Recent Reading

A few of the books picked up in the last month or so:

Garry Wills, Henry Adams and the Making of America (a book without a subtitle!). Garry Wills is a fine writer, certainly in the same stylistic rank as Adams. The title seems at bit a first curious. After all, Henry Adams was born in 1838, and had little to do with the "Making of America" normally presented in elementary school pageants or multi-part PBS epics. This book next seems to be an appreciation of Adams' 2700-page (Library of America edition) history of the period from 1800 to 1817. It can be viewed also as a precis of the history of the United States from 1800 to 1817, a period that is usually represented, rather than explained, by a few episodes: the Louisiana Purchase, Lewis and Clarke, the Star Spangled Banner, the Battle of New Orleans; but a period that is much more easily understood, as presented in this book, in light of the Napoleonic wars. The book can be seen as an intellectual history of Adams, showing how his ideas about 1800-1817 were based on his experience during the Civil War; and it can also be seen as a factual corrective to Adams' elegant but impressionistic Education. But in retrospect, the book is really about Henry Adams and the making of "America": the development and subsequent interpretation of Adams' ideas; the development of "history" as a discipline; and (ultimately) the arguments that continue today about original intent and the political significance of history in the United States.

Nandan Nilekani, Imagining India: Ideas for the New Century (I read the Indian edition, rather than the as-yet unpublished American edition referenced – the subtitle for the American edition is "The Idea of a Renewed Nation"). Nilekani's book reads like an extended Thomas Friedman essay on the development and future of India. In some ways, it's reportage – many quotes from the elite of India, especially the IT-inspired group who hope to pull India out of the 19^th century into the 21^st. In other ways, it's advocacy. For someone who's not Indian, much of the discussion lacked context. The voice seems a bit odd; unlike Friedman, Nilekani is not a reporter, and the mixture of reportage ("When [Goplalswami] tells me of his technology-aided solutions to stop box-stuffing, I cannot miss the twinkle in his eye") and advocacy jars. The combination is not always appealing to this reader, and the book feels over-long; still, anyone who's a reader, who does business in India, should read this book. (The American edition is 528 pages, the Indian edition 532 plus front matter; this, plus the different subtitle leads one to believe that the book will be somewhat different in the new edition.)