Agent Garbo, by Stephan Talty  Houghton Mifflin 2012  Rating - 8
Garbo was the name given by Britain's MI5 Intelligence agency to Juan Pujol, a poultry farmer from Barcelona, a man who would come to have a major influence on the course of the Second World War. Born on Valentine's day in 1912 Juan was the son of a wealthy Spanish dye manufacturer. He grew up in relative comfort, a clumsy accident-prone child who confessed to spending his childhood, swathed in bandages. Sent away to boarding school when he was seven, Juan was at best a mediocre student who hated school. His boyhood hero was Hollywood cowboy Tom Mix, he confessed he had little control over his imagination. Juan was a handsome teenager who inherited the good looks of his beautiful Andalusian mother, and he rushed headlong into numerous teenage love affairs. He confessed to being a slave of the weaker sex. Juan tried his hand at several businesses including a trucking company, a movie house and chicken farming, and failed at all of them. His son later described his father as being one who threw himself into something with great passion but without any planning or strategic vision. In 1936 he took a sales position with a poultry farm north of Barcelona. On July 17 of that year, Spanish soldiers in Morocco staged a revolt and the Spanish Civil War began. As a reserve cavalry Officer in the Artillery Regiment of the leftist Republican government, Juan was required to report for duty, but he refused to join in a war which involved killing fellow Spaniards, instead he hid out in his fiancée's house where just before Christmas 1936, he was discovered and marched off to jail. A week later he became an unwitting participant in a jailbreak, found himself on the outside and a wanted criminal, he was to spend the next two plus years on the run in the middle of a vicious war. By early 1939 Juan Pujol was a sick man, hospitalized with acute bronchitis in the city of Burgos. It was there that he met Araceli, the woman he would spend his life with, and there too that he met a man who would also have a great impact on his life, Kim Philby, War Correspondent for the London Times, future head of the Spanish Section of Britain's MI6 and future Russian spy. In April of 1939 the Civil war ended, leaving Spain a country racked with hatred, governed by Adolph Hitler's puppet Francisco Franco. It left Pujol a sick man, disillusioned, with his family's fortune gone and his country in ruins. He despised the fascists as much as he did the Communists and refused to align with either. However it also left him with a new outlook, playing it safe had gotten him nowhere, he was now eager to take risks, and in Araceli he'd found someone willing to take the plunge with him.
He hated war, and now that the Spanish war was over, he hated what Hitler was doing to the rest of Europe. So in January 1941 Pujol walked into the British Embassy in Madrid and offered his services. In his usual manner, he had made no preparation for the visit and when asked what services he had to offer, he was at a loss to explain, and they sent him away. His wife Araceli tried the same thing, she too was rejected. Downcast but still determined, the new Pujol decided on a different tack, he would become a double agent for the British, but first he had to make the Germans believe that he was on their side. He began by fabricating completely fictitious reports to the Abwehr, the German intelligence service. They were so well constructed that the Germans believed them to be true and coming from someone in England when in fact, Pujol was still in Spain. Eventually, because of their code-cracking ability, the Brits learned of the reports going to the Abwehr, and when they concluded that they were coming from the man who had previously applied to assist them, they called him in. So began what was to become the career of Garbo, the most successful double agent in the British intelligence service. Pujol proved to be a genius in constructing intelligence reports for the Germans which were credible but which would not harm the Allies. His master stroke was when he was able to convince Adolph Hitler and the Germans at the highest level that the D-day invasion would take place at some place other than Normandy. As a result, when the d-Day landings occurred on the Normandy coast of France on June 6 1944, a large part of the German army was waiting somewhere else. When general Eisenhower later awarded a medal to the British Intelligence officers, he said that Pujol's work amounted the equivalent of an entire army division. The book is very readable, thoroughly researched and well written,

The Party is Over by Mike Lofgren  Viking 2012  Rating  -  10
An excellent book, it's about our country's political dysfunction, written by someone who was in the center of the action, saw it going on and recognized it for what it was. No surprise that after 28 years of gradual decay, when it descended to the lunacy level of the 2011 debt ceiling debacle, and major media outlets were presenting crackpots like Eric Cantor and Michele Bachman as representatives of their party's position, he decided it was time to depart. He said "the Congressional Registry reads like a casebook of lunacy." To his credit, he turned his back on the Washington revolving door and almost immediately conveyed his feelings in a political essay for Truthout magazine. This book is obviously an extension of the thoughts conveyed in that essay. Too bad that long before that, when his boss Kasich decided to leave Congress in a futile bid for the White House in 2000, he did not seek his seat. Perhaps a man of his obvious intellectual integrity and depth of understanding of the ways of Congress, could have made a difference. Be that as it may, because of the type of dysfunction Lofgren wrote about, we in the 11th District of North Carolina are losing an excellent Congressman this year. He has decided not to seek re-election in 2012. His district has been gerrymandered by the Republican State legislature to carve out of it his main base of support, and he knows that if he returned to Washington he would begin again to spend most of his time raising campaign money for the party in a constituency weakened by gerrymandering. Being a young man with a young family, he'd rather spend that time taking care of his wife and kids. I for one applaud him, but the bottom line is that We The People will be losing another good man at the helm. I won't attempt to describe the book being reviewed, that has already been well done in the reviews on Amazon.com. Suffice it to say that the inexorable march to lunacy which Lofgren describes in Washington, has led this wonderful country to its current dilemma of massive national debt, continued mass unemployment, increasing inequity in the distribution of wealth, devaluation of real property, intrusion of government into personal lives and the continued unwarranted expansion of the Military-Industrial Complex which Eisenhower warned about 60 years ago. All of these things, and more, are he says, the consequence of the controlling influence of money on the electoral system in the country, and through that, on the legislative process. He devoted the final 17 pages to "What changes are necessary to right the ship of state?" and not surprisingly he concludes what many of us have long believed, we must adopt campaign finance reform of a radical nature. Get all private, corporate and institutional money out of political campaigns and fund them exclusively from the United States Treasury. But how?, it's the legislators who have to do it. It's like asking the foxes to get together and figure out how to prevent foxes from raiding the chicken coops. I hope Mike Lofgren will pick up his pen again and point the way. There's not much time, we're already 38th in life expectancy, 37th in health care, 49th in Freedom of the Press and 14th out of 34 in OECD education rankings. Like a wiser man ventured, it's hard to soar like an eagle when you're being governed by turkeys.

Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi,  Random House 2004  Rating  -  10
This book is a memoir by a woman who was born in Iran in 1947, and educated abroad. She earned a Ph. D. from Oklahoma University. She returned to Iran in 1977 where she taught at The University of Tehran, the Free Islamic University, and Allameh Tabatabai, before leaving that country in 1997. She is now on the faculty of John Hopkins University in the USA. This fascinating story covers the period from her return to Iran in 1977 until her departure for the US in 1997. During that period, while she was a professor teaching appreciation of literature, she was witness to the ouster of the Shah and the return of the radical Ayatollah Khomeini, to the eight years' war with Iraq, the invasion of the American Embassy and taking of hostages, and to the conversion of her country into one of radical Islamism, depriving Iranian women of rights they had long enjoyed. She was eventually expelled from her position at the University of Tehran because of her refusal to conform to a government order to wear the veil. She said that it was self-indulgence which caused her to then teach a private course of the study of literature, in her own home, with seven of her best students. In order to avoid problems with the morality police, they were all women. The theme of the classes was to discuss the relationship of fiction with reality. The works studied included Persian and western literature. Perhaps the story which best resonated best with the group was Nabokov's Lolita. The story of a young woman for whom freedom had been denied and who's very life was completely controlled by an older man who said "she has nowhere else to go". Their freedoms too had been removed and their lives were controlled by the aging Ayatollah and his legions of morality police who strictly controlled what women were permitted to do, what they wore and what they said. For the women who came to Nafisi's weekly literature classes, what could not be controlled was what they thought, and beneath the all concealing dark colored chadors were blue jeans, colored T-shirts and even brightly colored nail polish. For them, much as they loved their country, there was somewhere else to go. In this excellent memoir, Azar Nafisi deals in a very erudite way with the best of western literature, including Lolita, the Great Gatsby, Pride and Prejudice, Madame Bovary and Daisy Miller, among others. At the same time she painted a vivid picture of what life was like for young educated women who had been born in the relatively free society under the Shah, but who then grew into adulthood in the harsh uncompromising world of the Ayatollah where women were made to hide their bodies in black robes, ride in the back of the bus, and were subjected to invasive searches and groping every time they walked through the gate into the University. This is one of the very few books I have ever read which, when I finished the book, I turned back to the first chapter and read the book a second time. It is one of the most fascinating memoirs I have ever read.

In the Shadows of War  by Thomas Childers  Henry Holt & Co 2003  Rating - 10
I may have read as many as one hundred books about world war II. This story by Thomas Childers, is in a class by itself, perhaps the best of this genre I have ever read.  Roy Allen was a 21 year-old young man from Olney in North Philadelphia, drafted out of his freshman college year into the Army Air Corps. He went on to pass his flight tests with distinction. In 1943 he married May, his high school sweetheart and by 1944 he was on his way to England, pilot of a B17 Flying Fortress Bomber. In 1941, Colette Florin was a 21 year old elementary school teacher in the small French village of Jouy-le-Chatel 50 miles south-east of Paris. When the Nazis invaded and over-ran France in 1941 she had fled south with her family hoping to escape to southern France which would not be occupied. They didn't make it and had to return to the family home in Occupied France. In 1942 she had agreed to briefly hide a downed American aviator in her village apartment, and inevitably became a member of the French resistance. About that same time, 29 year-old Pierre Mulsant was running his family's successful lumber business in the French town of Troyes. He had served as an officer in the French Army from 1939 until the armistice in 1940. He was asked to assist with resistance undercover work in his town and eagerly agreed. After a while the Gestapo was on his trail and the British SOE intelligence service airlifted him out to England. There he was trained as an SOE Operative and parachuted back into France to run his own group. On June 14, 1944, just 8 days after D-day, Roy Allen was piloting his B-17, one of 300 bombers from the Eighth Air Force attacking airfields in occupied France which the Germans were using to ferry men and material to fight the landings in Normandy. He had already experienced the terror of a raid over Dessau in central Germany to bomb an aircraft factory. His plane had been severely damaged on that run by German anti-aircraft fire and he'd been recommended for a medal for the way he managed to get his crew home. So his crew regarded the June 14 raid as a "Milk Run" however, maybe it was a lucky shot which resulted in his bomber being crippled and he and his crew were forced to bail out. Roy waited on board until he knew that all of his crew were safely out and as a result he became separated and landed alone. It was his unplanned arrival in a French field that night which brought together the lives and fortunes of these three people. He was immediately taken in and protected by the local resistance. However his eagerness to get back to his base led him to take a chance on the French underground to ferry him via Spain back to England. He was betrayed by a Belgian double agent and what then followed was a year of unbelievable cruelty and deprivation at the hands of the Gestapo and the SS. Thomas Childers has done an amazing job of piecing this history together with interviews and documentation in England, France and Germany. He has written a book which is eminently readable, a story I put it on a par with Corelli's Mandolin, with the difference that this story is a true story and the people in it are real. If you've never read a World War Two story, this one is different, it reads like a novel, but I would warn you, the description of life in Buchenwald Concentration camp in 1944-5 is one told by men who were there.
Reviewwed by Dennis March 2011

Havana Nocturne, How The Mob Owned Cuba . . . and then Lost it to The Revolution. by T.J. English William Morrow 2007  Rating  - 10
This story really began with Congress's enactment of the Volstead act in 1919 -- which ushered in the era known as Prohibition. The mob, which already controlled the distribution of liquor in America, now needed to establish new routes and infrastructure for supplying liquor to their speakeasies in Chicago New York and the other major American cities. The Caribbean, and Cuba ins particular soon became a focal point of their supply chain. The island of Cuba, with its craggy coastline, was a very suitable location for loading and offloading contraband. It was described in Hemingway's novel To Have and Have Not. Both "Lucky" Luciano and Meyer Lansky visited Cuba in 1920 to oversee their bootlegging operations. Lansky soon fell in love with the island and visualized even then, a tropical paradise where he and other members of the Mob Syndicate could establish an empire of gambling, entertainment and sex, remote from the reaches of United States law enforcement. Nothing became of Lansky's dream until 1946 after Lucky Luciano had been convicted of multiple counts of promoting prostitution, and was exiled to Italy. He remained in Italy for a very short time and in the autumn of 1946 boarded a freighter in Naples bound for Caracas Venezuela. By agreement with his friend Meyer Lansky his journey would ultimately take him to Havana Cuba. Lansky had discussed his dream of a mob Empire headquartered in Havana Cuba with Luciano. Luciano's expulsion from the USA became the catalyst which could bring it about. Lansky had already become a part owner of the hotel Nacional in Havana and had established the National Cuba Hotel Corp. which would go on to become a part of the Hilton hotel chain. Luciano's journey from Naples to Havana was taken by a circuitous route in order to avoid detection by any US authorities. In Havana he was met by Meyer Lansky. Lansky had planned what would become the largest meeting of mob leaders in recent mob history. From December 22-26 the top two floors of the hotel Nacional were closed to the public, the grounds were patrolled by armed guards, and gangsters came from across the United States to attend the meeting Lansky had arranged. During the four-day conference Lansky made his proposal for a mob Empire on the island of Cuba involving resort-hotels nightclubs and casinos on the scale never seen before, creating essentially a kind of international Monte Carlo. It was a scheme bigger than Las Vegas and bigger than the syndicate had ever previously tackled. He warned them it was going to cost a lot of money, but there was also a lot of money to be made. The mob conference, which was portrayed in the movie Godfather Part II, was deemed by Lansky to be a smashing success. At the time of the 1946 conference, Fulgencio Batista was living in Daytona Beach, Florida. He was still pulling the strings on the government in place in Havana, and preparing his plan to re-enter Cuban politics with a run for a Senate seat. Lansky and Batista had long had a plan to collaborate on a Mob-funded expansion of the Cuban casino and night club facilities, and Batista's plan to re-enter Cuban politics, to eventually become El Presidente and to participate in the spoils, was a part of that plan. In the years which followed, the Mob invested massively in new luxurious resort-Hotel, night clubs and casinos and Fulgencio Battista in 1952 staged a coup to become El Presidente. American entertainment stars including, Sinatra, George Raft, Ray Charles, Eartha Kitt, and Steve Allen performed in the casinos, Havana Cuba became the hedonistic entertainment center of the western hemisphere. The Havana Mob and Batista made millions and stashed them in overseas accounts. Lansky began to dream of a global Syndicate controlling gambling casinos, liquor and sexual entertainment from their empire in Cuba, protected by the Batista regime and insulated from American law enforcement. They paid little attention to the revolution which was festering in the Sierra Maestra led by Fidel Castro and Che Guevara. That was until their world was blown apart on January 1, 1959. This is an excellent book about the rise and fall of the Mob in Havana. It is not the story of Cuba, nor of Batista and certainly not of Fidel Castro, and does not claim to be. It has clearly been thoroughly researched and entertainingly written, a most readable true story of crime, political corruption and greed on the island that really could have been the Pearl of The Antilles.
Reviewed by Dennis January 2012

Hedy's Folly by Richard Rhodes Doubleday 2011  Rating 7
This is supposedly a book about Hedy Lamarr the beautiful Austrian Hollywood actress of the 1930's, 40's and 50's. It's not intended to be a biography but rather an account of Hedy's alter ego, the inventor and specifically about her patented invention jointly with another, of a ground-breaking technique for directional control of torpedoes by a radio-based system utilizing "frequency hopping", a technique referred to today as "spread spectrum communication" one which now is widely used in a variety of applications including the modern cell phone. The story, however, is equally about her co-inventor, George Antheil and about the technical aspects of frequency hopping and the challenges of getting it patented and adopted by the US military. So Hedy Lamarr, probably the most beautiful woman to ever walk along Sunset Boulevard, does not really have a starring role in this book. She was born Hedwig Kiesler, into a wealthy Austrian family of assimilated Jews in 1914. She achieved worldwide fame already at 18 years old when in 1932 she appeared nude in the Czech film Ecstacy. In 1933 she married the third- richest man in Austria and by the end of that year she felt that she was "locked into a prison of gold" with everything her heart desired, except freedom. Her husband, Fritz Mandl was heir to the largest ammunition manufacturing firm in Austria, and her interest in matters technical was often piqued at the Mandl dinner table, at the time when German and Austrian firms were part of the Nazi weapons build-up to the second world war, and she listened to detailed technical conversations about new weapons systems . In 1935 her father passed away from a heart attack. Her unhappiness with her lifestyle and disagreements with her husband became more frequent and more serious. She made several unsuccessful attempts to leave him and finally divorced him in 1937. By that time Nazi pressure on the Viennese Jewish community had forced many well known Jews to leave Austria. Hedy packed as much of her jewelry and furs as she could carry and departed for London. There, purely by happenstance, she met the American Movie mogul Louis B. Mayer and after some negotiating, Hedy was en route to Hollywood with an MGM contract. It was Mayer's wife, Margaret, who proposed the stage name Hedy Lamarr. The other character in the story and co-inventor of the Kiesler patent, was the composer and part-time inventor, George Antheil. Born in Trenton NJ, George joined the American expatriate community in Paris in 1922 supported financially by the wealthy American Mary Louise Curtis Bok. Antheil's compositional work was anything but a success, in fact his first major work, Ballet Mechanique, was presented in Paris and caused an uproar of disapproval. By the fall of 1933, with further support denied by Mrs. Bok, George was back in Manhattan, married, hard up and often unwell. He and his wife decided to make a move to California for the healthier climate and the chance for George to try his hand at composing movie scores. In September 1940 a German U Boat torpedoed a merchant ship carrying over 400 passengers, including 90 children. Only 6 of the children were rescued. It was an event which caused Hedy to think about what she had learned at the Mandl dining table, and ways that she might assist the Allies to win the war against the Nazis she hated. In August of 1940 at a Hollywood event, she met George Antheil. He had recently lost a brother in the war, so they shared an interest in the war effort. She discussed with him her knowledge of new German weapons systems including torpedoes and revealed her ideas for a jam-proof radio control system for torpedo guidance. The two of them worked on the idea and in June the following year, the US Patent Office issued patent No. 2,292,387 to Hedy Kiesler Markey (her prior married name) and George Anteil, for a "Secret Communications System".
Reviewed by Dennis January 2012

Citizens of London by Lynne Olson  Random House 2011  Rating  -  10
Once again, Lynne Olson has used her talent for historical research to assemble from letters, newspapers, official documents and interviews, a mountain of information about a specific group of individuals during a specific period in English history. She has then applied her considerable skills as a writer to weave the information into a fascinating account of "The Americans Who Stood With Britain In Its Darkest, Finest Hour", which is the sub title of her book. Her previous book which I read and reviewed, was "Angry Young men" a story of the small group of young British MP's who, in 1940, overcame the odds to reverse Britain's policy of appeasement towards Adolf Hitler, and bring about the removal of its champion, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain. This book follows chronologically from those events. The time is now March 1941, 18 months since England declared war on Germany following its invasion of Poland, and things are not going well. France has already fallen under the Nazi jackboot and German warplanes are now stationed on captured French airfields less than 50 miles from the English coast. The Nazi commanders have developed "Operation Sea Lion", their plan for the invasion of England, and landing craft have already been assembled in French ports. All they have to do is to gain superiority in the air over the English Channel. The outgoing US Ambassador, Joseph Kennedy, a notorious appeaser, had returned to the US with the statement "England is Gone" and "I'm for appeasement one thousand percent". The new man, John Gilbert Winant, a shy, idealistic man with a different point of view, has arrived. King George VI went personally to meet him from the train. Together with Averell Harriman and Edward R. Murrow they would bring a new American perspective to the war, to Britain's plight and no doubt they influenced the outcome of World War II. It is an excellent book, scrupulously researched and well documented. It brings into the light the story of John Winant, a little-known American, one who was not flamboyant but who stood on the center stage at the cusp of history, and did it right. Olson's book is an excellent addition to the documentation about those years, it occupies a place on one of the easily-reached shelves in my library.Reviewed by Dennis, December 2011

And The Show Went On by Alan Riding Alfred A. Knopf 2010  Rating  -  8
In the Preface to his book, Alan Riding, reflecting on the Nazi occupation of Paris in the 1940's, asks "How, I wondered, had artists and intellectuals addressed the city's worst political moment of the twentieth century? Did talent and status impose a greater moral responsibility? Was it possible for culture to flourish without political freedom?" They are questions he does not answer in this encyclopedic treatise on French culture during the "Occupation". They are, in my judgment, the wrong questions. Instead he equivocates, concluding that sometimes it does and sometimes it does not, and where you stand depends on where you sit, and in any case, to paraphrase Anthony Eden, you shouldn't criticize others if you haven't walked a mile in their shoes. So instead he embarked upon a highly detailed accounting of the activities of innumerable artists, poets, writers, actors and musicians, some known to those who have some knowledge of pre-war French culture, many not known. It is true that France and specifically Paris had become a center of culture in the years between the wars. Writers, musicians, dancers and artists, including many Americans, had literally flocked to Paris during the 20's and 30's. However it's also true that politically, France had lost its way. The French economy was robust in the 1920's but the Great Depression of the '30's lasted longer there than elsewhere in Europe because of the government's proud refusal to devalue the Franc resulting in the decline of their exports. During the 20 year period before the start of WWII, Russia had been ruled by one dictator, Joe Stalin, Italy largely by one dictator, Benito Mussolini. Germany by Adolph Hitler and in England there had been only 4 Prime Ministers, during that same period France had 39 different governments. France's young manhood had been decimated by the Great war of 1914-1918. Anti-Semitism was practiced in several European countries and many Jews moved to France where the Jewish population grew from 90,000 in 1919 to over 900,000 by 1940, many of them in the Arts. In 1936 France elected Leon Blum, its first Jewish prime Minister, and all this in a country which had developed a strong anti-Jewish sentiment following the "Dreyfus Affair" of 1895. So it was that on June 14, 1940 when the jackbooted German army marched down the Champs Elysees to take control of the French capital, French political opinion already spanned the spectrum from the liberal and Communist factions on the left to the Fascist and anti-Semitic factions on the right, and with many in between. It was largely the right which "collaborated" and the left which "resisted". However, like historians before him, Riding debunks the myth of the French resistance, who's numbers only mushroomed in the weeks after the Normandy invasion and immediately prior to the city being liberated in August of 1944. This book was a major work of research, covering all branches of the Arts and reporting on each of them. It's a time consuming book to read, but if your interest is in Art History, it covers a very important period for the Arts, and covers it well.
Reviewed by Dennis December 2011

Christine, A search for Christine Granville O.B.E., G.M. Croix de Guerre by Madeleine Masson  Rating - 8
This is the story of one of a small number of unusual young women who, at the risk to their lives, volunteered to work for the British S.O.E Special Operations Executive, as an intelligence agent in support of the Allied war effort in Europe during the years 1939 to 1945. Christine Granville was the name given to Krystyna Skarbek a vibrant young woman of titled Polish ancestry, she was such a woman. Krystyna was 24 years old and living in Nairobi Africa on September 1, 1939 when the German army invaded her homeland. Since she could not return to Warsaw and did not want to sit out the war in Africa, she decided, even though she did not speak English, to go immediately to London where she offered her services to the exiled Polish government there. For the early years of the war, she operated clandestinely traveling on foot over a frozen mountain range into Poland to gather information regarding German activities there. She later did the same in Egypt and the Middle east. It was when she was returning from one of those ventures that she was apprehended by the Gestapo. The local British Ambassador, as a means to gain her release, gave her a fake British Passport in the name Christine Granville. It was a pseudonym she eagerly embraced. In 1944 shortly after the Normandy Landings, she was dropped into southern France where she became a key member of the leadership of the Resistance activities there. In 1945, at great risk to her own life she was able to get her friends the English and French leaders of the resistance in the south released from German custody before the Gestapo realized whom they had captured. It was an act which undoubtedly saved their lives and which earned her the English George Medal, the highest British civilian award for bravery, and the French Croix de Guerre. With the end of the war in 1945, Christine suddenly found herself in a quite different world, one which did not offer the life of excitement and subterfuge she had thrived on. It was also to the disgrace of the British that they did not immediately embrace this woman who had given so much, and provide her with a genuine British passport and a job. They did not. Christine then tried several ways to change her location and her lifestyle in attempts to make her adjustment from a wartime to a peacetime environment. None of them were successful. Eventually she accepted a position as a steward on an ocean liner traveling between England and South Africa. It was on the first of those voyages that she would meet the latest of a long line of men who became infatuated with her, but in this case, one who would eventually take her life. Although it was not published until 1975, thirty years after the end of World war II, this book still is very scant on detail of the actual operations conducted by Christine, Roger and the S.O.E operatives in France during the latter years of the war. Much of the story therefore does not relate directly to Christine Granville or her activities. In spite of that shortcoming and in spite of the fact that it is not well written, this is an important story of a brave woman who consistently placed her own wellbeing in jeopardy in order to further the Allied war effort. It was a sacrifice which all of those of us who survived that war and benefited from its outcome should honor and remember.
Reviewed by Dennis December 2011

Every Man in This Village is a Liar by Megan K. Stack  Doubleday, 2010  Rating  -  8
Just a few weeks after the attack of September 11 2001, Megan Stack, a 25 year-old journalist with the Los Angeles Times, found herself on assignment in northern Afghanistan and being accosted by an Afghan warlord. The warlord was an ally of the US, who had returned to his country to fight against the Taliban. It was her initiation into the culture of warfare. During those early days of the war in Afghanistan she spent time both in Afghanistan and in Pakistan. In the Spring of 2002 she was in Israel, near the town of Armageddon, Megiddo as it's known in Hebrew, where a 17 year old Palestinian boy had stolen a car, packed it with explosives and detonated it alongside a bus full of Israeli soldiers. She watched as they gathered the body parts in order to get them buried before sunset. The Israeli tanks, in retaliation, then rumbled into the city of Ramallah to destroy the headquarters of Yassir Arafat. In March of 2003 the US military invaded Iraq. Megan Stack was in Amman Jordan at the time, but by midnight, with a car and a driver, she was on her way to Baghdad. After the US invasion and route of the Taliban, she followed the pilgrimage of the Shiites as they trekked the miles south from Baghdad to Karbala and the tomb of their martyr Imam Hussein, grandson of the Prophet Muhammad. For over 1300 years, Shiites have punished themselves for having abandoned Hussein to his enemies on the plains of Karbala, and it was the time of year to make the journey to Karbala. She was in Amman when word came out about the US treatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib and was puzzled as to why people, who had suffered far worse torture under their own dictator were so outraged when the actions of a few renegade American soldiers was revealed. She was in Beirut Lebanon on Valentine's day 2005 when the President of the country, Rafik Hariri, was assassinated by a massive bomb in the center of the city. Hariri, a Sunni Muslim, was largely if not universally popular in predominantly Shiite Lebanon. He had patiently waited through the years of Lebanese civil war, ingratiated himself with the wealthy Saudi Royal family, enriched himself and brought massive reconstruction projects to Beirut to rebuild and revitalize the city. He became Lebanon's president and now he wanted to cut the umbilical cord to Syria who's army had provided security following the civil war and had become a de facto occupying force. It was because of that that on February 14 2005 he was assassinated. On the day of his funeral, thousands crowded the streets and the mood was "Syria out, we hate you". But the Shiite Lebanese were not among them. They were not there because of Hezbollah who held sway over the Shia community and Hezbollah needed Syria for its support and for its supply of weapons. A month passed before the Hezbollah chief, Sayed Hssan Nasrallah in a television address labeled Hariri's plans to oust the Syrians, "American and Israeli inspired" and urged his followers to protest the move in the streets. What then followed was the biggest street demonstration Beirut had ever seen, and the "Death to America" banners were everywhere. In July of 2006, Hezbollah in a daring cross border raid killed three Israeli soldiers and kidnapped two Israeli citizens who they took back into Lebanon to use as bargaining chips. In all probability, the two were already dead on arrival in Lebanon. What followed was a massive retaliation by Israel which brought the death of over one thousand Lebanese and the destruction of billions of dollars worth of Lebanese infrastructure. Megan Stack was sitting at Cairo airport awaiting a flight to Beirut when she got the word from the LA Times that Israeli jets were bombing Beirut airport, so she paid a driver to take here there. She witnessed first hand the merciless killing of Lebanese civilians by Israeli tanks and warplanes before a cease fires was finally agreed to in September. As a parting gesture the Israeli air-force rendered a large part of southern Lebanon uninhabitable due to the thousands of unexploded cluster bomblets dropped there in the final days. Megan Stack lived through an extraordinary time in the Middle east and this book is an extraordinary first hand account of it all. She is now the Moscow Bureau chief for the Los Angeles Times, no doubt a well-earned respite after the years of dodging bombs, bullets and warlords in the Middle East. . . . and by the way, she told the Afghan warlord who was hitting on her to get lost !
Reviewed by Dennis  July 2011

In The Garden of The Beasts by Erik Larson  Crown Publishers 2011  Rating  -  9
The Garden was Berlin, the Beasts were Hitler, Himmler, Goebbels and Goring, the "Four Horsemen" of the Nazi Apocalypse soon to wreak Conquest, War, Famine and Death upon the world.  The time was 1933 and the western world was in the grip of the Great Depression. Franklin D. Roosevelt, having been newly elected President of the United States, and having already had his first four choices for Ambassador to Germany decline the job, offered the post to Professor William E. Dodd, the little-known Chairman of the History Department at the University of Chicago. He told Dodd, "I want an American Liberal in Germany as a standing example" Dodd said he needed time in order to consult with his wife and with the University. Roosevelt said he could have two hours. Unlike your typical American Ambassador of the day, Dodd was a man of modest means and modest aspirations. At sixty four, he was not happy in his job at the University. While he loved teaching history, he preferred the time he spent at his farm in southern Virginia where he could find the time to work on what he considered his Magnum Opus, a four volume work he was writing, titled The Rise and Fall of the Old South. His only qualification for the post was that having spent two years at the University at Leipzig 35 years prior, he did have some facility with the language and some exposure to the culture. He also felt that after a lifetime of hard work and study, he had not really achieved the success in life that he and his wife Martha had hoped for. His friendship with President Woodrow Wilson back in 1916 had kindled his interest in foreign affairs, and he had nurtured the hope that one day he might aspire to a minor ambassadorial post in Belgium or The Netherlands, one that would provide the prestige and income he sought while leaving him the time to write. After only a brief discussion with his wife, and encouraged by Roosevelt’s assertion that if the University of Chicago so insisted, he could return to his job there within one year, Dodd called back to the White House and informed Roosevelt of his acceptance. Two days later, Roosevelt placed his name before the Senate which approved it the same day without his even having to appear. His appointment attracted little attention. On June 11 1933 it was reported in a brief article on page 12 of the New York Times. On July 5, 1933 the Dodds, their son Bill and daughter Martha, a fugitive from a failed marriage, embarked on the USS Washington with their 4 door Chevrolet, bound for Hamburg Germany. Dodd’s primary assignment from Roosevelt being, to get the German government to pay its debt to US bond holders. The Germany they entered eight days later, while also dealing with the malaise of the Great Depression, was quite different from Chicago. The factories were bustling, but in Germany it was with the building of planes tanks and other armaments, and the streets bore evidence of the new political winds sweeping the country as the old guard represented by the 85 year-old President von Hindenburg was being replaced by the young brown-shirted leaders of the new National Socialist Party. During the next 18 months, Dodd and his family would be witness to the steady, ruthless take-over of all aspects of German life by Adolph Hitler and the Nazi party, to the increasing anti-Semitism, to the gradual destruction of civil liberties and to the march towards militarism which would inevitably lead to war. Larson has done an excellent job of research and of documenting the scene in pre-war Nazi Germany. This is a very good book covering a period which has not been extensively covered in modern historical literature. My only criticism would be that I found the extent to which he dealt with the romantic escapades of Dodd's daughter, Martha, although it was of some historical relevance, was over emphasized.
Reviewed by Dennis  July 2011

Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand Random House 2010  Rating - 10
I read Laura Hillenbrand's previous book, "Seabiscuit" which I thoroughly enjoyed and which demonstrated her ample skill in bringing even common situations to life with her amazing ability to write so descriptively. I mean, how many of us could write an interesting paragraph about a race horse running around a track? Hillenbrand did so for pages on end and made your heart beat a little faster when you read it. So it is with her book "Unbroken" the amazing true story of an American flyer in WWII, Louis Zamperini. Zamperini, born in New York at the end of the First World War, was a troublemaker kid. By the time he was 2, his family, seeking a warmer climate, moved to Torrance California. Soon young Louie Zamperini was breaking into houses, stealing, fighting and running away from home, he was in truth, a juvenile delinquent. Louie's older brother Pete was everything that Louie was not, and it was largely Pete's influence coupled with Louie's desire to make out better with the girls, that got Louie interested in athletics. By the time he was 15, running was his consuming passion and by 1934, at the age of 17 he was running the mile in 21 seconds over 4 minutes. The four minute mile was not broken for another 20 years when in May 1954 a 25 year old Englishman Roger Bannister ran the mile in 3 minutes 59.4 seconds. Zamperini qualified for the US team at the Berlin Olympics in 1936 where he was slated to run in the 5000 meters race. Distance running was at that time dominated by the Finns, and while Zamperini came eighth in the final, he ran the last lap a full three seconds faster than anyone had ever lapped, an incredible feat at the end of a 3 mile race. Zamperini then set his mind on the 1940 Olympics scheduled for Tokyo. However, by 1940 Europe was at war and in Asia, the Japanese were tearing China apart. The US instituted the draft and those who volunteered before being drafted were able to chose the service they wanted. Louie was working at Lockheed aircraft and was already in love with the P 38's being built there. In 1941 he volunteered for the Army Air Corps, and they made him a bombardier. A year later in November 1942 after training, he and his crew were on their way to Oahu in Hawaii part of the force tasked to take the Pacific back from the Japanese after their sneak attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. On May 27, 1943 Louie got up early and went out for a one mile run, he clocked the mile at 45 minutes 12 seconds his best ever. He was in the best shape of his life, but it was the last mile he would run for a very long time. He and his crew were assigned that day to a search and rescue mission for a bomber crew which had failed to return from a mission. The aircraft they were to use was the one in the worst shape on the base and by the end of the day it had ditched in the Pacific Ocean. Only three of the crew of eight survived the crash, Louie was in the best shape and was made commander of the tiny life dingy which was to become their home and refuge for the next 47 days. Hillenbrand described that last mission and the their recognition of their dire situation in riveting detail. What then followed as they drifted in the pacific with no food, no water, no power or shelter, was an experience worse than that imagined and told by Yann Martel in the 2001 novel "The Life Of Pi". It was a terrifying experience at sea only to be followed by one even worse when they reached land. Zamperini survived the horrors of the Japanese death camps and the inhuman treatment he and others received at the hands of sadistic camp guards particularly one they called "Bird". However it left him with terrifying nightmares and a descent into alcoholism in the years that followed. Hillenbrand describes Louie's battle to overcome his addiction and restore his life, and his eventual return to Japan to look for the "Bird". This is an unforgettable tale of the bravery and determination of a man of indomitable spirit.  Much more than a good read, it's a story about a genuine hero.
Reviewed by Dennis January, 2011

And the Dead Shall Rise by Steve Oney Pantheon Books 2003  Rating  -  8
This is the true story of a murder which occurred in April 1913 in Atlanta. A thirteen year old girl, Mary Phagan, an employee of the National Pencil Company's Atlanta factory, was found dead in the basement of the factory, the victim of sexual assault and homicide. This case quickly became nation-wide news and the catalyst of a two-year long feud between various factions in the southern city, blacks and whites, Jews and Christians, management and labor, northerners and southerners. The pot was continuously stirred by the rabid media of the time led by a muck-raking anti -Semite in the person of Tom Watson, and his publication The Jeffersonian which took the public outcry and whipped it into a frenzy. The Atlanta police department, was staffed by some overly zealous investigators who had already made up their minds about the case and were intent on protecting the department's reputation, and some state prosecutors who were intent on making a name for themselves. Mary Phagan was a precocious teenager, described by the press as being a "sweet Christian maid", everyone agreed she was "exceedingly well developed for her age". Leo Frank, the factory supervisor charged with the murder was, according to the newspapers, a conniving northern Jew, preying on the young southern females under his charge. The third member of this saga was Jim Conley the factory's laborer, a black man who became the state's prime witness when he confessed to being Frank's accomplice in the murder. Leo Frank, a family man, protested his innocence from the start, eventually gaining the support of some very prominent northerners including William Randolph Hearst and the New York Times publisher Adolph Ochs. Frank was however convicted of the murder and sentenced to death. The Governor of Georgia, John Slaton, uncomfortable with the verdict, commuted the sentence to one of life in prison and had to flee the city to escape the enraged mob. But that was not the end of the story. What followed remains a stain on the system of Justice and law enforcement in the State of Georgia. The author, Steve Oney, for many years a staff writer for The Atlanta Journal Constitution, has done an excellent job of piecing together the series of events which make up this story. The official transcript of the trial having mysteriously disappeared many years ago. He presents both sides of the story and for the first time names the names of those powerful Georgians who, with impunity, planned and executed one of southern history's most repugnant deeds. This is a big book, over 700 pages including voluminous notes and an index, but well worth the time, and when you are done, you will conclude as I did who you think was really responsible for the death of little Mary Phagan.
Reviewed by Dennis December 2010

OPJB by Christopher Creighton Simon & Shuster 1996  Rating - 8
OPJB refers to "Operation James Bond" the title given to this 1996 story, which I can't decide whether to call a novel or an historical account. I just don't know if this is a true story or not and the writer's first swords in the preface to the book state 'I am well aware that many readers will find this story incredible." He was certainly right about that. Creighton writes in the first person, and claims to have been an under-cover operator in the secret "M" section of British Military Intelligence during the waning days of World war II. Since the activities of M section and British Military Intelligence are so secret, there is no evidence available even today, to confirm or deny his story, its left to you and I, the readers, to decide whether or not we buy this story. World War II in Europe and the activities described here, ended with the surrender of Nazi Germany in May of 1945. Creighton claims that he had subsequently been given permission by Winston Churchill to publish his story, and in fact a copy of the letter from Churchill to Creighton dated October 1954 which stated that permission is reproduced in the book, however in that letter, Churchill admonishes him to wait until after he, Churchill, is dead. Indeed Creighton waited for 40 years and until all of his superiors in the British Intelligence community of WWII, including Churchill, Mountbatten, Ian Fleming and Morton had all passed away. The story concerns the decision of the British government in 1944 to regain possession of the treasures including Art, sculpture, currency and gold, which had been stolen by the Nazi leaders and hidden in secret places all over Europe. That the Nazis had stolen and transported works of art is well established. In fact at the Nuremburg trials, evidence was presented about the two trains loaded with artwork stolen mostly from the Rothschild collections which Hermann Goering had arranged for transportation to Munich to be stored in the "Fuhrerhaus" of Adolf Hitler. So it was that in January 1945, Christopher Creighton, a young Naval Officer already working under Lord Louis Mountbatten in the Intelligence community, was selected to assemble and direct the operation which the Intelligence Officer Ian Fleming had titled "Operation James Bond", an operation to locate and take control of Art and other treasurers which had been taken by the Nazis. This book then is the telling of that operation. It is a story of daring actions undertaken by Creighton and his small band of men and women, several of whom lost their lives, in the very nerve center of the Nazi organization, and at the very moment of its ultimate destruction, but if true, it is also a story of the complicity of the highest level of western military and political leadership in decisions which they knew would cost thousands of lives and in a decision which potentially jeopardized millions.  I have listed this book in the "Non-Fiction" page of this web site because the Author says it's true.  But is it really True ? or is it false ? . . . you will probably end the book, as I did, with a point of view, but you know I'm not going to tell you mine.
Reviewed by Dennis  December 2010

The Good Man of Nanking  by John Rabe  Alfred A. Knopf 1998  Rating  -  10
John Rabe was a German businessman who worked for the Siemens Company and for 30 years lived and worked in Nanking China, in charge of that company's office there.  When it became evident in November 1937 that the invading Japanese Army, which had already committed murder and rape in the occupation of Shanghai, would soon arrive in Nanking, Rabe was urged by his employer to leave the city.  He declined.  John Rabe remained in Nanking until March of 1938 having voluntarily stayed on at his job in an attempt to protect his Chinese employees.  In doing so, he was witness to mass murder and unbelievable atrocities committed by Japanese soldiers against the citizens of Nanking.   Rabe kept a journal, almost a daily diary of what happened during that time, this book is that journal with very little added material.  In 1937 Nanking, the then capital city of China, was home to 1 million Chinese.  When it was realized in late 1937 that the Japanese army would soon invade Nanking, most of the resident foreigners and the well-to-do Chinese who could afford to leave, promptly left the city.  One half million of the poorest Chinese remained along with a small cadre of 22 Germans, British  and Americans, and the soldiers of the Chinese army.  In November the Foreigners set up a committee to establish a safe zone within the city for the non-combatants, John Rabe was elected committee President.  Under Rabe's guidance, a small safety zone was set up in the center of Nanking, designed to care for civilians.  Plans were made to provide for security, health, policing, food supply, sanitation and all of the other aspects of providing care for a large number of people.  Explicit in those plans was the condition that no military personnel or equipment would be allowed in the zone.  The Japanese declined to approve of the security zone, saying they would attempt to consider it however they would enter in search of Chinese soldiers or weapons.  As soon as the Japanese overcame the weak resistance at the gates, they entered the city.  Chinese soldiers immediately tore off their uniforms and looted clothing stores for civilian clothes and headed straight for the safety zone with Japanese soldiers in pursuit.  Day and night, the assaults on the zone by Japanese soldiers took place, to rob the people of their personal possessions and to take women out of the zone where they would be raped and usually murdered.  Rabe, wearing his swastika armband, he was a member of the Nazi party, would confront the invaders in order to try to protect his people.  On a nightly basis Rabe would have to physically pull a drunken Japanese soldier off a screaming Chinese woman inside the zone.   Using a pass given to him by the Japanese, he was able to travel around the city of Nanking and witnessed the results of numerous mass executions of Chinese soldiers and civilians, their bodies were left lying on the roadsides and were eaten by the dogs.  John Rabe finally left Nanking after some semblance of order had arrived in March 1938.  The Chinese honored him then and later, crediting the Safety Zone Committee and Rabe as its leader with saving at least 250,000 Chinese lives.  Upon his return to Germany, instead of the praise which was due him, John Rabe was arrested by the Gestapo and interrogated about his activities in Nanking, particularly as it related to cooperating with Americans.  At that point he ceased writing in his journal, afraid that he may compromise himself.  He resumed in 1945 when he was living in Berlin, not far from the bunker where Hitler eventually committed suicide.  This last part of his journal documents another horror in his life, when the Russian army blasted and raped their way into Berlin.  After the surrender of Nazi Germany in 1945, Rabe was unable to get work because of his party membership.  He was eventually "denazified" but suffered ill health due to the years of deprivation.  He died in poverty at his home in January 1949.  His diaries, which were written for his wife's eyes only, were left in the possession of the family.  It was nearly 50 years before they came to light.
Reviewed by Dennis  November 2010

The Rape of Nanking  by Iris Chang  Basic Books 1997  Rating  -  8
In August of 1937 the Imperial Japanese Army invaded the Chinese coastal city of Shanghai.  Because of their superior military training, equipment and discipline, they expected an easy victory over people they regarded as being inferior.  The Chinese army showed unexpected strength causing the Japanese to lose more casualties in the battle than they expected and to pour more forces into the fight.  Inevitably, by November of that year, the Japanese army had prevailed and they set their sights on the capital city of Nanking with an increased sense of hatred for the Chinese.  The assault was led by three Generals, Nakajima Kesago who's biographer reported that he had been described as a "Beast"; Matsui Iwane, a frail tubercular man, a devout Buddhist from a scholarly family; and Yanagawa Heisuke a short bald man who, because of his mysterious past was known to many in Japan as "The Masked Shogun".  Nothing was spared along the road to Nanking, peasants they encountered were bayoneted and small towns burned to the ground.  Between Shanghai and Nanking lay the beautiful city of Suchow (Suzhou) on the edge of Tau Hu lake.  Suchow was one of the oldest cities in China, famous for its temples, canals and for its delicate silk embroidery.  That city of 350,000 was completely destroyed, its old buildings burned, and its population raped and murdered.  When the Japanese army left on November 19 taking thousands of Chinese women with them as sexual slaves, only 500 of its citizens remained alive.  When they reached the gates of Nanking, the Japanese Emperor, Hirohito, promoted Matsui Iwane to commander of the whole Chinese campaign, removing him from direct ground command, and in his place selected his own uncle, Prince Asaka Yasuhiko.  Matsui was wary of the royal newcomer and a potential for abuse of power.  Although a sick man, he called a meeting of his staff officers prior to the attack on Nanking and issued orders for the orderly capture of the city without undue destruction and free of plunder. Matsui however had no direct control over what subsequently ensued.  Asaka arrived on the battlefield from Tokyo on December 8 1937, met with Nakajima who told him that the Japanese army had surrounded 300,000 Chinese troops who were about to surrender.  Asaka' s headquarters sent out an order to the field commanders to "kill all captives", it was never known if Asaka personally issued the order,  however it set the stage for what was to follow.  On December 13 the Japanese army overcame the weak resistance at the gates and entered the city of Nanking.  What then followed, the main subject of the book, was the wholesale slaughter and rape of the Chinese citizens of Nanking on a scale which had never previously been witnessed in warfare.  Men were shackled together in groups, thrown into pits, covered with oil and incinerated, babies were tossed from bayonet to bayonet, and women by the tens of thousands were raped, some were tied to chairs and raped repeatedly until dead.  Those who survived and some who witnessed, described six to eight weeks during which the city of Nanking was a scene of indescribable bestiality.  This book documents some of that scene and with some photographs.  It describes in some detail the courageous actions of a few foreigners including Germans under the leadership of John Rabe and Americans including the Physician  Robert Wilson and the Teacher Minnie Vautrin who established an International Safe Zone within the city to protect civilians, an action which saved as many as 300,000 Chinese lives.  The author goes on to analyze the extent to which the government and the Emperor of Japan were aware of, condoned or authorized the wholesale slaughter of Chinese citizens in Nanking, and the reasons for why the West has never demanded Japanese take accountability for the atrocities or pay restitution to the victims.  Matsui and some others were executed for war crimes after the war, but several others involved in Nanking are worshipped as heroes in the Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo.  Iris Chang discovered that John Rabe had kept a journal of his days in Nanking and much of her research stemmed from that journal.  It has now been published in the US a a book "The Good man of Nanking" which I will review shortly.  Iris Chang went on to research further atrocities committed by the Japanese military, being clearly outraged that even to this day Japanese political leaders refuse to recognize their responsibility for their country's war crimes.  She was working on a book about the Bataan Death March, and had been depressed after many weeks of video taping interviews with surviving war prisoners, when in November 2004 on the 67th anniversary of the attack on Nanking, Iris Chang took her own life.  Here is a link to Iris Chang's Web Site
Reviewed by Dennis March 2009

The last Campaign  by Thurston Clarke  Henry Holt & Company 2008  Rating  -  7
The sub-title of this book is “Robert F. Kennedy and 82 days that inspired America”   It is a chronology of the 82 days between March 16, 1968 when Bobby Kennedy stood in the Caucus Room of the Old Senate Building in Washington DC and announced that he would seek the Democratic nomination for the Presidency, and June 6, 1968 in the pantry of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles when he reached across a table to shake hands with a kitchen worker and was shot by a young Palestinian man.  The book is not another in the line of books idolizing the Kennedy’s.  Rather it is a quite detailed but rather passionless account of where Robert Kennedy went as he campaigned, who was with him, what he said both in his speeches and to a lesser degree what he discussed with his aides, and how his audience reacted to him.  It’s also an account of what was happening in America during those days and how it affected him and his campaign, including the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., and the happenings in the was in Viet Nam.  It’s not a big book, just 175 pages to tell the story, but let’s face it, it’s not Kennedy’s life story, it is specifically about those 82 days and as such, the events comprising the Robert Kennedy campaign are well covered.  I can well remember those awful days in 1968 and I recall thinking that someone might be looking to take Kennedy’s life.  At one time, after the assassination of Dr. King he said to Rev, Walter Fauntroy "I'm afraid there are guns between me and the White House".  I did not realize the extent to which this was a prevailing fear among his aides in the campaign, and the lengths to which they went, to try to protect Bobby Kennedy.  They used, for example, to encourage him to exit meeting rooms and hotels through a back doorway or kitchen, and he would refuse insisting that he push through the crowds to leave by the main entrance.  Tragically, on June 6 in Los Angeles, he acquiesced to his aides.  Regardless of how one regards the politics of the Kennedy’s, Robert Kennedy was clearly a very good man, who cared deeply about the misfortunes of the underprivileged.  Although his opponents, powerful opponents, were many at the start of his campaign, he was steadily winning a huge following as evidenced by his win in the California primary.  One is forced to wonder on what might have been in America if this man had not been assassinated forty years ago.  There probably would not have been a President Nixon or a President Ford or Carter.  One ponders too . . . on how awful are the consequences of the act of one deranged little man with a 22 caliber pistol and no agenda other than to gain a moment’s fame by killing a great man.
Reviewed by Dennis February, 2009

Mahler  by Kurt Blaukopf & Herta Blaukopf  Thames & Hudson 1991  Rating  -  8
Gustav Mahler is generally regarded as an Austrian composer although he was actually born in what then was known as Bohemia, now the Czech Republic.  This book relates much about the story of his life, however it is not a biography.  Rather it is a collection of letters to and from Mahler as well as newspaper articles about him and the comments of his contemporaries.  These documents are presented without commentary by the editors except to explain the circumstances or sequence of events.  Gustav Mahler was born in 1860, the second of 14 children, of whom only 5 survived to adulthood.  He lived only 50 years dying in 1911 from the effects of a strenuous lifestyle upon a weak heart and, in the end, a viral infection which, in the days prior to antibiotics, was incurable.  His life, and his work, spanned that period between the "romantic" composers of the 18th and 19th centuries and the "moderns" of the 20th.  He was greatly influenced by the work of Richard Wagner, an admirer of Mozart and Beethoven and a contemporary of Richard Strauss and Arnold Schonberg among others.  He lived his entire working life as a conductor but is remembered as a composer.  Son of a poor family, Gustav Mahler had to work.  Unlike Mozart and Verdi, he did not enjoy the benefit of having a wealthy relative or sponsor to provide for his needs, he had to work and he worked until he died.  His father recognized early on that he was musically gifted and arranged for the boy to attend the Vienna Music Conservatory studying piano under Julius Epstein. At the age of 13 he played at the wedding of Prince Leopold of Bavaria and by age 16 he had written his first piano quartet.  From the Conservatory he took work as conductor of orchestras in several eastern European cities, eventually coming at the age of 25 to the chief conductor position at the Deutsches Theatre in Prague.  It was his dream to head the orchestra of the Court Opera in Vienna, however his Jewishness hindered that dream.  By the time he was 30 in 1890 he had become famous throughout Europe and in 1891 he entered the mainstream of German classical music when he was appointed Kapellmeister at the Stadt Theater in Hamburg.  In Early 1897 he converted to Catholicism and six months later was appointed Substitute Director of the Court Opera in Vienna.  There he met and in 1902 he married Alma Schindler.  By that time he had written 5 symphonies. he remained in Vienna becoming Director of the Court Opera and taking on also the conducting of the Vienna Philharmonic until in 1907 he contracted to become Music Director for the Metropolitan Opera in New York,  They paid him as much money for six weeks work as he earned at the Vienna Court Opera in an entire year.  In 1910, with his wife planning to leave him, he was diagnosed with an incurable strep infection which coupled with his heart condition was deemed fatal.  At his request he returned to Vienna and died in 1911.  By that time he had completed several song cycles 9 massive symphonies, the first movement of Mahler's 5th is as long as an entire Mozart symphony.  Mahler's 8th Symphony which requires combined choirs and a large orchestra amounting in total to 1000 performers was premiered by Mahler himself in Munich just six months before he died.  This work, requiring such a large ensemble is rarely performed today but is scheduled for June 2009 by the New York Philharmonic.  This book is a valuable addition to the available literature about Gustav Mahler, a composer whom I regard as being at least equal to Mozart and Beethoven.
Reviewed by Dennis February 2009

Persian Mirrors by Elaine Sciolino  The Free Press 2000  Rating  -  9
No American reporter knows Iran as well as Elainivred to adulthoode Sciolino.  She was a former foreign correspondent and bureau chief for Newsweek, and is now a senior writer for the New York Times.  She has been writing about Iran for over 20 years.  She was aboard the plane which flew Ayatollah Khomeini from Paris to Tehran in 1979.  She was there at the time of the Iranian Revolution, the Hostage taking, the Iran Iraq war and the student riots in 1999.  She has long standing contacts with the powerful clerics as well as with politicians, taxi drivers and beauty parlor workers, and in this book, she can and does write authoritatively about the country which we know so little about.  It is a country where 99% of the population is Muslim 80% of them are Shiites, 19% are Sunni, a country where alcohol is banned but where, at private partiers behind the walls, people drink and get drunk regularly.  It is a country where women dare not go on the streets without covering their hair and most of them are fully covered with a black full length garment called a Chador, wrapped over the top of the head and held firmly with one hand under the chin, but once off the street and behind the private walls, those women are clothed in short dresses, with revealing necklines, heavy make up tinted hair and decorated with jewels.  It is a country of dichotomies where the clerics are struggling to hold on to their ancient power in the face of a young, post Khomeini population who are resistant to the strict control over their lives in ways which they do not believe is required by their religion.  When Khomeini first issued the order that all women must cover their heads in public, thousands of women in protest, marched bareheaded through the streets of Tehran.  She explores the act of martyrdom in Shiite culture, which has its root in the story of Hosein the Grandson of Mohammad who in 681 AD  sought to avenge the murder of his father by rebelling against the ruling Sunni hierarchy.  He and his men set out for the city of Kufa but were met by the Sunni warriors on the sun scorched plain at Karbala.  After a 10 day battle Hosein, holding a sword in one hand and a Koran in the other, was stabbed to death.  His followers were slaughtered, their bodies cut to pieces.  Their severed heads brought to the ruling Caliph Yazid in Damascus and the Sunni reign continued.  Sunni Muslims regard the battle at Karbala and the martyrdom of Hosein the way that Christians regard the passion and crucifixion of Jesus Christ.  Iran is a country, I suspect, where once again the American people have been somewhat mislead by the images of fanatical hoards of people, marching and chanting, burning American flags and shouting "Death to America".  There is also the Iran of the poet, Iranians revere their poets, and every child knows the poetry of Saadi of Shiraz and of a fourteenth century Sufi named Shamseddin Mohammad who was given name Hafiz or one who remembers the Koran by Heart.   Hafiz' alabaster tombstone is engraved with his poems and surrounded by acres of landscaped lawns and flowerbeds.  There is much to be learned from this very well written account of the years that Elaine Sciolino has been visiting and writing about the ancient country that is now called Iran.
Reviewed by Dennis December 2008

 

The Dark Side by Jane Mayer  Doubleday 2008  Rating  -  10
This is a story which every American should read, and one of which every American can be justifiably ashamed.   It is the story of how, following the terrorist attacks on the world Trade Center on 911, our government in the form of the CIA, abducted citizens foreign and domestic whom they suspected of terrorist connections, often on the basis of the slimmest of evidence.  Of how they then, without notifying the person being abducted or their family, placed these people onto a CIA owned small jet plane and flew them to a foreign location, a process known as "rendition".  Once outside of this country they then imprisoned these people in the most abominable conditions and subjected them to physical and mental abuse amounting to torture in conscious violation of The Geneva Conventions, of US Law and against all the principles of this country.  In one case, the head of the unit known as the "Al Qaeda Unit" at CIA headquarters Langley VA, flew on a voyeuristic trip to Afghanistan to watch one of the detainees being waterboarded.   In another case, after months of torture, they found their victim Khaled al Masri, a German car salesman, to be completely innocent and then didn't know what to do with them, so they stuffed his pockets with dollars and set him loose on a country road near the Serbian border and told him to start walking and not look back.  James Pavitt, the head of the CIA's Directorate of Operations is quoted in the book as having said about Masri, "At least the guy will have earned more money in five months than he ever could have any other way".  All the while this was going on, the Lawyers in the office of Vice President Richard Cheney, headed by one David Addington who obviously believes in the absoluteness of presidential power, were having their way by bullying and re-writing American law to circumvent the Geneva Convention and provide legal protection to the masked CIA agents who were doing the dirty work in foreign hell holes.  Alberto Gonzales, later to become US Attorney general was so completely dominated by Cheney that he acceded to the whole thing and indeed as White House Counsel, he recommended that the President set aside the Geneva Conventions, calling them “quaint” and “obsolete”.  Senators McCain, Warner, and Graham said, “Waterboarding, under any circumstances, represents a clear violation of U.S. law. … anyone who engages in this practice, on behalf of any U.S. government agency, puts himself at risk of criminal prosecution.”   Senator Dick Durbin, is regarded by Time Magazine as being one of the "Top Ten Senators" in the Senate.  Durbin received a lot of media attention on June 14, 2005, when on the U.S. Senate floor he compared interrogation techniques used at Camp X-Ray, Guantanamo Bay, as reported by the FBI, with those utilized by such regimes as Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, and the Khmer Rouge.  Government Lawyers who could see what was happening and tried to stop it were unceremoniously drummed out by Addington, who in reality had no administrative authority but derived his power from the support of VP Cheney.  Experience has shown that even when the subject being held is in fact guilty of terrorist associations, torture tends to lead them to provide false and misleading confessions, and the author shows that in the case of one detainee, the false confessions became a part of the case for the eventual invasion of Iraq and all that followed.  This book is a revelation of atrocities committed by representatives of our own government with the tacit agreement and support at the very top level of government.  Jane Mayer is a Staff Writer for the New Yorker specializing in political and investigative reporting, she was previously front page editor for the Wall Street Journal as well as its first White House correspondent.  The late historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. said this about the Bush Administration’s legal defense of torture: “No position taken has done more damage to the American reputation in the world—ever.”
Reviewed by Dennis November 2008

The Death of Dylan Thomas  by James Nashold M.D. & George Tremlett  Mainstream Publishing 1997  Rating - 8
Dylan Thomas a Welshman, and arguably the most famous poet of the 20th century, died in St. Vincent's Hospital in New York's West Village in November 1953 while on a reading tour.  At the insistence of his widow Caitlin, his body was returned to be buried in the village of Laugharne his boyhood home in South Wales.   For more than 40 years it was widely rumored and believed that Thomas died as the inevitable consequence of years of alcoholism and an accompanying dissolute lifestyle, as his attending physician had assured the hospital staff at St Vincent's.  Countless books and articles written about Dylan Thomas since that time, by friends and acquaintances, literary associates, agents and others have only lent credence to those rumors.  The legacy of Dylan Thomas, tainted with the stigma of an alcoholic demise, has suffered because of it.  Caitlin had remained at home in Wales when Dylan made his fourth reading tour in America.  When she received the telegram telling her that her husband had been hospitalized, she flew to New York, stopping in London to party on the way.  She was completely unaware that in fact he was dying. When, days after her arrival Dylan Thomas expired without ever regaining consciousness, Caitlin flew into a rage, assaulting the nuns at the hospital and tearing a crucifix off the wall.  She was put in a straight jacket and following the orders of the same physician who attended her husband, was hospitalized in a private mental facility nearby.  Caitlin Thomas died at her home in Sicily in August 1994 and now rests with her husband in Laugharne.  Throughout the rest of her life after Dylan's death she never accepted the circumstances of his death, but being an alcoholic herself, never followed up to investigate it personally.  However she never doubted the timelessness of Dylan Thomas' poetry.  If you have read his poetry and particularly the poem "Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night"  written for his Father, you will agree with her.  Author George Tremlett, who lives in Laugharne, first cooperated with Caitlin Thomas in 1978 when he worked with her in the writing of her successful memoir, Caitlin.  After working with Caitlin at her home in Sicily and reading extensively the accounts of others, he became convinced that the entire truth of Dylan Thomas' death had never been told.  This book is the result of his work.
Reviewed by Dennis August 2008

Churchill, Hitler and the Unnecessary War  by Patrick Buchanan  Crown Publishers 2008  Rating - 10
With this book, Pat Buchanan has taken issue with one of the icons of the 20th century, and one of my personal heroes, Winston Churchill.  He has done so very well.  I have never read a book so critical of Churchill, and few so well researched on the subject.  Buchanan's thesis is that Hitler never wanted to go to war against Great Britain, he wanted the return of German lands and people taken in the Treaty of Versailles which ended the first world war, and he may well thereafter have proceeded to invade Germany's old adversary, Russia, but it was not his plan to invade England, in fact he had an admiration for the English.   The Treaty of Versailles, written in Paris in 1919, was very punitive against Germany and among other things it awarded to Czechoslovakia the Sudetenland; to France, the area known as Alsace Lorraine and to Poland, the city of Danzig all lands which had previously been German.  It was Hitler's primary objective to return all of those lands and their citizens, who were ethnic Germans, to Germany.  In all three cases, the citizens of the disputed provinces favored a return to Germany.  France did nothing when German troops marched quietly into Alsace Lorraine in 1938, Britain and France acceded to German demands at Munich in September 1938 and agreed to allow Germany to re-occupy the Sudetenland, however when after that the rest of Czechoslovakia crumbled and the Germany military took control of the whole country, Churchill and the British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain were so incensed that they promptly signed a mutual defense agreement with Poland agreeing to come to their aid if invaded by Germany, essentially indicating a declaration of war on Germany if they invaded Poland.  It was, says Buchanan, a foolhardy action.  Britain was in no way prepared or able to do anything to defend Poland in the event of a German invasion, and Hitler knew that.  Germany invaded Poland with the "blitzkrieg" on September 2 1939 and when they refused to follow Britain's demand that they withdraw, Britain immediately declared war on Germany.  So began the second world war.  Buchanan says that had it not been for the foolish mutual defense agreement which Britain signed with Poland, the Poles would not have contested the return of Danzig to Germany, and Britain would not have had to declare war, and all the misery which followed would have been avoided.  The mutual defense agreement, Buchanan says, was signed by Chamberlain in a moment of anger, feeling he had been duped by Hitler at Munich, but in doing so, Chamberlain had the complete support of Winston Churchill.  Very early on in the war, both sides realized that Germany needed the iron ore from the neutral Swedish mines for its war materials and in winter, the only way to get it to Germany was through Norwegian ports.  Churchill, as first Lord of the Admiralty was responsible to insure that the key Norwegian ports be quickly brought under British control.  He bungled the job, the Germans got there first and dealt the Royal Navy a humiliating defeat.  That defeat and significant loss of British life, brought about the end of Neville Chamberlain's service as British prime Minister.  Winston Churchill, who in fact was culpable for the defeat in Norway, assumed the job of Prime Minister.  This war, Buchanan says, which cost tens of millions of lives, brought about the holocaust, and the ruination of the British Empire, did in fact rid Europe of the Nazi dictator, but it opened the door for one much worse, the USSR and Joe Stalin.  This is an excellent book, a new and worthy perspective on WWII, well researched and well written.  If you are a student of 20th century history, it's a book well worthy of your time.
Reviewed by Dennis  July 2008

The Forger  by Cioma Schönhaus  Da Capo Press 2004  Rating - 9
The sub-title for this book is "An Extraordinary Story of Survival in Wartime Berlin", and the story, written by Cioma Schönhaus about his own experiences in Berlin during the second world war, is indeed extraordinary.  No surprise to me that its about to be made into a film.  Cioma was born in Berlin in 1922 of Russian Immigrant parents who had moved to Germany to escape revolutionary Russia.  His parents were Jews. With the coming to power of the Nazi party in Germany in 1933, came also the repression, the segregation, the incarceration and eventually, the extermination of Jewish people.  Jews had already started to leave Germany in the tens of thousands in 1935, it continued at an increasing rate until in 1939 when over 70,000 Jews still lived in Berlin, the door was slammed shut and they were forced to live under a curfew.  In 1942 Cioma's parents were both placed on a train and taken to a concentration camp where they died.  Cioma was permitted to stay in Berlin because friends had arranged for him to work in a "reserved occupation" making gun barrels for rifles.  So began his life alone, evading the Nazis, helping other Jews to do likewise through his skill at forging identity cards and other documents.  He hid "in the open" making enough money to stay at fine hotels, eat in good restaurants, wear nice clothes and because of that and his bravado, he did not appear as a Jew and for a long time was neither suspected nor detected.  However, eventually, and partially through his own carelessness, he was identified, his likeness was posted all over Berlin and he had to escape.  He left Berlin as the Allied bombs were falling, and he left on a bicycle, heading for the Swiss border.  Its a wonderful story of determination and survival against incredible odds, all the more because it's true.  It will make a wonderful movie.
reviewed by Dennis March 2008

Istanbul by Orhan Pamuk Alfred Knopf 2006  Rating - 6
I did not do the usual amount of research before I purchased this book.  I had read Pamuk's last book "Snow" which I reviewed and thoroughly enjoyed.  he's a wonderful storyteller.  So when this book was published I just went and bought it.  I assumed it was about Istanbul, a city of great historical interest, and who better to tell it than the man who has lived his whole life there?  It is not about Istanbul, at least that's not what its primarily about.  It's about Orhan Pamuk and his family growing up in Istanbul.  An interesting story, well written as one might expect, but frankly, a little boring. 
Reviewed by Dennis February 2008

The Somme  by Peter Hart  Weidenfeld & Nicolson 2005  Rating  -  9
This is the story of what is the most famous, or infamous, battle of all time.  In the summer of 1916 the combined British and French armies, supported by troops from what were then the British Colonies, confronted the German armies who were dug in to trenches in the French countryside which bordered the river Somme.  The stratehic objective was to push the German line back east and recover control of the town of Bapaume, a distance of about 10 miles.  The political objective was to appease the French by relieving the pressure on them from the German military at Verdun.   The battle began with a massive artillery barrage on July 1 1916 and eventually ended on November 18 without achieving the prime objective.  The opening artillery was intended to disable the German guns, blast their trenches and permit the British soldiers to advance across "no man's land" and take control of the first line of German trenches.  That strategy failed.  The Germans were too well dug in and as soon as the barrage ended and the British soldiers "went over the top" to attack, German machine guns came back into place and the British soldiers were slaughtered by the thousands.  On the first day of the battle, the British army suffered 57,000 casualties, of which nearly 20,000 were dead.  By the time it was ended, the British suffered 420,000 casualties, of whom 131,000 were dead, the French 205,000 casualties and the Germans 600,000 casualties.  Over the five month period, the British/French line advanced some 3 to 5 miles at different points on the line of battle for a cost of over a million casualties on all sides.  So it was not a battle designed to gain ground, but a battle of attrition, one designed to kill as many of the enemy as possible.  The British Expeditionary Force was commanded by General Douglas Haig, with subordinate officers General Henry Rawlinson and General Hubert Gough .  While Haig had complete authority and control of British forces and all battlefield tactics, he was on French soil and the overall direction of the war was in the hands of French General Joseph Joffre.  The German army was commanded by General Erich von Falkenhaym.  The German army was a formidable force of men, well trained through the German system of conscription whereby every male served two years starting at age 20 and then entered the reserve force with regular training.  The British army, by contrast, was a volunteer army, totally unprepared for a land war.  Haig himself said that he did not have an army but a collection of divisions which were untrained, they would, he said, evolve into an army on the battle field.  Unfortunately, most of them never lived long enough.  The battle of the Somme, remains to this day a bone of contention among military historians, the most popular thesis being that Haig and Joffre with a flagrant disregard for human life, repeatedly wasted thousands of lives by pouring untrained men onto a battlefield without adequate preparation and with battle tactics which had failed on several previous occasions.  The author, Peter Hart, has done an excellent job of setting the scene of the Somme in the overall context of the first world war, and of introducing the leading Generals in charge.  The book is filled with the quotes from soldiers who were there at the time.  Almost every one of the nearly 600 pages in this book, contains the actual words of a private, a corporal, a sergeant or an officer who was actually present at the action being described.  This is a book about war, war of the very worst kind, many of the passages describe scenes of unimaginable horror.
Reviewed by Dennis  December 2007

Clapton, The Autobiography by Eric Clapton Broadway Books 2007   Rating - 8
Eric Clapton was nine years old before he learned that the couple he thought to be his Mum and Dad were in fact his grandparents. His real teenaged mother couldn't or wouldn't take care of him, and he never knew his father, so his grandparents took him in and raised him. It was ten years before he saw his mother again and she rejected him a second time when he asked if he could call her "Mummy". It was a rejection which would darken his personality for years to come. His grandparents were good to him and it was also at about that time they bought him his first guitar. Music, the Blues and his guitars became his sanctuary for most of the rest of his life. He was self-taught, but he studied well. His models were not the English pop idols of the time, Tommy Steele or Cliff Richards, but the American Blues legends, and he spent hours mimicking the techniques of artists like Muddy Waters and B.B. King. By the age of sixteen he was already playing in local bars and had developed a deadly taste for alcohol. His musical talent grew, his style developed and matured, and Eric Clapton quickly became the legend of English guitarists, as evidenced by the posters which appeared in the London subway proclaiming "Clapton is God". So he adopted the lifestyle of the incredibly wealthy young rockers who followed the Beatles and the Stones onto the world's pop stage, and with that lifestyle came his inevitable addiction to drugs and alcohol. Although he occasionally emerged from his continual alcoholic stupor to make good music, the next thirty years were for him the life of a drug and alcohol abuser with a long series of failed relationships. Among the list of women he had failed relationships with, was Patti, the then wife of George Harrison who has now written her own story of the times. Another gave him a daughter. One of the women gave him his only son who tragically fell to his death from an open window in New York City in 1991. Sobriety finally came to Clapton when he reached a low point in 1987 when he was in his early forties. He credits the 12 stage program with his recovery and he has maintained that recovery. With sobriety came even greater success in his music career and finally, marriage, stability, a yacht in the Mediterranean and three more daughters. Clapton's biography tells the story of a life inflicted with the curses of drugs, alcohol and hedonism, but it was not aimless. He maintained a focus on music and on his kind of music, the blues, not the chart busting rock & roll which was the genre of the time. He invested wisely in homes in Surrey England and in the US and the island of Antigua, and he never forgot his mates with whom he grew up in the business and often rushed to their side when they needed a friend. Biographies are usually slow to read, sometimes too detailed and often boring. This book is not of that kind, its is very well written, reads swiftly and holds the interest.   It is at times amazingly candid and self deprecating. I have listened to Eric Clapton's music, often in awe, since the days when he played with "Cream" nearly forty years ago. One gets to know this man in this book, know him and like him notwithstanding his drunken way so that at the end, when he finally beats his devils and finds peace in his own living room playing with his kids, one feels very happy for him. It is a very good book and worthy of the success it is evidently getting.
Reviewed by Dennis December 2007

Legacy Of Ashes by Tim Weiner Doubleday 2007   Rating - 9
On the very first page of this hefty 500 plus page remarkable chronology of the Central Intelligence Agency, author Tim Weiner states. “The one crime of lasting consequence has been the CIA’s inability to carry out its central mission, informing the president of what is happening in the world”. The Agency was created out of the Office of Strategic Services, the OSS, set up by FDR and operated as a World War II intelligence service under General William J. Donovan. Harry Truman wanted it to serve him as a “Global news service” to advise the president as to what was going on in the world.. He said “it was never intended as a cloak and dagger outfit”. Weiner states that the president’s vision was subverted from the start. Not only did the Agency morph into a spy agency, it also became the agency carrying out subversive operations around the globe, and doing so at will and without the control or even the knowledge of the United States Congress. In 1955 President Eisenhower created a “Special Group” charged with the responsibility to review the operations of the CIA. Their responsibility did not extend to approving their covert actions. Then CIA chief Allen Dulles, who's brother John Foster Dulles was the Secretary of State, often did not always tell that group or even the president himself, what they were plotting. “There are some things he doesn’t tell the president” Dulles sister told the author, “it is better that he doesn’t know”   The book goes on to relate numerous instances of occasional fleeting successes, and numerous long lasting failures of CIA operations; from a multi million dollar fiasco in Poland in 1952 to the failure of the Bay of Pigs in 1961 and the misinformation provided to General Colin Powell which he presented to the United Nations on February 5, 2003 leading to America’s disastrous invasion of Iraq.. The CIA was unable even to find the Russian spy Aldrich Ames within their own ranks even though they saw all of their own agents in Russia being arrested and executed. This is an important book. Tim Weiner is well qualified to write this story. In 1998 he was awarded a Pulitzer for his reporting of classified national security programs.   Accurate and timely information about changes taking place around the word, particularly among our potential adversaries, is fundamental to the security of our country. The author asserts that the Agency charged to provide that information has failed and is still failing in its mission. 
reviewed by Dennis October 2007

Troublesome Young Men by Lynne Olson Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2007   Rating - 10
The Treaty of Versailles, which ended World War I, imposed severe restrictions on Germany with regard to her ability to put men in arms, or to build warships, tanks or aircraft. We now know that during the 1930's under the Nazi party, Germany completely disregarded those restrictions and by 1939 she had assembled massive military strength. During the same period, England, with her Conservative government led by Neville Chamberlain ignored the developing threat of a militant Nazi Germany and not only did England not build her military strength, but also Chamberlain went out of his way to not do anything to "annoy Mr. Hitler". England did nothing when Germany occupied the Rhineland which had been given to France at Versailles, they did nothing when Germany rolled over Austria in the so-called Anschluss. They acceded to Hitler's demands to take over the Sudeten section of Czechoslovakia and did nothing when the Nazis proceeded to take over the entire country. Even when the Nazis invaded Poland and England finally declared war, Neville Chamberlain's government refused to do anything warlike and risk a German reprisal. The first bombers sent over Germany by England dropped leaflets not bombs. As is now well known, in the years prior to 1939, Winston Churchill was the lone voice in the English House of Commons warning of the Nazi threat, but as soon as war was declared, Churchill was made a member of the Chamberlain government and in keeping with his sense of party loyalty, he refused to do anything to even criticize let alone depose Neville Chamberlain. This book is not about Churchill. Its about the handful of young rebels including Leo Amery, Ronald Cartland, Duff Cooper, Harold Macmillan, Robert Boothby and others who recognized early on that the policy of appeasement would eventually result in England herself falling under the Nazi jackboot, and they opposed the Chamberlain policies at every turn. They knew they were fighting an almost impossible battle. Chamberlain was enormously popular, he had an overwhelming majority in the House of Commons, the King was behind him, the French government had given him a country home in France following his "peace in our time" meetings in Munich. Chamberlain even had a "dirty tricks" guy who made life difficult for Members of Parliament who opposed him, but they persisted and eventually they succeeded. The author has clearly done her research well and in this book, she has presented in great detail the story of how these rebels succeeded in eventually bringing about the resignation of Chamberlain and the elevation of Churchill to the position of wartime Prime Minister. It is a fine piece of work and if you are interested in the history of the days before the second world war, I highly recommend it to you.
reviewed by Dennis June 2007

Too Close to the Sun by Sara Wheeler  Random House 2006   Rating - 9
The sub-title of this book is "the audacious life and times of Denys Finch Hatton". If you have seen the movie or read the book Out of Africa, Denys Finch Hatton was the English gentleman-hunter who became the sometime lover of Karen Blixen when she lived in Kenya. I confess I do not comprehend the use of the term "audacious" in this connection. Finch Hatton's life was surely somewhat adventurous but "audacious" seems hardly the right word for it. He was, as the English say, "well born", His father was the 8th Earl of Nottingham, his maternal grandfather was an Admiral of the Fleet who had fought beside Nelson at the battle of Trafalgar in 1805. Upon his father's death the Earldom passed to Denys' older brother. Born into a well-to-do upper class family at late stage of the Victorian era, he enjoyed a privileged childhood, attended Eton "public" school for boys and although he failed to get into Baliol College at Oxford which his father had attended, he did attend Brasenose University there and eventually squeaked by with a fourth class degree. The poor performance in University did not surprise him because of his acknowledged tendency to party more than to study, and it seemed not to bother Denys either because the very thought of regular employment bored him anyway. He was a very handsome man, over endowed with charm and very popular with members of both sexes. The year was 1910, the war against the Boers in South Africa was over, the motor car and the airplane had both arrived on the scene, and young and restless Englishmen like Denys were interested in the adventure which might be found in Africa. So Denys Finch Hatton set off for Capetown. Already the European governments were scrambling to establish possessions in Africa. The English had already fought the Boers for control of the gold and diamond mines in South Africa, Germany had established German East Africa, and King Leopold of the Belgians had bought for himself the entire Congo and proceeded to exploit the people and resources there to degree never before witnessed. The Germans referred to it as "Torschlusspanik" the kind of panic which comes when you want to get in somewhere and the door is about to close. When Denys arrived in Kenya, there were already several of his contemporaries there with land and business holdings, hotels and country clubs for the high society had already been established and his carefree luxurious lifestyle continued as before. He soon met Baroness Karen Blixon who had come to Kenya from Denmark to establish an ill-fated coffee plantation. Their story was beautifully documented by Karen Blixon under the pen name Isek Dinesan in the book Out of Africa.  Finch Hatton never seemed to know what he really wanted to do, he knew what he did not want, which was the conventional lifestyle. He did eventually become a successful hunting guide, once leading the future and very brief, King Edward VII of England, on a safari. In this book, Sara Wheeler has in my opinion made a proverbial silk purse out of a sow's ear. I do not regard Denys Finch Hatton as a great Englishman. For someone who was born with golden opportunities and the gifts of good looks, charm and a good education, he accomplished nothing with his life except to satisfy his own selfish whims. He could not even commit himself to the women who loved him. However this author has a wonderful way with the pen, she writes beautifully, and she was obviously intrigued with her subject. More interesting than the stories about Finch Hatton is her telling of the developments in Africa in the first quarter of the twentieth century with a sound grasp of its history. I shall wait and watch for her next work hopefully with a meatier subject.
Reviewed by Dennis May 2007

Gate of the Sun by Elias Khoury Archipelago Books  2005 Rating - 7
This book has been described as Elias Khoury's magnum opus on the Palestinian saga. It is a story which needed to be told, and the telling has won this acclaimed writer even more praise. However, for me, riveting as the story is, it missed the mark. The book tells the tragic story of the Israeli - Palestinian conflict since the time the country was torn apart in 1948 to create the state of Israel. The telling of the story follows an unusual mode. Two men are alone in a run-down Beirut hospital. The older man, Yunes, a fighter and legendary leader of the Palestinian resistance, is in a coma. Doctors have said he is beyond hope and expect him to die. The younger man beside him is Khalil his longtime friend who regards Yunes as his mentor and the great leader of the Palestinian people. Khalil, who has had some medical training in China, believes that if Yunes' mind can be kept alive, then with time the body will repair and recover and to that end he sits with him day and night talking to him. Yunes can not speak or respond in any way to Khalil's conversation, so Khalil speaks of events which Yunes already knows about even things which were originally told to him by Yunes in the hope that it will trigger recognition in the comatose mind. What follows then is a very long monologue, retelling the endless stories of friendship love and war over the years which have passed. It was here that the author lost me. I understand that the book was not written for the western reader, and no doubt readers from the region will be more able to follow the many strange names of the people and places. However, I could not, and because of that from time to time I lost awareness of where we were and who were the friends and who the enemy. At no place in the telling did the author step back and put it all in perspective, to redraw the overall picture before delving back into another detailed telling of an attack on a certain village and who shot whom and continued the seemingly endless litany of atrocities by Israeli soldiers. I had looked forward to this book and hoped for a telling from the Palestinian side of the conflict which seems never to end there, what I found was a very long detailed telling, village by village and mountain by mountain, of fight after fight, and tragedy after tragedy. The story is beautifully written and beautifully translated from the Arabic, but I lost my way in this story long before the end. I am still waiting for the book which will tell the Palestinian side of this endless war.
Reviewed by Dennis May 2007

A Soldier's Story by General Omar N. Bradley Henry Holt & Company 1951   Rating - 9
It has taken me over 50 years to get to this book, but the wait was well worth it. This is not an autobiography of Omar Bradley. It is the story of World War II. It begins with Bradley in jeep on a coastal road in Sicily, headed up to Messina to observe General Montgomery's crossing of the Strait of Messina to attack the Axis forces in southern Italy. It ends with Bradley at his command post in Germany when he received a phone call from General Eisenhower to tell him that the Nazis has surrendered. By that time Bradley had four silver stars on his helmet. Omar Bradley was a soldier's soldier. He shunned the spotlight and fancy trappings of high military office, preferring to spend the time with his men in the field. While general Montgomery lived in a handsome wood paneled trailer which had been built for Rommel by an Italian craftsman, General Patton drove around in an open touring car captured from Rommel with a big silver star painted on each side, and Eisenhower slept in a French Chateau, Bradley drove around in a Jeep with his bed roll on the floor behind him, and slept in a field tent. Bradley never got to witness Montgomery's crossing to the boot of Italy, he was called away by Eisenhower to go to England in early 1943 to join with the British in the planning for the invasion of Europe, code named Overlord. He established the American presence in England and selected the Officers to serve with him there and lead the US invasion forces. Bradley landed in Normandy on D-Day plus one when the beaches had been captured and the British and American forces were fighting to break out into the French countryside and head for the port of Cherbourg. From Normandy, Bradley's army alongside Patton's and the British under Montgomery almost captured the entire German seventh army at the Falaise pocket, they liberated Paris, and in doing so, allowed the French soldiers under their General Leclerc to lead the allies into the French capital. From Paris they chased the German army towards the river Rhine and in doing so, outran their supply lines. Both gasoline for their tanks and ammunition for their weapons was in very short supply and it was necessary to stop the advance. The French resistance had done a good job of destroying the French rail lines to thwart the German supply lines, so it was necessary to truck supplies from the channel port of Cherbourg or from the Belgian port of Antwerp some 500 miles to where it was needed. This left the allies holding a front some 500 miles long during the winter of 1944 to 1945. During the lull, the Germans had rested and rearmed and on December 16 they struck with massive force at the weakest point on that front, in the Ardennes, with what became known as the Battle of the Bulge. In three days the German Panzer Corps had blown a hole sixty miles deep into the Allied front line, two US army groups held out in the face of incredible odds, one at Bastogne and the other at St Vith. After a few more days the Allied line was reinforced with soldiers from general Pattons army on the south and Montgomery's on the north. The Germans were pushed back and chased all the way to the famous bridges over the Rhine at Remagen and at Arnhem. With the relentless pressure from Allied forces from the west and a massive Russian army heading from the east across Poland, headed for Berlin, the war machine of the Third Reich collapsed and its leaders who did not commit suicide, were captured. Bradley and Eisenhower were strongly criticized for the losses suffered due to the Battle of the Bulge, and Bradley's relationship with Montgomery, which had never been very good, was seriously hurt when Monty announced to the press that he and his troops had saved the Americans at the Bulge. This is not a bullet by bullet account of battles, rather its an account of the war through the eyes and daily activities of one of its most famous generals. It is surely the best overall account of a war about which I have read many books. The only criticisms I will make are that Bradley makes only passing reference to the Battle of the Hurtgen Forest prior to the Bulge, a major battle which the US Army lost. It was a fight which lasted ten times as long as the battle of the Bulge and cost ten times as many casualties, and one which some experts said should never have been fought at all. Secondly, in relating the story of the Battle of the Bulge, Bradley barely mentions the fighting to hold the village of St Vith, a crossroad of far greater importance than Bastogne. US forces were overpowered at St Vith, some soldiers fled the scene, officers were relieved on the battlefield and 10,000 men of the 106th infantry surrendered to the Germans. Bradley makes no mention of those events but spends several pages explaining his opposition at the time to Eisenhower's decision to assign part of Bradley's US Army Group to Montgomery's control.
Reviewed by Dennis January 2007

The GOD Delusion  by Richard Dawkins  Houghton Mifflin  2006  Rating  -  7
Richard Dawkins writes on page 5 of this book  "If this book works as I intend, religious readers who open it will be atheists when they put it down"  I think it was a vain hope.  Nothing permeates life, in all of its aspects, as does the subject of god.  No single subject divides people so much as the subject of god.    God is either the greatest mystery of all time or the greatest myth.  So I believe it is both right and proper that intellectuals who have thought about it sufficiently, debate and publish their thoughts and beliefs about god, and we who have not thought about it enough, should read, listen and hopefully learn something from their effort. Richard Dawkins has thought about it and is an intellectual, he is a professor of Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University, and the unordained archbishop of atheists in the world.  But his book, unfortunately, is only somewhat about god and mostly about religion and they're two quite different subjects.  He begins well, with the thoughts of other intellectuals and scientists, Carl Sagan, Albert Einstein, Thomas Jefferson and John Lennon.  But before the end of the first chapter the book delves into the case of the Danish (Protestant) newspaper which published cartoons which the Muslims thought to be insulting to Islam and so they burned down Christian churches and threatened murder and mayhem.  A subject which has everything to do with religion and nothing to do with god.  By the first page of the second chapter, the author is already into name-calling, referring to the old testament god as "the most unpleasant character in all of fiction . . . a vindictive, blood thirsty  ethnic cleanser".  Parts of this book were, I thought, brilliant, such as his chapter on "Childhood, abuse and religion", some others, I thought, were silly and frankly, juvenile.  However when I accept that the book is mostly about religions and the strife that they have caused in the world for two millennia, a belief which I have long held myself, then it is a book with an important message and one which is well worth reading.
Reviewed by Dennis November 2007

Murder in Amsterdam  by Ian Buruma  The Penguin Press 2006  Rating  -  10
In November of 2004 on a street in Amsterdam, Mohammed Bouyeri, an angry young Muslim man, shot and killed the controversial Dutch film maker Theo van Gogh, great grand-nephew of the artist Vincent.  Theo van Gogh had recently completed a movie with the Dutch Politician Ayaan Hirsi Ali titled "Submission" which Bouyeri thought was an "insult to the Prophet Mohammed".  After shooting van Gogh in broad daylight and in the view of several witnesses, Bouyeri took out a knife and cut his victim's throat, then calmly walked away to a nearby park where he was captured by the police.  The murder horrified Holland,. a country which prides itself on its tolerance of immigrants, and sent shock waves around Europe where many countries have provided haven to Muslim immigrants.  The author returned to Holland to investigate the murder and to try to uncover its larger implications.  His book is not so much a story of a murder as it is the story of the people of post-war Holland.  There was in Holland according to Buruma, a sense of guilt as a result of their dismal record in protecting Dutch Jews from the Nazis during WWII.  One consequence has been their liberal immigration policy attempting to "make up" for that, and as a result they have seen a massive influx of Moroccans and Turks and the establishment of a multicultural Christian/Muslim/Kurdish society in Holland.   Ian Buruma, already a well respected writer has done a masterful job of investigating and reporting on this major shift in Dutch society.  This book ranks with the very best I have ever read, and sounds a warning bell for those who might favor the development of muticulturalism in America.
Reviewed by Dennis September 2006

Fiasco by Thomas E. Ricks  The Penguin Press 2006   Rating  -  8
Thomas Ricks is the senior Pentagon correspondent for the Washington Post, he's been in that job since 2000.  Before that he was in the same spot for the Wall Street Journal.  He has been a reporter for over 20 years and in the process, earned two Pulitzer prizes.  He has reported on military activities in Haiti, Korea, Bosnia, Kosovo, Kuwait, Turkey. Afghanistan and Iraq.  So I think he knows what he's writing about.  This book makes very serious charges of incompetence on the part of both the civilian and military leadership which have led America into the war in Iraq.  If they were not true, this writer would surely be in court by now.  He is not, and so I conclude that they are true.  This book confirms my worst convictions about the ineptitude of the leadership of the Department of Defense in the Bush administration.  The book goes on to document countless anecdotes concerning the military conduct of the war and its result in the creation of the so-called "insurgency".  Ricks writes "If America's top military commanders had set out to create an Iraqi insurgency, they could hardly have done a better job, . . . "  Go to your local public library and borrow this book.  Read just the first 111 pages dealing with the run up to war, and it will open your eyes.  The last chapter of that section, chapter 6 is titled "The Silence Of The Lambs" it deals with the failure of the United States Congress to do the job required of it by the Constitution.
Reviewed by Dennis September 2006

Dowding & The Headquarters Fighter Command  by Peter Flint  Airlife Publishing 1996  Rating  -  8
This is the story of the Royal Air Force Fighter Command during the Battle of Britain in 1940, and of Air Chief Marshal Hugh Dowding, the man who conceived the organization of Fighter Command.  Dowding was the man who directed Fighter Command during the fierce air battles of 1940 known as the Battle of Britain, who won that air battle upon which the entire future of Great Britain depended, and who was unceremoniously fired after it was over.  After having easily overrun all of his enemies including France, Hitler then set his sights on England.  At first he thought that England would bend the knee and sign a "peace" agreement with Germany which would leave Hitler the supreme dictator.  However Winston Churchill quickly disabused him of that notion.  On July 16 1940 Hitler announced that England must be invaded and conquered.  He gave to Herr Reichsmarschal Hermann Goering the task to first wipe out the Royal Air Force so that the German army could then cross the channel by boat with complete control of the air, and invade England.  Four days later on July 20th, Goering responded "When the time comes the enemy air craft industry and the air force must be destroyed at the earliest possible moment of the attack.  The defense of Southern England will last four days, and the Royal Air Force four weeks.  We can guarantee invasion for the Fuhrer within a month" . The Germans then commenced the bombardment of England.  However they failed to reckon with the men that Churchill called "The Few" and  failed to reckon with Hugh Dowding.   They soon realized that they had underestimated the capability of the British air defense and both the will and skill of its pilots.  In the first ten days of German attacks RAF Hurricanes and Spitfires shot down 697 German aircraft, while losing only 153 aircraft and 93 flight personnel of their own.  By the end of September that year, the Nazis had forever abandoned their plan to invade England and turned their attention to the East.  Not a single Nazi soldier ever voluntarily set foot on English soil.  The Luftwaffe then turned its attention to night bombing of English cities.  With the primitive radar and defense weaponry of the time, it was a strategy very difficult to defend against, and serious differences arose within Fighter Command.  Inexplicably, on November 24 1940, Hugh Dowding was retired from his position in charge of Fighter Command.  To this day, that action by the English Air Ministry approved by Winston Churchill, has been debated within the English military community.  This book, thoroughly researched and well written by Peter Flint, does not resolve it.
Reviewed by Dennis August 2006

Mayflower by Nathaniel Philbrick  Viking 2006  Rating  -  7
This is of course the story of the Mayflower and the Puritans and others, which it brought to Cape Cod in 1620.  At least that's what I thought it would be about.  The Mayflower left Plymouth England on September 6, on page 29 and arrived off Cape Cod on November 9, 1620 on page 32.  So you're not going to learn a lot about the 65 day voyage from this book.  They were well north of their intended destination, which was the mouth of the Hudson river, but with a ship full of sick and diseased passengers, Captain Jones decided it best to take what he could get and put them ashore as quickly as possible.  By November 11, the passengers had written and signed a "MayflowerCompact" to govern themselves, Master Jones had steered his ship around the tip of the Cape and brought it to anchor in Provincetown harbor, and on page 47 they went ashore.  The next 311 pages to the end of the book, are really about the various Indian tribes and how they interacted or didn't interact with the Pilgrims.  Mr. Philbrick has done a masterful job of telling the story of the Indians, the different tribes and their leaders, even down to knowing the color of the rug in the chief's wigwam and how he broke into a sweat when he took a drink of aqua vitae . . . how did he find that out?  But that's not what I wanted to know.  I wanted to know how the Pilgrims lived, particularly during the first year before crops came in, what did they plant, what domestic animals did they have if any, how did they decide who was in charge of what, and how did they handle the fact that males outnumbered females six to one?  How did they house clothe and warm themselves when they first arrived in a cold New England winter?  If you already know all about that stuff and what you really want to read about is King Philip's war, then this is the book for you.
Reviewed by Dennis July 2006

Ten Years at The Court of St. James  by Baron von Eckardstein   Rating  -  10
This book was published 85 years ago, so its not likely that you're going to walk into Barnes & Noble and find it.  Freiherr von Eckardstein was born in 1864  into German nobility. During his most privileged life he could count all of German nobility, two Kaisers, Kings, Princes, Prime Ministers, Foreign Ministers, and Ambassadors among his friends. After a short military career, he joined the German diplomatic service in 1888.  During the following 20 years he was a front row witness to the events taking place in Europe during the last years of the Victorian era and the short reign of Edward when England went to war against the Boers in South Africa, and the stage was set for the awful war to end all wars. It is that story which he tells in this book.  Its a fascinating story.
Reviewed by Dennis  February 2006

Guns, Germs and Steel  by Jared Diamond  W.W. Norton & Co. 2005  Rating  -  6
This book is no doubt the result of a great deal of research and a lot of erudite analysis, and if it had been reviewed by a Sociologist, it would probably have received a much higher rating.  However I am no Sociologist and unless you are really into sociology and interested in the development of cultures around the world, this reading is hard slogging.  It deals with the way that cultures have developed differently in different parts of the world.  It attempts to answer questions such as why some cultures developed metal tools and farming implements thousands of years before others and similarly, why some cultures developed weapons like guns , thousands of years before others and were able to dominate and in some instances, wipe out, other weaker cultures.  I confess to having done a little "skipping" over passages which I found uninteresting.  I was interested to read this book because I thought it might throw some well researched light on the subjects raised some years ago by a book titles "the Bell Curve".  However to my disappointment, this book does not address those delicate matters nor does it provide any insight as to why to this time, the continent of Black Africa, in spite of its ideal central location between the Americas, Europe, Asia and Australasia, in spite of its fertile soil and ample rivers, and in spite of its favorable climate and richness in mineral deposits, why that continent is so backward in every respect.
reviewed by Dennis  February, 2006

John Adams by David McCullough  Simon & Schuster 2001  Rating  -  10
This is perhaps the finest biography I have ever read.  Beautifully written by David McCullough about a man, one of the "Founding Fathers" a prime mover in the American Revolution and second president of the United States.  Its a big book, over 650 pages of 12 point type including a dozen or so pages of pictures.  In spite of its size this book never languishes, never strays off its focus and never bores.  It is a well researched and beautifully told story of the life of John Adams who was born in Braintree Massachusetts on October 19, 1735, and who died on the 50th anniversary of American independence at about 6 PM on the afternoon of July 4th 1826, about 5 hours after his lifelong friend Jefferson passed away at Monticello.  In the company of the likes of George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton,  history has treated John Adams as one of the lesser lights.  It is clear that he lacked the flamboyance of his contemporaries.  His one term as president was less than glorious, he was remembered more for the hated Alien and Sedition acts than for any other accomplishment of his term.  He was however in the overall scheme of things, a giant of the revolution.  He was a deeply religious man as compared to Jefferson and Franklin neither of whom professed any deep or abiding religious faith.  He was hard working, usually arriving at his office in the early morning hours often before sunrise, as compared to Ben Franklin, the man who wrote "early to bed, early to rise makes a man . . . ", but who in fact, when the two of them worked together in Paris, often had to be aroused at 11 AM.  Along with Franklin he was sent to Paris to try to engage French support, particularly naval support, in the continuing struggle against superior English military power.  Frustrated by the lack of  progress there, while Franklin busied himself with the ladies of French society, Adams went on his own initiative to Amsterdam to seek support from the Dutch.  On more than one occasion the loans he was able to arrange there saved the Republic during those early years.  When he was returned to Paris at a later date with Jefferson, Adams, ever mindful that he had a limited amount of money available to him for his keep, chose to live frugally in a rented room, while Jefferson lived the lavish lifestyle he loved in a small castle, and borrowed extensively to purchase lavish French furnishings for it, furnishings which later were taken to his home at Monticello.  While Franklin flirted with French courtesans and Jefferson bedded his teenaged slave girl, John Adams  wrote almost every evening to his beloved Abigail back in Braintree.  He was a man of absolute integrity. McCullough explores all of these phases of Adams' life, through the war years, the early years of the Republic when Adams spent most of his time in Europe, the presidential years when even Jefferson his Vice President worked against him and all the post-presidential years of his life, the years Adams called his happiest years.  It is truly a splendid book, worthy of all of the praise it has been given.
Reviewed by Dennis January 2006

Postwar, a History of Europe since 1945  by Tony Judt  The Penguin Press 2005  Rating  -  10
The dust jacket says that this is the result of a decade's work by Tony Judt, and I have no doubt that is true.  In 830 pages of incredible detail and careful analysis, this book  covers the period since the end of the second world war in 1945, and tells the story of the countries which make up the European continent, .  From the fight for a new French identity after the shame of Vichy France, and the miracle of German economic recovery, from the ethnic turmoil following the break up of former Yugoslavia and the tortuously slow recovery of debt ridden England, to the demise and fall of the super power USSR and the inexorable growth of the burocratic monster called the European Union.  Professor Judt has taken it all apart, examined it in detail and put it back together.  He has studied and documented the economic, the political, the military, social, health and welfare aspects of the countries and even their citizens' changing interests in motion pictures, literature, sport and dress.   It is truly a monumental piece of work which I think will stand as the reference work on post war Europe for a very long time.  The book is crowded with detail, and not an easy read, but it is well organized and indexed, contains many pages of interesting photographs and is liberally supplied with footnotes, which I find much better than a bibliography. Europe is my part of the world, I was born and educated there, I speak the languages, after I became a US citizen, I returned to work for a US Multinational company there and traveled extensively over Europe for several years.  So I think I know Europe and its history and I did not find any factual disagreement with Mr. Judt's book.  There were some instances where I did not agree with his analysis or conclusions, but they were not of major import.  This is a fine book about modern Europe and if the subject interests you I can unreservedly recommend it to you.
Reviewed by Dennis January 2006

Shostakovich and Stalin  by Solomon Volkov  Alfred A. Knopf 2004  Rating 10
Now I know that this book is not everybody's cup of tea.  Let's face it, not everyone is interested in post-revolutionary Russia and specifically in the relationship between dictator Joseph Vissarionovich Djugashvili Stalin and the so-called cultural intelligentia?  If however,  that period of history does sound interesting to you, then this book is a treasure.  Joe Stalin was perhaps the ultimate dictator.  He controlled everything.  Not just the military, the economy, foreign affairs and the system of justice, but also the entire cultural community in the country.  Books, paintings, plays, poetry and music, all were subject to his whim.  If Stalin did not approve, they were banned and in the most extreme cases, the artists were sent up the river to Siberia.  If their work pleased him, they were well taken care of with an apartment and a stipend in a country which, at the time, was in a severe economic depression.  During the second world war, when Russia was deeply involved with the bloody German invasion on the doorstep of Moscow and every able bodied Russian male was sent to man the guns, Stalin would not permit any of his favored artists, writers or musicians to go anywhere near the conflict.  Some artists and writers acceded to this total control, some could not take it and some even committed suicide.  Some left the country when they could, and many were executed or disappeared into gulags and remote prison colonies. The names of Boris Pasternak, Alexandr Soltzhenitsyn and Andrei Sakharov were soon to become well known in the West.  This book focuses on the relationship between Stalin and the celebrated Russian classical composer Dmitri Shostakovich, one of the people the author refers to as a "Holy Fool".  Dmitri Shostakovich was born in 1906.  He was 18 years old when Lenin died and he would spend the next 31 years under the heel of Joe Stalin's boot.  Throughout recent history he has been the target of much speculation as to whether he submitted to the dictates of Stalin or whether he seemed to appease the dictator while at the same time cleverly expressing himself through his music.  It seems that Stalin himself was not sure, at times banning his work and at times awarding him the prestigious Stalin prize.  In the USA during and immediately after the end of the second world war, Shostakovich was regarded as a beacon of light in Stalin's repressive Russia, defying the dictator and standing tall.  The author reveals however that " . . . in 1949 America's love affair with Shostakovich came to a sudden and brutal end."  It was on the occasion of the "Waldorf Conference", a signal event held at New York's Waldorf Astoria Hotel in the early days of the cold war.  Joe Stalin wanted the West to see Russia in a better light and encouraged, even insisted that Shostakovich become a member of the Russian delegation to this "cultural exchange".  Shostakovich had completed his speech to the conference when the American delegate, Nicolas Nabokov, cousin of the famous writer and himself a composer, jumped to his feet and asked "Is Shostakovich personally in agreement with the attacks that appeared in Pravda on the music of Western composers Stravinsky, Schoenberg and Hindemith?"  Shostakovich rose to reply and was handed a microphone . . .  "and with eyes lowered, burning with shame, he muttered that , Yes, he fully agreed with Pravda"  Nabokov later said that he knew what the answer would be and knew it would expose Shostakovich as being not a free agent, however it was in his opinion the only legitimate way to expose the internal mores of Russian Communism.   Solomon Volkov, an award-winning  Russian Musicologist and writer has done a magnificent job of documenting this aspect of Russian life at the time when it was closed to western eyes.
Reviewed by Dennis December 2005

The Lost Painting  by Jonathan Harr  Random House 2005  Rating 7
Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, usually known today simply as Caravaggio, was an Italian painter of the baroque period.  He lived a short and tumultuous life, dying in 1610 at the age of only 39.  Only some 60 paintings are known to exist today although he painted many more and in the end, in spite of his drunken carousing, he became wealthy and was recognized as a genius.  For centuries after his death, his work was relatively unknown, however in the last century his paintings have been recognized for the masterpieces they really are.  Caravaggio's paintings rarely come to auction and if and when they do they typically go to well endowed museums for astronomical prices. This story is about the search for one of Caravaggio's most loved paintings, The Taking Of Christ,  The painting was well documented, several copies had been made before it disappeared  two hundred years ago, and the experts had studied his style and technique, even the materials he used, the canvas, oils and pigments were known.  The author has well documented the efforts of two young Italian women, both Art History students, to trace the ownership record of the painting, trying to establish its movements through the centuries with the rising and falling fortunes of its Italian owners.  The story is well written, the book is extremely readable, I think I read it in a few days and enjoyed the read.  But the story is a little thin, it does not teach us much about Caravaggio or the time or place where he lived.  Its a story simply about the search and the people who participated, and as such its an interesting story about people for whom the search for this incredibly beautiful painting was the most important thing in their lives.
Reviewed by Dennis November 2005

The City Of Falling Angels  by John Berendt  The Penguin Press 2005  Rating 8
I have waited nearly ten years for this book and I am not disappointed.  In the early 90's Berendt visited my then home town of Savannah Georgia and wrote Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, a story about the people and events surrounding a murder and the subsequent trial of antiques dealer Jim Williams.  The book was a runaway success and forever changed the tourist industry in that town (that book is reviewed below).  I understand he's been looking for a suitable follow-on story since then.  He decided to visit Venice immediately after the fire in January 1996 which destroyed the famed opera house the Gran Teatro La Fenice arguably the most beautiful opera house in the world.   His visit was during the off-season when the city was not overrun with tourists, he wanted to get close to the people.  Mr. Berendt obviously has a talent for getting below the surface of a community, or in this case, above the surface, to meet the movers and shakers and discover what's going on.  It was quickly theorized that the fire was the result of arson, which immediately let officialdom off the hook because otherwise they would all have been accused of negligence.  Maybe it was because of that their tongues were loosened and most of them spoke freely with Berendt.  As a result, Berendt assembled a large cast of characters in this book, maybe if there's a fault in the book, its that there are too many characters to follow, some of whom are not at all connected to the theme of the fire of the Fenice.  The characters who come in for special attention in the tale are the group of mostly American socialites who comprise the "Save Venice" charitable organization, an organization which self destructed because half of its members were more interested in the parties they arranged than in the charitable work they professed to do. As with his previous book, John Berendt uncovers some unique and interesting characters, and as with his previous book, he weaves a fascinating story around them.  Its a good book.  It will not tell you much about the city of Venice and as compared to Midnight, which is a story about people at the street level, this book found its characters among the wealthy socialites and snobs of Venetian society.  However, its a fascinating tale, well told and as such and I recommend it to you.  So why is it called the "City of Falling Angels"? . . . you know I'm not going to tell you that, don't you?
reviewed by Dennis  October 2005

Founding Brothers by Joseph J. Ellis Alfred A. Knopf 2000  Rating 8
With this book, as with his later book on George Washington, Joseph Ellis removes some of the veneer and varnish which has accumulated over the two centuries on the images of Jefferson, Adams, Hamilton and others, who are credited with founding this Republic.  He reveals them as I believe they probably were.  Brilliant men, no doubt; dedicated to their purpose, for sure; but also imperfect, given to pettiness, foolish pride, even falsehood.  Each of them acutely aware that they occupied a conspicuous position in world history and conscious of the legacy they would leave.  I did not find this story as readable as the book on Washington, which I have reviewed here below.  Perhaps it was too ambitious to try to cover the five or six giants of American history in one small book, but then if he had written the 1000 pages which could easily have been written, who would read it?  So he dwells at some length on the duel between Hamilton and Burr, on Washington's final address at the time of his eventual retirement, and on the years of correspondence between Jefferson and Adams.  If anything, Jefferson's stature in my mind, was somewhat diminished after this read and John Adams, somewhat enhanced.  So I'll look forward to reading David McCullough's book on John Adams, which waits on my bookshelf, but will not be my next read.
Reviewed by Dennis August 2005

The World is Flat  by Thomas L. Friedman  Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2005  Rating  -  7
I have been an admirer of Tom Friedman for several years.  He's a foreign correspondent for the NY Times with a roving commission and a very bright man.  He spends a lot of time in the middle east and I think I have learned more about that region from him that from anyone else.  This book is not about the middle east, its not about foreign affairs, and in spite of its ranking at number three on the NYT best seller list, its not a great book.  Its also not a bad book.  In fact it will tell you quite a lot about how and why business is becoming a more international activity.  However Friedman's underlying thesis in this book seems to be that since Microsoft introduced Windows and Netscape introduced Navigator, since the Indian call centers began handling technical support for US high tech companies and China decided that capitalism was not a bad thing . . . then the world had become flat.  Well, I don't quite buy that, I think it started to "become flat", to use his expression, long before that.  It started to become flat at the time of Magellan, Francis Drake and Vasco de Gama, and later when ocean liners started to ferry passengers around the world, it became a bit flatter when Lindy flew into Le Bourget airport in France.  Sputnik made it flatter and so did Apollo and so did Ted Turner 25 years ago. So it started a long time ago, and Microsoft and Netscape have certainly helped, but its still not flat.  As long as people starve in Sudan while Americans throw food away, it is not flat.  As long as long as tribes in India kill female children and rape women as punishment for the crimes of their male relatives, the world is not flat.  As long as America, the most democratic nation in the world, supports, defends and conducts business with the ruling family of Saudi Arabia, the most undemocratic of nations, the world is not flat.  As long as there are a half dozen major religions in the world, all believing in one God but fighting to the death about in how to worship, the world is not flat.   When I doubt or disagree with the underlying thesis of a book, then what follows and the conclusions which are drawn, are less than credible for me.  Having said all that, this book makes an excellent study of the  economic and social developments in India and China, the two most populous countries in the world, and that alone is worth the price of this book, so I recommend it to you.
Reviewed by Dennis June 2005

His Excellency, George Washington  by Joseph J.  Ellis  Alfred A. Knopf 2004  Rating  -  9
This is definitely not another worshipful story of the "Father of our Country", replete with cherry trees and silver dollars.  On the contrary, its a story of an imperfect George Washington, together with Thomas Jefferson,  John Adams, James Madison and Alexander Hamilton all imperfect, working, sometimes in cooperation, sometimes in confrontation to keep the fledgling republic alive.  With this book, Ellis peels away the multiple layers of myth which over two centuries have sugar coated the Washington image.  He reveals the reason for why he married Martha instead of the lady he was really in love with, reveals how when he was a young Lieutenant Colonel, he lied when reporting on a skirmish with the French enemy when a French Officer and his men were murdered in cold blood.  He reveals the infighting which took place among the 'founders' and the eventual total estrangement of Washington from Jefferson, and he revealed, when Washington died, the surprising source of the biggest part of his wealth.  All too often biologies of famous political figures are highly detailed, boring and consequently are often started and returned to the book shelf never finished.  History books and biologies of that nature serve no purpose, no matter how well researched if they are not read.  This book is both very well researched and very well written.  It has taught me more about our first President and the first years of the republic between 1776 and 1799, than any other book I have read.
Reviewed by Dennis  May 2005

The United States of Europe  by T.R. Reid  The Penguin Press 2004  Rating  -  8
T.R. Reid is the Washington Post's bureau chief in the Rocky Mountains.  He was previously the Post's London bureau chief for many years and was in an excellent position to observe the formation and growth of the European Common Market, now called the European Union (EU).  The EU has been growing steadily for nearly 60 years, since Winston Churchill in 1946 told a Swiss audience "we must build a kind of United States of Europe". I lived in Brussels, the headquarters of the EU, for five years at the end of the seventies, it was already a major economic force at that time.   It has in recent times reached what I would call a "critical mass".  Critical in that it is large enough and economically powerful enough today to dictate terms to the United States of America.  Powerful enough that General Electric was forced to back down on its plan to acquire Honeywell because an Italian bureaucrat in Brussels refused to go along with it, powerful enough that Microsoft was fined $600 million and ordered to revise its Windows software if they wanted to sell it in Europe, a change which the US Justice Dept had tried and failed to bring about, and powerful enough that giant US cosmetics firms have been forced to reformulate their products to remove ingredients which the EU says are not acceptable in Europe.  US Congressman were outraged at the notion that Europeans would presume to dictate to a US Company, to which Jack Welsh, then the boss at GE replied, "We have to do business with Europe, so we have no choice but to respect their laws . . .that's just the way the world works now".  And so it is.  Europe is now a highly developed and sophisticated market having 500 million consumers, almost twice the size of the US, with buying power so large that no major US or other company can afford to ignore it, or take it for granted, as General Electric and Microsoft have discovered.  Most of the countries in the EU adopted a common currency, the "Euro", in January 2002 (in spite of Henry Kissinger's assurances that it would never happen).  Since that time the euro has gained over 50% in value against the US dollar.  I know from personal experience that you only need to make a trip to Europe to find out how the buying power of the dollar has declined.  T.R. Reid has captured the essence of the changes which have taken place in Europe.  His book describes in some detail the intricacies of the administration of that complex union of sovereign countries and the complex system of committees which overlap and oversee everything from aircraft design and construction to the ingredients allowed in beer.  He speculates on the serious consequences for the US if the euro even reaches the point of equality with the dollar, as the world's reserve currency of choice.  This is an important book, it documents the changes taking place in one of the two major economic centers of the world outside of the United States, the other one being the People's Republic of China.  They are changes which will forever affect life in these United States.
Reviewed by Dennis,  May 2005

The Tipping Point  by Malcolm Gladwell  Little, Brown & Company 2000   Rating  -  7
The sub title of this book is "How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference".  I have frequently made the point at our regular breakfast discussions that I believe that minor events in my life have had major consequences.  For example, I remember clearly to this day the time in England when I saw a gorgeous 1959 Chevrolet convertible, white with a red interior, being driven down through my home town by a couple of G.I.'s.  It was the most impressive car I had ever seen.  I had never previously considered moving to America, but before the year was over, I landed in New York City.  So when I heard about this book, it was a no-brainer.  My thesis is a personal one, I believe that minor events in our personal lives, sometimes and without our realizing it at the time, have major consequences.  Malcolm Gladwell's book however, makes the case on a much larger scale.  He posits that on a national level, relatively minor things happened which caused major shifts in human behavior, and on that score, I'm still somewhat skeptical.  However the book is full of very interesting anecdotes to make his case, many of them I found to be not only very readable, but fascinating.  He discussed how the sales of Hush Puppy shoes, which had all but gone out of business with sales down to 30,000 pairs a year in the early ninety's suddenly and surprisingly exploded and by the end of 1995 were selling over 400,000 pairs annually.  More interesting to me was his story about how crime was turned around in New York City.  In the 1980's New York had well over 2,000 murders and 600,000 serious felonies per year.  The NY subway was a jungle.  1984 was the year that Bernard Goetz on the subway, shot and four black youths who he though were going to attack him, and was acquitted.  Quite suddenly crime in New York turned around, murders dropped by two thirds, felonies were cut in half and felonies in the subway declined by seventy five percent.  Gladwell analyses why he believes it happened that by 1996 New York had suddenly become the safest big city in America, and writes at length about what is called "the Broken Window Effect".  There are several other quite fascinating stories in this book, each very well researched and if you are into sociology, what the author has presented here is quite a feast.  He has another book newly published, titled, "Jerk" exploring the importance of hunch and instinct to the workings of the mind.  It has been on the NY Times best seller list now for 12 weeks and as of the time I am writing this, it is number one.  I think I'll get me one!
Reviewed by Dennis April 2005

The Battle of Alamein, Turning Point, World War II  by John Bierman and Colin Smith  Viking 2002  Rating  -  8
This book is the story of World War II in North Africa, culminating in the battle at El Alamein for which a British General became known as "Montgomery of Alamein".  As world war II fades into history, and every day, fewer of the men and women who fought in it are alive, Alamein is one of the names which is likely to fade early from memory.  Over the years since the end of WW II we've heard a lot about the Battle of Britain, Normandy, The Battle of the Bulge, and the crossing of the Rhine and others, but very little about El Alamein.  In fact the place is not much more than a crossroads with a "scruffy little rail head" its even hard to find on the map.  However the battle which took place there was undoubtedly one of the most significant of the war.  Winston Churchill said about the Allied victory there, "Now this is not the end.  It is not even the beginning of the end.  But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning."   When the Axis forces led by the German Panzer-Africa Corps under the "Desert Fox",  Field Marshall Erwin Rommel, met the Allied British/Australian/New Zealand/American force under Lieutenant-General Bernard Montgomery and his "Desert Rats", not only were two great armies locked in combat but also two great military egos were on the line.  Rommel's principal desert advisor at the time was the shady Hungarian adventurer Laszlo Almasy, better known to movie goers as "The English Patient".  North Africa was important because the Axis powers already controlled Italy, Sicily, Greece and the south of France.  They bombed the island of Malta almost to a pile of rubble but failed to dominate that island which was later awarded the highest British civilian medal for bravery, the George Cross.  If they had controlled North Africa, they would have been in complete control of the Mediterranean and the Suez canal.  They were defeated at El Alamein.  It was the first major defeat for the German war machine which, up to that time, had been invincible.  Rommel eventually left North Africa to take charge of shoring up the Normandy defenses in preparation for the expected invasion.  Eventually, he was falsely accused of being complicit in the plot to assassinate Hitler, and was asked to commit suicide, which he did.  This book is the work of two men, both award-winning Journalists, who have clearly done a magnificent job of research at a time when there remains so few first hand accounts available to them.  The book is not an easy read because it is so full of the details of battles and the recounting of the many individual acts of extreme heroism.  But it is a story which needed to be told in the details.  Of all the wars of the last century, none was so clearly a choice between good and evil as this war, and the thousands of brave men and women who lost their lives in North Africa deserve their place alongside the heroes of The Battle of Britain, Normandy, Arnhem, the Bulge, Guadalcanal, Iwo Jima, Midway and so many other awful places where brave men and women lost their lives to defeat the horror which was Nazism.  This book names many of them and tells their stories very well.
Reviewed by Dennis  March 2005

Eleventh Month, Eleventh Day, Eleventh Hour  by Joseph Persico  Random House 2004   Rating  -  7
The book is the story of Armistice Day 1918, November 11, the end of the first World War.  Many books have been written about the first World War and I've read several of them.  This is a good book, but contrary to what is said on the book jacket, is not "the single finest work" on the subject.  Joseph Persico does succeed in taking a brand new look at the war, he reports on what happened during the last day.   The American Army came late to the conflict at the end of 1917, and at first with an insignificant force.  However, very quickly the American military machine built, under General John J. Pershing, a force of a million men and a thousand aircraft, a force with which the Germans knew they could not contend.  So they sent a delegation of middle level German officials headed by the leader of the German Catholic Party, Matthias Erzberger to meet with the French Marshal Ferdinand Foch in the famous railroad car in the Forest of Compeigne outside of Paris.  Foch realized that the Germans had sent a low level delegation in order to protect their generals from the shame of asking for an armistice, so he deliberately insulted Erzberger and his delegation and asked them why they were there, in order to force them to request the cease fire.  The terms of the Armistice, requiring that Germany surrender all land taken as well as Alsace Lorraine, return to their pre-war borders and make reparations to the Allies, were agreed to there in the railroad car on the 8th, but had to be approved by the German high command, which would take several days.  Erzberger begged that hostilities cease immediately pending approval, in order to save lives, Foch refused.  As a consequence, in the three days between November 8 and the end of the war on November 11th, 6800 soldiers of all nationalities died and an additional 15,000 were injured.  Even on the morning of November 11th, with the armistice signed at 5 AM and all fighting to stop at 11 AM, still the bloody conflict continued and in fact, escalated.  In the five hours between the 5 AM and 11 AM, the combatants on the western front suffered 10,944 casualties of which 2,738 were deaths.  320 were American deaths.  The 2,738 deaths during the morning of November 11th 1918, was greater than the average number of deaths in a 24 hour period for the entire war.  So the issue that Persico addressed was, "why did so many men die that morning, fighting for land which the Germans had already agreed to give up and which, only a couple of hours later, they could have walked onto without firing a shot?"   It is a question which so many Americans asked of their congressmen in January of 1919, that Congress began an investigation. 
reviewed by Dennis  November 2004

News Of a Kidnapping by Gabriel García Márquez  Alfred Knopf 1997  Rating  -  7
It is the story of an actual kidnapping which occurred in Columbia in 1990 and involved the kidnapping of 10 citizens, 9 of them journalists, by the Medellin drug boss Pablo Escobar.  These kidnappings were carefully orchestrated by Escobar's militia to abduct the most powerful of the country's journalists and use them to influence Columbia's policy with respect to the extradition of Columbian drug dealers to the United States.  The Medellin cartel was very powerful and feared only that their bosses, if captured, could be extradited to the United States to stand trial where they would inevitably end up in a jail from which they would never return.  They would rather surrender to the Columbian justice which they could control, than risk extradition to the USA, and it was because of that possibility that Escobar abducted several prominent citizens in order to try to influence the extradition legislation pending in the Columbian Senate.  In this story, Marquez, the absolute master of South American literature, retells the day-by-day events in the lives of hostages Diana Turbay a famous television journalist, Maruja Villamizar wife of a prominent politician Alberto Villamizar and of Beatrix Villamizar, his sister.  Against the backdrop of their kidnapping and their sometimes cruel treatment by the hostages, Marquez tells the story of the conflicting interests of the millionaire drug lord, Pablo Escobar, and of the government of Cesar Gaviria.  The interest of the government to put Escobar behind bars and Escobar's desire to end his life on the run without risking extradition to an American jail and enter the security of a Columbian jail, specially designed for him to meet his needs for comfort and luxury.  This is a master story-teller, the same story, told by another, would not have been so fascinating.
Reviewed by Dennis  August 2004

The Battle Of Hurtgen Forest  by Charles Whiting  Orion Books 1989  Rating  -  9
I consider myself to be a student (though not a scholar) of the Second World War, as a boy, I lived through it.  I have read quite extensively on it. In recent years, I have lived in Germany, and traveled through and around the area where this story took place, I've actually walked around some of the towns, and ate in some of the cafes and Biergartens.  I read, speak and understand the German language.  But I had never heard about this awful battle until I read this book.  Apparently few other have either, this author says that the reason we've not heard about it is because it was a great defeat for the US military, not for the fighting men but for the generals leading them, and the US military don't like to write about defeats.  It was a battle which lasted nearly six months during the winter of 1944-5, a battle which cost over 30,000 American lives and casualties, a battle which, for the US military, was a defeat and which according to this author who is a veteran of WWII in Europe and a noted military historian, was a battle which served no purpose and should never have been fought.  It took place after the breakout from the Normandy beaches and before the Nazi's last stand in the "Battle of the Bulge".  However US troops had just for the first time set foot on the soil of the "one thousand year Reich" and the Nazis were desperate to keep them out.  The US Army was on the way from France and Belgium to the Rhine and into the heartland of Germany, with General "Lightning Joe" Collins leading the US 8th Army.  Collins was concerned about a possible flanking attack on his forces from German units in the Hurtgen forest close to the Belgian-German border and and decided to attack there first to clean them out.  It was a strategic mistake of major proportions.  It was a dense forest with no major roadways for his tanks, no way for the air force to see what was going on and the well equipped German army was firmly established in concrete bunkers on the high ground.  All of which was known from the get go.  The 8th Army could easily have just passed it up, by-passed the forest and headed into the Reich.  Their generals decided otherwise and Division after Division were thrown into the useless battle and decimated, because once committed, the US Generals were too proud to admit defeat.  Generals all the way up the chain to Eisenhower were safely housed in fancy French chateaux with their friends and lovers and with wine for dinner, it seems they were callously unaware or unconcerned of the tragedy playing out in the forest, where young American riflemen were dying by the thousands in awful conditions.  Within the first fourteen days, the rifle brigades had suffered a 50% casualty rate, thousands suffered from battle fatigue and some just ran for their lives and deserted.  Desertion rates were so high that for the first time ever in the history of this Republic a US soldier was executed on the battlefield by a firing squad for desertion in the face of the enemy.  I gave this book a high rating, not because it is particularly well written, and not even because it is particularly well researched, which it is.  I gave it a high rating because it is clearly a story which needed to be told.  When the lives of 30,000 young Americans are foolishly sacrificed because of the collective stupidity of their leadership, that story should be shouted from a rooftop.  Gen. James Gavin, Commander 82nd Airborne Division is quoted in the book as saying "For us the Hurtgen was one of the most costly, most unproductive and most ill-advised battles that our army has ever fought"
Reviewed by Dennis  July 2004

A Man Called Intrepid by William Stevenson  Harcourt Brace Janovich 1976  Rating  -  9
This is the story of an unusual man, a Canadian, now known as Sir William Stephenson.  He is not related to the writer who has a similar name.  Stephenson was appointed in 1940 by Winston Churchill, the wartime Prime Minister in Britain, to oversee the British intelligence operations to be headquartered in New York during World War II, to maintain the crucial covert communications between Churchill and Roosevelt and to establish from absolute scratch a worldwide intelligence network to combat the massive Nazi machine.   The code name Churchill gave to him was "Intrepid".  He was sent to New York at the time long before America entered WWII, so that in the event that Germany invaded and overran England, there would be a representative of the British government still operating in the free world.  He sought not the light of the famous and powerful, but instead worked tirelessly in the shadows to develop the intelligence needed by the Allies.  Stephenson accepted this job from Churchill at a time after England had been led for years by a group of appeasers who had left England in no shape to fight against the Nazi military, and at a time when Joseph Kennedy, the defeatist US Ambassador to the Court of St. James had repeatedly advised the President of the United States to not back a 'dead horse", that England was in no shape to fight and would be whipped by the Germans.  He established the greatest intelligence network in the history of the world and tens of thousands of British and American merchant seamen owe their lives to his work.  It is a story which concerns Bletchley Park and some of the most closely guarded secrets of the British secret service, secrets which even now have not all been revealed.  Its a very important story of a great man doing great work.  Stephenson has always avoided the spotlight and as of the writing of this book, was living quietly in Bermuda.  This book was recommended to me by a guest at Prospect Hill and I am most grateful.
Reviewed by Dennis  July 2004 

The Bushes, Portrait of a Dynasty  by Peter Schweizer & Rochelle Schweizer  Doubleday 2004  Rating  -  8
This is a very good book about the Bush family and to its credit, its devoid of any political leanings.  Although the title refers to a "Dynasty", the family described in the book is frequently more aptly described as a "Clan" and I think that fits them better.  The focus is on the last four generations of the Bush/Walker line, starting with Samuel P. (S.P.) Bush who bucked the family tradition of an education at Yale and instead attended the much less prestigious Steven Institute of Technology on Long Island New York.  It seems that bucking traditions is a tradition in the Bush clan.  One of S.P.'s classmates at Stevens was Frederick W. Taylor, who to this day is acknowledged in business schools as the "Father of Scientific Management" and who's work had a definite influence on the thinking of later Bushes.  The importance of personal relationships to the men in the Bush family is evident in the book.  Other than S.P., Bush men were educated at Yale and were members of the Skull & Bones Club there.  Their relationships with other "Bones" men has been significant to their success in subsequent years.  According to the writers, the Bushes, although wealthy, were never a part of the super-rich of the country a la Rockefeller, Dupont, and Kennedy families, but were always closely connected with the sources of enormous wealth, being for generations, friendly with the royal families of Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, with the Emirs of various oil rich states, the President of Egypt and the Chairman of the Chinese Communist Party Jiang Zemin.  When needed, they called on those friendships to fund their various interests.  A member of the Kuwaiti Royal Family recently donated $500,000 to establish the George H.W. Bush Scholarship at Phillips Andover Academy in New Hampshire.  The book deals at length with the campaigns of the brothers Bush for Governorships of Florida and Texas and with George W. Bush' presidential campaign and Jeb Bush' campaign for Governor of Florida.  It also deals at length with the importance of George W. Bush' faith on his life and actions, and speculates about a run for the presidency by brother Jeb Bush in 2008.
Reviewed by Dennis July 2004

Plan Of Attack  by Bob Woodward  Simon & Schuster 2004   Rating  -  6
This book purports to tell the story of what happened in the US Government in the months, and days leading up to when we declared war on Iraq on March 19, 2003 and provide a "behind-the-scenes" account of how and why George Bush and his supporters decided to launch a preemptive attack.  I guess it does a good job of saying "how", but a poor job of "why".  Clearly, Wolfowitz and Cheney, aided by Rumsfeld, were very instrumental in persuading Bush into this course of action, but why? - I never discovered.  Woodward quotes Powell as saying that Cheney, Wolfowitz, and Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith had established what amounted to a "separate government." Woodward says that Powell called the Office of Special Plans, "Feith's Gestapo office." Its mission was to collect and cook "the most alarmist pre-war intelligence against Saddam Hussein and then stovepiped it to the White House via Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney, unvetted by the intelligence agencies."   The book is frankly a boring read.  It is no doubt an important book, Woodward had access to all of the important decision makers in the White House and his book is an important record of what took place.  It is neither an indictment nor a justification for Bush's action, however it does, it seems to me, cast serious doubt on the way that a major decision was made involving this country's unprecedented action in Iraq.  If you see the book in your library, pick it up and read the last 40 pages - the "epilogue" it will pretty much tell you what the book is all about.
Reviewed by Dennis June 2004

Bush's Brain  by James Moore & Wayne Slater  John Wiley & Sons 2003   Rating  -  7
This book purports to be a story about George Bush, but its really about Karl Rove.    Rove is, by all accounts, a genius at campaign strategy.  Texas, which in the days of Lyndon Johnson and after, was from top to bottom a strictly Democratic state has become a strictly Republican state and Rove has managed every campaign of those Republicans.  He has managed, or more accurately, he has directed the political campaigns of George Bush since he first ran for Governor in Texas, and for his father before that.  Not only that, but he continues, post election, to have major influence upon the policies of the President.  All candidates for political office, have some sort of campaign manager to develop and implement campaign strategies.  When the election day comes and the campaign is over, their job is over and they go away.  Karl Rove didn't go away, he has an office in the White House and a seat on Air Force One.  His influence is so great that the authors of this book titles the introduction to the book "Mr.Co-President".  They say that "Karl Rove, a solitary citizen,, now has the kind of power in government and politics never before granted to a private citizen".  Rove was obsessed with politics from even his high school days, he attended college, several of them but never graduated.  He rose within the hierarchy of college republicans and by thee early 1970's was appointed executive director.  In that job he organized regional conferences to instruct young republicans in the mechanics of political campaigns, in those conferences, Rove instructed the conferees on campaign dirty tricks or "pranks" as he called them.  It was about that time of the Watergate scandal when Nixon had to fire his advisors Haldeman and Ehrlichman,.  At that time, George Bush Sr. was Chairman of the Republican National Committee.  The Washington Post published an expose of the teaching of dirty tricks at seminars for Young republicans and Bush promised to investigate.  A few months later he hired Rove as Special Assistant to him at the RNC and kicked the guy who had leaked the story to the Post, out of the party.  So Rove was on his way, a home in Texas, an office in Washington and his star hooked to the most powerful men in the party.  This is a well-written and very important book about a man most of us know nothing about, but one who exercises enormous power and influence at the very top of our government.
Reviewed by Dennis  March 2004

American Dynasty  by Kevin Phillips  Viking 2004   Rating  -  7
This book is a critical analysis of four generations of the Walker-Bush ancestry of George W. Bush, 43rd President of the United States.  What Kevin Phillips calls an American Dynasty.  It is decidedly not a complimentary picture. The sub-title of the book is "Aristocracy, Fortune and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush".  It begins with the President's Great Grandfathers, Samuel Prescott Bush and George Herbert Walker.  The Bush line has always professed a "modest" wealth, but in fact in the 1850's, James Smith Bush, Samuel Prescott's father, George W.'s Great Great Grandfather, was the first of a long line of Bushes to attend Yale University. The President's Grandfather, Prescott Bush, a United States Senator from Connecticut, in order to garnish votes from the working class, frequently and disingenuously professed a hint of genteel poverty and claimed his Father did not have enough money to put him through law school, a notion which was thoroughly rejected by those who knew him.  Prescott's father was in fact the wealthy president of a large railroad equipment manufacturing firm with strong business ties to the blue-blooded Rockefellers, Morgan's and Harriman's of the time.  The Walker side of the Presidential ancestry was even wealthier.  The author casts no aspersions on all of the wealthy, only on those who deny it and profess otherwise.  He then draws a picture of several generations of a family which had a affinity for membership in closely guarded secret organizations and clubs, including the Yale "skull and bones" club and a family which tended to operate in the background, behind the super wealthy.  A family which achieved wealth and  influence in financial institutions, oil, military armaments and eventually, military intelligence - espionage.  He hints at their financial connections to American institutions doing profitable business with Hitler's Nazi Germany in the years prior to WWII, and at more recent connections to wealthy Saudi families including the Saudi Royal family and the bin Laden family.  In the Author's words "the result is an unusual and unflattering portrait of a great family (great in power, not morality) that has built a base over the course of the twentieth century in the back corridors of the new military-industrial complex and in close association with the growing intelligence and national security establishments".  He also draws an uncomplimentary picture of President George W. Bush as one who failed at most things he tried to do and was repeatedly propped up by family wealth and connections and who finally found his calling as a Texas Cowboy, a Born Again Christian and indeed the de facto leader of the Religious Right.  The book, unfortunately, is very badly organized and quite difficult to follow. I realize that this is not a biography and makes no pretense as such, however it would have been easier to follow if it had been arranged chronologically instead of thematically.  At the very end of the book, Kevin Phillips makes an unusual admission, he says that he has spent many years involved with GOP politics, and even before the two Bush Presidencies, he "didn't like the Bushes".  This is an important book, it deals with the moral character of one of America's first families and of a man who is asking again to be the President of the United States.  Too bad that the book is not better organized to present the case and too bad that the writer in the end, cast doubt on his own ability to be objective in his analysis.
Reviewed by Dennis  February 2004

Churchill, A Biography  by Roy Jenkins  Farrar, Strauss and Giroux 2001   Rating  -  9
Roy Jenkins, now Lord Jenkins, entered the British House of Commons as a Labour MP in 1948.  He has spent 50 years as a active participant in English politics and as of the publishing of this, his 18th book in 2001, was President of England's Royal Society of Literature.  He is imminently well qualified to add this biography, an excellent work, to the many already written about Winston Churchill.  Winston was born two months prematurely on November 30, 1874 at Blenheim Palace with the attendance only of a country doctor. His father had made all of the necessary arrangements expecting him to be born in London in early January, with a team of Doctors in attendance.  He blamed the child's early arrival on his mother, who that day had taken a bumpy ride through the countryside in a horse and carriage.   Blenheim is the ancestral home of the Duke of Marlborough.  Winston's father, Lord Randolph Churchill, a son of the seventh Duke, was a brilliant if somewhat erratic Member of Parliament who had no time for his son.  His mother was an American beauty named Jennie Jerome who was well known for her sexual exploits with a succession of England's powerful men.  Winston was a poor scholar, ranking at the bottom of his class at Harrow the exclusive private school he attended.  Not academically qualified to attend Oxford or Cambridge, Winston went instead to Sandhurst Military School, England's equivalent of West Point.  So began the military career of Winston Spencer Churchill, Second Lieutenant in the Fourth Hussars, soon to be posted to India, one day to be First Lord of the Admiralty.  In the military, Churchill, a voracious reader, succeeded where his teachers at Harrow had failed and developed his own intellect by reading Plato, Aristotle, Gibbon, Macaulay and others and reading thousands of pages of Parliamentary debates. Jenkins documents Churchill's military career in India, Turkey and South Africa and his early entry into English political life becoming a Cabinet Minister at the age of 33.   He follows Churchill's ups and downs in English political scene, and changing party affiliations, during the first quarter of the twentieth century up to the early 1930's when Churchill, and perhaps only Churchill recognized the danger for Europe festering in the Nazi Party in Southern Germany.  Churchill criticized the British Government for naively following the precepts of the flawed Treaty of Versailles which ended the first world war, and fought continuously with the appeasers in the British and French Governments.  When he was finally handed the reins as Prime Minister in 1940, Churchill remarked to his chauffeur driving him to Buckingham Palace to receive King George VI's request to him to take over the government, that "it might be too late".   Jenkins then continues to document Churchill's well-known war years including the many meetings with Roosevelt and Stalin, and the up's and down's again of the post-war years up to the time when Churchill reluctantly turned over the keys to 10 Downing Street to Anthony Eden.  Churchill remained a Member of Parliament for a further nine years, completed his work on his books, The History Of The English Speaking People, and The Second World War which eventually at the end of his life enabled Winston and Clementine Churchill to live without financial worry.  Winston Churchill died on January 24th 1965, seventy years to the day after the death of his father, now 39 years ago.  This is an excellent biography by Roy Jenkins of the man often referred to as The Last Lion, and undoubtedly one of the greatest men of the twentieth century.
Reviewed by Dennis January, 2004

Franklin and Winston  by Jon Meacham  Random House 2003   Rating  -  7
This book is aptly sub-titled An Intimate Portrait Of An Epic Friendship and it is indeed just that.  Jon Meacham has done his subject credit with massive research covering the relatives, friends, colleagues and acquaintances, the museums, archives and libraries to bring together in this book every scrap of information about the meetings, conversations and correspondence of these two men who briefly, but with major significance, dominated the course of history in the five years between late 1939 and early 1945.  There is already voluminous documentation in the literature about both of these men and in so far as Churchill is concerned, I have read a goodly portion of it, and I do believe that Meacham has added to that literature.  In fact, reading his book, which I might say reads very easily for a history book, is like being the proverbial fly on the wall at the meetings and conversations of these two men, with extensive reporting of their communications and those of their aides.  However, having said that, there is a background "theme" to Meacham's book which casts Churchill as the "suitor", almost a sycophant, and Roosevelt as the reluctant debutant.  It is a serious flaw.   I am well aware that Churchill in 1939 had to go to Roosevelt with his cap in his hand, asking for help, and Roosevelt, with a country much divided on the subject of whether or not to get involved, had to play his cards very carefully.  However I have never seen their relationship portrayed in the almost demeaning context of Meacham's book. He refers several times to the cable of congratulations which Churchill sent to Roosevelt upon his reelection, which Roosevelt did not acknowledge even after Churchill sent a "did you get my message", message.  Not at all subtly inferring that Churchill's words of congratulations meant nothing to Roosevelt.   At one point he refers to Roosevelt's joking about Churchill's need for a rendezvous with him before getting to the Yalta conference, and the fact that Roosevelt's party laughed about Churchill's "eagerness to stay close to Roosevelt".  Meacham's sub-heading for the chapter dealing with Yalta is, Roosevelt and Churchill part - A "Lovers Quarrel".  Roosevelt is displayed by Meacham as the skillful architect of the Yalta conference, playing off Stalin against Churchill, particularly with regard to the role to be assigned to France at war's end.  That's quite a different reading on the meeting from that given in a recent biography of Churchill by Roy Jenkins, who stated that at Yalta, Churchill "did as well as he could . . . confronted by a Stalin still more determined in victory than he had been in defeat, and aided only intermittently by a semi-comatose Roosevelt, . . ."  Two quite different interpretations of the same meeting.  One gets the impression reading Meacham's account that Churchill must have felt inferior to Roosevelt, and nothing could be less credible for me.  This was a man of enormous ego, a very learned man with considerable knowledge of the affairs of Europe both historically and contemporaneous with his time.  He understood the importance of France to a post-war Europe, he had witnessed the consequences of subjugating Germany after the Great war of 1914-18, and unlike Stalin, he and the British had no goals for territorial gain after the war.  However, in this affair between Germany, Britain, America and Russia, there is no doubt but that Britain and Churchill were dealt the weak hand. and whatever Churchill would accomplish would have to be done by persuasion.  There is a world of difference between that and sycophancy.   This is a good book, worth the read.  It is unfortunate that once Meacham, early in the book had tagged Churchill as a "suitor" he then mistakenly colored the rest of the story with that unfortunate characterization.
Reviewed by Dennis  January 2004

Flyboys  by James Bradley  Little, Brown and Company 2003   Rating  -  8
Most Americans have heard of the Japanese island of Iwo Jima and its Mount Suribachi, because of the fighting there during the war in the Pacific and because of the statue in Arlington cemetery. Most Americans had not heard of Chichi Jima island before James Bradley wrote this story.  Its a true story of bravery, of courage, of cruelty and of horror.  Iwo Jima lies in the Pacific about midway between Guam and Japan.  To the north of Iwo Jima, closer to Japan, is Chchi Jima.  As the Earth rotates and each morning brings sunlight to the Japanese islands, the sun shines first on Mount Yoake on Chichi Jima, heralding the arrival of day in Japan. During the summer of 1944 and the spring of the following year, Chichi Jima served another important purpose for Japan.  As they awaited the inevitable end of the war and the arrival of warplanes in their skies, it was the radio transmitters on Chichi Jima that warned the mainland of the approaching US warplanes.  For that reason, the island was targeted to be bombed and the radio transmitters destroyed.  Nine of the American flyers - the "Flyboys" - who went to bomb those transmitters, were shot down.  One of them was miraculously returned when a submarine rescued him at sea, his name is George Herbert Walker Bush.  Eight others were captured by the Japanese there.  Their names were Jimmy Dye, Floyd Hall, Marve Mershon, Warren Earl Vaughn, Dick Woellhof, Grady York and one still unidentified Airman.  After the Japanese surrender, the US Navy went to Chichi Jima to recover the American servicemen,  they were not there.  The American military investigated the fate of the eight with a high level military tribunal.  What they discovered was so horrific and so unbelievable that together with the Japanese government, they sealed the record and hid the facts from the world.  Even the Parents and the Brothers and sisters of the lost Airmen did not know the truth about what happened to them until Bradley went to Japan, met with some of the surviving Japanese soldiers, some of whom, spent years in prison for their deeds, and wrote the true story of the "Flyboys".  It is a story well written, unsparing of the gruesome, barbaric details of war, particularly the barbarism of a foe for whom surrender was a disgrace and a fate worse than death.  As such, it is at times a story which is hard to read, and Bradley does not fail to describe in detail the horrors wrought by the American warplanes dropping incendiary bombs on the civilian populations in Japanese cities when more civilians were killed by those incendiary raids than by the later atomic bombs.  I have long pondered the question of whether or not the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was justified.  James Bradley's research reported in this book, reveals to me for the first time, the extent to which Emperor Hirohito and his Generals, the so-called "Spirit Warriors", had prepared the population for all out war.  It reveals plans to execute the aged and infirm Japanese citizens in order to make food available to the young, to use children as weapons to blow up American tanks, and to implement a massive Kamikaze campaign which would sacrifice millions of their own citizens to satisfy the aims of the Japanese "Spirit Warriors".  Knowing these things, helps me to understand why Harry Truman decided as he did.
Reviewed by Dennis  December 2003

Masterminds of Terror  by Yosri Fouda and Nick Fielding  Arcade Publishing 2003   Rating  -  7
In the first week of April, 2002, just weeks after Wall Street Journal reporter, Daniel Pearl was tricked into a meeting and then murdered by Al Qaeda terrorists, Yosri Fouda received a call on his cell phone from an Al Qaeda representative asking him to come to a meeting with them in Pakistan.  Knowing that he was taking his life in his hands, Fouda went to meet them.  He ended up riding blindfolded in the back of a taxi cab.  When they removed the blindfolds, he found himself face-to-face with two of the most dangerous men in the world at that time, Ramzi Binalshibh and Khalid Shaikh Mohammed. They told him what the world already suspected, that Al Qaeda had indeed planned, organized and conducted the terrorist attacks of September 11 2001.  On the morning of September 11 2002, one year to the day after the attacks in New York and Washington, Binalshibh was captured by Pakistani security forces after a fierce gunfight in Karachi, and on March 1, 2003 Khalid Shaikh Mohammed was also captured in a town close to Islamabad Pakistan, both of these men are today in US custody somewhere in the world.  Fouda's book details the meetings he had with the terrorists and the planning which went into the 9/11 attacks.  It also tells of the deep seated hatred held by the fundamentalist Muslims for all non-muslims stemming largely from the US support of Israel and from the US influence over the Arab ruling families.  This book provides an unique insight into the workings of the fundamentalist Muslim terror organization, and of the planning which went into the 911 attacks.  It is not pretty reading, not a pleasant way to spend a quiet Sunday afternoon, but if you want to know what's happening there and why, this book will help.
Reviewed by Dennis  August 2003

War Talk  by Arundhati Roy  South End Press 2003   Rating  -  10
Arundhati Roy is a young Indian Woman, living in New Delhi.  She is trained as an Architect and in 1997 her first book, a novel, The God of Small Things  was awarded a Booker prize.  This little book, War Talk, is not fiction, but rather a collection of a half dozen essays or speeches dealing with social and political issues about which Roy is obviously passionate.  One of them begins with the tale of four activists who, in 2001, embarked on a hunger strike to protest the apparent lack of government concern for the plight of a thousand or so indigenous Adivasi people who were being uprooted from their land because of a new dam, one of literally thousands of dams to be built in the Narmada valley in India, to provide irrigation and hydro-electric power.  She makes the case that India's lasting gift to the civilized world, that of non-violent protest, was in danger of vanishing from the world because of the increasing tendency of governments to ignore it, and that the natural consequence will be violent protest, commonly called terrorism.  In another story of her native land she deals with the subject of religious bigotry and hatred in the Indian State of Gujarat where an attack by Muslims terrorist on a train, left 58 Hindus burned to death.  The result has been a massive reaction by the majority Hindu population, at best ignored by the local government and at worst, supported by them, which has murdered and mutilated thousands of Muslims, violated their women, destroyed their shrines and even rewritten history books.  In this essay she makes the best case I have ever read for why government and its agencies should never be infiltrated by religious dogma. There are other, equally provocative issues in this book.   Whether one agrees entirely with this Woman's philosophies, with part of them or with none of them, her ability to make her case is superb and her skill with the written word is absolutely exquisite.  I have also watched one of her recent lectures on a C-Span program, her presentation there was riveting.  There is no doubt in my mind that here is a relatively new and very powerful presence on the stage of social and political commentary.  Her Booker Prize-winning book is waiting on my desk, the next to be consumed.  However, I suspect that much of her future work will not be in the fictional genre.  She says of writing "Fiction and non-fiction are only different techniques of storytelling. For reasons I do not fully understand, fiction dances out of me.  Nonfiction is wrenched out by the aching, broken world I wake up to every morning."
Reviewed by Dennis   June 2003

The Skeptic, A Life of H. L. Mencken  by Terry Teachout   Harper Collins 2002   Rating  -  5
I did not read this book because I was an admirer of Henry Louis Mencken, and any possibility that I might become one was gone long before I had completed it.  I knew very little about Mencken and I was frankly puzzled as to why he is so often quoted.  Now that I know more about him, I'm even more puzzled.  Terry Teachout has written an illuminating, if somewhat confusing book, obviously well researched although the author said he did not attempt to be exhaustive.  It did indeed teach me much about what H.L. Mencken did and said, which is the main purpose of a biography, but I learned little about how or why he arrived at where he was.  Undoubtedly, Mencken had a way with words, his short description of the opening movement of Beethoven's Eroica symphony is a literary pearl, but as the lead journalist for the Baltimore Sun Newspapers for 35 years, he also had what amounted to a private platform from which to shout his opinions, he could hardly not have become widely known.   He was a man who obviously hated the puritans who were so influential in America at the beginning of the last century as well as all forms of mediocrity, but he was also pro Germany in the first world war and pro Nazi in the second, so much so that for his own security, he had to keep his mouth shut for a while.  Documents revealed after his death indicate that he was a very self-centered person, a bigot and an anti-Semite.  Even some people who regarded him as a friend were shocked when his private papers were released, to learn what he had said and thought privately about them.  The book is very informative, if you are into "menckenalia" it will interest you. otherwise . . . .
Reviewed by Dennis  March 2003

The First World War   by John Keegan   Alfred A. Knopf  1999   Rating  -  9
John Keegan begins this book "THE FIRST WORLD WAR was a tragic and unnecessary conflict."  This is a major work of 470 pages, documenting in some great detail the war which began with the Assassination of Arch-Duke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austrian throne, on June 28th 1914 in the city of Sarajevo in Bosnia.  It ended in a railroad car in the Forest of Compiègne outside of Paris at 11 AM on November 11th 1918 not long after the US had engaged in the war, when the Germans signed an armistice agreement imposing strict penalties upon them by the Allied governments.  Between those two dates, 1,000,000 Englishmen, 1,700,000 Frenchmen, 1,500,000 Austrians & Hungarians, 1,700,000 Russians, 2,000,000 Germans 460,000 Italians and tens of thousands of Turks, were killed in senseless warfare.  It all began because Serbian extremists wanted to reclaim Bosnia, then under the Austrian Hapsburg Empire, as a part of a greater Serbia.  The focus of their hatred was Franz Josef, Emperor of Austria.  When his heir, Franz Ferdinand, went to Sarajevo on a state visit, a band of 6 extremists known as "The Black Hand" plotted to assassinate him.  Their first attempt, by blowing up his car with a bomb, failed to hurt the Arch-Duke, but injured a member of his party and the bomb throwers were arrested.  Later that same day when the Arch-Duke drove to the hospital to visit the wounded man, his chauffeur took a wrong turn and when he stopped the car to turn around, fate brought the Arch-Duke face-to-face with the remaining member of the Black Hand, Gavrillo Princip.  Both Franz Ferdinand and his wife died from point blank shots from Princip's pistol.  Austria declared war on Serbia 30 days later, on Tuesday July 28th 1914.  Austria had a mutual defense agreement with Germany and the Kaiser had previously told the Emperor "We'll back you up" so Germany automatically came to the fight.  Serbia had a pact with Russia who immediately came to her aid and declared war on Austria and Germany, Russia had an agreement with France and that brought France into the conflict.  There was no legally binding contract between France and England, however when, on August 4th, Germany made clear by ultimatum, its intent to overrun neutral Belgium in order to invade France, England joined France and Russia, and declared war on Germany. Just 60 days after a Serbian Terrorist shot the Austrian Arch-Duke, whom nobody liked, millions of men who knew neither of them and cared even less were armed for war.  The three main combatants, Germany, England and Russia, were governed by Kaiser Wilhelm, King George V, and Tsar Nicholas of Russia, the three were cousins, each descended directly from Queen Victoria.   In this book, John Keegan has meticulously documented the four year's of military strategies and the many bloody battles, including The Marne,  Verdun, The Somme, Ypres, Passchendaele and others which have left the Belgian and French country sides dotted with thousands of Graveyards and memorials.  He has covered the war on the Eastern as well as the Western front, and covered Winston Churchill's ill-conceived campaign into the Dardanelles to fight the Turks. Nothing was accomplished by this war, and it sowed the seed for the next one to begin in 1939.  This is a fine history of the "Great" war, which clearly shows the evil, senseless, barbaric idiocy of war, when old men fail to agree and young men and women pay with their lives.
Reviewed by Dennis  January 2003

Some Desperate Glory  by Edwin Campion Vaughan    Henry Holt & Co 1981      Rating  -  8
The title of this book is taken from the poem "Dulce et Decorum est" written by Wilfred Owen in October 1917 when he was on a world war I battlefield.  Edwin Campion Vaughan was a young officer in the Royal Warwickshire regiment, he was sent to the front in 1917.  "Some Desperate Glory" is in fact the diary kept by Vaughan over a period of the 8 months he fought in the trenches during what has become known as the Battle of Passchendaele.  This book, if you can find it and if you can bear to read it, is a testament to the idiocy of war.  Vaughan came from a comfortable English home, he left for France on January 4th 1917.  The previous year, the Royal Warwickshires had fought in the disastrous battle of the Somme, Gen. Sir Douglas Haig's ill-conceived offensive, where the British army fought on a 20 mile wide front against the German second army, and between July 1 and November 15 they advanced eight miles, during which time  400,000 British soldiers died in the mud, 60,000 on the first day of the battle.  Vaughan arrived just after that disaster and just in time for Haig's next blunder at Ypres.  This time, Haig ignored his own intelligence reports, he also knew that in June of that year the French army had in fact mutinied and refused to go to the front to fight for their own homeland, a fact which French General Petain tried to conceal from the British.  On July 31 1917 after ten days of non-stop shelling, Haig launched the major offensive against the Boche which became known as the notorious Battle of Passchendaele.  This time the battle lasted 99 days until November 6th, the Allied front advanced by five miles, and the cost to Britain was a staggering 300,000 souls. Vaughn fought in that battle, he knew nothing of all the politics involved and his diary documents only his day-to-day experiences in the trenches.  On November 4th he was awarded the Military Cross for bravery for leading his men across the canal to attack the Huns at St. Souplet.  On the same day, in the same place, the poet Wilfred Owen died of a bullet to the head.   Edwin Vaughan vividly documented his daily experiences during the bloodiest of those battles, and survived until armistice was declared on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1918, by which time all of his fellow officers and most of his platoon were dead.  He returned to England after the war, married and had four children.  He died tragically in hospital in 1931 when,  as a result of an error by a Physician, he was injected with cocaine instead of novocaine.  The diary was packed away by one of his brothers who wanted to hide it from Vaughan's children.  It was not discovered for forty years.
Reviewed by Dennis January 2003

Gods and Generals  by Jeff Shaara.  Random House (Ballantine Books), 1996.  Rating: 9.

This is a prequel to the excellent novel The Killer Angels, written by Jeff Shaara’s late father, Michael, about the Battle of Gettysburg.  In Gods and Generals, the author focuses on the lives of two Union and two Confederate senior officers (Winfield Scott Hancock, Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson, and Robert E. Lee) in the years leading up to the Civil War and through many of the major battles preceding Gettysburg.  The book is as much a character study of these outstanding leaders as it is a war novel.  Shaara describes their civilian backgrounds, their attitudes toward military service, and the moral conflicts and uncertainties that each faced and tried to overcome: the frustration with incompetent commanding generals of the career soldier Hancock; the self-doubts of the scholar Chamberlain; the religious fervor and military drive of Jackson: and the almost overwhelming responsibilities of command that weighed so heavily on Lee.  Especially well done was the depiction of the hard-charging and violent Jackson in the seemingly contradictory role of a devoted husband and father, and the effects that his death by “friendly fire” had on his family and his country.  If the movie version of Gods and Generals, now in production, comes close to the quality of Gettysburg (based on The Killer Angels), then the book and the movie will be a double-barreled treat.
Reviewed by Bill, from Fayetteville, GA  January 200