Suicide in Nazi Germany Beowulf & Grendel movie
Christian Goeschel
Oxford University Press, 2009

In a 1933 speech, Chancellor Hitler, denouncing the economic depravities of the Weimar Republic (which he saw as imposed by the Treaty of Versailles), rightly said those conditions had driven large numbers of Germans to suicide: “Since the signing of this treaty … 224,000 people, men, women, elderly people, and children have voluntarily taken their lives almost exclusively because of misery and deprivation!”

As Christian Goeschel points out in this remarkable and unsettling little coda of a book, Hitler’s figures were mostly accurate. They would also turn out to be deeply invidious, since his own Nazi era ushered in a new and far greater epidemic of suicide — including his own. Goeschel’s book is a pertinent reminder that the Nazis waged an internal war as well as an external one; their racial and social purity doctrines drove increasing numbers of Germans to suicide, especially as the Second World War wore on an German victory looked less and less likely. As Goeschel writes, “Between April and September 1943, there were at least 6,898 suicides within the army” — and the numbers were correspondingly high among the civilian population (indeed, one of the many tragedies of life under Nazi rule is that after 1943, there were few meaningful distinctions between the two populations, in terms of suffering).

Revolution Summer trailer

This is a brief book (166 pages, not including extensive notes and graphs and a note thanking virtually every scholar of Nazi Germany alive today), but it traffics dolorously in that most arresting and depressing of all literary forms, the suicide note. From the teenager who left a note in his pocket saying “my father is to blame for my death, to a great extent” to the long, rambling manifestos rehashing every grievance and reliving every harebrained hope, the whole gamut of the suicide note is encapsulated in these pages, and that should serve as a caution for potential readers not already cautioned by a title like Suicide in Nazi Germany: this is concentrated, disturbing stuff. It’s extremely well done (Goeschel shows universal restraint and considerable rhetorical ability throughout), but even so, it’s good that it’s not longer.

– Steve Donoghue

Belisarius: The Last Roman General
Ian Hughes
Westholme Publishing, 2009

When the scheming, devious, brilliant, fearless, neurotic emperor Justinian I came to power in 527, he confronted his own paltry and fractured inheritance with his eyes wide open. The entirety of the old sprawling Roman Empire, of which he was the nominal head, had fallen onto evil times since the bright days of Trajan and Hadrian centuries before. Successive waves of foreign invasion had battered the once-magnificent ramparts of Roman invincibility, and faction had long since been bitterly codified at court. Supplicants kissed the earth as they approached Justinian’s throne, but the earth no longer belonged to Rome, as it once had.

buy Reno 911!: Miami

Nate and Hayes hd

Justinian devised a mad course to change that; he set out to re-conquer lost Roman lands in North Africa and Italy. No amount of money or manpower would have seen this accomplished if Justinian hadn’t also had the right man for the job. He did have that man, his famous general Belisarius, and through skillful maneuvering, careful coalition-building, and, incidentally, large amounts of tactical and strategic brilliance, Belisarius actually managed to rekindle the light of lost Roman triumphs in virtually every theater where his forces operated. Ian Hughes, in his new book, refers to Belisarius as “the last Roman general” – he was certainly the last great Roman general.

It’s an incredible story, lure for historians, moralists, and novelists over the centuries (not even Robert Graves could make it dull, though his Count Belisarius gives it the old college try), and Hughes prosecutes it with the thoroughness of a municipal pipe-layer. No square foot is left untouched, everything is systematically addressed, and there is not an ounce of panache anywhere on the premises.

buy Bully

Belisarius historians almost reflexively assume this stenographer’s approach, probably because their main source, Procopius, balanced his own sober public account of the great general with his Secret History, a wildly scandalous collection of anecdotes about Justinian, Belisarius, and their wives that’s still compulsively fun reading.

Nobody could call Belisarius: The Last Roman General compulsively fun reading. Hughes is instructively thorough, mind you – as a comprehensive introduction to Belisarius and his world, this book would be hard to beat. But Hughes spends a lot of time warning and re-warning his readers about Procopius, that scamp:

What is clear is Procopius’ dislike of Antonina [the general’s wife], and this should be remembered when reading his account of her; throughout Anekdota [that’s what classicists call The Secret History] she is ridiculed, especially concerning her nature, her reckless personal life, and her origins. For her grandfather and father were charioteers in the Hippodrome. Although as such they could be famous, and possibly rather well-off, they would not be acceptable in polite society.

Hughes, on the other hand, is always acceptable in polite society. And if that functions as a warning to you in reading his book, so be it.

–Steve Donoghue

Barbarians to Angels: The Dark Ages Reconsidered
Peter S. Wells
Norton, 2009

The concept of the ‘Dark Ages’ is particularly attractive to rulers and nations billing themselves as spearheading some kind of rebirth, and dates for these elusive ages wander all over the timeline. As Peter Wells points out in his well-grounded, engaging new popular study, Barbarians to Angels, there are several popular candidates for the date when everything started going to Hell –- there’s A.D. 410, for example, when Alaric sacked Rome, or there’s A. D. 565, when Justinian’s death brought to an end the last attempt to retake the old Western half of the empire.

Wells’ main point is that when we read about such dates – and when we think of such things as the Dark Ages – we tend to think in Roman terms. As he demonstrates over and over in his slim, packed book, by the 5th century Rome was no longer the center of the world but rather one town among many:

While Roman rule was gradually disintegrating in Italy, throughout the Mediterranean basin, and in the provinces beyond the Alps, the peoples of Europe living in the former lands of the Empire and farther north beyond the old imperial frontiers were thriving.

One such place was the city of Lundeborg, on the Danish island of Fryn -– a place it’s safe to say most people have never heard of, and yet by the 5th century it was a thriving and wealthy place, full of commerce, craft, and artwork. Three miles to west of Lundeborg, the settlement of Gudme was a center for religious and political power -– the remains of a great hall (and large amounts of gold and coins) have been found there, mute testimony to the huge amounts of enterprising human activity that went on there.

That ‘mute’ is the problem besetting all of Well’s examples – although it’s only a problem for us, and for our historians. These people who are the focus of Wells’ studies, these tribes and settlements living at the outskirts of what had been the old Roman Empire, didn’t leave copious written records – in fact, most of them left no written records at all. Virtually no record of the songs they sung about themselves comes down to us, but ample (and always increasing) archeological evidence shows they were hustling and bustling for all that.

Barbarians to Angels is a charming and intentionally slight book, less a full-blown ideological campaign of reform, more a well-argued after-dinner case that we stop using such simple science fiction constructions as ‘Dark Ages’ and start paying attention to the light our own studies are constantly throwing on that long period between the 4th and the late 9th centuries. Those ages weren’t dark to their inhabitants, Wells gently but tenaciously insists, and they shouldn’t be to us, either.

—Steve Donoghue

How I Became a Famous Novelist
Steve Hely
Black Cat, 2009

Being who I am and doing what I do, I could hardly be blamed for sitting up a little straighter at one certain point in Steve Hely’s feverishly hilarious novel How I became a Famous Novelist:

Book reviewers are the most despicable, loathsome order of swine that ever rooted about the earth. They are sniveling, revolting creatures who feed their own appetites for bile by gnawing apart other people’s work. They are human garbage. They all deserve to be struck down by the awful diseases described in the most obscure dermatology journals.

And he’s not done!

Even when being “kindly,” book reviewers reveal their true nature as condescending jerks. “We look forward to hearing more from the author,” a book reviewer might say. The prissy tone sound like a second-grade piano teacher, offering you a piece of years-old strawberry hard candy and telling you to practice more.

Writing a screed against book reviewers in the middle of your book seems about as clear an example of ‘asking for trouble’ as waving a red flag at a bull, or talking about fiscal responsibility at a Democratic National Convention, but Hely doesn’t need to worry: his fast-paced, deft, and very funny debut novel is virtually bile-proof.

The story here involves hack ‘content provider’ Peter Tarslaw, who learns his old college girlfriend is getting married (and daring to be happy without him) and decides to become a best-selling novelist so he can rub her face in his success when he attends her wedding. This doesn’t give him much time, but Pete has surveyed the sorry state of best-sellerdom, and he’s convinced he won’t need much time. Breaking into a book-list filled with the latest clichéd and bromide-filled epics like Sageknights of Darkhorn (Astrid Soulblighter attempts to reclaim the throne from the wicked Scarkrig clan. The fifteenth volume of the “Bloodrealms” series), Mindstretch (Trang Martinez suspects her Pilates instructor may also be a vicious serial killer), and Kindness to Birds (On a journey across the Midwest, a downsized factory worker named Gabriel touches the lives of several people wounded by life) shouldn’t take much work. What you need to realize, Pete’s convinced, is that all great literature is built on bilking a gullible reading public:

It went on back to Homer, who’d written stories so ridiculous, so full of special effects and monsters and busty, half-divine sluts that Hollywood would be ashamed to make them. And he’d pulled it off! He’d punched it up with rosy-fingered dawn and the sickeningly cloying scene of Priam begging for his son’s body. That blind old trickster probably got more chicks (or dudes?) than Pericles.

In page after page and scene after scene of searing, spot-on satire, Hely merrily eviscerates the book-publishing industry, heaps ordure on a vast array of very thinly-disguised popular-lit figures, and eventually gets our hero both to the bestseller list and to that old girlfriend’s wedding. And just when you think the book is too snarky to do more than make you laugh (you’ll laugh out loud several times while reading How I Became a Famous Novelist), a nicely-done sentimental twist at the end slips past your defenses.

In short: We look forward to hearing more from the author.

—Steve Donoghue

The Book of Destiny:
Unlocking the Secrets of the Ancient Mayans and the Prophecy of 2012
Carlos Barrios
Harpercollins, 2009

Although it’s almost impossible to believe, Carlos Barrios’ new book The Book of Destiny earnestly wants to offer hope:

Mayan prophecies of events during this period have been astonishingly exact. The prophecies regarding the war in Iraq, the attack on the Twin Towers, conflicts such as those between India and Pakistan and between Israel and Palestine, the tsunamis, earthquakes, and floods are just a few examples. The predictions that have not yet come to pass are even more catastrophic -– but there is time to change the outcome!

And the reason this is almost impossible to believe? The Mayans exist in a bottleneck of prescience that would have made Jean Dixon swoon right to the carpet. On the one hand, much of their religion was based on interpreting various signs to predict the future – but they either didn’t foresee their own conquest and deliquescence at the hands of the Spanish or were too dumb or masochistic to prevent it, and on the other hand, one of their prophecies clocks in the end of the world for the year 2012 on the Julian calendar – which kind of palls the idea of a hopeful future. The End will come just in time to save us from a Jeb Bush presidency, but it’ll come too late to save us from a wretched John Cusack disaster movie called 2012.

It’s fortunate, then, that Mayan prophecies are anything but astonishingly exact. Needless to say, they mention nothing at all about Pakistan or the Twin Towers – instead, they’re stuffed with Nostradamus-style fat generalities (“The Man with Two Eyes will Strike at Dawn” and the like) that can be interpreted in six dozen ways and fitted more or less neatly to virtually anything in the morning paper.

The interesting part of Barrios’ book lies elsewhere. He takes what he knows of Mayan literature and uses it to fashion a series of personality profiles, a kind of horoscope for those who want to determine which Mayan glyph rules the date and time of their birth –- always a fun way to beguile an hour’s light drinking. Naturally I figured out my own –- it’s Toj, which represents Grandfather Sun and the law of cause and effect. Those of you who don’t know me are probably wondering what Toj is like when he’s at home. Those of you who do know me are perhaps less prone to wondering:

Toj … show fortitude in the face of any situation and have the capacity to increase this strength over time … Toj are ill-tempered and shortsighted. They are possessive, destructive, proud, and vain … they are mentally unstable, sickly, and accident-prone, and they have a short life span. They face many problems and obstacles and could even destroy their own home.

Smartass Mayans. Who needs ‘em?

— Steve Donoghue

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

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

• Dirty Mary Crazy Larry video

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.

Timeline psp

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?”

Who’s Your Caddy? divx

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

The Hard Way on dvd

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:

The Crimson Kimono

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?

The Verdict hd

The Wrestler video

The basset hound is silent.

-Steve Donoghue

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

• gods of earth and heaven mp3 download

, 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.

Cry_Wolf trailer

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

Christine rip

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]

The Romantic Englishwoman full

“Yes.”

Sweeney Todd dvd

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.”

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory psp

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.

• Snakes on a Plane download

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.

Coyote Ugly buy

Get thee behind me, John Bunyan.

–Steve Donoghue

Once Upon A Time In The West buy

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.

Push dvdrip

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.

The Molly Maguires ipod

Fired release

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:

The Rainmaker movie

• The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas dvd

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

We Two: Victoria and Albert: Rulers, Partners, Rivals

Gillian Gill
Ballantine, 2009

When handsome 20-year-old Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha married Queen Victoria in 1839, his new countrymen (Albert had wept during the ceremony in which he renounced his German nationality and officially became a British citizen) were baffled as to what to make of him. One one level, literally what to make of him: the Prince Consort needed an English rank of his own, but what should it be?

As Gillian Gill writes in her clear-eyed and wonderfully antic new history of the celebrated pair, We Two, the debate over the Prince’s rank was awkwardly complicated by the Prince himself:

For his part, Albert [in 1839] declared that he would never stoop to an English dukedom, since a don of the royal house of Coburg outranked any English peer. In England, where many lords had genealogies as long and estates much larger and richer than Coburg-Gotha, this came off as a piece of pathetic rodomontade from a youth of twenty.

Gill’s account takes readers at a brisk pace through the twenty-year marriage at the heart of her book, tracing the slow, grudging steps by which the ruling elite of Victoria’s realm came to re-evaluate and then appreciate Albert’s many fine qualities. He was a hard worker, a temperate, responsible figure in an extended family of extremely dissolute morons (his family was Victoria’s family – they were first cousins, her mother being sister to his father), and in addition to what Gill calls his “theoretical brilliance,” he held a number of forward-thinking social attitudes, unlike his wife. Gill clearly likes Victoria, so perhaps she’s unaware of what a dithering, clueless portrait she inadvertently paints of the monarch who gave her name to an era:

Queen Victoria saw foreign affairs as an extension of family affairs. She was related in some degree to virtually every royal house in Europe, and in genealogical lore even her husband could not compete with her. Foreign policy for Victoria consisted in no small measure of her writing careful missives in beautiful French (the international language of diplomacy) to her kinfolk. One day she might advise her first cousin’s wife the queen of Portugal to be more careful in choosing her intimate associates. The next she might beg her distant Austrian relation for his own good to be kinder to the Italians and the Poles even if they did show a foolishly rebellious spirit: or her Dutch cousin to stop bothering dearest Uncle Leopold in Belgium; or her French uncle Louis Philippe to drop the idea of marrying one of his sons to the Spanish infanta. When war threatened to break out in any part of Europe, the Queen was stricken with angst. If Uncle France started fighting Uncle Austria over Italy, whose side should she be on?

By the time Albert died (young, overworked at age 42), he had succeeded by sheer strength of personality to carve for himself a position of real power out of what had begun as the greatest of all purely ceremonial appointments. The Queen, at first reflexively possessive of her prerogatives, gradually realized that Albert was never indiscreet, never unprepared on any issue, and perhaps most importantly, virtually never wrong. Not since Lord Burleigh had an English Queen been so well advised, and although Gill is not the first biographer to adjust upwards the dismissive estimates some historians have made of Albert, she just may be the most delicate in her discretion – a quality perfectly capable of handling even the most awkward question about Albert:

Nonetheless, even if it is easy to document that, after the age of five, Albert’s intimate relationships were all with men (except for his love of his wife, the Queen), even if it is possible to argue that the young Albert could have experienced homosexual love, there is not one scrap of hard evidence that he did. This is not surprising. He was a man of great renown, major achievement, and small popularity who died tragically young and had a loyal band of friends and relatives. In the years following his death, the person who assiduously collected and lovingly savored the records of Prince Albert’s boyhood was his wife. Queen Victoria was the last person likely to uncover evidence that her husband had not slept with women because he preferred to sleep with men.

A Dennis the Menace Christmas the movie

Book of Blood movie full

Mr. 3000 The Rainmaker ipod Dracula’s Guest move Syngenor release

It’s so smoothly done you almost don’t think to re-read it for the whisper-soft suggestion that evidence was destroyed, and that’s as it should be. Despite its famous subjects, We Two is a heart a very Edwardian production: it’s smart but chatty, responsible but slightly purple, and best of all, it expects you to do your own thinking. It would be claiming too much to say Gill has written a book Victoria would have liked – the Queen wasn’t much of a reader. But Albert would have filled this book with his spidery, passionate marginalia, and there’s high praise in that.

-Steve Donoghue