The Year’s Reading: Non-Fiction, Part Two
Now comes the second part of my 2008 reading list, which turns from current affairs to unalloyed history. In an effort to be orderly, I’ll keep to approximately chronological order.
All of Western poetry flows from ancient Greece, and most of it from a handful of poets living in a small area around the Aegean Sea, of whose compositions only remnants survive. It would be no difficult task to read the entire corpus in a few days, yet it has watered vast continents of literature.
To most modern readers, these formative influences are mere names, if that. The First Poets: Lives of the Ancient Greek Poets by Michael Schmidt seeks to bring them back to remembrance through their biographies.
The lives covered range in time from the mythical Orpheus through the Hellenistic trio of Callimachus, Apollonius of Rhodes and Theocritus. Mr. Schmidt has sensibly refrained from fitting them into a standard template. Sometimes he focuses on the man’s (or woman’s – the two great poetesses, Sappho and Corinna, get their chapters) verse, sometimes on his biography (factual or legendary), sometimes on his influence on his successors. The result is a pleasantly varied collection. The author’s obvious hope is that learning the facts about poets’ lives will engender a desire to read their works. Maybe it will.
The War Chronicles: From Chariots to Flintlocks: New Perspectives on the Two Thousand Years of Bloodshed That Shaped the Modern World by Joseph Cummins would have delighted me when I was twelve. If you have a middle schooler in your house who shows an interest in military history, buy it for him (or, yes, her). It provides lucid summaries of 22 major conflicts from the Persian Wars through the American Revolution, and the illustrations are attractive, albeit mostly anachronistic. Drawbacks are superficiality – there are no “new perspectives”, notwithstanding the title – and a complete absence of maps. How one can present wars, campaigns or battles through text alone, I don’t know. For beginners, the omission is tolerable, but not for anyone else.
Six-Legged Soldiers: Using Insects as Weapons of War by Jeffrey A. Lockwood starts with an enticing concept. Alas, the author has no critical sense. For instance, his section on ancient warfare draws solely (so far as I can tell) from secondary sources and then garbles them. The honey production of the Roman Empire suffered because soldiers hurled beehives from catapults? Forsooth!
To make matters worse, the longest section, three full chapters, is devoted to accusations that the United States dropped munitions loaded with disease-carrying insects on mainland China during the Korean War. These charges, advanced by an “international investigative committee” of dedicated communists who admitted to accepting unquestioningly what they were told by their Chinese handlers, were ludicrous on their face. Soviet archives opened after the end of the Cold War disclose the process by which they were fabricated. Supplementing this “evidence” were American pilots’ “confessions”. To credit those, leaving aside their extraction under torture, one would have to believe that the government routinely disclosed deep and gruesome secrets to thousands of rank-and-file military personnel.
The author is aware of these facts, as well as of the implausible biology implicit in the communist narratives, yet he concludes that the indictment is largely, if not one hundred percent, true. If he can believe that, there is no discernible limit to his credulity. When a reader cannot trust an author's judgment, there is rarely any point in reading his book. The best that can be said about this one is that a number of the works cited in the bibliography look interesting.
Bryan Sykes’ Saxons, Vikings, and Celts: The Genetic Roots of Britain and Ireland (more evocatively titled Blood of the Isles in the U.K.) is another potentially fascinating book gone awry (though far less so than the preceding). The author is a pioneer in the use of DNA analysis to study population movements, so he definitely knows his subject. For some reason, however, he is reluctant to write about it. I have voiced my complaints elsewhere and won’t repeat them here, save for a summary lament: “Historical genetics looks like a highly promising tool, but how are we to know if its practitioners are more interested in rating ice cream parlors than revealing the secrets of their art?”
As regular readers of this blog (both of you) are aware, I dabble in the pseudo-controversy about who really authored the works of William Shakespeare. Every year sees a number of books propounding theories of varying eccentricity. If I read them all, I’d have time for little else.
This year’s batch included two items of widely differing plausibility and originality. Joseph Pearce, author (though he borrows so much from others that “editor” would be as apt a designation) of The Quest for Shakespeare accepts that the playwright was William Shakespeare, the glover’s son from Stratford-upon-Avon, but wants to recast him as a Roman Catholic dissident whose oeuvre can be properly understand only through the prism of his religious allegiance. This opinion has lately inched from the speculative fringe of Shakespearean studies to near respectability. Mr. Pearce makes a case unconvincing enough to send it back to the fringe. Indeed, his handling of the evidence is reminiscent of anti-Stratfordian cranks. I’ve written at some length about his mistakes and misconceptions and won’t repeat myself here. As a quick precis, it isn’t impossible that Shakespeare adhered to or sympathized with the Church of Rome. His plays certainly treat it with a gentleness uncharacteristic of his time. Nonetheless, his birth, marriage and burial, and the christenings and marriages of his children, were all demonstrably within the Church of England. No contemporary or near-contemporary evidence marks him as a Papist. His preferred Biblical translation was the staunchly Protestant Geneva Bible. Mr. Pearce gets round such inconvenient points through the tactic, familiar from anti-Stratfordians, of constructing his narrative first, then explaining how all the discordant facts could be fitted in. Ultimately, his argument reduces to, The proof that Shakespeare was a Catholic is his success at hiding it.
Sweet Swan of Avon: Did a Woman Write Shakespeare? by Robin P. Williams offers an almost original alternative to Shakespeare of Stratford. So far as I know, Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke, has previously been proposed by only one anti-Stratfordian, and then only as a member of a committee. Miss Williams want her to have all the credit.
Leaving aside the generic weaknesses that afflict all Shakespeare heterodoxy, this particular hypothesis has a special flaw that I discuss at greater length elsewhere: Lady Pembroke’s taste in drama can be gauged with considerable confidence, based on what she and her adored brother, Sir Philip Sidney, wrote about it. That taste, founded firmly on the Renaissance reading of ancient Greek and Latin tragedy, was far removed from Shakespearean. The countess not only didn’t write Hamlet and King Lear; she wouldn’t have wanted to.
A previous owner of my copy of Salvador de Madariaga’s The Rise of the Spanish American Empire clipped and preserved a negative review. The critic was troubled to find, in a book written by “a liberal and opponent of the Franco regime” and distinguished by “the author’s wide-ranging knowledge and his skill in presentation”, the illiberal traits of “glorification of a culture dominated by the wealthy and by priests [and] undue emphasis on such elusive concepts as national characters”.
I doubt that Sr. de Madariaga was much shaken by such criticism. He vigorously defends Spanish rule in America – not in every detail, for he makes no secret of the crimes, corruption and incompetence that accompanied it, but in its guiding principles. The Spanish system, he argues, was well-suited – more so than the English, French and other alternatives – for the actual conditions of the colonies. The proof is the remarkable efflorescence of prosperity, intellectual activity and even personal liberty throughout the New World realms. The case isn’t convincing in every respect. The reviewer may well have been right to detect shared assumptions between liberal Madariaga and arch-conservative Franco. The intellectual distance between enemies is often not so wide as either imagines.
The Perils of Peace: America’s Struggle for Survival After Yorktown by the prolific popular historian Thomas J. Fleming recounts the two years between the Battle of Yorktown and the signing of the Treaty of Paris. We now think of the battle as the conclusion of our War of Independence, with the treaty an inevitable formality. At the time, however, the nascent United States seemed to be sinking into the mire of debt, disunity and discontent. It wasn’t at all clear that it would survive long enough to be granted sovereignty by the slow-moving, reluctant British government.
As one reads Mr. Fleming, the troubles pile up so impressively that the agreement – impelled more by the course of the worldwide conflict between Britain and France than anything happening in North America – comes almost as a shock. Mr. Fleming perhaps gives too little weight to the fact that, except for King George III, no one in the mother country any longer regarded the rebel colonies as a sound investment of British blood and treasure. The problem was to dispose of it without further loss, in particular, through arrangements that kept it out of the French sphere of influence.
On the American side, the problem was forming a stable confederation that would be able to cope with the disastrous economic consequences of the war. By the end of 1783, and this book, the Britons had gotten what they wanted. For Americans, solutions were still years away.
Under God: George Washington and the Question of Church and State by Tara Ross and Joseph C. Smith, Jr. disputes the widespread notion that Thomas Jefferson was the only Founder with anything interesting to say about relations between religion and the government. Our first President believed as firmly as our third in freedom of religion, but his concept of freedom did not include Jefferson’s famous “wall of separation”. Instead, he regarded it as right and proper for the governing authorities to express their faith in and reliance on Divine Providence. His words and official actions, the authors argue, are a better guide to the original meaning of the Constitution and the First Amendment than his successor’s idiosyncratic slogans.
Whether or not one thinks it possible to influence the Supreme Court’s Establishment Clause jurisprudence at this late date (I’m not optimistic), this book is interesting both for its close examination of Washington’s religious views and for its inclusion of almost everything he ever wrote on the subject.
David P. Currie’s The Constitution in Congress: The Federalist Period, 1789-1801 is the first of a series presenting Constitutional law from an unfamiliar perspective. We’ve grown used to thinking that the meaning of the Constitution is the exclusive province of the courts, yet the other branches interpret it, too. The Senate, for example, will soon have to decide whether it can refuse to seat a man appointed to fill a vacancy.
The earliest Congresses had to deal with a wide range of questions: Could a member be disciplined for misconduct when Congress was not in session? Could the federal government expend funds to build post roads? Could Congress impose tariffs to protect domestic manufacturers as well as raise revenue? Could the President on his own declare the United States neutral in the wars sparked by the French Revolution?
The precedents set by the first six, Federalist-dominated Congresses remain important today. Our government would look much different if, for example, President Washington had kept up his initial practice of regularly visiting the Senate chamber, or if that body had been recognized as having the right to advise during treaty negotiations as well as consent to ratification. In many instances, of course, later developments repudiated the early understanding. Most notoriously, majorities of both Houses thought the Alien and Sedition Acts perfectly consistent with the First Amendment.
One problem for which ante bellum America found no adequate remedy was the establishment of a stable currency. Until the Civil War, even during the existence of the First and Second Banks of the United States, the great bulk of the country’s circulating currency consisted of notes issued by state-chartered banks. For counterfeiters, this was an age of gold (or should one say “pyrite”?). Since there were hundreds of currency issuers, it was easy to pass bogus notes. Larcenous entrepreneurs were quick to seize this opportunity. Their activities bedeviled merchants and honest bankers. The effort needed to detect counterfeits imposed significant transaction costs on the economy, though phony bills may have benefited areas where currency would otherwise have been scarce. It is remarkable that the huge volume of bad bills didn’t lead to intolerable inflation and reversion to barter. Rather, the U.S. economy grew briskly, albeit interrupted by the occasional panic and recession (for which monetary failures were not the only cause).
In A Nation of Counterfeiters: Capitalists, Con Men, and the Making of the United States, Stephen Mihm describes what might be called the “social” element of early American counterfeiting: who the counterfeiters were, how they printed and distributed bills and evaded law enforcement, what businessmen and the government did in response, how the public viewed the contest. In doing so, he brings to light a great deal of forgotten history, full of colorful characters and fascinating events. On the economic side of the story – the actual effects of counterfeiting on consumption and production – he is silent, except for off-hand sniping at the “confidence game” (his term) of capitalism. He is thus in the position of a man writing a history of baseball without knowing the rules of the sport.
Cry Havoc!: The Crooked Road to Civil War, 1861 by Nelson D. Lankford is a day-by-day chronicle of the first two months of Abraham Lincoln’s Presidency, during which the civil war foreshadowed by Southern reaction to his election became inevitable. The author strives to keep foreknowledge out of his narrative. Here are the events as they were perceived at the time, when such daydreams as an alliance of slave-holding border states as a buffer between the North and the Deep South appeared viable, and public opinion throughout the country leaped rapidly between extremes. The book’s Lincoln is uncertain of his direction, and his advisors are far from resolute. Secretary of State Seward deals with Virginia unionists behind the President’s back and misleads them dangerously concerning the Administration’s willingness to “trade a fort for a state” by abandoning Fort Sumter.
The moment of greatest peril arrives after Virginia secedes and seizes the railway junction at Harper’s Ferry while pro-slavery mobs intimidate the local authorities in Baltimore. The upshot is the cutting of all rail links between Washington and the non-slave states, leaving the national government isolated and close to defenseless. One of history’s under-explored what ifs is, Suppose the Virginia militia had mustered and attacked. General Winfield Scott “decreed that the key redoubt should be the executive center of government, with the massive stone Treasury building as the final stronghold where Lincoln’s administration would make its last stand”. Might the 16th President have died in its ruins, a very different martyrdom from the one that actually occurred?
We know what happened, but it is worthwhile to feel the immediacy of the events and to see them as present and future rather than past. For one thing, we are reminded that history usually turns out unlike what anyone expects.
Confederate Colonels: A Biographical Register by Bruce S. Allardice is a work that one consults rather than reads, but the author is an old friend and I have browsed through many pages, so I’ll include it here. As the title suggests, it compiles data about Confederate officers who attained the rank of colonel – over 1,500 of them. The entries are telegraphic. Bruce apologizes for the absence of the literary grace that infused his More Generals in Gray (review). On the earlier book’s scale, this one would be 3,500 pages long. The telegraph does have its utility.
In The Bitter Road to Freedom: A New History of the Liberation of Europe, William I. Hitchcock views the close of World War II from the perspective of civilians (Norman, Belgian, Dutch, Polish and East Prussian), displaced persons, Holocaust survivors, and the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration. With the exception of a gushing chapter about UNRRA, he finds everything dismal. The invasion of Normandy killed thousands of noncombatants and leveled whole cities. The Germans devastated Belgium as they retreated and during their brief return in the Ardennes Offensive. The restored Belgian government was fractious and inefficient. The Dutch endured famine under their Nazi occupiers while the Allies bypassed their country. The Poles and East Prussians were victims of officially authorized atrocities. The Allies found it difficult to meet the needs of millions of brutalized refugees and occasionally showed shocking insensitivity toward Jews traumatized by the death camps.
All that sounds true enough. Little of it is a revelation, though the book adds much well-researched, often gruesome detail. It also adds an undertone of hostility toward the whole project of liberating Europe. While the author now and then acknowledges that continued Nazi domination would have been worse than all the death and destruction of the last year of World War II, his louder and clearer message is that the Allies – either through incompetence (the U.S. and Britain) or intent (the U.S.S.R.) – meted out unconscionable harm to friendly civilians. Meanwhile, enemy civilians weren’t punished nearly enough (except perhaps by the Soviets). What was needed, apparently, was a magic potion that could be sprinkled across Europe to dissolve Hitlerite malefactors into puddles of warm mush that, soaking into the soil, would cause food, fuel, medicine and houses to germinate spontaneously. The Allies having inexplicably failed to adopt that method of liberation, their histories of the war are bunk and “the greatest generation” a self-serving myth.
Alert readers can adjust for much of this odd animus – can see, for instance, that stopping the drive into Germany in order to liberate the Netherlands would not have made any military, or even humanitarian, sense; that, despite Professor Hitchcock’s cavils, the U.S. and British armies worked hard to ease the plight of the Western European populace; and that many decisions that look inhumane in retrospect were made in good faith on the basis of the facts known at the time. The only real villains are the Nazi and communist tyrants, the former for launching the war, the latter for turning liberation into an orgy of revenge, plunder and conquest.
Harry Turtledove’s The Man with the Iron Heart (to be discussed in the Fiction post) led me to pick up one of his sources, The Last Nazis: Werewolf Guerrilla Resistance in Europe 1944-1947 by Perry Biddiscombe. The “werewolves”, whose suggestive name derived from “war wolf” rather than the mythical beast, were one of the Hitler regime’s last, desperate stabs at reversing the tide of war. They were supposed to be a corps of trained guerrillas who would make life unbearable for any occupying army.
Whether Germans beaten down by catastrophic defeat would have offered guerrillas a “sea” to swim in is problematic. In the event, the enterprise was all but stillborn, enfeebled by division of responsibility and incompetent leadership. A few werewolves did rise up, and their terrorism wreaked a trifle of damage, but their obscurity in the historical record is well deserved. The Last Nazis tells their stories, which have a degree of human interest, and strives to pump up their importance – why else feature them in a book? – but only confirms the opposite. Of course, we should be grateful, for reasons made clear in the Turtledove volume, that Nazi ineptitude produced so damp a squib.
The Last Stand of Fox Company : A True Story of U.S. Marines in Combat by Robert Drury and Tom Clavin narrates one of the most remarkable and heroic battles of the Korean War. From November 27 through December 2, 1950, Fox Company, 2nd Battalion, 7th Marine Regiment held onto a key hill in the Toktong Pass, repelling attacks by five Chinese Communist battalions and thereby playing a crucial role in extricating cut-off American and British forces in danger of annihilation near the Sino-Korean border. Of the 250 defenders, three quarters were killed or wounded. Two were awarded the Medal of Honor. A higher officer described the company commander’s performance as “as the single most distinguished act of personal courage and extraordinary leadership I have witnessed or about which I have read”.
Of particular interest to military amateurs like me are three factors that help explain why the battle developed as it did: First is the way in which broken ground and vicious weather “enlarged” the battlefield. During the first enemy assault, a third of Fox Company were unaware that their comrades were under attack; they could neither see nor hear what was happening a few dozen feet away. Second is the primitive equipment and doctrine of the Chicom attackers. Many of them were former Nationalist soldiers conscripted into the Red Army. Their officers were happy to waste their lives in frontal assaults and were either unable or unwilling to support them with artillery or air power. Even machine guns were in short supply. Materiel advantages, amplified by superior leadership and training, gave the Marines a comparative potency all out of proportion to their numbers.
Finally, the incidents of resilience and endurance retold here go beyond astonishing. In minus 20 weather, most of the Marines lived in unsheltered foxholes, slept only in short bursts and ate irregular, ascetic meals. Just moving from one spot to another
Reconstructing a small unit action on the basis of official records supplemented by half century old recollections is a daunting task, and divergences from reality have doubtless slipped in. Despite such obstacles, the authors have done an extraordinary job. Laying out the terrain and defensive positions with precision (the maps are exceptionally fine), describing the assaults almost minute by minute, and paying close attention to the physical hardship that aggravated the defenders’ perils, their book gives a vivid sense of the engagement and clear insight into why the outnumbered Marines were able to hang on until relief arrived and retreat (pardon, advance to the rear) became possible.
For readers who would like to know how real, unromanticized spy agencies operated during the Cold War, Seduced by Secrets: Inside the Stasi’s Spy-Tech World by Kristie Macrakis has much to offer. The author, raised in pre-reunification German Democratic Republic, has pored through the surviving records of the Ministry for State Security (unpopularly known as the “Stasi”), with a particular eye toward its role in the government’s ambitious program to turn East Germany into a scientific powerhouse. We learn both how spies obtained embargoed Western technical and scientific knowledge and how they themselves employed technology offensively and defensively. The first part of the book concentrates on the former, leading up to a fairly detailed study of the years’-long campaign to purloin computer secrets from Siemens, IBM, DEC and other German and American companies. Judging by the degree of communist persistence and capitalist counterintelligence ineptitude, the project ought to have been a triumphant success. Instead, it “failed miserably”, stymied internally by excessive reliance “on pirated and cloned technology” at the expense of genuine research and externally by the Reagan Administration’s strengthening of restrictions on technology transfers.
The second part describes specific techniques utilized by spies and counterspies: communications methods, secret writing, eavesdropping, the use of scents for identification (a niche in which the Stasi was a world leader), and the use of chemicals and radioactive isotopes for tracing men and materials, plus, perhaps, more sinister purposes. (A remarkable number of anticommunist dissidents died young of cancer.)
With interesting, largely offbeat topics and a wealth of previously unknown information, how is it possible to go wrong? Alas, the author is seduced by her data and dumps it disjointedly onto the page. Too many of her anecdotes lead nowhere; too many of her explanations are obscure; too many of her details fit into no pattern. For instance, she devotes a chapter to the huge card file of Stasi agents that the CIA obtained during the latter years of the Cold War and allowed to be made public, in part, after reunification. We are told a great deal about the physical properties of the cards, the system by which they coded facts about agents and other such minutiae, but little beyond banalities about the men and women whose identities they record.
Announced in the preface is an overarching thesis: that “faith in the power of technological espionage” is misplaced. That point may be well-taken, but the evidence for it scarcely appears. The Stasi’s failures seem to have stemmed as often from inadequate technology as from overconfidence about what it could accomplish.
Although Molecules of Murder: Criminal Molecules and Classic Cases by John Emsley reads in places like the first draft of a chemistry professor's lecture notes, it is a fascinating approach to the shiver-inducing topic of homicide by poison. Ten “molecules of murder” are featured (but are not accused of committing crimes, despite the subtitle). Some are well known, such as cyanide, others, like the man-made radioactive element Polonium-210, obscure. For each, Dr. Emsley presents an introduction to its properties (for which a recollection of one’s high school chemistry is helpful), a summary of its beneficial and malignant effects (most have both), and brief accounts of one or more murders in which it figured. There is a good variety of motives, methods and opportunities. The murderers were impelled by money, love, politics and insanity. Some were fiendishly clever, like the Bulgarian secret service agent whose umbrella shot a ricin-laden capsule into Georgi Markov's leg. Others, like the notorious Dr. Crippen, bungled the job and had to finish off their victims by unscientific bludgeoning.
The author concludes with a hopeful moral: Poisoning is not as safe and easy as detective novels might lead you to believe. More than a few of his killers were confident that their chemical agents were undetectable. Modern advances in forensics make any such confidence more and more often misplaced. Since one of my heirs is working toward a doctorate in pharmacology, I find that reassuring.
Epic Rivalry:The Inside Story of the Soviet and American Space Race by Von Hardesty and Gene Eisman follows the technological competition between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. from its roots in the German V-2 rocket project through the landing of Apollo 11 on the Moon. The lead author, Von Hardesty, has written extensively about the Soviet Air Force, a background that informs the book’s view of the Soviets’ strengths and weaknesses. A top-down system mired in secrecy and intrigue depended, ironically, on individual brilliance. When brilliance failed, after the premature death of Chief Designer Sergei Korolov, Soviet space superiority vanished within a couple of years. Meanwhile, the slow-starting, but open and cross-fertilizing, American program caught up and took a decisive lead. Epic Rivalry offers no radically revisionist interpretations or startling revelations, but it skillfully retells the story of perhaps the most important non-military international competition of all time.
Comments