Category: Book Review

GoodReads meta-data is 110 pages, rated 3.96 by 324 litizens. 

Genre: Biography (sort of).

Verdict: Wash your hands and fasten your seatbelts.  

Hands up if you know Semmelweis (1818–1865)! He is the man who explained why we should wash our hands. His assiduous research into morbidly rates in maternity hospitals in Vienna led him to the conclusion that infections were transmitted by the hands of the doctors from one patient to another. From that finding he advocated hand washing and more hand washing.  On that subject more in a minute, but first a few words about the book.

The Life and Works of Ignaz Philipp Semmelweis was an eighty-page thesis submitted to meet the requirements of the medical degree Céline earned.  But there is nothing thesis-like about it. An indication of its tone and style hits the reader in the first lines: ‘Mirabeau howled so loudly that Versailles was frightened.  Not since the Fall of the Roman Empire had such a tempest come crashing down upon men…. ‘   This opening passage goes on the characterise the French Revolution as a carnival of blood.  Only three chapters later does Semmelweis appear, well, first his mother appears.   

To return to the story, for that hand-washing advocacy Semmelweis was shunned, ridiculed, demoted, demonised, exiled, and finally driven mad; in the latter state he took his own life by the very infection he had identified.  

Members of the obstetrics profession had long been resigned to high mortality in pregnant women, and accepted it. According to this upstart Semmelweis, doctors themselves caused these deaths!  Ridiculous! Moreover, hand washing was undignified! Hmmph!

The fact that women who gave birth at home, or even on the street, had lower death rates than those who gave birth in all modern-conveniences maternity hospitals was written off as false news.    

John Stuart Mill once opined that if the laws of geometry annoyed Republicans they would immediately declare them false.  (He may not have mentioned Republicans but I got the hint.)  Semmelweis’s intrusion upset a very elaborate and complacent medical establishment and the reaction was to shoot, stab, garrotte, strangle, quarter, and bludgeon the messenger. 

In Paris, Prague, Berlin, and London as well as Vienna the medical profession united against this tiresome interloper and his pages and pages of data.  In truth he was an easy man to reject, being rude and crude; he was quite unwilling to proceed by half-measures.  It was all or nothing for him with the result that it was nothing.  On more that one occasion he barged in the office of a hospital director and berated him about hand washing.  Likewise he burst into wards when doctors were doing the rounds and berated them in front of patients and students. The Austrian emperor at one point exiled him because of these disruptive antics.  

N.B. Semmelweis worked from aggregate data and there is nary a mention of a microscope observing little critters. That came later. What he had was a mass of data that showed a correlation between no hand washing and death.  Reason and evidence are feeble assailants of the fortress of conventional wisdom and it took forty years for Semmelweis to be vindicated, and countless thousands of maternal deaths that soap and water would have prevented.   

All of the above can be gleaned from the Wikipedia entry.  And it bears little resemblance to the book at hand by one of the most remarkable figures in French literature:  Louis Ferdinand Auguste Destouches (1894-1961) who used the nom de plume Céline. He was invalided out of the Army in 1915 with a wound at Ypres.  Later he took a job with the League of Nations in Francophone Africa where he travelled extensively.  Upon returning to France he trained as medical doctor and laboured in the working class districts of Paris where he was seldom paid.  At the time he was a rabid communist only later to because an equally rabid fascist (and energetic anti-Semite) during the war years.  He could be as rude and crude as Semmelweis.  

His most famous novel was Journey to the End of Night (1932) about his observations in Africa, followed by Death on Credit (1936) about working class life and death in the slums of Paris.  He wrote in the argot of the people he chronicled and not the stylised prose of the Academy and was thus reviled by the literary establishment for generations. These establishment gatekeepers are now gone and forgotten, while Céline is still in print.   

Declaration of interest:  One of the first reading assignments I had in graduate school concerned Semmelweis and his empirical data.  That is all I can remember but the name stuck because of the association with hand washing.    

GoodReads Meta-data is 336 pages, rated 3.65 by 519 litizens.

Genre: Popular Philosophy (as is Popular Science).

Verdict:  More!

Classical historian Edith Hall delves into the mind and works of the one and only Aristotle her BFF.   He is the leader of the pack as far she is concerned and there is no one else.  The enthusiasm for the subject with the light touch, simple prose, punctuated with real life examples and references to the popular culture are delight.  Though I doubt it got her tenure or promotion.  On that more below.

At the outset she briskly dispatches two of the rotten tomatoes thrown at Aristotle.  His remark that women lack deliberative capacity has empowered generations of the virtuous to hurl rotten fruit at him.  Yet in the Politics there is a more fine-grained remark that women have deliberative capacity but it is not authoritative; if an interpreter were less interested in scoring retrospective points, this remark could be taken as a sociological fact of the time and place.  In subsequent passages he goes to refer to wives running (ruling) the households of slaves, servants, extended family, provenders, tradesmen, and the like.  This oikos is the economy which has become the god all worship now.  Though, of course, he concedes less to woman than Plato does twice over. 

The most common trope used to justify ignoring Aristotle is this remark: 

‘Males have more teeth than females in the case of men, sheep, goats, and swine; in the case of other animals observations have not yet been made’ (Animalia 3).  This obscure passage and paraphrases of it abound among those who specialise in cheap shots.  Yes, Aristotle was wrong, but he was wrong because he was misinformed about observations, not because he did not value observations, though that it the drum most often thumped when this passage is cited.  Let’s take that drumbeat seriously for a minute.  

Though this statement is joyfully repeated on thousands of web sites, none of these bloggers themselves settle the empirical question empirically.  No writer who has belaboured Aristotle with this remark has ever then said, and I counted (to be strictly parallel) my wife’s teeth and we have the same number.  Think about that.  

As any dentist will say, counting teeth is easier said than done.  It is not just a matter of saying Aaah.  Any ten people people on Oxford Street today may well not have the same number of teeth.  Ditto dead bodies for the ghoulish. There are congenital omissions (I never had two adult molars), damage in childhood, and in Ari’s world most adult simply lost a lot of rotten teeth which accounts partly for all the soft food: olives, cheese, figs.   But her main defence of him on this point is simply that it was a passing, incidental point in his biological studies which he cited from other sources as a fact. He neither proclaimed it himself, not declared it a priori. In the passage where it is cited, he draws no grand conclusion about the inferiority of women as thus proven by teeth.  At most it proves difference.

The female of 1940s popular culture in film and fiction was flighty, easily frightened, weak, lacking concentration, physically inept stereotype. It continued into 1950s television where its steady diet went some way to make real the fiction it portrayed, repeatedly showing it so did make it so.  It took a great effort — intellectual as well as social — to see through those shadows on the cave wall, single them out, test, and reject them, and for that All Hail.  

The book is thematic starting the governing narrative of happiness, which is not an ephemeral feeling but a contentment and calm perhaps like zen, but she does not go that far.  When I look at the gang leaders on television news these days… oh, did I say ‘gang leaders,’ I meant world leaders, none of them look contented and calm.  They look driven, angry, confused even, bitter, overwhelmed, determined, purposeful in some cases. There are far too many angry old men who have never had anything to be angry about and aren’t going to take it any longer!

She does not mention Jean Vanier, Happiness – Aristotle for a New Century (2002).  But it is a companion piece, though it lacks the depth of the volume at hand.  

She goes on to treat such topics as Family, Friendship, and Mortality. There is also a discussion of discretion that made me uncomfortable.  In my years as Associate Dean, Institute Director, Head of Department I made it a point not to exercise discretion.  My rule was: what cannot be done for all that cannot be done for one.  Believe me there were a great many instances of special pleading, mostly by staff, but some by students.  But I knew that to concede one would set off an avalanche of more pleaders.  To say yes, would be to open the flood gates.    

Confession: I did make one exception.  As Associate Dean there was always tsunami of special pleading about admission.  Students whose track record made it abundantly clear they could not do the work of the course, wanted to pay the tuition.  I aways rejected them on the ground that no one should be admitted to fail.  Even so on one occasion a letter of appeal got through the buffers from one Veronica.  She had done the HSC fifteen years before and hashed it.  Since then she had done all manner of things including very successful study on TAFE, and she wanted to go to University to do things not available at TAFE.  If she had applied on the basis of the TAFE results, she would have been admitted.  However, in NSW one never escapes the HSC score and hers was so lousy that it pulled down the TAFE results.  That ghostly and ghoulish HSC result was always going to be there. I admitted her. (Though I never made her acquaintance I noted that she graduated in minimum time with a credit average.)  

Back to Aristotle and our author, who went to and spent time everywhere Aristotle did, walking where he walked. Who paid for that junket? Well whoever did spent the money did well.  That tactile immersion adds depth to the page.  

It is a book by an Aristotelian scholar but not one that is not written for Aristotelian scholars, and therein lies the reference to tenure above. Nor is it a textbook which a promotions committee might grudgingly acknowledge at a heavy discount.

When I gathered the meta-data from GoodReads my eye fell on a few of the niggardly comments, reminding me why I don’t read them.  So pompous, so self-centred, so much like a department meeting. 

Peersonal note. When we traversed the Anatolian plateau in 2015 one of our stops was Assos on the Aegan Coast. I was keen on this when I saw it in the program because Aristotle lived there for a time and married a woman from there. The tour guide assured me that in 2009 a statue of Ari had been erected to affirm the connection.

Our stay at Assos was rainy and the roads were clogged with desperate Syrian refugees who could see the European Union a few miles away across the water in the Greek island of Lesbos. The plinth for the statue of Aristotle was there but not the likeness. It had been vandalised and dismounted for repairs. I have since learned it was replaced in 2017.

Lee (1935 and 1958) by Douglas S. Freeman and Richard Harwell.  

GoodReads meta-data is 648 pages, rated 4.27 by 1644 litizens.

Genre: biography, hagiography.

Verdict: Ineffable.  

Robert Edward Lee (1807-1870) is a storied figure in American history and the definitive biography is a massive four-volume work by Freeman which I read in its entirety years ago. Freeman took twenty years to complete the biography and a Pulitzer Prize crowned the result.  Yet at the time I first read it I felt I knew nothing more about Lee the man after I finished the two thousand pages than I did before I started on page one. To double check on that recollection I recently skimmed through the one-volume abridgement cited above. My earlier conclusion stands: Lee eluded the biographer.  There is a blizzard of detail but in the ensuing white-out no overall picture of the man is to be seen.  

In the abridgement the focus is nearly exclusively on a day-by-day account of Lee’s war after a few short chapters on his early and late life.

The treatment of Lee after the end of the Civil War is itself an historical study, I am told.  While he was revered throughout the South and respected throughout the North, at the end of the war he sought seclusion free from the terrible times he had endured and became a very private citizen.  

Then the survivors began re-writing history with a fury.  Many of his subordinates found ways in their autobiographical works, and there were many such works, to blame their shortcomings and failures on Lee.  Each book was peppered with unerring hindsight.  I read a couple: one by James Longstreet and another by Jubal Early.  Both took full credit for their successes, some fictional, and sheeted home full responsibility for failures to Lee.  It was a litany repeated ad nauseam in the Reconstruction period as Confederate memoirs gushed out from every officer desperate to earn a living by the pen in those hard times. Lee himself, by the way, did not publish a word about the war, turning down considerable interest from publishers willing to pay him a fortune.  He had no wish to profit from the blood of followers to paraphrase something Dwight Eisenhower once said.  That reticence remained firm, while others had verbal diarrhoea.   

Yet this flood of self-righteous libel between covers mattered not one whit to the public as statues of Lee proliferated, like that in New Orleans, where he never set foot during the War, with an inscription bearing historical errors.  Nonetheless up it went up along with a forest of others. He became a demigod to the wider public even as he was a whipping boy for those colleagues disconsolate and desperate in defeat.  That none of this mud ever stuck to him and the proliferation of statues led one biographer, Thomas Connelly, to refer to him as The Marble Man (1978). 

Regrettably these statues have recently been caught up in the political tornados, but I rest content in recalling Robert Penn Warren’s observation (discussed elsewhere on this blog) that Lee would have spurned the strutting, fulminating segregationists of the 1960s as he had the firebrands of the 1860s.  By the way, before the war began he personally freed the slaves he had inherited from his wife’s family, herself a distaff relative of George Washington.  

The abridgement, like the original work, is a hostage to its sources.  There are so many extant letters, reports, telegrams, diaries, logs, inquiries that a mountain of primary material exists, and it overwhelms any insight, meaning, or lesson in the biography.  More yields less in this case.

Lee was an intensely private man all of his life and the pressures of command exacerbated that centripetal force. His most outstanding social characteristic was silence. He had iron self-control and even in the face of disaster brought about by an inept subordinate, he would strive to rectify the situation as best as possible with a nary a word of rebuke.  He left it to subordinates in respite, if they lived that long, to see the errors of their ways.  As the war went on he also realised that he had to make do with the officers available, whatever their limitations, because so many of their predecessors had been killed.     

At war’s end surviving subordinates would list this forbearance as a fault, though they benefited from it.  Likewise, his famous reluctance to give a direct tactical order to a subordinate became in hindsight a fault. Lee’s approach was that once a strategy had been set, he would not interfere in it, leaving it to the officers on the spot execution as the circumstances dictated.  

His campaigns in Maryland and Pennsylvania have long attracted the most fire from armchair generals, yet each has a perfectly obvious albeit mundane explanation.  The Army of Northern Virginia was a gigantic locust swarm that stripped the land of food, forage, provender, shoe leather, horses, grease, lead, firewood to say nothing of the impact on hygiene. Not even the bountiful Shenandoah Valley could sustain it indefinitely and also supply the civilian population.  To stay in Virginia meant ever more stripping down to the roots, whereas to move north his army could live off lands as yet untouched by the needs of 80,000 mouths, 40,000 equines, and other camp followers.  These incursions suited the Confederate government, too, which dreamed that these offensives would threaten Washington D.C., throwing the North on the defensive and weaken the will to fight, and might also win European support.  Pipe dreams to be sure, but we have all been misled by dreams. 

I used the word hagiography above because the treatment is almost reverential.  The modest Lee would have blushed to see how his every move is parsed, exalted, and praised.  Though I hasten to add that the author(s) does acknowledge that Lee made mistakes, but insists that he always learned from them and never repeated them. Ergo, the treatment is not completely blind but close to it.

There are two minor incidents that struck this reader.  The first is Judah Benjamin’s noble lie.  For those who missed Plato’s Republic — shame on you! — a noble lie is a one told in order to secure a greater good for the community.  When after the crushing Confederate victory at the battle of Second Manassas, the Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia did not pursue the defeated Unionists an outcry went up in the Southern newspapers, whose writers saw in this victory a great opportunity to crush the North.  What could explain the treasonous failure to capitalise on it?  

Indeed, what could?

The simple facts were that the Confederacy had not one ounce of reserves left to chase down its enemy.  There were no more horses, nor horse shoes, nor forage for the horses.  No rations for the men. There was no ammunition for the muskets.  No shot or shell for the artillery.  Nor wagons to carry the ammunition. No leather for marching shoes. Everything had been expended at Manassas; nothing was left in the locker.  But to admit that fact of complete martial impoverishment at this stage would be to encourage the North and depress the South, and cause European powers to withdraw interest in the Confederacy.  

So instead the Confederate Secretary of War, Judah Benjamin (a biography of whom is treated elsewhere on this blog) proposed to take publicly the blame.  Though he was surely the most competent, persistent, industrious, creative, and conscientious member of the the Confederate cabinet he was never popular with elite or mass for the simple reason that he was a born Jew. So the word was leaked to the Confederate free press and they hastily and happily hung Benjamin in effigy in their pages. Once a scapegoat was to hand, no further inquiries were made by the investigative journalists of the day because if the media sharks have blood, they are sated.  Rien ne change jamais. 

In this case the Confederacy did not have to admit how ill-equipped it was for war. Just blame the Jew.  Thus the near fatal weakness of the Confederacy was concealed from the North, from the Confederacy itself, and the European powers. 

I also noted that in 1869 when Lee, then president of Washington College in Lexington Virginia, was soliciting funding for the college at a reception, a youth of thirteen wormed his way through the crowd to see and meet the demigod.  This spout was Woodrow Wilson. This incident by the way is not mentioned in the biography of Wilson discussed elsewhere on this blog.  In that strange way that history connects the living and the dead, nearly a century later Wilson’s aged widow attended Jack’s inauguration which I watched on television in the auditorium of junior high school, and so the shadow of Lee fell even there, though I did not know it. 

Lee did some post-war travelling and attended events to honour the fallen and veterans as well to promote the college and wherever he appeared a crowd gathered to catch a glimpse of him, and usually did so in church-silence.  He might then, at the urging of his host, step onto the porch to bow in acknowledgement and then retreat.  At most he might say,  ‘Thank you.’  He, unlike his biographers, was a man of few words. 

Finally, a minor incident recorded in these pages says it all.  In 1870 Lee, while walking in Richmond, encountered John Mosby, a one-time colonel in the CSA Army, and they stopped, shook hands, and then, observed by another who reported this occasion, stood in silence.  After some minutes Lee said, ‘The War.’  Mosby nodded and walked on.  Nothing more can or need be said.  This Colonel commanded Mosby’s Rangers of legend.