admirable job of describing each song in a dozen different ways, but he's not a great music writer, and the strain shows by the end.  As a product of the 70's, Davis' prose (or maybe Davis himself) can get a little hammy, and most of the time he simply tries too hard.  It's not the 70's anymore, and though it's fun to see that energy captured in moments, too much of it makes LZ-'75 read as sensational rather than revealing.  Personally, I was never close to bored, but this is definitely one for fans of the band — aficionados of rock'n'roll history can probably find more thorough accounts.

THE LAST AMERICAN MAN (BY) ELIZABETH GILBERT

Published 2002, 268 pages
Characters: n/a
Writing: B
Plot: B+
Pacing: B+
Poignancy: B+

It's rare to find a biography as thorough and intimate as The Last American Man.  Of course, there aren't many subjects out there like Eustace Conway.  Since a very young age, Conway has taught and lived self-sufficient living, but he's more than just a naturalist and mountain-man.  He's a man that can conquer seemingly any goal he sets for himself, a man that seems to have nearly superhuman physical powers, and a mind to match.  At the age of seventeen, Conway left his parent's suburban home, built a tee-pee in the wilderness, made all his clothing out of deer-skin, and has more or less lived like that ever since.  Conway's is a complex story that could have easily been told through a lens of hero worship and idealism, but Gilbert does an excellent job of unraveling Conway's complicated motivations, aspirations and frustrations. The two have been friends for years, and it shows in her writing, which is deeply personal — affectionate, yet candid and critical.  In trying to demystify this man — who has already become a legend to many — Gilbert leaves out nothing.  No one this passionate achieves success without having a dark side, and The Last American Man takes the psychoanalytical risks to show why so many people idolize Conway from afar, then practically flee when given the opportunity to know him up close.

Eustace Conway is the owner of Turtle Island, a nature conservatory and ultra-primitive, self-sufficient farm in North Carolina; a sort of non-profit haven for preaching and teaching his message of environmentalism.  Yet despite building and running his own utopia from the ground up, Conway doesn't seem to stay in one place for very long.  He has broken multiple world records for long-distance horse riding and hiked the entire Appalachian Trail with only a small knife, wearing a loin-cloth.  He makes his own clothing out of animal skin.  He's hardcore, to the say the least.  Many would be quick to pin him as a hippie, a bleeding-heart liberal tree-hugger.  But Eustace Conway turns out to be far more complicated than that.  For one, he's shockingly conservative, and a brilliant businessman with a head for self-promotion.  He's a strict authoritarian, and often complains that he would run Turtle Island like a rigid military dictatorship if he could.  A man like Conway couldn't achieve success without being a control-freak.

While reading The Last American Man, it struck me how similar Conway's basic personality traits are to those shown by Mark Zuckerberg (as he was portrayed by Jesse Eisenberg) in The Social Network.  The lives of these men would seem to have little in common on the surface, yet both embody the same relentless drive, the need for absolute control, the perfectionism, the uncanny intellect and talent — and as a result, the tendency to drive away everyone close to them through the sheer intensity of their personality.  These men were born to succeed beyond measure, but might as well wear a plaque around their neck that reads: "... at what cost?"  What makes The Last American Man (and Eustace Conway) so fascinating is not just the adventures Conway has been on, but the way people react to him.  This includes the author, who can't seem to help interjecting her own thoughts and witticisms into the narrative, especially when deconstructing Conway's personal relationships (though to be fair, this might just be her writing style.)  That Gilbert is fascinated and perplexed by Conway even after knowing him so well — indeed, after writing such a thorough book on the man — is telling.  Many of the apprentices that come to Turtle Island to learn about the primitive life seem to look to Conway as a father figure and spiritual guide, and most end up leaving disappointed, jaded and even heartbroken.  Conway has had poor luck with his sexual relationships as well, though he seems to have had no lack of them either.  He is a man who is immediately and obviously compelling, who is described as constantly drawing people into his orbit before suffocating them through the intensity of his personality, the extreme demands he places upon himself and others.

As a book, The Last American Man is not perfect.  Gilbert's intimacy with Conway gives the reader access that few authors would have been able to obtain, or understand, but her tone is occasionally so casual that it's hard to take at face value.  Still, for this style of writing, she could do much worse, and the book has a nice flow and a vibrant, excited energy to match its subject.  The pacing suggests Conway's own trajectory, from capable young idealist to jaded, disappointed businessman.  This, in a way, makes The Last American Man an unintended but insightful commentary on the very nature of idealism, structured around an idealist who did not himself fail, like so many hippies and would-be-Utopians.  Eustace Conway tackled every goal he set up for himself, and he had just as high hopes for America — he truly believed he could save our country by teaching us how live a primitive, knowledgeable, hard-working lifestyle.  He really figured out how to do it, showed us that it works.  But most people are not like Eustace Conway, and the same problems he saw in his youth are looming larger than ever.  Watching this man recognize his own futility through the pages of a mere biography is a tremendously fascinating experience.

NOTHING TO ENVY (BY) BARBARA DEMICK

Published 2009, 294 pages
Characters: n/a
Writing: C
Plot: n/a
Pacing: B-
Poignancy: B+

I've been mildly fascinated with North Korea lately, probably just because it's so hard to find any information about the place — it's perhaps the most bizarre, backwards country on earth. In my research, I came across Nothing To Envy: Ordinary Lives In North Korea, which sounded like it might address exactly what I was wondering: what are ordinary lives like in North Korea like, and should I envy them?  Sure, the title is a bit awkward and nonsensical.  (Isn't it a bit like titling a book Not Particularly Delicious: How Enriched Uranium Changed Western Energy Consumption?)  Still, Nothing To Envy is a fascinating look into this real-world 1984, even if it's not meant to be a comprehensive one.

Demick, at the time of the book's release, had been to North Korea a number of times herself, though the North Korea government only allows select visitors into its showcase capital city, and allows tours into the countryside only with special government guides.  Most of her research for this book was through defectors from North Korea now living in China or South Korea — she says she interviewed over a hundred, as well as various humanitarian organizations and groups, but Nothing To Envy primarily follows six or so North Koreans throughout their lives, up to their escape into South Korea.  Much of the book deals with the terrible famines the country experienced in the 90's, and which most North Koreans probably still have to deal with today.  As a result, the narrative is paced somewhat strangely, jumping back and forth between its "characters."  Demick spends varying amounts of time with each, since some of their stories are inherently more interesting — like a boy and girl who fall in love as children and maintain a secret relationship all through their years in North Korea, yet never reveal to each other how they long to escape their country.  Yet both of them do, eventually but separately, and then find each other again in South Korea — except the woman has married and neither can remember what they saw in each other now that there's no longer a tyrannical government keeping them apart.  These stories are interesting, but Demick jumps in and out of others, all of which are ultimately about starving, jobless people with little to distinguish their lives, all eventually escaping over the Chinese border.  The pacing suffers as a result, with some stories seeming under-developed and hard to tell apart from one other.

I can't fault the book for its content — even when the pacing is a bit sloppy, the stories are always interesting.  Demick sticks to these "ordinary lives" and doesn't write much about the government and politics of the country, or anything much outside of the cities where her subjects lived.  If there is a major fault to Nothing To Envy, it is the tone it takes, or perhaps just Demick's writing style.  She is clearly a journalist and not a novelist, and unfortunately her book reads like it.  Her writing never drifts or loses focus, but it's lifeless and even a little cheesy when trying to convey the pathos of its subjects; it doesn't drive the story the way many successful non-fiction authors are able to do.  At times, Demick seems to skip narrative tangents that could have explained a great deal more about how these people lived, and since she writes without citations or specific references (because most of the stories were related to her orally), I often felt a strange disconnect as a reader, having to remind myself that this is a non-fiction book. She repeatedly refers to the habit of North Koreans having to forage for weeds and grass to eat, and multiple times mentions that older women would leave their jobs in the afternoon and go into the mountains to collect wild plants.  It's a very sad thought, but as an image, it doesn't really click — maybe just because I'm a hiker, but how are these starving, middle-aged women going from an urban center "into the mountains" to collect weeds that barely nourish them?  How are they getting there and back in a matter of hours?  I was genuinely curious, but perhaps Demick herself could not flesh out all these strange curiosities.

While the writing in Nothing To Envy doesn't give the book the spark it should have had — with such unbelievable, dramatic material — the material is still interesting enough to make this a great read, and Demick does seem to be a good researcher, uncovering anecdotes from her subject's childhoods, and allowing them to open up and speak their minds about the horrors they escaped.  In all of this, North Korea as a country comes out seeming the most flat and confusing of all, because it is such a contradiction.  Rather than a ruthlessly efficient dictatorship, it is a country where the military cannot afford to give socks to its soldiers.  The government is undoubtedly brutal, but from the comfortable distance of this non-fiction account, it often seems naively incompetent rather than sinister.  More than anything, it is astonishing that such a a regime still survives, when most have been predicting the country's collapse for over two decades.

I WAS TOLD THERE'D BE CAKE (BY) SLOANE CROSLEY

Published 2008, 228 pages
Characters: N/A
Writing: C+
Plot: C
Pacing: C+
Poignancy: C

In my recent review of The Thieves of Manhattan, I complained that maybe humor books just aren't for me anymore.  While my lament was certainly relevant to that novel, it was equally inspired by I Was Told There'd Be Cake, which I had started previously and, after struggling through a few stories, put down in frustration.  I almost never picked the book back up, knowing there was little chance I would like it.  But I have a blog, and therefore a mission, and thus an obligation, dammit.  The book had to be reviewed.  And guess what?  I did not enjoy it.  I Was Told There'd Be Cake is a collection of "humor" essays — modern confessional essays in the vein of David Sedaris, focusing on the wacky things that happen in the author's life and her self-deprecating reactions to said wacky things.  It's probably unfair to compare everything in this genre back to Sedaris, just like every other review of I Was Told There'd Be Cake does, but whatever — Cake is essentially a watered-down version of Sedaris without any of the insight or humor.

Ultimately, anyway, humor can't really be analyzed, since it's mostly subjective.  Nonetheless, I'm perplexed as to what in this book was meant to be funny at all.  I hate to be so cruel, but this collection reads like an assortment of LiveJournal entries that some college senior shipped off to a publisher.  It's choppy, banal and never says anything interesting or insightful.  Sure, any slice-of-life story can be funny if told the right way, with a strong voice, and Crosley doesn't go for cheap shocks or obvious hyperbole.  It's undoubtedly grounded in reality, no question.  But that's just the problem.  These are the sort of stories you tell your own friends, while wasted, to maybe get a few chuckles.  The sort of stories you write while pissed-off over the day's events and later read to your writing workshop so you can vent — and maybe get a few sympathetic smiles.  Crosley establishes herself as an average person from a wealthy suburban background, who's never had to work all that hard, who's suffered the same mild embarrassments and set-backs that everyone has suffered, but still manages to find time to condescend to those around her.  She's had bosses that were mildly irritating, and yelled at her — but don't worry, she found a new job the day after she quit anyway, the day after 9/11 no less!  What luck!  She's self-deprecating, in an attempt to make herself seem even more average, but self deprecation is an art that she can't quite pull off, and instead it just makes her sound self-absorbed. 

I don't want this review to sound like a character critique when it's a review of a book, but such things are hard to get past when dealing with confessional essays — the writer's personality often is the story. The main problem with Cake, and my primary confusion with how Crosley got this published in the first place, is that Crosley is just not a very good storyteller.  Her tone is generic and predictable; her every-day subject matter is never elevated to anything else.  She's not witty; she just sounds exasperated.  Her narratives jump around clumsily and rarely have anything like a satisfying resolution.  Some of the stories here are strangely hard to follow for lightweight humor essays, and others end so abruptly and pointlessly that I began checking my copy for missing pages.  Without humor, without poignancy, without gripping storytelling or well-crafted prose, there's simply nothing here.

1776 (BY) DAVID MCCULLOUGH

Published 1996 , 294 Pages
Characters: n/a
Writing: A-
Plot: n/a
Pacing: A
Poignancy: A

If you aren't familiar with David McCullough, one thing is important to know before reading one of his pop-history works: McCullough isn't writing for academics, history buffs or researchers.  A book like 1776 is the written equivalent of a History Channel special.  Personally, I don't see anything wrong with that.  If you want an intense study of the Revolutionary War, certainly look elsewhere.  If you just want to read a book — an entertaining book, even — and finish it knowing a bit more about history, than 1776 is just right for you.  In fact, it's perfect.

Admittedly, I'm pretty ignorant of most historical periods past the fall of Rome.  The last time I studied anything related to the American Revolution was exactly a decade ago.  My judgment of 1776 is based purely on its merits as a book, not as a historical analysis — but since it was given to me by a Revolutionary War reenactor and Thomas Jefferson impersonator, and has received fairly universal praise for its Pulitzer Prize winning author, I'm going to assume that its accuracy is beyond me to question.  This is a highly focused examination of one year in America's history that rarely strays from the side of General Washington, his generals and the British men facing him in battle.  Don't even expect to learn how the American Revolution ended, because 1776 — as its title implies — cuts off after the pivotal battles of Trenton and Princeton, long before the end of the war.  The Declaration of Independence is barely mentioned, the Continental Congress operates in the background, and the reasons for the war's beginning are only alluded to.  Is it somewhat odd for a non-fiction work to only barely scratch the surface of its subject?  Certainly it's a bold move, but the rewards are great.  I do wish that McCullough had continued all the way to the Siege of Yorktown and the end of the war, but only because he knows how to tell this story so well.

After all, there's a reason for the surge of pop history books becoming bestsellers in the last decade: most people don't want to bury themselves in a long, unrewarding academic tome.  Few people can absorb such large volumes of information, and histories are easily bogged down by the dozen branches their subject matter takes.  If the experience of reading such a book isn't rewarding, there's even less chance of remembering the history you wanted to study in the first place.  In this respect, 1776 succeeds magnificently: it reads like a novel, and a good one.  Few books this year have compelled me to turn the page as this one has; a doubly remarkable achievement considering I already knew the ending.  The suffering and setbacks faced by the American soldiers is real and fully-explored; McCullough injects suspense and tension into the events simply by layering his sources for maximum effect.  There were times when I thought to myself:  "Wow. I really want to know what happens.  And I'm reading this on Independence Day, so..." 

That's about the best praise I could think of for a book like this, but 1776 isn't soft on the historical details either.  McCullough offers little commentary of his own, though his assessments of the "character's'" thoughts, strategies and worries is always timely, useful and reasonable.  By sticking close to his source material, McCullough keeps the information grounded and even manages to create some historical atmosphere.  Indeed, the ultimate reason that 1776 is so readable both as a book and a history is McCullough's prose, which is clear, strong and enjoyable.  This is a man with a sure command over the English language, and he uses it to his full advantage, creating a historical narrative that earned its place at the top of best-seller lists.

NAKED (BY) DAVID SEDARIS

Published 1998, 224 pages
Characters: N/A

Writing: B-

Plot/Pacing: B

Poignancy: B

It's always an interesting experience re-reading something you enjoyed a great deal in the past.  I was a huge fan of David Sedaris in college, so I've already read every one of his books. Recently I needed a quick book to kill some time, and there was Naked, sitting on my shelf, untouched for probably six or seven years. I was curious to see how it fared, since I seem to be awfully jaded when it comes to comedy, of late.

Naked, like all of Sedaris' stuff, is a collection of autobiographical short stories, mostly detailing his childhood, family, wacky college adventures and difficulty coming to terms with his homosexuality.  The events in Naked are probably mostly true, but embellishment is part of Sedaris' authorial voice, so there's really no point in pondering how he could possibly remember a detailed conversation from 30 years ago. It's the events that matter, and the rest is clearly filled in by the author, writing retrospectively.  With that said — and having read his other books, which cover various other periods of his life — Sedaris has lived a remarkably tumultuous life that gave him plenty of material.  It's often difficult to believe that all these stories are about the same man, especially when the focus of one piece — his OCD, for example, which must have been a major part of his childhood — disappears entirely from the rest.  This is partly due to Sedaris' casual, flippant story construction.  He shapes each piece much like a sitcom, taking unrelated elements and weaving them into a purpose-driven plot, usually ending in some conclusion or retrospective revelation.  The fact that his OCD provided the basis for one story seems to have been enough, and he barely mentions it again — a sign of good focus and plot construction, I suppose, but it gives the collection a lightweight, surreal tone.  This is comedy, after all, and given the "PG-13"ish rating of some of the material, Sedaris plays it very tame.  Nothing really carries any weight — not his OCD, not his near-rape encounters with strangers while hitchhiking, not even his mother's death.  And that's fine; it fits his style.  Sedaris manages to produce tales that seem sharp and quick and enjoyable, regardless of their content.

If I can pinpoint one main reason that I failed to enjoy Naked as much as I did the first time around, it's that the stories are too tidy. Everything is so droll, skipping from one event to the next with little fanfare. Cleanly-presented material needs a bit of shock value to produce laughs.  Being older and more jaded, nothing in the collection was cringe-worthy or outrageous anymore, and most of the time it seemed like Sedaris was going out of his way to interact with the stupidest, most-ignorant people he could find.  He plays himself off as incredibly passive, a naive victim blundering from one bizarre event to the next with a sort of recklessness and ambivalence that eventually begins to raise flags.  How could someone so passive find himself in these situations again and again?  It's not that I don't believe him, but you start to see through his tone, and the authorial voice seems like just that — a style, something manufactured and deliberated upon. Since Sedaris mostly reacts as a narrator, and rarely as an in-the-action character, he seems to be merely drifting through life, prodding those around him in the hope that they'll produce material.  Despite this, there isn't a whole lot of comedy in the prose itself.  There are no jokes, per se, just funny situations.  It's entertaining, easily-digested, and little more.  I know I laughed the first time around.  But now, I honestly had a hard time trying to decide what was supposed to be funny about these stories. 

So perhaps its best to put aside expectations that this will be an outrageous laugh-fest, as most reviews would have it.  It's decently funny, in the way that a competent sitcom is decently funny, or at least entertaining.  And really, that's all it needs to be.  Considering that his material is far beyond anything you'd find in a sitcom, Sedaris doesn't take many risks with his narrative.  I suppose part of my disappointment is the contradiction in this — for everything that happened to him, for all the insanity he faced, Sedaris himself should be at least slightly unhinged, and yet he comes off as far too even-tempered.  He's condescending and snarky, but he never makes much effort to earn it, as if he's worried one of his victims might still find him out.  Still, by all means, read Naked at least once.  Just don't expect to die laughing.  Life is weird enough as it is, and it's all in what you make of it.

LIES MY TEACHER TOLD ME (BY) JAMES LOEWEN

I could not ignore a book with such an accusative title as it lay before me at the bookstore. A book of revisionist history could go either way, and while I'm not sure if I got what I was expecting, or even what the cover promised, I'm glad for its enticing siren-song. Now released again in hardcover for one of its umpteenth reprints, this revised version of the 1995 original is a national best-seller and certainly much more than a gimmick; from what I can tell, it's been extremely influential to its field. This is a book that should be read, even if said title is a bit misleading. A more accurate title would be "The Unspoken History of Racism in America; Or, White Guilt is a Pretty Goddam Complicated Issue." Loewen's criticism is actually mostly reserved for the history textbooks and the highly dubious publishing methods and ghost-writers that create them—not, in fact, the teachers who teach them, most of whom are themselves ignorant of history, as they are often simply gym coaches and other plug-in history amateurs attempting to hold their own in the most unpopular of high school classes.

Towards the end of the book, Loewen goes through the process of textbook creation. He finds that the authors on the cover—often noted historians or important college professors—almost always had nothing to do with the actual writing process. Either their names were rented or bought for the illusion of credibility, or they wrote some early edition back in the 50's. In many cases, the "authors" have no ideas what the books actually say, and when Loewen introduced them to certain sections that they allegedly wrote, they were shocked and horrified. The true authors are invisible, unaccountable, and often themselves ignorant of history, simply copying, pasting and rewriting from one another to create a bland blend of "facts" that grow more muddled and PC over the years. The idea, which the author argues convincingly, is not that there is some conspiracy of rich white men dictating what patriotic factoids students are allowed to be taught (which he defensively suggests is a ridiculous and nonsensical idea), but simply a result of the textbook adoption process. School boards want books that will not receive complaints, that will inspire patriotism and make students feel good about their heritage. As anyone who reads the newspaper and takes note of frivolous lawsuits knows, parents these days are an uppity lot. So it's fairly understandable, but as statistics and the students themselves show, this bland white-washing of history, erasing our country's tumultuous and often cringe-inducing heritage creates a boring, irrelevant piece of propaganda that students instantly reject, either out of boredom, an inability to relate or a subconscious knowledge that what they're being fed is more synthetic and structured than a McDonalds hamburger.

The main bulk of the book is therefore a run-down of the sort of compelling historic narrative that the author argues is missing from our texts. If you have to wonder whether or not his point is valid, simply take the success of the book's contents—it certainly makes for an engrossing, engaging read, and I covered it's 400-odd pages in three or four days. That in itself should make the case for the books validity, but naturally it's more complicated than that. As with the title, the book's aim is somewhat ambiguous, because it is neither a straight-forward critique of the textbooks themselves, nor is it "filling in the blanks" by acting as a stand-alone history textbook. It falls somewhere in between, with Loewen covering scattered chunks of America's history—only in areas he feels are relevant, however, as his objective is not to write an authoritative, complete history volume, but the idea of what one might be. He presents the sort of information the textbooks leave out, while at the same time quoting and critiquing the 20-or-so textbooks he has selected for reference. Therefore, because it's not a book of straight-up "missing information", it is written with a strong voice and quite a bit of opinion. His own take on history glares through, at times when it is not really needed, and not necessarily helpful. While there are few areas where I outright disagreed with him, he too often takes the opportunity to inject his authorial flavor into an argument that would have been just as well presented by simply dropping the facts and showing how the textbooks are overtly manipulative.

Loewen is clearly distraught with the state of things, and despite his obvious opinions, he manages to avoid damning any one group of people. While he clearly leans to the left politically, his criticism usually only emerges where warranted—against any ethnic, political or spiritual faction. And while his conclusion seems to be that almost all textbooks are worthless, I don't think he even means to suggest that every issue or forgotten fact he mentions should be included in them. For example, the Pilim's were so hapless when it came to survival, so ignorant of how to living off the land, that at one point they took to digging up the corpses of Indians and eating them. The Indians, coincidentally, were all dead from the White Man's plague that swept through earlier. Middle-schoolers do not need to read about necrocannibalism. However, it is the tone that Loewen rages against, the absurd portrayal of the Native Americas as ignorant savages who "had never seen such a feast as the Pilgrims presented at that First Thanksgiving." As Americans, we need to understand that God did not simply drop us on this continent free of charge because a couple guys got together and prayed really hard. This country was not formed without struggle and injustice. America represents freedom to many, but even our freedoms have not always been on the side of right. Americans, and our politicians, can be both wrong and malicious.

Both the Civil War and the Alamo were conflicts we fought bitterly and many died for, to maintain freedom—in both cases, we fought and died to maintain the right to own slaves. Few have any idea that the Alamo was fought for this reason—its participants are American heroes, after all. Before Columbus landed, there were 100 million human beings living in the Americas. At the same time, the population of Europe was 70 million. Hundreds of millions died over the next five hundred years, many of them of disease, and in a very short amount of time. Granted, the Europeans could not have known what they were unleashing, but nonetheless they praised God for doing it for them. In many cases, if disease didn't suffice, they simply enslaved the native population—the Spanish were particularly brutal in this regard. We celebrate Columbus, oddly. He has his own holiday. And as most know by now, he was not even the first to discover the Americas, he was essentially the last.

Loewen excels at bridging connections from seemingly unrelated historical coincidences. For example, the Native Americans of the north were disease-free, for reasons I won't get into here. When Lief Erikson and other Scandinavians reached North America hundreds of years before Columbus, they did so out of their own northern countries, through Iceland and Greenland, passing through climates that germs did not tolerate, and essentially sterilizing themselves. They did not bring the plagues that later Europeans did, and therefore their presence did not result in a holocaust of early biological warfare. Given that the Vikings were essentially no more technologically advanced than the Native Americans they encountered, it's no wonder their colonization didn't take off. (To be fair, I suppose it's possible they just didn't pray as hard as Columbus did). I find this unfortunate, as we could today be speaking Norse instead, and celebrating International Viking Day and heading home to see our parents and exchange gifts for Plunderandpillage Week. Connections and historical debates like this highlight the fact that history is not simply a collection of known facts, but a dynamic, tumultuous subject that is neutral of moral and message, and all the more interesting for it. Students, Loewen demonstrates, would be more engaged by such a version of history, compelled to do their own research and ask questions, rather than simply memorizing dozens of meaningless and inconsequential factoids.

In conclusion: While certainly capable as a transport vessel, the yacht strives too hard to add the little touches typically representative of a pleasure-craft, and therefore handles a bit clumsily. In able hands it can hardly be faulted for its seaworthy-ness, but if left unattended the craft drifts slightly to port. The hull is of fine construction, though with some cosmetic oddities, and somewhat inefficiently streamlined. Overall a worthy purchase if one wishes for an enduring, steady ship, but not one to take out racing. Probably will not get you laid.