socraticgadfly's reviews
972 reviews

Great book by Harden.

 

I knew the “textus receptus” of the myth of Marcus and Narcissa Whitman, and knew that Henry Spaulding had created it. I knew the basics of the reality but nothing more.

 

The reality? Marcus Whitman believed in manifest destiny and clearly threw his lot in with that, and with evangelizing white migrants to Oregon, after his 1843 midnight ride to back East.

 

Although the myth was first debunked more than a century ago, the debunking generally stopped there. Even though the Cayuses had good reason, in their lights, for attacking the Whitmans, the debunking didn’t focus on that.

 

Harden does. And, he looks at the resurgence of them and the other two tribes on the Umatilla Reservation today. Yes, it’s in fair part due to casino gambling. But, it’s also due to reclaiming some of their water rights and more. And, within the three tribes, the Cayuses are also focused on reclaiming their history. Harden talks to some of today’s Cayuses in the last chapters of the book. This is well-researched with many pages of footnotes, and well written.

 

Even before the Manifest Destiny part, unscrolling the original tale in order, per Harden’s research?

 

Methodist missionary Henry Kirke White Perkins, serving 160 miles west of Whitmans, noted the unsuitedness of Narcissa in particular on temperament and the Whites-first angle of Marcus, writing just 6 months after the trial of the five Cayuses, in a letter to Narcissa's sister. This ties in with Cayuse complaints about Whitmans profiting from living on their land, but paying no rent. 

Harden notes the martyr-like mentality of Narcissa from her early, pre-married, desire to be a missionary. Looks at letters and such from her as documenting this.

 

He also how depressed she became after loss of her toddler child, and seemingly never fully recovered. If she was unsuited before, she certainly was after this.

He also notes the racism of "extinguishment" of Indian land claims, as part of discussing Washington-Indian tribes relationships for 175 years.

 

Notes the ridiculousness of the various treaties by Gov. Stevens of Washington, next.

 

He also tackles the Calvinism of Spauldings and Whitmans and how that drove their particular missionizing mindset. He contrasts this to Catholicism of priests also doing conversions in area. Harden may oversell the Catholics' "letting civilization ride light" as well as letting the religious process ride light. The 1680 Pueblo Revolt, and the Spanish in California, show that the Franciscans, at least, where they could, did also consider civilizing part of converting. The "black robes" coming from France may have been more enlightened. But, they were also thinner in numbers. That’s not enough for a quarter-star ding; it’s a minor matter of note, though.

 

This by no means “spoils” the twists and turns of myth vs reality, nor of how the myth was used and sold in support of many issues.

Kind of a tough book to rate. Decently informative, but the tenor was often offputting.

To explain, some background. I'm a leftist who has read multiple books on CRT and think it has some good things to say but isn't perfect or totally close. Related? I don't think that everything nutters call "woke" is wrong. But I do think some things are.

And woke, the good, the bad and the ugly all run deep in this book.

I was "triggered," if you will, by something in the introduction. She talked about some Native Americans who believe "we've always been here." I knew, confirmed by footnote, she was referencing Vine Deloria. Along with that, she talked about "Indigenous science," setting it, in cases like this, against "Western science," and saying that she wasn't here to resolve these conflicts. Well, I've called out Deloria elsewhere. And, science has had its failures, ethical and otherwise. (I already knew about the Havasupai DNA testing.)

One or two digressions wouldn't be bad, but the book has a sidebar every 8-10 pages and half of them or nearly so are related to this.

==

OK, the actual informative parts.

I knew that Clovis was dead a full decade or more ago. But, how far back do we go before that? Raff has pretty solid DNA evolutionary evidence that humans were in the west end of Beringeria, modern Alaska, 25K years ago, before the peak of the Last Glacial Maximum. Like other recent research, she notes that traveling by boat would have worked around the ice sheets.

The White Sands footprint? She'd seen pre-print research by the scientists. Says the dating seems solid. So, humans were in the US Southwest by 25K years ago. Problem? Almost zero anthropological evidence in Alaska. For various reasons, we may never get a lot more. There is some in Eastern Siberia that goes older than that.

Next, based on DNA and other evidence, she talks about multiple waves of immigration, beyond what we know as a separate wave of Inuit and Aleut. Ties this to linguistics, noting that Greenberg and other "clumpers" are wrong.

New to me is that Clovis people apparently migrated north, from US South or Southeast, after development of Clovis toolkit. Lists a site in Florida that sheds further information on this.

For people who don't know that Clovis is dead, or that humans were likely in the Americas not just 15K years ago but 20-25K, this book would be reasonably informative. If you DO know that, there won't be a lot new here.

Surprisingly good, given that several years ago, I grokked "To Sell is Human" on a library new books shelf, saw Pink's claim that "we're all in sales now" and immediately shut the book and put it back on the shelf.

The only reasons this isn't 5-starred is that it's relatively thin, and it is a bit on the "pop psychology" side. But, it gets more than a flat 4 here. That said?

Pink book notes

One basic distinction, and a biggie, is action regrets vs. inaction regrets. Not doing something we could have vs doing something we shouldn’t. Inaction regrets often nag the most.

Four types of regret:
1. Foundational (health, mental health, education, self-development)
2. Boldness (see above)
3. Moral
4. Connection and relationship

The last one-quarter of the book, with its summary of tools on how to harness regret, is the key.

Those tools include:
1. Writing a “failure resume”
2. Doing third-person self-talk
3. Self distance in other ways, including with reliving to relieving, kind of like with PTSD
4. Doing “old year regrets” along with new year’s resolutions
5. Anticipating possible future regrets
6. Working on self-compassion even more than self-esteem (would you treat another person this way?)
7. Adopting a “journey mindset”

With action regret, Pink says undo them if possible; if not, minimize with an “at least it wasn’t worst” framing.

Pink also quotes another psychologist, that life has two narrative flows:

The first is a contamination sequence, the second a redemption sequence. Things like childhood abuse definitely are the former.

Pink does note that we should remember what’s out of our control. That said, speaking of things like child abuse, he could have talked more about how this, even into adulthood, can narrow or constrain human volition, as part of self-compassion for people with such background.

Don't get the low ratings here.

Surprisingly good for being a non-academic, or even quasi-academic book. Gets more beyond the Versailles tables in some ways than MacMillan's "Paris 1919," especially on the Arab world and in the Balkans. The latter, especially, is its strongest area. Andelman looks at each tidbit and sliver of land battled over by Poland and Czechoslovakia, Romania and Bulgaria vs Yugoslavia, Romania vs Hungary, etc. One of the maps at the end focuses on this.

On the Arab world, he notes the British didn't pay enough attention to Henry St. John Philby's tout of the House of Saud and so, and not just in terms of oil, backed the wrong horse.

Besides Ho Chi Minh, whose full story I already knew, Chinese pleas get at least a look, as do Japanese machinations.

Andelman tries to draw lessons for Bush-era Iraq War and other things that leave this book dated in some ways. That said, contra some lesser reviewers, as I understand him in the Arab world of a century ago, he was arguing for religious divisions, but yet within a larger confederation. (I wonder how many of these reviewers still have a romanticized view of Feisal.)

I also never before knew that the Dulles brothers were nephews of Wilson's Secretary of State Robert Lansing. 

Fascinating, challenging and dark book.

I knew the basics of Silk Road and Ross Ulbricht, and bits about Vinnik. I don't think I'd read at all about Alexandre Cazas and BTC-e.

It really gets dark, does the book, when it goes to Welcome to Video, which was using crypto not to peddle drugs, the occasional guns, and lots of stolen IDs, unlike the above, but was a hardcore child porn site, with its creator using various tools, such as insisting on "fresh" porn, to goose the buying.

Among the users? A school superintendent. Multiple Homeland Security agents.

And, yes, there's law enforcement corruption here.

There's also the folks of the IRS Criminal Investigations division, successors to the T-men who took down Capone. Greenberg does good work with them as people and characters. There's the Danish creator of Chainalysis, now the world's largest blockchain structure and chain tracer. And, there's libertarians and semi-libertarians who, while acknowledging all of the above problems with crypto, don't like Chainalysis for various reasons, either. (I largely agree with the thoughts of its founder toward their worries, and beyond that, what he may hint at, or at least that I take him as insinuating, that the utopian ideas of the early web, Internet 1.0 or even 0.0, were never going to remain that way. It's called human nature, folks.)

This is a full 5-star book.

Couldn't see it as a full 3 stars at the other site. Not even 2.75 here. Debated 2.25 and 2.5 before going with the former.

Jeffery has an interesting "hook" concept, but executes it unevenly, then makes "the fatal error" of WWI books, then has additional errors.

The "hook" is to look at the war month by month, with one big issue for each month, then extending that issue to other ongoing war issues.

He starts with a cheat for January 1916 — the evacuation from Gallipoli. The info itself is OK (and I did learn that Attlee served there), but nothing special, and not much extended.

February is a no-brainer: Verdun.

March is another cheat, with title of "On the Isonzo," while noting it's in medias res because this is the Fifth Battle of the Isonzo. April? The Easter Uprising, with Jeffery at the end trying to tie Ireland to Belgium. I don't really see that close of a connection; Jeffery teaching at an Irish university has a different angle, but I don't have to agree.

May is a no-brainer: Jutland. In the extension, and put an asterisk here, Jeffrey never discusses the illegality of British blockades in detail.

June? Eastern Front, specifically the Brusilov Offensive.

July: The Kazakhs and other Tsarist Central Asian peoples pushing back against conscription, inflation, etc. The one chapter where I actually learned anything much.

August: "The War in Africa," with the August 1916 Battle of Morogoro being an again contrived hook.

September: The Somme, another cheat, since the battle started in late June.

October: Eastern Mediterranean and the Balkans, with the hook being the October landing of British and French troops in Greece. Learned a few bits about the details of the war splits within Greece and Entente maneuvering, but nothing major.

November: Wilson's election, and Jeffery's "fatal error" of claiming the fake neutral Wilson was a real neutral. Normal 1-star ding. But Jeffery gets worse when he claims that Wilson actually stood up for US rights but presents ZERO evidence of Wilson standing up against the British blockade by extension or use of food as a blockade weapon, and that's because there is no such evidence. So, by protesting too much, the ding is more than 1 star.

December: Rasputin's assassination. Loses at least another quarter-star here for falsely insinuating Rasputin was a Germanophile, thus morphing and mouthing his assassins. The truth? Yes, off inside evidence from him of planned dates of offenses, many Russians made killings in the stock market. No evidence that anybody directly connected to Rasputin was selling secrets to Germany. Definitely no evidence that Rasputin was Germanophile. That said, at the start of the war, he warned the Tsar himself that entering it would likely be destructive to Russia.

And, with that said, and re the WWI reading odyssey I'm on right now (Christopher Clark's "The  Sleepwalkers")? Though the book gets two stars and change, not one, I won't read Jeffery again. 

Graded within its genre of sports discussion books, not against books as a whole, for its rating.

Solid overall for explaining how basic analytic tools, rather than, by and large, old counting stats, should be a key part of determining who to put in the Hall of Fame. I would add a few to what Jaffe has; specifically, on pitching, a 110 ERA+ or better and a 1.25 WHIP or lower. I'd also like to have seen more, already then, on what latest analytics could be used to better measure relievers.

Within who's already in the Hall, by position, Jaffe divides into "elite," "rank and file," and "bottom of the barrel" — these last generally having been selected by one or another of the various versions of a Veterans Committee.

I also have a few nits to pick.

1. David Ortiz is at best a borderline HOFer and definitely not a first-ballot HOFer. 
2. Todd Helton may be "JAWS approved" in Jaffe's world, but in a broader mix of sabermetrics (and counting stats, as 1B have low injury rates), he's not approved.
3. Why is Jackie Robinson only in his "rank and file" rather than elite among 2B? Adjust for the late start on his career and he's probably at 90 WAR. Jaffe doesn't discuss this, though he will discuss short careers elsewhere.
4. Roger Clemens is not possibly the best pitcher of all time, even if one totally ignores his PEDing. Walter Johnson is, and Jaffe doesn't discuss Johnson enough in the paragraph or two he has about Johnson.
5. Greenies may have been prevalent long ago. They probably did offer some boost to some players. Did they offer the same boost as PEDs, especially PEDs when dispensed in a rigorous sports-science manner like BALCO did? No.
I think it may have been over this last issue that I've thrown an occasional elbow with Jaffe on Twitter.

An all-around failure.

First, by trying to tie this much more to apocalypses written later, as in the ones found at Nag Hammadi, rather than ones written before this or at the same time, as in ones found at Qumran, Pagels has shown that she wants to ride her Gnosticism one-trick pony as part of her critique. This is only increased by her repeated referencing of Karen King, albeit before King's sinking into academic scandal.

Second, I reject her theory of compositional history. While I don't think all of Revelation was written in Neronian times, I think a central non-Christian core was. In what's a light book anyway, Pagels is definitely light on compositional history issues.

Third, no, Athanasius and the Council of Nicaea did not close the Christian canon. At minimum, that's misinformation. At maximum, that's a bald-faced lie; in general, "denominations" of the Church of the East omit bits of books at the back end of the New Testament ... including Revelation in some cases! And, given the fact that she references another author to talk about the Ethiopian church adding 1 Enoch, she knows this is untrue. In the case of the Church of the East, it starts with the Peshitta, which excludes 2 Peter, 2 and 3 John, Jude and Revelation. This was pre-Chalcedon and pre-split, and was the canon accepted by John Chrysostom.

Long before the "heroic" British exploration of the Canadian Arctic in the 19th century, followed by the Americans and others getting in the game, there was an earlier era, part of the old Age of Exploration, looking for a mythical Northwest Passage, followed by looking for its Northeast Passage counterpart.

The Dutch, not yet free from Spain and not yet fully organized as a nation, jumped in. That's where William Barents comes in

That said, this is light, in part because we don't have nearly as much info about these trips as we do about the likes of Franklin. But, also, pre-Barents information is taken lightly, Hugh Willoughby visited half a century earlier and is mentioned just once. It wasn't just, or even primarily, Russian sailors that visited earlier. Wiki notes Russian hunters were there 500 years earlier.

Speaking of, as other reviewers have noted, the number of polar bears encountered was interesting. But, was it really more than early European explorers of the Canadian Arctic saw, as in Frobisher, etc., or even the 19th century resurgence?

For someone who's read other Ehrman and knows he can be light and thin at times, or just wrong at times, this book might be a pleasant surprise.

Ehrman is not espousing an oral tradition theory of the synoptic problem or anything like that. Rather, this is about oral tradition leading to, and overlapping with, the development of written tradition, ultimately our synoptics, plus John, plus G Thomas, plus other materials.

As such, Ehrman gets away from traditional biblical criticism and into the moder study of memory and its fallibility. From there, it's into how memory operates largely in a societal background. From there, it's on to how early Christian communities would have shaped, expanded, and orally redacted Christian traditions.