Oct 18 2014

Twentieth Century France by James McMillan

I read this book from beginning to end, and I have almost nothing to say about it, except that French history after Napoleon is pretty boring.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2014/10/18/twentieth-century-france-by-james-mcmillan/

Oct 18 2014

The Second World War by J.F.C. Fuller

This is a tactical and strategic analysis of World War II, a purely military history without much in the way of human dimension. It makes some interesting arguments. Fuller believes air power is wasteful, immoral, and ineffective at deciding military conflict, and that the best use of it is in cargo transport rather than aerial bombing. He also believes that the Allies made a costly mistake in demanding unconditional surrender of both Germany and Japan, which ensured that the war would be ferociously fought to the finish when it could have been ended sooner with a negotiated peace. He makes some good points, but elsewhere he comes across as the pompous ass he obviously is. He clearly believes war is a game for gentlemen, and what he deplores most about World War II is that it was clearly not a gentleman’s war. He seems to believe that such wars occur when the little people are allowed to rise up instead of being kept in their proper place. Obviously a book from an older era.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2014/10/18/the-second-world-war-by-j-f-c-fuller/

Oct 14 2014

Tintentod by Cornelia Funke

This was the immensely satisfying end to a very good trilogy, although I will have to think about it a little longer to say just why.

The author thanks her English translator in the acknowledgements to German edition, so she is presumably very happy with its rendering as Inkdeath.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2014/10/14/tintentod-by-cornelia-funke/

Oct 12 2014

Catastrophe 1914: Europe Goes to War by Max Hastings

This book only covers the first five months of World War I, but those five months were certainly horrendous enough to be worth remembering. The author does not buy into the the subsequent consensus that the war was pointless and not worth the cost; perhaps it never should have been fought, but in his view Germany was certainly to blame for starting it, and once it started it was necessary to resist the German onslaught in order to prevent a German hegemony of Europe. As an Englishman he does not think Britain’s sacrifice was in vain, although many of his compatriots did and do not agree with him. A good book that makes some good arguments, although much of it is a catalogue of horrors that undermines the author’s thesis.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2014/10/12/catastrophe-1914-europe-goes-to-war-by-max-hastings/

Oct 11 2014

The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt by Toby Wilkinson

This is probably the best book on ancient Egypt I have read so far. The author is clearly passionate about Egyptian civilization, but he acknowledges its dark side; for all its artistic and architectural achievements, it was a repressive autocracy that cannot have been pleasant for ordinary people to live under. The continuity of this civilization is extraordinary and makes the history of the United States seem like a mere blip in world history by comparison. This book is entirely history and fortunately leaves out any discussion of archaeology, which makes it much more readable and interesting than most works on egyptology. The historical record of ancient Egypt is quite sparse, but what survives is an incredible story. This book did a better job of bringing an often dry and dusty subject to life than any comparable book I have read.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2014/10/11/the-rise-and-fall-of-ancient-egypt-by-toby-wilkinson/

Oct 07 2014

The Unquiet Ghost by Adam Hochschild

The Unquiet Ghost is both a terrific historical and journalistic investigation and a historical document itself, as the author acknowledges in a preface written in 2002, some eight years after the book’s first publication. More than eight more years have passed, and the conditions that made the book both possible and urgent slip ever further into the past. And yet. The memories, most now second-hand, remain; the glimpses of another possible Russia refuse to fade completely, no matter what the present leadership might wish; the ghosts are still unquiet.

The Russia where I had come to live, in 1991, was then a country where only in the previous few years had it become possible to read those long-forbidden books at last, to look the past in the face, and to ask the question that obsessed the Russians as much as it did me: How could the country that gave the world Tolstoy and Chekhov also give it the gulag? Everywhere I went, it seemed, people were thinking about this. In addition to the men and women I sought out to interview, I kept stumbling into other unplanned conversations about Russia’s Stalinist past…

And so 1991 turned out to be the right moment for my journey of exploration. It was a time when mass graves had been newly opened, and I was able to walk through several of them, seeing, in one, skull after skull with a bullet hole through it. It was a time when it was finally possible to see the old gulag camps, and I will never forget standing in the ruins of one of them, Butugychag, a place so cold and remote and surrounded by barren snow-streaked rock hills that it seemed like another planet. Even there, in that desolate moonscape with nothing but snowfields to escape to for dozens of miles, even there, the camp had an internal prison with thick stone walls and cross-hatched iron bars on the windows. Above all, it was a time when people who had survived such camps and the era that produced them were eager to tell their stories. It would be harder to gather such stories today [2002], because so many of those who spoke to me were in their seventies or eighties and are now dead.

In another way, also, I was unexpectedly luck in my timing. The very month I arrived in Russia, the government lifted prohibitions that for decades had placed huge swaths of the country off-limits to foreigners. This meant that in several places I visited in Siberia, I was the first American of Western European whom anyone there had ever seen. … The novelty of meeting their first Westerner made many people particularly eager to tell their stories. I was the first witness from another world.

Hochschild settles into a still-Soviet Moscow in January 1991, where waking up and falling down seem to be happening simultaneously all around him. Memorial, a now-beleaguered institution of Russian civil society was still a protean organization founded four years earlier — gathering names, publishing, archiving what it could digitally, assisting victims materially. “The core of Memorial’s work is to try to restore a set of memories the government worked for several decades to erase.” Much of it was still individual initiative and handcrafted work.

As the book progresses, he moves between Moscow and further reaches, ending with a visit to Kolyma, one of the gulag’s worst regions, described then and now as the dark side of the moon. Along the way, he meets former inmates, former administrators, and descendants of both, fated to live in the same place with the acts of their forefathers between them, seldom spoken but always known.

Hochschild brings the liveliness of good journalism — every page bristles with specifics — and the perspective of a historian. Fitting, then, that his book has become a testament to its times — the first flush of openness and the glimmerings of a new Russian state — as much as a document of the times before it.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2014/10/07/the-unquiet-ghost-by-adam-hochschild/

Oct 06 2014

Paladin Of Souls by Lois McMaster Bujold

After reading The Curse Of Chalion to prep myself for this book, that had come highly recommended to me by various sources, I made the mistake of reading the Wiki page and discovering that the Chalion saga is based very much on the historical House of Trastamara, the royal family that wound up uniting Spain around the turn of the 16th century despite great personal tragedy. Of course, remember that the unification of Spain allowed the Inquisition to run unchecked and that religious minorities were, at best, expelled from the peninsula — not that you’d suspect any of that given the way the subjects of religion and politics are handled in Paladin Of Souls. Despite being mapped very closely to historical figures, the characters in general are given none of the nuance of motive that real people have, instead being either good or evil based on which nation they belong to. This is problematic because these characters, despite changes to the specifics of religion and the addition of magic, are clearly stand-ins for Iberian Catholics and Muslims, and the depiction of Quintarians/Catholics as being tolerant and cosmopolitan whereas Quadrenes/Muslims are savage zealots when any student of history knows it was the reverse was deeply disturbing to me. It’s as if someone wrote a fantasy take on the Civil War where the Union was intent on zombifying the poor Africans whom the Confederates had saved from lives of savagery, y’know? That kind of revisionism is not okay.

But I can see where the allure of it would be hard to deny, in a way that isn’t explicitly bigoted against a particular people. The story of the Trastamarans is compellingly high drama, and if you just wanted to write a high romance with elements of fantasy in it, where you could explore your philosophical leanings but didn’t want to write something ridiculously long and probably overly complex, it’s easy to reduce the enemies of the main characters to being Bad People so you could get on with telling an exciting story. It just seems unethical, sort of the opposite side of the coin of what I complain about when I complain about Guy Gavriel Kay. GGK is too cautious as he retells history as fantasy. Here, I feel, Lois McMaster Bujold takes too many liberties. Both ways, it’s still pretty lazy.

History aside, would I have liked the book better? Maybe if Ista weren’t so awful. I tried so hard to like her: we’re both mothers, of middle age, with dim views of our “traditional” roles in society. But it bothers me that she doesn’t show actual remorse over dy Lutez’s death: she only seems upset that killing him didn’t end the curse, and she spends way too much time blaming him for not having the will to… what exactly? Live again so he could die again for her children? As much as I love my kids, I couldn’t kill someone on the off-chance it would save them. A person, for example, who would kill an organ donor in hopes it would help extend the life of her terminally-ill child is a fucking psychopath. As one of my favorite TV characters recently said, “Cool motive. Still murder.”

And then I didn’t care for her treatment of Cattilara. I get it, Catti is annoying and self-involved and hysterical, but maybe if Ista weren’t such a psychopath, she’d see how similar she and Catti are and try to relate to her that way. Instead, Ista is completely high-handed and awful to her, never even trying empathy and kindness as she forces Catti to do the right thing.

A friend compared this book to a sort of high fantasy Eat Pray Love and that probably also explains my dislike of the book, as well — the only thing worse than memoirs of privileged men in their angsty 20s are the memoirs of privileged women “finding themselves” in their 30s. Unlike my friend, I did enjoy the action sequences, which I thought were done better than in TCoC, or were at least more believable/coherent in their magic. And don’t get me wrong: I didn’t dislike the book, as critical as I sound. The prose is beautiful, the plot is great and when the religion/magic is unmoored of its historical roots, it’s really appealing. If Ista were only less of a psychopath, I would have liked the whole thing a lot more.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2014/10/06/paladin-of-souls-by-lois-mcmaster-bujold/

Oct 06 2014

Glamour in Glass by Mary Robinette Kowal

Glamour in Glass is the second novel in Mary Robinette Kowal’s Glamourist Histories series. This review contains spoilers for Shades of Milk and Honey, the first in the series.

Continue reading

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2014/10/06/glamour-in-glass-by-mary-robinette-kowal/

Oct 04 2014

The Cider House Rules by John Irving

This is a highly acclaimed novel, but I found it somewhat disappointing. The characters mostly are sweet, uncomplicated people, the kind of people who are nice to know but not very interesting to read about. This is basically the life story of a fictional character, but like the life story of a real person it goes on for quite a while without seeming to have much point to it. The story does pick up at toward the end, and finally you see what this rambling narrative was leading to, but I found most of it rather dull and unsatisfying. Not a totally wasted effort, but I loved *The World According to Garp*, and I definitely expected more from this author.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2014/10/04/the-cider-house-rules-by-john-irving/

Oct 03 2014

The Curse Of Chalion by Lois McMaster Bujold

An almost perfect fantasy novel, with one major exception. Cazaril is a compelling hero but there are parts where his heroism seems less a function of himself than of the story. I loved that he had personality and flaws, but the author sometimes seems to forget those flaws and forego realism for the epic, when a few more lines explaining the manifestation of his inner strength might have served to ground his actions in the believable. I spent the whole book rooting for him, but in scenes such as his last confrontation with dy Jironal, I couldn’t suspend my disbelief long enough to really enjoy what was happening, which quite drew me out of the book altogether. Otherwise, it’s an excellent novel, and I loved the philosophical underpinnings of the religious system. Lois McMaster Bujold writes beautifully, with the occasional intrusion of the hero-on-steroids trope the only flaw in this otherwise excellent book.

On a side note that didn’t affect my enjoyment of this novel: I was somewhat horrified at how easily Ista passed off the (truth of the) death of dy Lutez. I’m hoping it’s addressed in the sequel, Paladin Of Souls, which I’m about to gleefully devour.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2014/10/03/the-curse-of-chalion-by-lois-mcmaster-bujold/