Berlin Diary: The Journal of a Foreign Correspondent, 1934-1941
I’ve felt guilty these past months for escaping so often from Germany into pages and podcasts that don’t help my immersion into the language spoken all around me or my knowledge of the land in which I’m living. William Shirer's account, in English, gave me a much richer sense of the country that rests beneath modern Germany and illuminated some of this nation's darkest moments.
Written in nearly daily entries during his time as CBS’s chief man in Berlin, Berlin Diary records the thoughts of one knowledgeable man who’s still in the dark about much which only time could reveal. Hitler gradually unrolls his ambitions onto Europe throughout this account and our narrator does his best to analyze and predict the Führer’s actions as well as their impact on the peoples of Europe, including the inhabitants of the Third Reich.
Trips to the front lines in Poland and Belgium combine with the every day annoyances of reporting in a censored Nazi society to create a vivid portrait of mankind entering some of its darkest hours. We know what the narrator cannot-- what happens next. Despite the spoiled ending, Shirer records tension and miseries seventy years past in a fashion that gives his readers a much fuller view of history than to be found in conventional battle-by-battle histories.
The Imperial Cruise: A Secret History of Empire and War
Rarely have I been driven so far down by a book of non-fiction. Unlike the A Song of Ice and Fire saga in which favorite characters can be extinguished in a chaotic moment, non-fiction tends to humor readers with relatively little unheroic behavior or early death on the part of the protagonists.
The closest I can recall feeling to my time with The Imperial Cruise came during Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States,
which does an extended and thorough job of cataloging many of the
misdeeds and atrocities upon which the American iceberg majestically
floats. That's not to deny the greatness of America, only to temper it with the memory that even this city upon a hill can fail to live up to its creed, and grievously so.
Thanks to Zinn’s work, and an appreciation for the huddled masses that faced and formed our nation, I wasn’t wholly ignorant of early 20th century American imperialism. From Manifest Destiny to gun boat diplomacy, our nation grew in girth and power until it could claim the Pacific as an “American lake” and exercise a decisive hand in the affairs of foreign nations and distant peoples.
The problem with James Bradley’s history is not sensationalism or inaccuracies, though at one point I wanted such abuses to be true rather than adjust my framework of reference. Bradley’s most significant contribution to understanding this period rests upon his recalling American actions to the words and ways of though in which they were couched.
In practice, this means that Theodore Roosevelt, his college professors, and much of American society and soldiery operated through a racist haze that denied Filipinos and Hawaiians the right to self determination, sacrificed South Korea to please a Japan that they saw as Aryan in its right to conquest and civilize, and ignored the national spirit and human rights of Chinese people in America and their own homeland.
Bradley extrapolates too far from Roosevelt’s turn-of-the-century actions to the bombs and battles of the 1940s. But this illumination of the historical record certainly removes from his readers the illusion that inclusiveness and political correctness are without merit or historical counterpoint in the American experience.
The Abstinence Teacher
Small
town politics, middle-age, religion, and sex never read so good. I had a
great deal of fun throughout this novel of two divorced parents--one a
secular sex ed teacher, the other a warrior for Christ saved
from decades of drugs, rock and roll, and everything that goes with
them--as a series of light and serious notes blended to create a
hilarious book that nonetheless captures the nuance on both sides of the
culture wars.
Tom Perrotta manages to treat both Christians and everyone else with the respectful empathy that are often lacking when told from one side or the other. Ruth, the teacher and mother of two, goes through struggles with her daughters, agonized mandatory abstinence courses with her students, and imperfect romances in her memory and the present.
Her chief counterpoint is Tom, whose struggles to preserve his integrity and rekindle a satisfactory life are aided and channeled by a charismatic and controlling pastor who’s leading the charge against status quo secularism in our small-town, northeast setting. All the same, escape is never easy, and by the end it seems that youth soccer is the only true good in a world gone fundamental.
1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created
I remember the simple story of Christopher Columbus and his three ships from elementary school. In fact, I played a governor of Hispaniola in our school’s production about Columbus and his voyage of misguided discovery. 1493 filled in a lot of holes in my history, beyond the darker truths of enslavement, greed, and mass death that followed in the Nina, Pinta, and Santa Maria’s wakes that usually crop up by high school or college.
Charles C. Mann builds from the immediate aftermath of the Columbian Exchange into a tapestry of interactions that extends from sweet potatoes, silver, and trade wars in China to the numerous biological agents that continue to weaken people, plants, and animals around the globe to this day. 1493 is filled with fascinating anecdotes of a world transformed.
For a book that dissects the differences between strains of malaria and their impact on New World natives, as well as the first contacts between Spanish and Chinese traders in the Philippines--at a time when East looked down on a primitive West--look no further than 1493. Mann unrolls an intimate yet broad history from that year to this for all who’ll read it.
The Marriage Plot
I approached Jeffrey Eugenides’ post-Ivy League romance novel with trepidation, but as described earlier, I had a great time joining in the early adulthood angst shared by three intelligent people who managed to have just as many stumbles and struggles as the rest of us.
The Keys to the Kingdom: Mister Monday, Grim Tuesday, Drowned Wednesday, Sir Thursday
I enjoy reading fantasy, even when, as Adam Gopnik pointed out in his review of the final Eragon
novel, the narrative seems to be supplemental to the sweep of myth and
legend that supports the action. Like the Eragon series, Garth Nix’s Key
to the Kingdom saga takes place in a memorable world filled with a
proper mix of lore and whimsy.
I struggled to buy into the introductory pages of book one, Mister Monday, but having reached their end I decided to plow on in pursuit of more glimpses into the seven realms of a fantastical house, which serves the “secondary realms” including Earth. Seven trustees, Monday through Sunday, violated the will of the Architect several thousands of years in the past. Now, Arthur, a boy from a modern, if unconventional, America has been swept into the dysfunction and injustice of their reign.
I think I’m too old for the plot shifts, which all seem to arrive in the nick of time, through the assistance of an ally, or with a leap of skill that makes the insurmountable possible. Nonetheless, I don’t regret the hours spent learning the workings of a house whose “denizens” can don and doff wings, perform roles ranging from thesaurus to inkwell filler, and break the laws of mundane reality with skill and verve. Nix’s kingdom is well worth being unlocked.
A World on Fire: Britian’s Crucial Role in the American Civil War
Last year, I started in on Shelby Foote’s massive The Civil War: A Narrative.
I’d first met Foote during high school in Ken Burns’ splendid series on
the Civil War, at which time my American history professor, Bill
Pistner, lauded Foote as a remarkable historian who was worth far more
than a few minutes as a talking head. Unfortunately for me, despite a
14-hour car drive from DC back to Wisconsin with Foote as audiobook
company, I couldn’t will the space in my brain for dutiful
reconstructions of each battle in the fields and halls of that great
conflict.
A World on Fire broke this dam and left me thirsty for a second taste of Foote’s epic telling. This book may focus on a previously under-appreciated portion of the War Between the States, but it combines detailed character studies of significant as well as minor figures with the broad sweep of battles and diplomacy to create a great history. As the North and South slaughtered one another through years of disappointed strategies and dashed hopes, each side came to call at the greatest court of all Europe, St. James’s.
Amanda Foreman binds up that war for popular and elite opinion in distant Europe with the grim experiences of many young English men and women as they joined in the fight, or were more-likely dragged into it. The result is a perfect refresher for a war that may seem stale to modern, post-high school readers. With new secrets from a less well-known side of the tale, the Civil War resumes its epic tragedy and cries for further attention.
I’ve felt guilty these past months for escaping so often from Germany into pages and podcasts that don’t help my immersion into the language spoken all around me or my knowledge of the land in which I’m living. William Shirer's account, in English, gave me a much richer sense of the country that rests beneath modern Germany and illuminated some of this nation's darkest moments.
Written in nearly daily entries during his time as CBS’s chief man in Berlin, Berlin Diary records the thoughts of one knowledgeable man who’s still in the dark about much which only time could reveal. Hitler gradually unrolls his ambitions onto Europe throughout this account and our narrator does his best to analyze and predict the Führer’s actions as well as their impact on the peoples of Europe, including the inhabitants of the Third Reich.
Trips to the front lines in Poland and Belgium combine with the every day annoyances of reporting in a censored Nazi society to create a vivid portrait of mankind entering some of its darkest hours. We know what the narrator cannot-- what happens next. Despite the spoiled ending, Shirer records tension and miseries seventy years past in a fashion that gives his readers a much fuller view of history than to be found in conventional battle-by-battle histories.
The Imperial Cruise: A Secret History of Empire and War
Rarely have I been driven so far down by a book of non-fiction. Unlike the A Song of Ice and Fire saga in which favorite characters can be extinguished in a chaotic moment, non-fiction tends to humor readers with relatively little unheroic behavior or early death on the part of the protagonists.
 |
| American Progress by John Gast, 1872 |
Thanks to Zinn’s work, and an appreciation for the huddled masses that faced and formed our nation, I wasn’t wholly ignorant of early 20th century American imperialism. From Manifest Destiny to gun boat diplomacy, our nation grew in girth and power until it could claim the Pacific as an “American lake” and exercise a decisive hand in the affairs of foreign nations and distant peoples.
The problem with James Bradley’s history is not sensationalism or inaccuracies, though at one point I wanted such abuses to be true rather than adjust my framework of reference. Bradley’s most significant contribution to understanding this period rests upon his recalling American actions to the words and ways of though in which they were couched.
In practice, this means that Theodore Roosevelt, his college professors, and much of American society and soldiery operated through a racist haze that denied Filipinos and Hawaiians the right to self determination, sacrificed South Korea to please a Japan that they saw as Aryan in its right to conquest and civilize, and ignored the national spirit and human rights of Chinese people in America and their own homeland.
Bradley extrapolates too far from Roosevelt’s turn-of-the-century actions to the bombs and battles of the 1940s. But this illumination of the historical record certainly removes from his readers the illusion that inclusiveness and political correctness are without merit or historical counterpoint in the American experience.
The Abstinence Teacher
 |
Tom Perrotta manages to treat both Christians and everyone else with the respectful empathy that are often lacking when told from one side or the other. Ruth, the teacher and mother of two, goes through struggles with her daughters, agonized mandatory abstinence courses with her students, and imperfect romances in her memory and the present.
Her chief counterpoint is Tom, whose struggles to preserve his integrity and rekindle a satisfactory life are aided and channeled by a charismatic and controlling pastor who’s leading the charge against status quo secularism in our small-town, northeast setting. All the same, escape is never easy, and by the end it seems that youth soccer is the only true good in a world gone fundamental.
1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created
I remember the simple story of Christopher Columbus and his three ships from elementary school. In fact, I played a governor of Hispaniola in our school’s production about Columbus and his voyage of misguided discovery. 1493 filled in a lot of holes in my history, beyond the darker truths of enslavement, greed, and mass death that followed in the Nina, Pinta, and Santa Maria’s wakes that usually crop up by high school or college.
Charles C. Mann builds from the immediate aftermath of the Columbian Exchange into a tapestry of interactions that extends from sweet potatoes, silver, and trade wars in China to the numerous biological agents that continue to weaken people, plants, and animals around the globe to this day. 1493 is filled with fascinating anecdotes of a world transformed.
For a book that dissects the differences between strains of malaria and their impact on New World natives, as well as the first contacts between Spanish and Chinese traders in the Philippines--at a time when East looked down on a primitive West--look no further than 1493. Mann unrolls an intimate yet broad history from that year to this for all who’ll read it.
The Marriage Plot
I approached Jeffrey Eugenides’ post-Ivy League romance novel with trepidation, but as described earlier, I had a great time joining in the early adulthood angst shared by three intelligent people who managed to have just as many stumbles and struggles as the rest of us.
The Keys to the Kingdom: Mister Monday, Grim Tuesday, Drowned Wednesday, Sir Thursday
 |
| Book One, Mister Monday |
I struggled to buy into the introductory pages of book one, Mister Monday, but having reached their end I decided to plow on in pursuit of more glimpses into the seven realms of a fantastical house, which serves the “secondary realms” including Earth. Seven trustees, Monday through Sunday, violated the will of the Architect several thousands of years in the past. Now, Arthur, a boy from a modern, if unconventional, America has been swept into the dysfunction and injustice of their reign.
I think I’m too old for the plot shifts, which all seem to arrive in the nick of time, through the assistance of an ally, or with a leap of skill that makes the insurmountable possible. Nonetheless, I don’t regret the hours spent learning the workings of a house whose “denizens” can don and doff wings, perform roles ranging from thesaurus to inkwell filler, and break the laws of mundane reality with skill and verve. Nix’s kingdom is well worth being unlocked.
A World on Fire: Britian’s Crucial Role in the American Civil War
A World on Fire broke this dam and left me thirsty for a second taste of Foote’s epic telling. This book may focus on a previously under-appreciated portion of the War Between the States, but it combines detailed character studies of significant as well as minor figures with the broad sweep of battles and diplomacy to create a great history. As the North and South slaughtered one another through years of disappointed strategies and dashed hopes, each side came to call at the greatest court of all Europe, St. James’s.
Amanda Foreman binds up that war for popular and elite opinion in distant Europe with the grim experiences of many young English men and women as they joined in the fight, or were more-likely dragged into it. The result is a perfect refresher for a war that may seem stale to modern, post-high school readers. With new secrets from a less well-known side of the tale, the Civil War resumes its epic tragedy and cries for further attention.
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