Current Reading: December 2023

First up with Auto Racing in the Shadow of the Great War, an almost race by race chronicle of how motor sport (we're talking about the real roots of "Indy" cars here) was conducted in the United States while Europe burned. Not the most exciting book, but there is really nothing else like it and I'm inclined to buy my own copy on that basis.

Finished a longer book and a shorter one. First up is The Telegraph in America, 1832-1920 (Johns Hopkins Studies in the History of Technology) by David Hochfelder. As the author notes, this book grew out of three long articles published separately with additional material added. Oddly, the book barely describes usage of the electric telegraph in America before the Civil War, and then just as oddly, instead of stopping at 1920, he continues the story all the way up to the early twenty-first century. Also, rather than being an overall history, the author focuses on several specific topics; the use of the telegraph in the Civil War, the use of the telegraph in journalism, its uses in the financial world, etc. While the individual topics are interesting and well described, someone looking for a general history of the telegraph will be disappointed.

My other book, the short one, was Car Hops and Curb Service: A History of American Drive-In Restaurants 1920-1960 by Jim Heimann. This is mostly a picture book but has enough text for a couple of hours of reading. It is a fun, nostalgic read for those of us old enough to remember drive-in restaurants or are lucky enough to still have one to visit.

Wrapped up Promiscuous Media, a monograph on the creation of a mass-media environment in 20th-century Japan. Interesting stuff, but there were times when I felt as though the author was stove-piping me by explicitly not dealing with the question of fascist mobilization in 1930s Japan, as opposed to concentrating on issues of cultural transmission (the unnecessarily academic writing style didn't help). It's like when my niece was talking about her MFA thesis in Graphic Arts, and her response to my question of whether she was writing a theory of marketing, or a theory of aesthetics, was basically "Yes."

Finished The Age of Wood: Come for the examination of wood as a factor of production in human history, stay for the discussion of better approaches to forest management, and the psychological value for humans about being in the surroundings of trees and wood.

I finished Early Latin America: A History of Colonial Spanish America and Brazil by James Lockhart and Stuart B. Schwartz. This is a textbook, the major part of the reading for the course I audited at Columbia University this semester, Latin American Civilization I: (Early Latin America, 16th-18th centuries), taught by an excellent lecturer, Catarina Pizzigoni. The book was first published in the 1980s, and is what we think of as a traditional history textbook: very dense and more than a little dry. But when considered with the course lectures and the supplemental readings we were assigned, Early Latin America provides a fairly comprehensive and, for me at least, quite illuminating look at the more than 300 years of Spanish and Portuguese colonial rule in Mexico and Central and South America. I wouldn't recommend this for leisure reading, but as a textbook for an interesting course with a terrific professor, it filled the bill just fine.

Completed a very interesting Heligoland: Britain, Germany, and the Struggle for the North Sea by Jan Rüger. For those who do not know (I didn't), Heligoland is a small island in the North Sea just off the north coast of Germany. The book starts off in 1807 with the British, who are on their way to attack (again) the Danish fleet in Copenhagen, seizing the island from Denmark. The book continues with a history of the island and its people through the nineteen century, when it was a colony (the smallest) of Great Britain, then transferred to Germany in 1890. A lot of other things happened to the island and its people after that time which is covered much better in the book than I can do here. Anyway, it is a fascinating history since while it is such a small place it has had an surprisingly large impact on British and German governments and their people. I highly recommend it.

From the library: Annapolis, City on the Severn: A History by Jane Wilson McWilliams (2011)
Narrative history of Maryland's capital from 1650 to modern day with archival images and photos throughout the book.
I visited the city a few months ago and enjoyed it.

Currently reading A Good Dusting: The Sudan Campaigns 1883-1899 by Henry Keown-Boyd. This is a very good overview look at the campaigns in the Sudan from the Hicks disaster to the final Omdurman campaign. While I've read a number of books that address more specific subjects within this time period, I've finding this book very good as it ties together the various actions. It also looks at the origin of and composition of the British led Egyptian army in detail which is quite interesting. And since the author is one of those great British story tellers, there are excellent anecdotes and glimpses into the personalities of the times and place. Highly recommended.

Finished Confederate Reckoning, an accounting of the fairy tales of the Southern planter class told themselves when they pushed for secession, and how their image of the world did not survive the meeting engagement with total war. McCurry's account of the social insurrection of the Confederate "soldiers' wives" seeking to hold their governments to what they saw as a social contract is particularly enlightening.

Gave up on Seceding from Secession: The Civil War, Politics, and the Creation of West Virginia. I thought it would be a more interesting story, how what is now West Virginia split from Virginia, how the President and Congress approved adding a state in what was possibly a violation of the Constitution, and finally the 1871 lawsuit that was decided by the Supreme Court. Unfortunately, as the introduction notes, the book was written by three lawyers and for some reason they decided that every proclamation, government act, speech, etc needed to be quoted in full. It was just too dull a read to finish.

Finished a short but fairly interesting The Secret History of RDX: The Super-Explosive that Helped Win World War II by Colin F. Baxter.

He's back after 2 years of keeping the medical profession in business and taking care of our grandson. Finished going through Maryland A Guide To The Old Line State which is part of the American Guide Series. I'm working my way through all of them alphabetically including Alaska and Hawaii.

Finished reading The Reign of James VI. Currently reading Caesar: A Biography by Christian Meier.

Over the long holiday weekend, I finished . . .

Two-Bit Culture: The Paperbacking of America by Kenneth C. Davis (who's better known for Don't Know Much About History and its many, many sequels). It's excellent as a business history of US paperback publishing from the eve of World War II to the early 1980s . . . less so as a cultural history of the paperback (in part due to the author's disdain for genre fiction and less-than-serious non-fiction).

and

Hollywood's High Noon: Moviemaking and Society Before Television, by Thomas Cripps, a "what it says on the label" history--again, focused on the American context--that runs from Edison in the late 1800s to the mid-1950s. Cripps does a better job than Davis (above) at balancing business history and cultural history, and if you're looking for an introduction to the history of movies and society in America (in the time period it covers), it's an excellent choice.

I'm currently working my way through Leviathan: The History of Whaling in America, which is (so far) living up to its billing, by Nathaniel Philbrick, as the best history of its subject in a generation. Since I'm actively taking notes on it for a writing project, it will probably be January before I'm done.

Knocked off Slaying the Dragon, a popular business history of "Tactical Studies Research" (aka TSR), the people who created the game "Dungeons & Dragons," how the game became a cultural touchstone, and the many business misadventures that ensued.

I finished The Massacre at El Mozote by Mark Danner. In December 1981, during the fierce civil war in El Salvador, members of an elite strike force of the Salvadoran Army arrived at the village of El Mazote in a mountainous section of the country mostly controlled by leftist rebel forces and proceeded to murder somewhere around 800 villagers: men, women and children in the most horrible ways imaginable. The point was to demonstrate to the surrounding areas that the consequences of supporting for the rebels could be dire, even though even the most cursory investigation of El Mazote would have shown the army leaders that these villagers were doing their best to have nothing to do with either the rebels or the government's armed forces. Cruelty and viciousness was the point.

New Yorker reporter Mark Danner does an excellent job of setting up the background of the atrocity, geopolitically and internally. And then, using survivor testimony as well as the testimony of those few soldiers who were willing to talk to Danner anonymously, he walks readers step by step and atrocity by atrocity through that horrible afternoon. Danner's subtitle for his book is "A Parable of the Cold War," and he does a very good job of setting up the pressure put on Congressmen, including Democrats who should have known better, not to cut funding and thus be responsible to "losing" El Salvador to Communism, especially coming so soon after the victory of the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. Although the term is never used in the book, "plausible deniability" was the dominant paradigm as far as the U.S. administration was concerned. Reports of the massacre, or of the horrifying number killed "could not be confirmed." Danner's writing is clear and concise, and his reporting (the book is an expanded version of his writing for the New Yorker) is excellent.

Finished an uninspiring Transportation and the American People by H. Roger Grant. Not bad especially if you don't really know much about the subject, but it is very much of an overview book with a lot of anecdotal material but not much hard analysis.

And with a few hours to kill I knocked off a slim volume, The Fringes of History: The Life and Times of Edward Stuart Wortley by Robert Franklin. It's a shame that this is such a slim volume as Edward Stuart Wortley was a soldier in the late Victorian era and in WW1 who was so often at such momentous events, although, as the title notes, sometimes at the fringes. He served as a Transport officer in the Second Anglo–Afghan War but saw no action. He missed the First Boer War (the Wikipedia article is in error about this), but was part of Wolseley's army that invaded Egypt after the Urabi uprising and fought at the Battle of Tel El Kebir. Later he was part of the Nile Expedition to relieve General Gordon and fought in the major actions of the Camel Column.

All this would have been noteworthy, but he also took part in the second Nile Campaign led by Lord Kitchener and was present at the Battle of Omdurman. He also saw action in the Second Boer War. He had a number of diplomatic and training assignments and then eventually led the first Territorial Army division to be sent to France during WW1. He commanded the division on the first day of the Battle of the Somme and was relieved from command for not providing proper leadership, a charge that has been dismissed by many historians who attribute the removal as being instigated by Haig as Stuart Wortley was a favorite of Haig's predecessor.

All of this would make an interesting story, but in addition Stuart Wortley was a friend of Edward VII who asked ESW to write him personally every week after his division was sent to France. He was also close to Kaiser Wilhelm II, who at one time stayed with Stuart Wortley and his family for three weeks and later invited ESW to help leak a letter from the Kaiser to the British people. Nellie Melba was a family friend as was Winston Churchill. All in all a fascinating individual.

Last non-fiction book of the year: Calculated Risk, written in the spirit that Gus Grissom was done wrong by Tom Wolfe in The Right Stuff. A pretty good book overall, and I can understand why it was published by Purdue (Grissom graduated from that school), but I have the feeling that Nebraska would have done a better job of editing.

I just closed out 2023 with The Miracle of Dunkirk by Walter Lord . . . a book I'd had for 40 years (and that followed me through countless moves) but never gotten around to reading. I'm glad both that I kept it and that I (finally) read it.

The evacuation of the British Expeditionary Force (and tens of thousands of French soldiers) from Dunkirk is one of the legendary events of World War II: a miracle of brilliant improvisation and stoic courage under constant enemy threat and in the face of constant setbacks. Lord provides ample evidence for that view, deploying his trademark style of detailed narrative derived from first-hand accounts by participants. He takes care, however, to avoid painting the men of Operation Dynamo as plaster saints, as exemplars of "Democracy at war," or as the living embodiment of some abstract national virtue. They're just people, flawed and imperfect, who manage nonetheless to collectively achieve greatness . . . and all the more heroic for that.

Lord also makes two enormously important points about Operation Dynamo, which have tended to get lost in the celebration of the collective heroism of the participants. The first is the degree to which chaos, random chance, and the "fog of war" shaped events at Dunkirk, fully justifying Lord's use of the word "miracle" in the title. The second is the extent to which Operation Dynamo was one of the war's great feats of logistics, and (when chaos and random chance disrupted the "best-laid plans" of Admiral Bertram Ramsay and his staff) of logistical improvisation at every level.

Highly, highly recommended to anyone who -- like me -- knows Dunkirk primarily from novels, films, and brief summaries in broad-brush narratives of the war.

Here are my last two for 2023. I finished Mississippi a guide to the Magnolia State a few days ago. The chapters on "White Folkways" and "Negro Folkways" are interesting. Don't forget they were written in 1938. I finished Minnesota A State Guide. Nothing exciting in the chapters on this one. Both are part of the American Guide Series.