William Hickling Prescott!

Our book today is Roger Wolcott's gigantic 1925 volume The Correspondence of William Hickling Prescott, 1833-1847, featuring not only heaping piles of letters and notes by the great Boston historian but also a great deal of exposition, scene-setting, and explanatory footnoting - easily enough to constitute a life-and-times, despite the book's unassuming title.

The fact that there's so much Prescott correspondence to assemble is a testament not only to the man's die-hard Yankee work ethic but also to the long-suffering forbearance of his friends and associates - Prescott maintained the typical 19th Century voluminous flow of letters, but he was never able to simply sit at his writing desk and dash off a quick three pages. Instead, he was a member in good standing of that odd literary sub-set: historians who persevere despite near-crippling ailments.

In Prescott's case, there was no gradual decline: the fateful change happened in a moment - a moment neither he nor anybody else present would ever forget. During a raucous and very hard-fought food-fight with some of his fellow students at Harvard in 1812, Prescott was hit hard directly on his open left eye by a knot-tough little crust of bread. The pain and impact stunned him, and for the rest of his life, that eye was very nearly useless. According to the legend that sprang up around that day, the accident changed Prescott from a feckless boy to a conscientious adult, but even if that weren't true, when illness threatened his other eye three years later, the near chance of total blindness galvanized him as nothing else would have. He came from a wealthy family and wasn't expected to do much beyond the socializing he loved (and the production of some heirs to the line, which he loved perhaps less), especially since his eyes were crippled and often painful. But he decided to become a historian. He chose Spain as his subject and attacked the task with a will.

Wolcott's impressive volume here reprints a vast chunk of his correspondence from his working years, and it's fascinating to become reacquainted with all the routine impediments that were once a part of active scholarship. Prescott is forever importuning correspondents to hunt down certain obscure volumes for his research, constantly hectoring foreign friends to ransack their local libraries for works of possible interest to his researches. When such treasures are found, he's always obliged to shell out money for scriveners, hordes of scriveners, to make copies of the material - after which needs to find reliable couriers to get the material all the way to his library at Beacon Street in Boston (or his wonderful seaside house, Fitful Head, at Nahant). After publication, there are all sorts of new problems: international copyright is in its infancy, for example, and friends are needed in foreign countries to watch over the work at every stage. The world scholars take for granted in 2011 - a world of computerized libraries, searchable databases, scanning and photocopying - would have seemed to William Prescott to be the very secular image of paradise.

Likewise our ophthalmology departments. The horrible state of Prescott's eyes forced him to live big stretches of his life in darkened rooms, the tedium broken only by his sister reading to him (she often had to lay down on the floor and read by the light coming in at the foot of the closed door, and she never once complained about it). Even at its strongest, his good eye became painfully fatigued after more than an hour or two of reading a day. He had a zestfully powerful mind and a prodigious recall, luckily, and for much of his correspondence he used a device called a noctograph - a writing-slate with horizontal wire guide-lines designed to align handwriting the writer himself couldn't see ... essentially, a means of writing legibly in the dark. The noctograph gave Prescott a palpable (though illusory - he still needed copyists) sense of independence, and it was besides an oddly elegant-looking thing (it was a prized possession of Wolcott's for years).

The noctograph, helpful friends, many an unstinting amanuensis, and boundless amounts of self-discipline: through a combination of all these things, Prescott got his work done (needless to say, he would have been less than charitable to all those poor 21st century writers and would-be writers who moan over how hard it is to generate prose, despite having youth, perfect vision, ample leisure, and 24-hour access to the greatest research library in the history of the world). His History of Ferdinand and Isabella appeared in Boston bookstores on Christmas Day 1837 and promptly sold like griddle-cakes. There followed his The Conquest of Mexico, The Conquest of Peru, and he was working on his monumental work on Philip II when he died in 1859. His books set research standards on much the same level as Gibbon's - so high as to be virtually unimpeachable even in later, more politically correct ages. And his literary ability was nothing short of mesmerizing - whenever I find a young reader willing to tackle such obscure old volumes, they're always surprised to find such life in the pages (I get the same reaction about Francis Parkman as well, of course). They tend to have the same reactions as did priggish old Charles Sumner, who wrote about it to Prescott in 1843:

I hardly know how to express on paper the delight and instruction with which I have read your work. Since I first devoured the Waverley Novels, I have read nothing by which I have been so entirely entraine; sitting at my desk for hours, then trimming my lamp and still sitting on, and finally with the book under my arm adjourning home, where I read on until after midnight. The introduction was interesting and instructive, exciting thought and requiring attention, at the same time that it was clear and copious. Perhaps this will afford to enlightened minds a field of interest of a higher character than the other portions of the work; but these cannot fail to charm everybody.

Prescott's ability to make the past come alive is vividly on display in these letters, naturally. In 1840 he writes to a correspondent about his famous grandfather Colonel William Prescott, who fought at the Battle of Bunker Hill:

The moral courage demanded for the opening of the war of the Revolution was of a much higher order than what is required for an ordinary conflict, where the memory of the brave if he falls is covered with glory; but an unsuccessful rebellion brings only ignominy, and in case of capture an ignominious death. Yet strange to say historians have hardly touched on these circumstances. It is so true however that my grandfather even expressed his own determination before going on the field not to fall alive into the enemy's hands. It happened, singularly enough, that my wife's grandfather was a commander of a British ship of war, lying in an arm of the sea and firing on Bunker Hill, which my own ancestor was defending. The swords of the two belligerents are now peacefully crossed over my book cases, and there tell me silently, but not ineloquently, the tale of other years.

He adds a note that might make Bostonians smile: "A granite obelisk to be two hundred and twenty feet high is now erecting on the battleground, and it will be completed in a couple of years, probably ..."

Wolcott does a wonderful job mixing business with pleasure. For every two letters detailing text-corrections or making manuscript-requests, there's one of a purely chatty nature, catching up on the activities of friends, like the quick aside to Fanny Calderon de la Barca in 1841:

Summer divides friends as far asunder as politics or religion, or any other good cause for quarreling. Mrs. Ritchie is staying at Roxbury with her children. Her caro sposo has gone to France again. He usually touches at home on his peregrinations. Le pauvre homme, where is his home? His boys are in Germany at school. The Ticknors are at a place called Woods Hole, near Martha's Vineyard, where I propose to pass next week with them. The Appletons you know are in England ...

(Fanny wrote a little book of her own - a travel memoir, if memory serves - and the chivalrous Prescott tirelessly pushed its interests with every literary person he knew ... poor Charles Dickens got the worst of it, and in this instance he bore up magnanimously under the pressure)

And in addition to the personal and the professional, there was also the political, since despite the isolating nature of his eye-problems, Prescott was very much a man of the world. His letters are peppered with invaluable asides on the events of the day, and they often prove Prescott as shrewd a judge of the present as he was of the past. He certainly sizes up his commander-in-chief in 1846 rather tellingly:

We don't comprehend here the politics of President Polk. It is probable he doesn't perfectly comprehend them himself. He seems to be playing at fast and loose, and I rather think that it will prove a loosing game with him. HE stands on two crutches. the South and the West, but they will not walk the same way it seems. The South dreads a war with England as much as the North, though in the North there may be a warmer feeling of sympathy for our fatherland.

Prescott married a timid wife whose greatest delight was to help him with his work (and he genially adored her, starting several letters with variations on "My dear Wife, It is after ten and I am as tired as a cat. But I don't like to go to bed without telling you where and how I am ..."), and he was surrounded by friends and friendly rivals in the all-things-Spanish vogue that was then sweeping England and the United States. Prescott corresponded with Washington Irving while that gentleman was researching his big biography of Columbus, and of course Prescott kept up close contact with his fellow Boston Atheneum patron George Ticknor, who was also engaged in a massive, life-long work about Spain (his was a huge study of Spanish, Portuguese, and Castilian literature, a marvel of easy-going erudition that's now entirely forgotten) - indeed, the quasi-rivalry between the two of them is the basis for an entertaining novella called Ticknor that you should read if you can find it.

Needless to add, you should read Prescott too. I'd direct you to the pertinent Library of America volumes, but although there exist many volumes for such artistically negligible figurines as Saul Bellow and Philip K. Dick, there don't appear to be any for poor squinting Prescott, one of the greatest historians America has ever produced. There was a Modern Library volume from years ago, but I believe it only contained The Conquest of Mexico. No, the best volume to find is even older still: Irwin Blacker's fantastic 1963 Viking Portable edition, a compression of (what Blacker, that irrepressible man, called "the essence of") all four histories he called The Rise and Decline of the Spanish Empire. If you can read that abridgement and not come out of it hungry to read more Prescott, there's something medically - even spiritually - wrong with you.

 

 

Penguins on Parade: The Secret History!

Some Penguin Classics defy the very dignity of the term, and surely the Anecdota, the so-called "Secret History" of the 6th century Byzantine historian Procopius is the best possible example of that curious phenomenon.

It's a thoroughly scurrilous work, a scandal-sheet of gossip and fabrication, written in haste and in total privacy (public attribution would have resulted in the author being flogged to bloody cat-string in the public square), very likely at the same time that it's thirty-something author was also writing the work for which he was famous in his own day: his multi-volume (and quite excellent) history of the military campaigns of the great general Belisarius. Procopius was a secretary on the General's staff during the epic campaigns that briefly re-conquered large swaths of Persia, Africa, and Italy, and his sober, generally reliable account of those early campaigns stands as one of the last glimmerings of the great historical tradition of the Empire before it sank into darkness.

The Secret History is the under-side of all that imperial glory. In this brief account (this is a Penguin Classic you can read in one sitting - and trust me, you'll want to), Procopius centers on the four people at the head of his world: the Emperor Justinian, who's portrayed as a cold, grasping, semi-human monster, his wife the Empress Theodora, who in P's famous accounting becomes a jade and a wanton of such magnitude that she makes Messalina look like Mary Tyler Moore (although she has more of the latter's sense of humor - "When the fancy took her," P recounts, quivering with outrage, "she amused herself by turning the most serious matters into a subject for laughter, as if she were watching a comedy on the stage"). Rounding out the quartet are Belisarius (some of P's loyalty is showing even here: though vilified in the book, Belisarius isn't painted nearly so harshly as the others) and his wife Antonina, here a scheming, murderous, headstrong witch.

Grasping Palace officials, corrupt administrators, brutish army officers, and even a marauding whale (it was an enormous creature, nicknamed Porphyrion, and it attacked shipping all around the Golden Horn for decades - almost certainly a territory-crazed male sperm whale) - all show up and get tarred and feathered, but our author saves his most bitter words for the Imperial couple. He recounts an endless stream of slanders against Theodora, including some that will strike haters of Nancy Reagan as familiar:

 For from her earliest years she had herself consorted with magicians and sorcerors, as her whole way of life led her in that direction, and to the very end she put her trust in these arts and made them at all times the ground of her confidence.

Of course the end result of all this vituperation is inevitable: the reader comes away entirely rooting for Theodora and intensely saddened by the allusions Procopius makes several times that she's dead in her grave by the time he's writing his character assassination. Procopius retails every single bit of marketplace gossip about the ruling pair, and throughout this book, he then tries to cloak that gossip in a semblance of historical inquiry:

In view of all this, I, like most of my contemporaries, never once felt that these two were human beings; they were a pair of blood-thirsty demons and what the poets call 'plaguers of mortal men'. For they plotted together to find the easiest and swiftest means of destroying all races of men and all their works, assumed human shape, became man-demons, and in this way convulsed the whole world. Proof of this could be found in many things, but especially in the power manifested in their doings. For the actions of demons are unmistakably different from those of human beings.

Most of his contemporaries thought no such thing, of course, and we can legitimately wonder if Procopius himself did either. The Secret History not only outrages: it revels in outrage. You don't have to read many pages of it before you wonder if the author isn't just plain enjoying himself, relaxing after a hard day's work by sitting at his study table and writing the unwritable. I'd wager more than a few writers do the exact same thing today.

This 1966 Penguin Classic is done by Norwich School legend G. A. Williamson, who renders the whole sordid business in the clearest and (mostly) cleanest of prose, guarding himself always with the acerbity of an Oxford don. "I have resolutely refused," he tells us, "to translate barbaroi by 'barbarians', and I trust that I have used no other words or expressions savouring of translationese."

Williamson supplies the translation; Penguin supplies the edition; I supply the recommendation - it's up to you to supply the healthy skepticism. Armed with it, you'll find this an ancient classic you can't put down.

Six Authors in Search of the Revolution!

Today is the anniversary of the first meeting of the Continental Congress in 1774, and of course a bit of trivia like that brings to mind the towering mountain of American Revolution histories that confronts the curious wanderer - a profusions of such histories that only grows more daunting every publishing season. 2011 saw fourteen such histories lumber down the conveyor belt from major houses, with who knows how many more specialized monographs filling out the weight. Innocent readers - especially those semi-mythical 'common readers' just looking for a good book on the subject - must inevitably feel overwhelmed.

Must inevitably feel overwhelmed, that is, until they turn to Stevereads, the un-overwhelmer! I (needless to say?) have read almost every book ever written on the unprecedented revolution Boston devised, spearheaded, and then graciously shared with the rest of the colonies, and I'm happy to help clarify the field a bit. Doing more than 'a bit' will require several entries, but we can at least make a start with six American Revolution volumes and how they each sniff around that first assembly of the Continental Congress. We'll kick things off chronologically and then jump all the hell around:

The History of the American Revolution by David Ramsay

Ramsay was one of America's first prolific publishing historians, and he was collecting original documents about the Revolution while the guns were still firing. His account was first definitively published in 1789 (as usual in that benighted era, pirated versions cropped up too), and in 1990 Lester Cohen made a very good edition of that original two-volume work, including a warm, affectionate Introduction to Ramsay, his work, and his world that perhaps goes a little too far in the direction of forgiving congeniality. Cohen stresses the humanitarian side of Ramsay (who was, to be fair, an amiable man), noting how outspoken he was against the evils of slavery. But Ramsay was a Southerner to his bones, and his own writings on the subject of slavery don't exactly brim with reformer's zeal:

The peasantry of few countries enjoy as much of the comforts of life, as the slaves, who belong to good masters ... There is frequently more happiness in kitchens than parlours, and life is often more pleasantly enjoyed by the slave, than his master.

Fortunately, in the stately sprawl of his history, there's far more to draw the reader's attention (sometimes too close attention - Ramsay has been several times castigated for plagiarism), including our author's summary of that first congress:

Of the whole number of deputies, which formed the Continental Congress of 1774, one half were lawyers. Gentlemen of that profession had acquired the confidence of the inhabitants by their exertions in the common cause. The previous measures in the respective provinces had been planned and carried into effect, more by lawyers than by any other order of men. Professionally taught the rights of the people, they were among the foremost to decry every attack made on their liberties. Bred in the habits of public speaking, they made a distinguished figure in the meetings of the people, and were particularly able to explain to them the tendency of the late acts of parliament. Exerting their abilities and influence in the cause of their country, they were rewarded with its confidence.

This is pious and well-intentioned, certainly, and we may never know the full extent to which Ramsay was aware of the 'viral' and scandalous jokes circulating at the time about that surfeit of lawyers.

Angel in the Whirlwind by Benson Bobrick

Bobrick's tangled and intellectual 1997 book on the subject likewise ponders the make-up of those early Congresses, and he finds himself at odds with John Adams himself, who at the time was pessimistic about the caliber of men America could field to handle this great crisis. For his part, Bobrick sees giants (and he generously quotes the wonderful Esther Forbes, whom we've praised here before:

Although outstanding figures may occasionally emerge in response to a historical crisis, those who arose to lead the Revolution surpassed all that might have been hoped for or have since been seen. Surely this is so in the aggregate: George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Patrick Henry, George Wythe, George Mason, Edmund Randolph, and the Lee family of Virginia; Samuel and John Adams and John Hancock of Massachusetts; Benjamin Franklin, John Dickinson, and Robert Morris of Pennsylvania; John Jay, James Duane, and Gouverneur Morris of New York; John Rutledge and Edward Rutledge of South Carolina; and more, with Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and others beginning to step forth into the light. Generally speaking, they were men of wealth or professional distinction, socially staid, not likely to be rebels, and belonged to an intellectual elite. About a third were lawyers, and most held university degrees. They were "gentlemen" in the old-fashioned sense of the word, which, wrote Esther Forbes, "implied lace ruffles, clean hands, and a knowledge of Latin and Greek."

In most of these accounts, focus among those gentlemen tends to focus on one person more than all the others:

George Washington's War by Robert Leckie

Leckie's fantastic 1992 book is mostly a military history of the Revolution (of which there are quite a few equally excellent volumes), but he frequently takes time out of his tally of battles to paint the broader canvas - and he perforce returns often to that one diminutive central figure:

Yet while conservatives, such as James Duane of New York, Dickinson and Galloway, were attempting to revive the spirit of conciliation with the Crown, Jefferson did not join them. He was drawn, rather, like the Cavaliers of the First Congress, to unite with Yankees such as John Adams. When a petition was received from the Massachusetts Committee of Safety asking Congress to adopt the New England army that had laid siege to British-held Boston, it was Adams who did his utmost - inside and outside Carpenter's Hall - to prevent the nine lower colonies from splitting from the northern four. He arose in Congress to warn of the common danger from the tried-and-true British policy of "Divide and Rule." If New England were to fall, then one by one the others would be enslaved, beginning with New York.

That incendiary voice was a natural-born product of Massachusetts, which had borne the brunt of the king's tyranny longer than any other colony and naturally led the way in undermining and overthrowing that tyranny in every way possible. You wouldn't expect two Southerners to be scrupulously fair about that, and yet:

Rebels and Redcoats by George Scheer and Hugh Rankin

This classic 1957 account of the Revolution is every bit as excellent a read and exhaustive a study today as it was half a century (!) ago, and its authors recount with high drama the unfolding of events after those initial exchanges of gunfire with the British:

Those rebels moved swiftly to gain the advantage in propaganda. The Second Continental Congress would not convene until May 10; the Provinicial Congress of Massachusetts, convening on April 22, decided that news of the hostilities of the nineteenth should be given to the English people as quickly as possible and from the viewpoint of the colonists. Without waiting to consult the general Congress, the Massachusetts body within three days took depositions from scores of participants who avowed that the British troops fired first. These depositions, accompanied by a letter addressed "To the Inhabitants of Great Britain," were directed to Benjamin Franklin, agent for the colony in London, who was requested to "print and disperse" the story.

And in that account, again, a familiar name crops up:

A Leap in the Dark by John Ferling

That name is well known to Ferling, who wrote a masterful biography of John Adams, and in 2003 he came out with this fast-paced, anecdotal history of the entire Revolution - an account that's constantly enlivened by touchstone references back to his favorite Founding Father:

Adams feared that his quest for greatness would be thwarted by his physical limitations. "By my Physical Constitution I am but an ordinary Man," he said, a reference to his unprepossessing physique. He was about five feet seven and overweight. He also was balding, pale, ungainly, and, as one observer noted, "careless of appearances." Other liabilities dogged him as well. His visage was usually grim and stern, his manner gruff and grumbling, and he was often brusquely impatient with those who differed from him.

The 'other' Adams also gets fair mentions by Ferling (although our author has him vapidly diminishing in power and influence quite a bit more rapidly than he in fact did):

Samuel Adams's master stroke at the First Congress had been to discourage intemperate behavior by the Massachusetts delegates. It was John Adams's genius in 1775 to grasp intuitively that it would be counterproductive for the radicals to get too far in front of popular opinion.

In his Introduction to that very good edition of David Ramsay's history, Lester Cohen concludes his comments with a touching tribute:

In preparing Ramsay's History for publication, I had the extraordinary experience of coming full circle. At the beginning of my graduate career in 1966, I was blessed by having Page Smith as my mentor and friend; at the end of my teaching career, there was David Ramsay, whom Page introduced to me, along with his passion for beauty and deceptive simplicity of narrative. I have always identified the two, David Ramsay and Page Smith, no doubt because Page has always exemplified for me the finest spirit of the eighteenth century. If these volumes were mine, rather than Ramsay's, to dedicate, I would dedicate them with admiration and respect to Page Smith.

Anyone who knew Smith would warmly agree with this. From his days as a garrulous Harvard undergraduate to the much-deserved accolades he received as the nation's conscience during the Bicentennial hoopla, Smith was a smart and wonderfully inviting dean of Revolution studies (his own two-volume biography of John Adams might just be the best book ever written on that oft-biographied subject). It seems only fitting that we conclude our brief tour of some good Revolution books with his own:

A New Age Now Begins by Page Smith

He brought this two-volume narrative history out in 1976, and every page of it glows not only with his passion for precise revision but also with his Herodotean dedication to telling stories in the overlay of his researches. His books are unfailingly incredible to read, mainly because he never forgets to let the drama of his events come through, as when he follows the Massachusetts delegation to that first Continental Congress and puts us in their perceptions:

So, some twenty days after they had set out from Boston, the members of the committee arrived in the city where the fate of their province and of America would be decided. There would be, it appeared, about fifty-six delegates, of whom twenty-two were lawyers. The proposals had been made to meet at Carpenters' Hall rather than the State House - in order, the Tories said, to curry favor with the working men of the city, since the hall had recently been built by the subscription of Philadelphia's carpenters who were understandably proud of the handsome structure.

Like so many of these historians, Smith is fascinated by John Adams (and considerably aided by the fact that Adams, like all of his descendants, was a habitual and highly voluminous recorder of the events of his own day), so we get his impressions of virtually everything:

Two days after their arrival, the New England delegates met the famous Pennsylvania "Farmer," John Dickinson, who was hardly the picture of the simple husbandman as he arrived "in his Coach and four beautiful Horse." Dickinson was the antithesis of a bold patriot. "Slender as a Reed - pale as ashes," he looked at first sight as though he could not live a month, and, indeed, he gave a rather tedious recital of "his late ill Health and present Gout." As one hypochondriac viewing another, however, Adams was impressed with a certain tough resiliency, "as if the Spring of Life were strong enough to last many Years."

It would be pretty to conclude things here by noting with pleasure that the Spring of Life in Smith's own works was strong enough to last many years, but no: all his marvellous books are out of print, moldering unvisited in library stacks and used bookstore shelves. If you ever see anything by this author on those shelves, do yourself a favor and consume it - it's all popular history done perfectly.

As noted, popular history has always lavished attention on all aspects of the Revolution - each of these six titles deserves an entry of its own, and all six represent the smallest tip of the iceberg of what's seen print in the last two centuries. Maybe come July 4th we'll go over six more - in the meantime, find these! They all still have mighty powers to please!

Procession!

Our book today is a biggie: John Gunther's 1965 anthology of his own work, Procession, and it stands, among other things, as a monument to the unpredictability of literary fate. The books that brought Gunther fame and fortune half a century ago - his world-ranging "Inside" volumes (Inside Europe, Inside Asia, Inside U.S.A., etc.) - are now entirely forgotten, and this big book, which was meant to commemorate their success, is out of print and will remain so until the Arch of Time cracks above our heads. But Gunther is nevertheless immortal, because he wrote a tender, piercing memoir of his young son's death from a brain tumor, and Death Be Not Proud has been a work-horse seller ever since, made into a movie and installed on high school reading lists (the surest index of literary canonization, since it's self-propagating). Readers of that little book have responded to its terse beauty of expression and its relative lack of sentimentality, and it's a shame that most of those readers will never know that great surging oceans of those same qualities exist out there in the netherverse of out of print books.

Procession brings most of the highlights together, and it's an unending delight to read, in addition to being something of a one-volume tutorial on mid-20th century world politics. Gunther travelled everywhere and had the journalistic credentials and track record to gain access to any world leader, no matter how reclusive, busy, or insane. Millions of readers consumed his every published word, and for many of them, he was the Walter Cronkite of the printed page: accessible, informed, and most of all, trustworthy.

Fallible, too, as he points out again and again in this book. He reprints here his observations of the great and near-great men and women he encountered in his decades as "Surveyor General of the Universe," but he respects his own record - he neither alters original judgements nor omits them just because they might prove intemperate or embarrassing. What emerges is a truly remarkable historical document - and, thanks to Gunther's unerring ear for the good anecdote, an often very amusing one, as when he's reflecting on what a grind Ireland's Eamon De Valera could be:

Then Mr. De Valera turned to Ireland, and my "instructions" began. He was patient, explicit, and formidably, somberly reasonable. But in that gaunt face I saw the eyes of a fanatic. When I left him, deeply impressed by his terrific Irishness, I recalled the little story about his first talk with Lloyd George. "How did you get along with de Valera?" the Welshman was asked. "We have talked for two days," Lloyd George sighed, "and he has got up to Brian Boru."

Or when he's discussing the invincible arrogance of France's Charles De Gaulle:

This egotism is rocklike, unswerving from first to last, and almost sublimely absolute. Once, during his retirement, he was looking back to an early episode in his career and said, with perfect seriousness, "Ah! That was when I was France!" As recently as January 1961, when one of his friends suggested that he should thank those who had voted for him in the Algeria referendum just concluded, he replied, "How can France thank France?"

He's not afraid of big talk bordering on hyperbole, and because of that, many of his rashest pronouncements now resemble prophecies:

Mr. Gandhi, who is an incredible combination of Jesus Christ, Tammany Hall, and your father, is the greatest Indian since Buddha. Like Buddha, he will be worshipped as a god when he dies. Indeed, he is literally worshipped by thousands of his people. I have seen peasants kiss the sand his feet have trod.

And even his lesser-known subjects, like Massachusetts politician and arch-brahmin Leverett Saltonstall, come alive under his touch, especially when painted with funny anecdotes:

When James Michael Curley, the celebrated Irish boss of Boston, heard that Endicott Peabody Saltonstall might get this job, he snorted, "What! All three of him?"

The irony of his posthumous fame would not have been lost on Gunther, had he seen that Procession (and all of his slaved-over "Inside" books) has disappeared from public view while thousands of school children read Death Be Not Proud every year. The journalist in him would have said "These great men deserve your attention." The father in him would have said, "My boy was as great as any of them." No writer can fight fate - but you should find a copy of Procession and read it.

 

A Struggle for Power!

Our book today is Theodore Draper's luminous, contentious 1996 volume A Struggle for Power, one of the most interesting, provocative, and clear-headed accounts of the ramp-up to the American Revolution I've ever read. Draper takes the standard narrative of the Revolution - a downtrodden people yearning to breathe free, rebelling against the cruel tyranny of their distant oppressors in order to create a land where everybody was equal - turns it upside-down, strips it of all its historical hindsight, and then substitutes a narrative of his own. His story is far less stirring, but it's also far more interesting and infinitely more recognizable. In his account of that crucial decade from 1765 to 1776, 'tisn't morals, 'tis money that saves - and everybody dances to the sound of the profitable pound. Here we have two powers - one old and great, the other new and vibrant - facing off against each other not over principles but over cold, hard cash and the clout it buys. There are civics lessons here, but they happen without the soft focus of hagiography:

The company was supposed to make more money in the American market, drive out the Dutch competition, and benefit the American consumers.

But there was a flaw in the plan. Tea smuggling was big business. New York, Boston, and Philadelphia were havens of merchant smugglers. According to a well-informed Tory view, the British made the mistake of underestimating the smuggling business in America, which "was so universal, that the Smugglers Interest had engrossed so great a Power" it would have required ten British soldiers to protect every chest of tea.

Draper consistently paints a picture that's diametrically distorted from the stars-and-stripes narrative of US history textbooks (and the dim-lit imagination of certain former US presidents). In his view, the matters of contention between the British Empire and the American colonies were never the stuff of opera (or, gulp, musical):

At this moment, the final stage of the prerevolutionary struggle hung in the balance. Yet the real stakes were comparatively minor. The tea duty to which North and his ministers were determined to cling brought in a pittance of 9,790 pounds after 1770, little more than enough to pay for a couple of governors. It was a derisory sum on which to base a policy that at best was sure to annoy the Americans and at worst enrage them. It is clear from what North said that he was fed up with the Americans and wanted to pay them back for their insobordination and insolence.

And he saves his bluntest summing-up for the fiery final pages of his book:

The entire colonial case against British rule had been largely negative - against taxation, against a "standing army," against the importation of tea, against the Coercive Acts. In all the mountain of words against the British from 1765 to 1775, few - if any - have anything to do with changing the political and certainly not the social structure as it had developed under British rule. The Revolution was not fought to bring about democracy or any kind of egalitarianism. Before 1776 very few - if any - Americans expected to bring about a republic. The British gave the colonists a revolutionary program long before the Americans were willing to admit that this was their goal.

This is bracing stuff, and A Struggle for Power is rich with it. This isn't to say more traditional narratives of this same story don't have their merits - they certainly do, and my shelves would be the poorer without them. But Draper's kind of invigoration is a large part of why I read much history in the first place - because the past never stays the same. In the hands of researchers with powerful insights (and pithy prose), the past changes its reflections according to the lights shone upon it. Really good literary journalism can do the same thing for literature, but for me, the process is always more exciting when it comes to the historical texts, periods, and people that fascinate me so much.

So was there any disinterested heroism in the American Revolution? Were there even any such thing as patriots and martyrs to the cause of freedom? Draper would cast a jaundiced eye on the very notions, and thanks to books like this, those old readings will never be quite safe again.

The Illustrated History of the World!

Our book today is The Illustrated History of the World, and it's a response to several of you who caught the fact that when I was writing about Roberts' History of the World I mentioned that I myself had a sentimental soft spot for a world history that wasn't Roberts. Many upstanding members of the Silent Majority emailed me wondering what that sentimental favorite of mine was - and here it is.

This heavy, heavily-illustrated (there are maps, charts, and hundreds of black-and-white photos) volume was first published in 1927, edited by Sir John Hammerton and an erudite man named Harry Elmer Barnes, and its calm, accessible prose style quickly won it a reputation among schoolmasters and college professors. It sold well and was reprinted half a dozen times - a rare and heady success for those days. The edition I own was printed in late 1937 and opens with these words:

"To know nothing of the past," said an ancient philosopher, "is to understand little of the present and to have no conception of the future." Of all the branches of human knowledge, none is so essential, none so exciting, none has such practical daily usefulness as History. With the record of the past before us, we turn with serenity toward the present and move forward into the future armed for whatever may befall.

The optimism of it, given the date, is enough to make you cry.

There follows the whole panoply of human history, usually given in such useful scope and such accurate detail that I've actually continued to consult this big fat book, even despite the dozen or so more contemporary histories on the shelf next to it. And the work's two editors were no fools: they could see storm-clouds gathering in their own day, although neither they nor anyone else could predict the full horror of "whatever may befall." They conclude this volume:

City life produces new strains and stresses and leads to a great increase in mental and nervous instability. World war, using the deadly methods of destruction now available, may drag all civilization down once more to the level of barbarism. Only in the degree to which we understand the critical and transitional character of the contemporary age shall we be able to avert calamity and build a world order which will not only be new and different but better, when measured by the standards of general human well-being.

The mild socialism buried in this (our authors matter-of-factly inform us that capitalism has all but run its course) is instantly forgivable when seen in the light of how utterly their contemporary age failed to avert calamity, and I'd forgive it anyway, since it's not the business of history books to predict the future. What I enjoy most about this volume is its simple belief in the importance of facts - there are no politically correct causes in these pages, no 15 pages devoted to the Armenian Massacre and 2 pages devoted to the American Civil War, no fads or special interest distortion - the whole enterprise of it is too early for such things, and its editors, whatever their faults, too watchful.

And something about the fact that this volume contains no moon landings, no Holocaust, no Cold War or collapse of Communism, no Challenger explosion or September 11, no Internet or Twitter Revolution - something about the fact that the Persian Empire still spreads across its stately pages in this volume, that the same half-smiling Egyptian statues still stand in the Boston Museum, something about the way the past is allowed to be the past, rather than an endless series of springboards for the present, makes this volume oddly comforting to me. It reminds me how thin a film the present always is over the past.

Penguins on Parade: Cassius Dio!

Some Penguin Classics leave you yearning for more - well, a great many of them do, but few more than the 1987 volume selection of the second century Greek historian Cassius Dio, here translated by the always-reliable Ian Scott-Kilvert. The book doesn't leave you yearning for more in the sense that it has any shortcomings (as with so many Penguin Classics, I'd be hard-pressed to find any critical or rhetorical shortcomings - I think these things are fairly well vetted before they ever see library shelves) but rather in the sense that's evoked by that dismaying word 'selection.'

Cassius Dio (or, as he's known to those of weak moral fiber, Dio Cassius) is the best ancient historian nobody's ever heard of. Oh, professional historians have cherished his work for centuries, but your average educated layman, somebody who might be able to rattle off 'Livy,' 'Tacitus,' and maybe even 'Suetonius' will draw a blank with Dio. Great dramatists (and melodramatists!) have delved in his text to fill out their own works, mainly because he provides them with ample raw material for speeches (we'll get to Dio's speeches in a moment), and to historians he's always been invaluable.

Such was his own goal from the outset. He was born around 163 in the provinces and came to Rome on the strength of his family's money to enter politics and begin climbing the civil ladder. His climb was quick - he entered the Senate under Commodus and became consul under Septimius Severus. He was an important functionary in the reign of Septimius' son Caracalla but disliked the new emperor (as, indeed, did practically everybody else) and took to spending more and more of his time researching and writing his epic Roman History, which began with Aeneas and crept forward, book after book, to the year 229 when he himself was consul again, this time with the emperor Alexander Severus as his fellow consul.

This was a monumental task, and he looked to some great examples - Thucydides and Polybius are his models, and an engaging cogency is his goal. This is annalistic history in the grand Roman manner, full of character portraits, carefully weighed evidence, moral lessons, and often masterful rhetorical exercises in the form of speeches put in the mouths of his characters - speeches that were either wholly invented or greatly elaborated from what Dio found in the records. A first-time reader of Dio will notice the speeches before anything else, and the more ideologically flexible of those readers will start to look forward to them, because Dio pours quite a bit of art into them. Even in Ian Scott-Kilvert's careful, particular translation for this Penguin edition, something of their fascinating 'what if?' nature comes through, as when clever young Octavian is exhorting his fellow Romans to turn against Marc Antony:

To sum up, if it were a matter of being called upon to cavort in some ridiculous dance or cut some erotic caper, Antony would have no rival - for these are the specialities in which he has trained himself. But when it comes to weapons and fighting, what has anyone to fear from him? The fitness of his body? But he has become effeminate and his homosexuality has worn him out. His piety towards our gods? But he has declared war upon them and upon his native land. His loyalty towards his allies? Everyone knows how he tricked and then imprisoned the king of Armenia. His kindness to his friends? We have all seen the men who have died a cruel death at his hands. His popularity among his troops? But who, even among them, has not condemned him? The evidence for this is the number of his soldiers who join us every day. I believe that all our citizens will do this, just as happened once before, when he was on his way from Brundisium to Gaul. So long as they hoped to get rich without danger, some where happy to take his side. But they will not choose to fight against us, their own countrymen, for what does not belong to them, least of all when by joining us they can protect their lives and their property without risk.

But even for those more fastidious modern readers who want such speeches left in historical novels where the last 200 years of historical practice have said they belong, there's plenty in Dio to give satisfaction. He's a conscientious writer, and like Livy long before him, he views it as his duty to report on the existence of wild theories regarding his topics, even if he himself doesn't believe those theories. He can exercise a very light touch in such matters, as when he arrives at the death of Augustus:

So Augustus fell sick and died. Some suspicion attached itself to Livia concerning the cause of his death, because he had secretly sailed over to the island of Planasia to visit Agrippa Posthumus, and it appeared that he was about to become completely reconciled with him. Livia was afraid, some people allege, that Augustus might bring him back to make him emperor, and so she smeared with poison some figs which were still ripening on the trees from which Augustus was in the habit of picking the fruit with his own hands. She then ate those which had not been smeared, and offered the poison fruit to him. At any rate, he fell sick from this or from some other cause. Then he sent for his associates, and told them all that he wanted to be done. Finally he declared, "I found Rome built of clay: I leave it to you in marble." In this saying he was not referring literally to the state of the buildings, but rather to the strength of the empire. And when he asked them for some applause, as comic actors do at the end of the mime, he was in fact mocking very aptly the whole life of man.

You have to love that 'at any rate'! A workhorse phrase, and yet it speaks volumes here! Scott-Kilvert is to be commended for preserving so subtle an effect.

No, the problem with this Penguin edition of Cassius Dio is that it tries for theme over thump. This volume covers the reign of Augustus only - books 50-56 of Dio. But the whole Roman History spanned some eighty books, of which at least a dozen more survive more or less intact - and we have excellent Byzantine summaries of most of the rest. Reading and re-reading this present volume, I can't help but yearn for more, for a Penguin Classics Cassius Dio that's a 'Steve book' - 1500 pages long, lovingly annotated, absolutely as much of Dio as the unkind fates have seen fit to leave us. When I look over at the monster edition Penguin put out a few years ago of Domesday Book (and don't worry, all of you who've requested that I write about that volume - it's coming! they're ALL coming!), when I consider how that same printing-run and forests of paper could have been used instead for just the Dio mega-volume I'm imagining ... well, when I think of those things, I school myself in patience. It could happen, some day. I'd buy it.

J.M.Roberts' History of the World!

Our book today is surely a great big book on which everyone can agree: J.M. Roberts' 1150-page 1976 masterpiece now called The Penguin History of the World. This volume has gone through many incarnations and many editions, but it remains what it's always been: one of the most erudite, readable, and downright useful thousand-page books ever written. There's an informal yardstick I use in determining such things, and it takes the form of a single question: how often do I find a copy of the book (often in the tattered condition that connotes frequent consultation) located squarely in the small, separate company of those books we really use, the ones we go back and back to for the simple reason that when we have questions, they provide the right answers?

I have found the Roberts book in many, many such small select companies of books - and indeed, it's in my own. People who've used it understand this perfectly - other world histories are more visually sumptuous (DK's takes the prize, of course), and many dress out at even greater length, and some - fewer than you might think - are actually almost as insightful (Clive Ponting's unconventional World History: A New Perspective from 2000 - at a thoroughly respectable 920 pages - is a good example of this kind of rare exception, extremely thoughtful and at times eloquently written, although even in that case, there's something missing - Roberts' subtlety and bone-dry humor, perhaps), but even in the most prestigiously competitive bracket, Roberts stands out. It holds a special place in my own reading heart, and I know for a fact it's worked the same magic on many other readers - some of whom got their copies from me, but many, many others of whom must have come across the book on their own and been won over without any brow-beating from yours truly!

I think a bit part of the book's appeal is the way it somehow manages to combine 'accessible' with 'magisterial.' Roberts paints on the broadest canvas any historian can, and although his Index is many hundreds of names long, this book is necessarily more summary than detail. But unlike with so many other comprehensive overviews, Roberts' summarizing never feels hurried or elusive - reading the book is like listening to the most collected, poised history professor imaginable has he broadens and narrows his focus according to his subject matter.

But for me, the signal genius of Roberts' book is his sheer presence throughout it. He wrote this behemoth well before the advent of the Internet, which has both fragmented and consolidated all historical information to an extent and on a scale not only unimagined by the serried ranks of all previous printed books but utterly unattainable by them. And that process will only continue, and it should - but assemblages of mere fact, no matter how immense, have inherent limitations, and the assembling of facts has of course never been the primary job of the historian, as both Herodotus and Thucydides understood perfectly well at the dawn of the discipline. The best historians must have an easy command of all the relevant facts, yes, but he must also think about those facts. The facts themselves are now more easily and quickly available than any printed history book could ever make them (if I reference Torquemada or Mithridates or Palladio - and if that mention sparks a reader's interest, the very first thing that reader will do is go to Google or Wikipedia or half a dozen other websites and quickly learn - absorb, even - an overview and a great number of facts about those individuals ... something that would have been either flat-out impossible to do, in Leland, Georgia at 11:30 p.m., or only spottily possible before the Internet) - which, far from invalidating the craft of history, makes first-rate historians more important than ever.

Roberts fills that role on every page of his book. That's what makes it such captivating reading - it's actually a persistent problem with this book: you tell people that a thousand-page world history is captivating reading, and they naturally don't believe you!

Take for example the section where Roberts summarizes the many shortcomings of fourth-century Athenian society - its exclusion of women, half-castes, and slaves from social franchise, its cultural high-handedness, etc. Roberts discusses these limitations as forthrightly as any other modern historian you might read - but he's also right there to tell us what he thinks of it all, and whether you agree with him or not, you can't fault the clear tenor of that thought:

It is against that background that the errors, vanities and misjudgements of Athenian politics must be seen. We do not cease to treasure the great achievements of British political culture because of the shallowness and corruptness of much of twentieth-century democracy. Athens may be judged, like any political system, but its working at its best; under the leadership of Pericles it was outstanding. It left behind the myth of the individual's responsibility for his own political fate. We need myths in politics and have net to find a better.

The epigrammatic pith of that quote is also one of the unending bounties of this book, since equally good, sharp stuff can be found on the first page:

Historical inertia is easily under-rated. This is not just a matter of what we can see. Ruins and beefeaters are picturesque, but for the most part less important than much mental and institutional history lost to sight in the welter of day-to-day events.

... and on the last:

Only two general truths emerge from the study of history. One is that things tend to change much more, and more quickly, than one might think. The other is that they tend to change much less, and much more slowly, than one might think. The past hangs around longer and is more difficult to keep peacefully buried, even by strenuous efforts, than we believe.

I've read almost every world history ever written in English in the modern age - I've poured lovingly over Walter Raleigh's great book (another of those volumes that really ought to be a Penguin Classic but still somehow isn't), tsk-tsk'd at H. G. Wells', and been bored spitless by a couple-dozen 20th century volumes - but I've never found any example of that kind of work that felt like a companion in the sense I've described often here at Stevereads ... until this fantastic tome appeared and kept getting reprinted and repackaged until it finally caught my attention. Like everybody, I have a sentimental soft spot for a certain world history, and Roberts isn't it, but his book is that sentimental favorite for two generations of demanding readers, and rightfully so. The events of 9/11 put that last-page assertion of his to a terrifying acid-test (when you read the line in those earlier volumes about "the many reminders given us in the Middle East that the wars of the Ottoman succession which began long ago in the eighteenth century in south-east Europe are still unfinished," you get a chill), and subsequent editions have a new concluding chapter which really ought to be printed separately as a pamphlet on the power and wisdom of the historian's craft.

But no matter which edition you happen upon in your local used bookshop, snap it up immediately - and clear some reading time.

The Noble Revolt!

Our book today is John Adamson's 2007 tome The Noble Revolt: The Overthrow of Charles I, another addition to our roster of very good very long books (it's so long that one rather wimpy soul, upon seeing it, kept mechanically blurting out “It's the longest book in the world!” over and over again)(but it's not). It's the natural follow-up to the Kevin Sharpe's equally-massive, equally fantastic 1994 tome The Personal Rule of Charles I (Sharpe's book is actually 100 pages longer, but don't tell that to the aforementioned wimpy soul); both are about that most problematic of English monarchs, Charles I, a man so punctilious that he'd refuse to eat a meal if the place-settings were even slightly wrong, and a man who brought that ironclad sense of entitlement especially to his rule – and at one of the worst possible moments in English history.

Charles I had the misfortune to believe completely in the indivisible divine right of kings at just the time when large numbers of his subjects were beginning to feel real power for themselves. His great noblemen and merchant princes had long since begun to bridle at his thoroughly medieval views of what was due him, and matters weren't helped by the fact that Charles himself was not a commanding presence – personally, he was far more fit to be a local deacon or perhaps an overweening schoolmaster than to be king; he was physically tiny, possessed of a shrill, high voice, and prone to mincing. Mentally, he was one of those sticklers-of-pointless-detail whose own friends often want to punch them in the face. Even his dogs preferred to take their food from someone less apt to make pointers on their chewing methods.

Little surprise, then, that Charles I tussled with his Parliament often, and the title of Sharpe's enormous book refers to the King's idea of a solution to that friction: his infamous period of 'personal rule,' where used sub rosa foreign loans to render himself free of Parliament's financial support and so rule without them. Such an approach for a mightier king in mightier times, but a great many of the men in Charles' Parliament not only wanted more of the power they'd begun to accrue to themselves, they wanted more of that power to be specifically over the King himself. Rudely, awkwardly, the idea of the figurehead monarch – an expression and relic of pomp, possessing little or no real power – was being born. The Stuarts were the last English kings to hold vast monarchical powers personally in their hands, and they naturally fought to keep it.

Adamson's enormous book chronicles that fight in a minutely detailed virtually day-by-day fashion, and his prose is throughout so clear and forceful that, believe it or not, the reader is swept along. Adamson is perfectly aware of the larger societal forces at play over his vast canvas, but he never forgets that his is an intensely personal story – people always come first in his accounts, and he's very talented at delineating them, as in the case of Thomas Wentworth, the much-maligned Earl of Strafford, when the anti-monarchy forces of Parliament were baying for his blood:

This outward confidence and good humour, a facade seemingly maintained with immense emotional and physical effort, had defined Strafford's public performance from the moment the treason accusations had first been made. Although granted the favour of legal counsel to assist with the preparation of his case, a privilege usually denied to those accused of treason, Strafford's command of law and factual detail was nevertheless formidable. Ignoring his physical infirmities (he had been suffering acutely from the stone since the previous spring), he brought the full force of his intelligence and his devastating powers of sarcasm to bear against his accusers. He mastered his brief and had a command of detail and a quickness of repartee that repeatedly confounded his slower-witted opponents. To cite but two examples: his retort to th chart that using soldiers to enforce decisions of the Irish Council amounted to 'levying war against the king' (a long-established treason) is characteristic of his style: 'These be wonderful wars if we have no more war than such as three or four men are able to raise. By the grace of God, we shall not sleep very unquietly.'

Historians who can make politics this interesting are rarer than you might think – Adamson is to be commended all the more that he maintains the great tension of his story (whose famous outcome even most historical neophytes already know), shifting from broad-view to the specific personal details he clearly enjoys so much:

with the two Houses locked in immovable stalemate, it was becoming clear that the struggle for supremacy within Parliament would be determined not inside, but outside the Palace of Westminster; above all, by what happened on London's streets. For those vying for power, violence and coercion had once again become an indispensable element of their political calculus.

When it came to control of the capital, Charles believed that he started with one pre-eminent advantage over his enemies: Sir Richard Gurney, the City's fussy, elderly, but devoutly royalist Lord Mayor …

And because The Noble Revolt is so long, the reader gets to experience not only the momentousness of this unprecedented struggle but all its peaks and valleys, all the moments when the whole contest seemed to teeter on the edge of mob violence, or sudden unexpected reconciliation. It's a prolonged, enormously complicated chess match between Charles I and the men in his three kingdoms who were gradually, almost unwillingly coming to realize that their efforts could have only one end result, and it certainly wasn't Charles living in comfortable exile somewhere near the Hague.

I admit it: I absolutely delight in massive histories like this one (and Sharpe's). I want a historian to do the gigantic amount of work necessary to make the past live again, the gigantic amount of work necessary to present the whole of their mammoth subject, not just the banner headlines. Adamson's 200 pages of end-notes amply demonstrate that he's just that kind of historian – they're practically worth the price of admission all by themselves. In them, we see the infinite care he took in his researches:

I use the term 'protege' in the relatively strict sense of someone who received the protection of a peer, whether formally a member of the nobleman's household or not. Thus, for example, Calybute Downinge was 'protected' by Warwick and allowed to reside for a time in his country seat, even though (so far as I have been able to establish) he was never formally one of the earl's household chaplains.

How I'd love to see volumes this vast on a whole shelf of vital historical subjects! Every time one surfaces (and two very promising examples are expected later in 2011), I dive into it with avid joy – not only because I'm an enthusiastic fan of historical writing, but also for the reason that started off this whole epic digression: I love losing myself in a good book.

The Wages of Destruction!

Our book today is Adam Tooze's 2006 The Wages of Destruction. It's subtitled "The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy," and it's an astounding work that's rendered all the more remarkable by the fact that it should have bored me cross-eyed. Tooze has delved deep into the financial records and business accords of Germany in the first half of the 20th century, and his book is replete with tables and graphs, nor is he a man afraid to raise the unholy specter of tariff revisions. Fortunately, he's got an ear for serious historical narrative (this book is, blessedly, about as far away from the '102 Amazing Things You Thought You Knew About WWII - But Didn't!!!' school of history-writing as it's possible to be) and a compelling way with marshaling and presenting all that research he did, or I'd have been stonewalled after about two pages.

He also has a curiosity about bigger questions, including the biggest question of 'em all when it comes to Nazi Germany: how was it possible? How was it possible that a country known for its culture and hospitality could become the nest of one of the most evil states in history? Like virtually every other major historian of the time, Tooze refuses to state (or perhaps even to believe) the glaringly obvious explanation - but that serves his purposes anyway, since he's mainly concerned with the very practical side of that question: not how was it possible, spiritually and philosophically, but how was in possible, practically and financially? How did the Nazis pay for it all, and what can that tell us about their history? Tooze is convinced the question of money holds the key to many other questions besides:

For it is only by re-examining the economic underpinnings of the Third Reich, by focusing on questions of land, food and labour that we can fully get to grips with the breathtaking process of cumulative radicalization that found its most extraordinary manifestation in the Holocaust.

And he's not only convinced of this - he's convincing. Reading this fantastic book is like inhaling a gust of cold fresh air, clarifying so much and making you realize just how many WWII histories you've read that ended up being mainly one more colossal re-run of tanks, marching troops, the fog of war, Churchill's bulldog tenacity, and the race for Berlin. It's always invigorating when a really talented historian shakes up some comfortable narrative by looking at it from a new perspective, and Tooze does that throughout his book. He wants to know how the Great Depression fits into it all, how the economic policies of the National Socialists were received in all levels of German society, and abroad - along the way providing a much-needed reminder that the early 1930s were very tricky years for anybody to assume control of a nation, even if that 'anybody' was a gang of ruthless, evil thugs:

It was this contrast between domestic authoritarianism and international 'liberalism' that defined the ambiguous position in which German business found itself in 1933. On the one hand, Hitler's government brought German businessmen closer towards realizing their domestic agenda than ever before. By the end of 1934 the Third Reich had imposed a state of popular pacification that had not existed in Germany since the beginning of the industrial era in the nineteenth century. On the other hand, the disintegration of the world economy and the increasingly protectionist drift of German politics was profoundly at odds with the commercial interests of much of the German business community.

Naturally, Hitler steps onto the stage almost immediately and never leaves it, and you'd think that might hamper Tooze in the pursuit of his subject. But to the extent that he agrees with some big names in the field by insinuating that economics relies more on personalities than most people think, it turns out to be no hindrance at all. Hitler was no economist, but until he completely lost his mind, he had some pretty uncanny instincts for survival - and Tooze charts these shifts and twists very adroitly:

If Hitler had wanted war on 1 October 1938, he could have had it. The French and the British had reached the point at which they could make no further concessions. The armies of France and the Soviet Union had mobilized. The Royal Navy stood at full alert. On 29 September 1938 it was Hitler who stepped back not his opponents, and there is no better explanation for this abrupt change of course than the sheer weight of evidence, argument and pressure that had been brought to bear on him over the previous weeks ... Nobody could accuse either Goering or Mussolini of opposing war on principle. But neither wanted to risk a war against Britain and France in 1938. Furthermore, if Hitler abstained from open military aggression, the British and the French were clearly willing to give him virtually anything he might ask for. Reluctantly, Hitler backed down and accepted the extraordinarily generous settlement on offer at the hastily convened conference in Munich. In doing so, he almost certainly saved his regime from disaster.

Tooze naturally comes to some epic conclusions in the course of his book - one of the most bracingly fascinating things about The Wages of Destruction is how brave it is in making those big statements, and yet how shrewd (WWII wunderkind Niall Ferguson knows all about the big statement part, for instance, but he could learn a thing or two from this book about the shrewdness). Our author isn't willing to say that World War II was the war to end all wars, but he makes an interesting case that one of its aftermaths was "its demonstration of the futility of war as a means of great power politics." I read that first with outraged denial, but it stuck with me, and I like it when challenging ideas stick with me. Plenty of historians declare that the Second World War changed the very nature of the world, but I've never read the particularly limiting nature of that change put better:

The apocalyptic temptation of militarism was largely exorcized from Europe. Its dying embers flared up only occasionally in the rearguard actions of empire. but with it also went any aspiration to the 'freedom' once implied by great power status. As early as the autumn of 1943, after the Battle of Kursk, the United States ha realized that the dominant power over Europe for the foreseeable future would be the Soviet Union, not Britain, let alone France.

It's a mark of how good this book is that the above quote - and many more gems just like it - are actually far afield from its central topic; that prodigality of insight is the mark of a master at work, and it's one of the main reasons I so regularly re-read this book. There's a shelf of truly landmark WWII histories - it's about 55 books long, and The Wages of Destruction belongs on it.

The Sandburg Lincoln!

Our book today is the much-storied oft-maligned enormous biography of Abraham Lincoln by Carl Sandburg, who wrote it in multiple volumes (two of "The Prairie Years" and four of "The War Years") over the course of some 30 years of ongoing research and constant revision and who agreed to its publication in a gorgeously-made Reader's Digest one-volume edition in 1970. That edition is deliberately monumental - oversized, profusely illustrated, and of course sad, as all things connected with Lincoln must be.

He's an odd case, historically, and I've never quite known what to make of him. He acted less intelligent than he was, and he had an abiding personal belief not just in the utility of humor but in its power - a rare thing in anybody, much less a public official. And he was president of the country as it tore itself apart, which raises another crop of considerations entirely, especially since I naturally believe the Southern states should have been allowed to secede from the Union if they so chose. The Union was supposed to be voluntary - that was its whole point. Doesn't matter that the South wanted to secede for the ugliest of all possible reasons, and it doesn't matter that the resulting Union would have been much smaller and weaker. In the memory of some people still alive in 1861, America had started a rebellion and fought a war for freedom from a coercive union - the Civil War should never have happened, for that reason alone.

But it was fought, and it gave the young country a martial mythology it somehow failed to acquire in the War of 1812, and in Lincoln it got its first mythical leader since Washington, the nexus of nearly as many lies as Washington. Lincoln has lodged in the national psyche as a champion of the common man - yet he lived his whole life yearning to be wealthy, yet he suspended habeas corpus and imposed martial law and authorized military action against civilians. He's seen as a beacon light for freedom, yet he he dashed the independence of an entire fledgling nation and said repeatedly that if he could have 'saved' the Union without freeing one black slave, he would do it.

The key to both men - Lincoln and Washington - isn't in what they did but in what they didn't do. Washington didn't assume dictatorial powers - and Lincoln didn't live.

Hence the sadness whenever he comes up (I myself consider the Lincoln Memorial the saddest piece of scuplture in the world, even beating out a certain momument in Rock Creek Cemetery), and Sandburg was a poet - he couldn't fail to feel it, and it infuses his book.

His book has been much maligned in the half-century since its appearance, and I can only chalk that up to the knee-jerk contempt some academics have for any researched writing that gains a popular readership. Certainly the individual volumes Sandburg wrote did that: each one was an enormous best-seller, and we'll never be able to guess how many copies of the one-volume abridgment have sold in the last 50 years.

It's comforting to re-read it and realize that whatever role mythology might have played in inspiring this book or moving copies, the main reason it sold is because it's so damn good. I'm no great fan of Sandburg's poetry, but he's one hell of a historian. I have no patience for the argument that he lacked formal training - or even that he favors certain kinds of facts over others. For me these things are overridden and rendered moot (and they aren't at all true - books can provide an excellent formal training, and Sandburg's book is more thoroughly researched than its critics have ever given it credit). The point is, this is powerful, deep-rooted, utterly absorbing reading.

My favorite part this time around was the endless gallery of mini-portraits Sandburg provides of virtually every character who walks across his stage ... including two great abolitionists, Charles Sumner:

"I am in morals, not politics," said Sumner. He took it as his mission and role to tell the Senate and thereby the country North and South a series of tragic and horrible facts about slavery. He knew he was telling the truth. But he believed also that any such truth as he might omit was of no importance ... He mentioned the unmentionable, with a cold wrath and an evenly measured scorn, and at last there were Southern Senators and Representatives who wanted to see him suffer and die.

And Massachusetts governor John Andrew:

Andrew sat on Beacon Hill now, a square-built, deep-chested man, curly hair topping his round head, a face smooth with kindliness, almost boyishly cherubic, his eyes peering from behind spectacles, wanting results out of his loyal toiling, decisions quicker than Lincoln could give.

And of course the tireless photo-editors of the old Reader's Digest bullpen have made this particular volume the one to own. Virtually every person mentioned has a portrait, caricature, or photo included here, from the most aesthetically pleasing (that would be a young Joseph Fremont, the most handsome young man of his day, including Hawthorne and Lord Byron) to the least, which was certainly Lincoln himself, here seen in every photograph we have of him.

Sandburg's marvelous prose does the president more justice than those photos ever could. It's unexpected to be reminded how panoramic this book is, but in the end it concentrates amazingly on Lincoln and his many sides. Our author was born in 1878 in beautiful Galesburg, Illinois where the flat-bottomed clouds come freighting from the vast west and cast their tale-telling shadows on the fields and houses, and he grew up in an age that could remember Lincoln as a living man. That living man makes more appearances in this book than in any later biography, and quite a few of those appearances help to alleviate the gloom, as when Lincoln heard the grievance of an officer in the 69th New York regiment:

An officer stepped forward who that morning had tried to quite the service and leave camp, saying, "Mr. President, this morning I went to speak to Colonel Sherman, and he threatened to shoot me." Lincoln: "Threatened to shoot you?" "Yes, sir, he threatened to shoot me." Lincoln looked at the officer, looked at Sherman, and then, stooping toward the officer as if to give a confidential message, and speaking in a stage whisper that could be heard for yards around, "Well, if I were you, and he threatened to shoot, I would not trust him, for I believe he would do it." The officer turned and vanished. The men whooped.

But that gloom is ultimately all-encompassing, and it does occasionally tempt Sandburg to mysticism:

Had the people and events of those tornado years shaped Lincoln more and more into a man paradoxically harder than ever, yet also more delicate and tenuous in human judgments and affairs? Was there more often a phantom touch in what he did? Did certain men and women who studied him either close up or from far away feel that a strange shade and a ghost, having often a healing power, moving toward a wider and surer human solidarity, lived and spoke in the White House?

Such things are never written about presidents who retire to Crawford and live to a ripe old age innocent of books, disagreements, and introspection. They're reserved for martyrs, whether they're true or not. And Lincoln's own martyrdom propels the most powerful writing in Sandburg's Lincoln, the tense, mournful account of the President's last day leading up to that moment at Ford's Theatre, then that moment (brought about by "The Outsider" - he's not given a name during the re-enactment), then the horrible aftermath all night long. An immensely strong body fought all through the night against its own certain doom, but it's the moment itself that fascinates Sandburg:

For Abraham Lincoln it's light's out, good night, farewell - and a long farewell to the good earth and its trees, its enjoyable companions, and the Union of States and the world Family of Man he has loved. He is not dead yet. He is to linger in dying. But the living man can never again speak, see, hear, or awaken into conscious being.

The Lincoln scholars among you might scoff at the melodramatics of something like that, but you shouldn't deny its effectiveness. This is from first to last a wrenchingly heartfelt book, filled not only with the author's vast research but with his visceral reactions to everything he's learned. That's a combination not lightly to be discarded and not likely to be superseded, yet both those fates have been foisted on Sandburg, and I often wonder why. Is it because he was a poet, and so all other literary efforts can be branded dilettantism? That seems to me to over-inflate dilettantism and underestimate what a serious mind can do in its after hours. Fortunately, while doctrinal wars play out, we still have this book. A nice plump Penguin Classic of it would be no less than it deserves, even though we'd lose all the wonderful photos.

The Two-Ocean War!

Our book today is Samuel Eliot Morison's The Two-Ocean War, and it's a response to the readers (Silent Majority card-members all!) who wrote to me wondering how I, of all people, could recommend an abridged book – in this case Leon Edel's one-volume version of his massive five-volume biography of Henry James. Surely I, of all people, stood for the purity of the whole work, not the superimposed guesswork of somebody – even the author – deciding which scattered bits will be of interest to the mythical 'common reader'?

Not a bit of it! Abridgments serve self-evident good purposes, and they can be works of art on their own. There are facets of enjoying a subject that can get dulled or buried entirely when an author who's done a massive amount of research decides to share the whole of it with his readers. The sheer technical feat of keeping a narrative both coherent and interesting over the course of such an enormous work is within the reach of only a handful of writers, and it becomes all the more impressive when some of those writers can turn around and say, “OK, now that my world-encompassing labors are done, I'm going to write the 200-page book on this subject that was my original intent, and I'm going to make it just as good in its own way as the mother work is in all its splendor.” It takes a certain kind of humility to do that (a humility perhaps brought on by the need to eat, since it's almost always those 200-page one-volume versions that actually sell) – and a certain kind of craft, which is why you'll find many such abridgments on my bookshelves.

Morison's is an obvious and sterling example. In order to generate his gigantic fifteen-volume “History of United States Naval Operations in World War II,” Morison was given a rank and the freedom to move about from ship to ship as the official historian of the greatest naval war in the history of the world. He served on eleven wartime vessels and harvested unprecedented amounts of first-hand information and observation (much of it first-hand – Morison was no desk-bound historian; he served on fast ships, and he put himself in harm's way), and he had one crucial thing besides: a pronounced flair for writing history. His prose is half-Herodotus and half-Thucydides, bristling with facts and figures but also alive with heartfelt passion.

It goes without saying that I enthusiastically recommend that fifteen-volume account. I've read it straight through a few times and also rejoiced in picking up single volumes. In those volumes, Morison allows himself to give his subjects – the major battles, the major figures, the major trends – all the room and detail they deserve. Digression abound and are welcome. But I read very fast, and I devote almost all my waking time to reading, and I'm perfectly well aware that these things aren't true for most readers in the world – and Morison was well aware of it too. When his publisher (and his long-suffering agent – he wasn't always the easiest person to get along with) suggested a one-volume abridgment of his life's crowning achievement, Morison not only jumped into the task with gusto (he jumped into everything with gusto – when he paid a restaurant bill, onlookers got the impression it was the first time a restaurant bill had ever been paid, and they were tempted to applaud) but got it done in time for the Christmas book-buying season.

The Two-Ocean War sold like hotcakes, and deservedly so. In place of the sprawl of the original, Morison's largely reworked abridgment has the speed and punch of a torpedo. Here, in short order, readers get the whole of the war in the Atlantic and Pacific, from the dark early days when German U-boats, Italian mini-subs, and the mighty Japanese Imperial Navy seemed to have no serious hindrance anywhere in the world. The signal naval victory of those early years was of course the Japanese sneak attack on Pearl Harbor, and Morison gives us a concise look at how such a disaster was possible (modern readers familiar with the details leading up to the 9/11 attacks will find the scenario gruesomely familiar):

A series of false assumptions, both at Washington and Oahu, added up to something as serious as the sins of omission. In Hawaii, the Navy assumed that the Army had gone on full alert, and that the radar warning net was completely operational. The Army assumed that the Navy was conducting an effective air reconnaisance around the island. Admiral Kimmel assumed that aerial torpedoes could not operate in the shoal waters of Pearl Harbor. Both Army and Navy Intelligence officers assumed that Japan was sending all her naval forces south, and that in any event Japan would not be so stupid as to attack Pearl Harbor. In Washington, Colonel Bratton of Army Intelligence assumed that the Pacific Fleet would go to sea after the 27 November “war warning,” so to him the intercepted reports of ships' positions by the Japanese consulate registered waste effort; and Captain Wilkinson of Naval Intelligence assumed that these reports were simply evidence of the Japanese inordinate love for detail. Rear Admiral Turner of War Plans assumed that this and all other relevant intelligence was going to Admiral Kimmel, and General Gerow of Army War Plans assumed that Kimmel and Short were exchanging every scrap of what they did get, which was considerable. Washington was as vague and uncertain about what was going to happen on the first or second weekend after 27 November as Pearl Harbor itself. It was a case of the blind not leading the blind; false assumptions at both ends of the line.

And Morison is there with us throughout – as the United States, ironically granted a boon at Pearl Harbor (no aircraft carriers were hit, nor were the vast oil tank fields that were well within the range of all those Japanese fighter-planes), rapidly poured men and material and money and technology into fielding a huge navy in both theaters. Morison wisely reminds us that despite this build-up, the numbers in any given engagement still often favored the Axis powers; the flame that animates his thrilling book is heroism, and that goes well with the occasional underdog scrap.

And he's alive, naturally enough, to the hand of history that lay over it all. This is a quality you'll find in all of Morison's books – he's never so focused on what he's researching and writing about that he fails to see its wider importance, as in the epic and game-changing Battle of Leyte Gulf, where he pauses even in the midst of the frantic action to recall its larger significance:

Mississippi's one salvo, fired at Yamashiro just after Admiral Oldendorf ordered Cease Fire, concluded this major phase or the battle [of Surigao Strait]. Silence followed, as if to honor the passing of tactics which had so long been foremost in naval warfare. The Battles of Lowestoft, Beachy Head, the Capes of the Chesapeake, Trafalgar, Santiago, Tsushimam, Jutland, every major naval action of the past three centuries, had been fought by classic line-of-battle tactics. In the unearthly silence that followed the roar of Oldendorf's 14-inch and 16-inch guns in Surigao Strait, one could imagine the ghosts of all great admirals, from Raleigh and De Ruyter to Togo and Jellicoe, standing at attention to salute the passing of the kind of naval warfare they all understood. For in those opening minutes of the morning watch of 25 October 1944, Battle Line became as obsolete as the row-galley tactics of Salamis and Syracuse.

Such moments occur often in that fifteen-volume official history, and they're every bit as moving and powerful – but how many readers can find them? The sheer size of the work can serve to hide its highlights, whereas here they're served up one after the next in a brilliant performance.

And it's not the only performance of its kind! In the coming weeks, we'll take a look at other abridgments that stand as worthy works on their own. My shelves abound with them, and my shelves are at your disposal, after all.