Saturday, November 19, 2016

The Fall of the House of Dixie: The Civil War and the Social Revolution That Transformed the South

There is something to be said for a book whose opening chapter includes the passage: "Since ancient Greece and Rome, republican thinkers had worried and warned about the dangers inherent in conferring full citizenship upon those who performed the republic's hardest, most disagreeable labor in return for the meanest standard of life. Wouldn't such poor and unhappy citizens use their freedoms and civic rights to cause trouble? Wouldn't they protest and act collectively to change their condition? Wouldn't they elect to public office either one of their own - or some adventurer , some demagogue, some Caesar, who appealed to the mob's resentments and frustrations in order to gain power for himself? Wouldn't any of these outcomes doom the republic, just as it had repeatedly done in the ancient world?" [emphasis mine] Looking around today, I can't but think more prescient words have seldom been written.

The Fall of the House of Dixie, in addition to musing on the political leanings of the lower classes, examines the social and political cracks that existed in the Confederate States of America before, during, and immediately after the American Civil War. Far from being a closely united and firmly committed entity, the Confederacy was, in many ways, a loosely confederated block of states, whose only real point of agreement was on the supremacy of the white race over all others.

Bruce Levine mines rich material to paint a detailed portrait of a South in chaos: state government fighting one another, planters fighting the state governments, the state governments and the planters fighting the "national" government at virtually every turn. In much the same way that Michael Korda's Hero was a revelation to me as regards the Middle East, a single thought recurred to me throughout Dixie: ungovernable. The Confederates, and especially the planters, were ungovernable, working against their best interest at every turn, undermining anyone in a position of authority.

The greatest strength of The Fall of the House of Dixie is that it explores an aspect of the Civil War that is relatively unknown, as Levine discusses in the Acknowledgements at the end of the book. The South is almost always portrayed as a cohesive union in which the citizenry supported Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis to the last man. Levine reveals this "truth" for the myth that it is and explores many others along the way.

Leaving off as it does at the beginning of Reconstruction, this book makes an excellent precursor to After Appomattox: How the South Won the War, which completes the story of how the ungovernable were allowed to govern over all.

Wednesday, November 9, 2016

Zigzag: The Incredible Wartime Exploits of Double Agent Eddie Chapman

Zigzag takes its name from Eddie Chapman's code names; Chapman being one of the most successful double agents in all of World War II. His story is a fascinating one but, unfortunately, loses something in the telling. As a result, some of the "adventure" that so motivated Chapman is lost - and that assumes the reader makes it past Chapman's early (criminal) life and to his spy days.

Chapman was a serial safebreaker and petty criminal in the '30s, and found himself locked inside a Jersey jail when the Germans invaded. Seeking - always - to save his skin, Chapman offered to work for them, with an eye toward being sent back to England. His plan worked, and he was able to offer his services to the British, who used him to great affect in the latter years of the war.

I don't have any particular bones to pick with author Nicholas Booth. Zigzag is at least the fourth book I've read on World War II-era spying. With the exception of Operation Mincemeat (which I loved), I have been disappointed in all of them. I did not finish the one about Richard Sorge and was singularly unimpressed with the works on Vera Atkins and Roald Dahl's espionage career. On the other hand, Liar, Temptress, Soldier, Spy and She Rode with Generals are excellent Civil War-era spy biographies, so perhaps spying in that war makes for better reading.


Tuesday, November 1, 2016

The Truth According to Us

In the midst of the Great Depression, Layla Beck's father, the Honorable Senator from Delaware, cuts her off and she must go on relief. Fortunately for Layla, she has friends in high places and, unlike the millions standing in soup lines, she's able to quickly secure a job as a writer for the Federal Writers' Project. Promptly, she is shuttled off to little Macedonia, West Virginia, a far cry from her previous summer playground, Cape May.

Macedonia is, Layla quickly deduces, a hick town, with little of consequence. (It does not, however, have coal mines, for which is is at least minimally grateful.) Still she must write her book, and she throws herself into the task with gusto. As the weeks pass, her life becomes intertwined with the formerly proud but now fallen Romeyns, in particular shady Felix and his daughters Bird and Willa, as well as Felix's steady but odd siblings, Jottie, Mae, Emmett, and Minerva.

I *loved* the The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, of which Annie Barrows was one of two authors, and I wanted to love this. And I did love parts of it. The names, for example. Jottie. Willa. Bird. Felix. Also, the incorporation of the Federal Writers' Project, and some of the hilarious interactions between author and subject(s). Likewise, The Truth According to Us does a fine job of capturing the prettiness and pettiness of small-town America, and America teetering between the teeth of the Great Depression and the brink of World War II.

In the end, though, I couldn't help but feel a bit...meh. In part, I believe that's because the letter writing device, which worked to so well in Guernsey, seemed trite and tired here. A few pages chopped here and there wouldn't have hurt. The characters, too, felt overdrawn to the point of caricature and Willa, for whom I believe the reader is supposed to have the greatest felling, evoked a combination of contempt and pity from me. Mostly, though, I put that down to the ending, which, without giving anything away, left me disappointed. Barrows, it seemed, was about proving some larger "life lesson" than allowing the story to end as seemed most fitting. Or least as I deemed most fitting.