“I adore annotated editions,” admits Honoria St. Cyr in her long, loving look at a new annotated edition of Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows, found in the current Open Letters. And you will find that her adoration is perhaps trumped only by her deep affection for Grahame’s classic itself. As St. Cyr finds, when you are as devoted to a book as she and many millions of others are to The Wind in the Willows, you can’t get enough of the trivia that surrounds it.

Such trivia is at the forefront of Peter Parker’s review

in the TLS

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of no less than two annotated Wind in the Willows, one by Seth Lerer for Belknap Press and the second by Annie Gauger for Norton. Though Parker has plenty of nits to pick with each editor (the debating over trivia being just as fun as the trivia itself), ultimately he can’t resist the pull of simply recounting some of the grand speculation that the classic has inspired. For instance, the is the idea that

Toad is an unholy amalgam of Oscar Wilde, Horatio Bottomley and Grahame’s purblind, tantrum-prone son Alastair, for whom the book was written…. Toads by their very nature give the impression of being puffed up, and the carriage of their heads unwittingly suggests snootiness. Strutting down the steps of his country manor, stuffed into his preposterous driving togs; supplied with funds to buy the latest shiny toy, or take up and as quickly discard every passing fad; writing his appalling invitations on stationery “with ‘Toad Hall’ at the top in gold and blue”: Toad is the embodiment of nouveau riche vulgarity and bumptiousness. Ludicrously vain, utterly shameless and horribly self-pitying, he nevertheless remains endearing.

Parker goes on to agree that there is much in Toad that reminds you of Oscar Wilde, “from his aphorisms and his imprisonment to his middle-parted hair.” And he additionally suggests that the scene in which Toad is heckled as he’s transferred from the courthouse to the prison is “strongly reminiscent of the notorious occasion when Wilde was transferred by rail from Wandsworth Prison to Reading Gaol and was obliged to stand on a platform at Clapham Junction, handcuffed and in convict dress, surrounded by a jeering mob.”

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More trivia abounds in both St. Cyr’s and Parker’s pieces, and of course in the new annotated books themselves—enough even to sate the most obsessive fans of Wind in the Willows. Dig in.

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Corvus: A Life with Birds
Esther Woolfson
Counterpoint, 2009

“Familiarity doesn’t dull me to the wonder of birds,” writes Esther Woolfson at one point in her beguiling book Corvus, which mainly concerns the rook she takes into her home and names Chicken:

No Retreat, No Surrender hd …what they are and what they do. Chicken becomes more mysterious, more miraculous the more I learn, the more I observe. I spread her wings in my hand. She grunts and, briefly, objects. Before she tugs it back under her own control, I look at the lovely arc of it; feel the fine bones under my fingers, feathers all in their symmetrical and asymmetrical orders.

There are other birds than Chicken in this avian memoir – there are starlings and parrots and magpies, all taken into Woolfson’s home for varying lengths of time, all watched with her lively curiosity and observed (and often sketched – the book is delightfully illustrated) in intimate detail, by a bird-enthusiast so ardent she feels only sympathy even for the much-maligned Lord Byron when she reads a passage in his journal where he laments that “some fool” trod on his pet crow’s foot. “I salute the man,” she says. “I am unmoved by Lady Caroline Lamb’s famously designation of him, because nothing can alter the fact that it speaks well of a man when he cares about his pet crow’s toe.”

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by William Service or That Quail Robert by Margaret Stanger, and the reason is the same: like those authors, Woolfson has done more than simply take a bird into her home – she’s paid scrupulous attention to the person her guest quickly becomes, and she’s done it in graceful, affecting prose: “On a late-November afternoon, I see a hawk flying against a cold, silvered sky, the half flap, half smooth glide, the silhouette that can reduce a safe, protected indoor bird to shrieking terror.”

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Bird aficionados won’t want to miss Corvus, but it has a much greater appeal than that. Anybody who’s ever shared their life with another species will find a wonderful, insightful sympathy in these pages, a book to recommend and pass along.

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Flight From the Reich: Refugee Jews, 1933-1946 Madhouse film

Deborah Dwork and Robert Jan Van Pelt
W.W. Norton, 2009

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In 1938, just weeks after the Anschluss that united Germany and Austria, successful and respected Dr. Lothar Furth, who operated one of the most prestigious obstetric clinics in Vienna, wrote to an acquaintance of his in England, asking of if his acquaintance could offer work –- even menial work –- to him and his wife, since he was certain he would soon be losing his job under the rapidly-expanding Nazi regime. The friend in England wasted no time in contacting the German Jewish Aid Committee in an attempt to expedite the Furths’ emigration, only to learn that a mob had dragged the doctor and his wife out of their clinic and forced them to clean the sidewalk with toothbrushes. The following day, the two killed themselves.

The despair of the Furths was shared by thousands of German Jews who realized their initial optimism in the face of Hitler’s rise to power was gravely wrong. The Furths never got a chance to flee that new power, but the doctor’s desperate letter, the heartbreaking certainty that they City Rats movie download hoped to flee, brings them squarely into the focus of Flight From the Reich, the masterful and horrifically riveting new book by Deborah Dwork and Robert Jan Van Pelt. As Dwork and Van Pelt point out, that initial optimism wasn’t purely fantasy. “On average,” they write, “governments after 1918 had lasted less than nine months and no one had any reason to think this one would be any different.” Even when the darker reality began to assert itself, those with the means to flee did so in the explicit expectation of return. Berlin Alxeanderplatz

author Alfred Doblin speaks for many such:

One Night with the King ipod It would just be a brief trip abroad. You’ll let the storm pass over you, just three or four months, someone will have dealt with the Nazis by then … I left the house with one small suitcase, alone.

The fate of the six million Jews who fell victim to the Nazis is exhaustively documented; the fate of those who fled or were displaced is less so, mainly because it comprised many many thousands of different fates. Drawing a coherent picture on such a vast canvas is a task Dwork and Van Pelt prosecute with enormous energy and commendable spirit. Flight from the Reich may be dark in its subject matter, but it’s a bright shining accomplishment in Holocaust studies. Its authors begin with the clearest possible assertion that Holocaust studies is exactly what they’re doing:

All European Jews who came under the control of Germany and its allies were targeted for death. Some six million were killed. The remaining three million survived camps, endured life in hiding, “passed” as a gentile, fled to safety, or experienced some combination of these. All were victims of the Holocaust. Had Jews not hidden or passed, they too would have been deported. Had they not sought asylum elsewhere, they too would have been caught in the machinery of death.

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Fleeing does not write refugees out of the story; it simply takes the story elsewhere. Indeed: it takes it everywhere. The history of refugee Jews during and after the Nazi era is literally, from the Latin centrifugal, to flee the center.

That flight from the center landed refugees in thousands of far-flung and improbable destinations, and Dwork and Van Pelt follow them everywhere. The shame of the niggardly welcome extended by England and the United States is well known; the tales of other destinations will be less familiar to readers. As their civil rights were systematically curtailed and then erased, German Jews grew more and more frantic to find a way out of the trap closing on them … even if that way out led to places none of them had ever thought about before, except perhaps as a name on a map, such as Shanghai:

Panic-stricken German and Austrian Jews continued to buy tickets issued by Nord Deutsche Lloyd, Lloyd Trieste, and Nippon Yusen Kaisya, knowing that upon arrival they would have to fend for themselves in an utterly strange metropolis that promised nothing but the most destitute and temporary refuge from persecution -– a squalid waiting room for better times. Abandoning the idea that learning a trade would help them earn a living and giving up on acquiring the local language, Jews clutched at hope and set sail. By the outbreak of the war, seventeen thousand Jews had arrived in the city, without a future, but safe from the Germans.

Flight from the Reich, almost by definition, has a sister-subject living alongside its main one, because as Dwork and Van Pelt follow the exodus of their subjects, they must also chart the slowly growing and changing awareness of the Holocaust in other countries. This picture is usually not pretty, but our authors don’t flinch from reporting the worst, even though Americans who’ve learned their history from Hollywood movies just might (as when General Patton repeatedly refers to Jews as a “sub-human species”). But no matter: this is a great and powerful book, a fitting bookend for Richard Evans’ recently completed trilogy on the rise and fall of Nazi Germany and a masterpiece in its own right.

–Steve Donoghue

Heroes & Villains: Inside the Minds of the Greatest Warriors in History
Frank McLynn
Pegasus Books, 2009

British historian and biographer Frank McLynn has written many very good books. His 1066: The Year of the Three Battles is the best book on the oft-chronicled Norman Invasion; his biographies of Carl Jung and Napoleon are among the strongest ever written on either subject; his life of Robert Louis Stevenson is a towering achievement; his dual study of Richard I and King John is history at its thrilling best. His writing combines ironclad research with an accessibility that looks effortless.

That having been said, this recent book of his, Heroes & Villains, is easily the most frustrating book he’s ever written. It may well be the most frustrating book any professional historian has written in the last fifty years. It’s one thing to finish a work like this – it’s a comparative study of six great ‘warriors’: Spartacus, Attila, Richard I, Cortes, Shogun Tokugawa, and Napoleon Bonaparte – and wonder about some of the questions the book raises; it’s quite another to close it and say (out loud, plaintively, to one’s sleeping basset hound) “What the Hell did any of that MEAN?”

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The book’s subtitle (for which McLynn may not be explicitly responsible, although the sentiment is echoed plentifully throughout his book) promises a look inside the minds of the greatest warriors in history – and then it fails to deliver, on both the points of that subtitle. Not only are the six men on display here only very arguably the greatest warriors in history (we’ll come back to that), but at no point do we get a good look inside the minds of any of them – even though three of the six left behind windy memoirs, for Pete’s sake.

The heart of the frustration here comes from the fact that McLynn is such a damn fine writer, such a gifted sifter of fact and anecdote, that he could windify on practically any historical subject and still be topographically fascinating even when he’s engaging in what’s referred to in Brooklyn as talking out his ass.

To put it mildly, a strong suspicion of exactly that activity hangs around Heroes & Villains, which steps right away into the deep end of the quagmire from which you keep expecting it to extricate itself. McLynn writes, “A leading scholar of Chinese language and history once told me he could never become interested in the Mongols, as their main contribution to the story of mankind was a mountain of skulls.” How can the reader take that statement other than as McLynn’s implication that his sextet somehow do more Wild Child dvd than create a mountain of skulls? What “contribution to the story of mankind” did Spartacus make? Or Attila? It’s faintly tenable to say Richard I and Shogun Tokugawa made such a contribution, but in both cases it was an enormously negative

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one, respectively exacerbating Christian-Moslem antipathy and mindless Japanese militarism. Cortes’ flag, riches, and empire vanished almost before his body was cold, and McLynn must surely be aware of the sheer number of historians to declare Bonaparte an essentially pointless historical anomaly.

But there is no questioning the mountains of skulls. Firm figures for Spartacus and Attila are impossible to find (mainly due to the exaggerations upward by Romans who always had to have the very worst, fiercest adversaries), but at the very least they were responsible for the deaths of their thousands of followers. At Sekigahara, Tokugawa was responsible for probably 50,000 deaths; at the great city of Cholula, Cortes and his allies slaughtered probably 180,000 civilians; and Napoleon eclipses them all – his wars caused a conservatively estimated 4 million deaths (100,000 at the Battle of Borodino alone). Once he reached the Holy Land, Richard lept into the killing with a very personal enthusiasm that McLynn finds entirely charming, as at one of the battles of Jaffa:

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Even in a military career full of superlatives, this was the Lionheart’s finest hour. Throughout the day the issue was on a knife-edge, but the king’s energy, acumen, and bravery won the day. At one point he was completely surrounded and seemed certain to be captured but fought so ferociously that the Saracen ranks finally parted and gave him a wide berth; he emerged from the fray covered in arrows. After Jaffa even the Saracens concluded that he was no ordinary man but rather a creature of legend.

Madhouse divx The narrative here is so breakneck that it seems almost boring to point out that a) the Saracens certainly thought no such thing, and b) the king wasn’t exactly alone when he was doing all that surrounded fighting, although you’d never know that from our author’s starry-eyed summary. And yet, even in the midst of such jingoism (it’s much stronger with Richard than with any of the others, tellingly), McLynn is endlessly fascinating – readers picking up this book who are new to military history will find it deeply compelling, and even those who know enough about the events McLynn’s narrating to question his conclusions will enjoy his technique, his wonderfully assured voice. “The great warrior,” he tells us,

First Blood the movie …must be a master of strategy and tactics, have high military talents, boldness, cunning, self-belief, be lucky, fight in the right circumstances and against an almost equally matched foe. On these criteria Napoleon and Ieyasu would emerge at the top of the heap, while Cortes and Spartacus, because of the second-rate opposition they faced, would rank lower down. Despite his ultimate failure, one would be inclined to rate Attila ahead of them, if only because he had to contend with at least three first-rate figures who ought-fought him: Marcian, Aetius and Geiseric. Richard the Lionheart defeated the best the western and Middle Eastern world could throw against him, but just misses the first rank because of his showmanship and the gallery touch.

And that last-minute dismissal of Richard I (for his “gallery touch”?) brings us back to the question of whether or not this book even knows its own subject. “The greatest warriors in history”? Attila but not Belisarius? Cortes but not Rodrigo Diaz (‘el Cid’)? Richard I but not his mightier father, Henry II? Bonaparte but not Wellington or Nelson, the men who beat him? No Genghis Khan? No Boadicea? No Trajan? No Elizabeth I? No Marlborough? No Patton? No Hitler, for all that? Spartacus? What the Hell did any of that MEAN?

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BoneMan’s Daughters
By Ted Dekker
Center Street, 2009

If you’re going to inflict such a creaky and ham-handed thing as extended religious allegory on the long-suffering modern world, you’d bloody well better be as good a writer as John Bunyan.

Creepy pseudo-messianic religious fiction author Ted Dekker is no John Bunyan, and his new book, BoneMan’s Daughters

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, is no Pilgrim’s Progress. It barely qualifies as Pilgrim’s Regress. And as if reading a breathless, predictable narrative filled with paper-thin caricatures and megaphoned emphases weren’t bad enough, the experience is constantly given an extra-gummy sheen by carrying a freight of Biblical and quasi-Biblical double meanings. Reading it is like listening to that annoying co-worker who’s constantly making sexual double-entendres, except without the guilty pleasure.

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Difficult to know what pleasures BoneMan’s Daughters could impart, even though Dekker’s numberless fans (call them legion?) will no doubt claim it’s a masterpiece. The story concerns intelligence officer Ryan Evans, whose teenaged daughter Bethany falls into the clutches of the serial killer Alvin Finch, called BoneMan, who’s intent on horrifically killing young women until he finds his perfect daughter. BoneMan exercises a certain allure over poor confused Bethany, whose relationship with Evans has been troubled. And all of that might have worked as a simple straight-up thriller (Dekker has some glimmerings of talent in that direction). But in BoneMan’s Daughters

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it all gets served up so heavily slathered in encoded religious double-speak that every single passage – like this climactic confrontation between hero and villain – feels like some queasily hysterical Sunday morning revivalist melodrama:

“So you admit you’re not really even her father.” [said BoneMan]

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“Yes.”

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His answer seemed to confuse the man. This was the kind of reason and control that would give them hope, he realized. And although BoneMan knew how to hate with more passion than most men, real love would confuse him.

“I admit, I’m not her father, not really,” Ryan said. “But that’s changing now.”

“Now that you’re in my house.”

“Now that I’m pursuing her love.”

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Dark Water hd The words seemed to take Alvin Finch off guard. He was a man of exceptional control but now he blinked; he began to sweat.

“She hates you,” BoneMan said.

No. No, she couldn’t possibly hate him. Maybe on a hot afternoon when harsh words about who she was dating were exchanged, but not now when they were both fighting for her life.

Alvin Finch was so devoid of love that he didn’t know how to recognize it. He was indeed the Satan in the mix, bent upon winning the heart of his victim, though no one could possibly love him. His victims might show him a mirror of love to win his kindness, but they would never be able to return real love any more than he could receive it.

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The Little Shop of Horrors the movie BoneMan’s Daughters contains hundreds of passages like this, stretches that make you feel like there’s a second conversation being whispered just underneath the first one. In the audible portion, the motions of an ordinary serial killer novel are being enacted. In the inaudible portion, prophesies and revelations are being canted for the faithful. Readers sane enough to be terrified of eternal truths should consider themselves forewarned.

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–Steve Donoghue

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Helen Hackett
Princeton University Press, 2009

Merely glancing at the title of Helen Hackett’s new book Shakespeare and Elizabeth, how can a reader help but remember the single most thrilling moment at the climax of that merry little movie Shakespeare in Love, in which Judi Dench’s massive, imperious Elizabeth I reveals herself from the audience of the premiere of “Romeo and Juliet”? Smiling at the memory, those same readers may fear they’ve found in Hackett a stiff killjoy, since she writes:

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The Ballad of Jack and Rose Many mythologizers have loved to imagine Elizabeth attending a Shakespeare play at a playhouse, usually the Globe. The scenario has many attractions: it depicts Elizabeth mingling democratically with her subjects and sharing their pleasures; and it presents in one neatly encapsulated scene the essential ingredients of the so called Elizabethan golden age; Gloriana, Shakespeare and his characters, and the vivacious and rumbustious people of Tudor England, all dressed in colorful and picturesque period costume. Yet this event is not only undocumented but also highly unlikely.

I can assure you that Shakespeare and Elizabeth never carries through on this threat -– although it makes the threat with curious insistence, almost as though Hackett feels she has to provide an ongoing caution against the inherent fun of her subject matter. A quick passage from the book’s conclusion makes you wonder if academics actually want to scare away potential readers:

As well as continuing generic hybridity, cultural fusions are likely to play a part in future representations of Shakespeare and Elizabeth. This book has emphasized the importance of the doubt myth for Anglophone culture, and this culture extends, of course, in differing degrees to many of the nations which were formerly part of the British Empire, where Shakespeare’s words and Elizabethan history were part of the colonial educational syllabus.

Luckily, in the hybridity which governs this book, the fun always wins out. Hackett covers every permutation of her dual subject matter, from performance history to parodies (like Julius Sneezer, Much Ado about the Merchant of Venice

, and the great, forgotten Hamlet and Egglet), sonnet-analysis to, of course, the tangled mass of the Shakespeare authorship controversy, most pointedly the Baconian and quasi-Baconian rantings that posit Shakespeare as the secret son of Elizabeth:

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Also underlying it [the aforementioned rantings], of course, was snobbery. Some nineteenth-century Shakespeareans accentuated Shakespeare’s humble origins in order to emphasize his miraculous genius, but this could have an opposite effect, encouraging some to find it incredible that a mere provincial, grammar-school-educated glover’s son could have penned the immortal words of the great Bard. In many Baconian writings Elizabeth was vituperated as a bad mother, yet at the same time as a royal mother she was the means of elevating Bacon/Shakespeare to a more appropriate social station.

The quietly prodigious learning of Shakespeare and Elizabeth (its ungallant title notwithstanding) takes in everything from Doctor Johnson to Doctor Who, and naturally Mark Twain makes an appearance, lampooning the veneration of all things Shakespearean in his hilarious sketch 1601 and thundering into the authorship controversy in 1909’s Is Shakespeare Dead? Hackett deals with Twains obstreperousness just as even-handedly as she deals with the poor souls who maintain Elizabeth actually was Shakespeare and wrote all his plays the free moments when she wasn’t repelling the Spanish Armada. There’s quite a lot of material packed into this slim volume, and despite Hackett’s occasional lapses into academy-speak, the unpacking is well worth the price of admission.

The Butterfly Effect 2 movie download “Shakespear’s pow’r is sacred as a King’s,” Dryden once wrote. “Sacred as a Queen’s” would be more like it.

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In the Courts of the Sun

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Dutton, 2009

There’s a good reason why Jed DeLanda, the quick-brained and foul-mouthed main character in Brian D’Amato’s fantastic, fast-paced sci-fi epic In the Courts of the Sun, has to ride the brain of his 7th century Mayan host like a sentient kind of encephalitis –- there’s no other way to get there from here:

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The sad fact is that time travel is impossible. Into the past, that is. If you want to go faster into the future you can just freeze yourself. But going backward is absolutely, unequivocally, and forever unworkable, for a number of well-known reasons. One is the grandfather paradox, meaning you could always go back in time and kill your grandfather, and then you’d presumably never have existed in the fist place. Another is that even if you went back and did nothing, you’d almost certainly have some of the same molecules your younger self had been using incorporated into your body. And so the same molecule would be in two different places at once. And that can’t happen. The third reason is just a mechanical problem. The only way into the past that anyone knows of is the famous wormhole route, through a naked singularity. But putting matter through a singularity is like putting a Meissen vase through a pasta machine. Anything going through it is going to com out the other end crushed and scrambled and no good for anything.

The trick here isn’t how to send the data but where to send it, as DeLanda explains early in the book. “Of course, the next problem is that there has to be a receiver and storage on the other end. And in the era we were interested in, there weren’t any radar dishes or disk drives or silicon chips or IF antennas or even a crystal radio. Circa 664 there was only one existing object that could receive and store that much information. A brain.”

The reason for the interest? DeLanda and his colleagues are concerned about the Maya calendar’s prophecy that the world will end in 2012 (if you haven’t yet heard of this little tidbit, don’t worry – you will, until you’re well and truly sick of it; in sheer annoyance factor, it’s going to make Y2K look like a funny little YouTube viral video); DeLanda hopes that his own Mayan ancestry will give him some special insight into literally saving the world. There’s a straightforward adventure-story unfolding in In the Courts of the Sun (the first volume in a projected trilogy), but D’Amato’s caffeinated prose and sharp eye always provide a little more, as when DeLanda deals with the social delicacies of his racial heritage:

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“You don’t look Asian. Or Latin American.” She smiled to give it all a flirty spin like she was afraid of seeming racist. But it was true, I don’t really look like much of anything. The Maya tend to be short’ n ‘ chunky, but I was half Ladino, and because of all the calcium I’d gotten in Utah – atypically, I wasn’t lactose–intolerant, and I’d landed on a planet where milk is practically the only approved beverage -– I’d shot up to a towering five nine, more than a head taller than anyone else in my original family. Currently I was around 135 pounds, so I couldn’t really shop in the Husky Department, and that seemed to have thinned my face out. A real Maya usually has a wide face that looks like a hawk from the side and an owl from the front. But I just look vaguely tropical. Sometimes, when people hear my last name, they ask if I’m from the Philippines. Sylvana, that is, my sort of ex, used to say that my long hair made me look like a bad-looking version of Keanu Reeves in Little Buddha. I thought about saying all this to Marena and then decided to chill. Have a little mystery, for God’s sake.

There’s plenty of mystery on hand in D’Amato’s book, and lots of thrills (needless to say, the non-time travel time-travel goes awry almost from the first moment), and a very gratifying number of laughs per page –- and best of all, a hugely satisfying amount of modern and fascinating information about the Maya, how they lived and thought. DeLanda could easily write the world’s most engrossing textbook on the subject.

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But not just now! Like most readers of In the Courts of the Sun, I suspect, I want to know how this particular story ends first.

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The Wilderness Warrior:
Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America
Douglas Brinkley

Harper Collins, June 2009

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In his stirring, ambitious, and entirely welcome new book The Wilderness Warrior, Douglas Brinkley fervently makes the case that Theodore Roosevelt, amateur naturalist and the country’s 26th president, was also one of its greatest conservationists. Since such a claim would draw an astounded gasp of incredulity from the assembled ranks of the animal kingdom, Brinkley’s first job is to clarify is terms.

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It’s a fairly easy clarification, despite the appearance of incongruity; the country’s first Forest Service chief (and thorn in President Taft’s side) Gifford Pinchot perhaps put it best, saying conservation entailed “the greatest good to the greatest number for the longest time.” That sliding z-axis of time exonerates Roosevelt, who created the country’s first National Parks and set aside its first 51 wildlife refugees – 250 million square miles of pristine land he intended to stay pristine, the single one of his presidential accomplishments of which he was most proud. Newcomers to history who glance only at Roosevelt’s prince-nez may mistake him for a citified dandy, but as Brinkley abundantly and vividly reminds us, TR was as avid an outdoorsman as his crowded public schedule would permit – and he was always thinking about the deeper meaning of what he saw in the wild:

What Roosevelt had learned about nature from the Badlands blizzard was that it could, at a moment’s notice, be unrelentingly harsh. Back in 1856, as Charles Darwin was about to begin The Origin of Species

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, he scribbled in his journal, “What a book a Devil’s Chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering low & horribly cruel works of nature!” Roosevelt appreciated this high truth. A few times he had encountered locked antlers on the ground, the result of two bucks getting entangled in a butting duel and unable to free themselves died. Coyotes, Roosevelt knew, were attracted by the noise of locked horns struggling and began to feast on the deer’s flesh once they dropped to the ground in total exhaustion. Rudyard Kipling called it “The law of the jungle” while to Roosevelt it was “The law of the Badlands.”

Brinkley is very good at capturing the ethos of these “ambulating Ivy League-inspired scientists” – he characterizes them all as basically “children of Darwin,” and certainly Roosevelt wouldn’t have disagreed.

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of disagreement here arises from the fact that Roosevelt never met a wild animal he didn’t want to shoot dead. In North America, in South America, epically in Africa, he spent hours, days, and weeks toting rifles and blasting away at everything that moved, racking up ‘bags’ in the dozens and hundreds of spectacular animals who might otherwise have died peacefully in their beds. Despite the glaze-eyed chaw-balled assertions of America’s nutso gun-culture, this is not the face of modern conservation, and it sits awkwardly alongside some of Brinkley’s more saintly claims.

But this is TR we’re talking about, so all is forgiven. He was, as one friend caustically put it during his lifetime, a “juggernaut of good intentions,” and as Brinkley’s fine book makes clear for a new generation, the good he did for the greatest number ended up more than counterbalancing all those mounted heads on the walls of his study.

–Steve Donoghue

Vicksburg, 1863
By Winston Groom
Knopf, 2009

The siege of Vicksburg is the American Civil War writ small. All the key elements that characterized the four years of conflict are concentrated in the three months during which Federal forces under General Grant alternately pummeled and strangled the key Mississippi stronghold commanded by General Pemberton into submission. There is the overwhelming superiority of the North in men and material; there is the seemingly endless succession of bloody, pointless sorties on both sides; there is the expected gallery of larger-than-life figures, swanning and pirouetting as though they knew this was the last time war would give anybody the chance to do so; there is the doomed but canny valor of the Confederate commander (Pemberton is a cool character who has never received his due), offset by the usual muddled and contradictory instructions issuing from both Richmond and military high command; there is the absolutely vital role of water-power (be it the Atlantic, the Gulf of Mexico, or the Mighty Miss) in shaping the land-actions; and most of all, there is the allure of the might-have-been.

It’s an impossible story to resist, and popular novelist Winston Groom, in Vicksburg 1863

, has dived into the details with his trademark gusto. Groom has written half a dozen volumes of military history over the decades, and he’s become a practiced hand at searching archives and assembling facts. His presentation of those facts is unfailingly dramatic -– this is certainly the most engrossingly page-turning book on Vicksburg ever written.

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One of the most attractive elements of Groom as a writer is also one of the rarest among even amateur historians: he never loses his sense of humor. It sparkles most in the footnotes that are sprinkled across the bottom of his pages, where he alleviates the grim goings-on of his main tale with colorful details turned up in his researches, things like Confederate president Jefferson Davis’ odd partiality for using camels in Western survey work:

The camels proved something of a mixed benefit for the military surveyors. For one thing, their appearance unsettled herds of cattle, often causing them to stampede, but in general they proved as advertised until the Civil War broke out and surveying expeditions and other western exploits were quickly forgotten. The camels reverted to the wild and their progeny were occasionally seen roaming the southwestern deserts until after the turn of the century. The last sighting of one of the Egyptian camels was reported in 1929.

And Groom might as well be referring to those wandering camels when he elsewhere sums up Davis’ personality – one of the many memorable and spot-on characterizations he doles out in the course of the book:

The episode demonstrates two things about Davis’s personality: that once he decided on something, no matter how large or small, he was tenacious in seeing it through, and, second, he invariably took a direct hand in its implementation. These traits, admirable enough in most people, were to cause trouble when, as president of the Confederacy, he often injected himself directly into the military decision making as the war in the West heated up.

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The only persistent flaw of Vicksburg 1863 is, alas, a gigantic one: the author’s novelistic flair for the picturesque too often wallpapers some of the greatest human misery this hemisphere has ever seen. Margaret Mitchellesque passages like this one crop up much too often:

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Until the war came Vicksburg and its genteel environs were like a land in a storybook. Passengers aboard steamboats plying the Mississippi could look with awe and envy upon broad lawns and green pastures surrounding the elegant mansions that lined both sides of the river. Beginning in early spring the white blossoms of apple, peach, pear, and citrus trees perfumed the air and by midsummer an ocean of white cotton boles stretched as far as the eye could see. On Sundays, along the great River road, which was shaded by magnolias and moss-draped oaks, fashionable carriages carried families for visits to nearby plantations or other outings, accompanied by men on thoroughbreds dressed in stylish suits with velvet trim and wearing felt or beaver top hats.

If you can spot what’s missing from that astonishing, openly nostalgic picture, you’ll know the central blind spot of this otherwise excellent book. And if you have an ancestor who was starved, whipped, raped, dragged, chained, or beaten to death in the course of building those broad lawns and green pastures and elegant mansions, you may find the omission too hard to forgive.

–Steve Donoghue

A Fortunate Age

By Joanna Smith Rakoff
Scribners, 2009

At first, you immediately dislike Joanna Smith Rakoff’s debut novel A Fortunate Age The Great Escape download , and you have many reasons: the subject matter (talky, brainless New Yorkers, social satire, and restaurants – oh dear God, the endless restaurants), the manipulative setting (an idyllic 1990s Manhattan being unwittingly stalked by 9/11), and even the type font (six paragraphs in: “’Mom,’” Dave moaned”; eight paragraphs in: “’Barry,’”cried her mother”; eleven paragraphs in: “’Mom, it’s fine!’” … if italics cost by the pound, Rakoff would owe you a rebate on the book).

The process that changes your reaction will be familiar to anyone who’s ever been seduced by New York (a sordid, delectable experience that can happen repeatedly throughout your life – and against which there is no known vaccine): gradually, grudgingly, you find yourself no longer loathing these people who surround you – in the case of A Fortunate Age, shallow, successful actor Tal, nebbishy Dave, callow and annoying Emily, and hapless sub-editor (and focal character) Sadie. It’s a weird alchemy: you aren’t any less discriminating in your tastes, and they aren’t any less flighty and irritating, and yet you find yourself caught up in the drama of their lives, conversant in the molehills out of which they make mountains, and somehow genuinely caring about it all.

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”), she encounters a group of protesters in the street:

But as she approached Bleecker she saw that the signs were emblazoned with images rather than words, fuzzy red-tinted photographs of large-headed alien-type creatures. “Oh my God,” she said aloud, stopping cold. “No.” Then she started to laugh. The creatures were not, of course, aliens. They were babies. Or, no, fetuses. The protesters were shouting, over and over, “Murderer,” rendering the word nonsensical. This was an antiabortion rally. Antichoice, she corrected herself. In New York? she thought. In the Village? Bleecker, at its eastern end, was a posh block lined with quiet, elegant restaurants. As she rounded the corner, she found her answer: Planned Parenthood, the words imprinted in discreet teal script, several feet above the building’s glass doors. Somehow – how? – she’d never noticed.

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By that In the Village? you should be wanting to hurl things at Sadie, or to hurl A Fortunate Age download Grandes Exitos CD1 mp3 across the room – but you won’t. Instead, by some miracle of plotting and voice and sheer authorial conviction, Rakoff will keep you reading until the ending, as utterly predictable and inconclusive as that ending is, as you know it will be, long before you reach it.

And lest you scoff, recall: Dumas and Dickens owe their immortality to just such a miracle, and 99 percent of all authors living today couldn’t manage it on their best day at Yaddo. Time will tell if Rakoff can manage this twice, but in the meantime, we must all yield to A Fortunate Age download 'A' gai waak .

–Steve Donoghue