The Last American Aristocrat: The Brilliant Life and Improbable Education of Henry Adams by David S. Brown
Henry Adams had a fine pedigree. His grandfather was John Quincy Adams and his great- grandfather was John Adams, both American presidents. His father was Charles Francis Adams, a successful public figure and anti-slavery activist. Henry was born in 1838 and died in 1918. He met Abraham Lincoln and Queen Victoria and had dinner with President Theodore Roosevelt and hung around with Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt. Adams hung around with a lot of famous people. Had he lived a hundred years later, he would have had an impressive Rolodex of the phone numbers of important people.
Henry Adams is perhaps best known for the American history books he wrote, nine-volumes which comprised The History of the United States during the Administrations of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. His posthumously published memoir, The Education of Henry Adams, an extended meditation on the social, technological, political, and intellectual changes that occurred over Adams's lifetime, won a Pulitzer prize. The guy could write. He traveled extensively all around the world, going to Cuba, Russia and to islands in the South Pacific – an exotic destination during his times.
Adams was very privileged. He didn’t have to worry about money, and he was friends with so many prominent people whom he could rely on for favors. Many thought him arrogant, and they were probably right. He grew up in Quincy, MA, which was named after his family. (Coincidence? I think not.)
Henry Adams contracted scarlet fever when he was three years old and he always believed that the disease stunted his growth and drove him to focus on intellectual rather than physical excellence. His family had a world-class library in their Quincy home, so Henry got to read a lot of classic books.
Henry preferred the bustle of Boston to the calmness of Quincy. His father served as a Massachusetts state representative and senator so Henry often traveled to Boston and became involved in political discussions and activities. Both Charles and Henry became active in the Free Soil Party which, while recognizing the rights of slaveholders to their property, opposed extension of slavery into the territories and new states. The Free Soilers were a compromise. They were not anti-slavery as were the Abolitionists but they saw slavery as an existing evil that must be curtailed.
Charles Francis Adams was elected to Congress in 1858 and brought the twenty-year old Henry to Washington with him. Charles' mother, Louisa, lived in DC, and Henry became impressed by her embrace of genteel European culture, which Henry would personally explore during his many trips to Europe. While in DC, Henry often observed some of the classic debates of the day, including several between Jefferson Davis, the future president of the Confederate States of America, and Massachusetts’s Daniel Webster. The Adamses became friendly with Massachusetts Senator William Sumner who started his political career as a member of the fairly moderate Free Soil Party. However, over time Sumner became convinced that slavery was an abomination and became a radical abolitionist. This caused a serious rift in his friendship with the Adamses, who remained Free Soilers.
Henry had an interesting matriculation at Harvard, which back then cost the equivalent of $6900 a year to attend in today’s dollars. Harvard was almost a family business, with many of the Adams clan being on the board of trustees or holding other important positions with the school. Harvard presented a rigid, classical education that Henry thought was ill-suited to meet the emerging needs of contemporary society. He thought that Harvard’s inattention to science and technology was particularly troubling. Henry bristled at the regimentation of Harvard, where even petty personal transgressions resulted in being given a demerit which would affect your class rank. Henry had a lot of demerits, but he did enjoy his time in Cambridge. He became a member of the Hasty Pudding Club and made a lot of life-long friends.
After graduation from Harvard in 1858, Henry toured the South as he remained based in Washington. He found that much of what his Southern brethren espoused was disconcerting, especially slavery, but he was charmed by the lack of rigid institutional oversight and the calmer, slower pace of life in the South.
After touring Dixie, Henry had no idea what he wanted to do so he convinced his father to give him enough money to play and learn in Europe for two years. He started in Berlin where he began his legal studies. Less than a year later, Henry decided that learning law in Germany taught by people speaking German wasn’t a good fit, so he moved on to Dresden and studied other things. After a few months, he briefly made his way to Austria and Switzerland as part of his grand tour. He then went to Italy where he thought he had found a second home. He faithfully wrote letters to his father, the least Henry could do since Charles Francis was financing the tour. His letters were very detailed and very well written. They gave the reader the sense of actually being with Henry in Europe. Henry's sister, Louise, happened to live in Florence with her husband, so Henry had a base of operations. In Naples, he met Garibaldi, the architect of modern Italy. Henry knew how to hang out with the important people.
Adams returned to Washington in 1860 just as the Old Guard - including the Adamses - were being displaced by Abraham Lincoln and his crew. Charles Francis was still in Congress but his moderate anti-slavery position was about to be eclipsed by more radical approaches to dealing with slavery. Charles also badly misjudged the South – he was sure that no state would actually secede. He was wrong. Henry picked up work writing a column for a local newspaper where he often criticized Lincoln, a man he and his father did not think was fit – meaning “well-bred” – to be president.
With things getting dicey in the USA in 1860, Henry went off to London with his father who had been appointed ambassador to England. Charles Francis was charged with not letting Great Britain support the Confederate cause. Henry got a job as a London correspondent for the New York Times. He soon ran afoul of local sensibilities with his reporting that sometimes did not put Britain in a positive light. He left after seven months. He picked up other writing jobs in London until he returned home in 1868.
Henry decided to live in Washington, DC. It was a place where he felt he could find people to impress with his talents. As he arrived, the infamous black codes - regulations to limit the freedom and opportunity of freed slaves – took hold in the South. The election of 1876 that put Rutherford B. Hayes in the White House set up the end of serious reconstruction in the South. Hereafter, former slaves were once again denigrated and placed at the back of the opportunity line.
The Adamses were oblivious to the pernicious impact of the black codes on African Americans. The family kept processing what was going on in a political context – you can’t push too hard to change things -– rather than in a moral one that would brook no interference in the movement to make former slaves truly free. Adams also began to believe that it was the job of the privileged elite to fill in the posts of government to work for the common good.
As he turned 30 years old, Henry had become one of the world’s first pundits, a person who would write down his observations about what was going on in the world so that people would actually read them. Adams urged his fellow elites to deign to participate in public service in order to help the country achieve its goals. He was your classic elitist in believing that only the best-bred could run the country. In a way, Henry’s ruminations on how to improve government efficiency presaged the rise of the Progressives in the early 1900s. They believed that cultivating a bureaucratic management cadre was essential to providing good government for all. One of the knocks on the Progressives was that they were elitist, but they considered that a feature, not a design flaw.
When Adams came back from Europe, he became a professor of history at Harvard. He also became editor of the prestigious literary magazine, North American Review. Professor Adams tended to sympathize with his students. He still thought that Harvard was too stringent in its efforts to reign in student behavior. By all accounts he was a very good teacher, who added spice to his lectures by incorporating his personal history and travels into his presentations.
Henry married Marian “Clover” Hooper in 1872. Clover and Henry had seen each other over the years due to the fact that their families travelled in the same highbrow circles. While Clover was by many accounts “plain”, she had a sharp mind and was very well educated. She also came from a family with a history of severe depression. The honeymoon trip over to Europe and Egypt was very rough, as were the seas. Henry had a queasy stomach; Clover got depressed. Henry seemed to enjoy the trip a lot more than his wife did. While he was fascinated with the different culture of Alexandria, Egypt, she found the city “disgusting”.
Adams returned to teach doctoral students at Harvard. He was big into dominant race thinking, something he picked up when he was a student in Germany. Some races are superior to others, believed these people. It was a common thought in the late 1800s to which the restrictive nature of United States immigration legislation can be attributed. Throw in a little Social Darwinism (“Survival of the fittest'') -– another major belief of the period – -and you have a pretty good framework for race and ethnic relations of the day and of the Germany that Adolph Hitler would create in the 1930s.
Charles Francis and Henry Adams took great interest in the Election of 1876 that pitted Samuel Tilden against Rutherford B. Hayes. Neither candidate was seen to be a rising star but they were acceptable to most people. The Adamses tried to create a strong third-party alternative but that went nowhere, as it always does in a strong two-party system. Hayes won the election in a back-room deal that ensured that the South could continue to repress former slaves. After the election, Henry took a trip to Washington where he found out that the Adams Family’s brand of politics was not very popular. No one in DC took them seriously anymore.
Henry threw himself into writing. He worked with his graduate students as he wrote and edited a solid body of work including Documents Relating to New England Federalism, 1800-1815, which defended John Quincy Adams’ foreign policy when he was president. During the 1870s, Henry Adams and his former doctoral student, Henry Cabot Lodge, had a friendly rivalry concerning how they interpreted American history.
Henry abruptly resigned from Harvard in 1877 and moved to Washington with his wife. Henry had tried to reform the university by having it lighten up in how it dealt with students but he failed. He also was approaching forty years old, which he saw as really old. He was tired of being a professor, a “been there and done that” feeling. Henry’s relatives believe that Clover pushed Henry out of New England. She and her in-laws did not get along at all.
Henry and Clover leased a beautiful house in Washington, paid for by what was a pretty nice trust fund. The couple was childless, a situation Henry regretted. It’s not clear whether they couldn't have children or that Clover didn’t want to be a mother.
Henry really enjoyed being in the nation's capital. He knew a lot of people and could meet with all sorts of interesting leaders to discuss issues of the day. He and Clover hung around with a group of rich folks known as the Five of Hearts, which were bonded by their snobbery.
Adams’ writing flourished in Washington. Between 1879 and 1884 he produced two novels and two biographies and was finding his place as a serious writer. He had enough money coming in from his trust so that he didn’t have to have a real job. No doubt not having to teach students gave him the time and the focus to work on his craft. One of his biographies chronicled the life of former US Treasurer Albert Gallatin which ran to 2,700 pages. Henry liked to write. Not surprising was the fact that critics thought that it was too long. That is one book that Bob at the Bookshelf will not read and summarize.
Although the biography was not a commercial or critical success, producing it in a relatively short period of time boosted Henry’s confidence about writing about US history. He wrote Democracy, a short satire of elements of the American experience that sold well in this country and in Europe. That success further encouraged him to continue to write.
Henry’s marriage seemed perfunctory. The couple got along, but there was not much energy or passion in the relationship. Clover, unlike Henry, was not a social butterfly who enjoyed being with other people. One person that Henry found very attractive was Lizzie Cameron, the wife of the US Senator from Pennsylvania, Donald Cameron, one of Henry’s contemporaries. Don was much older than Lizzie and was not the sharpest knife in the drawer. He came from a political dynasty in Pennsylvania which was how he got elected. He is famous for this apt aphorism, “An honest politician is one who, when he is bought, will stay bought.”
Lizzie was not happily married. Don was old and a drunk and a boor who might have abused her. People couldn’t figure out why the young and attractive Lizzie would have married the rascal. It might have had something to do with the fact that he was very rich and helped bail out Lizzie’s family from a mountain of debt. Clover and Lizzie did a lot of social things together which is how Henry met her. While Henry was smitten with Lizzie, being a proper gentleman, he pined for her from afar since he and she were married.
Henry was commissioned to write a biography of John Randolph, a congressman from Virginia who died in 1833. Randolph was an early supporter of absolute state’s rights, a view that would weaken the federal government’s role in dealing with the slavery issue. Henry wrote this biography in three months and it was positively received. Ironically, Congressman Randolph had been at odds with both John and John Quincy Adams politically, but that didn’t stop Henry from writing the book.
Henry was a good investor and his finances only got better over time. He and Clover built a luxury home on a lot on tony H Street, in a deal brokered by John Hay, who had been Abraham Lincoln’s private secretary, essentially his chief of staff. Henry did know a lot of prominent people. Some things haven’t changed over the decades. The cost of the construction skyrocketed and the building took much longer to finish than had been promised.
In December of 1885, Henry went to his dentist for a toothache. When he returned home, he found out that Clover had ingested cyanide and killed herself. Her father, to whom she was very close, had died a few months earlier, something she had not gotten over. There was some evidence that Clover was overwhelmed by not being able to compete with Henry’s frenetic schedule and success in his professional endeavors.
Henry was devastated. He cut down his social interactions. Many years later he told a close friend that he never quite recovered from Clover’s death. He became very close to his five nieces. His relationship with Lizzie Cameron strengthened after Clover’s death but they never moved beyond friendship. Henry did commission Homer Saint-Gaudens to create a monument to Clover. Saint-Gaudens was a prominent sculptor who created the famous frieze near Beacon Street that commemorates the heroism of the Black 54th Regiment Memorial. The final work, which is in Washington’s Rock Creek Cemetery, is haunting and sphinxlike and considered a classic.
After Clover’s death, Henry was a changed man. He eschewed politics - he thought they were silly - and decided to see the world. One of his neighbors from Massachusetts, was Elizabeth Stuart Gardner, founder of the famous museum in Boston which coincidentally bears her name. She had raved to Henry about the wonders of Japan so he was off to Yokohama in 1886. His traveling companion was John La Farge (not LaForge, our cat - she can’t paint), who was a celebrated muralist that Henry happened to know. The two were an odd couple. La Farge was a free spirit who liked to roam around the country spontaneously. Henry was a lot more structured. He was into tours and such, of which there weren’t many in Japan back then.
They toured the entire country. La Farge produced several impressive watercolors while Adams didn’t write much. Henry was not impressed with the Japanese people. He found them too casual and thought that there were too many unpleasant odors in Japan. They returned to San Francisco in October of 1886.
Back in Washington, between 1889 and 1891, Henry produced what would become his epic work: The History of the United States during the Administrations of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, a nine-volume analysis of the formative years of the nation. He had been writing it for decades so he could get it ready to be published in only fifteen months. Henry had used his time at Harvard to do detailed research on the period between 1800 and 1817, a crucial time for the new USA. He also used his time in Europe to pore through archives that had relevant material.
The books are considered masterpieces of non-fiction. Despite being gentry, Adams takes a rather dim view of many of our nation’s early leaders. He makes the case that events made the country, not its leaders, most of whom he saw as flawed. The book was a critical success and eventually became a commercial hit. The work has been criticized for not spending much time on slavery; but, from the perspective of Americans in 1800, bondage was part of the South’s identity, culture and commerce. Adams was not about to criticize the peculiar institution.
In August of 1890, it was time for another big trip so Henry and La Farge took off for a year in Oceania, which was what the South Pacific was called back then. They went to Hawaii, Tahiti, Fiji, Australia, Indonesia, and Singapore. This is really impressive given the travel limitations of the day. Being filthy rich does have its advantages in getting from here to there.
Herman Melville, the author of Moby Dick, and Paul Gauguin, the painter, and author Robert Louis Stevenson (Treasure Island!) had preceded Adams and La Forge to the South Pacific. Adams took note of the colonial exploitation of the natives by the French in some areas but still enjoyed luxurious accommodations and fine food throughout the journey. Adams particularly enjoyed the native female dancers who wore nothing above their waists. Perhaps Henry would have enjoyed the “Gentlemen’s Clubs'' that dot the landscape today. (The descriptions Henry and La Farge put in their letters home sounded like they were describing strippers, which of course I have never seen but have heard about.) Henry was attracted to a young Samoan woman but as always, he was only in it for the friendship.
Adams and La Farge met with Robert Louis Stevenson who was broke and in terrible health. They then went to Tahiti where Henry made friends with the matriarch of the once-powerful Teva clan whose sun had set, much like what had happened to the Adams family’s power. Henry decided to write a history of the Tevas. The book chronicled the rise and fall of the family, which in many ways paralleled that of the Adamses. The last stop on the trip was Fiji which Henry found boring. Henry and La Farge returned to Europe where he met up with Lizzie.
She was the object of his affections and his messages to her from the South Pacific were almost love letters, but chaste ones. As it turned out, John Hay, Lincoln's secretary, developed a strong interest in Lizzie, who was still married to not-so dapper-Don. While in Paris, she did not see much of Henry, much to his dismay. Henry remained entranced with Lizzie throughout his life although it was obvious that her interest in him was much less than his interest in her. She had a lot of admirers, a situation she reveled in. While she no doubt liked Henry, he was way down on her depth chart in terms of admirers.
In 1893, Henry went to the Columbian Exposition in Chicago which celebrated the 400th anniversary of Columbus's voyage to the Americas. The country’s industrial might was highlighted, something that Henry thought was not necessarily a good thing. That year also saw the panic of 1893 which wiped out much of Henry’s fortune as the proceeds of his trust dropped sharply. Henry made some shrewd investments and got back in good financial shape. As was the case with most well-born American elites, he blamed the Jews for the nation’s financial troubles. Anti-Semitism was hard-wired into the psyche of many American leaders.
In 1888 and 1893, he traveled to Cuba and saw the country as a rustic antidote to the creeping industrialization of his country.
Henry came home and was appointed president of the American Historical Association. He got to give speeches and pontificate, two things that he really enjoyed. He was a pessimist regarding the future of the country. He saw industrialization and immigration as threats to the republic and he feared that as the United States became more entangled in the world, bad things would happen.
In 1897 Henry joined Henry Cabot Lodge and his wife, Anna, in a trip to Europe. Henry really liked Normandy in France. He was struck by the beauty of the cathedrals and the history of the area and saw himself as a Norman knight. While in France he wrote an imaginative novel that journeyed into the medieval mind. Henry returned to Washington with a broader sense of history than he had ever had. He was rested and ready to go.
Adams increasingly disdained politics and criticized the capitalist movers and shakers that moved America forward; it was ironic that Henry, a man of privilege, became a fierce critic of the establishment. He also sharpened his anti-Semitism as the 19th century was about to end. He was crude in his description of Jews and blamed them for many of the ills that he saw in society. This is interesting in that the robber barons that he hated were not Jewish. Henry also had no use for immigrants, particularly the Irish. In commenting on the elections of John “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald (grandfather of JFK) as mayor of Boston, he wrote, “Poor Boston has fairly run up against it in the form of its particular Irish maggot, rather lower than the Jew, but more or less the same in an appetite for cheese.” Adams saw immigrants and Jews as threatening to upset the apple cart of Yankee privilege which had been the foundation of his comfortable life.
Soon Henry got the urge for going once again, this time to Egypt with several friends including John Hay. Twenty-five years earlier, he and Clover went to Egypt for their honeymoon. Just being on the Nile River triggered an emotional reaction in Henry, one that helped him finally move beyond the grief he had been carrying for a quarter-century.
While he was away, the battleship Maine blew up in Havana and we were at war, sort of. Henry, an advocate for Cuban independence from Spain, was delighted that Cuba might emerge as a real country. A bit later, the United States went to Manila Bay to take over the Philippines, another positive in Henry’s expansionist mind. The late 1800s were perhaps the highlight of American imperialism and territorial grabs, things that fit the country’s sense of manifest destiny and exceptionalism.
Henry was frustrated at being out of the country during all of these neat wars but he followed the news closely and discussed current events with John Hay. Soon Hay got word that President McKinley wanted him to be secretary of state. That would free up the ambassador to England position that Hay now filled, Henry returned to Washington and tried to get himself appointed to the Court of St. James. Unfortunately, his disdain for politics and lack of connection to any political party did him in.
After the US had won the small wars over Cuba and Manila, Henry started to have second thoughts about America’s running roughshod over other countries but he generally liked our expansionism.
By 1900 Adams was splitting his time between Washington and Paris, which was a hotbed of technological innovation. Henry marveled at electricity and running water and sewage facilities but he didn’t quite trust modernity. As he entered his 60s he felt himself slowing down, something he consistently wrote about to Lizzie Cameron, his constant pen pal.
When Theodore Roosevelt became president after the assassination of William McKinley, Adams was as close to power as he had been in years. He and TR were sort of friends and John Hay was still secretary of state and very close to the president. Adams and Hay were housemates in DC, so Henry had solid influence over what Hay developed as policy.
In late summer of 1901, Henry and the Lodges journeyed to Russia to check out what Henry thought would become a major world power. He saw the country as a younger America, teeming with potential, although very far behind us. Henry also visited various countries in Europe including Scandinavia where he was impressed by the Northern Lights.
In 1903 Henry finished writing Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres, an ode to gothic Europe that was quite different from the histories and biographies that he typically wrote, Chartres was a literary love letter to the past, with metaphysical and spiritual elements that many people never thought they’d see in Henry’s work. He did awaken in many ways as he aged.
When John Hay died in 1905, Henry lost his best friend. They had traveled the world together and served in Washington together, and they were housemates. Henry thought that serving in government and politics had led to a premature death for Hay who Henry thought of as more of a poet and literary person than a politician. Adams ended up editing Hay’s papers but Clara, Hay’s wife, kept re-editing them so the final product was a bit of a mess.
The Education of Henry Adams, which he had been working on for many years, is considered by many to be one of the best books to appear in the twentieth century. It is an extended meditation on the social, technological, political, and intellectual changes that occurred over Adams's lifetime. Adams concluded that his traditional education failed to prepare him for understanding the world and that he had to self-educate, which he certainly did.
He nicely captures the imperative of fixing the world that motivated the Boston elite: ''Resistance to something was the law of New England nature; the boy looked out on the world with the instinct of resistance; for numberless generations his predecessors had viewed the world chiefly as a thing to be reformed, filled with evil forces to be abolished, and they saw no reason to suppose that they had wholly succeeded in the abolition; the duty was unchanged.”
Henry used his personal experiences as a scaffolding upon which to discuss the evolution of the United States, especially the role of industrial capitalism in shaping the nation. Henry bemoans the fact that by 1900, 12 percent of the population owned 99 percent of the wealth. Thirty years earlier, in a largely agrarian society, that had not been the case.
In 1907 Adams circulated copies of The Education to certain friends to get their reaction. He also was hoping someone would pay to get it published. The president of Houghton Mifflin in Boston offered to publish it but Henry had second thoughts. He was 78 and in frail health. He said that he would leave a clean copy of the book with Houghton to be published after his death. He died in 1918. The book was published in 1919, became a bestseller, and won the Pulitzer Prize for biography. World War I, with many things coming apart, confirmed much of what Henry had foretold in The Education.
During the last five or six years of his life, Henry claimed to have all sorts of ailments which he dutifully reported to Lizzie in his letters. Brooks, Henry’s brother, thought him to be a hypochondriac which was probably right. For his age, Henry was in decent health. In 1912, he did have a mild stroke from which he recovered in Lincoln, MA. He decided to curtail his traveling, yet that same year he bought a ticket to go to Europe on the Titanic on her maiden return voyage to England, which of course never happened.
Henry did get back to Paris in 1913 and 1914. While he found Washington too political and boring, Paris was alive to him. He was a car nut and bought a Mercedes which was driven by a chauffeur. It’s good to have trust funds. Henry left France as WW I was breaking out and went to London.
Henry returned to his comfortable home on H Street in DC. He had his niece and a woman who was like a niece take care of and entertain him with talk of the news of the day. They had great meals, always, with lots of champagne. He spent the summers of 1915 and 1916 respectively in Dublin, NH, and in Western Massachusetts. He also spent time in Beverly Farms, Massachusetts, where he and Clover had lived after they were married. He hadn’t been back there in decades.
On March 26, 1918, Henry Adams died in his sleep of a massive stroke. He had a humble funeral - most of his contemporaries had predeceased him - and was buried next to Clover in Rock Creek Cemetery.
The End.
Bob’s Take
Henry Adams seems to fit the definition of a prig, “a self-righteously moralistic person who behaves as if superior to others.” That comes close to describing him but there was more to Henry than that. He was very loyal to and invested in his friends, of which there were many. Most people of his class and stature in the 1800s were prigs, by definition.
He knew everybody – Henry James, Jane Addams, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Garibaldi, Gauguin, and lots of politicians and celebrities. Going to one of Henry’s dinner parties would have been memorable.
He was a small man with an unimpressive physique, which may well have been caused by his bout with scarlet fever as a child. He believed that his lack of athletic ability is what drove him to be intellectually curious.
Given how much he wrote and how quickly he cranked out pages, he was probably a writing savant. He was an excellent student and a very good professor. He might have been a genius. He was a true Renaissance Man who did many things very well.
Henry Adams had a vibrant social life but not much of a personal life. His marriage was not all sweetness and light, although he clearly loved Clover. He also was at least infatuated with Lizzie Cameron - he probably was in love with her - but he had to be satisfied with having a relationship that would never deepen.
One of the major sources for this and other books about Henry Adams were the letters he wrote to Lizzie. They were voluminous and detailed and were a great primary source for writers. He literally wrote hundreds of letters to her.
Adams took a different slant on history. Before Henry, most historians just recounted what happened without inserting too much personal opinion into their analyses. Henry added his take, which was often at odds with the considered wisdom of the day. He was not very impressed with the Great Man theory of American history. He didn't think that most of our leaders were really that great.
His politics were usually about twenty or thirty years behind the times. The Adamses were classic Yankees in a rapidly changing world where that wasn’t a plus.
He did a lot of traveling when traveling around the world was a real challenge. He made over a dozen major trips out of the country and was not afraid to go to the South Pacific, which was literally in the middle of nowhere.
I really enjoyed this book although it took about a hundred pages to get into it. It was densely detailed, but that’s not a bad thing. Many thanks to Dan in DC for suggesting it.
