Rebeccanyc Reads Nonfiction in 2013

I'm back for another year!

Yay!

My first nonfiction book of the year!

The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo by Tom Reiss



What a delight it is to read a biography that is impeccably researched yet rolls off the pages like a novel, that tells the story of a fascinating yet little known person and situates it so lightly yet fully in the tumultuous time in which he lived. The Black Count is Alex Dumas (father of the novelist), né Thomas-Alexandre Dumas Davy de la Pallertrie, the son of a white French slave owner in Saint-Domingue (now Haiti) and an enslaved black woman, who became one of the leading generals in the French revolutionary army and whose adventures and mishaps inspired his son (who was four when his father died).

The story begins when Alex's father Antoine goes to Saint-Domingue to seek his fortune and ultimately "disappears" for a while after running into problems with his brothers and others, only to reappear when it seems he may be able to claim his inheritance back in France. He sold his son into slavery to pay for his own passage to France, but then buys him back and sends for him to come to France to join him. The year is 1776, and Thomas-Alexandre is 14 years old. His father enrolls him in a fencing academy and he becomes quite the young gentleman around town, often admired, but sometimes encountering racist comments and actions. After his father remarries, in 1786, he enlists in the army, not as an officer but as a common soldier in the dragoons, and takes the name Alexandre Dumas, rejecting the aristocratic name and title and identifying himself as the son of Cessette and Antoine Dumas.

From there, his adventures begin, as he becomes involved in various activities relating to the Revolution. Having previously discussed slavery in France's American colonies and how people of color were treated in France under the laws relating to slavery, Reiss now describes the blossoming of a period in which people of color were considered citizens of France along with the white people, a time in which schools were multiracial and people of color could advance in the army. Along the way, Alex falls in love with Marie-Louise, a white woman, and her republican father couldn't have been more thrilled to have this handsome, dashing man for his son-in-law, only requesting that he make sergeant before the pair get married. Little did he imagine that Alex would already be a lieutenant colonel by the time he returned. Reiss describes what is happening in the revolution and how this complicates reporting requirements for army officers, as well as what happened in the wars it undertook to spread its republican mandate. We see Alex undertaking daring and heroic actions as he leads his men (even generals led from the front, not the back, in those days) and getting promoted to general. In the Alps, as part of the Army of Italy, he encounters dangers in the form of mountains and glaciers, as well as Austrians and impatient revolutionary bureaucrats back in Paris. And it is in the Army of Italy that he first meets another general, Napoleon Bonaparte, who will become his nemesis.

Alex goes with General Bonaparte (not yet just Napoleon) on his ill-fated expedition to Egypt. There, the Egyptians tend to think that six-foot Alex, riding a horse as if the horse were part of him, is the leader, not the shorter, less imposing, and less handsome Bonaparte. Needless to say, this adds to Bonaparte's dislike of Alex. After a military disaster, Bonaparte sneaks back to France, leaving Alex and his colleagues to find their own way back. It is then that Alex gets captured by the Neapolitans in southern Italy and is imprisoned in a cell in a medieval castle for two years while they try to figure out what to do with him. His experiences are harrowing, and form some of the basis for his son's novel, The Count of Monte Cristo. Eventually he is released and comes home to Marie-Louise; shortly thereafter, their only son, the future novelist is born. But Alex's health has been ruined, and the new government under Napoleon has no interest in helping him, and racial laws are returning, and he dies.

This book is a compelling read for so many reasons, as I alluded to above. It was so readable, in fact, that I worried about the scholarship, until I discovered the 45 pages of endnotes, several for almost every page, and the 16 pages of selected bibliography, including three of primary sources. I especially liked the way Reiss works in the history of everything from sugar plantations in Saint-Domingue to the ins and outs of southern Italian alliances while still telling the story of Alex Dumas. This is a fascinating portrait of a fascinating man and his era, and above all it is fun and thought-provoking.

3: Wondering what inspired you, I see this was an ER book, though yours doesn't have the icon. Your review is more thorough than most. Not for me, but your review tells me more than I ever knew.

I saw it in a bookstore and it looked intriguing, especially given my interests in the French revolution, colonialism, and racial issues. I may have also heard something about it on NPR.

Glad to see more positive words for The Black Count.!I did win it as an ER and found SO wonderful. I think Reiss found a really effective balance of giving us loads of sources while making it feel like a Dumas novel (which I suppose wasn't too hard, given the inspiration Dumas the writer took form his father's life).

Adding The Black Count to my list of probables for my NF challenge. Nice review!

My Century by Aleksander Wat
Crossposted from my Club Read and 75 Books threads.



Part prison/internal exile memoir, part intellectual history, this compelling and moving book is most fundamentally an exploration of ethics, human dignity, and religious struggle in the face of the horrors of Stalinism, Nazism, and the second world war. Born in 1900, Wat was the son of assimilated, intellectual Warsaw Jews who first became a futurist/dadist poet in the 1920s and, starting at the end of the decade, flirted with communism as the editor of The Literary Monthly. Arrested by the Poles, he was jailed for the first time, but not for long. Later, he rejected communism, largely because of the people who were executed (although he continued to be called a "Jewish communist")." When the Nazis invaded Poland, he and his wife, Ola, and son fled to L'wow, but became separated, although they did eventually find each other. After some time in L'wow, Wat was arrested by the Soviets and began his journey through a variety of prisons, including Moscow's notorious Lubyanka, before winding up "free" in Alma-Ata and the neighboring town of Ili.

The book is based on a series of lengthy interviews with Wat conducted by fellow Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz in Berkeley and Paris in the mid-1960s, shortly before Wat's death; he was in extreme pain even during the interviews and ultimately chose to commit suicide. Thus, except for two chapters which Wat had the opportunity to edit and make more literary, the reader is hearing Wat's voice as he talked to Milosz. And what a voice it is -- perceptive, informed, rigorously honest about human strengths and failings (including his own), unsentimental, at times prejudiced (but aware of that prejudice, e.g., the idea that Poles are superior to Russians, especially "Asian" Russians), warm, and often poetic.

The early part of the book depicts the literary and political scene in Warsaw in the 1920s and 1930s and was filled with the names of Polish and other intellectuals; this was a little heavy going for someone unfamiliar with that scene (although there is a very helpful list of people mentioned at the end of my NYRB edition). But the story picked up as the war started and the Wats fled. Wat's descriptions of the people he met in various prisons, the horrific conditions in many of them, how to adapt to prison life, the different types of interrogators, how bedbugs behave, the different kinds of lice, and much more are both spare and detailed, fascinating and profoundly depressing. Wat was very acute at picking up signs from people and hypothesized that his interrogator in the Lubyanka was no longer interested in his "crime" but was instead picking his brain about the Polish literary and intellectual scene in anticipation of the Soviets taking over Poland in the future. In prison, he worried terribly about what had happened to his family, engaged in in-depth conversations with other intellectuals, pondered (as all do) who are the informers, and underwent a religious experience in which he saw "the devil in history" and converted to Catholocism. When the Germans approached Moscow, the Lubyanka was evacuated and Wat was sent to a variety of prisons further east. Ultimately released, although barely alive, he traveled to Alma-Ata (despite not having papers to go there) to try to find Ola and his son; after heroic efforts, he did.. Everyone was desperately hungry, struggling to find food. Through connections with the delegation of the Polish government (in exile in London) in Alma-Ata, Wat was able for a time to find some work and some access to supplies the delegation received from foreign sources, but it was a very hand-to-mouth existence both there and in the smaller town of Ili where they wind up. The book ends, because the interviews ended, but the NYRB edition includes an excerpt from Ola Wat's memoirs which describes Wat's role in resisting the Soviet government's efforts to force Soviet passports on Polish citizens in Ili, and both their experiences in prisons, hers more terrifying than his.

The best part of this book is Wat's voice, his warmth, his perception, and his ceaseless self-evaluation. But almost equally fascinating is the varied cast of characters who pass through Wat's life, from Warsaw intellectuals to urks (Russian criminals), from NKVD officers with aristocratic manners to people from poorer walks of life who help him (or despise him), from people going mad from imprisonment to people who somehow learn to live with it. One of the interesting aspects is that everyone is acutely aware not only of each other's social status within the community of the cell, but also of their ethnicity or national background. In prison and elsewhere, Jews gravitate to other Jews, Poles to other Poles, and so on, and Wat is quick to point out if someone has a Mongol-type face, or looks like a Kazakh. This makes the challenge of the Stalinist effort to make all the various nationalities "Soviet" come alive. Finally, I found Wat's thoughts about such varied topics as the similarities between communism and Nazism, how to talk to interrogators, nighttime conversations between a former Polish cavalry captain and an Ukrainian peasant based on their shared love of animals, literary works and people, religion and the relationship between Judaism and Christianity, endlessly fascinating.

I picked up a copy of My Century last week and I'm excited to wade into it.

I hadn't heard of My Century before. It sounds dreadfully fascinating.

Thanks, Ellen and Meredith!

Young Stalin by Simon Sebag Montefiore



The most remarkable thing about this fascinating biography, which essentially shows how "Soso" Djugashvili became Stalin, is the amazing use Montefiore makes of the incredibly rich resources of recently opened Soviet and especially Georgian and other Caucasian archives. From memoirs recorded(?) by Stalin's mother, to those of the friends of his childhood and his colleagues in his early days as a thug for Bolshevism, these documents reveal much about the young Stalin and his environment, and Montefiore weaves them into a history that reads almost like a novel.

From his earliest years, Stalin exhibited the kind of drive, cunning, contempt for others, sense of his own superiority, and willingness to commit violence, albeit on a smaller stage, that stood him is such bad stead when he came to power. He prided himself on his ability to sniff out spies (although, it turns out, he was often woefully wrong) and he was a master of saving his own skin and escaping from dangerous situations. The story of his childhood, with an ambitious (for him) mother abandoned by an alcoholic husband, and his "adoption" by other families who his mother felt could help him get ahead (specifically by going to a seminary for his education) is fascinating, as is his interest in revolutionary ideas and his affinity for thugs and crime. (While he was studying in the seminary, he read a lot and it was a little disconcerting to learn of his enthusiasm for books I also like, including Germinal and Toilers of the Sea.) For a while he helped finance Lenin's work through bank and other robberies in the Georgian region; he and members of other pre-revolutionary groups also basically extorted money from oil barons in the Caucasus to support their activities.

Another interesting aspect of this book was the insight into the effectiveness of the Okhrana, the Tsar's secret police. According to Montefiore, they were one of the best spy services of the era and had double agents very close to the top in the Bolshevik and other parties. Certainly, Stalin was arrested several times and sent into exile, from which he escaped every time except the last time, when he was sent to an extremely remote (and cold) area of Siberia. His experiences there, where he became friendly with some of the local tribespeople, are fascinating. It was at a dinner with fellow Bolshevik exiles in Siberia that Stalin, in a discussion of the greatest pleasures in life, said "My greatest pleasure is to choose one's victim, prepare one's plans minutely, slake an implacable vengeance, and then go to bed. There's nothing sweeter in the world." (p. 295) And Molotov said, "A little piece of Siberia remained lodged in Stalin for the rest of his life." (p. 301)

Stalin was quite the ladies man. While in Siberia, he impregnated (twice) a girl who was initially 13 years old, and he was involved with dozens of women and girls over the years and abandoned them all. Early on, he married, but his wife died soon thereafter, and he ignored their son who remained in Georgia. By the end of this volume, in 1917, he had gotten involved with Nadya Alleiluva, who would become his second wife.

Stalin recognized that Lenin was the key to the revolution and to power, and increasingly sought to stay close to him and help him. Lenin, Stalin's opposite in background, recognized in him a kindred hard-liner and somebody who, with his coterie of thugs, could make certain things happen that his more intellectual hangers-on could not. After the Bolsheviks took over the Winter Palace in October 1917, Stalin and Trotsky were the only people allowed to enter Lenin's office whenever they wanted. The book presents a strong picture of Lenin as well, and makes the case that Leninism and Stalinism were aligned, not that Stalinism was a perversion of Leninism. Lenin is quoted as responding to a proposal by Kamenev and Trotsky that capital punishment in the army be abolished by saying, "What nonsense! How can you have a revolution without shooting people?" (p. 350)

Montefiore also argues that Stalin

"could not have risen to power at any other time in history; it required the synchronicity of man and moment. His unlikely rise as a Georgian who could rule Russia was only made possible by the internationalist character of Marxism. His tyranny was made possible by the beleaguered circumstances of Soviet Russia, the utopian fanaticism of its quasi-religious ideology, the merciless Bolshevik machismo, the slaughterous spirit of the Great War, and Lenin's homicidal vision of a "dictatorship of the proletariat." Stalin would not have been possible if Lenin had not, in the first days of the regime, defeated Kamenev's milder way to create the machinery for so boundless and absolute a power. That was the forum for which Stalin was superbly equipped. Now Stalin could become Stalin." (p. 353)

Finally, a word from Montefiore about his sources.

I have been hugely fortunate in finding new sources, often unpublished or partly unpublished, and barely previously used by historians. Archival sources are more reliable than oral histories, but of course they too have their dangers and must be analysed carefully. But the anti-Stalinist histories often turn out to be just as unreliable.

Many of the archives used in this book, for example, were recorded by official Party historians . . . Therefore, one must be constantly aware that they were recorded under constant pressure to present Stalin in a good light. At all times, one has to be aware of the circumstances and try to penetrate the Bolshevik language to see what the witnesses are really trying to tell us.

Yet those recorded before the Terror in 1937 are often astonishingly frank, tactless, or derogatory about Stalin: a derogatory story about Stalin in an official memoir is almost certainly true. Many of the witnesses were so naive or honest that their memoirs were unusable at the time, or only usable in small sections. Such memoirs were not destroyed, but were simply preserved in the archives. Many were edited, then copied and sent to Stalin's Moscow archive, so there are differences between versions. But the originals usually survived in the local archive." (p. 385)

He goes on, but this gives a flavor of his approach. He also conducted many interviews with descendents of key people. The effort that went into telling this story is remarkable.

This is a compelling and chilling portrait, and I am eager to read Monefiore's sequel, The Court of the Red Tsar (which he actually wrote first).

The Orientalist: Solving the Mystery of a Strange and Dangerous Life by Tom Reiss



Born Lev Nussimbaum in Baku in the revolutionary year of 1905, and buried as Mohammed Essad Bey in Positano during the second world war, the writer who is the protagonist of this biography reveled in creating new identities and life stories for himself, but ultimately was trapped by the weight of geography and history. This book hadn't intrigued me when it first came out, but after reading Tom Reiss's The Black Count, I was eager to read this earlier work and I was not disappointed. Reiss became interested in Nussimbaum when he traveled to Baku to write an article about oil and was introduced to the novel Ali and Nino, written by someone named Kurban Said, said to be the best book to read about the place; who Kurban Said was was a mystery, a mystery which led him to research the life of Nussimbaum/Bey.

And quite a life it was. His father was a an oil millionaire in Baku, but father and son had to flee across the Caucusus after the 1917 revolution, with quite dramatic adventures along the way, adventures made even more dramatic by Nussimbaum/Bey when he wrote about them. (His mother, a revolutionary, had killed herself earlier.) As a child, and especially after this flight, young Lev became interested in what we would now call the multicultural but then was called, often derogatorily, cosmopolitan nature of the region, with Jews, Muslims, Azeris, Russians, and more interacting in business and in the streets. He became especially intrigued by Turkish culture in particular, and came to invent a Turkish and Persian heritage for himself.

Along with other emigrés from Soviet Russia, Lev and his father moved around Europe from Paris to Berlin, eventually becoming poor. Lev invented his Essad Bey persona, began to write nonfiction, and hung out with a literary crowd. Having grown up with the turmoil and danger of revolution, he had strong anti-revolutionary politics and even flirted with fascism. Later, he began to write fiction, married, visited the US, was divorced, and started writing fiction. Here is where the mystery of the name Kurban Said comes in. Eventually fleeing Nazi Berlin, he landed for a while in Vienna, then in Italy, where he became very sick and died, known in Positano only as "the Muslim."

Even more interesting than Nussimbaum's strange and sad story is the background Reiss provides on the times, places, and events. From the oil boom days in Baku to the cultures of the Caucasus, from the revolutionary and counterrevolutionary events in Berlin in the 20s and 30s to the lives of the emigré population in Paris and Berlin, from the fascination of the west with "eastern" culture to the effects of the Nazi takeover of publishing, and more, he brings compelling and (to me) little known history to life. As with his later biography, this one also reads like a novel, but Reiss conducted extensive interviews, read primary sources, and includes detailed notes and a lengthy biography.

Glad to hear this is a good one too! I'd never heard of Reiss until I got the Black Count as an ER. Definitely have to look for this one soon. He is very skilled at presenting lots of sources while still maintaining the feel of a novel.

It Was a Long Time Ago, and It Never Happened Anyway: Russia and the Communist Past by David Satter



Since I read a lot of Soviet-era history and fiction, this book intrigued me when I spotted it in a bookstore, but I ended up having mixed feelings about it. When Satter concentrates on history and journalism, he presents an informative and chilling details about how contemporary Russians have responded to the horrors of Stalinist purges, executions, and slave labor. But when he ventures into speculation about the reasons for Russian lack of concern, specifically Russian "character," I found myself wishing he had stuck to what he could justify.

Throughout the book, Satter focuses on memorials to the victims of Soviet terror, specifically the dearth of them, as a proxy for Russian commitment to understanding their past. He begins with a look at efforts to memorialize in the early days after the demise of the Soviet Union, and moves on to locations near Moscow and St. Petersburg where thousands upon thousands of people were shot and "buried" in mass graves. The successors to the KGB and NKVD have been reluctant to confirm these killing sites despite pleas from the descendents of victims and the nonprofit group Memorial which accompanied Satter on many of his trips.

Satter moves on to discussions of the appeal of communism, the responsibility of the state (for "rehabilitating" previously convicted people), moral choice under totalitarianism (not a very deeply developed chapter), and the roots of the communist past, before turning to examine the Russian response to the Katyn revelations (in addition to the some 20,000 Polish officers and members of the intelligentsia who were "buried" their after their massacre, the forest also held the bodies of murdered Soviet citizens), the changes that have taken place in Vorkuta, the arctic site of one of the harshest camps in the Gulag, and the Russian treatment of a KGB agent who also worked for the CIA and was outed by Aldrich Ames.

Basically Satter's argument is that when the Soviet Union fell, Russians felt some urge to memorialize the victims of Stalinist oppression. But through a combination of the reluctance of the FSB (the KGB successor) to investigate its past, economic woes, and a Russian "preference" for a strong state, as well as the age of the descendents of the victims, they have not exhibited a strong urge for the kind of self-examination and ongoing remembrance that, say, the Germans have done for their Nazi past. Much of the book also felt repetitive. While I do believe it honors the victims to describe exactly what happened and how people have responded to this knowledge, it got a little tiresome when Satter then describes how only Memorial is interested in creating memorials and how they are thwarted. There is apparently more interest in creating monuments to the communist past than memorials to its victims.

Nonetheless, much of what Satter described was interesting. For example, in the far northern regions, where the post-Stalinist Russian government enticed miners and other workers by paying them extra, those new workers were glorified as "heroes of the North" and didn't want to think about how the regions had originally been developed by gulag slave laborers. It also seemed that when many people remembered the communist past, they were thinking of how they were taken care of as workers, and how the Soviet Union was a powerful and respected nation, and not about Stalinist terror. (In fact, in this book, Satter seems to conflate Stalinist terror with all of communism; a better subtitle would have been "Russia and the Stalinist past".) And I was discouraged to learn that Solzhenitsyn blames "the Jews" for much of the Stalinist evil.

In the end, I felt informed by a lot of the book. It's just that when I get to statements like the one I quote below, I feel uneasy about how Satter generalizes about national culture, and I sense a whiff of ideology:

"Russia differs from the West in its attitude towards the individual. In the West, the individual is treated as an end in himself. His life cannot be disposed of recklessly in the pursuance of political schemes, and recognition of its value imposes limits on the behavior of the authorities. In Russia, the individual is seen by the state as a means to an end, and genuine moral framework for political life does not exist. The result is that the weight of a lawless state apparatus is slowly destroying Russia's immense human potential, rendering the country's authoritarian stability precarious. Russia has little protection from a recurrence of murderous political fanaticism that, under normal circumstances, would be rejected immediately in the West." pp. 304-305

While much of this may be true, Satter just pulls it out of a hat. If he wanted to draw those kinds of conclusions, he should have written a different book, one that analyzed Russian political thought and behavior. These kinds of conclusions seem grafted on to a book which, in its history and journalism, tells an important and depressing tale.

That does sound interesting, but those generalizations would bug me too. Especially since it's not a Russian attitude it's an attitude found under most similar communist systems. The same attitudes seem to prevail in China and North Korea as well, according to what I've read.

Interesting review. I have to agree with you that those conclusions are off-base. It's frustrating when a writers biases get in the way of their good points.

Thanks. I wish he had stuck with the history/journalism and left out the theorizing.

Pieces of Light: How the New Science of Memory Illuminates the Stories We Tell About Our Pasts by Charles Fernyhough



I bought this book after hearing an intriguing interview with the author on my local public radio station. Many of the topics he discusses are fascinating and thought-provoking, but I found the book tiresome in some respects. Specifically, rather than focusing on the scientific evidence, Fernyhough mixes in a lot of personal stories, some in much more detail (especially at the beginning of the book) than I would have liked. He also includes quotes from novels, which I found much more engaging. But the personal stories and digressions, which Fernyhough no doubt would claim bring to life some of the points he is trying to make, gave me the feeling that he was trying to enlarge what could have been a long article into a reasonably sized book. Could have been just me.

Fernyhough's topic is what he calls autobiographical memory, our memories of what happened to us. He distinguishes semantic memory, or the memory of facts, from episodic memory, or the memory of events. As he writes, "Our memory for the events of our own lives involves the integration of details of what happened (episodic memory) with long-term knowledge about the facts of our lives (a kind of autobiographical semantic memory." (pp. 12-13) That is, I know (semantic memory) that I was in kindergarten when I had my tonsils out, but I remember and can picture myself (episodic memory) having ice cream for breakfast afterwards. (See, I can use personal examples too!) He also distinguishes between conscious or explicit memory and unconscious or implicit memory.

So what are some of his most interesting points? The biggest one is that we do not actually store memories in a complete form in our brains. Instead, every time we recall something we are recreating that memory not just from what we "remember" but from the perspective of who we are today and of all the other times we have recalled that memory. Each time we remember something we are adding to the way we will remember it the next time; in essence, we construct a memory anew each time we access it. Another point I found fascinating is that the brain structures that are involved in memory are also involved in thinking about the future (which Fernyhough points out are both imaginative processes) and that one evolutionary role of memory may have been to help us plan for the future.

Fernyhough covers a variety of other topics, all related to "new research in cognitive neuroscience the discipline that integrates findings from experimental psychology, neuroimaging and neuropsychology (studies of brain damage)." (pp. 14-15) Specifically, he discusses how our senses, especially smell and hearing, trigger memories; at what age children start having autobiographical memories, and whether this is related to their ability to express them; how we can remember things completely wrong, or things that never happened; traumatic memories, whether they are more likely to be accurate, and how they might be minimized if they become obsessive; why our memories are strongest of our late teenage and early adult years; and what happens to our memory as we age.

There's a lot that's worth reading in this book; I just found it annoying to have to read so much about Fernyhough and his family. For those who want to skip the book, but get the main ideas, check out this link to the radio program I heard.

31. An Armenian Sketchbook by Vasily Grossman



I became an admirer of Vasily Grossman when I read his magnificent and tragic Life and Fate, and continued on with his other works of fiction and reportage, all in NYRB editions. (I also have, but have not yet read, his A Writer at War.) Grossman not only lived through some of the worst horrors of the 20th century, but also, as a reporter attached to the Red Army, saw many of them first-hand, including being one of the first to enter Trebiinka. His writing shines with diamond-sharp clarity, and with a pervasive humanity.

Thus I was happy to read this much more personal account of two months Grossman spent, at the beginning of the 1960s and towards the end of his life, in Armenia. Although Stalin had died, the KGB had recently confiscated his manuscript of Life and Fate and, perhaps as something of a consolation prize, he was given the task of editing a literal translation of an Armenian book. So he went to Armenia, and in this brief volume he tells some of his impressions of Armenia and some of what he did there, and meditates on the meaning of nations, villages, Russian stoves,and -- above all -- what is good. The original title of this book was a Russian translation of an Armenian greeting: Barev dzez, or "Good to you."

I found much of this book very moving. Grossman is not afraid to share his personal thoughts and feelings, while the journalist in him observes the rocky environment of Armenia, the haunted look of the sheep (who become, in a way, stand-ins for the millions killed by Stalin and Hitler), differences in how people express their religious feelings, a wedding in a remote mountain village, and much more. Through what is at first glance a travelogue, Grossman comments on some of the foremost questions of the 20th century and indeed of all time, including the impact of history, the continuity of humanity, and how we treat our fellow human beings. I feel the best way I can illustrate his approach is by quoting several of the many many many passages I marked in this book.

"One thing astonishes me. An old man or woman has only to raise their hand and a bus driver will stop for them; people here are kind an compassionate. Pretty young women walk along the pavement, clicking their thin high heels; dandies in hats lead sheep they have bought for the impending holiday; the sheep click their little hooves on the pavement, and the young women click their fashionable little heels; amid the fine buildings and the neon lights, the sheep smell their death" p. 24

"All of this leads me to think that this world of contradictions, of typing errors, of passages that are too long and wordy, of arid deserts, of fools, of camp commandants, of mountain peaks colored by the evening sun is a beautiful world. If the world were not so beautiful, the anguish of a dying man would not be so terrible, so incomparably more terrible than any other experience. That is why I feel such emotion, why I weep or feel overjoyed when I read or look at the works of other people who have brought together through love the truth of the eternal world and the truth of their mortal "I." " p. 80

"Nowhere else in Armenia, perhaps, have I seen such a stony desolation, impossible to escape from, as in the high valleys of Mount Aragats. I have no idea how to convey this improbable feeling. In three dimensions -- height, width, and depth -- stone, nothing but stone. No, there were more than three dimensions of stone; there was also an expression of the world's fourth coordinate -- time. The migrations of peoples, paganism, the ideas of Marx and Lenin, the wrath of the Soviet state had all found expression in this stone, in the basalt walls of churches, in gravestones, in elegantly built new clubs, in schools and palaces of culture, in quarries and mines, in the stone walls of labor camps. p. 99

Surrender on Demand by Varian Fry



"The French Government is obliged to surrender upon demand all Germans* named by the German Government in France, as well as in French possessions, Colonies, Protectorate Territories and Mandates" From Article XIX of the Franco-German Armistice

*"Germans" came to include anyone in territories the Nazis had conquered, and indeed anyone they wanted.

After reading Anna Seghers's Transit, and learning that she escaped from Marseille to Martinique with the help of Varian Fry, I realized that I'd had his book on my shelves for probably 15 years, and that it seemed like a good time to finally read it.

When the Nazis invaded Paris in June 1940, Varian Fry was a 32-year-old journalist and former classics major who had visited Germany in 1935 and been horrified by the Nazis even in those early years. Three days after the French surrender, the Emergency Rescue Committee was formed; its mission was to rescue many of the European artists, writers, musicians, and intellectuals who had initially fled from all corners of Europe to France and who now needed to flee France as well. Varian Fry agreed to go to Marseille to help get them out, believing that it would take him three weeks to contact the people on the ERC's list and not much longer to get them out with the help he believed he would receive from the US consulate in Marseille.

This is the story of the 13 months Fry spent in Marseille and its environs, before finally being expelled with the aid of the US State Department. During that time, he and his colleagues helped some 4000 people and were able to send some 2000 safely out of France. These people included some of the foremost artists, intellectuals, and labor and political leaders of the time, people such as André Breton, Max Ernst, Franz Werfel, Heinrich Mann, Victor Serge, among many others. To do this, he found himself working 18-hour days and doing whatever was necessary, including buying passports and visas, working with gangsters and forgers and money changers, as well as with representatives of the British military, searching for boats that could take people away, and generally staying one step ahead of the French police and the Gestapo (which not "officially" active in unoccupied Marsellle). Fry introduces us to the diverse group of people who helped in both his above-ground and clandestine activities, and to a who's who of European artists, intellectuals, and anti-Nazis.

More exciting than spy fiction because it is real, this book is also the story of a man who found himself unalterably changed by the situation he found himself in and who then found the courage to face incredible danger and undertake activities that he probably never dreamed he would ever engage in, all because they were necessary to get people out. In fact, the afterword to the edition I read (written by curators of the exhibit on Fry that was the opening exhibit at US Holocaust Museum), quotes a letter Fry wrote to his wife on his way home from Europe in which he says "I do not think I will ever be quite the same person I was when I kissed you goodbye . . . For the experiences of ten, fifteen, and even twenty years have been pressed into one. Sometimes I feel I have lived a whole life (and one to which I have no right) since I first walked down the monumental staircase of the Gare St. Charles in Marseille and timidly took a small back room at the Hotel Splendide . . ."

Fry started writing this book after he returned, but didn't end up publishing it until 1945. He kept no notes while he was in France, and in fact he frequently mentions burning papers just ahead of police visits, but his experiences must have been indelibly recorded in his brain, because the people and his activities come alive in his writing. One of the parts I enjoyed was the way some French and other officials unofficially helped Fry and the refugees, or at least looked the other way. In one amusing episode, a sentry at the Spanish border saw the paperwork Golo Mann, who had just climbed over a mountain to enter Spain with his uncle Heinrich Mann, and realized he was the son of Thomas Mann. Of course, when the sentry asked them about this, they feared being on a Gestapo list, but the sentry said he was honored to meet the son of "so great a man" and then sent for a car to come and get them.

Shamefully, the US government did not fully support Fry in his activities, which he found shocking; this got worse as time went on, and finally the State Department collaborated in Fry's being expelled from France. The US became more concerned about letting political "undesirables" into the country than with protecting the intellectual and artistic elite of Europe. Fry came to believe that people in the US didn't fully understand what was going on in Europe, and that he had to write this book to make them see. In his original introduction, which was not published in 1945 but which is included as an appendix to my edition, he wrote:

"I have tried -- God knows I have tried -- to get back into the mood of American life since I left France for the last time. But it doesn't work. There is only one way to try and that is the way I am going to try now. If I can get it all out, put it all down just as it happened, if I can make others see it and feel it as I did, then maybe I can sleep soundly again at night. . . . Those ghosts won't stop haunting me until I have done their bidding. They are the ghosts of the living who do not want to die. Go back, they said, go back and make America understand, make Americans understand before it is too late."

Varian Fry was the first American to be recognized by Yad Vashem, Israel's memorial to the Holocaust, as
"Righteous Among the Nations," a non-Jew who saved Jews during the Holocaust.

Sister Bernadette's Barking Dog: The Quirky History and Lost Art of Diagramming Sentences by Kitty Burns Florey



I owe this thoroughly delightful read to a review by MJ (detailmuse), and it was the perfect accompaniment to waiting for my car at the shop: a quick, easy read that nonetheless had some meat to it. Not only did I enjoy revisiting the process of diagramming sentences, but I also appreciated Florey's entertaining examples (largely from literature) and her comments about other, more or less related, topics. She is an engaging writer and seems like a person I would like to know. This book was a lot of fun.

The Riddle of the Labyrinth: The Quest to Crack an Ancient Code by Margalit Fox



How do you decipher writing if you don't know anything about the script it's written in and you don't know what language it's in and no Rosetta Stone is available? That was the challenge facing Arthur Evans, a British archaeologist who in 1900 discovered tablets written in what came to be known as Linear B in the Bronze age ruins of the Palace of Minos in Knossos, Crete. The tablets were preserved because the fire that destroyed the palace and its contents in around 1400 BC essentially baked them: Fox quotes Evans as writing "In this way fires -- so fatal elsewhere to historic libraries! -- has acted as a preservative of these earlier records." At the time, these tablets represented the earliest European writing known.

Fox, an obituary writer for the New York Times, tells the tale of how Linear B was deciphered through the stories of three people, two of who are well known: Evans, who found the tablets, and Michael Ventris, a troubled and somewhat dilettantish architect, who eventually deciphered them. For the first time, she also tells the story of Alice Kober, a Brooklyn College classicist who, through patient and careful labor and systematic analysis, made the discoveries that enabled Ventris to solve the mystery; Fox had access to Kober's recently archived papers and believes that had she not died in her 40s she would have solved the mystery of the tablets herself. Ventris himself acknowledged that he used Kober's methods to arrive at his conclusions.

All three people were interesting and obsessed, and though much has already been written about Evans and Ventris, I enjoyed learning about them, as well as about Kober. But what was truly fascinating about this book is how Fox leads the reader through the process of deciphering ancient languages, introducing linguistic comments like inflected languages and bridging syllables as needed. From first showing how to determine if a language is logographic or ideographic (in which each written symbol stands for a whole word or concept), syllabic (in which each symbol stands for a syllable), or alphabetic (in which each symbol stands for an individual sound), to demonstrating the kind of painstaking work Kober undertook to document each instance of each symbol, it's position in a word, and its relationship to symbols on either side, to the role of an intuitive leap in Ventris's eventual success, she presents the kind of thought that goes into what at first seems like an impossible task. I found especially charming how Fox entices the reader into understanding through using the dancing man code from the Sherlock Holmes story as well as something called Blissymbolics. The illustrations of Linear B and Kober's charts are also intriguing

In the end, deciphering Linear B provided new insights into Aegean history, as well as into palace life in ancient Knossos (as the tablets were, unsurprisingly, lists and accountings of food, people, storage vessels, instruments of war, etc.). There is a romance in understanding the people who lived thousands of years before us: as Fox writes, "On the backs of the tablets, those scribes left traces of themselves in the form of fingerprints and even doodles. To look at the tablets even now is to be in the presence of other people -- living, thinking, literate people."

> 23

What a fascinating book. I've also been on a language kick lately. That will go on my wishlist... :)

I've had a book called Breaking the Maya Code on my shelves for many years (probably since it came out in 1992, since I have it in hard cover), because I used to be fascinated by the Maya, and reading this book makes me want to read that one too.

Ooh, that's going on my list too. Love a good language book.

Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar by Simon Sebag Montefiore



I started reading Montefiore's two-volume history of Stalin with Young Stalin, which comes first chronologically but which he wrote second and which I found absolutely compelling and chilling, because of DieFledermaus's fascinating and comprehensive review last year. There is little I can add to that review, so I'll just note a few comments about my reaction to this book.

Montefiore had access to recently released Soviet archives, and also was able to interview some people who still remembered Stalin, whether because they had been fortunate enough to live to an advanced age or because they had been children of his associates. So even though I knew the broad outlines of Stalin's life from having read the excellent Hitler and Stalin, these added texture to the story. And it is really a story of the magnates (as he calls them) who clustered around Stalin, schemed against their colleagues, tried desperately to stay in Stalin's favor, and endured endless alcohol- and food-filled nights with him -- his court, in other words. It is not a biography of Stalin (and, after a break, because he's a hard man to spend a lot of time with, both in real life and on the pages of a book, I would still like to read a biography that takes advantage of the Soviet archives) and it isn't a history of the tumultuous middle of the 20th century, although history intrudes now and then.

And there, in a nutshell, lies my problem with the book, its strength and its weakness. It is a remarkable accomplishment, and I appreciated the broad outline of what the magnates were like and what happened to them, but I guess I just wasn't that interested in the details of who said what to whom or did what to whom day in and day out (I exaggerate). Things picked up for me a little when the war started, because at least there was a little (!) action. Young Stalin was a real biography of Stalin's early life, and Montefiore integrated the quotations from archives and interview into the story in a very readable way, and I enjoyed (?) that book a lot more than this one. I'm glad I read it, and I certainly learned things I didn't know, but I was glad when it was over.

The Lost Art of Finding Our Way by John Edward Huth



Although this book wasn't what I expected to be, for the most part I found it interesting, if a little more detailed in places than I would have liked. At the beginning, Huth, a Harvard physics professor, talks about how technology has lessened our abilities to navigate by the stars, predict the weather, use compasses, etc. I thought this book would help me learn techniques for finding my way. Huth notes he taught a course on this topic, and gave his students some practical assignments, so I thought, or hoped, some of them would find their way into the book.

Instead, Huth has written a comprehensive book, heavy on the physics (not surprisingly) but with helpful illustrations, that covers everything from ancient navigation techniques to how people get lost to maps and compasses; the stars, the sun, and the moon; latitude and longitude; weather and storms; waves, tides, and currents; and the construction of hulls and sails. As can be seen, the book focuses more on ocean navigation than on finding one's way on land. Throughout, Huth stresses how vital sustained observation and practice are, and how navigators need to cross-check information obtained in different ways, especially if one reading or interpretation is unexpected.

Some of the most interesting parts of the book for me were the discussions of ancient feats of navigation, especially by the Norse and by Pacific Islanders, and also later, not always successful, feats of Arctic exploration. It is a remarkable testament to the human ability to observe, interpret, and remember patterns of stars, waves, weather, etc., that can be put to practical use. Needless to say, this information and practice are also important in military training.

I didn't attempt to study most of the topics in the book, but instead tried to get a flavor of what Huth was talking about; this was especially true for the sections about navigating by the stars, observing the relative height of the sun at noon, and understanding cloud patterns and what they reveal about weather. By the time I got to the last chapters about boat construction, I was skimming. On the other hand, I found the very limited practical information interesting, such as how big an angle of the sky your hand covers when you hold a fist out at the end of an outstretched arm. Of course, I am unlikely to use this information, but if someone were to condense a handbook of do-it-yourself techniques from the mass of physical information in this book, I would buy it.

The Examined Life: How We Lose and Find Ourselves by Stephen Grosz



Grosz, a psychoanalyst based in London, presents brief portraits of some of his patients (disguised, of course), exploring both the range of problems that affect his largely middle-class patients and the psychoanalytic process itself. While some of the patients have what might be considered run-of-the-mill problems (although disturbing and painful for them, of course), others have more interesting stories. And stories are what these are: stories of how the past (and sometimes the future) make trouble for us in the present. (Grosz also gives examples from literature.) Perhaps more interesting was the insight Grosz gives into how psychoanalysts work, what they listen for, what they have to struggle with themselves, how something unexpected can create understanding. I found this book for the most part deeply moving, and very well written, but not as illuminating as I might have hoped.

Who Owns the Future? by Jaron Lanier



Jaron Lanier is a visionary and and an idealist, and apparently a very successful and well known computer scientist, although I had never heard of him until I read about this book in a review of another one. Much of this book is speculative about the world we will live in when computers and networks become even more ubiquitous than they are now, and while I found some of that both whimsical and provocative, I was more interested in the ideas Lanier focuses on. The key ones, as far as I can tell, because much of his writing is digressive (and at times repetitive) are as follows.

1. We have been seduced by the "fake free," which as resulted in the loss (so far) of many middle class jobs. He cites the example of the music industry (he is also a musician and composer), in which the rise of online music in its various forms has resulted in a drastic reduction in record label jobs, music publishing jobs, record store jobs, etc., as well as in the diminution of copyright protections and payments to musicians when their music is played; for the musicians themselves, this has led to their largely being able to make money only when they perform live, a lifestyle which is possible only for those who are childless and have other means of support (e.g., parents). He extrapolates from this not only to other creative fields, such as writing books and making films, but, ultimately, also to manufacturing (when people will be able to "print" out most of what they need on home 3-D "printers" from design files available free on the internet, buying only the "goop" they need as input), and to medical care, with robots providing many personal care functions. The issue he raises is economic: how will people get paid for their work when it is being distributed for free or performed by machines?

"The idea that mankind's information should be made free is idealistic, and undeniably popular, but information wouldn't need to be free if no one were impoverished. As software and networks become more and more important, we can either be moving towards free information in the midst of insecurity for almost everyone, or toward paid information with a stronger middle class than ever before. The former might seem more ideal in the abstract, but the latter is the more realistic path to lasting democracy and dignity." p. 9

2. We have also been seduced by "Siren Servers," the huge online companies to which we willingly provide all sorts of personal information (e.g., Facebook, Amazon, and others, including large financial institutions and other businesses) while they ruthlessly "spy" on us, collecting, collating, analyzing the information we provide to provide economic value to themselves. He goes on at some length about how they do this and how they can do it.

3. Back in the pre-internet era, in 1960, a computer scientist named Ted Nelson proposed a system, then not technically possible, with two-way links, so that the link would not just connect to something but would also connect back to the person who had created the information. Although this system was not implemented with our current internet, Lanier believes it is both technically possible and a way to, in the future, implement a "nanopayment" system in which people get paid every time someone uses something online that they created, whether it is a song, or a book, or a video, or a file so someone can print out a new dress or a new pair of pants, or whatever we may dream of or not even imagine right now.

"In a network with two-way links, each node knows what other nodes are linked to it.

That would mean you'd know all the websites that point to yours. It would mean you'd know all the financiers who had leveraged your mortgage. It would mean you'd know all the videos that used your music.

Two-way linking would preserve context. It's a small, simple change in how online information would be stored that couldn't have vaster implications for culture and the economy." p. 227

4. Lanier's focus is on keeping human beings at the center of technology ("Belief in the specialness of people is a minority position in the tech world, and I would like that to change"), and in creating an economic system in which there are fewer economic "stars" and more of a bell curve of successful people -- i.e., a strong middle class with minimal extremes of wealth and poverty. He believes in people having economic "dignity." I cannot evaluate either his economics or his technical vision, but this certainly seems desirable from the standpoint of stable economies and stable politics.

5. Lanier also addresses the creepiness factor. "All three creepy vexations -- privacy, identity, and security -- have ancient pedigrees but have been made catastrophically more confusing by big data and network effects." This is one of the places where his idealism comes in, as he believes that a "fundamental economic model" that is structured to reduce the motivations for creepiness will result in "legit companies and professionals" not doing creepy things even thought there will be more and more reasons for people to want to accede to being tracked. As one of his subheadings says, "The Creepiness Is Not in the Tech, but in the Power We Grant to Siren Servers," which he sees as "soft blackmail."

All in all, this is a provocative book. Lanier has garnered both lots of praise and lots of criticism for it, as can be seen in the comments on this New York Times piece. But a reader doesn't have to agree with all his speculation about the future to see the very real problems he describes and to ponder the solutions he proposes.

59. Lost Girls: An Unsolved American Mystery by Robert Kolker



Maureen/Marie. Melissa/Chloe. Shannan/Angelina. Megan/Lexi. Amber/Carolina. These five young women were lost long before they turned to prostitution and were murdered and dumped along a lonely Long Island road by a still unknown serial killer.

To document these women's lives, both their childhoods and their transition to prostitution, Kolker, a journalist, conducted hundreds of hours of interviews with their families and friends. The reader sees the chaos of their economic and social lives; largely from working class communities, often communities from which jobs had fled, they experienced fractured families, occasional abuse, and constant worry about how to pay the bills. They dreamed of something better and prostitution, especially in the era of the internet when they could write their own ads and not owe anything to a pimp or a madam, offered the promise of making more money than they ever could at whatever minimum wage jobs they could manage to get. Of course, the anonymity of obtaining clients over the internet and through cell phone calls has its dangers too: a prostitute can't use her street smarts to sense when a client is weird or scary. And, with drugs so much a part of the scene, many fell into drug abuse too. The first part of the book, and the more powerful, is devoted to their stories.

In the second part of the book, Kolker examines the discovery of the bodies, the investigation (possibly bungled), the media onslaught, the bonding of the families (through Facebook and in real life) and then their unbonding, and some of the people who lived in the remote, gated community of Oak Beach, a marshy barrier island near some of New York's popular beaches, where the bodies were found. He also looks at some of the thinking about serial killers and why they often kill prostitutes. While interesting, I didn't find this as compelling as the first part.

At the end of the book, Kolker rightly notes:

"The demand for commercial sex will never go away. Neither will the Internet; they're stuck with each other. It may no longer even matter anymore whether the sale of sex among consenting adults is wrong or right, immoral or empowering. What's clear is that no good can come from pretending that the people who participate in prostitution don't exist. That, after all, is what the killer was counting on." p. 381

I have a quibble. At one point, Kolker discusses drug addicts hanging around Tompkins Square Park in Manhattan's East Village, and notes that the area has become gentrified and that the park even has a playground. I lived a few blocks from there in the late 70s and early 80s, long before it became gentrified, and there was a playground in the park back then. It's where the poor people who used to live around there took their kids, despite the addicts in the park; where else were they to go? My point is that if Kolker shades his information in this case with which I'm personally familiar, how is a reader to know where else he might be shading information?

The book was enhanced by some excellent maps.

The case remains unsolved, the murderer still at large.

Dersu the Trapper by V. K. Arseniev


Photo from the Kurosawa film, "Dersu Uzala"

I found this book fascinating on many levels, and much richer and deeper than the Kurosawa movie which I enjoyed when I saw it some years ago. I was spurred to get the book by references to it in Ian Frazier's wonderful Travels in Siberia. The book is an adventure story, an exploration of a remote rugged area and its plants, animals, and people, and a portrait of a remarkable man, Dersu.

In 1902, and again in 1906 and 1907, V. N. Arseniev was sent by the Russian government to make a geographic survey of the area north of Vladivostok and thus on the strip of Russia that drops down to the borders with China and Korea. "My duties included the making of a reconnaissance of the the chief rivers and of the central watershed, the range called Sihoté-Alin, which dominates the province. My orders covered the study of the zoology and botany of the district, and of the natives, both aborigines and immigrant." He was accompanied by some assistants and by some soldiers, along with pack horses. In the course of their work, they were confronted by many, often life-threatening, challenges, including predominantly weather and difficult terrain (both land and rivers), but also wild animals (including biting flies) and people.

However, they had the amazingly good fortune to very quickly run into Dersu (who actually found them), a native of the Gold(i) people, now apparently known as the Nanai. He and Arnseniev hit it off, and Dersu ended up accompanying them on the 1902 expedition and then, through another stroke of fate, on the later ones. Dersu had lived in the area for all his life, hunting and trapping, especially following an outbreak of smallpox that had killed his family. He was completely attuned to life outdoors, noticing and interpreting the smallest clues about weather, animals, and people. He could see a track in the ground and disturbance of nearby plants and tell what kind of person had been there, how long ago, what he was carrying, and more. He was a man of action, as when he more than once saved Arseniev's life, including building a shelter from reeds when a blizzard was coming in (highlighted int he movie), and a man of philosophy (he humanized all the animals, calling them "men," and he talked to them, and he also believed in not killing more animals than one needs for food and leaving supplies for the next person to use a hut). Arseniev admired him, respected his wisdom and values, and loved him; the reader comes to do so too, and Arseniev as well. They, and the very real hardships and adventures they share, are at the heart of this book.

But it is also a story of exploration, when there were still relatively unmarked lands to map: mountain ranges, rivers, forests, rocky outcrops. Of course, there were people who lived there, both, as Arseniev says, native and immigrant, who could serve as guides, on-trail and off. Most were friendly; some were not. The immigrants included Koreans and Chinese people, and in some cases the Chinese are excoriated for exploiting the native populations. Most people lived in extreme poverty, following traditional means of getting enough from nature to survive (including ingenious traps), although even at the beginning of the 20th century, before all its upheavals and "progress," Arseniev could see that these ways of life were destined to end, largely because of resource exploitation.

" 'All round soon all game end,' commented Dersu. 'Me think ten years, no more wapiti, sable, no more squirrel, all gone.'

It was impossible to disagree with him. In their own country, the Chinese have long since exterminated the game, almost every living thing. All that is left with them are crows, dogs, and rats. Even in their sea they have the trepangs, the crabs, the various shellfish, and all the seaweed. The Pri-Amur country, so rich in forests and wild life, awaits the same fate, if energetic measures be not taken soon to prevent the wholesale slaughter by the Chinese." p. 176

Even discounting his anti-Chinese sentiments (prejudice?), this is a prescient view of what was to happen worldwide later in the century.

Arseniev is entranced by the plants and animals he finds. His lengthy descriptions of the flora of different areas sent me running to Wikipedia to find pictures of some of them. And what remarkable animals: in addition to the wapiti and sable Dersu mentions, tigers, various kinds of deer, wolverines, seals, salmon, birds of all kinds, and more, more more. (Dersu can tell a lot about the weather from bird behavior.) Arseniev's sketchy drawings of some of the birds and other animals enhance the text. He is fascinated by what he sees, and was obviously completely the right person for the Russians to send on this expedition.

This book captures a moment in time. There was a revolution in 1905, and then the one that "shook the world" in 1917. As Jaimy Gordon (!) notes in her excellent introduction, Arseniev died in 1930 with a warrant out for his arrest, and his widow was arrested in 1937 and shot a year later as a Japanese spy. "Among other sagacities," she writes, "Arseniev had the good sense not to live to be old."

I loved this book, and am glad I saw the movie first, as it would have been a disappointment after the book. Kurosawa did a good job of capturing the more dramatic parts of the story, the ones that translate well into film, but he altered the meaning sometimes and made up a wife and son for Arseniev, and expanded the section, when Dersu briefly comes to live with Arseniev in Khabarovsk.

80. Midnight in Peking: How the Murder of a Young Englishwoman Haunted the Last Days of Old China by Paul French



I read this book because of a recommendation here on LT that assured me that a lot of it was about prewar, pre-revolution China and not just about the gruesome murder of a 19-year-old English schoolgirl. And so it was, and French is a good writer, and I was eager to find out what happened, or what the young woman's father figured out after the police failed at their investigation. And it was a mildly interesting read.

But I guess I felt French was saying, in so many ways, "look at the corruption, look at the vice, ooh, so exotic" and telling the story from the perspective of the English (and to a lesser extent, other Europeans, especially the White Russian refugees from the Soviet Union). You'd almost think the Chinese were only there to complement the Europeans.

There's a district where drinking and drug selling and prostitution go on. How shocking! The local police are corrupt. How terrible! Sometimes the Europeans and Chinese mix. How daring! Many people won't talk to the cops. How surprising! The English want to investigate but have their hands tied by their higher-ups. How unusual! Well, you get the idea. The book relies a lot on the unfamiliarity of most readers with this time and place, and on their being interested in the "exotic" nature of it. But I did read the whole thing.

And PS, the subtitle "How the Murder of a Young Englishwoman Haunted the Last Days of Old China" -- I don't think so!

The Broken Road: From the Iron Gates to Mount Athos by Patrick Leigh Fermor

Cross-posted from my Club Read and 75 Books threads.



For the many years since I was first entranced by Patrick Leigh Fermor's tale of his travels, on foot, starting at the age of 18, from Holland to Czechoslovakia in A Time of Gifts and then from Hungary to the Rumanian and Bulgarian border in Between the Woods and the Water, I , like his countless other admirers, have yearned for the third volume which would take him to his destination of Constantinople. And here, after his death, it is -- sort of. Leigh Fermor's literary executors, dear friends, took his early drafts of the material, enhanced by some of his own editing in his waning years, and turned into this still incomplete volume which ends in mid-sentence several days before he reached his goal. As his friends and editors note in their introduction:

". . . on his death in 2011 he left behind a manuscript of the final narrative whose shortcomings or elusiveness had tormented him for so many years. He never completed it as he would have wished. The reasons for this are uncertain. . . . The Broken Road may not precisely be the 'third volume" that so torment him, but it contains, at least, the shape and scent of the promised book, and here his journey must rest. pp. xii and xxi.

It is, of course, delightful to be on the road again with the youthful Patrick Leigh Fermor, with his fascination with and erudition about everything from natural history to the ancient movements of peoples, the individual people he meets (from aristocrats and diplomats to beekeepers, woodburners, fishermen, shepherds, and monks), art and architecture, wine and food, religion, charming girls and women, and drinking and conversation. His perceptions are not as finely tuned, as energetically shaped and edited, as in the earlier volumes, and the reader gains more insight into his memory and writing processes, personal commentary that perhaps was ruthlessly excised as those volumes were extensively written and rewriiten.

Nonetheless, there is much that is splendid in this book: the shock of the glittering nightlife of Bucharest after months in small villages, mountains, and plains; the dog that followed him and bayed at the moon; astounding dances in a cave filled with goats on the edge of the Black Sea; the wildness and solitude of much of the country he walks through. And over this, our knowledge that this was a world about to be torn apart forever by war, by nazism and then communism and then modernity, a world that is no more.

At the end, the editors have appended a section from Leigh Fermor's diary that covers three weeks he spent, just after reaching Constantinople, walking through the breathtakingly beautiful and astoundingly rugged peninsula of Mount Athos, where he stayed at the diverse monasteries that perch on the rocky outcrops. Written in great detail (although apparently edited multiple times), this section has an immediacy and a voice that contrasts with the longer journey that precedes it.

I am glad Patrick Leigh Fermor's literary executors produced this volume. It doesn't stand up to the two earlier ones but, as a devotee, I am grateful for their efforts.

Freud by Jonathan Lear



Cross-posted from my Club Read and 75 Books threads.

I bought this insightful and mostly fascinating book because of Dewald/dmsteyn's excellent review earlier this year and, rather than repeating a lot of what he said, I will mostly focus on my reactions to the book.

The author, Jonathan Lear, is both a philosopher and a psychoanalyst (nonpracticing, I believe), and he approaches Freud's key ideas primarily from a philosophical perspective. Neither an apologist for Freud nor a dismisser of him, he is not afraid to criticize Freud for ideas that haven't held up or weren't well thought out in the first place, but he also isn't afraid to applaud him for his innovative and creative theories. As he notes:

"It is worth reminding ourselves that the central concepts of psychoanalysis emerge as a response to human suffering. Freud listened to ordinary people who came to him in pain, and his ideas emerged from what he heard. Some of his ideas are speculative extravagances and deserve to be discarded, but the central concepts of psychoanalysis are closely tied to clinical reality. One aim of this book is to bring the reader back to clinical moments and show how theoretical ideas develop out of them. . . .

Just as a doctor probes for the hidden causes of physical diseases, so Freud took himself to be probing the unconscious for hidden meanings making the patient ill. With the benefit of hindsight, we can now see that a certain clinical brutality flows from this self-understanding. . . . It also blinds him to the profound philosophical and ethical significance of his discoveries. Another aim of this book is to bring this significance to light." pp. 9-10

In successive chapters, Lear explores Freud's ideas on interpreting the unconscious, sexuality, interpreting dreams, transference, mental functioning, the structure of the psyche, and morality and religion. I found the first chapters the most compelling, the ones in which Lear discusses the ideas at the heart of psychoanalysis, and the later ones, in which Lear discusses and mostly criticizes Freud's broader theories, less interesting. It was fascinating to learn about how anxiety can prevent us from examining our true motivations, how many of our strategies for avoiding troubling ideas extend back into childhood, how astoundingly complex many of the associations from our dreams can be, how we can repeat behaviors without realizing we're repeating them, and much more. I also liked the way Lear describes some of the people Freud treated (always acknowledging that he relied on Freud's notes, not on knowing the people himself), focusing on how they presented themselves in the clinical setting.

I was also interested in the way Lear brings in philosophical concepts, including those of ethics and freedom, and the way he illustrates how philosophers such as Socrates thought of the psyche. I know a little more about psychiatry than I do about philosophy (about which I know almost nothing) and I found Lear's philosophical discussions fascinating.

Unfortunately, I stopped reading this book for several weeks in the middle of it, and so some of the most interesting material isn't fresh in my mind. But for the most part I found it well-written, intriguing, compassionate, and perceptive.

As Lear notes in his conclusion:

"The aim of psychoanalysis is not to promote homogenization of the soul but to establish active communication between what hitherto had been disparate and warring parts. These lines of communication serve a bridging function -- uniting the psyche by bringing its different voices into an common conversation. Conflicts will still arise. It is a condition of life itself that the psyche will never be a conflict-free zone. But when they do arise, they will be experienced as conflicts -- rather than in some disguise. . . . .

Plato, who did so much to bring philosophy to life, was ever wary of the myriad ways it could go dead. . . . Philosophy, he said, was not so much a matter of acquiring beliefs as of turning the soul away from fantasy and towards reality. It seems to me that Freud -- whatever mistakes he made, whatever warts he showed -- made a significant and lasting contribution to our understanding of what soul-turning might be." pp. 222-223

108. 1941: The Year That Keeps Returning by Slavko Goldstein



Cross-posted from my Club Read and 75 Books threads.

This is a stunning and important book, very readable and yet very hard to read. Slavko Goldstein, a Croatian Jewish journalist and publisher, set out to describe not only what happened to his family and him when the Ustasha, a fascist nationalist Croatian military group, returned to Croatia in the wake of the 1941 Nazi invasion of Yugoslavia, but also to document as thoroughly what happened generally in Croatia in 1941 and how the impact of those actions reverberated in 1945, at the time of liberation, and then again starting in 1989. He has done this in detail, not shying away from the horrors of ethnic hatred, mass killings, and genocide, and as fairly as possible, attributing responsibility as precisely as the records permit. This is a a book of shining integrity.

At the beginning of the book, Goldstein explains his methods:

"So, in writing this book, I have placed all of my memories under suspicion. I have filled in the gaps and sought to make sense of them by poring over newspapers, official documents, personal letters, and memoirs of the time. My recollections were also on trial in conversations with my brother and with friends from that time whom I still see today. For the description of these times I have relied on the many documents in which I discovered a variety of lesser-known or unknown details that shed better light on the important events of this period. I have tried to be faithful to myself, to future readers of this text, and those about whom I am writing and who are no more."

and then concludes:

" 'For the living we owe respect, but to the dead only the truth' is an often quoted aphorism of Voltaire. To me it seems that we owe the truth to everyone, living and dead, equally. And we owe respect to many, both the living and the dead, but not to everyone." p. 11

It was especially meaningful for me to read this book during the time that Nelson Mandela died and was eulogized and buried. The search for truth Goldstein attempts in this book is analogous in purpose to the aims of the South African Truth and Reconciliation process.

Essentially chronological, the chapters interweave Goldstein's personal story with the documentation of the mass killings and ethnic "cleansings" that took place in the year 1941. Goldstein was 13 when first the Nazis and the Ustasha entered his home town of Karlovac. Two days after the Germans arrived, his father, the proprietor of a bookstore and lending library, was arrested along with about 20 others, including Serbians and communists as well as Goldstein's father and one other Jew. They were first transported to various jails, where Goldstein's mother could visit and bring food to his father, and then to a nearby, newly built concentration camp; ultimately his father was probably shot in one of the many mass killings, although no records exist. Goldstein and his younger brother stayed with his mother until she was arrested, although another family was moved into their apartment, and then were farmed out to brave friends who took them in. His mother was released and joined the partisans with her two sons. Their personal stories are moving and dramatically convey the extreme tension and terror of the times, as well as the mother's courage and the courage of the friends who stood by them.

The Nazis basically left the Ustasha in charge of Croatia, and the goal of the Ustasha was to create a nationalist Croatia: to eliminate not only the Jews and the Roma but perhaps more importantly the Serbians (who were Orthodox, as opposed to the Catholic Croatians). They did so brutally, and in a variety of ways, but principally by arresting/rounding up Serbians in their villages and then taking them out the woods, shooting them, and throwing the bodies into pits or caverns. They also burned Serbian villages to the ground to drive out any remaining women, children, and old people, although they also frequently killed them too. Through detailing the history step by step, Goldstein attempts to understand the original causes of what he calls "ethnic cleansing" as well as the forces that caused it to grow into an ever more horrifying series of events.

Throughout the book, but especially in a chapter entitled "A Tale of Two Villages," Goldstein develops the theme of "the year that keeps returning." By looking at a neighboring Serbian and Croatian village, he shows how the destruction of and mass killings in the Serbian village in 1941 led to fear and some revenge killings in the Croatian village in 1945. For some time after that, they coexisted uneasily, but this all fell apart again in the wars of the early 1990s, when there were mass killings of Croatians. Goldstein repeatedly makes the point that it is wrong to punish the mass of the population for the crimes of individuals. As he writes:

"Today's district of Lasinja includes only two Serbian villages, Sjeničak and Prkos. During the second world war, between 600 and 700 civilian inhabitants of these two villages and more than 100 members of the Partisan army were killed. During the same war and in the immediate postwar period about 150 residents of Lasinja and the Croatian villages were killed and several dozen more were killed in the ranks of the Home Guard and the Partisan and Ustasha armies. The war ended for these victims a long time ago. Is it not time that we stop commemorating them separately and in opposition to each other? They are not all equal victims nor are they equal criminals, but we should stop trying to use our victims in provocations, we should establish who the criminals were and single them out from all collective entities: villages, movements, and peoples alike." p. 465

The end of the book brings the reader up to date, with Goldstein's experiences during the communist era. Starting out as a partisan (and a commissar within his military unit), but then leaving the party and returning to school, he found himself frustrated during a particularly harsh period of the Tito era and going to Israel for a few years, but ended up returning to what he considered his home.

What I would like to convey about this book is that while the history is horrifying (and new to me), it is Goldstein's approach that is so remarkable. His desire to find out the truth and document both the good and the evil so we can know who did what is compelling and moving, and his portraits of individuals and what they did or failed to do is fascinating. He recovers the personal and the individual from the mass of numbers.

At the end of the book, he writes:

"The twentieth century produced the greatest hopes for mankind, but it buried most of them. It became the graveyard of great ideals. It taught us that ideals are most often a seductive chimera and that doubt is not a fatal weakness but a necessary defense against fatal beliefs.

This book was written with such thoughts in mind." pp. 559-560

I will definitely need to read 1941: The Year that Keeps Returning. It's so important to have that wider knowledge of what the war did in as many countries as possible, vs just Germany, Poland, France, Russia... I was feeling aggrieved that my library didn't have it, but I see it was just published in November, so hopefully they'll approve of my request that they buy it.

Yes, it was on the new book display table at my favorite bookstore and that was when I picked it up. Interestingly, it is a hard cover book published by NYRB, which usually publishes paperbacks.

I'm going to make a request at my library for the purchase of 1941: The Year that Keeps Returning, too.

Nice to see you here, Ellen.

This is probably a good time to note that I'm probably going to drop my Nonfiction thread in 2014 (and my 75 Books one too, for that matter) and just keep my Club Read thread, which gets the most discussion and where I post all my reviews anyway. I hope that those of you who follow my nonfiction reading here will come to my Club Read thread, and I'll post the link here when I set up my 2014 thread later this week.

^ Yep, I'll come find and star your Club Read thread, Rebecca. It makes sense (to me) to maintain only one thread, so I congratulate you in simplifying life a bit for yourself.

Wishing you all the best in 2014!

As I noted above, I am not planning on maintaining a Nonfiction thread in 2014. I'll continue to follow many of your threads, but I am simplifying my life and am going to keep only one reading thread over in Club Read. It is here! I hope those of you who have been participating in my 2013 Nonfiction thread will come over and visit me there too!