February 25, 2025 • 39 mins
Everybody is out for money ... politicians just want yours as well.
'The Gilded Age' by Mark Twain & Charles Dudley Warner is a fictional tale of the money, speculation & intrigue of American politics. It has two main branches of the story that intersect. The first is about a cast of small town people who seek out the riches of Washington (Laura, Washington & Col. Eschol Sellers). The second is of two well off young gentlemen who initially seek their fortune in the country before returning to the real action in DC (Harry & Philip). It showcases the influence that politicians have and how they abuse it for their own profit.
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Timeline:
(00:00:00) Intro
(00:03:19) Themes/Questions
(00:28:42) Author & Extras
(00:33:09) Summary
(00:37:26) Value 4 Value
(00:38:18) Join Live!
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Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Kyrin Down (00:00):
Everybody is out for money. Politicians just want yours as well.
Welcome, everyone, to another episode of the Mere Mortals book reviews. I'm your host here, Kyrin, live
on 11AM
strain Eastern Standard Time on a Wednesday,
(00:20):
this being the 02/26/2025.
As you might surmise, this is the podcast where I reveal the big expectations, the grand plans of the great Kyrindown drainpipe that's gonna go to the middle of this country. I'm gonna turn the desert wasteland into the utopia
it has and should be
for the help of the Aboriginal
(00:41):
population there.
Okay. No. I'm not gonna be doing that, but you will find very similar
ideas in this book here. We have The Gilded Age by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner, a joint authorship
book. This was published originally in 1873,
'4 hundred and '60 '8 pages in length, plus a little bit extra if you're adding in the notes at the end.
(01:04):
Probably took me twelve hours reading to get through. I'd say it's pretty dense,
writing. And then every now and then, they've got just, like, some little pictures in here
of illustrations
and stuff. So it is mostly writing, though.
Now this book is a fictional tale of the money, speculation, and political intrigue corruption that occurred in The United States Of America in roughly the period of, I think it was eighteen seventies to eighteen nineties, the late eighteen hundreds in any case.
(01:33):
So this is the era of, like, railroads being built out of the,
you know, population of the big cities
finding that there's huge opportunities and coal and gas and all sorts of things in the center of the country.
So what we find in this book is there's two main branches of stories that kind of inter intersect.
(01:53):
We have
the first, which is about a cast of small towns people in, I believe it was called Hawksville,
who
are just kind of small townies. They
moved around from place to place, and they're kind of like political
speculators, I guess, would be the
the the type to describe these characters. And so these are people like Laura Washington and the Colonel Eshel Sellers.
(02:18):
And they move into the to the big city to seek out the riches of Washington
and the the politics that are there. We then also have the other section, which is of two, young, well off gentlemen
called,
Harry and Philip, who have kind of like a lover. For example, Philip is in love with, Ruth Bolton is
(02:39):
good
friends with her family, and they actually seek their fortunes in the wilderness. So we've kind of got this switching of paths going on and where they, will go to places like, Hawkesville and stuff like that
to try and build railroads and to establish coal mines and things like this before they actually return to DC
and get in entangled in a mesh with the, you know, very beautiful Laura, for example. Harry gets entangled with her. This book, I guess, showcases the influence that politics have of what money has, of what speculation was during this era,
(03:14):
and,
how people will abuse it for their own profit.
So let's jump on to the main themes and questions that arise in this book.
And it's a bit of a strange one. I was taking the notes. I'm like, okay. I'm seeing these two little similarities appear here, and I I wouldn't have connected them initially. And this is being the love of women and the speculation of men. And is there anything to to kind of connect these two?
(03:37):
And I believe there is. So let's perhaps start with the the love portion.
And this is mainly,
I guess, related to the stories of the women.
I would hazard that this is because during this era,
the the women didn't have that much access to, you know, I think I don't think they could vote, for example. So their their opinions on things didn't matter in terms of politics
(04:00):
and things like that.
And in terms of like autonomy of having jobs,
a even,
were very much restricted
to the to the home, you know, being being the wife, for example.
And so with a lot else being denied to them, they, you know, focus on the things that they can kind of control, which is love and intrigue and in the love sense of things. So
(04:25):
we have a rather, I guess, strong difference between the the three main characters here, this being Ruth Bolton,
Alice, her friend from, like, childhood friend, I guess,
as well as the very beautiful Laura from the countryside.
And
so what we see with Ruth, for example, is she's probably the luckiest in this in this book in that she has a man she's who who kind of is already in love with her, this being the dependable Phillips, probably the best man in the book.
(04:55):
And what we see is that she kind of spurns his love for her and, you know, and and just plays around with it and kind of puts it to the side, scoffs at it, scorns it, and even some cases,
and she's a bit of a dandy. She turns into,
you know, she's very independently minded. She wants to control her own future, but she's flirtatious. She joins in these parties and she's kind of like, you know, I guess speculating around in the in the love sense of things, if you want to put it that way.
(05:23):
So she joins society and
and eventually, I guess she finds some hardships
with her family
and she actually needs to kind of work quite a lot hard. You know, the brutal reality of life somewhat
touches her. And and because of the decisions she's made, she needs to now work hard. Right at the end of the book, she she does get kind of like a little bit of a lucky break. And
(05:48):
she's manages just to survive an illness.
And Harry sorry, Philip comes and somewhat rescues her from this dire situation that she's got into. So
she's kind of one who
I think you would look at and go,
you know, she was
a bit
silly with what she thought she could do, especially with her frail constitution.
(06:10):
She certainly had ambitions, but
the ability to meet them personally with the condition that she was with her
her, like her brains, her body and things like this were probably far outstripping what what she actually
was able to do.
And,
she she gets a little bit lucky at the end.
(06:30):
Laura, sorry, Alice, her her friend is probably the
this, I guess, the most level headed of the of the three women.
She
apparently has her her graces, a calming effect,
a rather mature outlook, if if you want to call it that.
And she's in love with Philip, but is somewhat tortured by her by him because he's in love with with Ruth.
(06:53):
And so she kind of plays the the bleeding
heart, the bleeding ear, I guess. I don't know what you call that, where she has to listen to him whining and moaning about how Ruth doesn't love him
and,
takes it all very stoically.
The thing with her, I guess, is
she
kind of forces herself into this position. She, one, doesn't have the decisiveness to
(07:17):
tell him that she actually is in love with him or to at the very least stop talking about his love for someone else, which is hurting her.
And she also lacks the decisiveness or the intuitiveness to go out and find another prospect.
So she kind of is in this weird realm where
you look at her and you go, she's a smart woman. She
(07:37):
she's capable. She has the, you know, very appealing characteristics
of things that would make her successful in life.
Yet she she makes some bad decisions
in just that she keeps returning to the to the same person or she
hit more. Actually, he returns to her, but she she kind of is doing something stupid. And I would hazard that she knows that this is the case as well, yet she continually does it.
(08:02):
And
I guess
it's it's funny.
Yeah. We'll compare the the next section later as as to
comparing this with speculators.
She somewhat has equal qualities to to Laura in many respects in terms of
how she could turn out.
But Laura actually screws this up in a in a big bad way.
(08:24):
And Alice is much more stoic.
Laura of the three women is is somewhat one where you would say
she has the,
I guess, the ambitions
of
of Ruth in that she wants to craft her own way in life
yet with more of the physical constitution
and the beauty and the and I suppose the qualities that Alice does. So you would just be thinking like, oh, she's the perfect match. She has the the two things that would combine well to actually have a really good life.
(08:56):
And this turns out not to be the case because she makes some rather poor decisions.
We see that she actually gets burned in love relatively early early on. She was in love with a man who betrayed her trust and kind of ran away, left her
heartbroken.
And this ends up turning her from this kind of lovely, delicate flower into this poisonous lily, if you will. And so she kind of goes on this gradual descent of,
(09:23):
you know, she she joins into
the political world.
She makes intrigues. She does all these things, which would eventually turn her into a millionaire.
And because her father owned a lot of property, but it was kind of useless property. But, you know, through the wheelings and dealings in Washington,
in DC,
she manages to
(09:44):
create this university bill, which would buy up all of this land and then therefore make her obscenely rich.
And,
what actually happens, though, is she she can't let go of this this past burn.
She
meets the man again and ends up taking his life, and
her kind of delusions end up catching up with her in that her bad decisions, even though she has the the guile, the craftiness
(10:12):
to
continue
this and to trick people and to get what she wants out of life, it ends up just catching up with her in a very horrid way right at the end, especially where she gets publicly humiliated
and ends up making a rather bad decision for herself right at the end. So so we've got these three women and they're kind of like descriptions of them. And I think it's really fun right now to compare them to the three types of men, which we also see in this book. And
(10:42):
they don't deal in the in the realm of love. They deal in the realm of cold, hard cash. Boy, we're going to need some money in here.
And these are what I would just call speculators as a term in general, but
they come into a couple of different camps. So comparing Ruth here to the this first camp,
are they kind of like
(11:04):
pure,
they're pure ish, they're rather kind of thoughtless
people. And this would be Harry, a. K. A. Henry Briers,
as well as the Colonel Sellers who
he, you know, differences in these two men. The colonel is from the countryside,
but he just talks up a big game, has all these aspirations, things that he wants to do is always chatting. He's a he seems like a friendly and fun fellow,
(11:28):
yet he's never actually done anything with his life. He's a snake oil salesman in some respects,
except that he's just he can't he's too lazy to even create good snake oil. So he, you know, he has this wondrous product where he just needs this one little addition to it that would, you know, I think cure eye cancer or something. I can't remember exactly what it was, an elixir of some sort.
(11:51):
And Harry is very much the same in that
charming young man, except he's from
a well educated background,
still kind of poor ish,
and leeches off other people's money,
in in particular, Philip.
And but he talks a bit game. He's always got ideas. He's always got things that he's wheeling and dealing with. And,
(12:14):
they never really add anything of value
other than their ideas and thoughts.
And even if they did get rich, I imagine they would lose it all again pretty quickly. And this is what these guys are trying to do. They're they're trying to get rich quick.
So they seem mostly
ignorant of the game they're playing, and they lack the craft and guile to actually do well, somewhat like Ruth. She,
(12:37):
they she has these ideas and aspirations, but she doesn't actually have the
physical constitution
or the actual abilities to see them to reality. And these two men are very much the same.
There's this quote on page 192,
which actually has the,
I guess, the speculation
aspect of this and it describes them pretty well. So
(13:00):
this this man who was a,
I guess, a speculator, a distinguished speculator in the lands and mines made this remark. I wasn't worth a cent 2 years ago, and now I owe $2,000,000
Now I owe $2,000,000
2 millions of dollars, to be precise reading it correctly. So I think that's describes exuberant speculation to a tee.
(13:23):
Poor
yet through their guile and and craft,
I guess through their their talking, their exuberance,
their their chattiness, they're able to dig a very big hole for themselves
where people will lend them money or
but it's never really theirs to own. And they can perhaps, you know, talk and do and say we're gonna do things with this, but they never have the actual money themselves and can never use their money to
(13:49):
provide something of value to the world, some utility,
to actually bring that to fruition.
So we have that kind, and I think they compare very nicely with Ruth. The next kind,
are more similar to, I guess, investors, but with the the portion of gambling in them.
And this would be mister Bolton, Philip, and perhaps even Washington,
Laura's sister,
(14:09):
in into this mix. So these are the men who
they
are dependable.
They have
actual skills. Their engineers, for example, is what Philip develops or, Washington
seems to become a very able,
a personal assistant to a senator.
And they've got some skills, but they they also
(14:31):
have this portion of them in which they're like, I'm gonna take a bet. I still wanna get rich a little bit quick, but acknowledge, okay, I need to work hard to make that happen at the same time.
So they typically won't put all their eggs into one basket
yet will probably still gamble a little bit more than they can afford to lose if if when they if and when they lose out,
(14:51):
it's going to materially impact them and their families lives. And this is what we see happen to Mr. Bolton, who
continually
he knows that this guy, Mr. Bigler, is a is a fraudster of some sense, but he's always spinning a good tail
and he's always he doesn't have the kind of courage to say no to him and say, hey, I'm going to
(15:14):
I'm not going to invest with you
for X, Y and Z reason.
And
Philip is somewhat the same with his his love, I guess, for for Ruth. He's he's kind of afraid to make it public and to really
act decisively on this.
And
they have this.
They lack the ability to get by on pure fabrications like the the people above them do, like the, the real speculators of Colonel Sellers and of of Harry or Henry.
(15:46):
Yet they are able to compensate with this by some actual skills and and admirable qualities of fortitude, perseverance.
They can also be blindsided by just how dodgy some people in the next group are. And I think this is a good description of this here. So jumping on
to page 363
and we see,
mister Bolton and,
(16:07):
him,
this is a description of him by Ruth. And so she was nothing but a woman and did not know how much of a biz of of the business prosperity of the world is only a bubble of credit and speculation,
one scheme helping to float another, which is no better than it, and the whole liable to come to naught in confusion as soon as the busy brain that conceived them ceases its power to device or when some accident produces a sudden panic.
(16:32):
And right after this is is pretty much when they they go into debt. And as mister
mister Bolton, her father has extended himself too far. So
it it shows this predicament where you can have
the steady, reliable people with good qualities, much like Alice, who can make some bad decisions and get themselves into kind of predicaments where they didn't expect to. It's not the worst thing in the world. Like, they're probably not gonna go to the absolute poor house, but they can make bad decisions
(17:03):
because of this,
like, still little inherent part of them that that wants to to make it big
and to
to succeed
quickly.
Yet
if they persevere, they actually can make good decisions. And
we see all three of these characters after going through some hardships
because of their kind of silliness and letting themselves get into
(17:27):
predict predicaments.
They actually do make some really good decisions at the end. Philip
finds the goal of the coal mine eventually that he was searching for. Mr. Bolton is rewarded for investing in Philip and,
and his prospects
and his prospecting, I guess. And even Washington right at the end, despite
(17:48):
not getting the get rich quick scheme he made, ends up making a very good decision in terms of selling the land that was the cause of a lot of his his family's troubles and issues. So
we see them and,
they're a type that they're more investors and speculators. And I think they compare very, very nicely to Alice.
And then we come on to the final. And this is, I guess, getting to hinting at what I was talking about right at the start in terms of politics and and money.
(18:16):
And the final section, the type of person,
the hucksters and grifters, and these are the most repugnant.
These would be the Senator Dilworth,
Mr. Bigler and all of the politicians
that in this book fit into here
very, very, very nicely. And
these people are
(18:36):
I guess
they're perfectly fine with lying, with bending the truth,
with
being sneaky,
crafty, underhanded whilst putting on a facade of of actual business acumen of,
they kind of have the,
like I said, the two qualities
mentioned in other people in that they they can spin a good story like
(19:00):
the true speculators. They have the charm and wit to do that, much like,
Laura did.
And they also have the, I guess, dirty underhanded nature in them to actually make some things happen, to
pull the rug over these,
these people in the middle,
such as the Alice's, the
(19:20):
Phillips and the Washingtons
and Mr. Bolton's
to kind of extract money from them and also from the the public in general through the form of the government. So
what's outrageous, I guess, in this book is when they kind of become proud of their sneaky underhandedness.
It's like they're proud. They they work hard
(19:43):
at being sneaky and underhanded, and they kind of want people to know about it. So there's a section
where
the Harry gets to glimpse into the world of this when he's talking to a an investor, I guess. And the investor's like, yeah, well, you know, to get this bill through, we had to pay off this. And he's got like this full accounts of, you know, of the 200,000,
(20:06):
which will you thought you were going to get.
We can't send any to you because we had to pay 100,000
to the politicians,
X amount to their wives, X amount to the newspapers to promote our scheme,
X amount to, you know, the pastors of this church who would also glorify it and put it into good praise.
And this is why why actually
(20:26):
in reality, instead of you getting 200,000,
you owe us $5,000
or something like this.
And so
we we see or and even giving influential millionaires
free stock so that they have then the appearance of this being a legit, legitimate company and things like this.
What I think really irks me and gets me
(20:50):
disgust me about these types of people
is the justification of their wrongdoing. They they know in some sense that they're doing harm to people, that they're
being sneaky and underhanded,
and this will end up causing harm to other people.
But
they
they have this weird way of justifying it in their own minds. And so we're going to jump on to page two fifty nine here
(21:16):
where the senator
is being questioned by by Laura, who
is diving into this realm and realizing that she has the
capabilities of being like this and,
and learning from, I guess, her her sensei, her master,
the senator, her teacher.
And so we get to this little bit here where Laura looked a little incredulous and the senator proceeded. And this is just after,
(21:41):
him talking about why he's going to support this type of bill.
Don't misunderstand me, Laura. I don't deny that it is for the interest of all of us that this bill should go through, and it will. I have no concealments from you, but I have one principle in my public life which I should like you to keep in mind. It has always been my guide. I never push a private interest if it is not justified and ennobled by some larger public good. I doubt if a Christian would be justified in working for his own salvation if it was not to aid in the salvation of his fellow men. The senator the senator spoke with feeling and then added, I hope you showed her person that our motives were pure and hoppers. Sorry, hoppers.
(22:17):
So in in essence, this guy,
this fat cat, if you look at your your screen at the moment,
is one who, you know, he's part of these He's a senator. He's taking bribes. He's bribing other people to get through bills that will financially
benefit him or
friends of his and things like this. Yet
(22:39):
somehow in his own mind, it's and for him in particular, it was for the good of the Negro, the the as they were pronouncing it in the book of the of the Negro population. We're going to
everything that we do in this, the university that's going to buy up all of this land that his friend Laura owns,
it's it's actually going to be for the good of the the Negro population. That's that's why we're doing all of this. And, you know, if we just happen to get filthy rich of it, then that's that's just a just reward for all of this hard work I'm doing.
(23:10):
And
I think this book showcases
the mental hoops and jumps quite nicely that people like him
are able to go through,
but then also
that it also catches up with them. Mr. Bigler is very much the same of his wheelings and dealings, and eventually he gets caught caught out when people start to say no to him and realize like, oh, you know, this guy is a pure grifter and huckster.
(23:35):
The senator, despite
thinking he was a shoo in for reelection
because he did this and that, ends up just getting blindsided by another person much like him.
I think that's probably the the main one of the main takeaways is is that if you are this type of person,
because you're a grifter and a huckster,
(23:57):
you can do really well when you're
preying on, I guess, the speculators and the
and the investors who have a bit of gambling in in them. Okay, all the other people I mentioned in this. But when you come up against another grifter and huckster,
they're they're going to rip you off just as bad as you're trying to rip them off. And
it is a lose lose or a win lose game in that situation. One person is going to win, one person's going to lose, or sometimes they'll just both screw them themselves over.
(24:26):
And it's very rare that they can trust each other to get themselves into a win win
situation.
The rationalizing and justifying, I suppose the scary part of this is when you look at these types of people,
they're they're able to do this and
they don't need to resort to the, you know, rape,
murder, arson,
(24:49):
actual stealing from people,
in terms of robberies
that they probably would do if they weren't just lucky enough to have a bit of guile and
and be in a position of power and as a senator or something like that. But the justification would be very, very similar to to other people who do these sorts of things. There's essentially
(25:09):
sociopaths
and
the
it's, you know, it's somehow okay for them to do this in their own mind.
Money is a huge aspect of it, but
it's also the laws and other types of of soft influence. I think that that comes through this.
And, yeah, I think they compare well with Laura, who
(25:30):
they,
you know, with her, I guess it's a bit different because she she has she's under no illusions that she what she's doing is
benefiting solely for herself. And,
she doesn't need a justification of, like, I'm doing this for the greater good or anything like that.
But she certainly
deals underhandedly
(25:51):
in much the same way that these people do
and takes an active part in it and has no remorse, no guilt for it.
For her, she ends off really badly in the book for Senator Dilworth.
The unfortunate thing is that he actually still does okay. Like, he gets blindsided. He's not he's no longer a senator. He can't pull strings as much, but he's still going to be very well off financially.
(26:13):
And,
you know, that's just life sometimes. And it's it's pretty gross.
You know, me
personally, I'm
I'm somewhat of a notorious fence sitter on on
a lot of topics.
I think it's okay to have both sides of the equation and paradoxically
paradoxically
to
support both in certain situations.
(26:36):
But when it comes to abusing your position of power in this case, I
feel I'm rather idealistic in terms of
if someone
has done it once,
I don't think you can
give them,
I don't think there's any
forgiveness or permission
to,
(26:57):
of of redemption in in this sort of case. And so
even the small errors should be checked to the best of your ability. You know, if you're a senator and someone's trying to
influence you or give you soft bribes or things like this, I think
that I'm I'm I have very little tolerance for that sort of thing. Now, perhaps if you just get into that world of governments and money, this is just what happens.
(27:22):
Yet
in that case, you know, I find the best strategy is to,
simply avoid
situations where you can be put into compromising situations and things like this. So
people who sell their soul for a quick buck, I'm I'm not sure there's redemption
for them, at least in my world of the view of the world. And, I certainly don't don't really tolerate it,
(27:45):
myself. So, wow, that was a that was a lot to cover there. But I think just, you know, in general sum up, is there some sort of connection between
the love and money and the love of money perhaps
is yeah. I think these characteristics of people, you can put them into certain types of categories. Every person is an individual, of course, but
(28:08):
highlighting and saying, seeing, okay, there's these types of people.
And of course, we didn't even get to see all the types of people. There would be speculators who knew the game they were playing and managed to get out,
at the right time. There would be the
ones who refused to participate
at all. You know, I'd probably I'd maybe put myself in that camp a little bit,
(28:29):
but who knows? So
this was
an interesting book in with regards to showing that connection between love and
and speculation, which I didn't really expect coming in, to be honest. Let's jump onto the authors some extra details.
We've covered much Wayne a lot and what I have in a lot of these book reviews before.
(28:50):
So I don't really need to go over him per se. Jump onto any of those reviews and you'll get his story. So today, we'll focus on his coauthor Charles Dudley Warner,
the dudster paps. He was known probably not, but that's cool name. He was born in 1829
and just made it into
1900 before he passed away.
(29:10):
He's honestly
somewhat like the lesser well known Mark Twain.
Very well traveled.
He worked at surveying. He studied law. He had seems like he had quite a different
number of pursuits,
was pretty funny, well liked,
wrote a lot, but also an editor and essayist.
(29:31):
He was first to propose the flag holiday in The US. There's a little claim to fame for him as well as, you know, his small imprint on history was the Gilded Age. The name of this book
is actually now been taken as a reference to that age because this book seemed to just capture that moment so, so perfectly of the of the exuberant
(29:52):
money speculation that was going around
or the characteristics of the time and then also of the
rampant corrupt corruption
and bribery
of politicians
and things like that.
How much has that changed?
I doubt much. But, yeah,
this this book was, I guess, most notable for for him and for for Mark Twain in
(30:16):
that and it just stylistically the way they wrote it.
So Mark Twain wrote the first eleven chapters, for example, which were dealing all with the kind of small country town folk. And then
the subsequent 12 chapters were when we get introduced to Harry and Philip and what they're doing.
And then the rest of the book is kind of a mix between them where they they focused on their individual stories and then probably collaborated a little bit when the the stories overlapped,
(30:42):
especially towards the end.
You can quite tell this difference because Mark Twain has the usual
wit. So funny,
really, really penetrating and biting
with this descriptive scenery
of characters
and and the actual scenery itself.
Warner, I think, is his characters are a lot more serious. They don't have the joking
(31:05):
ridiculousness
of, of a Colonel Sellers, for example.
And
I guess his thematic influences of the book was to add perhaps a bit more suffering and reality to it.
An interesting point, I think, is right near the end where Laura
so she is on trial for murder of of her her husband,
of the men who
(31:27):
betrayed her, made her heartbroken.
And
we see that she gets thrown instead of being released out into the public, she actually gets thrown into a mental hospital.
And this goes on for a couple of paragraphs until the authors then jump in themselves and write in, you know, breaking the fourth wall. And they're like, now this is what we would say in this particular circumstance. But,
(31:48):
in reality, you know, this is what would have happened or things like this. And it was honestly, it was a little bit confusing. And if I had to guess,
and instead she gets set free and goes on a different path, which, you know, ends terribly for in the same vein.
And I think this would if I had to guess, I would say this is where the two authors differed on what should be done in the scenario. And so they kind of did both. One of them wanted
(32:14):
to have her thrown into
a mental asylum for what she did. If I had to guess, I would have said this would have been the choice of of mister Dudley Warner, who's probably a bit more realistic than than Mark Twain.
And Mark Twain would have wanted to have the
the crazy ending of the of her,
(32:34):
being public publicly humiliated and and having this rather dramatic ending,
which would not have conformed to reality. I think you'd if if you kill a man in broad daylight daylight like she did,
there's very little chance of you getting away with it per se.
So,
I think that would it it mesh well this
(32:56):
authentic life of what would actually kind of happen
with the Mark Twain
propensity for exaggeration
and exuberance and descriptiveness.
And I actually quite liked it for that. So jumping into the final summary, similar book recommendations.
Honestly, it's kind of brutal. No novel overall.
I came in with thoughts that this would be, you know, fun speculation,
(33:19):
all about the kind of Colonel Sellers and Harry
jumping around
thinking we're going to do this, we're going to do that. We're going to, you know, put the railroads here, we're going to relocate this town, we're going to do this.
And whilst there is a little portion of that,
the instead I got the reality
more of what actually did occur in this age and
(33:40):
how
a lot of people got burnt
from this exuberance and from the craziness,
which is probably more the influence of, mister mister Warner, as I as I was mentioning just before. So
there's a lot of suffering. There's a lot of impoverishment
of people who made poor decisions,
more psychologically
(34:00):
speaking, rather than in actual material circumstances.
You know, it's the it's this idea of
going up rapidly
and in wealth and then also losing it rapidly.
Those ups and downs can
it can hurt more the loss when you go go from a big position to a small position. So even though they probably ended up roughly where they should have been in terms of material circumstances,
(34:24):
whether that be in poverty, lower class, middle class or upper class,
the
the wild ride
certainly in the losses probably had a bigger impact than the winds did. So
it's kind of noteworthy just how little this book has to do with speculation
and more on the wheelings and dealings behind the scenes, the maneuvering of politicians
(34:45):
of
money creation,
stealing from the public and in essence
and the fraudsters,
how and their lesser ill care, how they conspire.
It sort of showcases how that speculators
are, I guess, vessels
for for the growth of fraud. So
the, you know, the seeds are actually the grifters, the hucksters, the senator, the deal with these and that type.
(35:11):
And they
are able to grow because of the wild exuberance of the speculators
like
Harry and Colonel Sellers, as well as the poor decision making of of the
other
people who should be a bit more prudent, who should know a little bit better.
So
nevertheless,
(35:31):
this is a there's a tremendous opportunity
for people in in these types of ages and that
people who work hard and can actually
find their wins like Philip did right at the end of the book.
Yet he it it was almost all for naught,
because for him, his Ruth almost dies.
And, yes, he he gets his win. But I think it's
(35:54):
ultimately a reminder in this book is that
money is is nice and fun and things like this. But, you know, the actual things in life that that matter
family, friends, good health,
and
love
are much more important than the distractions of politics, of power, of money.
(36:14):
And so this is a rather slow burn book. It takes a while, I think, to really get into these fully fleshed out nuances
and really starts heading hip hitting heavy towards the end, which is where I've started to feel the like, oh, this has actually got a bit of power to it. So The Gilded Age by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner, I think it's a very solid seven and a half out of 10. I quite enjoyed this book and
(36:38):
got some some good things from it. I enjoyed it.
Similar books, recommendations,
I guess roughing it is probably the closest of Mark Twain's that I've read in in similarity to this.
But this is pretty distinct because it does have that big influence of of the seriousness of of Warner in it.
If you enjoyed East of Eden
(36:59):
by
John Steinbeck, you'll probably enjoy this as well just because of the way the stories are set out with these kind of mingling of families. And,
it was a different era in that time, but
also has these same concepts of love and money,
intersecting,
as well as good and bad people and the
characters in within that book. So I'd probably recommend that, which I've also covered on this channel before.
(37:26):
Alright. Last section here. We're getting close to forty minutes. This is a value for value podcast.
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(37:47):
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(38:07):
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and what's coming up next. So I am live 11AM Australian Eastern Standard Times on a Wednesday, and I will be doing that for the foreseeable
future as well.
(38:29):
What's coming up? I've got the price of time by,
Edward Chancellor. I've got,
I think it's Thomas Paine's something about common sense.
What else do I have over there? There was a book of the bilingual brain, I think, is also
coming up. So I've got a few things on the run.
One might be doing he said he was going to do some book reviews, but I think he's been busy of late, so maybe those will be pushed back into March, hopefully.
(38:56):
And his aren't live. They'll just be, you know, published on a Saturday or something whenever he gets around to it. So, yeah, that's it for today. Thanks so much for joining in. I hope you're having a fantastic day wherever you are in the world. Chat for now. Cara now. Bye.
Everybody is out for money. Politicians just want yours as well.
Welcome, everyone, to another episode of the Mere Mortals book reviews. I'm your host here, Kyrin, live
on 11AM
strain Eastern Standard Time on a Wednesday,
(00:20):
this being the 02/26/2025.
As you might surmise, this is the podcast where I reveal the big expectations, the grand plans of the great Kyrindown drainpipe that's gonna go to the middle of this country. I'm gonna turn the desert wasteland into the utopia
it has and should be
for the help of the Aboriginal
(00:41):
population there.
Okay. No. I'm not gonna be doing that, but you will find very similar
ideas in this book here. We have The Gilded Age by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner, a joint authorship
book. This was published originally in 1873,
'4 hundred and '60 '8 pages in length, plus a little bit extra if you're adding in the notes at the end.
(01:04):
Probably took me twelve hours reading to get through. I'd say it's pretty dense,
writing. And then every now and then, they've got just, like, some little pictures in here
of illustrations
and stuff. So it is mostly writing, though.
Now this book is a fictional tale of the money, speculation, and political intrigue corruption that occurred in The United States Of America in roughly the period of, I think it was eighteen seventies to eighteen nineties, the late eighteen hundreds in any case.
(01:33):
So this is the era of, like, railroads being built out of the,
you know, population of the big cities
finding that there's huge opportunities and coal and gas and all sorts of things in the center of the country.
So what we find in this book is there's two main branches of stories that kind of inter intersect.
(01:53):
We have
the first, which is about a cast of small towns people in, I believe it was called Hawksville,
who
are just kind of small townies. They
moved around from place to place, and they're kind of like political
speculators, I guess, would be the
the the type to describe these characters. And so these are people like Laura Washington and the Colonel Eshel Sellers.
(02:18):
And they move into the to the big city to seek out the riches of Washington
and the the politics that are there. We then also have the other section, which is of two, young, well off gentlemen
called,
Harry and Philip, who have kind of like a lover. For example, Philip is in love with, Ruth Bolton is
(02:39):
good
friends with her family, and they actually seek their fortunes in the wilderness. So we've kind of got this switching of paths going on and where they, will go to places like, Hawkesville and stuff like that
to try and build railroads and to establish coal mines and things like this before they actually return to DC
and get in entangled in a mesh with the, you know, very beautiful Laura, for example. Harry gets entangled with her. This book, I guess, showcases the influence that politics have of what money has, of what speculation was during this era,
(03:14):
and,
how people will abuse it for their own profit.
So let's jump on to the main themes and questions that arise in this book.
And it's a bit of a strange one. I was taking the notes. I'm like, okay. I'm seeing these two little similarities appear here, and I I wouldn't have connected them initially. And this is being the love of women and the speculation of men. And is there anything to to kind of connect these two?
(03:37):
And I believe there is. So let's perhaps start with the the love portion.
And this is mainly,
I guess, related to the stories of the women.
I would hazard that this is because during this era,
the the women didn't have that much access to, you know, I think I don't think they could vote, for example. So their their opinions on things didn't matter in terms of politics
(04:00):
and things like that.
And in terms of like autonomy of having jobs,
a even,
were very much restricted
to the to the home, you know, being being the wife, for example.
And so with a lot else being denied to them, they, you know, focus on the things that they can kind of control, which is love and intrigue and in the love sense of things. So
(04:25):
we have a rather, I guess, strong difference between the the three main characters here, this being Ruth Bolton,
Alice, her friend from, like, childhood friend, I guess,
as well as the very beautiful Laura from the countryside.
And
so what we see with Ruth, for example, is she's probably the luckiest in this in this book in that she has a man she's who who kind of is already in love with her, this being the dependable Phillips, probably the best man in the book.
(04:55):
And what we see is that she kind of spurns his love for her and, you know, and and just plays around with it and kind of puts it to the side, scoffs at it, scorns it, and even some cases,
and she's a bit of a dandy. She turns into,
you know, she's very independently minded. She wants to control her own future, but she's flirtatious. She joins in these parties and she's kind of like, you know, I guess speculating around in the in the love sense of things, if you want to put it that way.
(05:23):
So she joins society and
and eventually, I guess she finds some hardships
with her family
and she actually needs to kind of work quite a lot hard. You know, the brutal reality of life somewhat
touches her. And and because of the decisions she's made, she needs to now work hard. Right at the end of the book, she she does get kind of like a little bit of a lucky break. And
(05:48):
she's manages just to survive an illness.
And Harry sorry, Philip comes and somewhat rescues her from this dire situation that she's got into. So
she's kind of one who
I think you would look at and go,
you know, she was
a bit
silly with what she thought she could do, especially with her frail constitution.
(06:10):
She certainly had ambitions, but
the ability to meet them personally with the condition that she was with her
her, like her brains, her body and things like this were probably far outstripping what what she actually
was able to do.
And,
she she gets a little bit lucky at the end.
(06:30):
Laura, sorry, Alice, her her friend is probably the
this, I guess, the most level headed of the of the three women.
She
apparently has her her graces, a calming effect,
a rather mature outlook, if if you want to call it that.
And she's in love with Philip, but is somewhat tortured by her by him because he's in love with with Ruth.
(06:53):
And so she kind of plays the the bleeding
heart, the bleeding ear, I guess. I don't know what you call that, where she has to listen to him whining and moaning about how Ruth doesn't love him
and,
takes it all very stoically.
The thing with her, I guess, is
she
kind of forces herself into this position. She, one, doesn't have the decisiveness to
(07:17):
tell him that she actually is in love with him or to at the very least stop talking about his love for someone else, which is hurting her.
And she also lacks the decisiveness or the intuitiveness to go out and find another prospect.
So she kind of is in this weird realm where
you look at her and you go, she's a smart woman. She
(07:37):
she's capable. She has the, you know, very appealing characteristics
of things that would make her successful in life.
Yet she she makes some bad decisions
in just that she keeps returning to the to the same person or she
hit more. Actually, he returns to her, but she she kind of is doing something stupid. And I would hazard that she knows that this is the case as well, yet she continually does it.
(08:02):
And
I guess
it's it's funny.
Yeah. We'll compare the the next section later as as to
comparing this with speculators.
She somewhat has equal qualities to to Laura in many respects in terms of
how she could turn out.
But Laura actually screws this up in a in a big bad way.
(08:24):
And Alice is much more stoic.
Laura of the three women is is somewhat one where you would say
she has the,
I guess, the ambitions
of
of Ruth in that she wants to craft her own way in life
yet with more of the physical constitution
and the beauty and the and I suppose the qualities that Alice does. So you would just be thinking like, oh, she's the perfect match. She has the the two things that would combine well to actually have a really good life.
(08:56):
And this turns out not to be the case because she makes some rather poor decisions.
We see that she actually gets burned in love relatively early early on. She was in love with a man who betrayed her trust and kind of ran away, left her
heartbroken.
And this ends up turning her from this kind of lovely, delicate flower into this poisonous lily, if you will. And so she kind of goes on this gradual descent of,
(09:23):
you know, she she joins into
the political world.
She makes intrigues. She does all these things, which would eventually turn her into a millionaire.
And because her father owned a lot of property, but it was kind of useless property. But, you know, through the wheelings and dealings in Washington,
in DC,
she manages to
(09:44):
create this university bill, which would buy up all of this land and then therefore make her obscenely rich.
And,
what actually happens, though, is she she can't let go of this this past burn.
She
meets the man again and ends up taking his life, and
her kind of delusions end up catching up with her in that her bad decisions, even though she has the the guile, the craftiness
(10:12):
to
continue
this and to trick people and to get what she wants out of life, it ends up just catching up with her in a very horrid way right at the end, especially where she gets publicly humiliated
and ends up making a rather bad decision for herself right at the end. So so we've got these three women and they're kind of like descriptions of them. And I think it's really fun right now to compare them to the three types of men, which we also see in this book. And
(10:42):
they don't deal in the in the realm of love. They deal in the realm of cold, hard cash. Boy, we're going to need some money in here.
And these are what I would just call speculators as a term in general, but
they come into a couple of different camps. So comparing Ruth here to the this first camp,
are they kind of like
(11:04):
pure,
they're pure ish, they're rather kind of thoughtless
people. And this would be Harry, a. K. A. Henry Briers,
as well as the Colonel Sellers who
he, you know, differences in these two men. The colonel is from the countryside,
but he just talks up a big game, has all these aspirations, things that he wants to do is always chatting. He's a he seems like a friendly and fun fellow,
(11:28):
yet he's never actually done anything with his life. He's a snake oil salesman in some respects,
except that he's just he can't he's too lazy to even create good snake oil. So he, you know, he has this wondrous product where he just needs this one little addition to it that would, you know, I think cure eye cancer or something. I can't remember exactly what it was, an elixir of some sort.
(11:51):
And Harry is very much the same in that
charming young man, except he's from
a well educated background,
still kind of poor ish,
and leeches off other people's money,
in in particular, Philip.
And but he talks a bit game. He's always got ideas. He's always got things that he's wheeling and dealing with. And,
(12:14):
they never really add anything of value
other than their ideas and thoughts.
And even if they did get rich, I imagine they would lose it all again pretty quickly. And this is what these guys are trying to do. They're they're trying to get rich quick.
So they seem mostly
ignorant of the game they're playing, and they lack the craft and guile to actually do well, somewhat like Ruth. She,
(12:37):
they she has these ideas and aspirations, but she doesn't actually have the
physical constitution
or the actual abilities to see them to reality. And these two men are very much the same.
There's this quote on page 192,
which actually has the,
I guess, the speculation
aspect of this and it describes them pretty well. So
(13:00):
this this man who was a,
I guess, a speculator, a distinguished speculator in the lands and mines made this remark. I wasn't worth a cent 2 years ago, and now I owe $2,000,000
Now I owe $2,000,000
2 millions of dollars, to be precise reading it correctly. So I think that's describes exuberant speculation to a tee.
(13:23):
Poor
yet through their guile and and craft,
I guess through their their talking, their exuberance,
their their chattiness, they're able to dig a very big hole for themselves
where people will lend them money or
but it's never really theirs to own. And they can perhaps, you know, talk and do and say we're gonna do things with this, but they never have the actual money themselves and can never use their money to
(13:49):
provide something of value to the world, some utility,
to actually bring that to fruition.
So we have that kind, and I think they compare very nicely with Ruth. The next kind,
are more similar to, I guess, investors, but with the the portion of gambling in them.
And this would be mister Bolton, Philip, and perhaps even Washington,
Laura's sister,
(14:09):
in into this mix. So these are the men who
they
are dependable.
They have
actual skills. Their engineers, for example, is what Philip develops or, Washington
seems to become a very able,
a personal assistant to a senator.
And they've got some skills, but they they also
(14:31):
have this portion of them in which they're like, I'm gonna take a bet. I still wanna get rich a little bit quick, but acknowledge, okay, I need to work hard to make that happen at the same time.
So they typically won't put all their eggs into one basket
yet will probably still gamble a little bit more than they can afford to lose if if when they if and when they lose out,
(14:51):
it's going to materially impact them and their families lives. And this is what we see happen to Mr. Bolton, who
continually
he knows that this guy, Mr. Bigler, is a is a fraudster of some sense, but he's always spinning a good tail
and he's always he doesn't have the kind of courage to say no to him and say, hey, I'm going to
(15:14):
I'm not going to invest with you
for X, Y and Z reason.
And
Philip is somewhat the same with his his love, I guess, for for Ruth. He's he's kind of afraid to make it public and to really
act decisively on this.
And
they have this.
They lack the ability to get by on pure fabrications like the the people above them do, like the, the real speculators of Colonel Sellers and of of Harry or Henry.
(15:46):
Yet they are able to compensate with this by some actual skills and and admirable qualities of fortitude, perseverance.
They can also be blindsided by just how dodgy some people in the next group are. And I think this is a good description of this here. So jumping on
to page 363
and we see,
mister Bolton and,
(16:07):
him,
this is a description of him by Ruth. And so she was nothing but a woman and did not know how much of a biz of of the business prosperity of the world is only a bubble of credit and speculation,
one scheme helping to float another, which is no better than it, and the whole liable to come to naught in confusion as soon as the busy brain that conceived them ceases its power to device or when some accident produces a sudden panic.
(16:32):
And right after this is is pretty much when they they go into debt. And as mister
mister Bolton, her father has extended himself too far. So
it it shows this predicament where you can have
the steady, reliable people with good qualities, much like Alice, who can make some bad decisions and get themselves into kind of predicaments where they didn't expect to. It's not the worst thing in the world. Like, they're probably not gonna go to the absolute poor house, but they can make bad decisions
(17:03):
because of this,
like, still little inherent part of them that that wants to to make it big
and to
to succeed
quickly.
Yet
if they persevere, they actually can make good decisions. And
we see all three of these characters after going through some hardships
because of their kind of silliness and letting themselves get into
(17:27):
predict predicaments.
They actually do make some really good decisions at the end. Philip
finds the goal of the coal mine eventually that he was searching for. Mr. Bolton is rewarded for investing in Philip and,
and his prospects
and his prospecting, I guess. And even Washington right at the end, despite
(17:48):
not getting the get rich quick scheme he made, ends up making a very good decision in terms of selling the land that was the cause of a lot of his his family's troubles and issues. So
we see them and,
they're a type that they're more investors and speculators. And I think they compare very, very nicely to Alice.
And then we come on to the final. And this is, I guess, getting to hinting at what I was talking about right at the start in terms of politics and and money.
(18:16):
And the final section, the type of person,
the hucksters and grifters, and these are the most repugnant.
These would be the Senator Dilworth,
Mr. Bigler and all of the politicians
that in this book fit into here
very, very, very nicely. And
these people are
(18:36):
I guess
they're perfectly fine with lying, with bending the truth,
with
being sneaky,
crafty, underhanded whilst putting on a facade of of actual business acumen of,
they kind of have the,
like I said, the two qualities
mentioned in other people in that they they can spin a good story like
(19:00):
the true speculators. They have the charm and wit to do that, much like,
Laura did.
And they also have the, I guess, dirty underhanded nature in them to actually make some things happen, to
pull the rug over these,
these people in the middle,
such as the Alice's, the
(19:20):
Phillips and the Washingtons
and Mr. Bolton's
to kind of extract money from them and also from the the public in general through the form of the government. So
what's outrageous, I guess, in this book is when they kind of become proud of their sneaky underhandedness.
It's like they're proud. They they work hard
(19:43):
at being sneaky and underhanded, and they kind of want people to know about it. So there's a section
where
the Harry gets to glimpse into the world of this when he's talking to a an investor, I guess. And the investor's like, yeah, well, you know, to get this bill through, we had to pay off this. And he's got like this full accounts of, you know, of the 200,000,
(20:06):
which will you thought you were going to get.
We can't send any to you because we had to pay 100,000
to the politicians,
X amount to their wives, X amount to the newspapers to promote our scheme,
X amount to, you know, the pastors of this church who would also glorify it and put it into good praise.
And this is why why actually
(20:26):
in reality, instead of you getting 200,000,
you owe us $5,000
or something like this.
And so
we we see or and even giving influential millionaires
free stock so that they have then the appearance of this being a legit, legitimate company and things like this.
What I think really irks me and gets me
(20:50):
disgust me about these types of people
is the justification of their wrongdoing. They they know in some sense that they're doing harm to people, that they're
being sneaky and underhanded,
and this will end up causing harm to other people.
But
they
they have this weird way of justifying it in their own minds. And so we're going to jump on to page two fifty nine here
(21:16):
where the senator
is being questioned by by Laura, who
is diving into this realm and realizing that she has the
capabilities of being like this and,
and learning from, I guess, her her sensei, her master,
the senator, her teacher.
And so we get to this little bit here where Laura looked a little incredulous and the senator proceeded. And this is just after,
(21:41):
him talking about why he's going to support this type of bill.
Don't misunderstand me, Laura. I don't deny that it is for the interest of all of us that this bill should go through, and it will. I have no concealments from you, but I have one principle in my public life which I should like you to keep in mind. It has always been my guide. I never push a private interest if it is not justified and ennobled by some larger public good. I doubt if a Christian would be justified in working for his own salvation if it was not to aid in the salvation of his fellow men. The senator the senator spoke with feeling and then added, I hope you showed her person that our motives were pure and hoppers. Sorry, hoppers.
(22:17):
So in in essence, this guy,
this fat cat, if you look at your your screen at the moment,
is one who, you know, he's part of these He's a senator. He's taking bribes. He's bribing other people to get through bills that will financially
benefit him or
friends of his and things like this. Yet
(22:39):
somehow in his own mind, it's and for him in particular, it was for the good of the Negro, the the as they were pronouncing it in the book of the of the Negro population. We're going to
everything that we do in this, the university that's going to buy up all of this land that his friend Laura owns,
it's it's actually going to be for the good of the the Negro population. That's that's why we're doing all of this. And, you know, if we just happen to get filthy rich of it, then that's that's just a just reward for all of this hard work I'm doing.
(23:10):
And
I think this book showcases
the mental hoops and jumps quite nicely that people like him
are able to go through,
but then also
that it also catches up with them. Mr. Bigler is very much the same of his wheelings and dealings, and eventually he gets caught caught out when people start to say no to him and realize like, oh, you know, this guy is a pure grifter and huckster.
(23:35):
The senator, despite
thinking he was a shoo in for reelection
because he did this and that, ends up just getting blindsided by another person much like him.
I think that's probably the the main one of the main takeaways is is that if you are this type of person,
because you're a grifter and a huckster,
(23:57):
you can do really well when you're
preying on, I guess, the speculators and the
and the investors who have a bit of gambling in in them. Okay, all the other people I mentioned in this. But when you come up against another grifter and huckster,
they're they're going to rip you off just as bad as you're trying to rip them off. And
it is a lose lose or a win lose game in that situation. One person is going to win, one person's going to lose, or sometimes they'll just both screw them themselves over.
(24:26):
And it's very rare that they can trust each other to get themselves into a win win
situation.
The rationalizing and justifying, I suppose the scary part of this is when you look at these types of people,
they're they're able to do this and
they don't need to resort to the, you know, rape,
murder, arson,
(24:49):
actual stealing from people,
in terms of robberies
that they probably would do if they weren't just lucky enough to have a bit of guile and
and be in a position of power and as a senator or something like that. But the justification would be very, very similar to to other people who do these sorts of things. There's essentially
(25:09):
sociopaths
and
the
it's, you know, it's somehow okay for them to do this in their own mind.
Money is a huge aspect of it, but
it's also the laws and other types of of soft influence. I think that that comes through this.
And, yeah, I think they compare well with Laura, who
(25:30):
they,
you know, with her, I guess it's a bit different because she she has she's under no illusions that she what she's doing is
benefiting solely for herself. And,
she doesn't need a justification of, like, I'm doing this for the greater good or anything like that.
But she certainly
deals underhandedly
(25:51):
in much the same way that these people do
and takes an active part in it and has no remorse, no guilt for it.
For her, she ends off really badly in the book for Senator Dilworth.
The unfortunate thing is that he actually still does okay. Like, he gets blindsided. He's not he's no longer a senator. He can't pull strings as much, but he's still going to be very well off financially.
(26:13):
And,
you know, that's just life sometimes. And it's it's pretty gross.
You know, me
personally, I'm
I'm somewhat of a notorious fence sitter on on
a lot of topics.
I think it's okay to have both sides of the equation and paradoxically
paradoxically
to
support both in certain situations.
(26:36):
But when it comes to abusing your position of power in this case, I
feel I'm rather idealistic in terms of
if someone
has done it once,
I don't think you can
give them,
I don't think there's any
forgiveness or permission
to,
(26:57):
of of redemption in in this sort of case. And so
even the small errors should be checked to the best of your ability. You know, if you're a senator and someone's trying to
influence you or give you soft bribes or things like this, I think
that I'm I'm I have very little tolerance for that sort of thing. Now, perhaps if you just get into that world of governments and money, this is just what happens.
(27:22):
Yet
in that case, you know, I find the best strategy is to,
simply avoid
situations where you can be put into compromising situations and things like this. So
people who sell their soul for a quick buck, I'm I'm not sure there's redemption
for them, at least in my world of the view of the world. And, I certainly don't don't really tolerate it,
(27:45):
myself. So, wow, that was a that was a lot to cover there. But I think just, you know, in general sum up, is there some sort of connection between
the love and money and the love of money perhaps
is yeah. I think these characteristics of people, you can put them into certain types of categories. Every person is an individual, of course, but
(28:08):
highlighting and saying, seeing, okay, there's these types of people.
And of course, we didn't even get to see all the types of people. There would be speculators who knew the game they were playing and managed to get out,
at the right time. There would be the
ones who refused to participate
at all. You know, I'd probably I'd maybe put myself in that camp a little bit,
(28:29):
but who knows? So
this was
an interesting book in with regards to showing that connection between love and
and speculation, which I didn't really expect coming in, to be honest. Let's jump onto the authors some extra details.
We've covered much Wayne a lot and what I have in a lot of these book reviews before.
(28:50):
So I don't really need to go over him per se. Jump onto any of those reviews and you'll get his story. So today, we'll focus on his coauthor Charles Dudley Warner,
the dudster paps. He was known probably not, but that's cool name. He was born in 1829
and just made it into
1900 before he passed away.
(29:10):
He's honestly
somewhat like the lesser well known Mark Twain.
Very well traveled.
He worked at surveying. He studied law. He had seems like he had quite a different
number of pursuits,
was pretty funny, well liked,
wrote a lot, but also an editor and essayist.
(29:31):
He was first to propose the flag holiday in The US. There's a little claim to fame for him as well as, you know, his small imprint on history was the Gilded Age. The name of this book
is actually now been taken as a reference to that age because this book seemed to just capture that moment so, so perfectly of the of the exuberant
(29:52):
money speculation that was going around
or the characteristics of the time and then also of the
rampant corrupt corruption
and bribery
of politicians
and things like that.
How much has that changed?
I doubt much. But, yeah,
this this book was, I guess, most notable for for him and for for Mark Twain in
(30:16):
that and it just stylistically the way they wrote it.
So Mark Twain wrote the first eleven chapters, for example, which were dealing all with the kind of small country town folk. And then
the subsequent 12 chapters were when we get introduced to Harry and Philip and what they're doing.
And then the rest of the book is kind of a mix between them where they they focused on their individual stories and then probably collaborated a little bit when the the stories overlapped,
(30:42):
especially towards the end.
You can quite tell this difference because Mark Twain has the usual
wit. So funny,
really, really penetrating and biting
with this descriptive scenery
of characters
and and the actual scenery itself.
Warner, I think, is his characters are a lot more serious. They don't have the joking
(31:05):
ridiculousness
of, of a Colonel Sellers, for example.
And
I guess his thematic influences of the book was to add perhaps a bit more suffering and reality to it.
An interesting point, I think, is right near the end where Laura
so she is on trial for murder of of her her husband,
of the men who
(31:27):
betrayed her, made her heartbroken.
And
we see that she gets thrown instead of being released out into the public, she actually gets thrown into a mental hospital.
And this goes on for a couple of paragraphs until the authors then jump in themselves and write in, you know, breaking the fourth wall. And they're like, now this is what we would say in this particular circumstance. But,
(31:48):
in reality, you know, this is what would have happened or things like this. And it was honestly, it was a little bit confusing. And if I had to guess,
and instead she gets set free and goes on a different path, which, you know, ends terribly for in the same vein.
And I think this would if I had to guess, I would say this is where the two authors differed on what should be done in the scenario. And so they kind of did both. One of them wanted
(32:14):
to have her thrown into
a mental asylum for what she did. If I had to guess, I would have said this would have been the choice of of mister Dudley Warner, who's probably a bit more realistic than than Mark Twain.
And Mark Twain would have wanted to have the
the crazy ending of the of her,
(32:34):
being public publicly humiliated and and having this rather dramatic ending,
which would not have conformed to reality. I think you'd if if you kill a man in broad daylight daylight like she did,
there's very little chance of you getting away with it per se.
So,
I think that would it it mesh well this
(32:56):
authentic life of what would actually kind of happen
with the Mark Twain
propensity for exaggeration
and exuberance and descriptiveness.
And I actually quite liked it for that. So jumping into the final summary, similar book recommendations.
Honestly, it's kind of brutal. No novel overall.
I came in with thoughts that this would be, you know, fun speculation,
(33:19):
all about the kind of Colonel Sellers and Harry
jumping around
thinking we're going to do this, we're going to do that. We're going to, you know, put the railroads here, we're going to relocate this town, we're going to do this.
And whilst there is a little portion of that,
the instead I got the reality
more of what actually did occur in this age and
(33:40):
how
a lot of people got burnt
from this exuberance and from the craziness,
which is probably more the influence of, mister mister Warner, as I as I was mentioning just before. So
there's a lot of suffering. There's a lot of impoverishment
of people who made poor decisions,
more psychologically
(34:00):
speaking, rather than in actual material circumstances.
You know, it's the it's this idea of
going up rapidly
and in wealth and then also losing it rapidly.
Those ups and downs can
it can hurt more the loss when you go go from a big position to a small position. So even though they probably ended up roughly where they should have been in terms of material circumstances,
(34:24):
whether that be in poverty, lower class, middle class or upper class,
the
the wild ride
certainly in the losses probably had a bigger impact than the winds did. So
it's kind of noteworthy just how little this book has to do with speculation
and more on the wheelings and dealings behind the scenes, the maneuvering of politicians
(34:45):
of
money creation,
stealing from the public and in essence
and the fraudsters,
how and their lesser ill care, how they conspire.
It sort of showcases how that speculators
are, I guess, vessels
for for the growth of fraud. So
the, you know, the seeds are actually the grifters, the hucksters, the senator, the deal with these and that type.
(35:11):
And they
are able to grow because of the wild exuberance of the speculators
like
Harry and Colonel Sellers, as well as the poor decision making of of the
other
people who should be a bit more prudent, who should know a little bit better.
So
nevertheless,
(35:31):
this is a there's a tremendous opportunity
for people in in these types of ages and that
people who work hard and can actually
find their wins like Philip did right at the end of the book.
Yet he it it was almost all for naught,
because for him, his Ruth almost dies.
And, yes, he he gets his win. But I think it's
(35:54):
ultimately a reminder in this book is that
money is is nice and fun and things like this. But, you know, the actual things in life that that matter
family, friends, good health,
and
love
are much more important than the distractions of politics, of power, of money.
(36:14):
And so this is a rather slow burn book. It takes a while, I think, to really get into these fully fleshed out nuances
and really starts heading hip hitting heavy towards the end, which is where I've started to feel the like, oh, this has actually got a bit of power to it. So The Gilded Age by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner, I think it's a very solid seven and a half out of 10. I quite enjoyed this book and
(36:38):
got some some good things from it. I enjoyed it.
Similar books, recommendations,
I guess roughing it is probably the closest of Mark Twain's that I've read in in similarity to this.
But this is pretty distinct because it does have that big influence of of the seriousness of of Warner in it.
If you enjoyed East of Eden
(36:59):
by
John Steinbeck, you'll probably enjoy this as well just because of the way the stories are set out with these kind of mingling of families. And,
it was a different era in that time, but
also has these same concepts of love and money,
intersecting,
as well as good and bad people and the
characters in within that book. So I'd probably recommend that, which I've also covered on this channel before.
(37:26):
Alright. Last section here. We're getting close to forty minutes. This is a value for value podcast.
I do all of this upfront,
so it's available anywhere, anytime, any place for anyone.
And I just, would ask that for all the value that I'm providing, you just provide it back in some shape or form, sharing it with a friend. Word-of-mouth is super important for for podcasts like this one.
(37:47):
Give me the like comments. Let me know how what you thought of the book, what you thought of the characters, things like this,
as well as giving me some book recommendations. What would you recommend that I would,
read, perhaps enjoy that you would like me to read?
Those are super invaluable. Reach out via any of the social links down below. And finally, you
can contribute with some treasure for
(38:07):
all of the, you know, lights, the cameras, the time that it takes to produce these. And we've got some links to a PayPal as well as on meremodelspodcast.com/stewport.Live
and what's coming up next. So I am live 11AM Australian Eastern Standard Times on a Wednesday, and I will be doing that for the foreseeable
future as well.
(38:29):
What's coming up? I've got the price of time by,
Edward Chancellor. I've got,
I think it's Thomas Paine's something about common sense.
What else do I have over there? There was a book of the bilingual brain, I think, is also
coming up. So I've got a few things on the run.
One might be doing he said he was going to do some book reviews, but I think he's been busy of late, so maybe those will be pushed back into March, hopefully.
(38:56):
And his aren't live. They'll just be, you know, published on a Saturday or something whenever he gets around to it. So, yeah, that's it for today. Thanks so much for joining in. I hope you're having a fantastic day wherever you are in the world. Chat for now. Cara now. Bye.
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