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Adventures in Bookland: The Path to War by Michael Neiberg

1 January 2017
Edoardo
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Categories: Book review, History

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At the dawn of the 20th century, the United States was a power hiding behind oceans. In the first decades of the 21st century, it is the world’s only hyperpower, able to project its military and cultural influence to every corner of the world. This fascinating book – at least, it’s fascinating for those with an interest in the political and sociological history of America – tells how America made the decisive turn towards engagement with the outside world.

It may be hard to realise now, but through most of its history, isolationism has been the strongest strand to America’s foreign policy. Its founders and first generations of immigrants crossed the sea to escape the wars and persecutions – political and religious – of the Old World. Having found a home in the New World, they had no wish to engage in the wars of their old homes. So when the First World War broke out, America remained neutral. Not only did this keep it out of the war, neutrality brought huge profits in its wake, as American goods and products found ready markets among all the combatants.

But such blood profits sat uneasily on American consciences, bought as they were in the immolation of a continent that many Americans still thought of as home. For none was this problem more acute than for German-Americans. Where did their loyalty lie? At first, they pushed for continued American neutrality. But as the war continued and incidents such as the sinking of the Lusitania increased anti-German feeling, such a position became increasingly untenable. War was coming. And German-Americans, in common with Irish-Americans, Italian-Americans and the other national groups, came to the one, common conclusion: they were Americans before they were anything else. Thus, the First World War killed off the 19th-century American experiment in multiculturalism (played out in a multitude of national-language newspapers and societies) and ushered in a new consciousness of what it was to be American.

Neiberg tells the story of this profound change through an encyclopaedic knowledge of the time, ranging from popular songs, through speeches and newspaper articles, to the letters of people ranging from Theodore Roosevelt to ordinary mothers contemplating the possibility of their sons being called up. It’s a great piece of scholarship – but only bother with reading it if you’re interested in the subject.

Adventures in Bookland: King Cnut by WB Bartlett

31 December 2016
Edoardo
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Categories: Book review, History

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Ask the man in the street how many times England has been successfully invaded and he’ll reply, “Twice: the Romans and the Normans.” Ask a historian, particularly one specialising in constitutional history, and he’ll add a third: William and Mary’s invasion in 1688.

They’re all wrong. There have been at least five successful invasions of England. These three, plus the slow-motion carving out of an England separate from Britain by the Anglo-Saxons and then, fifty years before the one date in English history everyone knows, the Vikings finally succeeded in what they’d been trying to do for the previous 150 years: grab the country.

This long-overdue book is about the Viking invasions that first crippled and then ended the reign of England’s worst-ever king, Æthelred, and the man who finally succeeded him, Cnut. In Denmark, his homeland, Cnut’s name is invariably followed by his appellation, ‘the Great’, but in England, where he spent most of his adult life and where he was buried, he is all but forgotten, his fame as a conqueror eclipsed by the man who followed him, fifty years later. Bartlett’s book seeks to redress that balance and it does a good job of demonstrating what a remarkable king Cnut was, holding together a sea-spanning empire encompassing Denmark, England, Norway and much of Sweden.

As a sea pirate with imperial pretensions, Cnut did all that he could to ensure the history makers of his time – the clerks of the Church – were on his side, as well as doing what he could in later life to atone for the judicious murders of his early life that had made his grasp of the crown more secure. The book is thorough in its exploration of the man and his time, although a little on the bloodless side. This is no fault of the author, but rather inherent in the limited contemporary sources – mainly chronicles and charters – which do not lend themselves to rounded character portraits. Later Norse sagas add colour but the careful historian, and Bartlett is careful, has to be cautious about adding these details to what is a sober assessment of England’s forgotten conqueror.

And the tide story? First related by Henry of Huntingdon in the 12th century (a century after Cnut’s death).

 

Adventures in Bookland: Xenos by Dan Abnett

29 December 2016
Edoardo
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Categories: Book review, Writers

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There are so many wonderful books out there, I seldom go back and reread a book I’ve read before. Why bother, when new worlds and new ideas are waiting to be explored? But, with Xenos, I’ve done just that: gone back and reread a book I first read six or seven years ago.

And it was great.

Xenos was the very first novel I read set in the Warhammer 40k universe. If you don’t know it, it’s a universe set up explicitly so that wargamers moving little plastic figures, often exquisitely painted, can play war games set in the far future. Given that the people playing the games are wargamers, you might surmise that the universe 38,000 years from now is not a particularly peaceful place. You’d be right. It is, however, a universe stuffed full of wonders. It turns out that all those goblins and elves and monsters that filled our fairy tales and folk stories were real – it’s just that we got the location wrong. They weren’t on earth, they were waiting for us out among the stars. In fact, that’s my only real criticism of the intricate universe that Games Workshop (the company behind Warhammer 40K) has created: with such a cast of creatures, there should be a bit of room for wonder in among the blasters and exploding alien heads.

But, no matter, for Dan Abnett manages to instil some of this wonder while remaining true to the dystopian roots of 40k and, at the same time, writing an amazingly involving adventure story. Indeed, so taken with the whole universe was I when I first read this that I immediately dived in, reading reams of the stuff, until I came to the same sort of realisation about Warhammer 40k books that I came to with fantasy and Tolkien. Back when I first read The Lord of the Rings it was actually the first fantasy novel I’d ever read. And I was completely blown away. So, I dived in, only to all but drown in Shannaras and Covenants and Belgeriads. I emerged, somewhat the worse for wear, to claim the hard-won knowledge that, with fantasy, I’d started at the summit and was busy working my way down. It turns out that, with Warhammer 40k and Dan Abnett, I’d done the same thing: I’d started at the top with Abnett and had been working my way downhill after him.

But, to return to the summit, it was a relief to reclimb the mountain to find the view from the top as exotic and brutal and breathtaking as the first time I’d found myself there. Thank you, Dan Abnett, and thank you, Gregor Eisenhorn. The Imperium is well served with both of you in its service!

 

 

Adventures in Bookland: St Augustine’s First Footfall by Gerald Moody

28 December 2016
Edoardo
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Categories: Book review, History

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This slim (87 page) book does exactly what it says in its subtitle: An Investigation into the Probable Location of the Landing Site of Augustine’s Mission in 597 AD. Of course, the really fascinating thing is why Augustine (the missionary sent by Pope Gregory the Great to bring the pagan and barbarian Angl0-Saxons into the fold of civilisation) should land right where, in centuries before and afterward, visitors and invaders ranging from the Emperor Claudius, through Hengist and Horsa, all manner of Vikings and, even would-be invaders such as Napoleon and Hitler, all made first footfall.

The answer lies in part in geography. Yes, Dover is closer to France, but it is exposed and has great towering cliffs standing over it: a particularly vulnerable place to make a landing. The great secret to landing where Augustine, and so many others, landed, is that the Isle of Thanet really was an island back then, a chalk hill cut off from the rest of Kent by the Wantsum Channel. In places, this channel was a mile wide, and up until the 15th century a ferry trip was still needed to get to Thanet. But the Wantsum silted up, joining Thanet to the mainland. However, while Thanet was an island, it provided a unique, and uniquely defensible, entry point to England.

In this book, Gerald Moody, deputy director of the Trust for Thanet Archaeology, employs the latest research into how Thanet’s coastline has changed to investigate just where Augustine and his team of Italian missionaries landed in 597 AD. According to our chronicler of the event, Bede, Augustine and crew were detained on Thanet while the king of Kent, Æthelberht, decided what to do with these strange visitors. Moody does an excellent job of examining the historical account through the lens of modern archaeology, and makes a convincing case for his siting of the landing and the location of Augustine’s stay on Thanet.

In short, an absorbing and detailed little book, well worth reading for anyone interested in the particulars (Augustine’s mission) or the general (England’s changing coastline).

Adventures in Bookland: 1847 by Turtle Bunbury

19 December 2016
Edoardo
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Categories: Book review

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Before reviewing this book I must do something unusual: I must review the author’s name. Has there ever been a better name bestowed upon a writer? I  aver that there has not. It is the juxtaposition of dissimilarity that makes it so unique, the elision of armoured testudo with cricketing rabbits, the juxtaposition of slow, considered movement with the sparkle of celebrity sport. Surely such a name tells of parental genius. The question arises though: can the writer live up to his name?

Almost. The title tells the tale. It’s the story of a year, a year rendered significant for the Turtle as the time when the building of his family home, a great pile of a place in County Carlow, Ireland, was begun. Not perhaps the most obvious time to start such a project, as Ireland was in the midst of the Great Famine that saw a million people die and a million more emigrate. But, as the Turtle shows in this book, such a year will reverberate through the world, setting off ripples in all sorts of unexpected places. Bunbury follows the year through, telling its history through the lives of people affected by the events of the year. Some are Irish, part of the diaspora already gone from the island but, hearing the news, responding to it. Others merely share the calendar.

This tells the book’s strength and weakness. It’s a chronicle, connected only by time and, when finishing it, one is struck by the same thought that arises upon watching Stephen Fry on QI. Yes, it’s all very witty and sharp, but what, exactly, is the point? If wit and sharpness are reason enough then buy this book: it will delight. If, on the other hand, you require some uniting, narrative thread for your explorations in the 19th century, read the Flashman books instead.

Adventures in Bookland: Atlas Infernal by Rob Sanders

9 December 2016
Edoardo
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Categories: Book review

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OK, I admit it. My guilty little literary secret is my love for books where blokes with big guns blast aliens into pools of green slime. And there’s no better universe for blasting aliens than the Warhammer 40k one: orcs, tyrannids (think Alien but hordes of them), the Tau (sort of like the Borg), necrons (metal zombies), Chaos (basically Michael Moorcock’s demons from the Elric era of his writing transplanted into outer space). And, of course, the eldar – basically elves in space but with spiky guns rather than shiny swords. In fact, the only failing of the Warhammer 40k universe is its unrelenting grimness – it’s really a world of wonders, only no one seems to have realised it yet!

One of the tropes of the universe that I particularly like is how it riffs on aspects of Tridentine Catholicism to inform the human world – for Imperium think Magisterium. Not least among the parallels is the Inquisition and, since you never expect the Space Inquisition, it has carte blanche to travel anywhere in this future, whereas other parts of the Imperium are more restricted. The Inquisitors even deal with alien species, which is just what Inquisitor Bronislaw Czevak does here: he travels the webways of the eldar (a tube system to the stars, but with fewer delays and no copies of Metro blowing on the line). So if, like me, you find the Warhammer 40k universe a place of wonder rather than just an arena for blasting aliens into alien gore, then this is a particularly good effort from the Black Library. So I’ve rather contradicted what I said at the beginning: my guilty secret is guns and marvels, and you’ll find them here.

 

Adventures in Bookland: The Norman Conquest by Teresa Cole

1 December 2016
Edoardo
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Categories: Book review

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Even 950 years after the event, the Norman Conquest still provokes division. It seems all but impossible for a historian to approach it without, in the end, taking sides: Norman or Anglo-Saxon, William or Harold. In part this is because the near contemporary sources are almost all Norman – with the exceptions of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and, intriguingly, the Bayeux Tapestry – and thus require interrogation. That the Normans, alongside their skill in castle building, were also early masters of the dark art of spin is pretty clear: the question remains, how much was spun?

Teresa Cole firmly takes the Anglo-Saxon cause. She sets the Conquest in the context of the previous century of history, starting with the accession to the throne of England, by the foullest of means, of England’s worst-ever king, Æthelred. Gifted a settled, ordered country by the labours of Alfred the Great and his successors, Æthelred squandered it all, pouring the country’s wealth away in a futile attempt to buy off Viking armies. Finding the country such a cash cow, the Vikings decided to stay and, in 1016, England was conquered, by Cnut.

If there is any one person to blame for the Conquest, that man is Æthelred. A competent, even a less cowardly, king would have been able to face down the Viking threat. But Cnut had set the precedent and when, fifty years later, Edward the Confessor died without an obvious heir, the beasts began to prowl. England had been taken once; it might be taken again.

Cole does a fine job of leading the reader through the events of 1066. In hindsight, whoever you might favour, it’s clear that luck played the greatest part in that bloody series of events. But, of course, for the people of the time, it was not luck, but God’s will. That William should essay such an invasion without a clear belief that God, indeed, willed it seems incredible in the context of the time. His victory, eventually, confirmed it for his contemporaries. Although in reaching this conclusion they forgot Augustine’s dictum that God hates evil but permits it. Deus non vult.

Adventures in Bookland: Matilda by Roald Dahl

23 November 2016
Edoardo
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Categories: Book review

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Staying for the weekend with some friends, I picked this book off the (children’s) shelf for something to read – then promptly dropped from social intercourse for the next three hours. Where, I thought when reading this, was Matilda when I was growing up? Were my parents – decent and loving though they are – guilty of the same sort of neglect as Matilda’s by failing to provide me with books like this when growing up.

Then I saw when the book was published. 1988. Ah. Just a tad past my childhood.

That explains things. Roald Dahl seems to have been around forever, but I don’t remember anything by him in the libraries when I was growing up – apart from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, maybe. But, being a child who found eating a chore (it took away valuable reading time as I wasn’t allowed to read at the table), the premise of the book never attracted me and nor did its follow up, James and the Giant Peach (see the consistent theme?). What I do remember is the tarot cards and the sub-James Bond dancing woman, and the music, of Roald Dahl’s Tales of the Unexpected on TV.

For a child who was somewhat wary of the adult world, the Tales of the Unexpected suggested that I might find some unexpected adult things in Roald Dahl’s books, so that was another reason to avoid them. As it turns out, I need not have worried – but I do think that modern-day writers for children, always so keen to expose their readers to the ‘real world’, might bear in mind my trepidation: children know perfectly well there’s all sorts of strange and icky things in the adult world and, really, they’d rather not read about them in their own books. And Roald Dahl had the good sense not to put them in – while still viewing the adult world with all the innocent scorn and righteous indignation of the child.

Matilda is a great book. I am glad to have read it.

Adventures in Bookland: Dynasty by Tom Holland

20 November 2016
Edoardo
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Categories: Book review

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The title is not coincidental. House of Caesar: House of Carrington.

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Politics as show business: show business as politics. Turns out, the lessons of the past have been read by a previously unsuspected classicist:

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Give the public a show: the essence of the new politics. But in his book, Tom Holland examines the first proponents of show business rule: the house of Caesar. Certainly, Caesar himself, with his games and books and careful eye to the crowds; not so much Octavian, the persuader emperor, the shadow hider who convinced Rome that it was still a republic even as he folded all power around his person like a classical toga; nor Tiberius, the emperor of anguish, trapped in life and death between power and principle; but with Caligula and Nero (and to a lesser extent Claudius) the politics of show reach a zenith that no one else is ever likely to match. So, if current political developments fill you with dread, study this witty and zestful book for the reassurance of history. Things can always be worse – much worse.

 

 

Adventures in Bookland: Amazing Spider-Man: Peter Parker – the One and Only

16 November 2016
Edoardo
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Categories: Book review

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Comics, and specifically Marvel Comics, filled my life when I was young – or they did so far as I was able to get hold of them. This was the 1970s: pre-internet, pre distribution networks, pre globalised content providers. It was no easy task finding Marvel Comics in a north London suburb. There was the Marvel British imprint, which reprinted the American originals in a weekly black-and-white format and which was my first exposure to Marvel comics, but of the American colour monthlies, there was often no sign. From visiting the newspaper shops around me – there were a lot more them then, before the internet decimated print – I found one or two that occasionally stocked original Marvel comics. Some of these had been minimally rebranded for the British market – their price was in pence rather than cents (which should give you an idea of how much prices have increased) – but some were available in the exotic dollar format. These were the ones I prized, with their stamp-sized label affirming that they were:

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By Source, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2089313

I could never tell which comics would come in on any given month, which made my collection rather haphazard, but Spider-Man was one of the most regular and the adventures of Peter Parker – geeky, science obsessed, shy – became mine because I was also geeky, science obsessed and shy.

But, slowly, comics slipped into the past.

Only for me to find, many years later, that comics have come round again and those people who grew up with are busy rediscovering them, while children seeing the Marvel and DC films are absorbing the comic book universes without even, necessarily, reading any comics.

So, I thought I’d take a read backwards. Nowadays, the easiest way to do so is via the book size reissues of a collection of comics, but I’ve found those frustrating. For some reason, Marvel and DC both have a tendency to publish part of a multi-part story, only for the book to finish before the story does. Is this to make readers buy the next part? For my part, this reader finds the practice annoying and, rather than buying the continuation, it puts me off going anywhere near the story again. So it was good to find, in this collection of Spider-Man stories, a number of complete, self-contained stories that didn’t go anywhere, that didn’t want to do anything other than to tell a good story and finish it off. And they did. The issue by thriller writer David Morrell was particularly good.