Suspense, Unrest, Disaster, Confessions

One recipe for a good book or movie: Place sympathetic characters facing personal difficulties within a large looming disaster. Think Casablanca, or The Lord of the Rings, or The Cypresses Believe in God. Joseph Kanon’s Shanghai (Simon & Schuster, 2024) is a terrific novel set in the Chinese city within a 1939 vortex of fascism and communism, sex and violence—and survival. Kanon, much like Philip Kerr and David Downing, captures the tension.

Good historians also seek out tension. I wrote last month about Erik Larson’s excellent The Demon of Unrest, and three days from now another good book on the lead-up to our Civil War comes out. David S. Brown’s A Hell of a Storm (Scribner, 2024) shows how the political ambition of Illinois Senator Stephen Douglas led to the Kansas-Nebraska bill of 1854. Douglas thought it could buy him not only southern support for a future presidential campaign, but also Illinois support for a transcontinental railroad with a northern route ending in Chicago.

Among the critics of Douglas was a member of Cincinnati’s radical Semi-Colon Club: Salmon Chase became a governor and a senator, then Secretary of the Treasury and Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. Chase exposed what was a deep state in the 1850s: “a federal government controlled by the slave power” that aimed to “establish slavery in the States and Territories of the Pacific, and thus permanently subjugate the whole country.”

Amid such suspicions, Douglas erred by saying the Kansas-Nebraska Act would bring peace and “the onward march of civilization.” The reality: with the matter of slavery about to be put to a vote, both sides financed supporters to move to Kansas. Terrorists from both sides created a mini-war that pushed the whole country toward the big war that began in 1861—the year Kansas entered the Union as a free state.

Tim Alberta’s The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory (Harper, 2023) is important preparation for what may be another very close U.S. presidential election in November. One big problem is that some Americans are glamorizing the January 6, 2021 insurrection, and even saying the rioters merely lacked firepower. What if the left wins in November? Alberta reports pundit John Zmirak saying, “The next January 6 should be open carry,” and radio host Eric Metaxas predicting that Jan. 6 one day will be celebrated as July 4 is now.

Alberta’s book is the best of a civil-war-to-come meme among major publishers that began with the election of Donald Trump in 2016. Sales of How Democracies Die by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt (Crown, 2018) encouraged other publishers to put out their own dire warnings, but they often pointed just to the far right and ignored the threat from the far left. How Civil Wars Start (Crown, 2022) by Barbara F. Walter (a U. of California professor, not the celebrity host) looks both ways before crossing the street. Her runaway truck disaster would “begin with sporadic acts of violence and terror, accelerated by social media. It will sneak up on us and leave us wondering how we could have been so blind.”

But the U.S. has long been a violent land, as Elliott West’s Continental Reckoning: The American West in the Age of Expansion (U. of Nebraska Press, 2023) shows. West provides fascinating specific detail about conflicts starting with the discovery of gold (on page five) or the ghost dance movement (on page 429). He offers empathy and realism regarding Native Americans and surprising asides about arguments between northerners and southerners in 1864 Montana. West’s writing is generally good: I tolerated his use of passive constructions because he shows how pioneers actively constructed a new civilization flush with highs and lows.

Glenn Loury’s Late Admissions (Norton, 2024) is a memoir of highs and very low lows. When Loury told Richard John Neuhaus, “I’m a social critic. I never claimed to be a saint,” Neuhaus responded, “If you deign to stand up and to tell people how to live, then you have a responsibility to live decently yourself…. You’re either a moral leader or you’re not. Now you choose.”

Some of Loury’s choices only mildly surprised and saddened me, but I was shocked, shocked (Casablanca-style) by Anne Kim’s Poverty for Profit: How Corporations Get Rich off America’s Poor (The New Press, 2024). Billions of dollars up for grabs, with lobbyists pushing self-serving regulations: What could go wrong? Much. The Earned Income Tax Credit, for example, is much more complicated than it could be, with lots of tax filing “services” that grab hundreds of dollars along the way. Concerning Medicaid fraud, a few dental profiteers apparently care more about filling holes in their budgets than holes in children’s teeth.