A tale of enormous narrative power about military exploits and love. It's an absolute heartbreaker. The narrator is Persian eunuch and great beauty, BA tale of enormous narrative power about military exploits and love. It's an absolute heartbreaker. The narrator is Persian eunuch and great beauty, Bagoas, who acts as Alexander's valet, adviser and lover. In this novel Alexander is an optimist and a gentleman. He sees his wars as making the world a better place. He is a young man whom we see ever so gradually worn down by duty, grief and injury. Somewhere it is said that he lived multiple lives in the span a normal man would have lived only one. In the end, the intensity with which he lives is impossible, unsustainable, reckless — even for someone held to be part divine. The recurring motif here is Homer's Achilles, half man and half god. I encourage you, prospective reader, not to think of the book as mere historical fiction. It transcends genre; it's literary fiction of considerable merit. It's tonally masterful and utterly gripping. I wish I could say how it's done. Staggering....more
1. What a book! Absolutely traumatizing. I have found myself periodically gasping and sighing as I read. There's a long passage about the work ofNotes
1. What a book! Absolutely traumatizing. I have found myself periodically gasping and sighing as I read. There's a long passage about the work of Ida B. Wells, the journalist primarily responsible for revealing the truth of lynching to the world. We follow her from her early years as a journalist to her British speaking tours where she brilliantly turned British sentiment against southern US industry and business, which tolerated lynching. This incited a number of governors of southern states to lie through their teeth. To wit:
"Missouri governor W. J. Stone publicly denounced Wells for stirring up trouble abroad and trying 'to keep capital and emigration [sic] from this section of our Republic.' He also insisted that 'Memphis is too high in the scale of civilization to be guilty of the crimes alleged by Miss Wells.' [Lord!] The governor of Georgia, W. J. Northen, accused Wells in a letter to The London Chronicle of being allied with a group of Northern investors who wished to steer immigrants away from the Deep South, and of lying about the extent of lynchings there. But Northen's protest was undermined three days later when a cable brought news to Britain of a lynching in the governor's own state in which the victim had been skinned alive. South Carolina's governor, 'Pitchfork' Ben Tillman, meanwhile, defended lynching itself, reminding his constituents that he 'would lead a mob to lynch any man, white or black, who had ravished any woman, white or black.'
"When the Anti-Lynching Committee sent an open letter to American journalists about the need for greater U.S. press inquiry into lynching, a heated response was forthcoming from J. W. Jacks, head of the Missouri Press Association: 'The Negroes in this country are wholly devoid of morality. . . They consider it no disgrace but rather an honor to be sent to prison and to wear striped clothes. The women are prostitutes and all are natural liars and thieves. ... Out of 200 in this vicinity it is doubtful if there are a dozen virtuous women of that number who are not daily thieving from the white people.'" (p. 104)
Sound familiar?
2. I had a mini epiphany on reading the first half of the book. The writer draws a line from vigilantism during the Revolutionary War to the Ku Klux Klan and lynching generally.
I was thinking about the recent penchant for US conservatives to paint Democrats as pedophiles. This is exactly what the southern lynchers sought to do with black men of the time by calling them rapists, and thus justifying their violence. (Meanwhile the white masters were too often found in the cabins of "their" black women.)
It's the same tactic now only the affected group is much larger, i.e. Democrats. Like the blacks who were accused of raping white women in lynching times — in the rare case where a sexual relationship did exist it was usually consensual — so the idea of grooming and pedophilia is now being applied to the current "enemy": liberals, Democrats, etc.
Now, why do I equate the two cultures so separated in time? Because they are both based in hatred and irrational claims. That is, accusation unfettered by evidence or logic, utter baselessness.
3. I am discovering a theme running through the book; that of the disenfranchisement of black and brown people in every walk of life: professional, social, and civil, especially when it came to voting. Check out this quotation from p. 122.
"As one letter to the editor in a Wilmington paper vowed in the run-up to the November 1898 gubernatorial election, 'North Carolina is a white man's state and white men will rule it, and they will crush the party of negro domination beneath a majority so overwhelming that no other party will ever again dare attempt to establish negro rule here.' The ensuing campaign would become one of the low points in the history of American electoral politics — a coup, for all intents and purposes, in which anti-democratic forces used violence and intimidation to influence an election and to remove legitimate officeholders."
Sound familiar?
There's a voting rights website called Democracy Docket. There you can read up on how black and brown people are today being disenfranchised of their vote by conservative Republicans. This as a result of the Supreme Court's recent finding that aspects of the Voting Rights Act—especially federal oversight of elections—are in our apparently enlightened times no longer necessary.
4. Lynching had always ostensibly been an act of preserving the white woman's virtue from "black monsters." Then after decades of lynching — starting during Reconstruction and lasting into the 1930s — an important alliance was made. It's a wonder it didn't happen sooner. That is, the alliance between black and white women. This is a wonderful and moving development to read about. It empowered white women with the guidance of their black peers to create the Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching.
"'The [white] women,' as Southern author Lillian Smith later remembered appreciatively, 'went forth to commit treason against a Southern tradition set up by men which had betrayed their mothers, sometimes themselves, and many of the South's children, white and mixed, for three long centuries. It was truly a subversive affair. . . The lady insurrectionists... said calmly that they were not afraid of being raped, as for their sacredness, they could take care of it themselves; they did not need the chivalry of a lynching to protect them and did not want it.'
"'They had more power than they knew,' Smith wrote. 'They had the power of spiritual blackmail over a large part of the white South.'
"Within months of its founding it was evident the group's program had hit a nerve. When Senator Cole Blease of South Carolina roared to his followers, 'Whenever the Constitution comes between me and the virtue of the white women of the South, I say to hell with the Constitution,' the ASWPL's Kate Davis fired back: 'Hundreds of thousands of white women in the South feel that the law... is their honorable protection and avenger. The women of the South are not afraid to stand by the Constitution.' A newspaper in Georgia averred that the coming of the ASWPL meant that 'rope-and-faggot courtesy' from men was no longer welcome, while a reporter for a Mississippi journal, taking note of the ASWPL's chastisement of Cole Blease, observed that the day had come when white women would not allow lynchers to 'hide behind their skirts.'" (p. 330)
5. Here, a little simplified, I admit, is the upshot of much of the book. It seems white women could not keep their hands off the south's black men. This was not always the case. There were genuine rapes and assaults, and other crimes like disputes over wages in which the rape charge was simply tacked on. In any case it was the anti-lynching activists desire to get the accused into court where he could receive due process, instead of immolated or shot or hung on fallacious pretenses. There are numerous stories here of consensual sex between black men and white women. So this is at least in part why the white mobs lynched nearly 4,000 black men over seventy years or so. The whites were so caught up with this idea of the virtue of "their" women. Well, human beings will desire other human beings regardless of race. We see that fact borne out every day ourselves and know its inherent truth.
"One of [Willie] McGee's best advocates proved to be his wife, Rosalee. She believed that Willie had tried to break off with Mrs. Hawkins, but that the white woman had blackmailed him by threatening to report him, knowing full well what consequences would result. According to Rosalee, McGee had met Mrs. Hawkins when he and her husband had worked together at the Masonite Corporation in Laurel in the 1930s. Mr. and Mrs. Hawkins had hired him to do odd jobs around the house and in their yard. The clandestine relationship had begun in 1942, as he explained:
"'I became well acquainted with Mrs. Troy Hawkins and one day after I worked there on and off for about a year I was waxing floors with her in the house and she showed a willingness to be familiar and let me have intercourse with her in the back room. After that she frequently sent for me to do work which gave opportunities for intercourse which she accepted, and on occasions after dark she took me in her automobile out to a place near the graveyard where we had intercourse.'
"After their first sexual encounter, Mrs. Hawkins would visit McGee at a gas station where he worked and once left him a note stuck into the nozzle of a gas hose. She would also come to the McGees' house and inquire for him. Rosalee became suspicious after an incident in which Mrs Hawkins drove up when they were walking home from a movie theater and attempted to coax him to go off with her in the car.
"'So all of a sudden Mrs. Hawkins come out of an alley and she says to Willie, "I got my car over here. Come on into my car with me." I got so mad I said, "What's that!" And I started to pull him away. And Willie himself he told her, "Go away. This is my wife. I'm with my wife." So she says to Willie out loud, "Don't fool with no Negro whores."'" (p. 399)
6. "Although black Americans constitute 12 percent of the overall population, they make up half the country's prison population; and for every one black American who graduates from college, one hundred are arrested. A comprehensive review conducted in 2000 of the federal death penalty since its 1988 reinstatement found that 50 percent of those slated for execution were black, and that another 25 percent represented other racial or ethnic minorities." (p. 459)
And this isn't the half of it. The book is an astounding document. Read it, please....more
The book is a gold mine for readers who know something about humanism but may not have grasped its historical development. It has the feel of an excellent graduate seminar. Bakewell exlores the fuzzy concept of "humanism" from late Middle Ages to the present by telling us of its history and proponents.
So the book points you toward others you might not have thought to read. Moreover, books like this are interstitial reads. They help you to tie together seemingly disparate bits of information gleaned from other readings into a more or less coherent whole. This time the focus is humanism. Fascinating....more
I’m reading this book while auditing Timothy Snyder’s Yale University course online, The Making of Modern Ukraine. This book is on the syllabus. You cI’m reading this book while auditing Timothy Snyder’s Yale University course online, The Making of Modern Ukraine. This book is on the syllabus. You can join, too.
The book is concerned with the many peoples who lived on the coast of the Black Sea from roughly 1,500 BC to just after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. It reminds me of two other books; one is Danube: A Sentimental Journey from the Source to the Black Sea by Claudio Magris, the other is a trilogy books by Patrick Leigh-Fermor that begins with the volume A Time of Gifts.
It begins in 1991 when the author visited Crimea just as a coup was being perpetrated against Mikhail Gorbachev by septuagenarian generals. Gorbachev was holidaying in Foros that summer and Ascheson happened to be visiting historical sites nearby.
There are some books I think as interstitial reads. In that they tie together for me many seemingly disparate narratives. The writing is tied together by an element of memoir, and, grounded in a description of the Black Sea peoples. Consider this passage about the Cossacks:
“The Cossacks were the last of many steppe peoples to inhabit the Black Sea plains in the old way. And yet they were in some respects unlike their predecessors. The Cossacks were never true nomads, who migrated in wagons behind their herds as the Tatar of the Golden Horde did, or the first Scythians and Sarmatians. The Cossack hosts were ramshackle rafts onto which all kinds of fugitives and adventurers had scrambled, and their economy was mixed: they were as much village-based free peasants as they were horse- and cattle-breeding pastoralists.
“Politically, Cossack unity was never more than a matter of short episodes in history. Nothing emerged with the stability and complexity of the Scythian kingdoms, or of the Crimean Tatar Khanate. When commercial port-cities revived again along the Black Sea coast after the Russian conquests of Peter and Catherine, the Cossacks were not capable of acting as partners and protectors, as the Scythian steppe lords had been to the Greek cities and the Tatar khans to the Italians, but fell instead into subjection. Compared to the Indo-Iranian peoples of antiquity, and to some the Turkic peoples who followed them, the Cossacks were primitive. Force, race and maleness are seldom the values of a stable and traditional society, but rather of bandits.” (p. 110)
Or this one about the founding of Odessa.
“The city went up with a rush. Two years after its official inauguration, held on a dusty building-site on the cliffs between the Steppe and the sea, Odessa had a cathedral, a stock exchange and a censorship office. There were just more than two thousand settlers at the end of the first twelvemonth, in 1795, and by 1814 there were 35,000. That was the year when Richelieu, the true founder, climbed into his coach among lamenting crowds and set off back to France. He took with him one small trunk containing his uniform and two shirts. Everything else had been given away. His salary was paid into the fund for distressed immigrants. His books were left behind to form the library of the Odessa school which he had founded, and which later took his name: the Lycée Richelieu.
“This was a man of the Enlightenment: energetic, austere, universal, lonely. Richelieu, whose statue notches the sky at the summit of the Odessa Steps, was happier among immigrants than among the Russian bureaucrats whom he commanded. As the city prefect and then as the governor-general of New Russia, he looked forward to creating another America in which the displaced and the ambitious of all countries would gather to live and to trade in freedom. Serfdom did not follow Russian and Ukrainian peasants who arrived as settlers, and Richelieu carefully embedded them among. German, Greek, Moldavian, Jewish and Swiss colonies, who would teach them both agriculture in the practice of liberty.” (p. 138)
The book reminds me of Robert Byron’s The Road to Oxiana, though Burton focussed on antiquities whereas Ascherson’s concern is peoples. ...more
The thematic through line is how did agriculture lead homo sapiens away from egalitarian social arrangements to inequitable kingdoms or empires and thThe thematic through line is how did agriculture lead homo sapiens away from egalitarian social arrangements to inequitable kingdoms or empires and then to nation states — or did it? The authors cite the rich complexity of recent research which the archaeological community as a whole has — paradoxically — yet to embrace.
There are hundreds of a-ha moments in this book. Perhaps the biggest one for me was a result of something called the "indigenous critique." That is, the valuation of European society, institutions, and mores by well-known indigenous Americans, the foremost example being Kandiaronk of the Wendats. Kandiaronk said many wise things of which this is one.
"Come on, my brother. Don't get up in arms . . . It's only natural for Christians to have faith in the holy scriptures, since, from their infancy, they've heard so much of them. Still, it is nothing if not reasonable for those born without such prejudice, such as the Wendats, to examine matters more closely. However, having thought long and hard over the course of a decade about what the Jesuits have told us of the life and death of the son of the Great Spirit [Jesus], any Wendat could give you twenty reasons against the notion. For myself, I've always held that, if it were possible that God had lowered his standards sufficiently to come down to earth, he would have done it in full view of everyone, descending in triumph, with pomp and majesty, and most publicly . . . He would have gone from nation to nation performing mighty miracles, thus giving everyone the same laws. Then we would all have had exactly the same religion, uniformly spread and equally known throughout the four corners of the world, proving to our descendants, from then till ten thousand years into the future, the truth of this religion. Instead, there are five or six hundred religions, each distinct from the other, of which according to you, the religion of the French, alone, is any good, sainted, or true." (p. 53)
*Cited here from Curious Dialogues with a Savage of Good Sense Who Has Traveled (1703), by Louis-Armand de d'Arce, Baron de la Hontan (Lahontan).
This "indigenous critique," gleaned from figures like Kandiaronk, was published by a number of European authors, some of them Jesuits. That's how it made its way from wilderness America to the salons of Paris and into the heads of Rousseau, Diderot, Voltaire, et al. — therby having a major influence on The Enlightenment....more
The cowardly attack on Salman Rushdie in Chatauqua New York (12 August 2022) sent me this memoir of the fatwa years, whiAstonishing, searingly candid.
The cowardly attack on Salman Rushdie in Chatauqua New York (12 August 2022) sent me this memoir of the fatwa years, which had been on my backlist for some time. It turns out to be a dazzling text. Suddenly one looks up and it’s 4 a.m.
Rushdie evinces a great sense of humor, at times appropriately black. On 14 February 1989, for example, he was sentenced to death by the Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran for his supposedly blasphemous novel, The Satanic Verses. The very day he heard about the fatwa he had to attend travel writer Bruce Chatwin’s funeral. He writes about himself in third person.
Rushdie and his wife Marianne Wiggins “were seated next to Martin Amis and his wife, Antonia Phillips. ‘We were worried about you,’ Martin said, embracing him. ‘I’m worried about me,’ he replied. . . The novelist Paul Theroux was sitting in the pew behind him. ‘I suppose we’ll be here for you next week, Salman,’ he said.” (p. 9)
What surprised me were the long periods he mentions when nothing was written. Being hunted down by an Iranian death squad will do that to you. Rushdie estimates that his state-sponsored cloistering stole two complete novels from him.
The account of the refusal of the Thatcher government to plead Rushdie’s case — that of the freedom of the writer to write as he wishes — is appalling. Thatcher’s government said nothing while he twisted in the wind; that is, while he was in isolation. No wonder Elvis Costello sang so fervently of how he longed to “tramp the dirt down.”
And let’s not forget the hostility of the tabloids too, which sympathized with local homicidal Muslim wack-jobs, and unconscionably called into question the cost of the protection services Rushdie “enjoyed." He didn’t get any traction on the British side until John Major gets into office, but by then he had, with the help of various GMOs, reeled in Bill Clinton and Vaclav Havel.
President Clinton would not commit in advance to meeting Rushdie, who was ready to settle for cabinet member Warren Christopher. Once in the White House however the two men met and Clinton promised his support. This was a huge breakthrough. America had spoken. Suddenly, the European states couldn’t wait to make some sign of their own support, whereas for the previous three years they had been quaking in their boots at the prospect of being executed by Iranian assassins. But the cowards soon backed down.
Meanwhile Rushdie couldn’t promote his own books. The first paperback version of The Satanic Verses had to be brought out by a nonprofit consortium because Random House was too afraid to publish.
His second wife Marianne Wiggins — also a novelist — didn't like living under a sentence of death, and she resented that her husband was taking up all the oxygen in the literary room. Her cruelty takes the breath away and it's a running motif through the first ⅔ of the book. Here’s one example. At one point early on she leaves him still in hiding in UK and returns to America. He calls her.
"He was in a red telephone booth on a Welsh hillside in the rain with a bag of coins in his hand and her voice in his ear. She had had dinner with Derek Walcott and Joseph Brodsky and the two Nobel laureates told her they would not have changed their lives as he had. ‘I would stay home and do exactly as always,’ Brodsky had declared, ‘and let's see what they could do.’ ‘ I explained it to them,’ she said on the phone. ‘I told them, "the poor man, he's afraid for his life!”’ Thanks a lot, Marianne, he thought. Joseph Brodsky had given her a foot massage, she said. Hearing that made him feel even better. His wife was with the two alpha males of world poetry getting foot rubs and telling them that her husband was too afraid to live as they would, in the open, courageously. She had been wearing saris everywhere, he said. So, not very low profile, then. He was about to say that perhaps the saris were a little obvious when she dropped her bombshell. She had been approached in her Boston hotel lobby by a CIA agent calling himself Stanley Howard. He had asked to speak with her and they had had a cup of coffee together. ‘They know where we were,’ she said in a heightened voice. ‘They have been inside the house. They took papers from your desk and your wastebasket. They showed them to me as proof that they had entered and looked around. The font and page setup and the work were all definitely yours. The people you live with didn't even know they'd been there. You can't trust the people you have with you now. You need to leave at once. You need to come to America. Mr. Howard Stanley wanted to know if our marriage was real, or if you just wanted to use it as a convenience, to get into America. I stood up for you, so he said then that was ok, you would be allowed to enter. You could live in America like a free man.’” (p. 190)
Rushdie tells all this to his British security detail who immediately move him, which is a colossal pain in the ass. Since, if the CIA knows, as Wiggins claims, then his cover is blown. Anyway, it turns out she was lying. She lied a lot apparently. He came to feel he could no longer trust her.
The use of the third person POV is, I think, needed. The story is powerful. There is so much chaos, danger, cruelty, so much grasping for the rational amid despair. The third person insulates the reader a bit from the madness. This reader cannot imagine the emotional contortions and assaults upon Rushdie’s dignity by his so-called peers, not to mention those wanting to murder him.
“There was an evening at Isabel Fonseca's apartment with Martin Amis, James Fenton, and Daryl Pinckney, and Martin depressed him by telling him that George Steiner believed he had ‘set out to make a lot of trouble,’ and Martin's father, Kingsley Amis, had said that ‘if you set out to make trouble you shouldn't complain when you get it’ and Al Alvarez had said that he had "done it because he wanted to be the most famous writer in the world.’ And to Germaine Greer he was a ‘megalomaniac’ and John le Carré had called him a ‘twerp’ and Martin's ex-stepmother Elizabeth Jane Howard and Sybille Bedford thought he had ‘done it to make money.’ His friends were ridiculing these assertions but by the end of the evening he felt very upset and only Elizabeth [West]'s love brought him back.” (p. 396)
Add to this the ups and down of everyday life; writing, of course, or not writing, but also his long cohabitation with Elizabeth West, who was to become his third wife; the growing up of his first son; the birth of his second; buying the big house on Bishops Avenue which was filled with armed policemen; the bother of doing something as commonplace as seeing a friend, dining out, walking down the street. And of course regular assessments of the “threat level.”
Though the themes vary greatly between the two books, for sheer punch-you-in-the-mouth impact, Joseph Anton reminds me of Nien Cheng’s astonishing Life and Death in Shanghai. Cheng’s ordeal was more squalorous — she was tossed into a Chinese prison during Mao’s Cultural Revolution —but what she and Rushdie endured is equally beyond conception. That’s really the only parallel between the two books.
Before you know it he's estranged from Elizabeth West and moves on to Padma Lakshmi. Of course she’s beautiful, but she’s also a narcissist. And so astonishingly icy she might have been a candidate to play the role of The Night King in Game Of Thrones.
“She was capable of saying things of such majestic narcissism that he didn't know whether to bury his head in his hands or applaud. When the Indian movie star Aishwarya Rai was named the most beautiful Indian woman in the world in some glossy magazine or other, for example, Padma announced, in a room full of people, that she had ‘serious issues with that.’ Her moodiness was unpredictable and extreme. About him, she was guarded. ‘I'm just giving it the summer and then we'll see.’ She blew cold and hot and he was beginning to be unsure if the hot made the cold worthwhile. She was dark and closed off for days at a time and then one morning the sunlight streamed out of her face. His journal was full of his own doubts. ‘How long can I stay with this woman whose selfishness is her most prominent characteristic?’ One night they sat in Washington Square Park after a quarrelsome dinner and he told her, ‘This isn't working for me.’ After that for several days she was her sweetest self and he forgot why he had said what he said. She met some of his women friends and most of them approved. When he told her what they had said the positive remarks about her character mattered less to her than the comment about her perfect breasts. French Playboy found nude photographs of her and ran one on the cover, calling her his ‘fiancée.’ She didn't care about the words and she didn't mind the picture being there, but she wanted to be paid for it, and he had to hire a French lawyer to work for her. This is what I'm doing now, he thought, bewildered. My girlfriend is on the cover of Playboy in the nude and I'm negotiating the fee.” (p. 606)
The cultural references throughout the book: novels, plays, pop songs, news events, etc. all evoke moments in this reader's own life. It’s a neat feature of the text, if you’re of a certain age. Lastly, and somewhat obliquely, after reading the book one tries to imagine the author’s carbon footprint. It must be vast. He flies everywhere and his books are printed on paper.
When you’re up and around again, dear Mr. Rushdie, you may want to plant some trees....more
1. What a revelation it has been for me to read about the gross incompetence of Chiang Kai-shek. Not to mention his megalomania, lack of educatiNotes:
1. What a revelation it has been for me to read about the gross incompetence of Chiang Kai-shek. Not to mention his megalomania, lack of education, corruption, and timidity when it came to offensive operations. Chiang would never go on the offensive against the Japanese. He spent almost all of his time holed up in Nanking, and later farther west inChongqing, the Nationalist capitals, or fighting the Communists.
He hoarded matériel and men because he was more concerned about his stability as a leader, than fighting the Japanese, whom he saw as invincible. General Stilwell's confidence in him was anything but high. The general by contrast felt that the Japanese were highly efficient, but imitative and often confused when the enemy showed initiative and a capacity for surprise. That is, unpredictable tactical skill.
"This became clear as soon as the AMMISCA officers went to work beginning in October 1941. The mission's artillery expert, Colonel George Sliney, confirmed after an inspection tour what Stilwell had reported as Attache, that the will to fight an aggressive action 'does not yet exist in the Chinese army.' Their demand for war material was not 'for the purpose of pressing the war against Japan but was to make the Central Government safe against insurrection' after other nations had forced Japan out of China. 'The general idea in the U.S. that China has fought Japan to a standstill and has had many glorious victories,' he discovered, 'is a delusion.'" (p. 222)
2. I had always wondered how it was possible for America to march into Europe, and later into the Pacific theater, and fight and win, not without considerable losses. The answer is training. Stilwell was a terrific instructor on and off throughout his career. The discussion of the California war games in the summer of 1941, just months before Pearl Harbor, is an eyeopener. Of course, the army trained vigorously stateside, but this is the first glimpse I've had of that story.
3. Afterward FDR and Marshall sent General Stillwell back to China. He is made Chief of Staff to Chiang Kai-shek and told he will command two of the Chinese armies, but this is not true since the armies' preceding commanders are never told to stand down. The story of General Stilwell trying to motivate the Chinese troops to fight the Japanese in Burma will set your hair on fire. The Chinese under Chiang had no concept of command and control, no understanding of western fighting techniques whatsoever. Their main strategy was not to fight the enemy, but to retreat from him. When Stilwell fails for myriad reasons, he has to walk out of Burma with 100 others, 140 miles through jungle in 14 days. Here's a quote.
"At the head of the column he [Stilwell] set the pace at the regulation Army rate of 105 steps a minute. The ghost of General Castner walked with him but Stilwell himself was the only veteran of those long-ago forced marches of the 15th Infantry [WW1]. From the first day many among the Americans lagged and fell out, suffering from heat exhaustion. May in Burma, just before the monsoon, was the hottest time of year. Stilwell raged at the softness and the 'damn poor show of physique.' He allowed a five-minute rest every hour but otherwise would not slow or stop. Coming to a river he plunged in without a break in his stride, 'obstinately scrutinizing his watch and counting out 105 steps to the minute' while he slogged steadily through the water with the long column stretching out behind in a single file. As malaria and dysentery attacked the marchers, weakness spread and slowed the pace. Stilwell had to increase the rest to ten minutes, conscious that every extra hour lengthened the odds. Two officers collapsed from sunstroke and had to be loaded onto the overburdened pack mules. Colonel Williams' box of medicines was stolen at one encampment, 'a terrible loss.' Ants, thorns, broken packs, vanishing bearers, a rogue elephant, insects, leeches, leg sores, blisters, infections and the blazing sun plagued the march and shredded what was left of goodwill and fellowship." (p. 296)
4. "'Why doesn't the little dummy [Chiang] realize that his only hope is the 30 Division plan, and the creation of a separate, well-equipped, and well-trained force?' [Stilwell's diary entry]
"The answer to this exasperating question was to unfold only gradually. It was a long time before Stilwell could bring himself to admit that Chiang did not really want a well-trained, well-equipped fighting force; that such a force represented to him less a boon than a threat; that he feared that an effective 30 divisions might come under a new leader or group, undermining or challenging his own control, and that Stilwell's proposal to remove incompetent commanders would remove those loyal and beholden to him; that he was not interested in an army that could fight the Japanese but only in one that could sustain him internally; that for this he believed it sufficed to have more divisions and more guns, planes and tanks than the Communists. . ."
"'This is the most dreary type of maneuvering I've ever done,' Stilwell wrote home, 'Trying to guide and influence a stubborn, ignorant, prejudiced, conceited despot who never hears the truth except from me and finds it hard to believe.'" (p. 317)
5. John Keegan has a wonderful book called A History of Warfare. It is a cultural history of war from antiquity to the present day in a single volume. And the present book might be an extended chapter of Keegan's book. For the Americans trying to support the Chinese during World War II precipitated a cultural clash that put the two “Allies” at each others throats. It’s hard to believe, but true, how duped the American public was in favor of China, presenting Chiang Kai-shek as this master leader of a democratic country. China was nothing of the kind. If anything Chiang was a dictator of a one party system.
Chiang corruptly sold, through his minions, American Lend-Lease matériel to the Japanese, the very “enemy” he was supposed to be at war with. The book leads to much astonishment on the part of the reader. It reminds me of Neil Sheehan’s masterpiece A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam, all about America's Vietnam folly. In fact, I have wondered if Mr. Sheehan did not learn from Stilwell and the American Experience in China and use it as a kind of model for his own wonderful book. For both books use biography as the thread or spine around which to build their detailed stories.
6. "Britain knew, Davies continued, that to whatever degree she joined the United States in actions designed to help China she would be acting contrary to her own interests [empire], while the United States should know that to whatever degree she joined Britain in helping to restore colonial rule and white supremacy would be acting contrary to American policy, sentiment and future relations with the countries of Asia."(p. 384)...more
I can say this so far, the writing is of great clarity. Superior math skills not needed. If you can read, say, Paul Krugman, or other popular economisI can say this so far, the writing is of great clarity. Superior math skills not needed. If you can read, say, Paul Krugman, or other popular economists of the day, you can read this.
Beautiful book production, sewn signatures and such....more
“'Everything is turned upside down at once,’ he wrote to one of his best friends. 'Absolute power disrupts everything. It is impossible for me to enum“'Everything is turned upside down at once,’ he wrote to one of his best friends. 'Absolute power disrupts everything. It is impossible for me to enumerate all the madness' in a country that had become 'a plaything for the insane.’” (p. 266) —Tsar Alexander I (reigned 1801 – 1825) on his father, Paul I, assassinated 1801
A dramatis personae at the start of each chapter helps track the actors and reemphasizes the idea of the intense melodrama here. This was not a group of subtle people. Even the occassional genius — Peter, Catherine — did not lead analyzed lives. The book is written with astonishing clarity and detail, yet it’s relatively trim. Twenty sovereigns (304 years) are profiled in 660 pages. Happily, the book lacks the main attribute of many survey texts, tedium. One thing helping readability, I think, is the many lively first-person voices derived from memoirs and letters. What did Martin Amis say of SSM — that he’s a Stakhanovite of the Russian State archives? Something like that. These are portraits of the power drunk. Each one has his or her signature cruelty. Moreover, each time a tsar died the succession looked more like a coup d’état than anything. You can imagine all the heads rolling.
The sex was incessant. Peter the Great, who probably wasn’t homosexual, when very drunk insisted on sleeping with his head on the stomach of one of his batmen. He also enjoyed orgies, passing women among himself and his buck naked subordinates.
The story of Catherine the Great and Potemkin is largely a story of sex, though there was also much armed conquest at the time, including major campaigns in Ukraine where Mariupol, Kherson and Odessa were founded. Catherine and Potemkin were ravenously libidinous. With Potemkin usually serving as both lover and pimp; that is, securing handsome young men for her from his armies. At the end of a given lover’s tenure, usually a few years, Catherine pensioned him off with thousands of rubles and serf-laden estates. Then she moved onto the next. But it must also be said that she loved; the young men weren’t simply diversions, though they were surely that too.
Here’s a note from p. 237: “Notorious for his idiosyncrasies, Suvorov, probably Russian‘s greatest ever commander, resembled a shabby, wirey, bristlingly alert scarecrow who liked to do calisthenic exercises stark naked in front of the army.”
The assassination plots, sometimes involving hundreds of people, are riveting to read about. The first was Alexi, not a tsar yet but a tsarevich, who was killed by Peter the Great, the father he despised. Also assassinated were Peter III, Paul I, Ivan VI, Alexander II and of course Nicholas II. The triple-cross that occurs during Paul I’s assassination plot will set your hair on fire. And then General Mikhail Kutuzov, the hero of the Napoleonic Wars —whom Tolstoy famously made say “I will make them eat horse meat” — steps right out of the pages War and Peace.
It is General Kutuzov who evacuates then burns Moscow. The astonished Napoleon writes, “To burn their own cities! A demon has got into them. What a people! (p. 307) Napoleon fumbles around in the Kremlin for weeks. Kutuzov marches his much reduced army group to the west. Kutuzov let’s Napoleon go: he is determined not to pursue him with such reduced forces. Emperor Alexander is of a different mind. With the two additional armies he pursues Napoleon across the breath of Europe. At the last minute Napoleon turns away from Paris, a feint, while the Russians and their Prussian allies enter. Alexander’s sister writes to him: “The imagination can hardly take in the idea of Russians in Paris!“ (p. 314)
And as always, there is the interminable fucking. I can’t begin to hint at the magnitudes of fornication taking place here across a continent. Alexander, after defeating Napoleon and occupying Paris, after touring London, during which he trysted with many British women, returns to Petersburg to find his mistress of fifteen years in love with another and is heartbroken. How could she? After all that I’ve done for her! Then we move onto the Congress of Vienna, aptly named.
“The Russians were said to be the worst-behaved visitors. On 9 November, Police Agent D reported that Alexander's courtiers, 'not content with treating the Hofburg like a pigsty, are behaving very badly and constantly bringing in harlots'. Vienna overflowed with such an embarrassing bounty of easily available sex that the streets seemed to swim with eager peasant-girls, a supply that was as inexhaustible as it was irresistible. One of Alexander's officers blamed the girls: 'It is impossible not to mention the unbelievable depravity of the female sex of the lower orders.’ The police agents reported that the maladies galantes —VD — were raging.” (p. 321)
Of course, it’s always the women who are to blame. Eve listened to the serpent etc . . . This is part and parcel of the tsars’ repellent belief in the divine right of kings; their mission unquestionably God’s will. Meanwhile they fuck and murder and subjugate populations.
“As Poland's rebellion was crushed [about 1830], a cholera outbreak sparked rioting on the Haymarket in Petersburg. Hastening there with just two adjutants, Nicholas faced down the mob, then ordered them to their knees. ‘I have to ask God's mercy for your sins,’ thundered God's own emperor. ‘You have offended Him deeply. You've forgotten your duty of obedience to me and I must answer to God for your behaviour! Remember you're not Poles, you're not Frenchmen, you're Russians. I order you to disperse immediately.' The rioters obeyed. No wonder Nicholas I believed he was the sacred personification of Russia. 'I am only here', he told his children preciously, 'to carry out her orders and her intentions.' Nicholas I was convinced that 'Our Russia was entrusted to us by God, once praying aloud at a parade: 'O God, I thank Thee for having made me so powerful.'” (p. 356)
Nicholas II was a rabid antisemite. It was under his regime that the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” document was concocted by the secret police, the Okhrana. The protocols implicated Jews in the outrage known as the Blood Libel, which said Jews were murdering Christian children in order to use their innocent blood in despicable rituals. Sadly the slander persists with some half-wits down to our day.
“On 20 March I9II, the body of a boy named Andrei Yushchinsky had been discovered in a cave outside Kiev. The Black Hundreds claimed that the body had been drained of blood by Jewish ritualists. While the boy had almost certainly been murdered on the orders of a vicious female gangster, the authorities, both to promote counter-revolutionary nationalism and to prevent anti-semitic disorders, arrested and framed an innocent Jewish brickmaker named Mendel Beilis. Even though the evidence was non-existent and the ritual itself was a myth, the justice minister, Ivan Shcheglovitor, briefed the tsar and appointed the top Kiev prosecutor to prosecute Beilis.¶ Now the prosecutor Grigory Chaplinsky reported to the emperor, ‘Your Majesty, I am happy to report that the true culprit in the murder of Yushchinsky has been found. The Yid Beilis.' Nicholas should have stopped the case. Instead he crossed himself and approved.” (pp. 551-552)
One feels sorrow for the children when they are killed by Bolsheviks, but it’s hard to feel sorry for the empress of the emperor, being such pigheaded religious ecstatics. I haven’t even touched on the story of Rasputin. That, reader, will set your hair on fire!
So just a few highlights. Montefiore’s a fine writer. One wonders how he handles such a bulky narrative in a mere 657 pages? I don’t know but it’s stunning. I have one quibble though, the description of Alexander III’s reign is riddled with lustful sex hungry missives to and from the emperor and his mistress. Bingleries, the emperor calls them. In one letter the mistress rhapsodizes about the how emperor’s “little fountain” gushed three times. Ick! Dozens of pages like this; most annoying....more
Harrowing. Stalin’s stupidity with regard to the Siege of Leningrad is mind boggling. First, there was his inability to acknowledge that the Nazis werHarrowing. Stalin’s stupidity with regard to the Siege of Leningrad is mind boggling. First, there was his inability to acknowledge that the Nazis were mobilizing on his borders in their teeming thousands. But, no, to suggest that war was imminent was a “provocation,” it was treachery, because of Stalin’s iron-clad belief in the German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact, signed August 23, 1939. Therefore, when the attack attack began on June 22, 1941, reports of it were not believed in the Kremlin! Even as they commenced denial was rife throughout the Soviet leadership. The so-called intelligence was disbelieved. (Sound like anyone we know?) Eventually the truth came to be known, even to Stalin. He went into a 6-week depression. He took no part in government or wartime decisions. This may have been for the best had he stayed away, but of course he did not. He emerged from his bed eventually to begin to countermand those few remaining officers he had, thereby making the siege worse than in would have been without him. Author Salisbury goes methodically over these fuckups one by one.
The important thing to keep in mind is that Stalin murdered many of his army officers during The Great Terror of 1936-37. He purged them by the thousands so no one could challenge his authority. So there was no one to fight when war came. Not surprisingly, his leadership in the war had been criticized unremittingly. It saddened me when reading poet Pablo Neruda's excellent memoirs how staunchly he believed in Stalin. But then little was known about Stalin’s incompetence in the 1960s when Neruda was writing. Nothing was known about the impact of Lend-Lease. This book wasn’t published until 1969....more
Reading Sarah Bakewell's excellent new Humanly Possible, about the development of humanist thought, has sent me back to reread Montaigne. My first reaReading Sarah Bakewell's excellent new Humanly Possible, about the development of humanist thought, has sent me back to reread Montaigne. My first reading was the translation by M.A. Screech on Penguin books, which may be out of print now, but which I highly recommend. This collection of the complete works, translated by Donald H. Frame, includes the essays, the travelogue of Montaigne's journey through Germany, Austria, and Switzerland to Italy, and his letters to various correspondents.
from That the taste of good and evil depends in large part on the opinion we have of them
"Men, says an old Greek maxim, are tormented by the opinions they have of things, not by the things themselves. . . . For if evils have no entry into us but by our judgment, it seems to be in our power to disdain them or turn them to good use. . . . If what we call evil and torment is neither evil nor torment in itself, if it is merely our fancy that gives it this quality, it is in us to change it." (p. 39)
"Epicurus says that being rich is not an alleviation, but a change, of troubles. In truth, it is not want, but rather abundance, that breeds avarice." (p. 51)
What’s fascinating here is the political context that we get for each of Seneca’s major essays. That said, it must be remembered that the author here What’s fascinating here is the political context that we get for each of Seneca’s major essays. That said, it must be remembered that the author here provides essentially a consensus view of many matters. The notes are filled with the clashing views of scholars.
For instance, “On the Shortness of Life“ is generally believed to have been written so Seneca‘s father-in-law might save face on being turned our of office—he managed grain supplies—by the emperor Claudius’s wife Agrippina. It was important that Seneca make it appear that his father-in-law was retiring for philosophical reasons, not, as was the truth, being turned out cruelly by Seneca’s enemy.
The story of Nero’s brutal murder of Brittanicus—deified Claudius’s natural son—simply for purposes of undermining his mother, Agrippina, takes the breath away. He had him poisoned at dinner with Agrippina there to witness. She had been threatening Nero, her blood son, with Brittanicus’s right to the throne, since he (Nero) was getting out of her control. It’s quite a scene. “On Mercy” is Seneca’s attempt, on one level, to absolve Nero for the murder and lead him to a new acceptance of virtue.
——
“Seneca had been the recipient of many such gifts [from Nero] over the years. Gardens, villas, and estates, including some of which had perhaps belonged to Brittanicus, made him vastly wealthy. But accepting them had made him an accomplice in the rough methods by which they were obtained. That Seneca was struggling with the problem is clear from the treatise he published in the late 50s or early 60s [AD], De Beneficiis, a long meditation on the topic of giving and receiving.” (p. 127)
After reading this book I will never again be able to read Seneca’s essays with a straight face as, say, Montaigne once read them....more
It surprising how continuous author Romm is able to make his story, considering he worked from so many fragmented sources. Told with alacrity and wit,It surprising how continuous author Romm is able to make his story, considering he worked from so many fragmented sources. Told with alacrity and wit, the tale positively hurtles along. I knew nothing before reading this book about the long-suffering Peloponnesian city-states’ bloody revolt against Spartan tyrrany, ca. 380 BC, and the role Thebes played in it. It’s deeply satisfying to read about. But it’s just part of the story of the Sacred Band, whose engine was erôs.
The theory goes that a fighting force made of male couples would possess a keener impulse to win at war than other fighters, because lovers would not want to disappoint each other. The idea was discussed by Xenophon in his Hellenica—he was a booster of Sparta who thought male erôs could only be weakness, never a virtue. Plato, however, in both Symposium and Phaedrus, suggested the motivation of same-sex lovers might be greater than that of ordinary unattached soldiers.
“Pammenes understood the Sacred Band, for it was he, according to one account, who first thought to station its lovers side by side. Plutarch explains the rationale, in words that perhaps came from Pammenes himself: ‘Men abandon their clansman and kinsman, even—by Zeus!— their parents and children; but no enemy ever came between an erastês and his erômenos.’ Significantly, Plutarch here calls Pammenes an erôtikos anêr, a term of high praise in this context: a man devoted to matters of erôs.” (p. 209)
Coincident with the formation of the Theban Sacred Band was the discovery of a new style of fighting. Instead of the rigid Greek phalanx, one of the Sacred Band’s leaders, Pelopidas—the other was Epaminondas—saw how an attack focused at a single point of the enemy's weakness could be radically advantageous. This is how the Thebans fought Sparta at both Tegyra and Leuctra which helped precipitate the aforementioned Spartan collapse.
There are so many narrative satisfactions here that I cannot begin to summarize them. Please read this wonderful book....more
Splendid. It’s astonishing to read about Russia's policy of acceptance even accommodation of the Jews in Odessa after Russia had won the littoral fromSplendid. It’s astonishing to read about Russia's policy of acceptance even accommodation of the Jews in Odessa after Russia had won the littoral from the Ottomans. The state encouraged Jews to move there because it needed the rapid commercial development. This was completely at odds with the suppression of Jews elsewhere in the Pale of Settlement. And the Jewish community flourished for more than a century (until the collapse of the grain markets). Included in that liberalization was one of the first modern diversified urban communities.
“Odessa’s social elite, observed a French visitor in 1838, was strikingly heterogeneous, for ‘here side-by-side with a broker’s wife [were], pure blood, mixed blood, all shades, all tones, all possible physiognomies.’ Nowhere outside the Italian commercial towns, he remarked, had he witnessed anything similar.” (p. 64)
More broadly the book is about how Odessa encouraged, if we can use that word, Jewish non-traditionalists—maskilim—who believed “...that the fundamental features of Judaism were entirely reconcilable with the modern world and that Jewish life could be judged by outside standards. [This reformist view, known as Haskalah], was also marked by a hunger for ideas and a readiness to sacrifice for their sake.” (p. 11)
The Haskalah, often termed Jewish Enlightenment (Hebrew: השכלה; literally, "wisdom", "erudition"), was an intellectual movement among the Jews of Central and Eastern Europe, with certain influence on those in Western Europe and the Muslim world. It arose as a defined ideological worldview during the 1770s, and its last stage ended around 1881, with the rise of Jewish nationalism.
The Haskalah pursued two complementary aims. It sought to preserve the Jews as a separate, unique collective and worked for a cultural and moral renewal, especially a revival of Hebrew for secular purposes, pioneering the modern press and literature in the language. Concurrently, it strove for an optimal integration of the Jews in surrounding societies, including the study of native vernacular and adoption of modern values, culture and appearance, all combined with economic productivization. The Haskalah promoted rationalism, liberalism, freedom of thought and enquiry, and is largely perceived as the Jewish variant of the general Age of Enlightenment. The movement encompassed a wide spectrum ranging from moderates, who hoped for maximal compromise and conservatism, to radicals who sought sweeping changes. (last two paragraphs excerpted from Wikipedia)...more
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