Weimar notes

Militants of the Communist Spartacist Uprising in Berlin, January 1919

When I finished Frank McDonough’s book The Weimar Years last month I had hoped to write a full review, but time, sickness, and a host of other complications meant I had to be content with a long paragraph in my non-fiction reading year-in-review. Unfortunately, the single-paragraph summation I hold myself to for those posts meant I could only raise a few issues that I had a lot of thoughts about, gesture toward them, and move on.

Here are two—both more or less about terminology or rhetoric—that I’ve been mulling anew under the influence of McDonough’s book and a few unrelated factors.

Right and left

After finishing The Weimar Years and celebrating Christmas, I caught up on some club episode of The Rest is History. The one I was most excited for was a live show Holland and Sandbrook presented at Royal Albert Hall last spring. The subject: Wagner.

Holland and Sandbrook begin their discussion by asking the audience to reconsider what they think they know about Wagner—a smart move. But this problem of terminology popped up immediately. You have heard it said, they essentially say, that Wagner is a right-wing figure, but I say unto you… he’s more of a left-winger. In their actual words, “a hippie.” But Wagner had “some right-wing opinions,” namely anti-Semitism. So: a leftie who is right-wing à la carte?

There’s an argument to be made for Wagner’s place on the left, given his role in the 1848 revolutions and his support for the overthrow of the Saxon monarchy as well as his generally bohemian lifestyle. But what precisely makes his anti-Semitism right-wing? And, from a certain kind of chest-thumping American view, supporting the overthrow of monarchies and seeking to create an all-encompassing national artform out of national myth could be spun as right-wing.

This was a great episode—and I especially appreciated Holland’s argument that Wagner’s music is not in itself anti-Semitic—but that left-right business neatly encapsulated much of my problem with this political frame.

Back to McDonough’s book. McDonough uses the language of left and right throughout but also, importantly, makes it clear what each of the dozen or so major German political parties of the 1920s wanted and stood for. Focusing on 1) goals, 2) methods, and 3) how these changed depending on circumstances explains much more, especially when it comes to the elephant in the room: the National Socialists—and yes, the Socialist part absolutely matters—who were themselves starkly divided along several political axes throughout the Weimar period. This is also considerably more helpful than a simple left-right spectrum when one reads of instances in which supposed opposites like the Nazis and the German Communist Party collaborated against the national government.

The terminology of right and left is rooted in a specific historical moment and the specific problems parties in that place and time argued and fought over. Unmoored from those specifics, I find it unserious. It’s a time-honored way to argue about vibes. I avoid it as much as possible when I teach modern history, invoking it only to give the point of view of people within the narrative I’m telling but not as neutral description.

“Democracy” vs this democracy

I didn’t get into the left-right thing in my paragraph on The Weimar Years but I did raise this question. Here’s what I wrote there:

But the epilogue, in which McDonough specifically blames Paul von Hindenburg for the death of “Weimar democracy,” is a bit of a fumble, as it is abundantly clear from McDonough’s own narrative—and even the earlier parts of the epilogue—that the Weimar Constitution had built-in weaknesses that were bound to weaken and undermine it. McDonough essentially faults Hindenburg for not believing in democracy hard enough. But if “democracy” in the abstract gave Germany this democracy in concrete, stubborn reality, it deserved to go.

Since finishing McDonough’s book I’ve browsed two new histories of Weimar from German historians: Vertigo: The Rise and Fall of Weimar Germany, by Harald Jähner and Fateful Hours: The Collapse of the Weimar Republic, by Volker Ullrich. (In the course of writing this I’ve also learned of a history of Weimar by Katja Hoyer, due out this summer.)

All of these (minus Hoyer’s book, for obvious reasons) do a bit of two-step around the concept of democracy: when the authors write about “democracy,” they sometimes mean the specific constitutional arrangements of the Weimar Republic—who voted, how, under what circumstances, how the Reichstag was constituted, who became chancellor and what authority they had, etc—and sometimes the concept of Democracy, in the abstract. The defeat and destruction of Weimar democracy is a tragedy for them because it means a defeat of Democracy.

But to paraphrase Burke, abstract democracy is not to be found; it inheres in sensible objects. It is useless to talk about Democracy without talking about the specifics of a given democracy, and a given democracy is only as valuable as its institutions and—one ought to add—the people who are using it. And as I wrote above, Weimar democracy was flawed from its inception because of the specifics of how it was designed and functioned and what options it made possible. Unstable, ineffective, hamstrung both by the outcome of a war it wasn’t responsible for and diplomatic agreements to which it consented, and—in the hands of feckless and corrupt politicians of all parties including the supposedly egalitarian socialists—unable to represent the people, it was a failure as a democracy long before Hitler seized power.

As I finished reading McDonough’s account and looked through those two other books—one more obviously leftist-oriented but both moaning and lamenting for Democracy throughout—I had a strange realization. The effect of switching from the collapse of actual Weimar democracy to a lament or apologia for Democracy in the abstract is suspiciously similar to “Real socialism has never been tried.” Democracy attracts the same mulish defensiveness as socialism. Both are the object of unwarranted faith. Neither can be blamed when they fail.

A confession

I started The Weimar Years shortly after the Charlie Kirk murder. Political violence openly celebrated by one side of the culture seemed like a good reason to familiarize myself with the broader narrative of Weimar.

That was a mistake, as looking for a useable, “relevant” past almost always is. Unfortunately historians of Weimar are just as prone to it. In both Jähner’s and Ullrich’s books I did a quick search for “Trump, Donald” in the index and guess what I found? Dumb parallels to the present, mentions of a specific political bugbear that will date their books as badly as a book I have on Mussolini that keeps bringing up George W Bush.

But McDonough doesn’t make this mistake, which is one of the great values of The Weimar Years. Throughout he emphasizes contingency and particularity: that things could have turned out other than how they did, something he makes clear through his detailed political narrative, and that Weimar Germany was a unique time and place offering no easy comparisons to our own. Pretending that Weimar tells us something or gives us insight into our enemies because there was political violence and politicians said mean things about their opponents is glib and misleading—for both the past and the present. The specifics matter.

So I confess to beginning McDonough’s book for the wrong reasons, but am glad I read it and for the sensibility of his approach, which brought me back to my senses. The closer I looked at Weimar, the less I saw of us, now. Which is as it should be. Not that we can’t learn anything from it, but we won’t until we understand it on its own terms.

More to come

I’m still trying to strengthen my grasp of Weimar. Of the two other books I’ve looked at, I may read Ullrich’s on the basis of his two-volume Hitler biography. He intones the ritual laments for Democracy in the portions I’ve read but his treatment of some of the specific topics and people I looked up struck me as more balanced than Jähner’s, which celebrates the hedonism and decay of the time. I may end up holding out for Hoyer this summer, as her book on the German Empire, Blood and Iron, was exceptionally good.

2025 in books: fiction

Gartenterrasse (detail), by Caspar David Friedrich

Happy New Year! After realizing yesterday that my annual reading list was nearing 5,000 words and wasn’t even finished, I decided to break it up and went ahead and published the non-fiction section. You can read that here if you missed it. Here’s the rest: fiction, kids’ books, and a simple list of the books I revisited in 2025.

As always, I hope y’all will find something good here to read in the new year. That said, in no particular order, here are my

Favorite fiction reads

The Friends of Eddie Coyle, by George V Higgins—A lean, tight, dialogue-heavy crime thriller about a washed up conman trying to make quick money by playing different criminal elements off each other, some gormless hoods trying to run guns, and the authorities who are closing in on them—if they can just figure out who’s up to what. Excellent, almost musical dialogue. When I noted this in my spring reading-in-review, I wrote that it “reads like an even more stripped down version of Elmore Leonard.” This summer I read a biography of Leonard (see yesterday’s post) and learned that, in fact, Leonard’s crime fiction sounds like The Friends of Eddie Coyle. It was a huge and openly acknowledged influence on him. A great short read and one I hope to revisit soon.

The Sound of Waves, by Yukio Mishima—Here’s a strange thing: a novel by Mishima with a happy ending. The story of a young man and young woman on a remote Japanese fishing island, where life in the 1950s continues, season by season, much as it has for hundreds of years, of love at first sight, of jealousy and gossip, of the beauty and resilience of local custom, and of the triumph of steadfastness. I think I read this in two days. It’s as powerfully sensual and moving as any of Mishima’s other work, but with a deep love of the ordinary.

Baron Bagge and Count Luna, by Alexander Lernet-Holenia—Two novellas from a great Austrian writer. Baron Bagge tells of ill-fated love born in the middle of WWI and Count Luna, a post-WWII story, concerns an aristocrat who believes a man killed in a concentration camp is haunting him. The former is a beautiful, ethereal vision; the latter is a fever dream. Full review of Baron Bagge at Miller’s Book Review here.

Game Without Rules, by Michael Gilbert—Two retirement-age spies in rural England fight the Cold War on their own terms, and with no diminishment of their skills or intelligence despite their age. A delightful collection of tightly-plotted, surprising, and thrilling short spy stories that run the gamut of the espionage genre while feeling fresh and exciting throughout. Full review on the blog here.

Payment Deferred, by CS Forester—Mr Marble is a impecunious banker with a dim, eager-to-please wife, two growing children, and a few habits—drinking, photography—that keep the family cash-strapped. When a long-lost relative unexpectedly arrives talking of his vast inheritance and lack of connections in Britain, Marble, a passive man all his life, acts impulsively and aggressively to get the money he needs. He poisons the man. (No spoilers: this is all in chapter one.) The rest of the novel is the tale of Marble’s slow descent into greater and greater paranoia and bolder and bolder sin. Based on my reading of The Good Shepherd, a later Forester novel, Forester was biblically literate, and while Payment Deferred rarely brings up religion, it is thematically suffused with Old Testament observations: “Be sure your sin will find you out” and “The wicked flee when no man pursueth,” among others. (It also brought to mind an old Jordan Peterson adage: If you think strong men are dangerous, wait until you see what weak men are capable of.) A grim but utterly absorbing 1920s British noir with a brutally ironic ending.

The Labyrinth Makers, by Anthony Price—A brisk espionage thriller in which the reemergence of a crashed RAF cargo plane from a manmade lake more than two decades after the end of World War II reopens the question of what happened to the pilot and why the Russians have always been so keen to find the wreck. The first of a long-running series by Price. I’ll be reading more.

The Cannibal Owl, by Aaron Gwyn—A brilliant novella about an orphan boy adopted and raised by the Comanches. Absorbing and brutal, with a strong touch of the uncanny, and sharply, powerfully written for maximum effect in a tight form. I read it in less than two hours but felt like I had spent the same hard years on the plains as the main character. I mean to reread it soon.

Judgment on Deltchev, by Eric Ambler—Foster, a British playwright, travels to an unnamed Eastern European country after of World War II to report on the Stalinist show trial of “Papa” Deltchev, a former agrarian politician accused of collaboration with the capitalist Western powers. Foster senses that something isn’t right—about the trial, about Deltchev, about Deltchev’s family, about Deltchev’s accusers, and most especially about Pashik, Foster’s repulsive local press contact—and he determines to get to the bottom of it. A good anti-Stalin novel—one that lost Ambler friends—and a good thriller. Full review on the blog here.

Dracula, by Bram Stoker—I made it to the age of 41 having never read Dracula. All through high school and college the received wisdom was that it was boring and dumb. Nothing could be further from the truth. This was a gripping novel, and the best evidence for its greatness is that I already knew virtually every beat of the story but still couldn’t put it down. A classic for a reason.

The Stress of Her Regard, by Tim Powers—I had heard that this was Powers’s most horrifying novel and so far that’s proven true. This is the story of Michael Crawford, an English doctor who unwittingly invites the conjugal attentions of a possessive female spirit. After a horrific wedding night incident results in Crawford being wanted for murder, he flees into the heady world of the great Romantic poets Shelley and Byron (with a small but important role for my man Keats along the way). It turns out that they not only lead the original high-flown and debauched “tortured poet” lifestyles, they do so at least in part because of the attentions of their own predatory, consuming otherworldly lovers. By turns eerie and horrifying, with a thrilling descent deeper into the mad worlds both of the poets and of the ancient vampirical entities—I don’t want to give away who they really are at the root of things—this is both powerfully imagined and believably oppressive. As in, I had a few restless nights of sleep until I was able to see Shelley and Byron buried and our heroes freed of their possessors. Reading this immediately after Dracula proved a knockout one-two punch. The Stress of Her Regard is brilliantly done, and I think I’m quite finished with vampires for a while.

Gabriel’s Moon and The Predicament, by William Boyd—A new historical spy series about Gabriel Dax, a British travel writer, who is slowly pulled into the paranoid world of Cold War espionage—dead drops, surveillance, “artifice” (tradecraft), “termites” (moles), double and triple agents, clandestine weapons training, and betrayal—as well as a strange, shapeless romance with his handler, Faith Green. I’ve enjoyed these first two entries, which are short and well paced. Gabriel reminds me of an Eric Ambler protagonist in starting off as a naive everyman and, though gradually learning how to cope with the dangers of espionage, is a bit dense and sometimes makes decisions out of frustration or spite—none of which ends well. Boyd nicely integrates Gabriel’s missions with some real-life events in the contested Third World. The second book veers into some conspiracy-mongering territory, which annoyed me but didn’t detract from what a good read it was. Hoping for more in this series soon. Full review of Gabriel’s Moon on the blog here.

John Burnet of Barns and The Path of the King, by John Buchan—A rambling, high-spirited historical adventure in the Scottish Borders and a novel-in-stories spanning everything from the Viking Age to the American Civil War. Two of my favorite reads for this year’s John Buchan June (for a full list, see the summer reading list). Full John Buchan June reviews on the blog here and here.

The Anubis Gates, by Tim Powers—Brendan Doyle, an undistinguished scholar of Romantic poetry is offered a strange gig by an eccentric businessman: accompany a tour group to London in 1810 to listen to a lecture by Coleridge. The businessman’s engineers have discovered a method that allows for some limited time-travel and he seems eager to use it—for reasons beyond meeting literary greats, as will become clear later. Complications arise when Doyle is left behind in Regency London and desperately fends for himself through begging, where he encounters increasingly strange and unsettling people like Horrabin, the disfigured street-performing clown to who commands an army of beggars from his underground lair, or Dog-Face Joe, a predatory body-hopping werewolf. Their inexplicable activities become more and more threatening and more and more obviously magical. Intricately plotted, totally engrossing, and with one of the most satisfying conclusions in my year of reading. Another excellent historical fantasy, and close to being my favorite of the year.

Runners up:

• Eight Hours from England, by Anthony Quayle—A solid short novel about the unique environment and frustrations of Allied commandos fighting the Nazis in Albania during World War II. Full review on the blog here.

• A Deadly Shade of Gold, by John D MacDonald—“Salvage consultant” Travis McGee travels to Mexico to avenge the death of an old friend who had gotten mixed up in some business involving Aztec gold. An involving and suspenseful crime classic.

• Chess Story, by Stefan Zweig—An involving, moving novella about the passengers of an ocean liner competing at chess with two men: a machinelike prodigy and a mysterious tortured man who, we learn, gained his expertise at terrible cost. Short, absorbing, and powerful. I mean to reread it soon.

• Call for the Dead and The Looking Glass War, by John Le Carré—Two solid early spy novels involving, in a greater or lesser role, George Smiley before the magnum opus of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. The second of these two is an ironic take on the public response to Le Carré’s Spy Who Came in From the Cold.

• The Watcher by the Threshold, by John Buchan—A great early collection of weird fiction and horror from John Buchan. Some especially eerie stories about relict forces—ancient people, restless spirits—beyond the ken of modern man. Full review for John Buchan June here.

• Lucky Jim, by Kingsley Amis—Jim Dixon, a young, feckless historian at an English university, is up for the review that could make his probationary lecturer position permanent. You know what they say about everything that can go wrong. Surely my worst case scenario as an academic, and hugely entertaining.

Best of the year: the year of man and machine

As with my non-fiction post yesterday, I’m cheating a bit by naming multiple “bests” thanks to a coincidental overlap across a few really good novels: war stories of men depending on their skills, training, and courage to survive combat in unforgiving environments aboard sophisticated and dangerous machines.

Bomber, by Len Deighton, tells the vast story of a single RAF bombing raid over Germany on a single day during World War II. Deighton gives us the civilian and military authorities in an ill-fated German town, the Luftwaffe defenders both in the air and at radar installations, the ground crews and command staff at a RAF base in England, and the bomber pilots and crewmen.

The characters’ personal lives, relationships, jealousies, misunderstandings, and preoccupations—a widowed German officer who has just begun an affair with his housekeeper, a bomber crew about to fly its last mission, an insomniac pilot and his anxious wife who works at the base, a squadron commander who mistakes one of his best pilots for a leftwing subversive—all develop alongside their assigned tasks, so that this sometimes technical novel always remains intimately personal.

But Deighton’s omniscient perspective also shows the reader things no character could be aware of as the story unfolds, especially the interplay of unwitting decisions, technical errors, and pure bad luck that direct the bombers over a small German town instead of their industrial target—and this is only the largest and most obvious of many such mistakes, some of which no one will ever know about. A harrowing account of all dimensions of a single raid, Bomber is also deeply, bitterly ironic. It’s gripping from start to finish and very moving.

The Cruel Sea, by Nicholas Monsarrat, is another British novel of World War II, but this time about the Royal Navy and of almost the exact opposite scope of Bomber, encompassing the whole war for a handful of men. (Not all war novels are the same, folks—you can do a lot with the genre.) Beginning with Commander Ericson’s assignment to a brand-new corvette, HMS Compass Rose, in Scotland in 1939, The Cruel Sea introduces as well junior officers Ferraby and Lockhart and other key officers and enlisted men. Compass Rose has been assigned convoy escort duties in the dangerous waters of the North Atlantic between Greenland and Britain, and as the war escalates the German U-boat presence increases as well.

Monsarrat conveys the physical and mental strain—and occasional excitement—of protecting the convoys and hunting the U-boats brilliantly, and like Deighton’s later Bomber balances the dangers of the war with the vicissitudes, disappointments, and joys of the home front. A powerful novel and rightly regarded as a naval classic.

Finally, The Oceans and the Stars, by Mark Helprin, is a contemporary novel of the US Navy, Somali piracy, Iran, and ISIS, but as a loose, subtle retelling of the Odyssey it brilliantly and vividly evokes the spirit and pathos of Homer. Bookended with a court martial, the novel follows aging Captain Stephen Rensselaer, who loses a cushy Pentagon job after speaking too honestly with the president. He’s assigned a dead-end final command meant to finish his career as an embarrassment: overseeing the construction and finally taking to sea the last of the Navy’s smallest class of combat vessels, a patrol coastal or PC he christens Athena. While at the dockyards in New Orleans he meets another marooned soul, Katy Farrar, a lawyer whose husband abandoned her. Together these two well-matched, intelligent souls kindle a poignant mid-life romance. What they had thought were their lives and careers have passed them by; they can start over together.

Then war with Iran breaks out and Rensselaer must put to sea, where he does combat in the Indian Ocean and even on land—engaging superior Russian-built Iranian ships, rushing to the aid of a cruise ship attacked by ISIS pirates, chasing after them when they retreat into Somalia with hostages. It’s technically interesting, thrilling, and emotionally rich and moving. I found the first part of the novel, when Rensselaer and Katy are simply washed up and finding each other, achingly moving.

You’ve probably picked up at least some parallels with Homer. There are more. But this isn’t a simple retelling or slavish point-by-point modern adaptation; you could certainly read The Oceans and the Stars and never catch the allusions. But they do enrich the novel and create dramatic irony and suspense. After all, the prologue details the beginning of a court martial, and the war keeps Rensselaer and Katy separate and vulnerable. What will happen, and how will they be reunited?

Despite their differences in time period, subject, structure, and style, Bomber, The Cruel Sea, and The Oceans and the Stars all offer interesting, compelling characters in suspenseful and deadly circumstances, with the former—character, family, relationships—only enhancing the danger of the latter. All three of these are stellar, and while some might resist reading novels like them out of some kind of Tom Clancy impression that war novels are all technical specs, ballistics, and tough-talking, invulnerable men, these showcase the richness of war as a subject for literature. Homer is apropos here—remember that before the Odyssey came the Iliad, the great war story.

Two of these I reviewed in full on the blog this year: The Oceans and the Stars here and The Cruel Sea here. Any one of these three would be well worth your time. I hope y’all will check one out in 2026.

Favorite kids’ books

The Reluctant Dragon, by Kenneth Grahame, illustrated by Ernest Shepard—I loved the Disney cartoon as a kid and only learned as an adult that it was based on a story by the author of The Wind in the Willows. A lark, and lots of fun to read aloud—which I did twice, once to my kids while camping and once to my wife.

The Green Ember, by SD Smith, illustrated by Zach Franzen—A fun fantasy series about a kingdom of rabbits at war with wolves and predatory birds. When the novel begins, the rabbits are on the back foot, their king having fallen and the kingdom in disarray, with isolated bands longing for the coming of “the Mended Wood.” Main characters Picket and Heather have a believable brother-sister relationship, and Smith includes numerous fun side characters like warrior and preparedness obsessive Helmer. My daughter ate these up and demanded I read them. I’m glad I finally got to the first one.

The Book of Three, The Black Cauldron, The Castle of Llyr, Taran Wanderer, and The High King, by Lloyd Alexander—A classic fantasy series that is well worth reading in its entirety, as my wife and I did aloud over the first few months of the year.

Troubled Waters, by Sophie de Mullenheim—Another good entry in this series about a group of boys in Diocletian’s Rome solving mysteries and gradually getting to know the persecuted Christians in their midst. Just got my daughter the fifth and sixth in the series and plan to read them aloud to the kids in the new year.

James and the Giant Peach, by Roald Dahl—Fun and bizarre. I had never read any Roald Dahl before last year. His status as a classic children’s author is well-deserved.

The God Contest, by Carl Laferton, illustrated by Catalina Echeverri—A picture book based on one of my favorite Old Testament incidents: the mountaintop contest between the prophet Elijah and King Ahab’s prophets of Baal. Not the kind of story that gets a lot of traction in our modern therapeutically-oriented Christianity, so this book, with its clear explanation of the handy victory of God in a competition for divine authority, was refreshing. A good read-aloud with all five kids.

Macbeth: A Graphic Novel, by William Shakespeare, adapted by Gareth Hinds—A good, atmospheric comic book adaptation of my favorite Shakespearean tragedy. I’m a big fan of Hinds’s work. Check it out if you haven’t heard of him.

Rereads

Lots of good rereads this year, with my two favorites probably being Emma and The Prestige, a book I last read in college and barely remembered. As usual, audiobook “reads” are marked with an asterisk.

• Emma, by Jane Austen

• The Prestige, by Christopher Priest

• The Hobbit, by JRR Tolkien

• Athelstan: The Making of England, by Tom Holland

• Freaky Deaky, by Elmore Leonard*

• Hombre, by Elmore Leonard*

• Mr Majestyk, by Elmore Leonard*

• The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, by John Le Carré

• Heart of Darkness, by Joseph Conrad

• Starship Troopers, by Robert Heinlein

• On the Marble Cliffs, by Ernst Jünger*

• The Book of Three, by Lloyd Alexander

• The Black Cauldron, by Lloyd Alexander

Looking ahead

I’ve gradually realized that I’m pretty bad at predicting what I will or won’t be reading over the next year, so while I have some goals and ambitions I’m going to refrain from sharing those. Like the mass of people playing “cheat the prophet” in that line from Chesterton, I tend to listen politely to my own predictions and then go and do something else. So we’ll see what the next year brings. If it’s a crop of reading as good as this year’s, I’ll be satisfied.

In the meantime, I hope y’all have found something good here to read yourself in 2026. Thanks as always for reading—your attention to this blog means a lot to me—and happy New Year!

2025 in books: non-fiction

Die Lebestufen (The Stages of Life) (Detail), by Caspar David Friedrich

Though this has been a rough break with lots of sickness I’ve managed to find time here and there to make sure I at least get my annual reading list put together. But I realized this afternoon, as I was about to rouse a couple of recently sick kids from their naps and go check on the two people who are currently sick, that I wasn’t quite finished with the fiction section and the total post was already pushing 5,000 words. So I’ve done something I don’t think I’ve done since the heady reading days of 2020—split the post in half. This evening y’all will get my non-fiction and “special mentions.” Tomorrow I’ll follow up with fiction and a few other oddments.

After a couple years in which fiction has threatened to overwhelm my reading in history and other subjects, I deliberately tried to steer back to a slightly more balanced mix in the latter half of this year. And good thing, too, as 2025 turned out to be a good year for great big literary biographies and shorter works on a diverse variety of fun subjects. I hope y’all will find something good here for next year. Enjoy, and thanks for reading!

Favorite non-fiction reads

A Time to Keep Silence, by Patrick Leigh Fermor—Beautifully written, evocative, and meditative account of Leigh Fermor’s stays in several monasteries in northern France—twice with Benedictines and once with Trappists—and his visit to the abandoned rock monasteries used by medieval Christian anchorites in the rugged hills of central Asia Minor. A brisk but by no means light read.

The Weimar Years: Rise and Fall, 1918-1933, by Frank McDonough—An exhaustive history, year by year, of the Weimar Republic from Kaiser Wilhelm’s abdication, the German military collapse, and the armistice in the fall of 1918 to the first month of 1933, when Hitler’s rise culminated in his assumption of the role of chancellor. There are isolated passages on cultural trends (e.g. the “New Woman,” cabaret life, Bauhaus architecture, silent cinema like Metropolis, literature like All Quiet on the Western Front) but the emphasis is almost entirely on nitty-gritty party politics. Given the chaos and corruption of the Weimar Republic and the proliferation of parties (at least 41 in one election), McDonough does an admirable job keeping the narrative clear and understandable and emphasizes contingency throughout. A Hitler dictatorship was not a foregone conclusion. But the epilogue, in which McDonough specifically blames Paul von Hindenburg for the death of “Weimar democracy,” is a bit of a fumble, as it is abundantly clear from McDonough’s own narrative—and even the earlier parts of the epilogue—that the Weimar Constitution had built-in weaknesses that were bound to weaken and undermine it. McDonough essentially faults Hindenburg for not believing in democracy hard enough. But if “democracy” in the abstract gave Germany this democracy in concrete, stubborn reality, it deserved to go. The pity is that when it went, it fell to Hitler, who only achieved electoral clout very late. This aside, The Weimer Years is a hefty expert introduction to an important period.

Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren’t Growing Up, by Abigail Shrier—A grim but necessary study of the outsized role of therapy and medication in the neuroticism, self-absorption, and worse among modern kids. Highly recommended if you’re skeptical of our therapeutic culture already or openminded enough to question the way therapy has become the panacea for everything we find disordered—or even out of the ordinary—about other people and ourselves.

Cooler Than Cool: The Life and Work of Elmore Leonard, by CM Kushins—A welcome biography of one of my favorite authors, a comprehensive volume that illuminates Leonard’s life, work, and craft in almost equal measure. Most interesting to me were the sections on Leonard’s childhood, education, World War II service, and early career—when he balanced a full-time white collar job, daily Mass, and raising a family with researching and writing the Western stories that put him on the map—as well as insight into his creative process, which changed in slow and subtle but significant ways over the years. Also entertaining: stories of his struggles against Hollywood, including the exasperating abortive collaboration with Dustin Hoffman that inspired Get Shorty. If the book lacks in any area, it’s in the personal as it approaches the present. Kushins gives good attention to Leonard’s religiosity early in the book, so what precisely turned him from a devout Catholic into a gentle agnostic in the 1970s? What was going on with his final marriage? We can only infer. That is, however, a minor problem in an otherwise thorough book. This was very close to being my favorite read of the year.

The Magic of Silence: Caspar David Friedrich’s Journey through Time, by Florian Illies, trans. Tony Crawford—A study of the life and work of German artist Caspar David Friedrich, whose Wanderer Above a Sea of Fog you certainly know even if you don’t recognize his name. Strangely structured but full of surprises and insights. Full review on the blog here.

Ian Fleming: The Complete Man, by Nicholas Shakespeare—Another of the big fat literary biographies I read this year. Not just thorough but exhaustive, Shakespeare having apparently tracked down everyone who had any connection whatsoever to Fleming and his family in order to get insight into the man. This is a brilliant portrait of Fleming, one that emphasizes the pressures and frustrations of his life—especially the domineering, manipulative mother, the wife who despised and mocked his work, and the onetime film producing partner who sued Fleming into an early grave. Fleming, in Shakespeare’s telling, was a gifted man who did great work in a variety of fields, not least in military intelligence, where he was one of a handful of people to know the whole secret of the Bletchley Park codebreaking program, but who lived a fundamentally unhappy life. Some of this was Fleming’s own doing, and the womanizing, drinking, and smoking eventually caught up with him. The Complete Man deepened my admiration of Fleming’s strengths and my appreciation of his work, but troubled me with his tony but self-destructive lifestyle. An absolutely worthwhile read if one can soldier through the genealogy and namedropping in the first chapters.

Henry V: The Astonishing Triumph of England’s Greatest Warrior King, by Dan Jones—A thorough, well-paced biography of Henry V that is both scholarly and approachable, though Jones’s decision to tell Henry’s story in present tense feels like an unnecessary gimmick. More importantly, however, Jones is evenhanded and fair to Henry and his time, avoiding some of the more popular modern misperceptions and false accusations (e.g. calling Henry a “war criminal”) and emphasizing his purposeful embrace of the divinely ordained duty of rule. A refreshing and worthwhile Late Medieval read.

The First Thanksgiving: What the Real Story Tells Us About Loving God and Learning from History, by Robert Tracy McKenzie—A good brief study not only of the First Thanksgiving and the people who experienced it—Pilgrims, Strangers, and Indians—but of how history works and how and why people remember and celebrate the things they do. It also implicitly conveys a truth I realized long ago: the true story of just about anything is always more complicated and much more interesting than the simplified versions people fight about. If I taught at a Christian institution I’d certainly assign this for US History both to give students the straight story on the Pilgrims—and how little we know about the meal mythologized as the First Thanksgiving—and to give them the rudiments of historiography. An excellent little book. I gifted my dad a copy on Audible and he greatly enjoyed it.

The UFO Experience, by J Allen Hynek—An interesting account of some genuinely inexplicable sightings from an astronomer who worked for years, through much frustration, as an expert consultant on the US Air Force’s Project Blue Book, and who sought to apply genuine scientific rigor to a phenomenon that was already evolving into folklore and crowdsourced mythology by the time he wrote this book. Also interesting as a window into a specific period of UFO history. Full review on the blog here.

Runners up:

• UFO: The Inside Story of the US Government’s Search for Alien Life Here—and Out There, by Garrett Graff—Readable, wide-ranging, but flawed overview of the government and academia’s attempts—honest and otherwise—to research and understand the postwar flying saucer phenomenon. Full review on the blog here.

• Van Gogh has a Broken Heart: What Art Teaches Us About the Wonder and Struggle of Being, by Russ Ramsey—Not quite as good as Ramsey’s first book on faith and art—which was easily my favorite non-fiction read last year—but a worthwhile read nonetheless, especially given its more specific focus on art and suffering.

• George Washington: The Founding Father, by Paul Johnson—A good short biography by one of the masters of the good short biography. Thorough (for its length) and, more importantly, evenhanded.

• Frederica: Colonial Fort and Town, by Trevor R Reese, illustrated by Peter Spier—A handy informative booklet about Fort Frederica on St Simons Island, with excellent drawings. Published in the late 1960s so some of the information may need updating from more recent research and archaeological work at the town, but still a solid introduction.

• Caspar David Friedrich: The Painter of Stillness, by Norbert Wolf—Good short overview of the life and work of Friedrich with many, many good color plates of his work. From a series by art publisher Taschen.

Best of the year: Poe vs Poe

This year I read a number of good biographies, several of which I’ve mentioned above, but two of the most enjoyable and with the greatest interest to me concerned Edgar Allan Poe. One book was older, one was brand new; one was shorter and one was long; but both were good. It was hard to select a favorite read this year—especially among a crop of good biographies of writers I love—so I’ve cheated and gone with both of these.

Edgar Allan Poe: His Life and Legacy, by Jeffrey Meyers, is a biography published in 1992. Meyers gives good attention to Poe’s life and work and is fair to this perplexing, exasperating, much-maligned man, especially in controversial personal episodes like his marriage to his first cousin Virginia, his spats with various literary celebrities, the controversy and mudslinging stirred up by the female literary elite of New York City in a strange episode concerning letters between Poe and an admirer, and most especially his tragic final year. Meyers also approaches Poe’s work with good critical sense, avoiding the autobiographical and especially Freudian readings that had been popular with Poe for quite some time. (Not long after Meyers’s book, Kenneth Silverman published Edgar A Poe: Mournful and Never-ending Remembrance, which is famous for going whole-hog into autobiographical and psychological interpretation. That way lies madness.) Short, readable, and comprehensive without being overwhelming, Meyer’s insight and good judgement make this one of the best Poe biographies I’ve read.

But I read Meyers in the first place while awaiting the release of Edgar Allan Poe: A Life, by Richard Kopley, which my wife graciously got me as a birthday gift. This is a massive new biography of the kind usually called “magisterial,” and lives up to the hype. Kopley is a well-established and accomplished Poe scholar and his mastery of every bit of material on Poe’s life and work is evident on every page. Like Meyers, he approaches Poe sympathetically but not uncritically, faulting him where appropriate—e.g. his self-sabotaging tendencies and his violent feuds with former friends—and defending him likewise. This is most evident in his treatment of Poe and race, which had not become the obsession that it is today when Meyers wrote. Kopley, despite some nods to present pieties, situates Poe in his time and place and in the landscape of opinion common at the time, rubbishing simplistic accusations of racism in Poe and his work. Kopley is primarily a scholar of literature and gives more detailed critical attention to Poe’s work than Meyers, including some new and helpful insight into Poe’s use of structure and poetic effects. This is a strong, weighty, exhaustive biography, but I did find Kopley relied heavily—perhaps too heavily—on some late sources for Poe’s friendships and personal character, things like the reminiscences of Poe’s best friend’s stepdaughter, which offered strangely detailed commentary on a man she had never met. Some explanation of the reliability of sources like this might have been helpful, but the book was already over 800 pages long and this is mostly a quibble.

So I got a two ten-gauge barrels of Poe to the face and loved every bit of it. While I appreciate and would recommend both biographies, I think for general purposes I prefer Meyers’s slightly older book as shorter, more approachable, less burdened with present-day anxieties, and with a bit more context and explanation for how Poe came to have the reputation he does today. But either could be a worthwhile read depending on what kind of emphasis you want in a study of Poe or just how much Poe you need.

Special mentions

Here are three favorite reads that don’t neatly slot into the fiction or non-fiction categories: all medieval, all poetic, all with some good scholarly apparatus and/or great artistic merit in translation.

The Divine Comedy, by Dante, translated by Michael Palma—The Divine Comedy is my favorite book, and since I have no Italian I have always read it in translation. That said, I have read enough about the original Italian, the perils of translation, and specific translators’ rationales for their approaches that I thought 1) I had seen everything and 2) that a translation of the Comedy that was both rhymed and faithful to Dante’s original tone and style was impossible. I’m glad to say I was wrong. Palma’s recent translation manages to capture Dante’s force, directness, and vividness while retaining his difficult rhyme scheme, brilliantly conveying not just the feel of the original but its most often neglected formal quality. I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve read the Comedy but this is the most I’ve enjoyed it in some years. I reflected in more detail on Palma’s achievement with this translation here.

Waltharius, translated by Brian Murdoch, ed. by Leonard Neidorf—A good English translation—with the original Latin on the facing page—of a lesser-known Early Medieval epic concerning Walthari (Walter of Aquitaine), his beloved Hildigunda, their flight from Attila, and their confrontation with Walthari’s old friend and comrade-in-arms Hagano. I wrote about some of the moral and cultural aspects of the story, especially the binding (and sometimes entangling) role of “unchosen obligations,” here.

Old High German Poetry: An Anthology, trans. and ed. by Brian Murdoch—If you’ve read any medieval German literature it is almost certainly something like Parzival or the Nibelungenlied, Middle High German epics or Arthurian romances. German poetry came into full flower in the High Medieval period, but of course it had much earlier antecedents. This book collects a huge variety of fragmentary poetry in Old High German—bits of epic, devotional verse, charms, prayers, and more—with informative commentary and recommended reading. A great volume, though it is sad and frustrating to look at these fragments, palimpsests, and marginalia and infer how much else was lost to time. Ach, Weh!

Stay tuned

I’m thankful for so much good reading this year and hope y’all will find something in this post to read, enjoy, and think about in 2026. In the meantime, be on the lookout for the second half of this post—fiction, children’s books, and rereads—tomorrow morning, and have a fun and happy New Year’s Eve!

The Odyssey trailer reaction

Matt Damon as Odysseus in the teaser trailer for The Odyssey (2026)

To say that Christopher Nolan’s treatment of Homer is highly anticipated would be an understatement. By the time I discovered the first teaser for The Odyssey this evening while doing some last-minute Christmas shopping for my kids, the official trailer on the Universal YouTube channel had been up twelve hours and already had 9.8 million views. (Addendum: In the time it’s taken me to dash off these thoughts and observations, the trailer has cleared ten million views.)

So, in a very real sense, what I think doesn’t matter. Here are my thoughts anyway.

I’ve mentioned recently that, while I like Nolan generally and love a couple of his movies, I think his success and the leeway studios have given him since he wrapped up his Batman trilogy have led him further and further into self-indulgence. This peaked with Tenet, which was entertaining because Nolan is a spectacular showman and completely incomprehensible because, with its involuted story, he leaned hard into all of his own worst instincts. Part of what kept it from being a pure disaster was that its slick near-future world was fitting for his style: Inception and Interstellar both fit the bill, as does the futuristic Wayne Enterprises tech of his Batman movies, especially The Dark Knight Rises.

But imagine that recognizable Nolan aesthetic—matte black tactical gear, brushed steel and brutalist concrete, affectless acting, and obsessive rejection of linear time—transferred to… the Bronze Age.

I follow a number of gifted historical and archaeological artists on social media and the scuttlebutt is that Nolan’s crew reached out to some experts in Mycenaean material culture and then ghosted them. It shows. Homer’s world was a world of elaborate courtesy and protocol, gold, jewels, and precious metals, and suits of burnished bronze armor that thundered when their warriors leapt from their chariots to do battle. Matt Damon’s crew from Ithaca look like someone asked an LLM to blend 1950s sword-and-sandal Romans with a SWAT team.

That’s harsh, I guess. I’m not particularly hopeful. As much as I like Nolan, he has to be one of the filmmakers least suited to this kind of story. (Let me second what some of those historical artists have wished for: a Homer adaptation from Robert Eggers.) If I hope anything, I hope I’m wrong.

With (most of) the negativity out of the way, here are a few things that impressed me in this teaser:

• The IMAX cinematography looks atmospheric as Hades, so to speak. Hoyte van Hoytema is working with Nolan again and a number of the brief glimpses we get of major episodes from the Odyssey look good in strict filmmaking terms.

• Anne Hathaway as Penelope looks pretty woebegone in her brief appearance. I like Hathaway but wonder if she has the requisite cunning for the woman who was so perfectly matched to Odysseus. (My ideal casting: Rebecca Ferguson, who combines regal beauty with obvious, potentially terrifying intelligence.)

• I like the shots in Polyphemus’s cave, but am puzzled that we actually get a brief glimpse of a giant, shadowy form entering behind Odysseus’s men. Word was that Nolan’s Odyssey would be demythologized to some degree. Perhaps not? Or will the adventure scenes be Odysseus’s exaggerated retelling? If Nolan indulges in his nonlinear storytelling it will surely be when Odysseus is rescued and hosted by the Phaiakians and tells them his story—a portion of the poem that, to be fair, lends itself to Nolan’s thing.

• We get a glimpse of Benny Safdie as Agamemnon near the beginning. Ridiculous Greek fantasy armor. Perhaps an artifact of Odysseus telling an embellished version of his story?

• We don’t see him in the trailer, but Jon Bernthal is listed as playing Menelaus. I’d like to have seen him—or someone like him—in the lead. Bernthal looks tough and has unbelievable charisma. Somehow he keeps getting slotted into second-fiddle roles behind flat, awkward leads (e.g. “The Pacific,” in which he by all rights should have played John Basilone, and “The Walking Dead”). Robert Pattinson is also slated to play Antinous, one of Penelope’s suitors, which should give him plenty of opportunities to steal the scene.

• Back to the trailer. We get brief glimpses of the Trojan Horse. No idea what the Achaians are doing hoisting it out of the sea, but the shots of the warriors crammed inside look great.

• Near the end we get some eerie shots of what appear to be Odysseus’s journey to the underworld. Not at all what I imagine when reading the story, but exceptionally atmospheric and spooky. Rightly so. Curious to know if we’ll see a bored, disillusioned Achilles.

• Devotees of ancient Greek shipbuilding are upset about behind-the-scenes images of the ships here. I know just enough to identify them as clinker-built, which is right for the Anglo-Saxons and Vikings but obviously wrong for Mycenaean Greece. That may or may not bother you.

• We end with an Odysseus and Penelope before the war, who seem much weepier and worrisome than the figures from Homer. Homer’s Odysseus cries, to be sure, but only after twenty years of bloodshed and captivity. Maybe it’s just that I have a hard time taking Matt Damon seriously when he channels high emotion. (His outburst as General Groves in Oppenheimer came across to me as impotent rather than righteous rage.)

So—we’ll see. This is a teaser trailer with perhaps a minute of footage, after all, and much of the film’s staggeringly large cast doesn’t appear at all. (Keeping Zendaya—as Athena!?—offscreen might have been a smart move.) It will certainly trade in spectacle, and maybe that will be enough. I’ve loved plenty of other atrocious historical films on that level (Exhibit A, Exhibit B), but something else those movies had going for them was strong performances and surehanded storytelling. Again—we’ll see.

I’m with those who were hoping for something a bit more meticulous in its reconstruction of Homer’s world, something we still haven’t really seen onscreen before. But that, for better or worse, is not Nolan’s forte. Even from this teaser it’s clear that he’s put his unmistakable stamp on the story. My hope is that, even without material fidelity to the original’s world, Homer himself will once again prove so strong that his power will shine through despite the filmmakers.

On smallpox blankets

A slight ding on Philip Jenkins’s History of the United States, which I’m still reading and still enjoying. In a chapter on the Indian prehistory of North America, Jenkins points out the role of virgin soil epidemics in massive demographic change across the continent, well beyond any areas of initial European settlement (thanks to networks of preexisting trade routes and exacerbated by endemic inter-Indian warfare) and far before any “deliberate policy of Indian Removal” by any modern European-descended state.

All well and good—I’m often at pains in class to point out these early disasters, occurring in an age before germ theory, were accidental. But that paragraph ends with this passage:

Sometimes destruction by biological means was deliberate: in the 1760s, the British ransacked smallpox hospitals for contaminated bedding to offer as gifts to the Ottawa people.

On a strict technical level, most of that sentence is true—although the word ransacked is a bit much, as we’ll see. The problem is that Jenkins accidentally implies a widespread policy (“the British ransacked . . . hospitals”) over a long period (“the 1760s”) when this occurred exactly one time in one specific place.

The root of the smallpox blankets legend is the 1763 siege of Fort Pitt (formerly Fort Duquesne, later Pittsburgh) during Pontiac’s War, one of the aftershocks of the French and Indian War. Well-coordinated attacks on overextended British outposts in the far-flung new reaches of the Empire overwhelmed or came close to overwhelming several forts. Fort Pitt held out, but the siege conditions and overcrowding led to an outbreak of smallpox.

The precise details are unclear (here’s a good longer explanation) but in a letter to British Commander-in-Chief Jeffrey Amherst, the commander of Fort Pitt’s garrison mooted the idea of giving contaminated blankets from smallpox patients in the fort (n.b: from the fort hospital, not hospitals plural) to a diplomatic party as part of the customary exchange of gifts during negotiations. Amherst apparently approved on the basis that the situation at the fort was desperate. Based on fort records, it appears two blankets and a handkerchief were used (by someone, possibly a trader on his own initiative rather than the fort’s commander) and their previous owners reimbursed.

But here’s the most important part of the incident: it didn’t work.

Smallpox, per the CDC, can theoretically spread through bedding contaminated with pus and bodily fluids but is unlikely to, especially if the fluids dry and age. It is much more often transmitted “by direct and fairly prolonged face-to-face contact between people.” Beyond the mechanics of how smallpox spreads most effectively, other contextual factors further complicate the story. Here’s Fred Anderson in The War that Made America, which I recently recommended:

There is no evidence that Amherst’s genocidal intentions and [Fort Pitt commander] Ecuyer’s abominable act actually succeeded in spreading smallpox among the Shawnees and Delawares who besieged Fort Pitt, for smallpox was already endemic in both groups at the time.

Another historian has pointed out that the smallpox outbreak at Fort Pitt arrived with the Indians in the first place.

Again, we are dealing with a single failed attempt at biological warfare in a desperate situation. So while that sentence in Jenkins’s book—a sort of tossed-off aside—is in some sense correct, it falls apart at the detail level.

The bigger problem is precisely that tossed-off quality and the impression it creates. The smallpox blankets are legendary—mythic. Even students who don’t know much about the colonial era or the complex history of European and Indian relations usually recognize this story. That’s because it has escaped its original context and all its bothersome details and, having thus escaped, the attempt to spread smallpox is assumed to have been successful.

So it’s become a story too good to check and, as proof of white perfidy, can be transplanted to the European villain of choice. I’ve seen Cortes and the Pilgrims accused of it, or “Europeans” generally, as if it happened many times.

This is an unfortunate single sentence in a book that is otherwise excellent so far, but the mere fact of its appearing in a good book by a careful historian points toward its prominence as easy shorthand for the evils of European and Indian interaction. But that very ease should raise our suspicions, especially since the story is so often used as a one-size-fits-all cudgel. Any story that handy for the purpose needs to be checked.

Jenkins on regionalism and contingency

One of the best perks of teaching is the opportunity to review examination copies of textbooks. This morning I received a copy of the new sixth edition of A History of the United States, by Philip Jenkins, part of Bloomsbury’s Essential Histories series. Jenkins is a historian of religion whose work I’ve greatly appreciated over the years, and I was excited to discover that he’s also written a short, one-volume American history text. I’m reading it with a view to replacing the late Robert Remini’s Short History of the United States in one of my online adjunct courses.

So far it’s off to a good start. One of the challenges of teaching history is trying to draw attention to recurrent patterns or themes. The standard multi-author committee-produced textbook—what you think of when you hear the word—usually does this clumsily, if at all. A single-author text that pays a bit more attention to literary qualities, like Remini’s Short History or Wilfred McClay’s Land of Hope, can develop these themes and throughlines narratively as it goes—which is also, not coincidentally, how I teach the subject.

Jenkins begins by explicitly laying out the themes he wants the reader to notice in a dedicated introductory chapter. Ordinarily this wouldn’t be my favorite approach, but it allows Jenkins to describe some of the peculiar parameters of American history very specifically, priming the reader to detect them. I especially liked what he had to say about two in particular:

First, having established “the tyranny of distance” as one of the key factors in the story, he points toward the differing trajectories and cultures of the US’s many regions, the two earliest and most important of which are the north and the South:

Different regions produced their own distinct cultures, the exact nature of which has given rise to much debate. The question of “Southern-ness” has been a popular topic for such works, though the very term betrays the prejudice that it is the south that is untypical from an American or even world norm. In terms of its history of slavery and racial hierarchy, the American South closely resembles the worlds of the Caribbean and of much of Central or South America. We could equally well argue that it was rather the north of the early nineteenth century that produced a set of cultural and intellectual assumptions that were bizarre by the standards of the contemporary Western world, while the aristocratic, rural, and deferential south was a much more “normal” entity than its egalitarian, urban, and evangelical neighbors. For anyone acquainted with the astonishing social turbulence of the Northern cities before the Civil War, it is startling to hear claims that it was the south that had a peculiar tendency to violence.

This is not just about geography but about culture and historiography. For a long time, the extent to which New Englanders have portrayed their story as normative, as the story of the US to which recalcitrants and rebels have to be brought into conformity, has been invisible. (Why, for example, did the entire country just celebrate a holiday inspired by the Pilgrims?) This can lead to especially warped interpretations since, as Jenkins points out, the culture that arose in the northeastern US is such a weird historical outlier. Restoring a broader perspective creates a better understanding not only of north and South, but of the whole.

Even more crucially, Jenkins pushes back against whiggishness, the assumption that history moves determinedly along toward a particular endpoint, both of the present and the past:

Yet when we tell the story of US expansion, it is tempting to describe a natural and even inevitable process, by which the Lower Forty-Eight acquires its predestined dimensions and natural borders. That was certainly how Americans thought, and how they recorded events, and we still use the phrase that was commonly cited to describe this process. . . . 

The speed and seemingly irresistible weight of American expansion make such a narrative of Manifest Destiny tempting. US histories can look like a map on a television documentary, with an illuminated core region along the East Coast, which spreads swiftly and inevitably over those hitherto dark regions, which in turn become lit up as they achieve their authentic destiny of being included in that United States. It is hard not to write the story backward, as if the ending was always predetermined. The problems with such an account are many[.]

Among these problems is the implied sense of inevitability Jenkins mentions, a sense rooted in the most subtle and insidious bias of historical study, historian’s fallacy, which erases the fog in which historical figures operated. Jenkins emphasizes contingency and the fact that historical actors didn’t know the end of the story. Here’s an example I mentioned, with reference to this piece by Jeremy Black, in my Substack digest over the weekend:

For much of American history, many Americans were convinced that the lands that became Canada would inevitably fall into the possession of the United States. That was a real prospect during the War of 1812, and frequent later tensions between the United States and Great Britain made it highly likely that Canada would someday be a theater for American conquest and annexation.

There’s what word inevitably again. (A helpful rule: when trying to understand a past culture, look at what the movers and shakers thought was inevitable at the time.) Jenkins expands on the problems of assuming inevitable outcomes, of “arcs” “bending” toward particular results:

Quite apart from any cultural or racial biases, the whole idea of “inevitability” is shaky. The emergence of the continental United States with its boundaries, that Lower Forty-Eight, was contingent, dependent on the outcome of political struggles and social movements. It is easy to imagine scenarios when the United States would have acquired a very different shape, and this is no mere issue of speculative alternative history. We are dealing with what well-informed people believed or hoped in those earlier eras. Most basically, it was far from obvious to contemporary observers that the United States would have resisted multiple serious efforts at secession or partition, which reached their peak during the 1860s. In retrospect, we know that the nascent Confederate States of America created in 1860 would not endure as a major New World power, or that the remnant United States of America would not be confined to the north-east and Midwest; but Abraham Lincoln could not take that fact for granted.

What happened was not inevitable, things could have turned out differently, and uncertainty is an important part of every historical story. Conveying these facts is an important part of my approach to teaching, and I’m hopeful that the rest of Jenkins’s book will underscore these themes.

For what it’s worth, I’d still recommend Remini’s book, but Remini’s narrative is a little too complacently satisfied with the postwar liberal consensus—the idea of America as an idea, gradually developing its doctrines to ever fuller and broader degrees—which is itself a kind of whiggishness. And when initially selecting a text for this course I considered McClay’s book, but its otherwise excellent narrative has a few too many major omissions (the Plains Indians Wars)—yet another historiographical and teaching problem.

On proportionality bias

This week The Rest is History dropped an excellent five-part series on Jack the Ripper. I managed to listen to all of it in two days. I strongly recommend it if you have any interest in that case, Victorian England, or the history of crime investigation, but also because Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook several times mention—albeit not by name—a useful concept for thinking about how we look for causes in past events: proportionality bias.

I’ve written about this briefly before, in a review of Rob Brotherton’s Suspicious Minds, on the cognitive aspects of conspiracism. Briefly, proportionality bias is our built-in tendency, when trying to explain something important, to look for something equally important as the cause. A cause that is, subjectively, incommensurate with the results is unsatisfying and tempts us toward identifying something else—usually something we are already suspicious of. Again, this is a built-in tendency, not a pathology, but while proportionality bias may be a helpful heuristic on the personal level, it does not scale to world events.

The go-to example is the JFK assassination. Many still can’t accept that the president of one of the most powerful states in history—a man involved in international intrigues at the highest levels including espionage, covert assassination programs, proxy wars, and near nuclear war—was killed by an unsympathetic loser who happened to have temporary work in a building his limousine happened to drive past. It happens to be true but is narratively unsatisfying. The conclusion that it must have been something or someone else comes first, and not necessarily consciously; arguments against Oswald are only meant to confirm it.

Something similar has been happening among certain types with regard to Charlie Kirk. It can’t have been a terminally online loser who killed him out of some half-formed, privately nursed political grievance; it must have been (insert fantasy villain of your choice, though one, the subject of a million crank fixations, keeps coming up).

In the case of Jack the Ripper, this is how we get theories of vast royal machinations or secret Masonic rituals—or some combination of the two—as the force behind the Whitechapel murders. That it was likely a still-unidentified local pervert who was skilled with a knife would, to many, prove disappointing. The imagination would prefer a dark cabal of willing actors, or at least a colorful weirdo, to the anonymous forces of poverty, deviance, and insanity.

Again, Holland and Sandbrook do a good job explaining this, even tying it back to their JFK series. The one point I would add to the above is the role that subjectivity of proportionality bias.

When I reviewed Brotherton’s book, I mentioned the assassinations of JFK and Archduke Franz Ferdinand in June 1914. The former is still the subject of fevered speculation and conspiracy theory; the latter, though part of a flourishing conspiratorial worldview in the 1920s, not so much. Why? Because JFK’s murder still feels important to people in way Franz Ferdinand’s, having become something we learn about in middle school rather than discuss casually, does not.

By the same token, Jack the Ripper is important—to us, for reasons Holland and Sandbrook explain well. In the same way that protesters will show up to vandalize the statues of high-profile targets like Robert E Lee or Christopher Columbus but not for Magellan or Raphael Semmes, or that ancient aliens enthusiasts will fixate on famous landmarks like the Pyramids but not much more complicated ancient construction projects like Roman aqueducts, preexisting cultural cachet matters perhaps more than the arguments themselves. This should, by itself, raise our suspicions.

The UFO Experience

In the late 1940s, the US Air Force approached Professor J Allen Hynek with a request for his services as a consultant. The original wave of flying saucer sightings was at its height, and the Air Force, in its defense role, was investigating this strange new phenomenon. How many reports of strange flying objects were simply misidentifications of planets and stars? They hoped Hynek, a respected astronomer, could help rule such cases out.

Over twenty years and three Air Force projects later, flying saucer flaps had evolved into UFO mania, the reports had evolved from sightings to encounters to abductions, and Hynek had been there for all of it. The Air Force, however, having determined early on that, whatever UFOs really were, they weren’t Russian and apparently weren’t a threat, had lost interest. But public fascination with UFOs, thousands of sightings and rumored sightings, and the multiple competing mythologies growing up around the phenomenon only intensified. Due to Hynek’s high public profile thanks to the Air Force (he is the man who gave us “swamp gas” as a feature of UFO investigation), the curious often asked Hynek to recommend “a good book” on UFOs. The UFO Experience, published in 1972, was Hynek’s attempt to provide it.

This is an interesting book for two major reasons. The first is Hynek’s perspective, which is genuinely openminded and scientific. Hynek approached the problem of UFOs as a field researcher, requiring solid, extensive data and basing interpretations on the data rather than forcing data into preconceived explanations. This would prove one of his ultimate frustrations with the Air Force, a topic we’ll come back to.

But data by itself isn’t of much use—it must be organized before it can be interpreted. And so approximately the first half of The UFO Experience is a taxonomy of UFO sightings with ample reference to cases Hynek (mostly) personally investigated. This is certainly the most famous part of the book. Even if you haven’t heard of Hynek, you’ve almost certainly heard the phrase “close encounter.”

Hynek’s taxonomy falls into two major categories with three subcategories apiece. The first are mere sightings: of nighttime lights; of “daylight discs,” the iconic 1950s flying saucer; and strange objects picked up on radar, possibly offering a hard empirical record of something seen by human witnesses. The second category, the close encounters, sightings of UFOs within 500 feet, a distance theoretically precluding misidentification of stars or aircraft, are of the first kind (sighting of an object in the air), the second kind (sighting of an object on the ground or otherwise physically affecting the environment), and the third kind (sighting of an object with the additional presence of some kind of living occupant).

Not only is this the most famous part of the book, it also has the best stories—the Levelland, Texas UFOs, the Lonnie Zamora sighting, and more. It also illustrates the other crucial scientific aspect of Hynek’s approach, which is his rigorously applied standards of evidence.

Hynek excluded from his study single-witness reports as too easily faked (or at least impossible to corroborate) as well as the testimonials of “contactee” types, flying saucer cultists who claimed to receive regular visits from extraterrestrials who offered touchy-feely advice on disarmament, among other things. In addition to prioritizing up-close sightings with multiple witnesses—preferably independent witnesses of good character or reputation—he factored in the subjective strangeness of reported sightings, an often overlooked data point. Contactee stories, with their feelgood peace-and-love vibes, were too obviously wishful thinking; more compelling were stories of inexplicable close encounters by honest people in professions requiring steadiness and sobriety—cops, doctors, farmers, engineers, military and commercial pilots, radar technicians, air traffic controllers. That many witnesses had been previously uninterested in UFOs was another important factor.

And Hynek, interestingly, found a lot of these, enough to convince him that, having eliminated out huge numbers of hoaxes and misidentifications, something strange was still going on. But understanding or explaining it would require a systematic approach through observation and testing and conclusions that did not exceed the possibilities suggested by the evidence. Hynek is, for example, notably skeptical of the Betty and Barney Hill abduction story, repeating but by no means endorsing their “recovered memories” of boarding the UFOs and enduring medical exams, and never endorses the extraterrestrial hypothesis.

Hynek’s primary concern is always to discover what we can say, scientifically and certainly, about what people have seen, and no more. But this careful, judicious approach was not apparently to the taste of the military, the public, or fellow scientists. He would be repeatedly disappointed.

That leads into the second half of the book, in which Hynek reflects on his twenty years doing the Air Force’s shoe leather work and examines some of the ways UFO investigations had gone wrong. I picked up The UFO Experience specifically to read about Hynek’s methodology, standards of evidence, and taxonomy—with all the good stories, being a non-believing, mostly aesthetic appreciator of the UFO phenomenon—but was surprised to find this half as interesting as the first. That’s because Hynek, though a thoughtful, judicious man, had scores to settle.

The first and most extensive is with the US Air Force. UFO lore of the Roswell coverup and Men in Black ilk posits Project Blue Book and its agents as omnipresent suppressors of information. Nothing could be further from the truth. Hynek criticizes Projects Sign, Grudge, and Blue Book as underfunded, understaffed, and headed by junior officers more keen to get promoted out of the position than to gather and assess evidence. Apathy was the rule, information-gathering was slapdash at best, and conclusions, in those instances when they were actually provided, were flippant and unconvincing. This only worsened once the projects had fulfilled their original purpose of determining whether the Russians were behind the UFOs.

Hynek also had harsh words for the scientific establishment, which refused to question its own paradigms in light of new evidence—the opposite of true science—and resorted to ridicule, blackballing, and naked appeals to its own authority to answer criticism and shut down public questions. They were also too eager to lump the curious in with the kooks. Hynek, in a prescient passage, predicts that these attitudes and browbeating the public with what one might now call, say, “settled science” will undermine science itself.

Hynek ends the book with a call for genuine curiosity, a willingness to investigate and incorporate knew knowledge, and a continued commitment to scientific rigor. I suspect he’d be still be disappointed.

This brings me to the second major reason I found The UFO Experience interesting, the purely historical—its place in the history of this phenomenon. Hynek wrote and published his “good book” on UFOs after they had become a secure feature of the American imagination but before some of the aspects we most commonly associate with it today had become mainstream. Abduction stories like the Hills’ were a relatively recent addition to the legendarium. The Pascagoula incident the year after Hynek published this book, the Travis Walton story two years after that, and Whitley Strieber’s Communion in the mid 80s—which also popularized the almond-eyed greys so often read back into the previous history—made abduction the central pillar of UFO myth and inextricably associated them with aliens.

Hynek also published The UFO Experience just four years after Chariots of the Gods, the original “ancient astronauts” book. Hynek, for whom many of the close encounters of the third kind he relates are, by his own standards, suspiciously “woo-woo,” makes absolutely no mention of this variety of UFO enthusiasm, which was genuinely fringe. It would require decades to grow and metastasize. But alongside the Roswell incident, which was resurrected and backfilled with UFO lore after Hynek’s time, ancient astronauts theories seemingly provide historical validation beyond the sudden appearance of flying saucers in 1947 and are responsible for much popular enthusiasm for UFOs now, from the History Channel (so-called) to Joe Rogan.

This book, then, arrived at a historical sweet spot, a moment of huge potential poised between how the original UFO legend began, how Hynek, newly free of the burden of government apathy, hoped it could develop, and what it would actually become. And that was certainly not more scientific.

The UFO Experience is a fascinating attempt by a principled, hard-working, thoughtful man to wrest some degree of scientific sense out of a phenomenon already buried under speculation, lunacy, and mockery. His standards of evidence and organized, taxonomical mind make for a fascinating presentation of the subject, and the cases he recaps and examines prove all the more compelling as a result. Not only has Hynek’s example shown me, personally, a way out of pure contempt for the believers, it’s a reminder of how rigorous, systematic thought and high standards could still salvage something useful out of a field that has only grown more bizarre since Hynek first applied his mind to understanding it.

The two basic ways history is going wrong

Last year, when Joel Miller asked me to introduce the subject of historiography over on his Substack, I noted the existence of modern schools of history that “deny even the possibility of Herodotus’s work.” Against this was a countervailing anxiety about “revisionism,” which undermines the discipline of historical understanding.

Last night I finished reading Robert Tracy McKenzie’s book The First Thanksgiving. McKenzie explains the historiography of that event and the broader context of the Pilgrims and post-Reformation Europe excellently, and it got me thinking about those two opposed errors in the approach to history again.

It seems to me there are two basic ways history goes wrong in the present:

The first, which I’ve railed against plenty of times here on the blog, stems from the hermeneutic of suspicion. This could be an ideological postmodernism that regards all historical sources as equally fictional “text,” feminist or postcolonialist or other intersectional assumptions about power and oppression, or—most commonly among the half-educated—a reflexive suspicion based on a cliche like “History is written by the winners.” In its elite form, with cultural cachet including glowing writeups in legacy print and endcap displays at Barnes & Noble, this is The 1619 Project; in its vulgar form, this is the TikTolk explainer that slices and dices to reveal to the viewer the dark forces behind great moments in history or, yet simpler, the Henry Ford or Napoleon attitude: history is “bunk,” history is “lies agreed upon.”

The second basic error is often a reaction to the first, and that’s resistance to any form of “revisionism.” Where the first error stemming from suspicion, whether in New York Times or neckbeard Redditor form, is leftist-coded, this is very much a conservative phenomenon. (It is also much more proportionally popular or vulgar, conservatives and their ilk having less purchase in elite taste-making institutions.) This error seeks to preserve the past in aspic, a complete, uncomplicated display piece. Questioning or correcting even the small details of an historical event as popularly understood—pointing out, for example, that the Pilgrims probably did not eat turkey and certainly did not have bread at the first Thanksgiving—is received as a profanation. That’s because, as with the first error, understanding the past isn’t actually the point for those making the error.

Though seemingly opposites—and you’ll certainly see the people doing this sneering at the others, especially imaginary others—both approach history more as a symbolic extension of themselves, both have a simplifying instinct (“Well, we know what’s actually going on here is…” vs “Just teach the facts!”), and both need a usable past, an instrumental version of history oriented toward achieving some goal. That is, they’re presentists.

McKenzie’s Thanksgiving book is excellent. I hope to review it in full here soon, but as I haven’t finished anything I’ve started writing for over a week, don’t hold your breath—and definitely give thanks for me if I do.

Dorothy Sayers, Steven Pressfield, and soldier slang

Alan Jacobs has an interesting post today on how Dorothy Sayers and WH Auden, at roughly the same time, approach the same problem: “How might one portray, for a 20th-century audience, the life (or part of the life) of Jesus Christ in a manner that is artistically and religiously serious?” Both, albeit in different ways, strove to make the story fresh and immediate through the use of contemporary language.

Read Jacobs’s whole post for more, but this chunk of Sayers’s apologia for her technique in The Man Born to Be King stuck out to me:

The technique is to keep the ancient setting, and to give the modern equivalent of the contemporary speech and manners. . . . We may make a Roman officer address his squad with modern military words of command, since some similar verbal technique must always and everywhere have been used to start and turn and stop bodies of soldiery, or to inspect their kit and parade-order. We may make a military policeman or a tax-collector lard his speech with scraps of American slang; for the local speech must have been full of catch-phrases picked up from the foreign soldiers and merchants who swarmed along the great trade-routes of the Empire; and for these bits and pieces of vulgar Latin, bastard Greek, and Syriac dialects the language of Hollywood is the modern equivalent. 

The military examples are well-chosen for the precise reasons Sayers lays out. The jargon and slang of soldiers’ speech offers riches to be mined in archaeological layers: antiquated vocabulary surviving in specialized senses, foreign technical terminology, foreign borrowings from campaigns that may have occurred before the current generation was born, myriad protean shortenings, acronyms, and euphemisms, and a huge stock of inventive, poetic, and almost always highly vulgar slang.

Mastering it is probably impossible if you’ve never served. Time intensifies the challenge. Marines now and Marines during World War II both swore a lot and used a lot of slang, but the precise words used and the way they were used, the posture of the language, so to speak, are going to be different. The further back in time—and the language—that you go, the bigger the problem.

I find that, as with regional dialect, suggestion, hinting at a system of slang or way of speaking, works much better than overwhelming the reader with every term one can dig up. My biggest experiment in this regard so far is The Snipers, in which, to a greater extent even than Dark Full of Enemies, I tried to give my young, unrefined, casual, but hard-bitten GIs a distinct, period-authentic linguistic posture that would both evoke the period while being instantly understandable through use and context. I tried to do this minimalistically, with specifically selected lingo. I gather from a handful of readers that it worked.

No credit to me, necessarily. Just like you train your ear for realistic contemporary dialogue by listening and talking, you can do something similar with historical sources. I have a WWII slang dictionary, which can be helpful, but the best method is simply to read lots of lots of contemporaneous writing by people who were there—the less formal the better. I listed three books I found helpful in the case of The Snipers at the time I published it; there are plenty of others.

But I also had the advantage that my characters, regardless of the changes wrought over eighty years, were still speaking modern English. What if, like Sayers and Auden, you’re trying to suggest the distinctive patter not only of a foreign language, but one from 2000 years ago?

Someone who does this exceptionally well is Steven Pressfield. His novels The Afghan Campaign, which tells the story of part of Alexander’s conquests from the perspective of a squad of grunts, and the incomparable Gates of Fire both excel in this regard. Perhaps its Pressfield’s varied experience in lots of fields, including serving as a Marine, but his ancient Greek and Macedonian characters have a distinctive, contemporary-feeling, lived in argot that sells itself as authentic immediately. Some of it accurately translates ancient Greek, some of it is contemporary military equivalents to ancient concepts, some of it is pure invention. But it works exceptionally well.

I’ve wrestled with this problem of capturing the tone or texture of a dead language plenty of times and am trying to figure out a looser, livelier approach for a project I’m outlining now. I’ll probably return to some of Pressfield’s work for inspiration.