Author: stanprager

Back in 2011, I was visiting Philly, where my daughter lived in those days, but the timing of my trip was all about the opening day of the exhibit of the Tarim Basin mummies at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. Fans of the history of the storied Silk Road know of the Tarim Basin as once hosting a number of oases that serviced caravans in the otherwise forbidding Taklamakan Desert, now located in the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region in the People’s Republic of China. Naturally mummified, the collection of desiccated remains that was scheduled for display at the museum that day are incredibly old—some dating back about four thousand years—but what’s more astonishing is their ancestry: an isolated population of Ancient North Eurasians that once spoke Tocharian, an extinct branch of the Indo-European language family.

To put that in perspective, these days in excess of forty percent of the world—more than three billion people—speak some kind of Indo-European language, including German, Italian, Russian, French, Hindi, Bengali, Punjabi, Persian, Greek, Irish, Albanian, Lithuanian, Armenian, and the English employed in the writing of this review. Tocharian was once part of that family! It is believed that all these languages (and hundreds of others) are descended from what once was a common tongue called Proto-Indo-European (PIE).

There is no extant record of PIE, but its elements have been partially identified through linguistic reconstruction, which is a remarkable tale in itself, although perhaps a far more extraordinary one lies in tracing how it is that descendants of this proto-language are spoken today by billions of people at such distant geographies. In Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global [2025], both stories are expertly woven together in a fast-moving, well-written, if sometimes flawed narrative by science journalist Laura Spinney, which serves as a solid introduction to the global implications of Proto-Indo-European for the past and the present.

I first became intrigued by the Indo-European languages some years ago during my deep dive into the classics and the Bronze Age Mycenaean Greeks who peopled Homer’s Iliad. The Mycenaean script was first discovered (if not identified at the time) in the ruins of the Minoan Palace of Knossos on Crete in 1900 by British archaeologist Sir Arthur Evans, on tablets tagged as Linear B to distinguish it from the other, earlier script found on other tablets that were labeled as Linear A. Linear B also turned up elsewhere on the Greek mainland, but no one could decipher the strange symbols. More than a half century later, Michael Ventris and John Chadwick cracked the code and determined that Linear B was in fact a form of ancient Greek, in use by the Mycenaeans who conquered the Minoans. The Linear B syllabic script seems to have evolved from the still undeciphered Linear A, which was almost certainly Minoan and probably unrelated to Greek, and thus likely a non-Indo-European language.

There are important lessons here that have global implications. First, while the ancient Minoans and Greeks for a time utilized similar scripts, the languages recorded by these scripts were different. Second, and perhaps of even greater significance, that the Minoans learned to speak and write the Greek language of their conquerors does not imply that the two distinct peoples were otherwise related. When Greek written language reemerged after a kind of dark age that followed the collapse of the Bronze Age—one of the earliest literary works recorded was The Iliad—they wrote it down in an alphabetic script borrowed from the Phoenicians, an unrelated people who spoke Canaanite, a Semitic, non-Indo-European language. Thus, the populations that today speak Hindi, French, Albanian, or English are not by necessity genetically related to those who at one time may have overrun them and imposed an Indo-European language upon them, although they may be, and in some cases we can determine that they definitely are.

But long before this—long before there were Greeks—their Indo-European ancestors walked the earth, presumably speaking PIE. Where did they come from? We cannot be certain, but the most widely accepted theory is based upon the Kurgan hypothesis, proposed by Marija Gimbutas, which holds that nomadic pastoralists from the Pontic-Caspian steppe (now southern Ukraine and Russia) moved south and west in the 4th millennium BCE and imposed their culture and language on Neolithic farmers in their paths. Kurgans are the ancient burial mounds archaeologists have linked to these steppe nomads. (Gimbutas’ later reputation suffered due to her fixation on a belief in an “Old Europe” matriarchal civilization dominated by a life-affirming Mother Goddess, which has been panned by archaeologists for lacking evidence, but the central tenets of the Kurgan hypothesis have withstood vigorous scrutiny in subsequent studies.)

Her work was revised and refined by anthropologist David Anthony, whose magnificent book—The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World [2007]—I read some years ago. Anthony argues that steppe nomad warriors, armed with domesticated horses and the advanced technology of wheeled vehicles, dominated Neolithic cultures in Europe, Anatolia, and beyond, spreading the proto-Indo-European language across continents. Paleogenetics has confirmed the likelihood that Gimbutas and Anthony were on to something, as DNA analysis has demonstrated the presence of a signature Y-chromosome (passed down by males) in modern Europeans, notably the Y-DNA haplogroup R1b that is traceable to steppe nomads. Evidence of mtDNA (the mitochondrial DNA passed down by females) in contemporary populations indicate that migrations of women from the steppes also occurred. Modern Indians are of mixed ancestry, but there too there is no mistaking the paternally inherited Y-chromosome that steppe nomads introduced thousands of years ago.

This was of course not the last time that steppe nomads put their mark on civilizations east and west—think Scythians, Huns, Turks, and Mongols—which certainly puts a lie to the “great man” historiography that dominated the textbooks of my youth, and solidly rebukes the likes of Will Durant, who with some arrogance once pronounced that civilizations rise on stoicism and fall on epicureanism. Really? How about climate change, pandemics—and invasions by steppe nomads?

Spinney deserves high marks for her review of the Kurgan hypothesis and competing theories. She is also on solid ground as she walks the reader through how it is that linguists can be certain that more than four hundred languages spoken by billions of people today—as well as a number of extinct branches of the Indo-European language family—are indeed related and must have descended from the PIE originally spoken by steppe nomads. To that end, she walks the reader through the homology of Indo-European languages to identify their linguistic kinship and common ancestry with PIE, including the correspondence of sounds, similar grammatical structures, and especially the shared vocabulary found, for instance, in ancient Sanskrit and Latin, and their modern descendants like Hindi and French.

Vocabulary that shares common ancestor words from PIE—but may sound altered today due to regular sound changes—are called Indo-European cognates. A popular example is the English “mother,” which is in Latin mater, Greek mētēr, Sanskrit mātṛ, German Mutter, Russian mat’—which share the “*mater-” PIE root. There are many other examples, including “father” which has the PIE root “*pater-” and appears as Latin pater, Sanskrit pitṛ́, Greek patḗr, French père, Spanish padre, Armenian hayr, and Irish athair. A hint of how these two words might have been pronounced in the very distant past may be detected in today’s Lithuanian—the most archaic living Indo-European language with the least sound changes, considered closest to the original PIE—with mother rendered as “motina” and father as “tėvas,” preserving in this “conservative” East Baltic tongue older sounds that changed, for instance, in Latin and English. It is not surprising that words like “mother” and “father” should remain closer to their ancient PIE roots, but there are many other examples of such cognates, although due to sound changes over thousands of years, some may not correspond as elegantly as others.

Indo-European languages are divided into either centum or satem languages according to how the sounds of the dorsal consonants (“K,” “G,” and “Y”) evolved. At one time, it was believed that there was a neat divide between western and eastern languages with centum and satem, respectively, but then Tocharian was discovered and it turned out to be something like a centum tongue, even if it’s a kind of special case. It’s complicated.

Indo-European is further categorized by its branches, and language divergence began very early on with the oldest branches of Anatolian (Hittite) and Tocharian, and later splits into Hellenic (Greek) and Indo-Iranian (Vedic Sanskrit). To my mind, perhaps most fascinating is the number of extinct languages that were once derived from PIE. The Tocharian of Central Asia is one, of course, which has no modern descendants, and actually the whole Tocharian branch is defunct. Another is its earliest, Hittite, which dates back to 1750 BCE. The Hittites, who once dominated Anatolia, modern Turkey, are famously referenced in the Hebrew Torah, and are notable in the archaeological record for the massive chariot warfare that occurred circa 1274 BCE between armies led by Hittite King Muwatalli II and the Egyptian Pharoah Ramesses II at the Battle of Kadesh, located in modern day Syria, which ended in stalemate and the world’s first recorded peace treaty! The Hittite Empire fell with the collapse of the Bronze Age, and eventually their language disappeared, as well.

Like Tocharian, the entire Anatolian branch—that once included Hittite as well as other tongues such as Luwian, Lydian, and Lycian—is entirely extinct, with no successor languages. Surviving main branches—many of which also include now vanished languages—are Indo-Iranian, Germanic, Italic, Hellenic, Balto-Slavic, Celtic, Armenian, and Albanian. Of these, the largest belongs to the 1.7 billion who speak Hindi, Persian, Urdu, and Kurdish, among the more than three hundred Indo-Iranian languages. While reading Proto, I got a kick out of the fact that the guys I buy beer from at my local package store hail from the Indian state of Gujarat, and speak Gujarati—an Indo-European language! There are close to four hundred fifty living languages in the Indo-European family today, but also more than eight hundred others that no longer exist.

Proto serves as a fine introductory course on Indo-European languages and their shared PIE ancestry, although it turns into a kind of travelogue as Spinney takes the reader on a journey to various spots across the globe where IE tongues are spoken, looking to the past and present with captivating excursions into history, archaeology, linguistics, genetics, and culture. On the one hand, this makes the book far more readable—she is a very talented writer—but will leave some wanting more, especially as she exercises the author’s prerogative to devote more emphasis to certain branches of IE than to others.

There are, unfortunately, a couple of glaring errors. The first is when she repeats the discredited notion that the volcanic eruption circa 1628 BCE of Thera (modern Santorini) brought on the collapse of the Minoan civilization, and opened the door to the Mycenean Greeks [p238]. Classicists know that while the catastrophe at Thera significantly weakened the Minoan thalassocracy, Mycenaeans did not conquer Crete until circa 1450 BCE—nearly 180 years later! Worse, Spinny repeats the long-debunked canard that the Egyptian pyramids were constructed by slaves [p.195] rather than skilled, paid laborers—a notion imagined in technicolor by Cecil B. DeMille but repudiated by historians. These are, of course, just two blemishes on an otherwise fine work, but nevertheless made me want to fact-check some of her other material.

Still, those of us who thrive on breaking news in science and history will derive a great deal of enjoyment from Proto, which balances content with readability such that there is an  appeal to an academic as well as a general audience—which is an achievement worth an underscore! But those with a focus on politics rather than scholarship might not be on board. Hindu nationalists firmly reject any connection to outside cultural influences, and vehemently deny that Sanskrit and Hindi are Indo-European in origin. Perhaps they share the conceit of the ancient Athenians, who likewise imagined themselves as autochthonous?

There are political sensitivities in the People’s Republic of China, as well. Turning back to my visit to Philadelphia for the opening day exhibit of “Secrets of the Silk Road” and the Tarim mummies: in the end, at the very last minute, to my great disappointment, the Chinese government yanked permission to display the mummies; paper cut-outs of the body forms were substituted. It was never stated out loud, but we all knew the reasons were purely political. The region where the Tocharian-speaking North Eurasians once roamed was now home to the often persecuted Muslim Uyghur minority population. Any challenge to the myth of the homogeneity of a single ancient Chinese people and culture in the wider geography of the PRC is a source of anxiety to the totalitarian regime. Apparently, the double-whammy of Turkic speaking Uyghurs and archaic Indo-Europeans was just too much for the Chinese Communist Party, and they pulled the plug on showcasing the Tocharian mummies.

Later, there was a change of heart, and the mummies were restored to their exhibit cases, but by then I was hundreds of miles away and never got to see them. Yet, that episode hardly dulled my interest in the Tarim mummies, nor the Indo-European language family, and in the last fifteen years I have read fairly deeply about both. Proto is only my latest!

On June 23, 2023, as the world watched with mouths collectively agape, longtime Vladimir Putin associate Yevgeny Prigozhin, leader of the notorious paramilitary force known as the Wagner Group, mounted a rebellion against the Russian military leadership over its fumbling prosecution of the war in Ukraine. Wagner mercenaries captured Rostov-on-Don almost unopposed and began a slow advance towards Moscow.  This was not only the most significant challenge to Putin’s increasingly authoritarian rule, but the most consequential threat to the legitimacy of the post-Soviet state in the three decades since Boris Yeltsin used tanks to shutter the Duma to forestall his own impeachment. Then, as suddenly as it began, it was over. Prigozhin called off the mutiny, and all criminal charges were dropped as he agreed to relocate Wagner forces to Belarus. Not long after, it was reported that Putin hosted Prigozhin at the Kremlin and fences were mended among the old allies, but few believed that would be the end of the story. So, on August 23^rd—exactly two months to the day since the rebellion launched—perhaps it came as a surprise only to Prigozhin when the business jet carrying him and his associates exploded north of Moscow.

So who was Yevgeny Prigozhin? What was his actual relationship with Vladimir Putin? What role did the Wagner Group play as an extension of Russian power, not only in Ukraine but in Africa and the Middle East?  And how could the thuggish ex-con paramilitary Prigozhin rise to such prominence to make international observers—albeit briefly—wonder aloud if he would be the instrument to topple the Putin regime? In a remarkable achievement, Putin’s Sledgehammer: The Wagner Group and Russia’s Collapse into Mercenary Chaos [2025], international expert and Arizona State Professor of Practice Candace Rondeaux brilliantly addresses these questions and much more in an extremely well-written if dense account that is at once a kind of dual biography of Prigozhin and Putin as well as a nuanced history of post-Yeltsin Russia.

It turns out that the intersecting avenues of (pardon the inevitable alliteration) Prigozhin and Putin were to be found on the  streets of St. Petersburg, formerly Leningrad. It was there that teenage petty thief Yevgeny Prigozhin grew up to be a volent gang member who spent nearly a decade in prison before he found himself selling hot dogs alongside his mother in an open air market. Both street savvy and entrepreneurial at a fortuitous moment when a fierce, nascent capitalism served as tsar of the new Russian state, Prigozhin turned burgeoning profits first into the grocery store business, then, along with a pair of new partners, expanded into a variety of other enterprises that included the city’s first casinos. The restaurant business was next. Here the duality that marked his character was most evident—he was at once markedly intelligent and adept in his every endeavor, as well as coarse and cruel when it suited him. He hired strippers to lure in diners before word got around that the menu was superlative. And he casually meted out violence to employees who failed to live up to his expectations. Prigozhin redefined upscale dining when he remodeled a rusting hulk into a floating restaurant known as New Island that became one of St. Petersburg’s most fashionable eateries. New Island hosted key state dinners for Vladimir Putin, French president Jacques Chirac, and US president George W. Bush. Prigozhin personally served Putin on more than one occasion, which earned him the playful sobriquet of “Putin’s Chef.”

Putin, the former KGB agent who later remade Russia into his own fiefdom while dismantling the nation’s fledgling democracy of all but its most superficial forms, could be said to be as much of a thug as Prigozhin on many levels, even if a more polished and articulate one. Both St. Petersburg natives who made good, Putin went to university and Prigozhin went to prison. You can at once envision Prigozhin with bloody knuckles and Putin filing a nail while ordering a rival tossed out a window. The end result is the same. The two men most likely first encountered one another when the ex-con was in his casino business phase and Putin—who had held a number of significant political positions in the city—was serving as chairman of the supervisory board for casino gambling. Over time, they grew to be close associates, and even friends of a sort, with Prigozhin growing fabulously wealthy off government contracts awarded to his catering business. As Putin evolved from president to autocrat, he came to govern Russia much like an organized crime family, with his oligarchs—whose fortunes depended upon his favor—acting as loyal capos. Corruption clung to every corridor of Russian government and society. It suited Prigozhin well: he became a jet-setter who owned his own jets, and he moved into a compound that sported both a basketball court and a helicopter pad. And he diversified: some of his riches were pumped into Prigozhin’s so-called “Internet Research Agency,” a Russian troll factory later infamous for US election interference as it promoted Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton’s candidacy through a web of social media bots.

But it was as head of the Wagner Group that Prigozhin cemented his stature as a key oligarch closely aligned with Putin. A private military group that offered Russia plausible deniability in covert actions abroad, Wagner operated ruthlessly in geographies as remote from the Kremlin as Africa and the Middle East. Many found it impossible to unsee the widely circulated 2017 video of Wagner mercenaries first torturing and then using a sledgehammer to beat to death a deserter from the Syrian army. The sledgehammer became an unofficial Wagner emblem. But long before Syria, Wagner filled the ranks of the so-called “little green men” of professional soldiers with no insignia who appeared suddenly in 2014 in Crimea and in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine, euphemistically identified by Moscow as organic separatists eager to secede and join the Russian Federation.

Putin’s brand of neofascist irredentism drew heavily on Hitler’s playbook. The Austrian Anschluss was almost effortlessly replayed in Crimea. And the Donbas would be the new Sudetenland. Meanwhile, Prigozhin and his Wagner Group would be the poorly disguised blunt instruments on the ground—as well as on plenty of other grounds, where shadow wars were conducted on distant continents and Russian power could be unofficially and mercilessly enforced. But absorbing eastern Ukraine proved a stubborn objective. And the West responded with economic sanctions rather than appeasement. Perhaps Poland 1939 would make for a better model?

On February 24, 2022, tanks rolled in, an act of unprovoked aggression not seen in Europe since World War II. But Russian ambitions turned out to be overoptimistic, to say the least. Putin expected to occupy Kyiv in a matter of days, but that was not to be. Ukraine held out. Joe Biden was president, not Donald Trump; Europe and NATO stood firm. But this spawned new opportunities for Prigozhin: he could rip off the mask, take Wagner out of the closet, and operate freely in Ukraine with his mercenaries as well as convicts recruited from Russia’s penal system. Yet, the war dragged on. Gains were few, Russian losses were magnified. Military effectiveness was handicapped by a culture of corruption not dissimilar to that which marked the rest of the state. Frustration fueled Prigozhin’s conviction that the stalemate might be broken if he was in charge, if only things could be done his way. He developed a heightened sense of self-importance. He clashed with high echelons of the military machine as well as with rival Russian nationalists. He made a lot of enemies. Still, Putin gave his old friend a lot of leash—until the day that Prigozhin came to believe his own bullshit. Putin’s chef proved to be the recipe for his own undoing.

Putin’s Sledgehammer is a magnificent book, but its inherent complexity and the level of detail it contains hardly makes for an easy read. I had the advantage of coming to it after previously poring through volumes by Peter Conradi on Russia, Thomas De Waal on the Caucuses, Serhii Plokhy on Ukraine, and Timothy Snyder on geopolitics. A talented writer whose work is based upon impeccable research, Candace Rondeaux ranks among those esteemed authors, but her work is not for beginners. Maps and a timeline would have been helpful. There’s also a dizzying array of characters, organizations, acronyms, etc. that are hard to keep track off, especially for those unfamiliar with Russian names and places. She does include a somewhat comprehensive table of principal players, but because these are arranged by association rather than alphabetically it is less helpful than it should be. Still, these are quibbles. This book will likely not only come to be considered the definitive biography of Yevgeny Prigozhin, but will certainly be counted as an extremely valuable contribution to the historiography in ongoing studies of the contemporary Russian state.

I have previously reviewed these other related books that are recommended reading:

Review of: Who Lost Russia?: How the World Entered a New Cold War, by Peter Conradi 

Review of: The Caucasus: An Introduction, by Thomas De Waal

Review of: The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine, by Serhii Plokhy

Review of: The Russo-Ukrainian War: The Return of History, by Serhii Plokhy

Review of: The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America, by Timothy Snyder

Wednesday, June 17,1881, a train had to leave station A at 3 A.M. in order to reach station B at 11 P.M.; just as the train was about to depart, however, an order came that the train had to reach station B by 7 P.M. Who is capable of loving longer, a man or a woman?

That is “Question 7,” excerpted from a little-known early short story by Anton Chekhov entitled “Questions Posed by a Mad Mathematician.” Of course, there can be no answer to such an absurd question.

At 8:15 AM on August 6, 1945, the Enola Gay’s bombardier Major Thomas Ferebee released a lever 31,000 feet over Hiroshima and forty-three seconds later some “60,000 or 80,000 or 140,000” people (no one really knows) died. At that same moment, eighty miles to the south  of Ground Zero, Arch Flanagan—who had miraculously survived a stretch as slave laborer on the infamous Burma Death Railway—was “pushing carriages of rock up long dark tunnels” in a coal mine under the Inland Sea.

Now in his fourth year as a Japanese POW, physically and psychologically broken, the skeletal creature that still endured fully expected death to take him soon. He could hardly know then that the atomic bomb that killed 60,000 or 80,000 or 140,000 people that morning would mean that he would be spared. Nor could he have imagined that about sixteen years later a son would be born to him who would go on to become an internationally acclaimed author and who would win the Man Booker Prize for his novel The Narrow Road to the Deep North, inspired by Arch’s brutal experience on the Burma railway. There is much that is unknowable in life, but it is almost certain that if not for the bomb nicknamed “Little Boy” that would mean death for 60,000 or 80,000 or 140,000 Japanese souls, Tasmanian novelist Richard Flanagan would never have been born. Were the lives of Arch Flanagan (or Richard Flanagan, for that matter) or the hundreds of thousands of other Japanese and European and American and Australian survivors of the war worth the sacrifice of the 60,000 or 80,000 or 140,000 human beings who perished at Hiroshima on that day? Of course, there can be no answer to such an absurd question.

But that paradox clearly haunted the author, and it informs every single page of his own Question 7 [2023], a mesmerizing literary tour de force that is styled as a memoir but is in every way so very much more than that. One reviewer branded it “genre-bending,” and while I am ever reluctant to borrow from others when composing my own reviews, I surely cannot improve upon that. But then, as someone who has read every novel penned by Richard Flanagan can attest, genre-bending is what defines his art, from my first encounter with him in Gould’s Book of Fish [2001]—which I described elsewhere as “a stunningly original and brilliant blend of satire, heartache, love, cruelty, comedy, and existential tragedy, tossed with a superb use of magical realism … think William Faulkner, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and John Irving, all stirring the same pot with different shaped spoons”—to the more mainstream literary fiction of The Narrow Road to the Deep North [2013], a historical novel focused on extremes of brutality and endurance that turns out after all to be a love story that likewise manages to qualify as a magnificent achievement.

At this point, it’s only fair to issue a kind of spoiler alert, because it seems to me that it would be nearly impossible to do justice to Flanagan’s work here without giving much of the story away, which yet sounds a bit weird because this is mostly nonfiction that hardly suggests a cliffhanger at the end. I say “mostly nonfiction” because while this is essentially an autobiography, the author admits to a certain literary license here and there. And if I state that it is “essentially an autobiography” I must immediately contradict myself because in fact it steps far beyond memoir to history, literature, and nuclear physics, as well as speculative challenges to notions of both teleology and existentialism that somehow manages not to reinforce nihilism. And there we are back to genre-bending! By the way, Flanagan never once cites schools of philosophy, though his musings repeatedly compel the mind of the reader to go there. He also never refers to quantum mechanics, but as I turned the pages I could not help but think of quantum probabilities and the “many-worlds” theory that insists that anything that can occur actually does occur elsewhere in the multiverse but is hidden from us because by observing an event we manifest only our own reality and obscure all the others. In a different take on the familiar “butterfly effect,” I suppose, in at least one of those worlds there is and never has been a Richard Flanagan.

It would hardly be giving too much away to point out that Flanagan plucked the title for his book from that brain-bender in the Chekhov short story. That he would turn to a corner of literature so utterly obscure for this purpose only underscores the eclectic range of the author’s intellect. Nearly as unfamiliar to most is The World Set Free, a 1914 novel by polymath H. G. Wells that predicted the development of the atomic bomb as a weapon of war. As Flanagan tells it, this sci-fi flight of fancy was written in part during a period that saw Wells distracted by his infatuation with the decades-younger journalist Rebecca West. Hardly as successful as his prior bestsellers, The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds (if indeed more prescient!), The World Set Free was largely forgotten—except by atomic scientist Leó Szilárd, who, upon reading it in the early 1930s, became obsessed by the implications, which later sparked an epiphany that had him conceive the concept of a chain reaction that could lead to nuclear detonation! As it turned out, Szilárd became part of the group that was to persuade FDR to launch a race to develop the bomb before Hitler could do so, as well as a key figure in the Manhattan Project that was to result in the creation of “Little Boy” and the deaths of 60,000 or 80,000 or 140,000 men, women, and children in Hiroshima in August, 1945—but also spare the life of Arch Flanagan, and thus make possible the birth of Richard Flanagan some years later.

Talk about the butterfly effect!

Despite the spoilers, there is a good deal more to Question 7, and it will definitely make you think. Like Gould’s Book of Fish—which I reread immediately after I turned the final page—I will likely read this one again at some point. There really is so much to ponder in what is after all a rather short book, given its dramatic scope. I especially enjoyed his treatment of the steamy relationship that arose between Wells and West, literary license and all, which reminded me a bit of his tortured portrait of Charles Dickens in Flanagan’s Wanting [2008], another outstanding effort. He also revisits the genocide that led to the almost complete extermination of aborigines by white settlers in what was then the convict colony of Van Diemen’s Land, a topic that runs through many of his books, the climate change driven fires that have forever disfigured the Tasmania that he knew in his youth, and his own near-death experience in a drowning incident that would later beget the substance of his superlative first novel, Death of a River Guide [1994].

Much as in Cormac McCarthy’s fiction, the universal themes that characterize Flanagan’s work frequently identify the prevalence of cruelty and evil in the world while ever holding out the hope—no matter how tiny—that love and compassion could ultimately prevail. In Question 7, there’s the compelling account of the all too real life encounters between the author and certain elderly Japanese men who had, many years before, once been the very sadistic camp guards who had cruelly victimized Arch Flanagan. They now seemed like such nice, older gentlemen. At the site of the mine where Arch once wasted away, local guides denied that slave labor ever existed, a potent reminder that history can not only be forgotten but intentionally scrubbed—a process sadly in progress across the United States today.

Arch Flanagan never fully recovered from his trauma as a prisoner of war, but he managed to live on to the ripe old age of ninety-eight, to hear his son relate back to him the stories of visits with other old men who had once viciously abused him. He passed away on the same day his now famous son confided that the final draft of The Narrow Road to the Deep North was complete. What does any of this actually mean? Of course, there can be no answer to such absurd questions—but we must nevertheless keep asking. At least, that’s my takeaway after closing the cover of Question 7.

I struggled to locate the text of “Questions Posed by a Mad Mathematician” [1882] on the web, and finally resorted to buying the collection, The Undiscovered Chekhov: Forty-Three New Stories [1998], in order to read it. At less than two pages long, the story proved anticlimactic. But I did get to read all the other questions. The final one, “Question 8,” is my favorite: “My mother-in-law is 75, and my wife 42. What time is it?”

I reviewed other Richard Flanagan novels here:

Review of: The Narrow Road to the Deep North, by Richard Flanagan

Review of: Wanting, by Richard Flanagan

Review of: Death of a River Guide, by Richard Flanagan

Review of: First Person: A Novel, by Richard Flanagan

Review of: The Sound of One Hand Clapping, by Richard Flanagan

It has been said the United States is a nation of immigrants that despises immigrants. At first glance that seems counterintuitive and smacks of hyperbole, but simmering beneath the satire lies more than a single kernel of truth. Benjamin Franklin worried that German immigrants might alter the character of the Republic for the worse. In 1798, just a decade after the Constitution was ratified, the Alien and Sedition Acts were passed. A massive influx of the Irish fleeing starvation during the potato famine fueled a nativist panic in the 1850s that brought the Know Nothing Party to national prominence. The heinous Chinese Exclusion Act was passed in 1882. Twenty years later, Woodrow Wilson complained of the coming of “multitudes of men of the lowest class from the south of Italy and men of the meaner sort out of Hungary and Poland … as if the countries of the south of Europe were disburdening themselves of the more sordid and hapless elements of their population.” Such sentiments were codified into law with the Immigration Act of 1924 that set strict national quotas not abolished until the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. Sixty years later, the news is dominated by ICE roundups across the country and detainment centers like Alligator Alcatraz, with the president even citing a statute from the Alien and Sedition Acts to justify his widescale crackdown on the undocumented.

I was long familiar with this history, but what was entirely new to me was that just a few years after Wilson was bemoaning the “meaner sorts” from certain parts of Europe flooding American shores to the east, on the west coast there was a full scale race riot in Bellingham, Washington, about ninety miles north of Seattle, that saw mobs violently physically assault and eventually expel hundreds of immigrants from India who had been working at lumber mills in the vicinity. Nor was I cognizant of the fact—although perhaps I should have guessed—that in this Jim Crow era citizenship was largely out of reach for South Asian emigres because white supremacy jealously guarded that privilege. I was also surprised to learn that the same University of California Berkeley that was the hotbed for student antiwar sentiment in the 1960s was in the early 1900s home to an increasingly radicalized community of Indian expatriates who, while struggling against discrimination in the US, became laser-focused upon overthrowing British rule back home on the subcontinent, spawning the revolutionary Ghadar Movement. And I was completely unaware that the machinations of Ghadar operatives came to jeopardize the neutrality enforced by now-President Wilson as World War I raged in Europe, while Germans and Brits competed to alternately court or persecute these insurgents abroad. Finally, I had no clue that the activities of these Indians became one of the key ingredients that drove passage of the lesser-known Immigration Act of 1917 that established an “Asiatic Barred Zone,” and banned so-called “undesirables” from entering the country.

That’s a lot to unpack, but Scott Miller proves more than up to the task in his latest work, Let My Country Awake: Indian Revolutionaries in America and the Fight to Overthrow the British Raj [scheduled for publication in October2025], a well-researched, highly readable, and fast-moving account that manages—in less than three hundred pages—to brilliantly capture a long neglected if pivotal series of events that touched three continents with some consequence. Moreover, Miller’s critical eye for detail and talented prose masterfully reaches back more than a century to breathe life into colorful characters who walk the earth no longer. These include Indian activists Lala Har Dayal and Taraknath Das, the villainous Canadian immigration agent William Hopkinson, noted anarchist Emma Goldman, pioneering female jurist Annette Adams, assistant attorney general Charles Warren, and a whole host of British and German diplomats and spies. Likewise, episodes long forgotten or at least neglected elsewhere are skillfully slotted back into the historical narrative to fill in some highly significant blanks that speak to the recurring fever of rising nativism in North America, as well as a pre-Gandhi Indian nationalism that was fierce and transoceanic.

The prevailing wisdom has long been that British imperialism represented a kinder and gentler subjugation for its inhabitants than they might have suffered had they been conquered by the Belgians, French or Germans. Perhaps. But also perhaps not. Tasmanian novelist Richard Flanagan would remind you that British colonists directed the genocide that resulted in the near extermination of aborigines in what was then Van Dieman’s Land. British soldiers used machine guns to mow down thousands of Ndebele warriors in southern Africa in the 1890s. Nonwhite combatants clearly were not treated with the kind of “civilized restraint” that would have been afforded fellow Europeans during and after hostilities.

This was also true in India, occupied by England since the eighteenth century. In the process of putting down the Sepoy (AKA Indian) Rebellion of 1857, the British killed more than 800,000 Indians! Miller notes that a popular method of executing Indian rebels was a technique termed “blowing from a gun” that had the condemned strapped to the mouth of a cannon, which when fired created a grisly public spectacle as the body was blown to bits. In 1858, India was placed under direct crown rule, known as the British Raj, which endured until independence came in 1947. But these atrocities were never forgotten by the Indian people, nor its activists, at home or abroad.

Because we were allied with England back then, and remain favorably disposed to the UK today, it is easy to forget that despite our antipathy towards the wanton aggression and brutal conduct of Germany in World War I, taking sides was not such a clear cut process for the subjects of British colonial rule. Sir Roger Casement, a British diplomat famous for helping to expose the inhumanity that reigned over King Leopold’s Belgian Congo, was also an Irish nationalist who was stripped of his knighthood and then hanged for treason during the war. As we learn more about the routine oppression of Indians under the thumb of the Raj, it is not at all surprising that Ghadar conspirators would welcome collaboration with German agents in the US to help achieve their ends, while the British naturally would do everything they could to derail such efforts.

It is the unlikely confluence of people and events in the United States, Canada, Europe, and the Indian subcontinent as global war is breaking out that makes Let My Country Awake such a fascinating tale—especially since much of what Miller covers here is hardly familiar ground. Apparently, it was once just as obscure to the author himself: it turns out that a random headline reporting the Bellingham race riot unexpectedly spotted at a museum display planted the seeds for what evolved into this book. As such, I do attach some comfort to the fact that I am not the only student of American history wondering at my own ignorance in this regard. On the other hand, just like the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921, incidents such as these had a way of being overlooked in the textbooks assigned to me back in the day.

Miller, a former international correspondent for the Wall Street Journal and other outlets,  knows how to take a good story and run with it, as he did in The President and the Assassin: McKinley, Terror and Empire at the Dawn of the American Century [2011], which also established his reputation chronicling history that meets the standards of academia while appealing to a much broader audience. In his latest effort, as a critic I struggled to find fault, but I could detect few flaws other than in the book’s title—plucked from a poem by Rabindranath Tagore—which while relevant strikes me as a somewhat dull designation for such a vibrant, exciting work! Spoiler alert: Ghadar does not succeed in toppling the Raj, but along the way the author treats us to plenty of action and intrigue marked by espionage, plots and counterplots, cloakroom diplomacy, courtroom drama, and assassinations.

The unstated irony in Let My Country Awake is that few residents of the United States—which had fought two wars for independence against Britain—found sympathy in the plight of the Indians chafing under the weight of British colonialism. Nor were they welcomed as refugees. Instead, as people of color with an alien culture and religion, they were mostly shunned and detested—or violently driven off as at Bellingham in 1907. In the course of the narrative, Miller relates the unsettling tale of Bhagat Singh Thind, a US Army veteran who skirted customary prohibitions against naturalization by arguing that as a Sikh high-caste Indian he was effectively white. Thind attempted to coopt white supremacy and at first he succeeded. Citizenship was granted, but then stripped away in a subsequent Supreme Court ruling that Thind was not really white and non-white immigrants were ineligible to be American citizens, which also resulted in retroactively revoking the naturalization of more than seventy other Indians.

There was a time when I believed that we were moving away from all that as a nation—Thind actually had his citizenship restored in 1935—but I no longer hold that view. Still, whether you choose to hang on to optimism or pessimism when it comes to such things, whether your glass is half-full or half-empty or simply shattered, the historical record matters. The more you know about the past, the better you can perceive the present, and the more it can inform your vision of what lies ahead, however you conceive it. To that end then, this is an important book that I would urge you to read, as simply a chapter of our past, or perhaps as a parable for our future.

NOTE: This review is based upon an uncorrected proof of this book issued prior to publication.

I reviewed a previous book by Scott Miller here: Review of the President and the Assassin, by Scott Miller

I have reviewed several novels by Richard Flanagan, including this one: Death of A River Guide, by Richard Flanagan

For more about Roger Casement, I recommend this book by Adam Hochschild, reviewed here: King Leopold’s Ghost, by Adam Hochschild

Some years ago, I published a journal article about the Know Nothings, which can be accessed here: Strange Bedfellows, by Stan Prager

Imagine a vast, deep, dense, forbidding swamp of tea-colored water and mud and patches of dry ground, blisteringly hot, thick with populations of alligators and panthers and poisonous snakes and legions of biting insects and all manner of various other perils. Now imagine you are an enslaved person, compelled to long hours of punishing labor, routinely beaten, likely scarred, maybe branded, perhaps raped, subject to helplessly watch your loved ones sold away from you forever, with no hope for any future except more of the same. Then imagine that swamp as your salvation. You don’t have to imagine any of it because at one time it was all very real.

It was the Great Dismal Swamp, a geography shared by Virginia and North Carolina that was in the antebellum about two thousand square miles—roughly the size of Delaware!—which indeed proved the salvation for thousands upon thousands of the enslaved, across many generations, because it represented freedom, a certain haven out of reach of the white slavecatchers armed with rifles and vicious bloodhounds who were in terror of entering the swamp and ever again emerging alive. Rather than an underground railroad to distant places where slavery did not exist, this was instead a kind of tunnel into a fantastical alien territory where slavery could not exist. The enslaved men, women, and children who chose this course or were driven to it were called maroons, and if they survived they would be forever free.

All but forgotten, echoes of their seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth century stories, long lost to history, are gradually being recovered with twenty-first century methods, through archaeological excavations, scientific analysis, and historical scholarship. Much remains unknown, yet unexplored, but a fascinating chronicle of what we have learned or can at least surmise can be found between the covers of Dismal Freedom: A History of the Maroons of the Great Dismal Swamp [2022], by J. Brent Morris, an extremely well-written study of a place and its peoples most Americans probably never knew existed.

I had a peripheral awareness of marronage—the self-emancipation of the enslaved who fled to live in the wilds—elsewhere in the hemisphere, but no idea that the process was so prevalent in the American south, nor that the numbers were so large. Exact figures are impossible to ascertain, but it seems that many thousands of fugitives and their descendants lived in the Great Dismal Swamp. Some estimates run as high as fifty thousand! That kind of scale demands far more attention than traditional studies have granted, which is what makes this fine work by Morris so valuable to students of the antebellum.

But I might never have come to it at all had I not first attended a presentation by David Silkenat entitled “Slavery and the Environment in the American South” at the Civil War Institute (CWI) 2023 Summer Conference at Gettysburg College—a lecture I nearly skipped because I thought it might be dull.  I could not have been more wrong: Silkenat’s skills at the podium are equal to his talents as a historian, and I sat captivated by his exploration of how much better adapted the enslaved were to their respective environments than their brutal white masters could have conceived. This empowered them to supplement their often meager rations by hunting and foraging after hours—as well as flee to marronage if there were wild lands nearby. But the true epiphany for me was when he put focus on the intricate mechanisms of the societies that developed and endured in the wildest and most massive space to host maroon colonies in the south: the Great Dismal Swamp. When his talk concluded, I picked up a copy of his book—Scars on the Land: An Environmental History of Slavery in the American South—and started in on it right away.

Marronage only represents a small slice of Scars on the Land, but there’s a story in it that affected me deeply. Silkenat cites the memoir of the formerly enslaved Charles Ball, which relates the tragic tale of his encounter with a naked and filthy runaway named Paul who had fled a beating to a nearby swamp. Paul’s escape was handicapped by a heavy iron collar around his neck that was fastened with bells to help discourage escape, which Ball attempted to remove, without success. When Ball returned a week later to try to assist him further, he found only the decaying corpse of Paul, who had hanged himself from a tree limb, crows pecking at his eyes. For Paul, clearly, not only was swamp life preferable to enslavement, but so too was suicide. This episode serves as another stark reminder that slavery in the south, long misremembered as a benign or even benevolent institution, was for many thus subjected marked instead by a horrific lifeway of oppressive labor routinely punctuated by cruelty so severe that a dark and dangerous swamp was a welcome refuge. And for some, like Paul, if that course failed, death yet remained a better alternative than living in chains.

In Dismal Freedom, Morris, professor of history at South Carolina’s Clemson University, succeeds brilliantly in recreating for the reader both the environment of the Great Dismal Swamp in the antebellum and the desperation that drove the enslaved to inhabit it, at any and all costs, as well as offering educated imaginings of the complex, vibrant communities that once thrived at its edges and in its depths. To this effort, he brings to a series of tight, well-crafted chapters a multidisciplinary toolkit that relies on the historical record, oral tradition, archaeological evidence, ecological studies, and much more to collectively summarize what is known of marronage in the Dismal over several centuries before it went extinct in the years that followed the Civil War and emancipation. Still, it’s not all data: Morris has a keen eye for interpretative analysis that resurrects for a modern audience the nuances of long-dead populations. But as a careful historian, he never fails to distinguish fact from speculation. And along the way, material that might otherwise be tedious is enlivened by the author’s talented pen and his obvious passion for the subject.

There’s a lot of history here, plenty of it unfamiliar. How many know of George Washington’s founding role in the Dismal Swamp Company (DSC), a fantasy turned to failure that dreamed of draining the swamp for agricultural purposes? Or that this attempt ultimately enlarged the maroon population, as some of the enslaved put to grueling labor in this effort fled to the dark recesses of the swamp? And who knew that Nat Turner’s father Abraham was rumored to be a maroon denizen of the Dismal, a footnote to that famous rebellion that was to weigh heavily long afterwards upon terrified whites who saw portents of insurrection in every corridor?

Morris also puts marronage in context as a phenomenon by no means limited to this geography—wherever slavery existed adjacent to wild places, those bold enough to dare would attempt to seek haven there. And not only enslaved blacks became maroons: Native Americans and even whites who lived outside the law would also call the Dismal Swamp home. For all, swamp life was both challenging and dangerous, but it offered not only freedom in the literal sense—especially for the enslaved—but a genuine independence from authority of all kinds, as well. For many thousands, the payoff was well worth the risk.

Morris identifies three different types of maroons who peopled the Dismal. The first were the “deep swamp maroons” who secretly dwelled far into the interior, fully secluded from the outside world. Some constructed cabins on stilts amongst the reeds. But many more put down stakes in the hundreds of the Dismal’s habitable islands, large and small, of drier ground—called mesic islands—that hosted individuals, families, and larger settlements. It is believed that trade networks were established between villages, and, ever wary of outsiders, that generations of maroons thrived there in isolation. And it turns out that the at-first forbidding tea-colored water of the Dismal is actually pure and safe to drink; stained an amber color by tannic acids from decomposing bark, the tannins inhibit the growth of bacteria and act as a preservative, so maroons could always count on a reliable source of potable water in what was an otherwise hostile milieu.

Then there were the “fringe maroons” who existed at the edges of the swamp. Because of their proximity to plantations, their liberty was more precarious, but that was offset by their ability to clandestinely trade goods and resources with those who remained enslaved, especially family members. Some even produced products, like shingles, which were valuable beyond the boundaries of the swamp. There were also runaways who sought temporary refuge at the swamp’s margins as fringe maroons, who then—unlike the hapless Paul—might after a “time out” return to surrender to slavery and take their punishment. Some resorted to this practice more than once.

Later, notably after the completion of another of Washington’s early visions, the Dismal Swamp Canal—which ran twenty-two miles to connect the landlocked sounds of Virginia and North Carolina—corporate ventures brought lumber and shingle industries to the region, and a third type of maroon emerged. Known as “liminal maroons,” these wily sorts would habitually step in and out of marronage, maintaining their freedom but making a living off the white man’s world. Like their fringe maroon brethren, once familiar with the Dismal’s ecosystem and how to survive there, formerly enslaved blacks could easily slip in and out at will, while their white captors could only proceed so far in pursuit, retreating in terror at dangers real and imagined that might lurk within the dark interior.

This is not to say such attempts were ever abandoned, only that these went largely unsuccessful—which further incensed slaveowners, for a variety of reasons. First and foremost, of course, was that maroons represented thousands of dollars in human “property” drained from their pockets, lost and unrecoverable. Second, viable maroon communities served as an open invitation to other potential escapees. But there was something else that infuriated them far more than any financial injury incurred: that numbers of the formerly enslaved could endure free and out of their clutches was an abomination they could not abide, yet they frequently found themselves powerless to redress. Their rage was fueled further by the paranoia of slave insurrection that dominated the southern plantation mentality; the slender thread that may have connected Nat Turner to the Dismal via his runaway father was imagined by many as a kind of sturdy chain linking their ostensibly docile chattel slaves with a restive savage mass hiding in the swamp, ever ready to rise up in concert and murder their white masters in their sleep. It never happened, of course, but it did not stop them from believing that the threat was real.

In between the books by Silkenat and Morris, I read The Battle of Negro Fort: The Rise and Fall of a Fugitive Slave Community, by Matthew J. Clavin, a stirring account of a maroon colony that existed in a setting that was almost exactly the opposite of the hidden sanctuaries of the deep swamp maroons of the Dismal. This was what became known as the “Negro Fort,” a refuge for fugitive slaves recruited into service by the British in what was then the Spanish colony of East Florida during the War of 1812, who opted to remain behind after hostilities concluded in a military fortification heavily stocked with cannon and munitions that even had the audacity to continue to fly the Union Jack after the Brits decamped. This outraged General Andrew Jackson, who plotted to ultimately annihilate the fort, an act quietly countenanced by the American government. At the end of the day, the very existence of maroon communities represented a kind of thumbing their noses at white supremacy, something that simply could not be tolerated.

Fortunately, great numbers of maroons met happier outcomes in the Great Dismal Swamp, and while turning the pages of Dismal Freedom, the reader cannot help but cheer for all those who remained out of reach of those who would return them to cruel captivity. It’s also worth cheering for Morris, who has in one slender volume turned out a magnificent addition to the historiography that is also that rare work both suitable to a scholarly audience and accessible to the non-academic. As Morris well underscores here, recent studies have only barely scraped the surface of all that remains unknown about maroon communities, in the Dismal as well as elsewhere. But if you are as intrigued by this nearly forgotten history as I am, you’ll be in for a real treat when you dive into Dismal Freedom.

NOTE: I reviewed Silkenat’s book  here:  Scars on the Land: An Environmental History of Slavery in the American South, by David Silkenat

 NOTE: I reviewed  Clavin’s book here: The Battle of Negro Fort: The Rise and Fall of a Fugitive Slave Community, by Matthew J. Clavin