The Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War

I haven't gotten to the part of this book where he talks about the far East yet so I can't speak to that, but the first half, which focuses, obviously, on Germany and Russia is truly remarkable. What Andrew Roberts understands that I have not found in any other history of WWII (and I've read more than my share, having been obsessed since childhood, and even more obsessed since learning Russian) is the paradox at the center of the conflict. As he says:

At the heart of the Second World War lies a giant and abiding paradox: although the western war was fought in defense of civilization and democracy, and although it needed to be fought and had to be won, the chief victor was a dictator who was as psychologically warped and capable of evil as Adolf Hitler himself. (169)

Yalta Conference: Churchill, Roosevelt, Stalin

If you study Russia and dig beneath the standard heroic narratives of how the Russians won WWII, this is very much what you find. The West couldn't have won the war without Stalin, but Stalin used the war as yet another excuse to more or less exterminate millions of his people--from those he starved in the countryside, to those who became essentially "interchangeable parts" in the Russian war machine. Roberts is clear on this: the Russians were more effective than the Germans not because they were better-trained or better-equipped but because there were so goddamn many of them--when one died there was always another one waiting to replace him. (While reading this I couldn't help drawing parallels to China today.) Moreover, the Russians were commanded not only to fight to the death, regardless of the circumstances, they also knew that their families' lives depended on their doing so. Deserters would not have a family to return to, for the NKVD (precursor of the KGB) murdered the families of deserters without compunction.

Roberts also has an important insight into Hitler's nature. It is clear that in his mind Hitler was not smart (certainly not as smart as he thought he was)--he made unforgivable military miscalculations that potentially cost him the entire war--but merely a charismatic leader and ideologue who compelled people to follow him though drama, manipulation, and fear. Moreover, the war that he sought, and the war that he got, "was the world's first wholly politically ideological war . . . [and] that was the primary reason why the Nazis lost it." (5) If Hitler had waged a war based on reason, rather than one based on ideology (I'm not suggesting he could have been reasonable, just that he could have followed a reasonable military trajectory), he wouldn't have been so convinced of the subhuman nature of the Slavic races or the ease with which they could be conquered and exterminated, and he might have thought twice about opening a war on two fronts simultaneously, one of which had proved too vast and too cold for would-be conquerors going back to Napoleon. Roberts says:

Hitler was also impelled to invade Russia by each of the three major strands in his political credo. As Ian Kershaw points out, the Fuhrer had 'a small number of basic, unchanging ideas that provided his inner driving-force.' Hitler's self-reinforcing Weltanshauung (world-view) was based on the need for Germany to dominate Europe, win Lebensraum for herself and come to a final reckoning with the Jews. These views never altered or moderated, and stayed central to his thinking from the 1920s to his death two decades later. All three could be achieved by an invasion of Russia, and none could be achieved without one. (124)

Sometime this summer I  found myself in an argument--happily, I forget why--with someone who was trying to tell me that the Germans only knew what Hitler intended to do "after the fact." I remember suggesting that one need only read Mein Kampf to have known exactly what he was up to. Roberts supports my point. Again and again he explains how Hitler's ideologies and plans were established in the '20s and remained unchanged, even when militarily they did not serve his purpose. This is the very reason he was as dangerous as he was, but it is also, ironically, the reason why he could be defeated. One shudders to think what could have happened had he not allowed his grotesque ideology to influence, and weaken, his military strategy.

Traveler of the Century

This novel by Andres Neuman is so good that I've put off reading the last five pages for a month. The premise is simple: a traveler (Hans) comes upon a mysterious German town where the streets seem to change their layout and direction every day--the kind of city were "the night barked and meowed" (11). He befriends an organ grinder and his dog, Franz, who live in a cave and sponsor a kind of low-brow salon in which revolution and social justice are the main topics of conversation. He also befriends a young girl, Sophie, soon to be married to a man she does not love, who hosts a high-brow literary and cultural salon, where many of the same topics are discussed from a very different point of view.

Because it is written as a 19th Century novel, I am more or less prepared to forgive Neuman the indulgence of calling his main character Sophie (Sophia = wisdom in Greek). What is particularly wonderful about the novel is that although it reads like a 19th Century novel, Neuman does not stint in his descriptions of the passionate sexual relationship that develops between Hans and Sophie, which is quite beautiful. Consider:

"He thought they shouldn't be doing this and he didn't care. He stopped thinking in a flash, and Sophie dragged him with her. Hans groped in the air, lost control, and found her breasts. They both rolled downhill together" (340). 

Their sexual relationship is premised on a mutual interest in the translation of European literature, and they use sex to heighten the intensity of their translations, and their translations to heighten the intensity of their sex. 

And then there are some lines that are simply too good for words, as wen Hans asks Sophie if something is wrong, and she replies, "No . . . I don't know if I just had an orgasm or a premonition," which has to be one of the best lines in all of modern literature (496). 

In short this is the book that lovers of the 19th Century novel have been waiting for. Ponderous discussions of revolution, history, philosophy, and literature paired with descriptions of a love affair that makes Emma Bovary's fantasy life seem tame. Truly, I am in love with this book. 

In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler's Berlin

Unless you're my friend Katie and you're writing a PhD on German history, you probably don't think that much about Germany in the '30s. I mean, we all vaguely understand that that was when Hitler really came into power, even if America didn't see his rise as a problem until...well, until he threatened our oil supply in the Middle East, actually, but there's probably a better book about that particular issue.

The shocking thing about this book is that it chronicles year after year of Americans--not just everyday Americans, but Americans up to and including the President--fighting to remain isolationist even in the face of what is, in retrospect, an enormous global threat.

I was sort of reading this book at the same time as a new, updated history of WWII, and I was constantly asking myself, did we really not see it or did we just not give a shit?

In truth, I think it was more the latter than the former. As Larson's book describes it, diplomats from everywhere imaginable were partying the nights away in Berlin as the situation became more and more desperate for the country's Jewish population. William E. Dodd, the ambassador in this book, started out very naive and enamored of Germany and the German government but slowly came to see the terror that was developing.

Even more interesting, though, is his daughter Martha, who sleeps with almost everyone and has long-term affairs with Rudolph Diels, the first chief of Hitler's Gestapo, and, later, a KGB agent. I pause upon writing that. Yes. She had an affair with the first chief of Hitler's Gestapo. How is that possible, you ask? What can I say? Perhaps she truly didn't get it. Perhaps the word "Gestapo" did not have the same chilling ring it does today. Perhaps she couldn't resist a man in a uniform? An important lesson nonetheless and one we could all take to heart: one day you're sleeping with the chief of the Gestapo (no biggie) and the next YOU'RE SLEEPING WITH THE CHIEF OF THE GESTAPO!!! Oh, shit.

We Need to Talk About Kevin

Kevin with his bow and arrows, from the film

What do you do as a parent when you know your child is a sociopath? Worse, what if only you know it because he has your spouse or partner snowed? This is the question that drives Lionel Shriver's We Need to Talk About Kevin. A film version came out last year. It's okay, but it focuses more on the question of how you respond after the world learns your child is a sociopath then it does the question of what one does when you're the only one who knows, so I'd strongly recommend the book, or at least the book as a prequel to the film.

Eva is a travel agent, author of a series of books even rougher than the Rough Guide. For her, pregnancy means settling down once and for all, something she is not necessarily ready to do. A significant difference between Shriver's book and the film version of this story, is that the book suggests that Eva's ambivalence about her pregnancy with Kevin is merely a more intense version of an ambivalence experienced by almost every woman, even though most don't admit it, whereas the film depicts her ambivalence as a sign of not wanting a child. But really, what woman doesn't experience the tiniest degree of ambivalence during her first, life-changing pregnancy, no matter how much she wants it? Obviously I can't speak from experience, but I think you'd have to be crazy not to be just a little bit terrified. (But maybe that's just because I'm terrified of being responsible for any creature needier than a cat.)

Eva tries to love Kevin, but he makes it nearly impossible. Lots of babies cry all the time, but he cries to manipulate and antagonize her. She stays at home with him and he cries all day, but when her husband Franklin comes home, Kevin quiets as soon as his father bounces him around a couple of times. As a toddler, he refuses to play. And as a pre-schooler, he seems to learn things on his own almost to spite Eva. He refuses to let her teach him his letters and numbers, then one day shows her with great pride that he has figured out how to read and do math. He insists on wearing diapers well into elementary school, not because he doesn't know how to toilet himself, but because he simply refuses to do so. As a child he hates everything. He has no friends, no interests.

In what is possibly the least responsible parenting decision ever, Eva and Franklin decide to have another child, who turns out to be a perfect little girl. This time Eva experiences all those warm and fuzzy feelings of motherhood, much to Kevin and Franklin's dismay. Naturally, Kevin abuses his sister terribly. She is scared of almost everything, and he takes advantage. He shoves her beloved pet down the garbage disposal, and the first time he's allowed to babysit he pours lye in her eye, leading her to lose it, then accepts all the credit Franklin gives him for so thoughtfully calling 911. Eva knows he's guilty. She's always known it. But she can't prove it, and the little girl is too terrified to rat out the brother who she no doubt thinks will kill her.

In what is possibly the second least responsible parenting decision ever, Eva and Franklin allow Kevin to take up archery. Growing up somewhere were a lot of people took their kids hunting, I've always wondered how they justified taking their screwed up kids off into the woods and teaching them to use weapons. I wondered that even more while reading this book.

In truth, the only "happy" moment in this book--and I mean that very cynically--is the moment when Franklin realizes that Kevin is indeed the sociopath Eva has been warning him of all along--a moment that comes about five seconds before he dies of an arrow through the head. Kevin's sister dies, too, pinned to a target by four arrows. Then he goes to school, locks all his enemies into the gym with some very sophisticated locks, and shoots them one by one.

Possibly the most telling moment in the entire narrative comes when Eva hears that there has been a shooting at the high school. She knows who her son is at heart, but when it comes down to it, she doesn't fear him, she fears for him. She worries that Kevin has been shot, not that he was the shooter.

In the end, she's his mom after all. She stays in their suburb and waits for his release. She rents a house with a bedroom intended for him. These are not acts that I can pretend to understand. All I know is that in the end, she proves Franklin wrong: even after Kevin has shown the whole world who he really is--perhaps especially after he has done so--she wants to be his mother.

Fire in the Ashes: Twenty-Five Years Among the Poorest Children in America

Jonathan Kozol has been writing about America's poorest children for over twenty-five years. I'm pretty sure I've been reading his books for almost twenty. As a child myself, his books showed me a world utterly different than my profoundly rural environment--a world I knew I needed to be part of, in one way or another. More so, his books taught me that "bearing witness" to injustice could itself be a form of social action. I'm glad to say, however, that in twenty-five years he has gone from bearing witness to becoming an educational advocate and tireless fundraiser for a new generation of children. He and Martha Overall, the minister with whom he works, have established a fund to address the needs of the children in the South Bronx community he has been profiling for so long, whether those needs are school supplies, a winter coat, or private school tuition.

What frustrates me to no end, though (and what I imagine frustrates him) is that the children they help remain the exception to the rule. They're the kids who stand out in a crowd. I'm reminded of the child who--it turns out this is not his real name, but I know him from Amazing Grace as "Anthony," so I'll stick with that--caught Kozol's attention because as a young adolescent he had befriended a local poet, liked to read Poe, and was writing his first novel. Kozol and Martha Overall managed to enroll Anthony in an excellent private school. Anthony was about two or three years younger than I, and we actually shared a strange connection in that the year I was a senior in college, he applied as a freshman, complete with a letter of recommendation from Kozol and a copy of Amazing Grace with the relevant chapters highlighted. Anthony's application galvanized the admissions office. The Director was convinced that a student with his background could not adapt to our rural environment and that his writing skills were inadequate for him to succeed at our writing-intensive school. The students on the Admissions Committee were adamant that Anthony should be given a chance. Maybe we were wrong. Maybe we would have been setting him up for failure, as the Director predicted. There's no way to know.

In reading Fire in the Ashes I was thrilled to learn that "Anthony," now referred to by his real name, had attended a different college, graduated in four years, and was on his way to becoming a teacher or social worker. But as Kozol readily acknowledges, kids like Anthony are the exception, and they will remain so until there is systemic change in how our nation funds education. Kozol understands what others don't, which is that while individual states may decide that the disparate funding of education is unconstitutional (even if they can't figure out how to fix the problem), the Supreme Court ruled in Rodriguez that funding schemes based on property values are just fine, provided they don't lead to intentional discrimination. Absent a new case before the Supreme Court that questions the ruling of Rodriguez, possibly on the grounds that the way we fund education has led to de facto segregation and a new version of separate and unequal, there will be no systemic change, and 99 kids out of 100 will not be as lucky as Anthony.

Most of the stories in Fire in the Ashes are success stories, as if fitting, since these are the kids in whose lives fate intervened. But some are not. There are also accidents, suicides, drug addiction, failure. I'm left with the feeling that Kozol is more or less pointing out the gross inadequacy of his project. I picked these kids out and intervened in their lives, he seems to be saying, and not all of them succeeded. What happened to the 99 out of 100 I was unable to help?

Every Love Story is a Ghost Story

David Foster Wallace, looking pensive

Every Love Story is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace by D.T. Max is a tremendously sad book, and not just because we know how it is going to end. We all know that writers struggle with self-confidence and motivation, but it seems hard to believe that anyone struggled more than David Foster Wallace. Even as he was writing Infinite Jest, possibly the defining book of my generation (if not, ironically, his) he was questioning every aspect of his project. I remember reading Infinite Jest--indeed, I think I wrote a blog on it--and wishing that he had provided a more satisfactory conclusion that told us what actually happened to his characters, but even at the time I understood that his intention was to make us uncomfortable and show us that we are as addicted to certain narrative conventions (beginning, middle, end) as his characters are to illicit substances or twelve-step programs or television.

It is terrifying to realize that an author this good suffered so much for his art. Or, in other words, he was a certifiable genius who published a pretty decent novel a year out of college and a magnum opus around my age. If he had it this hard, what chance for the rest of us?

I feel a particular affinity to Wallace because I remember watching his Charlie Rose interview and recognizing how incredibly uncomfortable he was with the spotlight and how unbearably painful it was to watch. Also, he is the only person I know to have stated flat out the dilemma between having to teach to earn a living, but being unable to write due to having to teach (although he was apparently an incredibly dedicated teacher, much more so than I). I also profoundly respect the candor with which he always discussed his mental illness, including his experiences with ECT, which I know only one other person (Martha Manning) to have written about publicly.

Max doesn't really attempt to analyze Wallace's work, and that's probably a good thing--a task better left to a cadre of graduate students--but his insights into Wallace himself are excellent. He understands that Wallace felt more or less like a freak his whole life, someone who simply couldn't fit it, did not play well with others. He also understand that Wallace, like many young recipients of the MacArthur Fellowship ("Genius Grant") was paralyzed by the need to live up to the honor. I think this happens more often than we know. Max is also very sensitive in describing Wallace's relationship (whether real or imagined) with author Mary Karr, recognizing that Wallace was forever trying to create his own family and that he was convinced that they belonged together, even if she wasn't.

The end of the biography is, of course, gut wrenching. We know all along how it will end, but that makes it no less horrifying when we see Wallace start lying to his love ones and realize that he's trying to buy himself time to kill himself. Unfortunately, no one understood Wallace's desperation until it was too late, and he hung himself, much, much, too young. I was at 57th Street Books in Hyde Park last week and on their front table there are new books by Eugenides and several other people of Wallace's era. But of course there's nothing new by him...just this biography, which is hardly the same thing.

The Rise and Fall of Anne Boleyn

Anne Boleyn

I've been watching The Tudors on Showtime since last summer, and at some point--possibly when Henry started having visions of his past wives in a kind of Dickensian Christmas Carol of a final episode--I started wondering about whether Showtime was giving me anything remotely historically accurate or if they were just making a really big deal about the sex lives of the Tudors. I posed this question to a Dean who is a British history buff, and he lent me The Rise and Fall of Anne Boleyn by Retha Warnicke. I don't believe it ever occurred to him that I'd actually read the book, at least not during the semester, but little does he know I've actually read a dozen books this semester, because I don't let school work get in the way of extracurricular reading.

Warnicke suggests that Anne was totally innocent of all the crimes of which she was accused--she was not a witch, and she did not seduce half the court, including her brother. Rather, Henry wanted her dead because she miscarried a male child, which would have reflected badly upon his masculinity, not to mention robbed him of the legitimate male heir he so desperately wanted. Henry was more than ready to move on to wife the third at this point, and he could not admit Anne's real crime, so he and his advisers conspired to frame Anne as a witch and seductress so that he would have a rock solid reason to execute her.

Further, the popular belief that Anne more or less brought about the the British Reformation seems to be largely false.Yes, Henry contrived to obtain a highly questionable divorce in order to marry her, and yes,  raised in the French court, she did have a penchant for reading the scriptures in both French and English translation, and she did keep abreast of developments on the Continent, but she hardly fomented any kind of religious uprising. (That was Cromwell, I think, but I'm waiting to borrow that biography.)

In short, this is a very practical and down to earth biography. Unfortunately, by humanizing Anne and more or less proving that her one crime was actually her miscarriage, Warnicke more or less robs her of her power. Had she been a witch or a seductress or a religious revolutionary then one could see her as dying for a cause and turn her into a kind of feminist icon. That she died for nothing more than bad luck certainly says a great deal about the status of women at the time, but it makes her much less of a heroine to emulate.