WALDEN ON WHEELS: On the Open Road from Debt to Freedom

Jun 28, 2013

Ken Ilgunas
New Harvest
ISBN 978-0544028838
296 pages
$15.95

Reviewed by James Norton

When Henry David Thoreau published "Walden" in 1854, he fueled a centuries-long debate about the relationship between man and nature and the shackles that we wear when we participate in urban civilization. The romantic image of Thoreau in his cabin is central to "Walden on Wheels," a remarkable memoir that manages to stay light on its feet while saying a great deal about the state of modern American society.

When "Walden on Wheels" begins, Ken Ilgunas is in a bad place: working at a Home Depot, deeply in debt for a useless undergraduate education and unable to find meaningful work.

What begins as a confrontation with his $32,000 college loan becomes a much larger conversation involving the author, his parents and his even more indebted friend Josh. The real heart of "Walden on Wheels" is the servitude that most Americans willingly enter to buy houses, wardrobes, vacations, educations and cars that do little more than keep them competitive with the Joneses.

Ilgunas documents his travels to Coldfoot, Alaska, where he earns money doing manual labor under sometimes brutal conditions. He also hitchhikes back to New York, helps with the post-Katrina cleanup on the Gulf Coast, and sleeps in a van while attending graduate school at Duke University. All the while, he lives by his wits, learns from his numerous and candidly documented mistakes, and catalogs the costs and benefits of opting out of a conventional consumer existence dominated by cars, cellphones and homes.

In less skilled hands, this could easily become a journey into thinly veiled martyrdom, but Ilgunas has an acute sense of humor that keeps the tone earnest and self-deprecating. His use of expense and income amounts (as Thoreau shared in "Walden") grounds his more abstract story of struggling to escape from the grasp of modern consumer society, and the memoir is much stronger for his command of detail.

Ilgunas is a rare and wonderful travel companion. Along the way, he describes natural phenomena so skillfully that you might be compelled to flee your desk and head for the hills, walking stick in hand.

James Norton edits a Midwestern food journal called the Heavy Table and is the author of "The Master Cheesemakers of Wisconsin."

Copyright 2013 Washington Post Writers Group

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FREEDOM NATIONAL: The Destruction of Slavery in the United States, 1861-1865

Jan 20, 2013 by Washington Post book reviewers

James Oakes
Norton
ISBN 978-0393065312
595 pages
$29.95

Reviewed by Howell Raines

The Republican newspaper publisher Horace Greeley bowed to no man north of Richmond when it came to underestimating Abraham Lincoln. In the late summer of 1862, his New York Tribune was pummeling the president for dragging his feet on an expected blanket announcement freeing all slaves in the rebel states. In response to these stinging editorials, on August 22 of that year Lincoln penned one of the most puzzling letters of his presidency. He reminded Greeley that the great mission of the war was restoration of the Union. He continued, "If I could save the Union without freeing (BEGIN ITAL)any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing (BEGIN ITAL)all(END ITAL) the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others I would also do that."

Was Lincoln really a "Reluctant Emancipator," as Greeley and many historians since his day have insisted? Then why did the 16th president, only a month later, on Sept. 22, convene his cabinet for a surprise reading of the Emancipation Proclamation and release it upon the public "like a thunderbolt" that same day?

In "Freedom National," historian James Oakes answers that question eloquently and, in the judgment of this amateur student of the Civil War, fully. Oakes argues that Lincoln, from the moment of his inauguration, began using every political and military means at his disposal to wipe out slavery forever. Yet he also believed, as did virtually all politicians on both sides, that the Constitution protected slavery as a right of individual Southern states and therefore allowed him to designate only one casus belli- the preservation of the federal nation.

"Unless the Constitution was rewritten, the federal government could not constitutionally wage a war for the purpose of destroying slavery," Oakes explains. "Only the 'military necessity' of suppressing the rebellion could legally justify emancipation. That, at least, was the standard Republican Party position all through the war, and Lincoln's answer to Greeley merely restated it."

Yes, one must agree, but what a restatement! Lincoln's letter embodied the kind of virtuous obfuscation that only Lincoln, the presidency's greatest natural political genius, could have managed. Or make that stage-managed. The theatrical analogy seems proper for a moment when the film "Lincoln" is vividly recreating the final act of the emancipation drama. As the film demonstrates, so attuned was Lincoln to the social, legislative and constitutional uncertainties of the coming Reconstruction that he foresaw that he could fully liberate 4 million new black citizens only by pushing for a new amendment to the Constitution (the 13th). This valuable book, along with Doris Kearns Goodwin's "Team of Rivals," gives inquisitive moviegoers access to the full back story.

Oakes' detailed account of this complex story cannot be fully summarized here. But his argument that emancipation was a process, not the result of a single document, has produced some helpful distinctions and benchmarks. Lincoln understood from the moment his armies went South that "military emancipation" would permanently free blacks in conquered territory. Early in the war, slaves who fled into Union lines were deemed to be beneficiaries of "self emancipation." Oakes also explains Lincoln's coldly pragmatic decision to allow slavery to continue throughout the war in the border states of Delaware, Maryland, Missouri and, most critically, Kentucky. He concluded that upsetting their slaveholders could hand victory to the Confederacy.

"Freedom National" also highlights an unlikely hero, the hated Union proconsul of occupied New Orleans, Gen.Benjamin "Beast" Butler, the notorious insulter of Southern womanhood. At a time when Union generals like Don Carlos Buell were forcing freedom-seeking slaves back into the arms of their masters, Butler set an example for other generals by unilaterally emancipating blacks who came to his camps. Later, his tactic of allowing cooperating owners of Louisiana sugar plantations to stay in production by putting former slaves on salary and forswearing the lash won praise from Lincoln as a model for the future.

Oakes makes his case that Lincoln and many of his Union colleagues intended from the start to achieve slavery's "ultimate extinction" by meticulous combing of documents of the time. He goes back to the words they spoke in Congress or wrote in newspapers between 1860 and 1862. Lincoln was not alone in his eloquence and passion. It was a time of great oratory and precise argumentation. The technique points up the impoverished nature of our current political dialogue. How could any future historian reconstruct a detailed picture of our current national crisis by drawing on, say, the collected speeches of John Boehner or transcripts of the Bill O'Reilly show?

Howell Raines, a former executive editor of the New York Times, is researching the Civil War period for a historical novel.

Copyright 2013 Washington Post Writers Group

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ESCAPE FROM CAMP 14: One Man's Remarkable Odyssey from North Korea to Freedom in the West

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Washington Post book reviewers

Apr 27, 2012 ARCHIVES  |  Entertainment  |  COLUMNS

Blaine Harder
Viking
ISBN 978-0670023325
205 pages
$26.95

Reviewed by Andrew Salmon

In 2007, at the conclusion of a press conference at the Seoul Foreign Correspondents' Club, a young man received an unusual request: He was asked to remove his trousers. A reporter had found the story he had just told so astonishing that she demanded physical evidence of its veracity.

Trembling, the man did so. A horrified gasp went around the room: his lower body was a lacework of scars.

His name was Shin Dong-hyuk, and his legs had been mutilated by electrified barbed wire as he crawled over the smoking corpse of a fellow prisoner to escape North Korea's most notorious - and previously inescapable - political prison camp.

Shin's existence in the camp and his escape to the unknown world beyond its fences is the remarkable and harrowing tale that former Washington Post reporter Blaine Harden recounts in spare, unadorned prose in "Escape From Camp 14."

North Korea is arguably the most insulated, most repressive nation on earth, a dystopia with a vast gulag imprisoning 200,000 people, according to Amnesty International. The gulag's most feared prison is "Total Control Camp 14," where Shin was born, narrowly survived, and from which he eventually fled. He is believed to be the only person ever to escape. North Korean defectors in Seoul were agog when they learned of his feat.

In Camp 14, children are punished for the political sins of their fathers. Hunger is so omnipotent that every prisoner behaves like "a panicked animal" at mealtimes. Teachers at the camp school beat students to death for minor infractions. Medieval torture devices are employed in dungeon-like underground cells. And human relationships are so degraded that prisoners inform on family members.

While Shin's story has been told before, Harden tells it well. He also corrects errors in earlier accounts, revealing that it was Shin himself who informed camp authorities of a planned escape by his mother and brother - information that led to their execution. That Shin would snitch on his own family underscores how the camp corrupts values. It also highlights the troubling fact that those with the grit and determination to survive dire circumstances can sometimes make for poor humans. But here is where Harden's account excels: He neither paints Shin as a hero, nor depicts his survival as a triumph of the spirit. Shin suffers brutalities and is himself brutalized in the process.

After his escape, Shin encountered itinerant gangs scrabbling to survive in North Korea's starving hinterland, corrupt border guards, Chinese farmers who exploit the labor of desperate refugees, and "brokers" who smuggle people out of North Korea for profit. One of the few sympathetic figures in the book is "Uncle," a mysteriously respected senior prisoner who nursed Shin back to health after his hideous torture - at age 13 - in an underground cell. Shin does not know, nor does Harden speculate upon, uncle's identity.

By the book's close, it is depressingly unclear whether Shin has been able to nourish his stunted soul while dividing his time between the United States and South Korea. Suffering post-traumatic stress, he drifts through life, often telling lies, doesn't communicate well and cannot maintain a relationship.

The book is also a useful primer on recent developments in the The Hermit Kingdom. Harden explains how primitive capitalism has spread nationwide as Pyongyang's elite has lost its iron-fisted control of the economy. He also documents the porousness of the China-Korea border. What he does not explain - and what remains a mystery to many North Korea watchers - is why only 21,000 defectors have come South in the last six decades.

A few recent books have cast light on North Korea. Barbara Demick's "Nothing to Envy" proved that there are "normal" people in the country. B.R. Myers's "The Cleanest Race" revealed that a racist, ultra-nationalist ideology underpins what is misleadingly labeled a communist regime. But almost no books by North Koreans have emerged, with the exception of "The Aquariums of Pyongyang," by Kang Chol Hwan. President George W. Bush was so moved by this defector's tale of life in the state labor camps that he invited Kang to the White House. While the horrors of the Russian gulag, Nazi genocide and Cambodian mass murders have been amply documented, North Korea's grisly conditions remain shadowy and under-publicized. In depicting the depravity of North Korean prison life, Harden's book is an important portrait of man's inhumanity to man.

Andrew Salmon, a Seoul-based reporter, is the author of "To the Last Round: The Epic British Stand on the Imjin River, Korea 1951" and "Scorched Earth, Black Snow: Britain and Australia in the Korean War, 1950."

Copyright 2012 Washington Post Writers Group
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FAIRNESS AND FREEDOM: A History of Two Open Societies, New Zealand and the United States

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Washington Post book reviewers

Feb 17, 2012 ARCHIVES  |  Entertainment  |  COLUMNS

David Hackett Fischer
Oxford University Press
ISBN 978-0199832705
629 pages
$34.95

Reviewed by Colin Woodard

It's said you cannot truly understand where you're from until you've spent time elsewhere, and that's perhaps especially true of a place as expansive and unwieldy as the United States, a continent-spanning federation riven by regional fissures and philosophical contradictions. Only by taking a step back - preferably way back - can one see it from the outside in its august complexity, compare and contrast it with other variations of the human experiment, and tease out the ideas and ideals that hold it together and those that distinguishes it from anywhere else.

Pulitzer prize-winning historian David Hackett Fischer offers such an opportunity in his latest work, "Fairness and Freedom," itself the outgrowth of a New Zealand sabbatical. The parallels between the island nation and our own were obvious: Both are open and democratic societies with British colonial origins, a frontier legacy, a history of mass immigration, and widely remarked upon senses of optimism.

But what really intrigued Fischer was a striking difference he recognized in their core values. Americans cherish freedom and liberty above all else, and much of our political history and public discourse has been about the meaning of these ideas. New Zealanders, by contrast, have organized their society around fairness, a principle that divides Americans. This book is the result of Fischer's quest to understand how and why these two open societies came to take such different paths and provides valuable insight into the American identity.

Fischer is perhaps best known for "Albion's Seed" (1989), which posited the existence of four competing "British folkways" in colonial America - each distinct in its founding values, ethnography, spirituality and societal structure - and showed how their respective influences have been felt thereafter. His "Liberty and Freedom" (2004) revealed how these regional cultures came to define the two guiding ideals of the American experiment in different and sometimes contradictory ways.

Given his past work, one might expect Fischer to have found an ethnographic basis for the differences between the two countries' guiding principles, some revealing set of cultural distinctions between the peoples who initially colonized each place that set them on their distinctive paths. But the key difference, he argues, was a matter of timing. The American colonies were part of the "First British Empire," which died when they became independent; their experience with London was largely confrontational, and the colonists were continually challenged to fight for their rights as Englishmen against imperial officials who denied taht they possessed them. New Zealand was founded during the "Second British Empire," which reached its apogee in the period from 1890 to1945; during this era, London granted Britons abroad the same rights as those at home; colonial ventures in this era had an idealistic bent, an outgrowth of a civilizing mission in which fairness, decency and social justice received plenty of lip service. The Kiwis' central concern wasn't that the empire was tyrannical, but that it was hypocritical. "The irony of British imperial rule," Fischer observes of this later era, "was that it inculcated its ethical ideals by failing to live up to them."

Fairness is a concept that was unique to English, Norse and Scandinavian languages, Fischer reveals, and is properly understood as "not taking undue advantage of other people." His exhaustive historical survey shows that Kiwis of all political persuasions have embraced fairness, even if they disagree on how it is achieved. Their heroes of sport, war and mountaineering are conspicuously celebrated for their decency toward others. Their parliamentary commissions sponsor programs to "promote fair play and good sporting behavior while discouraging a win-at-all-costs attitude among children." It's a country where everyone is insured against accidents - regardless of fault or cause - and is taxed to pay for it based on the danger of their profession; it's more equitable than our own system of tort litigation, which "brings large settlements to a few people ... (while) most victims of accidents ... get nothing."

By comparison, Fischer's survey of our history shows Americans often to be ambivalent about fairness. When veterans of earlier wars complained of being called up to fight Vietnam as well while others had not served at all, President John F. Kennedy famously responded, "Life is unfair," a notion that crops up regularly in our political discourse. Many American conservatives argue that fairness is "hostile to capitalism, destructive of national security, and dangerous to liberty," and that unfairness is virtuous and inseparable from freedom.

Fischer sees many virtues in our ideals, but argues we could learn a great deal from the New Zealand's stress on fairness. "In actual operation," he writes, "freedom and liberty and fairness can be mutually reinforcing ... (each with) the power to reinforce the other's virtues and correct its vices." In an era of increasing inequality, his is a timely argument, and one well worth hearing.

Colin Woodard is the author, most recently, of "American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America."

Copyright 2012 Washington Post Writers Group
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