Yes, indeed, I finished reading this biography of Alexander Hamilton. All 731 pages. It took me most of the summer, but it's not a book one can simply blithely fly through.
Let me preface the rest of my thoughts about Hamilton and this book by saying I didn't know much about the Revolutionary War and the beginnings of America. My history classes sort-of glossed over that, choosing instead to focus on the Civil War and the world wars. Those are fine, don't get me wrong, but it's also good to know how it all began.
I read a book about the early American newspaper industry called "Infamous Scribblers" awhile back. Its author talked about the essayists whose work filled those early newspaper pages. Hamilton was one of them. He was also part of the first sex scandal that rocked the young country. So I knew Hamilton was a prolific writer who had a, shall we say, shady side.
As you may have guessed at 731 pages, Ron Chernow (the author) did a lot of research. Even though Hamilton died relatively young at age 49, he was a busy man. He had his hands in almost everything, from the creation of the national bank and stock market to delineating the roles of government offices and agencies. Not only that, he was a lawyer, read voraciously and had eight children with his wife, Eliza. And he wrote. A lot. Thousands of words per essay. (And Kevin thinks we write long stories. He has no idea!)
Chernow did an admirable job distilling Hamilton's life and work into a more manageable package. I can't imagine the hours he must have spent reading everything Hamilton wrote, everything that was written to him and everything written about him. I think I would have despaired at ever getting through it all, in the first place, putting it into an organized whole and then deciding what quotes and comments from that time to use. It had to have felt overwhelming.
Hamilton himself was an interesting paradox. On one hand, he was brilliant. His ideas came from his head to his paper fully formed, without any need to make corrections. The institutions he set up still exist today, and our government runs as he determined it should. On the other hand, he made some really stupid mistakes. His affair with Maria Reynolds was one of them. And he didn't always back the winning horse. Once his influence began to wane, he seemed to grow more desperate to get back into the public spotlight, even though he said he didn't want the attention.
As you probably know (unless you've been living under a rock for the last couple years), this biography was the basis for the musical "Hamilton" by Lin-Manuel Miranda. While I haven't listened to the soundtrack yet (I know, I know), now that I've read the book, I'll have a better idea of what's going on.
Once I finished "Alexander Hamilton," I decided I needed something completely different. So I picked up "Local Wonders" by Ted Kooser. I've read it a couple times before, and I thought it would be a good balance to the extraordinary life I'd just read about.
One thing I admire about Kooser's work is its simplicity. He takes the ordinary, uses ordinary words to describe it and turns it into the extraordinary. I wish I could do that. "Local Wonders" works through a year, divided into seasons, of course. Kooser writes essays of varying lengths describing things like the outhouse on the farm, his dogs hunting for frogs, the small-town way of life that I know so well. He lives just over the way in Garland, so I know the area he describes.
I know the kind of people he talks about, too. The farmer driving down the road in his old battered pickup truck. The postmaster letting you know your paper will be late. The shopkeepers and people from town. I've met them throughout my life. That girl who grew up in a little town where everyone knew her and her family - you know, the one who always saved the world while delivering the morning paper and who preferred reading to almost any other activity. Yeah, I know her pretty well, too.
From 731 pages of Hamilton to 153 pages of local wonders. It doesn't get more disparate, or more similar in some ways, than that.
What's next on my reading list, you ask? Why, Harry Potter, of course.
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