World War I: From guiding you through the trenches to guiding you through the stacks of books

Back in the summer of 1978, two fellow Canadian teens who lived on the same street that I did in Brussels, came rushing over. Did I, they enquired, want to go and work in France for the rest of the summer and work as a tour guide at a World War I battlefield? I'd have to live in a youth hostel in Arras, cycle 11 kilometers each way to and from the site at Vimy Ridge every day and spend eight hours taking visitors on guided tours through the part of a restored section of the tunnels where soldiers preparing to assault the ridge overlooking the coalfields of northern France lived for years before the battle finally came at Easter 1917. At the time, I was working three half-days a week, babysitting a two-year-old boy who was partway through potty-training: he had learned that he needed to sit down on the potty, but had yet to understand the concept of pulling down his pants before letting fly. I was sick of the endless cleanup, and the lack of adult converation; a 22 kilometer bicycle roundtrip seemed like child's play by comparison. Of course, I said yes.

Sitting next to the trenches at Vimy Ridge, June 1980

And so began what would be my summer job for my teenage years until my family left Europe in 1980. It wasn't all wonderful. I rear-ended a car while riding my bicycle on the autoroute. (Don't ask...) My sweatshirt fell onto the space heater in the bureau des guides and nearly started a fire. The bike ride was grueling, taking me past freshly-manured fields every morning. On the other hand... I lived in the youth hostel and met travelers from all over the world. And I learned about the war from the locals, including people who had lived through it, or who had heard stories from those who had. About how, when the autoroute was built  nearby, countless skeletons were unearthed, and enough live ammunition to fight another war. I met veterans of the Vimy battle, one of whom cried when he couldn't find where he had scratched his name on a wall of the tunnels. I went spelunking down some of the closed-off sections of the tunnels -- strictly against the rules -- and aggravated my already horribly bad claustrophobia. And I developed an endless curiosity about this war, the physical legacy of which I could see all around me. Giant craters pockmarked the landscape and filled up with water when it rained -- leftover from the efforts of sappers to blow up the trenches and tunnel networks. In the woods -- one pine tree planted for ever Canadian soldier killed at Vimy -- unexploded shells worked their way to the surface almost daily, so sheep were used to keep the grass trimmed. Every so often, some hapless sheep would blow himself or herself to kingdom come -- and every so often, some foolish picnicker would come running to the guides to tell us about a strange metal object that at first had looked like a great flat surface to use as a table, and then...

So, I still read a lot about World War I. Not everything, especially this year, when so many new books about the Great War are hitting shelves to mark the centenary of its outbreak. Still, enough that over the years, I've found some favorites, both in fiction and nonfiction. Here are a few of 'em -- and be aware, they're not going to be the conventional histories. Those, I figure, you can find under your steam.

The Great War and Modern Memory by Paul Fussell
Really, if you're interested in World War I, you shouldn't be without this book. Not exactly obscure -- Modern Library named it one of the best 100 NonFiction works of the 20th Century -- it's still not mainstream. But it's riveting. Think of it as cultural history. What was the war like for those in the trenches? How did it transform their sense of who they were and how they fit into society, and how was that reflected in their writings, from their letters and diaries to their poems? How did the language itself change as the war progressed?


Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Modern Age by Modris Eksteins
This flows logically from Fussell's book -- it's about the birth of modernism, and the way that the destructive urge altered and fundamentally reshaped the forces of creativity. If you're curious about Dorothea Dix, George Grosz, and the art, music and literature of the interwar years, and how the bloodbath of 1914-1918 led to new artistic trends, this is the book to read. (And as I write this, it's only $2.99 on Kindle...)

The Daughters of Mars by Thomas Keneally 
This novel was one of my favorite books of 2013. It's the story of the two Durance sisters, both nurses, Australians, who serve first at Gallipoli and then at the Western Front. There are tensions underpinning their own relationship but the war forces them to form new bonds and brings them a sense of at least being useful, along with a sense of despair. "Young men were smashed for obscure purposes and repaired and smashed again," Naomi Durance muses. It's not about conflict itself, but life on the fringes of war, dealing with its detritus. "There's no rest for anyone until it's all over," one character points out, testily. "Unless it's the sort of final rest they dish out in Flanders and on the Somme." And there's no easy sentimentality here, either. And don't miss Keneally's other book about the Great War, the equally powerful, but very different, Gossip From the Forest. It's the chronicle of the 'negotiations' leading up to the Armistice in the Forest of Compiegne, which took effect on November 11, 1918. It's a heartbreaking and powerful novel.

Back to the Front by Stephen O'Shea
O'Shea set out to literally walk the length of the entire Western Front, from Flanders to the Swiss border, and chronicled what he saw and thought along the way. It's a slim book, but still thought-provoking and well worth a look.

Regeneration (the Trilogy) by Pat Barker
Yes, this trilogy -- especially the first book -- deserves every single speck of hype and buzz associated with it. (My least favorite is probably the middle book, but, whatever -- it's still a remarkable achievement.) Barker has captured the horrors of the final years of the war and the literal insanity of persisting in the same strategies, throwing men into no man's land in vain, and contrasted it with the treatment of men rendered insane by these military strategies by William Rivers of Craiglockhart. What is the real insanity? It's a question Barker poses repeatedly, in myriad ways, in what may be the consummate antiwar novels.

To End All Wars by Adam Hochschild
The senseless of the carnage is a theme of Hochschild's magisterial book as well. He focuses on those who resisted, from the conscientious objectors to the suffragettes, and their conflict with the die-hard loyalists, as well as those, like Kipling, who found their loyalties grievously tested as the years dragged on. Moving, because it sheds light on those whose names and stories should never be forgotten.

Three Day Road by Joseph Boyden
I am a massive fan of Boyden's prose, and it was this novel that converted me. Two Cree Indians are recruited as sharpshooters -- snipers -- for the Canadian army. The novel is told through the eyes of one of them being taken home to his own community, horribly wounded, addicted to morphine and written off by the army as likely to die. A healer from his own community who has known both boys since their childhood is taking him back -- the journey of the title -- but it's also a journey toward an attempted healing. What did Xavier and Elijah do -- and what did it cost them? It's a brutal, gritty tale, but unbelievably compelling.

The Missing of the Somme by Geoff Dyer
"What passing bells for these who die as cattle"? Wilfred Owen wrote in his "Anthem for Doomed Youth. Doomed himself, Owen is commemorated in war memorials -- and in the pages of this book, which examines the ways in which we remember. It's personal journalism, and it transcends raw facts and figures without ever tumbling over into banalities or sentimental claptrap. It's brilliant, pure and simple. Read it, don't read my rhapsodies about it.

Zennor in Darkness by Helen Dunmore
Perhaps an outlier in such august company, but I wanted to steer away from the obvious suspects -- Remarque, Brittain, Enid Bagnold, etc. In this novel, the war is the backdrop, but an integral part of the story, because it's about suspicion that surrounds foreigners/outsiders in times of war. The foreigners, in this case, are DH Lawrence and his German wife Frieda, cousin of a German war ace, Baron von Richthofen, and the setting is the remote tip of Cornwall, Zennor, near St. Ives, where the Lawrences sought refuge from war fever. Not up to the high standards of Dunmore's two later novels, The Siege and Betrayal, but something different.

Paris 1919 by Margaret Macmillan
Why, oh why, after such carnage, did Europe go back and do it all over again only two decades later? The answer lies in the Versailles treaty, and no one is better than Margaret Macmillan to lay out the whys and wherefores of the bastardized compromises and victor's justice that continue to shape the world we inhabit today. (Just look at the Middle East...)

A Very Long Engagement by Sebastien Japrisot
Another outlier, but again, worth trying. Made into a so-so film, it was a great popular novel, in which the intrepid Mathilde Donnay sets out to find out just what happened to her fiancé, Manech, one day in the trenches when five men were shot for cowardice. Was he one? Could he have survived? It's no easy task, Mathilde is no easy heroine to like or admire. But she bulldozes her way to a truth of sorts.

If you live in the United States, you can't buy a poppy to wear on November 11. But maybe you can pause for a moment of silence at 11 a.m. and remember the 16 million who died and the 20 million wounded during the 1914-1918 war -- and the millions more who died in the wars it spawned and continues to spawn.

The most of the Tower of London, filled with ceramic poppies, one for every one of the nearly 900,000 British fatalities in World War I.

Was the Irish famine genocide? The latest addiition to the debate...

"By the summer of 1847, newspaper readers in North America and Europe could be forgiven for thinking the only thing the Irish knew how to do any more was die."

That sums up the horrific story of the Irish Potato Famine of 1845-1848ish, a dreadful event that was sadly in need of a new and readable history. That is what John Kelly has delivered -- in spades. He does the world a service by not arguing that the collapsed of the potato crop was artificially manufactured and created by the British with the express purpose of triggering what ended up becoming the equivalent of a genocide of the Irish, nor does he romanticize life in pre-famine Ireland. What he does do is deliver a crisp, well-researched and authoritative history of the cataclysm and its consequences.

This is a book that appears to be causing quite a kerfuffle amongst readers who are committed to the proposition that the tragic famine was a deliberately genocidal act, readers who focus their attention on the use of English forces to export the country's grain crops and sustain commercial/mercantile contracts at the expense of human lives. (In fact, for commenting that this seems to me to be the outcome of stupidity, extreme callousness, lack of imagination, etc. rather than an explicit intent to  exterminate the Irish, which is what needs to be in place to rise to the level of genocide, I have been told in other forums that I am callously genocidal myself; I'm happy to entertain fact-based, rational debate and disagreement on this in the comments section, but will remove any comments that descend to vituperation and personal hostility; civil discourse is fine, but reasonable people know how to disagree reasonably without descending to that level.) In spite of the hostility of some readers, it is clear that in Kelly's eyes, the English are responsible for the astonishing level of fatalities -- about a million people died; at least another million emigrated -- but it's of a different kind than that assumed by those who say the intent was genocidal.

English policies of the era was not benign, as Kelly spells out for readers. Bizarrely to our eyes, a series of politicians and civil servants somehow seized on the crisis as an opportunity to exercise some "tough love" (for want of a better phrase) and force the Irish into what they viewed as a better way of life. That they were wrong in their prescriptive approach appears probable from Kelly's detailed analysis of the famine's aftermath;  within a few decades, for instance, land ownership once again was widely dispersed, with small plots being at the heart of the agricultural system. Were they wrong in their analysis? Perhaps not: certainly, utter dependence on a single foodstuff is a recipe for catastrophe, especially given that the tremendous crop failures of the mid-1840s had been preceded by several devastating but more minor ones; certainly, the fact that Ireland (outside the major cities) had little in the way of a "modern" market economy or even a cash economy exacerbated the impact of that crop failure, so transformation seems to have been a reasonable objective. But to prioritize such a transformation in the midst of a crop failure, famine and disease? That's something else again, and Kelly illustrates in damning detail just how each decision made that prioritized policy ideals over the preservation of human life proved devastating. (He devotes a lot of attention to the government's determination that no one should interfere with the "free market" operations by providing free grain, or selling grain below the market price, for instance, at the heart of the actions that have convinced many that the English authorities were deliberately genocidal.)

Few of the English politicians and civil servants whose actions and inaction doomed so many Irish to starvation, disease or forced emigration come across looking rational, reasonable, etc., (much less humane) in Kelly's book. But what the author does do is to remind us that their starting point was a radically different way of thinking than ours today is. More than 160 years ago, it seemed reasonable to Victorians to view the crop failure as some kind of divine judgment, whether on the island's over-reliance on the potato crop, the antiquated land ownership system or simply the fact that the Irish were Catholic or lazy. Hard to conceive today, especially with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight, but then, it was difficult for many Austrian and German Jews in the mid-1930s to view Hitler as anything more than the harbinger of a new kind of survivable pogrom. (It is with the benefit of hindsight that many of us can and do say 'why didn't they just flee when they could?') Kelly reserves a particular kind of icy cold vitriol for Irish landowners who used the famine and the epidemic of typhus that followed as a way to depopulate their estates, evicting their tenants and forcing them onto what amounted to plague ships. He doesn't need to use hyperbole or even dramatic rhetorical flourishes: the facts speak for themselves, as when he paints a portrait of a team of doctors in the St. Lawrence River, with the masts of ships stretching far up river, unable to keep pace with ships that were arriving with holds full of stricken, dead or dying "emigrants".

I have spent a reasonable amount of time in Ireland in the last decade, including visits to the archives of the country's famine museum in Co. Roscommon, and have talked to some of the historians working there. Their stories were more chilling and horrifying than the only major history of the events that I have read (which was thorough but dry). So Kelly's deft marshaling of the complicated facts and the juxtaposition of these against some vivid writing and an anecdotal style made this a compelling read. To me -- as a reader whose interest is in what happened, rather than defending English policies or insisting that authors label this a deliberate genocide -- it emerged as a compelling narrative that clearly spelled out the tragic consequences of people who are convinced that they know better than others, and those who put political ideals or social engineering ahead of humanitarian considerations. He pulls no punches, but he does let the facts speak for themselves -- which I appreciated. I read it cover to cover in two nights. And yes, the story gave me nightmares.

Some Ideas for Great Summer Reading

I don't know what it's like where you are, but here in New York, the temperatures are heading back into the 90s this weekend after spending last weekend flirting with 100 degrees Fahrenheit. Thoroughly unpleasant, by any stretch of the imagination. Whether you're spending the summer poolside, beachside or stuck indoors cozying up to your air conditioner, here are some tips for some fun, reasonably unchallenging books, all of which meet my definition of being "thumping good reads" and that will take your mind off the heat!

Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn: This is a novel that has got lots of new fans, and it deserves every one of them. The epitome of a "can't-put-it-down" rollercoaster ride that starts when a young woman goes missing on her fifth wedding anniversary. Another Scott Peterson/Laci Peterson story? We are seeing the story through the eyes of her husband, who acknowledges he's great at the art of omitting material facts -- so how reliable is he in what he tells us? Alternatively, how reliable is Amy -- can we trust what she is telling us? Just when you think you know what is coming next, Flynn whisks you off in another direction. This has to be the best thriller I'll read this year.

 The Taliban Cricket Club by Timeri Murari: What if... the Taliban decided to reach out the world through cricket? And what if one of the only ordinary Afghans to know how to play the game is actually a young woman, educated at a college in India? And what if she and her male cousins form a team as a way of helping them all escape the horrors of Taliban rule? Unexpectedly, this is an entertaining, amusing and heartwarming tale, one with sharp undercurrents reminding us just what is at stake for Rukhsana, a frustrated journalist who has risked her life to tell the outside world what is happening to Afghanistan's women under Taliban rule, and now may be facing the prospect of sharing their fate. At heart, it's a conventional romantic suspense yarn, but with enough bite, edge and novelty to make it compelling reading.

Defending Jacob by William Landay: There are several novels out right now about children or young adults committing -- or being charged with -- unspeakable crimes, and the adults who defend them. There is The Good Father by Noah Hawley and The Child Who by Simon Lelic -- and then there is this novel, in my opinion the best of the bunch. A classmate of Jacob's is found murdered, and Andy Barber -- his father, and the local assistant district attorney -- overseas an investigation into the crime. Suddenly,  Jacob is charged with the crime... and a father's protective instincts go into overdrive. Is he seeing things clearly, or is he choosing to ignore uncomfortable truths? The ending has one of the best twists imaginable.

Taft 2012 by Jason Heller: This is the novel to pick up when you just can't take any more political attack ads on television; when you want to tell both presidential candidates their handlers to put a sock in it. It's a gleeful romp of a book, that imagines what might have happened had William Henry Taft drifted off into the gardens of the White House during the inauguration of his successful rival, Woodrow Wilson, and ... vanished! Flash forward a century, and Taft finds himself waking up in the muddy grounds of his former White House domain -- and into a different political reality altogether. Heller has tremendous fun with what Taft discovers -- pleasant and revolting -- about the 21st century. While some of the gotcha moments are very predictable -- Taft and TV! Taft and the Internet! -- that doesn't spoil the fun, as long as you're not wedded to the idea of thinking logically about it all. Just enjoy the ride.

Double Cross by Ben Macintyre: This author has done several other books focusing on spy intrigues during World War II, and this, the latest, is easily the best of the bunch. It's the story of a motley crew of double agents -- a Serbian playboy, a Peruvian heiress, a Polish nationalist, a Spanish chicken farmer -- worked with British intelligence to mislead the Germans about the timing and direction of the D-day invasion. Bits of this story -- especially about Agent Garbo, Juan Pujol -- have already come out, but this is a great story that covers the experiences of a host of other people, with all their foibles and eccentricities. Worth reading for the exploits of one man convinced that the secret to keeping secrets and deception involved pigeons. Yes, pigeons.

Trapeze by Simon Mawer: Yup, another tale of World War II spies -- this time of the fictional variety. I was delighted to learn from Mawer's publishers that he plans a sequel to this novel, as it ends with a tremendous cliffhanger. To some, it spoils the book; to me, it was the only thing he could do and not end up with a too-trite ending. In any event -- there have been lots and lots of novels around the adventures of the SOE, entrusted by Winston Churchill with the mission of setting Europe ablaze. One young woman goes off to France -- and finds her life becomes unexpectedly complicated. One of the most nailbiting and compulsively readable chase scenes ever, through the streets of Paris, features in this.

The Cranes Dance: by Meg Howrey: A paperback original from a novelist who I hope will go on to write more novels. Howrey takes us backstage at the ballet -- and it's not as glamorous as you might think. (Although neither is it quite as deranged and maniacal as the movie "Black Swan" would have you believe.) Kate Crane has damaged her neck but her pain can be quashed with Vicodin, which she pops steadily as she tells us the story of her life and that of her sister. Talented enough to be one of a tiny handful of soloists in a top ballet company in New York, Kate knows she'll never measure up to younger sister Gwen in sheer talent. But as the reader learns, it's not that that makes Kate uneasy and anxious in her relationship with Gwen, who, at the time the novel opens, may be physically absent from the company and the stage and the pages of the novel but who is vividly present as a part of Kate's life nonetheless. The ending doesn't do justice to what came before -- the last page or two is an odd anticlimax -- but for ballet fans or chick lit readers looking for something a bit different, this is just the ticket.

1222 by Anne Holt: Now, here's a novel that will chill you ... Anne Holt has set her mystery yarn in a snowbound resort hotel -- when a train is derailed by an avalanche, its passengers all must take refuge there, where they will be struck as the storm of the century swirls through. Hanne Wilhelmsen, a retired detective now confined to a wheelchair, is among their ranks, and when a murderer strikes, she has to step into the breach. It's the last thing Hanne wants -- she'd rather not interact with any of these strangers, most of whom seem to her to be keeping secrets, some large, some small. There's a mysterious passenger, a runaway teenager, a priest, a television personality... A kind of hommage to Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None, this Norwegian mystery made me reconsider my recent aversion to Scandicrime and eagerly await Anne Holt's next novel to be released here.

Any of the novels above should help you beat the heat, and if you haven't managed to read any of the following (among my top books of 2012 so far), the summer is an excellent chance to catch up. Published over the last year or so, each is an excellent "thumping good read".

1. Gillespie and I by Jane Harris: Shame on you if you've missed it!
2. The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern: Fantastical, and imaginative. 
3. The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller: It's not just about the Trojan War.

A Pair of Brilliant Books About the Perils of Idealism

It's hard enough to find one fabulous and compelling book about a given subject, but to discover two that focus on roughly the same material in a short period of time; and then to have one of those be a novel that's been out for several years and the second a work of narrative non-fiction that won't be published for another month or two -- well, that's astonishing. The fact that the authors are a couple -- Geraldine Brooks (author of March) and Tony Horwitz (author of Midnight Rising) just makes it even more exciting, and left me longing to hang out at their dinner table and just listen to the conversation for, oh, a couple of weeks every year.

I had enjoyed Brooks's non-fiction writing so much that I had somehow convinced myself that her novels couldn't measure up -- yes, despite the Pulitzer that she won for March. Thank God I finally succumbed and picked up this novel, as it has gone straight on to my list of best books of the year. It's that rare bird -- a literary hommage that is neither slavishly devoted to the original (and thus nothing more than a tedious echo) nor untrue to it (making it nothing more than a modern day yarn in crinolines). In it, Brooks fills in the gaps in Louisa May Alcott's iconic novel, Little Women, by telling the story of what happened to their husband and father, Captain March, during his absence from the family. Alcott's March is an idealized paterfamilias; Brooks portrays him as a fallible dreamer forced to confront his own limitations and imperfect nature as he struggles to minister and teach in the midst of war. She does this so well, making him both sympathetic in his idealism and yet frustratingly irritating in his failure to understand the consequences of his inability to be practical or to compromise. At times while reading this novel I admit I sympathized with those March notices giving him "a look of the kind that I had become all too familiar with in the course of my life, a look that combined pity and exasperation."

Brooks's March is a utopian idealist, a vegetarian, someone who struggles to live out his dreams and fails to realize the impact of his dreams on those around him, whether it is his wife and children or the "contraband of war" (aka, the liberated slaves) whom he is sent to teach by the army when he proves demoralizing to the men to whom he had been trying to provide spiritual comfort. In the novel, she effortlessly blends the narrative as we know it from Little Women, giving the reader a plausible back story for Captain March that explains his personality and his actions, and leads right up to the point in Alcott's narrative where Marmee must travel urgently to Washington, where her husband is near death.
I think March blends perfectly with Little Women, although the former is the kind of nuanced book that could only have been written today. Nonetheless, I think it captures the ambivalence of those like March who believe absolutely in emancipation and yet have little idea of how to remake the world in a way that will be as welcoming to black as to white.

Intriguingly, Brooks's husband, Tony Horwitz, has written a non-fiction account of the efforts of another utopian idealist, John Brown, to eliminate the same evils of slavery that Captain March finds so abhorrent. (Indeed, in Brooks's novel, March impoverishes himself supporting some of Brown's projects and campaigns, at least in part to win the admiration of Marmee, portrayed in the novel as an even more ardent abolitionist.) But if March has little concept of what an egalitarian society might look like, Horwitz shows us that John Brown was one of the few abolitionists of his time who didn't just believe in wiping slavery from the face of the earth but acted in a truly egalitarian manner; he was, it seems, color-blind in a way that is still too rare today.

Horwitz's chronicle of events leading up to the doomed insurrection at Harper's Ferry is compelling, reminding us of the context in which he acted. Too often, looking aback at the Civil War, we forget that up until the time he and his tiny band of followers resorted to violence, the status quo was accepted, however reluctantly, across much of the North. Any conflict about slavery was largely confined to the issue of whether it would be allowed to spread to new territories and states in the West -- a conflict in which Brown participated and where his family experienced losses of their own. Arguably, John Brown's failure at Harper's Ferry paved the way for Abraham Lincoln, and the secession of the southern states, civil war and -- ultimately -- abolition.

Was Brown a madman? A monomaniac? Or a Messiah? Horwitz deals only tangentially with those questions, chronicling his life and experiences right up until his final days but letting readers draw their own conclusions. What I found more compelling about this book was Horwitz's ability to knit together not only Brown's tale but that of his companions at Harper's Ferry -- some of his sons, other idealists, drifters, free African-Americans and escaped slaves -- an oddball assortment who tried to force America to live up to the ideals enshrined in its own constitution and other founding documents. When the climax arrives and Brown's small troupe marches on Harper's Ferry, this becomes a book that is absolutely impossible to put down until the final outcome becomes clear. Even then, the final pages hold a poignant message, as Horwitz documents the link between one of John Brown's raiders and African-American poet Langston Hughes.

This is a more straightforward historical narrative than Horwitz has crafted to date -- most of his prior books have featured himself as a character, whether it's following in the footsteps of Captain Cook or becoming a Civil War re-enactor for Confederates in the Attic. He emerges as a thoughtful and articulate historian, who has crafted an impressive and immensely readable chronicle of John Brown, the history of slavery in the fledgling United States and -- above all -- the deserved return to the spotlight of all those who made possible the Harper's Ferry crusade, from financial supporters in Boston to the motley crew in the Virginia farmhouse waiting for the sign to risk their lives in support of an ideal. In the years to come, millions more men would do just that, most with far less pure motives, and I finished this impressive book wondering what John Brown would have made of the world that followed the Civil War, Reconstruction and, tragically, the rise of "Jim Crow" in the South.

I'd recommend both books very highly indeed; while you're waiting for Midnight Rising to appear in bookstores and libraries (it's due out October 25), go check out March and read or re-read it. They fit together in a way that is almost eerie, as Horwitz's imagined version of Captain March struggles to implement the ideals of the real John Brown. Certainly I found reading the novel made the history richer -- a tribute to Brooks's story-telling ability. I'm giving both books 4.6 stars.

Full disclosure: I received an advance review copy of Midnight Rising from Amazon.com as part of its Amazon Vine program.

Tabloid Wars -- And a Tale of Murder

If you had imagined that a tabloid newspaper couldn't possibly sink lower than the News of the World has done in recent years -- tapping the phones of British citizens and others -- it's time to pick up and read the lively and wildly-entertaining saga of a nasty 1897 murder case in New York City. "The public likes entertainment better than it likes information" wasn't a comment by a contemporary tabloid publisher today, but one uttered over a century ago by William Randolph Hearst as he prodded his reporters on the New York Journal to outgun and outmanoeuver their rivals at Pulitzer's World, particularly as the rival tabloids fought each other for an edge in any story involving gruesome or bizarre murders.

In The Murder of the Century: The Gilded Age Crime that Scandalized a City and Sparked the Tabloid Wars, Paul Collins (author of Sixpence House and the more recent The Book of William, about Shakespeare's First Folio), the author explores with glee and gusto the no-holds barred world of newspapering in the 1890s in a narrative that is built around the murder and dismemberment of William Guldensuppe, a German-born masseur. From the moment that the man's torso washes up on the southern tip of Manhattan on a hot summer weekend, the newspapers are on the case, turning it into a public spectacle. As the victim is identified, Hearst rents out the prime suspect's apartment after she lets her lease lapse -- his reporters allow the police in to investigate but block other reporters. Reporters cut telephone wires (except their own), hire passenger pigeons to carry sketches from the courtroom to the pressroom and even try to undertake a citizen's arrest of a possible suspect in the crime. “Really,” the Herald’s publisher had mused during the throes of that scandal, “the newspapers are becoming the only efficient police, the only efficient judges that we have.”

This focus on the early tabloid wars in the booming late 19th century Manhattan is the really fascinating part of this book, juxtaposed against the details of rudimentary forensic science, a murder conspiracy and life for "ordinary" New Yorkers at the turn of the century. One of the fascinating elements is the way that Collins hones in on the tiny details: when the man sentenced to die for the crime is taken off to Sing-Sing to await electrocution, he is able to glimpse out the window of elevated train the daily lives of New Yorkers in their apartments; in 1897, the community of Woodside in Queens revolved around the hub of a hay feed and general store and was so rural that ducks swam in the ponds. One of those ducks would play a crucial, if slapstick role in the investigation, and so hard up was one newspaper for stories that it would end up writing a profile of the critter. ("It is an ordinary duck," their correspondent informed readers...) His depiction of the "Wrecking Crew" -- a mass of journalists on bicycles whose goal was to outride the competition and hamper them by any possible means -- left me laughing so hard I ended up with hiccups.


This is a great book to read for summer, combining a true-crime mystery safely in the past with enough color about New York in the 1890s and the birth of "journalism as entertainment" of the kind that endures to this day to make it of broader interest. Those who might be tempted to mutter "but who cares?" about a century-old tale of reckless journalism might remember that only months later, Hearst would take great pride in the disproportionate role he played in pushing the United States into the Spanish-American War. From crime as entertainment, it was an easy step to war as entertainment.


Collins doesn't play up any explicit parallels or try to draw any morals, which is just fine -- that fun is left to the reader. His writing style is crisp and lively, doing justice to the larger-than-life characters that inhabit these pages. I found this both fascinating and fun -- a great book that can either be read for the historical tale it tells or looked at as one of the steps that led the tabloid world in the direction of headlines like the famous "Headless Body in Topless Bar" -- and the misadventures of the late and somewhat lamented News of the World.  Highly recommended; 4.4 stars.

What Happens When Readers Manipulate History

By now, after watching what passes for political discourse in the world today, I should be used to people confusing "casual" relationships with "causal" relationships -- you know, what happens when people comment on the fact that there are a lot of thunderstorms on election days (casual relationship) and moving on to concluding that election days provoke stormy weather (causal relationship). Still, the way in which historians and philosophers consciously or unconsciously manipulated and distorted whatever reality was originally contained in Cornelius Tacitus's short work on the German tribes during the early years of the first century A.C., as described in A Most Dangerous Book by Christopher Krebs, left me speechless -- well, nearly so.

When Tacitus was writing this relatively short work (dwarfed by his Annals and what survived of his history of the period from Nero to Dominitian), the German tribes occupying part of what is today Germany were among the few peoples to remain unconquered and uncolonized by Rome. Hence Tacitus's interest in crafting what seems to be the first ethnographic study to have survived. It's hard to imagine that he expected it to be used in the ways that it was: to demonstrate German religiosity, linguistic integrity, national identity -- and ultimately, and most perilously of all for the 20th century, Nazi ideologies revolving around an Aryan superman. Along the way, as the centuries passed, thinkers emphasized what was useful to their particular cause (sometimes mis-translating or ignoring facts contained in the original Latin that didn't support their theories) and glossing over inconvenient observations by Tacitus (such as the propensity for human sacrifices by the Germanes). As Krebs notes, ruefully, "he was repeatedly forced to say what in fact he had not" to satisfy patriotic stirrings and urges. Few of these philosopher-patriots seemed curious about the merits of the work itself -- had Tacitus ever visited Germany himself, or was he just recycling myths about 'barbarian' peoples and applying them to a region that had a bona fide history of fierce resistance? (Yes, Krebs refers often to the wiping out of Roman legions by warriors under the command of Arminius/Hermann in the forests of Teutoburg.)

The book canters through time, giving the reader a whirlwind portrait of humanist and Enlightenment thinkers, both German and others (there's an interesting look at Montesquieu here, and who knew that Jacob Grimm was a legal scholar as well as a re-teller of folk tales and myths?), who drew on Tacitus's work. For me, the most fascinating chapters were those that dealt with the rediscovery of a Tacitus manuscript in the early Renaissance (to his immense frustration, noted bookhunter Poggio Bracciolini never did manage to lay hands on it) and those later in the book in which Krebs examines the way in which a German "spirit" arose -- based in part on Tacitean analyses -- even before the creation of a pan-German state in 1871. Throughout, Krebs tosses one example of another of Tacitus-based political philosophies that abounded "in inconsistencies aided by inaccuracies" in the interpretation of the original document. As Krebs concludes, the Tacitus oeuvre was not born dangerous, "his readers made it so."

This was a lively and fascinating book, one that is based on tremendous scholarship but which wears that lightly. Krebs can appeal to the general reader, never forgetting that they may not have the depth of knowledge about Fichte or Martin Luther that he has acquired (much less of Tacitus himself). He also knows when to display a ready wit, commenting that an Enlightenment-era salon was one in which "the lack of morals was more readily condoned than the lack of wit or finesse." He is careful to show how discussion of cultural or national distinctiveness can tip over into a discussion of racial difference, and ultimately, racial superiority.

As we head into another presidential election in the United States -- one that will undoubtedly see candidates from all parties appealing to the primary documents crafted by the country's founding fathers -- I can't help wishing that those candidates and their speechwriters would turn to this book as a reminder that when you set out to mis-represent what is contained in a document of this kind, or try to ascribe to it powers that it doesn't contain, you set off down a dangerous path. Sadly, I suspect that I'm wishing in vain. A highly recommended book; 4.4 stars.

"If we were allowed to magically roll back history..."

 

That's the question that Adam Hochschild posits at the outset of this wonderful book about World War I: had that shot fired in Sarajevo, killing the heir to the Habsburg empire, never triggered the war, what kind of world might we inhabit today?


I admit I was predisposed to love this book. I'm convinced that if Adam Hochschild went off to a conference of ichthyologists, he would return with a compelling narrative about an obscure kind of spiny fish that no one had ever previously suspected was of any importance, and create a passion for oceanography and all the related disciplines among all his readers. That's the kind of storytelling prowess that Hochschild brings to all his books and that makes this latest narrative one of the best I've read about the First World War -- a part of history that is so replete with histories and first-hand narratives ranging from the mundane to the literary that prior to reading this I would have been prepared to swear there simply wasn't any room for a top-notch work offering a new perspective on the war or the issues it raised. Or, for that matter, any need for yet another tome on the subject.

I am delighted to have been proven dead wrong. Hochschild has chosen a fresh angle to explore, one that most of those who write about war shy away from altogether. Is war moral? Is it necessary? Is it something to be celebrated and glorified, or something we should avoid as a socially destructive force? When World War One ended, it became known as the war to end all wars -- so horrific had the experiences of survivors been, that they insisted war could NOT be contemplated again. And yet, at the outset, the mood was something quite different -- even socialists who had celebrated the global union of working men voted in favor of war and, with rare exceptions like Britain's Keir Hardie (one of the heroes of Hochschild's story) supported it and turned out to fight men whom they had embraced as fellow workers only months earlier but who had suddenly become "the enemy".

Hochschild does a superb job of finding the characters through which to tell his story -- the divisions within the Pankhurst family, with Emmeline the matriarch suddenly becoming an ultra-patriot, abandoning her violent campaign for womens' suffrage, even as her daughter Sylvia clung to her pacifist convictions. Sir John French, one of the generals who seemed unable to grasp the way that technological developments such as the machine gun and barbed wire had transformed the nature of war and who thus oversaw and commanded battles that resulted in unprecedented carnage, had his own cross to bear: his elder sister, Charlotte Despard, was a vehement critic of the conflict at home. Hochschild puts forth both sides with tremendous empathy, telling of the loss of Rudyard Kipling's son in battle and Kipling's wrenching grief and unshaken support for the war, as well as the fate of conscientious objectors who were shipped overseas to the front lines (against government policy) to serve in the ranks, and who faced being court-martialed and shot if they refused to pick up their rifles.

While the war was a long and complex conflict, stretching literally around the world, Hochschild's narrative is both easily digestible and makes the Great War comprehensible on a basic level. It doesn't purport to be a comprehensive survey of all the fronts and all the battles -- there is little here about the Galician front, the battle of Jutland or other naval conflicts, for instance, and there is a definite bias toward the experiences of war in the trenches of the Western front, from Flanders to Alsace-Lorraine. What is it is, however, is a book that will give even a reader who isn't familiar with the war an overview of its causes and major events, even as it prods them to think about the nature of war itself.

World War One changed the world -- it accelerated technological developments, transformed societies around the world, and laid the groundwork for subsequent conflicts that endure to this day in the Middle East. It did NOT end all wars, but it did make the question of whether war can be considered as valid a means of pursuing a nation's self interest as it was in the 16th or 17th centuries a legitimate one. Hochschild has done a brilliant job exploring the complex moral issues that surrounded that debate, without ever lapsing into platitudes or polemics.

I first received an advance review copy of this book from NetGalley; I liked it so much that I ended up purchasing my own hardcover copy as soon as the book was published. Highly recommended.


Some folks have asked me recently to recommend other books about World War I. There are a lot of broad histories, each with their various strengths and weaknesses, by authors such as John Keegan, Hew Strachan and G.J. Meyer. Later this year, I'll be reading some first-hand accounts, such as Storm of Steel by Ernst Junger. But here's a list of my personal favorites, each of which sheds light on the issues surrounding the war or what flowed from it, in more esoteric ways, in much the same way Hochschild's book did.

• The Great War and Modern Memory by Paul Fussell ***** is a magisterial look at the way that the war transformed society and culture. An emphasis on the Western Front.
• Testament of Youth by Vera Brittain ***** is a memoir from the "home front" in England, written by a woman who lost loved ones and then went on to nurse in the war. Seminal.
• Rites of Spring by Modris Eksteins ****1/2 takes a look at the cultural and social environment leading up to the war (it starts with the cacophany of the Stravinsky ballet of the title) and looks at the world that emerged from the other end, including art work by Kathe Kollwitz. 
• Death's Men by Dennis Winter ****1/2 is made up of first hand memoirs or contemporaneous accounts from the trenches.
• Back to the Front by Stephen O'Shea ****1/2 is the story of one man's walking tour (circa early 90s) along the trenches of the 1914-1918 war, from Flanders to the Alsation front.
• The Englishman's Daughter by Ben Macintyre **** tells what it was like on the other side of the trenches, in the occupied zones of France and Belgium, by looking at the experience of some hidden Allied soldiers who were eventually betrayed by villagers to the Germans. 
• The Missing of the Somme by Geoff Dyer **** is the story of trying to come to grips with the cost of war, and the "memorial industry" that sprang up. 

This is far from comprehensive; indeed, it probably focuses too heavily on the Western front. But then, my summer job in high school was to work as a tour guide in the underground tunnel system at Vimy Ridge (site of a Canadian victory in April 1917), so perhaps I'm biased... 

"A wall is a hell of a lot better than a war"

That was John F. Kennedy's verdict on the prolonged foreign policy crisis of 1961 surrounding the status of Berlin, still in limbo 15 years after the end of the Second World War, which had left both the city and Germany itself split into rival factions that gave dramatic shape to the Cold War confrontation between the Soviet Union and the United States. At the beginning of 1961, the year that Fred Kempe chronicles so painstakingly in this excellent diplomatic, political and social history, it was fairly straightforward for residents of Soviet-occupied East Berlin to cross into West Berlin, made up of the British, French and American sectors. So straightforward, in fact, that thousands of refugees -- including the young and able-bodied that East Germany's new Communist leaders needed to stay put -- were using Berlin as a way to simply walk across the border and take refuge in the West. East Germans may not have had free elections, but they were exercising their right to vote with their feet and fleeing at an ever-faster rate.

As this book opens, Ullbricht, the East German leader, is determined to halt this flow and enlists Khruschev, himself fed up with the need to subsidize the ailing German economy. On the other side of any negotiations about Berlin's status was Kennedy, just elected, who seemingly has never encountered a figure of importance whom he couldn't charm or a problem that was truly intractable. He saw Berlin as a sideshow at the time of his inauguration; for Khruschev, it was clear that the city was the most dangerous place in the world.

Kempe's chronicle of the events of 1961, which culminated in the building of a wall that would divide the city for nearly three decades, is a delicate balancing act. Just when the risk that the reader might bog down in too much diplomatic to-ing and fro-ing reached perilous levels, he injects a short three- or four-page tale focusing on a particular character whose life was affected by the division of the country and the city. These examples of how real lives were brutally affected by the great power talks were well chosen and force the reader to stop and remember the thousands of individual tragedies that preceded and followed the wall's construction. This isn't just a diplomatic history -- although it's that par excellence -- it's the story of real-world confrontation, misunderstandings, mistakes and missteps. Many of these were on the part of Kennedy, Kempe points out: while Khruschev may have looked like a buffoon to Americans when he slammed his shoe on the rostrum at the UN to win attention, he was a wily street fighter whom Kennedy was ill-prepared to confront. For his part, Kennedy may have been smart as a whip, but as Dean Acheson wryly remarked (and Kempe pointedly quotes), "brains are no substitute for judgment." The Bay of Pigs debacle, followed by a disastrous performance at the Vienna summit, put Kennedy at a diplomatic disadvantage that Kempe points out the Soviet leader ruthlessly exploited in 1961 in Berlin.

This probably won't be a book for all readers. It's a hefty tome, with 502 pages of text that require close scrutiny. On the other hand, it's been a long time since I've read a book about the Cold War years that engaged me as much as this one did. I grew up in a world where the Berlin Wall was simply a fact of life (I was born months after its construction; educated at schools in a rigidly divided Europe and honestly had little hope of seeing anything different) and it was fascinating to realize that while we may now see this as a simpler era -- one easily identifiable enemy, taking the shape of a nation state -- at the time policymakers were grappling with the unknowns of their situation in the same way they do today. It's also a sharp reminder that the process of making policy isn't simply a matter of what seems logical or wise, but what is politically expedient or what is dictated by the personalities and biases of the policymakers and the information they have at their disposal. (After all, Kennedy himself, lounging in a bathtub in Paris, commented that bickering over the state of Berlin when Germany would never be reunified anyway, was a bit of a foolish pastime.)

Before the postmortem reputation of Kennedy the statesman took hold and was fostered energetically by his circle, there was this Kennedy -- the man out of his depth in the aggressive games of power politics being played on a global stage. Read this book to understand how that shaped the world that many of us lived in in the decades that followed. Highly recommended to anyone interested in the personalities, the era, the issues or diplomatic history in general.

Full disclosure: While the author and I worked for the same publication in Europe for a few years in the late 90s, neither he or his publishers contacted me with respect to this book, or provided a copy for review.