The Uncomfortable Truth About Human Stupidity: Why Mom Was Right All Along

A few weeks ago, a former colleague reached out to thank me for serving as a reference for his new position. After the pleasantries, he gently mentioned that he'd noticed I haven't posted anything on my blog in a few months. "Everything okay?" he wrote. "Just busy, or have you run out of things to complain about?"

He had a point. It's been a while. But if I'm being honest, I haven't run out of material—far from it. Life has a way of continuously validating certain uncomfortable truths, and lately I've been thinking a lot about one particular truth that my mother tried to teach me years ago.

Mom used to tell my siblings and me, something to the effect of: If you remember that people are dumb, you will never be disappointed...

That Mom-proverb coupled with one of her other favorites: If common-sense were common, it wouldn't be so valuable...

These Mom-proverbs have always stuck with me. I know she told us those things because she was trying to convey that she believed we were each smart and "above average." While I realize, in some respects, these sentiments are rooted in the Lake Wobegon effect, I've never really forgotten her wisdom. Whether that was dealing with Little League parents who treated six-year-old tee ball like Game 7 of the World Series, bosses who make arbitrary "design" requests, or colleagues who believe that "office transparency" means they have to know everything about everything, Mom's observations have proven remarkably prescient.

What I didn't realize until recently is that my mother had essentially distilled the essence of what Italian economist Carlo M. Cipolla would later formalize in his book "The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity." While presented with academic rigor, Cipolla's work arrives at conclusions that would make my Mom nod knowingly.

Why Experience Keeps Proving Mom Right

Cipolla identified five laws that explain why stupidity is both more prevalent and more dangerous than we assume. His insights perfectly capture what I've witnessed throughout many of my career and volunteer experiences.

Early experiments in transportation
Far Side - ©1984 Gary Larson

Cipolla's first law states that we always underestimate the number of stupid people out there. Every time I think I've seen it all, someone proves me wrong. Like the parents who sent me long emails, accusations of favoritism, and ultimatums about pulling their kids from Little League when I was president. Why? Because their 10-year-old only played three innings instead of four in a recreational game. These weren't isolated incidents; these parents were convinced their child's future athletic scholarship was on the line…in Little League. Meanwhile, their kids just wanted to have fun playing baseball, but the parents had transformed what should have been a developmental experience into high-stakes drama that served no one. Mom would have just nodded and said, "What did you expect?"

The second law reveals that stupidity strikes randomly. Intelligence, education, or position don't provide immunity. Consider the university colleague whom I've shown six times in one month how to sum a column of numbers in Excel. Six times, using the same basic function. This isn't about learning curves or complex software; it is about someone who uses spreadsheets daily but refuses to retain the most fundamental operation. Credentials don't protect anyone from poor judgment of lack of effort.

Cipolla's third law cuts to the heart of why stupidity is so destructive: stupid people cause harm to others while gaining nothing themselves, often even hurting themselves in the process. In 2024, this played out perfectly with rural farmers. America's most farming-dependent counties overwhelmingly backed Donald Trump in last year's election; his support averaged 77.7% in America's breadbasket. American farmers were convinced that Trump's policies would protect their economic interests. (Felder, 2024), (Atkinson, 2024) Yet when the new administration began implementing mass deportation policies in early 2025, these same agricultural communities found themselves in crisis. "We are dangerously close to a breaking point," and "Farmers and other employers say they worry their workers will be deported" became common refrains as the very workforce these farmers depended on faced removal. The agricultural sector, which voted overwhelmingly for Trump, now pleads for exemptions from the policies that they helped elect him to implement. Simultaneously harming immigrant communities, damaging their own economic prospects, and undermining the agricultural system that feeds our nation—all while achieving none of their stated goals of economic prosperity. (Chishti & Bush-Joseph, 2025), (Rahman, 2025)

The fourth law warns that reasonable people consistently underestimate the damage that foolish people can cause. We assume rationality will eventually prevail, that obvious problems will self-correct, and that someone will step in before things get too bad. Instead, systems are designed by committee, and processes are implemented that prioritize appearance over function, like fixing font preferences. At the same time, actual problems go unaddressed, and organizations create processes for the 20 percent of exceptional cases rather than optimizing for the 80 percent that matter most. Looking back on my volunteer Little League experience, parents spent countless hours debating rules for edge cases, uniform policies, practice schedules, and "rules loophole" scenarios—while the 80 percent that mattered, like ensuring kids actually learned baseball and had fun, became a theater of adult insecurity, robbing their children of joy and development.

Cipolla's fifth law delivers the stark conclusion: stupid people are the most dangerous because their actions are both harmful and unpredictable. You can understand and work around people who act out of greed or malice; their motivations make sense, even if you disagree with them. However, the truly dangerous person is the one whose decisions follow no logical pattern you can anticipate or counter. They're not trying to gain an advantage; they're just creating chaos while everyone else tries to make sense of senseless behavior. Like the executive who insisted I drop everything to change fonts on thirty reports because "that's the font he prefers reading internal reports in." Not because the data was wrong, not because the formatting was unclear, just because he had a font preference. Meanwhile, I'm trying to find and fix actual data errors, but font aesthetics have become the urgent priority. There's no rational framework for predicting when someone will prioritize arbitrary preferences over actual problems — you just have to build systems robust enough to survive the inevitable disruption.

The Digital Amplification Effect

What makes these laws particularly relevant today is how our interconnected world amplifies stupidity's reach. Social media platforms reward engagement over accuracy, creating perfect conditions for Cipolla's predictions to manifest at scale. Misinformation spreads faster than corrections, conspiracy theories find fertile ground in confirmation bias, and complex problems get reduced to soundbites that satisfy our need for simple answers to complicated questions.

The rapid spread of obviously false information during major news events demonstrates how we consistently underestimate both the number of people who will believe nonsense and their ability to influence others. Mom's wisdom about disappointment becomes prophetic. If you expect rational responses to obvious facts, you'll be let down every single time.

Living with the Reality

I don't mean to be cynical or misanthropic. Acknowledging the prevalence of stupidity isn't about looking down on others, and indeed, I have fallen into this very trap on occasion. Instead, understanding the phenomena is about managing expectations and preparing for reality. When I remember Mom's advice, I'm less likely to be blindsided by poor decisions in group settings, more likely to build redundancy into my plans, and better equipped to respond constructively when things go sideways.

My goal isn't to make you jaded, but to have you become realistic. By accepting that stupidity is not just common but predictable, we can all design systems that account for it, we can communicate in ways that minimize its impact, and maintain our own sanity when confronted with its inevitable manifestations.

Mom helped prepare me, my brother, and my sisters for a world where critical thinking is rare, good intentions don't guarantee good outcomes, and the phrase "I can't believe they did that" loses its power to shock. She wanted us to be ready to be wise, not bitter, not cynical.

Turns out she was teaching us Cipolla's laws decades before I'd ever heard of them. Sometimes the most profound truths come wrapped in the simplest packages, delivered by the people who love us most and want us to be prepared for the world as it actually is, not as we wish it were.

Common sense really isn't all that common. And if you remember that people act dumb, you really will never be disappointed.

You'll just be prepared. Thanks, Mom!

---

References:

• Atkinson, M. (2024, November 7). "Rural America sent Trump back to the White House. Flip in Clarendon County helps explain why." Post and Courier. Link
• Chishti, M. & Bush-Joseph, K. (2025, April 25). "In First 100 Days, Trump 2.0 Has Dramatically Reshaped the U.S. Immigration System, but Is Not Meeting Mass Deportation Aims." Migration Information Source. Link
• Felder, B. (2024, November 13). GRAPHIC: "Trump support grew in America’s top farming counties despite first-term trade war." Investigate Midwest. Link
• Rahman, B. (2025, April 29). "Trump’s mass deportations are pushing US farms to breaking point." Newsweek. Link

Washing Clothes, Reading History, and Rethinking the Constitution (REVIEW)

The Quartet: Orchestrating the Second American Revolution, 1783–1789
by Joseph J. Ellis

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

When I moved from Boise to Syracuse, I figured I'd run into a few bumps, unpacking chaos, hunting down new grocery stores, and learning to live with colder, wetter weather. What I didn't see coming was life without a washer and dryer. My trusty electric dryer, after years of faithfully tumbling load after load, turned out to be useless in a place that runs almost entirely on natural gas. Now it's stuck in a storage unit across town, probably wondering what it did to deserve exile, which is how, one Saturday, I ended up at the local laundromat—basket of dirty clothes in hand and a faint whiff of nostalgia in the air.

After jockeying for a dryer and realizing I'd forgotten both my Bounce sheets and my earbuds (rookie mistake), I did what any self-respecting person without a podcast would do: I wandered around the laundromat. That's when I stumbled upon a weathered Little Free Library tucked beside the soda machine. Most of the offerings were exactly what you'd expect: Go Dog Go!, a few romance novels missing their covers, and Chicken Soup for the Cat Lover's Soul. But sandwiched between them was something unexpected: The Quartet: Orchestrating the Second American Revolution by Joseph J. Ellis. I have no idea if someone meant to leave it there or if a cat lover just happened to be into the Founding Fathers, but I grabbed it. As my clothes tumbled around me, I found myself drawn into a story about revolution and the struggle to keep a country together when everything's falling apart.

In The Quartet, Ellis turns his considerable talents to the underexplored period between the end of the Revolutionary War and the ratification of the U.S. Constitution, a stretch of time often glossed over in high school textbooks. His thesis is simple but profound: that the actual founding of the United States as a unified nation happened not in 1776, but between 1783 and 1789. And it wasn't the result of some grand inevitability, but of the determined efforts of four key figures, George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay, who understood that liberty without structure was a recipe for collapse.

I studied The Federalist Papers and read Ketcham's The Anti-Federalist Papers and the Constitutional Convention Debates in college and have always considered myself fairly well-versed in the mechanics of the Constitutional Convention. I'll admit, I've tried dropping "Publius" into regular conversation a few times. Most people have no clue what I'm talking about. My friends just look at me like I dropped some random professor name at a cookout.

Ellis's book hit me differently, though. It felt messy and urgent in a way history books usually don't. No sanitized founding fathers nonsense. Just these guys scrambling around, making deals, staying up too late arguing about whether any of this would actually work. Washington, Hamilton, Madison, Jay: they weren't just standing around making grand speeches in some stuffy Philadelphia room. They were making deals, twisting arms, probably losing sleep, and doing whatever it took to convince a bunch of stubborn states to actually stick together instead of going their separate ways.

Ellis doesn't present these men as statues in a park. They're human: brilliant, flawed, and sometimes just plain stubborn, wrestling with the chaos of post-war America. Washington's steady presence and self-control become political weapons in their own right. Hamilton brings sharp financial thinking and a gift for verbal fireworks to the push for federal authority. Madison, the grinder of the group, is everywhere: crafting the Virginia Plan, pounding out the Federalist Papers, and shaping the Constitution's bones. And Jay, who usually gets the least fanfare, turns out to be the glue guy, quietly brokering peace, building trust, and lending the whole project legitimacy.

The unnerving part? It all feels too familiar. The stuff Ellis writes about sounds way too familiar. Political gridlock, sketchy alliances, everyone freaking out about big government taking over. You could swap out a few names and publish these stories in today's news. Yeah, people yell louder now (thanks, internet), but we're still having the exact same arguments: Should states call their own shots or should Washington be in charge? Do we go with what sounds good or what actually works? It's the same old fight between big ideas and the ugly reality of trying to run anything. Ellis doesn't sugarcoat it: our system wasn't built for speed or comfort. It was built for haggling, horse-trading, and keeping the whole messy thing from collapsing.

In the long run (and this was probably Madison's most creative insight), the multiple ambiguities embedded in the Constitution made it an inherently "living" document. For it was designed not to offer clear answers…but instead to provide a political arena in which arguments about those contested issues could continue in a deliberate fashion. (Ellis, p.174)

The whole idea that the Constitution wasn't supposed to be some set-in-stone rule book really hits different these days. Madison and the others knew people would keep arguing about what it all means, and that was the point. They built the argument on purpose. Which feels relevant when every big issue we face comes down to how you read the thing and whether anyone's willing to actually talk to people they disagree with.

What I loved about Ellis's book is how straightforward it is. Ellis cuts through the heroic glow that usually surrounds the Constitution's origin story and shows us the mess underneath. This wasn't the nation locking arms in perfect agreement. It was a bruising campaign waged by a stubborn minority convinced the American experiment needed sturdier bones if it was going to make it. On paper, the Articles of Confederation had a certain nobility. In practice, they left the country broke, politically unsteady, ignored on the world stage, and hanging together by a thread. Washington, Hamilton, Madison, and Jay saw what plenty of others didn't want to admit: the revolution hadn't tied up the story with a neat bow. It had kicked off a brand-new chapter, one that promised to be just as messy as the last.

Ellis walks us through the Philadelphia Convention, the state ratification battles, and the artful persuasion that made unity possible. He brings a historian's rigor to the narrative but writes with the accessibility of someone who wants his work to be read on park benches, in coffee shops, and yes, even in laundromats. His focus on character-driven storytelling makes the political feel personal, which is a good reminder that it always has been.

Reading this book while I was dealing with my own move and starting over made me think about how much work it takes to build anything that's going to last. Whether you're trying to make a new place feel like home, fit into a community, or keep a whole country from falling apart. Moving to a new city and starting over in a dozen different ways, I felt an unexpected connection to the story of four men trying to stitch together a brand-new country from a jumble of states that didn't always trust (or even like) each other. The whole thing reminded me that reinventing anything, whether it's a country or just yourself, takes more than big ideas. You need patience. You need to stick with it when things get messy. And you have to be willing to face some truths that make you squirm a little.

What Ellis really gets at in The Quartet is the idea of second chances. Not just for America back then, but for what America could be, or can be again. He shows how those founding principles we all learned about in school are only as strong as the people willing to fight for them. And honestly, given how chaotic our politics feel right now, there is something reassuring about reading how messy things were back then, too. The United States made it through that chaos, so perhaps we can figure out the current moment as well. Ultimately, it simply takes people willing to do the actual work instead of just yelling at each other.

If you come across The Quartet somewhere, maybe at one of those Little Free Libraries or on a shelf at your bookstore, pick it up. You'll walk away with more than just some historical facts. You might even remember why any of this stuff matters in the first place.

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The Vanishing Center: What The Right Answer Still Gets Right (REVIEW)

The Right Answer: How We Can Unify Our Divided Nation
by John K. Delaney

My rating: 3½ of 5 stars

In December 2019, a friend gave me The Right Answer by John K. Delaney as a holiday gift. At the time, I was vaguely aware of Delaney as the first Democrat to enter the 2020 presidential race, but I hadn’t paid him much attention. The field was crowded with louder voices, flashier platforms, and sharper ideological lines. The gift felt like a gesture of quiet hopefulness, offering not just a book, but an invitation to consider what politics might look like if we chose construction over conflict. By the time I sat down to write this, Delaney’s campaign had long since ended. He suspended his bid in January 2020, before a single vote was cast. And yet, the book lingers not as campaign literature, but as a thoughtful reflection on what our politics might be if we made more space for decency, data, and the discipline of governing.

I read The Right Answer that winter, noting passages that spoke to the civic impulses I still believe in: common ground, mutual responsibility, the hard but necessary work of listening. Delaney’s vision, laid out in earnest and unvarnished prose, wasn’t revolutionary, and that was precisely the point.

Delaney, a former congressman from Maryland and successful entrepreneur, brought a rare combination of business acumen and policy pragmatism to the national stage. Before entering politics, he co-founded two publicly traded companies focused on healthcare finance and lending to underserved communities, ventures that reflected his interest in both innovation and equity. Elected to Congress in 2012, he represented Maryland’s 6th District for three terms, earning a reputation as a pro-business Democrat who valued bipartisanship and data-driven legislation. His 2020 presidential bid was an extension of that philosophy: a campaign rooted in optimism, civility, and practical solutions, which he called “facts over fury.” He stood, in many ways, as the last echo of a brand of politics that once thrived in both parties but now seems dangerously close to extinction.

None of Delaney’s campaign was designed to set Twitter ablaze. All of it was grounded in the belief that Americans still wanted their government to function.

But The Right Answer arrived and was largely ignored at a time when the political center was already disintegrating. In the 2020 Democratic primaries, Delaney's moderation felt out of sync with a party energized by sweeping structural reforms and ideological purity. His voice was steady, not soaring; his appeal was to voters’ practical instincts, not their tribal loyalties.

Looking back, it’s clear Delaney wasn’t just running for office; he was submitting a kind of civic preservation report. His book reads like a blueprint for a governing philosophy built on what used to be bedrock: compromise, incremental progress, mutual respect. It now feels like a dispatch from a version of American politics we are dangerously close to forgetting altogether.

The erosion of the political center isn’t just about polls or party labels; it’s a slow unthreading of the civic fabric. We trade in the deliberative processes of governance for the dopamine hits of outrage. What once lived in Rotary halls and town meetings now festers in comment threads and curated feeds. The incentives are all wrong: media algorithms reward extremity, primary systems punish moderation, and fundraising emails raise more when they vilify than when they unify.

This isn't a plea for false balance or nostalgic centrism but a recognition that without a stable center, democracy cannot hold. The center is where the work gets done: where laws are negotiated, budgets are passed, and citizens feel heard rather than herded. It’s where humility still has a seat at the table, and where policy is shaped not by purity tests but by lived experience. When we lose that space, we don’t just lose consensus, we lose the conditions necessary for pluralism to survive.

And so The Right Answer stays with me not as a relic of a failed campaign, but as a reminder of what we still risk losing: the belief that governance is possible without vilification, that policy can be more than theater, that democracy is slow, communal, and if we’re lucky, boring. But if the center fades at the top, it still flickers below. It’s in church basements, PTA meetings, Rotary clubs, volunteer fire departments, and union halls, places where Americans still come together not as partisans, but as neighbors.

Reviving the center doesn’t begin in think tanks or TV studios; it begins with regular people doing regular things with civic intent. Democrats and Republicans alike can help breathe life into the center by simply showing up: for school board elections, for community listening sessions, for city council public comment. We ask harder questions of our political leaders about real solutions, not slogans, and support candidates who are willing to risk a primary loss to preserve their integrity. We reward bridge-building over brand-building and remember that pluralism isn’t a liability, it’s the heart of the American promise. The work ahead is ours. Civic strength doesn’t trickle down from elite circles; it bubbles up from participation, trust, and collective effort. The center doesn’t have to be mushy; it can be muscular, rooted in values, powered by engagement, and carried forward by people who understand that compromise is not capitulation, but courage.

I don’t know if John Delaney would have made a great president. But I do know he wrote a book full of humility and resolve, and I’m grateful someone thought to give it to me. Like reading real history or sorting laundry by hand, the work of democracy is quiet, deliberate, and unfashionable. But it’s still worth doing.

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A Fierce Glory: Antietam (REVIEW)

A Fierce Glory: Antietam--The Desperate Battle That Saved Lincoln and Doomed Slavery
by Justin Martin

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

There’s something uniquely American about standing on a Civil War battlefield and trying to make sense of what happened there. The ground itself holds secrets: subtle rises and depressions that meant life or death to the men who fought over them, stone walls and creek beds that became the hinge points of history. I’ve walked many of these fields over the years, from Gettysburg to Manassas to Lookout Mountain, but Antietam feels different. Maybe it’s because September 17, 1862, remains our nation’s bloodiest single day. Maybe it’s because the battle’s outcome was so consequential yet so uncertain. Or maybe it’s because Antietam represents something uniquely American: a moment when individual choices, political courage, military hesitation, and desperate gambles combined to reshape the nation's entire trajectory.

Justin Martin frames the whole thing in his author’s note with a line that cuts right to it: “Had its outcome been different, there would have been no Gettysburg.” That single sentence, blunt and irrefutable, is the spine of the book. Everything else flows from it.

A Fierce Glory captures this quality better than any Antietam book I’ve read. Rather than delivering another tactical military history focused on troop movements and regimental positions, Martin weaves together the human stories of individuals touched by the battle: Abraham Lincoln in the White House, Clara Barton on the battlefield, Robert E. Lee’s audacious strategic gamble, and Alexander Gardner’s revolutionary war photography. It reads less like a military study and more like a meditation on how ordinary people, thrust into extraordinary circumstances, can alter the course of history.

More Than a Battle

Martin’s central thesis is embedded in his subtitle: Antietam was “The Desperate Battle That Saved Lincoln and Doomed Slavery.” This framing immediately lifts the book beyond conventional battlefield studies. Yes, Martin covers the fighting: the desperate struggle at Burnside’s Bridge, the horrific carnage at Bloody Lane, the missed opportunities that allowed Lee’s army to escape. But he’s more interested in how twelve hours of combat rippled through American politics and society.

He explains his approach directly in the author’s note: “I’ve chosen to tell this story in a different way, avoiding minutely detailed descriptions of troop movements (a standard feature of so many battle accounts) in favor of rendering a larger picture.” It works. The book shows how Antietam became a turning point not just militarily, but politically, medically, technologically, and morally.

Lincoln needed a Union victory to issue the Emancipation Proclamation from a position of strength rather than desperation. Secretary of State Seward had urged exactly that caution in July 1862, warning that without a battlefield win, Lincoln’s edict might be viewed as, in Seward’s own words, “our last shriek on the retreat.” So, Lincoln folded a two-page handwritten draft into a pigeonhole in his White House desk and waited. Army Medical Director Jonathan Letterman used Antietam to debut the three-tiered battlefield evacuation system (dressing station, field hospital, general hospital) that is still in use today. Alexander Gardner’s photographs of corpse-strewn Bloody Lane ended romantic notions about the glory of combat in a way no newspaper account could.

That last piece deserves its own moment. When Gardner’s images went on display at Mathew Brady’s gallery in Manhattan, visitors climbed the stairs in droves to peer into the stereoscopes. What greeted them, as Martin describes it, was “astonishing, like nothing they had ever seen on the pages of Harper’s. Here were dead soldiers in full 3-D, rendered with stunning clarity.” The New York Times observed that Brady had “brought bodies and laid them in our door-yards.” Martin sees the moment clearly: a cultural line crossed, with no going back. “So, this is what war looks like,” he writes. “So, this then is what is happening on those faraway fields.”

The approach puts Martin in the same territory as James Burke’s late-70s mini-series Connections, which is right up my alley. Burke’s thesis was that you cannot consider the development of any element of the modern world in isolation, that interconnected events drive history. Martin’s narrative works from the same premise. The battle becomes a case study in leadership under pressure, necessity as the mother of invention, and in how a single day’s fighting could determine whether America would emerge from its greatest crisis as one nation or two.

Lincoln at the Center

Lincoln at Antietam - October 1862

Martin’s most significant contribution may be how thoroughly he integrates Lincoln into the Antietam narrative. Too many battle histories treat Lincoln as a distant figure waiting for telegraphed reports. Martin shows how deeply the president was involved in every aspect of the Maryland Campaign, and how much was riding on it personally.

This was a man carrying enormous private grief alongside the weight of a nation at war. As Martin puts it, Lincoln’s daily commute from the Soldiers’ Home cottage to the White House was a refuge from “excruciating personal grief, the recent loss of their son, Willie.” He’d slipped the Emancipation Proclamation draft into a desk drawer and was waiting for his reluctant general to deliver the military win that would give the document credibility. Everything depended on what happened in a valley in Western Maryland on a September day.

Martin portrays Lincoln summoning the political acumen necessary to transform a tactical draw into a strategic victory. The Emancipation Proclamation emerges not as an inevitable moral pronouncement but as a calculated political gamble by a leader who understood that the war’s meaning would be determined as much by presidential proclamations as by battlefield victories. Martin calls it Lincoln’s “last card.”

This focus on Lincoln’s political genius helps explain why Antietam, rather than Gettysburg, deserves recognition as the war’s true turning point. As Martin argues: “Antietam was a more critical battle than Gettysburg. Yes, Gettysburg receives more glory…. However, the case for Antietam is simple and irrefutable. Had its outcome been different, there would have been no Gettysburg.” Confederate victory in Maryland might well have ended the war on Southern terms, inviting European recognition of the Confederacy and allowing a Democrat-controlled Congress to negotiate a settlement with slavery intact. The stakes in September 1862 were nothing less than the survival of the United States as a single nation.

The Human Cost

Martin never loses sight of what made all of it possible. His portraits of individual soldiers are where the book earns its keep.

The book opens with Lieutenant John Mead Gould of the 10th Maine, who fought at Antietam and spent the rest of his life trying to make sense of it. In a matter of minutes at the battle’s opening, a quarter of his regiment (seventy-one of two hundred seventy-seven men) went down. The field was shrouded in smoke. The air, in Martin’s description, “swam thick with projectiles.” General Mansfield stumbled past Gould “with his coat flapping open to reveal a crimson bloom spreading across his abdomen.” Gould helped him from the field. The general died soon after. As Gould would recall for the rest of his life: “how mighty easy it was to get killed or wounded that day.”

The Burnside Bridge scene is equally vivid. On one side: twelve thousand five hundred Union soldiers under a general who, Martin suggests, was “simply paralyzed.” On the other: a small force of Georgia farm boys who had converted “the steep bluffs on their side into a formidable natural stronghold.” Among them were elite sharpshooters hiding in the branches of elms and sycamores or kneeling behind farmers’ bales of hay on the bluffs above. The math was brutal: a twelve-foot-wide bridge, enough to squeeze maybe five soldiers shoulder to shoulder, funneling an army into what Martin calls “a narrow chute” under withering fire.

The Bloody Lane section doesn’t dwell on gore, but it doesn’t look away either. Martin’s description is spare: “In the road, the Confederate dead were so thickly strewn that it was hard to discern any of the ground beneath them. Forever after, the sunken road would be known as the Bloody Lane.”

The medical scenes round out the picture. Letterman’s reforms weren’t theoretical work; they were responses to immediate human suffering, hammered out in the weeks before the battle and tested under fire. At previous engagements, the wounded had often been left to regimental musicians and civilian teamsters who, under battle duress, frequently “drank the medicinal spirits—or simply bolted.” After Shiloh, thousands of wounded lay untended for days, peach blossoms fluttering down to cover them. Letterman wasn’t going to let that happen at Antietam. Clara Barton wasn’t, either. She arrived at a farmhouse aid station in a canvas-covered wagon loaded with bandages, bread, wine, chloroform, and lanterns, and got to work removing a minie ball from a soldier’s cheek with her pocketknife. No credentials required. “In such a state of emergency, any help was welcome, no questions asked.”

Contemporary Resonance

A Fierce Glory arrives at an unusually charged moment. Martin published it in September 2018, with the midterm elections six weeks away and the country more divided than it had been in a generation. His portrait of a nation on the brink, torn by fundamental disagreements about identity, values, and the role of government, doesn’t require much imagination to place against the current backdrop.

The parallels aren’t perfect, and Martin is too good a historian to force artificial connections between 1862 and today. But his portrayal of Lincoln’s patient political maneuvering, his willingness to wait for the right moment to act decisively while looking like weakness to critics, carries obvious weight for anyone watching the current spectacle in Washington and wondering whether steady, principled leadership still has a place in it.

There’s also something specific about this particular autumn that makes the book resonate. The 2018 midterms are shaping up to be a referendum on the soul of the country, not so different in structure from what Lincoln was navigating in the fall of 1862. Martin reminds us that the Confederates timed their Maryland invasion deliberately, hoping a Union defeat would sweep anti-war Democrats into Congress and force a negotiated settlement. Politics and the battlefield were inseparable then. Martin’s book doesn’t offer easy comfort, but it does offer something more useful: evidence that the republic has survived this kind of fracture before, when the right people made the right choices at the right moment.

Minor Criticisms

A Fierce Glory isn’t perfect. Readers seeking detailed tactical analysis may find the approach occasionally frustrating. For that level of military detail, D. Scott Hartwig’s comprehensive two-volume treatment, To Antietam Creek and I Dread the Thought of the Place, remains unmatched. The maps in Martin’s book, while adequate, pale next to Hartwig’s detailed battlefield cartography.

Martin’s writing style, while generally engaging, occasionally drifts toward the novelistic. His technique of getting inside characters’ heads, imagining what Lincoln was thinking as he waited for battle reports, or what Lee felt as he realized his invasion had failed, is dramatically effective but historically speculative. In his own author’s note, Martin acknowledges this directly, flagging certain passages as “battle is informed speculation.” That honesty helps.

These are minor quibbles. Martin is a narrative nonfiction writer by background, and he has the storyteller’s instinct for finding the human drama in historical events without sacrificing rigor. Hartwig provides the tactical foundation that serious students of the battle require; Martin builds the interpretive superstructure that helps general readers understand why Antietam mattered beyond the immediate military consequences. The two approaches complement each other. Hartwig gives you the facts. Martin tells you what they mean.

A Different Kind of Civil War Book

A Fierce Glory stands apart in the crowded field of Civil War literature because Martin grasped that Antietam’s importance extends far beyond military history. This is a book about how democracies survive existential crises, how individual choices can have generational consequences, and how the meaning of historical events often becomes clear only in retrospect.

Martin has written the kind of Civil War book that might actually change minds. It’s accessible enough for general readers and sophisticated enough for serious students of the period. Sweeping in scope and intimate in detail, politically sharp and humanly compelling. It doesn’t just tell you what occurred on that terrible September day. It makes you feel why it still matters.

Standing on the Antietam battlefield, I can still feel the weight of what happened there. Martin’s book sharpens that feeling. In an era when American democracy again faces serious challenges, it’s a reminder that the work of preserving our ideals will never be finished. Each generation has to take it up anew.

Highly recommended for anyone interested in Civil War history, Lincoln scholarship, or the broader question of how democratic societies navigate existential crises.

I visited the Antietam battlefield with my son this past June, during a cross-country road trip that wound through Little Bighorn, Mount Rushmore, and a genuinely strange afternoon at a circus museum in Wisconsin. That visit is the subject of a companion post: “When History and Present Collide.”

The Imperial Cruise (REVIEW)

The Imperial Cruise: A Secret History of Empire and War 

by James Bradley

My rating: 1 of 5 stars

Some lessons arrive early and stay with you for the rest of your reading life. Mine came from a professor named Keith Nelson, who taught history at the University of California and co-authored a slim but formidable book called Why War? Ideology, Theory, and History with Spencer C. Olin. The book came out in 1979, and it did something most undergraduate courses never bother with: it taught me to read the historian before I read the history.

Nelson and Olin’s argument is easy to state, but it changes everything once you’ve absorbed it. Historians aren’t neutral. They carry ideologies: conservative, liberal, or radical. Those ideologies generate theories, and those theories determine which questions get asked, which evidence gets elevated, and which conclusions feel inevitable before a word has been written. Most historians aren’t fully conscious of this. The ones who are rarely admit it. Dr. Nelson taught me to find it anyway: to look past the argument being made and ask what the author had to believe before they could make it.

I thought about Dr. Nelson a lot while reading James Bradley’s The Imperial Cruise: A Secret History of Empire and War.

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What Bradley wrote instead is a verdict in search of a trial.

As an undergraduate at UC Irvine in the late 1980s, Dr. Nelson taught me to do one thing before anything else: identify the ideological framework an author brings to the evidence, because that framework will determine everything that follows. Applied to The Imperial Cruise, that framework surfaces almost immediately. The villains are not simply flawed men making consequential decisions. They are the American ruling class, driven by a racial supremacist ideology, wielding state power in service of imperial ambition. That framing is recognizably Marxian: a dominant class, an ideological superstructure that justifies its dominance, a state apparatus that does its bidding. Bradley never uses that vocabulary. He doesn’t have to. The structure of his argument carries it.

That habit — reading the historian before reading the history — was also what drove me to the scholarly literature once I finished the book. Something felt wrong with Bradley’s method, not just his conclusions, and I wanted to see how trained historians had received it. I wasn’t surprised by what I found.

The tell is his use of the word “Aryan.” He applies it relentlessly and strategically, building a case that Roosevelt and the political elite around him were not merely products of their era’s racial attitudes. They were architects of a white supremacist project. And here is where the book crosses from argument into manipulation: Bradley deploys “Aryan” with the deliberate intent of drawing a through-line between turn-of-the-century American imperialism and Nazi Germany. Historian William Tilchin, writing in the Theodore Roosevelt Association Journal, identified the tactic directly, calling Bradley’s constant use of “American Aryan” obviously designed to suggest that historical American racism was on par with Nazism (Tilchin 39). Jonathan Tobin, writing in Commentary, described the book as representing a new and especially low chapter in ideological American historiography (Tobin 26).

None of this means the underlying history is false. American imperialism in the Philippines was, at times, brutal. The death toll from the Filipino-American War runs into the hundreds of thousands. Roosevelt’s racial views shaped his diplomacy in ways that deserve serious examination. The question isn’t whether the grievances are real. The question is whether the analysis is honest. And that’s where Nelson & Olin’s framework cuts deepest: when an ideology drives the evidence rather than the other way around, even legitimate grievances get buried under the weight of a predetermined conclusion.

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The most troubling part of the book is how Bradley uses his primary sources.

There’s a specific problem any careful reader will notice: the blurring of source and interpretation. Primary source material flows into Bradley’s own voice without clear demarcation. You find yourself reading what you believe is a direct quotation from Roosevelt or a period document, and then you realize — sometimes pages later — that you’ve been reading Bradley’s characterization all along, with no signal that the transition happened.

Tilchin documented this at the mechanical level. Quotations end without being marked as ending. In one full chapter, more than twenty-five consecutive endnotes don’t correspond to the note numbers they’re linked to. In one instance, Bradley invokes “one historian” to support a significant claim, names no one, and provides no citation.

That last example is worth sitting with. Attributing an argument to an unnamed historian isn’t an oversight. It’s a rhetorical device. It asserts the authority of scholarly consensus while deliberately withholding the evidence that would allow a reader to evaluate it. Dr. Nelson would have recognized that move immediately. It’s exactly the kind of covert theoretical operation his book was designed to expose.

Bradley’s most sweeping claims, including the Aryan argument at the book’s center, are made with almost no direct quotation at all. The evidentiary weight rests on assertion and framing, not documentation.

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What makes all of this more significant is that the pattern doesn’t start with The Imperial Cruise.

Bradley’s first book, Flags of Our Fathers, built its entire emotional and commercial foundation on a personal narrative: his father was one of the men who raised the flag on Iwo Jima in the iconic 1945 photograph. The book became a bestseller and was adapted into a Clint Eastwood film. In 2016, the Marine Corps completed an investigation confirming that John Bradley was not in the famous photograph. He had raised an earlier, smaller flag. The man in the iconic image was someone else entirely. You can extend Bradley the grace of noting that this was a pre-existing historical misidentification, not something he fabricated. But the kind of rigorous primary-source research Flags of Our Fathers claimed to represent might have found the discrepancy before it became the foundational premise of a bestselling book.

His follow-up, Flyboys, drew pointed criticism from Naval History Magazine, which found it riddled with errors and offered a concise description of Bradley’s research method: his technique, the reviewer wrote, seems to have been to find the most startling book on a subject, then borrow heavily from it. Find the most dramatic source. Borrow heavily. Assert confidently. That’s the throughline across all three books, and it reaches its most developed form in The Imperial Cruise.

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Here’s what I keep coming back to.

Nelson and Olin weren’t arguing that ideological historians are bad historians. They were arguing that hidden ideology is dangerous because it can’t be evaluated, challenged, or corrected. A scholar who argues openly from a radical framework does something intellectually honest: here is my premise, here is my theory, now test it against the evidence. Even when you disagree with the conclusion. What Bradley does is different. He presents polemic as investigation. He frames advocacy as discovery. He gives you a book that looks like history and reads like a closing argument.

The frustrating part is that the real history underneath it matters. The Taft-Katsura Memorandum deserves more attention than it gets. The American imperial project in the Philippines deserves reexamination. Roosevelt’s racial worldview and its diplomatic consequences deserve serious scrutiny. These are not invented grievances. They’re the foundation of a book worth writing.

Bradley chose to write a different book. One where the verdict came first, and the evidence was arranged around it.

Dr. Nelson taught me to recognize that move. I was twenty-two years old at the time, and I’ve never stopped using it.

View all my book reviews.

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Works Cited

Bradley, James. The Imperial Cruise: A Secret History of Empire and War. Little, Brown and Company, 2009.

Nelson, Keith L., and Spencer C. Olin. Why War? Ideology, Theory, and History. University of California Press, 1979.

Tilchin, William N. “James Bradley’s ‘The Imperial Cruise’ is an Outrage, Pure and Simple.” Theodore Roosevelt Association Journal, vol. XXXI, no. 4, Fall 2010, pp. 39-45.

Tobin, Jonathan S. “Smearing Theodore Roosevelt.” Commentary, March 2010, pp. 26-29.

Angels, Demons, and the Question I Wasn’t Expecting

I came across my old GoodReads review of Angels and Demons recently. I wrote it in the summer of 2008, and reading it now, I barely recognize the guy who wrote it. Not because the opinions are wrong, but because the review contains nothing. Plot summary, a few complaints about the ending, and a rating. It tells you nothing about why I was reading that book, or what that summer was like.

That summer, I was coaching baseball and going to church. Neither was something I would have predicted for myself.

The baseball part had a natural explanation. My son Ted was playing, and I'm the kind of dad who can't just watch. I'd just taken over as president of Crescenta Valley Little League, which meant fielding long, accusatory emails about whether a ten-year-old played three innings or four. If you've spent any time around youth baseball, you know the drill. The kids are having a blast. The adults are treating a recreational game like Game 7 of the World Series. I was spending so much time managing the adult chaos that I didn't always stop to appreciate what I was actually watching: Ted developing into a real player, game by game, summer by summer. I was keeping score in the wrong column.

The church part was harder to explain.

My parents raised me in the Catholic tradition, though not the daily Mass, every Sunday kind. We went when we went. I never had the full sacramental program run on me, but the Church was still part of the scenery growing up: the liturgy, the ceremony, the sense that something old and serious was happening at the altar. I absorbed more of it than I realized. I just never had a tight grip on any of it, so there wasn't much to walk away from.

What drew me in that summer wasn't a crisis of faith. It was a pastor named Dave Roberts at Montrose Church, just down the road. My kids were in youth groups on Sunday mornings, and rather than sit in the parking lot for an hour, I'd started going to the services. Roberts had been there since 1988. What he'd built was something I didn't expect: the congregation was filled with families I knew from the kids' school, Boy Scouts, and Little League. His sermons weren't just scripture. They were history lessons. What was happening in the Roman Empire when Paul was writing his letters. What the political situation in Jerusalem meant for the people reading the Gospels. He preached context. He made the ancient text feel like a living document.

I found myself looking forward to Sundays in a way I hadn't since I was a kid.

So that's where I was that Fourth of July weekend: spirituality stirred back to something approaching consciousness, history on my mind, managing an All-Star baseball tournament in hundred-degree heat, and refereeing adult nonsense. That's when I picked up Dan Brown's Angels and Demons.

I'd been told it was similar to The Da Vinci Code, which I hadn't read yet. What I hadn't been told was how directly it would walk into the question I'd been quietly turning over for months.

The premise: someone murders a physicist-priest at CERN named Leonardo Vetra. He and his daughter, Vittoria, also a scientist, had been creating antimatter and simulating the conditions of the Big Bang. Vetra's purpose wasn't ambition. He believed that if he could reproduce the moment of creation, he could offer physical evidence of God's existence. Science, in his view, wasn't the enemy of faith. It was a road that led to the same place.

Robert Langdon gets called in, and what follows is a frantic race through Rome and Vatican City chasing a stolen antimatter canister and a string of ritualistic murders tied to the ancient Illuminati. Brown does plot mechanics the way a good pitcher throws heat: fast, relentless, hard to put down. The first 450 pages are genuinely fun. What makes them work isn't just the pacing. It's history. Brown wraps his story around the Illuminati, the Vatican, and Bernini's Rome. He uses historical context the way Roberts used it in his sermons: not as decoration but as what makes the story matter. A different kind of pulpit, but the same instinct.

The last 50 pages are another matter. The story collapses under its own contrivances, wrapping up loose ends in a rush of melodrama that Brown's editors should have sent back for a rewrite. There's also a plot hole that drove me a little crazy. In a world where you can triangulate the signal from a wireless video camera, the canister's location shouldn't be much of a mystery. But I'm a science fiction reader by habit, so suspending disbelief is a professional skill. The weak ending doesn't ruin what came before. It just means the book fell short of what it could have been.

But I kept coming back to Vetra's idea. The scientist-priest who believed the same truth could be approached from two directions.

Growing up around the Catholic tradition, even loosely, the relationship between science and faith carried a particular weight. The Church has a complicated history there. Galileo is the most obvious example, though far from the only one. The faith I grew up around asks for trust in things unseen and unprovable. That's not incompatible with how science works at its edges, but the two don't always sit comfortably together. Roberts had been quietly suggesting something else: that the tension between faith and evidence isn't a contradiction to resolve, but a conversation to keep going. He'd probably like Vetra.

Vetra, a fictional creation in a thriller built around secret societies and ticking antimatter bombs, was trying to hold that conversation. He just blew up in the middle of it.

I'm not sure that was an accident on Brown's part, though he isn't the most theologically subtle writer around. What he understood, well enough to keep me up past midnight on a holiday weekend, is that the God question doesn't go away. It keeps showing up where you don't expect it. In a church parking lot in Montrose. In a book you grab on a whim. In the middle of a baseball season.

That last one lands differently now. Ted's junior year of college baseball just ended with an injury. I've been here before. Back in 2009, I watched a line drive catch him in the knee during the championship game at the Babe Ruth Regional tournament up in Eureka. We drove home the long way that trip, through the redwoods, and I remember standing among those trees thinking that they'd been growing since before baseball was invented and would be standing long after both of us were gone. The game shrinks to its proper size in a redwood forest. It didn't make the loss hurt less. It just put it somewhere you could carry it.

I've been thinking about the summer of 2008 more than usual these past few weeks. The Little League all-stars run. The car rides home. I was so busy managing adult egos that summer that I didn't always appreciate what I was watching. Five years later, I'd be standing in a high school stadium watching him launch a three-run homer in the seventh inning to win a Pacific League title. I didn't know any of that was coming. You never do. You don't ask the God question about the small things until the small things are gone.

Ted's got one more year. I don't know how it ends. But the Cubs look like they might be real contenders this year, which is its own kind of theology. And I keep coming back to Brown and Roberts, two people who share nothing except the instinct to use history to make the present feel like it matters. That's not a small thing when you're sitting in the spring of 2016 trying to figure out what you believe, and why, and what all of it was for.

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Angels & Demons

by Dan Brown

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Angels & Demons is an effective and engaging page-turner that introduces Harvard professor Robert Langdon as he races through Rome and Vatican City to prevent a catastrophe involving stolen antimatter, Illuminati murders, and ancient secret societies. The story takes a while to find its footing, with the first 50 or so pages being heavy on exposition, but once it picks up speed the intricate and fast-paced plot makes it nearly impossible to put down. The novel isn't deep literature, but it succeeds as a fun and easy read. The ending stumbles, but see the full review for details.

Read the original review here.

365 Thank Yous (REVIEW)

365 Thank Yous: The Year a Simple Act of Daily Gratitude Changed My Life
by John Kralik

My rating: 3½ of 5 stars

I first looked at this book in a college bookstore. It was on a shelf filled with books for graduates and students entering college. At first, I thought that perhaps it was a little out of place, immediately thinking it was a typical self-help book. I didn't buy the book then, but when I ran across it again at my local bookstore, I decided to pick it up based on the cover recommendation by The Last Lecture co-author Jeffrey Zaslow (whose NY Times column I frequently read).

Kralik's book is an accessible and easy read, and I was happy to find that it isn't really a self-help book at all; rather it is a personal memoir of a particular year or so in his life. It isn't great literature, nor is it a "step-by-step" guide to picking yourself up by the bootstraps—a Wayne Dyer-esque type book. 365 Thank Yous isn't really pop psychology, nor is it preachy... The crux of the book is Kralik's desire to try and look at his life through a different lens. Rather than continuing to be bitter and angst-ridden over all the problems in his life, Kralik sought to try and find things to be thankful for and to do so every day for a year.

As he goes through his thank you letter exercise, not only is Kralik able to gain a new (and better) perspective on his own life, he starts to equate the turn-around in his fortunes, as evidenced by some of the good things happening in his life, to his thank you letter writing campaign. Which not only reinforced his mission but recalled his earliest experience writing a thank you note to his grandfather:

He promised that if I wrote him a letter thanking him for this silver dollar, he would send another one. That was the way thank-you letters work, he told me.

I think that one of the reasons this book struck a chord with me is that I can recall being "chained" (figuratively, not literally) to my desk after my high school graduation, writing thank-you notes to all the people who sent me gifts. At the time, it was the last thing I wanted to do, but I remember my mother explaining that not only was it the right thing to do, but that good things would follow as a result...

As I read through the book, I found myself drawn closer and closer to Kralik's narrative. Initially, this had as much to do with our lives seeming eerily parallel. To begin with, we worked in the same part of town (at the same time he was going through his letter-writing campaign), and I've been to almost every place that he mentions in the book (in fact, we could have easily bumped into each other at any one of several local places). Our careers briefly intertwined when we worked for the same company in the early 1990s...

But most importantly, I can relate to how Kralik perceived himself in 2008. Like him, I had been through the divorce ringer; I wasn't happy with how my career was progressing and wasn't fulfilled by my work. On top of that, my personal relationships were at an all-time nadir.

Kralik's solution to these "problems" was to look for things to be thankful for (and to write his thank you notes). This is certainly a "therapy 101" solution to these kinds of challenges and isn't (or at least shouldn't be) an earth-shattering epiphany for most people. But for me, at least, reading Kralik's memoir has allowed me to look at my own life and consider all of the things in my life for which I am grateful, and if I choose to write a few more thank you notes as a result... then all the better.

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The Ugly American (REVIEW)

The Ugly American 

by William J. Lederer

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I first encountered this book as part of an undergraduate political science class on American politics. Among other long and dry reading assignments, I found myself thoroughly engaged in the book and looking forward to spending time reading Lederer and Burdick's work. In fact, I'd have to say that it has been my favorite book since that political science class almost 25 years ago.

I have read it at least 20 times in those 25 years (often as a source for a paper I was writing, but also for pleasure). While this is not a typical "beach read," I have re-read it while traveling and at the beach on several occasions. This past week, I was on a business trip and sleeping in a hotel room. This combination of factors is usually good for a bout of insomnia on my part, and this trip was no different. Lederer and Burdick came to my rescue yet again and provided a thoroughly enjoyable way to pass through several hours of insomnia.

The story(ies) centers on a fictional country in Southeast Asia named Sarkhan. The book's chapters compare and contrast the competence and incompetence on the part of the diplomats, politicos, military officers, and ex-pats in Sarkham. Heroes include Ambassador Gilbert McWhite, John Colvin, and Homer Atkins (THE ugly American) — all men who took the time to learn the culture in which they were being planted.

It is easy (now, with 20/20 hindsight) to see this book as a parable stemming from the Vietnam War. However, the book was written well before America stepped up its involvement in Vietnam (in 1958) and was purportedly read by President Eisenhower, and was responsible for many of the reforms that he introduced into America's foreign aid programs. The general thesis of the authors was that US diplomats (and other foreign station workers/advisors) who failed to study and adapt to the cultures they were entering were doomed to failure (or worse). Worse still, the American bureaucracy wasn't interested in the opinions of the Foreign Service staff who did study and understand the cultures into which they were placed.

Given that this book was written at the tail end of the McCarthy era, the insights of Lederer and Burdick are quite exceptional (if fact, some government agencies sought to ban the book in Asia and in many ways that (failed) effort can be seen as one of the last "scenes" of the McCarthy era). Burdick and Lederer are at once tongue-in-cheek, cynical, and satirical in their views of American foreign policy

Every time I read this book, I can't put it down. Despite its age, it is still a fine read and certainly has additional significance in today's world as the U.S. fights wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Although some parts of the book are antiquated (in particular the parochial way the authors treat the few female characters -- especially the Marie MacIntosh character), that small niggle can be forgiven to a book that retains its readability and relevance 50 years after it was first published.

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Stranger in a Strange Land (REVIEW)

Stranger in a Strange Land 

by Robert A. Heinlein

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I remember reading _Stranger In A Strange Land_ as a young high school student in the late 70s. At the time, the story appealed to my changing state (as an adult, I think I can finally admit that the adolescent young man who read this book the first time, did so because my friends told me it was filled with lots of sex scenes). I also remember that despite Heinlein's writing found it a difficult book to read as a result I "skipped" around looking for the "good" parts (which are all in the second half of the book).

However some (other) passages in the book did leave an impression on me during that first read. Heinlein's railing against the parochialism of the Church (and the Catholic Church in particular) was certainly instrumental in shaping my views on religion and partially contributed to some of my more existential leanings (I'd also note that the criticism leveled at Heinlein for passing off his impressions/views/ideas as fact is certainly warranted).

So, when I found myself stuck in the Charlotte, NC airport for 5 hours this weekend (awaiting a 5 hour flight home to LA) I surprised myself by deciding to buy the Ace (trade paperback) version of Stranger In A Strange Land and re-read it -- in retrospect, I am ambivalent that I took the time to re-read the book.

The protagonist, Valentine Michael Smith, is a child born on Mars to two of the crew of the first human expedition to that planet; he is raised by the Martians when a catastrophe wipes out the adults of the expedition. Years later, another expedition to Mars results in contact with the Martians and Michael's return to Earth, completely innocent of knowledge about the planet. The greater part of the novel details his attempts to understand human nature from his Martian philosophical perspective (which is rather like that of Eastern philosophy); these end in his foundation of a new religion to help human beings achieve their full potential, which hitherto has been impossible because of the straitjacket of human culture.

The book makes me think, which now (that I am considerably past my adolescence) I appreciate much more. It can be slow in parts (most of the book is dialogue with very little or no action), but (and I'm not sure if it is my age, or the fact that Ace added back in 30,000 words to this edition that weren't in the copy I read 30 years ago) much more readable than the first time through.

Some parts, especially in the second half of the text, result in disturbing thought patterns, even now. The concept that all human morals are arbitrary (which is how the "Martian" Valentine Michael Smith views them) and that anything that leads one to "grow closer" is good -- also leads down a slippery slope where moral objections to murder, and other heinous things, can be downplayed (in the name of the collective growing closer). While these attacks on Western culture don't seem quite as shocking as they must have been back in the 1960s, other parts of the book are just preachy and long-winded. The international intrigue and world government sub-plot of the first half of the book are more interesting to me now than they were on my first read (but ultimately unfulfilled as Valentine Michael Smith escapes to become the messiah like character of the second half of the book).

It would be easy to write this classic of science fiction off as a novel of the hippie era and relegate it to the dustbin (and history could still do that). However, the somewhat unique premise of analyzing human culture from an alien point of view, as well as the fact that the novel forever broke (maybe bridged) the barrier between science fiction and mainstream literature, put it into the classic (must-read at least once) category. By all means, read it and form your own opinion. Or better yet, (re)read Starship Troopers!

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An Army at Dawn (REVIEW)

An Army at Dawn: The War in Africa, 1942-1943 

by Rick Atkinson

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This book is the first of Atkinson's three-book "Liberation Trilogy" series, which provides an overview of the campaigns that eventually led to the liberation of Western Europe from Nazi occupation.

Above all else, the book's historical narrative is so well written that it simply refuses to let the reader loose from its pages. It will be hard to put it down until the job is finished and the book is completed. Atkinson's writing is very well executed and, unlike many books covering military operations, the story he weaves is consistent, clear, and a pleasure to read.

This title covers the North African theater from Operation Torch in 1942 until the last German and Italian troops were evacuated or captured in Tunisia in 1943. The North African campaign is frequently seen as a backwater and doesn't receive the attention of the later Italian, Normandy, and Bulge campaigns. However, Atkinson's thesis is that every subsequent Allied (or at least the U.S. Army) victory would not have been possible if the Allies had not attacked North Africa first.

The author shows the US Army's maturation as the crucible of battle transforms the men of the raw American war machine from a gang of inexperienced citizen-soldiers into a highly effective, efficient, and well-led army that led the defeat of Germany's vaunted Wehrmacht in Western Europe.

Covering the North African campaign at the operational and strategic levels, Atkinson's text does a terrific job illustrating the leadership problems of coalition armies. Showing that the Allies did not just "click" because they were united in opposition to Hitler's Axis powers. The text discusses the tensions that existed between the American and British leadership and does a good job of giving General Eisenhower "his due" as the right man, in the right place, at the right time (albeit one who had to learn his job and role). That Atkinson does so, with such a wealth of intimate detail, is clearly the result of many hours of research into contemporary first-person resources -- as evidenced by the hefty section of notes found at the end of the book.

My only criticism of the book is that the graphics (maps and illustrations) are a little sparse (in particular, the maps), and while they do an adequate job of illustrating the text, I wish they were more detailed. However, Atkinson's book is absolutely a recommended read, so get a good atlas and dig right in.

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