library post, supplemental

I have just acquired Donald Critchlow's Phyllis Schlafly and Grassroots Conservatism. For the dissertation, but I will review it here as well, why not?

Monday Library Day, belated, 9/14/10

I went to the library yesterday, and came home with nothing for me.

I have recently heard a rumor that my local library has only enough money in its new book budget to buy the New York Times bestsellers, and nothing more. I suppose that might not be a horrible thing - surely some of the books which make it to the top ten of the list are worth reading - but it's a sad statement on the state of libraries, and the short sighted process which passes as budgetary planning in this state.

AND a library post? Why not!

I did, actually, go to the library yesterday, and I did, in fact, pick up some books.

S.J. Parris - Heresy
A fiction account of the life of Giordano Bruno. A friend recommended it, I saw it, so I grabbed it. Interesting so far - Parris is telling a spy story, mostly.

Jane Lindskold - The Buried Pyramid
I know nothing about this - young Victorian woman travels to Egypt on an archeological dig, contends with enemies human, and possibly not? But my wife is devouring it, so it has to be good. I'll read it when I can pry it out of her hands.

Friday Review Post? Yes!

Dear merciful deity of your choice! It's Friday, and here's a review! Will wonders ever cease?

Tanya Huff - Blood Lines
This is the one with the mummy. At some point, it becomes clear that Huff is re-thinking the classic movie monsters - vampire, demon-worshiper, werewolf, mummy, zombies/Frankenstein monsters, and finishing up with ghosts. Anyway, this is, I think, my favorite of the series. What I really like about this one is that the monster is actually a monster. I also like the plot line which twists Victoria's beloved police back upon her, and finally, I really really like the point at the end of the book that Victoria and Celluci have been fighting despair for years. All in all, I think, the gem in a fairly stellar series. One more, and I can read the short story collection!

Bruce Cumings - The Korean War
Wow! I was expecting a fairly straight-forward history of the Korean War. This was NOT that book. Cumings covers the basic story in his first chapter, very briefly, and then goes off and does some seriously heavy cultural military history. His basic thesis is that Americans really have no understanding of what happened between 1950 and 1955 on the Korean peninsula, and that this is largely because they (understandably) insist on looking at the events as if they had something to do with the United States. More broadly, Cumings argues that the Korean war was the most visible/violent aspect of a Korean civil war which started in the 1930s with a new level of Japanese repression, and really hasn't ended yet. I've taught this war for several years now as the first of the Cold War proxy-wars, and that will remain an aspect of how I present the material. I will also, having read Cumings, be including the idea that what made Korea different from Vietnam was that both sides of the war (from a Korean perspective) saw themselves as the legitimate rulers of the peninsula. And, from the appropriate points of view, both sides were correct. A further point that Cumings makes is the idea that the United States was on the side of the Japanese collaborators - this was the first instance of the US siding with the repressive dictator because he was less "Communist" than the liberal reformer.

This was a seriously dense book. Cumings gave me lots to think about. He made a serious effort to connect the Korean War to current events, both in Korea and in the Middle East. His broadest possible point was that the Korean War really defined the way in which the United States has fought wars and enacted occupations since the end of World War Two. If, Cumings suggests, we are looking for a point in history where the United States "went wrong", we need look no further than the Korean War. That is, perhaps, too broad a statement to make, but he presents a very convincing argument.

Some final notes - excellent pictures throughout the book, but it needed more maps! Even given that the book was more cultural than military, the maps were entirely inadequate.

Alex Archer - The Spirit Banner
My wife described this book as slush, and she was oh so right. Because I'm sure your curious, no, Anja Creed does not have sex in this novel. Nor, however, does she consume absurd quantities of food in an obvious attempt on the part of the author to sublimate her sex drive. There is no explanation of the series title - Rogue Angel? Anja is not, as far as I've seen, an angel, she's just an archeologist with Joan of Arc's magical mystical sword. In this book, she finds Ghengis Khan's (at one point, a Mongolian calls him Chingis, which was actually his name. It would have been nice to have seen Ms. Creed correct her peers throughout - that would have been a nice touch of academic realism...) tomb. Oh, and has a fight in Mexico which was neither explained nor really resolved. She falls off of a bridge, and has a sword fight in which she reveals that she is, in fact, the bigger person, and an all around nice girl. The author indulges in military porn (that is, he describes, in painstaking detail, all of the military equipment used - this sort of gun, that sort of jeep, the other sort of helicopter, using such and such sort of ammunition, etc etc), and there's an entirely gratuitous scene where the baddy shoots up some of Anja's allies, even though she's not around to see, and never finds out about it. All of this, but despite the provocative cover image (look, I've included it so you can see what I mean - seriously, if this were a romance novel, there would be bodice ripping...), she does not have sex. Next time I have lengthy train rides where I need to put my brain to sleep, I'll grab some more of these.

Molly Crosby - Asleep
A book about the epidemic of encephalitis lethargica of the post WWI period. Fascinating stuff - a disease caused by swelling of the brain which resulted in severe lethargy (to the extent that patients' pulses were often too faint for doctors to sense) and, if the patient woke up, violent mood shifts. Linked, perhaps, to the 1918 flu pandemic, or maybe to a  concurrent strep throat epidemic (doctors are still unsure, which makes this whole thing even more interesting).

So, fascinating subject, but I have to question Crosby's organisation. She starts by breaking the book into a series of patient case files - this patient, seen by that doctor, with those symptoms - but she's really telling the story of a small group of neurosurgeons and psychiatrists and such who tried to figure out the disease during the 1920s and '30s. I almost feel as though the book would have been better served by following the doctors instead of the patients - the patient stories felt a little tacked on.

The book has ample endnotes, and an extensive bibliography, but the notes are not cited in the text, which makes it hard to find the reference points. Normally, this wouldn't bother me, but I've just finished the Keegan and the Cumings, and they are both histories written by historians, so in this book, it bugged me. Especially because Crosby includes some truly juicy information in her endnotes, and you wouldn't know it from the main text. Tsk tsk. Seriously.

Also, the glossy photos towards the end of the book really add nothing.  All in all, a fair book on an exceedingly creepy and interesting topic.

Monday Library post?

Monday was, of course, Labor Day. (Labour Day in Canada). The library was, naturally, closed. Instead, I went to the beach for the last time this summer. I might get to the library on Thursday, or possibly Friday - there will be a review on Friday, never fear. (By which I mean, probably Friday, but possibly late Saturday, you know.)

Just a reminder - it's past Labor Day, so it's time to retire your straw hats and get out the felt.

Friday Review 9/3/10, belated

So, let's see. This week I finished John Keegan's World War One, but I reviewed that on Tuesday, as I suggested I would last Friday.

I also read David Coe's The Horseman's Gambit


What can I say about this? This is the second book in the "Blood of the Southlands" series, of which the third has very recently been published. I read the first some months ago, and I recalled that I liked several of the characters, so when I saw Book 3, I decided to pick up Book 2. There was a lot about the book that I liked. I liked many of Coe's primary characters - they felt real, they interacted realistically, and they handled their problems realistically. (which, given that about half of them wield immense magical power, is saying something...) I liked the politics of about half of the continent - Coe has a continent, a sub-continent, actually, divided between some sovereign city states and a bunch of less established nomadic tribes. I liked the city state politics. The wandering tribes seemed unrealistically inflexible in their politics - they were very much "kill the intruders on grounds of associated guilt", and that felt a little over the top. The fact that the cause of the guilt was a magically created plague of genocidal proportions mitigates the reaction a little, but I think that Coe's "good" characters were too inclined to see both sides of the situation while his "bad" characters were too inclined to see things in black and white. I have no problem with these views being characterized, but they should be better spread out.

As I finished the book, I recalled what I didn't like about the first book - it ended abruptly, with no conclusion - because, of course, Coe is writing a trilogy (possibly longer), and wants readers to continue into the next book, but it's possible to have satisfying conclusions within the trilogy while allowing the trilogy to transcend the conclusions. That was my major problem with this book.

A minor problem - the names were too apostrophe infected. A minor quibble, perhaps.

Monday Library Post, belated - 8/30/10 + Keegan Review

So, I did make it to the library yesterday, but somehow I did not make it to the blog. Two books to add to my pile this week:

James Benn - Rag and Bone
This is the fifth of Benn's Billy Boyle WWII mysteries. They follow the career of Billy Boyle, Irish-American and distant cousin of Eisenhower. Family connections place Boyle on Eisenhower's staff, because it's supposed to be a safe place to ride out the war. Instead, Eisenhower uses Boyle to clean up difficult messes. Benn has done some very good research for these books, and includes a lovely author's note with each to explain where the history comes from and where he has stretched things a little. I think this one will almost certainly have to be near the end of the series, as Boyle is involved in looking into the Katyn Forest massacre, which didn't come out until near the end of the war. Also, I think I may well have missed one, and so will need to go back and see if I can find Evil for Evil.


Alex Archer - The Spirit Banner
If you were reading during my trip to DC last month, you recognize the author of this - this is another of the Rogue Angel books, and I'm reading it to see if the formula for the series holds up - also, does Ms. Creed continue to substitute large quantities of food for sex? Maybe not a question for the ages, but certainly a question for an hour or so of reading...

_______________

Review of:

John Keegan - The First World War
Keegan's book is considered to be one of the best works on the war as a whole, and I think it deserves that accolade.  Keegan is an excellent historian, military, popular, or otherwise.  This book is exceedingly well researched and cited, and yet remains accessible to most readers.  Keegan does use some unusual sentence constructions, not quite passive voice, but convoluted twisting of the subject and verb. Not all the way through the book, because that would make the whole thing unreadable, but every once in a while there will be this odd sentence that Keegan has dropped in the reader's path, like a land mine. A thing to watch out for.

Keegan also uses very long chapters - the book is over 400 pages long, and there are only 10 chapters. Each chapter has some subdivisions, but it does make it hard to find organic stopping points in the work. I don't know if this is a flaw, necessarily, but it might be off putting to a purely casual reader.

It would be tragic if a casual reader, upon encountering one of Keegan's odd sentences, or perusing the book, found the length of the chapters off putting, because, by and large, Keegan's work is beautifully written. His descriptions of battles are clear, his descriptions of politics and wrangling between the authors of the war are more so.  His portrayal of the soldiers is sympathetic, and his portrayal of their commanding officers, while less sympathetic, is not as nasty as some other historians of the First World War.  This is, indeed, a point which Keegan is quick to make - in several of his periodic historiographical digressions, Keegan points out that the commanders in the war, especially the top generals, have not been well treated by history.  Keegan does not go out of his way to salvage the reputation of generals like Haig and Joffre, but nor does he go out of his way to savage them - refreshing.

This book abounds with short digressions, historiographical and otherwise.  While I have, in past reviews, complained that books were too short to contain such digressions, this is certainly not the case with Keegan.  This is a massive book - as one might expect, given the scope of the conflict that Keegan is attempting to cover - and he uses the space masterfully, expanding his points carefully and clarifying areas where he thinks readers might get lost.

Even given the length of this book, there is room for more. Keegan is a British historian, and so the British Army is given pride of place throughout the book. Historians and budding historians-to-be would be well advised to find histories of the war from a French perspective, and from the perspective of the "Dominion" powers - Canada, South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand. A German history, a Russian history, and an Italian history would also probably be a good idea.  That being said, Keegan covers all of the various and diverse theaters of the war, including the Pacific (Japanese capture of German positions in China and elsewhere) and post-Tsarist Russia (both the landing of Americans and British troops in the far North and the landing of Americans and Japanese in the Far East).  The non-standard theaters - the Mid-East, Pacific, and Russian theaters - are not covered in the same depth as the Western and Eastern fronts, but this is entirely justifiable - the fact that they are included at all is admirable.

I have only a few complaints.  The first is that, as a Canadian, I felt that the Canadian troops were given short shrift here, which probably reveals the effects of my early education more than a lack in the text. I will be seeking out a Canadian history of the war, however, to fill in the gaps for my own purposes - watch for that. Second, Keegan, or his editor, needed to include more maps! I see no particular reason that each battle described could not have had a series of small sequential maps, instead of the more general maps which were included. The maps which were included (and there were many - just not nearly enough) were clear, well drawn, and easy to read, but I would gladly have sacrificed some of the glossy photos (very nice!) for more maps, if that was what it took. Finally, I wanted more on the air war. Keegan barely mentions this aspect of the war.  My desire to read more on this topic may, again, be a reflection on my own inclinations rather than a lack in the work, but, in this case, I don't think so. Aerial combat was entirely new during WWI, and added a third dimension to the battlefield. I think there could easily have been a sub-chapter on the air war, perhaps as part of a chapter on the technology of the war - a fuller explanation of tanks, the new sorts of artillery, gas weapons, the U-boats - actually, now that I think about it, this was something that was missing from the book as well.

A brilliant book nonetheless, a fantastic place to begin an investigation of the First World War, and heartily recommended to established historians, historians in training, and the purely curious.