RUTHFULLY YOURS

Ed Cline is author of many books as well as pithy opinion columns often posted here. Check out his Amazon page

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China Basin is set in 1928 San Francisco. Edward Cline presents an American city of cable cars, plain speaking and Prohibition. As the author observed in the book’s forward, “The country was unhampered by political correctness in speech and manners, and uninfected with other cultural maladies, the seeds of which were just beginning to sprout in art and ethics, as the reader of the novel will see.” Except for the Progressive hangover of Prohibition, Cline presents the country and city as the Founders largely intended it to be.

China Basin could be identified as neo-noir detective story in the classic tradition. There is some truth to this judgment, but it’s not the whole truth. The reason is the character of the detective-hero Cyrus Skeen. Skeen is a hero, not an anti-hero. He is a self-aware man of intelligence, breeding, and above all moral rectitude. He is also a man of action who places his life on the line in the pursuit of justice and truth. Skeen’s moral compass places him a world away from such protagonists as Sam Spade or Jake Gittes.

I’ve known Ed for nearly three decades. I remember talking to him on several occasions when he was plotting and writing China Basin. Two things have stuck in my mind ever since. First, Ed’s explanation for the book’s setting. He didn’t much care for the world inhabited by Sam Spade of Maltese Falcon fame. It is a grubby world and Spade’s is a barren, unexamined life. He wanted to present a happy detective of intellect. Skeen’s perspective is much wider and grander. Unlike other neo-noir detectives, Skeen is a bon vivant who spends much time in the sordid world of crime, but doesn’t become a part of it. He also wanted to recreate a bygone, and better, era. On both counts, China Basin is a roaring success.

The book’s plot is complex, but not overly so. There are no loose ends and the resolution is most satisfying. I won’t go into details here and give anything away for people who haven’t yet read China Basin. The story takes place in December 1928 after Skeen’s return from a month-long trip to Europe. The plot revolves around Skeen’s attempt to recover a lost artifact for a client. Of course, during the search both villains and femme fatales are encountered and dealt with.There is also a riot or rebellion against Prohibition officers at a local speakeasy where Skeen was meeting suspect:

“Let me through, damn it!” shouted the lead Federal agent as he banged through the onlookers. Skeen did not get a good look at his face, and he did not think the man got a good look at his, for a shot glass sailed through the air and struck the agent on an ear. He cursed in pain and held a hand up to it, and with the other reached inside his coat for his revolver. But an arm reached out and yank it from his fingers the moment is appeared, while another jerked his shoulder around and ripped off the whistle and chain that was around his neck. A beefy ship’s stoker turned him around again and pushed him, and the agent toppled backwards over the kneeling figure of a railroad fireman to the sawdust. A waitress calmly walked up a dumped her full tray of drinks on top of him. And all hell broke loose. (p. 155)

China Basin is the first of what are now twenty-nine Cyrus Skeen mystery and suspense novels. Their world of the late 1920s is believable with many interesting details of the period included. Ed did a prodigious amount of research for these books, and it shows. If you’re interested in good stories, with memorable characters set in a colorful and exciting time, the Cyrus Skeen series is for you.

Mark Bowden“In this peaceful city [Hue], during Tet, it was traditional to send cups of paper with lit candles floating down the Huong like flickering blossoms, prayersfor health, for success, for the memory of loved ones gone away…for an end to the war and killing…a vast flotilla of hope, many thousands of tiny flames.Not this year”

Hue 1968

Mark Bowden

Vietnam was my generation’s war. I was lucky, though and did not have to go. In February 1968, I was 27, married and a father of two, with four months to go on a six-year enlistment. In June 1962, I had enlisted in the U.S. Army reserve, at a time when most, including me, knew little, if anything, about South East Asia. While the U.S. did then have troops in Vietnam, their presence was small and our basic-training sergeants used Korea as their standard. By the time I was discharged, the United States was drafting 50,000 young men a month. Over the long length of the war, 2,700,000 Americans served in Vietnam, or almost 10% of the eligible population. 58,148 were killed and 75,000 severely disabled. 240 were awarded the Medal of Honor.

The Battle of Hue and its impact on the U.S. public’s perception of the war, is the story Mark Bowden tells. Most soldiers had been trained for the jungle; Hue was fought in the city – door-to-door, building-to-building, block-by-block. Bowden writes: “…Hue deserves to be widely remembered as the single bloodiest battle of the war, one of its defining events, and one of the most intense urban battles in American history.”

With the release of Ken Burns’ eighteen-hour documentary on the Vietnam War, fifty-year-old wounds have been re-opened. Vietnam divided the nation, more violently than today. It was the SDS and Radical “Yippes” (Youth International Party) against the police and “hard-hatters.” The losses at Hue, along with the lies and obduracy of General Westmoreland and others, led many to question government’s messages. Were we being told the truth? The under-educated and minorities comprised more than their share of foot soldiers, while many sons of the wealthy stayed in school or fled to Canada. Bowden’s book is more of a dispassionate look at that period, than is Burns’ documentary. The latter honors the soldiers, but de-emphasizes the war’s original goal – averting the spread of Communism.

It has been forty-two years since the last helicopter left Saigon with the last American aboard. Yet, feelings remain high. Was the war a mistake? On whose shoulders should blame lie? Did those who were killed or wounded, die or suffer in vain? Did the South Vietnamese endure unduly because of the U.S.’s hasty and ignominious retreat? Would the Khmer Rouge have committed genocide in Cambodia had Americans remained in Vietnam? Why were so many returning veterans treated so shabbily? Why did leaders who had privately lost faith in the war, continue to exploit the loyalty, ideals and patriotism of young American soldiers? These questions, and more, continue to haunt. It is probably too soon to answer them. Toward the end of his book, Mr. Bowden writes wisely: “Beware of men with theories that explain everything. Trust those who approach the world with humility and cautious insight.”

I believe Mark Bowden is right. The morality of the war should be debated, but answers are still being weighed. All wars are tragic, but those that are abandoned by politicians bear a special place in our hearts and minds. This book is their memorial. The soldiers who fought in Vietnam – in cities like Hue – were as brave as those who stormed the beaches at Anzio, Normandy and Iwo Jima. Because of his vivid descriptions of battle, this book, at times, is difficult to read, but Mark Bowden has done us a service in bringing the story of Hue, and the soldiers who fought there, to our attention.

In March 1932, Communist Party officials in Ukraine’s Odessa province heard rumors of hunger in outlying villages and sent a medical team to investigate. The doctors found empty cottages, corpses lying in the lanes, and the surviving inhabitants gnawing on carrion, boiled bones and horsehide. Local apparatchiks, the horrified medics reported, were doing their best “not to notice the incidence of starvation, and . . . not to speak about it.”

The dead were early victims of the “Holodomor”—literally translated as “hunger-extermination”—an artificial famine inflicted on the Ukrainian peasantry by Stalin in the years 1932-34. The best estimate of the death toll is 3.9 million, or 13% of Ukraine’s population. Up to an additional 2.5 million died in famines elsewhere in the Soviet Union at the same time.

Denied by the Soviet authorities almost until communism’s fall, the Holodomor was first documented by the British historian Robert Conquest in his ground-breaking 1986 book, “The Harvest of Sorrow.” Compiling census data and émigré memoirs and interviews, he demonstrated both the scale of the famine and the fact that it was not the result of drought or economic upheaval but of food confiscation, deliberately and violently enforced. Since then, a mass of new evidence has become available, on which Anne Applebaum draws—with generous acknowledgments to Ukrainian historians—for “Red Famine,” a lucid, judicious and powerful book.

The Holodomor was created in three overlapping stages. First, in the winter of 1929-30, came “collectivization.” Teams of activists were dispatched to the countryside to persuade peasants to hand over land and livestock to state-controlled farms, where they would work as day laborers for payment in kind. Villagers remembered how out of place the visitors looked, tiptoeing through the mud in polished shoes. One even mistook a calf for a colt, brushing aside correction with the declaration that “the world proletarian revolution won’t suffer because of that.”

Unsurprisingly, the anticipated wave of volunteerism failed to materialize, and the activists fell back on violence and intimidation, supported by local thugs and the police. Primed by years of indoctrination, even the more idealistic participants had no difficulty rationalizing their methods. “I firmly believed,” remembered one, “that the ends justified the means. Our great goal was the universal triumph of Communism, and for the sake of the goal everything was permissible—to lie, to steal, to destroy hundreds of thousands and even millions of people, all those who were hindering our work or could hinder it, everyone who stood in the way. And to hesitate or doubt about all this was to give in to ‘intellectual squeamishness’ and ‘stupid liberalism.’ ”

A few months later, the Kremlin launched a parallel drive to evict and deport “kulaks”—a term that in theory referred to wealthy peasants but in practice meant community leaders and anyone, rich or poor, who resisted collectivization. Targeted were teachers, clerks, store keepers, millers and tanners, as well peasants who owned two cows rather than one or whose huts were roofed with tin rather than thatch. Vicious propaganda, Ms. Applebaum notes, equated peasant farming with treachery and criminality: “Kulak-White-Guard-bandits” were said to be hoarding grain, sabotaging the collectives or plotting with the Poles to overturn the Revolution.

Not everyone submitted quietly. Police files reveal thousands of riots, shootings, raids on food stores and arson attacks on government buildings. One report, covering unrest in 16 Ukrainian districts, records 35 police and activists killed and an additional 314 beaten. Peasants’ most immediate form of protest was to slaughter their animals before they were confiscated. But though widespread, resistance was not organized enough to force the regime to backtrack. Instead, the regime hardened its position, fearing a repeat of the anti-Bolshevik risings of the Civil War. In the Soviet Union as a whole, more than two million peasants were deported between 1930 and 1933, mostly to Central Asia or the far north. Many died during the journey (in closed cattle cars, without food or water) or during their first winter in exile. At least another 100,000 went straight to the Gulag.

On their own, Ms. Applebaum argues, collectivization and “dekulakization” would not have led to outright famine. What tipped Ukraine from hunger into mass death was food requisitioning. Launched in the summer of 1930 in a drive to raise grain exports, it descended over the next two years into a sadistic pogrom, with no economic rationale at all. Tasked with fulfilling impossible quotas, search teams raided homes at night, smashing chests and cupboards and probing cellars and wall spaces with pointed metal rods. Cautiously, Ukrainian Party officials warned Moscow of growing hunger. “We have greatly overdone it,” reported one investigator. Face to face with desperate villagers, he had felt “like a carp squirming on a frying pan.”

But the Kremlin pressed on. In August 1932, food theft was made punishable by death or 10 years’ imprisonment, sweeping thousands more into the Gulag. Requisitioning brigades snatched fruit from trees, seedlings from gardens, soup from cooking pots. They killed dogs and smashed millstones. Children were shot at by mounted guards as they crept into the fields to glean fallen grain.

By New Year’s 1933 there was no food left, and full-scale famine took hold. Firsthand accounts are not as rich as those in Ms. Applebaum’s superb “Gulag: A History” (2003)—peasants were less likely to record their experiences than the middle-class professionals who filled the prison camps. But they are vivid enough: the eating of bark and weeds; children’s bird-like necks and wizened faces; ubiquitous, unremarked corpses; cannibalism. By the time Stalin finally called a halt in 1934, millions lay dead and thousands of villages stood empty.

At the time and for more than 50 years afterward, the Soviet authorities denied that the atrocity had ever happened. Doctors falsified death certificates. Students and soldiers sent to gather what there was of the harvest were told not to speak of what they saw. Not a whisper of it appeared in the press. In the cities—overflowing, despite roadblocks, with emaciated refugees—the dead were buried at night in unmarked mass graves. Notoriously, the Moscow-based Western press corps colluded in the coverup. Ms. Applebaum retells the shameful story of Walter Duranty, the New York Times correspondent who privately acknowledged the famine but publicly denied it so as to stay in with the regime. The American and British governments knew the truth from their embassies but, given trade requirements and Hitler’s rise, preferred to turn a blind eye.

Though far from complete—a few journalists reported honestly at the time, and eyewitnesses washed up in the West at the close of World War II—the coverup worked, in the sense that it sowed doubt. The Holodomor’s sheer wastefulness (why deport your best farmers and kill the rest?) made the Ukrainian diaspora’s claims “seem at least highly exaggerated, even incredible,” Ms. Applebaum writes. The authors of slightly amateurish émigré publications “were easily dismissed as ‘Cold Warriors,’ telling tales.” CONTINUE AT SITE

Ulysses S. Grant was a modest man, famously magnanimous toward his defeated enemies, but the myth of the Lost Cause irritated him. “The Southern generals were [seen as] models of chivalry and valor,” he once complained, while “our generals were venal, incompetent, coarse. . . . Everything that our opponents did was perfect. [Robert E.] Lee was a demigod, [Stonewall] Jackson was a demigod, while our generals were brutal butchers.”

Grant’s annoyance was understandable—and prescient. In the century that followed, no one’s reputation would suffer more at the hands of historians sympathetic to the defeated South than his. He was caricatured as a callous, plodding, sometimes drunken commander whose victories were due exclusively to Union advantages in men and materiel, a lucky general who became a politically clueless president, blind to corruption and bent on exacting revenge against the white citizens of the former Confederacy.

Over the past 20 years or so, scholars have done a great deal to rehabilitate Grant’s standing. A year ago, Ronald C. White, the author of the widely praised “A. Lincoln: A Biography” (2009), published his “American Ulysses: A Life of Ulysses S. Grant,” hailed in these pages by Harold Holzer as “like Grant himself” likely to “have staying power.” It demonstrated that Grant was not only the architect of Union victory but a two-term president with substantive achievements—among them, the virtual destruction of the Ku Klux Klan, restored relations with Great Britain, and soldiers sent south to protect the rights of at least some of the African-Americans he had helped to free. Too often, these have been overshadowed by the scandals that beset his second term.

If Mr. White’s book is Large, at 826 pages, Ron Chernow’s new biography, “Grant,” is Extra Large, at well over 1,000. Not one of those pages is boring. As readers of Mr. Chernow’s best-selling lives of George Washington, Alexander Hamilton and others know, he is a compelling storyteller. Much of the story he sets out to tell here may by now seem familiar, but he adds rich detail and brings to vivid life the reticent, unprepossessing but resolute man whom Walt Whitman called “nothing heroic . . . and yet the greatest hero.”

Every biographer has had to deal with the question of Grant’s drinking. Did he really drink too much? If so, did it interfere with his duties as soldier or statesman? Mr. Chernow is unequivocal: “Grant was an alcoholic,” he writes. For him, “alcohol was not a recreation selfishly indulged, but a forbidden impulse against which he struggled for most of his life. . . . The drinking issue . . . so permeated Grant’s career that a thoroughgoing account is needed to settle the matter.” Mr. Chernow does his best to provide one.

There is no question that drinking helped destroy Grant’s early career. Trained at West Point, calm and courageous in combat during the Mexican War, he drank only after the fighting ended, establishing the pattern he would follow for years.

He was a binge drinker. He could go for months without a drink, but as he himself once confessed to a friend who tried to fill his champagne glass: “If I begin to drink I must keep on drinking.” He actually consumed less alcohol than many of his fellow soldiers, but thanks to what one remembered as his “peculiar organization”: “a little did the fatal [work] of a great deal. . . . He had very poor brains for drinking.”

He knew he did and tried to stop, even joining the Sons of Temperance in 1851. But within a year he was drinking again. Three years later, stationed at a remote garrison on the California coast—bored, depressed and longing for his wife, Julia, and the children whom he hadn’t seen in two years—he suddenly resigned from the Army. No contemporaneous document survives to explain his reason, but Mr. Chernow makes a convincing case, based on a wealth of testimony elicited by biographers in later years, that his commanding officer had confronted him with a stark choice: resign or face the humiliation of a trial for drunkenness.

In that era, when excessive drinking was seen as evidence of moral failure rather than chronic disease, once the word “drunkard” was attached to a man’s name it was almost impossible to shake. When Grant rejoined the Army in 1861, whispers about his drinking haunted every step of his astonishing climb from captain of a company of Illinois volunteers to lieutenant general in command of all the Northern armies in just four years.

A Yale tour group visits a Havana restaurant in “The Cuban Affair,” the new novel by Nelson DeMille. As the Cuban handler expounds on the blessings of socialism, several of the Yalies nod in thoughtful agreement. “If they spent an hour in a kennel, they’d probably come out barking,” quips Mr. DeMille’s narrator. “So much for an Ivy League education.”

The point is made and the scene moves on—but during a conversation over coffee at Chicago’s Four Seasons Hotel, where Mr. DeMille is staying during a nationwide book tour, the author muses on the root of the problem. His mind turns to Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the Russian author and dissident, who died in 2008. “Intellectuals said socialism is good if you do it right. Solzhenitsyn said: No, it’s coercive by its nature. There are millions of people in the world and in this country who don’t know that. They can even visit Cuba and not change their thinking one iota,” Mr. DeMille says. “They are intellectually or emotionally tied to some kind of ideal.”

They’re also easy to lampoon—and Mr. DeMille’s wit is on full display in “The Cuban Affair,” his 20th major suspense novel, following the likes of “Plum Island” (1997) and “The General’s Daughter” (1992), the latter adapted as a 1999 movie starring John Travolta. The new book came out Sept. 19 and is on the fiction best-seller lists. Mr. DeMille calls it “an old-fashioned chase-and-escape action adventure.” Its Cold War theme echoes “The Charm School” (1988), perhaps Mr. DeMille’s best-known novel.

Mr. DeMille, 74, was born in Queens and grew up on Long Island, where he still lives. In 1966 he was a student at Hofstra University: “I was kind of bored at school and didn’t sign up for the spring semester.” He received a draft notice, enlisted in the Army, and attended officer candidate school. Then he shipped off to Vietnam, where he saw combat as a platoon leader during the Tet Offensive. After three years in uniform, he returned home, finished his degree, and tried to write what he calls “the Great American war novel.”

A book editor told him nobody wanted to read about Vietnam. So Mr. DeMille switched to police procedurals, pumping out six cheap paperbacks. He didn’t make much money, but he sensed he was in the right place: “If you’re a painter and you’re living in Paris in the 1920s, you’re where you need to be. If you’re a writer, you need to be in New York. I don’t care if anybody else says, ‘Yes, you can do it from your farmhouse in Dubuque.’ Being in New York helped.” Under pen names, he wrote a biography of Barbara Walters (as Ellen Kay ) and a fictionalized book on sharks (as Brad Matthews ). “That’s when ‘Jaws’ was out,” he explains. “It was on-the-job training. I was learning my craft.”

When a talent-spotting publisher advanced him a five-figure check, he began to draft “By the Rivers of Babylon,” the 1978 novel that became his first hardcover book—and also one of the first thrillers to take on Middle Eastern terrorism. Since then, Mr. DeMille has written a novel roughly every other year, selling tens of millions of copies. He’s in talks to turn the tales of one character—a New York police detective called John Corey, the hero of seven books—into a television show.

“I’ve been offered bonuses to write faster,” says Mr. DeMille. Many big-name novelists publish annually, encouraging fans to mark release dates on their calendars as if celebrating a birthday. Not Mr. DeMille. “To do a book a year every year is just incomprehensible to me,” he says. “The quality would suffer. Stephen King can do it. He’s a brilliant storyteller. Other writers aren’t doing their best because they’re rushing it.”

Mr. DeMille likes to tell a joke—I heard it twice, during our afternoon conversation and then during an on-stage interview at an evening event in Arlington Heights, Ill. It involves James Patterson, a friend of Mr. DeMille’s who is famous for his commercial success, aided by co-authors who help him publish at a dizzying clip: “I called James the other day and his wife picked up. She said her husband couldn’t come to the phone because he was working on a book. I said, ‘That’s OK, I’ll hold.’ ”

Contributing to Mr. DeMille’s slow pace is his aversion to technology. He composes his books with a pencil in longhand; assistants decipher his handwriting and type it up for him. He makes revisions by marking on the printed pages. He owns a flip phone and says he doesn’t use the internet much.

For a man so set in his ways, “The Cuban Affair” represents quite a change. After his last book, “Radiant Angel,” came out in 2015, Mr. DeMille thought about calling it quits. “My sales had flattened at a high plateau,” he says. “That’s a reason to stay in the business—and also a reason to get out. I was vacillating.” He changed agents, left his longtime publisher, and signed a three-book deal with Simon & Schuster. “I felt a lot of the old enthusiasm again,” he says.

He also invented a new character, Daniel Graham “Mac” MacCormick, a wisecracking veteran of the war in Afghanistan who runs a charter-boat business in Key West, Fla. “A lot of characters from my past books are approaching Social Security age,” Mr. DeMille says. “The magic number in Hollywood and popular fiction seems to be about 35 years old.” For insights into the mind of a character less than half his age, Mr. DeMille consulted his son, a 37-year-old screenwriter.

America is an exception among countries. It is a philosophical republic and a creedal nation. As Margaret Thatcher put it, while Europe was born from history, America was born out of ideas.[1] At its very core was the idea of limited government. That precept persisted almost universally until 1932. It did so through war and peace, prosperity and recession. It applied across all political parties and geographical regions. Then a breach occurred. A new politics emerged. It did not replace the Founders’ philosophical politics of principle. But it began to compete seriously with it.

This new politics was the politics of group identity. It started with Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal-era Democratic Party coalition of industrial workers, farmers, southern whites, northern immigrants and Catholics. Roosevelt’s forging of interest-group politics did not occur readily or easily. Historically some of the greatest supporters of limited government in America had been Democrats. They ranged from the remarkable Grover Cleveland to FDR’s nemesis Al Smith.

Roosevelt’s coalition lasted till the 1960s. Then it began to shrink as American manufacturing started to automate. Post-industrialism grew as classic industrialism declined. Public spending ballooned. New public-sector interest groups emerged. From the late 1960s onwards, the Democrats created a coalition of public-sector unions, government employees, African-Americans, the urban poor, liberal intellectuals, unmarried women and Hispanic immigrants. As this occurred, the Republican Party evolved as a philosophical party built on the abstract values of small government and cultural traditionalism.

The result today is that there are two Americas. One is committed to philosophical principle; the other to big-spending government programs. At a national level the two are pretty much evenly balanced. At the state level the differences are starker. In some parts of America, notably the Western Mountain states and Great Plains states, philosophical principle still rules.[2] Elsewhere government spending rules. The difference is not neatly defined by the difference between red states and blue states, or between coastal America and fly-over country. Philosophical America leans heavily Republican. But not all Republican-leaning states are low-tax, low-spending, limited governments. Some, though, are and in interesting ways.

The ‘middle’ ground of US policy and perspectives is a mess of graceless, cumbersome, knotty and embarrassing jerry-built legislation claiming to bridge what is an unbridgeable chasm. The conflicting truths of American life as seen by Left and Right cannot be reconciled. There is no meaningful in-between

The Complacent Class: The Self-Defeating Quest for the American Dream
by Tyler Cowen
St. Martin’s Press, 2017, 256 pages, $44.99

Asymmetric Politics: Ideological Republicans and Group Interest Democrats
by Matt Grossman and David A. Hopkins
Oxford University Press, 2016, 416 pages, $33.95

The Fractured Republic: Renewing America’s Social Contract in the Age of Individualism
by Yuval Levin
Basic Books, 2016, 272 pages, $35.99

The Working Class Republican: Ronald Reagan and the Return of Blue-Collar Conservatism
by Henry Olsen
HarperCollins, 2017, 368 pages, $49.99

The Vanishing American Adult: Our Coming-of-Age Crisis—and How to Rebuild a Culture of Self-Reliance
by Ben Sasse
St Martin’s Press, 2017, 320 pages, $55.99

White Working Class: Overcoming Class Cluelessness in America
by Joan C. Williams
Harvard Business Review, 2017, 192 pages, $34.99