Category: Reviews

In the very first chapter of Blood of the Tiger: A Story of Conspiracy, Greed, and the Battle to Save a Magnificent Species, by J.A. Mills, we are introduced to the horrors of Asian bear farming and bile milking: bears kept in cages no larger than the animal itself with tubes surgically implanted into their gall bladders to drain bile for use in Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), fueled by an apparently limitless demand in China and East Asia for such products which include bear paws, rhino and elephant horns, and various parts of tigers, as well as soup and wine derived from the bodies of tigers! The author colorfully describes her first encounter with a bear farm as “Dachau for bears . . .” [p28] and she makes a promise to herself to do something about this travesty.

This is a promising start, but alas the book declines from this point forward into a tedious and rather poorly-written narrative that is part-memoir and part-manifesto, long on the reporting of meetings and events in the narrow sense – i.e. the author attended the meeting/event and recounts it purely through her eyes – and far too short on the articulation of the wider theme outside of her parochial context. The book jacket proclaims it “heart-pounding” – from a review by noted author Amy Tan – but never once did I feel my pulse race over the long slog of nearly 250 pages that more than anything else encompassed a dull concatenation of conferences with the author ever shocked at her own naiveté and always surprised as events conspired to defeat her efforts to preserve wild tigers and outlaw tiger farming. Full disclosure: I obtained this book as part of an early reviewers program, so I felt obligated to read it through in order to fairly evaluate it; I kept reading long after I otherwise might have abandoned it.

That this is not a well-written book should not overshadow the cause Mills is championing. For those who believe that Traditional Chinese Medicine is just bunk, it turns out that tiger bone and other TCM products do contain certain potentially salubrious substances. At the same time, in the twenty-first century the far superior pharmaceuticals of modern medicine have virtually replaced the need to hunt wild animals on the verge of extinction to feed the demand of the superstitious chasing traditional remedies. And this demand continues to grow exponentially. Bear and tiger farms have been introduced in China and elsewhere in Asia to satisfy this demand by “farming” captive animals to turn into parts and distill into wine for an eager audience. Mills and her allies argue convincingly that apart from their inherent cruelty, such farms  perpetuate and exacerbate the problem of the threat to endangered species both because these blur the line between legal and illegal trade, further enabling poachers, and because many Asians still believe that the wild product is superior to the farmed one which the wealthy among them will pay a premium to obtain. Due to the stubborn refusal of China to outlaw the use of exotic animals in the TCM market, there has been an explosion of poaching: in faraway Africa this has resulted in the decimation of vast numbers of rhinos and elephants for the cherished ivory in their tusks, thought to be an aphrodisiac. Much of Blood of the Tiger details the struggle between those committed to protecting wildlife and the Chinese government, which officially decries poaching but actively cultivates the tiger farming that fuels the demand.

Mills comes from a journalism background, but as many other former journalists have discovered, composing a coherent book length manuscript is not the same as writing feature articles. Strengths in the latter often are weaknesses in the former. This is apparent throughout Blood of the Tiger both in the “I-attended-the-conference-and-this-is-what-happened” reporting style and in the choppy narrative flow from chapter to chapter. Her attempts to burnish the unremarkable prose with various literary techniques repeatedly fall flat. Because endangered tigers are ostensibly the protagonists, she is apparently tickled by the irony of the idiom “herding cats,” which in context is no more appropriate the fifth time she employs it than the first. One chapter even gets the hokey title “Sino-US Cat Fight.” She identifies the “good guys” and “bad guys” (as she tags them) in her tale by an annoying use of nicknames, so that the friends of wildlife become “The Great Dane” and the “The Welsh Warrior,” while the enemies – and these are predominantly Chinese – are identified as “The Fonz” and “The Dragon.” The characters of shifting alliances turn into “Montagues and Capulets.” As the book progresses, she attempts to add a clever intellectual spin to her meeting notes by awkwardly interspersing parenthetical Sun Tzu Art of War aphorisms that cannot help but make the reader’s eyes roll. Meanwhile, although she reveals very little of her private life outside of her crusade to save tigers and bears, she occasionally delivers jarring personal information, such as in a chapter that opens with the author awakened by the police pounding on her door because a long distance colleague believed her to be suicidal. A paragraph later, it is back to the “cat fight.”

Throughout the narrative, Mills complains about how misled and naïve she has been, how poorly she has misjudged people and policies, how hopeless her efforts seem to be. Reading this, I often wondered: did she ever do any research? Did she ever seek the advice of others? Was she really mature enough to take on this fight? In the “Epilogue,” Mills loftily states that “. . . this story isn’t about me . . .” [p233] but clearly to anyone who has read this volume, it certainly seems to be.

Despite the many weaknesses of this book, I did manage to learn much about the demand for TCM products and how this jeopardizes wildlife across the continents. Fighting tiger farms is a just cause and I am now a firm adherent. Mills has indeed dedicated herself to saving tigers in the wild, through her work with TRAFFIC – the wildlife trade monitoring network – as well as World Wildlife Fund, Conservation International, and Save the Tiger Fund. She cannot be faulted for her commitment. Still, it is unfortunate that such an important story as this is told through such a weak narrative. If I will not go so far as to recommend this book, I will encourage readers to explore this topic further by other means and to add their voices to those who loudly demand that such dreadful practices as tiger farming come to a swift end in our time.

I often make the mistake with short story collections of reading them end-to-end, like a novel, so that I am struck by the discontinuity of the tales – which typically have unique provenance separated by many years that were never intended to be housed together. Thus, by the time I finish the collection the stories are just a blur. I took a far different tack with Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman by Haruki Murakami, dipping into it irregularly over many months, savoring each one.   Whether it was due to this new approach or because of the quality of the selection, I found Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman a far more satisfying read than The Elephant Vanishes, another collection I read a couple of years back that left me (except for the title story) mostly underwhelmed.

Full disclosure: I have a love-hate relationship with Haruki Murakami, whose novels are usually stirring and well-written yet often lack resolution with critical characters and plotlines so that by the last page the reader is not so much dissatisfied as unsatisfied. Still, Murakami – along with Cormac McCarthy and Richard Flanagan – remains solidly among my top three living authors of fiction. I have read eleven of his eighteen published works, and I just began another, Sputnik Sweetheart, which makes me a serious and perhaps obsessive fan. The first one I read, Kafka on the Shore, was recommended to me by a barista and remains my favorite Murakami novel as well as one of my favorite novels of the new century. I liked the celebrated Norwegian Wood far less, although most fans would take issue with me here. Two others – Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and 1Q84 – were terrific reads that left me so frustrated due to lack of resolution that I gave them less credit than they deserved at the time, yet I have not stopped thinking about either in the years that followed. Side note: I entitled my review of 1Q84 on Amazon in 2013 as “Tedious Epic” and awarded it a mere three stars. Today, despite its flaws, I would revise that to at least four stars and have even considered rereading it. That’s Murakami for you!

Many writers start with short stories and progress to novels, but in the “Introduction to the Eighth Edition” of Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman, Murakami reveals that he only began writing short stories after publishing his first two novels, and that he only writes short stories when he is not working on a novel: “The two types of writing may well engage different parts of the brain, and it takes some time to get off one track and switch to the other.” Since I am far from new to Murakami, I set off with a trained eye looking for evidence of such trends, especially curious as to whether patterns in the character development of his protagonists differed from those in his novels, as well as how these may have changed over time: Murakami’s females are generally strong, complex, sometimes flamboyant characters, while the males are often passive, complacent, even dull and wishy-washy, as evinced in Norwegian Wood, Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and 1Q84. I hoped to trace an evolution in this regard, but my edition lacked dates for the stories. Fortunately these days we have Wikipedia, where I learned that the twenty-four tales in this collection were written over the period 1980-2005, as well as where these were published. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_Willow,_Sleeping_Woman]

As it was, my literary “theory of evolution” failed to materialize; although elements of both the characters and techniques apparent in his novels are evident in many of his stories, these barely changed over time. The very early “Firefly” (1983) personifies the weak-willed, complacent male protagonist. (“Firefly” actually gets new life as a segment in the novel Norwegian Wood.) The same can be said for the title story, “Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman” (1983). Most of his stories from this era – about half the collection, many of which appeared in the New Yorker – were not among my favorites, and reading “The Year of Spaghetti” (1981) and “A ‘Poor Aunt’ Story” (1980) especially kindled memories of the kinds of short stories that were popular in the New Yorker and elsewhere in the 1980s and 1990s by a number of authors of contemporary fiction that usually left me shaking my head at the lack of direction or resolution. The exception is in several early stories – such as “Crabs” (1984) and “Man-Eating Cats” (1991) – that hint at the magical-realism that is later so impressively developed in novels like Kafka on the Shore and 1Q84. My two favorites in the collection are magical-realism all the way: “Dabchick” (1981), which could be the script for an episode of Twilight Zone, and the masterful “The Ice Man” (1991), both of which adeptly mix magic, irony and allegory. More down to earth, it is worth mentioning the extremely well-written “Tony Takitani” (1990) that neatly captures Murakami’s gift for fine story-telling with an ever-present wisp of vague metaphor. I cannot resist pointing out that Murakami’s weird earlobe fetish shows up both in “Birthday Girl” (2002) and “Chance Traveler” (2005). My other favorite stories in the collection were all written in 2005, which perhaps implies that the author hit his stride with short story writing in that year. In addition to “Chance Traveler,” these include “Hanalei Bay,” “Where I’m Likely to Find It,” “The Kidney-Shaped Stone That Moves Every Day,” and the oddball “A Shinagawa Monkey” that strangely reminded me of something from Rudyard Kipling.

If you are a Murakami fan, this collection deserves a read. If you are new to the author, some of these stories may indeed tickle your fancy, although I would recommend instead that you start with one of the novels, such as Kafka on the Shore. Either way, you may find yourself as obsessively hooked as I am, and unable to resist going back for more.

[NOTE: For the uninitiated, a free taste of Murakami — his outstanding 2014 short story “Scheherazade” – is available online at: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/10/13/scheherazade-3]

Charles Freeman’s dense, panoramic and controversial The Closing of the Western Mind: The Rise of Faith and the Fall of Reason is actually three books synthesized into a single volume. One characterizes the marked transition from the ancient pagan rational philosophical and scientific world – especially in the west – into an increasingly rigid doctrinaire faith-driven Christian domain. This will come as quite a surprise to those who believed that this was a much later development characteristic of the medieval period subsequent to the fall of Rome. The second serves essentially as a history of Christianity and Christian theology that catalogs a merciless evolution into a static creed that not only unequivocally rejected scientific and rational thought but embraced an unquestioning dogmatism that brooked neither dissent nor even inquiry, and frequently brutally punished those who did not satisfactorily conform as heretics, much like a brand of Stalinism with a crucifix. The third is Freeman’s exploration of his thesis as spelled out in the book’s full title that Christianity was indeed responsible for what he terms “the fall of reason:” the end of science and philosophy and rational thought that thrived in the Classical World, whether by design or unintended consequence.

This is rather heady stuff, more than dizzying at times and by no means a light Saturday afternoon read. I myself read this book over several months along with multiple others, which allowed me more time to contemplate the contents. And there is much to contemplate! The book jacket credits Freeman with an “. . . encyclopedic knowledge of the ancient world,” which the text of this volume clearly reveals to be no idle boast. I have read Freeman before and he is always ambitious but this effort steps beyond ambition to the comprehensive and the magisterial and in this he mostly succeeds, although the complexity and the overwhelming wealth of detail will leave many readers behind in a swirl of ancient schools of philosophy, early Christian sects, asceticism, ecumenical councils, eschatology, emperors, bishops, martyrs, heretics and much more to make the heads of the uninitiated spin. In other words, don’t tread lightly as you open the covers of this work.

At the outset it should be noted that certain readers will no doubt queue up at diametrically opposed fault lines in reaction to this book, with true believers of the Christian faith likely to be hostile to a theme that might be happily embraced by the unapologetically atheist anti-religious school of a Richard Dawkins devotee. Much of the rest of us probably don’t fall neatly into either camp of extremes, although I myself would rather have a beer with Dawkins than Mike Huckabee. Among historians, I suspect most non-evangelical Christians and most secularists will have few passions stirred, but will instead read and study Freeman with exactly the kind of healthy skepticism more characteristic of Classical pre-Christian times than that which came after. Full disclosure: I am a historian and I have studied both philosophy and religious studies to some depth. I was raised with a Christian faith that precipitously tumbled after a long summer devoted to reading much of the King James Version, Old and New Testaments; by the fall I tagged myself an “atheist.” Much later in life, I find that term far too arrogant, so I often describe myself – with tongue fully in cheek – as a “dogmatic skeptic.” Whatever your beliefs, faith must be set aside in any rational study of history.

Edward Gibbon blamed Christianity for the fall of Rome. Freeman hardly goes so far, but he does unequivocally hold it responsible for the fall of reason. Gibbon’s thesis has largely been rebuffed by later historical analysis. It will be more difficult to dislodge Freeman. At first blush, I expected Freeman’s approach to be – like Gibbon’s in this regard – far too simplistic for such a complex topic, but as it turns out there is nothing even remotely simplistic about Freeman. Very slowly and methodically, Freeman walks us through how the most famous philosopher to embrace the supernatural – Plato – rewrites the logos of Greek reason to represent a higher perfection that can only be seen in rough reflection in this world (i.e. the perfect chair metaphor), which later Christians would rewrite yet again in a different form in the Holy Spirit. It is at once clear why and how Christianity was able to absorb and accept Plato as a noble pagan, while generally rejecting Aristotle the natural scientist. Christianity simply could not abide differing views, even between and especially among other Christian communities. This was true from the very birth of the faith, even in the legendary days of persecution and martyrdom, but its adoption as the official worship of Rome fueled its rage at dissent and likewise provided the tools to crush it. It was not as if there was a kind of conspiracy between the Roman state and the Christian creed to demand unquestioned obedience and orthodoxy, yet once the two became entangled it seemed impossible for any other course to prevail. This hardly abated when the central authority later weakened and powerful bishops enforced conformity instead.

In pre-Christian times, the gods of others – especially the conquered – were often absorbed into the prevailing deities of the conqueror, a process known as religious syncretism. The exception was Jewish monotheism which developed in Hellenistic times out of the earlier Hebrew henotheism; still, Jews hardly expected or desired other peoples to worship Yahweh. In Classical times, there were dozens of competing schools of philosophy, as well as budding explorations of science and the natural world, of which Aristotle was perhaps the most prolific writer. Persecutions of opposing beliefs were rare. Everyone who has studied the era knows that Socrates was not really condemned by the Athenians for disrespecting the gods, but rather for unfortunate political connections in the aftermath of the disastrous Peloponnesian War. Christian martyrs in pagan Rome were less common than advertised, but when this occurred it was more about their refusal to honor the Emperor Cult in worship than about their faith. But when Christianity became preeminent, all of this was to change – forever.

There is so much material in this book on so many interrelated topics that a solid review could easily run a dozen pages and still fall short. I will spare the reader that but instead focus on some key points. First of all, Freeman reminds us how little of Christianity really has much to do with Jesus at all, something most contemporary Christians and especially Roman Catholics are often shocked to discover. The gospels – with their often conflicting accounts of the life and death of Christ – were written long after his death and decidedly not by any of the original twelve apostles. The actual founder of Christianity was Paul, the erstwhile Saul of Tarsus, a Roman citizen who never met Christ in life but whose dramatic vision of the resurrected Jesus transformed him into an indefatigable proselytizer who constructed the foundation of Christianity as a universal religion rather than a Judaic cult. More than half of the twenty-seven books of the New Testament are attributed to Paul, who seems to have been a difficult man obsessed with guilt and a horror of human sexuality. As Christianity – with its emphasis on the afterlife rather than the world of the living – spread throughout the Roman Empire, its earlier theology struggled with its many contradictions, not the least of which was the character of Jesus: was he God or man? As such, there were schisms almost from the very start, much like that whimsically portrayed in the satiric Monty Python’s Life of Brian in the sect that formed around Brian’s lost shoe. But there was nothing funny about early Christian theological disputes, which often turned bloody.

Once Christianity achieved dominance in the Empire, it became critical that orthodoxy be established and enforced at the point of the sword if necessary. The most famous example of this was the Council of Nicaea in 325 CE under the auspices of the Emperor Constantine, which essentially established the most fundamental orthodoxy of Christianity – that God, Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit are manifestations of a single immutable “Trinity.” Not only is this notion nowhere to be found in scripture, but scripture decidedly contradicts it on more than one occasion with its portrayals of a very human Jesus struggling with doubt. No matter: this was deemed the correct interpretation and to reject it was heretical. And this tradition, that as Freeman notes “. . . castigates intellectuals and glories in paradox” long pre-dates Nicaea, has its roots in Paul and perhaps its best expression in Tertullian writing circa second/third century CE: “The Son of God died; it must needs be believed because it is absurd. He was buried and rose again; it is certain because it is impossible.” [p272]. As such, logic, science, and rational thought were deliberately crushed. Much more was to come as bishops, councils and great thinkers from Eusebius to Augustine created new manifestations of faith such as a pantheon of angels and demons, the cult of Mary, relics of martyrs, spurious miracles and new doctrines of theology, all of which brooked no room for dissent. In the late fourth century, the unquestionably brilliant Augustine became obsessed with the pessimistic notion of inescapable “original sin” that condemned much of mankind at birth, which also had little basis in scripture. Freeman argues that essentially “. . . Augustine’s rejection of reason and the wider philosophical tradition of the classical world had led him to a philosophical dead end.” [p290] And while Augustine was himself less sanguinary than most, from the very dawn of Christianity’s evolution it was a metaphorical “my way or the highway,” and that highway was often littered with the bloodied corpses of dissenters from the “true faith” — as current doctrine had defined it. It was less that rigid orthodoxy and a rejection of reason was a byproduct of a later medieval corruption of a more pure early church, but that these flaws were present at the creation, so to speak. Many will no doubt be as surprised as I was to learn that the vicious and often merciless persecution of Jews by Christians dates back to the very early days and was far more institutional than random.

Another significant victim was science, which like philosophy was no longer needed nor desired; if it was not part of scripture or theology, then it had no purpose. Hovering over it all was to my mind the image of Dr. Zaius crumpling up the paper airplane in the original chilling film version of Planet of the Apes. As Freeman reports: “Faith and obedience to the institutional authority of the church were more highly rated than the use of reasoned thought. The inevitable result was intellectual stagnation . . . The last recorded astronom­ical observation in the ancient Greek world was one by the Athenian philosopher Proclus in A.D. 475, nearly 1,100 years after the prediction of an eclipse by Thales in 585 B.C., which traditionally marks the begin­ning of Greek science. It would be over 1,000 years—with the publica­tion of Copernicus’ De revolutionibus in 1543—before these studies began to move forward again.” [p322]

I would have liked to see Freeman devote more time to the Roman “Cult of the Emperor” and how that enabled a transition to a state religion wrapped around Christ. I would also have been interested in an exploration of how Hebrew monotheism was turned on its head in its Christian offshoot to not only invite universal participation but to demand universal loyalty. But is there actually room to explore more ideas and concepts in this thick tome? Freeman will no doubt also be taken to task by some readers for failing to identify or focus upon the positive contributions that Christianity may have offered to Western Civilization, but I suspect that will be more of an issue with believers than secularists. Regardless of your perspective, I would recommend this book as very well-researched, well-written and highly thought-provocative.

Note: I reviewed Freeman’s follow-up work, The Awakening: A History of the Western Mind AD 500-1700, here: 

Review of: The Awakening: A History of the Western Mind AD 500-1700, by Charles Freeman

Reading The Proud Tower: A Portrait of the World Before the War 1890-1914, by Barbara Tuchman, reminds us of a style of narrative history that no longer exists, a kind that is starkly and unashamedly interpretative and neither makes a pretense to impartiality nor an attempt to disguise the author’s bias. In this vein, the way the story is told is nearly as important as the story itself; perhaps more so at times. Indeed, Tuchman – a true master of her craft – literally exhales pointed sentences that wickedly characterize and sometimes caricature the people, nations, and movements that come to life at the stroke of her pen. It is not the dull footnoted history of academic journals nor the sensationalized popular brand that is thin on facts and thick with swagger. Rather, it is highly observational, often judgmental and artfully written – without sacrificing the fundamentals of writing good history that at its root documents the facts on the ground. As such, Tuchman establishes the particulars and then unapologetically spells out the implications. The Proud Tower provides perhaps the best vehicle for her flourish of all of her books. Sadly, it is the kind of history that could not be written and published today, not only because the author has passed on but because this genre has passed on with her. What a pity.

I came to Proud Tower because of my recent focus on the causes of World War I during the centennial of Europe’s singular great cataclysm – upon the heels of reading To End All Wars by Adam Hochschild, Europe’s Last Summer by David Fromkin, and Sleepwalkers by Christopher Clark – which led to the realization that my knowledge of global affairs in the decades preceding the Great War was spotty at best. Events almost never spring forth from a historical vacuum: the American Civil War, for instance, cannot be properly understood except in the context of the years that led up to it.

I have actually owned this volume for more than thirty years, a nice reminder that one of the benefit of amassing a fine personal library is that you may often pluck just what you are looking for right off of your own neatly ordered shelves. Apparently I even once made a go of reading it some years back; there was a bookmark abandoned around page fifty although I cannot recall when I made this abortive attempt. No matter: back to page one.

It should be noted at the outset that the use of the phrase “Portrait of the World Before the War” in the subtitle is no literary flourish. Proud Tower is nothing like Tuchman’s other books in its structure. In fact, it is hardly like any other book at all. Rather than a historical study it is instead a series of snapshots of nations and movements on the eve of the tragedy of the Great War that ended what historians of Europe term “the long nineteenth century.” Far from a textbook approach, Tuchman elegantly thumbnails certain aspects of prevailing national character in key countries – England, France, Germany and the United States – and significant international movements of the era: anarchism, socialism and the budding crusade for peace centered upon treaties at the Hague to avoid or moderate conflict. A chapter is devoted to each – except the Brits, who without explanation earn two. The result is an uneven narrative that combines flashes of brilliance with occasional long pauses of tedium. Still, there is much to value in Tuchman’s broad-brush approach: I learned a great deal about facets of the era that I expect will send me down various future corridors of inquiry.

Among the most fascinating portions of the book is the chapter entitled “The Idea and the Deed,” that focuses upon the anarchists – who were the unabashed terrorists of their era. All but forgotten today, the anarchists – driven by a vague anti-authoritarian impulse that promoted a stateless society — wreaked havoc across national borders for decades with surprising successes that in the end accomplished … well … nothing. Still, on a macro level their grandiose flamboyance shook the globe with a triumph of violence that targeted heads of state with an astonishing rate of headlining achievement. In the three decades from 1881-1911, anarchists were responsible for the assassinations of Tsar Alexander II of Russia, King Umberto of Italy, King Carlos I of Portugal and his son the Crown Prince, King George I of Greece, President of the United States William McKinley, Empress Elisabeth of Austria-Hungary, a Russian Prime Minister, two Spanish Prime Ministers and the President of France — and these were only their most prominent victims! Tuchman’s treatment of anarchism and its adherents is engrossing, although to my mind neither she nor other historians I have read on this subject properly delve into the long term consequences for European stability fraught by the murder of so many key leaders in essentially a single generation. In probing the causes for World War I, I believe that this topic begs deeper exploration.

Tuchman’s two chapters on Britain reveals a nation blessed with great freedom and protections for the rights of its citizens yet burdened with a surprisingly very narrow franchise and a shocking gap – even by the standards of the period – between the conspicuous wealth of the aristocratic elite who controlled everything and the masses of the desperately poor who turned the cogs of that storybook society of drawing rooms and balls. However, political power was – albeit very slowly – gradually coming to the labor forces who would transform British politics in the twentieth century. Tuchman’s wide-lens perspective is perhaps most effective in the long chapter on France devoted to the signature “Dreyfus Affair” and how that impacted every aspect of French politics and society. The chapter devoted to the United States highlights a clear break with its past as America – in the Spanish-American War and beyond – embarked not only upon imperialism and internationalism but a striking celebration of militarism often overlooked by historians. The chapter on the efforts at the Hague to seek through international law a triumph of diplomacy over jingoism exposes that the U.S. was among the most vigorously opposed to any limitations on the number and types of weapons permissible in combat, including “dumdum” expanding bullets, larger navies, developing prospects for air warfare – and it was America that provided the lone vote against the use of asphyxiating gas! The most bizarre chapter, and in my view the least successful, is the one on Germany entitled “Neroism is in the Air,” that seems to use opera in the era of Strauss as a metaphor for the looming madness in the German zeitgeist. Curiously, there is no chapter devoted to Russia, although the Russians step on and off stage in various dramas throughout the book.

In my opinion, the weakness in Proud Tower is that it should more probably have been fashioned as a collection of essays rather than as a continuous narrative for there is almost no flow from one chapter to the next. Tuchman’s attempt to clothe all of it in a common fabric comes in the final chapter devoted to the Socialists, entitled “The Death of Jaurès,” after its eponymous and most celebrated leader, but this effort tends to fall flat as the threads do not neatly bind the rest of the work into a definitive seamless garment. Tuchman leaves us to draw our own conclusions; here is my own: although Jean Jaurès, like Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand, is assassinated on the eve of the Great War by a nationalist rather than an anarchist, I was struck once more by the phenomenon of so many leading individuals suddenly and randomly plucked from the political sphere, voices at once silenced that might have offered some moderation to the great catastrophe of world war that was soon to engulf Europe and echo far beyond its geography. Despite its faults, I would recommend Proud Tower to any reader who seeks a greater understanding of the nature of that notable age that loomed large at the dramatic eve of one era and the terrible dawn of another.

After deeply immersing myself in Civil War studies during the past four years of the sesquicentennial – including battlefield visits and tours, a weekend seminar with noted nonagenarian historian Ed Bearss, and a museum internship digitizing a trove of rediscovered diaries, memoirs and correspondence from a forgotten Massachusetts regiment – it was indeed fitting to finish up Richmond Burning: The Last Days of the Confederate Capital by Nelson Lankford in the sesquicentennial’s penultimate month and even somewhat eerie to find myself quite coincidentally reading of Lincoln’s assassination – and its reverberation in Richmond – on the exact one hundred fiftieth anniversary of this tragic event.

Lankford’s well-written and informative history is essentially a snapshot of the beleaguered city on the eve of its fall to Union forces and the subsequent early days of occupation. Most striking is how unprepared both the Confederate leadership and the proud citizens of its capital city are for this eventuality, even as March turned into April 1865 and it should have been clear to even the most Panglossian among them that the long siege of Petersburg would have to end badly and that therefore Richmond would have to be abandoned in short order. Part of this optimism was driven, of course, by the fact that the city – only ninety-plus miles from the federal capital in D.C. – had been the military objective for the Army of the Potomac under a string of Union generals for four years, all of which had been thwarted. Residents had grown imbued with an unrealistic sense of invincibility even as their doomed southern republic crumbled, all of its other major cities taken, its armies in tatters. It was one minute before midnight for the Confederacy, but no one in Richmond – including its most prestigious resident, President Jefferson Davis – seemed willing to look at the clock.

Davis had actually been willing to consider the loss of Richmond and had sent his family out of the city, but a kind of stubborn delusion seemed to keep him from coming to grips with its impending reality. When Petersburg indeed fell and General Robert E. Lee informed him that Richmond must be abandoned, Davis reacted with shock, especially at how little time remained. As Lankford walks us through the uneven retreat, it is apparent how deep this delusion ran, how little planning there was for this contingency, how abysmal its execution as ships are scuttled, liquor barrels smashed, bridges destroyed and – most famously – the attempt to deny resources to the conquering army spawned ill-advised fires that quickly burned out of control. At the same time, these pages of Richmond Burning reveal in the retreat one of the critical fundamental weaknesses of the entire Confederate experiment in its woefully inadequate infrastructure: “Five rail lines fed into the city at the beginning of the war, but only one link offered any hope of salvation to the Confederate government … The Richmond & Danville line . . . Like the rest of the South’s rail network, the Danville line lacked the steel rails, gravel-ballasted roadbeds, and coal-fired engines found in the North. All the rails in Virginia were iron, not steel. The ties, cut from oak and other hard­woods along the route, were laid directly in the dirt rather than in a gravel roadbed. And all of the engines were wood burners, a circumstance that required frequent stops for both fuel and water.” [p.85] Interestingly, this recalled for me the discussion in another recent read, Dominion of Memories by Susan Dunn, of Virginia’s stubborn resistance to railroad development and standardization in the 1820-30s, which further retarded its industrial capacity and its ability to compete with its neighbors to the north in peace or war.

Davis and his government and the remnants of his army fled, leaving terrified residents tensed for predations by an enemy in blue long vilified while the less savory among them ran wild in the streets to loot and plunder. As it turned out, the occupying forces were remarkably constrained and disciplined, restoring order, getting the great conflagration that engulfed the city’s commercial center under control and later ensuring that a population that eyed them with a barely-restrained hatred did not starve. Lankford also reveals the surprising number of Unionists in the city who welcomed the Yankees who had come to restore the flag they loved. It is rarely acknowledged in the south today, but Unionists lived – most often in secret – throughout the states that had seceded. (In fact, every state in the Confederacy with the exception of South Carolina sent at least one regiment to fight for the Union.) The most famous to emerge in Richmond was Elizabeth Van Lew, a highly effective Union spy who had long masqueraded as feeble-minded while she waited for the city’s eventual liberation.

Of course, the vast majority of citizens were far less congenial to their new circumstances, even as the dreaded Yankees proved not to be the bugaboos they had anticipated with such dread. Lankford is hardly sympathetic to them and he has been taken to task by some reviewers for his perspective. I disagree: there has been more than enough empathetic literature focused upon the defeated, who were after all hastily abandoned to the enemy with their city carelessly set ablaze by their own fleeing government. Moreover, it is enough for us to be reminded of what their chief cause – human chattel slavery – was based upon, and to be rightly repulsed by this. Especially telling in Richmond Burning is the remarkable juxtaposition of blacks – at the urging of General Lee – drilling for the Confederate army in the final days of desperation while others are chained in slave pens in the hopes that they can be hurried out of the city for sale elsewhere before the fall.

One hundred fifty years later, as we view with some deep concern the revival and resurgence of the “Myth of the Lost Cause”– not only in the south but in political circles on the right in much wider geographies – it is too often overlooked that the Confederacy was proudly founded as a “slave republic.” It was only after the cause was lost that the mythmakers went about deliberately erasing the prominence of that legacy and rewriting it to be about states’ rights, about tariffs, about agriculture vs. industrialism. While all of these issues were indeed part of the mix, without the centrality of slavery there never would have been a Civil War, there never would have been that sacrifice of some seven hundred thousand American lives. Yet, that truth fell to the more successful myth that in the impulse for reconciliation permitted Americans north and south to pretend differences could be put aside to reunite the country even as Reconstruction was abandoned and with Redemption the hopes for real liberty for African-Americans were abandoned along with it. The racist north did not go war at the outset to free the slaves – that cause came much later – but to preserve the union. The south surely went to war to ensure their independence to nurture, preserve and to spread their peculiar institution. When it was over, blacks were neither slaves nor truly free, and only a few decades later almost nobody really cared about that. Lankford sums this up beautifully on the book’s final page: “In time, by the early twentieth century, Americans North and South achieved the unity that defeated Confederates in April 1865 believed could never happen. They did it by remembering and honoring the fallen on both sides. But that was not enough. They also did it by denying or forgetting the part that slavery played in the coming of the war and by thwarting the promise of emancipation at its end.”

I had looked forward to reading 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed by Eric H. Cline, as it came to me from a friend with whom I share a fascination of Bronze Age history and the mystery of its abrupt collapse somewhat coterminous with the era of the legendary Trojan War. This is a fuzzy historical period for most people, even many historians, but not for those who, like myself, are enraptured with the roots of ancient Greek civilization. Adding to the book’s luster is its 2014 publication launching a new series – Turning Points in Ancient History – edited by noted historian Barry Strauss.

In the latter part of the nineteenth century it was Heinrich Schliemann who – after famously discovering the ruins of ancient Troy on the northwest coast of present day Turkey – later uncovered the forgotten Mycenaean civilization of Bronze Age Greece. Once among the great powers of the mid-to-late second millennium BCE engaged in international trade and swaggering with the likes of Egyptians, Hittites, Mitanni and Kassite Babylonians, the Mycenaean’s seem to have gone down in flames with the abrupt breakdown of Bronze Age civilization in the Mediterranean and Near East circa the twelfth century BCE, spawning a dark age lasting several hundred years where the Greeks seem to have actually lost literacy.

The Bronze Age collapse has received much scholarly attention but has never found satisfactory explanation. Part of the challenge in unravelling the mystery is that not all states were affected equally: the Hittites almost entirely disappeared from history; Egypt lost its empire but otherwise endured; some states saw decline and rebirth, others extinction. Various theories have been advanced over the years – including climate change, earthquakes, plague and more – but no one explanation seems to fit all circumstances and all geographies. Perhaps the most famous focuses upon the mysterious “Sea Peoples,” unknown invaders described in various sources who brought sudden fierce attacks to the region and undermined multiple states. While assaults by the “Sea Peoples” seem to have been an actual historical phenomenon, it is not clear whether their appearance represented a cause or effect of widespread destabilization that sparked a mass movement of populations. It is now commonly accepted, for instance, that the Biblical Philistines had their origins in Mycenaean Greeks who settled in Canaan. Upon arrival, they were no doubt “Sea Peoples,” as well.

That Cline, an archaeologist and eminent historian at George Washington University, seeks to take on such a fascinating time-honored mystery from an academic perspective only adds to the appeal of this volume. Unfortunately, the reader will be annoyed almost at once to discover that the book’s sensationalized title is wildly misleading: this work is a survey of life and trade and war and interdependence in the “globalized” world of the Bronze Age Mediterranean and Near East — not its fall, as implied. In a book comprised of 176 pages (not including notes, bibliography, etc.), Cline does not even address generalized collapse until the final chapter that begins on page 139. It turns out that even the year 1177 enshrined in his title is rather arbitrary, since there was no single year of systematic multi-state cataclysm, as Cline explains in the book’s final pages that “. . . the eighth year of the reign of the Egyptian pharaoh Ramses III – 1177 BC, to be specific … stands out and is representative of the entire collapse.” Even more disappointing is that the final chapter, entitled “A ‘Perfect Storm’ of Calamities?” is little more than a reasoned discussion of all of the various theories of what might have brought on a multi-regional catastrophe. Cline suggests that a concatenation of nearly simultaneous calamities might have pushed the entire civilizational structure to a kind of unrecoverable tipping point. While that may indeed have been the case, in my overall frustration I could not help but find myself reminded of Robert Mayer’s novel I, JFK, which concludes by whimsically trumping all conspiracy theories to reveal who was really behind Kennedy’s assassination, which turned out to be absolutely everyone: Cuba, Russia, the Mafia, the CIA and the FBI!

Cline should be credited with assembling the latest scholarship about Bronze Age civilization into a single volume with supporting citations to serve as an excellent source to a reader seeking to steep him or herself in what we know – as well as what we have yet to learn – about this fascinating period of ancient history. There is a wealth of data supplemented by solid maps, tables and a biographical list of key figures. On the other hand, while Cline places a great deal of his emphasis on the interdependence of the states and cultures of that era, he manages to do a rather poor job of weaving this into a coherent narrative, which instead tends to jump around from one place or theme or notion to another. Possibly a better editor was called for; Cline, after all, does not strike me as a bad writer, just a highly disorganized one. Perhaps he was put off course by being assigned to write to the book’s title, rather than what he had really hoped to communicate. If you want to learn more about the Bronze Age and can overlook a somewhat uneven narrative, then read the Cline book, but if you are seeking groundbreaking revelations of what may have led to its collapse, be sure to look elsewhere.

 

One hundred years ago — on May 7, 1915 — without warning a German submarine deliberately targeted and torpedoed the massive British passenger liner Lusitania en route from New York to Liverpool, which went down in minutes with a loss of nearly 1200 lives, including 121 Americans. This was a clear violation of international law and norms, but although the Great War had only been in progress for some ten months, Imperial Germany had already demonstrated that it would not be bound by such constraints: German violation of Belgian neutrality accompanied by widespread civilian atrocities was followed by an unprecedented aerial bombing of cities using both zeppelins and airplanes, and then the deployment of poison gas. The unprovoked sinking of a passenger liner full of civilians only upped the ante of total war. Many recall the sinking of the Lusitania as the reason the United States entered the war, but that is not entirely true: an outraged but stubbornly neutral America did not declare war on Germany for another two years. Millions died on both sides in the interim.

Today, most people know a great deal more about Titanic — a similar behemoth liner that met catastrophe just three years earlier and has been famously celebrated by multiple books and films — than they do about the doomed Lusitania. Just in time for the centennial, Erik Larson seeks to redress that with Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania. Despite the inherent risks of cliché in drawing comparisons between a fictional movie about the Titanic tragedy and a nonfiction book about the Lusitania disaster, I could not mentally resist the similes between James Cameron’s epic film and Larson’s latest book. I can clearly recall some source or another praising Cameron for his three-part approach to his subject: in the first part, the audience is made to fall in love with the ship; in the second, the audience is made to fall in love with the characters; in the last, the audience is spellbound as the ship meets destruction. Cameron succeeds masterfully; Larson not so much, in what turns out to be a dull, drawn out narrative that surprisingly manages to fall flat despite stellar built-in elements for drama, pathos and excitement.

A celebrated author of the dramatic historical moment who was catapulted to fame with The Devil in the White City, Larson has sometimes been criticized because he is not a trained professional historian, but this seems unfair: he has an undergrad degree in history, a master’s in journalism from Columbia, and his research seems perfectly sound, as evinced by the copious end-notes in Dead Wake. The problem with this book is less about content than presentation, which is surprising because the author has long been renowned for the verve of his writing style and his skill at reanimating people and events from the distant past. One review found fault with the lack of photographs and illustrations in Dead Wake, and Larson took a sideways swipe at that in the author event I attended, where he gloried in the strength of his craft to spawn lasting visual images that made accompanying graphics superfluous. With some exceptions, in Dead Wake this turns out to be more than a bit overconfident.

I might not have read Dead Wake except for the notice that he was to appear at this author event at Mt. Holyoke College, not far from my home. And the Lusitania theme was congruent with my current focus, as I was deeply invested in reading the magisterial narrative history Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914, by Christopher Clark, which I coincidentally completed the day of Larson’s appearance, March 11, 2015. The event left me disappointed. Seeming to awkwardly channel Alan Alda’s Hawkeye character from M.A.S.H., Larson came off strutting and a bit arrogant in his comedic attempts on stage, eschewing readings from the book and avoiding much discussion of Lusitania or the war. Instead, his remarks were about him, Erik Larson: his journey, his writing strategy, his family, his funny stories. Now don’t get me wrong – I have attended many author events and some great writers are quite frankly terrible speakers. On the other hand, the best blend some self-deprecating comments with tales of behind-the-scenes research and writing, as well as entertaining anecdotes – but the book and its subject always form the central theme. Larson clearly did not want to talk much about the book or its historical context and he went out of his way to deflect comments and questions from the audience that sought to probe such horizons. “I don’t want to spoil the ending,” he repeated with a wry smile more than once. For me, as I stood in line to get my first edition signed, he had to some degree spoiled the beginning.

Still, I resolutely put all that behind me while I read the book, which I anticipated precisely because of Larson’s reputation as a raconteur. Not constrained by the often stultifying structure of academic prose, Larson writing for a popular audience can indeed be credited with an engaging style, and Dead Wake starts off strong enough as the stage is set to weave a multiplicity of themes into a coherent narrative: there is the war and the danger to shipping from German U-boat submarines; there is the Lusitania and its captain and crew; there are the hundreds of passengers, only some who are aware on embarkation of the posted warnings by Germany that their ship could be fair game; there is the U-20 and its captain and crew; there is the secret room where British codebreakers monitor the enemy; there is Churchill and the Admiralty, where the barely suppressed desire to see an unprovoked attack on a passenger liner and its hoped-for result of US entry into the war is evident. Curiously, there is also another odd element: the backstory of the suddenly widowed and deeply heartbroken American President, Woodrow Wilson, who is just as suddenly smitten with a new crush, seemingly derailed and distracted during these most troubled times of emerging international crises.

That’s a lot to cover in 350 pages, but as Bill Bryson has demonstrated more than once – and Larson’s tone is a bit Bryson-esque – it can be done. Unfortunately, Larson falls short in Dead Wake. The Lusitania, which should be the main character, lacks the centrality in the narrative it deserves and without photographs or graphical representation the ship fails to form a vivid image in the reader’s mind. Other components receive better treatment – I learned more about the vulnerability and complexity of World War I era U-boats from this book than anything else – but the bulk of the narrative is strangely devoted to character sketches of selected passengers and how they battled the ennui of the voyage while wondering aloud with a mix of whimsy and trepidation when the torpedoes would strike. When the “unthinkable” (although it seems more than a few “thought it”) occurs, it is nearly anti-climactic, as if the author is impatient to get through it in the mere thirty-five pages he devotes to the attack and the loss of the vessel.

The remaining portion of the book is devoted to the aftermath and its implications – and these implications remain just that: did the British Admiralty, aware through codebreaking of the direct U-boat threat, deliberately fail to protect the Lusitania in the hopes that dead Americans would bring live Americans into the allied war effort? Was Wilson indeed so stunned by his wife’s death and his new passion that he could not find focus at a singular moment of great consequence? I might add another: was Germany or America aware that munitions were in fact being smuggled on the ship and would that have made any difference to either nation? These are critical questions that are left for the reader to ponder with little assistance. Worse perhaps, for a book so devoted to individual character development, I found myself unable to really care about any of the figures that populate the narrative. Shouldn’t the reader be brought to the brink of tears by the death of at least one of the hundreds of “souls” that went down with that ship? Whether it is Larson’s fault or my own, the fact is that I was decidedly less than overcome.

This is surely not a terrible book despite my negative commentary, and if my expectations were not heightened by the author’s reputation, I might be less critical. Or not. Either way, as a history guy, I have a sense that there is much to learn about the sinking of the Lusitania that I did not learn from reading Dead Wake. I promised myself at the outset that I would resist the temptation to use bad metaphors like “lifeboats,” “shipwrecks” and “clutching the oars” when writing this review, but I must admit it was not always easy to do so. I have never before characterized something as a “well-written but boring book,” but that is perhaps the best way I can sum it up. In the author event, Larson noted that he credited his wife for editing the book and forcing him to excise portions that failed to make muster. Perhaps she cut out the best parts?

I came to read The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914, by Christopher Clark, under somewhat unusual circumstances: it was pressed upon me by an elderly business client with similar historical interests, fresh from his very recent diagnosis with a terminal illness. With remarkable equanimity, he told me of his grim prospects while passing me the volume. “I tried but I couldn’t really get into it,” he confessed. I flipped through it while we chatted and at first blush it was indeed daunting: the trade paper edition he handed me was packed with 562 pages of dense, small type, not including the nearly 150 pages more of notes and index.

World War I – the “Great War” before they started numbering them – has only lately come to intrigue me, as it recedes ever deeper into the distant past and its centennial is upon us. I have read something of the causes of the conflict – most recently To End All Wars by Adam Hochschild and Europe’s Last Summer by David Fromkin – but I have much to learn. So I started on Sleepwalkers, driven also by a kind of obligation to read it, despite its intimidating format and size, due to the context of how it came to me.

The author has divided Sleepwalkers into three distinct parts. After the “Introduction,” “Part I” opens with a brutal regicide and coup that sees the king of Serbia and his queen ruthlessly murdered and immediately supplanted by a rival royal family, one far more antagonistic to their giant though somewhat wobbly neighbor, the Austro-Hungarian Habsburg Empire, a mammoth if somewhat archaic collection of nations and nationalities that dominates central Europe in sheer immensity if not political power. The exciting launch turns almost at once into a somewhat dull narrative pregnant with detail of names and places and events that explores the history of the troubled relationship between Serbia and Austria-Hungary in the context of Balkan entanglements. I was interested enough to persevere, but I could well understand why others might at this stage abandon the book, for while the material is encyclopedic the prose is less than compelling. Still, patience pays off as Clark does a truly masterful job as a historian recreating the complex background and the interplay between a conservative Habsburg monarchy that resists change in the interest of stability and an essentially radical Serbian regime that dreams of a “Greater Serbia” to dominate the Balkans with a fervor that seems to welcome any cost to suit that end.

There truly is much to learn about. For instance, I knew that the “Dual Monarchy” that united Austria and Hungary only dated back to the mid-nineteenth century, but I did not know much about how it worked – or often failed to work! I never knew that there was a Cisleithania as well as a Transleithania – the historic Austrian and Hungarian environs respectively – nor that the empire had eleven official nationalities: “Germans, Hungarians, Czechs, Slovaks, Slovenes, Croats, Serbs, Romanians, Ruthenians, Poles and Italians.” [p.66] (I never heard of a Ruthenian before!) The roots of pre-war instability as well as postwar fragmentation are all represented here in details that are mostly overlooked in other accounts to the lead up to the war. The most significant event here – the annexation in 1908 by Austria-Hungary of Bosnia-Herzegovina, the former Ottoman province already administered by the Habsburgs for three decades – is addressed by most treatments of this era yet it is Clark’s painstaking portrait that reveals why this is such an explosive catalyst to all that is to follow.

In his introduction, Clark announces that “Part II,” which represents the bulk of the volume, “. . . breaks with the narrative approach to ask four questions in four chapters: how did the polarization of Europe into opposed blocs come about? How did the governments of the European states generate foreign policy? How did the Balkans – a peripheral region far from Europe’s centres of power and wealth – come to be the theatre of a crisis of such magni­tude? How did an international system that seemed to be entering an era of detente produce a general war?” [p. xxviii] In response to these rhetorical challenges he succeeds superlatively and the narrative – freed from self-imposed chronology and other restraints – rebounds from its sometimes plodding course in the first part to take on with an exceptional verve the greater themes of how Europe managed to tumble into a war which all prepared for diligently while failing to anticipate the scale of catastrophe that was to follow, which is why the meticulous account Clark produces of pre-war Europe becomes so magnetic for the reader whose interest is piqued.

Often, my greatest complaints with books of history are a dearth of maps and the attendant referenced place-names in the narrative that are conspicuous in their absence on any chart of frame of reference. Sleepwalkers is no different in this regard, but Clark redeems himself admirably with the few maps he does include, such as the pair [p. 122] at the start of “Part II” that in one contrasts graphically the loose and evolving relationships among the Great Powers in 1887 – there is a “Reinsurance Treaty” between Germany and Russia! – with the more structured and inflexible Alliance Systems that had been carved out by 1907 and were to imprison these same Great Powers by obligations to friends that concomitantly ensured resultant enmities. Every student of the war should study these maps: even without accompanying text it becomes clear that the powers – trapped by their treaty commitments – had lost the free will of diplomacy that once prevented a general war from breaking out in Europe.

Even more dramatic are the three maps [p. 254-55] that illustrate the Balkans in 1912 and their transformation after the two Balkan Wars of 1912-13. There is a kind of epiphany for the reader contained here: one glance at the first map reveals that in 1912 a vast swath of southern Europe north of Greece was still part of the Ottoman Empire; in map three only a tiny corner hugging Constantinople remains. In between, two opportunistic wars dismantle what remains of Ottoman Europe and these bits and pieces become part of Serbia, Montenegro, Bulgaria, Romania and Greece – and give birth to the newly independent nation of Albania. Add to this mix the recent declaration of independence by Bulgaria in 1908 after thirty years of autonomy within the Ottoman Empire, and the previously mentioned ill-advised Austrian annexation of Bosnia-Herzegovina that same year, and it becomes increasingly clear why instability was inherent in the Balkans — and by extension all of Europe – after these Balkan Wars which, quite curiously, earn hardly more than a passing reference in most texts about this era. Such a radical redrawing of the Balkan map is naturally a recipe for turmoil, even aside from the prevailing strains of nationalism, yearnings for ethnic identity and historic antipathies of one group for another.

More than a chronicle of territorial churnings, “Part II” treats the reader to a comprehensive survey of the governments of the Great Powers on the eve of the war years as well as their complicated history of diplomatic entanglements. The complexity at the top levels of each nation’s governing body is quite surprising, especially since it comes to seem that with the truly critical life-and-death strategies that determine war or peace, the constitutional democracies of France and Britain turn out to be little different than their authoritarian monarchial counterparts in Russia, Germany and Austria-Hungary. On all sides, the most significant policy seems to be guided by shadowy members of cabinets, advisors and diplomats rather than the actual heads of state. In Serbia, of course, there actually was a clearly defined powerful shadow arm of the government known as the “Black Hand” which wielded enough authority to serve as architect to the famous assassination of Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo in 1914 that was to give spark to the by then well-dried tinder of great power political hostilities.

Clark’s narrative also nicely resurrects the key players and policies in the often overlooked Russian and Ottoman empires, as well as the tension between these two that is rarely referenced even tangentially. It is fascinating to see how the other European states sought to keep the Ottomans – known as the “Sick man of Europe” – afloat in order to ensure stability and the balance of power, often to the detriment of Russian interests. Moreover, it is remarkable how both friends and enemies alike misjudged the pace of modernization and what they perceived as the rapidly emerging strength of Russia, which later proved to be quite illusory. Nevertheless, “Part II” is sometimes clumsily encumbered by a crushing weight of data and detail, names and places, dates and events. This tends to underscore the great shortcoming to this otherwise magisterial work: a biographical index of the enormous cast of characters that populate this work is in my opinion absolutely essential for the reader’s ready reference to track these figures, their titles and their roles in the drama. Less critical but also helpful would be additional maps and a detailed timeline.

Sadly, “Part III” – which takes us from the assassination in Sarajevo to the start of hostilities – is the weakest segment of the book, especially as the narrative winds up. It is as if the author, who has said so much over so many pages, has run out of steam. Whereas most other historians roundly place the blame for starting the war on Austria-Hungary and what has long been perceived as her malevolent instigator, Germany, Clark clearly wants to spread the responsibility more evenly and in that he generally succeeds. But if all of the nations shared some element of culpability does it then follow that such accountability should likewise be shared equally? Here I would unequivocally say no.

Perhaps in overcompensation for the past sins of others, Clark places far less responsibility on Germany and far more on Serbia, the catalyst. As such, he actually takes on the consensus both of historians and contemporaries that Serbia could not possibly retain sovereignty and accept the Austrian ultimatum that led to war. Instead, Clark downplays the latter, making what I consider a wildly illogical contrast to NATO’s ultimatum to Serbia-Yugoslavia in the 1999 “Rambouillet Agreement” some eighty-five years hence by way of arguing that Austria’s demands in 1914 were not nearly as harsh. I suppose it would be no less ludicrous to compare these to Alexander’s demands upon Thebes before his siege and sack of that city in 335 BCE, but it would be no more helpful either.

But the real central blame, Clark seems to argue, should be placed upon Russia, whose machinations behind the scenes in her rivalry with the Ottomans, hostility to the Hapsburgs, alliance with the French and encouragement of Serbian revanchism provoked the greater instability that finally was to tinder the conflagration of the Great War. Here too, I remain less than convinced. Most historians of the era focus upon the aggressive intrigues and paranoia that lived in the German court, but with all of the dizzying detail included in this thick book, Clark spends less time on Germany than its key rivals, and whether he means to or not the result serves as a kind of apologist for the German role in waging total war at the outset of what might have been contained as a regional conflict. Unfortunately, more is implied by way of the concluding chapters than is categorically asserted by the author in support of a distinct argument.

Clark does succeed brilliantly by reminding the reader again and again that European alliances and enmities existed over ever shifting ground. Pre-war events in our mind are often frozen in 1914 because we know what came next, but had the Archduke’s untimely end came a year earlier or a year later the subsequent repercussions might well have been very different. Indeed, in the early 1890s it seemed more probable that England would form an entente with Germany rather than France. Clark argues quite convincingly that: “Crucial to the complexity of the events of 1914 were rapid changes in the international system . . . These were not long-term historical transitions, but short-range realignments.” [p.557] And in a digression on Balkan geopolitics in 1913, Clark tellingly points out that: “Given time, the new Balkan alignment might just as quickly have made way for further adjustments and new systems. What matters is that this particular pattern of alignments was still in place in the summer of 1914.” [p.279]

A century after the Great War detonated Europe’s long nineteenth century and inaugurated decades of bloody horror in the twentieth, Clark’s outstanding book on its roots should remind us of the intricate linkage between nation states in a global environment and how delicate and fragile coexistence can be amid such complexity. This is an especially chilling thought, I would suggest, because a hundred years after Sarajevo, we remain so much like these people and states of those days, except for the styles of clothes we wear and the nuclear weapons we now stockpile.

Postscript: This review is dedicated to Don Burke of Somers CT who gave me this book and died on March 18, 2015, one week after I finished reading it.

In Gateway to Freedom: The Hidden History of the Underground Railroad, Pulitzer Prize winning historian Eric Foner sets out to rescue the legendary “Underground Railroad” from both oblivion and revisionism, and generally succeeds in this effort. Long a staple of antebellum tales of daring-do inside and out of the classroom, Foner’s overview of its historiography reveals that the Underground Railroad has been both extolled as an effort largely by white abolitionists to help fugitive slaves to freedom and pilloried as a myth that unfairly deprives credit to the overwhelming numbers of self-emancipating African-Americans who made it entirely on their own or with the random assistance of the free black population along the way. Most recently, some have argued that the entire concept of an Underground Railroad was nothing more than romanticized myth. In this well-written, well-documented history, Foner first demolishes the latter allegation as without basis and then neatly demonstrates – in a narrative frequently peppered with personal accounts — that not only was the Underground Railroad very much a reality that was indeed responsible for ensuring the freedom from recapture for thousands of escaped slaves from the upper South over many years, but that it was deftly piloted both by dedicated white abolitionists and free blacks who worked closely together far more often than has been revealed in previous accounts.

While the geography of Gateway to Freedom surveys locales like Pennsylvania, Boston and upstate New York, it is set primarily in New York City in the final decades leading up to the Civil War, a largely unfriendly atmosphere for fugitive slaves due to the strong economic ties between the port city and the slave south. Yet, there was a vibrant network of free blacks and white abolitionists who approached the task of rescuing slaves seeking their freedom with an almost religious fervor. The state of New York – more sympathetic to the cause than the city – enacted laws that declared any non-fugitive brought to the state by their owner automatically set free, and evolving personal liberty laws that guaranteed a role for the courts in rendition, which acted as a certain kind of uneasy shield against an overtly hostile city government unwilling to damage trade ties by turning New York City into an escape hatch for runaways.

The personal liberty laws, not always ironclad, did when enforced offer some unwelcome legal hoops for slavecatchers to jump through – which was essential since it turns out that Solomon Northrup of Twelve Years a Slave fame was not an isolated victim as free blacks, especially children, were frequently kidnapped and then sold into slavery in the south with little or no questions asked on the receiving end. For the most part, though, these laws were typically employed by abolitionists and their allies as legal obfuscations – like a contemporary defense attorney might game the system to aid a guilty client – to delay rendition or effect release of runaways on a technicality to gain time to spirit the defendant away to another state more friendly to fugitives or, in many cases, to Canada, where they would be both free and safe. Not surprisingly, the south howled in unison in protest of such legal shenanigans. But slave state ire rose to new levels of outrage especially at the provision that slaves “in transit” – not uncommon in the hub of a great port city like New York – were if not escapees immediately to be liberated once their feet touched free soil. (Free blacks were certain to promptly share this with their newly-arrived enslaved brethren if they were heretofore unaware of the law.) This made for some sticky situations, most notably (this time in Pennsylvania) when North Carolina politician John Hill Wheeler – newly appointed ambassador to Nicaragua and fresh from dinner with President Franklin Pierce – was on a stopover in Philadelphia on his way to New York with his slave Jane Johnson and her young children when they were “liberated” by a team of white and black abolitionists, with the support of five black dockworkers. This created quite an uproar, of course, but the law upheld it since by statute Johnson and her progeny ceased to be slaves the moment they stepped on Philadelphia’s free soil. It is telling that Wheeler remained convinced that they were instead abducted, incredulous that Jane would want to free herself because presumably she was so well cared for while his property. This of course was a recurring theme in the antebellum south, where the suspicion was often voiced that well-treated slaves would not seek freedom if not for the influence of evil abolitionists – somehow oblivious to the oxymoronic pairing of the terms “slave” and “well-treated.”

Of course, as Foner relates with some detail, many slaves destined to run away were not treated well by any definition. Indeed, a good number fled simply for an opportunity to be free rather than enslaved, but tales of brutality abound, including beatings and deprivation of food and basic needs. There is an account of one stripped naked and flogged severely. Another who witnessed his own brother shot dead by their owner for resisting a beating. Many women became fugitives to spirit their children to safety when word leaked out that an impending sale of their offspring was on the horizon. In one poignant story, we learn of Eliza Manokey, a forty-two year old slave from Delaware who was often deprived of food and clothing and routinely flogged, who witnessed her four year old son being presented as a gift to the owner’s nephew for transit to Missouri: “… the boy clung frantically to his mother … but in vain.” Apologists for the south who rally to the myth of the “Lost Cause” notwithstanding, cruelty seems to have been institutionalized in the slave states, even if every owner was not a monster. This is most apparent in the punishments for recaptured runaways, as in the case of a successful rendition that returned a fugitive to his master, who subsequently had him tied and whipped in a public forum before selling him. It is difficult not to hold the witnesses to this brutal treatment unashamedly meted out in public – and by extension the entire slave south – complicit in such unspeakable acts that clearly put the lie to such unbelievable claims as that by the Richmond Whig that slaves in the south “. . . are the happiest and best cared for laboring population in the world.” If slaves were not, like Uncle Tom — the eponymous protagonist of the Stowe novel – routinely beaten to death, there seemed to be little shelter from arbitrary treatment in a system that at its core and on its best behavior was inhumane.

All of this – in Gateway to Freedom as well as the many other books I have read on slavery in the antebellum south – cannot help but lead the reader to vehement objection when contemporary apologists try to give the south a pass for their euphemistic “peculiar institution,’ with the polite fiction that we cannot judge them from the vantage point of today. Okay, let us then judge them by their times: with the exception of Brazil, slavery had essentially been abolished throughout the globe – the United States was the notable holdout. The founding elite planters four score years before had agonized over its moral blemish, and even if Jefferson and his generation did not have the will or the courage to let go “the wolf by the ears,” as he so aptly put it, they hardly celebrated it as a virtue. So if you lived in the 1840s or 1850s it is difficult to believe that you could have been unaware that the practice of institutionalized human bondage was universally condemned or that it was branded a great evil – unless you were delusional. Clearly, many in the south were indeed delusional victims of their own propaganda that over the years provided handy justification for going forward with something so repugnant. But delusional is no defense against culpability. As Lincoln said, “If slavery isn’t wrong, nothing is wrong.”

White abolitionists and particularly their free black associates took tremendous risks, especially in making forays to the south to effect escapes of slaves rather than only assisting them once they had already made their way to free soil. Gateway to Freedom reveals acts of tremendous courage by these intrepid engineers of the Underground Railroad. On the other hand, Foner like any fine historian brings nuance and complexity to the narrative, uncovering the bickering, disputes and even fracturing of the abolition movement which at last led to a schism between those loyal to the often volatile famous Boston pacifist William Lloyd Garrison and those in New York’s abolitionist camp with wealthy elite businessman Lewis Tappan, who took a somewhat more vigorous approach to assisting fugitive slaves. In retrospect, some of their squabbles seem so banal as to be reminiscent of the ludicrous hostility of the “People’s Front of Judea” for the “Judean People’s Front” in the Monty Python comic masterpiece, Life of Brian, but these men were driven by ideological and moral imperatives, so even if hardly sensible under the circumstances, we must forgive their quarrels if only because their mutual intentions were indeed admirable.

Gateway to Freedom is so pregnant with detail as to run dry in parts, although the account is often rescued by stirring tales of the enslaved struggling to be free and their saviors, white and black. Yet, the sheer number of escapees cited only further swells an already large cast of characters dominated by abolitionists on and off stage. An appendix with an alphabetical list would be helpful to the reader. Also, more of a quibble than a complaint, I suppose, the narrative is not nearly as compelling as it might have been if it was not written both for an academic and a popular audience, so the flow of the storyline is frequently and unevenly interrupted by commentary in quotation marks which adds pauses the reader might wish were not present. Still, Foner has done a masterful job with his subject: anyone interested not only in the Underground Railroad but also in slavery and abolition in the antebellum era should be encouraged to read this fine work.

 

If you have ever wondered, as I have, what possibly could have happened to the Virginia of the Founders’ generation that saw it fall from prominence and then emerge some several decades later hosting the capital of the Confederacy, then I would highly recommend that you read Dominion of Memories: Jefferson, Madison & the Decline of Virginia, by Susan Dunn. In a very well-written account of these bookends to Virginia’s history, Dunn brilliantly traces the path from Virginia’s dominance of the national stage through its slow decline into a provincial backwater mired in bad roads, a regressive state constitution, sub-standard schools and intellectual decay that finds itself clinging to a proud celebration of an imaginary past rooted in an agrarian paradise while shrilly whining about northern industry and growing increasingly paranoiac about the advance of federal power. For anyone who has devoted time to a study of the antebellum south, it should come as no surprise that the centrality of slavery is the chief culprit in Virginia’s unravelling, but Dunn’s scholarship stands out in her exploration of the complexity and nuance that reveals beyond this a multiplicity of competing forces that seem to doom the “Old Dominion” to its humiliating tumble from eminence.

Once upon a time, Virginia and Massachusetts took the lead in forcing a divorce from their colonial mistress and, when independence was achieved, creating the new Republic from a league of states jealous of their own individual sovereignty that almost miraculously was transformed into a nation founded upon both representation and the rule of law. When it came to the forging of a new nation, Virginia truly was a land where giants walked. Three of the six key Founders – Jefferson, Madison and Washington — were Virginian, as well as a larger cast of prominent fellow citizens: Patrick Henry, George Mason, Richard Henry Lee, Peyton Randolph, and James Monroe. Madison was one of the chief architects of the Constitution. Four of the first five Presidents hailed from the Old Dominion, as well as the highly consequential Chief Justice John Marshall who by defining judicial review essentially carved out the critical role of the Supreme Court as arbiter of constitutional law that it has played ever since. Could anyone have guessed that after James Monroe ended his second term as President in 1825 Virginia would essentially abdicate its central role in the nation? What could possibly have occurred to transform the Virginia of these larger-than-life figures that championed liberty to one some thirty-six years later that would take it out of the Union on a perilous course of secession to preserve and protect not liberty but the institution of slavery?

It turns out that the seeds of its decline were present at the creation. While Thomas Jefferson took the critical lead to turn Enlightenment Thought into statute – abolishing medieval anachronisms like entail and primogeniture that perpetuated hereditary wealth in the hands of a few, and passing truly progressive legislation that disestablished a state church and promoted freedom of religion – he and his spiritual kin were less successful with drafting a state constitution that was even close to democratic. As Dunn details, the Virginia state constitution that supplanted the colonial charter was cruelly regressive; long after other states had abandoned such requirements, the Old Dominion extended suffrage to only a very narrow band of property holders, so that most residents had literally no say in their government. Moreover, law was clearly tilted to favor not only the rich slave-owning plantation elite, but by virtue of that construction it placed virtually all authority in the Tidewater planters of the eastern portion of the state. As such, not only were less affluent whites excluded, essentially the entire western half of the state was disenfranchised. If you have ever wondered why the western geography of Virginia seceded from the state in the early days of the Confederacy and then joined the Union, the roots of it are right here. Yet, it was not simply the state constitution, but the fact that it empowered that Tidewater elite to ensure that tax laws favored them, that it resisted and forestalled any improvements to education or transportation or anything that might benefit anyone but their interests. And what were their interests? Basically, self-preservation and an almost bizarre fantasy of an idealized way of life that in fact never really existed except in their collective historical imagination. On the one hand, the rich slave-owning planter aristocracy saw no need to fund roads, canals or railroads to connect the more industrious western part of the state with the Tidewater, or to the predatory markets of the northern states they decried, even as their land lost value, their population hemorrhaged into fleeing emigrants, their schools succumbed to provincialism, their intellectual strength radically contracted as their book and journal publishing diminished. Both Jefferson and Madison decried the state constitution and ever hoped it would be rewritten as more democratic. It was a long time coming and Jefferson did not live to see the day, but a new state constitutional convention was convened in 1829. Although eighteenth century icons Madison and Monroe attended – Monroe colorfully still dressed in eighteenth century attire – it was tragically too late: despite his earlier jeremiads against the old regressive constitution, when it got down to the wire Madison caved and sided with the planters of his class so that the new vital organ of state government offered little but ineffectual saccharine reforms and power was retained by the same forces that had held the state back for decades.

For those who rightly recognize the centrality of slavery in the coming rebellion but fail to pay proper attention to simmering hostilities over states’ rights and tariffs, Dunn properly restores the balance. She wisely underscores that tariffs were likely unfair to agrarian Virginia and the south, and that all fears of an encroaching federal government were not fully unfounded, yet when she deconstructs their concerns it seems clear that much of their hyperbolic rhetoric lacked substance once again because they were acting in defense of a world that really never was. And in the real world, Virginia became simply a place most people did not want to remain in, even for the extended families of the planter elite who had such a romantic attachment to the land, a kind of feudal society ever oddly out of place for the revolutionary generation and beyond. So they left for schools in the north for a time, or they left permanently. Dunn also reminds us that Washington and Marshall – and Madison most of the time – were nationalists who rather than abandoning Virginia sought to further amalgamate her into the federal fabric they had helped to weave at the dawn of the Republic. Yet, in this they were left mostly disappointed.

That Madison and Jefferson are cited in the book’s subtitle is not a fanciful flourish to sell more copies: these two – in life and posthumously – are etched deeply into the historical record of Virginia from 1776 to 1861. From the start, there seems as if there were ever two competing political philosophies: the yeoman farmer with his plot of land jealously guarding his own sovereignty and that of his “country” — Virginia — free from the encroachments of others; and, the citizen of the Enlightenment that demanded liberty, equality, and democracy for all in a league with others to guarantee these rights as part of a nation that secured them. For those who have read his biographies – especially the magisterial American Sphinx by Joseph Ellis – it should come as little surprise that these two rival perspectives could not only be held by one person but sometimes could be held simultaneously by that same person, within the often brilliant intellectual schizophrenia of none other than Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson was a genius beset by contradictions, who championed liberty while excusing slavery, celebrated provincialism while calling for unity, demanded perpetual union while idealizing bloody revolution for each new generation. To this day, Jefferson – like the Bible – can be cited by just about anyone to support just about any cause. Madison, while often Jefferson’s right-hand man, was more circumspect and far more nationalistic. Both men were to leave an indelible stain in the record for those who claimed the right for nullification and secession as they took their respective turns authoring the Kentucky and Virginia resolutions in heated resistance to the hated Alien and Sedition Acts that were creatures of the Adams Administration in the 1790s. Madison, ever loyal to the union he helped forge, was to spend the rest of his life trying to live down his role in this affair. Meanwhile, other prominent Virginians like Washington and Marshall were unwavering Federalists who sought to strengthen that Union by attaching Virginia and the other states more firmly to its purposes.

The elephant in the room in Virginia, as in the rest of the antebellum south, was slavery. The very reason why the Jeffersonian vision of the independent yeoman farmer in an agrarian paradise was really so much smoke-and-mirrors was because it was only the wealthy planter elite of Jefferson’s class who could hope to make it work and only with legions of slaves and – most critically – it usually failed for them, as well. Jefferson was in debt and on the verge of ruin most of his life, as were much of his contemporaries. It was simply not a viable economic model, and — deep down, as their writings reveal — they knew it! Meanwhile, the despised northern states of free labor zoomed ahead with wealth and industry and canals and trains and factories and booming cities – while even the richest planters had to routinely navigate ruined roads to get from point A to point B, their children were educated in New England colleges, and both their wealth and their numbers declined. Still, they not only stubbornly clung to this lifestyle but celebrated it as much as they resented their brethren in the north and they disrespected their labor. Here, as Dunn points out, Virginia had much in common with the rest of the slave states of the south: the nature of slavery as a cherished institution was that free labor among whites came to be despised.

And yet … from the start Jefferson and the Virginia Founders – slave-owners all – recognized the evils of their peculiar institution and sought to find a way to divest themselves of it. In his first draft of the Declaration, Jefferson termed slavery an “abominable crime,” and later famously framed the conundrum of hating slavery yet owning slaves to an analogy of holding a “wolf by the ears” – afraid of what might follow if you let it go. Like the state constitutional convention, Jefferson did not live to see the state debate ending slavery in its House of Delegates sessions of 1831-32, but his grandson was there along with a host of others decrying slavery and seeking gradual emancipation, albeit through colonization to Africa for all blacks, free and enslaved, to avoid a mixing of the races. Still, this was a historic moment for Virginia even more potentially consequential than the failed constitutional reforms of two years before. It is difficult to imagine how a Virginia without slaves could have later served as the seat of the Confederacy. Again, there was mighty rhetoric and high hopes. Again, all of it was dashed as the delegates ultimately chose to do nothing. As it was, it was a turning point of sorts, but of the wrong kind. As Dunn notes: “Indeed, the slavery debate had legitimized pro-slavery arguments, making it socially, intellectually, and morally acceptable to condone, defend, and even extol slavery.” Ironically, the tables had turned from the days when the Founders made excuses for participating in a great evil; from now on slavery would be advertised as a virtue. Madison later came to blame it on the abolitionists, presciently foreseeing that talk of abolition “. . . would have the reverse effect and incite southerners to speak out even more passionately in favor of slavery.” Of course, in retrospect, the Virginians – and the rest of the south – can only blame themselves.

As a new generation of pseudo-historians on the right have made strong attempts to resurrect the “Lost Cause” Myth of the Confederacy to falsely assert the chief cause of the war as a loyalty to states’ rights rather than the centrality of slavery, Dunn’s book is an especially useful tool for scholars willing to explore peripheral causes without losing sight of the fact that despite various clashes over policy, north and south, had there not been slavery there never could never have been a Civil War.

Dunn, a professor at Williams College, has written an outstanding book that anyone with an interest in the antebellum years should read, although it should be noted that some background in the subject is requisite in order the make the most out of it. As the last pages are turned, the reflective reader cannot help but sense a certain shadow descending as the tragedy of Richmond burning and Appomattox looms ahead, a dire penumbra clearly anticipated by brilliant minds like Jefferson and Madison who were despite their iconic genius just as clearly incapable of forestalling it.