This book came highly recommended, but it left me cold. Gibson’s vision is of a future in which there is more of the artificial than the natural, in which reality is effortlessly constructed by ubiquitous technology, and in which what you perceive is much of the time what some powerful person wants you to perceive. And that is about all I can say about this book. I read the story from beginning to end, and I still don’t really know what it was about. Maybe I’m just not smart enough for this kind of book. There was no character I cared about, and there was nothing that happened that I could relate to or that made sense to me. If this is an accurate prophecy of the future, it is neither utopian nor dystopian…just really, really weird.
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2011/07/28/neuromancer-by-william-gibson/
Jul 25 2011
The Second World War by John Keegan
War is terrible to experience, but fascinating to read about. I have read this book before, but it was worth rereading. Keegan’s approach to the study of war is coldly technical and rather short on human feeling, but his tactical and strategic analysis is admirably thorough. For a snobby Brit, he is a great admirer of America’s military prowess and America’s performance in the war, and his portrait of Roosevelt is the most flattering of any of the wartime statesmen he profiles in this book. Nevertheless, the book has its defects: the human dimension of war is overlooked in favor of the technical, and Keegan has precious little to say about the Holocaust. But this book was intended from the outset to be a primarily military history, and as such it is worthy of study, even (and perhaps especially) for the cadets at West Point.
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2011/07/25/the-second-world-war-by-john-keegan/
Jun 13 2011
Ancient Israel edited by Hershel Shanks
This book states at the outset that it is not anti-religious, but it clearly goes to great lengths to provide secular explanations for events that in the bible are attributed to divine intervention. In one chapter it states that the nomadic Jews, coming out of the desert armed with primitive weapons, could not possibly have taken a walled city like Jericho, completely ignoring what the bible says about this. Other chapters dealing with events not recorded in the bible give better treatment. The account of the Hellenistic period and the Maccabean revolt illustrates a dilemma for people like me who are both Christian and admirers of Western civilization: history teaches us to believe that Greek civilization was a good thing, but when this amounts to defiling and desecrating Jewish religion with Greek paganism, whose side should I be on? As Irenaeus put it, what has Athens to do with Jerusalem? This book in its secular approach seems to favor Athens over Jerusalem, but Jehovah lives on.
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2011/06/13/ancient-israel-edited-by-hershel-shanks/
Jun 07 2011
Let Our Fame Be Great by Oliver Bullough
Review in brief: Encounters between Russia and the peoples of the Northern Caucasus have not been happy ones, and have generally ended badly for the smaller nations involved. From the Nogai driven into the Black Sea in the 1700s to the Circassians mostly slaughtered or removed to the Ottoman Empire in the 1860s to the Chechens, who fought for 30 years in the 1800s, were deported en masse to Central Asia in 1944 and subjected to two wars since 1994, the overall picture is bleak. The individual stories are full of spirit and life, and Bullough goes to great lengths to find people and paints deft portraits. He’s a better reporter than analyst, but overall Let Our Fame Be Great: Journeys Among the Defiant People of the Caucasus is a splendid book.
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2011/06/07/let-our-fame-be-great-by-oliver-bullough/
May 18 2011
World War I by S.L.A Marshall
The colossal horror of this war is made even more appalling by the fact that it was probably the most pointless war ever fought, yet the sacrifice involved was unimaginable. The author is rather harsh in his assessment of the quality of both the military and political leaders during these four years of unabating slaughter, but the record of the battles fought bears out his judgment. The Great War is a story of thousands of men charging to their deaths in battle after battle to gain a few yards of dirt. The victors showed themselves at Versailles to be no wiser in peace than they had been in war, and the narrative ends by detailing the seeds of Hitler’s revanchism. Thankfully, Europe has since then come to its senses, but war remains the one constant throughout history, and later generations may forget its appalling costs. If we truly live in a post-millennial world, as some believe, this revelation has no doubt escaped those who lie buried in Flanders fields.
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2011/05/18/world-war-i-by-s-l-a-marshall/
May 15 2011
Alexander to Actium by Peter Green
I can’t possibly do justice to this monumental work in the short space allowed for Facebook book reviews, but I would just like to say that in additional to being informative and educational, this book was delightfully entertaining and enoyable. I am currently taking a course on the Hellenistic Age, but this book, combined with Green’s excellent biography of Alexander, has taught me far more about the subject than the class has so far. The neverending wars and political intrigues were confusing and a bit wearying, but Green’s discussion of Hellenistic art, literature, and philosophy was the highlight of this journey. The paradox is that although at this period Greek cuture was at its apogee of influence and penetration in the world, this was also a period that saw a distinct decline in the quality of that culture, although this was not something that the philistine Romans could have ever appreciated. For all Alexander’s martial glory, Hellenization is his only truly positive legacy.
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2011/05/15/alexander-to-actium-by-peter-green/
May 14 2011
1776 by David McCullough
This is really good stuff. Personal accounts and testimonies from those who were there. Yet it seems like a miracle that America was able to win its revolution. The campaign was botched and bungled from the beginning, and Washington was hardly a military leader of the first order. Providence certainly played a role in the outcome, for which I am forever grateful.
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2011/05/14/1776-by-david-mccullough/
May 05 2011
Premature Evaluation: Yalta by S.M. Plokhy
Did FDR give away too much at Yalta? Was Churchill sketching out percentages of influence in Eastern and Southeastern Europe with Stalin? How far did Stalin’s plans for annexations run? And was the Cold War inevitable?
In Yalta: The Price of Peace, S.M. Plokhy goes to the literature and the archives with these questions, and so far (I’m not quite halfway through) comes back with good arguments and answers. His most helpful point, to my mind, is to relocate Yalta as a wartime conference. He accompanies the negotiations and their background with details of which armies were where at what times. While victory in Europe looked certain for the Allies if they held together, it was by no means certain whose forces would reach key areas first, and it was even possible that the Grand Alliance would break before war’s end. It certainly would not have been the first time in European history that a coalition had foundered on the shores of victory.
Two quotations that bear on the overall argument:
Stalin’s words [in a discussion about creating the United Nations] were a reminder that the peace being negotiated at Yalta was not one between the Allies and the Axis but between the victors themselves. (p. 126)
On January 16, 1943, Moscow informed the Polish government in exile that it had decided to revoke a provision of their treaty recognizing the Polish citizenship of ethnic Poles who found themselves on Soviet territory after September 1939 [i.e., after the USSR had invaded the eastern parts of interwar Poland, in accordance with the secret protocols of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact]. From now on they would be treated as Soviet citizens. (p. 159)
British leaders, having gone to war against Germany over Poland found it difficult to leave that country in Stalin’s sphere of influence without protest. Stalin, having seen Russia and the USSR invaded twice via Polish territory saw a friendly Polish government (for Stalinist values of “friendly”) as a necessity. Besides, the Red Army was in Warsaw, and the London Poles were in, well, London.
I’ll be interested to find out how much post-war conflict Plokhy sees as inevitable, given such deep divisions among the Allies on matters of both principle and practice. On the other hand, both East and West made compromises at Yalta, so maybe he will argue in favor of more contingency than is usually credited.
The research is solid, the prose is brisk, the details colorful and the argument clear. Good stuff.
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2011/05/05/premature-evaluation-yalta-by-s-m-plokhy/
Apr 22 2011
Infantry Attacks by Erwin Rommel
This book reads like a series of military field reports, which is basically what it is. Rommel displays his flair for aggressive command of infantry under extremely challenging circumstances in the First World War, and I suppose many might find his accounts of courage and resourcefulness under fire very inspiring. But reading this memoir gives one a look into the mind of a rather cold-blooded military man, and I find it rather disturbing. And in spite of all the action, Rommel’s emotionless, colorless descriptions of one engagement after the other render the narrative as a whole distinctly tedious. If war is too important to be left to the generals, so is the writing of history, even military history. Rommel ends the book on a patriotic and defiant note that suggests that he has learned many tactical lessons from the experience of combat, but no moral ones. His tactical brilliance…and lack of moral reflection…obviously made him an ideal candidate to lead Hitler’s army.
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2011/04/22/infantry-attacks-by-erwin-rommel/
Feb 11 2011
History of the Arabs by Philip Hitti
The author is a proud, patriotic, card-carrying Arab, deeply immersed in the brilliant cultural achievements of medieval Islamic civilization, and he argues persuasively that without the Arab contribution what we call Western Civilization would never have progressed beyond the Dark Ages. There are a few statements in this book that reveal how dated it is…”Lebanon is the most stable country in the Middle East”…”Suicide is rare among Moslems”…but it is rich in detail as it attempts to do justice to Arab culture. Israel and Zionism are omitted in this volume, although it goes up to the 1960’s, and the author takes a mild and objective view of Arab civilization’s relationship with the West, unlike many modern Arab intellectuals who are implacably hostile. A book like this could never have been written in the post-9/11 era, which makes me thankful that it is still in print. The book is an artifact of a bygone era when Arabs and Muslims were not yet the Enemy.
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2011/02/11/history-of-the-arabs-by-philip-hitti/
Al Singh
Doug Merrill
Doreen Sheridan
John Pitzel
Lars N. Goldschlager
Laura Eilers
Professor X
Robert Maedgen
Sylvere Ap Leanan
The Shire