Bridge of Spies is a thrilling true story of espionage and super-power diplomacy at one of the tensest moments of the Cold War, centered around a prisBridge of Spies is a thrilling true story of espionage and super-power diplomacy at one of the tensest moments of the Cold War, centered around a prisoner exchange in Berlin in 1962.
Willie Fisher, alias Rudolf Abel, was a Soviet spy in the finest traditions of the Bolshevik 'illegals' (named in comparison to legals, who had diplomatic cover as 'cultural attaches' or similar). His mission was to rebuild a spy ring to match the immense A-bomb theft of Klaus Fuchs and the Rosenbergs. Fisher was undercover for years, but it unclear what, if anything he managed to uncover, before a drunken and incompetent subordinate defected to the West rather than face recall to Moscow. Undone by the weakest link in a human chain, Fisher was sentenced to decades in prison.
Meanwhile, America was pursuing its own patented brand of espionage. The U-2 flew at an altitude of 70,000 feet, above the range of anti-aircraft guns and interceptors. Aerial photos provided detailed evidence of the weapons backing Khrushchev's bellicose 'we will bury you' rhetoric, or rather, a detailed absence of evidence. In the late 1950s, everything pointed to an immense American advantage in bombers, bombs, and even rockets, with the Russian ICBM program a handful of balky liquid fueled rockets. The overflights enraged Khrushchev, but the CIA's voracious appetite for intelligence lead them to schedule one last overflight on May 1, 1960. This flight put Gary Powers in range of an S-75 Dvina SAM, and the shootdown killed hopes for disarmament and detente.
The two spies were sentenced to years in prison. Mostly through the entrepreneurial efforts of Power's father, and Fisher's defense lawyer Donovan, were the two sides able to broker a swap, throwing in a US PhD student who's thesis on East German economic was also declared to be espionage.
Giles keeps it fast, interesting, and manages to capture the spirit of the era....more
I had a longer review, which got eaten by a refresh page, so tl;dr, this is an okay but light popular history, with Westinghouse and AC as the protagoI had a longer review, which got eaten by a refresh page, so tl;dr, this is an okay but light popular history, with Westinghouse and AC as the protagonist. It's best talking about the sensational safety maneuverings around the battle of the currents, including the first execution via electric chair, and gruesome public demos where dogs and horses were electrocuted, but it has a rather surface level take on technology and corporate politics. Still interested to compare electricity in 1890 to dotcoms in 1990, and contemporary Silicon Valley excess, and this book is probably more readable than David Nye's Electrifying America....more
American Warlords is an attempt at a World War II version of the classic Team of Rivals, focusing on the work of FDR, Secretary of War Stimson, Army CAmerican Warlords is an attempt at a World War II version of the classic Team of Rivals, focusing on the work of FDR, Secretary of War Stimson, Army Chief of Staff Marshall, and Chief of Naval Operations King. It's an engaging enough story, but Jordan gets caught in the details and fails to come to a truly important understanding of American strategy.
[image] B-24's under construction at Willow Run
By far the most important person was President Roosevelt. Roosevelt was the consummate politician, a man adept at finding consensus among the most ardent foes. This skill would be sorely tested, balancing the interests of Churchill and Stalin, the American homefront, and his senior commanders. Roosevelt gets a lot of pages, but we don't much insight into his thinking. It's somewhat counter-intuitive that a man allergic to clear lines of command and Clausewitzian concentration would preside over the greatest American victory.
Of the other three men, King is drawn the most clearly. A staunch naval chauvinist, and advocate of offensives against Japan when the stated policy was 'Germany first', he fought for his vision of the war. Some wag (elsewhere, not in this book), said that "Admiral King was the most even-tempered man in high command. He was always furious." Marshall is a self-effacing, trying to reign in Churchillian sideshows, while letting Eisenhower serve as the liberator of Europe. Stimson disappears almost entirely.
The focus on strategy and personalities is reasonable enough, but what I find most interesting about America in World War II was that it fought a New Deal War. America in 1940, as the clouds of war loomed, was at best a second rate power. Even before Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt and Marshall turned millions of civilians into soldiers, sailors, and airmen. They set factories churning out weapons, a tide of material warfare that buried the Axis power under tens of thousands of warplanes per year, M1 rifles, carbines, and tanks, dozens of aircraft carriers, and 2710 Liberty ships to bring the war to Europe and Japan. They harnessed science and technology to create advanced wonder weapons, including the B-29, the proximity fuse, the ULTRA codebreaking program, and above all else, the atomic bomb. This transformation of America into the arsenal of democracy was the real battle of the war, and Jordan only discusses it in passing....more
The Art of Renaissance Warfare is a light, popular gloss of the title. It's an odd choice for Turnbull, who's written something like 70 books on the mThe Art of Renaissance Warfare is a light, popular gloss of the title. It's an odd choice for Turnbull, who's written something like 70 books on the military history of pre-modern Japan, to switch continents and focus on Europe, and I think both the detail and analysis suffer.
Intrinsically, though, the 150 years discussed marked a major shift in how war was conducted, from feudal retinues centered around armored knights, to professional mercenary companies where linear formations of arquebusers and blocks of pikemen resisted cavalry more often than not. Meanwhile, siege artillery made millennia of vertical stone fortresses obsolete, and gunpowder went from a curiosity to the core of military power.
Turnbull tells engaging stories, ranging from Granada to Constantinople and Antwerp to Moscow, with lots of details of the supreme commander (oh, and great illustrations). But there's little sense of tactics, let alone strategy in this book, or what might make one soldier artful and another a clod....more
There is a great romanticism to the Battle of Britain. In the summer of 1940, at the height of Nazi power, all that stood between England and invasionThere is a great romanticism to the Battle of Britain. In the summer of 1940, at the height of Nazi power, all that stood between England and invasion were the pilots of RAF Fighter Command. Contrails traced labyrinths in the blue summer sky miles above the Earth as Spitfire and Messerschmidt tangled. The war fell from the sky on picnickers; shell casings, flaming wreckage, men, bombs. And of course, the good guys won. "This was their finest hour." Roll credits.
The real story is more complicated, of course, and Korda centers the battle as conflict between Air Marshall Hugh Dowding of the RAF, and Herman Goering for the Luftwaffe. Dowding is cast as a visionary. In the 1930s, when prevailing wisdom was that 'the bomber would always get through', Dowding pushed for the creation of the world's first integrated air defense network, a combination of radar, spotters, hardened telephones lines, centralized dispatch rooms where maps and indicator lights which enabled command of an air battle in real time, and fast and powerful monoplane fighters to do the killing. This was not going to be a random brawl, but a carefully planned battle of attrition. In the 21st century, with NASA Mission Control, the Star Trek bridge, and network-centric warfare, this is common stuff, but Dowding invented it all.
[image] The Churchill Bunker, with the big board
Against this, Goering's Luftwaffe was the most powerful airforce in the world at the time. But the Bf-109 had the range to stay over England for mere minutes, the medium bombers lacked accuracy and destructive power, and the Stuka and Me-110 were sitting ducks for modern fighters. The Nazis were also hampered by terrible intelligence, that continually predicted the RAF was at the breaking point, and political problems, when a retaliatory strike on Berlin lead to bombers being pulled off of airfields and factories to punish Berlin.
In one sense, the outcome was never in doubt. Dowding just had to contest control of the air through the first week of October, after which storms would make Operation Sea Lion impossible. On the other hand, RAF fighter command sacrificed immensely, taking tremendous casualties in the process of bleeding the Luftwaffe white. Dowding himself was never a political player, and had to turn over his command in November 1940. But Britain had been saved. As Churchill put it, "Never in the history of mankind has so much been owed by so many to so few."
With Wings Like Eagles is an erudite popular history that rises above the pack through a novel, and well-founded thesis around the command of Air Marshall Dowding. ...more
A Nation of Realtors® is up front that it is Hornstein's dissertation, and while this book is a close study of the creation of the professional culturA Nation of Realtors® is up front that it is Hornstein's dissertation, and while this book is a close study of the creation of the professional culture of Realtors® from 1900 to 1950, it has the weaknesses of a starting academic work, a kind of "wait, this is what you thought was interesting?" I mean no offense, academic work is hard, and my own dissertation is hardly a model of lucid clarity. But know going in this going to be narrow.
Hornstein's story is about the transformation of real estate brokers into Realtors®. And that 'registered trademark' symbol is an important part of it. A real estate broker is anyone who connects people who want to buy land with people who want to sell it. Through the 19th century, the whole profession was haunted by an image of unscrupulous 'curbsiders' who would pounce on unsuspecting newcomers to town, elderly widows, similar unfortunates, and swindle them out of their money. By contrast, a Realtor is a paid up member of a local real estate broker associate, affiliated with the national board, was an ethical professional, a keen dealmaker who provided access to middle-class dreams, and who helped build new beautiful cities.
Hornstein moves through a variety of cultural history conflicts. Pages are spent on the tensions in the conception of masculinity in the early 20th century, and the figure of the 'professional ethical entrepreneur' as a many-faceted figure. There are conflicts between Realtors® and non-member brokers, board status and state licensing requirements, the desires of the national committee versus local boards, and the new academic discipline of 'land economics' against the practice of actual real estate brokerage, along with pages about the role of women in real estate. While women were a minority in this era, as a paraprofession about the 'home', they made swift inroads as Realtors® well before they entered law, medicine, and science in significant numbers.
But this book touches only lightly on what I regard as the key issue, the creation of the middle class as defined by a owning a detached single family dwelling. Suburbia was no accident. Rather, it was a deliberate innovation to create a synthetic Jeffersonian agrarian republic at the time that real economic forces were encouraging a class of urban renters and rural megafarms. Realtors® played a key role in this, helping guide Federal policies that encouraged mortgage loans and discouraged public housing, as well as thousands of local level zoning efforts to create 'proper neighborhoods for proper people'.
The policy issues here are fascinating, and sadly mistreated in favor of worn tropes that hey, Progressive Era people were full of contradictions, and even the best of them were shockingly racist by post-Civil Rights Act standards.
Oh, and a life-long Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Reader, Hornstein has nothing to say about the allegation that all 1.3 million licensed Realtors® are actually aliens, acting as the first wave of an invasion. You read it here first!...more
Longitude is a sheer delight of a popular history of technology. Up until the 18th century, half of navigation was done by chance. Finding latitude isLongitude is a sheer delight of a popular history of technology. Up until the 18th century, half of navigation was done by chance. Finding latitude is easy, simply take the angle between the horizon of the sun at noon or Polaris at night, adjust for the date, and you know where you are relative to the equator. But longitude is a different matter. Ships wandered in the great oceans, crews riddled with scurvy, or crashed into rising cliffs. The British government offered a prize of 20,000 Pounds, equivalent to millions of dollars today, for a solution to the longitude problem. Meanwhile, finding longitude was ridiculed as an impossible quest, on par with perpetual motion and squaring the circle.
Serious approaches to longitude centered on time. If you knew what time was at some fixed point, a home port, and could compare it to local time, then 1 hour of difference in time corresponded to 15 degrees of longitude. But keeping track of the time simply was not possible with contemporary clocks which gained or lost whole minutes in an hour on land. Shipboard conditions, with constant motion, dampness, and temperatures ranging from sweltering tropics to arctic gales, made the problem seem impossible.
Sobel follows the story of the man who cracked it, a self-taught clockmaker from Yorkshire named John Harrison. Harrison developed the first chronometer, a clock which kept accuracy to within seconds under harsh maritime conditions. But Harrison's triumph was bedeviled by official opposition. The men who made up the longitude board were mostly astronomers, and they believed that the problem must be solved by reference to a celestial clock, either eclipses of the moons of Jupiter, or the position of the moon relative to major stars. British astronomer royal Nevil Maskelyne refused to accept a 'mere mechanic' had cracked the problem, instead preferring a method based on the moon.
After a decades long struggle, an elderly Harrison was awarded the money by Parliament, though not the prize. Chronometers were very expensive, ten times as expensive as an almanac of lunar ephemera, and navigators used lunar methods for decades. Harrison became the victor in the eyes of history. His chronometers are treasured artifacts. GPS, that omnipresent locator, relies on satellites and ultra-precise clocks. Longitude captures the spirit of the great age of exploration, and the taming of the leviathans in the blue spaces on the maps, in the best possible way....more
The character of a city is a hard subject to capture in words, even the partial character of 20 years, and Gill does his best, in a whirlwind politicaThe character of a city is a hard subject to capture in words, even the partial character of 20 years, and Gill does his best, in a whirlwind political, social, and artistic history of Berlin between the First and Second World Wars.
This book is at its best when it lets ordinary Berliners speak, using journals and interviews to remember the texture of ordinary life. A few people lived in great comfort, many more lived on a ragged edge of starvation, and the ominous politics of the era overshadowed everything. Nightlife, promiscuous sex, cocaine: Weimar Berlin was a city where anything could happen.
Of course the most important 'anything' was the politics, the shaky political norms of Republican politics, and how the apparatus of the State was seized by Nazis and then turned against the world. Gill does an okay job with the politics, though I don't think he does a great job explaining the rise of the Nazis in contemporary terms, rather than the historical horror we know them as.
Where this book spends most of its time is in the arts, the glittering cabarets, concerts, plays, films, poems, paintings, etc. I'd estimate 2/3rds of this book are about artists, and as someone weak on the period, I found my attention drifting. Too much of the art is inherently ephemeral, cabarets and concerts never recorded. The most lasting legacy is the Bauhaus design school, which laid out a visual grammar we still use today.
I appreciated the detail, but this a book that left me with more confusion than clarity....more
Most of us are guilty of using the phrase "Don't drink the Kool-Aid." The punchline conceals the horror of the last act of Jim Jones Peoples Temple, aMost of us are guilty of using the phrase "Don't drink the Kool-Aid." The punchline conceals the horror of the last act of Jim Jones Peoples Temple, a mass suicide which claimed 918 lives (including the ambush of Congressman Leo Ryan's party) in the jungles of Guyana. This book traces how a boy from small town Indiana became a preacher, a prophet, and then engineered a mass suicide. It's a fascinating journey, and Guinn does it with as little judgement as possible.
The young Jim Jones was a boy apart. His mother was an ardent noncomformist who believed that her son was destined for the great things she never accomplished. His father was a gassed veteran of WW1, tragically weak. Jim's mother raised him to believe in radical socialism, and his own importance. His peers from around Lynn, Indiana remembered a strange boy, fascinated by itinerant preachers, holding funerals for dead animals, and yet oddly manipulative and cruel.
In his early 20s, Jim started his ministry in Indianapolis, focusing on the black minority. The Peoples Temple (the name comes from the former synagogue building that served as its first home) focused on pragmatic matters, helping parishioners deal with bills, the courts, and an uncaring white world. Jones also hit the gospel circuit as well, 'prophesying' with the techniques of cold reading, and graduating to 'healings' where confederates pretending to pass "tumors" (actually rotten chicken offal).
The contradiction was at the heart of Jones's career. On the one hand, he was sincere in his belief in integration and socialism at a time when these things were wildly unpopular in America. The Peoples Temple provided real services for people, and really integrated themselves. On the other hand, for Jones the means justified the end, and chicanery and even Christianity themselves were tools to be used to further his true ends.
As Jones moved from Indiana to California, those ends became less about the mission, and more about himself. Always energetic and unwilling to delegate, Jones became increasingly authoritarian and paranoid. He urged members to 'go communal', turning over their property to the Temple. As he preached abstinence, he began taking mistresses from the faithful, and abusing amphetamines and barbiturates. A series of defections from highly placed lieutenants, including the Stoerns (Tim was Jones lawyer, Grace the mother of one of his children) made Jones paranoid.
He'd long dreamed of promised land, outside American jurisdiction, but the custody fight over the Stoerns' child prompted an immediate exodus to Guyana. The Guyanese government thought a settlement of Americans could act as a buffer against expansionist Venezuela on their remote frontier. Jones thought that the settlement could serve as a socialist utopia.
At this point, Jones really was under attack, from muckraking journalists and the Concerned Relatives, but he saw himself as at the epicenter of a massive conspiracy, involving the CIA, FBI, and shadowy mercenaries. As the Peoples Temple struggled to carve fields and homes out of the jungle, Jones degenerated further, seeing enemies everywhere, his once inspirational sermons degenerating into rants broadcast throughout the complex on speakers, and staging terrifying 'White Nights', where he rehearsed his plan for mass suicide, a final act of revolutionary martyrdom.
Guinn does his best to write without passing judgement, but from my perspective, it's impossible to separate the good Jones from the bad Jones. The same energy and self-assurance required to integrate in Indiana in 1961 are the qualities that lead him to see enemies everywhere. The bravery to fight social convention was in this one case, a slippery slope that started with false miracles and ended with demanding mass death. Jones appeal to peoples' better natures, but he couldn't defeat the darkness within....more
There is something in all of us that thrills to the sea. The vast oceans cover 70% of Earth's surface, eternal and everchanging. They are the h[image]
There is something in all of us that thrills to the sea. The vast oceans cover 70% of Earth's surface, eternal and everchanging. They are the highways of the world's commerce, the source of a great power's strength and prosperity, and a site where desperate battles fought, and heroic deeds done. In a swift and deeply sourced history, Toll brings alive the character of the period, and the role of the American Navy at the dawn of this country.
The Navy is specified in the constitution, but a naval build-up was controversial from the get-go. While Federalists saw a navy as a key protector of trade and defender of national honor, the agrarian Jeffersonian Republican party saw the navy as a useless expense that would incur ruinous debts, entangle America in European wars and benefit New England merchants at the expense of the common man. As Barbary corsairs began to prey on unescorted American traders, the Washington administration ordered the construction of six frigates to serve as the capital ships of the American Navy.
The six frigates, designed by renegade Quaker shipwright Joshua Humpfrey, proved controversial from the start. Humpfrey's design was larger than European frigates, with exceptionally heavy framing of southern live oak. Finely cut and powerfully armed, the frigates were intended to outrun lumbering ships of the line and overpower lesser frigates and brigs. Philadelphia, then the capitol and commercial center of North America, was the logical place to build the ships, but in an early example of pork barrel defense procurement, the actual job of construction was split to separate cities up and down the Atlantic sea coast, increasing cost and complexity.
The ships served with both success and catastrophe in the quasi-war with France and the initial retaliatory raids against Tripoli. The USS Philadelphia ran hard around outside Tripoli and was forced to strike her colors, before being destroyed in a daring raid. Ships were only one part of the American navy. The officers and sailors were even more important, and Tolls describes an alien martial culture of dueling and high honor.
The key conflict of the era was over impressment of American sailors. The British Navy faced a personnel problem of epic proportions as it waged war against Napoleon, and the burgeoning American merchant fleet was full of sailors, some deserters from the British Navy, but many Americans. The British were cavalier in stopping American ships and topping up their crews, no matter the legalities. British merchantile interests resented the Americans, who were prospering on trade with embargoed France as Britain bled. Through 1811, diplomacy failed and bellicosity increased, with the Chesapeake incident, where British ships attacked, boarded, and impressed sailors from an American man-of-war, tilting the balance towards outright war.
The six frigates earned their place in the history in the war, with a series of sharp single-ship actions against British frigates that showed that the Americans could fight and defeat the seemingly invincible British Navy. These battles had little strategic impact, the loss of four ships was a pin-prick, but the battles had an outsized effect on morale. American spirits soared, the British despaired, and large and expensive forces were used to tie the frigates down in port, while hundreds of American privateers sallied from smaller ports and devastated British merchants worldwide. The war ended two years later in exhaustion, with Washington DC burnt and the status quo ante restored.
But the six frigates proved their worth, and laid a tradition of victory. Toll closes with a historiographic review, discussing hooary 19th century American myth-making, an influential but libelous British account that was the standard work, and finally a young Theodore Roosevelt's The Naval War of 1812, which put seapower in a proper historical context. Roosevelt of course saw the birth of the American Navy as major power, with the Great White Fleet and the Panama Canal.
Six Frigates lives up to every accolade as one of the finest general histories and military histories I have ever read!...more
Bui Diem had a front row seat to some of the most important historical events of the Vietnam War. As ambassador to the United States from 1965-1972, hBui Diem had a front row seat to some of the most important historical events of the Vietnam War. As ambassador to the United States from 1965-1972, he was South Vietnam's representative in Washington during the most intensive period of intervention. From 1972-1975 he served as a representative to the Paris peace talks and ambassador at-large. Always one of the top civilians in the military government of President Thieu, Bui Diem advocated for nationalist and constitutional policies to little avail.
Bui Diem was born and raised in Hanoi, in a family with a legacy of academic excellence in the Confucian tradition. An uncle, Trần Trọng Kim, wrote an influential history of Vietnam and briefly served as Prime Minister under the Emperor Bao Dai. Instead of Confucian classics, Bui Diem was educated at Thăng Long School, where his history teacher as Võ Nguyên Giáp (yes, that Giap), and later studied mathematics. Hanoi in the 40s was roiling fervent of secret political groups, and Bui Diem joined a embryonic nationalist party. He was repelled by the overt manipulations of Communism, and became a hardened anti-Communist when his faction was systematically liquidated by Communist secret political assassination squads. Bui Diem only escaped with his life by running and hiding, reemerging in public life in 1955 in Saigon.
Bui Diem was locked out of the autocratic rule of Ngô Đình Diệm, garnering some influence as a newspaper editor. With the acccession of Thieu and Ky, and a stable military government, he was appointed ambassador to the United States.
This book is at its best when Bui Diem talks about his job. He tried to foster good relations between Johnson, Theiu, and Ky, sound out Johnson's "Best and the Brightest", and get a sense of political currents in Congress.
In The Jaws of History covers two major bombshells. The first is that the decision to dispatch Marines to Danang in 1965, the most significant escalation of the war, was made as a fait accompli with no consultation of South Vietnam. Bui Diem admires Johnson as a committed friend to South Vietnam, but admits that serious strategic considerations of the intervention, like how victory was to be defined, were known as early as 1965, and never seriously clarified by Johnson. The second is the Anna Chennault affair, which to summarize a great deal of complexity, is the theory that Richard Nixon used Anna Chennault and Bui Diem as a channel to tell President Thieu to scuttle peace negotiations in the runup to the 1968 election in order to increase his odds of winning. Diem both confirms and denies this theory. He did pass along messages from the Nixon campaign, but he doubts they influenced Thieu's decision. Theiu was a deeply suspicious man, and already doubted the intentions of North Vietnamese negotiators, with some justification.
This is an important and interesting book, and it also showcases the weaknesses of Bui Diem's side, particularly when read against Trương Như Tảng A Vietcong Memoir. Bui Diem certainly suffered, particularly during his childhood under French occupation, and in the desperate guerrilla days during the First Indochina War, but I don't get the sense of marginal existence from his memoir that less privileged Vietnamese had; where starvation and/or death by violence were ever present enemies. Bui Diem's elite diplomacy could take the temperature of public opinion, but Trương Như Tảng deliberately aimed to influence it. This account is ultimately a penetrating look at the failures of the American-South Vietnamese alliance, and the limited imagination that America had for the future of South Vietnam....more
As an American, I'll admit to knowing only the broadest strokes of Irish history. What I do know is that Ireland served as the testbed for British impAs an American, I'll admit to knowing only the broadest strokes of Irish history. What I do know is that Ireland served as the testbed for British imperialism, with the locals suffering from genocidal policies including wars of extermination, absentee-landlord plantations, enslavement and forced emigration, and artificially induced famine. Ireland also served as the testbed for post-colonial wars of liberation, with a gloriously failed rising in 1916 (Ireland loves its glorious martyrs), and then a guerrilla war against the British, finally followed by an even more brutal civil war between those who accepted a peace treaty that left Ireland part of the British dominions, and those who held out for a fully independent republic.
It's a big story, and this book follows one small, but important part of it. Michael Collins, the essential man of Irish liberation, knew that no force Ireland could muster could stand against the weight of British arms. This was to be a political war, and the decisive weapon would be targeted assassinations. The Twelve Apostles, also called The Squad, were the instrument of that policy. A dozen men, lightly armed with pistols, who carried out a series of brazen daylight executions. According to this book, The Twelve Apostles sowed carefully targeted terror, taking down key British intelligence officers, Royal Irish Constables, and links in the network of sources and stoolies that have could landed the whole Irish revolutionary leadership in prison.
Of course, violence begets more violence. Michael Collins was himself killed in an ambush during the following Irish Civil War. Many of Twelve Apostles had troubled postwar careers, finding themselves on the wrong sides of politics, simply aimless, or worst, running their own secret police torture shops.
Coogan does an excellent job depicting the life of a violent revolutionary, though this book assumes a fair bit of background on Michael Collins and the Irish revolution. Doing a little research on the author, it seems he's fairly analogous to Stephen Ambrose, a popular writer somewhat disdained by 'real historians' for light sourcing and partisanship rather than properly rigorous objectivity; Coogan greatly prefers Michael Collins over Éamon de Valera, who is depicted as the adversary of Irish public life. But the one great and irreplaceable advantage Coogan has is that he actually interviewed surviving Apostles in the 60s and 70s. This is a great look at the intimacy and brutality of political warfare....more
Any student of history or fan of science-fiction has wondered about the element of chance and chaos in making history. What unlikely series of events Any student of history or fan of science-fiction has wondered about the element of chance and chaos in making history. What unlikely series of events linked together, brought us to the present moment. How could things have gone differently? The old Great Man school of history says that bold plans and great leaders make the times. Marxists say that history is a struggle of class warfare and material forces. But what if both of these theories are wrong? What if history were driven by blind chance? What if instead of great men, history was full of idiots and blusterers?
That would be an interesting book. Sadly, it is not this one. Instead, The Hinge Factor is veteran war journalist Erik Durschmied taking us on a tour of consequential battles in history, starting with the Trojan Horse, jumping the entire ancient world to Hattin in 1187, and then wandering up to Desert Storm, with a slight anglophile bias. Durschmied is a solid enough writer, and he livens up his history with plenty of close personal details. It's fine reading for say, dads at the beach with a couple of beers, though as a snob with letters after my name, I wonder what is strictly sourced, what is common mythos (the St. Crispin Day speech is moving, but it is Shakespeare's version for centuries later, and may bear about as much relationship to the actual events as Hamilton does to the American Revolution), and what is created whole cloth.
Fine enough, but the chapter on the Tet offensive was is to knock this down to a two star review, which is especially galling because Durschmied actually is a first-hand expert on the Vietnam War. He was a reporter in country for ten years, and as a Canadian reporter, also has a unique perspective on the Communist side, because he covered the 1977 Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia. His inability to pick a coherent story between Westmoreland's failure to anticipate Tet, the bloody battle of Hue, the infamous photo of General Nguyễn Ngọc Loan summarily executing Nguyễn Văn Lém, and the destruction of the Viet Cong as a military force is just... staggering.
If you're in the mood for a book based around the title, I heartily recommend On the Psychology of Military Incompetence by Norman F. Dixon. Now that is how stupidity has influenced military history....more
Cruvellier is a journalist specializing in crimes against humanity and international criminal courts. This book, self-consciously modeled after EichmaCruvellier is a journalist specializing in crimes against humanity and international criminal courts. This book, self-consciously modeled after Eichmann in Jerusalem, follows the 2007 trial of Duch / Kaing Guek Eav, the commander of the notorious S-21 prison. S-21 was one of over 150 facilities established by the Khmer Rogue for the torture and execution of internal enemies. As commander, Duch oversaw the deaths of an estimated 20,000 people. The killing was meticulously organized and recorded, with an extensive archive of files containing photographs, biographies, and confessions of the doomed.
Revolutions invariably wind up eating their own, starting with Robespierre being lead to the guillotine, continuing through the 20th century, and culminating in the extraordinary bloodshed of the Cambodia genocide, which killed between 21 and 25% of Cambodia's population. S-21 was a central node in the machinery of death, where high ranking cadres were dispatched when they had run afoul on an internal power struggle. Pol Pot's paranoia was infinite. A single accusation would bring down subordinates, wives, children, in an ever-expanding web of death.
Two questions weave through the book. The first is about what type of man Duch must be, to commit such crimes? Eichmann was a bureaucratic nonentity, but Duch is somehow worse. Both before and after the revolution, he was a teacher, beloved by his students and peers as kind, reliable, and intelligent. Yet for a decade, he was an enthusiastic member of an apparatus of death, devoted to 'smashing' (the literal meaning Cambodian word used for execution) the enemies of the revolution. He handwriting is all over the archives, demanding more torture, proscribing executions, listing more victims to bring in.
The second is what manner of justice is possible, or even appropriate. The dead can never be brought back. The survivors will carry their wounds with them for a lifetime. I'm not even sure what manner of healing is possible for Cambodia, and neither is Cruvellier. the trial becomes a psychodrama, a grueling struggle which Duch initially controls, and then which takes its own momentum and breaks him. He acknowledges responsibility, but cannot find forgiveness. There are parallels between the obedience to authority which lead to Duch's crimes, and the obedience to authority on which the court runs. In the end a confession, whether extracted by torture or in a court of human rights, is a coercive bargain struck between those with power, and those at the mercy of power. Beneath the pomp and bureaucratic starch of the ICC is the mob, howling for blood....more
The Last Full Measure is contemporary military social history in the style of John Keegan, travelling most well-trodden examples of how soldiers die. The Last Full Measure is contemporary military social history in the style of John Keegan, travelling most well-trodden examples of how soldiers die. In some sense, the task is impossible. No historian, however able, can conjure up Achilles' shade to ask "So what was it like to die?"
Stephenson starts with some insights from anthropology. Indigenous people worldwide, and our near cousins in chimpanzees, practice a similar form of 'raiding' warfare, based on ambush and sudden violence against the isolated and unweary. From this he moves into 'Western warfare', based on a close analysis of the Iliad and historical accounts of phalanx and legionary warfare. There's a clear distinction between 'heroic' combat between champions of similar social status and ability, the random mass crush of arms, and the hit-and-run tactics of nomadic horse archers.
A clear break with the past is the introduction of gunpowder weaponry, which change combat from the duty of a martial elite to the levy en mass, with new ways of dying from lead shot and cannons. Stephenson discusses the bayonet debate, following the conventional wisdom that almost no bayonet casualties arrived to be recording at field hospitals, but allowing for the alternative that bayonets were a secondary weapon used to finish off the wounded in close assault.
From there it's a leap to the best section, a discussion of death in the industrial abattoir of the Western Front in World War I, where men were murdered and mangled by the millions by high explosive shells, machine guns, and poison gas. Sections on the Second World War, and war since, round out the book.
I'm torn, because this is a very good history within its bounds, and has a great selection of excerpts. But Stephenson doesn't have an explicit thesis or argument about death in battle. His choice of sources is thorough, but also entirely conventional. There's nothing about how, say, Vikings saw death, or the mercenaries who ravaged Europe in the 15th-17th century, prior to modern explicitly national armies. Death is horrifying, and killing the central aspect of war, but there's an element of pornography to this book, and how it shows men in their last and most vulnerable moments. Call it a four, but a low four....more
Claude Shannon's theory of information is one of the most important discoveries of the 20th century, up there with general relativity and the structurClaude Shannon's theory of information is one of the most important discoveries of the 20th century, up there with general relativity and the structure of DNA for things that reshaped the world. But the man himself was oddly self-effacing, an undoubted genius who cared little for the trappings of academic prestige and power, and who spent the latter part of his life tinkering with odd one-off devices while his disciples invented the practical applications of computing. A Mind at Play is a great biography of an unconventional past.
Shannon was born and raised in upstate Michigan, and was a strong if not top performing student. A chance fellowship for graduate work at MIT put him in contact with Vannevar Bush, and Bush's rooms of analogue computing machinery. Shannon had a magicians touch with devices, and more importantly the ability to see through the complexities of a problem to an underlying mathematics. Shannon was the first to apply a previously obscure branch of formal logic, Boolean operators, to electrical circuits, turning circuit design from an art to a science. Bush pushed him to do a PhD in genetics, where Shannon's equations for the evolution of traits in populations were far ahead of the field, and then saw him to a position at Bell Labs.
Shannon worked on military projects involving automatic gunsights and cryptography, was briefly married, and spent his evenings enjoying jazz and working on a private project on the fundamental nature of communication. His paper, when published in 1948, was like a starting gun, providing a formal basis for the new technology of computers which had been kick-started by the second World War.
Having created a field, Shannon entered a playful semi-retirement. He became a professor at MIT and worked on problems of interest, including a mechanical mouse that 'learned', a chess AI, wearable computers, and juggling and unicycles. By nature shy, he had little interest in leverage his intellectual authority for power and empire building, or even anything like a coherent research plan. He worked on what was interesting, and have advice to colleagues and students by asking provocative questions. Shannon life was made better by his wife Betty, a formidable mathematician in her own right, and children. He was diagnosed with Alzheimer's in 1983, and lived until 2001, in what can only be described as a pitiful shadow of his abilities.
A Mind at Play is a good, loving biography of a subject, whom for all his genius, had a clear purity. But the reason why I didn't give it five stars is that it seems clear that Shannon's tinkering was a clear mode of thought for him, and that his work at Bell Labs provided the impetus for information theory, and for whatever reason, this book fails to convey the joy of thinking with your hands....more
Tooze's The Wages of Destruction is the definitive book on the Nazi economy. It is as gripping as these kinds of books get, but at the end, still an eTooze's The Wages of Destruction is the definitive book on the Nazi economy. It is as gripping as these kinds of books get, but at the end, still an economic history, and therefore rather dry and specialized reading.
Germany post-WW1 was a country of middling prosperity by per capita measures, lacking raw resources, and dealing with the legacy of war reparations and the immediate post-war hyper-inflation. Through the 20s, the German finance ministry steered a moderate course, maintaining a balance trade, and relying on American loans to pay off war reparations to France and Britain, which were then used to pay Allied war loans. The system worked up until 1929, when the Great Depression hit and global financial markets tanked. Hitler came to power in 1933, at the same time as Roosevelt took the dollar off the gold standard, which preventing some kind of coherent international response to the Nazis in the early 1930s.
Nazi ideology, as expressed in Mein Kampf and Hitler's "Second Book" had a coherent economic policy. German should be the center of a continental system, revitalized on the basis of lebensraum in the Eastern frontier. It was an explicit recreation of the American frontier mythos, with Poles and Russians replacing Indians, along with extreme antisemitism. Starting in 1936, Hitler launched an ambitious rearmament campaign, with the goal of a European war sometime in the 1940s.
The Nazi economy of the 1930 was overheated and generally weak, failing to raise German standards of living. It lasted only though a series of desperate improvisations in financial markets. But it did succeed in increasing German military spending from 1% of GDP to 20% of GDP. The army that took over Czechoslovakia, invaded Poland, and finally conquered France, was by no means qualitatively superior to the allies, but they were boldly lead and very lucky, particular in the Battle of France. 1940 was the high water-mark of the Nazi empire, as the gambit of Operation Barbarossa failed to knock Russia out of the war, and Pearl Harbor brought in American resources firmly on the Allied side. The burden of production in labor, steel, coal, oil, was 4 to 1 or greater. Nazi defeat was inevitable.
But that didn't mean that they couldn't drag the war out, and kill as many people as possible in the process. Hitler's empire turned to mass enslavement to get labor and resources out of conquered territory. Lacking the ability to feed everyone, the Hunger Plan proposed mass starvation for millions, starting with the Jews. If there's a villain to this book, it's Speer. Tooze demolishes Speer's self-serving memoirs, revealing him as a vulture rather than organizational genius, someone who took credit for production changes other had started, and who 'armament miracle' was little more than delusion. Speer's talents, if any, were exporting Nazi brutality from the concentration camps to the ordinary shop floor. He was absolutely complicit in the Holocaust, and made others complicit.
The Nazi economy failed entirely by 1944, done in by inflation and the deployment of the nation-wrecking force of the Allied strategic bomber offensive, which in the last months of the war essentially severed the industrial areas of the Ruhr valley from the rest of Germany. The balance of powers, in the end, was as it was in the beginning. Germany against the world, and Germany simply not wealthy enough to defeat the entire world.
I was hoping for more stories of Nazi procurement fuckups, as in this amazing series on the Amerika bomber program and related inability to make an actual heavy bomber. According to some historians who I trust, there were lots of examples of vaunted Nazi engineering which simply didn't work: interleaved wheels on their heavy tanks made track repair a multi-hour nightmare, uniforms which looked great in photos but were too hot in summer and too cold in winter, resources diverted to super-heavy tanks, experimental rifles, and superweapons like the V-2 which lacked the ability to shape the direction of the war. Tooze glances at these, but doesn't get in to the metal shavings of machining a panzer drive train.
This is a great book. I'm glad I read it, and that's on sale nowish. I don't know who else should read it....more
From a 21st century vantage point, the moral struggles of the Second World War and the fight against Hitler seem obvious. He was a genocidal madman, aFrom a 21st century vantage point, the moral struggles of the Second World War and the fight against Hitler seem obvious. He was a genocidal madman, all good people joined in opposing him. For those living at the time, it was far from simple. In 1933, Hitler was an authoritarian and eccentric European ruler. Anti-Semitism was mainstream. German-Americans were the single largest European ethnic group. A shifting alliance of native-born American fascist groups like the Silver Shirts, German-American organizations, and outright Nazis spies plotted campaigns of propaganda, terror, murder, and revolutionary violence, to culminate in an American Final Solution. Los Angeles, home to the major movie studios and vital defense installations, was a key target. The police were bought off or complicit, ex-Klansmen who saw the Nazis as allies. The only defense was Leon L. Lewis, a Jewish lawyer and Anti-Defamation League leader who became an amateur spymaster, running teams of agents to monitor and subvert the American Nazis from within.
On one level, the Nazis were really not good at security. Lewis, and his aide Joe Roos, managed to get agents into the inner circles of the Bund and the Silver Shirts again and again. They successfully instigated leadership fights between various figures in the covert organization and German diplomatic corps, and kept tabs on a host of subversive behavior. On the other hand, there were hundreds to thousands of activatable Nazi agents placed all through key industries, as well as corps of hardened SA style street fighters. The Nazis made several plays to get arms for murder and revolution. Whatever their scanty ability to actually carry out their plans, they certainly wanted to kill Jews.
Most bleakly, despite Lewis and Roos' hard work, law enforcement was hardly interested in Nazis up until Pearl Harbor. The police were actively on the side of the Nazis, and the FBI and House-Un-American Activities Committee was more concerned with Communists than Nazis. American Jews had few friends in power, though those friends (include then Colonel George Marshall) did their best. When war was declared, the FBI and military security apparatus used Roos' files to make wholesale arrests, on almost no information.
There's a way in which history repeats. The movie studio bosses were the tech tycoons of their day, the highest paid individuals in America. Many of them were Jewish, and they funded Lewis's efforts. Yet despite their own self-interest, the 'below-the-line' technical work of movie-making was rife with anti-Semiticism, and the Nazi diplomatic corps had a final cut to maintain 'neutrality' in movies. The business of Hollywood was business, not principles. Just like how today's Big Tech hides between 'free speech' while letting neo-Nazi propaganda run wild on their platforms. I'm still unsure how much of a threat Hollywood Nazis really were, but it's indisputable that a few brave men and women ably confounded them....more
David McCullough ably captures the grand spirit of the age in this book about the Panama canal. For centuries, men had dreamed of a canal through the David McCullough ably captures the grand spirit of the age in this book about the Panama canal. For centuries, men had dreamed of a canal through the American isthmus, which would elimate the fraught passage around Cape Horn, opening up the riches of the Far East and the Pacific Coast to traditional Atlantic powers.
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The first man to seriously attempt a canal across the isthmus was Ferdinand de Lessup, builder of the Suez Canal and an entrepreneur par excellence. In the wake of the bitter defeat of the Franco-Prussian War, the elderly yet hale Lessups, and his eternal optimism for the canal, represented a possibility for a new France. Thousands of ordinary Frenchmen and women invested their savings in his canal company.
But Lessups, for all his reputation and energy, scorned technical matters. He had decided on a sea level canal at Panama, and manipulated his board into backing him without a thorough survey or solid plans. His company leaped into action, assuming that "men of genius" would arrive to meet challenges as they arose, just like at Suez.
There were definitely men of genius among the French, but they couldn't meet the challenges of the canal. Yellow fever began to slay men, first by the scores and then by the thousand, including the entire family of the local director. The Culebra Cut, the most critical part of the canal, slid continuously. Everything had to be imported to Panama, from massive dredges to Jamaican laborers, and the money ran out. The collapse of the French Panama Company destroyed Jessups reputation and nearly brought down the republic. Work stalled for decades.
Until the unlikely, almost accident figure of President Theodore Roosevelt. Americans had long favored a Nicaraguan canal, closer to the United States and with a more pro-American government. However, the Nicaraguan route was relatively long and twisty, and in a complex series of international intrigues, Roosevelt's administration bought the remains of the French company for $40 million (a song, relatively speaking), and fomented a revolution in Panama, when the Colombian government balked.
The American canal project succeed because it lead with medical hygiene, including a massive anti-mosquito campaign based on recent breakthroughs in epidemiology, as well as a cadre of tough railroad managers. The canal was essentially a matter of rail transport, of moving spoilage from the cut to dump piles as efficiently as possible. The French effort broke down continuously. The American effort was a well-oiled machine.
McCullough covers the grandeur of the effort, as well as it's darker side. There was a color line in Panama stricter than any Jim Crow law, where white Americans had every luxury and the best of healthcare, and the mostly black labor force from Trinidad and Tobago had comparatively high death rates and no amenities. The scale was monumental, from the cut to the the 1000 foot locks. The Panama Canal was the largest engineering project in history, a masterpiece of technological sublime. This book is the proper marker of its origins and place in history....more
Road of Bones is a masterpiece of military history, using an single battle to illuminate an entire conflict. Burma is the forgotten front of the SeconRoad of Bones is a masterpiece of military history, using an single battle to illuminate an entire conflict. Burma is the forgotten front of the Second World War. Relative to most military history buffs, I'm an expert in the theater, because I've read General Slim's memoir Defeat Into Victory, but that doesn't mean that there's plenty more to learn. Kohima was the turning point of the Burma campaign, which Feane uses as a lens to examine the British Empire at it's height, and the Japanese Empire at it's greatest extent.
The larger campaign of which Kohima was the final battle was one of those grand throws of the dice which had served Japan so well at Pearl Harbor and Singapore, and which would turn against them later in the war. The basic plan was to march an army through hundreds of miles of trackless jungle, across rivers and ravines, to conquer India, the diamond in the diadem of Empire. In the optimistic Japanese plans, Indian sepoy soldiers would turn against their white officers, and the difficulties of moving supplies would be obviated by capturing British stockpiles. This bold attack, carried out with stealth and surprise, would catch the British in their soft underbelly and lead to a wave of retreats and surrenders which would see IJA troops in Bombay in short order.
In execution, this attack required conquering the border post of Kohima first, with the 15,000 Japanese soldiers of the 31st Division facing off against roughly 2500 British and Indian defenders. The Allied forces in Kohima were line-of-communication troops, bolstered by the veteran King's Own Royal West Kent Regiment and the Assam Rifles. For two weeks, the Allies faced assaults characterized by the fanatic light infantry tactics that the Japanese army relied on. Then a relief column made it through, Japanese food supplies failed entirely, and they began the long, harrowing retreat.
This is more than a military history. Keane captures the entire feeling of the edge of empire in the twilight days of the Raj. I was particularly taken with Ursula Graham Bower, a British woman who was an anthropologist among the local Naga tribes, and who became a guerrilla commander against the Japanese. For reasons of language and literacy, this account is biased towards the British, who had the majority of survivors and surviving documents, but Keane does justice to the Japanese and the Indians who left records. The acrimony between Japanese commanders is astounding, and Keane's book serves as belated vindication of General Sato of the 31st, who did his best to achieve an impossible mission.
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