Sunday, December 19, 2010

Simplicissimus by Johann Grimmelshausen

Simplicissimus by Johann Grimmelshausen. The Catholic Encyclopedia calls him "The greatest German novelist of the seventeenth century." Sounds impressive, but how many German novelists were there in the 17th century? There are lots of historical novels written about 17th century Europe, but not so many written then as you see on this excellent website.


The original 1669 book cover.


According to Wikipedia, Simplicissimus is a picaresque novel published in 1669 and written in the Baroque style. The tale was inspired by the events and horrors of the Thirty Years' War which had devastated Germany from 1618 to 1648, it is regarded as the first adventure novel in the German language.
 
The classic history of the the Thirty Years' War was authored by C.V. Wedgwood. Sample it on Google Books.

My Books for 2010

Books Read in 2010


Most of book links are to Amazon. The author links are from all over - and they're pretty darn good so click on them. More links will be added - probably.


1. The Skull Mantra (Inspector Shan Tao Yun) by Eliot Pattison


2. Morality Play by Barry Unsworth


3. Ambrose Bierce and the One-Eyed Jacks by Oakley M. Hall


4. All the Shah's Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror by Stephen Kinzer


5. Newton and the Counterfeiter: The Unknown Detective Career of the World's Greatest Scientist by Thomas Levenson - his blog: http://inversesquare.wordpress.com/


6. Agatha Christie's Mysterious Affair at Styles (Hercule Poirot Mysteries) by Agatha Christie


7. The Burning Land: A Novel (Saxon Tales) by Bernard Cornwell


8. American Slavery, American Freedom by Edmund S. Morgan


9. The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler
Chandler requires two links: http://www.levity.com/corduroy/chandler.htm


10. Devil in a Blue Dress (Easy Rawlins Mysteries) by Walter Mosley


11. Conspirata: A Novel of Ancient Rome by Robert Harris


12. Pirate Latitudes by Michael Crichton


13. Ambrose Bierce and the Queen of Spades: A Mystery Novel by Oakley M. Hall


14. Mayhem by J. Robert Janes


15. Carousel (St-Cyr and Kohler) by J. Robert Janes


16. Henry V (Folger Shakespeare Library) by William Shakespeare
Slip virtually over to Oxford for a short course: http://www.conted.ox.ac.uk/courses/details.php?course_subject=English_Literature&id=O10P404LTV&coursetype=100


17. Henry IV, Part I (Folger Shakespeare Library) by William Shakespeare


18. Henry IV, Part II (Folger Shakespeare Library) by William Shakespeare


19. Anarchy and Old Dogs (Dr. Siri Paiboun) by Colin Cotterill


20. Scipio Africanus: Greater Than Napoleon by Sir Basil Henry Liddell Hart


21. Kaleidoscope by J. Robert Janes


22. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson


23. The One from the Other: A Bernie Gunther Novel (Bernie Gunther Novels) by Philip Kerr


24. Warlock (New York Review Books Classics) by Oakley Hall


25. The Nearest Exit by Olen Steinhauer


26. Spies of the Balkans: A Novel by Alan Furst


27. Mannequin (St-Cyr and Kohler) by J. Robert Janes


28. The Fall of Paris: The Siege and the Commune 1870-71 by Alistair Horne


29. Prisoners of the Mahdi (Norton Paperback) by Byron Farwell


30. The Friend of Madame Maigret (Inspector Maigret Mysteries) by Georges Simenon (also known as Madame Maigret's Own Case)


31. The Man Who Watched Trains Go By (New York Review Books Classics) by Georges Simenon


32. Eminent Victorians by Lytton Strachey


33. Fateful Choices: Ten Decisions That Changed the World, 1940-1941 by Ian Kershaw


34. The King of Kahel by Tierno Monénembo


35. The complete short stories of Raffles-- the amateur cracksman / by Hornung, E. W.


36. The Seven-Per-Cent Solution: Being a Reprint from the Reminiscences of John H. Watson, M.D. (Norton Paperback) by Nicholas Meyer


37. Pirates of the Levant (Captain Alatriste, Book 6) by Arturo Perez-Reverte


38. A Death in Vienna: A Novel (Mortalis) by Frank Tallis


39. Child 44 by Tom Rob Smith


40. At Bertram's Hotel by Agatha Christie


41. Dirty Snow (New York Review Books Classics) by Georges Simenon


42. A Conspiracy of Paper: A Novel (Ballantine Reader's Circle) by David Liss


43. Hypothermia: A Thriller (Detective Erlendur) by Arnaldur Indridason


44. Our Kind of Traitor: A Novel by John Le Carré


45. The Inimitable Jeeves (The Collector's Wodehouse) by P. G. Wodehouse


46. Law and Locomotives: The Impact of the Railroad in Wisconsin Law in the Nineteenth Century by Robert S. Hunt


47. Troubles (New York Review Books Classics) by J. G. Farrell


48. Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West by William Cronon


49. Wisconsin's Past and Present: A Historical Atlas by Wisconsin Cartographers Guild
 
50.  The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy by David Cannadine


51. Simplicissimus by Johann Grimmelshausen. A picaresque novel published in 1669 and inspired by the events and horrors of the Thirty Years' War.


52. Don Quixote by Miguel De Cervantes and Edith Grossman  (1605 and 1615) by Cervantes. (see also Don Quixote



53. Bai Ganyo: Incredible Tales of a Modern Bulgarian by Aleko Konstantinov. "A comic classic of world literature, Aleko Konstantinov's 1895 novel Bai Ganyo follows the misadventures of [Bulgarian] rose-oil salesman Ganyo Balkanski ("Bai" is a Bulgarian title of intimate respect) as he travels in Europe." From UW Press description.


54. Clandestine in Chile: The Adventures of Miguel Littin (New York Review Books Classics) by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

55. The Forsyte Saga (Oxford World's Classics) by John Galsworthy

Three History Recommended Reads

Submitted for your consideration are three books of history. The first two relate to Wisconsin and both involve the UW's Frederick Jackson Turner Professor of History William Cronon. The third, being about the decline of British aristocracy in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, doesn't.

By the way, this entry is similar, but better than the original post over on Monona Doug.

Wisconsin's Past and Present: A Historical Atlas by Wisconsin Cartographers' Guild with an Introduction by William Cronon. An astonishingly excellent collection of maps. Most of the maps are the creation of six Wisconsin cartographers that are uniquely insightful.

The atlas is particularly strong on ethnic histories. Just an example, the series of maps on the native nations of Wisconsin helped me understand - at last - where the tribes came from and where they lived in Wisconsin.

You can sample the book on Google Books.

(One disappointment is the woefully inadequate & inaccurate assessment of railroads in the state.)


***

Cronon authored my second recommendation:

Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991).

I've pitched this book before. It's a great read. If you live in the Upper Midwest and you have any interest in the area's history, you really have to read this book. Cronon explains by topical study how we got from such a foreign 'then' to the familiar present.

The cover is part of a magnificent lithograph of Chicago made in 1857 by Christian Inger based on a drawing by I.T. Palmatary. Click over to the Encyclopedia of Chicago to see this and other marvelous maps (and anything you want to know about that great city's history).


 
The book won just a few prizes.

Bancroft Prize for 1992



Chicago Tribune's Heartland Prize for best non-fiction work of 1991



One of three nominees for the Pulitzer Prize in History, 1992



George Perkins Marsh Prize for 1992 for Best Book in Environmental History published in 1990 or 1991 given by American Society for Environmental History



Charles A. Weyerhaeuser Award for 1993 for the best book in forest and conservation history published in 1991 or 1992 given by the Forest History Society



Award for Outstanding Achievement Recognition to Nature's Metropolis by the Wisconsin Library Association Literary Awards Committee



Honorable Mention for 1992 to Nature's Metropolis in the John Hope Franklin Prize competition, American Studies Association

Geographic Society of Chicago Publication Award for 1991



A review:

http://www.duke.edu/~ekb6/Review,%20Nature's%20Metropolis-3.pdf


A critical assessment of the book.

A study guide for the book.

***

My third offering is The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy by David Cannadine. This intensely factual forms around a simple thesis: The British aristocracy plunged from the top of the world primarily because of the collapse of agricultural prices in the 19th century (circa 1880) and secondarily, the almost concomitant extension of suffrage to ever greater numbers of common people. The British aristocracy was a landed elite. Their wealth was almost entirely in the value of their lands for agriculture and the rents the lands could generate. I found the simplicity of the explanation very attractive; how many big things are really just that simple?



As described here:

In 1880, Cannadine informs us, the members of the British aristocracy (which he defines as landholders with 1,000 acres or more) were the "lords of the earth." They were a tiny minority, only 7,000 families in a country of millions. Yet this "tough, tenacious, and resourceful elite" owned four-fifths of the land in England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales.
Cannadine richly details the various ways in which the decline manifested itself. The fall was swift - it started and was completed within the span of a single lifetime. They had to sell, sell land, sell art, sell houses, sell it all. (When the going gets Toff, the Toffs get selling.)

At times the meticulous exhaustive detail can get to be a bit much, but the occasional skimming along to the next topic is permitted. His accomplishment is collecting such a vast amount of information, compiling it, and still managing to present it in an interesting the fashion.

One wonders why anyone would bother to write another book on the topic.


More books by Cannadine.

 

Monday, September 27, 2010

"Why was "Don Quixote" originally written in Arabic?"

"Or rather, why does Cervantes, who wrote the book in Spanish, claim that it was translated from the Arabic?"

So begins a fascinating brief essay published in the NYT. The esssay highlights the connection between Cervantes epic work, Don Quixote,  and the ongoing forced expulsion of Muslims from the Iberian penninsula. Cervantes, by the way, had been held captive by Arab pirates for some five years from 1575 to 1580.


See, Cervantes in Algiers: A Captive's Tale by Maria Antonia Garces

Tuesday, August 3, 2010

Neglected Books

Somebody should create a web page to share information about books once highly regarded (or popular, etc.) and now neglected, except somebody already did. Check out The Neglected Books Page. I bumped across recently (for a reason I can't recall) and again this morning looking for information on (the now-defunct) Prion Lost Classics. I'm reading their reissue of Winston Churchill's early history of the 19th century war in the Sudan (or Soudan), The River War. See my recent post on Byron Farwell's book, Prisoners of the Mahdi.

You can read Churchill's book free at Project Gutenburg: http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/4943

or here: http://www.archive.org/details/riverwarhistoric00chur


***

One of the Prion Lost Classics reissues was Burgo Partridge's A History of Orgies. This caught my eye for more than the obvious reason. Burgo was the son of Bloomsbury Group leading lights Frances and Ralph Partridge. See Frances obits from The Times and the Independent.The obits give good background on the Bloomsbury troop of nonconformist artists, writers, and hangers-on.

Frances wrote A Pacifist's War: Diaries 1939-1945: Volume 1, which I reviewed here.

Saturday, July 31, 2010

Georges Simenon: Maigret and Much More

Gegorges Simenon's Inspector Maigret is one of my favorite detective series. Lucky me. Simenon knocked out 76 Maigret novels between 1930 and 1972. Below are a couple of short reviews of two of these books.

Simenon also wrote romans durs (hard novels) that are noted for their psychological darkness, such as Dirty Snow (New York Review Books Classics) From NYRB:

"Nineteen-year-old Frank Friedmaier lives in a country under occupation. Most people struggle to get by; Frank takes it easy in his mother’s whorehouse, which caters to members of the occupying forces. But Frank is restless. He is a pimp, a thug, a petty thief, and, as Dirty Snow opens, he has just killed his first man. Through the unrelenting darkness and cold of an endless winter, Frank will pursue abjection until at last there is nowhere to go."

Hans Koning has described Dirty Snow as “one of the very few novels to come out of German-occupied France that gets it exactly right.”


The Man Who Watched Trains Go By (New York Review Books Classics), NYRB:

Kees Popinga is a solid Dutch burgher whose idea of a night on the town is a game of chess at his club. Or so it has always appeared. But one night this model husband and devoted father discovers his boss is bankrupt and that his own carefully tended life is in ruins. Before, he had looked on impassively as the trains to the outside world swept by; now he catches the first train he can to Amsterdam. Not long after that, he commits murder.
Kees Popinga is tired of being Kees Popinga. He’s going to turn over a new leaf—though there will be hell to pay.



Tropic Moon NYRB:

A young Frenchman, Joseph Timar, travels to Gabon carrying a letter of introduction from an influential uncle. He wants work experience; he wants to see the world. But in the oppressive heat and glare of the equator, Timar doesn’t know what to do with himself, and no one seems inclined to help except Adèle, the hotel owner’s wife, who takes him to bed one day and rebuffs him the next, leaving him sick with desire. But then, in the course of a single night, Adèle’s husband dies and a black servant is shot, and Timar is sure that Adèle is involved. He’ll cover for the crime if she’ll do what he wants. The fix is in. But Timar can’t even begin to imagine how deep.


In Tropic Moon, Simenon, the master of the psychological novel, offers an incomparable picture of degeneracy and corruption in a colonial outpost.



The NYRB Classics are one my favorite sources for excellent, older books. They have just brought out Pedigree (New York Review Books Classics). The NYRB page for the book: http://www.nybooks.com/books/imprints/classics/pedigree/ describes it as:

Pedigree is Georges Simenon’s longest, most unlikely, and most adventurous novel....In the early 1940s, Simenon began work on a memoir of his Belgian childhood. He showed the initial pages to André Gide, who urged him to turn them into a novel. The result was, Simenon later quipped, a book in which everything is true but nothing is accurate. Spanning the years from the beginning of the century, with its political instability and terrorist threats, to the end of the First World War in 1918, Pedigree is an epic of everyday existence in all its messy unfinished intensity and density, a story about the coming-of-age of a precocious and curious boy and the coming to be of the modern world.
 In 2008, Paul Theroux wrote a fascinating essay for in the Times Literary Supplement titled, Georges Simenon, the existential hack in which he compares Simenon to Camus. OK, now you know Simenonon was no ordinary detective mystery writer. "A bleak vision and relentless seriousness earned his non-Maigrets the appellation romans durs, because dur means not just hard but implies weight, seriousness: not only a stony quality, but density and complexity – a kind of challenge, and even a certain tedium."


***

The Friend of Madame Maigret (Inspector Maigret Mysteries)



If you don't know Maigret and you like detective stories, then you are in for a treat - or about 76 treats because that's how many Maigret novels the prolific Georges Simenon published. (I take this number from an excellent essay in the Times Literary Supplement about Simenon by Paul Theroux called "Georges Simenon, the existential hack". The essay is available online.) As with many of the Maigret stories, this one is also published under another name, Madame Maigret's Own Case. Most, if not all, of the books in this new series were previously published under a different title.


Maigret is a seasoned French chief inspector of detectives with an eye for human foibles and a distinct humanism about his policing. Some lists include this title as one of the best of Maigret. Personally, I haven't found much to choose between them - as long as they are primarily set in Paris. Don't be put off by the title (either title). Madame Maigret's role, while key, is also collateral. She provides some crucial information, but Jules really does the work along with his crew of Lucas, Janvier and a very young La Pointe.

Highly recommended.

***

A Man's Head (Inspector Maigret Mysteries)


Although not strictly speaking one of Georges Simenon's "psychological novels", Maigret's War of Nerves nonetheless explores the psychology of several characters. Detective Maigret arranges the `escape' from prison of a convicted killer that he helped put away in the first place. Maigret had become convinced of the defendant's guilt, but the evidence at trial had been overwhelming. In this 1940 work, Maigret places his well-established career at risk.


Maigret slowly unravels the mystery behind the true killer, but will it be enough to save the wrongly convicted man or Maigret's own reputation? Simenon leads the reader through an examination of the most basic and most extreme human motivations. Simenon wrote dozens of Maigret mysteries as well as other `romans durs'. Maigret's War of Nerves is one of his better efforts.

Note: A number of the Maigret books have been published under duplicate names. This book was also published As Maigret's War of Nerves. It would be useful if someone put together a definitive list of these duplicate titles

Saturday, July 24, 2010

Prisoners of the Mahdi by Byron Farwell

My review on Amazon.

Summary:


Prisoners of the Mahdi tells two stories set in late 19th century Sudan. The dramatic rise to religious and temporal power of the Mahdi, a Sudanese man claiming to be the redeemer of Islam, provides the first tale and sets the background for the second, the stories of three European captives each held for at least ten years under often brutal conditions. The Mahdi expels the Egyptian/Ottoman/British powers from the Sudan in 1884, a victory that includes the martyring death at Khartoum of General `Chinese' Gordon. The British return under Kitchener to avenge Gordon and retake control of the Nile form source to sea. A fascinating read about a now obscure, but previously hugely popular part of the history of the British Empire.


Full Review:

Prisoners of the Mahdi first traces the meteoric rise of an ordinary Sudanese Muslim. On June 29, 1881, this fellow, Muhammad Ahmed, proclaimed himself to be the Mahdi, the messianic redeemer of Islam, the second coming of the prophet in 1881. With his extreme religious fervor he managed to build an army of followers and begins to take control of the Sudan. At the time, the Sudan was nominally under control of the Ottoman Empire through the Khedive of Egypt. In reality, although the lines of authority were intentionally muddied, the British Empire had the final say through its consul in Cairo, the aptly titled `controller-general' Evelyn Baring.

The Khedive, exercising a modicum of independence had extended Egyptian (`Turco') authority into the Sudan and it was his fight against this authority that helped the Mahdi gain traction. The Mahdi's army of ansars (followers) has won some small skirmishes and then took control of Darfur after annihilating a British-led Egyptian army. Baring sensibly recommended that Egypt simply withdraw from the Sudan. The British didn't want it and there was little enough there for anyone.

Prime Minister William Gladstone agreed, but the war party within his own government managed to push the through the appointment of General `Chinese' Gordon to just go have a look around and oversee the Egyptian pullback. Baring twice refused to accept the appointment, but finally gave in - to the regret of many. A less suitable candidate for such a role than Gordon is difficult to imagine (George Patton?). (By the way, Chinese Gordon plays a prominent role in Flashman and the Dragon).

Once on the scene Gordon inevitably decided that Khartoum must be held at all costs. The Mahdi soon laid siege to the city. Gladstone dithered before sending a relief force that managed to arrive two days too late. Khartoum was sacked. Gordon was killed and attained a heroic martyr status that lasted in England for decades. (As Farwell tells it, Lytton Strachey's Eminent Victorians did for Gordon's reputation - deservedly so in my opinion). The sacking of Khartoum led to the sacking of Gladstone. The Sudan was now entirely in the hands of the Mahdi and became the Madihya.

At this point, Farwell turns to the second part of his story, the tales of three European captives of the Mahdi: Austrian soldier/adventurer Rudolph Slatin, Catholic priest Father Joseph Ohrwalder, and German merchant trader Charles Neufeld. (Farwell is also a captive of sorts because of source limitations; these three subjects provide very nearly everything that was known about their own captivity.) Each was held captive for 10 years. Farwell gives Slatin an extended treatment and deservedly so because Slatin's story holds the most interest by far. Slatin, who had quickly become a leading official in Egyptian-held Sudan, also quickly decided that the best course in captivity was total submissiveness (For example, he professed a conversion to Islam, possibly sincerely). It worked - more or less - and he held a seat close to the center of power especially under the Mahdi's successor or The Khalifa. He could observe, but was never really trusted by the Khalifa and lived in fear of his life.

Ohrwalder's and Neufeld's stories are told more briefly and hold interest primarily by demonstrating the depths of cruelty that humans will subject one another to if they have the power to do so and the ability of humans to endure prolonged cruelty and privation. Neufeld in particular refused to cooperate in any degree and suffered accordingly. Ohrwalder's exciting escape story, and Neufeld's poor treatment upon in release.

Ironically, their post-captivity lives mirrored their success in captivity. Slatin went to a much-decorated career, being told at one point by King Edward VII that he would have to pin the Slatin's next medal on his hindquarters. Ohrwalder's role in the church was limited (presumably due his taking two wives and fathering at least one child in captivity, a fact that Farwell mysteriously seems to miss). Neufeld was suspected as a collaborator, a 180 from reality. Perhaps these fates reflect the men's inherent ability to flourish (or not) in any society - or perhaps it reflects something about the nature of power.

Farwell closes the book by briefly relating how the British retook the Sudan. After a hiatus of some eleven years, the British sent in the army under Kitchener to retake the Sudan for reasons having more to do with the `scramble for Africa' and control of the Nile than anything else.

Prisoners of the Mahdi is an excellent telling of a now obscure, but once hugely popular bit of history. The book's main limitations are from limited source material and Farwell's now-somewhat anachronistic viewpoint (the book was authored in 1967). Bearing those two shortcomings in mind and the reader interested in history has a tremendously fascinating tale in store.

***

For more on Gordon:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic_figures/gordon_general_charles.shtml

http://www.firstworldwar.com/features/mostpopularwar_gordon.htm

http://www.remuseum.org.uk/biography/rem_bio_gordon.htm

Read Gordon's journals at "Kartoum" online:

http://www.archive.org/stream/journalsofmajorg00gorduoft




Use a piece of paper to view his face one-half at a time.
For more on Slatin:

http://www.yale.edu/glc/events/cbss/Deng.pdf

http://search.barnesandnoble.com/Fire-And-Sword-In-The-Sudan/Rudolph-Slatin/e/9781590481394



Thursday, July 22, 2010

Mayhem by Robert Janes

Mayhem by J. Robert Janes

My review permalink.

J. Robert Janes is a Canadian author who has managed to create one of the more interesting detective duos among the many such pairs available in popular detective literature: a detective in the Paris police or sureté, Jean-Louis St. Cyr and a former Munich detective now in the Gestapo, Hermann Kolher. The two work as homicide detectives - after all even during the Occupation there were murders to be solved.



Mayhem is the first book in the series. As a persistent consumer of detective fiction, perhaps the most instructive things I can offer is to reveal that I am presently reading my third book in the series (Kaleidoscope after Carousel (St-Cyr and Kohler)). Mayhem provides much of the back story you need to understand the protagonists and their developing relationship. St. Cyr is attempting to hold on to his dignity and his patriotism and is quite wary of Kohler. Fortunately, Kohler is a detective first and a Gestapo only several steps distant and not a Nazi at any step however far removed.

The relationship between St. Cyr and Kohler is evolving; the relationships between them and their bosses and between those bosses and the competing German and French security forces is, to say the very least, complicated. Lines of authority are constantly blurred as theses forces vie for superiority. Among the goals of the leaders are the accumulation of loot and the exercise of brutal power. This complexity is a primary strength of Janes' writing that gives him a voice of vérité.

The clarity of his writing also suffers from this penchant for complexity. His stories are difficult to follow and are perhaps best appreciated like a Monet painting for the total picture they reveal.

I was thrilled to come across two more volumes (Sandman (St-Cyr and Kohler) and Mannequin (St-Cyr and Kohler)) in my favorite used bookstore, the Chequamegon Books in Washburn, Wisconsin. The Sandman attained recognition as a New York Times Notable Book of the Year in 1997. I do recommend reading Mayhem first as it provides much of the background for the protagonists.


***

 
Blogger Alex Waterhouse-Hayward on Janes and his Paris.

OpenLibrary.Org


Here is what OpenLibrary.org says about itself:

One web page for every book ever published. It's a lofty but achievable goal.

To build Open Library, we need hundreds of millions of book records, a wiki interface, and lots of people who are willing to contribute their time and effort to building the site.

To date, we have gathered over 20 million records from a variety of large catalogs as well as single contributions, with more on the way.

Open Library is an open project: the software is open, the data is open, the documentation is open, and we welcome your contribution. Whether you fix a typo, add a book, or write a widget--it's all welcome. We have a small team of fantastic programmers who have accomplished a lot, but we can't do it alone!

Open Library is a project of the non-profit Internet Archive, and has been funded in part by a grant from the California State Library and the Kahle/Austin Foundation.

Scipio Africanus: Greater Than Napoleon by Sir Basil Henry Liddell Hart

Scipio Africanus: Greater Than Napoleon by Sir Basil Henry Liddell Hart

The subtitle accurately reflects Liddell Hart's opinion of Scipio Africanus. Liddell Hart was a leading British military historian and strategist between the two world wars of the 20th century. But in 1926 at age 31, he wrote this brilliant concise history of the third century BCE Roman general. Publius Scipio Africanus led the Romans to victory over the Carthaginians in the Second Punic War. He defeated the better known Hannibal in the Battle of Zama in 202 BCE.



After a brief introduction and the story of Hannibal's defeat of Scipio's father in 211 BCE, Liddell Hart takes the reader through Scipio's victorious campaign against the Carthaginians in the Iberian Peninsula. Liddell Hart is unstinting in his praise of the Scipio's willingness and ability to innovate and break free from stale military strategies and tactics. He also lauds Scipio's generous treatment of the native tribes and even his defeated foes. Scipio returns home to election as consul and appointment as general for Sicily and Africa. Liddell Hart portrays Scipio as beset by conservative and jealous senators more anxious to drag him down than to further Roman interests.

Scipio narrowly prevails over his political enemies, but is granted a very small force in Sicily. Scipio overcomes all odds, takes his army to Africa and defeats the legendary and much more experienced Hannibal. He returns to Rome and an increasingly unhappy struggle against his political foes led by Cato the Elder.

Liddell Hart's writing is clear and concise (the Da Capo Press version is just 280 pages). He makes military strategy and tactics accessible to the general reader. From both the context and numerous comments, it is clear that Liddell Hart's high opinion of Scipio Africanus was against the grain of accepted scholarship at the time. He is especially dismissive of the opinions of the academic historians with no military background. I will leave it to others to argue the relative merits of Liddell Hart's view of the Roman general, but his book is well worth reading.

***

© National Portrait Gallery, London.
Painted on the eve of the Second World War, this portrait includes references to the impending conflict. Maps of Europe appear as a cloud and within a bubble; alluding to the instability of the continent. The 'listening' ears were included by the artist in the belief that Liddell Hart may have had some connection with the Secret Services.

See Hart's grave.

The Fall of Paris: The Siege and the Commune 1870-71 by Alistair Horne

The Fall of Paris: The Siege and the Commune 1870-71 by Alistair Horne

English historian Alistair Horne [A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954-1962 (New York Review Books Classics)] tells the story - really two stories - of the Franco-Prussian War's impact on Paris. First came the siege of Paris, a valiant struggle in its own right. A then after the downfall of Paris and the Prussian (partial) withdrawal came the Commune.

Horne does an excellent job telling these fascinating stories. I was surprised to learn that prior to this war the Prussians were somewhat lightly regarded as a military force - seen almost as a caricature of itself. The French under Louis-Napoleon (Napoleon III) expected to win the war and instead lost Alsace-Lorraine. As Horne emphasizes, this annexation planted the seeds for continued warfare between France and Germany. Bismarck opposed the annexation on those grounds, but lost the argument to the generals. The war culminated with the unification of Prussia and Germany into the new German Empire. In a scene foreshadowing Hitler's 1940 visit to Paris, the unification ceremony and elevation of King Wilhelm of Prussia to Emperor Wilhelm of the German Empire took place at the Versailles.

Louis-Napoleon and his Second Empire were given the boot in September 1870 even before the final surrender and the Third Republic was born. The Prussians kept coming and put Paris under a siege that lasted some 120 days. About two months later the Commune came into being as the first workers' republic (albeit small and short-lived). The establishment of the Commune led to a Parisian civil war.

Horne makes good use of the available source to bring the despair, hunger, terrors, thrills, and heroics to life. My only quibble is Horne's clear antipathy to the leftists; he assigns more derogatory terms to the Communards than the forces of reaction despite the fact that those forces certainly executed far more Parisians than the Communards. Still, his bias doesn't seem to interfere with his objectivity and his writing made the book a joy to read.

***

Why was Horne Bush's favorite historian?

Tuesday, March 23, 2010

Tobacco Road

Tobacco Road was Erskine Caldwell's most highly regarded book; hailed by the likes of William Faulkner and Saul Bellow. A 2006 Slate magazine review (Erskine Caldwell's greasy hairball of a novel. - By Dwight Garner - Slate Magazine) called it "one of the sickest and most lurid books to have emerged from the literature of the American South. It's about as nutritious as a plate of pork cracklings. You're going to feel a little ill when you get up from this table. And I mean all of this, I think, in a good way."

Tobacco Road depicts the Lester family as the "poorest, whitest, trashiest, horniest family in rural Georgia." They are about as lowdown as human beings can get. Lazy, shiftless, and dishonest, violent, and sex-obsessed. In some ways, Tobacco Road is the anti-Gone with the Wind; no magnolias and romantic chivalry in Caldwell's South. It is also an anti-Grapes of Wrath. The Lesters are stuck in the Depression too and about to be kicked off their land, but it's hard to work up any sympathy for them.



Tobacco Road was turned into one of the most successful Broadway plays of all time by Jack Kirkland and later a movie (starring the alluring Gene Tierney as Ellie Mae Lester). The movie recently aired on TCM and is showing on the Fox Movie Channel on March 26, 2010 8:00 am ET and April 14, 2010 7:00 am ET. The movie (directed by John Ford, who also directed Grapes of Wrath) turns the story into a hillbilly comedy.




The Georgia Encyclopedia entry had this to say about the movie:

Ford and screenwriter Nunnally Johnson (a Georgia native) attempted to preserve the caustic comedy and social protest of the book and play, but the studio overruled them on central issues, specifically the tragic ending. The result was a sentimental burlesque that Caldwell himself disavowed.

Nevertheless, the movie retains enough of Caldwell's sharp edge to draws the viewer in. The characters created by Caldwell became enduring cultural stereotypes of white Southern hillbillies. And it does provide a window into a time and place not too far over the historical horizon, but nearly unimaginable for many.

Netflix: Tobacco Road

Monday, February 22, 2010

Same Damn Good Reads

For whatever reason, (well, there is a reason, but I'm not going into that here), in 2006 I hit a reading mother lode. Now, 2006 just happened to be the year I read these books.


Here they are:


Life and Fate (New York Review Books Classics) by Vasily Grossman. Most of these books are extraordinarily funny. This one isn't. Life in Stalin's Soviet Union during WW II. NYRB pageMy review.

Excerpt from an essay on Grossman, a WW II Sovier war journalist:
It has proved almost impossible to write about the Holocaust without becoming bathetic or cheap, but Grossman did it as both a reporter and as a novelist, when he once again metamorphosed the material for Life and Fate.
“What music resurrects in the soul of a man about to die is neither hope nor thought,” Grossman writes, “but simply the blind, heart-breaking miracle of life itself,” and the gas chamber sequence in this book is a requiem that rises in rhapsodic detail and intimacy until it becomes virtually impossible to read without weeping. Beginning with the long, agonizing transport in a cattle-car, these chapters hook upon the characters of an educated Red Army doctor named Sofya Levinton and a foundling boy named David and follow their memories and minutest impressions from the train into the “bathhouse” of the death camp. Again each firmly shaped paragraph lends its weight to what follows, culminating in prose of nearly unbearable heaviness and grandeur:
The shuffling quietened down; all you could hear were occasional screams, groans and barely audible words. Speech was no longer of any use to people, nor was action; action is directed towards the future and there no longer was any future. When David moved his head and neck, it didn’t make Sofya Levinton want to turn to see what he was looking at.

Her eyes—which had read Homer, Izvestia, Huckleberry Finn, and Mayne Reid, that had looked at good people and bad people, that had seen the geese in the green meadows of Kursk, the stars above the observatory at Pulkovo, the glitter of surgical steel, the Mona Lisa in the Louvre, tomatoes and turnips in the bins at market, the blue water of Issyl-Kul—her eyes were no longer of any use to her. If someone had blinded her, she would have felt no sense of loss. . . .
The boy’s movements filled her with pity. Her feelings towards him were so simple that she no longer needed words and eyes. The half-dead boy was still breathing, but the air he took in only drove life away. His head was turning from side to side; he still wanted to see. He could see people settling onto the ground; he could see mouths that were toothless and mouths with white teeth and gold teeth; he could see a thin stream of blood flowing from a nostril. He could see eyes peering through the glass; Roze’s inquisitive eyes had momentarily met David’s. He still needed his voice—he would have asked Aunt Sonya about those wolf-like eyes. He still even needed thought. He had taken only a few steps in the world. He had seen the prints of children’s bare heels on hot, dusty earth, his mother lived in Moscow, the moon looked down and people’s eyes looked up at it from below, a tea-pot was boiling on the gas-ring. . . . This world, where a chicken could run without its head, where there was milk in the morning and frogs he could get to dance by holding their front feet—this world still preoccupied him.



Flashman: A Novel (Flashman) by George MacDonald Fraser. The British anti-hero. More Hilarious, outrageous, anything-but-PC. 





The Last Crossing: A Novel by Guy Vanderhaeghe. 2004. My review. Christian Science Monitor review. The Guardian review and excerpt:

The last crossing, the second in Guy Vanderhaeghe's nineteenth-century prairie-lands trilogy, comes heralded with praise from Annie Proulx and Richard Ford. Charles Gaunt's twin brother, Simon, has gone missing in Montana and Charles and his elder brother, Addington, are dispatched by their overbearing father, from his deer-filled estates in nineteenth-century England, to attempt their brother's recovery.


The Big Sky by A. B. Guthrie Jr. My review. He won the Pulitzer for the sequel, The Way West in 1950, but start here. Heading West in 1830.

"You can't beat God for bein' picky. No, sir. If he catches you playin' cards or sayin' one swear word...it's to hell with you forever and ever...Even thinkin' is mighty dangerous. As a man thinketh, that's how he is, and to hell with him ag'in. Why you reckon he gave us a thinker then?...God is some busybody."



The Towers of Trebizond (New York Review Books Classics) by Rose Macaulay. This book was outrageously funny as only the late Victorian British can pull off. My review. From the NYRB page:

"'Take my camel, dear,' said my aunt Dot, as she climbed down from this animal on her return from High Mass." So begins The Towers of Trebizond, the greatest novel by Rose Macaulay, one of the eccentric geniuses of English literature. In this fine and funny adventure set in the backlands of modern Turkey, a group of highly unusual travel companions makes its way from Istanbul to legendary Trebizond, encountering potion-dealing sorcerers, recalcitrant policemen, and Billy Graham on tour with a busload of Southern evangelists. But though the dominant note of the novel is humorous, its pages are shadowed by heartbreak—as the narrator confronts the specters of ancient empires, religious turmoil, and painful memories of lost love. 


Friends of pancho villa by James Carlos Blake. My review. I thought I was one of the few people ever to have read this book. Great historical fiction and also laugh out loud funny (really, not just LOL). But, hey ho! Johnny Depp is making it into a moving picture!

Blake's Pancho:
"From now on their books will have to say, 'Nobody ever invaded the United States except for Francisco Villa, the magnificent Mexican patriot who tried so hard to be our friend but who we treated so shamefully because we are such stupid sons of bitches and have no honor.' "


The Tears of Autumn by Charles McCarry. My review. One of the great spy stories of all time. The Kennedy assassination made simple. A WAPO review from 2005 Passing the Test of Time.

Saturday, February 6, 2010

Raskell and Roge and Short Arsed Raskell

In American Slavery, American Freedom by the great Edmund S. Morgan, when discussing the efforts at social control in the 17th century Virginia colonial era, he quotes the Surry County, Virginia records for April 16, 1660, that Bartholomew Owens of said county described Captain George Jordan as a “Raskell and Roge and shorte Arsed Raskell”. Owens further stated that he “Longed to kick that short arse”. Owens “spoke scandalous words” against the county commissioners averring that “he would never have justice in that county” and “highly reviled” Captain Jordan (one of the county commissioners). 

Here is a link to my review of American Slavery, American Freedom.



Later that same year, hearing that Owen “hath of late in divers places in ye said Countye & Elsewhere Scandalized & Defamed them in Generall by taxing them with Injustice”, the Surry County commissioners appointed Jordan “to sue & prosecute said Owen at next Court.” Owens was convicted, but the penalty remains unclear.

I was attracted to the quote by the colorful imagery and idiosynscratic spelling, but the episode does reflect fairly common insubordination even among the small landholders toward the the governing commissioners, who were large landholders and baldly used their power to favor their own interests.

The other thing that struck me was that I found a typed copy of Surry County records in about 2.4 seconds using Google, whereas Morgan spent months and years researching the award-winning book. (Francis Parkman Prize for 1976.)

(See my post of favorite authors.)

Friday, February 5, 2010

A Dozen Good Reads Or More - Fiction

Casting back from 2007 to 2009, here are a dozen of my favorite fiction reads (OK, actually thirteen). Some titles will be familiar, others not. Some are literature and others are genre fiction (if that has any meaning at all). All are good.

I've been reviewing books pretty steadily on Amazon since 2006, but I had to leave out 2006 to keep my list at a manageable size. For whatever reason, 2006 was a very excellent reading year for me, worthy of a separate post. So, no Flashman, no Richard Sharpe, no A.B. Guthrie Jr. No, Patrick O'Brian, whose 21 tales of naval adventure, scientific exploration, and intrigue featuring Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin, I had already polished off before 2006.


The Coroner's Lunch by Colin Cotterill. Featuring "72-year-old state coroner Dr. Siri Paiboun...in Cotterill's engaging whodunit, set in Laos a year after the 1975 Communist takeover...". My review is here.

***

The Stalin Epigram by Robert Littell, Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler, and The Case of Comrade Tulayev by Victor Serge each examines the Stalinist terror, its destruction of its victims, who are often loyal Communists, the manipulation of the human mind and body, and the nearly univerisal failure of resistance. Koestler and Serge were both disillusioned Stalinists, but Serge has the 'advantage' of having experienced the terro first-hand. How Littell manages to keep up is a credit to his skill as a writer. Remarkably, each book is a work of excelling merit. 

The Stalin Epigram: A Novel by Robert Littell. From PW: In 1934, real-life poet Osip Mandelstam struggles to get published in the totalitarian state....Much to the despair of his fellow poets, Osip writes an epigram likening Stalin to a ruthless killer, leading to Osip's arrest, brutal interrogation and exile...Littell is unflinching in his portrayal of Osip's tragic arc, bringing a troubled era of Russian history to rich, magnificent life." My review is here.



Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler.
Here is Christopher Hitchens' retrospective on Slate.com: "Koestler's chief character, Nicholas Rubashov, is modeled on those former Bolshevik intellectuals who made full "confessions" of fantastic and abominable crimes at the Moscow show trials of the late 1930s. And, because Koestler had by no means forgotten what he had learned about the dialectic, he decided to place Rubashov in a dilemma from which he himself had escaped. What if the opponent of Stalin is still half-convinced that Stalin is morally wrong but may be "historically" right? He may decide to put his name on the confession and hope that history will one day vindicate him. His last duty to the Party may, in other words, be suicide."

My review of Darkness at Noon is here.


The Case of Comrade Tulayev by Victor Serge has been republished as part of the marvelous NYRB Classics series. Here is my review.

NYRB says: "One cold Moscow night, Comrade Tulayev, a high government official, is shot dead on the street, and the search for the killer begins. In this panoramic vision of the Soviet Great Terror, the investigation leads all over the world, netting a whole series of suspects whose only connection is their innocence—at least of the crime of which they stand accused. But The Case of Comrade Tulayev, unquestionably the finest work of fiction ever written about the Stalinist purges, is not just a story of a totalitarian state."

Here is Hitchens again, this time in the LA Times reviewing a biography of Serge by Susan Weissman. And here is a review of that same biography on a web site called Revolutionary History:
"VICTOR Serge was one of the most interesting characters in left-wing politics during the first half of the twentieth century....Serge has been frightfully overlooked at all points of the political spectrum. This is not surprising, as his heartfelt defence of the October Revolution put him beyond the pale of most social democrats and anarchists, his active participation in the Left Opposition did likewise with Stalinists, and his clashes with Trotsky and often heretical views led him to be looked on with suspicion by many if not most Trotskyists."


 ***

Shadow Country (Modern Library Paperbacks) by Peter Matthiessen.
Here is the PW review. And here is my review.

"Oh Lord God," she cries. "They are killing Mr. Watson!"

Shadow Country is Peter Matthiessen's reworked rendering of his earlier trilogy of historical fiction relating the life of the brutal Florida pioneer Edgar J. Watson. (This version still consists of three "books" and runs to almost 900 pages.

Shadow Country is almost entirely set in the 1890's and early 1900's in a frontier region not widely known - the Ten Thousand Islands of south Gulf Coast Florida (the Everglades area). The area was absurdly remote at the time and presented such daunting challenges and dangers to any settlers that it was in fact nearly unsettled. It is brutally hot and humid, resistant to agriculture, possessed of dangerous animals (on sea and land), prone to calamitous storms, infested with mosquitoes, and inhabited by a large proportion of suddenly violent men as well as sociopathic criminals. This is the place Edgar J. Watson chooses to live.

Within the first ten pages of Book One, the reader confronts this sentence: "Oh Lord God," she cries. "They are killing Mr. Watson!"

That Watson is an exceptional man is undoubted. Beginning with nothing, he manages to set himself up as a power to be reckoned with. He is also grandiose, violent, and merciless. But is he a murderer (several times over)? Opinions vary. He drinks too much. He loses what he has and what he wants and what he values. It is a hard life in a hard place. Edgar Watson was a hard man in dire need of some education and civilization, neither of which could be found in any quantity in the islands.

Shadow Country is an American epic of a mysterious historical character (yes, Edgar Watson really lived and died in the islands). The writing is at times exquisite. The story it tells is often brutal or just about plain hard life. The writing is compelling, the reading can be draining.

***

Palace Walk (Cairo Trilogy) by Naguib Mahfouz.
My review is here.

"Naguib Mahfouz, the only Arabic language writer ever to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, begins Palace Walk with Amina, the devout and devoted Muslim wife of al-Sayyid Ahmad Abd al-Jawad patiently waiting for her husband to return home from another long night of drinking, music, and carousing with his male friends and pursuing illicit sexual relations in Cairo's clubs and cafes. Mahfouz thus immediately establishes Amina's willing and absolute subservience to her husband. Mahfouz takes the next several chapters to develop al-Sayyid Ahmad's position as the unquestioned head of a family of two daughters, Khadija and Aisha, and three sons, Yasin an adult son from a prior marriage, Fahmy a law student, and young Kamal.


About two-thirds of the way into the book, the Egyptian Revolution of 1919 breaks out against the British occupation and draws the family into its vortex. Much of the final third of the book is taken up with the family's interactions with the British occupiers. The revolution provides an important historical background and Mahfouz masterfully recreates the sounds, sights, smells, and tastes of Cairo's streets, but his greatest triumph is the creation of the complete life of this urban yet intensely Islamic and Egyptian family, a family that is perhaps remarkable in some ways, but well within society's accepted bounds.

Take the time to savor Palace Walk. Mahfouz rewards the persistent reader by patiently building the remarkable depth and completeness of his characters. Once the last page is turned, the reader can rest secure in the knowledge that Palace Walk is only the first book in Mahfouz's great Cairo Trilogy. Highest recommendation."

***

The Draining Lake: A Thriller (Reykjavik Thriller) by Arnaldur Indridason is another example of superb Scandinavian crime msyteries. Reviewed here on Euro Crime.
My review is here.
 
 
***
 
The Radetzky March (Works of Joseph Roth) by Joseph Roth. More to follow.
 
 
***
 
 
A Sailor of Austria: In which, without really intending to, Otto Prohaska becomes Official War Hero No. 27 of the Habsburg Empire by John Biggins. Read John Biggins!
 
 
***
 
 
The Singapore Grip (New York Review Books Classics) by J.G. Farrell.
Another gem recovered by NYRB Classics. Farrell specialized tales of the unraveling of the British Empire. He also wrote Troubles and The Siege of Krishnapur. Then he managed to get himself swept off the shore while fishing and drowned.
 
NYRB summary: "Singapore, 1939: life on the eve of World War II just isn't what it used to be for Walter Blackett, head of British Singapore's oldest and most powerful firm. No matter how forcefully the police break one strike, the natives go on strike somewhere else. His daughter keeps entangling herself with the most unsuitable beaus, while her intended match, the son of Blackett's partner, is an idealistic sympathizer with the League of Nations and a vegetarian. Business may be booming—what with the war in Europe, the Allies are desperate for rubber and helpless to resist Blackett's price-fixing and market manipulation—but something is wrong. No one suspects that the world of the British Empire, of fixed boundaries between classes and nations, is about to come to a terrible end.


A love story and a war story, a tragicomic tale of a city under siege and a dying way of life, The Singapore Grip completes the “Empire Trilogy” that began with Troubles and the Booker prize-winning Siege of Krishnapur."



***

The Turnaround by George Pelecanos.
The WAPO journalist takes his crime fiction to a new level in this trip back to DC in 1972 and the echoes into the present. His web site. http://www.hachettebookgroup.com/features/georgepelecanos/turnaround/


***

Little Big Man (Panther) by Thomas Berger. You've seen the movie, now read the book. It's even better.


***


McAuslan in the Rough by George MacDonald Fraser.
The author of the Flashman series also wrote a fictionalized version of his days in the postwar army.