The Wolf Of Sarajevo, Palmer - B

                                               In his third book, Palmer turns to the Balkans, specifically Bosnia-Herzegovina, a hell hole of religious and ethnic conflict decades after the Dayton Accords. The Bosnian Muslims,  the Croatian Catholics and the Serbian Orthodox Christians hate each other and the fact that they are tied together in an ungovernable artificial state. The focus of the story is an attempt by the UN to broker a deal to avoid a second conflagration. Opposed are the Serbs in a province looking to create havoc and secede from B-H. The Serbian leader has turned against the deal, because he is being blackmailed. Who is blackmailing him? Whose side is the State Dept. on? Even more important - whose side is the CIA on? This is a solid read with a goodly amount of historical background provided. Whenever reading about the Balkans, their blood-soaked history going back centuries, Turk versus Christian,  Hapsburgs v. Ottomans, and everybody lost in medieval superstition and hatred, I think of Bismarck. The Iron Chancellor purportedly stated that the Balkans weren't worth the bones of a single Pomeranian grenadier.

Secrets of State, Palmer - B -

                                               Obviously, I've gone straight to the author's second book. This one is set in Washington, D.C. and Mumbai (Bombay).  The background information is on the conflict in Kashmir and the now almost seventy years of contretemps between India and Pakistan.  A behind-the-scenes American group called the Stoics (think of a Tom Hanks or John Travolta movie about blue-blood movers and shakers in a 200-year-old organization with ulterior and evil secret motives) is planning on using a Pakistan nuclear terror incident on the sub-continent to 'snatch' the Pakistan nuclear arsenal. This one feels a bit too speculative to be truly good.

The American Mission, Palmer - B +

                                               This is the debut novel from a few years ago by a career Foreign Service officer.  The book has two protagonists: Alex Baines of the State Dept. and Marie Tsiolo, a Congolese mining engineer. The setting is the Congo of about a decade ago, a country in the hands of a corrupt president and an American mining company that is totally without conscience or morals. Baines and Tsiolo  save her village from Consolidated Mining's plans to strip mine an entire valley. Along the way, they join forces with a spurious CIA agent and a local warlord and oust the president in a bloodless coup.
                                                I must admit that I pay little attention to sub-Saharan Africa and know next to nothing about all of the horror in that part of the world. This is a well-written thriller that along the way sheds some light on the conflicts as well as the culture of the region.

White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America, Isenberg - B -

                                               This book is about the history of class in America. It refutes the theory and founding myth that  the United Sates is a classless society. The underclass has been part of our history from the beginning. English decision makers viewed the New World "as a giant rubbish heap" and the place to send their undesirables. "Expendable people -waste people- would be unloaded from England; their labor would germinate a distant wasteland." Criminals, indentured servants and lower-class discharged soldiers were more plentiful than the yeoman classes that crossed the ocean. This was less so in the Bay Colony, where many intact families migrated, but was certainly so in Virginia, Georgia and the Carolina's. Indeed, North Carolina was populated by people drifting south from Virginia and living in and around the Dismal Swamp. It is characterized as  "the first white trash colony". Georgia was actually "founded as a charitable venture, designed to uplift poor families and to reform debtors". Although 1776 saw the venerable phrase that "all men are created equal", Jefferson believed and lived in a very structured world in which he was very much part of the gentry. He agreed with Washington who said "only the lower class of people should serve as foot soldiers".  Class distinctions were alive, well and embedded in the new nation. As people poured into the trans-Appalachian frontier, the terms 'squatter' and 'cracker' entered the lexicon to describe the impoverished, landless settlers of the early 19th century.  "Over the two decades leading up to Andrew Jackson's election as president, the squatter and cracker gradually became America's dominant poor back country breed." "From the foothills of the Appalachians into the banks of the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers, the nation leaned backward. The squatter was frozen in time. His primitive hut represented his underclass cage."
                                               As the Civil War approached, the appellation 'white trash' came to apply to southerners stuck in a cycle of poverty, who were believed to have been marginalized because all the quality land was tilled by slaves. In contrast, northerners had opportunities through access to land because their soil was 'free'.  The south was littered with an underclass unable to climb out of the hopelessly sordid world they lived in and looked down on by all. After the war, the term 'redneck' came into use. "It defined the rowdy and racist followers of the New South's high profile demagogues of the late 19th and early 20th centuries." The condition of the uneducated, often ill with diseases like hookworm and pellagra, white trash led to the eugenics movement, which peaked in the late 1920's. The New Deal tried to tackle poverty in the south and programs like Rural Electrification and the TVA made some headway.  The Civil Rights conflicts of the 50's and 60's pitted the poor white redneck against the poor black. Orval Faubus and George Wallace played what the author calls 'the redneck card' throughout their careers. LBJ's Great Society's war on poverty attempted to tackle the similar problems of the nation's blacks and the Appalachian whites.
                                            In the final chapters of the book, Isenberg presents the thesis she calls 'redneck chic' discussing Jimmy Carter, Tammy Faye Baker and Dolly Parton.  In the 80's and 90's, "a growing chorus sought to clean up the image, to make 'redneck' a term of endearment".  Like Johnson, and to some extent Carter before him, Bill Clinton epitomized the American Dream by rising from southern poverty to the pinnacle of success. However, as a member of the class of poor southerners, he was an easy target for the hatred that poured out of the conservative right. He had not the class of Reagan or Bush - a pauper had replaced princes. "Beltway reporters said they had never seen such vitriol before."  Starr went after him over Lewinsky because "he had been caught in a tawdry sexual escapade suited for a trailer park".  Notwithstanding the thrashing Clinton took, redneck chic survives as evidenced by innumerable reality tv shows featuring, well, rednecks.
                                           Today, the vast amount of poor whites vote against their self-interest because the power elites have convinced them that they are unique and victims of the liberal establishment. "We are a country that imagines itself as democratic, and yet the majority has never cared for equality. " "White trash is a central, but disturbing thread in our national narrative." "They are who we are and have been a fundamental part of our history, whether we like it or not."
                                           This book is a highly acclaimed bestseller.  However, there has been some criticism. The 'Atlantic' reviewer disapproved of  her failure to address poor whites outside of the deep south.  Similarly, a NY Times reviewer asked about the downtrodden Asian immigrants, who were subject to similar insults and prejudice.  I also have a few concerns.  For the non-academic, forays into philosophy and political theory tend to dull one's attention. At times, I kept wondering where the book was going and what the point was of many chapters. I had also hoped to see this book address the evolution of the Scots-Irish in America and she barely touches the topic. In one of the more noteworthy books I have ever read, the author of 'Albion's Seed' sets out the religious, cultural, social and economic consequences of five different migrations from the United Kingdom. The fifth and largest group treated in that book are the Scots-Irish, described as border people in the UK, used to fighting and clan warfare and the backbone of the American 19th century westward settlers and the US military.  In the end, Im not recommending this one.

City of Sedition: The History of New York City During The Civil War, Strausbaugh - B +

                                               "New York City would play a huge role in the war, but it would be a confused and conflicted one. No city would be more of a help to Lincoln and the Union war effort, or more of a hindrance. It would be a city of patriots, war heroes, and abolitionists, and simultaneously a city of antiwar protest, draft resistance and sedition."  The city was home to the nation's largest port, its greatest emporium, the continent's banking houses and was the source of the vast majority of the country's revenue.  NY was also inextricably linked to the South, as its primary financier and a major cotton exporter. "It was estimated that on the eve of the Civil War the South was pouring at least $200 million a year into the city's economy. Because of cotton, no city in the North was more pro-South, anti-abolition, or anti-Lincoln." At the bottom of the booming city's economy were the 12,000 free blacks and the eventual hundreds of thousands of famine Irish, vehemently competing for the same menial jobs and developing an intrinsic hatred for each other.
                                                The speech Abraham Lincoln made in February of 1860 at Cooper Union propelled him to the front of the ranks of Republican candidates and endeared him to Horace Greeley, the most profound influencer of opinion in the country.  Yet, in the city and Brooklyn, he was outvoted 2:1 and after his election, there was public discussion of the city declaring itself 'free' and in sympathy to the South. After Sumter though, most rallied around the cause. German immigrants, many of whom had come over after the failed revolutions of 1848, enthusiastically supported the Union. The Irish were somewhat less committed, but their leaders, particularly Archbishop Hughes, thought it was an opportunity to show that they were true Americans. When a third of the North's casualties at Bull Run were NY'ers, the flag-waving abated a bit. A year later, the Irish Brigade, consisting  of NY'ers and men from Massachusetts, took heavy casualties at Antietam. In March of 1863 as the war ground on and the Union lost battle after battle, Lincoln signed a bill establishing a federal draft. A week after Gettysburg, the first drafts took place in the city, which had been wracked by violence on the docks, particularly against free blacks. Within days of the first names' announced, an angry mob attacked* and destroyed the offices with the draft lists. The mobs grew, overwhelmed the police and lit fires throughout the city. "The city was under siege from its own citizens." A week long rampage that destroyed fifty or sixty buildings and killed many blacks** only ended when four thousand federal troops came to New York.
                                              "Unhappy Northerners would resist the draft through evasion rather than draft riots. The specific combination of conditions that caused the rioting - long standing Southern sympathies, racial hatred, class conflict and extreme labor unrest - seemed peculiar to New York City." The following year, the city again gave Lincoln about a third of its votes.  In the following spring, 160,000 NY'ers would pass by his casket and half a million would take to the streets to stand on the procession route. The war had been a boon for the city, as it had been the arsenal of democracy, the shipbuilder extraordinaire, and the clothier and financier of the war. Those earnings propelled NYC into the Gilded Age. The nation, and in particular the city, moved on.  This has been a wonderful book that I've thoroughly enjoyed. As a native NY'er, I'd have preferred more on the city and less on the general background. That said, this is an excellent and, thankfully, only a 372-page read.

                                               *I first learned of the draft riots from Ken Burn's 'Civil War' and later read of them in a novel by Kevin Baker.  I thus concluded that my Irish-American predecessors in NYC had little enthusiasm for their role in the great conflagration.  I've since learned that my great-grandfather, David Barry, joined  (or perhaps was drafted to) the Union cause in 1863. I suspect his ardor may have been limited.
                                                 **The official death count was 119, but most historians believe the number to be significantly understated.