I recently finished John Farrell's new biography, Nixon: A Life. I jotted down some notes after completing it and have copy-pasted them below:

Farrell’s biography is an even-handed account of Nixon’s life and presidency, but fails to provide an over-arching framework for the man’s personality or his legacy. Farrell is at his best with Nixon before the presidency. He points out Nixon’s early ties to California oilmen and their funding of his early congressional campaigns. In these campaigns, Nixon would engage in red-baiting rhetoric that cast his opponents as communist sympathizers by way of their support with organizations like the CIO. Sabotage, smears, and heavy-handed tactics were part and parcel of Nixon’s campaign strategy from his earliest races.

Farrell provides a fair account of Nixon’s role on HUAC and his hunt for American communists. He calls Nixon a "precursor" to the rabid anti-communism that many politicians would use to browbeat their opponents. Nixon knew that Red-baiting was an effective political tactic and used it frequently. Nixon sought to hunt communists but, Farrell argues, also tried to distance himself from the extremists in HUAC. Farrell casts Nixon as being the most visionary and dogged in figuring out the truth behind the Hiss case.

Farrell argues that often the media truly was out to get Nixon due to his abrasive attacks on liberals, East Coasters, and the political establishment. The 1960 election and the harsh attacks on Nixon, along with the heavy-handed and perhaps illegal tactics of JFK’s allies, led Nixon to believe that he must undertake those types of actions himself if he were to succeed in politics. This argument is perhaps too exculpatory, and places too much of the blame on Nixon’s opponents and not enough blame on Nixon himself.

Regarding his relationship with Eisenhower, Farrell casts Nixon as a man constantly seeking Eisenhower’s approval, yet rarely finding it. Nixon was often tasked with what he believed was the dirty work that Eisenhower didn’t want to be associated with, and the two were never personal friends. Farrell, for instance, argues that Eisenhower’s indecision over whether or not to dump Nixon on the re-election ticket was incredibly cruel toward Nixon.

On race, Farrell is too positive of Nixon. He places Nixon as a key participant in the passage of the 1957 Civil Rights Bill, yet it isn’t clear whether or not this was done out of any genuine belief in racial equality . Nixon, in fact, viewed African-Americans as inferior and believed that equality wouldn’t emerge until the long distant future (as copiously noted by the author). Farrell also believes that Nixon’s Quaker religion led him to support civil rights, yet this conclusion seems dubious—Nixon’s religion didn’t stop him from drinking heavily or stop him from many other un-Quakerlike actions, so what was different with civil rights?

Farrell rightly argues that the Chennault Affair represented the most reprehensible of all of Nixon’s actions in American politics. In foreign affairs, Farrell goes against the prevailing scholarship on Nixon by claiming that Nixon helped usher in the new multi-polar world. As most historians now argue, though, Nixon wasn’t attempting to help bring about a new world order but rather protect the Cold War bipolar order.

For domestic policy, Farrell very quickly races through Nixon’s actions and positions on each of the issues while failing to take a position on a lot of issues. Farrell does point out that Nixon did more than almost any other president for the environment.

Farrell’s treatment of the China opening, Vietnam War, and Watergate are fairly conventional. Farrell does argue that one of Nixon’s major mistakes was appointing advisers that were only “yes-men” who promoted Nixon’s baser instincts. Farrell also argues that Nixon was judged by a double-standard—that his actions were not much different than the actions of presidents before him. Farrell then uses investigations conducted by the Church Committee on the CIA (on issues completely unrelated to anything like Watergate) to draw a comparison between Nixon’s actions and other government officials. It’s a very stretched comparison.

Overall, I think the book is good but not great. There's far too many weak arguments that try to minimize Nixon's faults. At the same time, the book is no hagiography--Farrell really goes after Nixon on the Chennault affair, for instance. I guess overall I would describe this book as inconsistent--some parts are fascinating, other parts are trite, and other parts are just flat out illogical.

I'm attempting to put together two lists, one of ten books and the other of thirty, that will provide authors of fantasy an overview of medieval history in order to clear up common misconceptions. The smaller list is just an introduction for those who want the bare basics, while the longer list is for those who want to dig a little deeper.

Apart from the difficulty in narrowing down the larger list to just ten books for the bare bones look at history, I've been extremely frustrated with authors of textbooks/syntheses about medieval warfare. There's not a single one available that looks at equipment, logistics, finance, sieges, naval operations, recruitment, psychology, social/religious aspects of warfare and a general history of medieval warfare. Some of them come so close and with another 100 pages would manage to tie everything pretty nearly together, while others seem doomed by their authors' particular focus on a time period. You end up having to read four or five separate books in order to get a complete, but basic, picture.

Do publishers refuse to publish these kinds of books if they're over 500 pages or something? Or do they just impose deadlines that prevent academics from managing to write more than four or five hundred pages in time to meet it?

I finished off David Donald's Charles Sumner and the Coming of the Civil War. Donald mostly controls his loathing of Sumner up through the caning, but it's always there. He will begrudgingly admit that Sumner held positions on reform issues before he became an activist on them but presents them all as "really" results of his emotional breakdown in the 1840s. He also handles them piecemeal, which gives the impression that Sumner is looking for any cause he can ride to get ahead, despite their actually being about contemporary with each other. Sumner's into prison reform, antislavery, and peace all in the late forties but there's scarcely a note in the narrative that they're contemporary so he presents more like a dilettante seeking a properly fashionable cause. Badly.

After the caning, the gloves really come off. Donald's willing to admit that Sumner was genuinely injured and suffered chronic issues thereafter. In a 1960 kind of way he even admits there's PTSD in play. But Sumner's attempts to get back into politics during his convalescence are treated as almost venal exercises, entirely oriented around saving the senator's career. His insistence that his suffering had political salience is dismissed as out of control narcissism.

By the time Sumner is back in the Senate for keeps there are only two years left in the book, so Donald finishes with a hurried-feeling wrap-up to 1860. The second volume, which I've not read, goes from there to Sumner's death. The last chapter feels like it belongs more as the first chapter in the other book, honestly. It's the first time that Sumner's own positions are going to have some kind of weight and the beginning of his national influence as more than a rhetorician or symbol.

All in all, it's not a terrible book but it badly shows its age. Donald writes in a tradition where hostility to antislavery politics was de rigeur and for all his mid-twentieth century references to psychology his central thrust doesn't depart much from his advisor's generation that just openly loathed the guy. But there's no newer book that covers Sumner's life even up to the Civil War, so it's Donald or nothing. I suspect part of the reason there's not is that so much of what Donald presents is trivially open to more positive interpretations. Coming in with no previous hostility to Sumner, the book probably reflects worse on Donald than him.

From there I decided to hop over to Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. A friend is rereading it and someone on FB was a jerk to her about that, which was enough to get me to a summary of the argument. Found out it seems to be in lines similar to what I've been thinking, so I picked it up. So far it's decent, but also right about at the limit of my patience for theoretical jargon.

Hello everyone! Hopefully this is the correct place to ask this. Does anyone know of any good books on the Triads? Specifically I'm looking for information about their tattoos: their origins and/or their meanings. Thanks in advance guys!