Flyboys

War is hell. These three words summarize Flyboys, James Bradley’s extraordinary book on the Pacific air war with Japan. In turns gruesome (I skipped entire pages more than once) and mesmerizing, this book is consistently a page turner. Bradley does an excellent job of setting the stage for Pearl Harbor and the United States’ subsequent war with Japan by providing a history of (largely antagonistic) relations between the two nations dating from their first “meeting” in 1853. In doing so, he tackles the issues of expansionism and racism head-on, providing a balanced perspective on the atrocities nations – including the U.S. – had long perpetuated on one another well before World War II. The history of the American experience in the Philippines is especially harrowing and one I’m quite certain I never learned in school. (In short, we “facilitated” the Spanish exist from the archipelago owing to their brutal treatment of the native population, then employed equally brutal methods against these same people, including an official policy to kill every man, woman, and child over the age of ten.)

Bradley uses this history to explain the particular animosity the Japanese felt towards America on the eve of World War II, while also providing a rather fascinating picture of the early air forces. Ultimately, this book is the story of eight American fly boys who were captured and killed by the Japanese after being shot down over Chichi Jima. (A ninth was rescued by a U.S. submarine – that pilot, famously, was George H.W. Bush, who is portrayed warmly in the book by Bradley.) The fate that befell these eight men was so startling that the post-war war crimes prosecutor opened the trial by warning that what befell these men was “so revolting to the human mind that man long ago decided it unnecessary to legislate directly against” such treatment (p. 317). It is shocking.

Yet, in many ways, it is less shocking than Japan’s treatment of its own soldiers (poor provisioning meant cannibalism became de rigeur during the war), and in many ways it is no more shocking that the acts committed by American soldiers against the Japanese (strafing the shipwrecked survivors of a torpedoed transport carrier, for example). Or the napalming of dozens of Japanese cities, leading to the deaths of hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of Japanese civilians. In the context of the widespread firebombing campaign that was designed to bring Japan to its knees, but which was still insufficient to convince the country to surrender, the atomic bomb seems the only possible way for the war to end. As Bradley notes, in a perverse way, the atomic bombed actually saved far more lives than it extinguished, a fact that many of the Japanese survivors whose testimony is a strength of the book, acknowledge. War is hell. I think I’m done with war books for awhile.

1812: The War That Forged A Nation

Meticulously researched, 1812 is as much a primer on early American history as a text on the War of 1812. Walter Borneman covers a broad sweep of American history, from the Revolutionary War, where the older generals cut their teeth, to the Civil War where the younger men (or their sons and nephews) would make their own mark. In doing so Borneman's research passes through the Mexican War and the Indian Wars and, of course, focusing on the events of 1812-1814.

This book drove home for me how many years it has been since I have studied American history. (Did I once know that many of the early War of 1812 battles occurred in Canada? That the Americans burned York - now Toronto - in a fit of pique that provoked the British to turn Washington to ash? That "don't give up the ship" was first uttered by a mortally wounded captain in this war? I hope so, of course, but I can't say.) In fact, despite having visited such places as the Constitution in Boston, Mackinac Island, and even Andrew Jackson's plantation the Hermitage, to say nothing of living for two years in Baltimore, my recent knowledge of this war could only be reliably counted on to produce that it resulted in that most mangled of national anthems, The Star Spangled Banner. (On second thought, it may be because of and not in spite of my brief residency in Baltimore that I can reliably recall this last fact.)

Admittedly, the book occasionally became mired in the same details that are a strength. I found myself frequently flipping back a page or two in an attempt to fit a general and regiment together - or even to remember on what side a particular man fought. And his regiment, by the way: was is Kentucky or Tennessee? 44th or 78th? Fusilier or Highlander? You get the idea. The best written chapters to my mind are those that focus on the naval battles, particularly that of the Battle of Lake Erie. ("We have met the enemy and they are ours" can be credited to Oliver Hazard Perry in his victorious dispatch to future president William Henry Harrison following a decisive American victory in this battle.) I also thought the chapter on Andrew Jackson at New Orleans was a real page turner, but, yes, I am a total nerd.

Finally, I will add that I was amazed again by the number of key officers, politicians, and frankly heroes, who hadn't yet reached their 30th birthdays. It's well and fine to remember that in 1812, 30 was already middle-aged, but their heroics still left me feeling old and unaccomplished. Then again, we can't all found a nation.

Bringing Up Bébé

At the risk of incurring the ire of friends who have children, and therefore might be more qualified to comment on a parenting book than I, I’ve decided to share my thoughts on Pamela Druckerman’s Bringing Up Bébé. Now the first thing to say about this book, that is the style and the writing – is that I really liked it. Not only is it written in the voice that I prefer and in which I often tend to write (sorry, but try as they might my dissertation committee could not beat the matter-of-fact, conversational quality out of my writing), but it actually made me laugh out loud more than once. This is rare, but then lately I seem to have read a lot about war, and a bit about mental illness, and often both at once. I suppose neither of those topics is particularly funny. So, this book gets points for making me laugh. It also earns high points for providing an excellent, inside look at life in France, from the schools to the hospitals to the bureaucracies. (It also loses points for this, as at various points I was tempted to ditch a life in America for one in Paris, until I remembered that France isn’t entirely the rose garden Druckerman portrays. Child care, healthcare, and college tuition may be heavily subsidized by the state, but the VAT is nearly 20% and most French people I know certainly have as many cost-/quality-of-life concerns as Americans.) I digress.  

As far as the comparisons between French parenting and American parenting, I quickly grew weary. So much of what the author identifies as 'French parenting' I would label as 'common sense.' For example, she bemoans the highly limited diets of American toddlers and children while delighting in the way French children eat a tremendous variety of foods. Now, this may not be a fair comparison for a number of reasons, not least because France is the land of brie and baguettes while America is home to Wonder Bread and Cheez Whiz. But, her case is not helped by showcasing an American toddler who refuses to eat anything except foil wrapped Santa Clauses; his parents buy out the stores at Christmas lest they run out and he go hungry after the holidays. They believe they are being good parents. I believe they should be investigated for child abuse. She attributes the wider palate of  French children to parents refusing to indulge in this behavior and requiring their children to sample all foods at least once and generally eat the same meals as the parents. Brilliant! Who ever would have thought? Other than my own parents, I suppose, and most every other family I knew growing up.

Likewise, we learn that all American children are unruly little wildebeests because their parents have yet to harness the power of the word ‘no.’ She even devotes several pages to how she had to learn to say this word with conviction so that her young son would listen and obey. It never occurred to me that parents would not use this word (and use it often). Clearly the wildebeests belong to the people who cannot say no. I mean, she tells horror story of restaurant meals with her own one-year-old, who cannot be made to sit at the table while the parents eat. Having recently enjoyed a long and lovely brunch with good friends and their adorably well-behaved, one-year-old daughter, I can definitely say that not all American toddlers behave this way.

Toward the end of the book she discusses the differences in baby-proofing philosophies: she wishes to replace the bathroom floors with something entirely rubber in order to reduce (eliminate?) the risk of a child slipping and falling. The French people who learn of this idea think it is madness. So do I. We simply used a bath mat and my mother would say, ‘be careful not to fall.’ I suppose if I had, I would have been more careful the next time.  I’d continue, but I’m sure you get the idea.  

Coco Chanel: An Intimate Life

Coco Chanel, whose real name was Gabrielle, was one fascinating broad. Born to peasants, she would be orphaned by her mother's death and father's abandonment before she was 12, when she was sent to the Aubazine convent. Such beginnings contrast starkly with her later life when she would figure among the wealthiest, most influential women in France, if not beyond - and also bed half of Europe, at least the wealthy half (men and women alike). At various times her lovers included the Duke of Westminster (then himself the richest man in England), Stravinsky, Picasso, Dali, the Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich, and a high ranking German official during World War II - in addition to countless others whose names are far less known or impressive (Etienne Balsan? Arthur Capel? Antoinette d'Harcourt?). Also, she had a serious morphine habit. Most impressively is not simply the way Chanel revolutionized fashion, however, but that she continued working at it and being a force within the fashion world until she the day she died at the age of 87, some 60 years after she opened her first little shop.

So, yes, Chanel is fascinating. Coco Chanel: An Intimate Life, however, is a bit dry. In fact, as I read I couldn't help but feel that it could have been written as a dissertation, something to the effect of the "The Life and Times of Coco Chanel: One Woman's Impact on a Century." It's incredibly well researched and painstakingly thorough but, unlike some books which manage to be this without the reader constantly realizing it. In this book, the research can sometimes drag down each dense paragraph, threatening to crush them under its weight. I will say, though, that when it comes to descriptions of Europe - particularly life in France in the 19th century when peasants still spoke patois, or in either of the pre-/post- war periods - the research does pay dividends.

On a separate note, the author (Lisa Chaney), had what was for me the terribly annoying habit of referring to and describing various photos of Chanel or others, sometimes in great detail, which were then not included in any of the photo insert pages. I felt cheated! If the photographs couldn't be reproduced for the book, she should have said so in the text; if they could have been and she chose not to, then shame on her.

The final verdict: Coco Chanel was almost certainly one of the most remarkable figures of the 20th century. She gets 4 stars just for surviving and thriving, let alone being a quiet revolutionary in her own way. (Also, I couldn't help but think that she should have just married Etienne Balsan when he asked - twice - but that really is beside the point.) The book, however, gets 2 stars because at the end of the day the reader often has to work to keep Chanel in focus and not be overcome by the words on the page.

A First Rate Madness: Uncovering the Links Between Leadership and Mental Illness

On the whole this is a fascinating book to read, or even to contemplate: Nassir Ghaemi posits that mental illness enhances crisis leadership, using many examples from history to make his case, most notably Abraham Lincoln, Winston Churchill, and John F. Kennedy. Yet, my enthusiasm for this book waxed and waned as I read. Sometimes it felt a bit clunky: crammed with the familiar jargon of the psychiatrist who wrote it. At these times, I would set it aside and turn my attention to some other book or project. Eventually, though, I was pulled back to it because, at the end of the day, it offers a series of excellent portraits of any number of Great Men from times past. By focusing on their mental health or lack thereof (and this book is primarily concerned with the ones who were a bit deficient in that area), it spotlights history from a new angle.

As examples of the mentally ill leader, General Sherman, Winston Churchill, FDR, MLK, JFK, Teddy Roosevelt, Gandhi, Abraham Lincoln, Adolf Hitler, and even Ted Turner all go under the knife at some point in this book, so to speak. (The sane leaders, by the way, are George McClellan, Neville Chamberlain, and Richard Nixon; Tony Blair and George W. Bush also make appearances, though Ghaemi cautions against drawing too many conclusions about the still-living. The analysis is sometimes stiff (as I said in the paragraph above, the jargon can be hard to read), but generally fascinating. So many Lincolns suffered debilitating depressions that one relative referred to it as the “Lincoln horrors.” MLK and Gandhi both attempted suicide as teenagers; Lincoln was once suicidal to the extent that his neighbors kept vigil over him to prevent him from attempting the act. The book also brought to light new facts for me, some of which I have probably learned at some point or another (for example, FDR did not contract polio until he was 39) and some of which I don't believe I've ever known (that Hitler was a big time drug addict and that Kennedy's chronically poor health repeatedly sent him to death's door - he was 6'1" and in 1944 weighed only 126 pounds, for example).

Additionally, when he explains it in plain English, the psychiatry itself is interesting. In addition to full blown depression and manic-depression, he spends a great deal of time examining dysthymic (always melancholy though never depressed, dysthymics tend to go through life at a very slow pace, even walking and talking slowly) and hyperthymic temperments (always in a frenzy, hyperthymics walk and talk a mile a minute, have 100 ideas a day, and generally sleep very little).

I also particularly enjoyed the liberal use great quotes, as well as lines the Ghaemi wrote himself. He quotes Sherman saying of Grant, "He stood by me when I was crazy, and I stood by him when he was drunk." Writing of Hitler's extensive drug use he writes, "To call Hitler a time bomb would be to understate matters."  “There is not Kennedy curse. There is a Kennedy gene…that is both a curse and a blessing.” But, my very favorite lines from this book begin with an excerpt from a Thornton Wilder novel:

George Brush is my name

America's my nation

Ludington's my dwelling place

and Heaven's my destination

As Ghaemi then writes, "One couldn't have have invented the irony - only the letter 'r' in George Brush's name separates fiction from recent reality. You'll have to A First-Rate Madness yourself to learn whether he thinks the man behind the recent reality was mad.

America, 1908

This was another great recommendation from my colleague, Kris, and while it doesn’t seem like beach reading, that’s exactly what it was. America, 1908 was published in 2008, with the idea of both broadly looking anew at the America of a century ago as well as revisiting a singularly impressive year. To recap, in 1908 the following happened: Henry Ford produced the first Model T, the Wright brothers publicly and repeatedly proved the possibilities of flight (as well as recorded the first aviation fatality), the world’s military powers grasped the implications of flight on and for future conflicts, Teddy Roosevelt sent the Great White Fleet ‘round the world, and Robert Peary put his boot print (or was it a snow shoe print?) on the North Pole.

Jim Rasenberger recounts all of these feats, as well as less earth shattering anecdotes about women’s fashions, holiday celebrations, and the zany New York-to-Paris (by-way-of-the-Bering-Strait) automobile race. His prose is lively and vivid and all the richer for a liberal sprinkling of excerpts from 1908 papers; I often felt that I had been transported back in time and was reading the accounts as they were happening. Very often I couldn't help thinking, "it's hard to believe this was only 100 years ago." At the same time, as my great-grandfather was born in the opening weeks of 1909, it was fun to contemplate the world he was born into and consider yet again how completely the world had changed in his lifetime. Reflecting on 1908, and therefore 2008 – or any other recent year for that matter – I can only hope that in 100 years a future author will be up to the task of such a fun and, yes, beachworthy retelling of the year that was. Not that books will still exist in another 100 years.

The Beauty and the Sorrow

The Beauty and the Sorrow combines a bit of All Quiet on the Western Front with For Whom the Bell Tolls, provides a different perspective on the events witnessed and/or instigated by Lawrence of Arabia, and includes a dash of Downton Abbey for good measure (the phrase “bow and scrape to their masters” even makes an appearance on page 361). It is a truly all-encompassing look at World War I. This book is very often raw and brutally vivid; initially I found it difficult to read more than a couple of dozen pages at a time but, like the population of Europe, the further along the war progressed, the more I became desensitized to the horrors of the war. That said, a more apt name for Peter Englund’s tome on World War I might have been The Sorrow and the Sorrow, for it is hard to see the beauty amongst the blood and slaughter of The Great War.

As I have noted previously, the Lawrence of Arabia biography, Hero, is one of my best and most favorite books from 2011, so I was eager to read a book devoted entirely to World War I. This is not a book about the history of the war, its causes or ramifications, but rather it seeks to allow the reader to feel what it was like to live the war, using first-hand accounts from individuals who experienced it in any number of ways. These include a German schoolgirl, an American neurosurgeon, a Belgian flying ace, a French diplomat, and any number of foot soldiers from the armies of Russia, France, England, Germany, Italy, Austria-Hungary, the Ottoman Empire, and Australia. 

Very early in the book, the senselessness of the entire affair is articulated by a German prisoner of war who writes, “The great lords have quarreled, and we must pay for it with our blood, our wives and children” (p. 18-19). Indeed, much of the population seems to be asking itself how this could have happened.  A Scottish aid worker, who will die during – though not of – the war and be buried in England with the guns in France audible across the Channel, likewise wondered, “Can one man be responsible for all this? Is it for one man’s lunatic vanity that men are putting lumps of lead into each other’s hearts and lungs…” (p.37). I felt some measure of justice that Gavrilo Princip, who wrought such hell with the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand, died not by the hangman but by tuberculosis, one of the most dreadful-sounding diseases I can imagine. Naturally, however, he was still a fanatic when he died, and felt no remorse for the war he began. (Yes, the tensions in Europe had been at a simmer for some years and if the assassination of the Archduke didn’t start the war something else likely would have, but still.)

Having studied European history at various points in school, I was aware that World War I wasn’t “The War to End All Wars” for no reason; yet, I was still unprepared to encounter in black and white the sheer scale of the bloodshed. Russia, the reader learns, lost four million men in the first 18 or so months of the war. Yet, these aren’t just words on a page. Englund does a masterful job of pulling the reader into the war, incorporating not just anecdotes but individual comments and quotes that put war into its starkest terms. For example, on page 116, he quotes Lieutenant Colonel Mustafa Kemal (later Ataturk) as shouting to his soldiers “I am not giving you an order to attack, I am ordering you to die.” In so many armies this practice was so routine that it is unconscionable. A French officer reflects before slogging  to the front that he will be relieved of his command once three-quarters of his men are dead or wounded – or he will die before he can be relieved. And, of course, I can’t leave out disease. For example, we learn that in early 1918 the Army of the Orient can nominally count 600,000 men among its ranks, but “once malaria, dengue fever, and other afflictions have done their bit” (p. 434), only 100,000 of the men are fit for service. Is it any wonder that before the war was over France would be drafting 17-year-olds and England would be “freeing” convicted murderers to go and fight the Hun?

“Endurance is far harder than bravery.” This phrase appears less than half-way through the book (p. 239) and is beautiful for its concise and painful truth. The grind that every man, woman and child faces – the burned out villages, famished children, refugees on the move – is almost unimaginable today. If It is difficult for me to reconcile these scenes with the Europe I have visited, picturesque, quaint, and above all, civilized, it is nearly impossible for me to remember that this devastation happened less than 100 years ago. Toward the end of his book, Englund notes that the world of 1918 is “a little thinner, a little less solid, and a little less substantial” (p. 470) than the world before the war. And, of course, these same countries will fight the same battles just one generation later.It all seems such a waste.