Who was Aaron Burr? Everyone knows that he was Vice President of the United States and the man who killed Alexander Hamilton in a duel. We all learn this in our high school history class. What we don't learn in our history class is presented here, in this book, a book that is chock for of information about a man who we are not taught enough about.

After the duel with Hamilton, Burr's political worth declined drastically. He and Jefferson were at odds and his career seemed to be over. He went west for many reasons and this is the story of what transpired, as best we can tell. Unfortunately Aaron Burr was not survived by much correspondence. Unlike Jefferson and Adams, the bulk of Burr's letters have never surfaced.

Aaron Burr was put on trial for treason. An unlikely charge against a former Vice President but times were different and Burr's actions at the time left many questions as to what he was actually trying to accomplish. He was rallying disenters in the land west of the Appalachian Mountains for some reason. He talked of invading Mexico but there was also other options. Invading Spanish Florida? To rein as King over his own country once he helped the western territories rebel against Washington DC and secede from the Union? We don't know for sure.

We do know that Burr talked to British diplomats trying to get the British Navy to help him by blocking the port of New Orleans. He tried to get US Military commanders to help him take over the city of New Orleans. What was it that he was really up to? While we may never know for sure this book goes an awful long way toward explaining many of the questions that you may have.

Filled with many of the outstanding names in history, offering insight into their character as well as their role in defending the United States, or involved in the conspiracy with Burr. See where they stand. Cheif Justice John Marshall, future President Andrew Jackson, current President Thomas Jefferson, future President James Madison, Francis Scott Key, Army Generals and Territorial Governors. In the end, Aaron Burr was found not guilty and faded away into history. But he left a legacy of hate and confusion.

This book was very interesting but at times did read like a history book. If that is not your cup of tea you may want to think twice. But th book was very good at explaining the details of Burr's actions. Where he was at, what he was doing and who he was meeting with. The book didn't have the flair of "Founding Fathers" but it is non the less worth the price. If you are in to history you will love this book.

Buckner Melton Jr. has tackled a complex, shadowy topic -- the mysterious plot of former Vice-President Aaron Burr in the early years of the Nineteenth Century which led to his trial on the charge of treason. What exactly did Burr conspire to do? Break off the Western lands in the Ohio and Mississippi valleys as an independent nation? Conquer Mexico or possibly Spanish Florida? Overthrow Thomas Jefferson's government in Washington? All of the above? None of the above? Ultimately, Melton is unable to answer the question because perhaps Aaron Burr was himself uncertain what was possible to achieve. But surely the disgraced former Vice-President, who had recently killed Alexander Hamilton in a duel, was grasping desperately at chances to revive his fortunes.

The cast of characters in this history of plot and trial is hard to beat. Besides the enigmatic Burr, we have President Jefferson, Chief Justice John Marshall, Andrew Jackson, and General James Wilkinson (simultaneously the senior American military commander in the Mississippi valley and a secret agent of the Spanish enemy). Melton constructs a solid narrative of the events, and it is not his fault that in the end he cannot answer all our questions. As the author himself states, "history is the recorded part of the remembered part of the observed part of what happened." And, unfortunately, with Aaron Burr too much was never observed or recorded.

Exactly what Burr was up to in his plans for the West will never be perfectly known. Many of his associates destroyed documents because of Burr's trial for treason--the trial of the century involving a Who's Who in the U.S. during the early 19th century. As the author quotes (from William Whichard) "history is only the recorded part of the remembered part of the observed part of what happened." (page 235) Yet public opinion in his time overwhelmingly concluded that Burr, the slayer of Alexander Hamilton, was up to no good. The author wrote this book as a reminder: "...if we are to govern ourselves, we must remember the danger of a brilliant mind driven by frail human needs." (page 236) This book, an excellently written summary of Burr's life much aided by the author's legal expertise, is a call to citizen vigilance against future threats to liberty by brilliant politicians whose motives are far from noble. In the latter half of the 20th Century Americans witnessed such scoundrels in both parties. The author will have achieved his purpose only if we continue to be vigilant by recognizing in our national political choices what Aristotle said long ago: character is destiny.

THIS IS A WONDERFULLY WRITTEN BOOK, NO MORE THAN A BOOK. FOR THOSE OF US WHO FEEL IT MORESO IN OUR BLOOD, EVEN IN OUR DREAMS. THIS BOOK HELPS US UNDERSTAND THE PAST, AND THE TRUTH OF WHO WE REALLY ARE. IT SPEAKS OF AN AMERICA WE CAN ONLY DREAM OF AND AS ONE SIDED A CONQUEST AS THEIR EVER COULD BE. ITS SPEAKS OF THE CONQUERORS NOT AS WHITE MEN, BUT AS MEN AFFECTED AND AFFLICTED BY THE SICKNESS OF GREED AND HOW THEY SHAPED THE WORLD, WHETHER SPANISH, DUTCH, FRENCH, ENGLISH, OR EVEN PORTUGUESE. WHITE WAS NOT THE ISSUE BUT THE REALITY. THOSE THAT CAME AND CONQUERED DIDNT HAVE NAMES, DIDNT HAVE A CARE, AND THEIR ONLY COLOR WAS GREED. THIS BOOK HELPS SOME, AS IT HELPED ME, SEE THROUGH THE FOG OF TIME AND REMEMBER THAT WHICH ONCE WAS. THIS BOOK HELPED ME UNDERSTAND A VERY IMPORTANT QUESTION, WHY? , IT IS A BOOK I WONT SOON FORGET. AND TO ALL THE OTHER YOUTH MISGUIDED, AS A SUN WITHOUT A FATHER, READ THIS BOOK AND REMEMBER, READ THIS BOOK AND DREAM.

This is the poetic telling of the story of the colonization of the western hemisphere. In that it is focused on recreating that which was lost, it is a one sided retelling, but unlike another reviewer suggests, in this book, not all Europeans are demonized because of some politically correct guilt on the part of the author inspired by a trite view of the noble savage. Indeed, the actors in the vignettes related (men, women, Indians, Europeans, entire cultures, religions) are full of remarkable moral complexity and depth. Reading Genesis, one is left saddened at the tremendous loss, enriched by the sight of the magical colors Galeano pulls out of the air as he reconstructs lifestyles so thoroughly forgotten by modern culture, and finally embarassed by our darker human nature. In the end, it is the rapacious greed that destroyed so much that is indicted in this book. The writing is never heavy-handed despite the obvious ease with which one could attack the European practices; rather the author allows the stories of injustice to unfold and gives the reader the opportunity to understand how this has shaped the world we live in. This book is recommended reading for anyone who has forgotten what a great story history is.

An amazing combination of history, literature, and poetry.
I highly recommend this book to anyone.
Another good book by Galeano that conveys a lot of the
economic history of South American colonization in greater detail and can be read along with this trilogy is The Open Veins of Latin America.

This is an interesting book but a little flawed. Author wishes to downplay the role of greeks in shaping of modern west and emphasize christianity, rome and germanic contributions, and he does offer some interesting perspectives, but the book could easily have been shorter. I didn't find an in-depth analysis of how the synthesis of christianity, rome and germanic character traits resulted in identity of west. It appeared as if author had an intuition about the same but he couldn't build a logical, detailed case out of it (It appeared more as hand-waving than convincing arguing, and repeating this idea 100 times doesn't make it a fact)

But still read the book for the an overview of western history, the role played by grand-narrative and various ideas/personalities which helped shaped the modern world.

I found this book a very interesting read, full of insights, ideas and penetrating discussions on the idea of the West over time and as seen by many different commentators. As an economist i did not agree with some rather sweeping statements on economics, and i find the writers' attempt at supposed 'objectivity', as he claims in the introduction, rather naive; any person unavoidably has values and judgments, and Mr Gress' values shine through with a passion. Nothing wrong with that of course, but they need to be acknowledged and stated as such. That said, i found the broad-ranging and captivating discussion of the dynamic interplay of Greek-Roman-Christian and Germanic roots of the West very interesting, informative and useful. I also much liked his point about the many different 'Wests' with its fundamental paradoxes that shaped it, and that it is merely the first society to globalize rather than taking over the world; the West is the West. As he points out, both claims to and criticism of the 'universality' of Western values do not do justice to the deep historical and societal roots in which the triad of democracy, science, and capitalism were developed. It does not mean either that other societies cannot take over its systems or values (notably the capitalist market production system) but that these values are not a-historical. Definitely worth-while and stimulating.

'The Idea of the West' and a 'Grand Narrative' of the Western Identity seems like an ambigious topic to tackle, but Danish author David Gress offers a sweeping overview and defense of the both the Western 'Idea' and 'Identity.' The West has been under attack for last century by universalism, multiculturalism, nihilism and relativism. In the 1960s, the cultural Marxism of Gramsci's "long march," which seeks to take over Western institutions and transform their Western character into something altogether different, began to make an aggressive march forward. The West is beseiged from within. Gress chronicles the Idea of the West and its Opponents in this remarkable intellectual and philosophical history.

Gress' chapter on Germanic Freedom and the Old Western Synthesis breaks with the New Liberal interpretation, which sees "an imaginary direct line connecting the modern West to the ancient Greeks... in which everything in between formed an orderly sequence culminating in liberal modernity. This version descended from the romantic and nineteenth-century cult of Greece and misunderstood both the Greeks and the West - creating an idealized vision of Greece seen through the lens of a West defined as the heir of that idealized Greece." Historians like Will Durant play a role in shaping this myth. The intervening history is sometimes treated as the dark ages, an aberretion or a period of disenlightenment. Two World Wars with Germany as the aggressor helped reinforce this progressive myth of Hellenic enligtenment. Gress challenges this absurd school of historical interpretation and shows how the West is a unique culmination of Roman, Christian and Germanic culture. Thus, modern Western concepts to freedom are very much indebted to Germanic influence more so than classical Greek influence. Two Germanic tribes- namely the Angles and Saxons - brought the Germanic culture and its concepts of freedom to the front.

Gress offers an astute analysis of the cultural crisis beseiging the West. First, in the twentieth-century, the West was overwhelmed with totalitarian threats, which Gress covers in the chapter entitled 'The Totalitarian Trap.' Secondly, the West is under attack for elitism and exclusivism by post-modernism, nihilism and relativism. Thirdly, in the aftermath of that crisis, a new secular universalism has emerged which seeks to supplant the West and create an altogether new civilization. The final chapters 'Battle in the Heartland' and 'The Failure of Universalism' draw the book to a fitting conclusion defending the Idea of the West. Gress offers a break from social scientists like Francis Fukuyama and Samuel Huntington that confuse Westernization and Universalization. "Universalism," notes Gress, "never solved its fundamental dillema of being both a Western idea - the idea that Westernization was global and irresistable - and an anti-Western idea - the idea that Western identity had fortunately come to and end and been superseded by a lowest common denominator of communications technology, capital markets, free trade and doses of American entertainment." It is clear that the West is under attack, but it is very much an attack from within. An appropriate response dictates the universalists within the intellectual nomenclature must be displaced by champions of the Western idea. The West can export "cultural capital," to borrow a concept from Thomas Sowell, but one is gravely mistaken to think it tenable or desirable to 'Westernize' the whole world. Moreover, efforts to supposedly 'Westernize' the world is really an exercise to 'Dewesternize' the West. The 'West' will itself die in the process of trying to universalize itself and an altogether different civilization will emerge. The West will only die if good men fall into a spirit of resignation and declare it inevitable.

First off, before you even think about buying this book, understand that is a socioeconomic study of the maritime profession from 1700 to 1750. The book was written by a Marxist who has succumbed to Hollywood's romantic characterization of the Pirate as a misunderstood individual who only wanted his unalienable rights which were withheld by the running dog lackeys of the capitalist pigs who ran the shipping business and the Navy. Even if he had to murder people to get it.

If you want a semi-legitimate justification of piracy, you may find enough here to keep you happy. Most of the study is a legitmate presentation of maritime economics and the danger of the trade in the early part of the 18th century. Yes, most ship owners and captains were capitalist pigs who would man a ship with a minimum crew and pray they lost no crew members to the many dangers that were common to shipping at that time. Not the least of which was piracy.

His arguements begin to fall down when he describes the commraderie and equalitarian brotherhood that pervailed on board a pirate ship. He intimates that slaves captured were treated as equals. (there is documentation to indicate otherwise including the sinking of a pirate ship which the crew members escaped, but the captured slaves were allowed to drown.

If you are reading this for the economic history of the shipping industry or for information of the quaint Naval custom of impressing their crew (both the Americans and British were known for grabbing able bodied saling men off the docks and encouraging them to join - they'd untie them when they were far enough out to sea) then this book is excellent.

If you are looking for information on a typical sailor's life, I'd suggest "Before the Mast" in conjuntion with this. But if you are looking for real information on pirates and piracy, This book does not provide much. there is is more accurate information regarding piracy in "Under the Black Flag" with a more varied discussion of the possible causes of the choice of piracy, backed by statements taken from court records of the time.

I would not recommend Between the Devel and the Deep Blue Sea as a history to most people as the author is attributing many modern sociological and psychological causes to historical events about which we have only in some cases, the account books for reference.

This text is interesting and engaging, but Rediker's bias ruins the credibility of his arguments. Rediker is a Marxist historian and therefore provides an extremely slanted view of seafaring men. His thesis is centered on the seaman as a member of the working class, and his struggle to rise in a capitalist system. One example of how his bias has clouded his analysis is in his discussion of alcoholism. Rediker assumes that the resort to alcohol is caused by alienation- this draws obvious parallels to Marx's own work focussed on the alienation of the workers (200). A particularly appalling example of his bias is when Rediker discusses the cruel treatment of seaman by their masters. Rediker then asserts that "when Karl Marx noted that the modern wage labor system could not have emerged without the bloody assistance of the lash, he may well have had the early modern shipping industry in mind" (213 n19). Clearly there is no basis for this statement save his personal beliefs.

Rediker is hardly the only man to notice - though he is one of only a very few to have written on the topic at length - that the Anglo-American Maritime world of the early to mid 18th Century was a socio-political hotbed of burgeoning revolution. To criticize the author for being a Marxist is absurd - the era about which he is writing, and the sailors and specific cultural events of that era, were socialist themselves, though they wouldn't have had the insight to realize it at the time.

Political scientists and economists should find this book of even more interest than historians, as many of the same events in the rise of Capitalism as Rediker writes about are now coming full circle and repeating themselves, with NAFTA and GATT creating the same social conditions that led to widespread - and often remarkably effective (in the case of piracy) - rebellion between 1700 and 1750. As Rediker points out, our very word "strike," in its labor union connotation, originated with merchant mariners striking sail on their ships and halting the movement of their cargoes.

Rediker is a remarkably thorough researcher, backing his thesis with the best possible sources and representing both the Capitalist and Labor points of view from contemporaneous documents. His masterful rendering of the world of "Jack Tar," an average mariner of the age, ably demonstrates that the social upheaval witnessed during the Golden Age of Piracy was an inevitability - as was its eventual downfall. Rediker is not a Marxist apologist, as his critics claim, but a keen and competent observer of statistical trends and social events, which he elucidates with extreme precision. He is less advancing any kind of argument, than simply putting the merchant marine world of three centuries ago into clear focus, and to some degree comparing and contrasting it with our modern landscape.

This is a truly fascinating book, as much for its brilliantly vivid portraiture of the age as for the validity of its social and economic arguments. It would make an excellent textbook for political science, economics, or sociology classes.

The unstated thesis of Walter Lefeber's book is that an expansionist foreign policy was a conspiracy that "the great and the good" fostered on an unsuspecting American public. Apparently there was this rather unfortunate tendency that arose after the Civil War toward emprire building and that there was an almost "illuminati" type approach by the "wise men" of American foreign policy to see that an empire was obtained.

The problem with this line of thought is that it bears very little relation to the truth. Empire building was not quite the new thing that Lefeber makes it out to be, rather these sentiments should be viewed as a continuation of manfest destiny. Once the US took the continent from the French and Spanish, eyes turned elsewhere. This was not quite the 40 year process that Lefeber makes it out to be. It was much more complex than that.

The other problem is that Lefeber, with his conspiracy approach to foreign affairs, seems to miss that the people who were apparently working together to build this overseas empire, did not really like each other that much. Theodore Roosevelt did not much care for the Adams brothers Henry and Brooks (though they were distantly related) who in turn thought him insane.

I cannot quarrel with Lefeber's scholarship and would recommend reading this book but with the proviso that at times he appears to be viewing American foreign policy as one vast conspiracy which simply is not true.

While the American Revolution and the Civil War are both extremely important periods in the history of the United States, the tendency of many teachers to overemphasize these two eras leads to a peculiar gap in American knowledge, especially when concerning America's period of economic and landed expansion. As Walter LaFeber impresses upon us from the very preface of his book, these formative years are some of the most important in the history of the United States; the opinions and policies shaped through the crises of the late 19th century impacted not only the foreign relations of the time, but created the base from which America's current foreign policy grows and shows many of the reasons for our prominent place upon the global stage.

The basic premise of LaFeber's argument is that all roots of American expansion and imperialism in the 19th century are economically based. There are many observable reasons for this economic instability, but the most important argument is that as a result of expanded production and an agricultural and industrial surplus, American companies needed new markets in order to survive. Yet as American converted from intense agricultural cultivation to industrialization, it became increasingly obvious to policymakers and intellectuals alike that due to the hard competition in existing European industrial markets, expansion into unexplored world markets was now essential for America's economic survival. According to LaFeber, the importance of these new foreign markets, especially in Latin America and Asia, becomes the driving force in all foreign policy decisions, forcing Americans, in a sense of self-preservation, from her self-imposed seclusion into participating in global politics.

Because this book as a whole is extremely well written and fairly impartial, it is very jarring to note the few times that the author does descend into either idealization or vilification. For instance, when explaining the ultimate reasons for the Spanish-American War, it is interesting to notice however the extreme lengths to which this author does his best to vindicate President William McKinley from the popular opinion of spinelessness. In contrast to the carefully accurate (if to a small degree, pro-American) description of the most of the policymakers involved, many times President McKinley is described in glowing terms that seem out of odds from the rest of the book's candid views. Terms such as "superb" and "uncommon" are used quite frequently to describe both the President and his actions; at every turn LaFeber is trying too hard to convince us of McKinley's political mastery and his decidedly controlling role in the declaration of war upon the Spanish (instead of blaming the whole affair upon McKinley's spinelessness and the pressure of the public and the press), and this becomes bothersome after the first few pages.

As the author is a man in a field of men, it is also bit disappointing but perhaps not surprising that Walter LaFeber's book focuses entirely upon the influential men of the time period. Indeed, through the entire book, there are only four women mentioned: Mrs. Gresham, the wife of Walter Quintin Gresham II, Julia Ward Howe, an author named along with Mark Twain and James Russell Lowell, the Queen Regent of Spain, Mariá Cristina, and the Queen Liliuokalani, ruler of Hawaii from 1891-95. At most, these influential women, and especially the Queens, were given only a couple lines on a few pages--nothing compared to the incredible depth of analysis presented on the influential men of the day. Despite the admittedly small numbers of significant women in the state and federal governments during this time period, it would be encouraging for someone as respected as Walter LaFeber to realize the importance of women in history--as 50 percent of the population, these women have had a considerable impact upon the shaping of ages and deserve more than just a few sentences.

Moreover, throughout this 400 odd page book, the reader is overwhelmed by evidence and quotations--footnotes can and have taken up all but a paragraph of space on the top, and even the "selected" bibliography is 8 pages long. While showing the exhaustiveness of LaFeber's research and quite impressive in its scope, this obvious exploration into every little detail is definitely overwhelming in the text and for those of us not students of history, it is extremely overwhelming at times, necessitating many readings and in some places simply obscuring the point that the author is laboring to make. This is extremely sad, because LaFeber has something very important to say and it should not be ignored, especially by the general public, who, despite most New York Time's reviewers, are not all intellectuals and may have some difficulty with the oftentimes superfluous detail.

Despite these and a few other flaws this book as a whole is thoroughly researched, skillfully laid out and clearly written, roughly succeeding in its attempt to explain an exceedingly complex subject in such a way that all the interconnections between countries and their policies are comprehensible even to a novice. As America becomes ever more present in global politics, and as America's current foreign policy and especially our tendency to concern ourselves in other nation's business can in some part be traced to the world economic ties that were formulated during America's Age of Expansion, this book is important for all Americans to read as we struggle to understand both our country's actions and its proper place among the world powers.

This book, written almost forty years ago, offers an important, fact-filled overview of a very important era in American history, one that is largely forgotten today. The New Empire does a more than credible job of filling in the huge gaps in our collective history of 1865-1898, and it turns out that something indeed happened between Reconstruction and the Spanish-American War. First, LaFeber provides a worthy overview of American expansion in these years. Next, he describes the development of expansionist ideas by examining critical policy makers and pundits such as Fredrick Jackson Turner, Henry Adams, and Alfred Thayer Mahan. Finally, he delves into the history of events and policy decisions chronologically. While his information on the 1870s and 1880s is good, it mostly serves as a springboard for his assessment of expansion and commercial imperialism in the 1890s. The final decade of the nineteenth century is a crucial time in American history. Wracked with the Panic of 1893 and the terrible depression of the following years, America first stepped out on to the world stage, largely in an effort to protect the very viability of the nation from labor unrest and anarchy. LaFeber describes all of the international issues the U.S. addressed in this era: revolutions in Latin America (and America's steadfast enforcement of the Monroe Doctrine), the strong push by both businesses and/or government for foreign markets, the question of annexation of Hawaii, the Philippines, and Cuba., and the fluid relations between America and the European powers. The depression of the 1890s convinced many influential men that America could not survive economically without developing new commercial frontiers in which to unload its surplus agriculture and, in particular, manufactures. Antiannexationist voices were muted by the late 1890s; the only debate was one of annexation vs the establishment of protectorate status to the likes of Hawaii and the Philippines.

LaFeber contends that economic issues largely explain the development of America's new imperial policy. This is argued most forcefully in his investigation of the origins of the Spanish-American War. The most important economic issues at the time were the Cuban revolution, the dangers of losing access to Chinese markets due to the machinations of countries such as Germany and Russia, the establishment of defensively important outposts in the Far East, and the construction of an isthmian canal in Latin America. He does a wonderful job of describing the wavering opinions of policy makers and businessmen in the 1890s and of America's reorganization of political alliances with the European powers, Russia, and Japan. He makes a forceful argument for his economic explanation of the war with Spain in 1898. McKinley was not alone in trying to avoid war, but he and many other leaders came to realize that America could not compete economically without establishing foreign markets and that stability and guaranteed access to such markets would require annexation of strategic areas and the development of a strong navy with which to secure and maintain access to foreign ports.

This book is a wonderful source of information on American foreign policy from 1865 to 1898. It is rather easy to point to the Spanish-American War as the herald of America's transformation from isolationism to globalism, but LaFeber proves that the U.S. began to aggressively pursue a policy of commercial imperialism in the mid-1890s. This is not an all-inclusive history, however. It can be argued that LaFeber relies too intently on economics in his description of America's evolving foreign policy. This is true to some extent, but he does not dismiss other factors in choosing to concentrate on economics. All in all, I would recommend this book wholeheartedly. It is enlightening to penetrate the veil of these forgotten years to see how a progression of events in and outside America set the stage for America's ardent stride into the role of global and commercial superpower. Those who begin their stories of American commercial and diplomatic expansion with the Spanish-American War and the introduction of the Open Door Notes would do well to read The New Empire and follow the true beginnings of the national transformation back into the 1890s.

In a 1994 interview on C-SPAN's Booknotes, reporter and critic John Corry told how politically one-sided the _New York Times_' newsroom was in 1980. In that year, of all the reporters and editors on staff, he only knew of one person who voted for Ronald Reagan, and that was the paper's art critic, Hilton Kramer. Kramer left a couple of years later, continuing his art criticism in the _New York Observer_. But he also set out to do battle with the cultural Left, that "herd of independent minds", in Harold Rosenberg's famous phrase. Eventually, he founded the _New Criterion_, an intellectual journal, which features some of the finest cultural criticism on offer today. This book, Twilight of the Intellectuals, is as much a retrospective of his often lonely mission, as it is a survey of the political climate of American intellectual culture in this century.

_Twilight_ differs from Paul Johnson's _Intellectuals_ in treating only 20th century intellectuals. Plus, Kramer's high culture background allows him to provide the reader with more insight into his subjects' worlds, as opposed to Johnson's uniform tarring of his as scoundrels (mostly accurately, though). Kramer even expresses some nostalgia for some of the people here, such as Kenneth Tynan, giving him his artistic due over the political divide.

But in the main, his work here is a series of political polemics. "Socialism is the religion people get when they lose their religion," is how the Catholic intellectual Richard John Neuhaus described the mindset that Kramer battles here. Throughout, Kramer selects his old articles with the intent of fixing the truth about influential leftist intellectuals firmly in the cultural memory. People like Lillian Hellman, Alger Hiss, Dwight MacDonald, Mary McCarthy, and such are all known qualities now, and do not need to be refuted afresh. But they still hold places of honor in institutions where like-minded intellectuals cluster, so the task of telling the truth about them is an ongoing one. The progressive myth surrounding Hiss is still so thick that Kramer felt compelled to include two essays about his case.

His praise of Sidney Hook, the lone ranger of socialism, is fulsome, and deservedly so. Hook did much of the heavy lifting in building the Marxist mindset among American intellectuals in the Thirties, and then atoned for it with a long, noble and lonely career as an anti-communist cold warrior. He oddly tags Hook for a philistine, though, for having pooh-poohed an anti-communist arts festival with the comment that artistic greatness could appear in dictatorships, too. Hook was right on that point, though, in my opinion. A musical program of Shostakovich and Prokovieff at their best would more than stand comparison with a program of contemporaneous Western composers, caged birds though the Soviet artists were otherwise.

His estimation of Saul Bellow may be a little unfair. Bellow has never been known for being a brawler, which may explain Kramer's disappointment in his seeming acquiescence to PC attacks against him. One _Herzog_, one _Mr. Sammler's Planet_, ought to be enough to ask from any writer's career, without also being called upon to spend creative energy in opinion journal polemics.

A print reviewer of this book commented on how entering the culture wars must have retarded Kramer's potential as a critic, by draining his powers. I don't know about that, but he makes a convincing Horatius At The Gate, giving battle to the herd of independent minds, who marched in leftist lockstep so disgracefully, for so long.

With this book, Hilton Kramer, a Cold-War anti-Communist Liberal of the last half of the 20th century, fills in many historical gaps for younger seekers of intellectual purity. While the book does a credible job explaining shifting differences of cold-war opinion amongst leftist academics and ideologues, it begs us to consider how otherwise intelligent people could continue to support tyranny in the face of such incontrovertible evidence of its evil. Kramer cites the verbal and media assault on anyone daring to question the tenets of the Cold War Socialist Left. He outlines the criticisms of Alexander Solzhinitsyn by George Steiner, the diatribes of Lillian Hellman, that staunch supporter of Stalinism, and the scurrilousness of Mary McCarthy, the pro-Hanoi apologist. He shines light on the Communists in Hollywood and the media and the many ways in which they aided the Soviet cause.

Starting with the intellectual rejection of Whittaker Chambers, in favor of the Soviet spy Alger Hiss, we are treated to a travesty of heresies that have yet to be renounced by their proponents. Kramer points out that Bard College today has an academic chair in their Humanities department in Alger Hiss's name. By the same token, women's studies departments at many universities still use "I, Rigoberta Minchu" as a text even while knowing that she made the story up. Current Writers who have kept on with this tradition of making it up as they go along, in the name of the class warrior socialist cause, are Mike Barnicle of the Boston Globe, Stephen Glass of the New Republic, Joseph Ellis of Mount Hollyoke and Janet Cooke of the Washington Post; and these are just the ones who got caught. Even though they are a tribe of diminishing numbers, the shrillness of their followers is reminiscent of the Pod People in "the Invasion of the Body Snatchers". They still make their presence known in the universities, worshippers of their secular religion, their social studies professor's a fit for the over 50 white guy demographic of those remaining listeners of Pacifica Radio. Even with Cold War Left intellectualism "water over the dam", we still stand witness to the twilight of the intellectual era while we watch a continued post-modernist assault on free market values. In the war of ideas, they still fight on the side of our political enemies, and their fight is as relentless as it is prolonged. The saving grace is that their numbers continue to dwindle as their message becomes ever more diluted and confused. We can only sit in awe as we watch them "rage against the machine" and tilt at the windmills of free market capitalism. The Ruckus society, Greenpeace, PETA and Friends of the Earth come to mind.

The book outlines the details of urgent political debates that tore apart friendships and sundered institutions. Kramer gives life to these issues that animated controversies, but ended in the triumph of a new sensibility over modernism, what he calls a strange fate for liberal anti-communism. What's so interesting is how people like Sidney Hook, Lionel Trilling and George Orwell were able to see the truth where other fellow travelers would not. It seems that the rigid ones suffered, and suffer still, from the condition that Thomas Sowell often refers to as compartmentalized brain syndrome. Hilton Kramer has done a fine job for those of us who are younger but still curious about this struggle of Cold war peripatetic's espousing their tale of the inevitability of a Marxist heaven on earth as the logical future for all mankind. This cruel plan, which oversaw the deaths of more than 100 million people in the 20th century, never succeeded and some of the credit has to go to those intellectuals with the courage to see the error of their ways. Hilton Kramer gives them their due.

Like most people born in the Sixties, I was taught by the commissars to exercise proper moral outrage at McCarthy and to ridicule the excesses of anti-communism. It wasn't until I was well out of school, when I read Witness by Whittaker Chambers, that I realized there was another side to the story, one more deserving of my sympathy.

I learned that the excesses of the "Red Scare" had not proved it wrong. There had been Communists in Hollywood, in the media, in politics, and in government, including Alger Hiss, a State Department official under FDR who had been revealed to be a spy by Chambers, himself a former Communist.

Despite the exoneration of Chambers and the slow trickle of information about the Soviet Union after its fall, the Left has never come clean about its failures on this issue. Hilton Kramer tries to set the record straight in this collection of his essays, most of them published first in his monthly review, The New Criterion, by telling some of the individual stories within the intellectual history of the Cold War (roughly 1930-1990). Kramer examines the impact of the politics of the Thirties and Sixties and the gradual fall of what Raymond Aron called "the two avant-gardes," Marxism and Modernism.

These were the days of coffee-house revolutionaries who had either taken leave of their senses or were willing to do anything in the name of Stalinism. Some of them were acquaintances of Kramer; some were merely part of the cultural smog that everyone inhaled. They were divided into the Communist Left and the anti-communist Left, with the latter typically excommunicated whenever it attempted to reveal the truth about Stalin.

The excesses of the anti-anti-communists were many. Kramer found Sidney Hook's autobiography a key text in the literature of anti-communism, but historian Arthur Schlesinger thought Hook exaggerated the influence of Communism on America. Lillian Hellman claimed it was the anti-communists who were the real threat to democracy. Susan Sontag called the white race the cancer of history. George Steiner was outraged to hear Solzhenitsyn say it was Lenin, not Hitler or Stalin, who created the slave-labor camp and that Soviet terror was worse than National Socialism. Mary McCarthy defended Communism in Hanoi and attacked the anti-communism of a fellow Leftist, George Orwell. Alfred Kazin tried to drum Saul Bellow out of the club because Bellow departed from Left-liberal orthodoxy. William Phillips, an editor of Partisan Review, wrote that defectors from Communist idealism, like himself, were often denied entry into various journals and university jobs.

If all of this sounds like puritanical, it is because the Left has often brought religious overtones to its politics. Despite claims to tolerance, liberals punished their dissenters harshly. But the untold story is the one Hilton Kramer has begun-of those who sacrificed and suffered because of their integrity and their loyalty to the truth.

This book brings to light a historical phenomenon hidden beneath the spotlight of cold war headlines of the early 1960s. Nearly forty years later, the exodus of 14,000 Cuban children whose lives were devastated by those headlines would still be hidden, if not for the diligent work of Yvonne Conde. Through painstaking research and sensitive, insightful writing, Conde has laid out in meticulous detail a more complete story of the effects of Castro's revolution on the lives of the Cuban people than I have read before.

As a middle-class American who was fourteen in 1961, I was shocked to read of this all-but-lost piece of history-14,000 Cuban children sent alone from their homes, many of whom were my age at the time.

Impressive in her ability to combine a clean, journalistic style with empathy and deep insight, Conde has written a beautiful and important book that lays out a timeline of political events even as it captures the personal pain, loneliness and fear of innocent children. The author tells each story in a way that compels the reader to imagine being a child again, suddenly sent away from parents and home to adjust, at best, to a foreign language, strange food and customs and harsh climates and, at worst, to endure the nightmare of physical, emotional or sexual abuse at the hands of strangers. This is essential reading for anyone who wants to know the whole story.

I just finished reading Operation Pedro Pan and I found it engrossing! I couldn't put it down. Although I am Cuban and a Pedro Pan child myself, I believe I am objective when I say that, yes, the book has a couple of typos, but nothing that detracts from the overall quality of this important historical work. As for it not being "organized"according to the Booklists review, Ms. Conde has presented a wonderful chronological sequence of events, starting with a thorough explanation of the political events in Cuba 1959-62 that made our parents take the drastic action of sending us away. It is followed with information on how the program started, how the visas were distributed clandestinely in Cuba, the temporary shelters in Miami where we were placed, letters from the children back then, and chapters on orphanages, living with foster families, abuse, forgetting our Spanish, the reunions with our parents, what happened to some of us in the 60's and 70's and comments from the children today on how this experience affected us. It finishes with the very valuable results of her questionnaire to 442 of the children, the only research of its type to date, as far as I know. Not well organized? C'mon! As for "not particularly well written"(Booklist again) people either like or dislike different authors and their styles, I found hers to be journalistic and easy to read. Who are these critics and what are their hidden agendas?

To Yvonne M. Conde I want to say, thank-you, thank-you, thank-you for writing this book. This true story is very close to my heart, for I am also, a Pedro Pan child. Reading this book was painful at times but at the same time it validated my part in it. As time goes by sometimes you wonder, did all that really happened or is my memory playing tricks on me? For me it has been almost 38 years. The book is very easy to read and the research that was involved comes through. I am buying two more copies to give my american born daughters. They have heard some of the stories from me, but again this is validation. I can identify with many of the feelings expressed by the other stories and I could not have said it as eloquent. This book will be with me forever.

While Wintermeier (above) dismissed Ayres because he disputes three points, he misses the whole point of the book. Who knows who is right on these points of history? As one wag once said, "History is a lie agreed upon." That some soldier's name does not show up in the army's list a hundred or so years ago does not mean they weren't there. That someone lost to us now claims credit for taps or for California or for the moon -- who cares. The only way we will really know is if we get in a time machine and go back there. And if the National Archives wanted to preserve the 4th of July for a special day instead of July 2, what is to keep them from changing the record for their own purposes? Politicians have been known to do that... The quote by Adams certainly sounds correct. I would like to see Thomas Ayres respond to Wintermeier here.

Meanwhile, this is an entertaining book that challenges a lot of our closely held opinions about history and makes us think twice about what we were taught. For that it is invaluable. Women have known forever that there is a reason it is called "history" -- it has always been a story about the men. The white men, to be exact. So who can trust Wintermeier's sources? To the victor belong the spoils and the history lessons. The rest of us minorities, women and non-whites, have largely been left out. What makes Ayres book so good is that he lets us know who some of these "others" are that helped to shape this country.

And if there is a dispute about a few points, so be it. No record is completely pure. No book is perfect. Get it and have a great read for summer.

Thomas Ayres' book is a great read that is impossible to put down. The only people who would not enjoy it would be stuffed-shirt academics that are simply jealous because they cannot write about history in a clear and entertaining manner. (For an example of those types, look around any college bookstore for paperbacks written by faculty members.) I can't wait for the sequel.

More history writers should write like Thomas Ayres.
"That's Not in my American History Book" is very refreshing.
Not the watered-down, approved by the school board type of
history books we all were force to read in school. In short
entertaining stories, Ayres captures our nation's little known
history, warts and all. Some of it is just plain funny. The way the author relates it is just plain fun. My favorite quote
from the book is in the introduction, when Ayres writes:

"After all, irony and humor have never been missing from history -- just historians." That's great! Loved it!
I read Thomas Ayres' most recent book also. It's called:
"Dark and Bloody Ground." It's about the Civil War in Louisiana
and it is also an excellent book.

There is a lot of information within the book and plenty of images. I personally feel that it could with colour images, however, there are many black and white photographs and illustrations for each chapter. I would recommend this text for all Mesoamerican students and enthusiasts alike.

As a new-comer to Mayan history, I enjoyed the writing in this book. Coe gives a broad description of this complex history while not getting bogged down in extraneous details. The pictures are valuable, especially the city scape pictures and the conditions which the sites were found in modern times. As a previous reviewer recommended, Read Chapter 8 and 9 after reading chapter 3. This might fill in some gaps and clarify some of the middle chapters. Overall, a good start to Maya history and culture

Overall, I found Coe's book to be informative and full of all the necessary facts. At the same time it kept my attention with the beautiful color pictures and descriptions of sites and artifacts. This book will give the reader an overview and introduction to the Maya area while incorporating the latest findings. This makes a great general reference book as well as a good read. The only suggestion I have is that the final three chapters on religion and every-day life come before the in-depth discussion of sites.

While this book does occasionally give an interesting glimpse at a diplomat's life, it is basically journalistic fluff. The profiles are superficial and often fawning, and broader political issues are largely ignored. It reads like a "Visit to Washington" column in a mediocre community newspaper. One gets the impression that the author wrote each section with the goal of being asked back to an embassy cocktail party. It was a disappointment given what I was expecting.

This is a missed opportunity. If the book had a competitor, there would be another view of Embassy Row available. Unfortunately, there's not. This journalist has difficulty distinguishing between the trivial (e.g. what videos ambassadors watch) and the important. It reads like a term paper in which the student had to write 15 pages with 5 pages of material. I suspect the journalist stretched the thin material she assembled from the limited access she received. At times, she invokes cultural stereotypes that are disturbing. At best, it's a "People Magazine" view of Embassy Row, focused on the glamour rather than the substance of diplomatic life.

If you are loooking for a treatise about diplomacy, this book is not for you. If yu are looking for a book that gives you a good overview about the people and the embassies in Washington, give this one a read. It deals with the inner workings of every day embassy life and provides a little hisoty into the enbassies interviewed. In my mind a worthwhile read.