Agatha Christie on historical perspective

Coincident to my recent posts about the “right side” of history and how our understanding of what happened in the past changes and, ideally, grows more thorough and accurate as time passes, here’s Agatha Christie in the short story “The Coming of Mr Quin,” which I’m reading in the collection Midwinter Murder: Fireside Tales from the Queen of Mystery.

Briefly, a New Year’s Eve party at a comfortable home is interrupted just after midnight by the arrival of a Mr Harley Quin, whose car has broken down. Quin says that he knew the house’s former owner, one Derek Capel, who unexpectedly killed himself a decade prior. Notice how Quin invites the partygoers to revisit what they know about the incident:

‘A very inexplicable business,’ said Mr Quin, slowly and deliberately, and he paused with the air of an actor who has just spoken an important cue.

‘You may well say inexplicable,’ burst in Conway. ‘The thing's a black mystery—always will be.’

‘I wonder,’ said Mr Quin, non-committally. ‘Yes, Sir Richard, you were saying?’

‘Astounding—that's what it was. Here's a man in the prime of life, gay, light-hearted, without a care in the world. Five or six old pals staying with him. Top of his spirits at dinner, full of plans for the future. And from the dinner table he goes straight upstairs to his room, takes a revolver from a drawer and shoots himself. Why? Nobody ever knew. Nobody ever will know.’

‘Isn’t that rather a sweeping statement, Sir Richard?’ asked Mr Quin, smiling.

Conway stared at him.

‘What d’you mean? I don't understand.’

‘A problem is not necessarily unsolvable because it has remained unsolved.’

‘Oh! Come, man, if nothing came out at the time, it's not likely to come out now—ten years afterwards?’

Mr Quin shook his head gently.

“The contemporary historian never writes such a true history as the historian of a later generation. It is a question of getting the true perspective, of seeing things in proportion.”

— Mr Quin

‘I disagree with you. The evidence of history is against you. The contemporary historian never writes such a true history as the historian of a later generation. It is a question of getting the true perspective, of seeing things in proportion. If you like to call it so, it is, like everything else, a question of relativity.’

Alex Portal leant forward, his face twitching painfully.

‘You are right, Mr Quin,’ he cried, ‘you are right. Time does not dispose of a question—it only presents it anew in a different guise.’

Evesham was smiling tolerantly.

‘Then you mean to say, Mr Quin, that if we were to hold, let us say, a Court of Inquiry tonight, into the circumstances of Derek Capel’s death, we are as likely to arrive at the truth as we should have been at the time?’

‘More likely, Mr Evesham. The personal equation has largely dropped out, and you will remember facts as facts without seeking to put your own interpretation upon them.’

Evesham frowned doubtfully.

‘One must have a starting point, of course,’ said Mr Quin in his quiet level voice. ‘A starting point is usually a theory. One of you must have a theory, I am sure. How about you, Sir Richard?’

Simple and tailored to the mystery genre, but not a bad explanation of how the greater perspective afforded by historical distance can lead to a more accurate understanding of important events. There are, certainly, parts of my own life I understand much better now than when I was an eyewitness living through them.

I’ve been trying to read more of Agatha Christie the last year or so after having made it to my late thirties with Murder on the Orient Express as my sole experience of her storytelling. My wife, on the other hand, has read a lot of Christie, and has done so over many years. But even she was unfamiliar with Christie’s Mr Quin, who is the subject of several short stories collected as The Mysterious Mr Quin. I’m enjoying him in this story so far—especially with this kind of sharp historical aside—and plan to check that out.

Sturgeon Wars

Last week some of the staff writers at National Review, of all places, had an amusing exchange of views on the current state of Star Wars. It began when one wrote of being “Star Wars-ed out.” Another seconded that feeling and drew an analogy with the Marvel movies: both are series that have decreased in quality as the suits behind them have produced more and more “content.” Yet another followed up specifically critiquing the trilogy produced by Disney while rightly reserving some small praise for Rogue One.

But the best and most incisive perspective came from Jeffrey Blehar, who with aggressive indifference toward everything since Return of the Jedi forty years ago, mildly suggested that not much of Star Wars is any good. Dissect and fuss over the prequel trilogy, the sequel trilogy, the Disney+ shows, and cartoon shows and novels and comics and video games however you want, none of it is as good as the original trilogy and most of it is terrible. In fact, the best thing to come of Star Wars since 1983 is Mr Plinkett.

I mostly agree (and wholeheartedly agree about Mr Plinkett), and that’s because I’m a big believer in Sturgeon’s Law. In its simplest formulation, Sturgeon’s Law states that:

“90% of everything is crap.”

For several years now I’ve been saying that Sturgeon’s Law applies just as much to Star Wars as to anything else, it’s just that Star Wars got its 10% of quality out of the way first. What they’ve been producing ever since is, well…

I have ideas about why this is, including but by no means limited to Disney’s desperately overvalued purchase of the rights to the series and—probably more importantly—its merchandising, executive mismanagement, ideological capture of the filmmakers, oversaturation (speaking of Marvel), and of course simple artistic failure. But there are three more fundamental problems that I’ve seen with Star Wars over the last couple decades.

One is that everyone forgot that Star Wars was lightning in a bottle. The original film didn’t emerge fully formed from George Lucas’s head like a nerd Athena, it was the product of a difficult production, a demanding shoot, and a host of other limitations. The many points of friction in the production required genuine creativity to solve, not least from a brilliant editor and one or two real creative geniuses like Ben Burtt and John Williams. But the very success of Star Wars meant that the circumstances that shaped the originals have not recurred. Everything since has been greased by money, money, money, and the synthetic smoothness of the prequel and sequel trilogies allowed bad or incomplete or incoherent story ideas to slide straight through into the finished films.

Second and relatedly, with one or two exceptions the fans and producers of Star Wars drifted into a category error regarding what kind of stories these are. Star Wars since Return of the Jedi has been treated like fantasy set in space. Mr Plinkett, among many others, has noted the ridiculous and gratuitous multiplication of planets, species, vehicles, and everything else since The Phantom Menace. But Star Wars wasn’t originally fantasy—it was a Boomer pastiche of westerns, Kurosawa samurai films, World War II movies, Flash Gordon serials, and a film school dweeb’s skimming of Joseph Campbell. As Star Wars quickly became the cultural remit of younger generations and more and more Star Wars “content” was churned out, those referents were lost to all except the buffs and nerds. The galaxy far, far away came to be treated as an infinitely expandable object of “world-building” when it is and always was an assemblage of spare parts.

I don’t mean that dismissively. Being made of spare parts is not necessarily a bad thing. The originals are greater than the sum of their parts, and it’s worth pointing out that the handful of new Star Wars material that tried to tap directly into some of what inspired Lucas—war movies about ill-fated missions in Rogue One, westerns in the first season of “The Mandalorian”—were good. Eventually ruined by committee-think, but good.

The final problem, which brings us back around to Sturgeon’s Law, is that the fans allowed it, even demanded it. Having had that 10%, they gobbled up that 90% we’ve been getting since and kept wanting more. I know plenty of people have complained about the storytelling, the filmmaking, the behind-the-scenes drama, the ideological drift of the Disney films, and everything else, but for every Mr Plinkett or Critical Drinker on YouTube there are a thousand people who are satisfied with anything as long as it has the Star Wars logo on it. From archetypal storytelling to lifestyle brand—that’s the real Skywalker saga.

This is by no means unique to Star Wars fans, as some trends among purported Tolkien fans have made clear in the last couple years. But if people want to enjoy their favorite things again they need to regain their suspicion of corporations as well as remember the difference between quantity and quality.

2023 in movies

After my apathy and complaints at the end of 2022, I was surprised to find myself eagerly looking forward to a few movies in 2023. I was only able to see a handful in theaters, but the quality of what I did see was reassuring enough that I’m no longer as bitterly pessimistic about the movies as I was the last time I wrote a list like this. And the hidden grace of missing several of the films I really wanted to see is that I have those to look forward to on home media in the months ahead.

2024, it’s your game to lose.

For the first time, owing to the slow changes of life, I’m dividing the movies I wanted to highlight into two major categories. The first section below will proceed as normal, with the handful of movies I most appreciated. But the second, new section will highlight the several children’s films I saw that are worth mentioning. Below that are the usual sections on older films I saw for the first time, a few movies ranging from entertaining but flawed to entertaining and bad, and the things I missed that I hope to see soon.

So, in no particular order, my three favorites of 2023:

Oppenheimer

Cillian Murphy as J Robert Oppenheimer in Oppenheimer

The best movie, artistically and dramatically, that I saw this year. Oppenheimer is a brilliantly structured and penetrating look at a complicated and self-deceiving man’s life that neither dumbs down the complicated world he lived in nor softens his destructive character flaws. Well-acted, beautifully shot, and technically brilliant in every way.

Full review here.

Mission: Impossible—Dead Reckoning, Part I

Archvillain, or mere lackey of an artificial intelligence? Esai Morales in Mission: Impossible—Dead Reckoning, Part I

If Oppenheimer was certainly the best movie as a movie I saw this year, Mission: Impossible—Dead Reckoning, Part I was the one I most enjoyed. Despite some structural hiccups in the first act, this Mission: Impossible had plenty of the inventive action set pieces and great stunts I’ve enjoyed in the last several films of the series, plus some unexpectedly moving character developments and an eerie and thought-provoking antagonist that—not who—created a sense not only of danger but of paranoia throughout.

Apparently Part II has been delayed until the summer of 2025. I’m not sure that long of a gap will do the second half any favors and I wish Paramount would go ahead with it this year, whatever it takes. (An impossible mission?) Nevertheless, looking forward to Part II whenever it comes out.

Full review here.

The Lost King

Being personally interested in the story of Richard III, his posthumous reputation, and the fate of his mortal remains, I was excited to see this movie’s trailer but had to wait a while to catch it on home video here in the US. It was worth the wait, though. The Lost King is a nicely written small drama, with just enough humor and wit to lighten a story that could potentially get grim, whether because of what happened to Richard or because of its main character’s physical and emotional struggles. It’s a well-acted and nicely structured movie of modest ambitions, the kind the big studios don’t make enough of any more.

But, as it happens, it might be a little too nicely structured. As I touched on in my review, The Lost King is a good movie but it is very much a movie version of the events it retells, with the sprawling, complicated true story shortened, tenderized and stuffed into a more Hollywood-shaped mold, and with several real people vilified to provide extra drama and an easy antagonist. A questionable aspect of a good movie. This is a film worth watching, and these questions worth reflecting on.

Full review here.

For the kids

A few years ago I included Paw Patrol: The Movie in one of these year-in-review posts with this introduction: “You know what? I’m thirty-seven years old. I have three kids between the ages of two and six. So yes, I saw this. And I mostly liked it.” Two years and two more kids later I’ve decided to include a kids’ own section here, especially since I saw several genuinely good kids’ movies in 2023. In descending order of enjoyment, they are:

The Super Mario Brothers Movie—A genuinely fun and funny adventure with a refreshingly straightforward story. It’s also really well designed, evoking the video game characters and their world perfectly, and beautifully animated. Both my kids and I greatly enjoyed this and we have rewatched it several times since it came out on Blu-ray. I’ve seen a few people criticize Mario for the simplicity of its plot but I think Hollywood would be better advised to copy it by revisiting basic storytelling techniques.

Puss in Boots: The Last Wish—A fun animated action comedy with great voice work, especially by Antonio Banderas as Puss and John Mulaney as the brilliant villain Big Jack Horner, and just enough thematic depth—including reflections on aging, fear, the meaning of courage, and the inevitability of death—to make the film both fun and meaningful for adults.

Paw Patrol: The Mighty Movie—A good sequel to the first film, this time focusing on Skye and her tragic backstory (everybody gets a tragic backstory nowadays) and following the team as they develop super powers and use them to save Adventure City. I’ll also add that the filmmakers did a lot to make Liberty more tolerable. Parents familiar with the show will probably wonder, like me, if we have a mer-pup movie in our future.

So-so, ho-hum, and egad!

I try to keep these posts positive, but sometimes there are movies I feel so ambivalently about or that were so strangely entertaining despite their massive flaws that I feel like they’re worthy of comment. Last year I had a category of “near misses,” movies that I wanted to like more than I could, so here are a few that, while not quite good enough to be near misses, I still found entertaining. In descending order of how much I liked them:

Guy Ritchie’s The Covenant—A well-intentioned action movie about a Special Forces operator who owes his life to his Afghan interpreter and, when the US government shockingly fails to honor its pledge to relocate the interpreter and his family, goes rogue, traveling to Afghanistan alone to rescue the interpreter from the Taliban. Oddly paced, with some obvious budgetary limitations, dodgy digital effects, and a climactic action scene that goes way over the top, this movie only works because of the excellent performances from Jake Gyllenhaal and Dar Salim. While The Covenant wants to be a stunning action drama, the best scenes in the film are easily the moments of subtle bonding between the two stars. This is an important topic and two good performances in search of a better movie.

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny—A creaky, miscalculated sendoff for Indy that does manage to be entertaining, but only just, and thanks mostly to lonely flashes of the old Indiana Jones mystery and fun. The climactic twist, the most daring and off-the-wall part of the film, was great fun but too little, too late. Full review from the summer here.

Napoleon—Speaking of miscalculation, here’s a whopper of a “historical” film. Bad history, odd writing choices, strange performances that only grow stranger upon reflection, and a clunky, half-baked structure that galumphs from event to event, it was nevertheless well made and entertaining, but not necessarily for the right reasons. Full review here.

New to me

Harry Andrews, Anthony Quayle, Sylvia Syms, and John Mills in Ice Cold in Alex

To return to the purely positive and praiseworthy, here are the best of the older movies that, for whatever reason, I only watched for the first time this year. I’ve included links to my full reviews for the three I wrote about earlier this year. In chronological order:

The Great Locomotive Chase (1956)—A classic Disney adventure set during the Civil War and partially shot in my hometown. Great scenery and stunts and a moving conclusion. I’m cheating a bit here since I saw this film once as a boy, but it had been long enough since then that the chance to watch it again felt like discovering a new movie. Full review here.

Ice Cold in Alex (1958)—A suspenseful small-scale war drama. As the British army is cut off and surrounded by the German Afrika Korps in Tobruk, a handful of units manage to escape and strike east toward Egypt. Among these is a single ambulance driven by Captain Anson (John Mills), a wreck of a man and a barely functional drunk since his escape from German captivity several months before. With him are two nurses and his sergeant major, and they pick up a stranded South African officer (Anthony Quayle) just as the German net closes around the city. This begins an arduous quest to cross the desert and reach Alexandria undetected, a quest marked by ambushes, minefields, mechanical failures, the harsh vicissitudes of the desert, and the growing suspicion that one member of the party may be a spy. Well-acted by a great cast and marked throughout by brilliant desert landscapes, by the time Anson’s crew reaches safety you feel just as parched, weary, and sand-begrimed as they do.

Pork Chop Hill (1959)—A no-nonsense, no-frills, unromantic war movie with an excellent cast and technically accomplished filmmaking. That it tells a story from the Korean War, making it among the rarest of war movie species, also makes it worth watching. Full review here.

City Slickers (1991)—I’ve heard about this movie all my life, and my wife and I finally borrowed it from the library. It’s a hoot, with good comic performances by Billy Crystal, Bruno Kirby, and Daniel Stern, all of whom play well off the intimidatingly manly and tough Jack Palance, and with a poignant vein of darkness running throughout.

The King’s Choice (2016)—The story of Norway’s King Haakon VII during the first few days of the German invasion of April 1940. A powerful study, both well acted and well made, of a character and a kingdom in crisis. Full review here.

What I missed in 2023

Here are movies that either piqued my interest or that I tried and failed to catch this year (these latter clustering in the fall and winter), listed in roughly descending order of personal interest and/or enthusiasm:

• Godzilla Minus One

• Ferrari

• Killers of the Flower Moon

• The Boys in the Boat

• The Zone of Interest

• Dream Scenario

• Butcher’s Crossing

• Asteroid City

• Sound of Freedom

Here’s to watching at least some of these in 2024!

Looking ahead

In no particular order, the handful of forthcoming films I’m most interested in seeing this year:

• ISS—American and Russian astronauts aboard the International Space Station are stranded when their respective governments go to (nuclear?) war. A really great hook for a sci-fi thriller.

• Wildcat—Ethan Hawke’s indie drama about Flannery O’Connor. This debuted last year at a film festival but I’m hoping for it to either get wider distribution or become available on home media this year.

• Dune: Part Two—I’m not a huge fan of Herbert’s novel but was impressed by Denis Villeneuve’s film adaptation a couple years ago. Been looking forward to the second half.

• Joker: Folie à Deux—Todd Phillips and Joaquin Phoenix made a surprisingly good drama out of a Joker origin story and I’m curious to see where they go in the sequel.

• Civil War—Frankly, this looks idiotic and predictable (Menacing Southerner? Check), but you know I’ll probably watch it out of curiosity.

• Nosferatu—Robert Eggers remaking a silent-era vampire movie? I’ll be there.

Conclusion

2023 was a surprisingly good year for movies, even without the many films I missed factored in. I’d heartily recommend any of those listed above, especially the older ones under “New to me.” If, like me, you struggle with weariness of the new, shiny, loud, and digitally assisted, check out one of those classics for a refreshing taste of another world and lost forms of storytelling. And in the meantime, here’s hoping for at least a few more good films this year.

Thanks as always for reading!

2023 in books

This turned out to be big year for our family. We welcomed twins in the late summer and between that, some travel earlier in the year when my wife was still mobile, and a lot of extra work in the fall, things have only just begun to slow down. Despite it all, there was plenty of good reading to be had, so without further ado, here are my favorites of 2023 in my two usual broad categories:

Favorite fiction of the year

This was an unusually strong year for my fiction reading, especially in the latter half, when I had little time and my concentration was strained. I’d recommend most of the novels I read this year but here, in no particular order, are my dozen favorites, with one singled out—after great difficulty choosing—as my favorite of the year:

The Midwich Cuckoos, by John Wyndham—A genuinely creepy slow-burn thriller in which a small English village, not noteworthy for much of anything, plays host to a brood of strange, emotionless, hive-minded children who were all mysteriously conceived on the same night. As the children grow—at twice the rate of normal children, by the way—and they manifest powers of mind-control, the people of Midwich are forced to consider what kind of threat the children pose to the village and the rest of the world. Vividly imagined and populated with interesting characters, this is the kind of sci-fi I think I most enjoy. For more Wyndham, see below.

With a Mind to Kill, by Anthony Horowitz—The last and most Ian Fleming-like of Horowitz’s three James Bond novels, this novel picks up threads from Fleming’s final two, You Only Live Twice and The Man with the Golden Gun, and develops them into a compelling new story. Having faked M’s assassination, Bond returns to the Soviet Union in a bid to infiltrate and destroy the Russian network that captured, tortured, and attempted to brainwash him. Briskly paced, atmospheric, and suspenseful, with the interesting twist of Bond having to pretend to be the thing he most hates.

The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea, by Yukio Mishima—A story of romance and disillusionment that is both hauntingly beautiful and disturbing. When an officer in Japan’s merchant marine service meets a young widow with an adolescent son, they fall for each other within a few days. The boy is smitten with the officer, too, admiring him as a man of action, adventure, and lofty independence—until the officer decides to give up a life at sea in favor of settling down and raising a family. When the boy relates his disappointment to the savage, cruel gang of schoolboys to which he belongs, they plot to bring the officer down. Briefly told in sensuously dreamlike prose, with a poignant love story and creepy parallel plot involving the boy, this novel totally absorbed me. I read it in a day, a rare feat for me these days.

The Inheritors, by William Golding—A richly written, moving, bleak, and wholly engrossing novel in which a small family group of Neanderthals have a disastrous run-in with a band of Homo sapiens. Full review from late spring here.

Rogue Male, by Geoffrey Household—A tense, relentlessly paced thriller set in interwar Europe. When an English hunter sets himself the challenge of stalking and lining up a shot on an unnamed central European dictator—just to see if he can—he is caught, tortured by the secret police, and left for dead. Despite his injuries he manages to escape, but must elude pursuit by a dogged agent of the (again, unnamed) fascist regime, who trails him all the way to southern England. Relentless pacing, a mood of palpable paranoia, the irony of a claustrophobic final standoff in the idyllic English countryside, and the resourcefulness and toughness of the hero keep this book moving from beginning to end. One of my favorite reads from the spring.

The Napoleon of Notting Hill, by GK Chesterton—An early Chesterton novel set in the near future, when England is ruled by a king selected at random. The current ruler, Auberon Quin, decides to make a joke of the institution by reintroducing heraldry, elaborate court etiquette, and the traditional subinfeudated privileges and freedoms of London’s separate neighborhoods. It’s all a lark to him until he meets a true believer, a young man named Adam Wayne, who determines to fight for his neighborhood and its people against the plans of the elite. A high-flying hoot, as much of Chesterton’s fiction tends to be, but deeply moving and meaningful.

Death Comes as the End, by Agatha Christie—One doesn’t often associate the name Agatha Christie with historical fiction, and yet here’s an excellent, evocative mystery set in the country house of an ancient Egyptian mortuary priest. Christie constructs a realistic family drama involving the remarriage of the patriarch to a haughty young concubine who threatens the priest’s grown children with disinheritance. When she winds up dead, there is talk of curses, vengeful ghosts, and murder. The priest’s young widowed daughter and his elderly mother, sensing something is amiss, work together to determine who may be responsible for the disasters visiting their home. I’d guess this is one of Christie’s lesser-known books, but it’s now one of my favorites of hers.

On the Marble Cliffs, by Ernst Jünger—An eerie and dreamlike fantasy of a peaceful seaside community thrust into bloodshed and destruction by the Head Forester, a violent warlord from the northern forests. Though Jünger insisted that On the Marble Cliffs, which was published as Germany invaded Poland in 1939, was not an allegory of Hitler and the Third Reich, it is certainly applicable to that situation—and to many others in which civilization declines into a scientistic and neopagan barbarism.

Declare, by Tim Powers—A genuinely one-of-a-kind novel: part espionage thriller in the mold of John le Carré, part cosmic horror, part straight historical fiction, part supernatural fantasy, this novel begins with Andrew Hale, an English sleeper agent, being unexpectedly reactivated as part of Operation Declare. He must flee immediately and seek instructions. As Hale returns to regions of the world he hasn’t seen in years and reflects on his career as a spy in Nazi-occupied Paris and the Berlin and the Middle East of the early Cold War, the reader gradually learns his mysterious history and that of the intelligence network of which he has been a part since childhood. The reader also gets to know Kim Philby, a real-life double agent who defected to the Soviets and who continuously and ominously reappears at crucial moments in Hale’s story. I read this on the strong recommendation of several trusted friends and loved it, though I made the fateful decision to begin reading shortly after the arrival of our twins in the late summer. The result was that it took me far longer to read Declare than it should have, and I do feel like I missed some of its cumulative effect. No problem, though—this is clearly worth a reread. It’s that rich.

The Twilight World, by Werner Herzog—An arresting short fictional portrait of Hiroo Onoda, a Japanese officer who carried on a guerrilla campaign for nearly thirty years after the end of the Second World War. Full review from late summer here.

Berlin Game, by Len Deighton—A close contender for my favorite read of the year, this is the first novel in Deighton’s Game, Set, Match trilogy, which follows British intelligence agent Bernard Samson as he tries both to help a valuable but endangered asset escape East Berlin and, when that is complicated by the discovery of a double agent in Samson’s own organization, to root out the traitor, whom he may be closer to than he’d like to think. Moody, atmospheric, suspenseful, and witty. Very much looking forward to Mexico Set and London Match.

Best of the year:

The Day of the Triffids, by John Wyndham

A man wakes up in a hospital to discover that the world has ended while he was unconscious. I’ve seen at least two zombie versions of this scene—both 28 Days Later and “The Walking Dead” begin this way—but this device originated in the early 1950s in John Wyndham’s post-apocalyptic survival story The Day of the Triffids.

Two events give rise to the plot of this novel: first, a massive meteor shower, visible worldwide, that blinds everyone who looks at it and, years earlier, the accidental discovery of triffids, walking carnivorous plants apparently developed in a lab (ahem) in Soviet Russia. Having been dispersed all over the world, scientists find uses for the oils produced by triffids and factory farms arise to cultivate them. Others acquire triffids as exotic garden specimens and remove their lethal stingers for safety. Gradually, triffids become part of the landscape, and Bill Masen, a biologist and the novel’s narrator, is partly responsible for their proliferation. Then the meteor shower comes.

Masen, heavily bandaged as he recovers from eye surgery, is one of a handful of people not to be blinded by the meteor shower, and he emerges from the hospital to find London almost silent and filled with the groping, helpless blind. But what begins merely as a grim survival story takes a turn into horror when the triffids appear, preying on the helpless people roaming the streets.

The rest of the novel follows Masen in his attempts to survive and to join others for greater protection. Different groups pursue different survival strategies—the blindness and the triffids offer many a chance to test out their ideal societies—and Masen bounces from one to the other. And all the while, the triffids are learning.

The Day of the Triffids is low-key sci-fi and its emphasis lies squarely on both the practical considerations of escaping and protecting oneself and one’s group from the triffids and on the ethical dilemmas such a catastrophe would produce. Masen witnesses the organization of many—one based on the guidance of academic experts, another based on charity and altruism, and another, the most menacing, based on autocratic paramilitary rule—as well as their failures. There’s an element of social commentary there, but it’s realistically done, not preachy, and also not the point. The point is the nightmare scenario created by the rapidly proliferating triffids and the question of how to survive, find love, and start over in a world ruled by sentient plants.

The Day of the Triffids totally absorbed me and I read it in just a few days. It’s a brilliantly written, vividly imagined, and engaging adventure that also manages to have satisfying depth.

After reading The Day of the Triffids I moved on quickly to Wyndham’s The Midwich Cuckoos (see above) and I have The Chrysalids and The Kraken Wakes on standby for this year. Wyndham’s fiction is my favorite discovery in quite some time and I look forward to reading these in 2024. If you check any of these out, make it The Day of the Triffids, but definitely seek some of Wyndham’s work out.

Favorite non-fiction

If 2023 was a good year for fiction my non-fiction and history reading flagged somewhat, especially after the twins were born (I read only three of the books below after that point). Nevertheless, there were some clear highlights, and what follows, in no particular order, are my thirteen favorites—a baker’s dozen this time, with one favorite of the year:

Beowulf: Translation and Commentary, trans. by Tom Shippey, Leonard Neidorf, Ed.—A readable new translation of Beowulf by a master scholar of early medieval Germanic literature with a detailed and insightful commentary on everything from word choice and textual problems to characterization and theme. An ideal text for students who want to dig deeper into this great poem.

Crassus: The First Tycoon, by Paul Stothard—A very good short biography from Yale UP’s new Ancient Lives series. Crassus is a difficult figure to understand because he is simultaneously involved in seemingly everything going on in the late Republic and is poorly attested in our surviving sources. Even Plutarch focuses primarily on Crassus’s failed campaign against Parthia. A full portrait is probably impossible to reconstruct, but Stothard does an excellent job of piecing together what we can know about him, his career, his wealth, how he used it, and his disastrous end in the Syrian desert.

The White War: Life and Death on the Italian Front, 1915-1919, by Mark Thompson—An excellent account of the First World War’s mostly forgotten Italian Front, where mountainous terrain, terrible weather, and the politics and mismanagement of the Italian army resulted in protracted and needlessly bloody campaigns. Focuses far more on the Italians than the Austro-Hungarians, but still offers a good overall picture.

The Wise Men Know What Wicked Things are Written on the Sky, by Russell Kirk—Trenchant observations on the American political, cultural, and educational scene from the early 1980s. Owing to its context, some of the examples Kirk uses are quaintly dated (e.g. complaints about the show “Dallas”) but the substance of his arguments is sound and quite prescient.

A Short History of Finland, by Jonathan Clements—Exactly what it says on the cover: a good brief history of a fascinating place and its people. Clements takes the reader from the Finns’ first mentions by the Romans—who were aware they were out there but probably never traveled to Finland—through conversion to Christianity, the Reformation, life under Swedish and Russian hegemony, and finally through both world wars to a hard-won independence and an important place in the modern world. A timely read considering the surprising Finnish decision to join NATO, and I recommend it in conjunction with Clements’s excellent biography of Marshal Mannerheim, which was my favorite non-fiction read of 2021.

The First Total War, by David A Bell—My closest runner-up for my favorite non-fiction read of the year, this is an excellent history of how European warfare changed in the 18th century. From wars fought by small professional armies for limited objectives, often ended through negotiation, and governed by an aristocratic code of honor, the French Revolution—which was partly rationalized, ironically, by the supposed pointless brutality of the old regime—ushered in an age of mass mobilization, unattainable ideological objectives, and an embrace of pragmatic and amoral brutality, especially against fellow citizens who have declined to join the new order. Bell’s chapters on the shockingly violent war in the Vendée and on Napoleon are especially good, and I strongly recommend this to anyone interested in how warfare and its conduct have evolved—or perhaps devolved—in the modern era.

The Union that Shaped the Confederacy: Robert Toombs & Alexander H Stephens, by William C Davis—A dual biography of two Georgians whose friendship, despite sometimes major political differences, proved crucial to both their homestate and the Confederacy. Through his portrait of Stephens and Toombs Davis also offers a good glimpse of the inner workings of secession and the dysfunction of the Confederate government as well as the course of the Civil War mostly away from the frontlines.

Poe for Your Problems: Uncommon Advice from History’s Least-Likely Self-Help Guru, by Catherine Baab-Muguira—A fun little book that works both as a paradoxical self-help guide focusing both on Poe’s strengths and his self-destructive weaknesses and as an approachable mini-biography of a great writer.

Napoleon, by Paul Johnson—I finally got around to reading this short biography from the Penguin Lives series following Johnson’s death in January. I’m glad I did. This is a bracingly unromantic look at the first great dictator of the modern world, a remedy to longer, more detailed, but worshipful accounts like that of Andrew Roberts. Johnson, a master of the character sketch, the elegant and razor-edged summary, and the telling detail, brings all his skills to bear on Bonaparte and crafts a convincing account of him as an ingenious brute. Not only did I like Johnson’s perspective on Old Boney, this little book was a joy to read. I strongly recommend it if Ridley Scott’s mess of a cinematic portrait got you interested in its subject at all. You can read a memorial post I wrote for Johnson last January here.

Joseph Smith, by Robert V Remini—Another in the Penguin Lives series, this one by an eminent Jacksonian era scholar. Remini does an excellent job not only narrating what we can know of Smith’s life, hedged about as it is by pious Mormon legend, but also contextualizing him in a world of fevered religious emotionalism, private revelations, and even mystical treasure hunting. I was most surprised by the chapters on Nauvoo, having had no idea that Smith had such a powerful private army at his disposal near the end of his life. An excellent read that I’ve already recommended to students.

The Book of Eels, by Patrik Svensson—The biggest surprise of my reading year, I looked at the first chapter of this book on a table at Barnes & Noble and was hooked. Part naturalist study of a familiar but strange animal, part history, part memoir, Svensson’s account of what we know—and, more intriguingly, all that we don’t know—about the European eel was informative and enjoyable.

Memory Hold-the-Door, by John Buchan—A posthumously published memoir by a great novelist and good man, this book is full of warm remembrances of places Buchan loved and elegies for the many, many men of his generation who were lost in the First World War. Expect a full review for this year’s John Buchan June. In the meantime, here are my extensive Kindle highlights and notes, courtesy of Goodreads.

Best of the year:

The Battle of Maldon: Together with The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth, by JRR Tolkien, Peter Grybauskas, Ed.

This was a tough choice, but in the end I just enjoyed this new volume of Tolkien’s work more than any of the other excellent non-fiction I read this year. Since reading it and blogging about it a few times this summer, I’ve also continued to reflect on it.

The Battle of Maldon is a fragment of several hundred lines of an Old English epic composed to commemorate a disastrous fight against Vikings in the year 991. During the battle, the Anglo-Saxon leader Beorhtnoth, ealdorman of Essex, was killed when he allowed the Vikings to come ashore and form for battle, a decision the wisdom of which has been debated ever since. The poem relates the story with great drama and sympathy, and with moving vignettes of Beorhtnoth’s doomed hearth-companions as they commit themselves to avenging their lord or dying in the attempt.

This book collects a large miscellany of Tolkien’s writings on the poem, including his own translation in prose, an alliterative verse dialogue designed as a sequel called The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm’s Son, multiple earlier drafts of the same showing how the poem evolved both formally and thematically as Tolkien considered and revised it, an essay on Beorhtnoth’s famous pride, and—best of all—extensive notes and commentary from Tolkien that provide a lot of insight into the poem, its context, and broader topics like history, legend, warfare, and human nature.

Anyone interested in Anglo-Saxon England or the literature of the period knows The Battle of Maldon, and it unsurprisingly occupied a large space in Tolkien’s thought and imagination. This book—given my own interest in the poem, the event it describes (which was one case study in my master’s thesis), and Tolkien himself—is a most welcome addition to my Tolkien shelf and my favorite non-fiction read of the year. I highly recommend it.

I posted about this book twice during the summer, first on the topic of tradition and the transmission of poetry and culture, and second on the false modern assumption that anything literary in history is necessarily fictitious.

Kids’ books

Here, in no particular order, are the ten best of the kids’ novels and picture books that we read this year, many of which were excellent family read-alouds:

• The Luck of Troy, by Roger Lancelyn Green—A novelistic adaptation of legends surrounding Odysseus’s theft of the Palladion, told from the perspective of a lesser-known character from Greek myth: Helen’s young son Nicostratus.

• The Broken Blade, by William Durbin—A fun historical kids’ adventure set among the trappers of French Canada and the Great Lakes.

• You Are Special, by Max Lucado—A beautifully illustrated and moving picture book about how it is our creator’s stamp, rather than any aspect of ourselves, that gives us worth.

• The Easter Storybook and The Go-and-Tell Storybook, by Laura Richie, illustrated by Ian Dale—Two nicely illustrated Bible picture books, one for the Lenten and Easter season and the other based on the Book of Acts.

• Little Pilgrim’s Progress, adapted by Helen Taylor, illustrated by Joe Sutphin—Probably my favorite kids’ read of the year, this is a charming simplified adaptation with illustrations showing the characters as anthropomorphic animals. Though simple and kid-friendly, it hit hard—I ended up crying several times while reading it to my kids.

• A Picture Book of Davy Crockett, by David A Adler, illustrated by John and Alexandra Wallner—A good short life of Crockett told accessibly but with commendable attention to the details and complexities of his life.

• The Phantom of the Colosseum and A Lion for the Emperor, by Sophie de Mullenheim—The first two volumes of a fun historical series about three young friends and their adventures in the Roman Empire. My kids adored these and I look forward to reading more.

• War Horse, by Michael Morpurgo—A simply written but powerfully moving look at the First World War from an unusual perspective.

Rereads

Everything I reread this year. My favorites were certainly my revisits with Charles Portis, especially Gringos, which I read for the third time while on a trip to Mexico in the spring. As usual, audiobook “reads” are marked with an asterisk.

• Gringos, by Charles Portis

• Norwood, by Charles Portis

• Colonel Sun, by Kingsley Amis

• The Vinland Sagas, trans. by Keneva Kunz

• The Night the Bear Ate Goombaw, by Patrick F McManus*

• Never Sniff a Gift Fish, by Patrick F McManus*

• The Face of Battle, by John Keegan*

• The Masque of the Red Death, by Edgar Allan Poe

• Beowulf, trans. Tom Shippey (see above)

• The Shepherd, the Angel, and Walter the Christmas Miracle Dog, by Dave Barry

One of my own

Of course, another big event for the year was the publication of a new book of my own, my World War II action novella The Snipers.

Set during the ferocious Battle of Aachen in the fall of 1944, months after D-day and the breakout from Normandy but still long months away from victory over Germany, The Snipers is the story of one bad day in the life of Sergeant JL Justus. A scout and sharpshooter in the 1st Infantry Division, Justus is tasked by his battalion commander with finding and eliminating a German sniper who has bedeviled the division’s advance into the city. Justus thinks finding the sniper will be tough enough, but the men he joins up with to enter the combat zone assure him that there is more than one. Discovering the truth and completing his mission will test Justus and his buddies severely, and give him a shock that will last years after the war’s end.

I wrote The Snipers in a three rapid weeks this spring and revised it in the early summer. The climactic action and its surprising revelation came to me first. After a vivid and disturbing dream of World War II combat, a dream the dark mood of which I couldn’t shake off, I decided to sit down and turn it into a short novel or novella. The rest came together very quickly.

I’ve been pleased with this book’s reception but, most of all, I’m pleased with the book itself. Every time I give a friend a copy I end up sitting down and rereading long sections of it. It’s always satisfying to find enjoyment not only in the work of writing but in the finished product, and The Snipers ranks with Griswoldville in those terms.

I’m grateful to those of y’all who’ve read it, either in draft form or since its publication, and I hope those of y’all who haven’t will check it out and let me know what you think.

Looking ahead

After a busy and chaotic fall things mercifully slowed down, albeit only briefly, for Christmas, and then revved right back up again with surgery and sickness in the family and prep for a new semester at work. But all is well, and I’m hoping for even more good reading in 2024. Right now I’m partway through an excellent study of Eastern Native American warfare and a short biography of Ramesses II, and there are so many novels jostling at the top of my to-read stack I don’t even know how to choose.

Whatever I end up reading, you can count on hearing about it here. And in the meantime, I hope y’all will find something good to read in this list, and that y’all have had a joyful Christmas and a happy New Year. Thanks for reading!

History has no sides

History, a mosaic by Frederick Dielman in the Library of COngress

I started this post some weeks ago, but sickness—mine and others—intervened. Fortuitously so, since it seems appropriate to finish and post this as a New Year’s Eve reflection, a reminder as 2023 gives way, irretrievably, to 2024.

Writing in Law & Liberty a few weeks ago, Theodore Dalrymple takes the recent conflict between Venezuela and Guyana, a large area of which Venezuela is now claiming as its own territory, as an opportunity to consider an idea invoked by Guyana’s rightly aggrieved foreign minister: “the right side of history.”

This is now a common term for an idea that was already fairly widespread, a sort of popularized Whig or Progressive view of history’s supposed outworkings that, as Dalrymple notes, “implies a teleology in history, a pre-established end to which history is necessarily moving.” History has a goal, an ultimate good toward which societies and governments are moving, a goal that offers an easy moral calculus: if a thing helps the world toward that goal, it is good, and if it hinders or frustrates movement toward that goal, it is bad. This is how history comes to have “sides.”

As worldviews go, this is relatively simple, easily adaptable—whiggishness, as I’ve noted, tends to be its conservative form, and Progressivism or doctrinaire Marxism to be its liberal form—and offers a clarity to thorny questions that may have no easy answer. This is why people who believe in “the right side of history” are so sure both of themselves and of the perversity and evil of anyone who disagrees with them.

But “the right side of history” has one problem: it doesn’t exist. Dalrymple:

“[H]istory has no sides and evaluates nothing. We often hear of the ‘verdict of history,’ but it is humans, not history, that bring in verdicts.”

— Theodore Dalrymple

But history has no sides and evaluates nothing. We often hear of the “verdict of history,” but it is humans, not history, that bring in verdicts, and the verdicts that they bring in often change with time. The plus becomes a minus and then a plus again. As Chou En-Lai famously said in 1972 when asked about the effect of the French Revolution, “It is too early to tell.” It is not merely that moral evaluations change; so do evaluations of what actually happened and the causes of what actually happened. We do not expect a final agreement over the cause or causes of the First World War. That does not mean that no rational discussion of the subject is possible—but finality on it is impossible.

“It is true,” he continues, “that there are trends in history, but they do not reach inexorable logical conclusions.” This is the false promise of Hegel or, further back, the Enlightenment. Outcomes are not moral judgements, and victories of one side over another are not proof of rightness. Dalrymple:

History is not some deus ex machina, or what the philosopher, Gilbert Ryle, called the ghost in the machine; it is not a supra-human force, a kind of supervisory demi-urge acting upon humans as international law is supposed to act upon nations. . . . Are we now to say that authoritarianism is on the right side of history, as recently liberal democracy was only thirty years ago, because so much of the world is ruled by it?

To equate victory with goodness or to view success as superiority—the inescapable but usually unstated Darwinian element in “the right side of history”—is, as CS Lewis put it, to mistake “the goddess History” for “the strumpet Fortune.”

Dalrymple concludes with an important question, one he is unusually reticent in answering:

“History might excuse our worst actions, justifying grossly unethical behaviour.”

— Theodore Dalrymple

Does it matter if we ascribe right and wrong sides to history? I think it could—I cannot be more categorical than that. On the one hand, it might make us complacent, liable to sit back and wait for History to do our work for us. Perhaps more importantly, History might excuse our worst actions, justifying grossly unethical behaviour as if we were acting as only automaton midwives of a foreordained denouement. But if history is a seamless robe, no denouement is final.

I’m going to be more categorical and say that it certainly matters whether we believe history has sides, and for the latter of the two reasons Dalrymple lays out. History—with a right and wrong side and a capital H—offers a rationalization, a handy excuse. Armed with an ideology and a theory of history’s endpoint and the post-Enlightenment cocksureness that society is malleable enough to submit to scientific control in pursuit of perfection, group after group of idealists has tried to shove, whip, or drag the world forward into the light. And when the world proves intractable, resistant to “the right side of history,” it is easy to treat opponents as enemies, blame them for failure, and eradicate them.

This is true even, and perhaps especially, of groups that start off making pacifist noises and decrying the violence and oppression of the status quo. The Jacobins and the Bolsheviks are only the most obvious examples, though our world in this, the year of our Lord 2023, is full of groups that have granted themselves permission to disrupt and destroy because they are on “the right side of history.” What do your puny laws, customs, and scruples matter in the face of History?

That’s the extreme danger, but a real one as the last few centuries have shown. Yet the first danger Dalrymple describes is even more insidious because it is so common as to become invisible—the smug complacency of the elect.

What kind of grim New Year’s Eve message is this? It’s a denunciation of a false idea, sure, but also a plea to view the change from 2023 to 2024 as no more than that—the change of a date. Year follows year. Time gets away from us. Everything changes without progress, things neither constantly improving nor constantly worsening and with no movement toward a perfect endpoint of anyone’s choosing.

Unless, of course, something from outside history intervenes. History, like war, like gravity, like death, is a bare amoral fact in a fallen world. If it is to have meaning and moral import at all it must come from somewhere other than itself. For those of us who believe in God, this is his providence. He has an endpoint and a goal and a path to get there but, tellingly, though he has revealed his ends he has kept his means, the way there, hidden. Based on what I’ve considered above, this is for our own good. The temptation not only to divine his hand in our preferred outcomes but to seize control of history and improve the world is powerful. We haven’t reached the end of it yet.

Until then, if history has sides at all, they are only the two sides of Janus’s face—looking behind and ahead, observing but never reaching either past or future. The more clearly we see this, the more deliberately we can dispel the luminous intellectual fog of thinking about the movement of History with a capital H, the more we can focus on the things nearest and most present with us. Celebrate the New Year, pray for your children, and get to work on the little patch that belongs to you, uprooting evil in the fields you know. That’s my goal, at least.

Thanks as always for reading. Happy New Year, and best wishes to you for 2024!

More if you’re interested

Dalrymple’s entire essay is worth your while. Read it at Law & Liberty here. The sadistic violence of the ostensibly pacifist French Revolutionaries is fresh on my mind because of David A Bell’s excellent book The First Total War, which I plan to write more about in my reading year-in-review. For CS Lewis on the false idea of “the judgement of history,” see here. And for one of my favorite GK Chesterton lines on progress, see here. For a view of history and progress and the pursuit of human perfectibility that closely aligns with my own, see Edgar Allan Poe here. Let me also end the year with another recommendation of Herbert Butterfield’s classic study The Whig Interpretation of History, the fundamental text in rebuking ideas of progress.

Buchan on the American Civil War

From John Buchan’s posthumously-published memoir Memory Hold-the-Door, Chapter IX, “My America,” which is a collection of his Tocqueville-esque observations of American culture:

Then, while I was at Oxford, I read Colonel Henderson’s Stonewall Jackson and became a student of the American Civil War. I cannot say what especially attracted me to that campaign: partly, no doubt, the romance of it, the chivalry and the supreme heroism; partly its extraordinary technical interest, both military and political; but chiefly, I think, because I fell in love with the protagonists. I had found the kind of man that I could whole-heartedly admire. Since those days my study of the Civil War has continued, I have visited most of its battlefields, I have followed the trail of its great marches, I have read widely in its literature; indeed, my memory has become so stored with its details that I have often found myself able to tell the descendants of its leaders facts about their forebears of which they had never heard.

What Buchan describes has—until pretty recently, anyway—probably been the case for many of us who first came to a love of history through the Civil War. Courage, cowardice, tragedy, glory, horror, and sentimentality; equipment, logistics, industrial outputs, orders of battle, and casualty figures; and a huge cast of colorful and shocking characters with ever-shifting soap opera-like relationships (think of the unease between Grant and his superior Halleck and the irony of Grant’s eventual promotion over Halleck, or all the bickering among the generals of Bragg’s army)—whether you study history for the drama, the ordinary people, or the numbers there for the crunching, there’s not just something for everyone in the Civil War, there’s a lot of it.

And for those of us who stuck with the Civil War or returned to it more seriously later, it furnishes a lot of ready imaginative and intellectual material for contemplation and comparison. Here’s Buchan himself from earlier in his memoir, on the early years of the First World War and General Douglas Haig specifically:

This was the attitude of all the principal commanders, British, French and German, at the beginning of the War. The campaign produced in the high command no military genius of the first order, no Napoleon, Marlborough or Lee, scarcely even a Wellington, a Stonewall Jackson or a Sherman. Its type was Grant. Hence changes of method had to come by the sheer pressure of events after much tragic trial and error.

This is the power of deep reading and study and the well-chosen allusion—one knows exactly what Buchan means by this, and it illuminates rather than obscures the situation he describes.

Buchan, who spent a stretch of the 1920s mentally recuperating from the First World War by writing biographies of men he admired—Montrose, Augustus, Cromwell—at one point planned to write a biography of Robert E Lee. He abandoned the project when he learned that a friend from Virginia was already working on one, a promising multi-volume work. The friend was Douglas Southall Freeman and the book was RE Lee.

But what I wouldn’t give to have Buchan’s perspective on that life.

End-of-semester book recommendations

I just wrapped up my last class of this long, busy, exhausting fall semester. On my final exams for this course I asked a final “softball” question of each student: which new historical figure that you learned about most interested you, and why?

Despite the word “new” I got a lot of Abraham Lincolns and Ulysses Grants and Frederick Douglasses in response, but I didn’t mind so much because the students mostly offered good reasons for their piqued interest. I found myself offering a sentence or two of feedback to each with at least one book recommendation based on the figure of their choice.

In addition to several primary source texts—including The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, John Smith’s True Relation of Virginia, Brokenburn, the Civil War diary of a young Louisiana girl named Kate Stone, and The Vinland Sagas for the several students impressed with the pregnant Freydis Eiriksdottir’s ferocious response to Native American attack—I came back to several recommendations over and over again. These were books I mentioned to students who named Nat Turner, John Brown, Stonewall Jackson, Robert E Lee, Jefferson Davis, and Ulysses S Grant as their most interesting figures. Given that the final unit of the semester covered the secession crisis and the Civil War there’s some obvious recency bias in these answers, but again, that didn’t trouble me too much. If even a fraction of them take those recommendations I’ll be pleased, and I hope they will too.

I thought about these books enough as I wrote that feedback that I decided to offer them as recommendations on the blog as well. So here, in roughly chronological order by subject, are six good books I recommended to my US History I students this fall:

The Fires of Jubilee: Nat Turner’s Fierce Rebellion, by Stephen Oates

A deeply researched and powerful short narrative of the life and rebellion of Nat Turner. Turner was a slave preacher in quiet, rural Southampton County, Virginia who believed he had received signs from God that it was his mission to rise up and slaughter his oppressors. In the uprising that he eventually led, Turner and his followers killed over sixty whites of all ages, including a dozen school children, a bedridden old woman, and a baby in a cradle. When he briefly eluded capture he became a boogeyman throughout the South, and paranoid fears that Turner might have a coordinated network of slave rebels prepared to rise caused widespread vigilantism.

Oates writes well and smoothly integrates his research with the broader historical context of Turner’s revolt, making this a good look at the overall state of slavery in American at the time of the Second Great Awakening. Oates also doesn’t soft-pedal, excuse, or celebrate Turner’s violence. Here’s a longer Amazon review I wrote when I first read this some years ago.

Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid that Sparked the Civil War, by Tony Horwitz

John Brown, like Nat Turner, is an arresting and irresistibly forceful figure, but unlike Turner Brown was much better connected and his life is much more fully documented. This popular history by the late journalist Tony Horwitz, whose most famous book is probably Confederates in the Attic, gives a solid, readable overview of Brown’s life, work, and the evolution of his rigid, fanatical views not just on slavery but on a host of other activist causes. (A favorite example I offer in class: Brown, not only an abolitionist but a teetotaler, once discovered a man working with him on a construction project had brought a bottle of beer along for his lunch. Brown poured it out. Students see the point immediately.)

The bulk of the book covers Brown’s violence in Kansas, beginning with the coldblooded murders of five farmers at Pottawatomie Creek in 1856, and his magnum opus, the planned rebellion in Virginia in 1859. Brown and a small circle of close followers, including several of his sons and a handful of escaped slaves, plotted to steal stockpiled rifles from an armory at Harpers Ferry and start a local slave revolt that, with plenty of firepower behind it, would snowball into a brutal nationwide purge that would rid the United States of slavery. It didn’t work out that way. Like Turner, Brown was hanged and became a symbol of violent extremism.

I like to recommend Midnight Rising because it offers a short, readable, almost novelistic account without unduly lionizing or condemning Brown. It’s also packed full of good anecdotes and telling, well-chosen details, and its blow-by-blow reconstruction of the disastrous Harpers Ferry raid is excellent.

The Man Who Saved the Union: Ulysses S Grant in War and Peace, by HW Brands

For students who expressed interest in Ulysses Grant I recommended Brands’s biography. This is a good, readable, cradle-to-the-grave biography that is neither as huge nor as worshipful as more recent Grant biographies like Ron Chernow’s. Brands not only narrates Grant’s life story and the campaigns of his career during the Civil War but also offers clear insight into Grant’s personal character, both for good and bad, as well as his relationships with superiors like Lincoln and Henry Halleck and subordinates like Sherman. Brands also doesn’t explain away or minimize the corruption of Grant’s presidential administration, as is often the habit of Grant fans. The result is admiring but not uncritical, highly readable and accessible, and detailed without being overwhelming.

The Crucible of Command: Ulysses S Grant and Robert E Lee—The War They Fought, the Peace They Forged, by William C Davis

One of the books I most often recommend in class, this is a dual biography of the two most important generals of the war, the protagonists of the final death struggle, and contested symbols of the aftermath. Davis—who has a lot of experience with this kind of work, having previously written multi-track narratives of the lives of Travis, Crockett and Bowie and Georgia’s Alexander Stephens and Robert Toombs—balances Lee and Grant’s life stories well, structuring them chronologically but still allowing interesting parallels and contrasts to emerge, especially as their careers weave past one another and occasionally overlap. Like the other good biographies in this list, he pays special attention to personal character, and is judicious and fair in his judgments of both men. The chapters bouncing back and forth between Lee and Grant and their dramatically changing fortunes over the course of the Civil War are the best of their kind, and radically reshaped by understanding of how the war unfolded as well as Lee and Grant’s places in the story.

Every time one of our children has been born, I’ve made it a point to read a book about Lee. That tradition started in the spring of 2015 with our first child and this book, and this is still my favorite of the ones I’ve read over the years.

Rebel Yell: The Violence, Passion, and Redemption of Stonewall Jackson, by SC Gwynne

This is a brilliantly-written, detailed, insightful biography of Jackson focusing primarily on the war years but with good coverage of his early life, too. Gwynne is a gifted writer and he not only capably untangles and narrates the complex, lightning fast campaigns of maneuver that Jackson fought in the two years before his death but also explores the personality of this exceedingly strange man. (Gwynne busts a few myths along the way, too, such as the one about Jackson constantly sucking on lemons. He didn’t. He may have been strange, but not that strange.)

Jackson’s lower-class mountain background, his inflexible Calvinist Presbyterianism, his experiences as an artillery officer in Mexico, his stern and rigid character both as a professor of science at VMI before the war and as an infantry commander—Gwynne explains and integrates all of these aspects of Jackson’s character, giving the reader a solid, understandable portrait of an eccentric, tenacious, fatalistic, but energetic and ferocious soldier whose career was cut short at its height. He also does an excellent job explaining and showing Jackson’s relationship with Lee in action, with the result that this book illuminates not only Jackson but Lee as well.

A book I never hesitate to recommend, and that I wish there were more like.

Embattled Rebel: Jefferson Davis and the Confederate Civil War, by James McPherson

Just one student, impressed with the tone of an excerpted speech that I assigned near the end of the semester, stated some interest in Jefferson Davis, which is not all that surprising—there are far more romantic, heroic figures on both sides of the Civil War than the president of the country that lost. Indeed, the deeper you look, the more inclined you might be to study someone else. Davis was fussy, vain, opinionated, played favorites, and unnecessarily inserted himself into his government’s military policy. James McPherson, an indisputably pro-Union historian of the Civil War era, brings all of this to his study of Davis but also has the intellectual honesty to admit that, after spending time studying the man, he came to admire some aspects of his character, not least the work ethic that kept him going despite the dysfunction of his government (compare his vice president, Alexander Stephens, who got fed up and left Richmond for much of the war) and through severe recurring illnesses. That honesty makes Embattled Rebel a good short study of Davis that, though not wholly sympathetic to its subject, is that rarest of all things nowadays—fair.

Others

Here are two other books I considered recommending but didn’t. Let me recommend them here. Both come from the Penguin Lives series of short biographies by well-known writers.

• Abraham Lincoln: A Life, by Thomas Keneally—An engaging, readable, warts-and-all biography of Lincoln that does an excellent job condensing his complex life and personality into a little over one hundred pages without oversimplifying.

• Joseph Smith, by Robert V Remini—I read this book most recently of all the books on this list, and it was a revelation. Remini’s account of the life of the founder of Mormonism not only narrates his life as clearly as we can know it, but situates him firmly in his broader historical context, showing him and his movement to be very much of their time and place.

Conclusion

This semester has been a blur, but I’m thankful for the work I had, the students I had, and that we can now take a break and focus on more important and long-lasting things. If you’re looking for some American history to read over Christmas and New Year’s, I hope you’ll check one of these out. Thanks for reading!

After-action report: 16th International Conference on World War II

An M4 Sherman of the 14th Armored Division crashes through the fence of the POW camp at Hammelburg, April 1945

Last weekend was the annual International Conference on World War II at the National WWII Museum in New Orleans. Learning last year—thanks to my friend and colleague Kirk at another college here in South Carolina—that online attendance was free was a major discovery, and this is the second year I’ve been able to tune in from afar.

As I alluded to in my last post, I’ve been sick all week, and though I began with grand intentions to read a lot, catch up on my significant backlog of correspondence, and publish several blog posts that have been simmering in draft form, pretty much all I’ve been able to do is lie in bed and read. I even started to go through my drafts folder deleting partially completed posts that I now deemed irrelevant, but just before I clicked delete on this one I took one more look at my outline and the few synopses I had already written.

I’m glad I did. I decided to buckle down and finish writing these up these, because the conference was excellent and I found blogging about it helpful last year. I hope these brief summaries will be helpful to y’all, too, and that you’ll seek out the recordings of these sessions at the museum’s Vimeo channel.

Thursday, December 7—Pre-conference symposium

The theme of Thursday’s pre-conference symposium was Finding Hope in a World Destroyed: Liberations and Legacies of World War II. The panel discussions therefore primarily focused on things happening immediately after the war or caused by the war rather than the war itself.

Europe in the Rubble, chaired by Jason Dawsey, panelists Robert Hutchinson and Gunter Bischof

A good opening session that paid particular attention to war crimes trials and sentencing. Dawsey outlined Soviet participation in—and manipulation of—the international war crimes trials at Nuremberg as well as the way Soviet concepts like “crimes against peace” have made their way into present-day intellectual norms. Hutchinson, in an especially interesting talk, discussed the often naïve ways American war crimes prosecutors, in the interests of fairness and with the goal of a kind of universalist liberal pedagogy, modeled their sentencing, appeals processes, and standards of “rehabilitation” for former Nazis on the American judicial system. The concept of the Nuremberg trials as “liberal show trials” that were meant, like Soviet show trials, to instruct observers was enlightening. Bischof’s talk briefly covered some major aspects of the Marshall Plan, including its popularity in Austria and the devastating results for Soviet-occupied countries of Soviet refusal to participate.

Books recommended: After Nuremberg: American Clemency for Nazi War Criminals, by Robert Hutchinson

Aftermath in Asia, chaired by John Curatola, panelists Yuma Totani and Rana Mitter

An opening talk on the eventual adoption by Japan of democracy and Western-style concepts of rights and equality as Douglas MacArthur’s greatest victory was somewhat interesting, though I have read enough Yukio Mishima to be suspicious of the supposed benefits of the Westernization, democracy, and capitalism imposed upon the Japanese. The second talk, on the trial and punishment of Japanese war criminals, began with some odd finger-pointing at Russia and the United States (over the invasion of Ukraine and the detention of terrorists at Guantánamo Bay, presumably, though this was not totally clear) as examples of moral failure before moving on to a very hard-to-follow narrative of Japan’s war crimes trials—which, knowing what kind of brutality the Japanese got up to during the war, makes the opening remarks seem silly by comparison. I struggled to follow this one.

The real draw for me was Rana Mitter, whom I have heard on The Rest is History and who always presents his work with enviable enthusiasm and mastery of the material. He didn’t disappoint. His talk on the role of China during the war was excellent, especially his attention to Chiang Kai-shek’s participation in the Cairo Conference, the subsequent reversal of what he accomplished there by the Soviets at Tehran just a few days later, and the lingering relevance of the war in modern China, which still uses the Cairo Declaration as grounds for claiming islands in the South China Sea, for example.

Follow-up Q&A for this one was more interesting, with one audience member asking pretty bluntly whether Emperor Hirohito should have stood trial for war crimes (Totani’s answer: “Yes”) and another describing how his elderly Chinese neighbor, who grew up during the war, is “adamant” that no one gave help to China because of the sheer number of funerals she remembers then.

Books recommended: Forgotten Ally: China’s World War II, 1937-1945, by Rana Mitter

A New World Order and Postwar US Responsibilities, chaired by William Hitchcock, panelists Blanche Wiesen Cook, Jeremi Suri, and Lizabeth Cohen

I found myself thinking of this one as “the liberal panel” in the sense of the sentimental, do-good liberalism of FDR. Indeed, the first talk was from a senior scholar of Eleanor Roosevelt and covered Mrs Roosevelt’s involvement in the development of the postwar UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights. As befit its subject, it was full of gassy positivity about equality and abstract political and social rights as well as gentle, disapproving shock that the US has still not signed onto some of the Declaration’s economic provisions. The third talk was an expert discussion of the ideals and, of course, the failures of “the consumer republic” created by the postwar economic boom, suburbanization, GI Bill education, and so forth, with a heavy emphasis on the failures, exclusions, and inequalities that persisted or were purportedly worsened as a result. You can read precisely the same yes-but approach to 1950s prosperity in the textbook I used for US History II this fall.

The panel ended with the chair suggesting a major lesson of the war was the power of the federal government to solve problems if it were only allowed to grow to the size necessary to handle them, as well as a breathless discussion of “the war on education” being waged in the US right now, with the first panelist admitting she hadn’t looked into its causes but still disapproved. I’d mildly suggest finding out why people are upset and what specifically they’re upset about before dismissing them as waging war on something as abstract as “education.”

However, the second of the three talks, by Jeremi Suri, was a masterful explanation of the quiet political revolution the United States underwent as a result of the war. Suri clearly laid out the ways participation in the war caused a massive extraconstitutional—and often unconstitutional—shift in the way the US government approached foreign policy and the military. The result was a country that began the 20th century with a mostly isolationist stance, an entrenched tradition of a small peacetime army made up of volunteers, and tight congressional controls on warmaking ended the 20th century entangled in the whole world’s affairs, maintaining vast alliances and with troops deployed to dozens of countries, and an enormous military under almost unchecked executive control. This was an excellent short talk and I hope to either assign it or play it in class for future sections of US History II.

We Shall Overcome: From Wartime Service to Social Change, chaired by Steph Hinnershitz, panelists Marcus Cox, Kara Vuic, and David Davis

Unfortunately I was only able to catch the first of the panelists, Marcus Cox, but he gave an exceptionally interesting talk on the challenges and, especially, the opportunities armed service during World War II presented to African-American men. He began with a moving personal reflection on his own grandfather’s US Army career from 1941 to retirement in 1972 and ended with brief snapshots of the roles played in the civil rights movement by black WWII veterans. A strong, worthwhile talk.

Rethinking World War II, Gen Raymond E Mason Jr Distinguished Lecture on World War II, Jeremy Black and Rob Citino

A very good freeform chat ranging across a variety of topics but concentrating mostly on the scale and scope of the war as well as some of its legacies. Black is by some measures the most published historian in the world (he publishes an average of about four books per year; here’s one I reviewed a couple years ago) and an expert on strategy. He had plenty to say on that not only from a theatre but a global perspective—some of his discussion of Japan, China, and the East dovetailed nicely with Mitter’s talk earlier in the day—as well as more nitty-gritty topics. Black is also, like Citino, his interlocutor in this discussion, funny and engaging as well as an expert who can always add more, making them well-matched and enjoyable to listen to. (“Easiest interview ever,” Citino joked at the end of the talk.)

Books recommended: Military Strategy: A Global History, A History of the Second World War in 100 Maps, and Air Power: A Global History, by Jeremy Black

Friday, December 8

Nimitz and His Commanders: Leadership in the PTO, roundtable discussion chaired by Jonathan Parshall, panelists Craig L Symonds and Trent Hone

A good discussion, based on Symonds’s book, of the character and leadership of Admiral Nimitz and the challenges he faced in his role as the Commander in Chief of the US Pacific Fleet from after Pearl Harbor to the end of the war. One especially interesting topic was Nimitz’s Eisenhower-like ability to get difficult subordinates to work together.

Books recommended: Nimitz at War: Command Leadership from Pearl Harbor to Tokyo Bay, by Craig L Symonds

In the Rubble, roundtable discussion moderated by Allan R Millett, panelists Keith Lowe and Donald Bishop

I was especially keen to listen to this discussion since Lowe’s Savage Continent strongly affected my understanding of the end and outcomes of the war when I read it about ten years ago. Both Lowe and fellow panelist Bishop, who primarily focused on Asia, were excellent, explaining graphically but dispassionately both the immediate challenges facing those left in the rubble—disease, starvation, homelessness, prostitution, rape—as well as longer-term problems like the plight of DPs (displaced persons), many of whom languished in camps for years. Lowe also discussed the often-overlooked ethnic cleansing that took place throughout Eastern Europe at the end of the war—at the same time the Soviets were violently suppressing native opposition in order to install puppet regimes—with millions of Germans from historically ethnically mixed regions of Poland, the Baltic, and Czechoslovakia either murdered or driven out, actions that caused the deaths of millions more Germans even after the war’s end. Lowe in particular was able to draw on conversations with a survivor of the aftermath for striking and poignant anecdotes.

Books recommended: A Continent Erupts: Decolonization, Civil War, and Massacre in Postwar Asia, 1945-1955, by Ronald Spector, Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II, by Keith Lowe, War Trash, by Ha Jin

To the End of the Earth: The US Army and the Downfall of Japan, 1945, John C McManus in conversation with Conrad Crane

Another good book-based discussion, this one based on the recent final volume of McManus’s trilogy covering the US Army’s role in the Pacific Theatre, which is popularly associated more with the Navy and Marines. (I have the first volume, Fire and Fortitude, but haven’t read the entire book yet.) Some discussion of New Guinea, the Philippines, and Okinawa.

Books recommended: McManus’s US Army in the Pacific trilogy, Fire and Fortitude: The US Army in the Pacific War, 1941-1943, Island Infernos: The US Army’s Pacific War Odyssey, 1944, and To the End of the Earth: The US Army and the Downfall of Japan, 1945.

Missed sessions:

• Our War, Too! chaired by Steph Hinnershitz, panelists Catherine Musemeche, Dave Gutierrez, and James C McNaughton

• Legacies of World War II, chaired by Gordon H “Nick” Mueller, panelists William Hitchcock and Jeremi Suri

Saturday, December 9

Dauntless: Paul Hilliard in World War II, WWII veteran Paul Hilliard in conversation with Rob Citino

Last year the Museum hosted centenarian veteran John “Lucky” Luckadoo, a B-17 pilot who flew 25 missions over Europe. This year the younger—at age 98!—Paul Hilliard gave a talk about his experience as a Marine dive bomber pilot in the Pacific. He also talked about growing up a Wisconsin farm boy and how, despite the Depression, he was largely unaware that his family was poor (“When you’re born on the floor you don’t spend a lot of time worrying about falling out of bed.”) Especially touching was his memory of the train ride from Wisconsin to California when he joined the Marines; he didn’t sleep for three days as he watched the magnificent American landscape roll past his window. After the war he went to college and wound up, through an odd series of circumstances, in the oil business, which settled him in New Orleans, where he has practiced philanthropy toward the WWII Museum, an art museum, and other institutions for decades. I greatly enjoyed Hilliard’s talk, especially since, with his genuine rags to riches story, toughness, and hard work coupled with good humor, he reminded me so much of my granddad.

Books recommended: Dauntless: Paul Hilliard in World War II and a Transformed America, by Rob Citino, Ken Stickney, and Lori Ochsner

Monuments Men and Women: A Never-Ending Story, with Robert M Edsel

The most flat-out enjoyable session of the conference. Edsel is a businessman who first became interested in art preservation during a trip to Italy. Wondering how it was that local people managed to preserve their artistic and architectural treasures during the most destructive war in history, few people were able to offer him answers. He set out to learn for himself. The result was several books, including The Monuments Men, the basis of the George Clooney film ten years ago, and The Monuments Men and Women Foundation, which Edsel helped establish. The MMWF exists to promote the memory of the people, mostly middle-aged academics with no military experience, who worked with troops on the frontlines to protect, recover, and return artwork stolen by the Nazis during the war. It also actively seeks lost artwork—there are still millions of works unaccounted for from the war—for restitution and has worked with the US military to reestablish a unit dedicated to art protection in war zones.

Edsel spoke with great passion as he told the story of the original monuments men—a much larger group and who worked for far longer than the Clooney film could convey—and the work of his foundation. He briefly described the careers of some important members of the unit, as well as the handful who were killed or wounded in action as part of their work. He also told some especially interesting and even moving stories about works of art either stolen by the Nazis or simply taken as souvenirs by GIs at the end of the war being restored to their rightful owners many decades after the war.

But I was most moved by Edsel’s passionate advocacy of the place of art in the memories and souls of people. In an age of ideologically-motivated vandalism and destruction of art, in which crowds cheer the toppling of statues and activists destroy paintings in the name of political platforms, to hear someone speak up so forcefully on behalf of preservation in the name of the dead and for future generations was more refreshing than I can express.

Books recommended: The Monuments Men: Allied Heroes, Nazi Thieves, and the Greatest Treasure Hunt in History, which is the basis of the film The Monuments Men, directed by George Clooney, Rescuing Da Vinci, and Saving Italy: The Race to Rescue a Nation’s Treasures from the Nazis, by Robert M Edsel

Mass Murder and Memory in Eastern Europe, the George P Shultz Forum on World Affairs, Christopher Browning in conversation with Alexandra Richie

A grim but outstandingly good discussion. Richie was one of my favorite panelists last year, when she covered the 1944 Warsaw Uprising among other things, so I was excited to hear her talk with the great historian Christopher Browning. They focused primarily on Browning’s classic study Ordinary Men, which examined the role played by a single battalion of reservist military policemen in killing tens of thousands of Jews in one region of Nazi-occupied Poland during the first phase of the Holocaust, when local populations were shot in batches rather than shipped to extermination camps. Browning and Richie walked through the book’s major points—that the reservists in question were not die-hard Nazis but middle-aged, bourgeois types, that there was no penalty for refusing to participate in the killings, that most of them participated in the beginning and all of them participated by the end.

Richie and Browning also discussed some of the aspects of social psychology he used to understand—rather than explain—how these men, who were neither Nazis nor psychopaths, could do what they did, including the Milgram tests, which found that physical and psychological distance were key factors in enabling the maximum infliction of suffering on other people at the behest of authority, and the Stanford prison experiment. They also helpfully talked through some of the controversies about methodology and interpretation surrounding the book.

I routinely recommend Ordinary Men when I teach World War II in class and will certainly use or assign this one-hour talk in the future, offering as it does a succinct but still chilling summary of the book’s themes, the most important of which is the challenging truth that there’s not as much difference between mass killers like these and ourselves as we’d like to think.

Books recommended: Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland, by Christopher Browning

Missed sessions:

• Forgotten Heroes, chaired by Jeffrey Sammons, panelists Maj Gen Peter Gravett and Cameron McCoy

• General Lesley J McNair: Unsung Architect of the US Army, Mark Calhoun in conversation with John C McManus

Conclusion

I was able to catch a majority of the conference sessions this year, and it was exceptionally rewarding. I’m grateful again to the National WWII Museum for hosting this event and making it available to attend online for free. Their hard work in educating the public and remembering the war and the men who fought it is, I hope, paying off. I’m certainly looking forward to next year.

Thanks for reading! I hope this has been helpful to you and that you’ll check out some of these sessions online as well as some of the books mentioned during the conference.

Ciceronian political moderation

I’ve been slowly, slowly reading through John Buchan’s posthumously published memoir Memory Hold-the-Door over the last couple of months. I’m sick for the third or fourth time since October, and while resting yesterday I dived back into Buchan’s book again and reached the point in his career when he entered politics, standing as a Conservative candidate for the Commons in 1911. Buchan:

My political experience at the time was nil, and my views were shallow and ill-informed—inclinations rather than principles. I believed profoundly in the possibilities of the Empire as a guardian of world peace, and as a factor in the solution of all our domestic problems, but I no longer accepted imperial federation, and I had little confidence in Mr. Chamberlain’s tariff policy. For socialism I had the distrust that I felt for all absolute creeds, and Marxism, to which I had given some attention, seemed to me to have an insecure speculative basis and to be purblind as a reading of history. On the other hand I wanted the community to use its communal strength when the facts justified it, and I believed in the progressive socialisation of the State, provided the freedom of the personality were assured. I had more sympathy with socialism than with orthodox liberalism, which I thought a barren strife about dogmas that at that time had only an antiquarian interest. But I was a Tory in the sense that I disliked change unless the need for it was amply proved, and that I desired to preserve continuity with the past and keep whatever of the old foundations were sound. As I used to put it in a fisherman's simile, if your back cast is poor your forward cast will be a mess.

There’s much to both agree and quibble with here—not least whether it’s even possible to have “freedom of the personality” under an ever more socialist state, though one has to forgive Buchan for having no idea just how bloated and all-smothering a bureaucracy could become—but the thing about Buchan is I know we could have a good-faith conversation about it. And I agree with most of the rest of it, especially the barrenness of liberalism and the need for continuity.

Buchan seems to have been ill-at-ease in the world of politics, not only because of his “inclinations” and his lack of striving ambition but because of his broad sympathies, fairmindedness, and honesty.

I had always felt that it was a citizen’s duty to find some form of public service, but I had no strong parliamentary ambitions. Nor was there any special cause at the moment which I felt impelled to plead. While I believed in party government and in party loyalty, I never attained to the happy partisan zeal of many of my friends, being painfully aware of my own and my party’s defects, and uneasily conscious of the merits of my opponent.

Ditto. This is actual political moderation, not the phony and elusive “centrism” promoted as the cure to our ills.

Buchan then quotes a passage from Macaulay’s History of England that describes the political stance of the 1st Marquess of Halifax, a political attitude that Buchan owned he “was apt to fall into”:

His place was on the debatable ground between the hostile divisions of the community, and he never wandered far beyond the frontier of either. The party to which he at any moment belonged was the party which, at that moment, he liked least, because it was the party of which at that moment he had the nearest view. He was therefore always severe upon his violent associates, and was always in friendly relations with his moderate opponents. Every faction in the day of its insolent and vindictive triumph incurred his censure; and every faction, when vanquished and persecuted, found in him a protector.

This description of his inclinations and positions, and most especially the passage from Macaulay, brought to mind Finley Hooper’s summary of Cicero’s politics, one I’ve often felt describes my own “inclinations” and that I now try consciously to hold myself to. Hooper, in his Roman Realities:

Cicero was a man of the middle class all his life. He opposed the selfish interests of a senatorial oligarchy and the selfish interests of the Populares, who had their way in the Tribal Assembly. When one side appeared to have the upper hand, he leaned toward the other. He was very conscious of a decadent ruling class which insisted on its right to rule regardless of whether it ruled well or not. The demagogues of Clodius’s stripe were even more frightening to him, and most of the time their activities kept him estranged from the people.

Hear hear. But while both Cicero and Buchan were sensitive to the cultural rot and decadence that manifested itself among the political elite and the wider culture, both would also aver that politics is not the solution. In Cicero’s own, words: “Electioneering and the struggle for offices is an altogether wretched practice.”

I’ve been savoring Memory Hold-the-Door, a warmly written and often poignant book, and I look forward to finishing it. And the above is not the only distinctly Ciceronian passage. Buchan, no mean classicist, describes his friend and publisher Tommie Nelson, who was killed in the First World War, this way:

His death made a bigger hole in the life of Scotland than that of any other man of his years. . . . In the case of others we might regret the premature loss to the world of some peculiar talent; with Tommie we mourned especially the loss of a talent for living worthily and helping others to do likewise. It is the kind of loss least easy to forget, and yet one which soon comes to be contemplated without pain, for he had succeeded most fully in life.

This could come straight from Cicero’s De Amicitia (On Friendship), another favorite essay of mine from late in his life. Interesting how a long life and nearness to an unexpected death sharpened the insights of both men.

For more of Cicero on politics, see this election day post from three years ago. For Buchan’s nightmare vision of individual moral rot leading to civilizational decline, see here.

Grace and the Grinch

I’m home with a sick four-year old today, which means I’m also home with the Paw Patrol. This morning began with “The Pups Save Christmas,” an episode in which Santa crashes in Adventure Bay on Christmas Eve, losing his reindeer and scattering presents over a wide area. It’s up to Ryder and the pups to help Santa or “Christmas will be canceled.” Naturally they pull through.

There’s more to the episode than that, but I was struck for the first time by how many Christmas shows and movies center on a team of good characters helping Santa “save” Christmas. They have to work to make Christmas happen, otherwise there’s a real possibility that it won’t. “There won’t be a Christmas this year” is an oft-repeated foreboding in these stories.

By contrast, think of “How the Grinch Stole Christmas,” a story the daring of which has been lost on us through sheer familiarity. The Grinch, not just a villain but a Satanic figure, does all he can to stop Christmas. He removes all of the Whos’ material means of joy, all the trappings of Christmas that characters in other stories work to save, and Christmas still happens. “It came without ribbons,” he says in outrage that turns to wonder. “It came without tags. It came without packages, boxes, or bags.”

“Paw Patrol” and other “save Christmas” stories show us the logic of magic or paganism—or, for that matter, computer programming, which is more like magic than devotees of either science care to admit. Certain conditions have to be met to get the desired result. If presents, then happiness. Mistakes or missing parts will crash the whole system. All of these stories have a lot to say about “Christmas spirit” and “believing” but this rhetoric is belied by the stories themselves, which always feature a desperate race to help Santa on his way.

What “The Grinch” shows us, on the other hand, is the logic of grace. It shows better than any other Christmas entertainment the pure gratuitous gift of Christmas, a gift that comes into the world through the goodness of someone else and that we have no control over. We can reject it, as the Grinch does at first, but we can neither make it happen nor stop it.

The nearest that that episode of “Paw Patrol” can get to grace is to assert that “Christmas is about helping others,” which is still making Christmas happen through your own best efforts. Again, compare the Grinch. Having put a lot of work into stopping Christmas and failed, he is transformed by it. You might even say converted. The grace given to the Whos extends even to him, and he returns the literal gifts that have proven, through grace, immaterial to them. Now that the presents and ornaments and roast beast don’t matter to him either, he has the grace to share them. Material blessing comes from joy and grace rather than the other way around, which is the Grinch’s starting assumption—and that of a lot of other Christmas stories in which mere mortals have to create the conditions for Christmas themselves.

This is the wonderful paradox of Christmas. The promise that Christmas will happen no matter what we do is a purer hope than any moralistic message about spending time together or helping others. Joy comes from grace, and that joy will produce everything else that makes Christmas meaningful—including helping others. We just have to let it transform us.

On lunatics and cranks

Last week a friend shared a screenshot of an interesting theory propounded, as all world-changing theories are, in someone’s Instagram comments. You know the Vikings? The old Norse raiders who terrorized all of Europe from the Baltic and the North Sea to the Mediterranean, laid the foundations of Russia, served generations of Byzantine emperors, and traded as far away as Baghdad and the Caspian Sea? Made up. Totally made up. A fictional scapegoat for the crimes of Christians. The Vikings were invented, you see, to cover up for the Knights Templar everywhere the Templars went a-pillaging.

It shouldn’t be hard to see problems with an idea like this—which shouldn’t even really be dignified with the name “theory.” In addition to all the basic factual stuff like when these groups lived and were active and where they lived and were active, it neglects the veritable Himalayas of evidence supporting the existence of the Vikings: letters, chronicles, charters, linguistic evidence, archaeological evidence on three continents… Name a field of historical investigation and there is a branch dedicated to the Viking Age. Just to deal with texts alone, Michael Livingston’s recent study of one battle between the Anglo-Saxons and a Viking coalition, Brunanburh, used sources in Old English, Latin, Irish, Old Norse, and Welsh to reconstruct what we can know about it. Was all of this manufactured and planted later?

Whatever. Anyone proposing an idea like this doesn’t know how we know what happened in the past; they don’t know how history works. Perhaps they should get into filmmaking.

But the hypothetical culprit behind Viking violence in this particular theory reminded me of a favorite line from Umberto Eco that I once shared here many years ago. This passage comes from Eco’s novel Foucault’s Pendulum:

“A lunatic is easily recognized. He is a moron who doesn’t know the ropes. The moron proves his thesis; he has logic, however twisted it may be. The lunatic on the other hand, doesn’t concern himself at all with logic; he works by short circuits. For him, everything proves everything else. The lunatic is all idée fixe, and whatever he comes across confirms his lunacy. You can tell him by the liberties he takes with common sense, by his flashes of inspiration, and by the fact that sooner or later he brings up the Templars.”

— Umberto Eco

“[E]verything proves everything else” should be a recognizable pattern nowadays. A theory like the one above is lunacy.

Revisiting Eco’s diagnostic passage also brings to mind one in which Joseph Bottum defines the crank, a type similar to but with important differences from the lunatic. Here’s Bottum with his useful working definition that manages to nail three common crank fixations, all of which have gotten plenty of play recently:

“There are three infallible signs of the crank—that oddball, goofball sort of person who mutters, as he walks along, about how he’s grasped the key to everything. The first is that he has a theory about the Jews. The second is that he has a theory about money. And the third is that he has a theory about Shakespeare.”

— Joseph Bottum

To put the distinction another way, there’s no arguing with a lunatic, but a crank will argue you under the table. Not that a crank is any nearer the truth than the lunatic, but whatever fixation a crank has will lend itself to tabulation, nitpicking, and a kind of big-data hairsplitting that feels like thought in a way the world-bestriding historical revisions of the lunatic do not. That guy you know who thinks the CIA shot down Flight 370 in order to cover up the fake moon landing on behalf of Satan-worshiping lizard people is a lunatic. That guy you know who posts three times a day about crypto—or the Fed, or the Mossad, or “the Zionists,” or, yes, Shakespeare—is a crank. And there’s a reason you avoid engaging.

For a case study in anti-Shakespeare crankery, see Jonathan Kay at the National Post here. (And I would recommend Kay’s book Among the Truthers for a broad and insightful study of lunatics, cranks, and other similar species.) And here’s a short reflection from Sonny Bunch, inspired by Bottum’s line about cranks and overlapping somewhat with Chesterton’s observations, about how conspiracy theories can reveal a lot—just not about the subject of the theory.

I posted that Eco quotation in the early days of this blog as an addendum to a long passage from Chesterton about the biased of motivated thinking of cranks. You can read that here. For crank-on-crank combat, see the world-class observer of the scene, Charles Portis, in Gringos, here.

CS Lewis, 60 and 125 years later

Last week I was too busy critiquing Napoleon to note the 60th anniversary of the death of CS Lewis here—one more thing to hold against Napoleon—though I did manage to slip through an Instagram memorial. Fortunately, today is Lewis’s 125th birthday, so in the spirit of commemoration and appreciation here are a few good things I read from others to mark sixty years since his passing.

CS Lewis (1898-1963)

At her Substack Further Up, Bethel McGrew has an excellent reflection on her own lifelong connection to Lewis and the way the endless quoting of his work risks simplifying him into a generator of therapeutic fortune cookie messages:

Lewis is much-quoted, for good reason: He is prolifically quotable. (There are also a few famously misattributed quotes, like “You are a soul, you have a body,” which no doubt would have annoyed him greatly.) And yet, there’s a paradoxical sense in which his quotability almost risks watering down his true value as a thinker. There’s a temptation to see Lewis as a one-stop “Christian answer man,” the super-Christian who always had the perfect eloquent solution to every Christian’s hard problems. To be sure, he came closer than most Christian writers to providing a sense-making framework for hard problems. But even he wouldn’t claim to have “solved” them. Indeed, his very strength as a writer was that his work swung free of top-down systematic theologies which claim to provide comprehensively satisfying theological answers.

She continues with a particularly poignant example from A Grief Observed. I recommend the whole post.

At Miller’s Book Review, another outstanding Substack, Joel Miller considers Lewis’s humor in the years just before his death, when failing health should have robbed him of his joy:

Sayer says that Lewis “never lost his sense of humor.” Indeed, he was famously good natured, even amid dire circumstances. On July 15, 1963, he suffered a heart attack and slipped into a coma. Friends feared the worst; some came and prayed; a priest gave the sacrament of extreme unction. Amazingly, an hour after the sacrament, Lewis awoke, revived, and asked for a cup of tea.

True to form, he found a joke in it. “I was unexpectedly revived from a long coma,” he wrote Sister Penelope, an Anglican nun with whom he frequently corresponded. “Ought one honor Lazarus rather than Stephen as the protomartyr? To be brought back and have all one’s dying to do again was rather hard.”

Miller also reflects on his own experience of reading and rereading Lewis. Like Miller, I came to Narnia late, well after many of Lewis’s other books, and I have also read and reread Lewis’s work many times. As Miller notes, though Lewis did not expect his work to be remembered, it’s a safe bet that readers like him and myself will continue to find and appreciate Lewis’s work.

At World magazine, Samuel D James has a good short essay on Lewis as a prophet:

Precisely because Lewis knew that the claims of Christianity were all-encompassing, he recognized that no civilization that abandoned it could function. This was not because Lewis desired some kind of baptized Anglo-Saxon ethnonationalist state (born in Belfast, Lewis never forgot the high cost of religious intolerance), but because modern man’s alternatives were quite literally inhumane. Lewis saw from afar, with striking prescience, that humans had no choice but to retreat from personhood if they wanted to escape the implications of Christian revelation.

At The Critic, Rhys Laverty elaborates more deeply on the same theme:

At the close of the Second World War, Lewis was one of a number of Christian intellectuals (alongside Jacques Maritain, Simone Weil, W.H. Auden, and T.S. Eliot) who had begun to consider what world the Allied powers would now make for themselves. Lewis saw a future in which the rejection of transcendent values would allow a technologised elite to re-make nature as they saw fit, ultimately overthrowing human nature itself — a process made possible through the ideological capture of education.

Laverty invokes not only The Abolition of Man, as James does, but Lewis’s dramatization of those ideas in the final novel of The Space Trilogy, That Hideous Strength, in which the elite of the National Institute of Coordinated Experiments (NICE) pursue genuinely diabolical technological progress and control:

With N.I.C.E, Lewis anticipated our contemporary technocracy. “Progress” is our unquestionable sacred cow, and its faithful handmaiden is technology. Whether we are tearing up areas of ancient natural beauty in order to build infrastructure supposedly intended to help protect the environment, prescribing new cross-sex hormones and surgery to enable greater self-realisation, or developing artificial wombs which we unconvincingly insist will only ever be used for the care of premature infants, there is now no technological innovation that we will deny ourselves today if it supposedly contributes to the nebulous “future good of humanity”.

It is only Green Book education which makes N.I.C.E possible. If truth, goodness, beauty, and so on are merely relative then there is nothing to rein in man’s “conquest of nature”. His scruples are mere hang-ups to be educated out. He will be driven by pure reason or pure appetite, with no sentiment to regulate their respective metrics of efficiency or pleasure. 

I commend all four of these essays to y’all. They’re good celebrations of a worthy life and a worthy mind, and have gotten me wanting to reread pretty much all of my Lewis shelf. Which might take a while.

Let me conclude with a brief personal reflection of my own. Growing up in the environment I did, I don’t remember ever not knowing about Lewis. He was a byword for intelligent Christian thought, something that stood out to me among the generally anti-intellectual atmosphere of fundamentalism. My earliest accidental exposure was probably the BBC Narnia films. I recall catching a long stretch of The Silver Chair on PBS at my grandparents’ house one morning. As dated as those adaptations are now, it scared me. But it also riveted me, and stayed with me. Indeed, The Silver Chair may still be my favorite of the Narnia books.

But it was a long time before I actually read anything by CS Lewis. My parents got me a set of his non-fiction books at our church bookstore when I was in high school. I started The Great Divorce one night and something about the Grey Town and the bus ride into the unknown disturbed me so much that I put it away. That nightmare quality again. But when I tried the book one sleepy Sunday afternoon in college—my way prepared by Dante, whom I discovered my senior year of high school—I read the entire thing in one sitting. It’s still among my favorite Lewis books.

From there it was on to The Screwtape Letters and Mere Christianity and The Four Loves. I read The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe and liked it but returned to the non-fiction, devouring Lewis’s essays on any topic. After college I read The Space Trilogy—all three in one week, if I remember correctly—and delved into his scholarly work: An Experiment in Criticism and, crucially, The Discarded Image. I also read as much about Lewis as I read by him, and dug into the works that Lewis loved only to discover new loves of my own, most notably GK Chesterton.

Only with the birth of my children did I seriously return to Narnia, and now I genuinely love them. My kids do, too. They’ll be yet another generation entertained and blessed by Lewis’s work.

He is one of the few authors who has grown with me for so long—guiding me, enlightening me, introducing me to great literature, telling me entertaining and meaningful stories of his own, and deepening both my understanding and my faith. Where the fictional Lewis of The Great Divorce meets George MacDonald as his heavenly guide, the Virgil to his Dante, Lewis could well play that role for me.

On this, his 125th birthday, just over a week from the 60th anniversary of his death, I am more grateful than ever for CS Lewis. RIP.