One book out of three I liked (#SFWApro)

But such is the life of the obsessive reader … PARADISE LUST: Searching for the Garden of Eden by Brook Wilensky-Lanford starts off on the wrong foot by squeezing all the centuries of pre-19th century searching into a couple of pages, focusing on the last couple of hundred years instead. Not that there aren’t some amusingly absurd theories (Eden is in Ohio! China! Apalachicola Florida! The North Pole!) but I’d have preferred a more global approach. And chapters on modern creationists and a visit to the Creation Museum felt like padding—the fact Creationists believe in a literal Garden of Eden isn’t the same as searching for it (and as Wilensky-Lanford notes, they don’t). Then there’s a discussion of a theory she likes which is that the whole story is an allegory for the first clash of Mesopotamian farmers and hunter-gatherers—sorry, once you get into that sort of metaphor, you’re not searching for a “real” Eden, just a metaphorical one (not the same, IMHO). Plus the theory didn’t dazzle me anywhere near as much as it did the author. A disappointing one.
BRIGHT YOUNG PEOPLE: The Lost Generation of London’s Jazz Age by DJ Taylor is more a case of a mismatch than a bad book: I’d assumed this would be an overview of 1920s London and its “Bright Young Things” as they were known, but Taylor’s looking specifically at a small in-crowd of debutantes, celebrities, authors and nouveau riches including authors Evelyn Waugh and Anthony Powell, the Mitford sisters and other less famed figures. This made it a collection of biographical sketches of people I wasn’t really interested in, but if I had been, I think I’d have given it a thumbs up. The book also made me realize that just through fiction (PG Wodehouse, for example), I’m more familiar with the images and style of the era than I’d have thought.
BATTLE CRY OF FREEDOM: The Civil War Era is the week’s winner, James McPherson’s exhaustive 800-page look look at the Civil War era, starting with the previous decade to show how politics, economics and America’s westward expansion all combined to make slavery an increasingly contentious issue (spreading west raised the question of whether the west would be Slave or Free for instance), then plunges into the war itself and the complex tangle of diplomacy, technological breakthroughs (the development of ironclads showing the traditional wooden fleet was now obsolete), politics and military maneuvers that kept it going and often threatened to end it prematurely. As this focuses on specific er, arcs (Southern economics, military campaigns, Lincoln’s re-election),rather than event-by-event, the procession of events is harder to follow, but the analysis makes up for it. I can see, for instance, why figuring out Lincoln’s views on the post-war fate of black America is such a headscratcher, as he expressed multiple different viewpoints over the years, and had to shape some of his statements to fit a country that wasn’t ready to embrace equality. Very good.