Doug McAdam's 3 favorite reads in 2023

In 1945 J. Robert Oppenheimer was lionized as a brilliant scientist and a courageous American patriot, for his direction of the Manhattan Project. And yet, just a scant nine years later, he was a political and cultural pariah, stripped of his security clearance and subjected to a humiliating, public fall from grace.

This extraordinary transformation in his stature had little to do with Oppenheimer, who remained much the same person over the course of these nine years. What changed was the historical context, which could not have been more different in 1945 than it was in 1954.

This is a powerful, riveting, maddening story of America’s descent from the pragmatic, can do energy of the war years to the paranoia and vindictive excesses of the McCarthy era. It is also an extraordinary, deeply researched, piece of historical scholarship, that sheds important new light on one of the most shameful periods in American history.

Leave it to a Finnish historian to fundamentally challenge and transform the way Americans understand the native American experience, post-European contact.

Beginning with The Comanche Empire and continuing with Lakota America, Hämäläinen, through exhaustive research, has forced us to see that not all native tribes were overwhelmed and decimated by the destructive force of European presence in North America.

Many tribes did succumb in this way, but there were those—like the Comanche and the Lakota Sioux—who took advantage of the disruptive force of European conquest to fashion ways of life and tribal organization that allowed them to thrive for a century or more, in spite of, or perhaps because, of the chaos occasioned by European settlement.

Trust me, you will not see European/Native American relations the same way ever again.

I don’t know how I missed this extraordinary debut novel when it was first published back in 1994, but I count myself very lucky to have finally found my way to it.  

One reviewer put it this way: “Miraculous. . . . reads like life itself.”  Another described it as “quietly heartbreaking, laugh-out-loud funny, and always, absolutely convincing.”

Add to that characters who, however egregious their flaws, are rendered honestly and sympathetically, and you have a novel that is as rich and deeply heart felt as any I’ve ever read.