The Second World Wars

Just before Thanksgiving I had the honor to talk with Victor Davis Hanson, a classicist and military historian whose work I've long admired, about his most recent book, The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict was Fought and Won. An analytical rather than chronological history, Dr. Hanson's book looks at World War II from multiple perspectives—like industry, leadership, infantry, armor, and naval power—to examine why the Allies won, the Axis lost, and why the war was the bloodiest in human history.

This interview is part of the Christian Humanist Profiles series. Profiles is a member of the Christian Humanist Radio Network. Listen in to my interview with Dr. Hanson below, and check out the network as a whole.

John Ronald's Dragons

Saturday morning I took my kids to the library. My daughter insisted on finding a picture book "bout dragons," so I went to the catalog computer, and once I had narrowed the search to that particular branch of the library and its kids' collection, I found this gem: John Ronald's Dragons: The Story of J.R.R. Tolkien, by Caroline McAlister with illustrations by Eliza Wheeler. 

John Ronald's Dragons is a children's picture book biography of the first half of Tolkien's life, and it's wonderful. The story follows young John Ronald from his youth in the Midlands to school, his move after his mother's death when he was twelve, his meeting and courtship of Edith, his experience in World War I, and finally his professorship at Oxford where, one day while grading exams, he came across a blank sheet of paper and scribbled "In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit." The theme throughout is Tolkien's love of dragons, and the illustrations bring out the inspirations for his dragons in his everyday landscape.

The story is well told and a good jumping off point for your kids. I'm a bit of a nerd about Tolkien and his life, and so I would have liked more detail on, for instance, his remarkable courtship of Edith (when his guardian worried that she would interfere with his studies and forbade him to see her until he was twenty-one, Tolkien obeyed; he sent her a proposal the day of his twenty-first birthday), but this is a succinct and warm retelling that kids will enjoy. My daughter certainly does. We've read it five or six times in two days.

The illustrations are beautiful—far and away the best feature, and the best I've seen in a picture book in quite a while. The pictures include many real places, especially Oxford locations like the Hertford Bridge and the Eagle and Child, with a cameo by C.S. Lewis. Illustrator's notes at the end of the book point out some nice details tucked away in some of the pictures: a fountain pen that Edith gave John Ronald for his birthday, a copy of Beowulf hidden in his study, distinctly hobbit-like neighbors from Tolkien's childhood in the background of a landscape scene. 

Perhaps my favorite—or at least the most evocative, to me—shows Tolkien huddled in a trench, hard at work on Quenya, as tanks breathe fire in a treeless no-man's-land above.

The climax of the book is a trip through two-page landscapes from The Hobbit, in which John Ronald follows Bilbo and a troupe of dwarves through the Misty Mountains, Mirkwood, and across the Long Lake to find "his dragon," a lavishly illustrated Smaug hulking above a mountain of gold. Sharp eyes will note a golden cup and the Arkenstone among the pile of treasure.

As a geek bonus, the end matter includes a list of dragons from Tolkien's work, including Glaurung, Smaug, and the underappreciated Chrysophylax, and quotations from several of his essays and lectures on dragons. Good stuff.

John Ronald's Dragons is a beautiful picture book and I highly recommend it. It's a double treat in that I can read my daughter a book about one of my favorite authors and both of us enjoy it.

Visit the publisher's page for some full-page samples of the gorgeous illustrations.

Another Dark Full of Enemies sighting

A few paperback copies of Dark Full of Enemies have been sighted at Re/Max of Rabun in my hometown of Clayton, Georgia. They're available at the front desk for just $10, three dollars off the list price of $12.99. Stop by and pick one up while they're still available!

If Clayton is too far a drive, you can always find it and my other books at Amazon. Enjoy!

The Loved One

As I've mentioned before, I've been reading Evelyn Waugh this year, and have already gotten through two of his shorter novels. I'm a latecomer but love his work. Last night, I finished The Loved One. 

The Loved One, published in 1948, is the story of Dennis Barlow, a young English war veteran living in Los Angeles. After publishing one volume of poetry to great acclaim in Britain, he was recruited by Hollywood to help write a biopic of Shelley. That project having fallen through, he became a script doctor. When the novel begins, he has been totally out of work for months and has settled for a job he is surprised to find he enjoys—working at a mortuary for pets.

When a friend in the English expatriate community loses his writing contract after twenty-five years with the studio, he kills himself, and Dennis is the only one available to make funeral arrangements. He goes to the largest and most famous cemetery around, Whispering Glades, where "loved ones"—not corpses—are prepared for eternity in "slumber rooms" and "the waiting" have a wide variety of non-sectarian ministers and sanctuaries to choose from for preparation, commemoration, and burial. 

At Whispering Glades, Dennis meets and falls for Aimée Thanatogenos, a young cosmetician who specializes in freshening the appearance of "loved ones" with makeup and haircuts. She works under the rock-star embalmer Mr. Joyboy, charismatic and beloved of everyone at Whispering Glades, who has been making his intentions toward her clear by passing his freshly embalmed "loved ones" on to her work station wearing enormous grins. 

Think Barton Fink crossed with Bernie.

After Aimée criticizes the Happier Hunting Ground, the pet mortuary where Dennis works, he determines to woo her strictly through his poetry, never mentioning his job. Unfortunately, he has writer's block, and cribs from everyone from Keats to Poe in order to win her over. Aimée finds herself torn between the flashy and winsome Mr. Joyboy and the apparently unemployed but sweet British poet.

I can't summarize much more without giving things away, and the novel is less than 150 pages long, so I'll stop there. The situations that develop from these circumstances are hilarious, and finally intersect in first funny, then shocking ways.

Evelyn Waugh (1903-66), master of savage satire.

Waugh's sense of humor is notoriously dark and cruel, and this novel has some of the blackest comedy I've ever read. It's also one of the funniest novels I've ever read. I laughed out loud throughout, even through some of its darkest and most shocking turns.

Beyond the dark humor, Waugh's sense of irony gives the whole book a cutting satirical edge. Most obvious are Waugh's digs at American manners. "They are a very decent, generous lot of people out here and they don't expect you to listen," one elderly Englishman remarks near the beginning. "Always remember that, dear boy. It's the secret of social ease in this country. They talk entirely for their own pleasure. Nothing they say is designed to be heard." 

More biting are Waugh's critiques of American beliefs and sentiments, particularly around the subject of death. Whispering Glades is a very obvious spoof of a real place—Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Los Angeles. Waugh visited on an abortive trip to MGM to discuss filming rights for another book, and left more fascinated with the cemetery than anything else in the film capital of the world. The sentimentality, the tasteless displays, the rootless striving for legitimacy, the commodification of a sacred rite, the litany of unthinking euphemisms—many of which, like memorial park and loved one, we no longer even notice as euphemisms—all show a world in retreat from the realities of life and death. A world like Hollywood.

Waugh brings these themes out poignantly in several late incidents in the plot, but I don't want to give anything away. The Loved One is a rich and hilarious novel, and I highly recommend it.

On History in Fiction (and Vice Versa)

Last month, Peggy Noonan had a column in the Wall Street Journal about what is at stake in inaccuracy—or, perhaps, misrepresentation—in historical films. Noonan wrote in response to season two of The Crown and Steven Spielberg's latest film The Post. If her summaries are accurate she raises some legitimate but relatively minor concerns, but she rather hyperbolically calls these inaccuracies "lies" and writes that, through depicting JFK as a smoker and Nixon as a malevolent criminal power withholding the Pentagon Papers to protect himself, "we are losing history."

Today, Christopher J. Scalia, son of the late Justice Antonin Scalia, responded with a column on the virtues of even inaccurate historical films. 

I both teach history and write historical fiction, so I care deeply about the uneasy marriage of history and fiction in that genre label. I also think Scalia has the better argument.

Scalia draws from Sir Walter Scott, author of immensely popular 19th-century romances—what we would today call "historical novels"—to make his point. Briefly, Scott responded to accusations that he had, in novels like Ivanhoe, "adulterat[ed] the pure sources of historical knowledge" or, in Noonan's terms, lied about the past. The danger represented by his inaccuracies or adulterations is described in terms strikingly similar Noonan's: Scott was "causing history to be neglected—readers being contented with such frothy and superficial knowledge, as they acquire from your works, to the effect of inducing them to neglect the severer and more accurate sources of information."

Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832)

Scott's critics had a point—if they were looking for pure accuracy in his novels. Ivanhoe is replete with medieval stereotypes and anachronistic howlers. But pure accuracy was not his concern; telling a good story was.

Here, Scott's defense gets interesting, and he makes a point I have felt intuitively but never seen put into words before. The benefit of even a book like Ivanhoe is that, if the story excites and entertains—delights, in one half of Horace's formulation—and does these things well enough, the reader who has been touched by the story will seek out the truth behind it: 

I have turned the attention of the public on various points, which have received elucidation from writers of more learning and research, in consequence of my novels having attached some interest to them.

Or, in Scalia's words: "Historical fiction actually promotes interest in purer history."

I might amend this to "good historical fiction," since there must be excellence in execution for any art to be effective, but Scalia's summary is, in my experience and observation through hundreds of novels and films, exactly right. Accurate, if you will. 

How many readers have—on their own—dug deeper into Anglo-Saxon England or the Napoleonic Wars because of Bernard Cornwell? Or ancient Rome because of Colleen McCullough? Or Greece because of Stephen Pressfield, High Medieval Europe because of Umberto Eco, the Tudors because of Hilary Mantel, or Texas, Hawaii, Poland, and large tracts of the rest of the world because of James Michener?

All of these writers' books have problems—some of them serious, and worth serious consideration—but they have all successfully interested the public in the past, and that's something. Fiction may be the first history that many untrained readers come to, but it is often not the last.

Read both Noonan's and Scalia's pieces; they're both worth your while. I have much more I could write, especially on the reaction of some historians to a fine film like Dunkirk, but those thoughts can wait for another day.

A final thought on the value of fiction from G.K. Chesterton, a passage I return to again and again, which I'll close with sans commentary: 

No wise man will wish to bring more long words into the world. But it may be allowable to say that we need a new thing; which may be called psychological history. I mean the consideration of what things meant in the mind of a man, especially an ordinary man; as distinct from what is defined or deduced merely from official forms or political pronouncements. . . . It is not enough to be told that a tom-cat was called a totem; especially when it was not called a totem. We want to know what it felt like. Was it like Whittington's cat or like a witch's cat? Was its real name Pashtl or Puss-in-Boots? That is the sort of thing we need touching the nature of political and social relations. We want to know the real sentiment that was the social bond of many common men, as sane and as selfish as we are. What did soldiers feel when they saw splendid in the sky that strange totem that we call the Golden Eagle of the Legions? What did vassals feel about those other totems the lions or the leopards upon the shield of their lord? So long as we neglect this subjective side of history, which may more simply be called the inside of history, there will always be a certain limitation on that science which can be better transcended by art. So long as the historian cannot do that, fiction will be truer than fact. There will be more reality in a novel; yes, even in a historical novel. 

—from The Everlasting Man

Dark Full of Enemies sighting

Blogger Jay Eldred, an old friend and fellow history teacher and Germanophile, has profiled Dark Full of Enemies for "Teaser Tuesday" at his blog Running in My Head. Check it out. 

Read like it's a vice

Advice to keep reading fresh and enjoyable, from a master:

"The great thing is to be always reading but not to get bored—treat it not like work, more as a vice! Your book bill ought to be your biggest extravagance." 
—CS Lewis

And one that came on an Amazon bookmark I got in high school, nearly twenty years ago, and have never forgotten:

"When I get a little money, I buy books, and if any is left I buy food and clothes." 
—Erasmus

Of course, Erasmus didn't have two kids, but this is an infinitely adaptable sentiment.

Helena on the course of modern politics

St. Helena with the True Cross, by Lucas Cranach the Elder

I'm currently reading Helena, Evelyn Waugh's novel of emperor Constantine's saintly mother, and the author's personal favorite among his many books. The story is a beautiful meditation on motherhood and religious faith, but Waugh has a number of jabs to throw at the modern world.

Here, in conversation with her power-mad son, Helena reflects on the dangers of power:

“Sometimes," Helena continued, "I have a terrible dream of the future. Not now, but presently, people may forget their loyalty to their kings and emperors and take power for themselves. Instead of letting one victim bear this frightful curse they will take it all on themselves, each one of them. Think of the misery of a whole world possessed of Power without Grace.”

Power Without Grace would be an excellent title for a study of post-Enlightenment political thought.

I've just discovered Waugh in the past year, when I read Sword of Honor. I'm digging fervently into his work, and Helena is wonderful so far. Check it out.

2017 in Books

For the inaugural post of this new blog, I want to highlight a few of the best books I’ve read in the last year. I’ve selected five favorite books from a few broad categories in which I do a lot of reading. I’ve cheated a little, as you’ll see, since it’s always hard to limit myself to a set number, especially when it comes to a really good reading year.

These are just a handful of the books I’ve read this year. You can see the rest in my Goodreads reading challenge summary here.

Keep in mind that these are my favorites from each category, not necessarily the best—although the two mostly overlap.

Fiction

Sword of Honour, by Evelyn Waugh—The first Waugh I’ve read. Sword of Honour is a trilogy of novels about Guy Crouchback, scion of a failing English Catholic family. Despite already being in his thirties, Guy signs up for service in the British army at the outbreak of World War II, inspired by crusader forebears and a keen, traditional sense of duty. The trilogy is the story of his disillusionment in the face of modern warfare, the totally amoral pragmatism of even the good guys in modern war, and ideology—from Nazism to Communism. It’s magnificent and heartbreaking.

The Prisoner of Zenda, by Anthony Hope—One of the most enjoyable adventure stories I’ve ever read, a classic swashbuckler with a clever plot, fascinating setting (Ruritania, the forerunner of every vaguely central or eastern European state from Durmstrang to Elbonia), and enjoyable characters. I also found its old-fashioned sense of duty, honor, and obligation refreshing; if Zenda were written today, it’s ending would be totally different, and inferior. (I’ve since watched both classic film versions, and love the 1937 adaptation starring Ronald Colman.)

Emma, by Jane Austen—Jane Austen’s reputation as a master of manners, motivation, and understanding of the human heart is well earned. To read her is to despair of ever writing anything witty or insightful again. Emma is my wife’s favorite, and I can see why, though I’m still partial to Pride and Prejudice.

News of the World, by Paulette Jiles—A beautifully written novel set in a fascinating time and place: Reconstruction-era Texas, with the miasma of the Civil War still pervading the air and intermixing with the threat of Indian attack. Jefferson Kyle Kidd, an itinerant newsreader, finds himself saddled with delivering a young girl, the survivor of an Indian massacre and years of captivity, to her nearest living relatives. Brilliantly evocative of its time and place, and it also avoids romanticizing any aspect of Western life. 

The Black Flower, by Howard Bahr—A magnificent Civil War novel taking place over approximately twenty-four hours at the Battle of Franklin in 1864. The Black Flower follows Bushrod Carter, a young Mississippi infantryman, his comrades, and Anna Hereford, a cousin staying at the McGavock house, destined to become a Confederate field hospital. The battle both unites and separates them in profoundly moving ways. One of the best Civil War novels I’ve read. Bahr has two related novels that I also recommend: The Year of Jubilo and The Judas Field.

Runners Up:

A Friend of Mr. Lincoln, by Stephen Harrigan—An imaginative story set during Abraham Lincoln’s less well-known early years as a striving lawyer in frontier Illinois.

Nutshell, by Ian McEwan—A weird but clever reimagining of Hamlet, in which the melancholy Dane is Claude and Trudy’s unborn child.

The Mark of Zorro, by Johnston McCulley—Zorro has been a favorite of mine since childhood, and this is his highly entertaining—and very pulpy—debut. The 1940 film version starring Tyrone Power is also excellent.

Duel: Terror Stories, by Richard Matheson—A bit of a cheat, since I haven’t quite finished this book yet, but it’s a great collection of short fiction by an underappreciated master of the genre. The title story is excellent, the this collection includes several other really good ones, including four or five that served as the basis of “Twilight Zone” episodes.

History

The Fall of Berlin 1945, by Antony Beevor—A deeply depressing but necessary study of the last two or three months of World War II in Europe, the nearest I believe we’ve ever come to literal hell on earth. 

Brand Luther, by Andrew Pettegree—A view of Luther through his relationship with print. Turns out Luther was persnickety about more than indulgences, Zwingli, rebellious peasants, and the Jews—he demanded quality printing and exercised tight control over not just the content but the presentation of his books. I was more genuinely interested and learned more from this book than many others I’ve read in the last few years. Outstanding.

The Earth is Weeping: The Epic Story of the Indian Wars for the American West, by Peter Cozzens—An excellent narrative history of the Indian Wars that presents all sides fairly, good and bad, and avoids ideological axe-grinding. It’s also a thrilling read, which isn’t necessary in a work of history but is always appreciated—especially as rare as it’s become today.

The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won, by Victor Davis Hanson—An engrossing topical history of World War II. Hanson analyzes the war from a variety of angles—command, leadership, armor, siege warfare, naval power, air power, industrial production, and many more—rather than chronologically, and pulls on some fascinating threads in order to approach the war from a fresh angle. I had the chance to interview Hanson just before Thanksgiving and hope to post a link soon.

The Autobiography of Frederick Douglass—Justly regarded as a classic. Douglass’s spare, unadorned prose, his brutal narrative, and his unflinching moral lucidity should be a challenge to any reader.

Runners Up:

Summer of Blood: England’s First Revolution, by Dan Jones—An excellent short look at the Wat Tyler rebellion, a brutal peasant uprising from the south of England crushed by a young Richard II in 1381.

Communism: A History, by Richard Pipes—An excellent short history of Communism. Pipes does not back away from pointing out what should be obvious—the problem with Communism is, and always has been, Communism.

Children’s and Picture Books

Shooting at the Stars, written and illustrated by John Hendrix—A beautifully illustrated account of the 1914 Christmas truce, one of the few bright spots in the miserable opening act of history’s bloodiest century.

The Silver Chair, by C.S. Lewis—A classic that should need no introduction. For all the Lewis I’ve read, I still haven’t read all of the Chronicles of Narnia. I’m one step closer to fixing that. Puddleglum should rank as one of the great characters of twentieth century fiction.

The Tale of Troy, by Roger Lancelyn Green—Excellent distillation and adaptation of the myriad Trojan War legends. Several passages, for all their brevity in this form, are still quite moving. 

Twenty and Ten, by Claire Huchet Bishop—A favorite from fourth or fifth grade, the story of twenty French Catholic school children who come together to protect ten Jewish children from the Nazis during World War II. 

Pompeii: Buried Alive! by Edith Kunhardt Davis, illustrated by Michael Eagle—A very good account of the destruction of Pompeii suitable for young readers. What attracted me to this book was the illustrations by Michael Eagle, who also illustrated The Trojan Horse, one of my favorite books as a child.

Runners Up:

The Princess and the Goblin, by George MacDonald
The Shakespeare Stealer and Shakespeare’s Scribe, by Gary Blackwood
Found, by Sally Lloyd-Jones, illustrated by Jago
Medallion, by Dawn L. Watkins

Classics

How to Grow Old, by Cicero—A translation of De Senectute (On Old Age), one of a batch of philosophical treatises Cicero produced in his last two years of life. A very good meditation on aging—not just consolation as one grows older, but encouragement to embrace the changes and positives of age in accordance with the Stoic principles of Reason and Nature. Excellent.

The Saga of the Volsungs, translated by Jackson Crawford—An excellent new translation of one of the great pieces of Norse literature, the source of most of our stories about Sigurd, the dragon-slayer, and his violent family. This edition includes a sequel of sorts, The Saga of Ragnar Lothbrok, which I had never read before. If you haven’t subscribe to Crawford’s excellent YouTube channel and follow him on Twitter. He’s one of the best academic social media presences out there.

Jason and the Argonauts, by Apollonius of Rhodes—A fun adventure from the Hellenistic Age, combining subversion of literary convention with real excitement and pathos. It’s also short compared to something like the Iliad, so if you’re trying to read some classics but you’re on a tight schedule, check it out.

Beowulf, translated by Stephen Mitchell—A good new translation of one of my favorite books. I still prefer those of Seamus Heaney or Michael Alexander, but this is a solid new one and was good excuse for me to reread it over Christmas.

The Aeneid, by Virgil, translated by David Ferry—My second cheat of this list. I got this acclaimed new translation with my Christmas money and have been enjoying it since. It’s been better than a decade since I read the Aeneid, and that’s too long. This coincided with my grandfather’s passing at the age of ninety, and so fathers, leadership, and honor have been on my mind. Virgil is excellent food for the soul under those conditions.

* * * * *

I planned to cover a few books I reread this year, but this piece is quite long enough already.

I’d be remiss if I let this opportunity pass to plug a book I read and reread several times this year as I prepared it for publication—Dark Full of Enemies. Please do check it out if you’re interested, and let me know if you do. I hope it’ll be an entertaining and thought-provoking adventure for you.

I’m looking forward to the new year, to new projects of my own, and to new books to discover and read. I hope you’ve all had a merry Christmas and that you have a happy new year!