Category: books and books review
February 5th, 2012
Mediterranean Front, A Year of Battle, The End in Africa
Alan Moorehead
642 pages including index
published in 1941, 1943,1943, compilation 1945
If journalism is history as first draft, then these three books, Mediterranean Front, A Year of Battle, The End in Africa; published in one volume as African Trilogy are history as second draft. Written while the Second World War was still ongoing, each of these books tell the story of one year of war in the desert, as seen by one of the preeminent war correspondents of the era. Written largely without the benefit of hindsight, from the notes that Moorehead took at the time, these three books together not only provide an interesting look at an important period in World War II, which England largely had to fight on its own, but also at how people at the time thought about the war, when the outcome was by no means certain yet.
If you’ve heard of Alan Moorehead, it’s probably for his post-war books on the exploration of the Nile, The White Nile (1960) and The Blue Nile (1962). During the Second World War he was a correspondent for the Daily Express, following the war in North Africa, the invasion of Sicily and the war in Italy. As becomes clear from reading these three volumes, Moorehead wasn’t one of those journalists content to stay at headquarters, but went chasing down the front whenever he could. Some of the incidents here certainly read like Boy’s Own Adventures stuff, several times barely escaping running into the enemy at several moments. Moorehead is a born raconteur, aimable, slightly understated, though with some of the attitudes and language use of the time that might seem strange to modern readers.
Read more…
Categories: books and books review, history
Tags: African Trilogy, Alan Moorehead, World War II
February 1st, 2012
And so ends the first month of the last year of the world, if we can believe all those new age hucksters shilling for that supposed Mayan prophecy. I’ll believe it when I see it. Meanwhile this is the start of the fifth year I’ve been doing these monthly roundups, not to mention the eleventh year of my Booklog. Just like happened last year I had to start the new year reading through the backlog of books I’d gotten from the Middelburg library, as I stayed with my parents over Christmas and had gotten more books out than I turned out to be able to read while there — shouldn’t have played so much Colonists of Catan I guess.
I also started a new reading project this month, by working my way through some of Sandra’s favourite books this year. The first of which was Wendy Williams’ Kraken, who in fact left a nice comment at my review, which was appreciated. Not sure which of Sandra’s books I’ll be reading this month, but I’m leaning towards trying one of her gastronomic books, perhaps one of her M. K. Fishers, or a Bemelmans volume, or perhaps Ruth Brandon’s The People’s Chef, which Sandra was raving about a year or so ago.
In the meantime, here are the books I read this month, in order. Eight books in total, mostly non-fiction as I worked my way through that cache of library books.
The King’s Name — Jo Walton
““The first I knew about the civil war was when my sister Aurien poisoned me.” Surely one of the better openings to a fantasy novel and the rest of the book doesn’t disappoint either. Sequel to The King’s Peace.
Giant of the Grand Siècle: The French Army 1610-1715 — John A. Lynn
An indepth look at the French Army and its soldiers during the century that Louis XIV turned France into the most powerful nation in Europe.
Kraken — Wendy Williams
A short, but interesting look at cephalopods — squid, octopussies, cuttlefish, nautiluses — and their importance for medical research, as well as why they’re just cool in their own right. Sandra loved cephalopods and so do I.
War, State and Society in England and the Netherlands, 1477-1559 — Steven Gunn, David Grummitt & Hans Cools
Not entirely succesfull comparative history of England and what we’d now would call the Benelux or Low Countries, during the period which arguably determined the modern shape of both countries.
Mediterranean Front — Alan Moorehead
If journalism is history as a first draft, this is history as second draft: the experiences of Australian war correspondent Alan Moorehead during the first year of the war in the desert in WWII.
The Crisis of the Twelfth Century — Thomas N. Bisson
In the Long Twelfth Century, here defined from roughly 1066 to the early decades of the thirteenth century, Europe went through a crisis of lordship, as every knight with a castle made himself into a lord. Another dense, thick sociological history, interesting but hard going at times.
City of the Chasch — Jack Vance
A classic Vancian novel, set on the mad world of Tshcai and the first in a tetralogy, infamous for its second entry: Servants of the Wankh… I’ve read this a long long time ago in Dutch.
A Year of Battle — Alan Moorehead
The second book in Alan Moorehead’s Africa trilogy, about the second year of the Desert War, now mostly fought between the British and Commonwealth forces against Rommel.
Categories: books and books review, posts interesting only to me
January 28th, 2012
For a change, why don’t we take a post that I mostly agree with and take a side issue to nitpick? Here’s a short extract from Gareth Rees’ excellent credo for critics
This objection eventually amounts to a denial of the legitimacy of criticism on political or moral grounds: that an author’s choice of setting and political ethos for a work of fiction cannot be subject to criticism. Brahm: “Writing does not need to be didactic or satirical in order to be important or insightful: you seem to view the situation as that either Martin should be condemned because he supports the medieval feudalist system or that he should be damned because his work is not a satire and therefore meaningless. Why he can’t simply write a story in a medieval world, that realistically shows the workings and limitations of the system as well as the mindsets of those that inhabit it, is beyond me.”
Ethical criticism has got itself a bad name because it’s at the root of the Victorian idea that books must be morally improving. But you can reject that position without denying the legitimacy of ethical criticism tout court. I don’t necessarily agree with every point McCalmont makes but I think his argument is basically right: fiction that treats of kings and queens without any kind of satire, irony or other form of undermining is implicitly endorsing conservative and authoritarian ideas.
I think that is wrong, or at least not the whole truth. Sure, on the one hand there are fantasy authors, with the most obvious example being Tolkien himself, who do believe in the idea of a rightful king and all the baggage that implies, while on the other hand there are legions of lesser writers following the footsteps of a Tolkien, unthinkingly taking the same bagage with them, but that doesn’t mean that all fantasy set in a medievaloid setting with kings and queens has this bagage, or that fantasy authors explicitely have to reject these ideas not to have it. There needs to be room for writers who want to use a medieval like setting to tell stories that aren’t political in the sense Gareth is talking about, who take the political and sociological implications of such a setting as a given, rather than something to be endorsed or condemned.
Categories: books and books review, fantasy
January 25th, 2012
Ivan’s War
Catherine Merridale
396 pages including index
published in 2005
Though things have improved a lot since the end of the Cold War, the Eastern Front is still underrepresented in western histories of World War II. Quite naturally British and American historians have focused mostly on their own countries’ experiences in the war but even so the Russian experience is still under-represented. And often when the Eastern Front is looked at, it is from a German rather than a Russian perspective. German historians, generals and others were quite quick in putting forward their experiences in order to put the record straight in their favour, German sources were much more available to western historians than Russian sources, stuck behind the Iron Curtain as they were. So we got plenty of Konsalik novels talking about poor, intelligent middle class German officers stuck in the hell of the Ostfront facing the Slavic hordes, not so much about the poor Russian soldiers trying to liberate their homelands. What’s more, Cold War ideology, which presented an outnumbered NATO alliance trying to defend itself against the vast communist tank armies poised to overrun Western Europe at any moment, quite easily identified itself with the German experience and was fed by the same German generals that had been defeated by the Russians on how best to fight the bolshevik menace.
So it’s good to see a book like Ivan’s War be published. It’s the first book I’ve read about the Eastern Front that looks at the war there not just through a Russian perspective, but looks at the ordinary soldier’s experiences, somewhat comparable to e.g. Stud Terkel’s “The Good War” about American experiences of WWII. Catherine Merridale went to Russia not just to look at archives long inaccessible to western scholars, but also to talk to the veterans themselves and get their stories. What’s more, she didn’t just show the stories of the common soldiers, but also those of their officers and political commissars too and does so without editorialising. It’s important to hear those stories, to get an idea of what the Great Patriotic War was really like for those who fought it, without seeing it filtered through American or Western European, let alone German eyes for a change.
Read more…
Categories: books and books review, history
Tags: Catherine Merridale, Ivan's War
January 21st, 2012
War, State and Society in England and the Netherlands, 1477-1559
Steven Gunn, David Grummitt & Hans Cools
395 pages including index
published in 2007
Everything the authors tried to achieve with this book is in the title, but whether they succeeded is another question. Based on a massive research project that was carried out between 1999 and 2002, what the book was intended to be was a comparative study of two roughly similar countries in a period critical to Early Modern European history, to determine the impact of war both on society and the (semi-modern) state. As the authors argue, both England and the Netherlands (meaning what we would now call the Low Countries) were sort of outliers in Europe, neither quite fitting in “conventional narratives of the growth of state power”, not as centralised as other countries and with a greater level of democracy. For English historians, an added advantage of this comparison is that it puts England back into an European context by showing the simularities and differences between the two countries’ experiences.
War, State and Society in England and the Netherlands, 1477-1559 is impressive and interesting but what it lacks is that comparative aspect that the title and introduction promises. It’s more a parallel than a comparative history, with developments in the two countries looked at side by side. So you’d have a section on the defence of towns looking first at how English towns dealt with fortifications, then at how Dutch towns did the same, but nothing much on how they differed or why they did. This lack of analysis wasn’t that big a problem for me personally because I found the subject interesting enough already.
Read more…
Categories: books and books review, history
Tags: David Grummitt, Hans Cools, State and Society in England and the Netherlands, Steven Gunn, WAR
January 20th, 2012
Not the best of pictures, but good enough to show off the books I bought yesterday. And yes, I know I have too many books already, not to mention a fair few library books that need to go back soon. But I can’t help it; every now and then I get the urge and need to get more. What’s nice is when that urge is satisfied, like it was this time. Sometimes you have to let a bookstore lie fallow for a while, not visit for a couple of weeks or months to give it time to surprise you. The secondhand English bookstore near Nieuwmarkt I got all this from certainly did.
From the bottom up: The Kaiser Battle, about the first day of the last German offensive in World War I by Martin Middlebrook, Justina Robson’s Keeping it Real, the William Tuning sequel to H. Beam Piper’s Little Fuzzy novels, a pre stroke Keith Laumer novel I haven’t read yet (Galactic Oddyssey), Karl Schroeder’s dbut novel Ventus, Cordwainer Smith’s The Planet Buyers, Tatja Grimm’s World, an early Vernor Vinge novel, a Zelazny novel I didn’t know yet (The Dream Master), Robert Holdstock’s The Bone Forest…
Moving on to the female writers: there’s Ann McCaffrey’s The White Dragon which I foolishly had gotten rid off a few years ago, the first three Eluki Bes Shahar Hellflower space adventure stories and Justina Robson’s debut novel, Natural History which had been on my wishlist for ages.
But the books I’m most happy to have found are at the very top: three Joanna Russ novels: We Who Are About to, And Chaos Died, and The Two of Them. Reading The Female Man last year was a revelation; I hadn’t realised how good Russ was as a writer, rather than as “just” a feminist science fiction writer. Annoyingly, that reputation of being a firebreathing feminist had kept me far too long from trying her novels and then when I did want to read them, I couldn’t find them anywhere. Not anymore.
Categories: books and books review, posts interesting only to me
