Read any good books lately? The Matt-only edition of my favourite holiday assignment.
Dead U.S. presidents, crippling plagues, and charming computer game designers.
Gameplay screencap from the original Civilization computer game.
This is a time of year when media outlets — newspapers, in particular — desperately need canned content. So-called "evergreens" are pieces that can be written and edited in advance and run at any time.
This is the first December holiday in a long time — a very long time — when I haven't been responsible, in some form or another, for the National Post's Comment pages. The first year I was in charge, my editor asked me what the plan was for the holidays, and I replied that we had our annual year-end news quiz, plus a few book excerpts and evergreen op-eds good to go. "OK," the editor said. "What else?"
"What else?" I thought. "What the fuck do you mean what else? This is all I've got!" But out loud I said, with aplomb, "And all our columnists will be reviewing their favourite book from the past year. And I'd love you to write one for us, too." My editor's eyes lit up. I had said exactly the right thing. Now I had to go out and arrange that, fast, because the thought hadn't occurred to me until I confidently reported it as a fait accompli.
This happens to me sometimes. Part of my brain just sort of seizes control of my mouth and a fully formed sentence just pops out. I'm as surprised to hear it as any other listener. I'm not prone to just spitting out the first thing that comes to mind. If anything, I'm the opposite of that. But every so often, I can't help it. I'd say it's normally worked out to my advantage, though it has sometimes blown up in my face. (Even on those occasions when it's blown up in my face, though, it's been because I meant what I said, not because I didn't. Whatever part of my brain seizes control in those moments, I'll say this for it: it's honest.)
Despite the bizarre origin of this idea, it actually became one of my favourite things as a Post editor. I looked forward to it every year. I was glad to see that the Post continued it this year, but mildly bummed not to contribute a review of my own. So I figured ... why not just do it here?
Why not indeed?
A rule I set out for the contributors while I was at the Post was that it didn't have to be a new book. It didn't even have to be a book they'd read for the first time. An old favourite, or a classic they finally got around to reading, was just fine for my purposes. Looking back at the first half of 2020, I realize that almost everything I read was an old favourite — literary comfort food in a stressful time. Besides, early in 2020, I was reading a ton, but it was all reports and research papers. I clued into the coming pandemic early and was frantically loading my brain with information I thought would be useful (some of it was!). In early March, my family took a vacation — we had the last vacation in North America before Rod Phillip's, I guess — and instead of doing what I normally do before a trip to a warm clime, which is load up on beach reading, I was reading about pandemics, coronaviruses and survival skills.
Do I know how to relax or what?!
Anyway, we returned safely, and I continued cramming more and more stuff into my brain. Leisure reading just seemed absurd. I didn't think I had a moment to spare. Finally, though, as March was ending and once I realized that COVID was going to be bad but not an existential threat, I relaxed and read some light, fluffy novels. A few techno-thrillers, including two Tom Clancy's — Red Storm Rising and Hunt for Red October — and a few sci-fi books. I'd read them all before, but this was how I finally let my brain stand down from battlestations after a pretty dialled-in few months. That made a nice change of pace. Once I was into April, I felt confident enough in my accumulated knowledge, and bored enough by the drawn-out isolation of Toronto's first-wave lockdown, to be ready to actually read something new.
The first thing I decided to do was learn about a historical figure I'd always been interested in, and admired, but only from an intellectual distance: Theodore Roosevelt. I knew bits and pieces about him. He was a Roosevelt, obviously, and that itself tells you a lot. I knew about his military career with the Rough Riders in Cuba, and a few of the high points of his presidency — the Panama Canal and the Great White Fleet, mostly. But I knew almost nothing about the man or his life. I naively asked Twitter for suggestions of a memoir or biography that would cover the basics, thinking I was going to end up in for a 500-page (or so) survey of the man's life. It was my then-National Post colleague Stuart Thomson who pushed me to take a deeper dive, and tackle Edmund Morris's three-volume biography of the man. This was a vastly bigger commitment than I was expecting to get into — the first volume alone is almost a thousand pages and only brings the reader to Roosevelt's sudden ascension to the presidency (he was vice-president to the assassinated William McKinley). A thousand pages of preamble, I thought. What madness is this? But Stuart encouraged me to try it out, and, it's not like I had anything else going on mid-lockdown. So I gave it a whirl.
Theodore Roosevelt.
And it's a damn good thing I did. The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt is a spectacular book. I went into it with almost zero knowledge of Roosevelt's early life, and was astounded. I won't recap it here, because you should read it yourselves — you should read it yourselves! — but suffice it to say, even if Roosevelt had never become president, the first volume of his biography would still have recounted one of the most insanely interesting and exciting lives I've ever read about. It was almost impossible to believe that any single human could be as accomplished in so many fields, but Morris carefully documents all of it. Roosevelt was an incredibly interesting person, and I couldn't put the first volume down. I hurled myself into the second volume, Theodore Rex, this summer, and also enjoyed it. But if you can believe it, the man's early life was so fascinating that his eight years as chief executive of the United States, during an absolutely fascinating period of history, was less interesting than what came before. A third volume, Colonel Roosevelt, recaps his post-presidency years, and is what I'm reading now. It's terrific. With the obvious proviso that I haven't finished the third part yet, let me heartily recommend the entire three-volume collection. It takes some time. But it's worth it.
Harry Truman.
You might think that thousands of pages of presidential biography would be enough for any man. And that would probably be true for any normal, well-adjusted man. But reading the first two volumes of the Roosevelt series whet my appetite for more of the same, even if I wanted a brief break from Roosevelt himself. So I downloaded, via Audible, the audiobook version of David McCullough's Truman, an 1,120-page biography of one of Roosevelt's successors — elevated to the presidency after the death of Theodore's distant cousin Franklin, in fact. I had read Truman years ago, but wanted to go back to it. The audiobook version was a better fit with my relaxing summer at the cottage. My family became used to the sight and sound of me laid out like a slug on a hammock, eyes shut, listening to the narrator tell me of Truman's clothing store in Kansas City, his time commanding a First World War artillery battery, his political career from small jobs for the Missouri Democratic machine to a successful time in the Senate, and so on.
It's a terrific book about a fascinating man (I've previously noted my admiration for him here at Code 47). Truman does not get the respect he deserves, though history has been increasingly kind to him. Check it out — Amazon seems to be having a sale on the Kindle edition today, in fact.
A field hospital during the Spanish Flu. Courtesy of the National Museum of Health and Medicine, Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, Washington, D.C., United States.
That scratched my presidential history itch for a while, but in the fall, I found myself remaining in a historical frame of mind. Once it became obvious that a second wave was going to clobber Ontario, despite my earlier high hopes, I figured I should read up on second waves. So I checked out historian John M. Barry's work on the Spanish Flu, The Great Influenza. It's very, very interesting. The Spanish Flu was a lot like Theodore Roosevelt to me — I knew a lot of disparate bits but didn't have a good sense of the overall whole. Barry's work is told from a heavily American perspective; it doesn't give a global view except when necessary. But it still did an excellent job telling the story not just of the pandemic itself, with its far-more-devastating second wave, but of medical science, which was undergoing rapid, and essential, change at the time. The best of modern science wasn't able to do much to slow the pandemic down, but there were at least, for the first time, the tools and know-how available to try to meaningfully combat it, even if the efforts were largely futile.
Readers of Barry's work will naturally draw comparisons to our own efforts to combat COVID-19 over the past year. We've done better on the scientific and medical front, largely thanks to our vastly superior technology and a century of accumulated knowledge. But have we done much better on the political or societal fronts? Maybe a bit ... but only a bit, at best. Barry's work is a very sobering read, a necessary reminder that COVID-19 could have been much, much worse. And the next one might be. Check it out.
The above is all pretty heavy, so I wanted to end with a mention of something a bit lighter. Long-time readers of mine will know I'm an obsessive fan of the Civilization franchise of computer games. The game's creator, Sid Meier, one of the biggest names in computer games going on decades, published a memoir this year, titled simply Sid Meier's Memoir! (Gamers will get the joke.) It's a short, delightful read, and more about the creation of the modern multi-billion-dollar gaming industry than any particular game. I confess I'd hoped for more of a history of the Civilization franchise itself, but while this memoir isn't that, it's still a damn good read, and a fun look inside the quirky but apparently very pleasant mind of a man who's given me more hours of entertainment than I care to count.
But he’s also given me some homework to do, I realize. Thanks to him, I’m going to have to go write a correction to a column I wrote years ago …
A gameplay screencap of the world map from Civilization 2.
This isn't all I read this year, of course, but it's a short list of the highlights — a bit of food for thought if you, like me, enjoy spending your downtime buried in a good book. I already have a few ideas of what I'll be reading in early 2021, after I finish up the third Roosevelt volume, but that's a topic for next year's readin' roundup.
I hope you enjoyed it, and want to wish you all a happy new year and the best for 2021. Take care.
mgurney.responses@gmail.com
Twitter.com/MattGurney