The Best and Worst Books I Read in March

One So Bad the Author Shouldn't Even Be Tossed in a Volcano

Welcome back, everyone, and thanks for reading. It’s the beginning of another month, so I have another set of short book reviews for you. I’ve tried to keep them a bit shorter than last time, limiting myself to three paragraphs in each review, so you have an easier time looking through it for interesting reads. Let me know whether you prefer longer or shorter reviews of each work; I can adjust based on your preferences moving forward. For the older books, I recommend hunting for an original print, if you want to read them, rather than a modern reprint, as most of the reprints are of poor quality. Checking the “used” options on the pages to which I link and looking for original prints is the easiest way I have found to do so.

Most of these books are research works I consulted for my The Old World Show, namely the upcoming series on the history of Virginia and the First Families of Virginia, which will begin this week with a discussion of the reality and myths of the Old Dominion’s Cavalier roots.

For those who want to skip to the highlights, my favorites this month were numbers 11, 16, and 17, in that order, and the book that was by far the worst—and thus has my funniest description of what should happen to the author—is #10. Further, as a reminder, paid subscribers can listen to audio versions I record for every article. You can do so for this one here:

[Audio] The Best and Worst Books of March

1. Virginia 1705-1786: Aristocracy or Democracy? by Robert E. and B. Katherine Brown

Virginia 1705-1786: Aristocracy or Democracy? is an interesting book in that it runs contrary to the general message pushed by authors whose work on Virginia I have covered before—namely Carl Bridenbaugh, Clifford Dowdey, Louis Wright, and Morris Talapar—and generally leans toward framing Virginia as being culturally a democracy rather than an aristocracy, despite the influence of the grandees. To support that argument, the authors bring a bevy of interesting land ownership data showing that most land was held by essentially yeoman farmers in small parcels of a few hundred acres at most, that being a tenant was not looked down upon, and that grandee-favored candidates often lost Burgess elections.

However, the overall thesis is mostly unconvincing. For one, the land ownership data is interesting but far from determinative, as most of the large owners owned a great many small tracts that they rented out to tenants, which diminishes the importance of evidence that landholdings were generally small. Further, the matter of elections is interesting, but matters little because Virginia’s history is a story of great men who worked through the House of Burgesses and the Council to achieve great things. With the exception of Patrick Henry, much of Virginia’s history is the story of men like Robert “King” Carter, George Washington, the Lees, and John Randolph of Roanoke—which is to say, large landowners who were generally seen as aristocrats, even if they functioned in a semi-democratic environment.

So this book is somewhat interesting and presents a contrary perspective well enough, which is useful. However, its arguments are made imperfectly, and the overall thesis is unconvincing. It’s also a real bore of a book, as it is very academic, somewhat leftist in spirit, and lacking in the sort of narrative elements that make the history of this period so interesting. The authors needn’t be tossed in a volcano, but their book can be safely ignored.

2. Social Life of Virginia in the Seventeenth Century by Phillip Alexander Bruce

Social Life of Virginia in the Seventeenth Century by Bruce is a fantastically interesting work that covers, as the title suggests, the formative years of Virginia’s history through the lens of how Virginia’s society developed. From horse racing and drinking to country house life and church, this is a fabulous resource for those who want a glimpse into what life was like for some of the earliest and most civilized Americans. Though it covers all the classes in Virginia over this period, by far the most interesting parts of the work come when Bruce shows how a colonial gentry developed out of the colony’s hard-scrabble origins, and how the foundations of the families that dominated the eighteenth century were laid in the seventeenth century.

Yet further, this is an older work, so Bruce speaks freely about the unique spirit of the Anglo-Saxons that led to Virginia being the way it was, English culture of the time and how it influenced the colony, slavery’s relation to social life in Virginia, and so on. There is no dancing around those issues that modern historians find “discredited” or distasteful, and the result is a fabulously interesting work of immense utility in examining the essentially aristocratic culture of Virginia.

This one is a bit dense, and the semi-archaic language can make it hard to read, at times, but it is well worth ordering and reading if the subject interests you. It was one of my favorites, and is fabulously interesting and well-written.

3. The Old Dominion: Her Making and Her Manners by Thomas Nelson Page

Thomas Nelson Page is a somewhat infamous character amongst modern historians of the antebellum period because of how his delightful ability to paint a picture of a romantic and idyllic antebellum life in the Old South, particularly the Old Dominion, did so much to color post-war perceptions of what life had been like in the land destroyed by Grant and Sheridan. What he describes in The Old Dominion: Her Making and Her Manners is essentially the world presented by Gone with the Wind, but in Virginia and with far more noble protagonists…along with the framing of the matter as fact rather than fiction.

That very rose-tinted view of Old Virginia makes Nelson’s work hard to trust implicitly, particularly when he waxes poetic about the tender treatment most slaves received. Still, much of what he argues is well supported, and his stark descriptions of how Reconstruction, more than war itself, destroyed the state are particularly powerful. Further, his charming portrait of what Virginia had been and how such a noble culture of cavaliers was built presents something of an idyll for those interested in hierarchical societies, and makes for a fun basis for further research.

Overall, this one was an enjoyable read. It is imperfect because of how partisan it is, but that’s not something Page tries to hide and most of his overly positive generalizations can be quickly glimpsed and ignored, while his facts and figures that are much more supported are easy enough to glean. Further, the romantic picture he paints makes the history enjoyable to read, and the emotional impact of that, I found, makes its details and anecdotes easier to remember than those of perhaps more factual but certainly much drier works.

4. A Bold Return to Giving a Damn: One Farm, Six Generations, and the Future of Food by Will Harris

A Bold Return to Giving a Damn is a book I have been meaning to read for a while, as it is about a subject I find fascinating—regenerative ranching—and is written by one of the men who has done more than nearly any other to popularize such a concept. In it, Harris discusses how industrial agriculture (particularly synthetic fertilizers and pesticides) destroys the topsoil, how regenerative-style agriculture fixes that problem, and what the economic challenges to shifting toward regenerative agriculture are. He also weaves in his family history, which makes the book somewhat more entertaining to read, and adds color to his commentary on what challenges and opportunities ranchers face.

My main takeaway was that American agriculture needs what English agriculture long had—wealthy agricultural landlords with decades-long time horizons who are interested in improving agriculture, care relatively little about short-term financial returns compared to stewarding the estates, and who have the resources to invest in improved agricultural methods. Harris would probably disagree, though his plowing all the earnings of his operation into expanding his domain and reinvigorating his small town is effectively making him that guy, but the “Coke of Norfolk” model is probably the only way to achieve what he sees as necessary at any degree of scale. Achieving as much would require a shift toward Great Houses (as I spoke with Gregory Treat about recently), reattaching social prestige to being a successful agricultural landlord, and much more, which is why I write about it. More on that soon, perhaps.

All in all, this book is worth reading if you’re interested in the subject. It’s not a fabulous read. Harris’s performative libertarianism (“we have workers of all sexual preferences/races/etc. who listen to loud rap music, and that’s great!”) is grating at times, and a fuller discussion of the financial challenges to regenerative agriculture would have been interesting. Still, it’s good enough for what it is, and Harris is a generally sympathetic character. That makes this book a good one to pass around to people who might be interested in the general concept of regenerative ranching and why supporting non-corporate ranchers is important.

5. Behold Virginia! The Fifth Crown by George F. Willison

There isn’t anything obviously wrong with Behold Virginia! The Fifth Crown, but I didn’t particularly enjoy reading it. That might have just been because I was tired of reading histories of Virginia when I read it. However, I think the bigger problem is that Willison’s general hostility to and negativity regarding most aspects of Virginia’s formation, particularly Captain John Smith, the early Jamestown settlers, and the later grandees, is grating. That is particularly so because this is a general history of Virginia from Jamestown to the Revolution, and so his grating negativity and cynicism pervades most of the book.

However, Willison is the only author other than Talapar whom I have so far read who directly confronts the matter of Puritan involvement in early Virginia and its later extirpation at the hands of Gov. Berkeley, which makes it an important read because it is a relatively unique resource in that respect. His discussion of slavery and indentured servitude is also interesting, though it’s less fleshed out than that of Wertenbaker, whose work I reviewed last month.

Overall, this isn’t one I would recommend. There are far better general histories of Virginia that are far less grating. But if the Puritan influence on Virginia Company-ruled Virginia interests you, this one does have some information on that subject that most other works leave out.

6. Old Virginia: The Pursuit of a Pastoral Ideal by William Rasmussen

Old Virginia by Rasmussen is absolutely fabulous. It is a wonderfully told story of how Virginia’s gentry developed, from the earliest days of settlement into the mid-twentieth century period in which Paul Mellon and a few others did much to revive it. Further, it covers how the concept of the pastoral ideal, as renewed and cultivated in Britain over that time period, did much to shape it. Adding to that is that a plethora of pictures of country houses, portraits of great men, and stunning landscapes are included throughout, which adds tremendously to the work and helps Rasmussen paint a vivid picture of “Old Virginia” over the ages.

The big issue is that Rasmussen is something of a leftist, despite his love of Virginia history, and so the book is full of lengthy tirades regarding the great evil of slavery. I find such moral preening quite tiresome and unnecessary: no one who doesn’t already think slavery was bad will read this book and walk away from it with their mind opened to the modern, progressive view regarding slavery. However, those sections are generally segmented off and can be skipped over.

This is one I would recommend if you are interested in the general subject of the Virginia gentry. Much of it is quite in-depth, the research is excellent, it’s fabulously interesting, many of the pictures and paintings included are ones I had not seen before, and the overall historical discussion of how the Virginia gentry developed is well told. The liberal attitude toward slavery is annoying, but it is at least thoughtful enough and segmented off enough to not be grating.

7. Sir William Berkeley And The Forging Of Colonial Virginia by Warren Billings

The characterization of Gov. Sir William Berkeley presented in most of the older works on Virginia is that he did a terrific job as a young man, before being deposed during the English Civil War, and that he was too old and crochety for the job when returned to duty under the Stuarts, which resulted in the string of avoidable mistakes that led to Bacon’s Rebellion. That general understanding of him was perverted over time, primarily by leftist historians upset with how he turned Virginia into a Cavalier colony (Talapar covers this well), into being that he had always been a ruthless tyrant without redeeming characteristics.

Billings then wrote Sir William Berkeley And The Forging Of Colonial Virginia to present what he frames as an original thesis—that Gov. Berkeley did a great job as a younger man and poor job as an older one. Despite that thesis being far less original than he presents it as being, the biography is nevertheless quite interesting. Billings does a wonderful job of showing how Berkeley’s origins and relationships led him to rule as he did, how his prescience regarding the problems with tobacco led him to push well-meaning but ultimately fruitless diversification schemes on the colony, and what went wrong that turned him into a crochety tyrant. It also shows, somewhat indirectly, how royal rule over Virginia worked in the 17th century and how Virginia’s unique identity and political self-conception flowed from that. Further, it provides an excellent discussion of why Colonial Virginia never really moved past its fixation and reliance on tobacco, despite the flaws of a one-crop economy.

This biography is quite good, and should be interesting to the layman and scholar alike. The narrative flows well, the level of detail presented is neither skimpy nor overbearing, and the thesis is well-supported. Billings being a bit self-inflated about the novelty of his thesis is humorous, but it also helps his obvious interest in and respect for his subject shine through quite well. I would recommend it to anyone remotely interested in Colonial Virginia or the British Empire.

8. The Transformation of Virginia, 1740-1790 by Rhys Isaac

I ordered The Transformation of Virginia, 1740-1790 thinking it would be a study of agricultural issue-driven decline in Virginia similar to Dominion of Memories: Jefferson, Madison, and the Decline of Virginia by Susan Dunn, which I didn’t want to reread because I remembered quite detesting Dunn’s work. As that alleged decline is a prominent feature of discussions of 18th and 19th-century Virginia (mistakenly, I think), that would have been a helpful resource.

But Isaac’s work is not that. Instead, it is a lengthy dissertation on political and religious conflicts in mid-18th century Virginia, primarily the religious feuding between Episcopalians, Presbyterians, and Baptists. That subject is mind-numbingly dull, and Isaac does it no favors by generally refusing any opportunities to make it interesting, other than one fun line about Virginians preferring ministers who were gentlemen and could hold their religion like their liquor.¹

This book is terrible. It is a boring subject written as boringly as possible and adds nothing to far briefer and better-written discussions of the same issues in most other works that cover this period. Unless you want to bore your brain to death, toss any copy of this book you see in the fire, or at least the trash.

9. Babylon Revisited and Other Stories by F. Scott Fitzgerald

I needed a break from Virginia, so I turned to a collection of Fitzgerald’s short stories that I hadn’t read before: Babylon Revisited. Short stories were Fitzgerald’s strong suit, though he found them distasteful compared to novels. That shines through here: all of these stories are delightful to read, but Fitzgerald lacked the passion for them that would have tied them together well, or led to their continuing to be published after about the mid-point of his short career.

So, these are fun, and require little brain power to read through. However, most of the stories in this collection are not as good as his Tales from the Jazz Age collection of short stories. They’re not quite as interesting, fun, or energetic. Instead, they suffer from his general tendency toward melancholy and wistfulness.

Still, they are enjoyable enough to read, and if you like Fitzgerald’s work, then you’ll probably like this collection.

10. George Washington, Entrepreneur: How Our Founding Father’s Private Business Pursuits Changed America and the World by John Berlau

I was quite excited to read George Washington, Entrepreneur when it arrived. Washington’s varied business enterprises are fascinating, and make him much closer in spirit and orientation to the early Virginia greats and grandees than their heirs, most of whom generally shied away from trade and mercantile activities other than selling tobacco as their wealth grew older. Washington, however, tried a great many different sorts of business tied to his estate, from commercial fishing to selling branded flour.

Unfortunately, however, this book is absolutely terrible. Berlau does not do a good job of including anything more than the most anecdotal of details, the narrative is as jumbled and confused as could be possible, there is no overarching theme of note, and many of Washington’s business activities are utterly ignored other than in the broadest of terms. It is, in short, a vapid collection of pointless words that point toward no conclusion and adds absolutely nothing to one’s understanding of the greatest of Americans.

I cannot recommend this book any more than I’d recommend dropping a cinderblock on your foot before jogging to Long John Silvers for a terrible meal. I would suggest tossing it in a volcano, as with Graeber’s disaster of a book on debt, but that would be to grace it with far more attention and notoriety than it deserves. Right now it languishes in the quiet depths of the forever unknown, which is where it deserves to be and ought remain.

11. Lewis and Clark: Pioneering Naturalists by Paul Russell Cutright

When working on my Lewis and Clark series for The Old World Show, I realized that reading an abridged version of the journals and Undaunted Courage, along with a great many articles, was enough for constructing a good narrative of the mission, but not enough for the video I really wanted to do—the story of their legacy as scientific adventurers, and why it was blunted.

So, to correct that, I read Lewis and Clark: Pioneering Naturalists. This is a dense book, but an absolutely fascinating and fabulous one. In it, Cutright tells the narrative of the expedition while pausing along the way to discuss what they discovered at each step of the journey, how they carried out the scientific aspects of their mission, how much they contributed to our understanding of this continent, and how a few disasters—namely Lewis’s suicide and the destruction of an important cache of preserved specimens—unduly limited their influence on American science. It includes everything from chapter-by-chapter lists of what they discovered along their journey to in-depth discussions of the importance of those discoveries woven into the narrative of the journey.

This book is really fabulous. Of all those I read this month, this one is probably my favorite, and the one I would most recommend that everyone read.

12. Economic History of Virginia in the Seventeenth Century, Vols I and II by Philip Alexander Bruce

If you want to understand how Virginia came to be the social, political, and economic powerhouse it was during the eighteenth century, then this two-volume work on its economic development and growth during the seventeenth century—Economic History of Virginia in the Seventeenth Century, Vols I and II—is a set of books you’ll need to read. The books are dense and hard to read through, but are very much worth it, as they present a detailed picture of how the colony’s economy functioned and what led to it functioning the way it did.

Particularly, Bruce discusses the development of the plantation system, the shift from yeomanry to grandees, attempts at diversification, the political implications of the economy developing as it did, how the First Families of Virginia were involved in and benefited from that development, and much more. As a scholarly work that was written to be referenced, it is excellent and without par, at least from what I have read so far.

That said, this is no beach read. I was fortunate to have a few days to devote nearly entirely to reading these two books and taking copious notes on them so that I could use them as the basis for future podcast episodes and articles. Had I not had that spare time imposed by catching a cold that stuck me on the couch, these two alone would have taken me most of the month to get through. So, I recommend them, but know what you’re getting into.

13. Colonial Virginia: Its People And Customs by Mary Newton Stanard

Colonial Virginia: Its People And Customs is another book that is great as a reference work, but terribly boring to actually read. In it, Stanard tracks the cultural and social development over time in Virginia by using copious numbers of probate documents, scholarly journals, bills of trade, and so forth to show what sorts of goods the Virginians were ordering from England and using in Virginia, and thus what the material prosperity of the colony was over time and how it developed across key periods. She uses that data, along with related history regarding marriage practices, religious practices, architectural practices, and so on, to show how Virginia developed culturally and socially over those same key periods in its colonial history.

On one hand, this makes it tedious and boring in the extreme. I can’t imagine anyone wanting to read a list of which Virginia planters had grandfather clocks or grand mirrors in the late 1600s. However, that level of extreme detail, all of which is well supported by her sources, also makes it a tremendous reference work to support more anecdotal claims about the colony’s economic development and what flowed from it with hard data.

If you are embarking upon some sort of scholarly or historical project related to colonial Virginia’s development over time, this is a reference book that probably ought be on your list. Otherwise, it can be safely ignored.

14. Tender Is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Tender Is the Night is probably the best of Fitzgerald’s novels. It is by far the most coherent, fleshed out, and tied together of any of his works. Unlike Gatsby, it is a full-length novel that doesn’t rely on insinuations. Unlike This Side of Paradise or The Beautiful and Damned, it isn’t jumbled and left feeling somewhat unfinished. Further, as it is essentially about the life that F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald lived as dissipated expats along the Riviera, it’s full of a great degree of vivid details that couldn’t be known without real-life experience, which makes it really come alive as a story.

However, it probably isn’t the best to read, as it is incredibly depressing. All of his novels are depressing like that, in contrast to his short stories, but this one is the most depressing. Particularly, I found it creates a general sense of unease and disappointment while reading it.

Still, it is quite good and worth reading if you like Fitzgerald’s work. Parts of it are fun, the story is well told, and it is full of terrific and memorable characters.

15. Virginia: The New Dominion, A History from 1607 to the Present by Virginius Dabney

Virginia: The New Dominion is a book I ordered because it came much recommended. Written in the early 1970s, it’s the tale of Virginia written by a man who obviously loves the state. It covers the full sweep of Virginia history, from the first settlement to the period of racial strife during which Dabney was writing, and does so with a great amount of detail, fun anecdotes woven through it appropriately, and a wonderful narrative pace. It also doesn’t end with the Revolution, as most general histories of the state do, or War Between the States and Reconstruction, as most of the remainder do, but instead continues through into the modern day. That makes it a great resource in many respects, and Dabney does an admirable job of connecting its then-present state with its ancient history.

That said, it is imperfect. For one, Dabney obviously wanted to avoid being labelled as a wrongthinker, so it is full of copious throwaway passages about black contributions to the state that feel quite forced; who wants a passage on Robert E Lee interrupted by a paragraph on the black servants of Confederate officers in the early war? Most of these passages are fine, and some are even interesting. But they do all feel forced, popping off the page as incongruous with the rest of the content, and ridiculous at times. Additionally, Dabney’s generally positive attitude about the modern development of the state was proven wrong by history: economic growth has killed Virginia by filling it with leftists and foreigners.

I would probably recommend this one, but I was confused, at times, as to why it had been recommended to me. The liberalism of someone who should know better is always grating, and that is certainly the case here. Still, it’s a generally fun to read and well done history of the state.

16. The Landed Gentry: Passions and Personalities Inside America’s Propertied Class by Sophy Burnham

The Landed Gentry is a book I had read before, but which I read again because I thought it would pick up where Dabney leaves off and tell the tale of the Chesapeake since the late 1960s. To some extent it does, though it is much broader than that, covering the landed across America. Still, about a third of the book is about what remained of traditional Virginian landed society into the 1970s, from the perspective of someone who grew up in that milieu, and that makes it interesting.

This is not a scholarly work. It is a collection of anecdotes with a bit of data tossed in semi-randomly. But it is a wonderful, fun, and delightful to read collection of anecdotes, one that I can’t recommend highly enough. So, I would certainly recommend you read it if the subject at all interests you, as it is a real pleasure to read, and is quite easy to read.

17. The British Gentry, the Southern Planter, and the Northern Family Farmer: Agriculture and Sectional Antagonism in North America by James Huston

As I discussed the findings of this book—The British Gentry, the Southern Planter, and the Northern Family Farmer—in depth in my article on the yeomanry of America, I won’t reiterate all that here. You can read that article if interested. What I would say is that this is one of my favorite books on American agriculture, as it cuts through a multitude of myths, from the claim that slavery was economically inefficient to the tale that Virginia was dying because of soil exhaustion in the 1840s, from the myth of the yeoman to the claim that the South was poorer than the North. Huston brilliantly shows from where all of those myths came, why they are false, connects them to the Cavalier-Puritan split, and shows how they led to the US Civil War. It is a fascinating read, supported by an abundance of data, and it is written in a way that makes it delightful to read despite how dense the subject matter is. I can’t recommend it highly enough.

Read the article in which this book features prominently here:

In Conclusion

I hope you enjoyed those book reviews. They are always fun to write, and most of the books are fun to read. If you have made it this far, and are not yet a paid subscriber, I would really appreciate you upgrading your subscription. These books are quite expensive, and your subscriptions on here enable me to continue reading and reviewing works like these, all while producing new content that you find interesting. Thank you!

Featured image credit: Stephen Lea, CC BY-SA 3.0 <http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/>, via Wikimedia Commons

1. He says, quoting an ad for a ministerial role in the period:

“And as in words and actions they should be neither too reserved nor too extravagant; so in principles should they be neither too high or too low: The Virginians being neither favourers of popery... nor of presbytery. ... They must be such as can converse and know more than bare philosophy and speculative ethicks, and have studied men and business... as well as books; they may ... . be facetious and good-humoured, without too much freedom and licentiousness.”

Wanted, a parson who can carry his religion, as he should his liquor, like a gentleman!