An extraordinary person, an unjust fate in The Spy Who Loved

From the Week of February 17th, 2014

Joy comes in many forms. Be it ushering a new life into the world or watching a young mind expand with the possibilities of the life to come, be it performing a perfect piece of music or experiencing the power of a sublimely toned body, we are all uplifted by the exhilaration of life's rare moments, those cherished slivers of time in which we, or those we know, are at our best. But while, for most of us, it is enough to simply have these precious memories, others are not so easily satiated by the past. For these souls, joy only erupts from the extremity of emotion and circumstance, from moments in which one's life or one's wellbeing has been wagered on the outcome. Which is precisely why the past wont' suffice. For it is already a known quantity, a settled question from which victory has already flowed. The next battle is the only cure. But as Clare Mulley explains in her riveting work, for some, there can be no more battles.

Born in 1905 to a wealthy, landed family in Poland, Krystyna Skarbec of a daughter of the aristocracy, an educated beauty of class and repute whose life was overturned and shaped by the two great wars that transfixed Europe in the first few decades of the 20th century. Without the Nazis and Communism, without politics and ideology, she might have been someone's wife, a creature living a life of proscribed comfort in which the sorrows and frustrations of being a pretty woman in a man's world would have remained her own. But when the freedom of her beloved country was crushed beneath the jackboots of continental regimes hungering to impose their notion of unity upon the world, the cage of her social confinement was breached, allowing her to crawl out into a broken world and fight for her own freedom.

Beginning in 1939 and only concluding with the end of the Second World War, Krystyna Skarbec, naturalized by Britain as Christine Granville, was an agent in both the Polish Resistance and the Special Operations Executive, a British organization whose remit was to spy on the Axis powers and to commit acts of sabotage where possible. Trained in everything from parachute drops to the transmission of secret codes, Skarbec operated behind enemy lines in much of occupied western Europe, curriering messages to the Allies, helping to take fortified Nazi positions and even intervening to bribe Nazi officers to spare allied prisoners. But despite her extraordinary efforts and the Allied victory over the Axis, she was never able to free her beloved Poland which would remain in the rough hands of soviet Russia long after she had succumbed to the miseries of postwar life.

The spellbinding account of a remarkable woman, The Spy Who Loved is nothing short of extraordinary. Ms. Mulley, an author and journalist, has helped to resurrect the life and times of a woman who should have never been lost to the rough tides of history, whose fearlessness and determination remain inspirational even some sixty years after her death. Swiftly dispensing with Granville's early years, the author concentrates on Granvile's wartime service, painting a lush portrait of a woman of charm and hunger, of grand habits and even grander drive who surmounted the prejudices of her age to leave her mark, to make a difference, to be someone. That sorrow was her primary reward for such strength of will is a pity that no amount of acclaim can sooth.

Cultures then and now might call Krystyna Skarbec a slut. They might look at her sexual appetites and her many lovers and dismiss her as a woman who slept her way to success. Indeed, this opinion, or fear of, is partially responsible for her present anonymity. For the men with whom she was close were so eager to guard her reputation that they were reluctant for her story to be told at all. This is idiocy. For while it is inappropriate to so blithely condemn any woman, it is even more foolish to do so with a woman who behaved no differently than any of her many male comrades. And even were it appropriate to label any woman such, such a label would not fit. For far from a degenerate, skarbec seized life, sucking from it every drop of nourishment it could offer her. In wartime, she comes alive, relishing her own agency, her own power, her own capacity to be a hero. This is the designation she has earned, not one rooted in dated sexist notions of foolish propriety.

As much as this is a winning biography of a rare woman in a brutal period of history, The Spy Who Loved is also a kind of office drama set in wartime. As the first woman to join the SOE, Skarbec was beset by all manner of prejudices that, with sixty years of reformist hindsight, appear even more absurd now than they must have seemed to her then. Despite her willingness to risk her life for her country, despite her obvious competence in the arenas of espionage and sabotage, she was distrusted, denied the legal use of a gun and often marginalized to the sidelines of a war she was eager to fight. Worst of all these nonsensical sins, however, is Skarbec's treatment after the war where upon England, the nation so fond of thinking of itself as the great civilizer, entangled her in sexist legalities which not only denied her the combat medals she so clearly deserved, but obligated her to pretend to be married in order to receive the citizenship she'd so clearly earned. It is shameful enough that these foolish codes troubled such a courageous veteran. That they also indirectly contributed to her death is an intolerable irony.

The Spy Who Loved could have devoted more time to Skarbec's early years. And indeed, it is slightly troubling that so much of the work has to be told through the eyes of others, an unfortunate necessity thanks to the dearth of skarbec's own correspondence. But these are small imperfections in what is otherwise the biography of a brave, liberated hero who should be celebrated for achievements on the battlefield and pitied for the peace she could never find off of it. Unforgettable... (4/5 Stars)

An innovative if monotonous The Book Thief

From The Week of October 1st, 2013

However much it entertains us in theatres and agonizes us in our personal lives, tragedy, more than anything else, is the revealer of true character. For it is only when pushed to the extremity of ugly circumstance and torturous emotion that we come to understand who we are. Do we buckle in the face of cruelty from both the world and our fellow humans? Do we resign ourselves to fates imposed upon us by powers far more immense than ourselves? Or do we remind ourselves that setbacks, in whatever form, are merely opportunities to learn, to grow and to be better next time? All humans, at one point or another, have been compelled to respond to tragedy by taking one of its many roads, but how many of them have comprehended just how consequential that decision was, just how much it shapes their lives and their souls? Marcus Zusak ruminates in his interesting, if problematic, work.

Growing up in the harsh, racist nationalism of Nazi Germany, Liesel is an angry girl with nothing to call her own. Her parents, communists who fear the worst from Hitler, have sent her to a foster home in Munich where she's softened by the kindness of her foster father, Hans, and stiffened by the sternness of her foster mother, Rosa. Teased for being slow to learn how to read, she proves to be fearsome with her fists, pummeling anyone who deigns to scorn her. For she is a girl determined to overcome her own shortcomings and prove everyone wrong.

With Hans' help, Liesel slowly learns her letters, knowledge that kindles a lifelong thirst for books and the wisdom contained within. Her family's relative poverty, however, leaves little expendable coin for the buying of such luxuries, so Liesel turns to stealing them from book burnings and private libraries, insatiably accumulating a collection of works that fill her with words and dreams. But no collection of books can shield her from the outside world which is convulsed by World War II and all of its civilian atrocities. Liesel may have conquered the word, but she cannot conquer the world that made them, and so she must hold on in hopes that those she's come to hold dear make it through to the new dawn.

The claimant of numerous honors and awards, The Book Thief is inventive fiction. Told from the perspective of Death, a seemingly omnipotent force tasked with the claiming of the souls of the recently deceased, it narratively dips in and out of the lives of its main actors, sometimes granting them the privacy of their own thoughts while at other times exposing, in depth, the secrets of their most closely guarded memories. In this, Mr. Zusak is able to paint a wide canvas, filling in his characters at the pace and the style of his choosing. This proves to be a fairly successful technique that affords the reader a blend of both the intimate and the removed, the soulful and the dispassionate, as we revisit the harshness of Nazi Germany and life beneath its yoke.

Despite the grimness of its setting, The Book Thief is populated by warm characters who, though they possess different motivations and occupations, share in a common desire to endure, as best they can, this life as they know it. Kindness, faithfulness and generosity from the commonfolk stand in stark contrast to the uncaring mercilessness of the Nazi machine which does its best to feed them into its voracious maw. Most everyone in Liesel's orbit exhibits a desire to protect what they have and to forge ahead despite the nightmare in which they've found themselves. Liesel, meanwhile, takes that stoicness a step further, repeatedly placing herself in danger to aid those that society has deemed unworthy. For her, kindness does not stem from pamphlets or marches. It flows from deeds, a truth she does not forget despite her own thievery.

Despite its engaging themes which ask us to contemplate both the ascendent good and the inescapable bad of humanity, The Book Thief is ultimately a disappointment that failed to hold my interest. Liesel's combativeness is, at times, engrossing, as is the sweetness of her foster father who will stop at nothing to make her dreams come true. But these virtues cannot make up for the slow, grinding relentlessness of the plot which fails to come to anything like a culmination. Our protagonists are merely presented with incident after incident, moment after moment, challenge after challenge, and asked to react to them. And so, when the novelty of Death-as-character wears off after the first few chapters, we're left with a monotonous journey that leads nowhere. This is a work animated by a wonderful idea that, for all its potence, lacks the power to carry 500 pages on its own.

At times fascinating and touching, but too much of a slog to be laudatory... (3/5 Stars)

The depths of human endurance explored in Moorehead's A Train in Winter

From The Week of February 18, 2013
As much as we plan out our lives, the colleges we attend, the jobs we want, the people we attach ourselves to, control over our futures is nothing more than an illusion. For while some of us may have the fortune of executing their plans without incident, others have their hopes and dreams shattered by circumstances beyond their mastery: car accidents and pink slips, assaults and terminal illnesses. These are not foreseeable pitfalls. They are unanticipatable traps that, when sprung, have the power to devastate not just our lives, but the lives of those we love. And if they cannot be avoided, then they can happen to any of us, at any time, dreams broken on the altars of powers beyond our command and our imagination. This decidedly grim theme runs right through Ms. Moorehead's engaging, if bleak, micro history.

The year is 1940 and Europe is exploding into war. The French army has been humiliated by the German Wehrmacht which has subsequently blitzkrieged its way all the way to Paris. There, aided by a puppet government and the collaborative French police, the Third Reich establishes France as a civilized German territory, using its absolute power to slowly roust France's Jews, communists and other dissidents from places of authority. At first, the arrests lead only to imprisonment, but as the war progresses, the Third Reich reaches for a more permanent solution for those who it considers dead weight. Undesirables are taken from their homes and their workplaces and packed into trains which relocate them to brutal concentration camps in which these unfortunates suffer an unimaginable combination of humiliation and forced labor that not only takes the lives of millions, but reduces the survivors to but shadows of what they were.

Though many of France's key institutions shamefully capitulate to the will of the German occupation, in particular its police forces which pursue Nazi-approved targets with sycophantic zealousness, some lone voices speak out against the gradual dissolution of their country. From academics to laborers, these brave souls organize a resistance which endeavors to both disrupt Nazi operations in France and carve a path for a revival of the French army under Charles de Gaulle. Men and women band together to write speeches and create pamphlets, to pool cash and plot attacks, designed to advance the cause of a free France. However, before many of their schemes can come to fruition, the French police attack these dissident networks, making mass arrests of their own countrymen who are in turn deported to Germany deathcamps. These are their stories, of resistance and survival, of degradation and regret.

Though at times relentlessly tragic, A Train in Winter is an unforgettable examination of the French resistance and all that its members suffered at the hands of both the Nazis and the Vichy government. Focusing in particular on a group of young, sympathetic French women who wrote speeches and distributed pamphlets for the movement, Ms. Moorehead captures the essence of the resister. For to be such is to embrace a life of sacrifice, to put above ones own self-interest the rights and freedoms of a nation, and to pay for these beliefs with blood and servitude. Many of the women did not enter the resistance expecting to be captured and killed, but they knew these were possibilities. And yet, instead of standing by, instead of taking the easy path, these individuals chose to risk their precious lives for a future they held in their hearts. Moreover, they did so knowing that they stood to lose not only their lives, but the health and safety of their loved ones, spouses, parents, even sons and daughters.

But though the stories of the women Ms. Moorehead has singled out here are interesting enough, her work ascends to the truly mesmerizing when it chronicles the depravities and the spinelessness of the collaborators. Every occupying force needs them. For no land can be understood and operated without them. And so every occupier incentivizes men and women in key positions to keep their jobs and do their work, placing them into an ethical bind that is by no means easy to escape. But the degree to which these collaborators performed their tasks, oftentimes going above and beyond the call of duty simply to exercise their power, or, worse, to impress their masters, is as startling as it is revolting. The lives of hundreds, if not thousands, of brave souls who sacrificed all for their country were ruined by men and women bent on self-preservation at all costs, making a Faustian bargain with the Nazis for which, sadly, they never had to adequately pay.

As a history of a particular group of women, Ms. Moorehead's tale leaves a lot to be desired. She is too often interested in hailing their virtues, in celebrating their bond, than in truly examining their lives. Moreover, most of these events are now nearly 70 years in the past, making details decidedly blurrier than they appear here. However, as an exemplar of the triumphs and perils of the resisters, as a chronicle of Nazi cruelty and as an enduring statement about the nature of endurance in the face of unimaginable degradation, this is admirable work. Well worth the read... (3/5 Stars)x

Hirohito by Herbert P. Bix

From The Week of August 06, 2012

Self-delusion is a remarkable and underrepresented aspect of human nature. For it has the capacity to convince us that we are right when we are wrong, righteous when we are sinning, strong when we are weak. In an effort to ease the pain of the cognitive dissonance we experience every time we compare our actions to our morals, self-delusion sands down the rough edges until our two worldviews, the internal and the external, are once again in harmony. But of course, this way lies disaster. For eventually, after the internal has had its way with the external, our conception of the world is so far out of step with how things actually are that calamitous mistakes are inevitable. We have lost all perspective. And with that goes any hope of relating to anyone of consequence, much less anyone we care about. For the powerless, this is simply pitiable, but for the powerful, for those in whom society invests authority, the consequences can be disastrous. Mr. Bix demonstrates in this lengthy, scholarly biography.

The child of centuries old Japanese nobility, emperor Hirohito stood at a vital crossroads in 20th century history. Born in 1902, he was trained from the cradle to not only be the imperial ruler of an emerging world power, but to be a man of the military, to be disciplined, to be regimented, to be efficient. But more than a leader, more than a man invested by his people and their government with an authority second only to fascist dictators like Hitler and Mussolini, Hirohito was thought by many to be divine, to be a force through whom the will and the superiority of imperial Japan could be made manifest on the world stage. A warrior became the focus of a war machine that had but few rivals in the century's early decades.

With no checks in place to mitigate this unimaginable power, Hirohito used it. He shaped his government to suit his desires; He authorized territorial conquests in Manchuria and China, looking the other way when his soldiers committed abominable war crimes; he even bid that war be declared on world powers like the United States, heedless of his military's own assessments that Japan would be overmatched in such a conflict. He did all this while endorsing the very culture that kept him in power, believing in the conceit that he understood both his place in history and his family's position in his country's destiny. Such hubris drove his empire into ruin, causing the deaths of millions of soldiers in war and hundreds of thousands of citizens in the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It destroyed the Japanese economy, ended imperial rule and directly lead to the American occupation of Japan. It lead to the end of the world that his family had so carefully imagined and that his supporters had so imprudently endorsed. It created a new Japan.

However, as Mr. Bix argues in this, his exhaustive biography of the last true emperor of japan, Hirohito himself escaped the consequences of his actions with only a few moderate wounds. He had to surrender his power and take up a largely ceremonial role in Japanese culture. He had to sit by and watch his country be transformed into a democracy. And he had to swallow the humiliating concessions made to japan's reformer, the United States. There would be no war crimes trial for Hirohito. For he was useful to japan's masters in Washington, Americans who, ignorant of Japanese culture, would invariably blunder in the country's westernization. He could glue the nation together while it was reborn into a new form, a new state.

This usefulness, contends Mr. Bix, lead to the suppression of Hirohito's role in WWII and the events that preceded it. Instead of the mastermind, Hirohito had been the victim of a militarized state. He was held captive by the influence of bellicose forces within Japan's government which foolishly sought out a war with the west. He was helpless to prevent the inevitable and destructive outcome. Perhaps, as the decades accumulated, he even believed this notion. But Mr. Bix does not. Arguing against the tide of popular opinion, he calls upon government records and the accounts of Hirohito's contemporaries to paint a different portrait of the man, one consistent with what we know of human nature, that power is corrupting, that to use it is destructive, and that to relinquish it is impossible. The idea that a man invested with ultimate authority refused to deploy that authority goes against everything we know about man and of Hirohito.

This is fascinating work. There can be no doubt that Mr. Bix has strongly held views on the role Hirohito played during WWII. But his scholarship and his willingness to declare his position on the matter, openly and honestly, lends his work here credibility. There's perhaps too much attention paid to the machinations of Japanese politics in the 1920s and 30s which must have been bewildering even then. But he nonetheless leaves us with a captivating portrait of a fascinating man who deserves both our pity, for the extent to which he was born into a life he could never change, and our scorn, for not rising above the world around him to be a visionary for his country. An intriguing study of a powerful man in a turbulent time... (3/5 Stars)

The Sunflower by Simon Wiesenthal

From The Week of May 28, 2012

Forgiveness is a powerful and vexing pursuit. For to forgive is, in a critical sense, to absolve, to wipe clean the slate of past wrongs in hopes of normalizing relations between perpetrators and victims. Considering that, by and large, more is gained from friendship than from enmity, such a normalization is beneficial to both sides, draining from an emotional wound that ugliest of poisons which harden our hearts and calcify our grudges.

Such logic, however, depends upon the perpetrator being, to some degree, sane. It depends upon him grasping the incentive not to wrong in the future. It depends upon the wrong not reaching the level of the heinous. For how can we forgive the unforgivable? How can we allow our most wicked crimes to be absolved with but a few heartfelt words? Are some sins not too grievous, too nihilistic, for forgiveness? Mr. Wiesenthal compellingly ruminates on this question in this short but moving work.

The year is 1943 and much of Europe is awash in war. Though Nazi Germany has recently endured two decisive defeats in their efforts to conquer Great Britain and Russia, their ubermensch war machine churns relentlessly onward in hopes of realizing its Fuhrer's dreams for an Aryan world. In the path of that terrible destiny stands Simon Wiesenthal, a young, European Jew, whose life is irrevocably altered when he is condemned to unimaginable deprivations in the Lemberg concentration camp for no better reason than he is Jewish.

While at the camp, as he and his fellows suffer, Mr. Wiesenthal is approached by a nurse who leads him to a wounded Nazi soldier. Over an afternoon, the blinded warrior describes, to Mr. Wiesenthal, the circumstances and the tragedies that lead him to this moment, asking, at the culmination of his tale, for the Jewish man's forgiveness. Struggling with this burden, Mr. Wiesenthal solicits the opinions of others in the camp, agonizing over his responsibilities in a matter both consequential and insignificant. After all, one soldier's appeal for forgiveness does not absolve the Nazis. And yet, is it not a key piece of information in the understanding of how this horror came about and how it can be made right in the future? Haunted, Mr. Wiesenthal is liberated from the camp and seeks out the soldier's mother, in hopes of finding some cruelty there that will ease his conscience, but when she only has sadness and regret to offer him, his search must go on.

The Sunflower is a momentous and disturbing search for the truth to an unanswerable question. What are the limits of forgiveness? Harnessing the malevolent energies of perhaps the worst, most systemic crime in human history, Mr. Wiesenthal, a man who would eventually become a noted hunter of Nazis, confronts the notion that forgiveness might well be too small, too soft for crimes against humanity. For when faced with a collaboration of men and women intent upon the arbitrary extermination of a people, what can be gained by forgiveness? What future is there after the apologies are made and closure found? The dead remain. The atrocities remain. History cannot be undone, nor paved over. Some stains cannot out.

And yet, there must be an end sometime. The burdens conveyed by such wicked crimes must be laid down. For to clutch close such pain is to allow ones life to continue to be ensnared by the cruel ideologies that once sought to be dominant in the world. They cannot be forgotten, but nor can they be allowed to rule what time the victim has left. If forgiveness can be a means through which peace can come to the victim, and it seems to me a necessary component to the finding of peace, then it must be granted, if only as a means of smoothing the victim's return to something resembling normality.

As a piece of literature, The Sunflower is intriguingly composed. Divided into two parts, it first relates Mr. Wiesenthal's experience and then answers that with essays from prominent figures who have consumed the story, digested its philosophical nourishment and provided, in turn, their individual answers to his ultimately subjective question. Can one man grant a regime absolution? Does forgiveness even matter in a secularist world? How do we weigh the need to move past horror against our need for justice? All such thorny aspects to this persistent problem are raised and addressed by the luminaries, both light and dark, who speak to Mr. Wiesenthal's brief but telling experience with his wounded captor.

There are no limits to forgiveness. There cannot be. For what has been done cannot be unmade. What has past cannot be rewritten. It is. It must be met, assimilated, and, finally, fatefully, laid to rest. To not forgive is to be consumed by the crime, to extend the suffering conveyed by it. there must be an end.

Moving and provocative work... (4/5 Stars)

Eva Braun by Heike Goertemaker

From The Week of May 28, 2012

From chiefs to presidents, from visionaries to celebrities, humans have always responded to strong leaders. A consequence of our hierarchical coding that demands we cohere around powerful personalities, we have allowed them to create our culture, establish our social norms and organize our governments. We have let them inspire us to be better and we have permitted them to terrify us into committing to ruinous war. For good and ill, we remember them better and longer than anyone else, their potent legacies handed down to us through fables, a gallery of giants with lessons to teach. But what attracts us to these luminaries of history? What gives them the power to compel our fealty? Surely it is more than a quirk of evolution that allows them to master us and imprint upon us their ideas for a glorious future. Of all such figures, few have been responsible for more horror and more fascination than Adolf Hitler. This is the history of the woman who followed him unto death.

The product of a seamstress and a schoolteacher, Eva Braun was born and raised in tumultuous times. Germany, an empire at her birth, collapsed, during her adolescence, into a doomed republic burdened by hyperinflation and the punitive reparations the Treaty of Versailles compelled it to grant to victorious France. This scarred and defeated country was the place of Braun's formative years, a giant brought to its knees by trickery and betrayal. Or this was at least the palatable fiction pedaled by Hitler and his Nazis, a movement comprised of proud and angry men who could not stand to abide the notion that mighty Germany could have been vanquished in war fair and square.

Fascinated by photography, Eva Braun fell in with this vehement crowd in 1929 when she was hired on by the National Socialist's official photographer. By 1933, she was not only committed to the cause, she had graduated to Hitler's inner circle of confidantes, rejecting the moderation of her parents to become a creature comfort to a dictator at the age of 21. Deploying the real threat of suicide as a means of binding herself to the standoffish Fuhrer, Braun eventually became Hitler's most loyal supplicant, willing to keep herself clear of his public life if only he would share with her his private one. The mutual bond grew throughout World War II until, finally, when all other hope for victory was gone, they married in the rubble of Berlin, at the heart of a world annihilated by their actions.

Eva Braun is fascinating work. Dismissing the popular notion that female Nazis were merely dragged along in the wake of their powerful husbands, Ms. Goertemaker constructs a portrait of Eva Braun that leaves little doubt that Hitler's only wife was devoted to both her man and his cause. Successfully placing Braun at key meetings throughout the war, the author convincingly argues that Braun was in a better position than most to understand the extent of the devastation her lover was visiting upon the world. Moreover, it is clear that it was well within Braun's powers to reject the ugliness into which she'd happily sold herself. That she refused to do so, that she contentedly and knowledgeably followed him into death sets up, for the reader, the age-old question of immoral leadership.

Do electrifying leaders use their innate charisma to compel their followers to abandon reason for cruelty and war, or do the followers themselves enchant their leader with the very charisma they then credit him for bewitching them with? Does the monster make himself, or is he the gestalt of the pain, the suffering and the wounded pride of all his creators? Eva Braun is a case study for the latter for Ms. Goertemaker leaves little doubt that the young woman was like the millions of fellow Germans who joined the Nazi party, desperate to believe in something and someone who could erase their degradation, who could give them work, and who could imbue them with worldly purpose. It did not matter if the result of sewing this corrupted seed would be a blighted crop. All that mattered was the restoration of what should have always been.

Ms. Goertemaker adopts an academic's scholarly remove to narrate the history of a woman at the center of a fascinating time. Her account suffers somewhat from a lack of correspondence that would have allowed us to hear Braun's own voice, but the author fills in the silhouette of her subject with the backgrounds of relevant figures with whom she interacted, using their biased opinions to help complete the image of a youthful woman utterly devoted to her man. (3/5 Stars)

Hedy's Folly by Richard Rhodes

From The Week of February 06, 2011

For some, life is a constant struggle between internal aspirations and external expectations, between what we want and what others want us to be. Customarily, these expectations flow from our parents who understandably infuse us with their own biases and beliefs. But for some famous few, they extend out to society as a whole which, seizing upon our talent at a game, a pursuit, a school of thought, compels us to do what they would have us be. No matter how much external pressure is applied to us, we have our own wishes. It does not automatically follow that being good at something means that it must become our life's aim. Sometimes the heart desires a different challenge, a different destiny, one which the world would, for reasons of bias, rather deny us. This is precisely the difficulty Hedy Lamarr faced throughout her long life. And though she never entirely overcame it, she ensured that history will remember her for that which she was most proud.

Born in Vienna to middleclass Jewish parents, Hedy Lamarr lived a long and fascinating life. Possessing a keen mind and a famous beauty, she was a willful adolescent transfixed by the arts. Initially a stage actress, at seventeen, she graduated to work in film at which time she performed her most infamous role as Eva in Ecstasy, a 1933 film made controversial by sexual content which, though tame by modern standards, was salacious for 1930s Europe. Her fame and beauty -- she was once declared to be the most beautiful woman alive -- earned her attention from one of Austria's wealthiest men, but marriage never appeared to suit Ms. Lamarr and she broke the arrangement to emigrate to the United States where, within a few years, she was one of Hollywood's brightest stars.

Never comfortable with being perceived as a beauty, Ms. Lamarr was given a chance to express her more intellectual talents when, with the onset of World War II, she and George Antheil, a film scorer, developed a new technique for frequency hopping which they patented and sent off to the Navy in hopes that it would be used to improve the remote control of American torpedos. The technique, which later became a cornerstone for wireless technology, was ignored by the US Armed Forces and shelved for decades before fresh eyes and opened minds in the 1960s and 70s returned it to academic prominence where, in subsequent years, it became the bedrock for many of the devices we use today.

Hedy's Folly is a slim but powerful biography of a remarkable woman. Though, for fans of Ms. Lamarr, the book contains few revelations, Mr. Rhodes, an award-winning historian, succeeds in interweaving her story with the even lesser known George Antheil to create a portrait of two inventive souls who, troubled by war and yearning for recognition, strove to create an achievement of the mind for which they could be proud. Though denied timely recognition, the extent to which their ideas helped fuel the technological revolution of the last 20 years ensures that their legacy will far outshine any glory Hollywood has the power to bestow.

As much as Mr. Rhodes pleases with his narrative and as welcome as the recognition might have been for both Lamarr and Antheil, the work's strongest virtue is the degree to which it exposes us to the minds of inventors. We live in a cultural age that venerates individuals. From Steve Jobs to Warren Buffett, from Bill Gates to George Soros, we are in awe of and marvel at the accomplishments of once ordinary men and women who shattered the rules of the game of life by shaping the world instead of being shaped by it. Consequently, we've become enamored with their stories and the secrets to their success, hopeful that, if we mine their wisdom long enough, some measure of their brilliance will rub off on us. Perhaps it will. Perhaps we can learn from them. Perhaps not all of their success is due to being in the right place at the right time. But such believers will find little comfort here for Hedy's Folly strongly suggests that inventiveness is a quality with which only some of us are blessed, that it cannot be bestowed like a gift. It is not reducible to an equation. It is the capacity to make intuitive connections that open up previously unconsidered avenues of thought. Sobering to say the least.

Quick and engaging work. Ms. Lamarr deserves to be remembered as a pioneer of our world. this volume certainly helps to make this a reality. (3/5 Stars)

Far to Go by Alison Pick

From The Week of January 30, 2012

Though, as a world, we've come some way to restricting state power, it remains a potent force that can easily become pernicious when it is not checked by robust opposition. For with a few, clever manipulations, the state can tap into its people's worst fears, stoke them, inflame them, and then harness and shape the resulting anger into a blowtorch of violence and destruction, a righteous weapon that can be deployed against anyone foolish enough to stand in its way. Not only has this curse of nationalism been extensively discussed in countless works, its results are still visible in the ghost-filled battlefields of western Europe where two such bloody, propagandist wars were fought just in the last hundred years. Less visible, though, are the individual wounds inflicted by such conflicts, the costs, to families and their offspring, that are born in silent misery. It is to these small-scale pains to which we turn in Far to Go, the suffering of a single family who stand in for so many. It is a matter on which Ms. Pick speaks with passion and clarity.

The year is 1939 and, though Neville Chamberlain believes he has bargained with Hitler for "peace in our time," he has, in reality, purchased a few months of quiet at the cost of millions of souls. For in exchange for this brief respite, England has agreed to look the other way while Nazi Germany gobbles up Czechoslovakia and the Sudetenland, territories it considers German by dint of the ethnically German populations who live there. Though this is notionally true of at least a portion of the population, these territories consider themselves free actors, imbued with their own traditions and councils, cultures and notions. They are proud to be who and what they are. The prospect of being annexed by a fascist Germany, and having all that they know overturned, is as terrifying as it is inevitable.

Pavel Bauer is a proud Czechoslovakian who, until the coming of the Nazis, never thought much about his Jewish heritage. He filled his days with family and the operation of his successful factory which earned him a comfortable, quiet existence. But as the Third Reich descends upon him and his country, Pavel, for all his wisdom, spirit and kindness, is no more able to defend himself than his country. Abandoned by France and England, Pavel and his country are forced into a succession of humiliating retreats: armies absorbed, factories repurposed, Jews disenfranchised. Eventually, faced with betrayal on all sides, Pavel flees to Prague, attempting to plan an escape for his young family, but doom seems to stalk his every step and not even the love of a good woman can keep the Damoclesian sword from descending upon him and the country he loves so much.

Longlisted for the 2011 Man Booker Prize, Far to Go is a stunning novel. Told from the perspective of the Bauer's tender-hearted nanny, it is an exquisitely detailed reconstruction of everyday life in the midst of apocalyptic disaster. For the Bauers are witnessing nothing less than the end of everything they know. Though Ms. Pick succeeds in vividly reconstructing Czechoslovakia during World War II, crafting a cast of believable characters and embedding them in the midst of that nation's tragic circumstances, her genius truly shines in the extent to which she details the individual efforts of the Bauers to fend off the darkness. Holding onto his pride and his decency, Pavel tries to be stoic in the face of Nazi degradations, to endure their fists, their words and their deeds with silent courage that gets him nowhere. Meanwhile, his far more pragmatic wife, Anneliese, while fragile and emotionally remote, yields to the inevitable and tries to bargain with it in hopes of earning leniency. Together, they are the portrait of a marriage in war.

But as much as this is Pavel's story, Marta, the tale's narrator and the nanny to the Bauer's young son, is Ms. Pick's greatest success. Having never known her mother, and having been forced to bear the unwelcome attentions of her father, she is a damaged but lovely creature in a constant but silent search for love. Her life experiences tell her that she is too dirty to be the object of such pure emotion, to be the center of someone else's world, and so she is plagued by doubts that manifest in bouts of destructive self-sabotage. Nonetheless, she tries and in this we are witness to an achingly delicate girl trying to become a loved woman in one of our world's ugliest times. She is as exquisite in her sadness as she is beautiful in her gentle bravery.

Ms. Pick has a painter's eye for detail and a poet's emotional gravitas. Together, they have produced a novel as powerful as it is quiet. Rarely has war's devastation been writ small so well. (5/5 Stars)

Kokoda by Paul Ham

From The Week of January 23, 2012

For humans, war should hold no surprises. It has been perpetrated so often, with such ferocity, that we ought to be quite familiar with the depths of its depravity. And yet, there are crimes of war so dark, both in the ordering and in the executing, that they shock even the most hardened cynics and leave them fearing for what will become of us. Of these shamefully numerous incidents, the Kokoda Campaign was one of the worst. This is Mr. Ham's lively and opinionated account of its many sins.

In July 1942, during the darkest hours of World War II, the Japanese Imperial Army, seeking to cut Australia off from its allies, landed and occupied the island of Papua New Guinea, then an Australian possession. If Japan could hold and utilize the island, it would not only have a friendly base from which to launch attacks against shipping and naval interests, it would have a platform from which to begin an invasion of Australia itself. Having never seriously faced such an existential threat to its sovereignty, and with its military assets all-but-entirely deployed elsewhere, at the behest of and under the command of the British Empire, Australia was, to say the least, ill-prepared for this dark reality. A force would have to be hurriedly assembled, armed and hurled into the breach in hopes of buying the country time to recall its regular troops from their distant theatres and re-deploy them at home.

Thus, without training, and often without even the basic necessities of combat, the 39th battalion was scraped together, thrown onto Papua New Guinea and ordered into some of the most forbidding mountains in the region. There, for the next six months, they engaged with and halted the advance of the Japanese Imperial Army, some of the most supremely trained and ideologically driven soldiers in the world. Imbued by the divinity of their emperor and sworn never to retreat, let alone be captured, their thousands should have swiftly overwhelmed the mongrel force of Australians slapped together to impede them. Yet, in battle after battle, skirmish after skirmish, the stubborn defenders resisted, often with their lives, forcing the Japanese to pay dearly for the ground they won, lost, won again, and finally, fatefully, relinquished. For not even the fabled will of the Japanese soldier could withstand months at war without food, without home, and without hope of victory, not against a resilient foe able to resupply, recharge and replenish its forces.

As powerful as it is scathing, Kokoda is both a detailed history of a crucial WWII battle and a stinging indictment of those who orchestrated it. For as much as Mr. Ham, an Australian-born journalist and historian, celebrates the willpower and the tenacity of the belligerents to endure any hardship in the achievement of their goals, he does not allow more than a handful of pages to pass, in his lengthy account, without condemning the pigheadedness and pugnaciousness of the leaderships that ordered it. Though the author castigates both sides for the extent to which they worsened the suffering of the men under their command, he saves most of his bitter fire for the Australian brass which, but for a few beleaguered lights, is almost universally portrayed as a collection of selfish and stubborn politicians, more interested in promotions and medals than in the health of their men. In this, there is no doubt that Mr. Ham's sympathies lie firmly with the soldiers who fought fiercely and died horribly in a most terrible war.

Mr. Ham is a talented author. Though his narrative occasionally digresses into the lives and the quirks of figures somewhat peripheral to the Kokoda campaign, his vivid depictions of the ugliness of war, his psychological profiles of the men who prosecuted it, and his revealing portrayals of the politicians who oversaw the whole mess infuse his history with energy, authenticity and gravitas. He leaves no hero unheralded nor villain unscorned in an attempt to frame what must have been one of the most difficult chapters of a long and costly war. Excellent if grim work. (4/5 Stars)

Exorcising Hitler by Frederick Taylor

From The Week of January 09, 2011

Sadly, humans are experts in war. Over millennia, we have honed it into an art, a science, a pastime. Its prosecution has spawned as many feuds as it has founded cultural institutions and codes of honor which venerate its practice, to our cost. But as damaging as war can be -- just a glance at the 20th century is confirmation enough --, its legacy is even more powerful. For the more that we wrap ourselves in the honor of our flags, the more we link our self-esteem to the strength of our national institutions, the less we can accept defeat. Someone must have betrayed us, mislead us, tricked us. We could not have been vanquished from the battlefield any other way. We are the best; everyone tells us so.

This is a dangerous mindset. For as soon as defeat is assured, excuses are generated, excuses that flower into grievances, grievances that mature into fantasies of revenge. We've only to look at the ethnic conflicts in the Balkans or the cultural ones in the Middle East to see the damage wrought by this most vicious cycle. So how can we stop it ? How can a violent country be defeated and pacified without inspiring rancor, hate and recrimination? Mr. Taylor asks as much in this treatise on post-Nazi Germany. His answers are compelling.

Long before Germany's destruction ended the Second World War in Europe, the world was aware of the extensive program of social engineering being conducted in that most proud and ancient country. Hitler, capitalizing on German pride, on the scarcity of jobs, on the plundering of national resources, and on the slights of the French, had, for 20 years, been inculcating Germans with his revanchist anger. Their historic defeat in World War I was a betrayal. For the greatest nation on Earth, populated by the greatest people in human history, could not be brought low by any coalition of inferiors. And even if the defeat was deserved, which it wasn't, the Treaty of Versailles, in which the French took advantage of a weakened Germany to attack her industry and confiscate her land, was unjust. These ideas, which found fertile soil in a starving, struggling Germany, catalyzed a revisionist revolution which culminated in the rise of Hitler to power, the implementation of his fascist ideas, and the destruction of German opposition to what would become some of the most murderous government policies in history.

Hitler was wrong of course. He was wrong about the war; he was wrong about Germany. Not that it mattered... In seeking to provide for the German people a salve for their pride, he gave them a license to hate. He institutionalized racism and a sense of superiority that promised to sustain the war, if only in the hearts of defeated Germans, long after his death. Understanding this better than they understood Hitler's Nazi threat, the Allies, exhausted by war, set upon a bold and difficult course. Germany had to be rebuilt, culturally, economically, fiscally. It had to be made aware of its sins, but not punished for them. For to do that would be to trigger yet another cycle of conflict no one could afford. In covering the trials and tribunals, the policies and the textbooks, the politicians and their constituencies, Mr. Taylor describes the myriad ways in which the Allies reformed German society in hopes of bleeding the poison from its wounds and restoring it to what they considered health.

Exorcising Hitler is a powerful history of postwar Germany. Though Mr. Taylor focuses too much on the immediate aftermath of Germany's defeat, banishing to his epilogue the cultural transformation that took place in subsequent decades, the extent to which he meticulously reconstructs the Nazi culture and juxtaposes it with the suffering of the defeated Germans is as informative as it is gripping. The author summons both startling statistics and painful first-hand accounts which demonstrate not only the German desire to believe in Hitler's revisionist narrative, but the lengths to which they were willing to go to actualize it. In this, Mr. Taylor is as successful in presenting a convincing case for how Germans were indoctrinated as he is in describing how the Allies tried, successfully and otherwise, to peacefully encourage Germany back into the fold of nations.

For all the work's successes, I am troubled by the extent to which Mr. Taylor downplays the cultural reforms of later decades. In choosing to focus on the immediate aftermath of the war, he has emphasized the Allied role in reforming Germany. And though their wisdom should certainly be credited for helping that proud nation restore itself, Germans themselves are solely responsible for revisiting the root sins of their own culture. They changed their worldview, not the Allies. Thus, when Mr. Taylor confines these reforms to a few dozen pages at the end of his 400-plus-page chronicle, he is deemphasizing Germany's contribution to its remarkable turnaround.

Though it suffers for abbreviating the equally important reforms of later decades, reforms that Germans undertook themselves, This is a thorough account of a difficult and complex time. Wonderful if unbalanced work. (3/5 Stars)

Lisbon by Neil Lochery

From The Week of January 02, 2012

Though every great war begins with clear grievances, slights that, at the time, seem worthy of instigating conflict, they all evolve beyond their origins and into a fight to decide winners and losers. After all, each faction fighting the war has had to invest immense resources into its prosecution, sacrifices for which they will want compensation. And no one compensates losers. This is why morality is an inevitable casualty of war. Eventually, winning is all that matters. And this can have as devastating an impact on the countries outside a conflict as on those within it.

Great wars have no honorable neutrals. If you are not for one side then you are against it, a slight that will be remembered when it comes time to divvy up the spoils and to execute grievances. Neutrals must then choose the right side, but how? And on what terms? As a neutral, Portugal was forced to make such choices during the Second World War. This is Mr. Lochery's reconstruction of that tense and troubled time.

During World War II (1939-1945), Portugal was, politically, a dictatorship. Its ruler, Antonio Salazar, was a ruthless intellectual whose legendary discipline and work ethic helped to steer his country through the war's turbulent waters. Initially sympathetic to the Axis powers, Mr. Lochery describes how Salazar, a hater of Communism, eventually saw the Allies as the only force capable of repelling it from Europe, an understanding which helped sway his sympathies away from the fascist forces ravaging continental Europe. But as much as the pendulum of Salazar's allegiance swung back and forth,over those six, chaotic years, his desire to keep tiny but militarily vital Portugal out of the war never wavered. And in this, despite Lisbon being a neutral city frequented by enemy agents from both sides, despite the immense pressures from the Allies and the Axis powers alike, he succeeded, keeping the terrible cost of conflict from his sundrenched shores.

As much as this is a biography of Antonio Salazar, the man who was essentially the government of Portugal before, during and after the war, it is also the history of a neutral country attempting to sail through the storm of a global war. Mr. Lochery devotes as much time to the economic and social pressures troubling Portugal during this period as he does portraying the dictator who tried to manage them. Lisbon, a city of light, is described as a spy-laden, prostitute-filled tumult, a neutral marketplace for allies and Axis agents alike to comingle, to scheme and to agitate for the betterment of their side. In this, the author reveals war's impact on the innocent, its temptations for the avaricious, and its tendency to constrict the freedoms of the masses.

Lisbon is gripping work. Most histories of war center on its antagonists, not those who stand on its sidelines. rightfully so; for the action, and thus the events that shape war's outcome, are generally with war's prosecutors, not its onlookers. Neutral nations are scorned by both sides as weak and nervous, countries lacking conviction and courage. Mr. Lochery counters that view by pointing out the economic costs that befall small countries when they back the wrong side and are punished for their sins by the victors. For his courage and strength of will, to defy the greatest men of his era, Antonio Salazar should be complimented.

However, the sins of a dictator cannot be swept so cleanly under the poverbial rug. Mr. Lochery soft-sells Salazar's crimes, downplaying their importance in the context of the war. And perhaps he's right. Perhaps Salazar's personal crimes are nothing next to the ravages of war that would have tormented Portugal had he allowed it to enter WWII. But crimes are still crimes. Diminishing them in ones narrative gives the reader the impression that they've been overblown, or that they do not matter. Truth is truth.

To the extent that Mr. Lochery captures the unique pressures applied to neutrals in war, this is outstanding work. The author goes a long way to rightfully redeeming their honor. Neutrality is not, as many would suggest, synonymous with cowardice. But for all that, Lisbon reads like a Salazar apologia which is hard to swallow considering his crimes. Fascinating work... (4/5 Stars)

Quartered Safe Out Here by George Macdonald Fraser

From The Week of October 31, 2011

War is so costly a weapon, in lives and coin, that it must only be used when all else has failed. For war is an insidious crime that runs longer and cuts deeper than its instigators ever imagine, scarring the world with its pain and ugliness. But even though we all, to some extent, understand these truths, war persists because acuteness of its cruelty fades with time, allowing populations to forget its harsh lessons. This is why we read war memoirs, to remind us of what has come and gone and of those who suffered in the embrace of that most destructive of human inventions. Unfortunately, in every way, Quartered Safe Out Here is incapable of teaching us anything.

Mr. Fraser, a British author and screenwriter, here, reflects upon his time in the British infantry during the second world war. Stationed in Burma, he vividly details the unromantic side of war: the suffocating conditions, the endless marches, the chaotic battles and the blessings of fortune which distinguish the living from the dead. Contesting the British forces in this inhospitable land are the soldiers of the Japanese Imperial Army who, in their dogged determination and their suicidal bravery, earn both Fraser's grudging respect and his burning enmity. For many of their deadly traps and their bullets have found the flesh of his friends, striking them down far away from home, in a theatre of battle halfway forgotten by a world seemingly exclusively focused on the dramatic collapse of the third Reich. Even while Germany is surrendering and Paris is being liberated, the war grinds on in the east until, with some relish, Fraser observes the capitulation of the Japanese after their homeland becomes the first in the history of humanity to be devastated by nuclear weapons.

Though Quartered Safe Out Here harbors some wisdom regarding the everyday deprivations confronted by soldiers fighting far from home, it is, in every other respect, a contemptible memoir. Published some 50 years after the events it describes, it is full of long and detailed conversations between the author and his fellow infantrymen. Everything from politics to the age-old complaints of soldiering are covered in discussions which the author appears to remember with exquisite clarity even though he had no way of recording them for posterity. His unwillingness to so much as caution the reader on the authenticity of these conversations drains his account of credibility.

Worse, though, is Mr. Fraser's unwillingness to bestow even a gram of validity upon any viewpoint but his own. Not only is he dismissive of those who were critical of the United States' use of nuclear weapons -- would they have rather hundreds of thousands of western soldiers die taking Japan? --, he exposes himself as a hopeless fossil by decrying the extent to which the modern culture is in touch with its feelings. Soldiers of Mr. Fraser's day complained, sure, but they didn't need to see psychiatrists. They did not suffer from PTSD. They did their jobs because these were the tasks before them, the routines assigned to them. They did not blubber like babies; they accomplished their goals. They were real men, living in a better time. Such boastful blather not only ignores the heavier, psychological burden placed upon the modern soldier who, more often than not, is fighting an unconventional war, it assumes that 50 years of advancements in the understanding of the human mind is nothing more than an attempt to weaken man's indomitable spirit. This is backward-thinking nonsense from someone clearly incapable of adapting with changing times.

Some engaging moments centering on the poignancy of war, but has very little else to recommend it. A thorough disappointment from a narrow mind... (1/5 Stars)

Death In The City of Light by David King

From The Week of October 10, 2011

The vast majority of humans are decent, lawful souls. After all, were it otherwise, civilization would have never coalesced. Humanity would be characterized by discord, a vortex of murderous chaos out of which nothing of order could possibly cohere. That we experience civilization on a daily basis tells us that most of us form families, follow the rules and put ourselves to productive work in an effort to build rather than destroy. But for as many of us as there are, the othersstill exist, minds so unhinged from the laws of our shared reality that subordination to them is out of the question. Many of even these anomalies are harmless, persisting around the edges of our world, content in themselves, but some bend their wills to desires and deeds so violent, so cruel, that they threaten to destabilize our reality, pulling it down into the darkness that has already consumed them. Of these deeds, surely none are darker than those perpetrated by Marcel Petiot.

Mr. King, whose potent pen gave the world a vivid biography of the Congress of Vienna, here, investigates the life and crimes of Dr. Marcel Petiot (1897-1946) who, during the Nazi occupation of Paris (1940-1944), capitalized on the chaos of a destabilized country to sadistically murder at least 26people. A doctor by education and a politician by trade, Petiot, in a scheme worthy of Nazi depravity, let it be known that, for a fee, he could help Jews, and other beleaguered citizens, flee the German occupation. In exchange for exorbitant sums, Petiot would secure his clients safe passage out of the country and fresh identities in the lands of their choosing. However, despite the hopes of their families, Petiot's victims never left Paris.

Petiot, under the guise of inoculating his escapees against viruses they could encounter in the new world, euthanized his clients and, from a hiding place in his chamber of death, watched them pass from this world. In this way, he is suspected to have claimed as many as 60 victims, among them women and children.

Death In The City of Lightis the meticulous reconstruction of Petiot, his troubled life, his tangled motivations, his intricate and endless lies and his spectacular trial which culminated in his execution. In-between,Mr. King introduces us to Paris, her hedonism during the interwar period and her pain during the Nazi occupation. Drafting in famous philosophers and resistance fighters, the author demonstrates how the desperation of the period brought about many crimes, but none as heinous as those committed by the clever and erratic Petiot who, up until his death, steadfastly claimed that his victims were all German and that the bodies discovered on his properties were planted there by his enemies. Not once did Petiot offer the families of his victims any peace or understanding as his flawed trial entertained a postwar Paris struggling to reclaim her dignity.

Mr. King is a commendable historian and a first-rate storyteller. Death In The City of Lightis a 400-page recount of 60-year-old murders that have little bearing on the troubles of the 21st century. This is surely a recipe for boredom. And yet the author's engaging narrative maintains the reader's interest throughout. The only discordant note struck here arises when Mr. King tries to connect Petiot's crimes to the modern day; this is shaky at best. But such is the compelling nature of the piece that it needs no relevance. It is enough to understand the depths to which some of us can sink and the damage that, in doing so, they do to the rest of us.

Gripping and entertaining both. Hopefully, someday, we will better understand the Petiot's of the world and, in doing so, be able to prevent them from doing so much harm. For while most of us can now recognize that evil is just a placeholder for the incomprehensible deeds of the mad, this knowledge does nothing to mitigate the suffering they can cause when unleashed upon an unsuspecting world. (4/5 Stars)

Moral Combat by Michael Burleigh

From The Week of September 12, 2011

For the last sixty years, the West has been taught that World War II was a moral War of good versus evil, of freedom versus totalitarianism, of tolerance versus prejudice. And because we are Westerners, because this narrative flatters our sense of superiority, we have endorsed it as truth. After all, not only have the unspeakable sins of despots like Hitler left us with plenty of evidence to support this self-congratulatory retelling, we had to find some way of psychologically and spiritually justifying the immense cost, in lives and resources, the war's prosecution levied upon the world. Certainly, there is truth in this narrative -- the barbarity of the Axis powers staggers the mind --, but it does not automatically follow that the Allied powers that fought them were noble.

In Moral Combat, Mr. Burleigh, a British historian, investigates the extent to which all of the national combatants in World War II neglected their humanity, carrying out a war that cost the lives of 60 million people and forever reshaped our world. From the bombing of Dresden to the rape of Nanking,His chronicle, coming in at some 650 pages, extensively reconstructs both the war's crimes and their social, political, and ethical consequences. Though the spotlight here is often trained on the atrocities committed by the Nazis and their allies, understandably so given their brutality, the extent to which these crimes have been imprinted upon our collective consciousness by past reconstructions saps them of their punch, especially relative to the underreported crimes of the Allies which Mr. Burleigh relentlessly and thoroughly assembles here. For while countless films, books and stories ensure that we will never forget the Holocaust, how many of us remember that, for want of an ally with which to resist the overwhelming might of Nazi Germany, Winston Churchill, that most venerated leader of World War II, joined forces with the most murderous dictator of the 20th century, Joseph Stalin who, by the time of their alliance, already had the blood of millions staining his hands?

Though Moral Combat lacks the focus and intensity of Bloodlands, its lengthy and fairhanded reconstruction of war crimes during the Second World War is both potent and enlightening. It dismisses the popular narrative declaring WWII a war of good versus evil and replaces it with the more realistic notion of a war of clashing ideologies, democracy versus totalitarianism. And though we might wish to believe otherwise, neither side is able to claim the moral high ground. For as many times as the allies might point to the Death Camps as symbols of Nazi depravity, the Nazis could, if they were here, point to Dresden and the rape and bombing of Berlin as moral crimes the victorious Allies never had to answer for. After all, the defeated foe can hardly set up their own Nuremberg, their own Tokyo.

For all that Moral Combat is vigorous and thorough, Mr. Burleigh fails to draw any conclusions from his research. Though he dispenses with the allied claim of moral superiority, he does not speak to any of the broader themes his research uncovered. His chronicle allows the reader to conclude that war crimes are an inevitable outcome of Total War, that a nation cannot practice Total War without inviting the possibility of equally total destruction, but we never learn if these are the author's conclusions. For other than a handful of sarcastic comments, he is silent on what he has learned. Perhaps he meant this to be an academic text from which his readers must draw their own conclusions, but we read great historians as much for the clarity of their insight as we do for the power of their research. Timothy Snyder did not fail his duty as a historian by opining in Bloodlands. After consuming 650 pages of academic writing, a few of the author's own conclusions is the least the reader can expect.

Interesting and at times provocative, but its flaws leave substantial holes in the end product. (3/5 Stars)

Bloodlands by Timothy Snyder

From The Week of May 15, 2011

History has had its bloody periods, episodes of political, religious, and tyrannical conflict which stain our past. The Terror sparked by the French Revolution, the doctrinal slaughter of the Thirty Years War, and the Killing Fields of Pol Pot all immediately come to mind. But though all such conflicts have, directly or indirectly, impacted civilians, never have so many innocents born the brunt of a more widespread and systematic extermination than that which Germany and the Soviet Union enacted in the years between 1933 and 1945. Mr. Snyder, a professor of history at Yale University, meticulously reconstructs these twelve, gory years and, in doing so, sheds light on crimes both familiar and forgotten.

Though their motives and their methods were quite different, Mr. Snyder estimates Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia to have, together, slaughtered 14 million eastern European non-combatants during this period. Though Stalinist Russia got an early start, enacting a series of disastrous economic policies and cruel political reforms which resulted in the mass-starvation of millions of its own people, many of them in the Ukraine, Hitlerian Germany swiftly caught up and surpassed the Soviet total when World War II ignited their plans to exterminate what they considered to be inferior races, particularly the Slavs and the Jews. In a chilling reconstruction of these unimaginable depravities, Mr. Snyder describes a relentless march of organized killing and its peripheral costs. He begins with the near extinguishing of civilization and civilized humanity in an Ukraine forced into cannibalism and, mercilessly, ends with the grotesqueness of Nazi death camps and starvation plans which tormented Poland and the Soviet Union. His conclusion? That these two nihilistic regimes walked similar paths of tyranny. Their policies brought about catastrophes, the blame for which they aimed straight at their enemies. In doing so, they succeeded in creating a kind of feedback loop in which the more things went wrong, the more they could fan the flames of anger for the enemy, further entrenching themselves in the seats of power.

Bloodlands is a valuable but masochistic read. It describes the consequences of state tyranny and articulates how that tyranny perpetuated itself. However, it takes the reader on an implacable tour of some of the grimmest scenes in human history. There seems, at times, no end to the existential slaughter, no reprieve from the cruelty of men who largely escaped the consequences of their terrible actions. But for as challenging as this book can be to the mind and the stomach, it articulates the motives and the processes that drove and allowed these two states, ensorcelled by charismatic tyrants, to commit some of the most grievous crimes in history.

The most valuable contribution here is the filling in of Soviet history which, for numerous reasons, has been played down in the decades since the Second World War. German accountability, coupled with a desire to never again succumb to such savage nationalism, has left behind a vivid record of Nazi atrocities. But the closed nature of Soviet society, succeeded by the prideful, authoritarian governments that have followed its collapse, have, to some degree, kept the lid on Stalinist crimes. In describing these barbarities, Mr. Snyder eloquently expresses what I consider to be Bloodlands' most telling truth about human nature, that Stalin, upon being faced with the calamitous nature of his economic reforms, fixed upon the idea that, as socialism nears its goal, resistance to its implementation increases. In other words, the failures of ones plans can be self-justified on the grounds that somewhere out there someone is working against you, frustrating you, defeating your noble goals, that it's not a fault in your stars but enemy resistance. This idea is the enabler of tyranny. "I'm not wrong!" "It will work if people stop fighting me!" Until we can rid ourselves of the capacity for such justifications, we will always be susceptible to the crimes of such men.

This is a powerful, existential, and sobering read, but its unyieldingly grim view of humanity during this period, while probably deserved, left me flailing for some shred of goodness to hold onto. It offers no reprieves from its repeated, savage blows to the reader's head. And so, even while it informs, it alienates. This is a tricky balance to maintain and Mr. Snyder never quite gets it right. (3/5 Stars)

Americans In Paris by Charles Glass

From The Week of May 15, 2011

I enjoy monographs. They offer their readers incomparable glimpses of the inner-workings of great events, forsaking the big-picture view for a narrower but deeper understanding of the forces that underpin them. The risk of the monograph is irrelevancy, the adoption of such a restricted view that the reader is left to question its importance. This, unfortunately, is a disease that afflicts Americans in Paris.

Mr. Glass' 540 page history of American expatriates in Nazi-occupied Paris (1940-1944) chronicles some fascinating figures who had their careers and their lives jeopardized by war. Chief among these are DR. Sumner Jackson and Sylvia Beach, the former the chief surgeon at the American Hospital, the latter the owner of the famous Shakespeare and Company bookstore. Initially, the expatriate community in Paris seems inclined to weather the storm, but as the crisis deepens and French resistance collapses, many withdraw from the city, leaving behind a hard core of as-yet neutral Americans in a city swiftly conquered and controlled by the Third Reich. While Beach kept her shop open, using it as a means to disseminate information through the American community and the French Resistance, Dr. Jackson took an even bolder role by treating wounded, French irregulars against the explicit instructions of the occupying Nazis. Eventually, Beach and Jackson, like many of their fellow Americans in the City of Light were interned, some under crippling conditions which proved, for some, to be fatal.

Though Beach and Jackson are incredible protagonists who deserve every page of attention paid to them, the rest of Mr. Glass' micro history fails to launch. There are some machinations here concerning the French Resistance and some secondary Americans who float in and out of the story, but these are poorly articulated sidebars that don't integrate well into the main narrative which is the plight of the key Americans. I'm left to conclude that Mr. Glass wanted to write about this period in occupied Paris, knew he had strong characters in Beach and Jackson, and so he did his best to weld his heroes onto a basic backdrop. Not only does the welding fail to take, the backdrop does not satisfy. I needed to know more about the French Resistance. I needed to have at least one German character to give me an impression of the Nazi view of these American expatriates. I needed someone, or something, to tie all this together. Americans in Paris delivers none of these. It's only the remarkable stories of Beach and Jackson that save this piece. (2/5 Stars)

A Special Mission by Dan Kurzman

From The Week of March 27, 2011

In A Special Mission, Mr. Kurzman argues that, late in World War II, faced with mounting desolation at home and military failures abroad, Adolf Hitler ordered the supreme commander of the SS in occupied Italy to kidnap and confine Pope Pius XII. Even if this plot did happen -- the author hinges much of his claim's authenticity on the testimony of the aforementioned SS commander --, he failed to convince me of the relevance of his investigation. Is a failed plot from a war fought decades ago worthy of a 320 page book published 62 years after the incident allegedly took place? Seems unlikely. And yet Mr. Kurzman, an author of military non-fiction, provides such glittering portraits of the participants in this drama that he makes the read worthwhile.

Of the various actors in our drama, no two figures play larger roles than Pope Pius XII, and Gen. Karl Wolff. According to Mr. Kurzman, Pius strived, throughout the war, to keep the Catholic Church neutral. So intent on silence was he that he failed to condemn the Holocaust, fearing that it might make him seem, to the German leadership, too sympathetic with the Allies. Furthermore, Mr. Kurzman argues that Pius had his sites set on a peace plan that would bring the war to an end and restore the church to its rightful place of prominence as a powerful, Western institution while, simultaneously, sparing his beloved Rome a thorough sacking by the ruthless Nazis. But regardless of Pius' motivations, his ambitions unraveled when Hitler, heedless of the Pope's neutrality, ordered Wolff's SS into Rome and then to the Vatican, to dethrone a pope. Which brings us to the flamboyant Karl Wolff, a loyal general who, as Himmler's eyes and ears earlier on in the war, surely knew of the Holocaust. But when, fearing that he might be on the wrong side of history, Wolff surrendered an entire German army, in Italy, to the Americans, and in refusing to follow Hitler's order to kidnap the pope, the Allies may have looked the other way on Wolff's earlier crimes, deeming him too useful to execute.

Mr. Kurzman draws in some secondary characters to flesh out life in Rome during the 1940s, but his tale, such as it is, revolves around the ambitions of two men, Wolff and Pius, the former fearing ill treatment at the hands of the ascendant Allies and the history books, the latter fearing his own life and that of his city. Mr. Kurzman succeeds in portraying both men in all their pride and their want of glory. He succeeds in laying out an admirably clear case for why such men can bring themselves to ignore the Holocaust for the sake of their own goals. But that he cannot successfully sell the importance of a failed plot over a non-kidnapping prevents his piece from doing more than educating us on some of history's more interesting and ambitious figures. (2/5 Stars)

Hitler's Holy Relics by Sidney Kirkpatrick

From The Week of August 08, 2010

With events as well-chronicled as World War II, it is inevitable that historians will tire of covering the big battles and turn their inquisitive powers upon a phenomenon's more eccentric incidents. All spectacular events have them, bizarre chapters in which the insanity of war produces some truly strange episodes. Most of these chapters are lost to the vicissitudes of time, but not this war, not this conflict which redefined a world... Mr. Kirkpatrick's encapsulation of one of the strangest incidents in World War II, the German fixation with the trappings of ancient power, is a study in how the examination of a single thread inside the greater tapestry can lead to a better understanding of the big picture.

Throughout the war, it was clear to the Allies, and the world, that the Nazis were looting works of art from conquered territories and relocating them to German museums. Hitler, Mr. Kirkpatrick argues, instigated this systematic theft not just to legitimize his supremacy, he believed that, as the leader of the Aryans on Earth, he and his people owned supposedly Aryan art. The plan was to transform Nuremberg into a capital of art and a monument to the power of the Aryan race, creating a historical link, through time, from the killing of Christ down to Hitler himself. Of the many looted works, Charlemagne's crown jewels had the greatest significance. Even they might have had to take a back seat to the Lance of Destiny, otherwise known as the spear a Roman soldier used to skewer Christ, had it been authenticated. It is likely a fake.

Hitler's Holy Relics follows the efforts of Lieutenant Walter Horn, a German-born, naturalized US citizen who, in 1945, headed up a special unit tasked with recovering the looted works of art so that they could be returned to their proper owners. Horn, who went on to be a medieval scholar and an art historian at UC Berkeley, is one of those heroes, an ordinary, honest soul thrust into extraordinary events. His doggedness and his courage in the face of both German denials and Allied obfuscation, is a study in tenacity and honesty as he attempted to right a horrific wrong. It is a story that needed to be told, not just to give the rightful glory to an everyday hero, but to shed light on the madness of men like Hitler, men who believe so strongly in their vision of the world that there is no crime too heinous, no wrong too horrific, to keep them from reshaping it to fit their own beliefs.

This is a wonderful story told wonderfully well. (4/5 Stars)

The Bicycle Runner by G. Franco Romagnoli

From The Week of August 08, 2010

Mr. Romagnoli's wonderful memoir of life in Rome during the occupation of the Nazis is as laugh-out-loud irreverent as it is heart-warming. Mr. Romagnoli, a student during the Second World War, looks back on one of Rome's harshest times with humor and hindsight, able to discuss the broader events of the war's impact on Rome alongside the machinations of his family's squabbles. It's clear that, for all of war's deprivations, Mr. Romagnoli would never quit living his life and doing what little he could to resist the Germans.

Click here to read the full review up at my website.

Tears In The Darkness by Michael Norman and Elizabeth Norman

From The Week of June 27, 2010

Prior to reading a brief reference to the Bataan Death March in one of Iris Chang's books, probably The Rape of Nanking, I knew nothing of this most remarkable and ugly incident of the Second World War. Mr. And Ms. Norman have assembled a chilling account of this bloody and shameful odyssey, fixing it through the eyes of an American survivor who, prior to the war, would have had no way to prepare himself for the darkness he was about to experience. I only read the book and I wasn't prepared for what one group of humans can do to another when national pride is at stake.

In April of 1942, after a three month battle against Japanese imperial forces, 75,000 American and Philipino troops surrendered on the orders of their immediate commanding officer, Major General Ned King. A Southerner by birth and disposition, and under orders from Douglas Macarthur to fight on, King knew his men were exhausted, that a series of strategic blunders had made the situation hopeless, and that there was no escape from the Japanese. Continued hostilities would destroy his army, but if he surrendered, well, then that army would exist in some form or another, to fight another day.

The Japanese accepted the surrender of the army, stripped the soldiers of their belongings and without rest, without food, and without a shred of mercy, ordered them to march 100 kilometers to a Japanese internment camp. For men already starving, this might be a deathblow. And indeed, as the soldiers were whipped, prodded and beaten to march onward, 11,000 of the 72,000 POWs who began the march died before reaching their destination, with many thousands more succumbing during captivity. Tears In The Darkness is an account of that march and of the mistreatment that came after: the slavery, the transportation, the deprivation, and finally the freedom.

Though the march itself is harrowing enough, Mr. And Ms. Norman also cover the war crimes trial which sought to find justice for the dead. But the book's greatest success is in portrayal of the various forms of human courage. After being personally responsible for many of the strategic blunders which lead to the surrender, Douglas MacArthur was allowed to flee back to America with promises that he'd get the army in the Philippines out soon enough. But not only did that help never arrive, he ordered his men to die heroically while safely ensconced half a world away. Meanwhile, the soldiers in the trenches, trenches General MacArthur couldn't bring himself to do more than occasionally tour, endured untold hardships to make it home alive. And because their names are many and MacArthur's is but one, it is the cowardly general history remembers, not the brave souls who lived up, unbowed, from the unspeakable. I always knew history was unfair, but this unfair?

Often, in order to convince ones own armies of the rightness of the cause, a country's leadership will claim the enemy is subhuman, beneath the dignity and the glory of the rightful victors. These are lies, of course, but belief in a lie can still make one do unspeakable things. And it turns out, a human being is willing to do the most hellish things imaginable to you just so long as he doesn't think you human. Devastating... (4/5 Stars)