From the Shelves of the Paco Library

I didn’t have much time this week to do a proper book recommendation, so this is just a snapshot.

Regular readers will remember that I have mentioned author David Liss on a couple of occasions. He has created an interesting niche for himself writing novels centered on various 18th-century financial panics, including a wonderful series featuring thief-taker and investigator, Benjamin Weaver. I have just finished The Whiskey Rebels, which is a variation on the same theme.

Liss takes us to late18th-century America in an action-packed story that revolves around the bank panic of 1791. The book is structured in the form of two alternating first-person accounts by Ethan Saunders and Joan Maycott. Captain Saunders is a former spy for the Continental Army who was cashiered on phony charges of selling information to the British and has fallen on hard times. Joan Maycott is the daughter of a farmer who marries a carpenter, and who, with her husband, moves to the wilds of western Pennsylvania, her husband having been tricked into selling his unpaid army scrip in exchange for what turns out to be worthless land. Their lives become intertwined as Captain Saunders works with Alexander Hamilton to stave off the failure of the Bank of the United States, which is threatened by speculators, and Joan leads a conspiracy of western “whiskey men”, incensed over a new excise tax on their product, to destroy both Hamilton and his bank. The intricate plot features a host of well-drawn characters, including fictional treatments of actual historical figures, including Alexander Hamilton, the financial manipulator William Duer, a cameo appearance by Thomas Jefferson and a walk-on role for George Washington. In addition to the exciting plot, we learn much about the debate in our young country between those who favored a strong national government, and those who viewed the federalists as harbingers of a new tyranny (sound familiar?)

This is highly enjoyable historical fiction, and succeeds in what the genre, at its best, is supposed to do: it enables us to see a distant time through the eyes of the kind of people who lived it, transforming the old, dead past into something fresh and new.