A fascinating article in the current issue of the New York Review of Books on three books about the Dreyfus Affair, by Robert Gildea. In the Contributors page, he is identified as Professor of Modern History at Oxford University. Indeed.
Four of his books are in the OPAC:
Barricades and borders : Europe 1800-1914. Oxford [Oxfordshire] ; New York : Oxford University Press, 1987.
Children of the Revolution : the French, 1799-1914. Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press, 2008.
France since 1945. Oxford ; New York : Oxford University Press, 2002.
Marianne in chains : everyday life in the French heartland under the German occupation. New York: Henry Holt, 2003.
HW owns the 2nd and 4th; I'm going to take a look.
Showing posts with label US. Show all posts
Showing posts with label US. Show all posts
Saturday, May 22, 2010
Wednesday, June 17, 2009
Tears in the darkness
American and Filipino troops in April 1942 on the Bataan Death March, a 66-mile ordeal that remains a hallmark of brutality.
No aspect of this battle or the infamous march that followed seems to have been overlooked. It is possible to buy volumes devoted to Bataan’s nurses, its military chaplains and, in Hampton Sides’s best-selling 2001 book, “Ghost Soldiers,” the men who rescued its survivors.
“Tears in the Darkness” is authoritative history. Ten years in the making, it is based on hundreds of interviews with American, Filipino and Japanese combatants. But it is also a narrative achievement. The book seamlessly blends a wide-angle view with the stories of many individual participants. And at this book’s beating emotional heart is the tale of just one American soldier, a young cowboy and aspiring artist out of Montana named Ben Steele.
Tears in the darkness: The Story of the Bataan Death March and Its Aftermath. Michael Norman and Elizabeth M. Norman. Illustrated. 464 pages. Farrar, Straus & Giroux.
Two weeks after Pearl Harbor Japan invaded the Philippines. The poorly trained and untested American and Filipino forces were overmatched; they eventually retreated into the mountainous jungles of Bataan for a brutal last stand, one that the Normans, who are husband and wife, describe as “a modern Thermopylae.”
The authors are sympathetic toward Ned King, the surrendering American major general, who was beloved by his men. (General King made it clear to his soldiers that he had surrendered, not they.) Mr. and Ms. Norman reserve their scorn for the initial Allied general overseeing Bataan, Douglas MacArthur, whom they accuse of not leading from the field and later abandoning his men there.
MacArthur was always busy becoming a great man.
There are many Japanese voices in “Tears in the Darkness.” Mr. and Ms. Norman don’t excuse Japan’s actions, but place them in careful context. Japanese soldiers, they write, were the products of “a closed world of violence where men were subjected to the most brutal system of army discipline in the world.” These soldiers “had been savaged to produce an army of savage intent.”
What are the physics of suffocation? How does a bomb blast actually kill a person? What exactly does lack of water do to a human body? “Tears in the Darkness” is a grim and comprehensive catalog of man’s inhumanity to man.
In the end, though, “Tears in the Darkness” is a book about heroism and survival. All along you are glued, out of the corner of your eye, to one story, Ben Steele’s. If you aren’t weeping openly by the book’s final scenes, when he is at last able to call home and let his family know that he is still alive after more than three years “missing in action,” during which time this thin young man lost 50 pounds, then you have a hard crust of salt around your soul.
An authoritative history of the Bataan Death March that seamlessly blends a wide-angle view with the stories of individual American, Filipino and Japanese participants.
The Bataan Death March has been written about before, and well, by a number of historians. Memoirs alone about Bataan fill a long, harrowing shelf. Their titles cry out in silent pain, bitterness and defiance: “My Hitch in Hell,” “No Uncle Sam,” “We Refused to Die.”No aspect of this battle or the infamous march that followed seems to have been overlooked. It is possible to buy volumes devoted to Bataan’s nurses, its military chaplains and, in Hampton Sides’s best-selling 2001 book, “Ghost Soldiers,” the men who rescued its survivors.
“Tears in the Darkness” is authoritative history. Ten years in the making, it is based on hundreds of interviews with American, Filipino and Japanese combatants. But it is also a narrative achievement. The book seamlessly blends a wide-angle view with the stories of many individual participants. And at this book’s beating emotional heart is the tale of just one American soldier, a young cowboy and aspiring artist out of Montana named Ben Steele.
Tears in the darkness: The Story of the Bataan Death March and Its Aftermath. Michael Norman and Elizabeth M. Norman. Illustrated. 464 pages. Farrar, Straus & Giroux.Two weeks after Pearl Harbor Japan invaded the Philippines. The poorly trained and untested American and Filipino forces were overmatched; they eventually retreated into the mountainous jungles of Bataan for a brutal last stand, one that the Normans, who are husband and wife, describe as “a modern Thermopylae.”
The authors are sympathetic toward Ned King, the surrendering American major general, who was beloved by his men. (General King made it clear to his soldiers that he had surrendered, not they.) Mr. and Ms. Norman reserve their scorn for the initial Allied general overseeing Bataan, Douglas MacArthur, whom they accuse of not leading from the field and later abandoning his men there.
MacArthur was always busy becoming a great man.
There are many Japanese voices in “Tears in the Darkness.” Mr. and Ms. Norman don’t excuse Japan’s actions, but place them in careful context. Japanese soldiers, they write, were the products of “a closed world of violence where men were subjected to the most brutal system of army discipline in the world.” These soldiers “had been savaged to produce an army of savage intent.”
What are the physics of suffocation? How does a bomb blast actually kill a person? What exactly does lack of water do to a human body? “Tears in the Darkness” is a grim and comprehensive catalog of man’s inhumanity to man.
In the end, though, “Tears in the Darkness” is a book about heroism and survival. All along you are glued, out of the corner of your eye, to one story, Ben Steele’s. If you aren’t weeping openly by the book’s final scenes, when he is at last able to call home and let his family know that he is still alive after more than three years “missing in action,” during which time this thin young man lost 50 pounds, then you have a hard crust of salt around your soul.
Tuesday, May 5, 2009
Writer’s violent end, his activist legacy
The Nigerian writer and activist Ken Saro-Wiwa.
“I had a surprising call this week,” the author Richard North Patterson told the audience that had gathered last weekend as part of the PEN World Voices Festival of International Literature. It was former President Bill Clinton. Mr. Patterson’s new novel, “Eclipse,” is based on the case of the Nigerian writer and activist Ken Saro-Wiwa, and Mr. Clinton spoke of a phone call he had made 14 years ago to Gen. Sani Abacha of Nigeria, asking him to spare Mr. Saro-Wiwa from the hangman.
Mr. Clinton said General Abacha “was very polite,” but “he was cold,” Mr. Patterson related. “Clinton took away from that, among other things, that oil and the need for oil on behalf of the West and other places made Abacha, in his mind, impervious.”
The event’s moderator, the Nigerian novelist Okey Ndibe, added an unexpected epilogue. A friend in the Abacha cabinet said the general later boasted: “All these pro-democracy activists run to America and expect America to save them. But the U.S. president himself is calling me ‘sir.’ He is scared of me.”
Mr. Saro-Wiwa, a popular author who helped create a peaceful mass movement on behalf of the Ogoni people, was executed in November 1995 along with eight other environmental and human rights activists on what many contended were trumped-up murder charges. His body was burned with acid and thrown in an unmarked grave.
Ken Wiwa, son of the Nigerian writer Ken Saro-Wiwa, says his father’s legacy has influenced his own life and career choices.
PEN, an international association of writers dedicated to defending free expression, along with Guernica , the online literary magazine, sponsored the panel with Mr. Patterson, Mr. Ndibe and Ken Wiwa, Mr. Saro-Wiwa’s son, to discuss Mr. Saro-Wiwa’s literary and political legacy.
“I had a surprising call this week,” the author Richard North Patterson told the audience that had gathered last weekend as part of the PEN World Voices Festival of International Literature. It was former President Bill Clinton. Mr. Patterson’s new novel, “Eclipse,” is based on the case of the Nigerian writer and activist Ken Saro-Wiwa, and Mr. Clinton spoke of a phone call he had made 14 years ago to Gen. Sani Abacha of Nigeria, asking him to spare Mr. Saro-Wiwa from the hangman.
Mr. Clinton said General Abacha “was very polite,” but “he was cold,” Mr. Patterson related. “Clinton took away from that, among other things, that oil and the need for oil on behalf of the West and other places made Abacha, in his mind, impervious.”
The event’s moderator, the Nigerian novelist Okey Ndibe, added an unexpected epilogue. A friend in the Abacha cabinet said the general later boasted: “All these pro-democracy activists run to America and expect America to save them. But the U.S. president himself is calling me ‘sir.’ He is scared of me.”
Mr. Saro-Wiwa, a popular author who helped create a peaceful mass movement on behalf of the Ogoni people, was executed in November 1995 along with eight other environmental and human rights activists on what many contended were trumped-up murder charges. His body was burned with acid and thrown in an unmarked grave.
Ken Wiwa, son of the Nigerian writer Ken Saro-Wiwa, says his father’s legacy has influenced his own life and career choices.
PEN, an international association of writers dedicated to defending free expression, along with Guernica , the online literary magazine, sponsored the panel with Mr. Patterson, Mr. Ndibe and Ken Wiwa, Mr. Saro-Wiwa’s son, to discuss Mr. Saro-Wiwa’s literary and political legacy.
Thursday, March 5, 2009
Lincoln's Bicentennial Soundtrack
Our nation was striving in the 19th century to establish suitable venues for the performance of European music and also to prove that American composers could write music just as good as the imported kind. After all, in 1840 the director of the Paris Opéra dismissed an offer by the American composer William Henry Fry to pay all the costs of mounting his opera "Leonora" there, declaring: "In Europe, we look to America as an industrial country – excellent for railroads but not for art."
Dismissive.
America had no railroads in 1809, when Lincoln was born in Kentucky. Indeed, his birth occurred just a few weeks before Thomas Jefferson, a keen amateur violinist and music collector, handed over the presidency to his friend James Madison, whose redoubtable first lady, Dolley, presided over the first inaugural ball in the federal capital's history, and brought a taste for French music and elegance to the Executive Mansion.
And so a tradition started.
The Lincoln family left Kentucky for Indiana in 1816, shortly before a remarkable musical figure, Anthony Philip Heinrich, arrived there from Philadelphia. Heinrich installed himself in a log cabin in Bardstown, Ky., taught himself composition, and in 1820 produced a collection of songs and pieces for violin and piano loftily entitled "The Dawning of Music in Kentucky," Opus 1. A second volume followed, prompting a critic to call Heinrich "the Beethoven of America" because of the relative complexity of his music. Heinrich went on to even greater complexity, composing large-scale orchestral works with titles like "The Washingtoniad, or the Deeds of a Hero" and a "Grand National Heroic Fantasia: Scintillations of 'Yankee Doodle.'"
HWPL, of course, has: the score to his Opus 1; a CD of The ornithological combat of kings, and a couple of other CDs which include music of his (one of those, The wind demon, has a piece by William Henry Fry, who helped found the New York Philharmonic Symphony Society).
Lincoln was 17 when the U.S. celebrated the 50th jubilee of the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1826. On that day, Jefferson and John Adams both died. And on that same day, in Pittsburgh, was born the first American song composer still widely remembered, Stephen Foster.
Quite a coincidence.
Lincoln apparently enjoyed Gottschalk's music, and when the 9-year-old Venezuelan piano prodigy Teresa Carreño played at the White House in 1863, she performed several Gottschalk compositions to please him. Afterward, at the president's request, she improvised a set of variations on one of Lincoln's favorite ballads, Septimus Winner's "Listen to the Mocking Bird."
Lincoln was also an opera lover. En route to Washington in 1861, he took in a performance of Verdi's "A Masked Ball" at New York's Academy of Music, and throughout the war years he attended operatic performances in Washington whenever he could.
Dismissive.
America had no railroads in 1809, when Lincoln was born in Kentucky. Indeed, his birth occurred just a few weeks before Thomas Jefferson, a keen amateur violinist and music collector, handed over the presidency to his friend James Madison, whose redoubtable first lady, Dolley, presided over the first inaugural ball in the federal capital's history, and brought a taste for French music and elegance to the Executive Mansion.
And so a tradition started.
The Lincoln family left Kentucky for Indiana in 1816, shortly before a remarkable musical figure, Anthony Philip Heinrich, arrived there from Philadelphia. Heinrich installed himself in a log cabin in Bardstown, Ky., taught himself composition, and in 1820 produced a collection of songs and pieces for violin and piano loftily entitled "The Dawning of Music in Kentucky," Opus 1. A second volume followed, prompting a critic to call Heinrich "the Beethoven of America" because of the relative complexity of his music. Heinrich went on to even greater complexity, composing large-scale orchestral works with titles like "The Washingtoniad, or the Deeds of a Hero" and a "Grand National Heroic Fantasia: Scintillations of 'Yankee Doodle.'"
HWPL, of course, has: the score to his Opus 1; a CD of The ornithological combat of kings, and a couple of other CDs which include music of his (one of those, The wind demon, has a piece by William Henry Fry, who helped found the New York Philharmonic Symphony Society).
Lincoln was 17 when the U.S. celebrated the 50th jubilee of the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1826. On that day, Jefferson and John Adams both died. And on that same day, in Pittsburgh, was born the first American song composer still widely remembered, Stephen Foster.
Quite a coincidence.
Lincoln apparently enjoyed Gottschalk's music, and when the 9-year-old Venezuelan piano prodigy Teresa Carreño played at the White House in 1863, she performed several Gottschalk compositions to please him. Afterward, at the president's request, she improvised a set of variations on one of Lincoln's favorite ballads, Septimus Winner's "Listen to the Mocking Bird."
Lincoln was also an opera lover. En route to Washington in 1861, he took in a performance of Verdi's "A Masked Ball" at New York's Academy of Music, and throughout the war years he attended operatic performances in Washington whenever he could.
Friday, February 6, 2009
Monday, January 12, 2009
Barcelona
Saw Barcelona this weekend; found it to be virtually the same movie as Metropolitan. Okay; nothing great. Acting a bit wooden. Story moved along, slowly. Charming? Yeah, that.
Saturday, January 10, 2009
Veeps
Veeps: Profiles in Insignificance. 973.099 K Bill Kelter ; artist, Wayne Shellabarger. Marietta, Ga: Top Shelf ; London: Diamond, 2008.
Saturday, December 13, 2008
Friday, December 12, 2008
Such Good Friends
The Eagle and the Crown
By Frank Prochaska
(Yale, 239 pages, $40)
The King and the Cowboy
By David Fromkin
(The Penguin Press, 256 pages, $25.95)
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