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doctormabuse's review
adventurous
emotional
funny
informative
inspiring
reflective
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.5
lpm100's review
adventurous
informative
inspiring
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
5.0
Chesapeake
James Michener
5/5 stars
"The weight of 4 centuries of history, hidden in plain sight"
******
It's really easy to forget what a large place the United States is, and what a protracted process the settlement and building of a nation was.
Easily enough to fill several very large books about it. (This is the 4th James Michener book that I have read about said topic--the other three being "Alaska,"/ "Centennial,"/ "Hawaii.". And the book "Texas" is still sitting on the shelf.)
It has been said that Michener had an army of researchers working for him, and that does make sense because it's hard to imagine that somebody could write books with this much local color and detail working under his own steam.
Even though this book did encompass the period of all of the major events on what became the United States, Michener seems to deliberately sidestep certain things.
The assassination of MLK and the ensuing riots are given short shrift. (I think the book skips over 1967 to 1976). Ditto for the Civil War.
I have tried to pick 25 points that were the most interesting from the book. 1 point every 34.6 pages.
*******
Acquired information:
1. The United States is something that grew organically and the formation of a government was secondary to bunch of people living and trading in a matter of fact way.
a. Nobody these days thinks about moving from one state to another as defecting, but in those days.... people could talk about blaming everything on those "damned Virginians," etc.
b. There were several generations before there was a single road, let alone a currency.(All was done by barter).
It's also amazing how much people can accomplish by the simple task of self-organization and without the government putting their grubby mits into it the mix.
2. It's amazing how theocratic the character of the country was--these guys had nothing on the Taliban.
Can you imagine somebody being sentenced to be whipped or hung because of being a Quaker? Can you imagine somebody setting up a proprietorship (which was later to become a state) as a way to create a refuge for Catholics? The ducking stool?
3.
a. The religious movements of one age are the literary entertainment of the next. (Quakers were a Big Thing once upon a time, but who has even met one in modern times?)
b. It also seems to be a small matter to find a bunch of idiots who are willing to throw their lives away for any reason. (Again, as in the case of these quakers- who didn't even survive as a religious movement, for that matter).
c. A lot of dimwits will appropriate things from a mythical time period that they don't really even understand. (thee/ thy/ thou/ thine are all specific cases / have correct uses. And the "spiritual leader" of the church spoke Aramaic, not Old english. But don't tell that to the Quakers! The bumpkinish, simple, mildly aggravating Quakers.)
4. The Indians, even though they had a rough go of things, were not all helpless victims. Some of them were peaceful and passive, and some were a lot more warlike. Settlers could not sort out the difference, so they just killed them all.
It's also amazing that they were on the North American continent for thousands of years and they never thought to invent a sail.
5. White trash and baby daddies have been with us for a very long time. (The Turlocks!)
6. Pirates make for a lot of film fighter, but they were (and are) emphatically not good things/people.
7. Slavery in Haiti was much worse than it was in the States. The average slave there only lived for one year.
8. (p.496): "Black leaders sold their followers for baubles; Arabs chanting the Quran organized the marches; Christians intent on saving souls managed the barracoons; renegade captains transported the slaves in proscribe ships; and in Cuba pariah dealers risk buying them on the chance that they could be smuggled into the southern states, where importation of New slaves was forbidden." (No wonder Arabs just like black people so much; their contact with them was mostly as slaves. A comment slur that they have for black people is "slave.")
9. The mortality rates for blacks brought into slavery were brutal (27 prime age blacks and 119 infants and children started a 60 day march to the shipping port; 25 prime age survived and 41 infants and children. On the ship, 431 out of 517 survived)
10. Even Jesuit priests were involved in the slave trade.
11. The conditions for slavery were hugely variable both within and between countries. For example: (p.518) "Portuguese men found their wives in the slave population, and a curious, strong and viable society developed. Slaves were slaves and were treated as such until they produced beautiful daughters; then suddenly they became the parents of the bride. At 14 the master's son was giving his own slave, the prettiest black woman of 18 on the plantation, and it became her pleasurable task to introduce the lad into an essential meaning of slavery."
12. The Black American English is actually a mix of words from field hand English and gentleman's English (and I'm impressed that Michener even noticed something like this), and he gives a mechanism by which it could have happened (p.585): field hands marrying house slaves.
13. If you have forgotten since high school (if you ever knew): the economic setup of the northern cities versus the South was completely different, and that alone is enough to explain the civil war. Slavery was an impelling factor, but not the major / sole factor.
14. Antebellum Southern society in this book was composed of: planter class (that owned a lot of slaves), the large middle (a few of which owned only one or two), and white trash swamp dwellers (who owned none, but participated in slave tracking and generally hated blacks). The Great Potato Famine made an infusion of Irish.
(p.603): "These were the poor white trash. There were 41 Turlock scattered about Patamoke and no one could unscramble the relationships that existed among them."
15. (p.697, 688, 693) Even as late as the 20th century, there was no clear concept of interstate trade. ("... He would telegraph the governor of maryland, requesting armed Force to repulse The Virginian invaders.") people from different states are actually battling and killing each other for dredging rights.
16. (p.646) The moulting of a crab takes about 3 hours and 20 minutes; regrowing of his shell takes another 5 hours from start to finish.
17. (p.678) People have been noticing that black people can't swim for a very long time. At least a century ago.
18. Jews were not allowed to leave Germany in the events leading up to the second world war unless they paid ransom money - - which the Germans defined as "educational reimbursement."
19. Quakers were instrumental in raising $1 million to purchase the freedom of 40,000 Jews (p.721), but only 25,000 were saved because they could not find a country to accept the other 15,000.
20. When people talk about white trash inbreeding, it may not be just a joke. (p.693: "Turlock girls had a habit of running off with Turlock men."; p.729: "For one thing, he had married his full cousin... Fatal inbreeding head encouraged family weaknesses to multiply")
21. Marshes are filled with rubbish so as to reclaim the land. Things are built atop the rubbish. (p.780)
22. Michener has really done his homework. He picks up on the conflict between gradualist practical black men who believed in trades and saw a future in the south (such as Booker T. Washington) and more academic/radical types they wanted to go out and protest their way the economic prosperity (p.789) and solve the "equality of public accommodation" problem. He also clues into the high rate of fatherless homes.
23. The community activist is at least half a century old. (p.791: "His two years of wandering had not improved his chances for employment, for he had mastered no trade nor improved his education in any specific field.... He had returned home prepared for only one job: to agitate the minds of Black's younger than he and to direct them in the analysis of their community.")
24. Negro Logic (p.793): Let's burn down everything we own (and don't have the wherewithal to rebuild), and then wonder why there are no customers to provide us jobs!
25. An entire island can disappear with a storm. And the events of this book happened over an area about 144 mi². About the size of Detroit.
*******
Quotes:
(p.329): "Society must be a compromise between new, untested men, who want to destroy old patterns and old, tried men, who tend to cling too long to the patterns we're trying to protect."
(p.460): "Geese is just like men. When their minds get fixed on ass, caution goes out the window, and come next week we're going to knock down enough careless geese to feed us through July."
(p.519): "... most Nations have at one time or other both practiced and condoned slavery."
(p.769): "The quality of any human life is determined by the differential experiences which impinge upon it."
(p.826): ".... that is the risk and reward which comes from sending generations of intelligent young men to do it in alien lands: when they return they see their homeland clearly. "
(p.844): "Man's got only three obligations, really. Feed his fambly. Train his dog. Take care of his gun. You do them jobs properly, you ain't got no worries about such things as mortgages and cancer in the tax collector. You take care of the gun, God takes care of the mortgage."
Verdict: Recommended.
Vocabulary
*******
gibbets
cutpurse
clement
appurtenances
shallop
cupidity
scrimshaw
penurious
ketch
toothsome
palatinate
roanoke (small "r")
werowance (by p.184. an Indian chief of Virginia or Maryland.)
*
adze
sawyer
trunnel
keelson
scantlings
jib boom
scarph
blowsy
shrive
summum bonum
pinnace
snow (a type of ship)
unprepossessing
inglenook
ducking stool
sacque
bombazine
dimity
excrescence
spar
luff
wallow
belaying pin
teredos
fearnought
frieze
Osnaburg
*
burnt hartshorn (p.312)
advowson
stock (article of clothing, early form of tie)
canaille
hogshead (cask, 63 gallons)
ordnance (≠ordinance)
tussock
doughty
widow's walk
chatelaine
livery
gimbaled
ecru
reach-and-beat
Fugitive Slave Act (1850)
peroration
malamute
factotum
Majordomo
eplithalamium
skipjack
aprowl
shanghaied
estuary
aprowl
isohaline
spat (a young bivalve (such as an oyster))
sook (female crab)
cloaca (archaic word for "sewer")
drayman (p.692)
*
loblolly
torpid
waterman/watermen≠pirate, sailor
beat a tattoo
mastoiditis
harrows
repple depple
prosaic
palisade
nutria
subvention
contumely
rapscallion
davit/davit system
halyard
dacron
Avernus
Dutch door
klaxon greeting (=blowing your horn)
James Michener
5/5 stars
"The weight of 4 centuries of history, hidden in plain sight"
******
It's really easy to forget what a large place the United States is, and what a protracted process the settlement and building of a nation was.
Easily enough to fill several very large books about it. (This is the 4th James Michener book that I have read about said topic--the other three being "Alaska,"/ "Centennial,"/ "Hawaii.". And the book "Texas" is still sitting on the shelf.)
It has been said that Michener had an army of researchers working for him, and that does make sense because it's hard to imagine that somebody could write books with this much local color and detail working under his own steam.
Even though this book did encompass the period of all of the major events on what became the United States, Michener seems to deliberately sidestep certain things.
The assassination of MLK and the ensuing riots are given short shrift. (I think the book skips over 1967 to 1976). Ditto for the Civil War.
I have tried to pick 25 points that were the most interesting from the book. 1 point every 34.6 pages.
*******
Acquired information:
1. The United States is something that grew organically and the formation of a government was secondary to bunch of people living and trading in a matter of fact way.
a. Nobody these days thinks about moving from one state to another as defecting, but in those days.... people could talk about blaming everything on those "damned Virginians," etc.
b. There were several generations before there was a single road, let alone a currency.(All was done by barter).
It's also amazing how much people can accomplish by the simple task of self-organization and without the government putting their grubby mits into it the mix.
2. It's amazing how theocratic the character of the country was--these guys had nothing on the Taliban.
Can you imagine somebody being sentenced to be whipped or hung because of being a Quaker? Can you imagine somebody setting up a proprietorship (which was later to become a state) as a way to create a refuge for Catholics? The ducking stool?
3.
a. The religious movements of one age are the literary entertainment of the next. (Quakers were a Big Thing once upon a time, but who has even met one in modern times?)
b. It also seems to be a small matter to find a bunch of idiots who are willing to throw their lives away for any reason. (Again, as in the case of these quakers- who didn't even survive as a religious movement, for that matter).
c. A lot of dimwits will appropriate things from a mythical time period that they don't really even understand. (thee/ thy/ thou/ thine are all specific cases / have correct uses. And the "spiritual leader" of the church spoke Aramaic, not Old english. But don't tell that to the Quakers! The bumpkinish, simple, mildly aggravating Quakers.)
4. The Indians, even though they had a rough go of things, were not all helpless victims. Some of them were peaceful and passive, and some were a lot more warlike. Settlers could not sort out the difference, so they just killed them all.
It's also amazing that they were on the North American continent for thousands of years and they never thought to invent a sail.
5. White trash and baby daddies have been with us for a very long time. (The Turlocks!)
6. Pirates make for a lot of film fighter, but they were (and are) emphatically not good things/people.
7. Slavery in Haiti was much worse than it was in the States. The average slave there only lived for one year.
8. (p.496): "Black leaders sold their followers for baubles; Arabs chanting the Quran organized the marches; Christians intent on saving souls managed the barracoons; renegade captains transported the slaves in proscribe ships; and in Cuba pariah dealers risk buying them on the chance that they could be smuggled into the southern states, where importation of New slaves was forbidden." (No wonder Arabs just like black people so much; their contact with them was mostly as slaves. A comment slur that they have for black people is "slave.")
9. The mortality rates for blacks brought into slavery were brutal (27 prime age blacks and 119 infants and children started a 60 day march to the shipping port; 25 prime age survived and 41 infants and children. On the ship, 431 out of 517 survived)
10. Even Jesuit priests were involved in the slave trade.
11. The conditions for slavery were hugely variable both within and between countries. For example: (p.518) "Portuguese men found their wives in the slave population, and a curious, strong and viable society developed. Slaves were slaves and were treated as such until they produced beautiful daughters; then suddenly they became the parents of the bride. At 14 the master's son was giving his own slave, the prettiest black woman of 18 on the plantation, and it became her pleasurable task to introduce the lad into an essential meaning of slavery."
12. The Black American English is actually a mix of words from field hand English and gentleman's English (and I'm impressed that Michener even noticed something like this), and he gives a mechanism by which it could have happened (p.585): field hands marrying house slaves.
13. If you have forgotten since high school (if you ever knew): the economic setup of the northern cities versus the South was completely different, and that alone is enough to explain the civil war. Slavery was an impelling factor, but not the major / sole factor.
14. Antebellum Southern society in this book was composed of: planter class (that owned a lot of slaves), the large middle (a few of which owned only one or two), and white trash swamp dwellers (who owned none, but participated in slave tracking and generally hated blacks). The Great Potato Famine made an infusion of Irish.
(p.603): "These were the poor white trash. There were 41 Turlock scattered about Patamoke and no one could unscramble the relationships that existed among them."
15. (p.697, 688, 693) Even as late as the 20th century, there was no clear concept of interstate trade. ("... He would telegraph the governor of maryland, requesting armed Force to repulse The Virginian invaders.") people from different states are actually battling and killing each other for dredging rights.
16. (p.646) The moulting of a crab takes about 3 hours and 20 minutes; regrowing of his shell takes another 5 hours from start to finish.
17. (p.678) People have been noticing that black people can't swim for a very long time. At least a century ago.
18. Jews were not allowed to leave Germany in the events leading up to the second world war unless they paid ransom money - - which the Germans defined as "educational reimbursement."
19. Quakers were instrumental in raising $1 million to purchase the freedom of 40,000 Jews (p.721), but only 25,000 were saved because they could not find a country to accept the other 15,000.
20. When people talk about white trash inbreeding, it may not be just a joke. (p.693: "Turlock girls had a habit of running off with Turlock men."; p.729: "For one thing, he had married his full cousin... Fatal inbreeding head encouraged family weaknesses to multiply")
21. Marshes are filled with rubbish so as to reclaim the land. Things are built atop the rubbish. (p.780)
22. Michener has really done his homework. He picks up on the conflict between gradualist practical black men who believed in trades and saw a future in the south (such as Booker T. Washington) and more academic/radical types they wanted to go out and protest their way the economic prosperity (p.789) and solve the "equality of public accommodation" problem. He also clues into the high rate of fatherless homes.
23. The community activist is at least half a century old. (p.791: "His two years of wandering had not improved his chances for employment, for he had mastered no trade nor improved his education in any specific field.... He had returned home prepared for only one job: to agitate the minds of Black's younger than he and to direct them in the analysis of their community.")
24. Negro Logic (p.793): Let's burn down everything we own (and don't have the wherewithal to rebuild), and then wonder why there are no customers to provide us jobs!
25. An entire island can disappear with a storm. And the events of this book happened over an area about 144 mi². About the size of Detroit.
*******
Quotes:
(p.329): "Society must be a compromise between new, untested men, who want to destroy old patterns and old, tried men, who tend to cling too long to the patterns we're trying to protect."
(p.460): "Geese is just like men. When their minds get fixed on ass, caution goes out the window, and come next week we're going to knock down enough careless geese to feed us through July."
(p.519): "... most Nations have at one time or other both practiced and condoned slavery."
(p.769): "The quality of any human life is determined by the differential experiences which impinge upon it."
(p.826): ".... that is the risk and reward which comes from sending generations of intelligent young men to do it in alien lands: when they return they see their homeland clearly. "
(p.844): "Man's got only three obligations, really. Feed his fambly. Train his dog. Take care of his gun. You do them jobs properly, you ain't got no worries about such things as mortgages and cancer in the tax collector. You take care of the gun, God takes care of the mortgage."
Verdict: Recommended.
Vocabulary
*******
gibbets
cutpurse
clement
appurtenances
shallop
cupidity
scrimshaw
penurious
ketch
toothsome
palatinate
roanoke (small "r")
werowance (by p.184. an Indian chief of Virginia or Maryland.)
*
adze
sawyer
trunnel
keelson
scantlings
jib boom
scarph
blowsy
shrive
summum bonum
pinnace
snow (a type of ship)
unprepossessing
inglenook
ducking stool
sacque
bombazine
dimity
excrescence
spar
luff
wallow
belaying pin
teredos
fearnought
frieze
Osnaburg
*
burnt hartshorn (p.312)
advowson
stock (article of clothing, early form of tie)
canaille
hogshead (cask, 63 gallons)
ordnance (≠ordinance)
tussock
doughty
widow's walk
chatelaine
livery
gimbaled
ecru
reach-and-beat
Fugitive Slave Act (1850)
peroration
malamute
factotum
Majordomo
eplithalamium
skipjack
aprowl
shanghaied
estuary
aprowl
isohaline
spat (a young bivalve (such as an oyster))
sook (female crab)
cloaca (archaic word for "sewer")
drayman (p.692)
*
loblolly
torpid
waterman/watermen≠pirate, sailor
beat a tattoo
mastoiditis
harrows
repple depple
prosaic
palisade
nutria
subvention
contumely
rapscallion
davit/davit system
halyard
dacron
Avernus
Dutch door
klaxon greeting (=blowing your horn)
mattje's review
adventurous
challenging
dark
emotional
funny
informative
inspiring
reflective
sad
tense
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
5.0
I first read half of this book as a prerequisite for an AP history class in my high school years. Now, substantially older and more experienced, I’m so sorry that it took me this long to fully digest this novel as a whole. What an excellent story with characters that propel you through the full history (an arduous 51+ hours of audio) to absorb the lore and truths of society in the US’s Capital Region from foundation to relatively modern day. Plenty enough to still be relevant.
marysec's review
4.0
Un autre très bon livre écrit par Michener.
Certains passages sont plus difficiles à lire que d'autres - voire révoltants.
Somme toute, sa lecture a été un bon divertissement.
Certains passages sont plus difficiles à lire que d'autres - voire révoltants.
Somme toute, sa lecture a été un bon divertissement.
giantenzym's review
adventurous
informative
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
4.0
duparker's review against another edition
4.0
One thing you have to give the auther is that while he's good at writing, he's better at researching and he's best at moving the story along and fitting in a lot of information in a well-paced structure.
chughes120's review
3.0
Epic historical fiction following three families in the Chesapeake Bay Area over hundreds of years.
I was into it until about halfway through and then I lost focus. It’s well written and interesting but just too long and there’s not enough excitement for the length.
I was into it until about halfway through and then I lost focus. It’s well written and interesting but just too long and there’s not enough excitement for the length.
emily_dub_loves_books's review
4.0
Really fascinating, especially if you're living on the East Coast. Plan on it taking you about a month to read. It's looooong!