David Liss. The
Whiskey Rebellion. Two narrators alternate until their stories come
together. Ethan Saunders, who had been a
very successful spy for General Washington until he was unjustly accused of
treason just before the end of the war, is busy drinking himself to death in
Philadelphia, while Joan Maycott, a young New York woman, accompanies her carpenter
husband to land they thought they had bought near Pittsburg. It was a swindle by a financier named William
Duer. The Maycott’s only had a lease,
and it required quarterly payments in a back country where cash was rare. Nevertheless the Maycott’s, with the help of
neighbors in a similar situation, made a success of their uncleared land,
principally by developing a better formula for making rye whiskey. When Alexander Hamilton attempted to fund his
Bank of the United States by imposing an excise tax on whiskey, Duer’s agent
for collecting lease payments was appointed tax collector and tried to use his
position to take back the leaseholds and prevent competition with the whiskey
he was making on his own estate. The
agent kills Maycott’s husband and accuses her of the murder. Maycott goes to confront the agent and finds
that one of his own men has killed him.
She scoops up the agent’s money and flees to the office of a lawyer in
Pittsburg. She sells her lease to the
lawyer and conspires with some of her neighbors to get revenge on Hamilton. She next turns up in Philadelphia with a
scheme to break the Bank of the United States.
Meanwhile, Saunders attempts to protect the woman he was to marry, until
he was disgraced. She had married a
financier who is part of Duer’s plot to corner the market in 6% bonds and take
over Hamilton’s bank. The ins and outs
of the various plots make exciting reading.
Meanwhile the principal male characters are consuming unimaginable
amounts of alcohol. Liss manages to give
us a lot of the history of finance in 1790s America and tell a very good story
without bending that history too much.
January 2013
.Matthew Pearl. The
Technologist. The first graduating
class from MIT in 1868 is the vehicle Pearl uses to tell a tale of scientific
terrorism in Boston. It’s exciting, and
the historical tidbits are interesting, but the science behind the acts of
terrorism is more than just a stretch.
As he did in the Dante Club,
where he had Longfellow assisted by James Russell Lowell and Oliver Wendell
Holmes, searching for a serial killer, Pearl makes 19th C Boston come
alive. Sometimes you don’t want a novel
to end, but not this time. It could have
been cut by as much as a third. January
2013
Asne Seierstad. The
Bookseller of Kabul. The author,
a Norwegian journalist, spent six weeks embedded with Northern Alliance
commandos in Afghanistan before moving
on to Kabul. In Kabul, she met an Afghan
businessman whom she calls Sultan Khan and eventually asked if she could move
into his household to collect data for a book on life in Afghanistan. Surprisingly he said “yes,” and she lived
with him and his family for four months.
The stories of family life, shopping in a burka, courtship, marriage,
pilgrimage, crime and punishment and Sultan’sd book and postcard business are
well-told and fascinating. The author
spends a lot of time on Sultan’s role as head of the family, and how he
tramples over his wives and children. The first thing I took away from this
book was that if you are a woman, you don’t want to be an Afghan. The second this is that if you are a man, you
don’t want to be an Afghan. January 2013
Daniel Silva. Prince
of Fire. This may be the last mission for Mossad agent
Gabriel Allon, alias Mario Delvecchio.
He had been undercover in Venice for many years working as an art
restorer and is currently inactive and off the payroll. When he is outed by one of Arafat’s agents,
his time in Venice must come to an end. There’s a good bit of back story here
as Gabriel hunts a third generation terrorist under deep cover in France as a
distinguished archeologist. The action
story is thrilling, but there is more. Silva provides his own sense of the conflicts, dreams and
sadness that have defined Arab/Israeli relations for decades. Towards the end
of the book Allon has a conversation with his mentor, Shamron, about the way
Arabs within the borders of the newly partitioned Israel were dealt with in
1948. Little has changed in the
intervening 60 years. January 2013
No comments:
Post a Comment