Category: Book Review

War Women (2021) by Martin Limón 

Good Reads meta-data is 214 pages, rated 3.18 by 96 litizens.

Genre: krimi.

DNA: South Korea.

Tagline: Women with guns!  

Verdict: The dynamic duo return. 

Having recently enjoyed a South Korean movie, I remembered this title was in the Kindle reading bank so I turned to it to continue my mental travels in Korea.

Sergeants George Sueño and Ernie Bascom are at it again. Ernie is tall and looks very aryan, while George is even taller and looks very hispanic dark.  They often play on this contrast as bad cop Ernie and worse cop George.  Since they have served in this fictional South Korea well beyond the decade of the 1980s, George has had time to learn a lot of Korean, and treats the natives with consideration and respect.  Ernie accepts his leadership on this front…when he is  sober. Since they are cops, GIs shun them, leaving them to spend most of their time off- and as well on-duty together.  

In this outing one of their prime snitches has gone missing, a Sergeant First Class aiming at the twenty-year pension who manages the classified files, filing system, and archives — the last man to go AWOL. In the past he has passed over useful intel to them for a price. Ergo his absence is more than just an official problem, it jeopardises their own capacity to stay on the good side of the Head Shed wherein sit the brass (sometimes on tacks).  

The plot concerns the rape of women by American soldiers and is even more unpleasant to read in the book than in this line.  Ah, most readers probably supposed the women in the previous sentence to be Korean. Not so, The victims are members of 877th Field Transportation Company, drivers and loaders who cart around boy toys.  Yes, these are women, because the volunteer Army has to take whom it can get, and that riles pea-brains high and low, including brass in that Head Shed in Seoul whose widely repeated off the record remarks about what women are good for have been interpreted by a few sergeants on field manoeuvres as the license to rape.  Everyone knows that in the Eighth Army to lodge a complaint about being raped, or anything else, is more likely to lead to punishment for the reporter than the perpetrator, as in most corporations. After all, there was no problem until the report created it.

Instead the women have turned vigilante on the same assumption, that for the C.O. to report their mutiny would be a stain on his record, one big enough to lose his pension.  Having no North Koreans to shoot at, the Americans, men and women, trade gunfire.  It may sound far fetched but the writer make it credible, nearly.

All of this is aided and abetted by that recurring intrepid journalist, Katie Bird, who puts plenty of cats among the Army pigeons.  She is always a welcome addition to any party with a razor wit and never take no for an answer attitude. She is always two or three steps ahead of Bascom and Sueno and stays there as they follow in her wake.

The to-ing and fro-ing in Seoul is detailed, and in this instance there seems to this reader to be too much of that to disguise the rickety, if distasteful, plot. North Koreans are in the formula as usual.

The series started in 1992 with Jade Lady Burning and this is #17 recounting law enforcement (sort of) in the Eighth Army during its occupation of South Korea in the 1980s. At the time South Korea was a military dictatorship of an unpleasant type, and still impoverished with the constant threat from the north.

Olivier Zunz, The Man Who Understood Democracy: The Life of Alexis de Tocqueville (2022). 

GoodReads meta-data is 472 pages, rated 4.08 by 37 litizens.  

Count Tocqueville’s life’s work was the reconciliation of liberty with equality.  It began when he was twenty-five and went on to the end.  Liberty can only exist if it is self-limiting. Democracy with its countervailing institutions might offer a means to that end. This is a counter-intuitive conclusion because for most people liberty means license, that is, no limits, meaning anything goes. Of course, if anything goes, liberty will soon destroy itself, e.g., shouting fire in a darkened theatre.

This self-destructive tension pervades and explains everything he did and wrote.   

John Stuart Mill put it this way: the maximum liberty consistent with a like liberty for all.  We can only be as free as everyone else, and vice versa.  By the way, he and Mill were correspondents, and Karl Marx may well have been in the British Library on the days Tocqueville visited with Mill.  

It all began when as a bored lawyer with little to do, Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859) and his friend Gustav de Beaumont (1802-1866) went to the New World in 1831 for nine months, which to them was less a geographic than a political expression. The New World they wanted to see (and to report back to France upon) was Democracy which happened to be located in North America. Making use of their aristocratic connections during the reign of King Louis-Philipe, they got themselves commissioned to study prisons. This writ related to a movement to reform French prisons to rehabilitate inmates rather than only to confine or to punish them.  The commission gave them letters of introduction and entrées to French counsellors but no financial support. The trip was funded by their families. 

They did visit many prisons like Sing-Sing and they did write a report (1833) which few either read or cite. More importantly, Tocqueville wrote the magisterial Democracy in America, and Beaumont wrote novel called Marie (1835) (about the evils of slavery and racism which he had seen).  

The trip itself is worth reading about: they went by ship, steam boat, canoe, barge, horseback, foot, raft, dog sled, mule, and stagecoach from New York City, Boston, Montreal, Quebec, Detroit, Sault St Marie, Green Bay, Pittsburg, Cincinnati, Louisville, Nashville, Memphis, New Orleans, Mobile, Columbia (SC), Fayetteville (NC), Norfolk (VA), Baltimore, Washington (DC), Philadelphia, and many points between from May to March of the next year through swarms of mosquitos, boiling heat, enervating humidity, hail, driving rain, sleet, snow, over black ice, and repeat. See Anne Bentzel, Travelling Tocqueville’s America (1998).  

They met all manner of people from President Andrew Jackson, former president John Quincy Adams, Davy Crockett, Sam Houston, to rising magnates, and French-speaking native Amerindians around the Great Lakes, German immigrants who spoke no English, and more. This trip and these experiences were the formative years of his life and later as he wrote the two volumes, the experience made him the man he became. The book was his teacher as he ordered, culled, refined, discarded, reinterpreted, digested what he had seen, heard, and learned, and it changed his mind about many things. To be sure, the man certainly made the book, but the book also made the man.  

Having seen France go through one cataclysmic disaster after another, each of its own making, Tocqueville hoped to find a new way to live in Democracy and to communicate it to his fellow citizens. This ambition was no abstract exercise for him.  His parents, just married, had been arrested and sentenced for the crime of birth to the guillotine during Robespierre’s Terror. They endured 10-months or so on death-row waiting for their turn at the blade, such was volume of prisoners, as all of his wife’s family from her aged great grandfather to her teenage nieces, nephews, and cousins were beheaded one after another to the audible cheers of the crowd. They were spared, and later Tocqueville was born, only when Robespierre was ousted and there followed a brief respite in the blood-letting. 

The author avoids the pious homilies that others shower on Tocqueville when he points out more than once the obvious that he missed, like the suppression of his Catholic brethren in New York City and Boston, like the emerging political machines in those cities, like the continued theft from Amerindians, like the oppression of French in Canada and the Irish in the States, the early gestation of the abolitionist movement in Boston, and so on.  Nor did he have much of an eye for the wonders of nature. There was so much to take in and almost all of it was new to this ingenue, so that he did not perceive it all. 

What he did have was a thirst for knowledge, and he filled one notebook after another with observations of towns, crossroads, inns, street scenes, hotels, and endless interviews with all and anyone would talk to him.  He spoke a fractured English swotted up during the sea voyage to New York. In addition to the high and mighty he met, he also talked to wagoneers, hunters, inn keepers, travelling salesmen, farm wives where they bunked en route, gamblers, deck hands on river boats, a day labourer at a harbour, and a slave or two.  When they took ship to return to France he had three large steamer trunks filled with the notes and artefacts he had collected from government reports to a bow and arrow and a buffalo rug.  

As he travelled through North America he hatched the idea of a book on democracy, but upon return he and Beaumont decided they had to write the prison report immediately to complete that obligation. They did so post haste: On the Penitentiary System in the United States and Its Application to France, which runs to 300+ pages, nearly half of which being appendices of notes and documents. What they found was no system at all but variations between and within states. A great deal of hindsight has been applied to this report by scholars in search of a topic.   

Tocqueville is so judicious, careful, and hesitant in Democracy in America that he gives lengthy accounts of opposing points of view, subsequently providing ammunition for others to quote for and against every proposition he considers. He can be quoted for and against democracy itself, since he recognised and catalogued its flaws and failings.  Moreover, he did not suppose the American example could be transplanted to France, so he did not recommend that, but rather sought, and continued to seek, the underlying mechanisms that could be developed in France.  Hence, his later research into the origins of the French Revolution, where he elaborated what a hundred and fifty years later would be called the J-curve explanation of revolution. (Look it up, Mortimer.)         

Every US President, except for the illiterate one, has had occasion to quote, cite, or refer to Tocqueville, yet one suspects that they have seldom turned a page of Democracy in America (1835 and 1840), making it a classic that fits Mark Twain’s definition perfectly.  It is widely cited and equally unread.  I have to plead guilty to that charge.  I bought the abridged student edition of the two voluminous volumes when I was an undergraduate and read whatever was assigned at the time and no more.  Since then I have picked over other sections when investigating this topic or that.  I tried and failed to read the long chapter ‘The Three Races.’  It is a safe bet that few, very few, of those who quote from Democracy in America have read even as much as that, and sure thing to bet that they have not read more.  

By the way, while topics like the tyranny of the majority command many citations, one of the best parts of the book concerns the development of public opinion in the spiral of silence.  

See also, as reviewed elsewhere on this blog, Leopold Damrosch, Tocqueville’s Discovery of America (2010).  

By the there is a phd to be had in a comparative study of theorists in parliament, Tocqueville, Mill, and Max Weber had a term in office.  Who else?  

We Scholars: Changing the Culture of the University (1995) by David Damrosch

GoodReads meta-data is 242 pages rated 3.83 by 6 litizens.

The central line of argument in this monograph is the long term deleterious effects of specialisation which combines with a central tendency of colleges and universities to converge on a single model, as seen in Australia where within a decade colleges of advanced education and institutes of technology assumed the name and morēs of universities, abandoning their own distinctive histories and achievements near instantly. In my small world I had an experience similar to one the author describes.  Writing a letter of assessment for a candidate for promotion in one of those re-named institutions, I meant to praise and support the individual.  In it I emphasised the clever means by which she had integrated current research into undergraduate courses and presented it in ways that would arrest the attention of young students, adding that I had seen her classroom interaction with students and admired it. I also said that chapters of her dissertation could be published in the fullness of time for their groundbreaking insights.  Pushing back from the keyboard, I thought that this testimonial would help. Not so. In fact, quite the reverse.  

I had tried to calculate the letter to match the circumstances of what was in all but name a teaching-only institution and so stressed teaching and put that comment on publication as a ‘might be.’  Both tactics were mistakes. My assessment had been sought, said an icy reply from the dean at that institution, because I was a leader in the field (no one else before or since has ever crowned me thus, so I savoured that) at the leading research University (our marketing department always said that but this was the first and only time someone outside feigned to take it seriously) in the country so that I would measure the candidate against the standard that prevailed in my milieu.  Oh.  By concentrating on teaching I had condemned the applicant.

While he mourns the loss of some of the fruits of a core curriculum in a common reference point, in shared experience, and in the intrinsic value of much of it (like William Shakespeare or Emily Dickinson) as compared to watching a comic book-based film, he makes a hash of the defences of the core by the likes of Allan Bloom by showing just how selective that core always was, namely that despite the loud and persistent howls of its defenders it never did include anything of the stories from the Bible, yet what could be more core to the Western tradition than that.  He also shows just how narrow the focus is of one the most widely used undergraduate literary anthologies (which I had myself in those salad days), the Norton Anthology of World Literature. His aim is not to amend the core with the Bible, but to demonstrate how tenuous the justifications for the core have been.  

In my years I heard the ‘curriculum’ discussed repeatedly, even annually, but in none of those discussions did I ever hear anyone talk about what a students needed to learn and how they would learn it by graduation. The discussion was always about boxes of content that might allow us to teach our research to undergraduates.  In other words, the interests served were those of the teachers not the students.  This order of priorities was announced early in my experience by one colleague thus: ‘It matters not what the subject is, as long as it is offered with enthusiasm.’  I put it somewhat more delicately than he did, but clearly it was all about being the centre of attention and having a captive audience to do what he liked to do.  Yet these discussions of curriculum could be teleological, reasoning backward from the knowledge and experience a citizen might benefit from in later life, a civil servant, a lawyer, a social worker, a journalist, a parent, a researcher, a data analyst, a trade unionist, a community organiser, and a graduate student. Once three or four of these generic types were identified the content and the experiences were put under them, or not.  By experience I mean, essay-writing, small group seminars, group work, community research by interview, statistical literacy, front of the room presentations, analysis of data, comparative assessments, revisions, seminars and other kinds of discussions, long or short essays, and so on.  This approach never worked.

He also indicts the nationalism of departments to which I plead guilty, nor do I like the changes he has outlined. Dissolving departments in financial acid, which is certainly happening, will create a mass society in which individuals relate singularly and poorly to the whole. That way lies hegemony coupled with anomie and alienation, requiring a new book to address that situation with another title drawn from Nietzsche. 

He is dead right about the hypocritical individualism of the humanities and social science professoriate.  On the keyboard we pound out clarion calls for community engagement, civil society harmony, fraternity, and camaraderie, but themselves refuse to go to committee meetings, or worse, once there, feigning duress, fail to take the proceeding seriously during and afterwards, or concentrate on their grievances (that start with parking). Of course many committee meetings become idle talking shops but that is because of the participants, not intrinsic to such associations. 

I savoured his description of academic conferences as the opportunity for delegates to patronise inferiors, pander to superiors, and sample the local cuisine.  His explication of the mechanics of conferences that lead to those ends is interesting and it is juxtaposed to a residential, invited seminar of dozen specialist which was productive.  Hmm, I took part in a couple of such gatherings that included Olympian professors, ambassadors, senior civil servants, and an international celebrity and found them useless.  Everyone talked when it was their turn, but it was never anyone’s turn to listen, it seemed.  People talked past each other in seriatim though everyone was effusive at the end about how wonderful it was. They liked the local wines, sights, and cuisines.    

Though Damrosch deplores the denigration of undergraduate teaching in favour of graduate supervision, he does the same himself in that the longest chapter of the book, with one of the most developed alternatives, concerning graduate education.  While its importance is undeniable, say I as one of the its products, it is not the heart of higher education for it touches so few. Of courses, there are the indirect and long term effects but they are even harder to estimate.

It is an insightful, well written, and fully researched book.  Yet since its publication in 1995 the major changes in higher education have not been such as he commended, but rather, changing attitudes of students to inflate grades, and in Australia the availability of material first through the cheaper air cargo of print books and now digital technology, and ever more resources like Wikipedia or ChatGPT. 

Echoland (2013) by Joe Joyce

GoodReads meta-data is 352 pages, rated 3.72 by 458 litizens.

Genre: Krimi

DNA: Ireland.

Verdict: More, please.

Tagline: High heels on cobble stones?

A krimi set it in Dublin during May and June 1940, sprinkled with Gaelic and the manners and morēs of rural Erin.  A desperate Britain might be driven to occupy the Free State to preempt a German advance.  That would start with seizing the western ports and airfields as enclaves for the Battle of the Atlantic, and once ensconced, expansion to the hinterlands would follow all the way to Dublin. Or the Germans, already using Ireland as a base for spies, might target the western ports for its U-Boats.  That seems dangerous enough but there is also the irreconcilable IRA within looking for German allies to unite the island on the principle that my enemy’s enemy is my friend.  Meanwhile, the parliamentary government with a thin majority and thinner legitimacy sticks to neutrality in word and deed, while preparing for both eventualities.

Into this minefield steps a junior army officer who reads some German and because of that is transferred to Army intelligence and set to work spying on the spies both German and British and later American.  There are some nice twists and turns and the characters are several and varied.  There is much of the time and place, the bicycle as transportation, the ubiquitous cigarettes, the invisible hand of Catholicism in hospitals and schools, the furnishings and dress, the smells and sounds of the city, but the descriptions of these backdrops are spare and do not deflect or delay the narrative.  By and large the author’s touch is light but firm and clear.  

The officer is a country boy new to the ways of the big city, and stumbles around.  But he is good at finding threads in the files of reports, and questions the obvious that others have looked through. Moreover, his knowledge of German is better than that of many others in the office, and they turn to him for help in translation, which enlightens him further about the bigger picture.  

There is no explanation of the title that I noticed, and note well that the title used by three or four other authors.  Nor is there an explanation of why and how he learned German.  

I liked it enough to go onto the second in the series, and the third.  

Above, I said that the characters are varied, and when I started another similar book, I was reminded of the importance of that variation.  In this other, unnamed book, every character in the Kindle sample uses the same words, idioms, and register, like one of those plays where one actor does all the parts, changing costume but nothing else.

An Atlas of Extinct Countries (2020) by Gideon Defoe

Subtitle: The Remarkable [and Occasionally Ridiculous] Stories of 48 Nations that Fell off the Map.

Genre: Non-fiction, though some of the countries were all but fictitious.

Verdict:  no more!

Tagline: No kidding? No kidding!  

The motley crew is divided into four parts, each is twofold:  

1. Chancers and Crackpots who declared themselves king of an acre, like Prince Leonard in West Australia though he doesn’t make the cut here. Most of the examples treated occurred in the age of colonialism when a European would chance upon a clearing in a forest or an island in a stream and crown himself.  Yes, though the author does not underline it, they are all men.  He includes here the Kingdom of Bavaria, which despite the insanity in the royal family, was a country from 1805 to 1918.  Ditto the kingdom of Sarawak (1841-1946) without the insanity.
2. Mistakes and Micro-nations.  This section includes the ludicrous story of the Scots attempt at colonisation in a Panamanian jungle that is still uninhabitable; they bought the land cheap, being Scots. The most interesting other specimens are Elba when Napoleon briefly ruled it, 1814-1815 and Tangiers when it was an international city from 1924-1956. The later served as a backdrop to much thriller and spy fiction long after its 1965 absorption into Morocco. Don’t forget the tangerines, either. (Though it is curious that it went quietly into Morocco but the three Spanish enclaves along the Moroccan coast did not, and still have not, being the last examples of European colonialism.)
3. Lies and Lost Kingdoms. There were scams before the internet!  An entrepreneurial soul would dream up a luxurious and wealthy unclaimed land where gold grows on trees, and sell shares in it to investors and settlers, then – in the time honoured fashion of bankers – take the money and run.  Credulity is as old as the credulous.  Old. Lost kingdoms include Sikkim (1642-1975) and Dahomey (1600-1904).  Nobody wanted Sikkim, not even India, but as a buffer against China, it relented. Dahomey became a French colony of the same name, known to stamp collectors, until de-colonisation created Benin (now famous for its bronze artwork to viewers of The Antiques Road Show on BBC).  The author includes here The Serene Republic of Venice (697-1797) when Napoleon ended it in person by burning the Golden Book and supervised a shotgun wedding with Italy. Methinks Defoe whitewashes Venice’s tortured and violent history, omitting the piles and piles of dirty laundry.
4. Puppets and Political Footballs.  There are both important and unimportant examples included here.  As the latter, various proto-states in North America, like West Florida (which lasted a few days and was located in Louisiana); as to the former the Texas Republic (1836-1846). Three others were even more significant: Yugoslavia that preserved ethnic hatred in amber for forty years, The Deutsche Demokratische Republik (1949-1990) that de-populated itself by a quarter while bankrupting itself, and Mussolini’s last respite, the Salo Republic (1943-1945), that gave the Germans free rein to what was left of Italy and its Jews.  Here the author includes the terrible story of the rapacious and inhuman plunder of the Congo.  Manchukuo (1932-1945) is in this section, a puppet state set up by the Japanese to cloak their brutal colonisation of this iron ore rich region.    

There follows an appendix with some comments on the flags and anthems these places had, ranging from the silly to the stupid.  

Omitted are the Second Spanish Republic (1934-1939) which had its own flag and anthem, as did Australia’s very own aforementioned Prince Leonard (1925-2019) of the Principality of Hutt River. Maybe the Spanish Republic isn’t qualified since it did not change the borders nor the existence of Spain. But as to crackpots, well, Lennie is hard to beat.  Check him out on Wikipedia. Then there is California that declared itself a republic for thirty days, and the kingdom of Hawaii. Wasn’t Vermont also briefly an autonomous unit?   

Each entry is written to a template of about five pages with a small map.  The result is superficial but the treatment is spritely, and when you know nothing, an informative start.  There is a short, but well-judged bibliography to continue with.   

The Sand Digger’s Skull (2023) by Chris McGillion.

GoodReads meta-data is 262 pages, rated 5.0 by 2 litizens.

Genre: krimi.

DNA: Timor.

Verdict: Didn’t see that coming. 

Tagline: who dun what?

More dirty work in Timor-Leste when labourers shovelling up sand for cement along a river came across human bones, one after another.  Geographic, hydrological, and meteorological analyses indicate the bones were carried by the river and deposited in the sand at the spot where they were found.  Pathological analysis suggests several died years ago but the death of one is much more recent.  

Evidently most crimes in Timor-Leste trace back to the Indonesian invasion and occupation of 2002, so Investigator Codero in Dili gets the assignment to look into the matter as part of his INTERPOL duties with his reluctant Yankee associate, Carter.  Together with the office interpreter and dog’s body, they head for the hills from where the remans likely originated.  

What follows is immersion into the remote backwaters of the island of Timor with its animist and xenophobic culture, tropical rain, and subsistence living overlain with its recent history. Saturation in these details nearly drowned this reader but it does convey much of the place and people. 

It’s a complex plot which I won’t spoil. Suffice it to say little is what it seems to be and guilt is by many hands. Jaded krimi reader though I am, I was blindsided several times. In addition, the author successfully distinguishes a host of characters and brings them together from the dissolute priest to the surly apprentice mechanic, the ever correct Carter, and the naive translator. The hardest of all and the most uncommon to the genre is the child.

Disclosure:  The author is a pal. 

Ever the teacher assigning further reading, because everything I read these days reminds me of something else.  In this case the reference list included:

Ben Anderson, ‘The Idea of Power in Javanese Culture,’ a chapter in his book Culture and Politics in Indonesia (Cornell University Press, 1972), pp 1-70.  Power incarnated in the first half of the chapter.

Denis Thompson, ‘Moral Responsibility of Public Officials: The Problem of Many Hands,’ American Political Science Review, 74 (4), pp 905-916.  Who did it? All of them and so none of them.

Colin Turnbull, The Forest People.  NYC: Simon & Schuster, 1968. One chapter concerns crime and punishment in a Pygmy community.  

Miguel Unamuno, ‘Saint Emmanuel the Good Martyr,’ a short story about a priest who has no faith.  

At one time or another each was on a syllabus.

Spaghetti Dinner (1955) by Giuseppe Prezzolini

Good Reads Meta-data is 149 pages, rated 0.0 by 0 litizens who have missed a chance to spout off.  

Genre: History and cooking

Verdict:  A Curiosity only. 

About half of this short book is a social history of the development pasta (‘spaghetti’ is used as a generic term for pasta) and its importation to the United States.  The other half is made up of recipes, some historical and some contemporary to the original publication date above.  

The first half consists of short, illustrated chapters of 8-10 pages or less on the happy discovery of the hard wheat, the early use of the word ‘macaroni’ for all pasta, the wrong and right ways to eat pasta, the stereotypes of pasta eaters and eating through the ages, and so on.  

It explains that odd line in the tune Yankee Doodle, ‘he stuck a feather in his hat and called in macaroni.’ In the 18th Century macaroni was brought back to England by grand tourists who had their cooks cook it (badly), and so eating macaroni was the mark of a toff, a dandy, a fad-following aristocrat.  A macaroni was a rich layabout.

He also suggests that macaroni went from being a immigrant food in the United States with Prohibition when Italians discovered a new source of income by selling their home-made wine to the thirsty anglos, who might like a meal to go with this sly grog.  

The author published not one but two biographies of Niccolò Machiavelli, both of which I have acquired and read. The first was Machiavelli, The Florentine (1929) and the second was Machiavelli (1967). In Italian the latter’s title was Machiavelli, Anticristo (1954). That stimulated me to find out a little about him, and there were two things of note. First, was the above book. The second was that in 1930s he taught Italian literature at Columbia University and was perceived by some as an apologist for the Mussolini regime until 1941. He weathered that storm in the academic tea cup and remained there.  

The Library: A Fragile History (2021) by Arthur der Weduwen and Andrew Pettegree 

Good Reads meta-data is 518 pages rated 3.84 by 987 litizens. 

Genre: History.

Verdict: The new is old. 

Tagline:  Where’s Melville?  

A comprehensive survey of book collections from Alexandria – both ancient and contemporary – to digital.  Along the way is papyrus, vellum, linen, paper, and pixels. 

Books have always sparked conflicts by those looking for a fight.  Romans were one of the few conquerors who preserved the books of the vanquished for a time. Of course, these books were scrolls on papyrus, which is very durable, but burns easily and most of what they saved was in fact later lost in the convulsions of Roman history.    

There is always someone who opposes change.  When Greeks began writing plays on papyrus, Socrates decried it.  By writing things down, we no longer have to remember them and that will weaken our brains. Ergo the smartest people had an oral culture. Aborigines know that.

When Gutenberg’s printed books began to appear alongside handwritten manuscripts, Erasmus, among others, decried it.  Printed books were not invested with the effort, the grace, or the artistry of manuscripts. 

Priests and kings decried printing because it put books, including Bibles, into the hands of too many people without religious, social, or political censorship. That undermined both theological and political authority.  Books are like that. 

When e-Readers came along in the 1990s it was the same story, and still is. (We got our Rocket e-Books long ago when Bill Clinton was president.) Many today refuse to use a Kindle or any of its cousins because… [some reason or other].  

Then there were the wars over what is in the books.  When Martin Luther kicked-off the Reformation, he also toppled many a library.  Catholics purged monastery libraries (these being the main book collections) of Protestant-sympathetic items, and commanded their faithful among the book-owning aristocrats to do the same. That was the first shot.

Protestants replied in kind.  When Henry VIII closed monasteries their libraries were purged, i.e., most books were burned. Henry also sent scrutineers around the countryside to find books in the private homes of the wealthy reading class and purge them. Closet Catholics hid offending volumes in priest holes. 

This went on for a hundred or more years. More than one reader, more than one printer was murdered (executed) for possessing forbidden books by Catholic and by Protestant authorities doing God’s will. Sure. Happy in their work. 

Another skirmish concerned books (printed or manuscript) versus pamphlets, posters, coffee house sheets, newspapers, cahiers, and other ephemera. One of Christopher Columbus’s sons became an omnivorous book collector and he gathered everything on paper and then bound the leaves like books. The result is a social record still used by researchers today. Whereas when Thomas Bodley put up an enormous fund to build a library for Oxford University he forbid it ever to hold such trivialities. Sniff. Sniff.  

In the Nineteenth Century as literacy increased and the cost of making books decreased, then another front was opened in this culture war. It concerned the printing, distribution, and availability of books as the public library slowly emerged. The first fault line was non-fiction versus fiction.  Political authorities, social influencers, respectable investors wanted only pious, practical, uplifting books to be printed and to be available.  No Tom Jones or Moll Flanders, thank you. A benevolent coal mine owner might establish a library in a colliery town and stock it with books like, How to be a Good Employee, Coal Mining for Beginners, The Joys of Being a Child Miner, Taking Care of Tools, How to Survive on Gruel, Pray don’t Strike, Church not Union, and other such titles. Few locals visited such a library more than once. They wanted light, escapist fiction to divert them for a time from the realities of their lives or literature that promoted a better future in the here and now, not in the afterlife. 

This demand led book printers and sellers to form subscription reading libraries to cater for this taste.  This struggle went on for a long time, and in the early Twentieth Century Mr Mills and Mr Boon came along and supplied one part of this market, and still do.

In the Cold War libraries were again in the firing line. Demands were made to purge the shelves, but to warehouse the books to keep them out of circulation not to destroy them. The Bolsheviks of 1917, after the initial thrill of victory, realised they could sell the seized libraries, much of which were in Latin, French, or German, of the aristocrats to the West and did so. But in the USA the goal was to silence the books period, but it was too close to the end of World War II to license Nazi book burning, however tempting that was.   Below are some of the books recently banned in Florida.

The story in France is distinctive. After the Revolution of 1789 in the heady days of victory the winners declared all libraries public, the first and biggest of these is the Mazarin Library (which I have used), but they soon realised the stock of books was very Catholic, very aristocratic, and very reactionary.  They then banned just about everything and devised a censorship system that was so complex not even René Descartes would have been able to navigate it. When Catholicism made its periodic rebounds, those forces wanted psalters, hymnals, books of days, and little else.  When Jean Jaurès’s (1859-1914) socialists rose, they decided to make the local school room with its few dictionaries and primers the public library in the charge of an overworked and underpaid teacher. Thus a public library system was created without the expense of a building, staff, or funds to buy books. It was zero-budget policy hailed as genius.    

It was only in the 1970s that the French government funded a huge initiative to create médiathèques, several thousand of them to accompany the Minitel revolution. (Who remembers Minitel?) These were multi-media cultural, community centres and quite by accident have become the model that underlies a great many public libraries today like the one I visited the other day. On now entering a library no longer does one feel like one is entering a memorial tomb where all is hushed, if not quiet. Originally intended as a site for public access to Minitel and its adjuncts, the médiathèques have endured by adapting.

Andrew Carnegie paid for the library building in which I did my early reading; it was one of 5000 he paid for in the USA and UK which then included Ireland. The deal was, he would pay for a building, if the local town council would supply the land and commit to spend a sum equal to 10% of the building cost to stock and staff the library every year thereafter.  He offered six or seven types of building that might be selected, and if a town want to embellish or add to one of those at its expense, fine, but all had to include a Children’s Room. I am sure a shade of Herbert Marcuse can explain why this is an example of repression.  

Recounted is the hubris of the San Francisco Library that anticipated a future library without books, and so built at great expense a new public library with space for only a third of the existing book stock, and there being no budget leftover for storage, pulped much of the remainder or sold it (perhaps legally). According to these authors no records were kept because the card catalogue was the first thing to go and with it all the meta-data.  

There is a lot more in the book, but there is also a lot that isn’t there. It seems to me to be more about book collections than libraries.  By that I mean there is nothing but a few asides about how the collections would be organised for retrieval, stored against degradation, restored after damage, the professionalism of librarians, the gender balance among librarians, and so on. 

While closed versus open stacks are mentioned, that question is not connected to shelving. For open stacks to work there has to be some order based on content, whereas for closed stacks a shelf mark will do.  That is in open stacks all the books by and about Aristotle will be proximate, not so for closed stacks.

Nor do they mention that marvellous short story by Juan Luis Borges, The Library of Babel with its Purifiers patrolling the shelves on search and destroy missions like those now occurring in Florida. Nor does this book mention Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451 and the ineradicable quality of the ideas in books.  Nor the German librarians who secreted books from Nazis.

Of Beards and Men (2015) by Christopher Oldstone-Moore 

Goodreads meta-data is 352 pages rated 3.65 by 165 litizens. 

Genre: History.

Verdict: Occam did not do it!  

Tagline: Male-Patterned History.

To beard or not to beard, that has often been the question. Whether it is nobler, sexier, scarier, holier, smarter, easier on the skin and chin to have a beard or not to have a beard. Or just more manly to be bearded.  

In answering these momentous questions, men have turned to god, to science, to politics, and to women. They have also cast sidelong glances at each other. 

If god gave us beards, then we are meant to have them, that is one recurrent school of hirsute thought.  Another is that shaving is an act of obeisance to god. Is the beard natural, or a penalty for the fall from Eden? And so it goes. Priests have promoted conflict over this divide for millennia. Even the peace-loving Amish have fought over this question though the most persistent and violent these days seem to be the rabbis and imams.   

The science is no less mystical. The beard has been related to – sit down and brace reader – sperm, muscles, and brains by hundreds of savants. Autodidacts like Caesar reasoned that when he was going bald on top, if he pulled out all the other hair on his body starting with his face, the hair would grow back on his head, so he plucked away, including [use your imaginations]. Dopey, yes but no dopier than many scientific explanations, see the reference to sperm above.

Just when scientists settled on one explanation or another for face hair, an adventurer would find nearly hairless indigenous men in the New World or apes with hair everywhere except faces to say nothing of bearded ladies. The wheel of explanation had to be spun once again, and again.  Hygiene came into the question in the Twentieth Century. Did the beard harbour germs, parasites, or illegal immigrants?

Adolf Hitler, an exponent of the moustache, experimented with several different looks early in his career. The walrus moustache of a Bismarck was out, identified with the long-ago past.  The spiky moustache of Kaiser Wilhelm was out, being identified with defeat. To be clean shaven was a sign of modernity, discipline, and the future to be sure, but the moustache yet retained a certain martial quality that he wished to evoke. Advised by his lifelong bromance and sycophant Joseph Göbbels, Hitler settled on the toothbrush mo. That toothbrush moustache more or less died with him. No one else wants to recall him, evidently, for not even dedicated Neo-Nazis can be seen with one. His mo is now identified with failure, too.  

Although he was moustachioed, Hitler decreed his followers, including the army, be clean shaven modernists. Face hair was regarded as Jewish, Bolshevik, Slavic, or Gypsy. Not good. After the Night of the Long Knives, no other Nasty sported a mo. That shave was final.   

Those Bolsheviks grew and shaved sideburns, goatees, beards, mono-brows, and moustachioes to elude Czarist police. No disguise could protect them from each other.

Stimulated by some primal memory of ferocious cavemen, generals have sometimes concluded that a bearded soldier is more frightening than a shaven man, and ordered the troops to grow a beard.  Regiments of Napoleon’s cavalry were so ordered, with the further specification that the beard be long, glossy, and black. Not every horse-soldier could meet this standard and the entrepreneurs descended with black wax, false beards, and beard extensions that could be stuck on for parades and inspections. One regiment of the French Foreign Legion continues that tradition. 

Later, shaving became a sign of military conformity and discipline. It was also an indication that the soldier had been near soap and water to keep clean. Though even then generals themselves often kept at least a moustache to evoke the primitive warrior. 

Side Bar:  In many creature feature films the monster is usually hairy. Are there any smooth-faced monsters on film? Submit answers below.

When King (1824-1830) Charles X in the French restoration turned the clock back to before the Revolution, the resurgent Catholic hierarchy, thrilled to be back bossing others around, ruled that shaving was god’s law. This edict was largely a reaction to all those bearded Protestants in the North. Chas X was hard to take seriously and soon on the Rive Gauche, in the student quarter (where I once lived for six months), it became an act of defiance to let it grow. Royal police arrived to fine the hairy, who then appealed to the courts. One case turned on the definition of a beard, for the defendant claimed he had forgotten to shave, been too busy to shave, had broken his razor and that stubble was not a beard when it came to paying a fine. In the modus vivendi that followed moustaches were accepted. They sprouted all over the Left Bank, and have recurred with each new generation of self-styled protestors. A similar story played out in the 1960s Stateside, during the Vietnam War. Hair everywhere was the norm for many against the army buzz cut and sub-dermal shave.

The last U.S. Presidential candidate to sprout face hair was…?  New York Governor Thomas Dewey in 1948. He had a pencil moustache that was much discussed, especially by women. His wife proved exceptional in that she liked his mo but most others, as questioned by pollsters seeking the big news, did not. His mo was subjected to the intense and trivial attention that journalist still reserve for women, as when it was international news that the leader of the French Socialist Party appeared at reception in D.C. in flat shoes. Quelle horreur!  Both French and American media had a feeding frenzy on that.    

The last president to be furry? Go on, guess! Howard Taft (1908-1912) and his immediate predecessor Theodore Roosevelt (1901-1908). If a moustachioed Clark Gable had run for office, well he might overcome the hair barrier.  

Mrs Dewey is not the only woman to rule on beards. Psychologists, social and not, have conducted endless experiments to see if a beard makes a man more or less attractive to women. As with much such research, the permutations of method are ingenious and meaningless. Our tax dollars at work. As with all social science the results are yes, no, and maybe. 

There are also a few words on the carefully curated, meticulously cultivated Hollywood stubble look. It is a kind of a peach-fuzz version of the aforementioned Clarke Gable. (Gable, by the way, shaved his moustache and joined the Air Force in 1942 where he flew combat missions.  He had no need to prove anything with a mo.)  

The high priests of the gay fashionistas have ruled and misruled on face hair ad nauseam.This is followed by the rabbis and imams ruling on beards which is told in piteous detail.  Like Hotspur they summon, but….who cares?  

The book ends where I began.  The return of the cheek fuzz today is an effort to assert manhood in an age when gender roles have been questioned, changed, made fluid, or otherwise challenged.  The one thing a man has left to mark and make him a man is a beard.  Pathetic I know, but that makes sense to me. 

I had hoped for something about the evolution of shaving from dry blade to the micro-electrics today. 

I wondered if Montesquieu had anything to say about beards and climate, but not enough to look for myself.  Likewise the effect of the mass armies of 20th Century, setting the norm to shave in the name of hygiene.  

In the French Army a grunt is called a ‘poilou,’ a hairy one. Explanations for its origin are vexed. One is that the mass conscription of World War I cleared the countryside of men who sported bushy mo’s as a token of masculinity like the stubble of today.  The printing presses of the era spread the image and word far and wide.  Another takes it back to Napoleon’s hussars who were as hairy as Twentieth Century hippies. Think Abbie Hoffman on horseback with a sabre. Scary, right? 

Occam’s razor suggests that there was little shaving in the trenches. Whatever its figurative origin it became literal there. 

I read this in the hope of finding out something about beards in Renaissance Italy of Machiavelli’s time.  There is a reference that I will follow up but nothing in this book bears on my interest.