Life is So Good by George Dawson & Richard Glaubman

Dawson, George, and Richard Glaubman. Life is So Good. New York: Penguin, 2000.

George Dawson was in his nineties when he learned to read. He was a centenarian when he and coauthor Richard Glaubman wrote his biography, Life is So Good. I think Dawson’s life was good, and not just because it has been so long.

Even a good life is sometimes hard. Most of Dawson’s life was hard. Black and poor were not auspicious beginnings for a boy in Texas at the beginning of the 20th Century. In the opening chapter, Dawson tells of how, as a boy, he witnessed the lynching of a young black man falsely accused of raping a young white woman. Dawson was ready to become bitter and withdraw from all contact with white people, but his father would not allow him to even consider it.

Dawson presents his parents and wise and pragmatic, making things better for themselves bit by bit. He picks it up and does the same thing in his own life, especially once he settled down to start his own family.

He had some wandering to do first. His early life of travel and adventure makes for interesting reading. He road trains all over North America, sometimes as a ticketholder and sometimes joining the hobos. He was able to find work wherever he went, mainly because there was no job so hard or unpleasant he was unwilling to try it.

Traveling opened his eyes, especially to race relations in the U.S. Growing up in the South, he thought the discrimination and oppression he was accustomed to be the way things were. In Mexico and Canada, even in parts of the U.S., he was treated like anyone else, regardless of color. Mexican villagers welcomed him like family and delighted in the novelty of someone so tall. Canadian lumbermen were curious about his home and happily directed him to the snow he had never seen before—it almost killed him. In his early days, he found it strange to be in places where no one cared which train car he was in or the restaurant at which he ate.



Things changed a lot in Dawson’s more than 100 years of life, though racism hasn’t disappeared. (I grew up in a town that was 99 percent white and I’m barely 40 years old. In the same county were villages that were almost entirely black.) Even in the face of difficulties, Dawson persisted and bit by bit made life better for himself and his family. When retirement came it wasn’t time to rest from his labors, it was time to pick up the education he had been denied as a boy because he had to work.

Dawson’s life story is worth reading simply because he is a witness to history who tells his story in an interesting and accessible manner. It’s worth reading because, without trying, it has a message too: don’t worry. Dawson recommends that people not worry if they want a good life. I think it’s very good advice. Arguably, though, he was working too hard most of his life to have time for worries, even though he had cause for them.

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Reckless by Chrissie Hynde

As I get older, I start noticing some strange connections. If Peter Parker aged naturally, he’d be the same age as my father. I also learned that Chrissie Hynde, lead singer of the Pretenders (one of my favorite bands), is only three years younger than my parents. I can hardly believe it, though there is an unreliable part of my mind that seems convinced that I’m still in my early 20s.

This bit about Hynde’s age is hardly the most interesting thing in her autobiography, Reckless. You find many things you normally find in autobiographies. For instance, her early childhood in Ohio was surprisingly and pleasantly normal.

Things get more interesting in her teen years. She became a teenager in the 1960s and she was swept up into the youth culture of the time. She had two loves, music and drugs.

Hynde did a lot of drugs. She doesn’t dwell on the term addiction, but she doesn’t hide that she clearly was addicted. She subjected to herself to may dangers and abuses for the sake of getting high. A person would not do that if she was thinking straight, but addicts don’t think straight.

Unfortunately, drugs got in the way of the music. Drugs took the lives of many innovative musicians of the 1960s and 1970s, and Hynde mentions many of them that she knew. Two members of the Pretenders, Jimmy Scott and Pete Farndon, died of drug-related causes. It seems that there are several occasions in her story, before the Pretenders, when her dream of being in a band was interrupted by drugs, either her own pursuit of them or her potential bandmates’.

Hynde was adventurous. She traveled far from her childhood home in Akron to Canada, Mexico and France before settling in London. London became her home, largely because of the music scene. There she finally put together a band, though an unusual British band with an American lead. She met an amazing number of other musicians, famous then or later, who were there. It may seem like name dropping to discuss the Clash or the Sex Pistols, but these were people she knew and she lived their ups and downs with them.

The final section of the book, covering the career of the Pretenders, is surprisingly short. Admittedly, the original line-up did not last long due to the deaths of Scott and Farndon.

Hynde’s tone is not nostalgic. She has nostalgia for a Midwestern urbanism that was almost dead by the time she came along. She speaks frankly about her own days. She expresses a strong sense of agency and does not blame anyone for the way they treated her or depict herself as a victim. She seems to regret that the drugs people thought would set them free did not, and that as addicts they kept using drugs long after they knew it was a trap.

If you’re interested in rock and roll (and rhythm and blues and punk), you’ll likely enjoy this book. Hynde clearly loves this music and was around when it was undergoing much innovation. She was friends with some of the first stars of punk. He story is also an interesting section of the 1960s and 1970s. For instance, she was a student at Kent State University and witnessed the protests and other events that led to the National Guard firing on students.

If you’r interested in this book, you may also be interested in

Professional Amateur by T. A. Boyd

The Ten-Cent Plague by David Hajdu

Hynde, Chrissie. Reckless: My Life as a Pretender. New York: Doubleday, 2015.

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Road to the Sea by Florence Dorsey

James B. Eads was a prominent 19^th Century civil engineer who was based in St. Louis most of his long career. The mark of his work can still be found on the Mississippi River more than a century after his death in 1887. Florence Dorsey’s 1947 biography, Road to the Sea, recounts his life and accomplishments.

Eads came to St. Louis with his family in 1833 at the age of 13. They were coming by river from Louisville, Kentucky, to set up shop in greener pastures ahead of his father, Col. Thomas Clark Eads, who moved westward from one failed venture to the next. The ship that carried them caught fire just as they arrived in St. Louis and all their possessions burned up with it.

The family needed the support of the enterprising boy, so he had no opportunity to go to school. He read voraciously, though, borrowing books from an employer, Barret Williams, whose collection included many books on scientific and mechanical subjects.

Eads decided to stay in St. Louis when his family moved upriver to Iowa. He was on his own at age 17, but maturing into a man who would have success as an engineer, businessman and builder.

Eads career began to flourish when, at age 22, he designed and had built a boat with a diving bell. He eventually launched a fleet of bell boats that supported his salvage business. He salvaged wrecks and cargo from the Mississippi and its tributaries. He spent a lot of time in the river and began to know it very well.

By the time the Civil War broke out he had retired from salvaging and enjoying his wealth, but he risked his own fortune to secure the Mississippi River for the Union. He built ironclad gunboats to guard the river and attack Confederate fortifications. America’s military leaders weren’t sure what to make of them at first, but as the war progressed his ships were in great demand.

Eads found it frustrating to deal with Washington politicking and bureaucracy, especially in the U.S. Army. In his post-war endeavors he regularly had opposition from the Army Corps of Engineers and its chief, Andrew A. Humphreys.

These ventures were daring feats of engineering that were aimed at improving the commerce of the Mississippi valley. He built the world’s first steel arch bridge at St. Louis that would connect the city to the east by railroad (and got soaked by his contractor, Andrew Carnegie, while he was at it). He opened a route through the mud at the mouth of the Mississippi River that gave passage from the middle of the country to the ocean and helped make New Orleans a major port. In both these efforts he faced opposition and meddling from the Corp of Engineers.

In his last days he proposed to build a railroad across Mexico’s Tehuantepec isthmus to permit shorter passage from the Atlantic (i.e., the Mississippi) to the Pacific Ocean. His proposal was a serious alternative to Ferdinand de Lesseps’ Panama Canal. Though others took up the cause, Eads’ ship railroad proposal practically died with him. The Panama Canal didn’t fare much better at the time; the United States didn’t take over the project until 1904 and it didn’t open until 1914, de Lesseps’ plan for a tide-level canal with no locks having been abandoned.

As an engineer and Missourian, I’m fascinated by Eads and his extraordinary career.  I would recommend Dorsey’s book to anyone looking for an interesting and little-known bit of history.

If you’re interested in this book, you also be interested in

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Dorsey, Florence. Road to the Sea: The Story of James B. Eads and the Mississippi River. New York: Rinehart & Company, 1947.

Water by Marq de Villiers

I originally posted this review at Infrastructure Watch, where I write about civil infrastructure, the environment and other matters of technology.

de Villiers, Marq. Water: The Fate of Our Most Precious Resource. 1999. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000.

Marq de Villiers serves as a guide on a tour of water problems, conflicts and occasional solutions around the world. Though he is not an alarmist, his book seems to indicate that the problems have so far greatly outpaced the solutions.

There are several aspects of water problems and conflicts that de Villiers considers: natural, technological and political. In each area, he provides specific examples of water in or nearing crisis.

The natural distribution of fresh water in the world is uneven. That may be the fundamental aspect of water problems: even where it’s seemingly abundant, it doesn’t occur where and when people want it to make use of it. In parts of the world, this is a dire situation.

The technological solutions people have applied to correct this distribution have resulted in some amazing works of engineering since early in human history. It has also had many unintended consequences. Irrigation that made marginal land productive has made some of that land useless, even desert, through increased salinity. Dams, drainage and transfers have created ill effects in regional climates. Water mining, pollution and other human activity are also threatening the quantity and quality of water even in developed nations. There is hope in the technological area in that much of this harm may be reversible and the human ingenuity that created these technologies might also create sustainable solutions to our water needs.

Political considerations are very important to water issues, particularly when considering the possibility of conflict, even outright war, because of water scarcity. The Middle East and North Africa come to mind as hot spots where water is a critical issue; de Villiers enlightens both the current situation and history of these regions. Though mistrust runs deep between the nations in this region, even seemingly friendly ones, there is hope for solutions to their water problems. North America has its water problems to, and the problems on the Colorado River are surprisingly similar to those on the Nile. The differences in water availability in the United States, Mexico and Canada also makes for interesting relations between these close and usually friendly neighbors. China may present the largest political problems related to water and it’s food production and population that threatens to push it into crisis.

The book closes with four general strategies for dealing with the world’s water problems. First, get more water by either bringing it in from elsewhere or making it (i.e. desalination). Next is conservation and pricing to reduce demand and encourage using water in the most valuable ways. Third is population control; de Villiers seems relieved that world populations have been growing more slowly without major intervention. Finally, you can steal water from others. Since 40 percent people worldwide live in watersheds that cross national boundaries, it becomes a complicated matter of who has what right to the water and this is a potential source of water conflict, though not insurmountable.

Order this book here.

P.S., here is a little something extra for those of you interested in China, especially the probably fictional Emperor Yu the Engineer.

A Sand County Almanac by Aldo Leopold

Aldo Leopold had a long career working with and studying nature as a government forester, university professor, founder of the discipline of wildlife management. He is remembered as author and popular proponent of wilderness based on his book A Sand County Almanac.

A Sand County Almanac is a collection of essays in three parts. The first part is a tour of his Wisconsin farm covering each month of the year. Actually, it is not a farm in the sense of being a business that produces food and fiber. It was abandoned as a farm and hiding place for illegal stills when Leopold bought it as a semi-wild getaway. To be fair, though, it was abandoned as a farm because of practices that destroyed much of its productive capacity, and Leopold’s theme is land management. He approaches that theme gently in the first part. A reader can have the sense of strolling around the place with Leopold as he points out the plants and animals that live there, full-time or seasonally, and shares his enthusiasm for them.

In the second part, Leopold expands the scope to cover many places in the central and western United States, and even a few places in Mexico and Canada. These essays also recount his personal experiences relating to wild lands. In some of these essays he begins to touch more firmly on points of land management and policy.

In the final part, Leopold’s essays are more direct. The point of the book is that, if Americans, or people generally, want to have a rich landscape, wildlife, and land that is productive for generations, we need to value land in a new way and take new approaches to managing it.

The culmination of this discussion is the land ethic. Ethics are essentially about community, and the appropriate and acceptable relationships between the members of the community and each member and the community as a whole. A land ethic treats the land as a part of the community. In land, Leopold includes “soils, waters, plants, and animals.” Land is a part of our community that produces things of both economic and ineffable value. The land ethic implies that we have obligations to each other and to the land to conserve it. Conservation isn’t simply a matter or protecting specific areas, plants or animals. There is a place for policy, but the ethic is also individual, and a successful conservation efforts will mean landowners will need to treat the land and something inherently valuable. We would conserve ethically out of a sense of humility, realizing that the land is much more complex that we understand, and that our progress can outpace our understanding with possibly irreversible undesirable results.

Reconnecting to the land, and learning to value it, is encouraged by Leopold. Arguably, the first two parts of the book are intended to give the reader a sense of connection to the land. On the policy front, he suggests that many of the things we do to connect people to wilderness is destroying the wilderness. A land ethic could be a curative for this because aware people could connect to the land (especially wild plants and animals) close to home, even in cities, and be able to appreciate even wilder places from a distance. He goes so far as to suggest that amateur wildlife research could become a new type of sportsmanship, and cites cases were amateurs managing their own small plots have contributed to our understanding of wildlife.

It should be noted that, in addition to being a collection of thoughtful essays on nature, A Sand County Almanac is beautifully written. He can be poetical and political in the same sentence, such as “Hemisphere solidarity is new among statesmen, but not among the feathered navies of the sky.” He expresses himself with a gentle, homey cynicism as when he wrote, “Education, I fear, is learning to see one thing by going blind to another.”

*

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

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Leopold, Aldo. A Sand County Almanac and Sketches from Here and There. New York: Oxford University Press, 1949.

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