A Common Reader . . .

Review: Paradise Lost - Giles Milton

There was so much "history" in the 20th century that it is easy to forget highly significant but more local events which have been lost among the big picture issues of world wars, evil dictatorships and million-strong massacres.  The destruction of Smyrna (now modern-day Izmir) in 1922 is one such, and Giles Milton has done us a great favour in writing such a lucid and interesting book, Paradise Lost, about the destruction of this great city.

In outline, after the First World War, Greece, with the support of western governments, invaded Turkey in the hope of establishing a Christian Empire in Asia Minor.  By 1922, the Turks had driven the Greeks back and their victory was imminent.  The citizens of Smyrna, who inhabited perhaps the most cosmopolitan and multi-cultural city in the region, believed that as was shown many times before in their history, all parties had an interest in maintaining the peace and prosperity of their great city.  In particular, they mistakenly believed that the Allied war-ships off their coast would protect them from Turkish retribution.  Alas, how mistaken they were, for over the course of two weeks their city was almost totally destroyed, with almost 2 million people falling victim to the catastrophe. 

Review: Love and War in the Pyrenees - Rosemary Bailey

This book, Rosemary Bailey's Love and War in the Pyrenees, is a rare treat: a moving and well-written history book/travelogue, from a writer with a considerable personal knowledge of the area she writes about and an intimate acquaintance with the people who live there.  Although my knowledge of these events was scanty to say the least, I was immediately interested in the book and soon found myself engrossed in this record of the social and military crises that hit this corner of France.

Rosemary Bailey has lived in the area for several years and has been able to lace her book with many personal accounts of visits to elderly survivors of the war years and their relatives.  This gives the book a unique perspecitve on the effects of a World War on a remote, underpopulated area of Europe which found itself on a vital escape route which saw hundreds of thousands of people pass through as they fled from a tyranny coming from the south and later the north. 

The story starts with the Spanish Civil War, when in 1939 huge numbers of Republican Spanish saw that their only hope of survival (after the victory of the army of General Franco) was to cross the mountains into France.  Rosemary Bailey describes the impact on this area as the initially hospitable French peasants did their best to cater for the vast crowds arriving on their doorstep, but rapidly found their civil leaders adopting repressive methods of containing the tide. 

 I have visited Argeles Sur Mer and the surrounding areas twice and have noticed the information boards on the promenade describing the camps set up for refugees from the Spanish Civil War in 1939.  At that time, Argeles was a place of sand-dunes bordered with swamps and was only just beginning to be developed as a resort.  But the facts are staggering: by February 1939, the arrival of 500,000 refugees had doubled the population of the Pyrénées Orientale region.  It was impossible for this largely rural population to cope with such a tidal wave of starving, distressed people and the response of the authorities was to set up barbed-wire bounded camps on the beaches. 

Review: Hitler's Private Library - Timothy W Ryback

I am always interested in the way reading affects people, and also in the psychology of the German people in the build-up to the Second World War.  Timothy Ryback has studied the remnants of Hitler’s private library, some 1200 books, which occupy shelf-space in the rare book division of the Library of Congress in Washington.  In his new book,  Hitler's Private Library:  The Books That Shaped His Life, Ryback describes the original collection of 16,000 books, and how as the sub-title suggests, they "shaped his life".

I am used to hearing how books educate, inform and enlighten and it was a surprise to read that the wholly unenlightened Adolf Hitler was "possessed by a voracious appetite for reading".  From his earliest years after returning from the First World War battle-front in France, Hitler scoured the book-stalls of Munich to fill two book cases in his rented rooms.  He read "intently, even fiercely", usually late into the night, and Ryback records an occasion when Eva Braun interrupted a reading session and was "dispatched with a tirade that sent her hurtling red-faced down the hallway". 

Associates  recalled, "I can never remember Adolf without books", and "books were his world", with reading being a "deadly serious business".

Review: A Time To Dance, A Time to Die - John Waller

A Time To Dance, A Time to Die was more or less perfect holiday reading for me, being written about events in the country I was visiting (France) and both serious enough to occupy my mind and sufficiently entertaining to match my mood while sunning myself in courtyards and outdoor cafés.

The book concerns an outbreak of what appeared to be Chorea sancti viti, or St Vitus Dance in 16th century Strasbourg.  Whereas chorea is usually a symptom of serious illness, the Strasbourg outbreak seems to have been something like mass hysteria, involving hundreds of people and lasting for some weeks before dying out again.

John Waller uses his first three chapters setting the scene.  The people of Strasbourg and its surrounding area had suffered much in the preceding years.  A series of bad harvests, periods of drought followed by torrential rain, culminating in the "bad year" of 1517 with grain prices soaring and famine striking with terrible force, killing thousands from malnutrition and related maladies. 

The populace was exploited by a rapacious church, with monasteries exploiting the high grain prices by selling their grain stores (obtained from taxes and tithes) outside the area, the starving peasants observing convoys of grain leaving their towns and villages to achieve higher prices in wealthier areas.  The population was threatened by the "infidel Turk", the arrival of syphilis in their communities and a terrible epidemic of a disease named "the English Sweat". (click on the link below to continue reading this review)

Review: Human Smoke - Nicholson Baker

Human Smoke attracted a great deal of interest when it was published earlier this year, with controversy in abundance.  In essence, the book is seen by many as pacifist, and appears to present both sides in the Second World War as having a moral equivalence, holding equal disdain for the human cost of the terrible conflict they provoked.

The book consists of a compilation of hundreds of first-hand quotations, extracts from papers and articles, accounts of conversations, diary extracts and numerous other detailed sources.  These all appear in sequential order and provide a day by day account of the development of the war from the perspective of various world nations.  These appear at first to be largely unedited, in "raw" form, but of course, the selection was made by Nicholson Baker, and we read nothing in the book about his selection criteria.

However, it soon becomes apparent that one of his objectives is to show the huge resistance to joining in the conflict, particularly in America, and how this resistance was eventually suppressed.  Baker shows that there was a huge concern for European Jewry and the starving people of Europe, with Americans digging deep into their pockets to support relief operations.  However, there was strong governmental and labour movement resistance to changing immigration quotas to allow more Jews to escape to America from German persecution.  Baker quotes the example of one family who eventually managed to enter America after travelling from Berlin via Moscow, Japan, Costa Rica, Panama and Chile.  They were the lucky ones, others of their ilk being deported from Germany to entirely infeasible destinations where they were to perish as stateless persons. 

Review: Best of Enemies - Richard Milton

In Best of Enemies: Britain and Germany - 100 Years of Truth and Lies, Richard Milton describes the cross-fertilisation of ideas between Britain and Germany and the ensuing propaganda wars that accompanied the conflicts of the last century.  Milton describes the rise of public relations techniques in America and Britain, firstly in the world of advertising and later in political campaigns, eventually of course being adopted by Joseph Goebbells, the master Nazi propagandist.

Milton's main thesis in this book is how close were the links between the two nations, and which were only sundered at times of war.  There has in fact always been considerable synergy of ideas between the two nations, unsurprisingly in view of England's Angle, Saxon and Jute past.  During the 19th century in particular, relations between Britain and Germany were on a high. Each nation had considerable respect for the other, not least because of the Royal links, with Queen Victoria having wholly German blood in her veins, and the German Prince Albert being a visionary leader, and the inspiration behind much of the Great Exhibition of 1851. 

It is interesting to read of the strong cultural and commercial links between the two countries at the time, with Siemens laying the underwater cables which made London the hub of the financial world, Julius Reuter setting up the the global news agency, and German brands such as Nivea, Osram, Agfa achieving market dominance.  On the German side, the highest fashion was English, with its tweed jackets, monocles, and childrens' sailor suits. Interestingly, the Germans adopted the game of cricket and the Berlin Cricket Club was founded in 1883 and Germans took to the fields in whites.   

Review: A Writer at War - Vasily Grossman

Having read Anthony Beevor's "Berlin The Downfall", my eye was drawn to A Writer at War, being as it is, a significant historial source for the Russian experience of the German invasion and its aftermath.

Grossman was despatched by his editors to the locations of most of the key events in the Russian war with Germany, and the book is particularly interesting because it runs right through from the invasion, to the defeat of Germany.

Grossman describes countless small events which fill in the broad picture with illuminating detail. He records the capture of a Russian deserter who tried to sneak back home in full peasants rags, but had the misfortune to be recognised by troops of his own unit. He met with brave peasant women who gave their all in order to survive the terrible events that came upon them. There are many stories of Russian military officers and men, snatches of conversation, descriptions of their appearance and behaviour, which all fill out the picture of "Ivan" and show their loyalty to their homeland - and their ignorance of how utterly their political masters were failing them thought lack of foresight and planning.

The book benefits from a fine commentary by Beevor - the diaries are not just edited, they are interpreted for us by a great historian who sets them in context and explains the background to the events, so that the book builds up to a complete history of the Russian war.

I highly recommend this book which reveals a compassionate and humanistic man who recorded the lives of "everyman" on the Russian front and enables us to understand more about the events of those terrible years.