McCullough, Philbrick (...and a smattering of Larson)

Every once in a while I try to read something "educational". (And yes, I mean that statement to be as tongue-in-cheek as possible - reading of any sort is for the most part brain-boosting.) I'm a fiction lover to the core but lately I have been trying to spice things up with the occasional nonfic pick. Which leads to my latest comparison, David McCullough's 1776 and Nathaniel Philbrick's Mayflower.

I read 1776 last summer and pretty much adored it. (This is really high praise coming from a lady who also loved Twilight and just about anything by R.A. Salvatore.) McCullough's long been hailed as a brilliant history writer but I can't say enough about his ability to make nonfiction read like a well told story. Part of my love for the book was that it coincided with a trip a took to the east coast and reading about the Revolutionary war after visiting Mount Vernon and various parks along the Potomac really brought the book to life.

Currently I'm in the middle of Philbrick's book Mayflower: a story of courage, community and war. Having not yet finished it, I can't post a full judgment, but I can say that it doesn't quite live up to the expectations I had after reading McCullough's historical writing. The book just seems a bit drier than 1776. I'd be tempted to blame the subject matter, but in school I actually enjoyed studying Puritan times even more than early colonial stuff. For me, the biggest difference is not even to blame in Philbrick's writing, but in the simple matter of source material available. In 1776, much of the material is drawn from letters written between key players in the Revolutionary War. These personal accounts really brought vivid color to McCullough's writing. Obviously there are fewer primary sources of this nature to rely on for narrating the events of Plymouth plantation - most of his sources are histories written by settlers and lack personal details - so Philbrick's story seems more bland. (Maybe my view will change if I take a trip out to Cape Cod this summer....)

To throw another log on the proverbial fire, I'm also drawn to toss Devil in the White City by Erik Larson into the mix. Covering an even later era, the richness of detail brings further depth and action to the account so that it hardly reads like a nonfiction book. The trend I am seeing is that across these three centuries of American History the farther back authors delve, the less primary source material they have to draw from and (to me at least) the drier their books become. Has anyone else noticed this with other historical works? Are there any pre-colonial books that rely heavily on first-person source material?

Regardless, I still find that all three eras are fascinating to learn about. Philbrick's book may not be as easy to read as McCullough's or Larson's but it's not without it's merits and I look forward to providing a more adequate review when I finish.

I've never read The Devil in the White City but my wife who is nuts for true crime, especially serial/mass murders, did. She read every other chapter.

1776 is fabulous, though I must confess to having read only half of it so far. My TBR pile kind of flowed over, and 1776 got buried. So often, the history we "know best" comes to seem somehow inevitable and unreal. 1776 is a great antidote, because we can see how anxious Washington and his men and supporters generally must have been. He was not actually a great general, at least when the war started. What he did do was learn from his mistakes and not come down so hard on himself for making them that it made him afraid to keep trying.

I would agree that first-person source material is probably the most important key to writing nonfiction as gripping as a novel (assuming the writer doesn't start playing fast-and-loose with the facts, which can also spice up a history book, but at the expense of the nonfiction part). But there's a surprising amount of first-person source material for times surprisingly distant from our own. Colonial America isn't my time period, but I recently wrote an article about Hildegard of Bingen, a twelfth century nun and visionary. Many of her letters and writings are extant, not only describing her visions, but also preserving her rather sharp voice - she dared to scold popes and emperors! A superb biography of her is Hildegard of Bingen: the Woman of Her Age by Fiona Maddocks.

I also think it's possible to write exciting books about history even without primary source material that preserves a specific person's voice. Cultures change a lot, but people really haven't changed much over the millennia. Too many history books present the dates and dry facts of events that must have been profoundly emotional and meaningful for the people who lived through them. Providing enough context for a reader to imagine himself or herself in a historical situation involves us in a way that a recitation of dates and logistics simply can't. It helps if, not just the author, but the reader too makes a point of visualizing what happened and imagining what it would be like to live through certain situations. Sometimes, though, it seems like history writers deliberately shy away from providing the kind of textured context that helps a reader do that. I'm sure they do it in the interest of "objectivity," but it's a distortion to present history as though the people who made it had no feelings. I'm not saying writers (or readers) should make unwarranted assumptions about how people felt - we can't do that when they left no record behind to say how they felt. But it's clear, for example, that the men and women who stormed the Bastille during the French Revolution were feeling something! Inviting the reader to identify with them can be as simple as taking care to present the facts in careful, precise chronological order.

While I have not read any of the above mentioned I did read Philbrick's In THe Heart Of THe Sea which I thought was a fabulous retelling of the true story that Herman Melville based Moby Dick upon.

I hope I didn't come across too harsh on Philbrick. The book is definitely getting better as it goes along and I have heard plenty of good things about In the Heart of the Sea. He is a very talented writer, and if I remember correctly 1776 took some time to get into as well.

I think margad makes a great point about the humanistic element to nonfiction that makes it more readable. I liked 1776 for the reasons pointed out and now that I'm more in the heart of Mayflower, I'm realizing that part of why it's not as enjoyable is the simple fact that the people are not quite as likeable. I think the "heroes" of the revolution were much more easy to relate to than the players in the early Plymouth settlement but it's mostly because I disagree much more with the actions of some of the Pilgrims and the decisions that were made to preserve the colony.

There's a great article in this week's New Yorker magazine (March 24, 2008) about distinctions between history and fiction and the sometimes (always?) blurred lines between the two. It's called "Just the Facts, Ma'am" and is by Jill Lepore, and is not only insightful but also really funny.

She points out that historians are often biased, and have at various times in the past felt free to simply make things up. In one of the funniest sections, she quotes from Jane Austen's parody (titled "The History of England from the Reign of Henry the 4th to the Death of Charles the 1st, by a Partial, Prejudiced & Ignorant Historian") of Oliver Goldsmith's History of England.

Of course, history is indispensable. But so is fiction, in my view and in Ms. Lepore's. Not to mention Jane Austen's.

I'll have to track down that article as it's a topic I'm pretty interested in. I really like reading what I call "dramatic nonfiction" - history with a narrative style - and I wonder a lot about how much the author's perspective can influence the facts. Obviously with every book, the author must choose which facts and accounts to include and which ones to omit and also in order to give the history some color it's nice when the language is more descriptive but this usually means including some type of bias.

On the one hand I want to feel like I'm reading a true account, but on the flip side if it was "just the facts" I know I would find it overly boring. And then there's the whole recent issue of memoirs - blurring the lines between fiction and non more than anything.

I don't think it's possible to write unbiased history. The best history writers strive to be as unbiased as possible, but all historians have subconscious biases to at least some extent. If they try to overcome these by bending over backwards to take other perspectives into account, they are often accused of being biased in the other direction! And then, they have to rely on sources which are often extremely biased.

That's why it's sometimes hard for me to take people seriously when they complain about a novel being inaccurate. There's a lot of controversy about Philippa Gregory's The Other Boleyn Girl, largely, I suspect, because some readers don't care for the portrayal of Anne Boleyn as a schemer who slept around, having read other novels which portray her far more sympathetically. Frankly, we don't really know, at this remove from the events, what Anne's personality was like. It's possible she was completely innocent of the charges made against her that led to her execution, because it is clear that Henry VIII wanted to get rid of her. On the other hand, just because he had a motivation to make up charges doesn't necessarily mean Anne was a complete innocent. I suspect the truth was somewhere in between, and I found the novel worthwhile because it did show a different possible interpretation of the history.

On the other hand, I just read that the current HBO miniseries about Henry VIII does take what I consider to be unforgiveable liberties with historical fact. They've got the wrong sister of his marrying the king of the wrong country, because they were afraid viewers would get confused because his sister and daughter were both named Mary, etc.

Are there any pre-colonial books that rely heavily on first-person source material?

You might like The Island at the Center of the World it's about New York (New Amsterdam) from some newly translated material.

And really how can any history NOT be biased? A story is made up of what is left in/left out and the words chosen so it's always going to reflect the perspective of the author. That's what makes it fun no?

Another fun book is Big Chief Elizabeth about the Roanoke colony. Okay maybe not 'fun' but riveting/interesting in the sense that it shows that politics are basically the same as 200-300 years ago. It's quite appalling actually.