By Geoff Ryman (Small Beer Press, 2006)

In the American popular consciousness, Cambodia is associated with two things: our carpet-bombing of it during the Vietnam War and the genocide perpetrated by the Khmer Rouge a few years later. It was interesting for me to learn a few years ago that, apparently, our war with Vietnam doesn’t loom quite as large in the Vietnamese public imagination as it does in ours: To Vietnam, we are participants in just one of a series of overlapping conflicts that it fought from 1947 to 1979. Among foreign invaders, France preceded us and Cambodia and China followed. The Khmer Rouge’s genocidal campaign, however, really was devastating to Cambodia. Somewhere between one in eight and one in five Cambodians were killed during it—we still don’t know exactly how many people died—and the wars that came after, both within Cambodia and between Cambodia and Vietnam, killed more. By the time a peace agreement was reached and Cambodia began to draft its new constitution in 1993, the country had been fighting for twenty years.

For those of us who grew up and still live in the shelter of stable, developed countries, it is very hard to understand how Cambodia’s recent history—not to mention the sadly similar histories of other countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America—affects the people who are living there now; how each individual has been touched, or bruised, or wounded for life, and how each one responds. It is thus astonishing that Geoff Ryman, a Canadian living in the United Kingdom, had the guts to write a book like The King’s Last Song, though not quite as astonishing as the results, which, at least to this gringo reader, seem as sensitive and humble toward the subject matter as the author could be, yet manage also to tell an unflinching, wrenching story involving some deeply, deeply flawed people who are nonetheless searching for a way out.

The King’s Last Song is actually two stories centering on Cambodia’s most famous ruin, Angkor Wat. In the modern-day Cambodia—2004, to be precise—a UN archeological team uncovers a book engraved on gold plates that, it is immediately believed, was written by King Jayavarman VII, a twelfth-century Buddhist leader who united Cambodia and brought peace to a region riven by war. News spreads quickly about the find, and within a day of the book being fully excavated, both it and its guardian, a French scholar named Luc Andrade, are kidnapped. The plot then follows both Luc’s trials with his kidnappers and the effort to rescue him, led by William, Luc’s Cambodian porter, and Map, an ex-Khmer Rouge soldier, both of whom consider Luc their mentor and benefactor. Interspersed with this harrowing story is the equally tense tale of Jayavarman’s life and rise to power eight hundred years before. It’s not a simple book, but Ryman is such a good, visceral writer that one barely notices its structural complexity, and by the end, the two plots strands resonate so loudly with each other that it’s hard to imagine the book working any other way.

As if that were not enough, thematically Ryman is after big game: Following in the tradition of James Joyce and Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy, he wants nothing less than to depict a country’s struggle to reconcile itself with its past and move on toward a better future. That Ryman approaches his project with such humility—in the afterword, he’s the first to admit he’s no expert on Cambodia—doesn’t diminish the scope of his ambition. I don’t know nearly enough about Cambodia to say whether he succeeds, but I can say that Ryman has written an engrossing and, in the end, extremely moving story, and one that taught me a lot about a part of the world of which I am shamefully ignorant. Ryman says that he frequently visits the place, and his love for all of it—the land and its people—comes through achingly loud and clear, perhaps because it’s so hard to see something you love in so much pain.

Brian Francis Slattery is an editor of the New Haven Review.

By Tiya Miles (University of California Press, 2005)

“Being in possession of a few Black People and being crost in my affections, I debased myself and took one of my black women by the name of Doll, by her I have had these children named as follows…” So begins an 1824 petition by a Cherokee man named Shoe Boots, requesting tribal membership for his and Doll’s Afro-Cherokee children. In this book, Tiya Miles reconstructs Doll’s biography, nothing less than a prism on nineteenth-century America.

Race was complex among the Cherokees. The tribe had mixed-race and full-blood factions, free black members, traditional forms of captivity, and African slaves purchased from slave-traders — like Doll. Shoe Boots, a full-blood Cherokee, bought her as a maid for his first wife (the one who “crost” him in love), a white Kentucky teenager he kidnapped in 1793 and allowed to return home a decade later with their children. Doll, however, remained among the Cherokees, sharing their fortunes during several turbulent decades, and joining their deportation from Georgia in 1838, the Trail of Tears. Outliving both Shoe Boots and a later owner, she died in 1860, a free woman and landowner in Oklahoma.

Miles tells Doll’s story with care and simplicity. Sometimes frustrated by the opaqueness of Doll’s inner life, she reaches for analogies in other slave narratives, as well as (less effectively) in Toni Morrison’s Beloved. She is at her best in close readings of the few available documents, such as an account of Doll sitting next to Shoe Boots at the dinner table, which Miles points out a traditional Cherokee wife would never do. Miles ends the book with Doll’s “Negro” descendents’ frustrated attempts to establish Cherokee citizenship, framing her story in contemporary struggles over authentic Native American identity. Along with a fascinating biography, this book offers an utterly original angle on American history itself.

Jeremy Ravi Mumford teaches at the University of Michigan.

We’re on a short vacation while we close issue #4, coming soon. Meanwhile, please feel free to send us e-mail at editor@newhavenreview.com . . .

By William E. Leuchtenburg (Times Books, 2009)

As the United States and rest of the world stare the possibility of global depression in the face, it has become common to compare the present day to the late 1920s and early 1930s. But Herbert Hoover, an intense new biography by New Deal historian William E. Leuchtenburg, draws parallels that can take your breath away.

In 1932, the country was facing a credit crisis the likes of which had never been seen. Americans were losing their jobs, their houses, and their life savings as the stock market crashed and banks collapsed. To stymie a plunge that could last years, Hoover OK’d the renewal of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation to recapitalize the financial sector, infusing $2 billion—a “staggering amount” at that time, Leuchtenburg reminds us—into banks, insurance firms, railroad companies, and other finance institutions. Will Rogers wrote that the bankers had “the honor of bring the first group to go on the ‘dole’ in America.”

But efforts to save the banks and stimulate the economy from the top down backfired. Banks were still closing, though at a slower rate, and instead of loosening up credit markets, as the bailout was intended to do, banks found a way to use the millions to shore up their own holdings.

New York Senator Robert Wagner, a progressive critic of the Hoover administration, responded to this blank-check strategy by zeroing in on the fatal flaw of Hoover’s economic ideology: Even in extraordinary times, even in the face of starvation, Hoover believed welfare would impair the character of the needy and rob benefactors of the opportunity to exercise voluntarism and civic duty. Wagner, like many others, was stunned by Hoover’s decision to bail out banks. “We did not preach to them rugged individualism,” he said;

We did not sanctimoniously roll out sentences rich with synonyms of self-reliance. We were not carried away with apprehension over what would happen to their independence if we extended them a helping hand.… Must [the individual] alone carry the cross of individual responsibility?

I don’t think Leuchtenburg intended his biography to reflect so acutely our current hardships. His aim was to paint a not unsympathetic portrait of a hard man to have sympathy for. But as I zipped through this lucid book, I kept trying to think of a good word to describe the feeling of my frequently being taken aback. History repeats itself, sure, but how often does it do so with such vengeance?

* * *

No president had ever fallen from such a great height, Leuchtenburg writes. Hoover was a hero after World War I for feeding millions of Europeans as a food administrator. He organized the recovery of the American Midwest after a devastating flood along the Mississippi River. But his name came to be attached to the shantytowns—the Hoovervilles—where millions of poor and out of work ended up. Millions more lived in empty freight cars derisively called Pullman Hoovers. A couple who had named their son Herbert Hoover Jones eventually changed his name to Franklin D. Roosevelt Jones in order to save him future “chagrin and mortification.”

When he lost a bid for a second term to FDR, Hoover lost badly. In 1928, he won forty (of 48) states. In 1932, he won six. “Not for eighty years had there been such avalanche of Democratic ballots,” Leuchtenburg writes; “1932 marked the worst defeat in the history of the GOP.” These superlatives suggest Hoover’s defeat was more than a referendum on his policies. It was a wholesale rebuke of ideologies that had given Republicans a popular majority since 1853 and that calcified under the reign of Big Bert.

These ideologies concerned the role of government.

Though authoritarian and eager to use executive power to bulldoze legislation, or bypass political debate entirely, Hoover was unwilling to expand government’s role in society. The president believed, Leuchtenburg says, “that one should rely not on government but on civic-minded individuals ‘imbued with the spirit of self-sacrifice in full measure.’” Governor Bobby Jindal of Louisiana cited this position last week in his rebuttal to President Obama’s feux State of the Union address. Jindal said the best thing for post-Katrina New Orleans wasn’t government intervention. It was the spirit of community volunteerism.

Before his presidency, Hoover had even written a widely read book called, appropriately enough, American Individualism, in which he warned against the “tyranny” and “timorous mediocrities” of trade unions. But American Individualism, “a jejune screed” that was “little more than pamphlet,” Leuchtenburg says, showed another side of Hoover that was not ideological but pragmatic, a quality likely rooted in his time as food czar during World War I. Private underwriting of America’s effort to feed war refugees, he said, was of an “uncertain quality.” As philanthropy could only go so far, “we must obtain a regular government subsidy.” Pragmatism returned when he wrote that government regulation of capitalism was necessary because “we have learned that the foremost [i.e., the rich] are not always the best and the hindmost [the poor] are not always the worst.… Fair division [of capital] can only be obtained by certain restrictions on the strong and the dominant.”

This Herbert Hoover, however, didn’t show up for the Great Depression. In the end, ideology won out. At the time when something could have been done, Hoover left almost all responsibility to corporations who suggested consumers add sun porches to their houses to stimulate the economy. Then he gave banks millions. Later, as Americans were losing their savings and queueing up in bread lines, Hoover said they were suffering from “frozen confidence” more than “frozen securities.”

If that doesn’t remind you of Phil Gramm, John McCain’s former economics adviser who callously said we were in the middle of a “mental recession,” you haven’t been paying attention. But you’re not alone. Gramm led the 1999 charge against the Glass-Steagall Act, a law put in place during the Roosevelt administration that kept banks from investing on Wall Street. He also won legislation to deregulate derivatives, the financial instruments that brought down AIG and cost us $150 billion. Apparently, all of us keep forgetting our history. And our money, too.

John Stoehr is the arts editor at the Charleston City Paper.