Skip to main content

The Peabody Sisters of Salem by Luise Hall Tharp

Slow, stately biography of three sisters from 1800s-era Massachusetts. The eldest, Elizabeth Peabody, was a well-regarded educator; the middle sister, Mary Peabody, was a teacher and author who became the wife of educator and congressman Horace Mann; and the youngest, Sophia Peabody, was an artist who married author Nathaniel Hawthorne. 

It's not my favorite style of biography when the author attributes thoughts and feelings to each of the characters when there's no way the author can know their thoughts and feelings. This is "James Michener" history, not real history. At the same time, the book gives a competent tour of a kind of birth and early gestation of American literary and artistic culture. 

You'll meet a shy and weird Ralph Waldo Emerson, who was Elizabeth's Greek tutor. You'll learn the circumstances of Nathaniel Hawthorne surprise breakthrough to worldwide literary fame with The Scarlet Letter. You'll meet general (later President) Franklin Pierce, as Hawthorne writes a controversial biography of him. You'll see educator and congressman Horace Mann's career arc as he befriends Elizabeth, marries Mary, wins a seat in Congress, and then goes on to Ohio to found Antioch College. 

You'll see the Peabody sisters mingle with prime movers in the public education movement in the early USA, you'll meet key New England abolitionists, and you'll meet leaders of the socio-philosophical "Transcendentalism" movement, as they attempt to create a self-sustaining agricultural community (the result was about what you'd expect if a group of Brooklyn soy-hipsters tried the same thing today).

Finally, you'll see dynamics common to all families: manipulation, sibling rivalry, and angry disputes over the political issues of the day. Slavery, for example, became a wedge issue in the Peabody family when the youngest sister's abolitionism wasn't sufficiently pure and aggressive enough for the oldest sister's taste. They "ruined their Thanksgiving dinners" arguing about politics too, and I'm unsure if it makes me depressed or sympathetic to know it. 

To read:
Conyers Middleton: Letter from Rome
Nathaniel Hawthorne: The Scarlet Letter, The Marble Faun

More Posts

How to Survive and Thrive in the Coming Wave of Deflation by A. Gary Shilling

I'd like to accomplish two things with this review of a book that, frankly, isn't worth a close read. First, I'll briefly point to the specific sections of the book readers can skim to extract most of the book's value--see the next paragraph for that part. Second, I want to use this book--which is the macroeconomic prediction equivalent of a man with a hammer--to expose the "expert prediction" game and illustrate how dangerous it is to credulously follow so-called expert predictions, especially when it comes to stock markets and economics. We'll start with what to skip and skim. A time-constrained reader can extract 99% of the value of the book by skimming parts 3 and 4 (pages 209-331) and studying the two charts on pages 330 and 331, which spell out all the dos and don'ts for surviving deflation. Readers might also consider reading Chapter 15 for its discussion of the Kondratieff wave concept, a useful mental model for thinking about cyclicality in a...
Read more

Generative Energy: Restoring the Wholeness of Life by Ray Peat

A disorganized book by a highly-censored medical iconoclast. Despite its sloppiness, it will still send you down a lot of good rabbit holes. I don't recommend a labored, close reading of this book: just use it as an introduction to Ray Peat's dissident health and physiology ideas. In certain ways, we can think of Ray Peat, along with Robert Mendelsohn and Ivan Illich , as direct ancestors of the courageous COVID-era medical dissidents: doctors like Peter McCullough, Mary Talley Bowden, Pierre Kory, Kirk and Kimberly Milhoan, Paul Marik, Meryl Nass and Peter Gotszche, among others, who bravely spoke out against foolish lockdowns, hospital protocols, government mandates and the use of risky (but of course highly lucrative) therapeutics like Remdesivir--and were censored, suspended or fired for it. [1] As a general rule: in any knowledge domain you should always know who the dissident thinkers are. They are usually the ones who were right all along. [2] [A quick  affiliate link ...
Read more

The Congress of Vienna, 1814-1815 by Sir Charles Kingsley Webster

When we study history, we often see clear analogies from one era to another. This book is such an exercise in analogy: it is an analysis of the post-Napoleonic world order used as a specific study tool to grapple with the post-World War I world order. Today's readers can use this book as analogy too, to better understand events in our day. It's excruciatingly obvious that the leadership throughout the entire West is profoundly ignorant of history. And if it's true that those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it, then those of us who do know our history--and can see various analogies and parallels to the past--may well figure out what's going to happen well before they do. I'll explore a few of these analogies in this essay. One immediately visible example is the various interlocking suzerainty/vassalage arrangements in place in any given geopolitical landscape, and how rapidly they can shift when there's a disruption among the dominant states. ...
Read more