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.

The Polysyllabic Spree

This is another book I really struggled with, though I can't figure out precisely why. At only 140 pages, it certainly wasn't too long. Polysyllabic Spree is a collection of Nick Hornby's columns from The Believer in 2003-2004, and the vast majority of them are colorful and humorous, even if I didn't find many books to add to my reading list. (I did find three, which doesn't seem too bad - Random Family, George and Sam: Autism in the Family, and On and Off the Field, the latter of which is improbably a cricketer's biography. As in the British sport, not the insect-obsessed.) At the end of the day, perhaps it's that I'd rather read the books myself than read someone else's impressions of them. Undoubtedly there's a bit of irony in writing that sentence in a blog dedicated to my own, not-as-entertaining-as-Nick-Hornby's impressions of books.

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society

This quirky book, written entirely in letters, and awash in colorful, spirited characters, is on my shortlist for Best of 2012 thus far. Briefly, it is the story of making a (n often new) life in the ration- and rubble-filled years in immediate post-WWII England. It is so vividly written that not only did I feel I was in Guernsey along with Juliet, I also felt the grind of the Occupation - and what it was to be free of it after so many years. Also, the authors (more on that in a minute) get bonus points for character names: Dawsey, Izzy Bickerstaff, Booker, Simon Simpless. Simply reading the names on the page was half the fun.

These little islands are caught in a bit of the channel between England and France, and are probably the richer in culture for it. The islanders are true to King and country - the Union Jack, lavish teas, the Royal Family, and all that is right and good and British - yet, it's the Normandy coast they can see in the distance. Naturally, my reaction to such a place is to want to visit it, not that I hadn't already planned on trekking to the Channel Islands one day or another.

Now about the authors. I was surprised and saddened to read in the afterword that Mary Ann Shaffer died before Guernsey reached final publication and that it was her writer-niece, Annie Barrows, who completed the rewrites and edits, and saw it through publication and its rise in popularity. Perhaps somewhat selfishly, I think I was most disappointed because, as this was her first book, there is nothing else to read by Mary Ann Shaffer.

Hemingway's Boat

Hemingway's Boat has the dubious distinction of being my first unfinished book of 2012. After fighting my way through 215 pages, I simply decided I didn't have it in me to continue for another 350. Don't get me wrong, the book is well-researched and well-written, but my interest in Hemingway is not deep enough for me to enjoy reading hundreds of pages about, well, Hemingway's boat, Pilar, the people who joined him aboard (and in some cases, their own life stories), the fish he caught, the books he wrote, and the relationships he crumbled. For the ultimate Hemingway enthusiast, this book may be just the thing, but for the casual reader and admirer, I'd recommend Paris Wife (one of the best books I read in 2011).

As a side note, something Nick Hornby wrote in Polysyallabic Spree came to mind more than once. I'm paraphrasing here, but what he wrote is that when an author sets out to write a biography, he should have to apply to a National Biography Office which will have the sole ability to set to maximum number of pages that may be written about said person/aspect of person. By my count, this book exceeded it's allowable pages by many score. It did, however, succeed in making me want to visit Cuba even more than I did previously.

Hedy’s Folly: The Life and Breakthrough Inventions of Hedy Lamarr, the Most Beautiful Woman in the World

I have to confess that my newfound obsession with Downton Abbey has really eaten into my reading and blogging routine. The truth be told, I actually finished this book early last week, but was on a DA bender and am just now putting thoughts to paper. (I also haven’t started anything new yet…)

Hedy’s Folly is a fairly slim book, and this review, likewise will be fairly slim. Hedy Lamarr was a famous Hollywood actress (and reportedly the most beautiful woman in the world) in the late 1930s and early 1940s who like to invent any manner of things. Likewise, George Antheil was an avant garde composer (his most famous work having caused a near-riot in Paris) and notorious womanizer who was also mechanically inclined and liked to invent. Having discovered this shared interested at a dinner party, this unlikely duo set about to invent a jam-proof anti-torpedo system at the height of World War II. Naturally, the U.S. military failed to capitalize on their invention, but decades later when the patent was declassified, any number of private enterprises capitalized on their frequency-hopping spread spectrum technology. The technology has made possible everything from cell phones to GPS.

That’s the background story.  In this case, the sum of the parts is less than the individual parts. Hedy Lamarr and George Antheil are both interesting people, whose lives hopscotched from Europe to the U.S. (and vice versa) during the Roaring Twenties and Nazi rise. George Antheil lived in the mezzanine apartment above Shakespeare and Company, which is worth something in and of itself. Their stories, though, are often overwhelmed by the technical details of their various inventions. I appreciate Rhodes’s efforts to describe the scientific importance and how-to of their various frequency-hopping innovations, but ultimately, he often provided too much information for the casual reader to fully absorb.

Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President

Destiny of the Republic chronicles the life, times, and assassination of James A. Garfield, 20^th President of the United States. In many ways, Garfield is a man who never wanted to be president, did not seek the nomination, did not actually campaign once nominated, and was ultimately president for only 200 days (nearly half of which he spent languishing in a sick room). This is also the story of the barbarism of nineteenth century medicine, on the eve of the transformation of the operating room from a stinking, vile place to a sterilized one and the story of a political era so ripe with corruption that Rutherford B. Hayes stated that, should the Republicans nominate him for a second term as President, he would refuse the honor outright.

I liked James Garfield. I found him to be a fascinating, smart, highly likable man; I was sorry to see him assassinated, all the more since he never sought the presidency and was a very reluctant candidate, at best. Garfield became the president of what is now Hiram College at age 26, then served as a Union general before spending over a decade in Congress.That it was the decisions of his doctors, rather than his assassin’s bullet, that ultimately killed him made me all the sorrier.

In addition to liking Garfield, I very much liked this book. In many ways it reminded me of The Devil in the White City: there is murder and mayhem, but also the undercurrent of ideas, inventions, and glimpses of the future. The parallels between Guiteau and Prendergast are unmistakable, as are those between the centennial fair in Philadelphia (where Alexander Graham Bell first demonstrated the telephone) and the World's Fair in Chicago. Millard does a fine job tracing the interwoven stories of Garfield, Guiteau, and Bell, bringing to life figures about whom I previously knew very little. At times the book is prescient, as on page 184 when Millard describes the transition from an open access White House to one guarded by armed men writing, "the nation had changed not just suddenly, but fundamentally and irretrievable." (The statement harkened me back to my first time in an airport post-9/11.) At other times the book is nearly laugh-out-loud funny, particularly the courtroom scenes during Guiteau's trial. Clearly, if ever a man were insane, Guiteau were that man.

Sheepishly, I have to admit to feeling a jolt of nerdish excitement at the mention of New York City's 1888 blizzard (thank you, Isaac's Storm), and - also nerdishly - took pleasure in adding to my bank of random trivia that Garfield's was the first presidential library created (thanks to his adoring wife and tireless personal secretary) and that Robert Todd Lincoln is the only individual to have been present or in the immediate vicinity of three presidential assassinations (Lincoln, Garfield, and McKinley, in 1865, 1881, and 1901).