A Review of An Army at Dawn by Rick Atkinson

Reviews
May 14, 2006 | 6 books mentioned 14 3 min read

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coverThe more I learn about World War II, the more it fascinates me. I feel like most people have a vague, middle-ground understanding of the war. Two generations removed from the war, I have trouble fathoming both the global scale of the conflict and the impact it had on hundreds of millions of individuals. I had a child’s school-taught understanding of the war until I read a novel, actually. The second part of Ian McEwan’s novel Atonement tells of the British evacuation from France at Dunkirk after the Germans overran the country. It was an important event in the war, but one that I had never really learned much about, and McEwan’s rich storytelling made me want to learn more. I also realized that I ought to know more about the war that both of my grandfathers fought in, one in Europe and one in the Pacific.

Wanting to get an overview, I opted for John Keegan’s The Second World War, which turned out to be an ideal choice in that it was the broad, readable overview of the war that I had been looking for. (I would later read Keegan’s history of the First World War and review it.) But after Keegan, I wanted to delve into the war more, to take a narrower view and learn about some of the hundreds of smaller conflicts that, taken together, comprised the war. I turned to Rick Atkinson, not least because I had the chance to meet him twice and because I read and enjoyed his book, In the Company of Soldiers, about being embedded in Iraq.

An Army at Dawn is the first book in Atkinson’s trilogy about the liberation of Europe during WWII. This book covered North Africa, while the forthcoming books will cover Italy and France. An Army at Dawn won the Pulitzer in 2003 and deservedly so. I don’t think I’ve ever read a history book that flowed so well. The book is an incredible marriage of storytelling and historical fact, so that the reader feels both entertained and very well informed. Atkinson relied on battle memoirs and letters from soldiers to augment traditional, official sources and it shows. The war’s narrative is textured at every turn with the words of the men who were there, providing an insight I’ve not gotten from other history books. Along with using the men’s words directly, Atkinson also combines these collective observations in his own way to paint a vivid picture of the goings on. An example:

The rain slowed to a drizzle, then stopped for the first time in two days. A monstrous, blood-orange moon drifted behind the breaking clouds. Backlit by desultory shell fire, British victualers darted up with tins of cold plum pudding for men who spooned it down behind their pathetic fieldstone parapets. Flares rose to define the dead.

That scene occurred near Longstop Hill as the conflict raged back and forth in Tunisia. We all know about World War II, but beyond the most familiar aspects of the War – the invasion of Poland, the Battle of Britain, Pearl Harbor, Normandy, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Holocaust – how much do we really know? For me, it didn’t go much deeper than that, but as Atkinson makes so vividly clear, the world once watched North Africa, and battles like Kesserine Pass, Mareth, and El Guettar made headlines. To me, though, the book is powerful in that it goes beyond just knowing when and where and how these battles happened, it gives us a glimpse into the lives and deaths of the men who were there. In that sense I found this book both incredibly informative while also conveying the unfathomable (to me in this day and age) emotions of war.

An Army at Dawn was one of the best books I’ve read in a while. I’ll certainly read Atkinson’s next two books when they come out, but in the meantime, as I look at my queue of books to read, I see that only Robert Capa’s Slightly Out of Focus is about WWII. I need to read more books about World War II. Any suggestions?

created The Millions and is its publisher. He and his family live in New Jersey.

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The Spanish Prisoner Redux: On Finn Brunton’s Spam: A Shadow History of the Internet

Reviews
July 19, 2013 | 6 books mentioned 7 min read
It was not long after the death of the Yasser Arafat that I received an email purporting to be from a cousin of his, soliciting my assistance in spiriting away several hundred thousand dollars held in a secret account somewhere. I had a Hotmail account at the time: its spam filters were not as effective as Gmail’s, so a lot of this kind of stuff got through. Filters have come a long way since then -- and so, in turn, has spam itself. A colorful assortment of international tradespeople, drug-pushers, swindlers, and fraudsters, spammers have become a familiar feature of our digital landscape. Finn Brunton’s investigation of the question of spam, Spam: A Shadow History of the Internet -- the problems of defining it, understanding it, and tackling it -- takes us to the front of an ongoing and highly sophisticated technological war, a keenly contested territorial struggle for control of the information superhighway. The precursor to the modern Internet was the U.S. government-sponsored Usenet network. It was the product of a marriage of convenience between two very different groupings: the “Iron Triangle” of the US Department of Defense, the U.S. Congress, and the defense industry on the one hand, and an Ivory Tower of pioneering computer geeks and academics on the other. Merging the hierarchical and technocratic secretive culture of the military with the libertarian, communitarian ethic of an emergent hacker ethos, the Internet’s complex and contradictory cultural formation contained the seeds of an identity crisis that would be brought into sharp focus by the advent of spam in the 1990s. “Spam,” in the Usenet era, denoted the practice of posting excessively voluminous or repetitious missives across various newsgroups. The word’s contemporary association with commercial self-promotion can be traced back to 1988, when a scammer called Rob Noha posted a message in multiple newsgroups, in waves across several days -- subject line: "Poor College Student needs Your Help!!:-(" -- asking readers to contribute a dollar each to “Jay-Jay’s College Fund.” The message provoked an outcry from network users, enraged that the system was being so flagrantly abused. Reluctant to resort to oppressive policing measures to combat the new scourge, the system administrators were happy to hand the matter over to mob justice: We have received a number of inquiries about JJ...If you view these questions as the burning issues of our time, you might wish to call JJ yourself. You can reach him at: Rob Noha (aka JJ) 402/488-2586. And they did, in droves. In time, the administrator’s withering sarcasm would prove to have been misplaced: when large-scale commercial spam began in earnest in the 1990s, this scourge did indeed become one of the “burning issues of our time,” because it highlighted critical ambiguities about the nature of the Internet. What was it for? Who owned it? Who, if anyone, had the moral, ethical, or legal right to police it? Six years later, the issue was brought into the limelight once again, courtesy of two immigration lawyers from Arizona, Laurence Canter and Martha Siegel, who circulated a 34-line email to users of 6,000 active newsgroups, soliciting clients with the offer of assistance in filling in applications for a Green Card Lottery run by the U.S. government. Applicants needed only to send their details on a postcard to be eligible, but Canter and Siegel posed as necessary middlemen who could help with the paperwork of registration, for a fee. The online community was predictably enraged, but powerless; in the absence of any structural system of redress, suggestions for remedial solutions were limited to the usual collective vigilantism. (“Let’s bomb ’em with huge, useless GIF files, each of us sending them several, so as to overwhelm their mailbox and hopefully get these assholes’ account cancelled by their sesames.”) Canter and Siegel later published a bestselling book, How to Make a Fortune on the Information Superhighway, which expounded an essentially Lockean argument whereby the Internet geeks who populated the network from its earliest days were characterized as backward “natives,” while the authors were cast in the role of Wild West “pioneers.” The “land,” they argued, should belong to those, like Canter and Siegel, who would work it profitably. The “natives,” stuck in a primitive social system -- a volunteerist, commons-based economy -- had no meaningful rights to it. Canter and Siegel spawned a wave of imitators, a veritable cottage industry of how-to guides, including Davis Hawke’s The Spambook, Jason Heckel’s instruction manuals, “How to Profit from the Internet,” and Rodona Garst’s Premier Services, “exemplary gray-area spammers,” who were (according to their brochure) “opening the doors to cyber space and smoothing the transition into these infinite markets.” Several important developments had fundamentally altered the online landscape by the mid-1990s: the foundation of Tim Berners-Lee’s World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), alongside the emergence of the Marc Andreessen-led Mosaic web browser, meant the networked computer was about to become far easier to use for many more people, bringing into the online world “a vast influx entirely free of pre-existing intellectual commitments to the ethos of computational resource sharing, research, non-commercial use, and radically free speech.” On New Year’s Day in 1995, the ban on commercial activity on the NSFNET (the successor to Usenet) was rescinded; the Internet ceased to be the property of the U.S. government. By 2000, the infamous “419 message” -- named after the section of the Nigerian penal code pertaining to online fraud -- had established itself in the popular consciousness as the quintessential spam email. As Brunton explains, the 419 scam was merely an updated version of the “Spanish prisoner” confidence trick of years gone by: a beautiful, aristocratic woman, incarcerated by the King of Spain for oblique political reasons, needs your help to escaping; in return she will give you some part of her fortune. The plot requires money for bribing guards, hiring guides, and purchasing supplies for the trek through the mountains. Things don’t work out as planned; more money is needed for more bribes, the prisoner falls ill and needs money for a doctor, and on and on. Brunton takes us back a whole century, to a New York Times account of one such syndicate operating in the U.S. in 1898 via Havana: the “prisoner,” in this instance, is a certain Captain D. Santiago de Ochoa, imprisoned in Cuba with a trunk full of French banknotes buried in New Jersey. A variation on the theme would appear in Martin Amis’s London Fields, in which the temptress Nicola Six persuades her lovestruck admirer to part with a large amount of cash to help smuggle a couple of non-existent Thai children to safety. In its modern, digital version, the scam was being carried out on an industrial scale: What makes 419 so remarkable is that all of this business, this international criminal activity and transfer of wealth and the creation of a small population of specialized, almost craftsman-like spammers, is the constantly metamorphosing story of the Spanish Prisoner -- possibly, quantitatively, the most told and retold story of the twenty-first century so far. Some people lost more than others. In 2000, a businessman named James Adler unsuccessfully sued the government of Nigeria and the country’s central bank, after having paid $5.6 million over several years to participate in transferring stolen funds out of the country, with the promise of a 40 percent cut. A Czech retireee, Jiri Pasovsky, murdered a Nigerian secretary at the country’s Prague embassy in 2003 after being told that the consulate could not help him recover losses amounting to around $600,000. The phenomenon was gloatingly satirized by Nigerian actor and comedian Nkem Owoh, in his 2005 song “I Go Chop Your Dollar”: National Airport na me get am / National Stadium na me build am / Presiden na my sister brother / You be the mugu, I be the master / Oyinbo ["white person”] I go chop your dollar / I go take your money disappear Once a new generation of spam filters had learnt to spot the distinctive, cajoling language of commercial spam -- as the programmer Paul Graham, developer of the successful Bayesian spam filter observed, “the Achilles heel of the spammers is their message” -- spammers turned to innovative new techniques with increasingly mind-boggling results. Cue the arrival of “Litspam,” cut-up literary texts statistically re-assembled to take advantage of flaws in the design and development of Bayesian filters. Filtering may have killed off conventional spam -- couched in the language of the respectable sales pitch -- but Litspam was an entirely different register, devoid of the usual syntactic rhythm; words functioned not as signifiers but as carriers. The messages read like utter gibberish, with excerpts from Shakespeare plays or Obama speeches messily spliced with the occasional significant word. New laws and filters had all but wiped out the world of legitimate online marketeers pushing low-margin products, leaving the field open to criminals pushing low-take-up, high-margin products. Spam had shifted from sales pitching for goods or sites to phishing, identity theft, credit card scams, or spreading viruses, worms, and other malware. It became much more criminal, experimental and massively automated...A striking example of the move into a new kind of computationally inventive spam production. Somewhere, an algorithmic bot with a pile of text files and a mailing list made a Joycean gesture announcing spam’s modernism. This new phase also saw the proliferation of “splogs,” spam blogs designed to deceive search engines into directing people to their pages. Comprising more than half of the total number of all blogs, these were made up of RSS feeds from other blogs and news sources, chopped up and remixed, inserting relevant links, hour after hour and day after day with minimum human supervision. “Content farms” actually produced human-authored text for some such blogs, filling the web with what Brunton calls “a nonsensical poetry of uselessness” -- articles such as “How to wear a sweater vest” and reviews of deodorant containers. The content was utterly meaningless, but just about realistic enough of to attract both search engine returns and clicks. Having established a working definition of spam -- “the use of information technology infrastructure to exploit existing aggregations of human attention” -- Brunton is realistically pessimistic about the prospects for a spam-free future. Because the very characteristics that enable spam to happen are also at the core of what makes the Internet what it is: that unique openness and ease of communication, the flexibility of open access, of anonymity and ambiguity. Lose these and you lose the essence of the Internet as we know it, and what remains is “a carefully specific theme park of a system,” a civic-minded, highly-managed proprietary space -- in relative terms, a closed network. The poise and elegance of Finn Brunton’s prose is all the more remarkable considering the high level of technical detail that necessarily pervades this Shadow History of the Internet. For all his pragmatism, he still dares to imagine that our contemporary online ecology might someday evolve into “media platforms that respect our attention and the finite span of our lives expended at the screen.” If there is hope, it is surely to be found precisely in the communitarian ethic of the anti-spam movement itself, in the tireless efforts of a multitude of enthusiasts driven by a desire to fulfill the tremendous potential of the digital revolution -- a movement whose own history comprises, in Brunton’s words, “a decade-long case study in online collaboration, community work, and negotiation at the barricades.” Image Credit: Flickr/epSos.de
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| 6 books mentioned 7 min read
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Reviews

Where Fiction Heralds Facts: On Armando Lucas Correa’s ‘The German Girl’

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October 27, 2016 | 6 books mentioned 3 6 min read
The German Girl (in Spanish, translated by Nick Caistor), is a novel with a purpose:  To expose the atrocity of the S.S. St. Louis, whose 1939 voyage from Hamburg to Cuba exemplifies the fatal consequences of closed borders and failed humanity, of hope gone horrendously wrong.  Armando Lucas Correa, raised in Cuba before emigrating to the United States, writes with a political agenda as well -- to out Cuba not only for denying sanctuary to most of the St. Louis’s ill-fated passengers, but also for erasing the crime from Cuba’s history books.  Cuba is not the only country with a selective memory.  The United States, too, played a key role in the horrors that transpired, and was very late in coming to a public admission of guilt. Correa is a journalist.  Among other professional activities, he is editor-in-chief of People en Espanõl.  His first book, En Busca de Emma (In Search of Emma: Two Fathers, One Daughter and the Dream of a Family) is a memoir about the arduous and emotionally fraught journey of starting a family with his male partner. The German Girl is his debut novel. The novel alternates chapters between two narrators. The first is Hannah Rosenthal, a Jewish girl who is 12 in 1939, having lived a bourgeois existence in Berlin before the Nazis’ rise to power.  Hannah experiences the world through smell.  Two women on the S-Bahn give “off waves of sweat mixed with rose essence and tobacco.”  Berlin after the November pogrom (Kristallnacht) -- “a stench of broken pipes, sewage, and smoke.”  Hannah’s childhood nanny, recalled through “the fragrance of her lemon-bergamot-cedarwood cologne mingled with the smell of sweat and spices.”  Hannah also experiences the world through her beloved friend Leo Martin.  Together they travel Berlin, hiding from the “Ogres” -- her parlance for Nazis -- and sharing a passion for adventure. The second narrator is Anna Rosen, an American girl living in 2014.  She and her bedridden, widowed mother are enshadowed by 9/11. They live a sober existence in New York.  Hanna’s sections are written in the past tense, Anna’s in the present. The parallels between the girls are many, sometimes tipping their similarities toward the contrived.  Both have suffering mothers with whom they appear to have a strained emotional connection.  Both idolize their absent fathers, each missing for different reasons.  Both are only children.  Both have a male friend their own age, though Hannah is much closer to Leo than Anna with Diego. Hannah lives with her parents: an anxious, self-centered opera singer mother named Alma Strauss Rosenthal (faint homage to Alma Mahler, perhaps?) and her father, Max Rosenthal, an esteemed university professor.  As Berlin becomes increasingly dangerous, Hannah’s family -- desperate to leave -- secures passage on the St. Louis.  Leo’s widowed father, too, manages to book passage for himself and his son. The voyage appears to bring escape and deliverance, but instead, it is their terrible misfortune to have set sail on a doomed ship. At the end of the book, Correa provides these facts -- on May 13, 1939, the St. Louis sailed for Cuba from Hamburg with 900 passengers, the majority German Jewish refugees.  It docked two days later in Cherbourg to pick up 37 additional Jewish passengers. All refugees had landing permits from the Cuban Department of Immigration, as well as U.S. entry visas.  Cuba was intended as a transit point; passengers were to await emigration to the United States.  A week before departure, Cuban President Federico Laredo Brú invalidated the landing permits. The St. Louis arrived in Havana early morning May 27.  Only four Cubans, two non-Jewish Spaniards, and 22 refugees were ultimately permitted to land, despite efforts by relatives, and protracted negotiations with offers of payment by Lawrence Berenson, lawyer for the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee.  Ordered to vacate Cuban waters, Captain Gustav Schroeder made heroic efforts to find a non-German port to accept the refugees.  He sailed for Miami, but the United States denied entry.  A similar refusal came from Canada.  Forced back across the Atlantic, the ship stopped in several European countries that agreed -- following  another intense set of negotiations -- to take the passengers.  Great Britain accepted 287; France, 224; Belgium, 214; and the Netherlands 181.  In September 1939, Germany declared war.  Other than the 287 taken into the relative safety of Great Britain, most of the rest of the passengers suffered the terrors of war.  At least a quarter were exterminated by the Nazis. In The German Girl, Anna and her mother are shaken from their depressing existence by a set of photos they receive from the 87-year-old Hannah Rosenthal, who turns out to have been one of the “lucky” passengers permitted a landing in Cuba.  Having spent her whole life there, she has now reached out to her great-niece (Anna’s father was her nephew).  Anna and her mother travel to Cuba, where Hannah reveals her life story in a series of largely expository chapters.  Sharing her great loves and tragic losses, she generously roots Anna in her father’s family and puts Anna’s mother on a path forward. In a recent review of Affinity Konar’s Mischling, Lisa Zeidner wrote: The morality of fictionalizing the Holocaust has been a subject of scholarly discussion since philosopher Theodor Adorno famously declared “To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.”  Do the scaffolding of plot and invention, the linguistic embroidery, deny the actual victims their more authentic voices?  Conversely, might fiction have “the power to take the narrative to places that survivor testimony cannot?” [citing Anna Richardson] The German Girl begs a different question.  Given Correa’s professional credentials, might this book have packed more punch as nonfiction?  Perhaps a futile inquiry, but Correa’s journalistic instincts are apparent not just in his clear reporting on the voyage of the St. Louis, but throughout the book.  For example, he introduces Jehovah’s Witnesses to make the very important point that the Nazis singled this group out for torture and brutality due to their refusal to accept totalitarian authority. In Crossing the Borders of Time, journalist Leslie Maitland set out to find her mother’s teenage lover, lost to her when her family fled Nazi-occupied France. Her mother’s family was able to secure passage to Casablanca, and then to Cuba on the San Thomé in 1942.  Describing the horrors of the St. Louis, Maitland notes the “infighting among unscrupulous officials,” Cuba’s corrupt immigration director, and the fruitless “frantic telegrams to President Roosevelt” and other world leaders. Scholar Peter Gay describes his Berlin childhood under the Nazis in My German Question. Like many other highly assimilated and non-religious German Jews -- including Hannah Rosenthal’s family -- in 1933 “We had suddenly become Jews.” Deeply interested in the psychological ramifications, Gay says he cannot write autobiography, his has to be memoir.  His past has proven “to be a mosaic with central pieces missing.”  He recounts his father’s daring maneuvers to secure passage to Cuba.  Finally obtaining visas and tickets for the St. Louis, his father, having an eerie sixth sense, took a harrowing risk to fake documents for passage on the Iberia, which sailed April 27 (two weeks earlier than the St. Louis). The German-Jewish refugee community in Havana, numbering over three thousand, clung together and talked Germany:  who was still caught up in the Nazi trap and what one could do to help…. Our ties to our former homeland…remained intimate and inescapable, a cause of wrenching anxieties. Anxiety coupled with deracination’s fallout.  A Longing in the Land, poet Arthur Gregor’s memoir of being forced as a teen to flee Vienna post Anschluss, makes clear the longing never ends: The crack of displacement -- irreparable, as I have learned -- also affects our most personal relationships, often shapes or destroys them.  It makes our need for them so urgent -- for who but the object of one’s love can soothe this rift? -- and this urgency works against them…. The anguish of this rift is not appeased. The truth -- documented -- can be more powerful than fiction.  And yet, doesn’t fiction provide the ultimate truth?  Here’s Peter Gay: That my mother loved me as much as she could seems to me beyond doubt, but her ability to give voice to her affection for me was compromised by her anxieties and her ailments. Such a description fits perfectly both Hannah and Anna’s mothers in The German Girl.  They are sleepless, ailing women, suffering from grief and worry.  Through fiction, Correa has captured not only the unspeakable anxiety of protecting a family while fleeing for one’s life, but also the endless pain of deracination, emotions from which Hannah is never released.  Speaking of her life in Havana, toward the end of the book she muses: I can wander one last time among the colorful croton bushes, the poinsettias, the rosemary, basil, and mint herbs in the neglected garden of what has been my fortress in a city I never came to know. Correa deploys facts to honor his fictional subjects. In a heartbreaking appendix, he lists every passenger on the St. Louis.  If this ship’s manifest is insufficiently potent, Correa writes to remind us of the deadly consequences of closed borders, neglected refugees, and maligned and forgotten immigrants.
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| 6 books mentioned 3 6 min read
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14 comments:

  1. Hi,

    I have three recommendations. They cover different sides of the war and require no special knowledge of the military in order to enjoy them. They are wonderfully written.

    The first is a novel, the Cruel Sea by Nicholas Monsarrat. It's about a crew of an anti-submarine corvette in the North Atlantic. I like it because you see how wearing it was. The crew gets on board in 1939 and those that live get off in 1945. The drudgery and terror are nicely described.

    Eric Bergerud's Touched With Fire is great. It concerns the land war in New Guinea and the Solomons. The fighting differed from Europe in a number of ways. For one it is tropical, making the fight somewhat similar to Vietnam. For another the two sides were more closely matched in air and sea power which forced the US to fight differently. It's an excellent read.

    Antony Beevor's Fall of Berlin 1945 is great, but is also terribly depressing. The end of the catastrophic Russo-German conflict is described in all its brutal horror.

    Tripp

  2. Corelli's Mandolin by Louis De Bernieres is the story of a Greek island that comes under the control of the Italians and then the Germans in WWII. It's a fantastic read and one of those relatively untold stories of the war you were mentioning above. I highly recommend it.

  3. I second anonymous' recommendation of Corelli. Just a great book.

    A few nonfiction choices. In my opinion, Beevor's "Stalingrad" is the better of his two books on the war. Stalingrad was the true turning point in the European war (although you will see many smart folks argue that the turning point was Pearl Harbor, the Russian Front broke the Wehrmacht and Stalingrad, with Kursk following, was the breaking point). The scale of the battle is just amazing. I loved Atkinson's book, but reading about Stalingrad makes you wonder whether we could have won a battle like that and thankful we did not have to find out. Richard Overy wrote a very good overview of the Russian Front as well, in "Russia's War". William Shirer's "Rise and Fall of the Third Reich" sets the standard and rightly so. For a thousand page tome it is incredibly readable and never less than fascinating. John Lukacs wrote a great book about the period immediately following Dunkirk, when any sane nation would have sued for peace and the British decided to fight on alone ("Five Days in May").

    Oddly, or perhaps not, there is a lot of good detective fiction set in Europe immediately prior to and during the war. Robert Janes and Alan Furst are both good, as is Eric Ambler (the latter two are probably better described as spy novelists). If you get nothing else from this long entry (apologies), put this one in the queue: Philip Kerr wrote three detective novels that have been anthologized under the title "Berlin Noir". They are set in Berlin in 1933, 1938 or so (just prior to Kristallnacht) and in post-war Berlin around 1946. Spectacular – Kerr hasn't written anything close to this good since, but these are just fantastic. The changes in German society over the course of the three books are worth the price of admission by themselves, and the stories are quite good.

  5. I second the Beevor recommendations. Both are excellent.

    For a more personal look at the war, I recommend Studs Terkel's oral history of the war: The Good War. I'm a sucker for almost any Terkel book, but this one stands out even that body of excellent works.

  6. Great post. A guy like me doesn't find many readers interested in the warrior condition much these days. I recomend Flag of Our Fathers by James Bradley. Clint Eastwood is working on making it into a movie. I could make recommendations all day long, but I think you have a good start with the books already suggested.

  8. The war produced a lot of good fiction. I’d say all the famous books are still worth reading: The Naked and the Dead, The Young Lions, The Caine Mutiny, Catch-22, even A Bell for Adano and Tales of the South Pacific. A couple others I remember liking are Guard of Honor by James Gould Cozzens and A Walk in the Sun by Harry Brown. For contemporary non-fiction you won’t do much better than Serenade to the Big Bird by Bert Stiles.

  9. I'm just a few chapters into Paul Fussell's Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War. His The Great War and Modern Memory is one of the best WWI books I've ever read, and so far in Wartime he is proving just as insightful on WWII. He served in WWII himself as an infantry officer and that firsthand experience adds another layer to the analysis.

  10. "Articles of War" by Nick Arvin–this new novel was inspired by Arvin's grandfather's service in WWll. I've heard it compared to Red Badge of Courage. There was lobbying here to have it as the "one book" selection for in our city–it may be set in WWll but it's certainly timely today.

    See you at the party! Wendi

  11. The Beevor book on the Battle of Stalingrad is indeed good, but here's a couple of other suggestions on the eastern front, a side of the war which Americans tend to not know much about. Years ago I read a book by a German war correspondent: it's just called Stalingrad by Heinz Schroter. It's doubtless out of print and it's journalism more than history and only from the German side. But still, it's worth reading. The author was at the battle and the horrific stories and sheer immediacy conveyed by the book gives you a real sense of what it was like to endure this military disaster from the German side. I recently also read Writer at War: Vasily Grossman with the Red Army by Vasily Grossman. Grossman was a Russian writer who worked as a war correspondent; most of the book is excerpts from his journals and reporting. Again, there's some vivid writing about the unbelievably horrible eastern front, and the entire book gives you a sense of the mixture of idealism and brutality which characterized the Soviet side of that monumental conflict.

  12. I keep coming back to this thread to note down the various recommendations that are being posted. Chatten's recommendation re: German perspectives and the Eastern front reminded me of a couple more books that I wanted to mention. One of the best books that I read last year was Uwe Timm's In My Brother's Shadow: A Life and Death in the SS. It's an extraordinarily powerful memoir that has to do more with the aftermath in Germany than with the war itself. I posted a mini-review of it on my blog in connection with my top ten reads from last year here. Another excellent book which covers similar territory in fiction is Bernhard Schlink's novel The Reader. It's been a while since I read that one but I remember finding it deeply disturbing and very thought provoking.

  13. "The Forgotten Soldier" by Guy Sajer (Engrossing memoirs written by a German soldier); Ian Kershaw's recent biography of Hitler is excellent — though there are other good ones, his is bifurcated and the second volume deals with the 1936-1945 time period, which fits your bill nicely; "A World at Arms" by Weinberg (massive and slow-going, but comprehensive); "Ordinary Men" by Browning (the banality of evil — a look at the killing squads that moved through Poland in the wake of the fighting); I agree with previous posters that Beevor's books are worth your time, and also that "Fall of Berlin" is incredibly bleak; don't waste your time with "The Rise and Fall" by Shirer — it was poor history by the time it was published; also suggest you steer clear of Ambrose. One final suggestion: "The Book Thief" by Zusak (marketed as teen-lit, but a well-written).

  14. I don't know if you're still checking this, it's been a while since anyone posted but the book that got me started reading WWII stuff, that also does a great job of conveying the emotion tied to the war is "Ghost Soldiers" by Hampton Sides. It focuses on one event in the war, in the Pacific, but is a great read, also very well researched. I'll also differ from the previous poster and suggest reading at least the first third of Shirer's "Rise and Fall of the Third Reich." It was very helpful in understanding how it all came about, although it is very dry and you have to be really interested to get through it.

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The ‘P’ is Free: A Review of Jesse Ball’s Samedi the Deafness

Reviews
October 22, 2007 | 6 books mentioned 4 3 min read
As a term of approbation, "precious" has lost its currency. These days, the p-word puts us in mind less of rare gems than of independent films about quirky white people. But as A.O. Scott's recent review of The Darjeeling Limited reminds us, we needn't choose between precious and precious. In the movies of Wes Anderson, the boxes of Joseph Cornell, and now, in Jesse Ball's unabashedly imaginative debut novel, the two senses of the word collide.The set-up is pure Hitchcock: a (seeming) bystander, James Sim by name, witnesses an act of political murder that draws him into a web of intrigue (or, as my friend Colin's dad liked to put it, "a tissue of lies.") Confined to an asylum for compulsive prevaricators, Sim must ferret out the truth. Ball has followed Murakami, however, in replacing the traditional terms of the suspense novel with his own cryptic obsessions. It soon becomes apparent that Samedi the Deafness is less an epistemological mystery than an existential one. The important question for is not whodunit, but "Why am I here?"The pursuit of an answer proves to be highly entertaining, thanks in large part to Ball's untrammeled idiosyncracies. This 28-year-old debut novelist is also a poet and an illustrator, and his prose, in Samedi the Deafness, leavens flights of hallucinatory vision with the arch diction and mannered dialogue of mid-twentieth-century British children's novels. (The bad guys are always saying things like, "For this reason...") At its weakest, the novel struggles to sustain its tone; the juvenile elements decay from wonder into whimsy, the poetic ones start to feel strained. At its best, the tongue-in-cheek and the earnest harmonize to produce a vivid and dreamlike whimsy, as in this flashback to James Sim's formative years:"The best hiding place of all, said James's friend Ansilon, from his perch atop James's shoulder, is inside something hollow when no one knows it's hollow. Ansilon was James's one friend. He was an invisible owl who could tell the future and also speak English, although he preferred to speak in the owl language, which James understood perfectly. -But if no one knows that it's hollow, said James, then how would I manage to know that it's hollow? Should I just go around with a little hammer, tapping things?"Ball has pronounced The Castle one of the greatest novels of the 20th Century, and this literary debt is obvious. Like Kafka's K., Ball's protagonist is a patient and bemused Everyman. His character emerges not in his actions, but in his reactions, and despite his unusual gifts (a near-photographic memory, for example), James Sim is a democratic figure; he could be any one of us. Ball is less successful at creating a supporting cast. Where the inhabitants of Kafka's village are both madcap and mysteriously human, the denizens of Ball's asylum often seem a mere accumulation of tics. Their setting redeems them, however. With its labyrinthine architecture and wonderfully arbitrary list of rules, the asylum itself becomes a character, and a worthy foil for our hero.In the end, the delights of Samedi the Deafness outweigh its flaws. Ball's sensibility is, despite his many influences, entirely his own, and one can expect good things to come. (Another novel, The Way Through Doors, will be published in 2008). At a speedy 280 pages, Samedi is a welcome appetizer to what one hopes will be a rich and - dare we say it? - precious career.
Reviews
| 6 books mentioned 4 3 min read
Reviews

The Great Divide Between Science and Literature Is False

Reviews
March 9, 2016 | 6 books mentioned 2 6 min read
1. I wonder if Paul Kalanithi remembered, as he wrote this book, the childhood dream of the father of modern neuroscience. This was a Spanish anatomist called Santiago Ramón y Cajal, who, as a child, wanted to become an artist. “At eight or nine years old,” Ramón y Cajal wrote, “I had an irresistible mania for scribbling on paper, drawing ornaments in books...” The boy's father discouraged such frivolity. Ramón y Cajal went to medical school, where he grew devoted to histology, the microscopic study of cells. At that point in the 19th century, inferior microscopes, which failed to show the fine structure of the nervous system, had stalled neurological investigation. (The vague term “gray matter” is a product of this period -- coined, one imagines, by exasperated scientists.) So it must have been with excitement that, in 1887, Ramón y Cajal learned about a staining technique, using silver nitrate, by which nerve cells finally revealed their intricate features. “A look was enough,” he wrote. “All was sharp as a sketch with Chinese ink.” He drew what he saw. His illustrations would lead to the discovery that the neuron was the basic unit of the nervous system. The artist's pencil advancing science -- such is the intellectual traffic that might have intrigued Paul Kalanithi. Kalanithi was a neurosurgical resident at Stanford when, in his mid-30s, he was diagnosed with lung cancer. While his peers fretted about careers, his life tilted toward a reckoning with mortality all the more ferocious for how, as a doctor, he had spied death in the corner of his eye. His own encounter with death contained his patients', too. “I had pushed discharge over patient worries,” he remembers, critical now of his actions, “ignored patients’ pain when other demands pressed. The people whose suffering I saw, noted, and neatly packaged into various diagnoses, the significance of which I failed to recognize -- they all returned, vengeful, angry, and inexorable.” Death is one thing, and dying another. Dying might bring a series of humiliations and panics, time choking upon itself, or it might slyly resemble living. Kalanithi and his wife had a child, a daughter, while he grew increasingly sick. When his wife questioned his wish to become a father, asking if having to say goodbye to a baby wouldn't make death more painful, he replied, “Wouldn't it be great if it did?” Avoiding pain was never a priority for Kalanithi. Pain signalled love and meaning. In his professional life, Kalanithi continued to perform surgery, resting his aching back against the wall of the operating room, until, one day, he declined to schedule any more operations. It was time, he accepted, to discard plans for his future. Looking to his past, he wrote this book, typing with painful fingers soothed by silver-lined gloves. Kalanithi died on March 9, 2015. The book he worked on in his final months -- this memoir, When Breath Becomes Air -- has achieved tremendous recognition as a moving narrative of a doctor's dying. Rightly so. Unclasped, however, the book is also an argument for an intellectually rousing way to live. Why have we not seen, in widespread and admiring coverage of the book, engagement with the ideas Kalanithi held dear? Might not such an engagement honour the doctor's life? Within the mortal man -- never a smoker, yet whose lungs grew dense with tumors -- there agitated a rare intellect that continued to consider questions of science and art even while life's end alighted nearby. 2. Kalanithi argues that the great divide between science and literature is false. As a teenager with literary aspirations in Kingman, Ariz., Kalanithi read what sounds like an awful book. Still, Satan: His Psychotherapy and Cure by the Unfortunate Dr. Kassler, J.S.P.S., loaned him by a girlfriend, offered the astounding realization that the mind was simply a function of the brain. “Of course, it must be true,” he writes. “What were our brains doing, otherwise?” The revelation turned his mind to neuroscience. At Stanford, he added, to his list of literature classes, courses in biology. Though Kalanithi went on to complete graduate studies in English literature, ever present on his mind were the physiological systems, sturdy and fallible, that undergirded meaning. He writes, “There must be a way...that the language of life as experienced -- of passion, of hunger, of love -- bore some relationship, however convoluted, to the language of neurons, digestive tracts, and heartbeats.” (What does he do by referring to languages rather than fields? Well, even while admitting how the humanities are positioned against the sciences, he planes smooth the friction of their edges. This might be to the credit of the philosopher Richard Rorty, under whose tutelage the young Kalanithi began to see academic disciplines not as separate regions but separate vocabularies. When we see sociology and chemistry as vocabularies, we perceive that they are methods, not subjects, of investigation. Under unified examination across literature, the humanities, and the hard sciences: consciousness, living, the world.) Kalanithi continued to grapple with the opposition between science and literature, and to live, in his life, with commitment to each. He worked his instruments -- blades, electrodes -- into bodily interiors as unfamiliar to his patients as a foreign country. Yet these interiors were the matter of which their personhood was composed. In one operation, Kalanithi placed an electrode nine centimeters deep in a patient's brain to treat a Parkinson's tremor. The patient protested, “I feel...overwhelmingly sad.” “Current off!” said Kalanithi. And the patient felt better. At the same time, faced with cases where surgical instruments could do little, Kalanithi drew on words to comfort patients. More important for him than saving lives -- in the end, everybody dies -- was the task of bringing patients and family members to an understanding of illness with which they might make peace. How else to do this but by speaking, and listening? By asking us, in this book, to consider how a life in medicine is essentially composed of -- not merely ornamented with -- the light and shelter of language, Kalanithi foregrounds one of the ways in which literature and science are continuous. We encounter both through the medium of language. It is difficult, here, not to think about the language of this book, both gentle and relentless, retrieved and arranged not only by Paul Kalanithi but also by his wife. Lucy Kalanithi took on the work of gathering his words from e-mails and other documents to complete the book after he was gone. In a moving epilogue, she shares her husband's final moments. A machine helped him breathe in a hospital bed -- he'd stood over this very bed as a doctor -- while his daughter, too young to be grave, played atop his prone body. As a younger man, Kalanithi had turned to medicine as a way to find the truth -- perplexing, knotty -- of human experience. Within the hospital he had found it rewarding to confront the persistent irresolution of life. “Would you trade your ability -- or your mother’s -- to talk for a few extra months of mute life?” he writes. “Your right hand’s function to stop seizures?” He had felt then that true experience of mortality and suffering came not from text but from immersion in the world. Diagnosed with a serious illness of his own, however, the doctor found that he needed literary translation of his experiences. When scientific studies and survival statistics offered little, he turned to books: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Leo Tolstoy, Virginia Woolf. He read memoirs by cancer patients. “It was literature,” he writes, “that brought me back to life during this time.” Throughout When Breath Becomes Air, which is, true, a moving memoir of a man’s dying, but very much more than that, Kalanithi directs us to consider the braiding of science and literature. Kalanithi might have grasped, more intuitively than many, how meaning originates both in a book that moves us, and in an electrochemical operation in the anterior insula. 3. Ramón y Cajal’s drawings of dendritic branches and axons, an artist's hand tracing scientific truth, remain. The representations are arboreal. They are beautiful. Kalanithi might have asked: What do we do when we call a neuron beautiful? Aesthetic appraisal expands the proper place of the nerve cell. The cell crosses the boundaries of scientific study, and submits itself to humanistic consideration. What we come away with is not just a sense of science and literature’s abutment, but something greater. Shining a beam on the beauty of a neuron asks that we consider not just neuron but also beauty. Isn’t it true that the humanistic notion of beauty is then allowed access to the laboratory, and to the clinician’s office? Such visitation might have pleased Paul Kalanithi -- neurosurgeon, reader, and writer. For in his life, as in few others, the disciplines appeared, their hostilities eased, to show themselves as forms of the same revelation.
Reviews
| 6 books mentioned 2 6 min read
Reviews Screening Room

Preacher Problems: John Huston and Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood

Reviews Screening Room
May 20, 2009 | 6 books mentioned 3 4 min read
"I think I've been had," John Huston remarked when he finished filming his adaptation of Flannery O'Connor's novel Wise Blood, which was just released on DVD by the Criterion Collection. Or at least that's the story the screenwriter Benedict Fitzgerald tells. Huston's take was that the film had a darkly comic heart, dressed in religious trappings. He was not convinced that the main character, the staunch atheist Hazel Motes, finds God in the end. That is, until the Fitzgeralds persuaded him otherwise.If anyone other than O'Connor was aware of her intentions, the Fitzgeralds were. Robert and Sally Fitzgerald provided her with a room for two years while she wrote the novel, parts of which she shared with them. Robert became the executor of her estate after she died and Sally edited volumes of her letters and nonfiction. Wise Blood stayed in the family, so to speak, when their sons, Benedict and Michael set out to turn the novel into film, for which they recruited John Huston as the director. The brothers and their mother were present on location during the filming in Macon, Georgia, and among other things, made sure Huston's depiction remained faithful to O'Connor's vision.If Huston was had, it was only because Hazel Motes was too. Haze wants more than anything to out Jesus as a liar and false prophet and to found his own religion, the Church Without Christ, as a response to the evangelism that he grew up with and has thrived around him. The grandson of a circuit preacher who would park his car, climb atop the hood, and start preaching hellfire and redemption, Haze determined early on to become a preacher too - but one who speaks against belief, who disabuses its converts of the false notions, needless guilt, and notions of depravity.After a stint in the army, Haze makes his way to a small southern town called Taulkinham, where he finds a whore, buys a ramshackle car, and sets out to start the Church Without Christ. As O'Connor explained in a letter to the novelist John Hawkes, Haze's striking out against Jesus was a rebellion against a deep-set faith within him: "There are some of us who have to pay for our faith every step of the way and who have to work out dramatically what it would be like without it and if being without it would ultimately be possible or not." With the same fervor that Haze rejects Christianity and the street preacher's refrain, he crashes into it head-on.So it goes with Haze, that in spite of his valiant efforts to discern what is true, he's often unable to see what lies directly in front of him. And he's not the only one. Much is made of eyes and vision in Wise Blood; appearances are often merely facades. The blind street preacher, Asa Hawks, who Haze follows when he first arrives in Taulkinham and later becomes obsessed with, isn't really a man of God and isn't really blind. Asa's bastard daughter, Sabbath Lily, gives Haze "fast eye" when they first meet, and of course there's Haze, whose penetrating eyes, according to Sabbath, "don't look like they see what he's looking at but they keep looking." That Haze continues to look becomes his saving grace. When Wise Blood's characters believe they have clarity, it's often the point where they're led most astray. Take Haze's car. He has great pride in his decrepit jalopy with one door attached by a rope; even when it breaks down, he claims it's as fine as any. And as they're sputtering along, Sabbath corroborates, telling Haze it runs "as smooth as honey."In this vein, Huston's partial blindness to O'Connor's ultimate vision while filming Wise Blood may help explain why the film stays so true to the novel's tone and intent. The Fitzgeralds' guiding hand made sure Huston didn't stray too far from the course, but the eccentric characters and the humor of their foibles could easily have slipped into caricature. Instead, they strike O'Connor's unique pitch. Thanks to Benedict Fitzgerald's screenplay, many of the best lines remain untouched, such as Enoch Emery's description of his foster mother whose hair was so thin "it looked like ham gravy trickling over her skull." Perhaps the only off note is the musical score, that inserts a punchy banjo riff a la the Beverly Hillbillies during interludes and whenever the town's desperate newcomer Enoch Emery appears, as if to cue laughter. In contrast, Emery's on-screen presence - disheveled, lonely, and naively enthusiastic - is nuanced and pitiably comedic. Had the director been more attuned to O'Connor's religious vision, the depictions could easily have become more-heavy handed, and lost some of their comic potential if not their humanity.To speak of O'Connor without touching on religion is missing the point, but to focus so intently on religion that the story is sacrificed would be the greater loss. O'Connor's genius was that she could perform the balancing act and execute it with near perfection. As she confided to John Hawkes, "I don't think you should write something as long as a novel that is not of the greatest concern to you and everybody else and for me this is always the conflict between an attraction for the Holy and the disbelief in it that we breathe with the air of our times." That O'Connor's characters so believably grapple with disbelief makes them more human, and their struggles more profound. In the best sense, Huston's film breathes life into O'Connor's characters, with a single-minded Hazel Motes, a befuddled Emery Enoch, and an elfin Sabbath Lily, along with a host of characters from this small southern town, trying to find their way as best they can.John Huston's Wise Blood was just released on DVD by the Criterion Collection. Bonus goodies include John Huston interviewed by Bill Moyers, an essay by Francine Prose, and an audio track of O'Connor reading her story "A Good Man Is Hard to Find."
Reviews Screening Room
| 6 books mentioned 3 4 min read
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Reviews

The Young Magician, Practicing His Tricks

Reviews
June 24, 2013 | 6 books mentioned 1 6 min read
The effect of The Savage Detectives is to blur the line between history and fiction, to envelop whatever Bolaño and his friends actually did in Mexico in the 1970’s in a self-aggrandizing, romanticized cloud of smoke - and we imagine all of his poetry, written so many years ago in a notebook lost somewhere in Mexico, must have been really good. But it turns out that Bolaño’s juvenile writing reads very much like juvenile writing.
Reviews
| 6 books mentioned 1 6 min read
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