Reading Wednesday
Sep. 9th, 2015 04:45 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
brigdhWhat did you just finish?
No God But Gain: The Untold Story of Cuban Slavery, the Monroe Doctrine, and the Making of the United States by Stephen Chambers. A nonfiction book with a very interesting premise, but unfortunately not so great an execution. Chambers's central argument is that after the US outlawed the slave trade in 1808 (note: the slave trade, not slavery itself. That is, new people could not be imported into the US to be sold as slaves, but the ones already there could still be exploited. Slave trading had also been made illegal in the British colonies by this time) Cuba – as a Spanish colony – was one of the few places that still allowed the importation of new African people. This allowed Cuba to become the primary producer of sugar and coffee, crops which were farmed in such a way that they were incredibly deadly. There's an estimate that life expectancy for a slave on a sugar farm was a mere five to eight years. Other than the obvious human moral horror of this, it doesn't work as a capitalistic system – unless there's a steady inflow of cheap new slaves. Chambers provides evidence that, despite it being technically illegal, Americans captured new people in Africa, sold them as slaves in Cuba, and then sold the sugar and coffee they produced in Europe and Asia for further profits. Some Americans even went so far as to buy their own plantations on Cuba. A great deal of money was made this way, enough to stabilize the early American economy. In addition, American politicians fought to maintain the status quo, since if Cuba had been assimilated to the US the slave trade would necessarily have become illegal, but if Cuba achieved independence from Spain, it was likely to have been snapped up by the British, French or Mexican governments, endangering US interests on the island.
Okay. So that's clearly an important bit of history. The problem is that Chambers doesn't demonstrate the evidence for it as well as he might. Partly due to a lack of documentation – since it was illegal, many of the people involved deliberately destroyed records of this trade – but partly due just to his writing style. He skips between way too fictionalized interpretations of what people were thinking: "It was Christmas Eve, 1816, and Benjamin Bosworth felt good. He was drinking rum and thinking about sex, money and the funny way men’s feet kicked and twirled when they were hanged by the neck." to excessively dry lists of numbers: "Immediately after the outbreak of the Haitian Revolution, Cuban ingenios and cafetales expanded at a frantic, unprecedented pace, and sugar production nearly doubled in just eight years, rising from 16,731 metric tons in 1791 to 32,586 metric tons in 1799.26 Meanwhile, in an attempt to outmaneuver the French, Great Britain granted U.S. traders greater access to British colonial markets in the Caribbean, and the U.S. re-export trade increased in value “from $8 million in 1795 to $26 million in 1796". There's barely anything in between these two extremes. He also tends to make grand claims at the beginning of a chapter ("Whereas the previous chapter concentrated on the activities of the smugglers, assassins and thieves in Cuba who created this early trade, this chapter details the strategies of elite ship captains and consuls in an overlooked U.S.–Cuba–Baltic circuit (1809–12) that linked Boston with the frozen docks of St. Petersburg and the sweltering warehouses of Havana") that he can't quite live up to.
In addition, the book ends very abruptly. Chambers chose to focus on what he calls "the generation of 1815", that is, the first generation of Americans born after independence. Which is a fair choice, but by ending the book as they pass out of political power, nothing has particularly changed or peaked or stopped in Cuba, so it feels like a very arbitrary point to stop. There's no conclusion to the events. I feel like I need a sequel to know what happened to the trade and politics he's set up.
Ah, well. An interesting topic, but I can't quite recommend the book overall.
I read this as an ARC via NetGalley.
The Colour of Magic by Terry Pratchett. If you didn't know, I'm a huge Pratchett fan, especially of his Discworld series. They've been some of my favorite books, as well as hugely personally important and influential to me, ever since I first stumbled on them around age 13. I haven't posted much about them in recent years not because I loved them less, but because I'd reread them so many times I'd sort of worn out their humor and goodness. They were too familiar. The obvious solution seemed to be to let them rest for a few years, until they'd faded enough from my memory that I didn't have every single plot-point and joke firmly memorized.
But a few years have passed, Pratchett has passed away, and there are a few new books in the series that I've never read. It seems like a good time to do a re-read.
Starting with The Colour of Magic, the much depreciated first book, which I've only ever read once before, long ago when I was first getting into the series. I remembered not liking it much, and it has a terrible reputation even among Pratchett fans, which is why I've never before reread it. But I should have, because this time I loved it. Okay, yes, it's much shallower than the greatest Discworld books, and overall it's a forgettable piece of fluff. But such an enjoyable piece of fluff! I could hardly put it down because I was having such a fun time that I wanted to keep reading. The humor is great, and already in this early book there's so much of inherent magic of Discworld: a cranky Death! Corrupt Ankh-Morpork with its barely-liquid river! Bumbling wizards! Climaxes with a million plot-threads piling up! There's differences too; I'd completely forgotten that this book actually has chapter breaks, which feels so odd in a Discworld book. And there's only two footnotes in the whole thing!
I suspect I might not have liked this when I was younger because I didn't know the books he was parodying. But now I've read Lovecraft and Leiber and McCaffery and Dungeons & Dragons and all the general fantasy tropes he's mocking. And sure, "the fantasy genre" is a much lesser target than "organized religion" or "Shakespeare" or "mortality" that he'll cover later on, but that doesn't make this book less of a good time.
The Belton Estate by Anthony Trollope. I've never actually read any Trollope before, despite having constantly heard him recommended. A quick google suggests that this probably wasn't the best one to have started with, but ah well. I'd picked it up years ago at a second-hand book store, and needed to read it to get it off my shelf.
In 1860s rural England, a low-end gentry woman named Clara has recently discovered that she's about to be very poor. Her brother should have inherited the family estate, but instead he killed himself, and as a woman, Clara can't inherit. Instead the money and land will go to a very distant cousin she's never met. She accepts an offer of marriage from Captain Aylmer, who's a pompous cold fish, but at least she can trust him not to kill himself or leave her in poverty. And then she meets that distant cousin, and realizes he's A) hotter than Aylmer, B) a better person than Aylmer, and C) way more in love with her than Aylmer is. WILL TRUE LOVE PREVAIL?
Obviously it does. Nonetheless, this was a very pleasant book, with lots of interesting insights into the gender and class politics of the time. Based on what I'd heard before, I'd expected Trollope to be much funnier than I found this book. Instead I'd describe him as a cross between Jane Austen and Charles Dickens; Dickens-like in his style of writing and characterizations, and Austen-like in the focus on women and "smaller", more intimate plots. I'll definitely read more by him in the future.
What are you currently reading?
The Unexpected Inheritance of Inspector Chopra by Vaseem Khan. Another NetGalley book; this one looks like the start of a cute mystery series.
No God But Gain: The Untold Story of Cuban Slavery, the Monroe Doctrine, and the Making of the United States by Stephen Chambers. A nonfiction book with a very interesting premise, but unfortunately not so great an execution. Chambers's central argument is that after the US outlawed the slave trade in 1808 (note: the slave trade, not slavery itself. That is, new people could not be imported into the US to be sold as slaves, but the ones already there could still be exploited. Slave trading had also been made illegal in the British colonies by this time) Cuba – as a Spanish colony – was one of the few places that still allowed the importation of new African people. This allowed Cuba to become the primary producer of sugar and coffee, crops which were farmed in such a way that they were incredibly deadly. There's an estimate that life expectancy for a slave on a sugar farm was a mere five to eight years. Other than the obvious human moral horror of this, it doesn't work as a capitalistic system – unless there's a steady inflow of cheap new slaves. Chambers provides evidence that, despite it being technically illegal, Americans captured new people in Africa, sold them as slaves in Cuba, and then sold the sugar and coffee they produced in Europe and Asia for further profits. Some Americans even went so far as to buy their own plantations on Cuba. A great deal of money was made this way, enough to stabilize the early American economy. In addition, American politicians fought to maintain the status quo, since if Cuba had been assimilated to the US the slave trade would necessarily have become illegal, but if Cuba achieved independence from Spain, it was likely to have been snapped up by the British, French or Mexican governments, endangering US interests on the island.
Okay. So that's clearly an important bit of history. The problem is that Chambers doesn't demonstrate the evidence for it as well as he might. Partly due to a lack of documentation – since it was illegal, many of the people involved deliberately destroyed records of this trade – but partly due just to his writing style. He skips between way too fictionalized interpretations of what people were thinking: "It was Christmas Eve, 1816, and Benjamin Bosworth felt good. He was drinking rum and thinking about sex, money and the funny way men’s feet kicked and twirled when they were hanged by the neck." to excessively dry lists of numbers: "Immediately after the outbreak of the Haitian Revolution, Cuban ingenios and cafetales expanded at a frantic, unprecedented pace, and sugar production nearly doubled in just eight years, rising from 16,731 metric tons in 1791 to 32,586 metric tons in 1799.26 Meanwhile, in an attempt to outmaneuver the French, Great Britain granted U.S. traders greater access to British colonial markets in the Caribbean, and the U.S. re-export trade increased in value “from $8 million in 1795 to $26 million in 1796". There's barely anything in between these two extremes. He also tends to make grand claims at the beginning of a chapter ("Whereas the previous chapter concentrated on the activities of the smugglers, assassins and thieves in Cuba who created this early trade, this chapter details the strategies of elite ship captains and consuls in an overlooked U.S.–Cuba–Baltic circuit (1809–12) that linked Boston with the frozen docks of St. Petersburg and the sweltering warehouses of Havana") that he can't quite live up to.
In addition, the book ends very abruptly. Chambers chose to focus on what he calls "the generation of 1815", that is, the first generation of Americans born after independence. Which is a fair choice, but by ending the book as they pass out of political power, nothing has particularly changed or peaked or stopped in Cuba, so it feels like a very arbitrary point to stop. There's no conclusion to the events. I feel like I need a sequel to know what happened to the trade and politics he's set up.
Ah, well. An interesting topic, but I can't quite recommend the book overall.
I read this as an ARC via NetGalley.
The Colour of Magic by Terry Pratchett. If you didn't know, I'm a huge Pratchett fan, especially of his Discworld series. They've been some of my favorite books, as well as hugely personally important and influential to me, ever since I first stumbled on them around age 13. I haven't posted much about them in recent years not because I loved them less, but because I'd reread them so many times I'd sort of worn out their humor and goodness. They were too familiar. The obvious solution seemed to be to let them rest for a few years, until they'd faded enough from my memory that I didn't have every single plot-point and joke firmly memorized.
But a few years have passed, Pratchett has passed away, and there are a few new books in the series that I've never read. It seems like a good time to do a re-read.
Starting with The Colour of Magic, the much depreciated first book, which I've only ever read once before, long ago when I was first getting into the series. I remembered not liking it much, and it has a terrible reputation even among Pratchett fans, which is why I've never before reread it. But I should have, because this time I loved it. Okay, yes, it's much shallower than the greatest Discworld books, and overall it's a forgettable piece of fluff. But such an enjoyable piece of fluff! I could hardly put it down because I was having such a fun time that I wanted to keep reading. The humor is great, and already in this early book there's so much of inherent magic of Discworld: a cranky Death! Corrupt Ankh-Morpork with its barely-liquid river! Bumbling wizards! Climaxes with a million plot-threads piling up! There's differences too; I'd completely forgotten that this book actually has chapter breaks, which feels so odd in a Discworld book. And there's only two footnotes in the whole thing!
I suspect I might not have liked this when I was younger because I didn't know the books he was parodying. But now I've read Lovecraft and Leiber and McCaffery and Dungeons & Dragons and all the general fantasy tropes he's mocking. And sure, "the fantasy genre" is a much lesser target than "organized religion" or "Shakespeare" or "mortality" that he'll cover later on, but that doesn't make this book less of a good time.
The Belton Estate by Anthony Trollope. I've never actually read any Trollope before, despite having constantly heard him recommended. A quick google suggests that this probably wasn't the best one to have started with, but ah well. I'd picked it up years ago at a second-hand book store, and needed to read it to get it off my shelf.
In 1860s rural England, a low-end gentry woman named Clara has recently discovered that she's about to be very poor. Her brother should have inherited the family estate, but instead he killed himself, and as a woman, Clara can't inherit. Instead the money and land will go to a very distant cousin she's never met. She accepts an offer of marriage from Captain Aylmer, who's a pompous cold fish, but at least she can trust him not to kill himself or leave her in poverty. And then she meets that distant cousin, and realizes he's A) hotter than Aylmer, B) a better person than Aylmer, and C) way more in love with her than Aylmer is. WILL TRUE LOVE PREVAIL?
Obviously it does. Nonetheless, this was a very pleasant book, with lots of interesting insights into the gender and class politics of the time. Based on what I'd heard before, I'd expected Trollope to be much funnier than I found this book. Instead I'd describe him as a cross between Jane Austen and Charles Dickens; Dickens-like in his style of writing and characterizations, and Austen-like in the focus on women and "smaller", more intimate plots. I'll definitely read more by him in the future.
What are you currently reading?
The Unexpected Inheritance of Inspector Chopra by Vaseem Khan. Another NetGalley book; this one looks like the start of a cute mystery series.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2015-09-09 09:26 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-09-09 09:46 pm (UTC)I have never read Trollope - you are the first reader to sway me!
no subject
Date: 2015-09-10 02:06 am (UTC)But you know, between the two, I'd recommend Pratchett first!
no subject
Date: 2015-09-10 02:10 am (UTC)And ha, am I? I feel like my review was not particularly enthusiastic! I did enjoy it though, and I've seen so many other very passionate reviews that I will be reading him again myself.
no subject
Date: 2015-09-10 08:27 pm (UTC)The museum was fascinating, they've worked very hard at not making it just endless misery - it opens with displays of African cultures, language, and heritage, to make you understand how large and complex the civilisations disrupted by slavery were. They run various narratives (gender, violence, capitalism...) throughout, and show how it shaped the world. There's a bit where you flip Liverpool street names to see their connection to slavery - Penny Lane was named after the captain of a slave ship!
After that there's an exhibition on modern slavery, and by the time we got to the sex trafficking bit we mutually tapped out and went to get some fresh air.
no subject
Date: 2015-09-11 06:15 pm (UTC)