GoodReads meta-data is 380 pages, rated 3.80 by 254 litizens.
Genre: History.
Verdict: A comprehensible narrative. Aaaah.
The first and hardest thing for me to grasp is just how long the Portuguese and Spanish have been in the Americas. Sailors in the employ of the Portuguese monarchy landed in what is now Brazil in April 1500. They began building permanent settlements in 1532 and remained thereafter. To avoid conflict among Christian nations with the threat of the Ottomans in the East, the Pope brokered a treaty dividing the new world(s) between Spain and Portugal, recognising that the Portuguese were already in Brazil to stay. That solved one problem and created another since neither catholic France nor protestant England or the Netherlands recognised that division.
Brazil began to pay for itself with the sugarcane, the price of which skyrocketed when the Haitian rebellion against the French all but eliminated it as a source of the commodity. This lucrative trade attracted the Dutch, first to trade in it and later to grow it in Suriname, as it is now called, and likewise the French. Conflicts followed.
But the most unusual conflict, however, was among the Portuguese. Three hundred years after first contact, Napoleonic France invaded Iberia. In the ensuing Peninsula War, the French continued into Portugal, which had long been associated with England as a counterbalance to Spain. The French pursued the British into Portugal and in 1808 the Portuguese royal court went into exile wholes bolus, setting sail for Brazil, numbering as many as 12,000 courtiers, soldiers, merchants, officials, priests, and others. The English cooperated for a mix of reasons, some political and some commercial. Banks in London lent money to the exiles to set up in Brazil where the King John VI declared the United Kingdom of Portugal, Brazil, and the Algarves (a province of Portugal itself like Holland in the Netherlands). There were also unrealised ambitions to extend this realm to the Portuguese African colonies of the time.
With the extinction of the Napoleonic threat by 1815 there were those who wanted to move the king and court back to Lisbon and return Brazil to the status of a colony ruled from there. Others wanted the court to remain, including the king for a time. Meanwhile, back in Lisbon a council governed with close English oversight in the royal absence, but in 1820 King John returned to quell the restive. (He was urged to return by the English who found the close oversight expensive and unproductive.) Now here is where the wrinkle sets it.
The king did not reduce Brazil to a colony, rather to placate local interests he left behind his son Pedro as Regent. Inevitably conflicts occurred between those who supported the Regent and those favoured autonomy or even independence, inspired by the distant example of the United States and fired by rebellions against Spain in its American colonies. Much manoeuvring followed.
The upshot was that in 1822 Pedro declared Brazil independent, even while in Lisbon lawyers were splitting hairs about the reversion of Brazil to one colony among many. A civil war of sorts ensued in Brazil between the Portuguese loyal to Lisbon and the locals. The French and Dutch stoked these fires to confuse the English, who were not quite sure whom to back, having sizeable commercial interest in both Brazil and Portugal. To distinguish him from his father the king of Portugal, Pedro became the emperor of the empire of Brazil. Compared to the long-lasting and bloody wars for independence in Spanish America’s colonies this transition was short. King John soon accepted this independence, partly in order to maintain commercial relations, lest the French intervene. At times Brazil invoked the Monroe Doctrine to ward off European interest in picking off part of its vast and underpopulated territory.
But wait, there is more! When King John died his presumptive heir was Pedro in Rio de Janeiro. The crowns were one, again, but not the nations. See? (No, neither do I.) Pedro soon abdicated the Portuguese throne in favour of one of his daughters who went to Lisbon to be queen.
While the author does not consider the general context, to this reader Brazilian independence in this way distinguished it from its other Latin American cousins. (1) The army was not the crucible that created the nation which it was in Argentina, Venezuela, or Colombia. Indeed the army was Portuguese and much of it left with the king. In its place were local militias which later morphed into a national army. But the Brazilian army did not create Brazil in contrast, say, to the Argentine army which created Argentina.
Boris Fausto
(2) When Simon Bolivar recruited armies to rebel against the Spanish he declared anyone who joined the fight was a free man be he white, black, or red and any shade between. While the liberation rhetoric of the King James Protestant Bible was absent, the message was indisputable, and at times Bolivar’s army was more dark than light, more Black and Red than White. In Brazil without this martial deliverance, race remained a fixed social identity and barrier, and all the more so because of the vast slave – mostly black but some red – population for the labour-intensive products: sugar cane, coffee, cotton, and rubber. Only external pressure and the vagaries of the markets for these commodities gradually led to emancipation. All of that made it a late entrant in attracting European migrants as a cheap source of labour to replace slavery.
GoodReads meta-data is 780 pages, rated 4.36 by 484 litizens.
Genre: History (not biography).
Verdict: Parochial.
Declaration: I only read the lengthy sample, and decided not to proceed.
The sample was long on pointless erudition and short on facts. It seemed to presuppose the reader was familiar with the major elements of the history of the region, the arrival of Europeans, and the individuals and families that founded Brazil. And then sets about to debunk them without ever quite explaining or contextualising them.
I did learn this. Portuguese sailors in the East Indies found a tree with red bark and red sap which was used to make a red dye. Then when the Portuguese in their constant competition with the Spanish went West, they found a red tree with red sap that could be used as a dye and they called the area Brasil after the name of tree in the east Indies. It is from the Latin for embers as a colour.
While the authors expatiate at length on the terrible consequences of the European invasion for natives, they are mainly portrayed as hapless and helpless victims even as the more detailed discussions show that some native tribes cooperated with the Europeans to defeat their traditional enemies.
After first debunking myths about cannibalism in the region, the authors then devote much space to it.
Yes, I know only a small mind would be bothered by these inconsistencies and so I stand convicted.
The book does not offer the short history of this vast and varied land that I sought. Rather it declares its purpose to be to debunking the myths Brasilians tell themselves about their history and country. Since this reader does not know these myths, there is no traction. It lacks the conventional road signs to guide readers and it lurches back-and-forth. There are no transitions, no indications of time, no summaries and much musing which is not amusing. There is a whiff of the post-modern. Always deadly.
The city of Brasilia registered on my imagination when I was an adolescent and since then I have come across a few references to it. The striking architecture is the main thing, though James Scott’s Seeing Like a State (1998) has some diamond insights into the resulting city. John Brunner’s sy fy novel The Squares of the City (1966) was another take on it. I also sought out and read a couple of novels set there, but they made no use of the reality or fantasy of Brasilia. Some of this itch was stimulated anew by our visit to mother Portugal a couple of years ago where there was no sign of Brazil or any of its other one-time colonies. Not even any statues that I saw.
The post hoc criticisms of Brasilia are legion. I tried reading David Epstein’s Brasília: Plan and Reality (1977) but found it largely impenetrable. It is a discussion mostly of what other researchers have said, and so guarded and encoded in academicese that it does not communicate to a general reader – moi. It reminded me a little of the story of a Danish bus shelter without the insights or humour in Bent Flyvbjerg, Rationality and Power: Democracy in Practice (1998).
This activity about Brasilia on Amazon awakened the mechanical Turk who presented me with this title. I clicked for a sample, and read it. In this case it is a substantial sample of many pages (though on the Kindle I cannot be exact about the number), whereas many Kindle samples of Non-Fiction are so consumed by superfluous front matter there are few pages of substance. Not so in this case. There is plenty to judge by.
Good Reads meta-data is 510 pages rated 4.28 by 247 litizens
Genre: Biography
Verdict: An éminence grise without the robes.
‘Harry Who?’ asked the fraternity brothers, ever perplexed by reading, since they get along just fine without it. Harry Hopkins (1890-1946) was a shopkeeper’s son from Iowa who by dint of his mother’s determination and grit got a college education, along with his sisters, at Grinnell College in Iowa. Lucky them. Prior to that the Hopkins family had lived briefly in Kearny and Hastings Nebraska (though I remember nothing about him from Hastings but I do remember the WPA works at Heartwell Park. See below for relevance.)
After graduating from college he followed in his older sister’s footsteps and became a social worker, and Jacob Riis in New York City was hiring, so this Iowa hick (q.v. Bill Bryson) took the train east to work in a settlement house. His experiences in the immigrant slums of New York City during the Great Depression made him a champion of government intervention, regulation, and assistance. It also proved him to be an efficient and effective organiser of people, material, and money. His work impressed the philanthropic owner of Macy’s department store who later recommended him to New York state governor FDR.
Per Wikipedia his claim to fame is that he was US Secretary of Commerce for a little less than two years, 1938-1940. In that capacity he was an architect of the Works Progress Administration whose labours can still be seen far and wide, e.g., Heartwell Park, and later the organiser behind the Lend-Lease program. Those, Class, were some of his lesser accomplishments!
Later in Washington Hopkins was a whirlwind, working all the hours of the clock at the expense of his first marriage, and set land speed records in distributing funds to put the unemployed to work. Within a fortnight of his first appointment he had put 88,000 unemployed men with families to work through state governments building bridges, tarring roads, landscaping parks, reinforcing railway embankments, digging drainage ditches, repairing the roofs of libraries and town halls, shoring up damns, stringing telephone wires, planting trees, cutting fire trails in forests, and so on and on. He did this working from a broom closet in a ramshackle building off the beaten track in D.C.
In these works he was an ambitious empire builder who irritated some and made enemies of others, particularly Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes. Hopkins made mistakes but he always pressed on.
His most significant accomplishments were not, however, in these domestic matters but later in foreign policy where many, including such diverse figures as Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin regarded him as the glue that held together the Anglo-Soviet Alliance against the odds. About which more later.
Hopkins back left.
Harry was a sickly child, boy, and adolescent but youth fuelled him, as it does, though the maladies remained and came to the fore with maturity, compounded by a life of cigarette smoking and whisky drinking. He can be seen in many photographs as a spectral figure on the periphery with FDR. He was so constant that some referred to him as the shadow.
When people met him for the first time, there were many remarks on his pale complexion, bony face and figure, pallor, pasty face, clammy perspiration, sunken eyes, ….. But they also noted that when the spoke of his purposes, the embers came to life and the fire within was apparent to even the most imperceptive observer. Those purposes kept him alive against the odds.
On the first of his many visits to wartime England in the middle of 1941 Hopkins was allowed to see and go when and where he wanted. By then FDR had no confidence in the reports and assessments of the US ambassador to England, and wanted an unbiased account from someone he trusted. The mission fell to Hopkins, who by the way was paid no salary, though his travel expenses were covered. For FDR’s personal friend and representative the British rolled out a red carpet. Hopkins was inquisitive and demanding; he was also impressed. More than once in the company of Winston Churchill inspecting bomb damaged docks in Bristol, military hospitals overflowing with wounded, rubble strewn streets in London, those Britons present stopped their weary labours to cheer the Prime Minister who walked among them. In a most secret cable Hopkins told FDR that Churchill’s rhetoric, while elevated and melodramatic, nonetheless represented popular opinion. (The cable was carried by hand to an American warship in port, and transmitted from here in the navy’s darkest code.)
During this visit, Hopkins also managed something few others ever did, upstaging Churchill. At a dinner of forty Churchill gave an orotund speech of welcome. Hopkins had selected the guest list to include those he wanted to meet, trade union heads, businessmen, press owners, munition plant managers, bankers, hospital directors, Red Cross workers, shipping experts, accountants, aviation engineers, and social workers. After the meal it was Hopkins’s turn to thank his host. He did so by quoting the Book of Ruth, bringing tears to Churchill’s eyes and silencing the room… ‘even to the end.’ (Look it up.)
Pilloried after his death by headline hunting red baiters of the Republican Party as a Soviet agent because he advocated material support to sustain the Soviet front. If it needs to be said, Russian archives give that allegation the lie. Churchill and Hopkins and others wanted to keep Russia from signing a separate peace with Germany, and that meant keeping Russia in the war. With that priority Churchill himself sometimes deferred British needs for American material to satisfy Russian hunger for supplies which held down 140 German divisions on the Eastern Front. With perfect hindsight we now assume that Hitler was so driven by hate, as weaklings are, that no peace with Russia was possible. Ahem, everyone had thought that before the 1939 non-aggression pact, too, and were surprised at his and Stalin’s flexibility. Better not to risk another surprise. The more so when it was realised that Soviet and German diplomats met regularly in Stockholm even as the war raged.
For much of later 1943 to early 1945 Hopkins was the de facto Secretary of State, as the incumbent Cordell Hull, a decade on the job, had become ill and was replaced by a cypher. Hopkins committed himself completely to holding together this unlikely and unholy alliance against the common enemies of Germany and Japan. He traveled the world in difficult circumstances to listen patiently to the complaints of each party about the other(s), and slowly found the common ground firm enough for the next step. Churchill complained to him about FDR who complained to him about Stalin who complained to him about both of them, and so on. A glutton for punishment Hopkins also tried to draw Charles de Gaulle into the party by fair means and foul. Since he turned on the tap of Lend-Lease I suppose Churchill, Stalin, and de Gaulle were aware that he might turn it off, too.
The book is particularly good on the international conferences. The prose brings to life the preparations and activities, but it is especially good at demonstrating what was at stake in the meetings from Newfoundland to Yalta. The conclusions about Yalta are insightful. In short, Roll concludes that the fate of Eastern Europe was sealed long before Yalta in 1945. When the decision was made to invade North Africa in 1942, rather than to wait until 1943 and then attack northern France, the deed was done.
Without a second front in 1942 or 1943, the Soviets went all out and by the time the second front came in mid-1944 the momentum of Soviet advances into Eastern Europe could not be rolled back short of another war. The 1942 decision to land in Africa was prompted largely by Churchill’s morbid fear of a repeat of the charnel house of World War I in northern France, but in hindsight it made military sense to test the US Armed Forces on a small scale before the Big One. Indeed the pitiful performance of much of American arms in North Africa was a stimulant for major changes from the equipment of rifle companies, tank armour, operational command, signals, co-ordination of arms, and more.
Let it be noted that Hopkins’s son Steven was a marine, killed on the Kwajalein Atoll in 1944. Another son Robert was hold up in Bastogne during the Battle of the Bulge.
Hopkins was the man behind Lend Lease for several years. He made it work for Great Britain and then extended it to the Soviet Union. He also suggested war crimes trials and got agreement for that. He was early advocate of a United Nations and staked out many of the arrangements the came into being. FDR said it was Hopkins’s good-natured persistence that provoked Stalin into a grudging commitment to join the war against Japan which at the time had the highest priority on the assumption that neither Britain and the Empire, the Netherlands, or France would offer much.
His health was never good and there were periodic hospitalisations for blood transfusions and vitamin injections. There was also abdominal surgery over the years. When FDR died, Hopkins’s hold on life slipped, too.
The early, brief description of Hopkins’s students days at Grinnell reminded me of my own years in a similar institution of do-gooders who did good by me and many others.
For some time I had in my mind and in my Amazon shopping cart Pulitzer Prize winning playwright Robert Sherwood’s biography of Hopkins, but, well, it is out of print and not always available, and, worse, it is not in a Kindle edition, so it languished in both places. Then the mechanical Turk’s algorithms suggested this title and I bit.
Goodreads meta-data is 351 pages, rated 3.84 by 45992 litizens.
Genre: Chick Lit
Verdict: Go girl!
Our titular heroine (an updated Elizabeth Bennett) is late-twenties, educated, smart, loner, who works in an indie bookstore, reads, bests all comers in trivia contests, plans each day on paper, talks to her cat, is nearly anti-social. She runs three bookclubs at the store, one for first readers 5-8 years old, readers around 10, and seniors. Then twice a week with a team whose members have learned not to intrude on her privacy, she dons a Kevin Ashmore super hero Quizzling non-descript costume on a trivia team destined to be champions of East Los Angeles.
All that is fine, until one day an unusual customer walks into the neighbourhood bookstore seeks her out. He wears a ten thousand dollar three-piece suit with a thousand dollar haircut. Yes, he is a lawyer come to tell Nina that her long lost and forgotten biological father has named her in his will.
That she had a father was news to her. Wait, that is, the biological fact of siring was not new to her because she had read about it (just kidding), but that there was a distinct individual who knew her name and was her father, so named on her birth certificate, that was (unwelcome) news to her, intruding on her carefully circumscribed world. Remember this is a person who makes a written plan for everyday and never deviates from it.
It is all a matter of indifference to her roaming, rambling, and — as usual — absent mother who liked men so much she could never marry just one.
Over the decades that father had three wives, and there are children from each as well as Nina, the resulting clan is large and spans generations. On Monday morning there was just Nina and the cat in her life, and on Monday afternoon came along half-a-dozen siblings, grand parents, more aunts, and a slew of nieces and nephews by blood and law. Whew! What’s more they are riven by carefully nurtured grievances against each other. There is enough malice to go around and around to incorporate Nina whose G&Ts disappeared apace that night, while Phil, the cat, watched in brooding and silent disapproval.
I liked the set-up in the bookstore with its crew, and the quiz league, but they receded quickly into the background. Though Nina spends all her time reading we never quite know what she is reading with such intensity or what she gets out of it.
Following the Chick Lit convention there are about a hundred pages of misunderstandings between boy-girl which is resolved in a flash in the last few pages. Predictable, and also forced. And most of that miscommunication is played out in dialogue that goes on and on, and on. It looks like a wannabe film script.
Really?
Really.
Really!
(See what I mean?)
Abbi Waxman, who has other titles.
Moreover, the wedding on picnic blankets complete with a supernumerary camel followed by a food fight at the bookstore are just too much. The deceased father is partly redeemed, but not the ever-absent mother. I did like the motor mechanic’s patient effort to teach Nina to drive a stick-shift.
Goodreads metadata is 273 pages, rated 3.73 by 453 citizens.
Genre: Cold War espionage fiction.
In 1949 West Germany entered its first post-war democratic election with an unspoken bipartisan agreement not to mention the only issue that mattered: reunification. Incumbent chancellor by appointment Konrad Adenauer, der Alte, was expected to win easily. Into this milieu Blackford Oakes (aka the alter ego of William Buckley, Jr.) is dropped.
Start with that name: Blackford Oakes, a New England wanna be aristocrat who is suave, so resourceful that he makes MacGyver look like a boy scout, a lady killer in every way, and never, ever at a loss. (See his Wikipedia entry for more hyperbole.) He is tall, lanky, handsome, multi-lingual, and just about perfect for a CIA agent. James Bond is an uncouth oaf in comparison. Oh, and Blackford is humourless, unlike Mr. Bond.
The neatly arranged German apple cart is threatened by Prussian Count Axel Wintergrin who has formed a reunification movement and could well best Der Alte at the polls. Such an outcome might prompt the Soviets to intercede. As always, Washington decides to interfere. The D.C. intercession has three parts: (1) diplomatic as the USA tries to convince the USSR to accept the situation, (2) while itself working feverishly to discredit Wintergrin with all kinds of Pox News from this spotless past (he sat out the war in far north Norway), and (3) by inserting the polymath BO into his entourage as an engineer employed through a Marshall Plan grant to restore the Wintergrins’ private chapel. BO is the backstop if all else fails. See that coming…?
The reader realises far sooner than the smug and self-confident BO that the final phase of the Washington plan will be to murder Wintergrin to keep the Soviets from invading. BO finally does figure this out and there are pages and pages of his crisis of conscience. He likes, he respects, he has a man-crush on Wintergrin and the prospect of pulling the trigger on him gives him sleepless nights. Let us pause here and reflect.
Wintergrin is a mirror for BO: two peas in two pods. Both devastatingly attractive, omni-competent, far-seeing, in short, god-like. If Wintergrin had been a working class stiff, say like the real German opponent of Der Alte, Kurt Schumacher, it seems doubtful to this reader that BO would have thought twice about murdering him for the greater good. By the way Adenauer is named in the novel, but the Socialist Party leader is made fictional, and not named as Schumacher. Go figure. I read a biography of Schumacher so long ago I have forgotten whatever I learned from it.
Spoiler. In the end all of BO’s posturing is pointless since his superiors, after having wasted much time and effort in priming him, arranged another end for Wintergrin, whose omniscience extended to his own Christ-like death.
Loose ends are many: the resident KGB agent is left in place, the nuclear weapon Wintergrin had purloined are not retrieved, the election outcome is not mentioned (Der Alte won by a whisker), and Wintergrin was wrong about his own death. Yet the closing is reverential. This is the second in a series of ten of these potboilers. Not sure I can brook another bout of BO’s smug complacence. Far better on a similar theme is A Small Town in Germany (1968) by John le Carré.
William Buckley, Jr.
In fact, I read this one eons ago and forgot it, until I read Buckley’s Unmaking of a Mayor. That prompted me to try again with the same reaction: what a tiresome prat is BO.
The Idealist: Wendell Wilkie’s Wartime Quest to Build One World (2020) by Samuel Zipp
GoodReads meta-data is 416 pages rated 4.0 by two litizens.
and
The Improbable Wendell Wilkie (2018) by David Lewis
GoodReads meta-data is 400 pages, rated 3.73 by 86 litizens.
Genre: Biography.
Verdict: Meh. Meh.
I am in the market for a biography of Wendell Wilkie but neither of these two samples captured my attention. The Zipp sample is quite long but the book is not a biography and otherwise not compelling. The Lewis sample is chapter one only and it did not suffice to lure me in for the whole works. In neither case is my judgement a reflection on the subject who remains of interest.
Lewis Wendell Wilkie was born in Indiana and proud of it. He never held a public office and ran for an elected office only once – the President as the Republican Party nominee in 1940, against the twice incumbent FDR.
He went by the name Wendell because when he joined the Army in 1917 a clerk mistakenly transposed his first names, and by the time Wilkie realised this had happened it was in all of the army records, so he decided to accept it. On the point of names it is a curiosity to note that he married Edith Wilk.
Wilkie grew up in a small town that experienced the ups and downs of the business cycle. That experience of boom and bust made him accept, if not advocate, government regulation. Elwood, Indiana prospered with electricity and in time he became a business man investing in and selling electricity in the area. At the time, as with the railroads, there were many competing electricity providers with different standards and little capital for investment in research and development or improvement of service. He began buying these up in a holding company that at one time was one the largest businesses in the land. He re-located to New York CIty.
His parents instilled in him a respect for and appreciation of art and literature and he waxed in New York City with its libraries and galleries. He became a patron of the arts, but he never did quite fit in. He seldom wore the de rigour tuxedo on glittering occasions; he introduced himself to drivers, waiters, and other workers. He did not regard the Roosevelt administration as socialist as did so many eastern industrialists. He encouraged the development of trade unions in his electricity empire and worked with them to improve safety. From New York City his outlook broadened to international affairs. In short, he became a Ripon Republican true to the original purposes of the GOP.
He differed strongly with FDR about the Tennessee Valley Authority and became a national figure as a result. He led the business and industry opposition to this vast project, testifying before Congress, on a speaking tour, lining up lobbyists, overseeing the advertising campaign, and in so doing discovered that he liked the limelight, that he liked meeting people, that he liked travelling (and seeing the country), that he had the stamina and wit to do it.
Robert Taft and Thomas Dewey were silently locked in a death struggle for the 1940 Republican nomination when Wilkie took it by storm. He did not participate in the few primary election there were, nor did he court the GOP establishment in state committees. He did it by an energetic public campaign of speaking, meeting, listening, debating, and being here, there, and everywhere. He got the nomination on the fifth ballot when it was clear that neither Taft nor Dewey would ever get a majority so much did they and their supporters detest each other. It all seemed spontaneous and neither of these samples say anything about the organisation that made it happen, but surely there was one.
While he polled better than the 1936 Republican candidate (Alf Landon) he lost. He alienated much of the Republican base during the campaign with his explicit support of trade unions, international relations, civil rights, and more. A journalist today looking for a cheap shot (when do they not?) would say he was FDR-lite, His differences with Roosevelt were matters of degree, not of kind.
He had been a registered Democrat and said in many interviews that Woodrow Wilson was right about the League of Nations. That conviction meant the Republican Senate which had blocked adhesion to the League was wrong, and that riled the hard core of the GOP. Some of those very same Republican Senators were still in the Senate. He changed his registration to Republican six weeks before the nominating convention but he never changed his mind about Wilson.
In January 1941 after the election, President Roosevelt asked him to go on a good will tour around the world, bearing personal messages from FDR to Churchill, Stalin, and Chang-Kai Shek in a display of national unity. Wilkie took the assignment and set out on a remarkable voyage that made him even more of the internationalist than before. Neither of these samples gets to this trip.
The relationship between Democrat Roosevelt and Republican Wilkie seems to parallel that of Democrat Wilson and Republican Hoover. Respectful and civil with a fundamental unity of purpose for the common good which proved more important than momentary partisan advantage.
Goodreads metadata is 341 pages, rated 4.03 by 118 litizens.
Genre: autobiography.
One of a kind Bill Buckley was asked during his 1965 electoral campaign for mayor of New York City what his first action would be if elected? ‘Demand a recount!’
He was always the smartest guy in the room, and that has been as much of a hindrance as a help. The book is convoluted, digressive, and replete with surgical insights hidden in glades within a lush prose overgrown by an elephantine vocabulary of polysyllabic words combined with his fastidious obsessions (too many to parody or name) to obscure nearly everything like a fog.
To venture a comparison, Buckley was magnificently gifted, talented, creative, and industrious but, unlike a comparably stellar athlete, say, Michael Jordan, Buckley never learned to play with and for a team, as Jordan did. Buckley always went one-on-one…against many teams at once, and he lost. No surprise there. But oh, some of his moves on the highlight tape were legendary.
At the time of this election Buckley was the uncrowned king of conservatives and Conservatives who found Barry Goldwater a spent force. Buckley reviled the press — at the time there were a dozen daily newspapers in New York City, each with several editions a day, and more weeklies — and it members reciprocated his revulsion; he seems to have spent hours each day finding his name in their pages and reacting, writing letters, sending telegrams, and dispatching texts by courier hither and thither to them to score points. He was a brilliant debater who never won an argument. See above.
After publishing six polemical books by the age of thirty-nine, he founded the National Review to give voice to the conservatism he thought excluded from the mainstream media after he had run the John Birch Society out of the Republican Party and the Conservative moment more generally. He also went on to host a syndicated television program – Firing Line – for 1,500 episodes. Busy he was as well as brilliant. What he lived off is left out of these pages but it is worth remembering that his father was a Texas oil millionaire. It just shows that inherited wealth can be put to use.
The mayoralty campaign was a platform for his many views. Aside from the trench war of words with the media, he also excoriated the voting blocs that dominated New York City politics: unions, Catholics, Irish, Italians, Jews, Blacks, Wall Street, police, and so on. Instead of pandering to the sweetheart deals a winning candidate had to do, he rejected all of that and himself free from the spectre of success had only to promote ideas not deliver on anything. Fearless as he claimed to be, I noticed no reference to organised crime in either the waste or construction business. Likewise with no danger of ever having to implement word-one, he had a license to shout from the roof tops in a way no prospective winner could, would, or should.
In one long and detailed exposition that would have deadened a seminar he makes a brilliant point buried in a tangled tropical rainforest of detail. He compares the reality of single working mother’s day with the statistical progress New York City has made in the last decade. On the one hand is her lived experience through the flesh of constant worry about her children (food and safety), an unendurable commute to sweatshop labour, and eking out a living while presenting a cheerful face to her kids. On the other hand in city hall there is the aggregate accounting which shows more and more money is being spent to make her life better: over the decade, so much more on schools, on policing, on transportation. But the accountants offered nary a word on her concrete benefits from such expenditures.
Her bus ride is seldom faster than walking. The preceding subway ride is crushed with unfettered bag snatching. The children’s playground is haunted by drug pushers. The manager of the sweatshop employs with impunity illegal immigrants who will work for less than she can. The air is polluted. The garbage is rarely collected. She herself walks home from the subway stop in the evening fearful of muggers. The apartment’s plumbing failures are a matter of indifference to the owners whose code violations are never settled. The school teachers have given up education and concentrate of getting through each day.
The example is trenchant and cuts to the core, but no doubt came across like static on a radio. He really needed a speech writer to trim the shag carpet of prose that comes from the typewriter. And perhaps a coach to affect, at least, a common touch. He always seems to be delivering testaments from on high to the unenlightened even in these pages, read more than half-a-century later.
In another attenuated instance he argued that free services were not free. Someone was paying, and it was mostly likely those least able to do so who paid the largest percentage of their income for services to be enjoyed by those better off. The example he used, just to rile the audience, was college tuition. It worked. The students were riled. After delving into some city hall accounting statistics himself, he showed that by far the bulk of the costs of free college tuition in New York City colleges was paid for by janitors, taxi drivers, doormen, waiters, bus drivers, dustmen, cops, while the student body came from the clerical and managerial class whose taxes were a lesser portion of their income and aggregated to a lesser amount of the total than those of the blue collar, working class. Needless to say he was booed off the platform at CCNY.
Did Peter Walsh, a one-time Finance Minister who understood that free is not free, listen at the time.
Candidate Buckley advocated an entry tax for cars coming into Manhattan and extensive bicycle lanes for transit not just recreation. Both were regarded as fantasy at the time, and both now exist in much of the world. He also proposed the legalisation of marijuana in 1965, which has yet to come. Later he served on the board of Amnesty International and raised money for its work.
The book is not easy to read. There is no core narrative but a pastiche of this brilliant and tendentious intellectual, being, well, intellectual, about all things, including doughnuts. It is a kind of performance art. A reader need not approve, agree, or care, but no reader can deny the verbal pyrotechnics on display. There was once an Italian showman who ran head first into walls to entertain jaded Romans; am I alone is seeing parallels with Buckley?
Pedants’ note. Since he was never mayor, the title seems inflated, like much else about Buckley.
Throughout his long career as a gadfly Buckley was constantly attacked by the likes of Gore Vidal, Norman Mailer, and Noam Chomsky. With that enemies list he rose in my estimation. The Supercilious, the Vain, and the Fatuous are just the enemies I want.
In case anyone wondered about the NR today.
In addition to the polemics he also wrote a series of spy novels, and I tried one years ago without its leaving a trace in my memory. Perhaps I should try again, starting with Stained Glass (1980). He was altogether a man for many seasons, if not all.
I have been searching for biography of John V. Lindsay who won that election, and in the absence of such a book, I turned to this title in the sure and certain knowledge it would flame for good and ill.
Buckley visited Australia once and I angled (through student who worked at the ABC) without success to get a ticket to the event, but it was ideologically closed and I failed.
Goodreads metadata is 384 pages, rated 3.62 by 56 litizens.
Genre: Biography.
Verdict: One of a kind.
If you don’t know Jack (and a surprisingly large number of people of my acquaintance don’t – and they wouldn’t get that remark) read that subtitle above which includes the phrase ‘General of the Armies.’ Plural. At the time that rank was accorded to Pershing by an act of Congress, the only other officer ever to bear it was Ulysses Grant.
Arlington.
Born to a shop-keeping family in Missouri Jack Pershing (1860-1948) liked to read and write, as well as the other pursuits of a boy in a small town. The Civil War had been a fratricidal war in Missouri and the other border states, and its residue gave the boy Pershing a belief in the necessity of order that never left him. This inchoate conviction was born from the ragtag of armed villains who prowled Missouri claiming to be soldiers for either the North or the South during and after the Civil War, but who were in fact criminals. The economic depression that followed the Civil War ruined his family’s fortunes and the boy had to make his own way in the world. How he did that shaped the man he became.
At seventeen he became a backwoods school teacher to earn a living, albeit school teaching was usually woman’s work in that time and place. He would have been teased about that, but what really got a reaction was the students he taught. It was a reaction that stayed with him to the end of his time.
He was hired to teach freed slaves and their progeny to read and write. This experience lead to the nickname that he had the rest of his life: ‘Nigger Jack.’ He was bullied and assaulted and that drove him to the serious study of self-defence, i.e., boxing. This experience with blacks has echoes in his late life. Stay tuned.
School teaching put food on the table, but it led nowhere because his students were black. He then learned that the West Point nominations for Missouri would be filled by open examination, and he saw in this a way to get a free college education, which he and family otherwise could not afford. It was not the army that attracted him but the education. He went at preparing for this examination the way he came to do most things with longterm, meticulous staff work, as his father used to manage the store. He sought out previous candidates who had sat the exam and interviewed them about it. He hired, out of his meagre salary, a tutor to start him on French. He haunted the few free libraries within his reach to study grammar and geography. He gained admission and excelled there.
His youthful reading and writing had given him the ambition to be a lawyer and the army was a means to an end, but he liked the order, discipline, and purposefulness of military life.
As a young lieutenant he spent six years at the University of Nebraska as a Professor of Military Science and ran – with efficiency and excellence – the ROTC-scheme that existed at the time, and today bears his name. Here as everywhere else he served, the regimen was one of strict discipline which was imposed with an even hand. Even the son of the largest donor to the University as well as a star athlete felt the rod in that hand. Soldiering was never a game to Pershing. While performing his duties, he also obtained an LLB degree from UNL but that ended his legal career (as it has for so many others).
That is why there are so many things named Pershing in and around Lincoln, including Pershing Elementary School, Pershing Auditorium, Pershing Drive (Omaha), Pershing town in Burt County, and the Pershing Block at UNL. The Pershing Rifles is a national drill and discipline organisation headquartered for years in Lincoln.
His military career included the tail end of the Indian Wars in New Mexico (around Silver City) and North Dakota. Unlike many of his brother officers he respected his foes and learned much about tactics from the Apache and Sioux he pursued. The only time his unit came into contact with hostile Indians it was the latter who attacked.
His service in New Mexico was noted and he was promoted and put in command of a regiment of Buffalo Soldiers in Montana. Buffalo Soldiers? These were black men, mainly one-time slaves or veterans of the Civil War, or the sons of the same. He was proud of the discipline and deportment of these men and that earned ‘Nigger’ Jack more scorn from peers. Later on his recommendation several these troopers received the Congressional Medal of Honor. He had no doubt of the courage and wit of these men in doing their duty. This assignment spread that derogatory nickname further and wider in the army. He commanded the 10th Cavalry for three years.
Then came assignment to West Point to teach tactics. At the start of the Spanish-American War in 1899 he was a well-known and experienced line officer who was readily available because he had no field command. He was re-united with the Buffalo Soldiers and together they stormed up a hill and defeated the Spanish, while Teddy Roosevelt and his Rough Riders with attendant journalists went up the other side to a glory won by the Black Blue Boys, as the Buffalo Soldiers were called, on the obverse side. This action earned the unit a citation and Pershing a Silver Star. It was then that he made his medal recommendations. Shortly thereafter he contracted malaria in Cuba and it stayed with him for years.
The Buffalo Soldiers he commanded in Puerto Rico.
In the same year he was assigned to the Phillipines where his commander in Manila wanted to teach this ‘Nigger lover’ a lesson in the real world and assigned him a command in the most difficult part of the most difficult island. Pershing started by learning the local language and began a public relations campaign with the locals that featured medical care for children, free food for the elderly and infirm, agricultural tools swapped for produce, feast days for one and all. His troops also paraded around to remind viewers that there was muscle behind the good will. He engaged in some tense negotiations with local warlords who in time came to trust him. He thus pacified Mindanao over a four-year period with a minimum of bloodshed. Made me think of J. Paul Vann.
He then served as an observer with the Japanese army during the Russo-Japanese War in engagements when Gustav Mannerheim of Finland was in the Tsar’s army across the river. His tactful persistence finally got him permission to visit battlefields and to accompany patrols. His reports on the effects of new weapons (repeating rifles, machine guns, ranged artillery, much improved binoculars, barbed wire, telegraph communications, trains, and aerial reconnaissance) were terse and much discussed in Washington D.C. More importantly, he bore them in mind in 1917 in his insistence on training and equipment, and the use of all arms, including artillery and aviation, though not cavalry.
Republican President Theodore Roosevelt promoted him from captain to brigadier general, passing over nearly a thousand more senior officers, making Pershing no friends in the army, but stiffening his resolve to be worthy of the rank. To explain: The president cannot promote an officer from captain to major, or a major to colonel, but the president can promote anyone to general, though the custom was to promote to that rank only senior colonels. TR was no one to follow custom.
Through the years.
When in 1915-1916 Democratic President Woodrow Wilson decided to teach Mexico what was good for Mexico, Pershing was assigned command of the mission, which had no clearly defined purpose or goals. His efforts to extract the latter from Wilson had no success. Its purpose became the apprehension of Pancho Villa, whose raids across the border into Texas had attracted Wilson’s attention. In that mission it failed but it did break up Villa’s armed gangs and so was declared a success. During this exercise Pershing commanded 10,000 men in the field with all the attendant necessities of logistics, supply, medicines, transportation animals, wounded, hygiene, and so on. The Mexican government, such as it was, did not cooperate, and Wilson, perhaps embarrassed by his overreaction, starved the expedition of support at a time when all eyes were on the Great War in Europe. Yet it might be well to note that from 1914 Germany encouraged and financed disturbances in Mexico to distract the USA from the European war. Read the Zimmerman telegram for details.
‘Lafayette, nous voilà’ is a phrase forever associated with him. Idiomatic, it means ‘Lafayette, here we are’… to repay the debt of the decisive French financial and naval support during the American Revolutionary War. When Wilson entered the Great War to defend the freedom of the seas, Pershing was the obvious choice for command. He had managed more troops in the field than any other serving general, and was relatively young and energetic. In May 1917 he arrived in France with a headquarters company of 250, and they marched through Paris to bolster civilian morale. Months of acrimony and conflict followed.
The French and British wanted men in the trench line N O W! Pershing did not want to entrust US soldiers to them, though the author is too circumspect to say why. Stay tuned to find out more. Moreover, he wanted US troops to serve only under American command. Finally, he wanted them to be trained and equiped. All of this took time. Lots of it.
French and British leaders went over his head, repeatedly, to President Wilson who absolutely deferred to General Pershing. If American units had been fed piecemeal into the trenches, is there any doubt exhausted French and British commanders would have used these fresh troops as cannon fodder to spare their own for at least a time. None whatsoever. But the author omits this point, though he does note that the French and British denied that American troops needed any training for trench warfare nor any weapons their own, implying the short lifespan anticipated.
The press introduced him to the American public and applied its alchemy to the nickname, changing it to Black Jack without explanation.
Pershing’s finest hour(s) may have been at the conference table with Allies to withhold US soldiers until they were trained and equipped, and in so doing to save them from being cannon fodder. By the end of the war there were 2.2 million American troops on the Western Front and when unleashed they swept all before them. The Germans called them ‘Devil Dogs.’ The battle of the Argonne Woods lasted forty-seven days, a sustained offensive then quite beyond the men and material of the French and British. Among those who learned from him were George Marshall, Dwight Eisenhower, Omar Bradley, George Patton, and Douglas MacArthur.
There is no indication in the book that US forces used poison gas, though it certainly was used against them. (See the comments on Rondo Hatton elsewhere on this blog.) Hence one vital piece of equipment was the gas mask. The book is likewise silent on the Buffalo Soldiers though other sources (see picture below) indicate that Pershing did make an effort to include black troops in the AEF but it was blocked by Secretary of the Treasury William McAdoo who interfered generally in the latter days of the Wilson administration. McAdoo was also Wilson’s son-in-law, and having purged the civil service of blacks, he wanted to do the same for the army. He had presidential ambitions himself.
Pershing stayed in Europe after the war for a couple of years, attending to the aftermath, repatriating the wounded, planning cemeteries, inaugurating monuments, auditing equipment, and other mundane chores. He was feted and had to make numerous speeches, all short and awkward. Publishers offered him large advances for memoirs none of which he took, though he did struggle for years to write the indigestible account of the war that appeared, finally, under his name.
The general is ever on duty.
He was also briefly touted as a presidential candidate but shunned the call. He served as chief of staff in the Harding Administration, and created the Pershing Map of the roads of the United States, which in time became the starting point of the Interstate Highway System initiated by President Eisenhower. Pershing retired in 1934. Later he championed aid to Great Britain and France in 1939-1940 in press interviews.
He had been a happily married man with four children when a fire in the age of oil lighting and candles burned his house down while he was on campaign. His wife and three of the four children perished. He was stunned for more than year and became thereafter even more terse, unforgiving, morose, stoic, and a workaholic.
The book ends with a long and pointless chapter on his surviving son and then his grandson. It adds nothing to our appreciation of the subject, and is in lieu of, but no substitute for, a summing up the man and his achievements, strengths and weaknesses, and heritage.
I found Pershing mentioned in the biography of Phillipe Pétain I read and that reminded me that I had once been curious about Pershing’s connection to Nebraska, so I set out to scratch that itch.
Goodreads meta-data is 252 pages, rated 4.0 by 3 litizens.
Genre: Biography.
Verdict: Great arrival but lousy trip.
Henri Philippe Benoni Omer Pétain (1856-1951) became the head of a state after the defeat of France in June 1940. He was eighty-four years old at that time, i.e., 84. This very old soldier became the head of brand new state known as Vichy France. That’s his picture on the wall in the opening scene of Casablanca (1942).
While two-thirds of France was either occupied, governed directly by Germany, or annexed to Germany, the mainly rural south became Vichy. Circumscribed though that territory was, the Vichy administration had civilian authority over the Occupied Zone, too, but not the Pas-de-Calais which absorbed into the German administration of Belgium, and Alsace and Lorraine which were annexed to the Reich. Vichy managed schools, hospitals, police, road maintenance, rationing, and everything else for most of France. Yet its ministers could not travel out the Southern Vichy zone without German permission which was seldom given. In addition, it exercised sovereignty over the vast French Empire, though again its officials were not permitted to travel there. Rather there were German civilian officials in Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, and Senegal to observe French neutrality.
It sounds like a constitution drawn up by Rufus T. Firefly.
This book does much to explain how Pétain came to head this rump, client state. For those who tuned in late, Hitler preferred that defeated France mostly govern itself so that he could concentrate German resources first on the invasion of England and when that was shelved, then Russia. As long as the French complied with German demands for material, Hitler did not care how they went about it. In this way the Vichy regime had domestic autonomy.
Pétain was born to a peasant family in the North where his world was home, farm work, and church until he went into the army. He never read a book apart from the infantry manual, and while later many army publications bore his name they were all penned by ghost writers, including Charles de Gaulle. In 1913 when Pétain was 57 he bought a house to which to retire and married (to secure a housekeeper). There had been many women in his life and he only married when retirement loomed.
He had and projected a complete self-confidence born out of his nearly complete ignorance of the wider world. (Does that remind you of anyone?) When the Great War started he was a senior general and did his duty. In the chaos of trench warfare he was one of the few who opposed attacks, hurling men against barbed wire, minefields, massed machine guns, and point blank artillery. Indeed as the commander at Verdun he tried to rein in subordinates from launching offensives. He preferred the defence. Let the Boches attack our barbed wire, minefields, machine guns, and artillery.
He even engaged in tactical retreats to lure Germans into difficult positions, but in so doing he surrendered some of the sacred soil of France, which infuriated his superiors. Yet he succeeded in breaking the German offensive against Verdun – the birthplace of Jeanne d’Arc and thus often regarded as the spiritual core of France itself. Even with his defensive tactics more than 300,000 poilus died defending Verdun. Many others were wounded or captured, among them Charles de Gaulle who was both wounded and captured. Two of Jules Romains’s twenty-seven novel sequence Men of Good Will concern the political and social repercussions of this battle: Prélude à Verdun and Verdun (both 1938).
Promotion followed this success and he became one of five field marshals. He was the man of the hour, or one of them.
Compared to the other marshals and most of the generals he was perceived to be a Republican and a humanitarian. This latter adjective was granted even though he put down a mutiny with fifty executions. The thinking was that another marshal or general would have murdered ten times that number. The Republican attribution owes more to his humble origins than any recorded conviction or activity.
He had always been personally vain about his appearance (tall, erect, blue-eyed, blond) and the fame that befell him inflated and hardened that vanity. He began to believe he possessed all of the heroic qualities the press attributed to him. He collected the press cuttings and the grateful letters from the French as external affirmation. At Vichy he often spoke in the royal ‘We.’
Success and public adulation combined with his reticence and terse speech gave him an aura of mystery. Whereas other Great War marshals could not shut up, Pétain let his actions speak for themselves. That set him apart from Joffe, Foch, and their talkative ilk.
His experiences in the war confirmed his native born anglophobia. Trying to coordinate with Alexander Haig let him to suppose all British (and by extension) Americans were unreliable. That conviction was compounded, not cured, by his own realisation in 1917 that he and France needed both the British in the North and the supplies and troops the United States poured in. He resented that reliance and disliked those on whom he depended.
He had imbibed in his childhood the commonplace anti-semitism and it only grew during the Dreyfus fiasco. Though he observed a studied silence, there is no doubt he supposed Dreyfus should be punished, if for no other reason than being a Jew who had dared to wear the uniform. Equally from his peasant childhood he developed a resignation to expect and accept the worst. This negativism was often display during the Vichy years.
He left religion behind though he always recognised and respected the Catholic Church for the order and acquiescence it engendered in its adherents. He was a philanderer who married a divorcée and had no children and seldom attended mass and never went near the confessional. Nonetheless the Church nearly canonised him in the Vichy years.
When desperate Third Republic governments played musical chairs in the 1930s – eight defence ministers in sixteen months, each intent on undoing what the predecessor had done – one transitory government recruited the Victor of Verdun in the hope of stabilising parliamentary support. Pétain became minister of defence and set about cutting the defence budget. While he, unlike many of his rank, accepted tanks and aircraft, he thought only a few were needed, and certainly there was no need to develop them further. His penchant for defence translated itself into the Maginot Line. Later he would complain about the budget cuts that he himself had made without acknowledging his own actions. He was always ready to blame others for what he had done.
Pétain disliked the volatility of the Third Republic with its comic opera succession of cabinets and prime ministers. He saw that instability to be the inevitable fruit of parliamentary democracy and despised politics and politicians. Devoid of self-knowledge, he never realised that he himself was an inveterate and adept politician, having spent most of his army career undermining rivals in one way or another and continuing that approach in the Vichy regime.
When the defeat loomed in May 1940 Prime Minister Paul Reynaud as a last gamble made Pétain Deputy Prime Minister to raise public morale, rallying the French for another effort but it was far too little and far too late. By the time of this appointment Pétain had accepted defeat and said so. When Reynaud could not convince the cabinet to continue the war by going into Algerian exile and he resigned, then figurehead president Albert LeBrun nominated Pétain as Prime Minister to ascertain what terms for a truce the Germans would offer. Instead Pétain went on the radio to announce that France was surrendering. The first most soldiers knew of this was when German leaflet drops announced it.
Pétain surrendered to head off another Paris Commune, he said, fearing his countrymen more than the Nazis. Added to his other phobias was a fear of communism: Better Hitler than a red commune. In his hermetically sealed naiveté he supposed he would secure a favourable relationship with Germany, after all he was PÉTAIN. Thereafter he spent much of his tenure in office trying to collaborate with Germany, only to be rebuffed. Hitler did not want a partner. To woo Hitler Pétain ordered that the considerable French Fleet and the vast colonial empire to a strict neutrality. He even offered the Germans Lebanon and Syria to threaten the Suez Canal but to no avail. He had the tiny Vichy airforce bomb Gibraltar to show Hitler he was an enemy of Britain. He ordered French submarines to attack British ships in the Mediterranean Sea but most naval commanders found that their boats needed repairs as they studied the neutrality provisions Pétain had earlier signed. See Colin Smith, England’s Last War against France, 1940-1942 (2010).
His domestic policy was to undo the French Revolution which had germinated the Third Republic, creating the l’État français to replace le République française. The Marseillaise was supplanted by a paean to the Marshall himself. The motto ‘Liberty, Equality, Fraternity’ was overwritten by ‘Work, Family, and Country.’ Even the tricolore was changed to include on the centre white field a double-headed axe, the francisque, an antique Frankish device. It was a culture war across the board from school rooms, town halls, and the pulpit.
Bounties were offered to families to move from cities to the country, to have ever more children, the laws requiring basic schooling were relaxed in the countryside, the few taxes the Republic had dared levy on commercial property owned by the Catholic Church were eliminated, God and the Church were put back into the classroom as science was taken out, education was curtailed (especially for girls), books were denounced for making readers weak and confused, and so and on. Without German prompting decrees against Jews were nearly the first order of business in July 1940. To Pétain they were all foreigners anyway and not to be trusted as Dreyfus had shown.
When Pétain, absorbed by his colossal ego, ‘made France the gift of himself,’ as he put it on the day, he was eighty-four but walked without a cane, climbed stairs, and was alert in meetings, though he tired easily. Nor was he senile, though that was often said later in his defence. And in office he continued his ceaseless intrigues.
He had asserted that his new regime would replace the ever-changing circus of the Third Republic and bring harmony and stability. Ha! In fact his cabinet ministers and his prime ministers came and went even faster than had been the case during the Republic. Much of this was due to Pétain’s own manipulations, some was a reaction to external pressure – real or imagined, and other changes were due to his rivals who wished to turn him from the fountainhead of the new regime into its figurehead. The politicking was constant, the more so since there was little of substance for anyone to do. There were thirty cabinet changes as ministers came and went in the few years of the Vichy regime.
The book ends with a summation and evaluation of the man, the legend, and the regime. Pétain was, when all is said and done, a vain and imperceptive man in way over his head and did not know it. His self-confidence remained undented and unbreached to the very end. In conclusion there is a lengthy and cogent bibliographic essay that reviews a vast literature. It is a very impressive achievement in its own right.
While the content of this book is excellent with extensive secondary research and plenty of primary material, too, and well written with judicious summaries and conclusions, it is difficult to read because of the morass of typographical errors that dot the pages like a smear on a computer screen. I have never encountered such a welter of mistakes in any of the other five-hundred Kindle books I have read and for that reason I list below examples, most of which were repeated many times in the book published by the estimable Routledge of London. The author has a long list of other titles from this publisher. Ah hem.
Pans = Paris
Hider = Hitler
make = take
Begun = Belgian
refined = defined
Gamelxn = Gamelin
batde = battle
considtute = constitute
litde – little
Raynaud = Reynaud
setdement = settlement
parlie = Paris
apparendy = apparently
drôte = drôle
explicidy = explicitly
modon = modern
diat = day
tnat = that
associadon = association
Frangaise = Française
fluency = influence
tnarshal = marshal
oi = of
ir = in
providentieJ = providentiel
recendy = recently
fruidess = fruitless
oudawed = outlawed
oudlined = outlined
thoqgh = though
lie = he
beers = been
tiling = thing
‘threatened to resign In the country several’ = ‘threatened to resign. In the country several’
gready = greatly
french bases = French bases
shordy = shortly
blundly – bluntly
reladonship = relationship
tins = this
and the list goes on.
Was the text was rendered digital by OCR software and thereafter not proof read or copy edited? What other explanation could there be? Yet without human intervention this Kindle title sold for $64.51! That amount if $0.07 more than the paper cover. Though that is nothing compared to hardcover price of $286.40!
There is an excellent krimi set in 1944 Vichy by J. Robert Janes, Flykiller (2002), part of the Kohler-St-Cyr series. Janes has a laborious, cryptic style (think of the much lauded but nonetheless incomprehensible Hilary Mantel), but the setting is superbly realised. It helps to know Kohler and St-Cyr, too, by starting at the beginning of the series. This title and others by Janes are discussed on my blog.
IMDb meta-data is ten episodes of 50 minutes each, rated 7.9 by 229 viewers.
Genre: Documentary.
Verdict: Addictive.
Architectural historian Dan Cruickshank set off on a five-month journey around the world to bring to viewers’ attention eighty treasures that define epochs, cultures, and civilisations. Singularly and collectively they represent instances of the highest achievements of our species. The itinerary went through thirty-four countries on all of the inhabited continents, considering about 400 objects for inclusion in the top 80. They ranged from massive buildings to vast irrigation schemes to buildings to intricate carved miniatures to manufactured goods to symbolic gestures to practical engineering.
The choices are in some cases, obvious, like the Taj Mahal, and others at the end of a long bow, like the Colt-45. But each of the candidates is interesting and the research, explanation, photography, and travelogue to put them into context are engrossing. There is no doubt that each of the candidates are themselves treasures, but, perhaps as a boy, inspired by Jules Verne, Cruickshank limited himself to eighty. The time constraints, the budget constraints, viewers’ attention spans, the limitation to eighty, combine to produce focus and discipline.
Other among the eighty are the Incan Salt Pans, Nazca Lines, Monticello, St James Church, Kakadu Rock Art, Ankor Wat, samurai sword, the Forbidden City, the Great Wall, Giant Buddha, Jantar Mantar Observatory, Lalibela, Samarkand tiles, Petra, Dogon Mask, Tuankhamun’s death mask, Hagia Sophia, VW Beetle, Guernica, and more. As the list indicates, many are religious in one way or another. The Wikipedia entry lists them, and the DVDs are still available.
At fifty-six years of age, Cruikshank is intrepid, abseiling up rock faces, descending in a crouch for hundreds of meters down damp, slippery, and poorly lite shafts, ascending rocky scree for hundreds of metres in the Sahara heat to reach a treasure. Of course the unseen and unacknowledged camera operator and sound engineer always go first. Always Dan has a notebook in hand to record the details, always sports a neck bandana, and always whispers.
Like many others I find the whispering annoying when it is not done out of consideration of the environment. To whisper while observing a religious ritual is appropriate, but not when standing in an isolated locale talking about rock art. But whisper often he does, reminding me an Australian celebrity academic who always whispered, a technique to make the audience to lean forward and listen to his priceless banalities. I had the misfortune a few times to share a conference panel with this poseur.
At times, Cruikshank seems to go off script with visits to local bazaars and haggling over the price of hat or a meal. More exposition of the candidates and less beating down the locals in price would have been better.
We watched these in 2009 and reviewed them again recently.
The pompous, opinionated, and ignorant troll criticisms on IMDb attack his clothes, his accent, his inflection, his explanations, his choices, his hat, the bandana, the whole project and in some cases all of the above and more. Armchair trolls indeed.
