Ron's View

The video above tells the story of a British World War II poster with the message “Keep Calm and Carry On.” I happened to see a link to it yesterday morning on Andrew Sullivan’s blog. I rarely click on Sullivan’s video links, but something about this one caught my eye, and I’m glad it did. For, poster story aside, I was charmed by the views of the bookshop, Barter Books, where the poster was found in a box. See for yourself, starting at around 1:15 and continuing to the end. The bookshop is located in part of an 1887 railway station in Alnwick, north of Newcastle on the way to Edinburgh. One can learn more about the shop and station here and in the subsequent links.

I feel more than a little awkward about admiring the shop while confining most of my book purchases to Amazon. This is an on-going problem for us when we visit Nantucket, which has two wonderful bookstore that I have written about before, Mitchell’s Book Corner and Nantucket Bookworks. I was pleased to read three days ago that the two are likely to survive as part of a partnership that will run them jointly as “full-service, year-round bookstores,” thanks to the Schmidt Family Foundation. This is an extraordinary commitment for such a small community. Wendy Schmidt is quoted as saying, “I truly believe that collaboration rather than competition is the best course for the island’s bookstores. Mitchell’s Book Corner and Bookworks will each retain their own unique personalities, but by functioning cooperatively we’ll be able to strengthen both entities and offer even more for the island’s readers.” I do lots of reading when we’re there, but on my Kindle. This year we’ll make a point of buying books from both stores.

Meanwhile, in looking at the Barter Books website, I was led to The 20 Most Beautiful Bookstores in the World, a slideshow with brief descriptions. Most of the featured stores are in Europe, with two in China, one in Japan, one in Taiwan, one in Mexico, two in South America, and two in the US (LA and Ojai). I wish I knew about Bart’s Books when we were in Ojai a few summers ago.

I mentioned last week that I had begun reading Jim Baggott’s The Quantum Story: A History in 40 Moments, inspired by Jeremy Bernstein’s WSJ review just short of a year ago. I’m on moment #25 now, having made it from Max Planck’s introduction of quantized energy in Berlin in 1900 to Sheldon Glashow’s introduction of the charm quark at Harvard in February 1970.*

*Speaking of which, I was there! February 1970 would have been the start of spring semester of my freshman year. I was taking the honors freshman physics course. No one bothered to tell me that exciting developments were going on right around me. From where I sat, physics was pretty darn boring.

The Quantum Story has been interesting, but it’s a puzzle what Baggott assumes of his readers. He doesn’t explain much. I suppose you’re actually supposed to know the physics already. It helps, for instance, to know about the strong and weak forces, which appear on the scene quite suddenly, as the book shifts from the oft-repeated history of the early days of quantum theory through World War II to quantum electrodynamics, electro-weak theory, and high energy experimental physics. I was happily reading about the good old days of Franck, Einstein, Bohr, Heisenberg, and Schrödinger, then the war comes and suddenly they have left the stage, supplanted by Feynman and Dyson, Weinberg and Glashow. The material on the Bohr-Einstein debates about quantum mechanics are well told. Einstein comes off as a huge pest, a meddling nay-sayer whose best days are behind him, mucking up the works by making everyone stop to listen to his latest criticisms. Also well told is the story of Heisenberg’s ambiguous allegiance to Nazi Germany and its atomic bomb effort, which he was either actively leading or discouraging. After the war, the book seems to lose its narrative thread.

But I’m here to tell a different story, the sad story of the dying art of fact checking. Moment 20 takes place in Princeton in 1954. It’s a technical tale, about the strong force, quantum field theory, and the work of Chen Ning Yang. To get there, Baggott, backs up to talk about earlier work of Hermann Weyl, one of the giants of twentieth-century mathematics and a hero of mine. Like any mathematician who has done any work in the field known as representation theory of Lie groups, I am greatly in Weyl’s debt. Lie groups are the very objects that became crucial to further developments in quantum physics. Baggott explains that

Weyl had worked on the representation theory of types of symmetry groups called Lie groups, named for the eighteenth century Norwegian mathematician Sophus Lie.

Sigh. This is mostly true. The problem is, Sophus Lie didn’t live in the eighteenth century. He was born near the end of 1842 and died in early 1899. And anyone with the slightest knowledge of the history of mathematics would know that the objects named after Lie couldn’t possibly have come into existence in the eighteenth century, unless some mathematician headed back in a time machine.

It’s discouraging. In Bernstein’s rave review of the book, he writes that Baggott “manages to get the people right. I know this because for many of the scenes he describes I was there.” I suspect Bernstein doesn’t have Lie’s time in mind.

Baggott continues, in the very next sentence, with what I consider another clunker.

These are groups of continuous symmetry transformations, involving gradual change of one or more parameters rather than an instantaneous flipping from one form to another, as in a mirror reflection.

I realize this post isn’t the place to get technical, but Baggott’s sentence seems to confuse the continuous change of parameters defining elements of the group with the actions the group elements perform on space. Baggott follows with a description of the group U(1), which plays a role in the physics to follow, describing it (correctly) as the collection of rotations of the plane (or, say, a piece of paper) through all possible angles. This is “continuous” in the sense that one can move from one rotation angle to another smoothly through all angles. In contrast, the group consisting of just the 0 degree and 180 degree rotations would not be continuous, since one can’t go smoothly from doing nothing to doing the 180 degree rotation. I suppose Baggott understands that. But it’s not at all what he says. Even in a continuous or Lie group, the individual rotations do perform what he describes as “instantaneous flipping” from one form to another.

Maybe I’m just mis-reading him in his effort to explain mathematical concepts in ordinary language. It’s difficult to do. Then again, I have no idea why he even bothers trying, given all the other language he throws around at this point in the book with no explanation at all.

I’ll keep reading. I’m eager to learn more. But I’m also eager to get on to the next book.

I’ve read many accounts of the early days of quantum mechanics. Einstein and Planck, Bohr and Born, de Broglie and Dirac, Heisenberg and Schrödinger. A familiar tale, for good reason. I wouldn’t think we’re in need of another account.

But a year ago, another one appeared, Jim Baggott’s The Quantum Story: A History in 40 Moments, and last April, Jeremy Bernstein reviewed it in the Wall Street Journal. This passage suggested that another account may well be needed, and this may be the one:

I have never come across a book quite like Jim Baggott’s “The Quantum Story.” He has done something that I would have thought impossible in a popular book. He manages to present the full ambit of the theory, starting with the introduction of the quantum—the basic unit of energy—by the German physicist Max Planck in the beginning of the 20th century, and ending with the search for the Higgs particle at the collider at CERN in Geneva. In doing this Mr. Baggott navigates successfully between the Scylla of mathematical rigor and the Charybdis of popular nonsense. He also manages to get the people right. I know this because for many of the scenes he describes I was there.

That Baggott brings the tale to the present day, an unexpectedly ambitious undertaking, was reason enough for me to consider the book. And consider it I’ve done, off and on for months, whenever I cast about for what to read next. But I have resisted.

Two nights ago, with Pelecanos’s What It Was behind me, it was casting time again. I turned first to another book on my list, Orlando Figes’ The Crimean War: A History. Its day will come, and soon, but Friday I decided I wasn’t ready. Next I considered Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England, William Cronon’s 1983 study that, I believe, evolved from his PhD thesis. Since reading his brilliant Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West last April, I have been eager to return to this earlier work. The Kindle edition is inexpensive, so I downloaded it and read the Preface, only to decide again that the time wasn’t right.

What else? Well, maybe The Quantum Story. I had downloaded the free Kindle sample before. This time I moved beyond that, took the plunge, bought and downloaded it. I’m about a sixth of the way into it, in the midst of moment number nine. The year is 1926, and sure enough, the usual characters are doing the usual things. Nonetheless, I’m thoroughly enjoying it. Baggott is a good storyteller. And he manages to perform a neat trick at the start of each moment, continuing the previous chapter’s tale for a few paragraphs in a way that effectively sets the stage for the next one.

Not that the explanations of the quantum mechanics are easy to follow. Bernstein warns in concluding his WSJ review that “the problem is not the mathematics. There is almost none. The problem is that physics is hard. Quantum mechanics is hard. Like a good wine, you cannot take this book in gulps. Take it in sips. It is well worth it.” I might actually prefer more mathematics rather than vague mathematical talk. Not to complain. So far so good. And I still have the Crimean War to look forward to.

I mentioned two months ago that I had given up reading George Pelecanos’s DC-based crime novels. Back in September, Marilyn Stasio featured his latest, The Cut, in her NYT Sunday Book Review crime roundup. Looking for books to read that coming week in Nantucket, I ignored it, but was inspired by her briefer remarks about the third in Martin Walker’s series about Bruno, the Dorgogne police chief. That led, as I wrote regularly throughout the fall, to my reading the first Bruno novel while in Nantucket, then in quick succession the second and third, and finally the fourth (not yet available in the US, so I ordered it in hardcover from UK Amazon).

I mentioned in the same December post that in Stasio’s survey of notable crime books of 2011, she included The Cut under the heading “Favorite New Sleuth.” I ignored it once again, this time being inspired by her listing of Sebastian Rotella’s Triple Crossing — reviewed with Pelecanos’s and Walker’s books in that very same Labor Day roundup — as both her favorite debut novel and favorite action thriller.

But my Pelecanos resistance was broken down at last, and for the silliest of reasons — cost. In the NYT a month ago, Janet Maslin reviewed a still newer Pelecanos novel, What It Was. I was surprised he had released another less than half a year after the last one. What especially got my attention was this:

Mr. Pelecanos writes a lot of books. His publisher seems particularly intent on finding readers for this one. It is available in an unusual array of formats: $35 hardcover (a handsome boxed edition decorated with an Afro pick); eye-catching $9.99 paperback with a big red Fury on its cover; an e-book with the bargain price of 99 cents, a first for Little, Brown (though it will rise to $4.99 a month after publication); and the usual audio-book CDs.

Ninety-nine cents? I may not care much for Pelecanos anymore, but you never know. In case I have a change of heart, I may as well grab it before the price increase. I resisted for a couple of weeks, until Stasio, in yet another Sunday NYT crime roundup, once again led off with Pelecanos. It wasn’t clear if she was enthusiastic, and anyway I didn’t want to read the details and learn too much of the plot, but she seemed positive. So I downloaded it.

Last Monday, a holiday for me, I had spent the morning finishing Donovan Hohn’s Moby-Duck: The True Story of 28,800 Bath Toys Lost at Sea and of the Beachcombers, Oceanographers, Environmentalists, and Fools, Including the Author, Who Went in Search of Them (which I wrote about here). Wondering what to read next, I found myself drawn to What It Was, perhaps because it’s short. Thursday night, I finished it.

Is it worth 99 cents? Sure. I mean, that’s really cheap. Of course it is. And it’s still available at that price.

The book takes us back to the spring and summer of 1972, the early days in the private detective business for Derek Strange, one of Pelecanos’s strongest recurring characters. As Stasio explains, “Pelecanos is crazy for details, so all these particulars — the colorful names, the flashy clothes, the sexy cars and soulful music — add to the big picture he’s continually drawing of crucial moments in America’s changing history, as viewed from the streets.”

There’s a lot of music, on LPS, 45s, and AM radio, and a great scene at an outdoor Roberta Flack-Donny Hathaway concert. I hadn’t remembered, but Flack’s version of The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face was released that March and hit #1 in April, staying there through the time of the book. Like some of the characters who find themselves at the concert, I wasn’t much of a fan of it.

Well, things could be worse, and let me assure you, soon enough they were. For, soon enough, there was Brandy (You’re a Fine Girl), the song I identify with the summer of 1972, the hottest summer of my life. A story for another day, perhaps. The short version is that I spent much of the summer in New Brunswick, New Jersey, with no air-conditioning in either the dorm I lived in or the car I was driving, a car equipped with AM only. I can’t think of New Brunswick without hearing the song, played incessantly as I drove along the Raritan River, or on the Jersey Turnpike on my weekly trips back home to Long Island. Brandy, Brandy, Brandy. I couldn’t get it out of my head. It was torture. Here, hear for yourself:

I’m losing the thread here. What can I say? There’s better Pelecanos, but What It Was is entertaining. And 99 cents. Plus, if you’re a Derek Strange fan, you won’t want to miss it.

I mentioned a week ago that I had just downloaded and begun reading Donovan Hohn’s Moby-Duck: The True Story of 28,800 Bath Toys Lost at Sea and of the Beachcombers, Oceanographers, Environmentalists, and Fools, Including the Author, Who Went in Search of Them. Janet Maslin’s weekday NYT review, which appeared a year ago this week, got me interested. The Sunday review by Elizabeth Royte two weeks later inspired me to download and read the free opening portion. But I wasn’t inspired to read further at the time. I simply added the title to my list of books to go back to some day.

Three months ago, Maslin placed Moby-Duck on her list of ten recommended books for 2011, re-kindling my interest. I re-read the reviews last weekend and took the plunge. Here, for instance, is a portion of Royte’s enthusiastic review:

“Hast seen the white whale?” a Melville-loving officer aboard a research vessel asks Donovan Hohn, in his dazzling “Moby-Duck,” whenever they pass in the ship’s corridor.

“Hast seen the yellow duck?” Hohn cheerfully responds.

The answer is always no, but this hardly dampens Hohn’s enthusiasm for his Moby — a load of bath toys that plummeted off a storm-wracked container ship in the northern Pacific in 1992. The maritime misfortune was exciting for beachcombers, who would find the toys on North American coastlines for years to come, and it provided data for scientists who study ocean currents. It also spurred the map-loving Hohn, a dozen years on, to give up his Manhattan teaching gig and embark upon what could have been a fairly straightforward investigation. Where did the ducks come from, where did they drift, and why?

… The duck’s world is large, it turns out, and the desire to chart it puts Hohn on seagoing vessels of varying sizes and seaworthiness with captains courageous and cranky. … As the ducks drift, so drifts Hohn, from the China-based toy industry to the depths of polymer chemistry; from a history of childhood to Sesame Street’s “Rubber Duckie” and the role of animals in art; from early Arctic exploration to modern maritime disasters and the study of hydrography. Hohn is game to learn as much as he can, and his scholarship is impressive. But his real interests are far more abstract: the nature of quests, the line between fable and fact, the distinction between the natural and the man-made worlds, and the impossibility of fully understanding one’s place — to say nothing of a toy duck’s — in relation to the universe.

[snip]

“Moby-Duck” succeeds as harebrained adventure, as a cautionary environmental tale, as a deconstruction of consumer demand, and as a meditation on wilderness and imagination. Hohn moves easily between the micro and the macro, weaving personal histories into science and industry as he roams. … Hohn seems to have it all: deep intelligence, a strikingly original voice, humility and a hunger to suss out everything a yellow duck may literally or metaphorically touch. Naturally, he can’t, but the chase is, after all, the thing.

Sounds great. But Hohn’s deep intelligence and strikingly original voice have eluded me. Through the first fourth or so of the book, I considered abandoning ship. Friday night I read a big chunk, today another fourth, bringing me three-fourths of the way through, and now I’m committed to seeing the book to its conclusion.

The book is organized around a sequence of trips, each exploring some facet of beachcombing, garbage, the environment, plastics, manufacturing in China, container shipping. We’ve been to southern Alaska by Sitka, farther north Alaska along the Kenai Peninsula, south of Hawaii’s Big Island, Hong Kong and southeast China, a container ship sailing from Pusan to Seattle, and now an oceanographic cruise from Woods Hole to Greenland aboard a famous research vessel, the Knorr.

I have learned some interesting tidbits about ocean currents and weather, the risks of a career on container ships, though I hunger for more detail. It’s been fun to meet the characters Hohn sails with, though again I wish he told us more. I have come to appreciate the fascinating lives led by oceanographers — academic and non-academic. (Russ, you’ll have to tell me more. Are you fascinating too?) But when Hohn meditates on the deeper meaning of toys, or the sea, or whatever topic he probes in greater depth — or when he connects what he learns to his own life — I lose interest.

Back to the North Atlantic. I’m enjoying this part.

After finishing Timothy Snyder’s Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin two Friday nights ago, I thought about turning at long last to Tony Judt’s Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945, a natural successor, as I mentioned in writing about Bloodlands. More natural, indeed, than I even realized, what with the publication last week of Judt and Snyder’s joint enterprise, Thinking the Twentieth Century, which was reviewed in the Sunday NYT Book Review yesterday by Francis Fukuyama. (The book is based on conversations between Judt and Snyder before Judt’s death two summers ago.)

Instead, the next morning I found myself downloading Robert Crais’ new crime novel, Taken. I was a fifth of the way through when I stopped to write about it a day later, a week ago yesterday. By last Wednesday, the momentum was too much. I got home late that evening from the department’s annual dinner, read another 50 pages before going to sleep, then awoke at 4:30 Thursday morning and read the last 115 pages. Pretty good. Crais’ best in a while.

Once again, I had to figure out what to read next. Judt’s Postwar? Friday night, I paged through it, then saw the Fukuyama’s review on-line of the Judt-Snyder book and considered that. But I was leaning toward a novel, and at the top of my list has been Chad Harbach’s The Art of Fielding. I wasn’t feeling ready for a 500+ page commitment just yet, so I returned to my list of books to keep in mind, explored a few, then reminded myself of why Mat Johnson’s Pym was on the list. The reason was Adam Mansbach’s review in the Sunday NYT a year ago today, in which Mansbach begins:

“If we can identify how the pathology of Whiteness was constructed,” the narrator, Chris Jaynes, proposes early in “Pym,” Mat Johnson’s relentlessly entertaining new novel, “then we can learn how to dismantle it.” For Jaynes, the only black male professor at an “intimate, good but not great” college, the project of making whiteness visible has led to an obsession with “The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket,” the only novel by Edgar Allan Poe.

It’s as good a place as any to begin. Toni Morrison has written that “no early American writer is more important to the concept of American Africanism than Poe,” and his single work of long fiction is a simmering trove of racial terror. Poe’s protagonist, Pym, is a hapless seafarer whose adventures culminate in the discovery and exploitation of Tsalal, a tropical island located improbably close to Antarctica and populated by primitive natives so dark even their teeth are black. “Horrors from the pit of the antebellum subconscious,” Jaynes calls them.

I was ready for an adventure. I downloaded it, began reading, and now I’m some 90 pages in. It’s fascinating, constantly surprising, with a passage every few pages that is completely captivating. For instance, early on, the protagonist discusses the Diversity Committee at Bard College, the small school (a real school) on the Hudson River in New York where, as part of the novel’s plot he has been denied tenure by the president. Talking with a new colleague, Jaynes explains that

“the Diversity Committee has one primary purpose: so that the school can say it has a diversity committee. They need that for when students get upset about race issues or general ethnic stuff. It allows the faculty and administration to point to it and go, ‘Everything’s going to be okay, we have formed a committee.’ People find that very relaxing. It’s sort of like, if you had a fire, and instead of putting it out, you formed a fire committee. But none of the ideas that come out of all that committeeing will ever be implemented, see? Nothing the committee has suggested in thirty years has ever been funded. It’s a gerbil wheel, meant to ‘Keep this nigger boy running.’”

Coincidentally, Improv Everywhere, which has been re-mastering and re-releasing videos of some of their old missions, today put out a new version of Meet a Black Person, in which comedian Colton Dunn went to Aspen in 2006 to offer just that service.

In Pym‘s world, one where dozens of African-Americans in Gary, Indiana, can believe that their background is more Native American than African-American until, to their dismay, DNA testing by a University of Chicago proves otherwise, a “Meet a Black Person” stand sounds entirely believable.

Watch the video. Read the book.

I wrote two posts ago about finishing Timothy Snyder’s Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin last night, closing with the observation that I was ready for something completely different. It didn’t take long for me to decide on the difference. This morning I downloaded Robert Crais’ latest crime novel Taken, which came out just this past Tuesday. It’s #15 in the Elvis Cole/Joe Pike series, of which I’ve previously read entries #11-14.

After finishing the last one a year ago, I wasn’t convinced I wanted to keep going. I wrote at the time that “maybe reading three of them in 6 1/2 months wasn’t such a good idea. I didn’t enjoy this one as much. I don’t feel that I learned much more about Pike as a character, and I didn’t find him so interesting anymore. The plot drove me along. Crais is pretty good at that. But even that wasn’t so interesting.”

This morning I took a rosier view. After Bloodlands, leaving Eastern Europe behind for LA and the latest activities of Elvis and Joe sounded mighty attractive. So far, Crais is proving me right. I’m a fifth of the way through, and it’s all I could do this afternoon to put Taken aside so I could blog. Speaking of which, I’ll stop here so I can keep reading.

Three weeks ago, I finished Max Egremont’s Forgotten Land: Journeys Among the Ghosts of East Prussia, which I had been reading off and on and writing about several times over the preceding two months. As I mentioned two weeks ago, it focus in the later chapters on the close of World War II, the arrival of Red Army, and the mass westward re-location of the German population reminded me that a year earlier I had thought of reading Timothy Snyder’s then-new Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin. Anne Applebaum’s review in the New York Review of Books had caught my attention, and I quoted from the review at the time.

Two weeks ago I downloaded the free opening sample of Bloodlands to my Kindle. A day later, I bought and downloaded the full book. With the arrival of snow days later in the week, I began to read it and was surprised by how gripping Snyder’s account was of the events between 1932 and 1945 in Ukraine, Belarus, Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia. No short description can do the book justice, and in any case, you can read Applebaum’s account for that. But the book turns out to be an unexpected, and horrific, page turner.

I finally broke free from Bloodlands‘s grip early this past week, in mid World War II, because a new New York Review of Books had arrived and I decided to devote my evening reading to that. A day later, fearful of returning to the horrors, I took another night off. But once I returned, I was again swept along, finishing last night.

Snyder works on three levels, if I may be a bit simplistic. There are brief overviews of the broader historic European and world events, beginning with the close of World War I and the Russian Revolution. There are detailed accounts of the actual horrors, starting with Stalin’s mass starvation of millions of Ukrainian peasants in 1932-1933 in favor of shipping agricultural produce abroad in order to obtain the necessary capital for rapid industrialization (to simplify once again). And there are the searing descriptions, typically no more than a few sentences or a paragraph, of individual lives and deaths.

Special attention is given to the lands that formed the eastern half of Poland at the onset of war in 1939, the portion that the Soviet union took over by mutual agreement with Germany when the two invaded from east and west and divided the country between them. Two years later, Hitler would take these lands over on his way east toward Moscow, and three years after that the Red Army returned, pushing its way on to Berlin.

This of course isn’t news. Nor is the ultimate result, Stalin choosing to incorporate one-time eastern Poland into the Soviet republics of Ukraine, Belarus, and Lithuania, while getting the agreement of Churchill and Roosevelt that Poland would be shifted westward to include lands that had been part of Germany before the war. Millions of Poles, Germans, Ukrainians, and others were moved back and forth, a significant percentage dying along the way. And this was the least of the horrors. The Jews, of course, were by then already largely exterminated, as were (by design) millions of Poles, this suiting the interests of both Hitler and Stalin.

How all this came about, and why, with an explanation of the evolving political logic, forms the heart of the book. A central goal is the placement of the murder of six million Jews in a broader context, where it can be seen as not just an isolated abhorrence but part of a larger universe of mass killings. Snyder argues that there is in particular a need to recognize that typical accounts of the Holocaust are skewed, and for a particular historical reason: much of what we knew for decades was based on the camps discovered by the US and British troops in the west, whereas much of the killing was done in the “bloodlands” to the east, lands conquered by Soviet troops. This had two consequences in terms of our sources of information. First, Stalin did not allow news to come out about what was found. Second, much of the killing in the east was by shooting, or mobile gassing, the gas chambers of Auschwitz for example coming into use only after the majority of the killing was done. Thus, to the extent that we typically picture the Holocaust as consisting of Jews being sent to and dying in concentration camps, we are viewing only a small part of the story.

Here’s a short passage from Snyder’s Preface:

At the end of the Second World War, American and British forces liberated German concentration camps such as Belsen and Dachau, but the western Allies liberated none of the important death facilities. The Germans carried out all of they major killing policies on lands subsequently occupied by the Soviets. The Red Army liberated Auschwitz, and it liberated the sites of Treblinka, Sobibór, Belzec, Chelmno, and Majdanek as well. American and British forces reached none of the bloodlands and saw none of the major killing sites. It is not just that American and British forces saw none of the places where the Soviets killed, leaving the crimes of Stalinism to be documented after the end of the Cold War and the opening of the archives. Is that they never saw the places where the Germans killed, meaning that understanding of Hitler’s crimes has taken just as long.

I am so glad that I read Bloodlands, and didn’t content myself with a few reviews. A natural book to read next might be Tony Judt’s Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945, which has sat above my desk for years. But 831 pages?! And small print? I don’t know. Some day. I’ll then want to re-purchase it for my Kindle, the price for that currently being set at $16.99. (What’s up with that?) For now, I’m ready for something completely different.

I mentioned throughout the fall that when the Wall Street Journal would finally stop being delivered (they kept delivering it long after I stopped paying), I would miss the book reviews, and the arts and culture coverage in general. Thanks to WSJ book reviews, I was led to two books that I would not have read otherwise, Robert P. Crease’s World in the Balance: The Historic Quest for an Absolute System of Measurement and Max Egremont’s Forgotten Land: Journeys Among the Ghosts of East Prussia. Add Larry Silver’s Pieter Bruegel to the list.

The last day the Wall Street Journal was delivered was December 23. A few days later, I used my iPad WSJ app to find out how much content was available, and sure enough, it knew I no longer had full privileges. But I discovered that I still had access to a significant amount, including most of the Saturday book reviews and the food-wine-auto coverage. On New Year’s Day, I checked online for the WSJ’s weekend reviews from the day before, and there was Jonathan Lopez’s review of Pieter Bruegel.

I can’t remember when I first became a Bruegel fan. One of his most famous paintings, The Harvesters, is at the Metropolitan Museum of Art — the cover of Silver’s book is a detail — but I can’t say I remember admiring it in my childhood. During a stay in Antwerp to attend a conference in 1978, with side trips to Bruges and Brussels, I fell in love with Flemish art. I began to read about it, made sure to stop by The Harvesters when in Manhattan, and checked out the Flemish paintings whenever passing through other major museums, such as the National Gallery in London. In 1983, I returned to Antwerp for another conference and spent more time in museums. In 1985, during our honeymoon, I arranged for us to pass through Antwerp for a couple of days between longer stays in Paris and Glasgow so Gail could share my little hobby. But I haven’t been back to Belgium since.

Regarding The Harvesters, here is its reproduction at the Metropolitan’s website:

The Harvesters, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 1565

And here is what the gallery label says:

This panel is part of a series showing the seasons or times of the year, commissioned from Bruegel by the Antwerp merchant Niclaes Jongelinck. The series included six works, five of which survive. The other four are: “The Gloomy Day,” “Hunters in the Snow,” and “The Return of the Herd” (Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna); and “Haymaking” (Lobkowicz Collections, Prague).

This remarkable group of pictures is a watershed in the history of Western art. The religious pretext for landscape painting has been suppressed in favor of a new humanism, and Bruegel’s unidealized description of the local scene is based on natural observations.

For years, those Bruegel seasons paintings in the Kunsthistorisches Museum made me eager to visit Vienna. Three decades later, I still haven’t made it, and the list of places Gail and I want to visit keeps growing. Some day. In the meantime, perhaps I can content myself with the book. In the WSJ review, Silver writes that

“Pieter Bruegel,” a superb and sumptuous monograph by the scholar Larry Silver, is an object of beauty in its own right. This large-format volume presents all 40 or so of Bruegel’s surviving paintings and a wide selection of his drawings and prints in color plates that render tone and hue with scrupulous accuracy. Mr. Silver’s text offers an indispensable introduction to Bruegel’s achievement—in Mr. Silver’s phrase, “the epitome of naturalism in art, the climax of the Netherlandish tradition.”

The book isn’t cheap. List price $150.00. But only $91.30 from Amazon, in stock, a lot cheaper than a trip to Vienna.

Europe in 1933

[Map credit: Mike King, in New York Review of Books]

I finished Max Egremont’s Forgotten Land: Journeys Among the Ghosts of East Prussia two Saturdays ago and have intended to write about it since, but I’m struggling with what to say. I first wrote about it at the end of November, having been inspired to order it earlier in the month because of Andrew Stuttaford’s Wall Street Journal review, in which he wrote:

Max Egremont’s idiosyncratic, disjointed and beautifully written volume makes an ideal guide to this shifting, shadowy realm. In part a piecemeal history of the final half-century of German East Prussia, in part a travelogue through what was left behind, “Forgotten Land” is gently elegiac. Shifting constantly between present and a variety of pasts, it is as wistful as a flick-through of an old photo album, as melancholy as a rain-spattered northern autumn afternoon.

I commented at the time that I was “some 70 pages into Egremont’s book and thoroughly enjoying it.” But I then became distracted by a sequence of other books, returning to it intermittently but not making further progress until late December, at which point I wrote:

I’ve been slowly working my way through Egremont’s Forgotten Land: Journeys Among the Ghosts of East Prussia in recent days, reaching not quite the halfway point yesterday. And what do you know? It’s reviewed by Richard Eder today in the NYT, not entirely flatteringly. I’ve been convincing myself that I enjoy Egremont’s meandering approach. A little World War I history here, a little World War II history there. A few words about one historical figure, then another. It’s not entirely clear why we spend so many pages in Ypres reading about British World War I war dead. Belgium’s a long way from East Prussia. But that’s the journey we sign up for when we read the book. Eder clearly has less patience for it than I do.

Will I make it to the end?

That Eder review almost stopped me in my tracks, given my eagerness to get to the books I had lined up to read next. Fortunately, I kept going — fortunately because of the astonishing tales that awaited me. In the latter stages of the book, the focus is on the lives of selected residents of East Prussia in the buildup to World War II, during the war itself, and in its immediate aftermath. We’re talking about land that passed back and forth in complicated ways between Germany, Poland, Lithuania, and the Soviet Union.

A chapter is devoted to the historic German city of Memel, now the Lithuanian city of Klaipėda. A recurring character in several chapters is Walter Frevert, an East Prussian forester who becomes the head forest master for Hermann Göring. Göring, of course, would become the head of the German Air Force, but when the Nazis initially came to power in 1933, he was put in charge of Prussia, coming often to East Prussia to hunt. As we learn, Frevert’s responsibilities grew as Göring expanded the forest holdings in Germany’s eastern lands. Expansion might mean, for instance, forcibly moving Poles from their villages to be re-settled farther east and then razing the villages, an operation Frevert oversaw. Frevert would take on forest duties in West Germany after the war and become a popular figure, through radio and TV programs and his memoir Rominten, about the hunting preserve in East Prussia that he once ran.

Egremont tells these stories in an understated manner that allows the details to speak for themselves, which they do quite powerfully. Another example is the story of the last Jews left in Königsberg in January 1945, whom the Germans decide to move westward before the inevitable arrival of the Red Army. They are forcibly marched to the Baltic town of Palmnicken. Two thousand die or are killed along the way. The survivors were driven down to the beach, into the frozen sea, and shot. The details of the march are described from the perspective of some of the East Prussian natives, some of whom would go through their own hell when the Russians arrived.

The closing chapters of the book reminded me that last year I had thought of reading Timothy Snyder’s 2010 book Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin, which was widely and well reviewed. Anne Applebaum’s review in the New York Review of Books (from which the map at the top is taken) had especially gotten my attention. As Applebaum explains,

Snyder’s ambition is to persuade the West—and the rest of the world—to see the war in a broader perspective. He does so by disputing popular assumptions about victims, death tolls, and killing methods—of which more in a moment—but above all about dates and geography. The title of this book, Bloodlands, is not a metaphor. Snyder’s “bloodlands,” which others have called “borderlands,” run from Poznan in the West to Smolensk in the East, encompassing modern Poland, the Baltic states, Ukraine, Belarus, and the edge of western Russia (see map [above]). This is the region that experienced not one but two—and sometimes three—wartime occupations. This is also the region that suffered the most casualties and endured the worst physical destruction.

More to the point, this is the region that experienced the worst of both Stalin’s and Hitler’s ideological madness. During the 1930s, 1940s, and early 1950s, the lethal armies and vicious secret policemen of two totalitarian states marched back and forth across these territories, each time bringing about profound ethnic and political changes. In this period, the city of Lwów was occupied twice by the Red Army and once by the Wehrmacht. After the war ended it was called L’viv, not Lwów, it was no longer in eastern Poland but in western Ukraine, and its Polish and Jewish pre-war population had been murdered or deported and replaced by ethnic Ukrainians from the surrounding countryside. In this same period, the Ukrainian city of Odessa was occupied first by the Romanian army and then by the Wehrmacht before being reoccupied by the Soviet Union. Each time power changed hands there were battles and sieges, and each time an army retreated from the city it blew up the harbor or massacred Jews. Similar stories can be told about almost any place in the region.

This region was also the site of most of the politically motivated killing in Europe—killing that began not in 1939 with the invasion of Poland, but in 1933, with the famine in Ukraine. Between 1933 and 1945, fourteen million people died there, not in combat but because someone made a deliberate decision to murder them. These deaths took place in the bloodlands, and not accidentally so: “Hitler and Stalin rose to power in Berlin and Moscow,” writes Snyder, “but their visions of transformation concerned above all the lands between.”

Egremont, of course, is not writing a comprehensive history. He is examining a handful of people who are victims, collaborators, or perpetrators in one region, East Prussia, that forms part of Snyder’s larger bloodlands story. When I set Egremont’s haunting book aside, I was tempted to turn directly to Bloodlands to better understand that larger story. I haven’t yet, for fear that it will keep me from other books and other projects. But yesterday I downloaded the opening portion that Amazon makes available as a Kindle sample. It won’t be long before I buy and download the entire book. Perhaps I’ll have more to say after reading it.