The White War

Thompson, M. (2009). The White War: Life and Death on the Italian Front, 1915-1919. New York: Perseus Books Group.

The blurb on the inside of the jacket includes this tidbit: To maintain discipline in the face of desperation and low morale, the Italian chief of general staff restored the Roman practice of decimation, executing random members of units that retreated or rebelled.

Decimation literally means destroying or killing a large part of the population (literally every tenth person as chosen by lot).

Booklist Reviews
Hundreds of thousands of men are fed into a meat grinder in futile charges against entrenched positions; opposing armies are forging a weird sense of camaraderie as they fraternize during lulls in the slaughter; and rows of rotting corpses are scattered over a bleak, pockmarked landscape. But this isn t the familiar western front in France. Rather, these stark images are part of a stunning and emotionally wrenching account of war between Austria and Italy over the disputed terrain they both claimed. Although the struggle was recounted in the writings of Ernest Hemingway, the Italian front was regarded as a sideshow by many European journalists as well as Allied war planners. Whatever the strategic value of the campaign, Thompson illustrates that this was a massive, epic struggle that may have cost a million lives. He crafts a narrative rich in detail and which does not shrink from describing the horrors of a war that began, on the Italian side, in a spasm of wild nationalistic fervor but quickly degenerated into resigned cynicism. This is a masterful and moving chronicle. Copyright 2009 Booklist Reviews.

Kirkus Reviews
Penetrating study of one of the forgotten fronts of the Great War.Italy went to war with the neighboring Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1915 for complex reasons, writes British historian Thompson (Forging War: The Media in Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia, and Hercegovina, 2003, etc.), not least of them the irredentist view that ethnic Italians belonged to a greater Italy. The Allies abetted this view, promising to render Tyrol, Trieste and the Dalmatian coast to Italy, as well as portions of the Greek islands, Turkey and Africa. Italy's politicians pitched an inadequately prepared and provisioned army against a tactically superior enemy, which held most of the high ground. The "white war" of Thompson's title refers to the snowy peaks along the alpine front, but also to the sheer limestone walls that gleamed white in summer and had to be scaled—the Western front, Thompson memorably notes, tilted 45 degrees. In any season, the front was terrible, and thousands of men died—in sheer percentages, at a higher rate of casualty than in much better-known battles in France and Belgium. A few future historical giants turn up in Thompson's pages, including Benito Mussolini, Gabriele d'Annunzio and Erwin Rommel, but mostly his informants are the forgotten soldiers of the forgotten war, one of whom recalled, "We kill each other like this, coldly, because whatever does not touch the sphere of our own life does not exist." Many of the ethnic groups in which those soldiers figured would reappear in the history of Europe, among them Bosnian Muslims, Serbs and Slovenes, "whose alleged pacifism would be a stock joke in Tito's Yugoslavia" but who drew rivers of Italian blood. Ironically, Italy never got its promised empire, though Mussolini would spend much effort and countless lives seeking it.A much-needed addition to the literature of World War I, which is undergoing substantial revision nearly a century after it was fought.Agent: Jason Cooper/Faber and Faber Copyright Kirkus 2009 Kirkus/BPI Communications. All rights reserved.

Publishers Weekly Reviews

Independent scholar Thompson (Forging War) is familiar with a burgeoning Italian literature on the Great War’s military aspects. He utilizes that material to construct and convey, better than any English-language account, the essence of three years of desperate struggle for the Isonzo River sector in northeastern Italy. Thompson distinguishes elegantly among the 12 battles for this nearly impassable ground, although the book is best understood as an extended essay on the causes, nature and purpose of Italy’s involvement. Thompson presents Italy’s war as a test of the vitalist spirit (best expressed in futurism) to demonstrate that the country was more than a middle-class illusion. In consequence, Thompson shows, strategic, diplomatic and political vacuums were too often filled with leaders’ rhetoric and mythology. Too many generals, like Luigi Cadorna and Luigi Capello, were case studies in arrogant incompetence. In that environment, the less ordinary soldiers knew about causes and purposes, the better. When they failed in their mission, the draconian responses included summary execution. Prisoners of war were treated as cowards. The war, says Thompson, stands as Italy’s first “collective national experience” and illustrates the poisonous nature of European nationalism. Photos, maps. (Apr.)

Inside of the book is a black and white photo of Unique Forms of Continuity in Space by Umberto Boccioni.

Goal! : the dream begins

Shush!

A patron requested this book:

Draitser, Emil. (2008). Shush!: growing up Jewish under Stalin: a memoir. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Mexican Shiva, & Glory Road

Friday night I watched My Mexican Shiva. A patron at HWPL had told me about it months ago; he said friends that lived in retirement in Mexico told him about it. Then it hadn't been released in the US. It's Mexican title is Morirse está en Hebreo, which baffles me: Dying is in Hebrew? I must be translating it incorrectly. Maybe Dying in Hebrew.

Funny, bittersweet, to the point, good, yet falls short just a bit. Moishe dies and his family arrives to sit Shiva. (Not chiva, says one character; Shiva). There are family complications, beginning with the resentment Moishe's daughter, Esther, feels toward Julia Palafox, Moishe's lover. The details are taken care by Jevreman, who ensures proper Jewish custom is followed. The dramas played out during the seven days are sad, funny, poignant, human.

Much better on second viewing; much.

This was recommended to me by Michael Simon as we worked together at the Information Desk yesterday, and talked about basketball. It is a feel-good, hockey, corny story that makes for a good film. The tagline from the studio is: Don Haskins, a future Hall of Fame coach of tiny Texas Western University, bucks convention by simply starting the best players he can find: history's first all-African American lineup. But it is more than that. In the mid 1960s, in El Paso, new coach Haskins recruits seven black players. He drills them, works them, teaches them fundamental basketball, suppresses their fancy footwork and behind-the-back dribbling, sustains them, and, finally, drives them to the national NCAA championship against powerhouse Kentucky University (coached by Adolph Rupp, and one of whose players was Pat Riley).

Good film.

When March Went Mad

When March Went Mad
By Seth Davis
Times Books, 323 pages $26

















Michigan State's Magic Johnson pursues Indiana State's Larry Bird during the 1979 NCAA championship game. Michigan won, 75-64








Catch those shorts.

Tax Rebellion in a Jar

Interestingly, a remembrance of Popcorn Sutton, a modern-day moonshiner, appeared in Saturday's Wall Street Journal.



"The time has come when an honest man can't take an honest drink without having a gang of revenue officers after him," complained Zebulon Vance, a former governor of North Carolina, in 1876. That same year Lewis R. Redmond, a fellow North Carolinian, killed a revenue agent near Brevard, N.C., when the agent tried to arrest him for making and transporting illegal whiskey.

The murder elevated Redmond (1854-1906) from obscure moonshiner to notorious outlaw and folk hero. Soon enough he had crossed the state line into South Carolina and, with the aid of friends, evaded attempts to bring him to justice. In fact, Redmond turned the tables and pursued his pursuers – the government agents – through the Blue Ridge mountains, invading their homes and rescuing his gang members from jail.

Lewis R. Redmond's exploits were recounted, and romanticized, in an 1879 dime novel.



In June 1878, the Charleston News and Courier sent a reporter named C. McKinley to find Redmond and get his story. McKinley found himself in "the dark corners," the region where Georgia and both Carolinas meet, scrambling through the woods "directly upward to some veritable land of the sky." There he met Redmond, "one of the handsomest men I ever saw." Together they sampled Redmond's mountain dew. "Colored like a rose with the tonic of wild cherries, it constituted a draught which might have been likened to a nectar flowing down from some illicit still run in the private interest of the gods up there on the blue wooded Olympus above." The series of articles in the News and Courier were so favorable to Redmond that Wade Hampton, the governor of South Carolina, withdrew the reward he had offered for the outlaw's capture.

Gotta love that description: "Colored like a rose with the tonic of wild cherries, it constituted a draught which might have been likened to a nectar flowing down from some illicit still run in the private interest of the gods up there on the blue wooded Olympus above."

And Ole Wade Hampton took the ree-ward money away.

What was all this trouble really about? Mr. Stewart writes that, after the Civil War, "southern highlanders . . . resumed the antebellum practice of distilling their crops into alcohol." During the Civil War the U.S. had begun to levy taxes on alcohol and set up the Bureau of Internal Revenue to collect them; after the war the taxes were applied in the South, too, but Southern distillers were – how to put it? – reluctant to pay them. Adding insult to injury, most of the revenuers were home-grown Unionists, taking advantage of Republican patronage to make a living by hunting down their neighbors. The struggle of Southern mountain farmers to feed their families by selling their own spirits thus became entwined with a fight against the ravages of Reconstruction.

Public opinion would eventually turn against the moonshiners as Southerners made their uneasy peace with the post-Civil War world and came to prefer a semi-orderly new South to the wild and rebellious old one. Redmond himself was pardoned after serving just three years in prison. He returned to his wife and children and got a job running a licensed distillery. The bottle labels and barrel heads for "Redmond's Hand Mash" naturally featured his portrait. His legal whiskey proved to be even more popular than his contraband version.

Mark Twain

Mark Twain: a life. Powers, Ron. New York: Free Press.


Started reading this biography yesterday, and am finding it wonderful. Powers writes with a grand style. A few things have caught my eye, and I am duly keeping notes.

This quote I liked: "An Englishman is a person who does things because they have been done before. An American is a person who does things because they haven't been done before."

Travels in the Republic of Letters

Worlds Made by Words
By Anthony Grafton
Harvard, 422 pages, $29.95

Early in the last century, when the German historian Adolf von Harnack was appointed head of the Prussian State Library in Berlin, he chose as a legend for the entranceway the Latin tag Bibliotheca docet: "The Library Teaches." This wasn't just another pompous building-decorating slogan.
Libraries still teach.

For von Harnack, the ideal library hosted on its shelves a lively, if silent, conversation of past with present. The future too was an implicit partner; after all, who knew what might prove important to generations yet to come? If the library "teaches," it does so by promoting this timeless colloquy. Von Harnack believed, too, that "one book is no book." Authors may be touchy, but books are naturally gregarious; they converse with one another and sometimes strike sparks. Only by offering the widest array of resources, von Harnack maintained, could a library provoke that tiny, unpredictable flash of insight on which all scholarship depends.

Thus, information sources interact with one another, and with the reader and researcher.

Today von Harnack's grand dream seems quixotic. Libraries are increasingly seen less as collections of printed materials and more as purveyors of access to data bases and online information.
O, drat, the future has changed the present, and nt for the better. What a common complaint. Off the mark, too.

Mr. Grafton may be steeped in the past, but he is no antiquarian. He is quick to link submerged traditions with present trends. He regards recent developments in technology, and their effects on libraries and on reading, as both a blessing and a burden. Ideally, new technologies don't displace old ones; they augment them. Cuneiform tablets, papyri, manuscripts, as well as books, remain essential to scholarship and to learning at large, if only because the look and feel of the past can be as important as its content. The larger, more troubling question is: Who will read them in the future? Sometimes Mr. Grafton sounds an elegiac note; he laments "the dull, provincial scholarship of our own sad time." He may be right to do so. Nevertheless, he himself represents the best proof that the Republic of Letters is alive and kicking.

People still read, do research, and learn.

Texas, Brooklyn, China

Saw three films this past weekend:

The trip to Bountiful (1985)
Script by Horton Foote (who passed away 5 March). Good acting, but not a terribly enjoyable film. One interesting piece of trivia" the actor who played Ludie Watts was John Heard, who played the shithead executive Paul in the movie Big (1988).














Everyday People (2004)

A big old Jewish restaurant is closing down, being sold to a developer who will build a high rise in the neighborhood that is beginning to be 'gentrified'. The movie traces a number of characters over the course of one day. Deftly acted, it engages the viewer. Very enjoyable.











Please vote for me (2007) - Michael Simon recommended this film to me. Three third graders run for Class Monitor. The politics of the 8-year-olds is startlingly bitter and highly competitive. Just how involved parents are is interesting: they even go to the school. Seeing how the Chinese live is interesting: the kids nap and eat in school, are greeted by parents when their school day is over, and go home to do a lot of work.

The movie was not that good as entertainment, but informative.

The woman behind the New Deal

Downey, Kirstin. (2009). The woman behind the New Deal : the life of Frances Perkins, FDR's Secretary of Labor and his moral conscience. New York: Nan A. Talese

Other than the name, I knew nothing about Frances Perkins. Now I know a great deal. She became interested in social work very early in her life, worked with Hull House in Chicago (with Jane Addams), and wound up in New York. The day of the Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire she was in a friend's house on Washington Square North, and ran to the location of the fire (on Washington Square East -- I actually took an NYU course in a building in that same location).

FP met FDR early on in New York government. She knew Robert Moses before he worked in State government. She knew Al Smith. When FDR won the Presidency, he appointed her Labor Secretary, the first woman to ever serve in the Cabinet. She accomplished a great deal, indeed.

The book contends that Social Security, Unemployment insurance and others New Deal programs were her ideas that FDR adopted. I have never read about that before. The book also contends that when FDR told Cabinet member of the Pearl Harbor attack, FP suspected that he had known about it, for he did not show the same surprise and shock that other Cabinet members showed.

Revealing, sympathetic, the book does a good job of uncovering a forgotten figure who played an important role in 20th century America. Indeed, the world: she was instrumental in saving LIO people from Europe, and got Churchill and FDR to support it after the War.

In her personal life, FP was quite unlucky. Both her husband and her daughter were bipolar, in an age when there were no medicines to effectively deal with the illness. She did make friends, close personal friends with several women. Mary Harriman Rumsey, older sister of Averell, in particular, was very close friends with FP. They shared a house for some time.

Yet about halfway through, the book gets sloppy in its assertions. I'd like to see more documentation on some of the declarations made.

And then there is the Venona Project.

"The Americans and British long had been skeptical about Soviet intentions. As a result, between 1942 and 1945, the United States and Great Britain engaged in the Venona Project, intercepting encrypted cables between Russian intelligence agencies and Soviet spies based in America. They began successfully decrypting these messages in 1946. National security officials kept the information secret, but released some facts through the FBI, and through that agency to Truman.The deciphered messages exposed several hundred Americans, including some government officials, as communist spies."

Connections

In reading the review written by William Anthony Hay of 1848, by Mike Rapport (post below this one), I came across the name of Metternich. I know the name, but little about the person. Thus, I googled the name; the first link was Wikipedia. In the article's bibliography I found the entry: Zamoyski, A. (2007). Rites of Peace: The fall of Napoleon & the Congress of Vienna. New York: HarperCollins Publishers. HWPL owns it.

A Year of Living Dangerously

1848
By Mike Rapport
(Basic Books, 461 pages, $29.95)

Reviewed by William Anthony Hay

Dramatic changes over the early 19th century and the long shadow of the French Revolution set the context for 1848.

So what

A book on the New Book cart caught my attention.

My Happiness Bears No Relation to Happiness : A Poet's Life in the Palestinian Century. (2009). Hoffman, Adina. New Haven: Yale Univ Press.














I looked him up on the OPAC, and found a book of his poetry. I'll look at it.

So what : new & selected poems (with a story), 1971-2005. (2006). ‘Al¯i, T¯ah¯a Muhammad. Port Townsend: Copper Canyon Press.

Ottobib's entry: Muhammad, T., Cole, P., & Hijazi, Y. (2006). So What: New & Selected Poems (with a Story) 1971-2005. Port Townsend: Copper Canyon Press.

Two Crooks for the Road

Go Down Together 364.1552 G
By Jeff Guinn
(Simon & Schuster, 466 pages, $27)

Among couples known almost universally by their first names, few have captured the imagination like Bonnie and Clyde, the young lovers from Texas who escaped the poverty of West Dallas in the 1930s and went on a meteoric crime spree on America's back roads.

Unfortunately, most of the newspaper stories that breathlessly fueled the couple's legend contained so much embellishment that even Bonnie Parker herself felt the need to set the record straight. While the duo was releasing a police chief that she and Clyde had taken hostage, the lawman asked Bonnie if there was a message she wanted to send to the press. "Tell them I don't smoke cigars," she said.

All well and good, but get this one: If anything, Bonnie and Clyde owed their popularity to timing. In 1933, amid the countless foreclosures, forced evictions and failed financial institutions of the Depression, the public had soured on bankers and law-enforcement officials. For the average person, "Clyde and Bonnie's criminal acts offered a vicarious sense of revenge," Mr. Guinn writes. "Somebody was sticking it to the rich and powerful."

Emphasis added.

China -- Description and travel.

Lost on planet China : the strange and true story of one man's attempt to understand the world's most mystifying nation, or how he became comfortable eating live squid (2008).
Troost, J. Maarten.
New York : Broadway Books.

Friend, Soulmate and Sister

The Ballad of Dorothy Wordsworth
By Frances Wilson
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 316 pages, $30)

Her subtle sense of nature's effects made its way into William's poetry.

Ms. Wilson's previous two biographical studies have unusual, even exotic, slants: The first, "Literary Seductions," focuses on literary couples who find themselves possessed by text and sex, including the erotic memoirists Anaïs Nin and Henry Miller; the second takes up the case of Harriette Wilson, the Regency courtesan who published her tell-all memoirs serially, blackmailing her clients into paying her to stop. (The Duke of Wellington was unfazed: "publish and be damned.") Racy stuff! So what in the world does Ms. Wilson see in Dorothy Wordsworth?

It is true that Dorothy occupies a permanent place in literary history, but that place is often marginal, even literally so. Through much of William's discursive meditation "Tintern Abbey," we think that William is soliloquizing in high-poet fashion but then read, at about line 120: "May I behold in thee what I was once, / My dear, dear Sister." For all that time, as editors tell us in their footnotes, William's sister has been standing there. It is Dorothy, the poet claims, who reflects a picture of his true self: "Nature never did betray / The heart that loved her."

Her sensitive awareness to subtle natural effects were such that Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William's friend and fellow poet, considered her to be the equivalent of a perfect "electrometer" – a "fragile piece of gold" able to measure tiny changes in electrical pulses. Both poets relied on Dorothy's observations of the natural world – Coleridge in "Christabel " and William in "I Wander'd Lonely as a Cloud ," with its dancing golden daffodils.

2 biographies

The fly swatter: how my grandfather made his way in the world. (2002). Nicholas Dawidoff.
New York: Pantheon Books.



















Also his:

Least-Heat Moon

Roads to Quoz: an American mosey.(2008). William Least Heat-Moon. New York: Little, Brown and Co.

On Lincoln

Lincoln on race & slavery. (2009). edited and introduced by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Princeton : Princeton University Press.

Books on the Brilliantly Disturbed

1. A Beautiful Mind

By Sylvia Nasar
Simon & Schuster, 1998

To paraphrase F. Scott Fitzgerald, there are no second acts in the lives of schizophrenics. Once entrenched, paranoia rarely lifts. Thus the resurrection of mathematician and economist John Nash is a tale for the ages. While Nash's conversation as a young man had "always mixed mathematics and myth," by the late 1950s the MIT professor was going far beyond eccentricity. He talked of becoming the emperor of Antarctica; he also insisted that aliens were communicating to him through the New York Times. Nash spent the next three and a half decades as a revolving-door psychiatric in-patient and aimless wanderer. But after receiving the 1994 Nobel Prize for his long-ago dissertation on game theory, the former boy wonder miraculously regained his appetite for scientific study. Sylvia Nasar's "A Beautiful Mind" is less schmaltzy and tidy than the Oscar-winning movie based on it. The Hollywood version suggests that Nash benefited from new medications, but as Nasar reports, Nash actually stopped taking antipsychotics in 1970 and relied solely on his potent mind. "Gradually," Nash recalled, "I began to reject some of the delusionally influenced lines of thinking."

2. The Man Who Loved China
By Simon Winchester
Harper, 2008

Best known for his gripping narrative about the odd couple behind the Oxford English Dictionary ("The Professor and the Madman"), Simon Winchester here portrays the hypomanic, chain-smoking Brit who produced an immense encyclopedic work all by his lonesome. In 1936, Joseph Needham, a noted biochemist and ladies man, fell in love with a young scholar from Nanjing who taught him classical Chinese. "Almost delirious with happiness" from creating his own personal English-Chinese dictionary, this "20th century Erasmus" then sought to rescue China from its lowly status as "the booby nation." Needham's magnum opus -- he produced 17 volumes before his death in 1994 -- was called "Science and Civilisation in China," and it argued that the Middle Kingdom was once way ahead of the West. Printing, for example, came six centuries before Gutenberg. Winchester spotlights Needham's perilous research trips, which brought him into contact with Chairman Mao and Zhou Enlai, as well as his colorful non-academic obsessions, including gymnosophy (i.e., nudism), Morris dancing and burnt toast.

3. Empire
By Donald Bartlett and James Steele
Norton, 1979

Nearly a full generation before Leonardo DiCaprio did his star turn in "The Aviator," Donald Bartlett and James Steele punctured the myth that once was Howard Hughes. Today it's easy to forget that Hughes's name was, for a long time, synonymous solely with gargantuan achievement. "Nobody can outdo me," the 25-year-old movie producer proclaimed shortly after taking Hollywood by storm with "Hell's Angels" (1930), an early talkie, which he also directed. Eight years later, the dashing mogul became a national hero when he shattered the record for flying around the world by a full three days. Bartlett and Steele, having sifted through 250,000 pages of documents, detail every chilling twist and turn of Hughes's descent into emotional paralysis. By the late 1960s, just about all the lonely billionaire ("Don't dare call me millionaire!") looked forward to was sitting naked in the middle of hotel rooms -- "the germ-free zone."

4. The Difference Engine
By Doron Swade
Viking, 2001

In 1822, disgusted by human error, the 30-year-old Cambridge-educated mathematician Charles Babbage dreamed up a cure: a calculating machine. After his annus horribilis of 1827, in which he lost a son as well as his wife and father, Babbage was inconsolable. To avoid a complete breakdown, he threw himself into working on a mechanical computer that he called the "difference engine." A few years later, he completed a part of Difference Engine No. 1, a 15-ton contraption that he used as a demonstration piece. Unfortunately, Babbage's obsession produced mountains of elaborate drawings for uncompleted machines but little else except bitterness. According to one of his few friends, the aging loner "spoke as if he hated mankind in general, Englishmen in particular and the English government most of all." Though as Doron Swade, a curator at the Science Museum in London, memorably shows in "The Difference Engine," this indefatigable misanthrope was the grandfather of the computer age.

5. Wizard
By Marc Seifer
Birch Lane, 1996

A century before cellphones and the Internet, another "wireless revolution" turned America upside-down. Its chief theoretician was Nikola Tesla, a Serb from Croatia, who secured the first patent for a means to produce high-frequency radio waves. Tesla was considered, along with Thomas Edison, one of the "twin wizards of electricity," Marc Seifer writes in this absorbing biography. Right after arriving in Manhattan in 1884, Tesla began working 20-hour days at Edison's lab; when his boss nixed his alternating-current induction motor, Tesla set out on his own. Seifer's meticulously researched account, some 20 years in the making, features riveting anecdotes of this man about town who hobnobbed with both Mark Twain and Stanford White. Like Howard Hughes, Tesla was a germo-phobe who called the hotel room home. But the room number had to be divisible by three, and he required assurances that no hotel employee would get within three feet of him. Sworn to celibacy, the anorexic Tesla saved up his passion for pigeons: "To care for those . . . birds . . . is the delight of my life. It is my only means of playing."

Mr. (Joshua) Kendall's biography of Peter Roget, "The Man Who Made Lists," has just been released in paperback.

For the relief of unbearable urges

A patron asked for For the relief of unbearable urges by Nathan Englander. I'll have to take a look.

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society

Patrons have asked for this book a number of times. Today a patron asked for reviews of the book; Edna Ritzenberg, a local of South African extraction (who leads book discussions here at HWPL and at other libraries) is going to lead a discussion of it.