Category: Leadership

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 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 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. 

——

Genre: Biography

GoodReads meta-data is 235 pages, rated 3.70 by 57 litizens.

Verdict: [Blank]

Charles XII of Sweden figured in the biography of Peter the Great I read before we travelled to Russia in 2016. That was the first time I had heard of him, but he seemed to be a snow and ice version of Alexander the Great.  From that hostile, secondhand view, as Peter’s nemesis, aside from Charles’s warrior prowess, what was remarkable was that Sweden remained stable while Charles constantly campaigned.  That stimulated me to find a biography.  I tried samples of The History of Charles XII, King of Sweden (1731) by Voltarie; Charles XII, King of Sweden (2012) by Carl G. Klingspor, and A Warrior Dynasty: The Rise and Decline of Sweden as a Military Superpower (2014) by Henrik Lunde. The scholarly one by Lunde has so much indigestible front matter about sources, acknowledgements, definitions, summaries that the sample ends just as the text begins. Voltaire’s pamphlet is a vehicle to excoriate the barbarian Peter the Great.  Klingspor is hagiography. That left Bain.  

Charles XII (1682-1718) was king of Sweden from age fifteen and made endless war  with Danes, Germans (the Hanseatic League, Saxony, Prussia, Hannover), Poles, Danes, and Russians singly or in alliances.  For the Hansa Stockholm was a backwater that had no business in Baltic commerce (timber, amber, felts and furs). For the Poles, and Poland was a power in this day, Sweden was the protector of hated Protestants and it was, accordingly, god’s work to destroy Swedes.  For the Danes, Sweden had once been a colony in all but name and should stay that. For Russia Sweden blocked access to the Baltic.  

Then there were the outsiders, Catholic France wanted to undermine Protestant Netherlands by weakening its Swedish protector, and Protestant England that wanted to undermine Catholic France by encouraging continental Protestants.  

Got it so far?

Two generations earlier Sweden had intervened in continental religious wars and earned the title of Protector of Protestants.  Sweden then was little more than a geographic expression, however, Swedes, though few in number, proved to be organised, thorough, and committed and so had military success. The artillery helped. Swedish armies were among the first and most proficient at combined arms operations where cavalry, artillery, and infantry co-operated and co-ordinated in attack or defence.  By the time Charles took the field this was old news. 

Once enmeshed in the geo-politics of the region, Sweden could not extricate itself and instead waded in deeper and deeper.  By age fifteen Charles conceived of a Swedish Empire that enveloped the Baltic and drove the hated Danes onto the peninsula shorn of a navy.  Sword in hand he set out to make it so – this became the Great Northern War (1700-1721) that in time drew in the Ukraine, Ottomans, Bulgars, Tatars, Hannover, Prussia, Danes, Saxony, Poland, Cossacks, Tatars, and more. 

When Charles took the throne the Swedish Empire was at its peak, encompassing all modern Sweden, a good chunk of the middle of Norway, all of Finland, the Karelia peninsula some of which is now in Russia, the Baltic islands, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and some of the Polish Baltic coast. There were also two overseas colonies in Delaware in America and in Benin in Africa.  It was a power of its day to rival the Netherlands and England, though not golden Spain nor vast France.  That is, it was a middle power. 

What followed in the reign of Charles XII was continuous war that led to defeat and by 1721 Sweden had shrunk to the borders it now has. He left Sweden spent, depleted, exhausted, and impoverished by his appetite for war with the hordes of Russia, the masses of Poland, the might of the Germans and Prussians, and he never seemed to know when to quit. When adversaries offered favourable peace terms, he spurned them. The comparison to Alexander the Great makes itself. 

One historian estimates that one fourth of all men between 20 and 40 years old during his tenure died in war. Nearly every man served in the army at one time, stripping the land of labor in the fields, orchards, ports, markets, tanneries, smiths, and so on.  By his death vast stretches of contemporary Sweden were ghost towns. If young(er) men are away at war for twenty years there are fewer young children.     

King Charles departed Stockholm in 1700 and never returned to that capital.  He spent the remaining twenty-one years of his life mainly with the army on campaign.  Yet with his absence for more than two decades back home Sweden remained stable and willing, if not always able, to supply his financial and human requirements for the army.  Despite his long, and costly absence from Stockholm, there was no usurper, no rebellion by the nobles at the war taxes, no deterioration in the civil administration for lack of funds, no palace coup, no secret deals with the Russians, Poles, or Germans to end the war.  Or so it seems.  That is what I found fascinating when I read about Charles in the biography of Peter the Great.  Regrettably Bain offers no explanation for this remarkable stability in the permanent crisis.  

If Peter the Great had spent twenty-one years away from Moscow there would have been a palace coup and/or an uprising by the nobles in the first six months. French kings seldom travelled further than Versailles, fearing that when absent the nobility would plot even more than it did when the king was present. Elizabeth in England had a secret service actively blocking internal threats to her seat. Alexander had secured his home base with a trusted emeritus general and a small but dedicated palace guard in Macedonia, but nothing like any of that seems to have been the case, or to have been necessary, in Stockholm.

While he was away, he was, in fact, not always with the army.  Here is a quirk of history.  After defeat at what proved to be the last major battle of the Northern War in central Russia, Charles found it impossible geographically to return to Sweden and so he went south on the reasoning that my enemy’s enemy is my friend. He found his way to the Ottoman Empire which sheltered him from the Russians for many years, while he always plotted a return to the battlefield and always urged the Ottomans to strike at Russia. He was there for years, and wore out his welcome.  

When he finally returned north he continued to make war on all comers, and whenever the Senate or Chancellor in Stockholm cried for peace, he sent a stern letter reminding them who was king, and they then dutifully complied to his latest demand for yet more money and yet more men. 

While he was polite in person he had a stubborn streak that had no bounds.  With no political sense he went at everything straight ahead.  Likewise his military tactics consisted of frontal assaults. There was no Napoleonic manoeuvring or artillery preparation. He usually plunged ahead so rapidly that artillery could not keep pace and in some campaigns he dispensed with it altogether. His wars were as destructive as Napoleon’s it is true but there is nothing constructive in his reign as there was in Napoleon’s: schools, laws, reforms, science, bridges, roads, weights and measures, tolerance….  

Charles was nearly as ascetic as any stylite, wearing one uniform until it was bloody rag and then changing to a new one, eating the soldier’s gruel, sleeping on the ground in a Russian winter, and so on. He was usually at the front in combat and that is where he was killed in a meaningless skirmish with Danes.  In these ways he led by example. But he had none of Napoleon’s charm in dealing with the rank and file. He remembered no names, handed out no medals, did not promote individuals for special contributions, offered no pensions, seldom even acknowledged the men as more than tin soldiers.  

In sum, it remains a mystery to me why Swedes put up with this self-destructive man who was willing to take the whole Swedish people with him to the grave.   

GoodReads meta-data is 336 pages, rated 2.73 by 11 litizens.

Genre: Biography.

Verdict:  Not found. 

Declaration: I read only the Kindle sample.

We have been to Doris Duke’s (1912–1993) home — Shangri-la — three times, and found it interesting, impressive, intriguing, innovative, and more.  The accounts of the guides and the handouts tell visitors a little about the reclusive DD, but not very much.

When I went looking for more information after our last visit I came across a reference to this forthcoming title, so I signed on for the Kindle sample when it was published.  In due course it popped up on the screen.  

Well, the sample includes the first two chapters which I read to the end.  I am none the wiser about DD.  The chapters I read have neither rhyme nor reason but dart back and forth with the breathlessness of a confused thriller writer.  There is no orderly or organised examination of her origins, nature, nurture, growth, and….    

Even that soft touch, GoodReads, has some stingers about the ‘shambles’ the book is and the endless ‘fluff’ and ‘distractions’ that pad it out. Two chapters was more than enough for me to press Delete. 

This title was published by a very major New York City publisher from which fact draw your own conclusions, Reader. Bingham has published many short stories and other fiction.

Here’s what I already knew:  Mr Duke make money from cigarettes, so much that he founded the eponymous university, Doris was the only child and a fabulously rich heiress who built on Oahu a spectacular all-modern-conveniences house, which has an Arabic water garden and pavilion. She filled the house with  with Islamic decorative art.  During its construction in the 1930s the film Lost Horizons (based on James Hilton’s novel) was current and the builders nicknamed the building Shangri-la; she liked that. Tall, elegant, and rich, this is one of the places where she went for solitude, hiding from the predators. 

In addition to the buildings and the art work, there are also videos of its construction and some of her activities there.  She was a very serious collector and the property also houses an archive documenting and authenticating the collection.  She willed it all to the state of Hawaii to preserve and make public with an endowment of one billion dollars.    

There are entries on Wikipedia that offer a more general account of the Dukes.  

Mari Sandoz, Crazy Horse: Man of the Sioux (1942)

GoodReads meta-data is 428 pages, rated as 4.26 by 1301 litizens.

Genre: Biography.

Verdict:  Unique.

Crazy Horse (1840-1877) was born an odd man out in the Sandhill country of Nebraska.  He was of fair hair and fair skin relative to his people. There is no reason to suppose any European connection in his gene pool, just an aberration like Peter the Great’s height. When he was teenager a European described him as an albino with red eyes.  Set apart from birth by appearance he became moody teenage loner, often preferring his own company to that of his peers.  Aloof, he played little role in the tribe, though his father and brothers were leaders.

There had long been a trickle of European immigrants travelling west on the Holy Trail in the Platte River Valley, but the trickle changed after 1865 in two ways:  first, Europeans established ever more permanent settlements along the way.  They were coming to stay. Second, after the end of Civil War the trickle became a flood. These changes coincided with Crazy Horse’s manhood.  

There were many conflicts, first, with the traditional enemies the Crow, Pawnee, and Utes for hunting grounds and winter quarters; there were few with the immigrants who passed though but when the army began to build forts the conflicts with the immigrants and army increased.  The linguistic and cultural barriers provided much room for misunderstanding and conflict, as did the sense of superiority held both by the Sioux and the Europeans.  Each thought the other primitive.

Even in Crazy Horse’s youth the demographics were clear.  There were many more white men than red men at any one place. But it is also true that the many Indians had no history of cooperation, and for a long time many of them still perceived other Indians as the real enemy, which was reinforced by cultural norms that praised horse theft, ambush of traditional rivals, and the like.  There were no cultural values for dealing with the white man and his guns and cannons.  In addition, the usual Indian methods of warfare emphasised the individual warrior and not teamwork, coordination, or planning.  Ergo even within one tribe like the Ogalala Sioux there was neither experience nor cultural reward for teamwork, coordination, or planning.  The impetuous hothead who struck out on his own was the ideal.  

Add to that the temptation of demon whiskey and some tribesmen sold out others to get the burning cup.

But the capstone was gold in Black Hills.  Once it was found the whites did not pass through or stay in the forts, but penetrated the hinterland and spread out to find and to mine gold, and the army followed to protect them.  This exploration led, inevitably, to many conflicts and escalating violence.  Once the Civil War ended many in the eastern and southern United States looked to the West for a new life, to forget the past and gold was magnet for them and those who would live off them selling coffee, shovels, and the like.  The demand for protection from Indians increased exponentially as the white population increased.      

Crazy Horse proved to be skilful warrior and had many successes.  He was thus anointed as a shirt-wearer, or leading warrior, who embodied the tribe.  Later he lost this honour in a quarrel over a woman.  Sioux leaders were supposed to be above such personal concerns, think Philosopher Kings, and he lost the title, though he remained the best warrior.  

There were peace-makers and peace-keepers, straight arrows, and negotiators among both the Red and White, but there were also self-serving scoundrels, liars, hotheads, and the greedy on both sides. The Indian social unit was a clan and any joint action with other Indians was difficult after years or rivalry, hostility, and worse.  It is also true that in the army were many officers who had learned that the gun solved all problems. They applied the Appomattox solution of overwhelming force to the Indians. The irony is that many of the US troopers in the Indians Wars were veterans of the Confederate army who had nothing and no one to go home to and no other means of livelihood but soldiering.  They were determined to be on the winning side this time. 

The white buffalo was a rarity and when one appeared it was taken by the Sioux to be sign from the gods.  That Crazy Horse was so pale associated him in the minds of many of the tribesmen with this holy sign. Moreover, he himself came to find several of the white buffalo which was remarkable.  The white buffalo is not a sacred cow, but rather is killed and returned to the earth as an offering to the gods.  It was rare for a warrior to kill one white buffalo when Crazy Horse had killed two. In this way he was further set apart from his fellows. 

There were also other signs of charisma.  He survived being shot in the face by a jealous rival when all thought he would die.  He was indeed marked out.  His successes attracted envy and the envious started rumours to blacken his name, but his persistent modesty and serenity were proof against these innuendoes.  

The sad story ends when Crazy Horse surrendered to live on a reservation, but was killed.  How and why he was murdered is unclear, but murdered he was at a fort while under the protection of the United States Army.  No inquiry was held and no one held responsible.  Sounds like something that could happen today.  

This book is written from the Sioux point of view, using the idioms and references of the Lakota.  One might almost might call it a fictional autobiography. At the end is long list of the individuals whom she interviewed, and the archives consulted.  Sandoz grew up in the Sandhills among the Sioux and they were a lifetime preoccupation for her.  

Following Charles van Doren’s advice from long ago, I usually skip the front matter of a book to read the book and make up my own mind, but for some reason I started to read introduction by the reprint series editor and found is self-deprecating, honest, devoid of clichés, self-promotion, and corporate-speak, and penetrating.  I read it to the end, a rarity that.

A decade ago or so we went to Mount Rushmore and saw the site of the Crazy Horse memorial.  The mental note I made then to find out more about this legendary figure was redeemed with reading this book.

Crazy Horse echoes: An Excelsior class starship bears his name in StarTrek:  The Next Generation.

Like an NBA shooting guard, a writer needs a short memory to forget the mistakes, errors, misses, and rejections.  Sandoz once said she had had more than 7000 rejections for her short stories, novels, essays, and non-fiction.  She was so depressed by word ‘No’ at one time that she burned a bathtub full of manuscripts.  In the early years she made a living as a school teacher by day.

Sandoz’s first book was rejected by fourteen major publishers before it won a prize sponsored by a magazine for a new writer’s first book.  That was Old Jules (1935), followed by many others including Cheyenne Autumn (1953) and These were the Sioux (1961).  The more she published about the treatment of Sioux the more persona non grata she became in Nebraska and she finally relocated to the East Coast to be near the publishers. Though now her likeness graces the state capital building in a hall of notables.  

Alan Wilkinson’s Red House on the Niobrara (2012) is a tribute to Sandoz.  It is discussed elsewhere on this blog.  

Macquarie (2019) by Grantlee Kieza

GoodReads meta-data, 576 pages, rated 4.45 by 40 litizens  

Gerne: Biography

Verdict: Visionary

Lachlan Macquarie (1762 – 1824) was the longest serving early Governor of the New South Wales Colony (1810-1821), and without a doubt the one who did the most to shape Sydney and beyond.  Today the Hospital, Mint, Barracks, and Parliament House still standing proud on Macquarie Street are his testament.  He was a visionary and a reformer who gave convicts a second, and at times, a third chance at redemption.  He battled the Colonial Office to develop New South Wales, while dealing with the many local conflicts. To anticipate what follows, the Colonial Office did not want New South Wales to prosper, while the locals were more interested in undermining each other than laying the groundwork for the future.  

How did he come to these qualities and why was he chosen for New South Wales? Those were the questions that prompted me to read this biography.   Below are the inferences I drew from it. They are not questions pursued explicitly by the author who concentrates on the day-by-day record.  

Macquarie grew up poor but proud and made a second home in the British Army.  Long before he arrived in Sydney Town he was well travelled and much experienced.  He had served in the Army in North America during the last stages of the American Revolutionary War, the West Indies, India, and Egypt and between these postings had traveled through Persia, Russia, and South Africa.

He recurrent dream was to prosper in the Army and retire to the life of a Scots laird back home.  At times to secure that prosperity he cut corners with some very creative accounting.  In the fullness of time this sin came to light and he managed to live it down, though it blotted his chances for promotion for years.  

He often idled away the hours sketching how he, as a highland laird, would lay out a property of crofters in Scotland for the benefit of both master and men.  These thoughts and jottings were the seeds that later fell to earth in Sydney.  When they did, they were nurtured by the great cities he had seen on his travels, Bombay, St Petersburg, Alexandria, and London.  

That the Army, albeit reluctantly, gave him a second chance seared into him and he tried thereafter to live up to it.  That second chance was largely due to the circumstances for it was during the Napoleonic Wars when experienced officers were at a premium.  If he had been dismissed, then someone else would have to be found to take his place and responsibilities.  

He was a correspondent who wrote many letters, often keeping copies of his own, and he retained, as one did in those days, the letters he received.  In the stereotypical manner of a thrifty Scot he also kept careful records of his incomes and expenses.  This penchant for keeping notes and records made him an unofficial accountant many times where he weakened to the temptation to fiddle the books.  This penchant also left behind an extensive archive mined in these pages.  

During more than a decade in India where he saw combat and did a great deal of organising and marching, he married an Anglo-Indian woman, Jane Jarvis, who subsequently died young there.   He was also in the last battle at Alexandria in Egypt to expel the French.  At the time, democracy was identified with the excesses of the French Revolution and, ironically, Napoleon, and so Macquarie reviled it.  

New South Wales was roiling with the Rum Rebellion against Governor William Bligh when Macquarie was dispatched to put oil on the waters.  He had spent years managing-up, that is, stroking his superiors in the hope of promotion, and had become something of the patient and persistent diplomat.  He needed those qualities when he got to Australia.  

In Sydney he found there a three (or more)-sided conflict among the free settlers (sometimes called squatters), the irascible Governor Bligh and his supporters (mostly his own family and appointees) and the convicts (who had revolted earlier at Castle Hill, and among whom there were further divisions between criminal and political).  The rebellious free settlers wanted to use the convicts as flexible slave labour in a gig economy avant le mot.  In the absence of McKinsey managers, the egregious Reverend Samuel Marsden provided the bellicose but shallow justification for that.  Bligh did not care about the convicts but he did care about his authority to tax, especially rum to reduce the rampant alcoholism he found there.  Psst, he also got a cut of the taxes he collected. 

The accounts of this conflict read like today’s news when members of the elite spent most of their time securing their prerogatives from each other, sometimes through litigation which brings it out into the open, rather than doing their jobs.  One reviewer recently noted of a Commonwealth regulatory agency that it was unlikely much work got done considering the volume of suits and countersuits among its directors over the intemperate remarks arising from arguments over car spaces, leave allowances, salary increases, name plates, and so on.   Sounds like a university department where within every tea cup there is a storm.  

Macquarie proved tenacious and held on against the Marsden-MacArthur gang for a decade but in the end, they were many and he was one, and they wore him down.  Having slowly risen in the ranks to Major General, he resigned, and to please the Colonial Office his successor Thomas Brisbane undid much of Macquarie’s efforts at emancipating convicts. Brisbane wanted the job because he wanted to study the southern sky and built the Observatory on the hill today near the Harbour Bridge where it still stands.   

The Colonial Office wanted transportation to Australia to be a fearsome prospect that would deter criminal from offences.  Stories of Macquarie’s efforts to build a comfortable life and redeem convicts, so many of whom were petty thieves with a single offence committed in dire straits, were expensive and also counter-productive to the Colonial Office.  Nor should we forget the many Irish political prisoners who got swept up in a round-up to meet the KPIs of the day.   

Macquarie tried to make peace with the aboriginal people but not very hard or consistently, and yielded all too quickly to the demand of free settlers for a military response.  It almost seems to this reader that he used the occasion to show the settlers he was indeed a soldier and the Appin Massacre of natives followed.  Neither women nor children were spared to the cheers of the Pox News of the day. Relations between the new comers and natives never recovered thereafter when gun powder become the arbiter of the civilising Christians, though it pleased Marsden and his cronies.  

Though the author is coy about it, Macquarie contracted syphilis in the usual way while in India and it blighted much of his subsequent life.  His second wife, Elizabeth, for whom Lady Macquarie’s Chair was carved in the Botanic Gardens where it remains today, had at least six miscarriages that might have been the consequence of that disease and its treatment with mercury.   

A few years ago we saw an exhibition at the State Library about Macquarie and at the time I wondered what his inspirations and sources had been.  Hence, I was primed for this biography when the tide brought it to my notice.  

Macquarie was not a reader, it seems, not even the Bible.  There is nary a mention of a book in this study of the man.  Note also that he spelled his name in a variety of ways (as have I). 

However it was spelled, he liked seeing his name on things, hence the many places and features in Eastern Australia and Tasmania bearing his name.  He travelled around the realm far more than any of the predecessors and most of his successors, bestowing his name as he did so.  It would please him, I am sure, to note that a university now bears his name.  

In the middle 1970s I boned up on Australian history reading Stalinist Manning Clark’s turgid six-volume A History of Australia (1962+) which recounts much of Macquarie’s story.  Clark identified with Marsden, whom I found as objectionable as recent churchmen who want to tell others how to live. Not knowing when to quit, I also read Herbert Evatt’s rehabilitation of Bligh, The Rum Rebellion (1943).  It was another instance where the author seemed to identify with the subject. Neither of these titles is recommended.  

Back to the book at hand, there are nits to pick.  First is the editorial decision to parallel much of Macquarie’s early biography with developments in New South Wales.  No doubt this is one way to show the context that Macquarie found when he arrived in 1810, but this reader found it distracting and padded before 1810 was reached.  Moreover, much that is included in this parallel, is never mentioned again and so is hardly background.  After all Macquarie himself did not have the benefit of all this background and hit it head on.  

Second, much of the expression is clichéd.  There are references to ‘higher ups,’ ‘sent off in scores,’ ‘bigwig,’ ‘put up his hand for,’ ‘splash his cash,’ ‘top brass,’ ‘heart of gold,’ ‘mojo,’ ‘gunned down,’ ‘two sidekicks,’ ‘the cut of his jib,’ ‘on the nose,’ ‘never going to fly,’ ‘leading lights,’ and so on and on.  Lazy and vague are these uses. No doubt someone thought they were lively and would attract readers like Alan Jones’s listeners.  As if! 

There are also plenty of anachronisms, but my favourite is a reference to a ‘slide rule.’  Its original conception dates to 1622 when tables of logarithms were combined in handbooks.  Its modern form emerged  in latter Nineteenth Century in France for military engineering and artillery plotting.  It is just possible, though unlikely, someone in Macquarie’s Sydney had a nascent equivalent, but unlikely, and in any event it just clangs as a metaphor.  Might as well refer to jet flight. By the way, I still have the slide rule that got me through the required science courses in high school and Physics in college, and which I used a lot in graduate school in the study of voting and elections.  It was a great day when I learned to use it.  Trivial fact, the engineer cum novelist Neville Shute called his autobiography Slide Rule (1954); he wrote two landmarks in Australia literature:  A Town like Alice (1950) and On the Beach (1957).    

While picking away I also note the propensity of the author to read Macquarie’s mind as in: ‘he glanced down to admire his patent-leather dress boots,’ he was ‘reminded of the wild country he had been born into,’ and more. 

Finally, a declaration of interest.  We live in a well-defined area of Newtown that was once called O’Connell Town, the first street of which was O’Connell Street named by Sir Maurice O’Connell who was Macquarie’s 2-i-C and then married Bligh’s daughter Elizabeth. We walk around park a block away in what was once called the Bligh Estate, which Elizabeth had – after years of litigation with crown authorities and competing relatives – inherited from her father.