Two nights ago, I wrote about Thad Ziolkowski’s new novel Wichita, which I was inspired to read by Natalie Bakopoulus’s review in last Sunday’s NYT. She wrote that “its emotional terrain is touching and vast. Whereas you might begin the book drawn in by its sense of humor, its ending will unhinge you, as if a storm has ripped through you and, like the wind in Rilke’s poem, sucked “the world from your senses.” I was halfway through at the time, and noted that I wasn’t unhinged yet.
I finished it yesterday. Bakopoulus has a point. I wasn’t all that fond of the characters initially, but the novel sneaks up and surprises with its power, so much so that I awoke this morning thinking about it and decided to download Ziolkowski’s memoir from a decade ago, On a Wave.
I’m just over a hundred pages in now. What a ten-year-old!
In the delightful prologue, the author, a week into a proofreading temp job in New York after teaching for a year at an upstate college, leaves work and takes the subway to Far Rockaway, where he finds a surf shop and heads out on a board for the first time in years. Then we begin the memoir proper, going back twenty-five years to the aftermath of Ziolkowski’s parents’ divorce. His father remains in DC, where he is a classics professor, while his mother and her soon-to-be husband move with the author and his younger brother to the Atlantic coast of Florida, near Cape Canaveral.
I don’t know which is more astonishing: the feats of the young author as he braves a world of teenagers and adults in order to learn the skills and culture of surfing or the willingness of his mother to let him participate in this world. Either way, it’s a breathtaking story, compellingly told.
Four days ago, I wrote about Edmund de Waal’s The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Family’s Century of Art and Loss, which I had begun reading. I didn’t happen to mention that I was considering putting it aside temporarily in order to read a new novel, Thad Ziolkowsi’s Wichita. I did so just after writing the post, and I’m now halfway through.
Why Wichita? More to the point, why Wichita when I was enjoying de Waal’s book, and when a long list of novels awaited me if it was fiction I hungered for?
I don’t have a good answer. I suppose it helps that Wichita is only about 250 pages long, in contrast to the undoubtedly richer Hilary Mantel historical novels that top my fiction list, Wolf Hall and the new Bring Up the Bodies. All I can say is, last Friday night I was previewing the Sunday NYT book review section online — a weekly habit — and Natalie Bakopoulus’s review drew me in. I downloaded the free Amazon sample right away, read the first few pages, and as I continued to enjoy The Hare with Amber Eyes over the weekend, I couldn’t get the idea of Wichita out of my head. On Sunday evening, I gave in.
I am invariably at a loss as to what to say about a novel without saying too much about the plot. For much the same reason, I didn’t read Bakopoulus’s review of Wichita all that closely. I just skipped around, alighting on a few passages, such as the review’s close:
“Wichita” is a novel about expectations and outcomes, about what is open and what is veiled. Its emotional terrain is touching and vast. Whereas you might begin the book drawn in by its sense of humor, its ending will unhinge you, as if a storm has ripped through you and, like the wind in Rilke’s poem, sucked “the world from your senses.”
“Through the empty branches the sky remains. / It is what you have.”
Part of what tempted me to read Wichita is the fact that some of the characters are academics. I suppose I won’t be revealing too much if I say that the book starts with the main character arriving at his mother’s home in Wichita upon graduating from Columbia, leaving his east-coast-based academic father and grandfather and uncle and aunt and cousins behind. At the book’s halfway point, he is only in his third day back at the house. I’m not unhinged yet.
Ziolkowski is himself an academic, a professor at Pratt. Wichita is his first novel. He is also a poet and the author of a memoir, On a Wave, about his surfing years. So I’ve learned. A week ago, I knew nothing about him. I’m looking forward to reading this interview once I finish the novel.
The wonders of the internet! A week ago, I wrote about the book I was reading, Charles King’s Odessa: Genius and Death in a City of Dreams. My plan was to turn to the latest installment of Robert Caro’s LBJ biography, when I finished it. But instead I’m now a fourth of the way through Edmund de Waal’s The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Family’s Century of Art and Loss. Why that? Because of the kind suggestion of someone who took the time to write a comment in response to my Odessa post. A complete stranger. I rarely get comments to my posts. Which is fine. I don’t expect any. But I’m grateful that I got this one. I remembered reading about de Waal’s book when it came out. Perhaps I read Walter Kaiser’s review two Octobers ago in the New York Review of Books. But I had since forgotten about it.
Here’s the publisher’s description:
In the 1870s, Charles Ephrussi assembled a collection of 360 Japanese ivory carvings known as netsuke, some comical and some erotic, none of them larger than a matchbox. The scion of a rich, respected banking family that “burned like a comet” in Parisian and Viennese society, Ephrussi was an early supporter of the impressionists; Marcel Proust was briefly his secretary and used him as the model for the aesthete and lover Swann in Remembrance of Things Past.
The Holocaust swept Ephrussi and his glorious, cosmopolitan family into oblivion, and almost the only thing that would remain of their vast empire was the netsuke collection, smuggled out of their Vienna palace (now occupied by Hitler’s theorist on the “Jewish question”) in the pocket of a loyal maid, Anna—one carving a day for a year.
In this grand story, the renowned ceramicist Edmund de Waal, the fifth generation to inherit the collection, traces the story of a remarkable family and a tumultuous century. At once sweeping and intimate, A Hare with Amber Eyes is a deeply personal meditation on art, history, and family, as elegant and precise as the netsuke themselves.
And the conclusion to Kaiser’s review:
Only someone for whom objects are as meaningful as they are for Edmund de Waal could have performed his quest. Only someone with his intelligence and sensitivity could have written such a fascinating account of his journey. The reader—and, indeed, the author—of this book will probably never fully understand the compulsion that drove him to undertake that journey, and his account inevitably leaves us with unanswered questions. Just why and how did a collection of netsuke impose, as he claims, a responsibility on him to explore his family’s history? Wasn’t it, rather, an opportunity that he may, consciously or unconsciously, have been seeking? But even if it was, how then did these Japanese artifacts allow him to open the doors of his family’s European past? Hasn’t his netsuke collection come to have greater significance for him than it did for any of its previous owners? Why did he feel compelled personally to revisit the rooms in Paris, Vienna, and Tokyo where the netsuke had resided? In short, how has a collection of tiny carvings exerted such irresistible exactions and provided such poignant ancestral awareness?
At the very end of the book, when his quest has taken him geographically and historically as far as Odessa and his family’s origins, he suddenly wonders what sort of book he is writing: “I no longer know if this book is about my family, or memory, or myself, or is still a book about small Japanese things.” The answer, of course, is that it is about all of those things, but most of all it is the evocative account of a gifted, interesting, inquiring man in search of his historic identity.
None of this explains why I chose to read de Waal rather than the LBJ biography. All I can say is that I’m having difficulty finding the ship to board that will take me away from the borderlands of the nineteenth-and twentieth-century’s Russian and Soviet empires and on to the new world. The trouble began with Max Egremont’s Forgotten Land: Journeys Among the Ghosts of East Prussia, which led to Timothy Snyder’s Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin, Orlando Figes The Crimean War: A History, Colin Thubron’s Shadow of the Silk Road, Thomas de Waal’s The Caucasus, Charles King’s Odessa, and now The Hare with Amber Eyes. I need to find an LBJ ancestor who emigrated from the Black or Baltic Sea to Texas and get on board with him or her.
In any case, the current book is a natural successor to the Odessa book. Early on, we learn about the origin of Edmund de Waal’s ancestral wealth, in a paragraph that could have come straight from King’s book.
Odessa was a city within the Pale of Settlement, the area on the western borders of imperial Russia in which Jews were allowed to live. It was famous for its rabbinical schools and synagogues, rich in literature and music, a magnet for the impoverished Jewish shtetls of Galicia. It was also a city that doubled its population of Jews and Greeks and Russians every decade, a polyglot city full of speculation and traders, the docks full of intrigues and spies, a city on the make. Charles Joachim Ephrussi [the author's great-great-great grandfather] had transformed a small grain-trading business into a huge enterprise by cornering the market in buying wheat. He bought the grain from the middlemen who transported it on carts along the heavily rutted roads from the rich black soil of the Ukrainian wheat fields, the greatest wheat fields in the world, into the port of Odessa. Here the grain was stored in his warehouses before being exported across the Black Sea, up the Danube, across the Mediterranean.
By 1860, the family had become the greatest grain exporters in the world.
De Waal writes beautifully about objects and touch. For instance, in introducing us to the netsuke collection that his great-grandfather acquired in Paris, de Waal discusses the vitrines in which wealthy people of the era would display their findings.
A collector friend of Charles is described in the act of placing Japanese objects in a vitrine, “like a painter applying a stroke to his canvas. The harmony is complete and the refinement exquisite… “
The vitrines exist so that you can see objects, but not touch them: they frame things, suspend them, tantalize through distance.
This is what I realise now I failed to understand about vitrines. I spent the first twenty years of my life as a potter earnestly trying to get objects out of the glass cases in which my pots were often placed in galleries and museums. They die, I’d say, behind glass, held in that airlock. Vitrines were a sort of coffin: things need to be out and take their chances away from the protection of formal display, to be liberated. “Out of the drawing-room and into the kitchen!” I wrote in a sort of manifesto. There was too much in the way. There was trop de verre, too much glass, as a great architect commented on seeing a rival Modernist’s house of glass.
But the vitrine — as opposed to the museum’s case — is for opening. And that opening glass door and the moment of looking, then choosing, and then reaching in and then picking up is a moment of seduction, an encounter between a hand and an object that is electric.
One more quote, because the story is so charming.
Charles bought a picture of some asparagus from Manet, one of his extraordinary small still lives, where a lemon or rose is lambent in the dark. It was a bundle of twenty stalks bound in straw. Manet wanted 800 francs for it, a substantial sum, and Charles, thrilled, sent 1,000. A week later Charles received a small canvas signed with a simple M in return. It was a single asparagus stalk laid across a table with an accompanying note: “This seems to have slipped from the bundle.”
On finishing Thomas de Waal’s The Caucasus three days ago, I thought I was done with books on countries or wars or travel or history of the Black Sea, the Caucasus, and Central Asia. Before The Caucasus was Orlando Figes’ The Crimean War and Colin Thubron’s Shadow of the Silk Road (see my posts here, here, and here, as well as here) Next on my reading list was Robert Caro’s latest LBJ tome The Passage of Power, just out.
But Caro’s book is so long. I wasn’t ready to immerse myself in it. Searching for an alternative, I found Charles King’s Odessa: Genius and Death in a City of Dreams. I suppose I was destined to read about Odessa before leaving this part of the world. It is, after all, my ancestral homeland, the 1893 birthplace of my grandmother, and a city I know little about.
Italian merchants, Greek freedom fighters, and Turkish seamen; a Russian empress and her favorite soldier-bureaucrats; Jewish tavern keepers, traders, and journalists—these and many others seeking fortune and adventure rubbed shoulders in Odessa, the greatest port on the Black Sea.
Here a dream of freedom inspired geniuses and innovators, from Alexander Pushkin and Isaac Babel to Zionist activist Vladimir Jabotinsky and immunologist Ilya Mechnikov. Yet here too was death on a staggering scale: not only the insidious plagues common to seaports but also the mass murder of Jews carried out by Romanian occupation forces during the Second World War. Drawing on a wealth of original source material, Odessa is an elegy for a vibrant, multicultural city as well as a celebration of the survival of Odessa’s dream in a diaspora reaching all the way to Israel and the United States.
I’m a little more than a third of the way through so far. It’s not a long book, and therefore not all that detailed either, but informative nonetheless. An opening chapter surveys the history of the Black Sea region from ancient times to the 1780s. Each of the next few chapters is built around one or two people of note in Russian and Odessan history.
First we learn about Potemkin, his relationship with Catherine the Great, war with the Ottomans, the arrival of John Paul Jones to assist with naval warfare, his dismal performance, and the saving of the day by José Pascual Domingo de Ribas. Among other successes, de Ribas took the small Black Sea village of Khadjibey from the Ottomans, leading to its incorporation into the Russian Empire in 1792. Subsequently, he received Catherine’s approval to build a new city, Odessa, on the site.
De Ribas and Catherine would both die before much progress was made. In the next chapter, we move on to the early 1800s, during which Richilieu carried through on the project, creating Odessa. The plague intervened in 1812, almost killing Odessa before it could reach adolescence, but Richilieu saved it through quarantine and fire.
On we go to Mikhail Vorontsov, his marriage to Lise Branicka, his appointment as governor-general of New Russia, the arrival in Odessa of the young Alexander Pushkin, his famous affair with Lise, and Odessa’s growth as a major international city attracting Italians, Greeks, Germans, Jews, Armenians, and many more.
Odessa’s role as a progressive port city made it especially attractive to Jews, for whom it provided a two-fold freedom: freedom within the larger culture to work in a variety of professions and live where they pleased, plus freedom within Jewish culture from the more traditional practices of the Pale. The chapter I’m now reading focuses on this growing Jewish community. King writes:
Jews emerged as the critical middlemen in Odessa’s commerce, linking up with peasants, immigrant farmers, and herders in the interior and forming an essential bridge to the large export concerns in the port city. Through their energy and social networks, Odessa became something that none of its early founders, from Potemkin to Vorontsov, could have imagined: the preeminent port of the Yiddish-speaking world. As a frontier city in need of both people and income, Odessa became one of the major urban centers of the Pale system, a modern and dynamic city where Jews could find economic prosperity and a degree of freedom within an otherwise constraining system. While Jews were viewed as competitors to Christian businesses in other corners of the empire — one of the reasons for legal restrictions on Jewish economic activity — their business contacts were seen as a boon in the growing city.
That’s my family he’s describing, a family I know close to nothing about. Not even when they would have arrived in Odessa. What I know is my grandmother’s stories of her childhood, the pogroms, and the Cossacks. Not that I had any idea what pogroms or Cossacks were, but I knew they were bad. And I knew that because Cossacks were attacking Jews (no doubt the 1905 Odessa pogrom that I will soon learn more about in the book), my grandmother’s family had to stay indoors to avoid danger. But they had to eat, and it fell to my grandmother to go out to buy food for the family.
In retrospect, the point must have been that she was the child most able to pass for a non-Jew. The language spoken at home was Yiddish, but she spoke Russian at school. Indeed, she studied French and was probably fluent in all three. Given how good her English would become, with less of the classic Yiddish accent of so many of her generation who came to New York, I would bet her Russian was that of a native. Whatever the reason, she was the family food procurer.
Not long after the pogroms, the family made their way to New York. My great-grandparents never did learn English or fit in. My grandmother did so quickly. It’s stunning to realize that she was equally at home in the world I’m now reading about and in late twentieth-century New York. What a woman!
Time and again, as I read the book, I would recognize the ground being laid for conflicts of the twentieth century. The Balkans. The Caucasus. Afghanistan. Recent developments such as the Chechen War and the 2008 conflicts between Russia, Georgia, Abkhazia, and South Ossetia all make more sense to me now. Not to mention that I know where they all are.
I then explained that since “I could finally picture the geographical relative positions of all the countries in Central Asia, it was time to learn more.” And that’s what led me to Thubron’s book.
Yet, I could just have easily have chosen to read more about the Caucasus. I was therefore delighted to open up the latest issue of The New York Review of Books a couple of weeks ago and find Tim Judah’s review of Thomas de Waal’s The Caucasus: An Introduction.
Unfortunately, Judah has nothing to say about the book. He takes the opportunity to write about his own travel in and views of Armenia — certainly a reviewer’s prerogative — but provides no enlightenment on de Waal’s work. Quite a ways in, Judah speaks of de Waal’s “excellent recent book,” including a quote to support his view. And the closing sentence returns to the book for another supporting quote. That’s it.
Nonetheless, interest piqued, and then making slow progress through the China portion of Thubron’s journey, I downloaded the free opening portion of the book (from Amazon) to read. Then, three mornings ago, after arriving with Thubron in Antioch (Turkish Antakya) and concluding what turned out to be an extraordinary journey, I downloaded the rest of de Waal’s book. I’m now two-thirds through it. Here’s the Oxford University Press blurb:
In The Caucasus, de Waal provides this richer, deeper, and much-needed appreciation, one that reveals that the South Caucasus–Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia, and their many smaller regions, enclaves, and breakaway entities–is a fascinating and distinct world unto itself. Providing both historical background and an insightful analysis of the period after 1991, de Waal sheds light on how the region has been scarred by the tumultuous scramble for independence and the three major conflicts that broke out with the end of the Soviet Union–Nagorny Karabakh, Abkhazia, and South Ossetia. The book examines the region as a major energy producer and exporter; offers a compelling account of the Rose Revolution in Georgia, the rise of Mikheil Saakashvili, and the August 2008 war; and considers the failure of the South Caucasus, thus far, to become a single viable region. In addition, the book features a dozen or so “boxes” which provide brief snapshots of such fascinating side topics as the Kurds, Turkish-Armenian rapprochement, the promotion of the region as the “Soviet Florida,” and the most famous of all Georgians, Stalin.
The Caucasus delivers a vibrantly written and timely account of this turbulent region, one that will prove indispensable for all concerned with world politics. It is, as well, a stimulating read for armchair travelers and for anyone curious about far-flung corners of the world.
For someone ignorant, like me, de Waal’s book is indeed what Judah says: excellent. But it is no more than what it claims to be, an introduction. It provides a whirlwind tour through history, with the briefest of mentions of centuries before the nineteenth; a closer look at Russian dominance during the nineteenth; a bit of a pause in the 1918-1922 years, when the status of the South Caucasus entities was up for grabs; and a review of the changing status of the various republics during the Stalin years. From there, we get to the heart of the book, an examination of the conflicts just before and after the Soviet Union’s collapse (which I’m reading about now), then a jump to the more recent conflicts.
Mike King’s map accompanying Judah’s review gives some sense, if you don’t have a geographic picture in view, of the complexity of the region.
The account of the complexities of the political situation facing Armenia, Azerbaijan, and the Soviet Union/Russia in the late 80s and early 90s is illuminating, as are the subsequent accounts of the war at that time between Georgia and South Ossetia, and the war that began just as that ended between Georgia and Abkhazia. The map doesn’t go quite far enough west. Missing is a view of the Black Sea coast, with Turkey, the region of Ajara, Georgia, and the region of Abkhazia. And the fact that there are all these regions, each with a history of independence as well as a history of consolidation within the Ottoman Empire, the Russian Empire, the Soviet Union, and Georgia only begins to suggest how complicated the mixing of peoples, languages, and cultures is. Sorting this out for the novice is de Waal’s principal accomplishment.
Still awaiting me is de Waal’s treatment of the 2008 war between Georgia and South Ossetia and the Georgian-Abkhazian conflict as well. Who can forget John McCain’s assurance to Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili at the height of the war in South Ossetia that we Americans are all Georgians? Oh, here we go. There was an op-ed piece in the WSJ on August 14, 2008, with the title, “We Are all Georgians.” And that same day, the Foon Rhee of the Boston Globe reported:
The United States should stand with the democratic government in Georgia, he said, adding that he had offered Americans’ prayers and thoughts in a conversation with Georgian president Mikhail Saakashvili.
“He knows that the thoughts and the prayers and support of the American people are with that brave little nation as they struggle today for their freedom and independence. And he wanted me to say thank you to you, to give you his heartfelt thanks for the support of the American people for this tiny little democracy far away from the United States of America. And I told him that I know I speak for every American when I say to him, ‘Today, we are all Georgians,’ ” McCain declared.
To think that McCain portrayed himself as the foreign policy expert. Like Romney now, he just wanted to posture that he would stand up to Russia, regardless of the actual history of the conflict.
Anyway, I’m finding this quite a useful primer. Now I need a companion for the North Caucasus. I wouldn’t mind knowing more about Chechnya and Dagestan. Plus, the Sochi 2014 Winter Olympics will be upon us soon, with skiing in Krasnaya Polyana. I better bone up before then so I’ll have an understanding of the local tensions.
I haven’t written about any books in weeks. What’s going on? Well, partly, I’ve been unable to decide which of several books to concentrate on, and partly, I haven’t been able to build up much momentum in the book that won the battle. I haven’t felt committed to it. But that has changed at last, and I anticipate finishing it this weekend.
Four weeks ago, I was struggling to figure out what books to have on my Kindle before we headed to New York and North Carolina. I had begun Candice Millard’s book about James Garfield’s assassination, Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President, and anticipated (correctly) that I would finish it during the trip. What to read next?
In the background, I knew two books would be coming out this month that would command my attention: the fourth volume of Robert Caro’s monumental LBJ biography, The Passage of Power (out yesterday, with a review now online by Bill Clinton that will appear in the Sunday NYT), and the second historical novel in Hilary Mantel’s trilogy, Bring Up the Bodies (out next Tuesday, though reviewed by Janet Maslin in today’s NYT).
It turns out that I have yet to read Wolf Hall, the first installment of the Mantel trilogy, and a book I just had to have a couple of years back. (I have some old posts about it, dealing for instance with my desire to read it on our trip to Europe in the fall of 2009, except that it wasn’t available on Kindle and I didn’t want to carry the hardcover around). One option a month ago, then, was to read Wolf Hall at last. Or, I could read a massive history I had bought just before deciding to read the Garfield book, Norman Davies’ Vanished Kingdoms: The Rise and Fall of States and Nations. (I’ll have more to say about it another time.) And there was John Jeremiah Sullivan’s collection Pulphead: Essays, which I had bought for Joel a few months ago and therefore could read as well on my Kindle.
But I had a different idea. I was determined to find something to read about Central Asia. Why? Well, that’s the topic for a massive post in its own right. The short version is that, with no particular plan in mind, I seem to keep reading history or travel books that treat regions near Central Asia without actually reading about Central Asia. For example, going back to the early months of Ron’s View, in December 2008 I wrote about Judith Herrin’s Byzantium: The Surprising Life of a Medieval Empire, which I never did finish, owing to terminal boredom.
Time and again, as I read the book, I would recognize the ground being laid for conflicts of the twentieth century. The Balkans. The Caucasus. Afghanistan. Recent developments such as the Chechen War and the 2008 conflicts between Russia, Georgia, Abkhazia, and South Ossetia all make more sense to me now. Not to mention that I know where they all are. I have a complete picture for the first time in my life of the geography of the Black Sea (which happens to be where my grandmother was born and spent the first part of her childhood, in Odessa). And for good measure, I’ve extended my picture eastward past the Caspian Sea into Central Asia, inspired in part by the book and in part by attending the Central Asian ikat exhibit at the Seattle Art Museum two weeks ago. Indeed, I can now name and locate all 15 former Soviet republics.
Now that I could finally picture the geographical relative positions of all the countries in Central Asia, it was time to learn more. Plus, that ikat exhibit left me with thrilling images of the architecture in Samarkand and Bukhara. I wanted to know about Uzbekistan (Herman Cain’s proud ignorance notwithstanding) and Turkmenistan and Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. Kazakhstan too, though that I thought I knew a little about (and not just thanks to Sacha Baron Cohen).
What to read? After a little searching, I was led the famous British travel writer Colin Thubron, who wrote about all five former Soviet republics of Central Asia in The Lost Heart of Asia shortly after the fall of the Soviet Union, and who more recently covered some of the same ground in Shadow of the Silk Road.
Before heading to New York, I downloaded the opening portions of both books from Amazon. The narrower focus of the earlier book more closely matched my specific interest. But I feared that it would dwell too much on the conditions in the five countries in the immediate aftermath of their independence. The alternative, Shadow of the Silk Road, has the following description from the publisher’s website:
To travel the Silk Road, the greatest land route on earth, is to trace the passage not only of trade and armies but also of ideas, religions, and inventions. Making his way by local bus, truck, car, donkey cart, and camel, Colin Thubron covered some seven thousand miles in eight months—out of the heart of China into the mountains of Central Asia, across northern Afghanistan and the plains of Iran into Kurdish Turkey—and explored an ancient world in modern ferment.
My fear with this book was that I wasn’t really looking to read still more about China. The table of contents suggested that Thubron would take a long time to get out of there. Also, in passing from China to Afghanistan, Thubron traveled through only Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan. Nonetheless, this seemed like the better bet. On the eve of our departure for New York, I downloaded it.
I have to say, Thubron really does take forever to move on from China. Every time he left a city, I thought, great, he’s going to get to the border. But no matter how far he traveled, the border never seemed to get closer.
Which has something to do with why I moved slowly myself. A few pages here, a few pages there. The book doesn’t have narrative drive, a lesson I was slow to accept. Now, at last, I have learned to be content with Thubron’s pace. And we’ve made some headway in recent nights: through Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan, across the Amu Darya, and into Afghanistan.
Thubron isn’t much for filling in the history in big doses. He goes for drips instead, the picture slowly emerging of peoples and religions and cultures and languages and goods working their way slowly back and forth across the vast distances of Asia, national boundaries falling where they may, through accident or force but not logic.
Here are some passages I’ve marked that give some small sense of Thubron’s writing. From somewhere in China:
I listened to the river, and felt the traveler’s old excitement. The early Silk Road seemed to enter Central Asia as into somewhere wild and opaque. The great empires to east and west — China, Persia, Rome — petered out in its silence. The illusion was of a dark transition. But in fact this black hole in Asia’s heart nursed a delicate interdependence of nomad and settler. A distant turbulence at one end of the road trembled along its length like an electric current, so that the pressure of pastoral tribes along the Great Wall, in a relentless chain reaction, might unleash the Huns over Europe. A disaster could not occur in Asia, wrote Cicero, that did not shake the Roman economy to its foundations.
From Tamerlane’s grave in Samarkand:
The tsarists, and the Bolsheviks after them, entered a land without nations, where a state was only the outreach of a ruler. Its heart was not an abstract institution, but a living dynasty. Its frontiers were blurred opinions. Craving order from this multilingual soup, Moscow prescribed labels, tinkered with languages, allotted suitable heroes and carved out countries as best it could. By the time Uzbekistan lurched to independence in 1991, the nation was a full-blown Russian invention. Its rulers, part of the myth themselves, discovered legitimacy in the Soviet fantasy of a pre-existing Uzbekistan, embracing the glory of Tamerlane now, and fading back into an indefinite past.
Still in Samarkand:
You climb a stairway of intricate splendor. Its hexagonal stones are mellow underfoot. Here and there a willow brushes the path, or a swallow chirrups from a cupola. On either side the tomb facades converge in waterfalls of pure faience, sometimes only twelve feet apart. Their colours are turquoise and kingfisher blue, often on a dark blue field, tinged by olive or Pompeian red. Half close your eyes and you imagine this a street of the living, lined with mansions of inexplicable richness, their doors open. Sometimes their porches are lined by six or eight vertical bands of glazed terra-cotta, perforated with a spider’s delicacy, so that the whole building seems to glisten in a skein of blue lace. Over them a gallery of fifteenth-century ornament unfurls, interlocked flowers, a dusting of stars, tears, wheels, a lexicon of scripts. To the illiterate eye, calligraphy and foliage intertwine, words become leaf-stems, creepers blossom into letters.
I love that last image.
I will continue on my journey with Thubron. It may not be the journey I was looking for. And I don’t have the enthusiasm evinced by Christian Caryl in his New York Review review or Lorraine Adams in her NYT review, both from 2007. But I’m hooked at last.
Caro beckons. And Mantel. Though I may detour through Pulphead, Sullivan’s essay collection. A couple of weeks back, when I was bogged down in China, I dipped in a little and found his essay on Michael Jackson improbably thrilling. (Yes, Thriller/thrilling. I know. But that’s what was most thrilling, Sullivan’s discussion of the making of Thriller.)
zeroes in on what other historians overlook. Ms. Millard digs deeply into the turmoil that got James A. Garfield elected, the lunacy that got him shot and the medical malfeasance that turned a minor wound into a mortal one. Her story is so full of outsize figures — not least of them the unexpectedly noble Garfield — that Alexander Graham Bell is only a bit player.
It’s a short book, 260 pages. I would have welcomed more details on Garfield’s time in Congress, or his duties as president of the university that is now Case Western Reserve, or the 1880 election. But Millard isn’t writing a biography, and doesn’t claim to. Indeed, the title does a perfectly good job of describing what Millard is writing. And so far, she’s doing a fine job of it.
As evidence of that, I was so caught up in the stage she had set for Garfield’s shooting that I kept hoping for a change of route, an alteration of circumstance, that would prevent Guiteau from firing the gun. Alas, Millard failed to change history and the shots went off on schedule.
This morning I got a few pages into the second half of the book, learning of the medical attention Garfield received at Washington’s Baltimore and Potomac train station in the immediate aftermath of the shooting. Perhaps as further evidence of Millard’s story-telling prowess, I put my Kindle aside with the thought that I may be just as happy not reading further. The medical mishaps are already too painful to learn about, to say nothing of the pain they caused Garfield.
I’ll keep going. I’m eager to learn more about Chester Arthur. I’ve already learned what a mediocrity he was before the vice-presidency was thrust on him. The book is a valuable reminder of the immense importance of the vice-presidential selection process, and none too soon, as another round soon waits us. (I wonder anew what McCain was thinking.)
Changes in the Land is another fabulous blend of history, geography, economics, and ecology, plus culture. Highlights include the treatment of the differing conceptions Indians and colonists had of land rights and ownership, the complex nature of the forest ecology circa 1600, and the deforestation that took place over the next two centuries. The blurb for the book at Amazon gets it right:
In this landmark work of environmental history, William Cronon offers an original and profound explanation of the effects European colonists’ sense of property and their pursuit of capitalism had upon the ecosystems of New England. Reissued here with an updated afterword by the author and a new preface by the distinguished colonialist John Demos, Changes in the Land, provides a brilliant inter-disciplinary interpretation of how land and people influence one another. With its chilling closing line, “The people of plenty were a people of waste,” Cronon’s enduring and thought-provoking book is ethno-ecological history at its best.
I do have one major complaint, not about the book itself but about the rotten thing that was done with its Kindle-ization. A year ago, when I finished Cronon’s Chicago book, I looked on Amazon for this one and saw that it was available only as a paperback, that being the 20th anniversary re-issue described in the blurb above, with preface and afterword. Had there been a Kindle version, I would have downloaded and begun reading it instantly. Instead, I simply put added it to my list of books to read.
A month ago, I went looking again and was surprised to discover that there was a Kindle version. I didn’t see it at first. In contrast to Amazon’s normal setup, in which when one goes to a book’s webpage, one sees listings of all available versions, including Kindle versions, the paperback page does not show a Kindle version. I stumbled on it in a separate search, not usually necessary, revealing an independent listing of a 2011 Kindle version at the unusually low price of $6.99. That’s what I downloaded a month ago.
Just today, in looking for the Amazon webpage to insert in this post, I saw the blurb quoted above and was reminded that there’s such a thing as the 20th anniversary edition. That’s great, but the Kindle version is the 1982 original. No preface. No afterword. And no warning. Geez. I feel cheated. I’ll have to find a copy of the new version in the library and read the missing pieces. I’m especially interested in Cronon’s afterword.
But don’t let me distract you from the main point. Cronon is brilliant. Read his books. If you read only one, make it Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West. If you don’t read it all, read the three central chapters, each with a separate theme: grain, lumber, meat. As I wrote a year ago, “each is a gem. I can think of no better microeconomics primer, as we watch capitalism take root and transform the western regions of the country along with the way of life of its population and the land itself. Prairie makes way for farming, the white pine of the north woods makes way to fence the prairie and house its inhabitants, and plains buffalo make way for cattle range land. People’s lives improve, but at a cost, which Cronon always keeps in our field of view.”
What a book! I learned so much. It starts slowly. Figes even warns in the Introduction that a reader eager to get to the war without reading the preliminary chapters on the conditions that led to war should just skip ahead. This would amount to jumping to about page 150 of its 500 pages. And it would be a huge mistake, since much of what makes the book so good is the context it provides for the war. On the other hand, the pace certainly picks up once the war starts.
I had intended on several occasions over the past week to write about the book’s many strengths. Now that I’m done, I hardly know what to highlight. I’m tempted simply to say read it yourself and you’ll see. Plus, much of what so fascinated me may reveal more about my prior ignorance than about the book itself. Still, it’s a superb primer on the tensions from the late eighteenth century to the middle of the nineteenth between Britain, France, Russia, Austria, and the Ottoman Empire over the former, present, and future countries, the principalities, and assorted ethnic and national groups that surround the Black Sea. Underlying all these tensions is the religious divide between Islam and Christianity, along with the divide within Christianity between Orthodox and western Christians, and still further between Protestants and Catholics, as well as divides between modernizing Muslims of Turkey and more fundamentalist Muslims throughout the Ottoman Empire or within areas controlled by Russia. It’s for good reason that the original British title of Figes’ book is Crimea: The Last Crusade.
I can try to elaborate on all of this, but there’s a reason Figes takes 500 pages to lay it out. Any attempt on my part to summarize would be silly. Keep in mind, when it comes to the complexity of the religious and political considerations, that ultimately France and Britain would go to war against Russia on the side of the Ottomans. Russia saw itself as the protector of Orthodox Christianity, the rightful heir since the fall exactly 400 years earlier of Constantinople. Britain was more interested in preserving its trade routes through Ottoman-controlled lands to India, and in supporting a liberalizing Turkey against what it perceived to be an expansionary Russia. But this is simplifying.
The broader issues aside, there are the amazing stories of poorly trained troops (with ample quotes from their letters), the never-ending wonder of the siege of Sebastopol, bad weather, inadequate supply lines, sea battles, reporters in the field getting word back home via telegraph, war photography. And, of course, the battle of Balaklava with its Charge of the Light Brigade. Oh, and don’t forget Florence Nightingale. Tolstoy too.
Time and again, as I read the book, I would recognize the ground being laid for conflicts of the twentieth century. The Balkans. The Caucasus. Afghanistan. Recent developments such as the Chechen War and the 2008 conflicts between Russia, Georgia, Abkhazia, and South Ossetia all make more sense to me now. Not to mention that I know where they all are. I have a complete picture for the first time in my life of the geography of the Black Sea (which happens to be where my grandmother was born and spent the first part of her childhood, in Odessa). And for good measure, I’ve extended my picture eastward past the Caspian Sea into Central Asia, inspired in part by the book and in part by attending the Central Asian ikat exhibit at the Seattle Art Museum two weeks ago. Indeed, I can now name and locate all 15 former Soviet republics.
I’m getting away from the point, which is that like all great history, the book has much to teach us, both about the past and about our present time. Here’s one example, from early in the book, in a discussion of British attitudes toward Russia:
In November 1835 [David] Urquhart launched a periodical, The Portfolio, in which he aired his Russophobic views, of which the following is typical: “The ignorance of the Russian people separates them from all community with the feelings of other nations, and prepares them to regard every denunciation of the injustice of their rulers as an attack upon themselves, and the Government has already announced by its Acts a determination to submit to no moral influences which may reach it from without.”
I have to confess that when I read about a country whose people regard “every denunciation of the injustice of their rulers as an attack upon themselves,” with a government determined “to submit to no moral influences which may reach it from without,” I could not help but think of our own country under President Bush, though I fear that Obama is little different in this regard. You may think otherwise, but I promise you this. If you read Figes book, time and again you will find passages that resonate with the present day.
(See also reviews by Max Hastings last June in The New York Review and Gary Bass last July in the NYT.)
Two months ago, I wrote about Jim Dodson’s upcoming book American Triumvirate: Sam Snead, Byron Nelson, Ben Hogan, and the Modern Age of Golf. A year ago, I had read his 2005 biography Ben Hogan: An American Life, writing about it a month later and quoting from that post in January. As I explained in January, “since finishing the book, I have thought that I would enjoy reading more about the golfers of that era. A biography of Byron Nelson perhaps. You can understand, then, how pleased I was to read a month or two ago (I don’t remember where) that Dodson would have a new book coming out on Hogan, Nelson, and Sam Snead.” My one concern was that having just read the Hogan biography last year, I would find this book repetitious. But with the Masters approaching, another historical golf excursion would provide a good warmup.
The Dodson book was due out a week ago today. The week before, I was reading Jim Baggott’s The Quantum Story: A History in 40 Moments (which I have written about here and here). When I finished it two twelve evenings ago, I had to decide whether to start another book or distract myself otherwise for five days while waiting for American Triumvirate to appear. Remembering that I had pre-ordered it on Amazon, I checked but failed to find evidence of that. This reprieve led to the creative idea that I could actually wait before buying it, allowing myself to read another book (or more) first and turn to Dodson at my leisure.
So it was that I downloaded Orlando Figes The Crimean War: A History, one of the books I was trying to decide among two weeks earlier before selecting Baggott’s quantum mechanics history. (And by the way, what do you make of that subtitle? Might I have thought the book was a comedy without that little tip? Or should I take this as a sign of the perceived ignorance of US readers? The original title in the UK was the more useful and informative Crimea: The Last Crusade.) I will write about it separately. It’s superb. Also long, and dense. As I made slow progress, I realized that I wouldn’t be ready for Dodson for a while.
And then a funny thing happened. On Monday night, eight days ago, the eve of American Triumvirate‘s publication date, I got an email from Amazon informing me that American Triumvirate was now being sent to my Kindle. But I didn’t pre-order it! Then I remembered that my Kindle account purchases aren’t listed together with my book purchases in my Amazon account information. When I checked a few days earlier to see if I had pre-ordered it, what I found was that I hadn’t pre-ordered the book. But I had pre-ordered the e-book, which I now owned. Curious, I picked up my Kindle, got out of The Crimean War, and found American Triumvirate as promised. I went back to The Crimean War, finished chapter 2 (60 pages in) so that I would be at a good pausing point, then began reading American Triumvirate.
Dodson sure does draw the reader in. He’s an excellent companion when proctoring a final exam, as I did Wednesday morning. Unfortunately, he’s also an excellent companion when trying to grade said final exams.
The conflict between reading Dodson and grading felt familiar. Checking, I discovered that sure enough, I had read the Hogan biography at exactly the same time last year, finishing it the weekend I needed to get my final exams graded. And this year I did the same, finishing American Triumvirate late Saturday afternoon, grading tests the rest of Saturday and all day Sunday.
I should explain that the logic behind publishing a book about Snead, Nelson, and Hogan now is that they were born months apart in 1912, making this a centennial year. Yet, as Dodson’s subtitle (“the modern age of golf”) suggests, he aims to tell us a wider story than that of these three contemporaneous golfers. A Prologue plunges us into the middle of the 1954 Masters, but Chapter 1 takes us back to 1912 for an overview of life and golf in America at that time. Soon we go back farther, to 1900 and golfing great Harry Vardon’s visit from Britain, then still farther, to the 1840′s, St. Andrews, golf pro Allan Robertson, and his assistant Tom Morris. From here, time moves forward again, as we return to the turn of the century and the original Great Triumvirate of Vardon, John Henry Taylor, and James Braid, learning about the development of new golf balls and clubs, the growth of the game and of golf courses, andy the births of our heroes-to-be.
Eventually Dodson narrows his focus to our boys, but with the growth of the American pro game a continuing theme. I should note that these aren’t just three of the century’s greatest golfers. They are three absolutely fascinating men. It is a continuing wonder that the Hogan and Snead families both settled not far from the same golf club in Fort Worth, with Byron and Ben heading over just two weeks apart to find out about caddying, eventually to compete in the club’s annual caddy golf tournament. As happened again and again in the coming years, Byron got the upper hand, edging Ben in a playoff. Only after Byron’s miraculous year of 1945, his early retirement a year later, and then Ben’s stunning recovery from the February 1949 accident in which he and wife Valerie collided head on with a Greyhound bus would Ben finally become the unquestioned greatest golfer in the world.
There’s Sam too, but it becomes clear where Dodson’s heart lies. He is, after all, the official Hogan biographer. Despite my fear that I would find the book repetitious, I happily read again of Hogan’s recovery, his peak golfing years of 1950-1953, his painful defeat in the 1955 US Open, and his success as a businessman. He is a towering figure, his story a great piece of American history. However much I admire many of today’s golfers, I don’t see an equal. By all means read American Triumvirate, but even better, read Ben Hogan: An American Life.
