America

I have no intention of reviewing this book. What is there to review? The story it tells is one we are told every day. It does not need telling. You know it already –  a story that is not a story at all.

The forty-sixth president of the United States, like most of his predecessors, is an avid student of American history. In August 2022, Joe Biden met for the second time with a group of pre-eminent historians to discuss his presidency and the many threats facing American democracy. A month later, standing in Independence Hall in Philadelphia, he told the American people: ‘I know our history.’ Biden has, from the beginning of his campaign for the presidency, characterised his own period of American history as a ‘battle for the soul of the nation’, riffing off historian Jon Meacham’s book The Soul of America: The battle for our better angels (2018).

I was once subjected to a lecture by a Dublin taxi driver ‘on the extensive inequities of the Central Intelligence Agency’. Its every atrocity, in Southeast Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East, was relayed to me. It was an object lesson in the popular contempt in which the CIA has been held since its founding in the 1940s.

This book will at times quite literally take your breath away. A deeply reported account of the fall of Afghanistan’s capital, August in Kabul tells the harrowing stories of those who escaped and those who were left behind in the maelstrom of those two weeks between the arrival of the Taliban on 15 August 2021 and the final US flight to depart – at one minute to midnight on 30 August. Compelling, vivid, and distressing all at once, it is a damning indictment of the Taliban’s wanton cruelty and of the domestic and foreign policy failures that allowed them to return. It is an impressive book-length début by one of Australia’s pre-eminent photojournalists.

In the chaos that opened the Trump administration in 2017, foreign governments were looking for any and all insiders for information. Australia turned to Joe Hockey, who turned to golf. In this very readable account of the former treasurer’s four years in Washington (2016–20), Hockey tells us how he navigated ‘TRUMPAGEDDON’. This is a story replete with funny anecdotes and unsettling observations. Diplomatic leaves the reader convinced that diplomacy is more about art and luck than about science and process. It is also oddly reassuring about the vicissitudes that the Australia–United States relations can weather, even under the most weird leadership.

Ilan Stavans is a professor of Humanities at Amherst College in Massachusetts, a native of Mexico City who is now a distinguished scholar of Latin American and Hispanic cultures. Here he turns his outsider’s gaze on the large question ‘What is American Literature?’ to productive if rather erratic effect. This is a strange book, one that purports to achieve an Olympian overview of an established academic field, but one whose most effective contributions manifest themselves in casual, digressive comments on particular authors and contemporary cultural issues.

The Trump presidency (2017–21) has generated more books across its four years than most presidencies have across eight. It is ironic that an avowedly anti-intellectual president, who advertises his dislike of reading, has had such a profound impact on political literature. These two books – Landslide and Peril – will likely remain the most read of that growing collection. As their titles suggest, each is a chronicle of the chaos that consumed the United States during and after the 2020 election campaign.

In 1995, a new online marketplace called Amazon sent out its first press release, with its thirty-one-year-old founder, Jeff Bezos, proclaiming: ‘We are able to offer more items for sale than any retailer in history, thanks entirely to the Internet.’ Nearly three decades later – Amazon having steroidally expanded from a book retailer to a multinational hydra of e-commerce, cloud storage, and digital streaming – this is no longer hyperbole. The company absorbs at least half of America’s online spending, and nearly 150 million US citizens subscribe to Amazon Prime, roughly the same number that voted in the recent presidential election. In 2020, while the pandemic crippled most industries, Amazon’s net profit swelled by eighty-four per cent. Today, Jeff Bezos is valued at US$200 billion – approximately the value of New Zealand’s GDP.

William Darrah Kelley – a Republican congressman from Philadelphia – stood at the front of a stage in Mobile, Alabama, watching as a group of men pushed and shoved their way through the audience towards him. It was May 1867, Radical Reconstruction was underway, and Southern cities like Mobile were just beginning a revolutionary expansion and contraction of racial equality and democracy. The Reconstruction Acts, passed by Congress that year, granted formerly enslaved men the right to vote and to run for office in the former Confederate states. Northern Republicans streamed into cities across the South in 1867, speaking to both Black and white, to the inspired and hostile – registering Black voters and strengthening the already strong links between African Americans and the party.

Lerone Bennett Jr, bestselling author of Black history, ruffled feathers with a 1968 article in the glossy monthly magazine Ebony. ‘Was Abe Lincoln a White Supremacist?’ the piece’s title asked provocatively. The title of Bennett’s later book on the topic proclaimed that Lincoln was Forced into Glory. Mainstream media either ignored or denigrated Bennett’s work, but his insights about Lincoln’s racism paved the way for a host of historical works that have revised our understanding of who should be credited with ending slavery in the United States.