Book Review: "107 Days" by Kamala Harris

The title of former Vice President and former future President Kamala Harris's new campaign memoir about her bid for the Presidency in 2024 refers to the length of her campaign, but it could just as easily be a reference to how long it takes - or seemingly takes - to read it.

There are three revelatory facts in "107 Days" that most people didn't know before this book was published.  The first is that she came to the realization that President Biden shouldn't have sought a second term.  "In retrospect, I think it was recklessness," Harris wrote. "The stakes were simply too high. This wasn't a choice that should have been left to an individual's ego, an individual's ambition. It should have been more than a personal decision."  The second is that her first choice for a running mate was Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg but she thought it would be too much to ask voters averse to identity politics to elect a ticket headed by a half-black, half-South Asian woman (with a Jewish husband) whose running mate was gay.  She deemed Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro, her second choice,  "unrealistic expectation" for the role of the Vice President and thought his Jewishness and his support for Israel may have been a turnoff for voters.   And the third revelation is that Biden White House staffers seemed to have little interest in defending her record against attacks from Republican ideologues.  But you don't need to read this book to learn all of that.  The media already reported on it.

I was going to say that the reader wouldn't learn anything beyond what I've already noted, but apparently that is not true.  I, for one, learned that Vice President Hubert Humphrey wouldn't count the votes in and certify the 1968 presidential election, in which Humphrey lost to Richard Nixon, when the electoral votes were tallied in Congress, so he let the Senate president pro tempore do it.  But did I have to hack my way through a book as revealing as a burqa just to learn that?

I'll come right out and say it: This is the most boring campaign memoir I've ever read.  It induces the worst sort of tedium - enough to make your eyes glaze over, but not enough to cure insomnia.  Harris's writing style is the sort of style you'd expect from a lawyer - emotionless - and her picayune descriptions of life on the campaign trail - her accounts of the hotels she stayed in, taking hot baths, relaxing with a chamomile tea - actually brought to mind that hilarious episode of "The Mary Tyler Moore Show" in which Ted Baxter tries to write his autobiography and documents every minute thing that happens to him or is said to him.     And then there are irrelevant personal stories the story of her mother, a medical researcher, complaining about a male co-worker walking around the lab with an obscene cell sample in a Petri dish that's one of those stories I could have done without hearing.

Kamala Harris tries to make the case for her one-hit wonder of a presidential campaign as a pretext for a possible third try (counting her failed 2019 presidential campaign which sputtered out before the 2020 Democratic primaries and caucuses began in earnest) in 2028.  Like Hillary Clinton before her, Harris deflects most if not all of the blame for her loss to Donald Trump on others.  Unlike Hillary Clinton, not everything that went wrong was her fault - after all, she inherited a Biden campaign staff more loyal to the President than to anyone else, and yes, racism and misogyny are to blame (in part) for her loss - but she still bears some responsibility, such as not directly addressing issues concerning the voters (like inflation), and her perky, cutesy-pie turns of phrases that she thought would endear herself to voters ("Trump has an enemies list, I have a to-do list.").  Plus, she kept playing that horrible Beyoncé song at her rallies (which is not worth expanding on in yet another parenthetical clause). If this book is meant for Harris to make her presidential ambitions for 2028 take off, it crashes without ever getting off the ground.

As always, the best reporting on the most recent presidential campaign, which is thus the most riveting reading, is Jonathan Martin's and Amie Parnes' "Fight" about the Harris-Trump election.  If Kamala Harris wanted a solo account of her campaign without a male perspective, she should have let Doris Kearns Goodwin produce a book about the 2024 presidential campaign.  Harris is only good at making history - not writing it. 

Book Review - "Bayou City Burning" by D. B. Borton

There are hard-boiled Philip Marlowe mystery novels, and there are plucky Nancy Drew novels.  D.B. Borton, a mystery novelist, manages to write a gripping novel that's both.

In Bayou City Burning, Borton tells a tale of the shady characters and high-rolling businessmen in 1961 Houston, then a city on the make and eager to land a contract from NASA to build a mission-control space center in the heat of President Kennedy's quest to put a man on the moon.  Harry Lark, a divorced private eye, takes on a mysterious man as a client to investigate a fact-finding mission from the government looking at Houston as a possible site for the space center, and Harry initially suspects possible corruption from local politicians.  The more he learns, the more he realizes that the Mafia is involved - a point made clear when his client, who turns out to be a mobster, ends up dead in Harry's own office.  Soon, Harry must deal with not just mob infiltration of Houston's pursuit of a NASA contract but the growing civil rights movement, which has spread into Texas like a gathering storm and has sparked violence in the form of fire bombings.

But as all this is going on, Harry's twelve-year-old daughter Dizzy, who runs a lost-and-found out of her mother's garage, gets an odd request from a little girl in the neighborhood; she wants Dizzy to find her father, believed dead in a train wreck, his mutilated remains having been buried.  The only clue Dizzy has is the little girl's Barbie doll; the little girl explains that her father sent it to her as a birthday present before he died.  Then, while Harry is hounded by mobsters interested in recovering missing cash, Dizzy finds something very interesting inside the Barbie doll . . .

Borton has a lot going on in Bayou City Burning, and she weaves her tale through a disparate array of characters that includes Houston itself, a brash, aspirational city that simmers with humidity and explodes with violent thunderstorms, its volatility reflected in the rough-and-tumble attitude of its inhabitants.  The feel is Hollywood noir, but the vibe is pure Texas, where everything is big - including the intrigue and danger. 

Borton brings a unique style to her storytelling by having Harry and Dizzy narrate the story alternatively, seamlessly melding Harry's cynical, sour accounts of his experiences with Dizzy's innocent exuberance.  Harry's descriptions of his investigation are jaded, describing a motel room as smelling of "mildew and cigarettes - that cheap motel smell like the funk of an old man who has given up bathing because his own familiar smell reassures him that he's still alive" - while Dizzy descriptions have the thrill of discovery as when she hears something inside the Barbie doll when she shakes it  - "I shook her again.  We heard the faint but distinctive tap of something small and solid against plastic."  As they grow dependent on each other while their cases converge, they grow closer than they expect to, and they begin to respect each other.  And this is not a casual read; the plot takes numerous threads and ties them together in a complex but careful way, as the pieces of the puzzle come together.

Borton based her novel on actual events in early-sixties Houston and brings that age to life vividly, showing the city in mid-metamorphosis from a sleepy backwater port town to one of the most dynamic and most important cities in America.  I'll reveal this much about how Bayou City Burning ends - Houston gets the space center and helps put a man on the moon.

Book Review: 'Occupied' by Kurt Blorstad

The German invasions of Denmark and Norway in April 1940, code-named Operation Weserübung - the first major Nazi military campaigns since the invasion of Poland seven months earlier - were the invasions that turned a regional conflict between the Third Reich and the Anglo-French alliance into a second world war.  And Kurt Blorstad's father came of age in the middle of that catalyst.

Blorstad's novel Occupied is a novel based on his father's experiences as a boy born to Norwegian parents in the United States and growing up in Norway before and during the German occupation.  It casts light on a theater of World War II less well known than the Nazi occupations of Poland and France or the fight against the Japanese in the Pacific. Trygve is a boy who goes with his mother and younger brothers to live with his maternal grandmother in the late 1930s while his father, living and working in the United States, hopes to send for them to come to America.  It starts out as a typical coming-of-age story in the Scandinavian countryside at a time when rural life there was unaffected by modernity. Trygve and his brothers Thoralf and Odd learn how to farm and fish as well as harvest peat cakes for home heating, and Trygve learns the value of gainful employment by baking bread in a small general store.  Their mother and grandmother run the family together through the birth of Trygve's sister Thelma and with help from Trygve's kindly uncle.  The contrast between the old ways of rural life in 1930s Norway and the more advanced, more urban living pattern that Trygve's father has found in America are obvious, and Blorstad's illustrations of the mundane realities of Trygve's life are in fact a study in building character strong enough to face adversity - which becomes clear when life for Trygve's family and neighbors changes the day Adolf Hitler gives the signal to the German armies lying in wait to commence Operation Weserübung.

The German occupation of Norway illustrates how Trygve and his older brother Thoralf went from being boys to being men as they worked to keep their family well-fed and free from harm, trying to stay one step ahead of German soldiers who could arrest them for the smallest transgression.  But Trtygve finds his real strength in helping Norwegian resistance fighters and spying for them on the local German military base and prison camp, taking risks in helping to protect his country while assuming greater responsibility for his family.  While you know that Trygve will survive - the story opens with Trygve in the summer of 1999 telling his tale to his own son -  you'll be left in suspense wondering how he will survive and whether his family will make it through intact.

Occupied may seem like old hat to readers of World War II novels set in other Axis-occupied countries, but there are some telling moments here.  One involves the attempt by the Germans to secure a source of "hard water" that was later revealed to be part of the Nazis' attempt to beat the Allies in the race to build an atomic bomb.  Even if you've read novels about Axis-occupied lands elsewhere, the book is fresh and revealing because of the often-overlooked Nazi occupation of Norway and how its strategic proximity to Great Britain made it an important front in the war.  Occupied is Blorstad's noble effort to to look at the war in Europe in a whole new aspect and from a whole new perspective.

Book Review: "Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton's Doomed Campaign" by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes

"After the primary loss in Michigan, Hillary needed answers from her team about what they planned to do to make sure she didn't get blindsided again.  It was hard enough running against Bernie Sanders, Donald Trump, the Republican National Committee, the FBI, the House Benghazi Committee, and the national media - plus slippery-lipped Joe Biden on any given day - without her own team screwing things up.  The one person with whom she didn't seem particularly upset: herself.  No one who drew a salary from the campaign would tell her that.  It was a self-signed death warrant to raise a question about Hillary's competence - to her or anyone else - in loyalty-obsessed Clintonworld."

Thus wrote political reporters Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes in their book "Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton's Doomed Campaign," a book that simultaneously confirms the suspicions of Hillary Clinton's political opponents and surprises them as to how right they were and how much they didn't know.  Democrats who opposed Hillary's candidacy for their party's nomination feared - and Republicans hoped - that her own liabilities would doom her presidential ambitions, but "Shattered" presents a candidate and a campaign far more flawed than anyone ever realized. 

The book makes clear that Hillary Clinton was a troubled candidate who set out to win by default.  She cornered all of the top Democratic campaign experts and donors to clear the field of challengers for the party's nomination, refused to acknowledge any Democrats who did challenge her (and played mind games with Vice President Joe Biden to discourage him from running), and failed to present a solid reason for why anyone should vote for her.  But what is really eye-opening is how the campaign unfolded.  Both Hillary Clinton and her husband Bill are depicted as being cut off from reality and vindictive toward their critics within the party, and Hillary in particular comes across as being cold and heartless toward her own staff.  Campaign staffers, meanwhile, knew she was beatable and susceptible to being defeated by Donald Trump, yet they avoided communicating their concerns to the candidate out of fear of being seen as disloyal.  Hillary was astonishingly tone-deaf to warning signs of her vulnerability, such as on her e-mail issues and suspicions that she felt "entitled" to be the 2016 Democratic presidential nominee.   She saw her problems with white working-class voters - the same voters she'd courted in the 2008 Democratic presidential primaries against Barack Obama - and made no effort to reach them, preferring instead to focus on minority voters and women.  And for all of her efforts, she failed to anticipate the rise of Bernie Sanders and how Trump would exploit the same weaknesses in Hillary's campaign that Sanders did.

"Shattered" depicts a campaign more animated by data and analytics than by actual voter outreach - so much, that entire states like Michigan and Wisconsin (which Hillary lost to Trump) were taken for granted in the general election.  Campaign manager Robby Mook tried to run an efficient, lean operation that emphasized the Democratic base rather than persuasion.  But Martin and Parnes keep coming back to Hillary as her own enemy (but not her worst).  One memorable tidbit is about how she was prepared to undermine U.S. Representative Chris Van Hollen of Maryland in his bid for the Senate when it became apparent that blacks were more likely to vote for his primary opponent, former Representative Donna Edwards, who is black, and because of the unions' ambivalence for her and their support for Van Hollen.  "Who gives a f--- about Chris Van Hollen?" she said. Hillary feared that too many union votes would help Bernie Sanders in the concurrent Maryland presidential primary.  (Van Hollen won his primary in Maryland, as did Hillary.)  But there was another reason she was ready to undermine Van Hollen; the Clintons kept a Nixon-like list of disloyal Democrats to punish for their apostasy, and Van Hollen (who was elected to the Senate) was one of their worst offenders.  This is one of many eye-opening stories, such as the preponderance of American flags at the Democratic convention to hide anti-Hillary delegates from TV cameras and concerns that Hillary was working too hard during the general election campaign when she should have been resting, opening her to concerns about her stamina.

"Shattered" isn't a perfect book, though; it downplays Democratic National Committee chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz's role in tipping the scales for Hillary (though the account of her lust for power made my jaw drop!), and the influence of third-party presidential candidates is completely overlooked; Libertarian Gary Johnson gets only one mention and Jill Stein doesn't even get that much.  But Martin and Parnes validate a lot of long-held suspicions about Hillary's deficiencies as politician and what ultimately made her unelectable.  The fly-on-the-wall accounts of campaign strategy alone are worth the time to read this page-turner.

Hillary Clinton is putting out her own campaign memoir in September 2017, with the infantine and obvious title "What Happened."  You don't need to read her memoir, because, in "Shattered," Martin and Parnes will tell you exactly . . . what happened.   

Book Review: "Death of an Assassin: The True Story of the German Murderer Who Died Defending Robert E. Lee" by Ann Marie Ackermann

A forgotten murder mystery in a small Germanic kingdom and a forgotten war between the U.S. and Mexico intersect to help bring one of the most accomplished military men in American history to prominence. That's the intriguing tale behind Ann Marie Ackermann's "Death of an Assassin," a short but gripping book mixing true crime with history.

Ackermann writes about how a beloved mayor in a small town of what is now the German state of Baden-Württemberg was shot to death in 1835 in the dead of night.  Eduard Hammer is the intrepid police magistrate assigned to the case. He gathers clues along the way of his investigation, extensively interviewing people who heard the shots and were near the location of the shooting at the time it took place. As this is happening, young Army officer Robert E. Lee struggles to balance his military career with the demands of his family. The murderer is on the loose and makes his way to America; as several residents of this small German town remain under suspicion of the yet-unsolved crime, Lee achieves successes in peacetime, such as his direction of the Army Corps of Engineers to open the river harbor in St. Louis. When war is declared against Mexico, Lee sees his chance to prove himself in battle . . . and so does the German murderer, now residing in Philadelphia's German-immigrant community. The murderer will serve in the U.S. Army and defend - and die defending - Lee's division at the siege of the Mexican city of Veracruz.

"Death of an Assassin" brilliantly weaves two diametrically opposed tales with astonishing detail. Magistrate Hammer's investigation reads like a well-paced mystery novel, with dialogue taken from a nineteenth-century scribe's transcription of the interrogations along with minute descriptions of clues and ground-breaking forensic tests. Obscure moments in American history are seen through the eyes of a murder-immigrant directly and indirectly involved in them, and the reader learns a good deal about how America developed in the 1830s and 1840s. The siege of Veracruz is vividly brought to life, as is the heroism of the soldiers and sailors who fought there. In a letter home, Lee's poignant account of a man who died under heavy fire presents him as a multi-dimensional individual of honor and humanity. Little did Lee know that the man he eulogized was the man who shot a public official back in Germany.

Ackermann brings everything full circle by showing how one of the longest cold cases in German history was solved by chance in 1872 - long after Lee's death, the end of the Civil War, and the unification of Germany - and how the assassin was proven to be the same man Lee praised in his correspondence. Without the verification of historical record, Ackermann's book could easily be fiction. The realization that it's all true is one of the many surprises and twists in a book that entertains as well as educates.

Book Review: "Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President" by Candice Millard

A forgotten U.S. President, a since-discredited physician, an insane assassin and a famous inventor whose work revolutionized the world all come together seamlessly in a tale of how unrelated people and events ultimately intersected and changed the course of American history.

Elected President of the United States in 1880, James A. Garfield was the most talented man to attain the office since Abraham Lincoln twenty years earlier, but his Presidency was sadly cut short when a deranged office seeker named Charles Guiteau shot him after having failed to secure a position in the government.  Garfield was born into poverty and worked his way up through getting himself a classical education and serving his country in the Civil War.  Between the war and his Presidency, he represented his congressional district in Ohio in the House of Representatives.  Highly intelligent and eminent qualified for the Presidency - a job he did not even want - Garfield accepted his election and sought to reform Washington.  When he was shot in July 1881, four months into his term, he survived the shooting but was infected by the unsanitary practices of his doctor, D. Willard Bliss.  Garfield died that September, two months short of his fiftieth birthday, leaving his promise unfulfilled.

Candice Millard brings that forgotten period of a American history to life and brilliantly shows how Garfield's assassination set the stage for making America a wiser and more united country in her 2011 book "Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President."  She brings us back to 1881 and introduces us to the major political players of the time and their battles over civil service reform and to the controversies in the medical field over the new and revolutionary practice of antisepsis in Europe that Americans rejected as being unnecessary and based on unfounded germophobia.  (This peculiarly American distrust of science would manifest itself in other ways later on, as with evolution and climate change.)  Though Millard's retelling of the events of 1881, heroes and villains emerge on cue as in a good historical novel.  Charles Guiteau emerges as a charlatan driven to madness by his own self-importance, whom no one took seriously enough to commit, and Vice President Chester Arthur, a political hack of the lowest order, is a character who exhibits growth and redemption in the months leading up to his assumption of the Presidency and surprises skeptics with his personal honesty as President.  The greatest hero of "Destiny Of the Republic," apart from Garfield (who maintained his dignity and grace through the seventy-nine days of suffering between his shooting and his death), is Alexander Graham Bell - the same man who invented the telephone.  Bell was spurred by the national tragedy of Garfield's shooting to invent a machine that could detect the bullet in Garfield's back, and his relentless drive for innovation and his devotion to improving people's lives with medical inventions such as an iron lung and with his efforts to help the deaf.  As a man devoted to science and innovation,and as a Scottish immigrant, Bell stands out as someone who strove for the common good in the face of public and private adversity (he lost a newborn son in 1881).

I couldn't help develop some anger, though, as I read this book.  Garfield's doctor rendered him to a premature death that common sense and openness to medical advancement could have prevented, and he cuaed the President's death by spreading germs in to his body looking for a bullet that, ultimately, didn't need to be removed.  (Bliss would only let Bell search the right side of Garfield's body with his machine; it was in the left side.)  Millard's greatest gift, aside from placing the reader back in time, is making the reader feel the same outrage that Americans must have felt then - toward Bliss, toward Guiteau - and feel the same sympathy Americans in 1881 had for Garfield's family.  The parallels between the shooting of Garfield in 1881 and the shooting of President Reagan in 1981 - Presidents getting shot by deranged men divorced from reality - leapt out at me, and I contemplated how much medical knowledge had evolved in a century.  Garfield could never have survived the more serious wound Reagan received, yet Reagan could have survived the less serious wound Garfield received - ironically, not because of advances in medical science but because of a greater appreciation of them by American doctors as a result of Garfield's own death.      

Millard's book reclaims Garfield, a forgotten President, as one of the great figures of American history.  She shows us a great man who, if not for misfortune, could have been great leader, yet his formidable character, remembered by his peers in the aftermath of his assassination, reinforced American aspirations to greatness (not like the current White House occupant).  Garfield would be memorialized by those who survived him - a 184-acre park in Chicago and a suburban town in New Jersey are named for him, for example - but this book demonstrates how the greatest memorial to Garfield is his own story of how he lived and died.   

Book Review: "Beatles '66: The Revolutionary Year" by Steve Turner

Of the nine calendar years in which the Beatles were a working band contracted to EMI, the year 1966 tends to get overlooked in favor of the numerous analyses of 1964 and the heat of American Beatlemania or of 1967 and the psychedelic musings of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band and Magical Mystery Tour.   But 1966 was more than just the end of the Beatles' moptop years and the beginning of their more ambitious phase.  It was the year in which their ambitions and their most daring work were in full bloom, and it was the year in which their work set the standard for pop for the next half century.

Steve Turner, best known for writing "A Hard Day's Write" (also known as "The Complete Beatles Songs"), which explained the genesis of every original song the Beatles recorded, thoroughly documents how the Beatles spent 1966.  He demonstrates how they spent their down time listening to various forms of music and exploring literature and art in London at at the height of the city's "swinging" period, which influenced their work, and how chance encounters with everyone from Stevie Wonder to Yoko Ono also expanded their artistic horizons.  We learn more about how John Lennon's statement about the Beatles being more popular than Jesus was slow to outrage American fundamentalists and how the difficulties of their final world tour were not limited to their time in Manila or the North American leg.  We learn about Paul McCartney's discovery of electronic music and how it portended today's EDM craze, John Lennon's gameness at trying new artistic pursuits (his role in How I Won the War, Dick Lester's sharp black-comedy war movie, is covered in great detail), and George Harrison's first meeting with Ravi Shankar after taking up the sitar . . . and how all of this led them to view rock and roll from a new perspective.  (Ringo Starr, the everyman in the group, remained thoroughly grounded and thoroughly Ringo; his unpretentiousness helped the Beatles keep one foot in the outside world.)  Several myths are also debunked, such as the reason the Beatles posed as butchers in what became an infamous U.S. album cover.              

But it's when Turner discusses Revolver, the groundbreaking album the Beatles released in 1966, that the book is at its most illuminating.  The making of songs like "Tomorrow Never Knows," with its tape loops and distorted Lennon vocal, and the writing of "Eleanor Rigby" and its vivid depictions of loneliness are discussed with the same excitement and freshness that Turner brought to explaining all the Beatles' songs in "A Hard Day's Write," and the contributions of session musicians like Alan Civil (who played the horn on "For No One") and Anil Bhagwat (who played the tabla on George's "Love You To") are better appreciated in exciting prose. 

Throughout "Beatles '66," Turner makes this pivotal year in the Beatles' career come to life; reading it makes you feel as if you are there.  By the end, you understand anew the importance of the Beatles' innovations on Revolver and the new influences they opened themselves up to at a time of rapid change (brought about not just by politics and social movements but by Bob Dylan, the Beach Boys, the Who, and other contemporaries of the Fabs).  One might think that rap and Taylor Swift have no connection to the Beatles' influence, but Turner makes it clear that the group's technical breakthroughs and personal songwriting styles continue to reverberate in pop at at time when, ironically,  rock and roll - the very genre the Beatles brought back from the dead - seems more lifeless than ever.  

One minor flaw is that Turner romanticizes the time he writes about, though this period is as well remembered for the anarchy it spawned (the Vietnam War, racial and social unrest, the rise of the American conservative moment)  as for the music it spawned.  However, at the dawn of 2017, when the world seems to be on the cusp of similar discord, reading "Beatles '66" will remind you that, even when times seem to be at their darkest, anything positive is possible. 

Book Review: "The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party" by Michael F. Holt

The short history of the Whig Party in the United States is usually presented as thus: A party is formed in the 1830s to oppose President Andrew Jackson, his Democratic Party, and their policies, but the new party's members have little to unite them other than their opposition to Jackson.  Ironically, their only success in winning the Presidency is to run two old soldiers who remind the voters of Jackson, and when a third old soldier can't defeat an appalling Democratic presidential prospect such as Franklin Pierce, the party, already divided over slavery, rolls over and dies.

Michael Holt's 1999 book "The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party" brilliantly makes it clear, over the course of a thousand pages, that nothing could be farther from the truth.  Holt uses numerous historical sources and exhaustively studies voter turnout in the states that made up the Union between 1834 and 1856 to show how the Whig Party was more than just reflexive opposition to the Democrats.  Holt presents the party, founded largely by Henry Clay and Daniel Webster, as a cohesive political organization intensely devoted to preserving republican self-government and economic vitality and opposing the Democrats' disdain for active government while advocating for a system that provided opportunity to all Americans rather than let the economy sort itself out.  Holt presents a fascinating story of principled Whig politicians in both the North and the South who strove for a strong Union and fought to balance sectional interests to keep the country together.  

Holt doesn't necessarily say that the slavery question could have been settled once and for all without a civil war, but he credits the Whigs for their efforts to avoid such a conflict.  He seems myopic, though, by suggesting that the Whigs might have prevented a war as bad as the one that actually transpired.  Historians have argued whether the United States was destined for Armageddon, as Michael Harwood once put it, in settling the slavery issue, but Holt doesn't seem to probe this question far enough.

The book's most obvious fault - an overemphasis on the inner workings of politics - is also, perversely, one of its biggest strengths.  Holt shows how differently American politics operated in the antebellum years, and the reader comes to understand how the Whigs prospered before they eventually withered.  Their basic program - low tariffs, a national bank, improved infrastructure - sustained them early on.  But Holt demonstrates how numerous issues - the war with Mexico, the struggle to craft the Compromise of 1850 that tried to handle slavery expansion territories ceded by the Mexicans, the undermining of the bonds between northern and southern Whigs over the Kansas-Nebraska Act - caused disagreements within the party.  The party's leading figures - Clay, Daniel Webster,  John Quincy Adams, Thomas Ewing, William Seward - are large players here, of course, but the roles of lesser-known Whigs like Robert Toombs, Truman Smith, and John Bell are also highlighted here.  And the party's two last Presidents - Zachary Taylor and Millard Fillmore - are reassessed as major figures of their day in their efforts to govern the nation and preserve the Union.  

Holt also describes the efforts at new Union parties and a new party around President Taylor in great detail, with  a dissection of how factors in addition to slavery - the growing irrelevance of old issues such as banking and tariffs, patronage, disputes between conservatives and moderates in state Whig organizations, the divisions caused by the rise of the anti-immigrant Know-Nothing movement - divided the party and set it on a course for extinction.  Despite the academic, dry prose of Holt's text, the central argument of why the Whig Party died - it became too out of step and too slow to realize changes in the American body politic - becomes clearer with each passing chapter.  With the two-party system in America at a greater risk of collapsing than at any time since the 1850s, this book is required reading for anyone who might want to save the dying parties . . . or figure out how to start a new one.