The End of Borders

Patriots and Peoples began with a shopping trip to Borders books. Soon, Borders will be no more. This blog will go on, but how will other brick and mortar stores fare? It seems that I rarely visit Auntie's Bookstore, my local independent. Instead I carry a feed from Amazon in the column highlighting books that I've mentioned recently in this blog. The best bookstore between Seattle and Denver, Bookpeople of Moscow, has an uncertain future now that Bob Greene is retired. Bob often seemed as though he was one of my professors in graduate school in the sense that he frequently recommended books that would illuminate some aspect of problems that I was exploring. His recommendations were usually spot-on, and he was rewarded with a large share of my discretionary income.

Big Box stores do not offer this personal touch. Of course the employees can recommend books, but how often are their recommendations built on knowledge both broad and deep of me as a reader and scholar, and of the worlds of scholarship I tend to inhabit. It helped that Bob's partner was the director of the graduate program in which I was enrolled. But, I get the sense that many of his regular customers in other fields far different had similar experiences. Bob is a man of the world, and a man of books. Barnes & Noble employees seem to be book lovers, but their tastes run to genre literature more often that belles lettres; their knowledge of history seems grounded more in the History Channel than the output of Cornell University Press.

The largest selection of books available for browsing and purchase in Spokane is found at Barnes & Noble near the Spokane Valley Mall, but Barnes & Noble at Northtown Mall is nearer my house. Hastings has a better selection of Culture studies, including historic works by and about American Indians. Trips to Seattle, Bellevue (a Seattle suburb), or to the Tri-Cities usually permit a stop at one of the Barnes & Nobles there, and I'm always pleased to see that Big Box does not always mean the sort of homogenized junk that fills Spokane's stores. Of course, Seattle has much better choices: University Bookstore near the University of Washington (AKA Purple Puppy Pound from the point of view of this Cougar), and Elliott Bay Book Company. David Ishii Bookseller closed in 2005, a loss to the region.

The nearest Borders was handy because it was near the path between home and work. Its selection when it first opened exceeded Barnes & Noble Northtown, but that changed in the recent past. In the first year of its operation, I bought a couple of William Faulkner's texts from this store, but as they sold they were not replaced. Someone else also bought some Faulkner and the selection diminished. The opportunity to browse among a nearly full collection of inexpensive paperbacks by America's best novelist vanished, presumably because the sales were slow.

Borders never had the selection of chess books stocked by Auntie's (thanks to a chess enthusiast working at Auntie's many years), but it was better than Barnes & Noble for awhile. However, the last time I visited Borders, there were two chess books that were not worthless junk, and I reduced their inventory by one-half. I won't miss the absence, nor the time I wasted going in hoping that something had changed.

I'm gonna miss Borders' history section, and their new book tables in the front, and some of the bargain books. I'm gonna miss them a lot less than I would have had they closed four years ago when they had an impressive selection of literature (including Proust and Faulkner), U.S. history that is not military history (including Zinn and Schweikart), chess, and Pacific Northwest history, AKA regional that is not travel guides.


The End of Browsing

Browsing has changed. These days I'm more likely to browse by downloading a Kindle sample. I spent decades developing the ability to pick up a book in a library or bookstore, read the table of contents, examine the notes and bibliography, read the beginnings of a few paragraphs, and make my assessment. Does the work contribute something new? Does the author demonstrate sufficient mastery of his or her topic to warrant the elimination of trees that went into publication? Kindle samples do not permit this sort of analysis, but Google Books previews often do.

I can still browse at Costco, but their selection has deteriorated in the past two years. Before Senator Obama became President Obama, they carried his Dreams from My Father, and John McCain, Faith of My Fathers. Now they seem to have piles of screeds by Glenn Beck and a host of others pushing similar nonsense, but nothing on the other side.

Browsing is one form of reading that often leads to more time in a chair turning pages, growing, learning, thinking. Ebooks take away, or alter, the process of turning pages. But, some fear that ebooks are part an resistible trend away from reading itself. Hundreds of writers are musing over the meaning of the closing of Borders as though the failure of this behemoth is symptomatic of disturbing trends. "Electronic Book: The End for Borders" looks to have been published a few months ago. "Borders Closure and the End of the Book" appeared early this week. Google "borders books end of reading" as I did, and you can find many more.

Misplaced Emphasis

The book table at Costco proves an irresistible lure, but the barbs there leave my jaw aching. Increasingly since the historic election of 2008, there have been stacks of right-wing diatribes by authors with little regard for accuracy of facts or analysis. But good books remain among the chaff. I'll be sorely tempted by Autobiography of Mark Twain, Vol 1 (2011) on the next trip because I've found that the Kindle edition is not well suited for this sort of scholarly text and the price at Costco is $1.02 less than at Amazon. I nearly bought Life (2010) by Keith Richards, and may yet when the paperback comes out in a few months if they carry it. I've bought and read two books on the Battle of Little Big Horn--both were disappointing histories.

Off and on over the past week, I've been trying to labor through a book that I thought would be a quick and interesting read. I bought Richard Kluger, The Bitter Waters of Medicine Creek (2011) from Costco in February with plans to read it during spring break. Last Monday I started. The Forward appalled me for its abysmal failure to mention tribal sovereignty while pretending to lay out the critical historical framework at the heart of the Medicine Creek Treaty of 1854. Reading further has been slogging through questionable factual assertions (I need to do some fact checking on several points) and episodes in misplaced emphasis.

This morning I came upon this sentence:

Scholars have estimated that by 1850, the aboriginal population in North America--besieged by the invaders' explosive weaponry, wondrous technology, contemptuous cruelty, and irresistible pathogens, as well as the Indians' own ever-deepening despair--was just one-tenth of what it had been when Columbus first ventured ashore. (57)

Kluger gets the demography correct, but fails to explain it well. Beginning with weapons and technology demonstrates that he has read neither my "Superior European Technology" nor Charles C. Mann, 1491: New Revelations of the Americas before Columbus (2005)--another text that I found at Costco. He also reveals his failure to comprehend the significance of ecological damage, easily rectified for starters by reading William Cronon, Changes in the Land (1983). Most egregious is the way that he seems to put disease behind conscious imperialism and technology in his explanation of traumatic demographic change.

Kluger sets up the reader to expect that he would comprehend the significance of ecological changes on the previous page:

Essential to this metamorphosis would be correcting the red race's attitude toward the land, which they shrank from actively cultivating but regarded as a hallowed preserve ... Such footloose practices were deemed unsuitable for a civilized society. Instead, the Indians needed to buckle down within far less expansive territory, where they would work the soil as the Scriptures directed (see Genesis 9:1) and make it flourish. (56)

The Bitter Waters of Medicine Creek concerns peoples and events in the southern Puget Sound Basin, so the failure of a historical gloss to recognize the cultivation of corn, beans, and squash by everyone from the Pueblos of New Mexico to the Seneca of New York might be forgivable. The Neolithic Revolution emerged in Meso-America and southern China approximately the same time that it emerged in the Fertile Crescent. Even so, the U.S. Supreme Court encoded this common stereotype of Indian hunters and gatherers with respect to those indigenous to the Ohio River Valley in Johnson v. McIntosh (1823) and with respect to the plantation owning Cherokee in Cherokee Nation v. Georgia (1832). As a description of Anglo-American attitudes, if not American Indian realities, Kluger's gloss serves its purpose.

Ten years ago I revealed my own understanding of the role of disease in the European conquest:

Epidemic disease was the decisive factor in the European conquest. Epidemics not only eliminated entire communities, but the resulting sociocultural disruption created conditions that made Native peoples more receptive to European trade items and religious ideas.
James Stripes, "Native Americans: An Overview," Encyclopedia of American Studies, vol. 3 (2001), 198.

One of my first entries for this blog, "Practicing Objectivity," quoted that tertiary source. This morning I am reminded how easily historians searching for a new writing topic without adequate grounding in the scholarship will easily miss the critical significance and fall into popularly believed errors--technology conferred minimal advantages to Europeans, and when it did it was swords and cannons more than personal firearms. Disease was the decisive factor, followed closely by assaults on the land. Technology ultimately assisted, but only after the initially tenuous foothold was well established. Then, the plow did more to facilitate conquest than did the gun.