Read this book years ago, but it was worth rereading. This is mostly told from the Western and American side, chronicling the steps and missteps that American policy makers took to counter the threat of communist expansionism. Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Reagan all get their share of due credit, but ironically the President on whose watch the Cold War ended, George Herbert Walker Bush, is described as “sleepwalking through history” during the critical moments of the unraveling of the Soviet Union. There is indeed some evidence that Bush saw the demise of the Soviet Union as a threat to stability and the established order and actually sought to slow down the process somewhat rather than aid and abet it. But it is Gorbachev and not any Western leader who really emerges as the key actor in this phenomenon, although what he brought about was surely not what he intended. This was a good book, opinionated but fairly evenhanded, definitely at the top of the list on CW history.
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2011/10/22/the-cold-war-by-martin-walker/
Aug 12 2011
Death on the Installment Plan by Louis-Ferdinand Celine
Celine has a way of writing about perfectly horrible experiences in a way that makes you laugh out loud. This book is a work of genius, although not quite as good as *Journey to the End of Night*. It’s too bad he didn’t write more. He has an uncanny way of finding humor in all the petty miseries of life, and humor is possibly the best antidote for such misery.
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2011/08/12/death-on-the-installment-plan-by-louis-ferdinand-celine-2/
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/
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/
Jan 11 2011
Dreams by C.G. Jung
I made a good faith effort to read this book from beginning to end, and I feel severely taxed for having endured such a load of nonsense. The idea of the unconscious is not altogether implausible, but Jung takes it to levels that Freud never dreamed of. Jung’s pretense to “science” is outrageous; there is nothing remotely scientific in this work, even by the standards of Jung’s time. Jung should be read as a literary figure rather than a scientist, and even in respect to psychology he is clearly more interested in mythology and mysticism than the workings of the human mind. There were many interesting dreams recorded in this book, but I am convinced that Jung grossly misinterpreted most of them in the light of his flaky theories. Dreams are a fascinating subject, but I learned nothing from this book.
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2011/01/11/dreams-by-c-g-jungi-made-a-good-faith-effort-to-read-this-book-from-beginning-to-end-and-i-feel-severely-taxed-for-having-endured-such-a-load-of-nonsense-the-idea-of-the-unconscious-is-not-altoget/
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2011/01/11/taking-stock-of-2010-books/
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