Joan Of Arc, Her Story by Reine-pernoud & Marie-veronique Clin

From The Week of September 26, 2010

I'm often critical of histories for being too dry and lifeless, but here is a scholarly work which, while academic in its rigor, has the potency of narrative fiction. Joan of Arc, or Joan the Maid as she called herself, launched a remarkable uprising in France as, at the age of 19, and claiming to herself the will of god, lead a French army against the British during the Hundred Years War. She helped crown a king and win freedom for France, but the divine guidance she claimed was no match for the political machinations inside the French nobility. A faction opposed to Joan's Dauphin betrayed her, sold her out to the British who handed her over to a religious court for trial and sentencing. The trial was a sham which rammed through a conviction against Joan which was later overturned, but not until long after she was burned at the stake, a traditional punishment for Christian heretics.

Joan of Arc was a remarkable woman living in a time antithetical to the rights of women. Distrusted and despised by her enemies, and little more than a means to an end for her king intent upon his own power and achievement, she was wronged at virtually every step by men who did not appreciate her uniqueness. But then the medieval world was not kind to exceptional souls, over all of whom it cast a suspicious and jealous eye.

This is a thoroughly researched biography of Joan and the politics that surrounded her in life and lead to her death. There's a scarcity of speculation here on what her mental condition may have been, but virtually every other aspect of her life is deconstructed and explained in a most edifying way. Dry but enjoyable. Well-balanced. (3/5 Stars)

The Year That Changed The World by Michael Meyer

From The Week of September 26, 2010

When in 1988, Mr. Meyer was installed as Newsweek's man in Germany and central Europe, no one, least of all the man himself, imagined that he would have a front row seat to the fall of the Iron Curtain. As he points out early on in this compelling recount of 1989 and the death knell of widespread Communism, few predicted that year's political tumult, with even fewer prepared for its ramifications. With admirable dedication, Mr. Meyer makes up for his shock by leaving few political stones unturned as, resulting from a dizzying number of trips to various Communist strongholds, he captures the pivotal moments of Communism's collapse in East Germany, Romania, Hungary and Czechoslovakia, all while drawing vivid portraits of each country's prime movers. From the secretive efforts of reformists to put Hungary on a capitalist footing to the last, vicious days of Romania's despotic leader, Mr. Meyer allows us to watch the sad end to a disastrous social experiment which hindsight makes seem so fraught with folly.

There is, I believe, a consensus among reasonable human beings that fairness, in life and society, is a vital virtue worth striving for, that inequities should be minimized where possible as a means of giving everyone an opportunity to succeed. But as noble as this idea may seem, its wisdom is not matched by our arrogance which demands that we act before we fully grasp the consequences of our policies. Fairness is worth fighting for, but not when it means, as it so often has, economic ruin. When we allowed half the world to be swallowed up by Communism, it was in the name of fairness and idealism. The planned economy would bring efficiency and fairness to the population. But what resulted was economic stagnation brought about by a lack of innovation and a total ignorance of the human drive for self-preservation.

An order comes down from the leadership that 10,000 tons of corn must be harvested this year, but as the local boss you know full well that you can only produce half that amount. So, in a world where disappointment leads to being fired, if lucky, and prison, if not, would you tell the truth to power, risking your family's wellbeing, or would you lie to preserve yourself at the expense of disseminating critical, false information through the economy about the abundance of food? You'd not be alone if you chose to lie. Most would. And this is precisely how a planned economy transforms itself from something that ought to be more efficient than the chaos of the free market into something that is disastrously less efficient than the free market. This leads to the real deaths of real people while the political leadership, secure in the knowledge of an efficient system, and their own role in enforcing that system, consolidate their hold on power and, in the name of public morale and national unity, trumpet their own achievements until it becomes impossible for them to tolerate dissent.

This is the spirit of the world Mr. Meyer captures, a world in which millions upon millions of people were consigned to suffer under the weight of the bloated egos of their dictators while the rest of the world moved on. The sadness of their collective realizations of what they've lost is balanced against the joy in the freedoms they've won. Freedom, yes, but such scars they've earned in its attaining. The Year That Changed The World is an apt title for the events of 1989 which changed the fates of countless lives and Mr. Meyer was there to tell us how it all went down. Work well done. (4/5 Stars)

Stasiland by Anna Funder

From The Week of September 26, 2010

There is, and ought to be, a natural suspicion of ground-eye-view histories that make claims to narrative truth on the basis of "I came, I saw, I understood." This danger is especially apparent in journalism where famous reporters are parachuted into conflicts and, on the basis of a few staged interviews, draw sweeping conclusions about both the conflict and the region. They can't claim understanding. They are parrots echoing back to their readers nothing more than that moment's conventional wisdom. But this is the wonderful genius of Ms. Funder's brilliant piece about life in East Germany leading up to the fall of the Berlin Wall. She makes no claim to understand what life was like under East German Communism. Instead, she allows her subjects, her contacts, to tell their own stories and, in this, she permits her readers to reach their own conclusions about the experiences of her interviewees. She is a facilitator of understanding, not its augur. And this lends her account a wonderful and refreshing authenticity.

The title of this piece is inspired by the name of the secret police which, to a real extent, ran East Germany for most of its 40 years of troubled existence. In addition to its thousands of actual agents, the Stasi could boast of countless informants who were so pervasive, who had so deeply penetrated the social industrial scenes, that public discourse became a carefully guarded sideshow in which citizens did their best to say and reveal as little as possible. At the height of its influence, the Stasi had an agent for every 63 citizens it was tasked to watch. This stands in stark, and insane, contrast to other repressive regimes which can only boast of an informant for every few thousand citizens. This police state masquerading as communism separated families and destroyed lives, all while holding in its hand the power to make or break any business, any venture. It was an agency of truly Orwellian turpitude which, as Ms. Funder's interviewees will attest, cared not a wit for the souls it crushed. From the dissident musician, to the 16-year-old girl in the wrong place at the wrong time, the author relates the real lives of East Germans under one of the world's most oppressive regimes, doing so with an admirable capacity to get out of the way of their appalling narratives which pour off the page.

For anyone interested in the daily lives of those living under authoritarianism, this is a must read. Ms. Funder's dogged determination to gently pull life stories from these battered people is both admirable and slightly ghoulish. But boy does it make for a compelling read. Absolutely one of my best reads this year. (5/5 Stars)

Mary Queen Of Scots by Alison Weir

From The Week of September 26, 2010

I have long admired Ms. Weir's passion for English history and her capacity to animate the subjects she chooses to chronicle. On any day of the week, I'd take the warmth of Weir over the dryness of Fraser, with Biographies of Catherine Swynford and queen Isabella being particular favorites. And yet this investigation into the murder that defined the life of Mary Queen of Scots is a bloated tragedy in desperate need of a heavy edit.

Historians like Weir have taken the reconstruction of 16th century English history to the level of fetishism. Most of the time, this works for the reader so long as the education they are receiving from the text has some small relevance to the present. But here, Ms. Weir's obsession proves her downfall. It may be that the murder of lord Darnley, then the husband of queen Mary of Scotland, was a pivotal moment not only in her life but in the destiny of Elizabeth I. It may even have proven to be an event which summed up Mary's flawed character, exposing her poor judgement. But these hardly necessitate a 700 page reconstruction of a 500 year old murder. Ms. Weir meticulously builds a case for each of the possible suspects, droning monotonously on in her attempt to solve a crime for which time has robbed us of resolution.

If Ms. Weir enjoyed both the writing of this book and the investigation of its subject, then I congratulate her on her diligence. But no single historical event requires this much ink, not unless it has a lot more bearing on today. Ms. Weir is at her best in capturing a subject, fleshing her out, and illustrating both her similarities and her differences in personality and culture brought about by the passage of centuries. This just feels like pointless self-indulgence. Mary's background was edifying, but everything else here disappoints. (2/5 Stars)

The Year 1000 by Robert Lacey and Danny Danziger

Though the Norman conquest of 1066 and the subsequent passage of a millennia have robbed us of much of Anglo-Saxon culture, Misters Lacey and Danziger reconstruct a surprisingly vivid picture of life in England prior to William the Conquerers overthrow of the Anglo-Saxon way of life. Drawing inferences from the illustrations in a contemporary calendar, illustrations which were meant to guide citizens of the day in activities appropriate to the seasons, the authors assemble a favorable portrait of Anglo-Saxon life which suggests they were advanced beyond the culture of the Normans who conquered them. Women had the power to divorce their husbands, or be recompensed for rape. Many crimes were handled by a system of fines in lieu of physical punishments, an inducement to comply with the law without permanently debilitating the perpetrator. Every Anglo-Saxon had the right to hunt the land and claim what he killed. This democratic policy was in contrast to the Norman method of restricting such rights to the nobility and the owners of the land. Finally, kings were not hereditary. They were chosen from a pool of the worthy who were related by blood to the ruling family, a system that promoted ability over the primogeniture practiced by the Normans.

This is not the first book to argue that a people conquered in the name of enlightenment were actually more enlightened than their conquerers. There is, no doubt, a tendency amongst historians to elevate the virtues of cultures lost to antiquity. They, like great rock stars who die young, are frozen in time, their middle-aged warts unrealized. And yet this is a compelling case put forward with charming good humor that cannot but entertain. (3/5 Stars)

A Little Bit Wicked by Kristen Chenoweth

From The Week of September 19, 2010

It is a credit to Ms. Chenoweth's sweetness that her memoir avoids devolving into a self-congratulatory parade for her own achievements. For make no mistake; this lady of music, theatre and television wasn't sitting at the back of the bus when the supreme being -- insert your preferred deity here -- was handing out talent. As if it wasn't already enough to possess a lovely voice, a keen mind, and an innocent's spirit, she must also be able to claim an actor's aptitude and a charmer's wit? If I was a woman, I'd be green with envy.

And yet the lives of the blessed aren't always as effortless as we might expect. In A Little Bit Wicked, Ms. Chenoweth charts her uneven rise to moderate stardom: her personal struggles, her problematic relationships, and her moments of indecision. In this, she exposes her humanity to those of us who only ever see the finished product, the actor in a role, the creature in the magazine. It's a lesson about celebrity most of us could stand to learn, that those we see in our media come to us polished, packaged. It's what makes them seem larger than life, more than human. But we can't forget that they are still like us, worthy of admiration, not devotion.

This is a charming ride through a world few of us will ever experience. The spiritualism is a bit much and, despite being a total West Wing lover,Ms. Chenoweth's on-again/off-again flirtation with Aaron Sorkin grows tiresome, but this is a charming read that animates a real person behind all the performer's masks. Real enough to sink ones teeth into. (3/5 Stars)

Coyote Frontier: The Coyote Trilogy 03 by Allen Steele

From The Week of September 19, 2010

This final installment in the main sequence of the Coyote novels is a fitting denouement for the trilogy. It lowers the curtains on a quality series from an insightful author without betraying the spirit of the whole.

Having beat back various severe, ideological threats from Earth, the Coyote colonists, now organized into a technologically primitive but intellectually free republic, finally possess enough stability to set about living their industrious lives without fear of external dangers. But no sooner have they settled into their free-market utopian plans when a new technology from Earth makes it possible for virtually instantaneous travel between Coyote, the pure, new hope, and Earth, the environmentally degraded cradle of humanity. For while this new development offers Coyote opportunities to trade for all the high-tech conveniences it lacks, in exchange for providing natural resources it has in such abundance, resources depleted on Earth, it has also opened the door to a tragic crush of refugees fleeing Earth, and its collapsing climate, for Coyote, and its fresh shores.

In Coyote, Mr. Steele's ragtag band of heroes defied fascism and won. In Coyote Rising, they stood up to radical socialism and won. In Coyote Frontier, Mr. Steele sets aside political philosophy for a more balanced discussion centered on both the nature of trade and the thorny morality surrounding the idea of the greater good. Is it right to plunder a planet's natural resources in order to create trade goods that can be sold for profit? Is it right to burden that same planet with an unchecked flood of refugees fleeing a manmade, ecological disaster? Who has the right to claim ownership of land? Who has the right to deny desperate people a new beginning? The first two Coyote novels pleased because their characters were polarized into camps of good and evil, free and tyrannical. Coyote Frontier pleases because it graduates from such simplicities to the grayness of adult ambiguity. In this way, it pays off what captain Lee bravely began when he stole the URSS Alabama, realizing a fully fledged world and its band of freedom-worshipping, capitalist, democratist frontiersmen. Satisfying. (3/5 Stars)