The bookshelf

Haven't done one of these in a long time, so I've forgotten a good bit of reading. Not that it matters. Anyway:

Larry McMurtry, Lonesome Dove series: I read these in story order, not publication order. They're page-turners, though I question whether I'll read any of them again. No, I never saw the mini-series.

Ross Macdonald, Lew Archer series: found a good many of these at Choctaw Books and have been consuming them like potato chips. Macdonald may be more clever at plotting than Chandler, but Chandler is the better stylist and Marlowe is the more memorable character. OTOH I'm only on, what, book # 7.

Michael Grant, Saint Peter: picked this up re: the class on Acts that I'm trying to lead. No one should ever have high expectations from Grant, but the book was weak even from that limited perspective. I'm sufficiently aware of some of the debates around the history of the early church and of the New Testament's composition to catch Grant when he simply takes some fact for granted (heh) without mentioning that anyone might think differently.

A.N. Wilson, Paul: The Mind of the Apostle: thus far a much better book than Grant's. Written from the same relentlessly secular perspective, but with a richer appreciation of the debates and the context - lots of context (what did Paul's near-contemporaries write about Tarsus? etc.). The only thing I've wondered about is Wilson's assumption that Paul really did study under Gamaliel the Elder, which I recall Garry Wills' being unconvinced of ... for some reason ... that I'll have to go back and check ....

Dashiell Hammett, Red Harvest, The Glass Key, The Dain Curse: these are books I'd read a long while back but had forgotten in large part. It would be interesting to think about how each novel fails in some respect, though Red Harvest, the best of the three, may not. Ned in The Glass Key never quite comes together as a character in the way that, say, Sam Spade does. And The Dain Curse is just an implausible mess. But bad Hammett is still better than good lots-of-other-people.

J.E. Neale, Queen Elizabeth I: presumably not the title it bore when published in 1934? The classic biography, judicious and never dull.

Peter Longerich, Heinrich Himmler: everything you will ever want to know about Himmler, for whom the tidying-up of Europe's Jews was simply a preliminary to the wonderful future Germania, an empire defended by stalwart, micro-managed SS knights. In a better universe, Himmler would've been the slightly nuts proprietor of the health-food store down the street, who would detain unwary or like-minded shoppers with his theories about "ice people" and the Pyramids. As it turned out, he became the most feared man in Europe and one of the darkest criminals ever. History's a bitch.

The bookshelf

Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer: Came at this one from a position of near-total ignorance on the subject. The historical approach worked well for me, and I have a new respect for the smarts that go into cancer research.

Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs: A good, quick read, again on a subject of which I was almost totally ignorant (I didn't even know where Silicon Valley was, exactly). Isaacson is a great explainer, as I found in reading his Einstein biography. A little disconcerting to read someone's biography and find descriptions of things that happened 4 or 5 months ago; if it will encourage you to read it, Isaacson pretty much concludes with Jobs's resignation, and doesn't give us any grim final scenes. According to Isaacson, the only grief he got in creating the book was that Jobs hated the dust jacket and designed a new one himself.

Peter Rowland, David Lloyd George: The life and career of the man who broke the Liberal Party. A sympathetic but unworshipful account.

H.W. Brands, The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin: In the middle of this one now, with Franklin at his most Anglophilic and 1763 just about to roll around. I picked this up at the Liberty Bell gift shop in Philly last year, having acquired a little curiosity about Franklin from the visit. I confess to being a bit underwhelmed by Franklin's genius, which so struck his contemporaries; maybe here too I should be reading Isaacson.

... Had to take back three books to the library unread because I simply didn't have time for them: Carthage Must Be Destroyed by Richard Miles, The New Deal by Michael Hiltzik, and Eisenhower: The White House Years by Jim Newton. Dipped into each and they looked good. But I finally remembered to order a copy of David Cannadine's Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy and have pledged to read that next.

The bookshelf

Somehow this hasn't been updated since last August. Here's some of what I've read or am "reading" in some sense or other:

David Kynaston, Austerity Britain: A social history of the UK from 1945-51, giving the bottom-up perspective on the postwar Labour years. Quite good, though probably richer for a British reader who knows more about some of the pop culture. I've already begun the 1951-57 volume, Family Britain. Note: neither paperback available in U.S., but affordably orderable via abebooks.com and the like.

Diarmuid MacCulloch, Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years: Despite his inability to count, MacCulloch has written what is probably now the best one-volume survey, with a bit less history-of-theology than many competitors and careful attention to the margins -- the non-Chalcedonians, the Orthodox, the mission churches. By no means impossible to put down, but charming and witty, from the POV of a respectful but unembarrassed nonbeliever.

Philip Ziegler, Melbourne: A readable biography of an interesting but not terribly important Prime Minister, whose do-nothing style of conservatism bears little resemblance to the modern variety. His son Augustus tragically had a condition that, to this biased reader at least, sounds rather like autism.

Jasper Ridley, Lord Palmerston: More entertaining than the Ziegler because, hey, it's Palmerston. The bad boy of the incipient, then newborn, Liberal Party, essential to grasping his times; we quoted Ridley on Mme de Lieven.

Dominic Lieven, Russia Against Napoleon: For years, accounts of the Eastern Front in WW2 were heavily based on German sources, partly because of Soviet restrictions, partly because so many more Western historians read German than Russian. That has changed in the past 30 years or so. Lieven gives a similar treatment to the Russian war against France, though his subtitle's claim to give the true account of the campaigns described in War and Peace is a bit misleading - Lieven gives short shrift to the 1805 campaign that ended at Austerlitz, but covers the war from 1812 to the fall of Napoleon, thus going well beyond Tolstoy. Not a gripping account, but of great interest for its perspective and its corrections of what we think we know from reading the novel.

Robert Blake, Disraeli: The classic biography. Look no further.

Winston Churchill, Marlborough: His Life and Times: Very much worth reading though I'm only halfway through. It says a great deal for Churchill's talent as a writer that he can cover the most minute details and keep the reader's interest. Still a little weirded out by Leo Strauss's eulogistic plug: "the greatest historical work written in our century," which of course the publisher, U of Chicago, puts on the cover. (Note to U of Chicago P: why do you get the year of Marlborough's birth wrong on the back cover?)

... UPDATE: Harry Jaffa:

In 1946, in a letter to the philosopher Karl Löwith, Leo Strauss mentioned how difficult it had been for him to understand Aristotle’s account of magnanimity, greatness of soul, in Book 4 of the “Ethics.” The difficulty was resolved when he came to realize that Churchill was a perfect example of that virtue.

Barnes also relates that after F.E. Birkenhead loaned Churchill a translation of the Ethics, it was returned a few weeks later with the polite comment that it was all very interesting, but Churchill had already thought most of it out for himself. (Given that Aristotle was essentially giving coherent form to the aristocratic ethos, Churchill's remark is not so arrogant as it sounds.)

Alfred Bester, The Stars My Destination: Finally got around to reading this; despite the dated references to extinct corporations, it reads well and quickly as a pure adventure story. The ending is a bit silly. Not I think as essential as it's made out to be, but entertaining.

The bookshelf

Robin Lane Fox, The Unauthorized Version: Truth and Fiction in the Bible: I couldn't finish his Pagans and Christians -- *enough* already about dream interpretation! -- but this one was more readable, as a classicist's look at the text and history of the Bible and what import that has for how much of it is "true" in any normal historical sense. He comes to some interesting conclusions, for instance that John's gospel is the most likely to be based on an eyewitness account of Jesus by one of his disciples. Not for the fideistically squeamish.

A.J.P. Taylor, The First World War: Somehow I'd never picked up Taylor's little essay on the war, which seems to've held up well in the past 50 years. The Amazon reviews are entertaining -- consensus being that it shouldn't be the *only* book one reads on WW1, but that one should definitely read it. I would disagree; if you're the kind of person who will read only one book, ever, on WW1, then you are much more likely to finish Taylor's book than any other.

Kenneth O. Morgan, The People's Peace: British History 1945-1990: Found this previously unsuspected book at Choctaw Books in Jackson, and have enjoyed my desultory way through it, being quite ignorant of postwar Britain. Mostly a political account.

Peter Longerich, Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews: Saw this blurbed in the Atlantic as being "hailed as the definitive single-volume history of the development and implementation of the Final Solution," and the new English version updates the 1998 original -- was pleasantly surprised to find it on the shelves of the local Barnes & Noble. Longerich suggests that the intentionalist/structuralist divide is really two sides of one coin, which is probably correct but effectively a win for the structuralists: no, Hitler did not sit down with Goering and Himmler the night of January 30, 1933, and say "all right boys, now that I'm chancellor, let's work out how we're going to exterminate the Jews." Still in the "persecution" part of the book, but having high hopes.

... Pierre Goubert, The Course of French History: It's absurdly difficult to find a decent survey of French history in the bookstore, as opposed to half a shelf on events from 1789-1815. Goubert's 1984 volume (found in my library) needs to be about twice as long, but it's quite serviceable, beginning with the Capetians, not scanting the early centuries, and finding a nice balance between social history and personalities.

The bookshelf

Been reading a good bit of Philip Kerr lately, especially his Bernie Gunther "Marlowe amongst the Nazis" novels. Obviously I like them enough to be on # 5 now, but I'm not sure how good they really are. The One from the Other had the best plot thus far, but Kerr is not as consistent as I'd like; Bernie gets all religious on us in A German Requiem but seems to've forgotten it in the next book. And particularly in the early ones, the Chandler wisecracks and similes seem to flow out of everyone's mouth, not just Bernie's, which gets a bit cute and misses the point of Marlowe's irony, which is part of what sets him against the rest of the world.

Also picked up his Hitler's Peace, which was well-plotted again but did not impress me with Kerr's research skills -- the first chapter has FDR making ultra-strong martinis. Uh, no: Roosevelt's 2:1 gin:vermouth recipe was notoriously nauseating.

... Robert Service, Trotsky: Not as good as his bio of Stalin, this book manages to be rather foggy about just what Trotsky did, and didn't. His collaboration in Lenin's use of terror is more assumed than discussed, and Service seems to have to strain a bit to let us know how bad a fellow Trotsky was. The book mainly left me wishing for a strong narrative account of the Soviet government's 1920s; how Stalin came out on top is a story worth telling well.


... Not sure how I forgot Peter Lyon, Eisenhower: Portrait of the Hero, a left-leaning bio covering both the Army and the White House, which makes it the only reliable full-length, full-dress Eisenhower bio now that Ambrose is more or less discredited. Lyon is more discursive than most biographers these days (the book's from 1974), but his judgment is good and he gives a fair-minded, bemused appreciation of Eisenhower's hits and misses.

The bookshelf

Max Hastings, Winston's War: Churchill, 1940-1945: It's questionable whether the world needed another book on Churchill, but the generally judicious Hastings makes it worthwhile. Sympathetic to the man's greatness without omitting his blunders and failings, Hastings is particularly good on how Churchill's narrow focus on the war sowed the seeds of his 1945 electoral defeat, and on the never-really-friends relations between him and FDR, and the Brits and Americans generally.

Peter Hamilton, The Reality Dysfunction and The Neutronium Alchemist: The first two volumes of a SF trilogy as long as Proust page-wise if not word-wise. Hamilton is one of the Brits who've been rehabilitating "space opera," and does so in this work with a metaphysical twist that comes off better than I would have expected -- indeed, I'm not sure I'd have bought 'em if someone had spoiled the surprise. No great shakes on characterization or style, but he keeps the plot moving and the reader caring.

Theodore Besterman, Voltaire: Why this 1969 classic is out of print, I can't imagine (I actually dropped the NYRB Books folks a line to beg 'em to reissue it if they can). Good luck finding *any* Voltaire bio at your local bookstore; this one's by the editor of Voltaire's correspondence, a scholar whose humane values fit his subject well. I may have an exaggerated sense of Voltaire's historical importance, but values we take for granted today -- free thought, free religion, secular inquiry -- had to be fought for with the pen, and did anyone do more than Voltaire to win those battles?

C.J. Cherryh, Downbelow Station: Not sure how I'd gone so long without reading this (my intro to Cherryh was the Morgaine novels, not the harder SF). A hard-nosed space opera itself, tho with Cherryh's usual difficulty creating interesting aliens (that is a minority opinion, I'm sure). Going to dive into Cyteen next I think.

Friedrich Heer, The Holy Roman Empire: More of a book-length essay than a comprehensive history, Heer's book focuses on the Empire as a European ideal. His treatment of the Salians vs. Gregory VI and his cohort is a brilliant little sketch, from which I'd quote if I had the book handy -- he sees Gregory as identifying holiness with monasticism, fatefully making the clergy into monks.

... Steven Englund, Napoleon: A Political Life: Less limited than the title suggests, this is really a biography of Napoleon that uses its subtitle as an excuse for not repeating well-worn accounts of Austerlitz, 1812, etc. This may be the best English-language biography. Recent efforts by Frank McLynn and Alan Schom are respectively too glibly psychological and too contemptuous of the subject. The man was a disaster, but then, so was Julius Caesar, and that doesn't require us to treat Caesar as a proto-Hitler, or to ignore the fascination of his genius and personality.

The bookshelf

Between spring break in Vermont and Easter in NOLA, I think I can safely refrain from buying any more books for the rest of the year.

Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic. For some reason, this is not in every history section of every general-interest bookstore in America. (Though B&N has plenty of Mein Kampf.) A classic I'd been meaning to get to, and Jacob Levy's mention of it put me over the edge.

Henry James, The Wings of the Dove. Late James is my favorite James, but I've probably read The Golden Bowl thrice for one time through this superb novel. The great opening chapter is so dramatic, you can see why James thought he could write for the stage; but the drama's 95% in the narration, not the dialogue. The only great book I can think of offhand where the "villain" is the protagonist.

Elizabeth Longford, Wellington: Pillar of State. The post-Waterloo career of the great general and less great statesman, sympathetically told by Longford, who turns out not only to've been a socialist, but also Antonia Fraser's mother.

Richard Reeves, John Stuart Mill: Victorian Firebrand. I had avoided this because, rightly or not, I've thought of Reeves as a rather loose biographer (perhaps that's my assumption about anyone who writes about JFK); but I picked up Mill's Autobiography and was so struck by the omissions, I had to turn to Reeves's book. Quite competent-seeming thus far, though since the same subtitle's been used for a life of Thorstein Veblen by a different author, I hope it will now be retired.

The bookshelf (and a reckoning)

Joe Haldeman, The Forever War: One of those books I really should have read 20 years ago. Haldeman's account of interstellar war at relativistic speeds is the metaphor of all metaphors for a soldier's alienation from the home front, and from "his" own war. And his treatment of homosexuality would be remarkable today, let alone in 1974. God knows what the Ridley Scott adaptation will make of it.

Jean Edward Smith, Grant: Better thus far than Smith's bio of FDR. I'm into the beginnings of Congressional Reconstruction, and a little amazed at how much my previous reading was treading the track of the Lost Cause school of historians. (Tho for a biographer of John Marshall, Smith is thus far proving reticent about such issues as the constitutionality of the Tenure of Office Act.) Smith admires Grant's character, and rightly so, but I would like to see a bit more psychology -- for a man as simple and unassuming as Grant, he had a waspish pen in his Memoirs, hinting at something more complex under the surface.

Kurt W. Beyer, Grace Hopper and the Invention of the Information Age: As I'd hoped, this little book goes beyond biography of Hopper to an account of the early days of computing, and the institutional/economic/governmental forces that shaped its development. A topic I knew nothing about, so Beyer is very informative, to me.

Daniel Farber, Lincoln's Constitution: Another little book, usefully and cogently recounting the debates, then and now, over the constitutionality of secession and of Lincoln's actions. Generally supportive of Lincoln while conceding that he overstepped sometimes, Farber concludes with a neat distinction that while Lincoln probably went beyond the law on occasion, but never held himself above the law -- he always was vulnerable to Congress's refusal to ratify his actions, which however never came up. Comparison and contrast with George W. Bush's violations of law, and Congress's effective ratification of them, would make another good book.

Stephen W. Sears, Gettysburg: Reread this in anticipation of visiting the battlefield. It's a straightforward account, more accessible than Coddington's Gettysburg Campaign or Trudeau's Gettysburg: A Testing of Courage. Why Lee would not listen to Longstreet and either flank the Federals or dare them to come on, remains a mystery I suppose.

... And a reckoning: how many of these damn "Bookshelf" books have I actually finished? Not counting the present post, 31 of 37. Better than I feared. All too easy to flit from book to book. That biography of Lord Salisbury in particular, while interesting whenever I read it, is quite the incubus.

The bookshelf

Peter Wilson, The Thirty Years War. The must-read of the season for European-history nerds. At 800+ pages, less readable than Wedgwood's 1938 classic, but promises to cover the second half of the war in detail, which she rather slid through as tedious. N.b. -- do not buy copy with missing endpaper maps.

John Keay, China: A History. If anyone can make a one-volume survey of Chinese history into more than One Damn Dynasty After Another, it should be Keay. Just put the late Han to rest.

Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. In my lit-theory days, I never could take this book quite seriously enough to pick it up; I mentally categorize it as leading a "second wave" of theory that put Foucault et al. together into a radically subversive mix and, well, jumped the shark. (See here.) So I was delighted to visit the bookstore the other day and find a new paperback reprint -- in Penguin Classics. Too damn funny not to own a copy, and it dovetails nicely with my new resolve to read theory and philosophy for their fictional value.

The bookshelf

Andrew Roberts, Salisbury. Not a Roberts fan by any means, but his ponderous bio of Salisbury gets evenhanded praise, and fills the Prime Ministerial gap between the age of Gladstone and that of Asquith. Next I shall have to find something on Melbourne or, more interestingly, Peel. But I'm not even halfway through this monster, an exemplar of the "definitive" biography, which means a biography so long and detailed that you will never want to read another biography of that person.

Rudiger Safranski, Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil. If they weren't going to go with the wicked German title, A Master from Germany, couldn't they've made it the subtitle? The book is horribly translated -- "validity" is obsolete as the noun for "having value," and indeed sounds like a bad Heidegger translation -- but thus far of interest in illuminating early Heidegger and the many ephemeral figures in German philosophy who appeared important in his day.

Susanna Clarke, Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell. I read a library copy when this came out, and found it charming at first, then dramatic, then blah. But I've forgotten just where the "blah" came from, and its mention on a couple of best-fantasy-novel blog posts (here and here) got me thinking I should give Clarke another try.

... Better than I remembered the first time around; no "blah" here.

John Farmer, The Ground Truth: The Untold Story of America Under Attack on 9/11. That's what it is, padded out with transcripts of air traffic controllers trying to figure out WTF. Essentially an amplication of the parallel portions of the 9/11 Report, pointing out the lies and CYA that accreted to the story. Just the thing to get from the library without paying for.

The bookshelf

Byron, Don Juan. Second try, da capo, at the masterpiece. Best read in a relaxed manner -- it's witty and clever, but not a page-turner.

James Ellroy, American Tabloid and The Cold Six Thousand. These are page-turners, and they've pretty much eclipsed my other reading while I dash through, upon which I hope that the final volume, Blood's a Rover, has made it to my library so's I can avoid buying the hardback. I hadn't read any Ellroy, but this review (warning: dumb-ass spoilers!) made me pick up the first book, and it's wonderfully engaging even to a non-conspiracy-buff like myself. (Most Kennedy-conspiracy works, I submit, are failed novels.)

Gordon S. Wood, Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815. Latest in the Oxford History of the United States, whose volumes I am prone to snap up like potato chips ... well, like very, very large bags of potato chips, anyway. 100 pages in it's quite good, with an emphasis on "gentlemen" vs. "middling folk" in the politics of the early years.

Walter Isaacson, Kissinger. Almost finished with Chace's Acheson bio (very good, tho hampered by the author's subordinating chronology to topics) and dipping into the second of my Cabinet-secretary trilogy (a library copy of the new Rumsfeld biography is the goal here). Thrown off-track by the Ellroy novels, but looking forward to getting back to my Secretaries.

The bookshelf

What have I been reading? Forgetting to update this at least monthly means I've forgotten some stuff.

Jenkins, Asquith. Typically good Jenkins for political coverage, while failing, as with his Gladstone book, to give a strong sense of the personality. It's never terribly clear for instance what Margot meant to him, or what was going on inside him to make him so passionate for Venetia Stanley. This was not a fault of Jenkins's excellent Churchill bio, possibly because Churchill's personality was so powerful, or just that I already had a sense of what Churchill was like.

Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms. My favorite novel, in high school; now, I admire his descriptions more than I used to, but the characterization is poor. Catherine seems too much of a fantasy girl (perhaps what commended it to me in high school), and her death's foreshadowing is heavy as a pile of bricks. Picked it up in a British paperback whose advert pages notified me that, in Britain, The Sun Also Rises was published as Fiesta. Good heavenly lord.

Langguth, Patriots. I liked his Vietnam book, and thus far the focus on individuals is working well in this book on the American Revolution -- there's a lot more on the leadup to the rebellion than I'd seen before. Though Langguth is surely the first person to be inspired to write about our revolution by the example of the Vietnamese war against France and America.

Kershaw, Fateful Choices. Not sure why I've been rereading this actually. A good study, distinguishing absolutely gratuitous blunders (Mussolini's invasion of Greece) from hard but arguably compelled choices (Hitler's war on Russia).

Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man. Finally got around to finishing this. Quite readable, and anyone who can make me want to pick up more Hegel is doing something well. His thesis, once one actually reads the book, is not terribly radical. How much, though, can any era see the next era coming?

(... Have picked back up Hegel's Philosophy of Right which I shamefully abandoned months ago in the midst of Hegel's introduction. I think I'm going to spot him his dialectic and just take him for whatever the hell he says about stuff, without worrying how he got there.)

MacCarthy, Byron: Life and Legend. The "one to read" is deplorably out of print in this country, but with Amazon all things are possible. Hadn't realized quite how gay Byron was, but then, not many had prior to MacCarthy's book -- she does force the interpretation here and there, but the evidence overall seems indisputable.

Anderson, Three Hearts and Three Lions. A minor classic of the fantasy genre; I'd never read any Anderson, oddly enough, but found this in a bookshop in Laurel, Miss. Emphasis on "minor" -- the world-building is dubious, the prose is mediocre. But it's fun seeing how much Gary Gygax grabbed from this book for D&D, and the part where the elfin duke recites a legend about Brigadier Gerard just about made the book worthwhile by itself.

Wickham, The Inheritance of Rome: A History of Europe from 400 to 1000. Tyler Cowen talked this up, and while Cowen is too idiosyncratic to be always reliable (bought a dreadful Shostakovich violin concerto at his behest once), I'm dark enough on the Dark Ages that this seemed worth a buy -- even if he really does omit the Battle of Tours. I note that the Penguin History of Europe volumes have gotten longer since the appallingly short Europe in the High Middle Ages, which is a good thing.

The bookshelf

Lots of slacker reading over the past month:

George R.R. Martin, A Song of Ice and Fire: Went back through volumes 2 through 4 of the series. Classic swords-and-politics fantasy that features the words "fuck" and "cunt" too often for me to try to inveigle my 13YO into reading 'em. If you read this kind of thing and haven't picked up A Game of Thrones, do so.

Dungeons & Dragons 3.5: No good reason for me to've picked these up, since I can't imagine ever running another D&D game. But the new 4th edition is so appallingly bad (we already *had* computer gaming, thanks), I thought I might should snag these while I could. I like what the 3d edition did with skills and feats -- it's entertaining to try to reconstruct Uma Thurman's Kill Bill character -- but combat seems like it must take FOREVER now.

Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: A book that seems like I should've read it 10 years ago. It's good as it goes, but his crow's-eye view of the last 500 years in terms of military and economic competition seems like a well-worn tale. I'm hoping that when I hit the 19th century, it will all sound a bit less like my college textbooks.

David Reynolds, In Command of History: Churchill Fighting and Writing the Second World War: As someone who always suspiciously avoided reading Churchill's big book, I found Reynolds' study vindicating; he meticulously studies what Churchill omitted or spun, and often relates those changes to postwar issues revolving around the Cold War and Churchill's quest for the premiership (again). One has to be a serious WW2/Churchill buff to find this interesting rather than painful, n.b.

John Conroy, Unspeakable Acts, Ordinary People: The Dynamics of Torture: His assessment of Aristotle may be dubious, but this is a must-read book on torture in democratic states: how it happens, how it's addressed, how it's swept under the rug. Soldiers in Israel, police in Chicago, spooks in Britain -- they all torture, they all lie about it, they all get slaps on the wrist.

Adrian Goldsworthy, How Rome Fell: His Caesar biography was a from-the-library read, as he didn't seem to add much beyond a more careful appreciation of Caesar as soldier; but I picked this one up on the strength of its contention with such works as Peter Heather's The Fall of the Roman Empire. Rather than "the Barbarians, on the Frontiers, with a Battleaxe," Goldsworthy's culprit is "the Romans, amongst Themselves, with a Gladius" -- civil war brought down the empire, without which there's no particular reason why Rome couldn't have continued to fend off the barbarians. Or so I gather from reviews and the preface. Right now I've only just seen Alexander Severus into his untimely grave, so the thesis hasn't unfolded very much. (The best Caesar bio IMHO continues to be Meier's, btw.)

Robert Service, Stalin: A Biography: Stalin's never been as fleshed-out a baddie as Hitler in my reading, so I picked this one up to gather what the current view seems to be. It still reads nothing like, say, Kershaw's Hitler (being, for one thing, less than half the length), but I suspect we still just don't have anything like the degree of documentation of Stalin -- there are advantages to being a successful despot. The author goes to some length to be fair to Stalin where called for, which I gather is going to make the 1930s look just that much worse.

The bookshelf

Currently reading 3 or 4 books, plus noting some I've finished:

Herring, From Colony to Superpower - long sidelined but now I've been at it in earnest; just got through his review of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Generally good at demonstrating that America's strengths and weaknesses in foreign policy stretch all the way back, or at least a good ways beyond, say, Teddy Roosevelt or Woodrow Wilson. Herring does not have heroes, and can generally find something to criticize. For instance, however prudent JFK may've been in the missile crisis, it was his obsession with Cuba, coupled with his vacillation as to acting on same, that made Cuba a sore spot and inspired Khrushchev to try installing missiles there.

Axworthy, A History of Iran - apparently the only popular survey of Iran's history that gives due weight to how long that history is. Axworthy's is not a deep treatment, though he does veer off for a chapter into discussing a number of Persian poets, but his light, sure touch keeps the book enjoyable.

Hegel, Outline of the Philosophy of Right - I'd never picked this up, and Oxford's excellent decision to release a revision of Knox's edition in its World's Classics line brought it unexpectedly to a bookshelf near me. The introduction is good on disabusing the reader of Popper's nonsense. Thus far I'm still on Hegel's preface, which is remarkably snarky about contemporary contempt for philosophy and about Hegel's contemporary philosophers. Looking forward to this, especially when I get a chance to really sit down with it.

Perlstein, Nixonland - the shoddy, overpriced hardcover is now a shoddy, overpriced paperback, but I felt less cheated at the lower price. The content thus far seems about as good as advertised, though perhaps Perlstein worries too much about the reader's being bored and makes his style a little more catchy and clever than need be. (Or perhaps Perlstein is much smarter about his general audience than I am.) The tragedy of the liberal collapse is coming through vividly.

Rhodes, Masters of Death - his book about the Einsatzgruppen, who carried out the first steps of the Holocaust in the wake of the German invasion of Russia, is a disappointing contrast to The Making of the Atomic Bomb. Rhodes is fuzzy on some of his facts (like how America came to be at war with Germany), and displays an amateur's arrogance on such vexed questions as when Hitler took the decision to outright exterminate the Jews. But even those flaws, plus an unnecessarily pronounced contempt for such contemptible people as Himmler (yes, even that can be overdone), don't outweigh the value of the book for its documentation of the Nazi horror. Einsatzgruppen members said that they tossed small children in the air to shoot them, not out of cruelty, but because bullets passed through their bodies too easily, raising the risk of ricochet if they shot them on the ground. One detail like that, reminding one of how much practice underlay that judgment ... and it's hard to feel that one shouldn't have read the book.

The bookshelf

As usual, I have been trying to read too many books at once:

George C. Herring, America's Longest War: The United States and Vietnam, 1950-1975. Longest war perhaps, but not Herring's longest book ... his survey of American foreign policy rests on my sidelines, while I'm liking this concise, thoughtful survey of the Vietnam debacle. His notes on further reading are inadvertently amusing for their use of the word "competent," as in "a competent biography," which begings to sound like faint praise when one sees it repeated. I would like to find a solid military history of Vietnam, but the only one he lists is "Philip B. Davidson, Vietnam at War, The History: 1946-1975," which is "a competent military history by a retired senior U.S. Army officer, [that] emphasizes the importance of North Vietnamese strategy in the outcome of the war [good] and concludes -- unconvincingly -- that with a proper strategy the United States might have prevailed [less good]." Amazon.com's indefatigable reviewer of military histories, R.A. Forczyk, would seem to dispute the "competency" -- he finds "a whitewashed history" by "a major apologist for General Westmoreland," under whom Davidson indeed served. Don't think I'll be picking that one up.

Alan Wolfe, The Future of Liberalism. As a counterpoint to my curiosity about defining conservative thought, I picked up Wolfe's book for a glance at the opposing definition. Whatever liberalism's future, I hope TBA's future will include some posts on Wolfe's main points.

E.P. Sanders, The Historical Figure of Jesus. Sanders appears to be the go-to guy on the subject, and his book is reassuringly given to extensive preliminaries on the background, sources, and other issues regarding what we can hope to know about Jesus as a matter of historical records. Enjoyably readable -- the guy is from Texas and writes in the best friendly-English-don-who-knows-everything-there-is-to-know manner.

Richard J. Evans, The Third Reich at War. Evans finishes his trilogy on Nazi Germany, and I was sufficiently impressed by the first two volumes to grab this one in hardback. For a 700-page book, it's a fast read. He does about as well as can be expected in covering only the outline of the war, so that he's not sucked into writing yet another WW2 history -- my only fault is that he spends a trifle too much time on the Soviet perspective, necessary for a WW2 history but not for his work, where an excess page on what happened to Soviet-occupied Poland is a page cut, doubtless, from something happening in Germany. But the book is splendid, incorporates quite recent studies, and manages to appall the reader who thought he couldn't be more appalled by the Nazis.

H.P. Willmot, The Great Crusade: A New Revised History of World War Two. What was that about "yet another WW2 history"? So far, this is the best replacement I've found for Liddell Hart's dated operational-level history of the war. Willmot has opinions and isn't afraid to share them (MacArthur gets mentioned in passing as simply "the clown who lost the Philippines"); he's particularly good at rebutting the myth of German military genius (as opposed to tactical brilliance).

Liaquat Ahamed, Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World. Tyler Cowen recommended this, and I've found it good. Ahamed follows the careers of the central bankers of USA, UK, France, and Germany in the 1920s and their failed responses to the Depression, with Keynes tracked as well in a sort of counterpoint. Explains the gold standard and its pitfalls as well as an economic illiterate like myself could hope to understand it, and the biographical approach doesn't hurt. (His epigraph is Disraeli: "Read no history: nothing but biography, for that is life without theory." Surely Disraeli can't have been so naive as to believe that literally, though I take his point.)