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ivyficI just finished The Lost City of Z, which is a fantastic book. I highly recommend it. It's the story of Percy Fawcett, a famous Amazonian explorer who disappeared, with his son, on an expedition into the Amazon in 1925. The book captures the romance of such exploration, but also the absolutely horrific conditions the explorers met. It gives such a vivid description of the jungle that I'd walk around with this creeping sense of unease, and then realize it was because of the book.
It also has a heartbreaking family drama--Percy took his oldest son on the trip, and left behind his youngest. You would think Brian Fawcett would thank his lucky stars he avoided the fatal mission, but he instead felt that rejection by his father the rest of his life. My only quarrel with the book is that, though it gets off to a roaring start, it ends with kind of a whimper. We don't know what happened to Fawcett, so, this being nonfiction, you're left with a question more than a resolution.
Of course, it left me with a yen to reread 1491, another great book, which details pre-Columbian North and South American civilizations. Now if I could only find my copy...
I finished this at work on a day when I hadn't brought a backup book (there were about fifty pages of notes, so I didn't realize how near I was to the end). Lack of book is not a problem at my office, so I picked up one I thought would hold me til I got home: Plunkitt of Tammany Hall.
George Washington Plunkitt was a politicdian in New York's notoriously corrupt political machine, Tammany Hall. This book (only 90 pages long) is a bunch of essays of his, originally published in 1905. And by "essays" I mean extemporaneous speeches he gave from a boot black stand to a reporter. The first one is called "Honest Graft and Dishonest Graft."
Plunkitt only had three years of schooling, and the essays are written in a vernacular that makes you hear the thickness of his accent. The first impression you get reading it is that it is appalling that a public official would think like this.
For example, in that first essay, he talks about how he never shook anybody down, but if, say, he knew the city was going to build a park in an area, and he went and bought up land there, then sold it at a profit when the plans were announced, that's perfectly honest. He also talks about how his absolutely most important job is getting jobs for his constituents (and by "constituents" we mean "contributors to Tammany Hall"). For him, this meant literally going to the water commision and demanding that the new job that opened go to one of his.
And it's just about here reading this that you realize this is still how politics works. They don't say that's how it is, but that's how it is. He has a whole speech in here about how you don't win elections with a college education, you win them by knowing the people, and that's still true.
You also realize why Tammany Hall was in power so long. Think about it--they gave New York many of its defining features. The park system. George Washington Bridge. (Both sponsored by Plunkitt himself.) Consolidation (when the burroughs of NY became part of the city proper). The subway system. They stayed in power despite everyone knowing they were corrupt because, as Plunkett says, they were "of the people and near the people." Plunkitt talks at length about how he always made sure to go to scenes of fires to pay for a hotel room and some clothes for the newly homeless families, about providing opportunities for advancement for young men, giving wedding gifts to poor couples--all in the name of votes, of course. He was the person you could go to if you lost your job, who would fix it for you. He routinely bailed drunks out of jail. Because he knew that winning the janitors' votes was more important than winning the bankers'. And it's not surprising that for the city's many, many poor, they'd rather have politicians who were corrupt but looked out for them than honest upper crust reformers.
(He also goes on and on about how civil service reform is driving young men to suicide. I've never really thought about the civil service exam seriously before, but it was clearly a way to keep corrupt politicians from filling government positions with their friends. But it was also a way to keep government positions in the hands of the rich and well-educated. No wonder Plunkitt hated it. He also hated Albany with burning passion, but that's another story.)
I just have to quote some of these things, because they are hilarious:
It also has a heartbreaking family drama--Percy took his oldest son on the trip, and left behind his youngest. You would think Brian Fawcett would thank his lucky stars he avoided the fatal mission, but he instead felt that rejection by his father the rest of his life. My only quarrel with the book is that, though it gets off to a roaring start, it ends with kind of a whimper. We don't know what happened to Fawcett, so, this being nonfiction, you're left with a question more than a resolution.
Of course, it left me with a yen to reread 1491, another great book, which details pre-Columbian North and South American civilizations. Now if I could only find my copy...
I finished this at work on a day when I hadn't brought a backup book (there were about fifty pages of notes, so I didn't realize how near I was to the end). Lack of book is not a problem at my office, so I picked up one I thought would hold me til I got home: Plunkitt of Tammany Hall.
George Washington Plunkitt was a politicdian in New York's notoriously corrupt political machine, Tammany Hall. This book (only 90 pages long) is a bunch of essays of his, originally published in 1905. And by "essays" I mean extemporaneous speeches he gave from a boot black stand to a reporter. The first one is called "Honest Graft and Dishonest Graft."
Plunkitt only had three years of schooling, and the essays are written in a vernacular that makes you hear the thickness of his accent. The first impression you get reading it is that it is appalling that a public official would think like this.
For example, in that first essay, he talks about how he never shook anybody down, but if, say, he knew the city was going to build a park in an area, and he went and bought up land there, then sold it at a profit when the plans were announced, that's perfectly honest. He also talks about how his absolutely most important job is getting jobs for his constituents (and by "constituents" we mean "contributors to Tammany Hall"). For him, this meant literally going to the water commision and demanding that the new job that opened go to one of his.
And it's just about here reading this that you realize this is still how politics works. They don't say that's how it is, but that's how it is. He has a whole speech in here about how you don't win elections with a college education, you win them by knowing the people, and that's still true.
You also realize why Tammany Hall was in power so long. Think about it--they gave New York many of its defining features. The park system. George Washington Bridge. (Both sponsored by Plunkitt himself.) Consolidation (when the burroughs of NY became part of the city proper). The subway system. They stayed in power despite everyone knowing they were corrupt because, as Plunkett says, they were "of the people and near the people." Plunkitt talks at length about how he always made sure to go to scenes of fires to pay for a hotel room and some clothes for the newly homeless families, about providing opportunities for advancement for young men, giving wedding gifts to poor couples--all in the name of votes, of course. He was the person you could go to if you lost your job, who would fix it for you. He routinely bailed drunks out of jail. Because he knew that winning the janitors' votes was more important than winning the bankers'. And it's not surprising that for the city's many, many poor, they'd rather have politicians who were corrupt but looked out for them than honest upper crust reformers.
(He also goes on and on about how civil service reform is driving young men to suicide. I've never really thought about the civil service exam seriously before, but it was clearly a way to keep corrupt politicians from filling government positions with their friends. But it was also a way to keep government positions in the hands of the rich and well-educated. No wonder Plunkitt hated it. He also hated Albany with burning passion, but that's another story.)
I just have to quote some of these things, because they are hilarious:
"A Brooklynite is a natural-born hayseed, and can never become a real New Yorker. He can't be trained into it. Consolidation didn't make him a New Yorker, and nothin' on earth can....And why? Because Brooklyn don't seem to be like any other place on earth. Once let a man grow up amidst Brooklyn's cobblestones, with the odor of Newton Creek and Gowanus Canal ever in his nostrils, and there's no place in the world for him except Brooklyn."
[on state supreme court nominations] "Now I ain't sayin' that we sell nominations. That's a different thing altogether. There's no auction and no regular biddin'. The man is picked out and somehow he gets to understand what's expected of him in the way of a contribution, and he ponies up--all from gratitude to the organization that honored him, see?"
"There's only one way to hold a district: you must study human nature and act accordin'. You can't study human nature in books. Books is a hindrance more than anything else. If you have been to college, so much the worse for you. You'll have to unlearn all you learned before you can get right down to human nature...What tells in holdin' your grip on your district is to go right down among the poor families and help them in the different ways they need help....It's philanthropy, but it's politics, too--mighty good politics."