“Take Honor from me, and my life is done” – A review of The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen by Kwame Anthony Appiah
 

Different people have different definitions and interpretations of what a revolution is. Looking up the word on Wikipedia, I see it defined as a drastic political or social change that usually occurs relatively quickly. I think that’s as good a definition as any. The concept of revolution, especially in politics and revolution, is embedded in most educated people’s knowledge of human history. Countless books have been devoted to examining political and economic revolutions over time. Every year in the United States many books are written and many reenactments staged to commemorate the political revolution of the late 18^th century that saw British monarchical rule terminated and a new sort of representative democracy established in what will become the United States. The American Revolution has been almost studied to death but every year some other scholar, or politician with a historical bent, manages to release one more book that promises a new twist on some obscure aspect of the whole saga. Same goes for the French revolution of 1789, which had a collateral effect of sending King Louis XVI to the guillotine. Revolutions in the economic / business sphere have also being studied and published about extensively. We all learn and talk about the historical significance and causes of the Industrial Revolution that started in Great Britain in the late 18^th century and spread across Europe and North America in the decades of the first half of the 19^th century. In more recent times we have all gotten used to speaking of the information / internet revolution that has swept the world since the early 1990’s with the commercialization of the internet and invention of the World Wide Web. Given the fascination with revolution in many parts of our lives, it is somewhat baffling that the concept of “moral revolutions” is not more central to our every-day vocabulary and historical consciousness. I think it is the absence of robust everyday discussion of the significance of, and requirements for, moral revolutions that this excellent book by the noted philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah is ideally placed to fill.

 

Why is the examination of honor important to understanding not just moral revolutions but human existence? I would say it is because honor is so central to human life. Most people desire, consciously or otherwise, to be regarded as honorable and not to have their honor diminished or maligned. This is something the great bard William Shakespeare realized and acknowledged when in the play Richard II he placed in the mouth of Thomas de Mowbray, the banished Duke of Norfolk, the following words “Mine honor is my life; both grow in one: Take honor from me, and my life is done: Then, dear my liege, mine honor let me try; In that I live and for that will I die”. There is nothing inherently wrong or right about the human sense of honor, it is just there in us. There are many times when the honor codes of individuals or particular societies are very congruent with what we can all agree to be morally upright or beneficial to society (e.g., ensuring protection for vulnerable children, selflessly working to free people stuck in burning buildings etc.). However, there are many situations when the honor codes conflict with what will be broadly accepted as being morally just and beneficial to society. A good contemporary example of this situation is the practice of “honor killing” of women by members of their own family in response to some behavior that they perceive to have brought disrepute to the family. Mr. Appiah’s book helps readers understand the factors that sustain such evidently harmful honor practices and the factors that were responsible for their decline (in cases where such practices are thankfully no more).

 

The author does a great job of explaining this phenomenon of harmful honor practices and the process of fomenting the moral revolutions that can end them by giving an excellent historical summary of three situations when morally repugnant honor practices were successfully ended. These include: the decline of the duel in 19^th century England; the move to stop the binding of the feet of young girls in turn-of-the-20^th century China and the movement in England in the first half of the 19^th century to abolish the transatlantic slave trade. The author also spends a good deal of time examining the unfortunate durability and the valiant efforts being made to eradicate the existing practice of honor killing.

 

Of the thankfully defunct practices that the author profiled, I found the history and practice of dueling to be the most interesting for a variety of reasons. Dueling was a colossal waste of human talent as the practice claimed the lives of many aristocratic men of means at the prime of their lives. A good example was the death of Alexander Hamilton, the first Treasury Secretary of the US, at a duel at the age of 47. Also, for most of the time that dueling was practiced across Europe it remained an unambiguously illegal activity that was frowned upon by governments and civil leaders. And these leaders had a good reason to be against dueling. European monarchs and civil servants had worked diligently over many centuries to establish the concept of a state as one in which the sovereign / government held a monopoly on the legitimate use of physical force and by so doing managed to drag Europe out of the fractious lawlessness that pervaded the continent in the dark ages. The quasi-execution aspect of duels flew against the monopoly power of the state to render judgment and deliver capital punishment. It was bad enough that this practice was illegal, it was also widely viewed as immoral by many. The practice was fundamentally immoral. It is reasonable to view a moral outcome as one in which the quest for truth is successful and the perpetrator of a lie or some other form of bad behavior is brought to justice. Given the varying quality of dueling pistols and differences in the quality of duelers’ marksmanship, this outcome was far from assured. A better marksman is much more likely to prevail in a duel than a bad marksman is, even if the great shot was the perpetrator of an offence. So let’s think about this: you impugn the honor of another man who then feels duty-bound to challenge you to a duel unless you do the honorable thing by apologizing for your statement or act. You refuse to apologize and you then show up on the day of the duel and because you are a better marksman you shoot him dead in broad daylight and you end up paying no price because there is a gentleman’s agreement that dueling gentlemen are not prosecuted for murder. By the way, all the religious authorities are also vehemently against this activity. In a nutshell, the practice made absolutely no sense. So why did all these educated upper class men keep participating in such a senseless activity? It’s simple, they thought dueling was necessary for them to defend and maintain their honor. If you went back and really quizzed some upper class type in early 19^th century England about his support for dueling you would probably not get a better answer than “this is what we do”.


So how did the duel fall out of favor in Victorian England? It was not because people pointed out to potential duelers that the practice was illegal, there were already well aware of the fact. The practice didn’t all of a sudden become immoral, it had always being immoral! What happened was that opponents of the duel worked within the confines of the honor code to redefine what honorable conduct meant for a gentleman such that it actually became dishonorable for an aristocrat to participate in a duel. A similar strategy was adopted by the brave members of the Chinese intelligentsia that formed the core of the resistance against foot binding. These people had a deep appreciation for the honor traditions of their society and took great pains not to impugn the honor code of the society. Rather, they succeeded in redefining the honor code such that it became a dishonorable thing to bind your daughters’ feet. These Chinese reformers couched their opposition to foot binding in terms of the honor of China (e.g., “this practice is making our country look bad in the world”, “all modern societies no longer do this” etc.).

 

These moral revolutions hold great promise for some of the moral challenges that confront us in the 21^st century, including the scourge of violence against women. If humanity will successfully beat back honor killings and other acts of violence against women, the movements will need to be led by local groups of committed people who live in the affected societies and have a deep appreciation for the culture of their people. Reformers are unlikely to meet with great success if they simply dismiss the honor codes of these societies as atavistic behavior. Rather they will need to work within the confines of their cultures to redefine what honor means and have the protection of the dignity and physically wellbeing of their wives, daughters and sisters be the highest consideration for the honor of the members of her family.

 

Overall, I found it to be a great and accessible book that should be read by politicians, social activists and anyone with an interest in seeing positive change in their society and the world at large. It also gives the lie to the view, held by some, that philosophers hardly write books with tangible real world practical value.

 

The Forgotten Empire – A review of “Lost to the West: The Forgotten Byzantine Empire That Rescued Western Civilization” by Lars Brownworth

If someone in a history class, or just an overly nerdy friend, asked the question: “when did the Roman Empire end?” the answer to the question is likely to be varied. Some may say that the empire ended in AD 476 when the commander Odoacer deposed Romulus Augustulus (the last Roman Emperor) and proclaimed himself King of Italy. Others may trace it even earlier to AD 410 when the Visigoth king Alaric sacked Rome and put paid to the myth of Roman invincibility. Others may even have more “out there” choices for a date of the empire’s demise. What is not very likely is that many people will say the Roman Empire ended in 1453 (a millennium after) when Constantine XI Palaiologos died defending Constantinople (present day Istanbul) during Ottoman Sultan Mehmed II’s conquest of the city. However, that choice is probably the closest to being the most factually correct answer, as it was technically the Western Roman Empire that fell in the 5^th Century AD. The eastern half of the empire lived on for another millennium until it was overthrown by the Ottoman Empire, which itself ended at the end of the First World War. That many history buffs will miss the date of the de

mise of the empire by a full 1,000 years goes to support the title of this excellent book (i.e., “Lost to the West”). In fact most people’s association with anything Byzantine is through the adjective used to describe a process that is overly complex and intricate but ultimately devious or duplicitous in nature - not sure who we should thank for the reduction of an illustrious empire into an uncharitable adjective! This book by Lars Brownworth, a speaker and author who happens to be a high school history teacher in his day job, is a laudable step in correcting this sorry state of affairs as it provides a great introduction into the fascinating world of this great but somewhat strange empire.

The author’s decision to adopt a personality-driven historical narrative was a brilliant decision. Telling the history of an empire through the lives, actions and circumstances of its emperors certainly made the book a more engaging read than a straightforward chronological work would have been. The author’s thrilling narrative transports the reader back to an age largely lost to common memory, when men with large armies and even larger egos played geopolitics in such a way as to make even the most scheming 21^st century statesman seem like some dowdy old matron. The author describes colorful men such as Justinian the Great, the 6^th century emperor who reclaimed huge swathes of the lost western empire and ruled over a kingdom stretching from Constantinople to Rome and parts of present-day Gibraltar, Portugal and Spain. Not only did Justinian conquer vast lands and enact a uniform code of Roman law that still serves as the basis of civil law in many European states, he also embarked on massive building projects including the world famous Hagia Sophia: a building which served as a Greek Orthodox church for almost a thousand years, a Roman Catholic church for half a century, a mosque for about 500 years and a museum since 1935. We also meet Justinian’s most illustrious general, Belisarius: a man who is probably the most successful military commander in all of antiquity. A widely successful and popular man whose exploits on the warfront was perhaps only matched by his unwavering loyalty and commitment to a scheming emperor and bureaucracy that often tried to sabotage his best efforts.      

 

One of my favorite stories is that of Leo III the Syrian, the man we have to thank for the word “iconoclast” (literally translated as “icon breaking”). This was a man so wedded to a puritanical and fundamentalist reading of the Christian scriptures that he sought to rip out all graven images and icons in his empire and have them destroyed. Leo III and his band of original iconoclasts were so successful in their quest that they effectively tore apart their church and retarded the arts and culture of their society so badly that it took a very long time after the death of Leo III and his son for some semblance of the fine arts to germinate again in the empire.

 

Surprises also abound in this engaging read. Probably the most intriguing is that of Emperor Basil I “Basil the Macedonian”, if only because his rags to riches story is not something one would associate with monarchy. Born into a peasant family, he ended up ingratiating himself (due to his wrestling prowess) with the ne’er do well and perpetually drunk Emperor Michael III. Once in the emperor’s good graces, he merrily proceeded to murder the emperor’s uncle (obviously with the dim-witted emperor’s support). Since someone of Basil’s ambition could not possibly be expected to contend himself with getting rid of just an uncle of an emperor, he proceeded to dispatch the emperor in a particularly gruesome murder and usurped a throne for which he did not even have the most tenuous of legitimacy. Despite this particularly inauspicious start to his reign, Basil turned out to be a particularly effective emperor. Ruling for 19 years, a long time by Byzantine standards, he established a dynasty that was so enduring that over two centuries later one of his direct descendants still occupied the throne of Byzantium. Another interesting character was Basil II “the Bulgar Slayer”, who probably gets honors for having the most interesting nom de guerre of all the emperors. Orphaned at age five, Basil II spent most of his youth being pushed around by courtiers with the general consensus being that he was another timid and ineffective emperor in the making. However, upon managing to secure control he became a very effective emperor who ruled for almost 50 years. If Basil II had a fault, it was his penchant for excessive display of force and a ready willingness to be crushingly brutal towards its opponents. During a campaign against the Bulgarians (the source of the grotesque “Bulgar Slayer” nickname) he captured 15,000 prisoners and proceeded to blind 99 out of every 100, sparing the sight of only 1 man out of 100 so the “lucky” man could have the necessary task of leading his blinded colleagues back home to further inflict terror in the civilian population.

 

Reading this book is to become engrossed in the dozens of these stranger-than-fiction stories that showed how rich and tragic the history of this most fascinating empire is. All things considered, I found this book to be a very engaging and accessible introduction to the history of a place and era that I knew nothing about.  

Tinkering with Leviathan – Review of “The Fourth Revolution: The Global Race to Reinvent the State” by John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge
 

“The ten most dangerous words in the English language are ‘Hi, I'm from the government, and I'm here to help’” – Ronald Reagan
 

Anyone following American politics will be familiar with quotes similar to the one from America’s 40th president. There is no shortage of people eager to echo sound bites like the above or the even simpler charge to “shrink government to a size that we can drown it in a bathtub”. While these statements make for effective campaign rhetoric, they do not make for elegant policy prescriptions and are also guaranteed to elicit reflexive opposition from their adversaries on the opposite political spectrum. A lot of air time is spent by the right in denouncing the “evils of big government” with their counterparts on the left responding in kind by describing any attempt to trim the government as an attempt to starve poor kids. What has been sorely lacking is a debate or examination of what the proper role of government should be in modern society, what the structural challenges are that prevent governments from being responsive to the needs of its citizens and, most importantly, what steps could be taken to right the ship. This excellent book by two journalists at The Economist goes beyond doing much needed justice to these essential topics, it also provides an intellectually coherent and beautifully written sweep of the evolution of what could be termed “western democracy”.

The authors’ essential point is that the values and governing structures of western democratic societies (broadly defined to include much of Europe and Anglophone North America) have undergone distinct dramatic changes or revolutions over the past half millennia. These changes have happened in response to the needs of society or to correct the excesses that result when successful revolutions are transformed into a staid status quo by the passage of time and the calcification of the governing elite.

The first revolution identified by the authors is the emergence of the modern European state in the 1600s. This is a revolution personified by its intellectual godfather, Thomas Hobbes who in his seminal work: Leviathan (or The Matter, Forme and Power of a Common Wealth Ecclesiasticall and Civil) advanced for the first time the concept of a social contract between the governed and their (absolute) sovereign. While modern readers may wince at the powers that Hobbes sought as ideal to bestow on the sovereign - essentially a call for dictatorship - it is important to put the work in its proper context. Europe in Hobbes’ day was a place where life was truly nasty, brutish and short. The entire continent was a relative backwater (compared to China) that was been torn apart by senseless wars started by every petty lord or minor aristocrat who could muster men under arms and proceed to find something to be offended about. The most important thing that 1600 Europeans needed was order and security, so the first revolution in government occurred to grant them the much needed order. In the 1600s and subsequent centuries, Europe’s monarchs grew much more powerful. Gaining greater control or successfully co-opting previously troublesome noblemen and establishing dominance over religious activities within their realms through the concept of cuius regio, eius religio (“whose realm, his religion”). They effectively succeeded, in many cases, in establishing a monopoly on the legitimate use of physical force within their kingdoms. France’s monarchs went to such great length to keep tabs on their country’s nobility that they come up with the concept of “The whole of France around the king”, keeping anywhere from 1,000 to 10,000 noblemen as hangers on at court and occupied with frivolities to keep them from dangerous thoughts of war. The net effect of these moves was the emergence of a stronger and more prosperous Europe that was able to shift its attention and resources away from the wasting competition of civil wars to the productive competition of commerce.

Like every innovation, the move to more powerful governments embodied by the sovereigns - while serving a real need at that time to tame the fractious tendencies of petty nobles - soon became long in the tooth and self-serving. Government, especially in the UK, became largely a vehicle through which elites extracted rents from the economy and society. This was the era of “rotten boroughs”: parliamentary constituencies so small (one had 3 houses and 7 votes) that wealthy landowners basically treated them as heirlooms that were passed from father to son and in that way secured an absurdly disproportionate influence on the legislative process. This concentration and abuse of privilege was not only restricted to the legislature. What counted as a civil service was little more than a system of sinecures, with stories of privileged appointees to government offices not showing up for a single day of work for decades. To correct this unfortunate turn of events, the 2^nd revolution identified by the writers was launched by thinkers such as John Stewart Mill and politicians like William Gladstone, a Liberal politician who served as Prime Minister and Chancellor of Exchequer on four separate occasions each. William Gladstone was a man so committed to reforming the corrupt and inefficient public service of his time that he earned the nickname “The People’s William” and had a most famous parsimonious quote: “No Chancellor of the Exchequer is worth his salt who is not ready to save what are meant by candle-ends and cheese-parings in the cause of his country”. If Gladstone is the political embodiment of this movement, its intellectual godfather will be John Stuart Mill: a thinker who championed the rights of the individual in opposition to unlimited state control. These liberal reformers made important tweaks to the apparatus of the state: instituting competitive exams for civil service roles; reforming the parliamentary process and laying the foundation for a laissez faire economic system.

This trend towards utilitarianism however met with its inevitable reversal as 19^th century England became an increasingly harsh place. This was the era of workhouses, debtors’ prisons and other cringe-worthy mainstays of life now immortalized in the great works of Charles Dickens. By the dawn of the 20^th century, many people had come to find the situation untenable and the authors did a masterful job of explaining how the yearnings of the citizenry for a more humane society led to some deemphasizing of utilitarianism as a governing philosophy and the advent of Fabianism (in the UK) and Social Democracy (in much of Scandinavia and Northern Europe). This movement, embodied by intellectual and organizer extraordinaire Beatrice Webb, had the establishment of a universal welfare state coupled with strong workers’ rights at the core of its governing structure and philosophy. Proponents of this philosophy often viewed government control of “the commanding heights of the economy” as a necessary condition for an ideal society. This thinking led to the establishment of social security in the US in 1935 and universal health care in the UK through the founding of the NHS in 1948. Governments all over the western world become more assertive in the economy and more willing to intervene in the markets when they felt the markets were not helping to achieve desired public policy. Franklin Roosevelt established the Tennessee Valley Authority (“TVA”) to electrify America’s deep south when it appeared profit-maximizing utilities were more than happy to ignore the, often poor inhabitants, of these sparsely populated farms in favor of the North’s more industrialized centers. In the UK, the post-World War II government of Clement Attlee proceeded to establish the foundations of the British welfare state and embarked on a vast nationalization agenda that covered coal mining, railways, telecoms, road haulage, electricity and the steel industry. The Swedes went much further in putting a safety net under their citizens and a paternalistic glow on their nation by coming up with the concept of Folkhemmet (“the people’s home”). A concept that says society should effectively function like a small family with everyone’s needs taken care of and the richer members subjected to the crushing taxes required to maintain such a generous “cradle to the grave” style welfare system. The social democrats’ long unbroken tenure running Sweden’s government (from 1932 to 1976) gave them enough time to put this concept into action that people started to refer to a Swedish “middle way” between socialism and capitalism.
 

Like everything conceived by man, the appeal of Social Democracy / Fabianism / The Welfare State - or whatever term can be used to describe the intellectual justification of the brand of activist government popular in much of the western world in the post-war years – soon began to fade and its warts became all too apparent in the 1970s. And if the backlash against the welfare or corporatist state has a guardian angel, it will be Margaret Thatcher, a grocer’s daughter made good, who decided she was going to force a sought of striver’s thriftiness on her countrymen. To put into perspective how much of a trailblazer she was, it is important to think about how involved the government was in the lives of ordinary Brits when she came on the scene. A Briton getting up to catch a flight to America in the late 1970s, would have put on his bed lamp with electricity from the state; left a message for his superiors on a phone line provided by the state; fixed himself breakfast on a stove using gas supplied by the state; rode to the airport on a train owned by the state; arrived at an airport owned by the state and travelled on a wide bodied aircraft owned by an airline controlled by the state. And this is all before 10am in the morning! Margaret Thatcher was not going to put up with this for much longer and proceeded to launch a major privatization program, which ensured that by the end of her tenure almost all of the services earlier referred to would have been provided by private firms. Her kindred spirit across the Atlantic, Ronald Reagan also embarked on a task to shrink the state. Although he had much less to cut because the state in  America was never as big (in relative terms) as it was in the UK. These reforms were not limited to the western world. India, a nation in love with Fabianism as any, also embarked on a series of lauded liberalization programs in the early 1990s that effectively put the “License Raj” to a well-deserved death. The Brazilians also launched a series of ambitious privatizations in the early 1990s and the Russian privatizations, though seriously flawed, achieved a real objective of shrinking the state.  

So why, one may ask, was the Thatcherite / Reaganite only described as a “half revolution” by the authors? The answer lies in the lack of durability of their revolution. After a lull in the 1990s, the governments of the western world have continued to grow at a fast clip. Both conservatives and liberals continue to find things to spend money on (e.g., defense and homeland security for conservatives, education and other welfare spending for liberals). Essentially, the authors argue, in much of the western world there is no real party of small government. Each party is perfectly willing to be big spenders when it comes to favored constituencies or projects and often times unwilling to raise the tax revenue necessary to fund this expenditure, leading to deepening fiscal problems.  

If the authors of this book did an admirable job of explaining the evolution of government in western democracies, they did a much more outstanding job in examining and distilling the current ills that plague western democracies. Of the “Seven Deadly Sins” of modern government that the authors raised, using California as an example, the two that resonated the most with me are: Olson’s Law and the problem of the “Overactive State”. Olson’s law, first proposed by American economist Mancur Olson, essentially states that because lobbying and collective action in a democracy is inherently time-consuming and expensive only the people with the most interest in a topic or issue will be sufficiently motivated to organize to effect change on that issue. This “law” provides a good explanation for why so many issues that affect society at large are effectively controlled by a few people. Examples of this abound and they range from the influence the National Rifle Association (“NRA”) has on US gun policy; the impact of the teachers’ union on shaping public K-12 education and the very significant role that the prison guards’ unions have played (especially in California) in advocating harsh criminal law policies of questionable value such as the “three strikes” law. For these constituencies the issues they care about are “voting issues” and they can effectively dictate the agenda since most of citizens don’t pay enough attention.

One doesn’t have to be a “small government conservative” to be sufficiently miffed by the overactive state and the move to ever more licensing and regulation. When Hippocrates was hanging out in ancient Greece around 400 BC and codifying some of the early precepts of medicine or Benjamin Rush was helping to lay the foundation of modern American medicine in 18^th century Pennsylvania, they may have contemplated a situation where the practice of medicine will require a state license obtained after rigorous examinations and many years of postgraduate medical education. What both men will probably find deeply ridiculous is that it takes about 300 hours of coursework to work in the wig trade in Texas or that many American states require multiple hours of coursework, exams and licenses for people wishing to be barbers, florists and even fortune tellers. While it is important for government to protect the unsuspecting from an unqualified brain surgeon, I think it should not be a high priority for the state to protect citizens from receiving a terrible haircut, or from buying an incompetently arranged bouquet of flowers; or from wearing wigs that are just not cut exactly right or receiving an inaccurate forecast of their future. People are perfectly capable of dealing with these things. While consumer protection may be the headline reason for the proliferation of licenses, the net effect of this excessive licensing is increased costs to consumers as prices are kept artificially low due to the barriers to entry that licensing provides. You could wake up a medieval guildsman in the 21^st century and he will quickly recognize much of occupational licensing as basically the same stuff they did back in the day. Liberals, with an interest in protecting the poor and striving, should have an interest in taming the overactive state as it increases costs to the people least likely to afford the extra cost. This is one area of reform in which liberals and conservatives can make common cause.

In concluding the book, the authors laid out a series of common sense reforms that could go a long way in improving governance and providing an avenue for western democracies to regain the edge in the competition with alternative Eastern governance models (notably those of Singapore and China). The idea I find most appealing is setting a sunset clause for every new law that is passed. Every law that is passed should have an expiry date, at which time it would be reexamined for relevance and if there is sufficient public support it will be reaffirmed and if not, the law will be struck off. That seems like a good antidote for anachronistic laws.

Overall, I believe this is a great book that should be read by every politician or person interested in how people organize themselves for effective governance in a democracy. And if you are just a history buff, the sweeping history of western political philosophy and organization should tick some boxes as well!

From Sea to Shining Sea – A review of “The Men Who United the States: America's Explorers, Inventors, Eccentrics and Mavericks, and the Creation of One Nation, Indivisible” by Simon Winchester

Of the 193 sovereign nations that are member states of the United Nations (as good a definition of a “country” as any), only 21 border on two or more oceans. Of these 21 countries only a small group of 11 countries share the distinction of bordering on the earth’s two greatest bodies of water: the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans. The United States is not just one of these 11 countries; it manages to get on the list in grand style. The country has a massive land mass and long coast lines on both oceans unlike some other members of the “club of 11” such as Chile, which can be uncharitably described as being effectively a strip of land on the Pacific that just happens to touch the Atlantic.

Translating the phrase of “sea to shining sea” in the (unashamedly patriotic) song, “America the Beautiful” into a real physical and cultural reality took centuries of diligent and often mind-bending and back-breaking work by courageous pioneers and adventurers. These people decided they were going to bend untamed wilderness to their will and embark on engineering marvels that still manage to boggle the mind. In the process, these pioneers wove regions and lands as disparate as the cotton fields of Louisiana; the rugged hills of Appalachia and the windswept coastal fishing towns of New England into a multicolored, imperfect but ultimately enduring quilt that is the modern United States. These people had to put together rail networks; draw up cartographic and geological maps; build steamships and carve out broadcast networks and flight routes literally out of thin air to create the physical and cultural bonds that hold the country together. Some of these pioneers remain famous; some have seen their fame lapse with the passage of time while a great number never achieved any renown that could be subsequently lost. Simon Winchester’s new book (“The Men Who United the States”) provides a great service to all these people, the well-known and the barely-known, by telling their stories in as compelling and completes a manner that surely deserves an award by some august body that hands out such laurels.

I found the book to be an absolutely great read, with a lot of things to commend it to readers. Chief among the many commendable qualities of the book was the author’s decision to organize the book in a thematic fashion. Given the large cast of characters that were involved in “Uniting the States” and the considerable span of time this uniting took, there was a temptation that a less able writer could easily have fallen for to organize the book chronologically or, worse still, as a series of mini-biographies. That would have resulted in a book that reads more like an encyclopedia. Thankfully for readers everywhere the author avoided that trap. Instead Mr. Winchester, who lived many years in Asia, chose to organize the book using the five elements (or the Wu Xing) of Chinese philosophy: Wood, Earth, Water, Fire and Metal. The author was helped by the various elements aligning pretty reasonably with the broad chronology of American progress. The theme / element of wood corresponds closely to the early years of post-independence America when logging activity was a key driver of economic growth and the famed Lewis & Clark expedition took place to the period from 1835 to the current day which is dominated by metal (i.e., electricity grids, cable TV, radio transmission, telecoms / telegraph etc.).  

The cast of characters and events so richly described by Simon Winchester range from popular people and popular stories such as Samuel Morse and the invention / commercialization of the telegraph; to the Lewis & Clark expedition to cross the west after the Louisiana purchase to the construction of the transcontinental railroad. Lesser known people and stories also come alive in this book. My favorite story is that of John Wesley Powell, the one-armed soldier who climbed mountains, led expeditions and finally served as the 2^nd director of the US Geological Survey. For the stories most likely to be well known by his readers, the author sheds new light and provides a fresh perspective that makes reading a story you already know still pass for a very engaging read.

This book is one of the best I have read in a long time but it is not without its flaws. One is that it adopts a sometimes overly adulatory tone towards these men and the America they created, a minor flaw that is probably linked to the enthusiastic patriotism often exhibited by naturalized citizens (“Americans by choice”) such as the author. The second and slightly irritating flaw was the author’s constant reference to Native Americans as “Indians”, a deliberately non-political correct term that most of the literati in America has jettisoned by now. I found the constant use of the term to be particularly silly, especially since “Indian” is a term that Christopher Columbus applied to Native Americans when he got lost, landed on American shores and thought he had arrived in India!

All told, this is a truly good book that deserves to be highly placed on best seller lists.