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Edward Morris

NonfictionHistoryAmerican History

The final word on the Hatfields and McCoys

Review by Edward Morris

“What!” you gasp with mouth agape. “Another Hatfield-McCoy saga?” Yes, but The Feud attempts to tie up all the loose ends—a monumental task, indeed, since so much of the convoluted story had to be gleaned from second-, third- and fourth-hand accounts (many wreathed in family biases), wildly inaccurate newspaper reports and incomplete public records.

To bring some semblance of order to this conflict that began at the end of the Civil War and concluded at the turn of the 20th century, author Dean King provides a series of Hatfield and McCoy family-tree charts, each with the relevant names X-ed out as the feud proceeds. These charts serve as graphic representations of how much more effective at assassination the West Virginia-based Hatfields were than their Kentucky-dwelling adversaries. They also kept better records.

As King points out, there was no single flashpoint that set off the feud. Nor did it continue at a steady and unrelenting pace. To be sure, some of the animosity stemmed from the fact that the Hatfields fought for the Confederacy and the McCoys for the Union. But there were substantial clashes as well over the ownership of livestock, the conduct of elections and real or perceived personal insults. Whatever the latest affront, both sides were consumed with the concept of getting even. The most romanticized element of the conflict—the relatively brief love affair between Johnse Hatfield and Roseanna McCoy—was, according to King, a fairly inconsequential episode in the overall scheme of things.

King also sets this story in a broader historical context. Besides chronicling the feud proper, he describes the emergence of the West Virginia-Kentucky border region as a lumber and coal center and demonstrates how New York newspapers, embroiled in their own rivalry, turned the vendetta into a circulation bonanza.

Because it involves dozens of combatants, sympathizers and innocent bystanders over a period of four decades, the story King tells in The Feud is sometimes hard to follow. But from start to finish, the dominant and most distinct figure is—as in previous retellings—the charismatic Devil Anse Hatfield, guerrilla fighter, moonshiner, squirrel hunter, timber baron and fecund patriarch. He persisted relatively unscathed while family and foes were falling all around him and died peacefully of natural causes at the age of 82, long after the smoke had cleared.

“What!” you gasp with mouth agape. “Another Hatfield-McCoy saga?” Yes, but The Feud attempts to tie up all the loose ends—a monumental task, indeed, since so much of the convoluted story had to be gleaned from second-, third- and fourth-hand accounts (many wreathed in family biases), wildly inaccurate newspaper reports and incomplete public records. To […]
Nonfiction

An impossible tale of Arctic survival during WWII

Review by Edward Morris

In Frozen in Time, his second recounting of a largely forgotten World War II rescue mission, Mitchell Zuckoff shifts his focus from the steamy jungles of New Guinea—the locale of 2011’s Lost in Shangri-La—to the glacial wilderness of Greenland. Even before America entered the war, it began constructing military bases in Greenland, both to defend the frozen island against possible German invasion and to serve as a way station for ferrying planes from the U.S. to Britain. So much air traffic over such a hostile environment made crashes inevitable and rescue attempts perilous.

On November 5, 1942, a C-53 Skytrooper cargo plane crashed onto a glacier there. But its five-man crew survived the impact. One of the planes dispatched to locate the survivors was a B-17 bomber. It also went down in a snowstorm, leaving nine survivors stranded. Yet another rescue plane, a Grumman Duck, crashed after having transported two of the downed B-17’s crew to safety. These three crashes and their aftermaths form the core of Zuckoff’s account. Drawing on personal letters, recollections and official reports, he spins claustrophobically up-close stories of what it was like to be marooned for weeks and months in subfreezing temperatures with gravely ill comrades, insufficient supplies and dwindling hope.

Early in the book, Zuckoff introduces yet another level of drama. While amassing details for his main story, he encounters a modern-day adventurer who is intent on finding and retrieving the Grumman Duck, now buried under hundreds of feet of ice. Zuckoff joins in, helps finance the project and describes the bumpy course of this high-risk effort.

Astoundingly thorough in his research, Zuckoff not only chronicles the significant actions of dozens of “characters,” but he also probes their individual lives before they went to war, sketches in their personality traits, digs up their photographs and interviews their descendants. Thus, each character stands apart from the others.

Because so much of this narrative takes place against an unvarying backdrop of snow and ice, and because there are no real “villains” to heighten tension, Frozen in Time doesn’t have quite the same expansive, edge-of-your-seat quality that Lost in Shangri-La possesses. Even so, it is an engaging testimony to perseverance, ingenuity and monumental self-sacrifice.

In Frozen in Time, his second recounting of a largely forgotten World War II rescue mission, Mitchell Zuckoff shifts his focus from the steamy jungles of New Guinea—the locale of 2011’s Lost in Shangri-La—to the glacial wilderness of Greenland. Even before America entered the war, it began constructing military bases in Greenland, both to defend […]
Social Science

Finding the third path to progress

Review by Edward Morris

In Future Perfect—as in earlier books such as The Ghost Map and Everything Bad Is Good For You—Steven Johnson seeks to discover the processes by which truths are incrementally revealed and goals attained. His inspiration for Future Perfect arose from a headline in USA Today that said “Airlines Go Two Years With No Fatalities.” It set him to thinking about how this remarkable record of safety had been achieved and why it wasn’t bigger news. In looking for answers, he became convinced that the drift of history is toward improving human conditions, even though isolated—but heavily publicized—setbacks make many of us believe that life is becoming more perilous.

In today’s political scene, Johnson notes, two contrasting philosophies hold themselves up as roads to progress: the market-driven, libertarian route and the top-down, central-planning approach. He maintains, however, that there is yet another way of bettering society, one that overcomes the limitations of these competing orthodoxies without jettisoning their useful features. Those who subscribe to this new way he calls “peer progressives.” While these people recognize the genius of markets in ferreting out and satisfying certain needs, he says, they are also aware that markets are indifferent and sometimes hostile to meeting such other needs as “community, creativity, education [and] personal and environmental health.” Still, he argues, the more minds there are focused on delineating and solving social problems, the better the results will be. What government can do—at least sometimes—is consolidate, analyze and implement these torrents of data and suggestions.

To illustrate peer progressivism at its best, Johnson cites dozens of examples of that process in action, from New York City’s 311 service that enables citizens to report a wide range of problems that the city can then chart and follow up on, to Kickstarter, the website that allows artists and entrepreneurs to raise private funds to support their projects; from corporate innovators like Whole Foods, which caps executive pay at no more than 19 times that of the average worker’s wages, to a host of private and government organizations that offer prize money—rather than market-thwarting patents—for new ideas and products.

This book is not a call for peer progressives to band together for political purposes. Rather, it aims to demonstrate the dynamism and value that ensues when a great number of diverse people network together to solve common problems. This it does well.

In Future Perfect—as in earlier books such as The Ghost Map and Everything Bad Is Good For You—Steven Johnson seeks to discover the processes by which truths are incrementally revealed and goals attained. His inspiration for Future Perfect arose from a headline in USA Today that said “Airlines Go Two Years With No Fatalities.” It […]
NonfictionEnvironment

A small town takes on a toxic disaster

Review by Edward Morris

Despite this book’s emotionally neutral title, Toms River is at bottom a horror story of unregulated capitalism. A Ciba-owned chemical plant came to the coastal town of Toms River, New Jersey, in 1952 to make dyes through processes that used and discharged enormous quantities of water. This same company had been polluting the Ohio River in Cincinnati since the early 1920s, but its huge Toms River plant employed so many local people and contributed so many civic adornments to the community that it took years for the citizens to realize they had clasped a viper to their collective bosom.

First, the plant polluted the adjacent Toms River and the aquifers that supplied the town with its drinking water. Then, when these convenient dumping grounds became overloaded, Ciba constructed a pipeline through the town that enabled it to pump millions of gallons of daily waste water directly into the Atlantic Ocean. Smoke from its operations, which the plant tried to conceal by emitting it at night, persisted in fouling the town’s air.

So firm was Ciba’s economic grip on Toms River that local politicians—and even the city-owned water company—remained docile and compliant as the plant continued its environmental assaults. Whenever Ciba had the choice of either lessening its poisonous impact by installing expensive safety devices or ramping up its public relations pitches, it invariably chose the latter. To make matters worse, in 1971 Union Carbide began dumping barrels of toxic chemicals at a site near Toms River, further polluting the groundwater.

The advent of the federal Environmental Protection Agency in 1970 made polluters like Ciba and Union Carbide somewhat more accountable for their actions. But it took a group of Toms River parents of children with cancer to ultimately exact a small measure of justice from their corporate assailants.

Author Dan Fagin, a distinguished science reporter, provides meticulously detailed accounts of the rise of the offending chemical industries, the evolution of the science of epidemiology and the struggle of the fiercely devoted parents who hounded politicians and bureaucrats to do their jobs when their natural inclination was to do nothing.

Despite this book’s emotionally neutral title, Toms River is at bottom a horror story of unregulated capitalism. A Ciba-owned chemical plant came to the coastal town of Toms River, New Jersey, in 1952 to make dyes through processes that used and discharged enormous quantities of water. This same company had been polluting the Ohio River […]
NonfictionHistory

The spark of the great evolution debate

Review by Edward Morris

One can have the benefits of a first-class education these days and still be oblivious to the name and exploits of the Victorian-era explorer Paul Du Chaillu. He was the man who plunged into the jungles of Gabon, West Africa, in 1856 and, three years later, brought back—first to America, then to England—the skins and stories of a theretofore legendary creature: the gorilla. Those unfamiliar with the man would do well to pick up a copy of Between Man and Beast, Monte Reel’s new book about Du Chaillu’s life and adventures in pursuit of this fierce creature.

Returning from his travels the same year Charles Darwin published his Origin of Species, Du Chaillu’s own origins were murky—and remain so today. He was probably born on the island of Reunion in the Indian Ocean east of Madagascar, the illegitimate son of a French father and a mixed-race mother. While still in his teens, he came under the care of an American missionary in Gabon, who taught him English and eventually helped him get a job teaching French at a seminary in New York. During his tenure there he wrote a series of newspaper articles about his time in Africa. The articles eventually attracted the attention of the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia, which agreed to sponsor his 1856 expedition.

Du Chaillu’s written account of his travels—buttressed by the physical evidence supporting it—quickly became a bestseller in England and catapulted the author into the center of scientific and religious debates about man’s relationship, if any, to other primates. It also exposed his shortcomings as a scientific observer, deficiencies which he was determined to mend by leading a second expedition into the same harsh territory.

Although Du Chaillu’s checkered life story is the bedrock of this book, Reel builds upon it fascinating sketches of England’s leading intellectuals, explorers and freelance eccentrics of the day, detailing not only their personal achievements but their professional jealousies as well. And he has plenty of tales about how “gorilla mania” saturated English culture via the publicity attending Du Chaillu’s discoveries. Through it all, Du Chaillu stands as a sincere, endlessly curious but often naïve witness to the human folly that surrounds him.

One can have the benefits of a first-class education these days and still be oblivious to the name and exploits of the Victorian-era explorer Paul Du Chaillu. He was the man who plunged into the jungles of Gabon, West Africa, in 1856 and, three years later, brought back—first to America, then to England—the skins and […]
American History

The inside story of Jimmy Hoffa’s downfall and disappearance

Review by Edward Morris

Once a giant of the American labor movement, albeit a flawed one, Jimmy Hoffa has now been reduced to the punch line of virtually every joke that involves a sudden and mysterious disappearance. His name was resurrected most recently when archeologists discovered the long-lost bones of King Richard III buried beneath a parking lot in Leicester, England. The remains of Hoffa, who disappeared on the afternoon of July 30, 1975, have yet to be found, and, if author E. William Henry is correct, they never will be.

Henry, a lawyer, worked for Robert Kennedy on his brother John’s successful 1960 campaign for the U.S. presidency and was subsequently appointed chairman of the Federal Communications Commission. His closeness to Robert, who became his brother’s attorney general, gave him special insight into the younger Kennedy’s campaign to “get Hoffa”—both for his criminal mismanagement of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters as its president and for the union’s affiliation with known gangsters. After outwitting and outlawyering his nemesis in earlier courtroom encounters, Hoffa finally was convicted of jury tampering and sent to prison, where he chafed and schemed for four and a half years until President Richard Nixon commuted his 13-year sentence to time served.

An engaging writer, Henry begins his story by probing the almost instinctive enmity between the scrappy, blue-collar Hoffa and the patrician, overachieving Robert Kennedy. He then goes on to describe, in dramatic detail, the series of legal clashes between the two men. After John F. Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, Robert became less of a thorn personally, but by this time Hoffa’s offenses were so blatant that other federal officials continued to hound him. He entered prison in early 1967 as defiant as ever, wholly convinced that he could find a way to hold on to his control of the IBT. But Nixon’s commutation of his sentence came with strings attached that thwarted his plans for good.

At the time of his disappearance, Hoffa was still resisting being sidelined from the union he had built into a personal empire. Henry relies on the confession of a mobster and strong ancillary evidence to conclude that Hoffa was shot twice in the head the afternoon he went missing and that his body was taken promptly to a mob-controlled waste disposal facility in a Detroit suburb and incinerated. Thus was born a myth—and a punch line.

Once a giant of the American labor movement, albeit a flawed one, Jimmy Hoffa has now been reduced to the punch line of virtually every joke that involves a sudden and mysterious disappearance. His name was resurrected most recently when archeologists discovered the long-lost bones of King Richard III buried beneath a parking lot in […]
NonfictionMemoir

For better or for the worst

Review by Edward Morris

Barely a year after her marriage in 1987, Wendy Plump embarked on the first of three volcanically passionate affairs she would immerse herself in before she and her husband, Bill, began having children. She did so, she freely admits, simply because she wanted to, because it was so exciting, so different from the humdrum of domestic life. But each affair was undercut by such feelings of guilt and the endless fatigue of covering up that she would ultimately confess them to Bill, who would first rage, then adjust. And so their marriage—later undergirded by the birth of two sons—continued to limp along.

Then, in January 2005, friends told Plump that Bill not only had a mistress living nearby in the same town, but that the two of them also had an 8-month-old child. (All these distressing details are revealed in the first chapter.) Plump was aware that Bill had strayed before, just as she had, but this news was devastating. Despite its glaring imperfections, she wanted her marriage to last. By the end of that year, however, Bill had moved out for good.

Plump and her husband had met in college and dated for eight years before they married. After college, she became a newspaper reporter, while he went to work as a financial advisor, a job that involved a lot of travel and which gave them both ample opportunities to find other sexual partners.

Having drawn the general outlines of their infidelities, Plump spends the remainder of her book examining where and how things went wrong. Even so, she doesn’t engage in a lot of blaming or self-excoriation. She still remembers her affairs as glorious interludes, and she understands that her husband’s temptations must have been much the same as her own. She does blame him, though, for steadfastly refusing to discuss his feelings for her or for the other women.

In 2008, Bill lost his job, the upshot of which was that Plump and her two sons had to move from their large home into a tiny rental property. It’s been mostly a downward spiral of disappointments for her ever since. Still, she finds comfort in recalling the vividness of her affairs. “When I am eighty years old,” she muses, “I will sit on my front porch, wherever that may be, and I will have sumptuous memories of these men. I will have to see if that is enough compared with the loss that infidelity has wreaked.”

Barely a year after her marriage in 1987, Wendy Plump embarked on the first of three volcanically passionate affairs she would immerse herself in before she and her husband, Bill, began having children. She did so, she freely admits, simply because she wanted to, because it was so exciting, so different from the humdrum of […]
NonfictionHistoryAmerican History

Dixie’s land no more

Review by Edward Morris

Few experiences are as exhilarating as watching a bully being brought to his knees. And if his former victims have had a hand in his collapse, it’s all the more delicious. That, in essence, is the scene Bruce Levine presents in The Fall of the House of Dixie as he traces the smug rise and ignominious fall of the Confederacy in America’s Civil War. Levine offers a fresh perspective on this oft-told story by relying heavily on personal letters, journals and diaries to reveal just how vile, self-serving and, ultimately, delusional the slaveholders were.

Brushing aside the notion that slavery was merely one of many issues over which the war was fought, Levine, a professor of history at the University of Illinois, shows that it was at the center of everything—the economy, culture, social relationships and worldview. While it was true that most Southerners didn’t own slaves, those most active in the push for secession did—and they were the ones who stood to gain the most if the war went their way. After describing the brutal conditions under which slaves lived, Levine then quotes a series of masters on how happy and contented their slaves are with their lot. “A fascinating quality of the human mind is its ability to hold firmly and simultaneously two contradictory ideas,” he observes wryly.

The dynamics of the war, even when the South seemed to be winning, made slavery increasingly untenable. Both sides needed their labor for military purposes, which gave blacks a certain leverage. With the men of the plantations away, it was more difficult to keep the slaves subdued and productive at home—and impossible to keep them from hearing the siren call of liberation, especially as Northern armies took control of the Mississippi and the vital port of New Orleans, and as General Sherman’s forces did their scorched-earth march from Atlanta to Savannah. Yet many slaveholders, instead of becoming gallantly self-sacrificing when the South needed them most, clung to their sense of entitlement, refusing to contribute war materials, pay higher taxes or allow their slaves to be used for the common good. Nobody was going to tell them what to do.

Few experiences are as exhilarating as watching a bully being brought to his knees. And if his former victims have had a hand in his collapse, it’s all the more delicious. That, in essence, is the scene Bruce Levine presents in The Fall of the House of Dixie as he traces the smug rise and […]
NonfictionHistory

Sibling rivalry and revelations

Review by Edward Morris

Ever since Cain and Abel, societies have been shaken and shaped by brothers who competed with, supported or blithely ignored one another. George Howe Colt, the second-born of four brothers, has plowed through history to describe these powerful and perplexing sibling dynamics. He does so within the framework of recounting the ups and downs of fraternal relationships that prevailed inside his own family.

While Colt’s personal accounts of growing up and finding his place in the pecking order are the most vivid and psychologically revealing, he interlaces them with extended close-ups of brothers Edwin and John Wilkes Booth; John and Will Kellogg (of Kellogg cereal fame); Vincent and Theo van Gogh; John and Henry David Thoreau; and Chico, Harpo, Groucho, Gummo and Zeppo Marx. He found that brothers tend to heighten certain qualities in each other—good and bad—that might have lain dormant if not for that incessant grind of proximity.

George’s older brother, Harry, first served the role of hero. Then, when they were at Harvard together, Harry’s seriousness as a student became a living reproach to George’s hard-drinking, devil-may-care ways. More readjustments lay ahead as younger brothers Ned and Mark came along to fight for their own identities. As the author tells it, harmony now reigns among the Colts. Harry became a doctor, George a writer (whose 2004 book The Big House was also a family history), Ned a reporter for NBC and Mark, “the least competitive of the brothers,” a recycling coordinator at a school for the blind.

Brothers is meant to charm with its stories, not to be a template for predicting behavior. “Over the past three decades,” Colt writes, “studies of intelligence, personality, interests, attitudes, and psychopathology have concluded that siblings raised in the same family are, in fact, almost as different from each other as unrelated people raised in separate families.” Maybe so, but at least they’re around when you need someone to play catch with.

Ever since Cain and Abel, societies have been shaken and shaped by brothers who competed with, supported or blithely ignored one another. George Howe Colt, the second-born of four brothers, has plowed through history to describe these powerful and perplexing sibling dynamics. He does so within the framework of recounting the ups and downs of […]
Social Science

The lives of the global megarich

Review by Edward Morris

Plutocrats is an immensely useful and entertaining book, not only because it lets the striving 99 percent of the world’s population see how the glittering 1 percent live but, more significantly, because it provides insight into the mindsets and methods of the super-rich—insights that sympathizers will regard as instructional manuals and opponents will seize upon as Achilles’ heels. A former reporter for the Financial Times, the Economist and the Washington Post, the author moves with ease among the financial titans she anatomizes, chatting with the likes of investor George Soros and Google chief Eric Schmidt and moderating panels at international economic conferences where the wealthy ponder ways of remaining so.

Freeland does not concern herself here with mere millionaires. Her microscope is trained on those whose outsized wealth gives them global impact. She seeks to determine the factors that enabled them to become wealthy and then considers what the social effects may be of the widening gap between the self-satisfied rich and the resentful middle class and poor.

The two biggest factors in gestating today’s megafortunes, Freeland concludes, have been advances in technology and the breaking down of national trade barriers. Add to these basics such economic opportunities as the collapse of the Soviet Union and subsequent privatization of its state-owned resources, China’s rapid embrace of capitalism and the U. S. government’s shielding of Wall Street from the consequences of its risky speculations and you have an entrepreneur’s concept of heaven.

Freeland is a bit too ready to buy into the “self-made” rationale from which some plutocrats derive smug comfort. “[T]he bulk of their wealth,” she says, “is generally the fruit of hustle, intelligence, and a lot of luck.” Overlooked in this sunny equation is the essential contribution of workers whose pay and benefits are kept low by outsourcing, union busting and lax or non-existent labor laws. One may get by but no one gets rich on his own, much less super-rich.

Using the economic rise and fall of 14th-century Venice as a cautionary tale, Freeland lays out a warning to plutocrats. Once Venice’s entrepreneurial class had made its vast fortunes, she says, it tried to safeguard them by closing off the very social mobility that enabled these fortunes to be created in the first place. Today’s plutocrats are inclined to do the same, she says, through manipulating laws and regulations and disregarding “the interests of society as a whole.” That path, she acknowledges, is fraught with peril.

Plutocrats is an immensely useful and entertaining book, not only because it lets the striving 99 percent of the world’s population see how the glittering 1 percent live but, more significantly, because it provides insight into the mindsets and methods of the super-rich—insights that sympathizers will regard as instructional manuals and opponents will seize upon […]
Social Science

A transformed business landscape

Review by Edward Morris

Beware the apocalyptic book title. It’s a great marketing device, but the forcefulness and flash with which a title states a book’s theme virtually ensures that the author’s more measured conclusions will be overlooked. Hanna Rosin, who previewed the thesis for The End of Men in a 2010 cover story for the Atlantic, doesn’t use the word “end” to mean “termination” or even “destination.” She’s essentially arguing that men, particularly in the lower and middle classes, are losing ground economically to their female counterparts.

To illustrate this point, Rosin peers into the day-to-day lives and evolving motivations of several groups, including college girls and post-grads who embrace their sexuality as a career tool, upper-class couples who have made their marriages work to their mutual advantage (as opposed to lower-class ones who haven’t), men left idle or underemployed after a textile mill leaves town and women who are inundating the once primarily male profession of pharmacy.

Rosin also investigates the little publicized fact that women are so outpacing men in college enrollment and completion that some schools have quietly instituted “affirmative action” programs to recruit more men by lowering or re-structuring admission standards.

As Rosin demonstrates, women are getting ahead on the economic front in no small part because they work for less money and fewer benefits. In addition, many of them are too occupied in their off hours by children and unemployed or underemployed mates to demand more from their employers.

Don’t look for any Norma Rae unionizers or 9 to 5 score-settlers here. The men Rosin shadows are not out of work because there’s no work to be done but because companies can make more money and pay less taxes by shifting the work elsewhere. It’s not a pretty picture to see women and men forced to compete with each other for economic success and happiness.

Beware the apocalyptic book title. It’s a great marketing device, but the forcefulness and flash with which a title states a book’s theme virtually ensures that the author’s more measured conclusions will be overlooked. Hanna Rosin, who previewed the thesis for The End of Men in a 2010 cover story for the Atlantic, doesn’t use […]
NonfictionHistory

Fancy meeting you here

Review by Edward Morris

Famous people cross each other’s paths all the time and end up exchanging views on various topics. No surprise there. What is surprising about Craig Brown’s Hello Goodbye Hello: A Circle of 101 Remarkable Meetings is how artfully he strings these meetings together into an unbroken chain. Brown begins with a 1931 traffic accident involving Adolf Hitler and British playboy John Scott-Ellis, then moves on to an earlier encounter between Scott-Ellis and Rudyard Kipling and from there to a meeting between Kipling and Mark Twain, who, in turn, grants a farewell audience to Helen Keller, and so on. Each account involves a person from the former one. By the time Brown writes his last vignette—reconstructing a 1937 tête-à-tête between the Duchess of Windsor and Hitler—he has completed the circle.

Brown, a London-based satirist, includes in this bounty of historic get-togethers such seemingly disparate pairings as Nancy Reagan and Andy Warhol, Frank Lloyd Wright and Marilyn Monroe, H.G. Wells and Josef Stalin, and Alfred Hitchcock and Raymond Chandler. He enlivens these brief accounts (each precisely 1,001 words long) with smirky asides and breezy footnotes.

In one such note, Brown quotes the Australian comedian Barry Humphries concerning his reaction to meeting playwright Arthur Miller: “When [he] shook my hand,” Humphries recalled, “I could only think that this was the hand that had once cupped the breasts of Marilyn Monroe.”

For the most part, it’s the incongruity of these one-on-ones that interests Brown—and the reader. Why does Groucho Marx persist in discussing King Lear when T.S. Eliot clearly prefers talking about the Marx Brothers movies? Is it conceivable that the 92-year-old philosopher Bertrand Russell is putting the moves on his 22-year-old neighbor, the budding actress Sarah Miles? (Short answer: Oh, yeah.)

There are many personalities chronicled here who won’t be familiar to an American audience, but that doesn’t matter. Brown makes them all come alive.

Famous people cross each other’s paths all the time and end up exchanging views on various topics. No surprise there. What is surprising about Craig Brown’s Hello Goodbye Hello: A Circle of 101 Remarkable Meetings is how artfully he strings these meetings together into an unbroken chain. Brown begins with a 1931 traffic accident involving […]
Social Science

Beating the professionals

Review by Edward Morris

Conceding that the term “amateur” means different things to different people, in his book Bunch of Amateurs Jack Hitt nonetheless singles out particular examples of that breed—those characterized by curiosity, open-mindedness and self-confidence—and shows how they have functioned in such disparate fields of study as ornithology, astronomy, genetics, robotics, archaeology and history. “Amateurs are more likely to see what is actually there,” he asserts, “because there’s no money, no power, no prestige (at least not immediately) attached to anything else. Amateurs mainly just want to know.”

To set the stage for his amateur vs. professional faceoff, Hitt devotes a chapter to America’s most exemplary novice, Benjamin Franklin, and his prissy, think-inside-the-box nemesis, John Adams. (Never one to shy away from reductionism, Hitt calls Adams “the Yosemite Sam of the founding fathers.”) Both men were in Paris in 1778 to drum up French support for America in the war against Britain. Franklin, who tended to wing it when it came to diplomatic relations, was a living affront to all the traditional formulations Adams held dear. But he was also an infinitely more effective emissary.

Hitt demonstrates these competing approaches in a series of profiles. His method is to “hang out” with especially provocative amateurs, describe their personalities and assess their processes for discovering truth or utility. There’s Meredith Patterson, for example, who cobbles together a home laboratory and homemade ingredients to study DNA; John Dobson, a “ninety-two-year-old hippie” whose obsession is teaching other amateur astronomers how to grind large telescope lenses in order to better view the universe; and the ever-enthusiastic David Barron, who contends—and not without reason—that certain stone structures in southeastern Connecticut were built 1,500 years ago by Irish monks.

Fascinating though Hitt’s profiles are, they merely serve as entry points to his more extensive discussions of the subjects they’re obsessed with. He goes into great detail about the search for a living specimen of the ivory-billed woodpecker and how the professional ornithologists were just as prone to embrace flimsy evidence as amateurs often are. The same holds true in his discussion of the discovery of the remains of the “Kennewick man” in 1996 and the subsequent effort to establish that he was Caucasian, an exercise in wish-fulfillment to which even credentialed professionals were not immune.

Hitt doesn’t really develop a cohesive thesis here on the nature and value of amateurism, nor does he argue persuasively that it is a distinctly American phenomenon, as he suggests at the outset. But he does illustrate with striking specificity that the road to knowing is cluttered with hazards, the chief of which are our own desires and preconceptions.

Conceding that the term “amateur” means different things to different people, in his book Bunch of Amateurs Jack Hitt nonetheless singles out particular examples of that breed—those characterized by curiosity, open-mindedness and self-confidence—and shows how they have functioned in such disparate fields of study as ornithology, astronomy, genetics, robotics, archaeology and history. “Amateurs are more […]

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