Iron-Horse Stampede

Bettmann/CORBIS: An illustration of the race on Aug. 25, 1830, between a horse-drawn mill car and the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad's Tom Thumb steam engine—the first used on a commercial track in America. Horse power won when the engine broke down.

* BOOKSHELF
* FEBRUARY 27, 2010

Iron-Horse Stampede
The rise and fall and possible resurgence of the railroad
By Mark Lewis


When Warren Buffett announced last fall that Berkshire Hathaway would buy the Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railway, some kibitzers wondered what he saw in a business based on 19th-century technologies. The answer, for those who care to look, can be found in Christian Wolmar's "Blood, Iron and Gold."

Mr. Buffett is communing with the ghost of James J. Hill, the one-eyed visionary who established the Great Northern Railway in 1889. Many years and many mergers later, it remains the ancestral corporate heart of the Burlington Northern. Hill's story is part of the epic romance of the railroads, skillfully recounted by Mr. Wolmar.

The railroad was born in Britain in the early 1800s as a means of transporting coal from mines to market. But proprietors of the early railways, such as the Liverpool & Manchester in Britain and the Baltimore & Ohio in the U.S., quickly discovered that people could also be profitably transported over great distances. The result was a revolution.

Blood, Iron and Gold
By Christian Wolmar
PublicAffairs, 376 pages, $28.95

An excerpt from the book.

"It is almost impossible to exaggerate the profound impact of the railways," Mr. Wolmar writes. "They transformed the agricultural economies, which had prevailed since mankind emerged from the caves, into the industrial age."

The emergence of this new form of transport "enabled the migration of wide swaths of the population from land-based employment or subsistence farming to paid work for capitalist businesses," Mr. Wolmar says. This newly mobile labor force ranged far afield, supplying manpower for a host of new industries.

The transforming effect of railroads ranged into the world of finance as well. Vast amounts of capital were required to build locomotives and freight and passenger cars, to lay down track, to acquire land, to build stations, to buy fuel, to pay wages. Railroad barons like Cornelius Vanderbilt became major players on Wall Street, while financiers like Jay Gould, J.P. Morgan and E.H. Harriman found themselves drawn into the railroad business.

Of course, the government played a role too, especially in continental Europe. Britain and the U.S. took a more laissez-faire approach to railroad development. But even in the land of free enterprise, politicians inevitably became involved in the process, not always with beneficial results.

Mr. Wolmar, who bills himself as Britain's leading railway expert, is something of a cheerleader for railroads, and he does not shy away from hyperbole. At least three times in this book he compares one railway project or another to the construction of the pyramids in ancient Egypt. But he has a point: The railroads were indeed a vast undertaking, vastly impressive in their technologies, accomplishments and social effects.

Most Americans are at least somewhat familiar with the epic story of the building of the Union Pacific and the Central Pacific railways, which famously converged at Promontory Point, Utah, on May 10, 1869. But this was not the first line to span the North American continent. That distinction technically belongs to William Aspinwall's Panama Railroad, completed in 1855. It was only 47 miles long, yet at least 6,000 workers succumbed to tropical diseases during its construction. Mr. Wolmar dubs it "the railway from hell."

He covers a great deal of territory in "Blood, Iron and Gold," but he keeps the reader engaged by highlighting extraordinary projects like the building of the Trans-Siberian Railway from 1891 to 1904. It connected St. Petersburg to Vladivostok, a distance of almost 6,200 miles. Equally stirring is the saga of Cecil Rhodes and his never-completed Cape-to-Cairo line; and that of Peru's vertiginous Central Railway, which ascends the Andes and passes through the Galera Tunnel, 15,694 feet above sea level. The book also features cameo appearances by such colorful figures as Benito Mussolini, who may or may not have made Italy's trains run on time but who definitely made them run faster and more frequently. Nor does Mr. Wolmar neglect the pop-culture angle: Agatha Christie fans will be sorry to learn that history records no instance of a real-life murder on the Orient Express.

By the end of the 19th century, railroads were ubiquitous. Railway managers scoffed at the notion that the newfangled horseless carriage might cut into their business. Mr. Wolmar quotes one particularly clueless executive on the subject: "The fad of automobile riding will gradually wear off and time will soon be here when a very large part of the people cease to think of automobile rides." That comment was made in 1916. Four years later, railroad traffic in the U.S. peaked at 1.2 billion passengers. By the 1930s the Iron Horse was in serious decline, thanks to the internal combustion engine.

Everett Collection

The Union Pacific and Central Pacific railways meet

at Promontory Point, Utah, on March 10, 1869, completing the first coast-to-coast rail link in the U.S.

he railroads shifted from steam power to electricity and diesel engines, but it was too late: Competition from cars, trucks, buses and airplanes cut deeply into their business. More recently, passenger service has mounted a comeback in much of the world, thanks in part to the popularity of high-speed rail. But not in the U.S., where intercity passenger service is now mostly confined to a few Amtrak routes in the Northeast Corridor.

The prospects are much brighter for freight, which is where Warren Buffett comes in. His new toy, the Burlington Northern Santa Fe, incorporates three of America's five original transcontinental lines. All but one—James Hill's Great Northern—were built with government support. Hill built his with private capital and his own implacable will. Mr. Wolmar describes him as "probably the greatest American railroader, who for 30 years pursued his vision of a line that would open up the vast prairies of Montana to settlers and allow the export of grain to the Far East."

As it happens, two of my great-grandparents were among the settlers that Hill lured to Montana a century ago. Neither of them ever got rich off the Far East trade, and neither did Hill, who made most of his enormous fortune from domestic traffic. But his Pacific strategy may well pay off for Mr. Buffett, thanks to China's rise. Rail traffic to and from the West Coast should be increasing for years to come. Hill was known as "the Empire Builder." Mr. Buffett may effect a restoration.

Passenger service too may finally be ready for a revival in the U.S. President Barack Obama recently earmarked $8 billion in stimulus funds for high-speed rail projects. Carl Icahn is backing a new venture that will manufacture passenger cars in Arkansas.

"Trains may be of the past, but they are still the future," Mr. Wolmar writes. "They will improve, not just on high-speed lines, but elsewhere too as technology makes them more efficient, more comfortable, and faster. And there is the rather delicious prospect that they might conceivably outlive the car." More hyperbole. And yet: Would you bet against Warren Buffett?

—Mr. Lewis is writing a book about America's colonial experience in the Philippines.

Say Anything

a 1989 romance film written and directed by Cameron Crowe and marked Crowe's directorial debut. In 2002, Entertainment Weekly ranked Say Anything... as the greatest modern movie romance. This movie ranked number 11 on Entertainment Weekly's list of the fifty best high school movies.

Greatest modern movie romance? How about Ghost? One of 50 best high school films I can see.

John Cusack plays a high school graduate intense about kick-boxing, otherwise unsure what to do with the rest of his life. He figures he has time to decide, and that those that already, at 18, 19 years of age, either don't really know or are fooling themselves. He becomes infatuated with Diane Court (Ione Skye), the valedictorian brainy girl out of reach of all guys. He asks her to a party, and she has a good time. Slowly, they become involved romantically, then sexually. Her father, James Court (John Mahoney) at first accepts Lloyd, but grows to dislike his presence in his daughter's life, for he has unbounded plans for her. Turns out Mr. Court has been embezzling money from residents at his nursing home; he planned to use it to finance his daughter's education. She is scheduled to go to England on a fellowship, has doubts, but decides to go when Lloyd says he will go with her.

Cute, fun. Funny, too: the kid who played Lloyd's nephew was wonderful. Dated. 3 stars.

Faulkner Link to Plantation Diary Discovered

Southern Historical Collection/Library of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill - Francis Terry Leak’s diary was read by Faulkner. A page from 1856 records a slave sale.

 

February 11, 2010
Faulkner Link to Plantation Diary Discovered
By PATRICIA COHEN

The climactic moment in William Faulkner’s 1942 novel “Go Down, Moses” comes when Isaac McCaslin finally decides to open his grandfather’s leather farm ledgers with their “scarred and cracked backs” and “yellowed pages scrawled in fading ink” — proof of his family’s slave-owning past. Now, what appears to be the document on which Faulkner modeled that ledger as well as the source for myriad names, incidents and details that populate his fictionalized Yoknapatawpha County has been discovered.

The original manuscript, a diary from the mid-1800s, was written by Francis Terry Leak, a wealthy plantation owner in Mississippi whose great-grandson Edgar Wiggin Francisco Jr. was a friend of Faulkner’s since childhood. Mr. Francisco’s son, Edgar Wiggin Francisco III, now 79, recalls the writer’s frequent visits to the family homestead in Holly Springs, Miss., throughout the 1930s, saying Faulkner was fascinated with the diary’s several volumes. Mr. Francisco said he saw them in Faulker’s hands and remembers that he “was always taking copious notes.”

Specialists have been stunned and intrigued not only by this peephole into Faulkner’s working process, but also by material that may have inspired this Nobel-prize-winning author, considered by many to be one of the greatest American novelists of the 20th century.

“I think it’s one of the most sensational literary discoveries of recent decades,” said John Lowe, an English professor at Louisiana State University who is writing a book on Faulkner. He was one of a handful of experts who met Dr. Francisco at the hand-hewn log house in Holly Springs last month. There they saw the windowpane where a cousin, Ludie Baugh, etched the letters L-U-D-I-E into the glass while watching Confederate soldiers march by — a scene that appears in several Faulkner works.

During the gathering Dr. Francisco, known in childhood as Little Eddie, described how Faulkner stood in front of that window and said, “ ‘She’s still here,’ like she was a ghost,” Professor Lowe recalled.

Dr. Francisco, speaking by telephone from his home in Atlanta, remembered hearing Faulkner rant as he read Leak’s pro-slavery and pro-Confederacy views: “Faulkner became very angry. He would curse the man and take notes and curse the man and take more notes.”

Sally Wolff-King, a scholar of Southern literature at Emory University who uncovered the connection between the author and the journal, called it “a once-in-a-lifetime literary find.”

“The diary and a number of family stories seem to have provided the philosophical and thematic power for some of his major works,” she added.

Names of slaves owned by Leak — Caruthers, Moses, Isaac, Sam, Toney, Mollie, Edmund and Worsham — all appear in some form in “Go Down, Moses.” Other recorded names, like Candis (Candace in the book) and Ben, show up in “The Sound and The Fury” (1929) while Old Rose, Henry, Ellen and Milly are characters in “Absalom, Absalom!” (1936). Charles Bonner, a well-known Civil War physician mentioned in the diary, would also seem to be the namesake of Charles Bon in “Absalom.”

Scholars found Faulkner’s decision to give his white characters the names of slaves particularly arresting. Professor Wolff-King said she believes he was “trying to recreate the slaves lives and give them a voice.”

Dr. Francisco says he is still very uncomfortable that his family’s connection to Faulkner has come to light. “I wouldn’t have done it at all,” he said about publicizing the diary. “My wife urged me until I finally did it,” he said of Anne Salyerds Francisco, his wife of 50 years. “She pushed and Sally pulled.”

“There were long-repressed things that Faulkner uncovered that I didn’t know were in the family,” Dr. Francisco explained, adding that his father never talked about Leak and his slave-owning past. “I just bottled all that up and forgot about it.”

Dr. Francisco said that neither he nor his father ever read much of Faulkner’s work, including “Go Down, Moses.”

“I tried to read that book years ago,” he said, “but I got so angry I threw it across the room, and it stayed there for months.” He said he now might give it another go.

The mothers of Faulkner and of Dr. Francisco’s father were close. The boys went to each other’s childhood birthday parties. Later they double dated and became hunting and drinking buddies, remaining friends until their 40s, when they drifted apart, a situation probably encouraged by Mr. Francisco’s wife, who did not approve of Faulkner’s drinking, smoking and cursing.

Professor Wolff-King had been working on a book about people who knew Faulkner and ended up connecting with Dr. Francisco because he was an alumnus of Emory. When she visited his home in Atlanta, his wife suggested he show the professor a typescript copy of the ledger. Included was a facsimile of a page that listed dollar amounts paid for individual slaves.

“At that moment I realized this diary may not only have influenced the ledger and slave sale record in ‘Go Down, Moses’ but also likely served an important source for much of William Faulkner’s work,” said Professor Wolff-King, who has spent 30 years studying the writer.

A short preview of her findings is in the fall 2009 issue of The Southern Literary Journal; her book “Ledgers of History: William Faulkner, an Almost Forgotten Friendship, and an Antebellum Diary,” is due out in June from Louisiana State University Press.

Professor Lowe reviewed the manuscript before publication. To protect against leaks the editor arranged a meeting in a coffee shop. “He gave me the manuscript in a plain brown wrapper, and I was sworn to secrecy,” he said.

“I was electrified when I was reading it,” he said. “Faulkner had a very intense and intellectual relationship with Dr. Francisco’s father,” which seems to have formed “the basis of some of the conversations you find in ‘Absalom, Absalom!’ and ‘Go Down, Moses.’ ”

The Leak papers are not unfamiliar to scholars. The family donated the journal, which includes the plantation accounts as well as descriptive sections, to the University of North Carolina in 1946 and received a typescript copy of the material that runs 1,800 pages. The original documents have been used by Southern economists and social historians for their insights into Mississippi’s plantation life, but no one has previously been aware that Faulkner, who died in 1962, had any connection to them.

Professor Wolff-King argues that elements and terms from the diary repeatedly surface in Faulkner’s work, including the ticking sound of a watch that Quentin Compson is obsessed with in “The Sound and the Fury”; descriptions of building a plantation match Thomas Sutpen’s in “Absalom, Absalom!”

Noel Polk, the editor of The Mississippi Quarterly and among the deans of Faulkner scholars, said, “I was surprised at the discovery of what is so clearly a major piece of information about his life, and maybe his work.”

He and others said it was still too early for them to gauge just how significant the diary is without reading Professor Wolff-King’s book and examining the ledgers themselves, especially when it comes to the more common details about the antebellum and Civil War eras.

“Almost every document that you can come up with that Faulkner used is interesting, but the question is what do you do with it,” Judith L. Sensibar, whose biography “Faulkner and Love: The Women Who Shaped His Art” was published last year. What does it tell us, for instance, about his “obsession with the ways in which slavery has disfigured the lives of both the slaves and their masters?” she asked.

Although literary experts have been taken aback by this unexpected find, Faulkner more than anyone would have understood how the past can unpredictably poke its nose into the present.

Valley of Death

The French Connection - Vietnam lessons the U.S. might have learned at Dien Bien Phu

Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

French paratroopers landing at Dien Bien Phu in November 1953.

In November 1953, France was in its eighth year of war for control over Indochina. Things were going poorly—Vietnamese guerrillas, or Vietminh, held the upper hand—and at a strategy session in Saigon the French commander, Gen. Henri Navarre, outlined his latest plan. "I'm thinking of occupying the basin of Dien Bien Phu," he began. "The goal of this risky operation will be to defend Laos." He went on to argue that the move would draw the Vietminh into a battle they could not win. France had the advantage of air power. A base at Dien Bien Phu—in the northwest corner of Vietnam, near the Laos border—could be resupplied by air, while guerrilla leader Ho Chi Minh's cadres would be forced to move huge numbers of men and matériel through miles of mountain jungle. Finishing his presentation, Gen. Navarre turned to the group. "What do you think?"


The politicians were onboard—but the officers balked. The military men were "unanimous in objection," one senior officer noted. Building a base in a mountain valley, they told Gen. Navarre, presented formidable challenges. Dropping in paratroopers would be dangerous, resupplying the base difficult, and Dien Bien Phu would drain manpower from more important theaters—all for questionable military gain. Nevertheless, Gen. Navarre got his base. Within months—on May 7, 1954, to be exact—Dien Bien Phu was overrun by the Vietminh. Two years later Gen. Navarre was rewriting history in his memoir of the war. "No unfavorable opinion," he wrote, "was expressed before the battle."


The annals of warfare are of course studded with questionable military decisions and after-battle lies, but for sheer hubris and incompetence it is hard to match what happened before and during the 56-day battle for Dien Bien Phu. Ted Morgan's "Valley of Death" is an authoritative account of those days—but it's also a history of the early U.S. involvement in Indochina. "The words Dien Bien Phu," President Dwight Eisenhower told a conference of newspaper publishers in April 1954, "are no longer just a funny-sounding name to be dismissed from the breakfast conversation because we don't know where it is." Indeed, by then Dien Bien Phu was proving a disaster for the French—one that held warning signs for the U.S.

A lesson not heeded.

Nearly every French assumption would be punctured that spring. None proved more disastrous than Gen. Navarre's faith in the power of air supremacy. The Vietnamese, led by the brilliant general Vo Nguyen Giap (whom the Americans would face a decade later), moved a seemingly limitless supply of men and munitions through the jungle to Dien Bien Phu. It was a mind-bending feat, and it gave the Vietminh high ground above the French base. In a memorable analysis, Ho Chi Minh turned a helmet upside down, pointed to the bottom and said: "That's where the French are." Fingering the helmet's rim, he added, "that's where we are. They will never get out."

Air power was held to be a significant advantage by US politicians and generals, and the Vietminh, relabeled Viet Cong and North Vietnamese, flouted as inferior.

Ho was right—and his forces held other advantages. China sent the Vietminh food, medicine and heavy weaponry. As a guerrilla force, the Vietminh enjoyed the edge in motivation and in knowledge of terrain. As Mr. Morgan writes: "The French had an air force. The Vietminh had home-field advantage and could count on the support of the rural population."

In the meantime, French blunders multiplied. France's commissioner general for Indochina was "better known for his champagne dinners in Saigon than his military knowledge." As soldiers died waiting for fresh supplies of food and medicine, parachute teams were delayed because they lacked training certificates. All the while, horrors accumulated on the battlefield. Wounded men languished in overcrowded wards; trenches filled with corpses; monsoon rains flooded the French camp. As conditions deteriorated, evacuation became nearly impossible. Mr. Morgan draws a stirring portrait of the French medic Paul Grauwin, who worked in soaked-through, maggot-infested tents handling "an unending procession of blinded eyes, broken jaws, chests blown open and fractured limbs." Certainly courage was not lacking at Dien Bien Phu.

For years, Indochina had been a geopolitical sideshow for the U.S. After World War II, Washington stood with the region's liberation movements— and so, as a gesture of friendship, a small contingent of American paratroopers was dropped into Ho Chi Minh's forward base in July 1945. Mr. Morgan gives a fascinating account of the meeting: The paratroopers are greeted by a banner hailing "our American friends," and a U.S. medic treats Ho for a dangerously high fever. Says Mr. Morgan: "It is entirely possible that the life of the future president of North Vietnam was saved by an American medic."

Irony of ironies.

Of course the early friendship frayed as anticommunism gripped 1950s Washington. No fewer than seven U.S. presidents and would-be presidents appear in Mr. Morgan's book, and their words make compelling reading, given what was to come. As Dien Bien Phu nears collapse, Eisenhower worries about falling dominoes in Southeast Asia but remains steadfast against intervening on France's behalf. "No one could be more bitterly opposed to ever getting the U.S. involved in a hot war in that region than I am." John F. Kennedy, a senator from Masschusetts at the time, is just as firm: "To pour money, matériel and men into the jungles of Indochina without at least a remote prospect of victory would be dangerously futile and self-destructive." Among future commanders in chief, only Richard Nixon stands unabashedly for intervention.

Seven.

Valley of Death
By Ted Morgan
Random House, 722 pages, $35




Still, as the French plight worsened, American diplomats searched for ways to help. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles pressed Congress and the British for a muscular response, but Dulles found few takers. "No more Koreas, with the U.S. furnishing 90% of the manpower," vowed Senate Majority Leader William Knowland, a Republican from California. As monsoons turned Dien Bien Phu to muck, diplomacy bogged down in its own way. No reinforcements would be forthcoming. In the end, the Vietminh laid siege to the French positions, swarming the valley and capturing thousands of prisoners. For France, the catastrophe meant the end of an era, the loss of a jewel in its colonial realm. For Vietnam, it meant partition into North and South. And for the U.S.—though no one knew it then—it meant the seeds had been sown for another Indochina war.

"Valley of Death" draws deeply on documentary evidence from all sides—French and Vietnamese, American and British, Russian and Chinese. Mr. Morgan's chronicle is exhaustive— sometimes overly so. There are nearly 200 pages of buildup before Dien Bien Phu is mentioned. On the diplomatic front, though one marvels at Mr. Morgan's ability to bring the reader into the negotiating rooms, after a while one finds oneself eager to leave.

Much has been made of Dien Bien Phu's lessons—lessons that the U.S. perhaps should have heeded in Vietnam: the tenacity of the country's indigenous forces, their passion and organization, and the difficulties posed by climate and terrain. But the descriptions of battle in "Valley of Death" are instructive for any military endeavor. At its best, the book is a blistering indictment of commanders whose missteps and arrogance condemn young soldiers to terrible fates. Mr. Morgan tells the haunting story of a French colonel who takes his own life after the fall of a key position. A few days later a young officer reflects: "If all those responsible for what's happening decide to kill themselves, it's going to be quite a crowd in Paris as well as Dien Bien Phu."

—Mr. Nagorski, a senior producer at ABC News, is the author of "Miracles on the Water: The Heroic Survivors of a World War II U-Boat Attack."

Tumultuous Reign of Nina Simone

Sam Falk/The New York Times - Little Girl Blue: Nina Simone at the Village Gate in 1965.


In 1960, one year after Nina Simone’s first album, “Little Girl Blue,” was released, the poet Langston Hughes struggled to put the appeal of Simone’s music and presence — that dusky voice, that unblinking gaze — into words. “She is strange,” Hughes wrote in The Chicago Daily Defender. “So are the plays of Brendan Behan, Jean Genet and Bertolt Brecht. She is far out, and at the same time common. So are raw eggs in Worcestershire.”

Hughes was just getting warmed up. “She is different. So was Billie Holiday, St. Francis and John Donne. So is Mort Sahl, so is Ernie Banks.” He continued: “You either like her or you don’t. If you don’t, you won’t. If you do — wheee-ouuueu! You do!”

Simone soon befriended Hughes, and through him she dove into the beating heart of that era’s young black intelligentsia, becoming close to both James Baldwin and Lorraine Hansberry, who would become godmother to Simone’s daughter. That Simone was absurdly talented was already clear. But her new friends helped crystallize her inchoate political thinking.

One result was a stunning song, “Mississippi Goddam,” written by Simone in the wake of the 1963 Birmingham church bombings and the killing of the civil rights advocate Medgar Evers. In many respects it represented the pinnacle of what would become a long and tangled career. “Alabama’s got me so upset,” Simone sang. “Tennessee made me lose my rest./But everybody knows about Mississippi Goddam.”

It was a song that inserted her into the forefront, at least musically, of the civil rights movement. Its recording is a moment that Nadine Cohodas’s fascinating if turgid new biography of Simone, “Princess Noire,” builds toward and then falls away from. In the case of her career, that falling away was a long, slow and painful one into mental illness, megalomania and increasingly strange behavior.

From the start audiences and critics had trouble pinning Simone down. She was a classically trained pianist, but her work also drew upon jazz, gospel, the blues, folk and European art songs. When the jazz writer Ralph J. Gleason described her as “some exotic queen of some secret ritual,” he was commenting on her comportment as much as her sound.

Simon was a remote and formidable presence onstage, not afraid to stop a song midchord in order to chew out a talky audience member. While playing at the Apollo Theater in Harlem in 1961, she snapped, “For the very first time in your lives, act like ladies and gentlemen at the Apollo.”

Her anger spilled over offstage too. After the Animals had a hit in 1965 with “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood,” a song that was written for Simone, she confronted the band’s lead singer, Eric Burdon. “So you’re the honky,” she said, “who stole my song and got a hit out of it?”

Simone wrote an autobiography, “I Put a Spell on You,” that was published in 1991, but Ms. Cohodas is convincing on the subject of that book’s factual deficiencies. Ms. Cohodas has clearly done her research, but “Princess Noire” remains a strangely distanced and brittle biography.

Wartime trickery and misdirection

Five Best: The British talent for wartime trickery and misdirection is fully revealed by these books, says Nicholas Rankin

1. 'Blinker' Hall. (2008). David Ramsay.  Stroud : Spellmount. 940.459

As David Ramsay recounts in this fascinating biography, Britain's Machiavellian director of naval intelligence in World War I, Reginald "Blinker" Hall, was a man whose talent for tricks and bribes made the U.S. ambassador consider him "the one genius that the war has developed." Hall's organization, working out of Room 40 in the Admiralty offices, "tapped the air" for German wireless messages and scanned diplomatic cables. The codebreakers' greatest coup came in 1917 with the interception and deciphering of "the Zimmermann telegram," a secret message from Germany to the Mexican government offering money and the return of the American Southwest if the Mexicans would help wage war on the U.S. The furor that ensued after the message's contents were revealed helped impel the U.S. into the war, thus clinching final victory for the British and their allies.

2. The Double-Cross System in the War of 1939 to 1945. (1972). J.C. Masterman. New Haven: Yale.  940.5486 M

J.C. Masterman was an Oxford don who, during World War II, chaired the secret Twenty Committee—20 is XX in Roman numerals, but XX is also a "double cross." The group coordinated false information fed to German intelligence through Nazi spies who had been "turned." Masterman waited nearly three decades after the war's end to publish his account of how the committee and more generally the British Security Service (also known as MI5) actively ran and controlled agents of the German espionage service, but his book caused a sensation nonetheless. It was the first great, unsanctioned breach in the wall of British wartime secrecy. As an operating handbook of astonishingly successful deception, "The Double-Cross System" is without peer. But some of Masterman's colleagues never spoke to him again for having exposed their work.

3. The Man Who Never Was. (1953). Ewen Montagu. Philadelphia: Lippincott. 940.5486 M

Operation Mincemeat, designed to divert German attention away from the Allies' impending invasion of Sicily in 1943, involved planting false papers on a genuine corpse outfitted to be a British Royal Marine, "Maj. William Martin." The body was dropped in the ocean off the coast of Spain; when it washed ashore, the Germans soon discovered what seemed to be plans for an invasion of Greece and Sardinia. Mincemeat worked perfectly—the Nazis took the poisoned bait and rushed to bolster their Greek defenses. A novel published soon after World War II told the tale of the operation, but readers had no idea how close to the truth the improbable story was until the appearance a few years later of "The Man Who Never Was." Lawyer Ewen Montagu, who had been the naval-intelligence representative on the Twenty Committee during the war, was given official permission to write the book after a reporter began digging for the half-buried facts in the fictional version. Montagu produced a genuine wartime thriller.

4. The Deceivers. (2004). Thaddeus Holt. New York: Scribner. 940.5486 H

This scholarly yet entertaining magnum opus is the definitive account of all the stratagems used by the Allies against the Axis in World War II. The "master of the game" was the enigmatic Britisher Brig. Dudley W. Clarke, and "The Deceivers" follows the development of Clarke's organization, from its origins in a converted bathroom in Cairo to a world-wide network with key nodes in Washington, London and New Delhi. It was during the desert warfare in North Africa that Clarke started using such ruses as dummy vehicles and fake radio traffic to make the enemy think the British were stronger than they were. The culmination of these ideas was the big lie that convinced the German high command in 1944 that the Allied invasion of Europe would come not at Normandy but with an Army Group led by Gen. George S. Patton at Calais.

5. Garbo. Tomás Harris. (2000). Kew: Public Record Office. 940.54 H

Catalan-born Juan Pujol— the greatest of World War II double agents—was such a brilliant actor that British intelligence gave him the codename Garbo. The Germans, who thought Pujol was working for them, called him Arabel (sometimes Arabal). His exploits were recorded by his handler, Tomás Harris, in an intelligence file that made such riveting reading that it was published in book form. It shows how Pujol and Harris collaborated in creating a network of fictitious sub-agents throughout Britain to channel bogus information through "Arabel" to the enemy. His ultimate coup was playing a key role in persuading the Germans to hold troops ready for the imminent D-Day invasion at Calais. During the war the oblivious Germans gratefully awarded the Iron Cross to Pujol; after the war, he was given the Order of the British Empire (fifth class) and a gratuity that allowed him to retire quietly to Venezuela, where he died in 1988.

—Mr. Rankin is the author of "A Genius for Deception: How Cunning Helped the British Win Two World Wars" (2009). New York: Oxford.

New books

Before the Throne: Dialogs With Egypt's Great from Menes to Anwar Sadat. Amer Univ in Cairo Press. 2009.
FIC Mahfouz 

Library Journal Reviews

An early work by the only Arab writer yet to receive the Nobel Prize in literature, Cairo Modern was originally published in 1945 and was first issued in English in 2008 by the American University in Cairo Press, in the same translation that appears here. His fifth novel overall and the second to be set in 20th-century Egypt, it captures Mahfouz in a fiery, youthful stage. Though largely a work of social realism, the story has strands of the existentialism that would figure heavily in Mahfouz's later novels. Mahfouz explores the lives of several recent university graduates in 1930s Cairo, particularly that of Mahgub, a poor but ambitious young man whose life spirals out of control as he fiercely pursues a place among the upper class. Throughout, Mahfouz displays a mastery of character development and strong control of his themes, mainly the consequences of trying to escape one's fate.

Also appearing in English this fall, Before the Throne (1983) offers a glimpse of a very different side of this author's prodigious talents. In this distinctive work, written largely in dramatic dialog, Mahfouz is concerned with understanding his country's identity through an exploration of its ancient history. The novel is set in a courtroom, with the sun god, Osiris, presiding. One by one, the great leaders of Egypt's past, beginning with King Menes of the First Dynasty, are summoned to defend their accomplishments and explain their faults. Osiris makes the final judgment and determines the fate of each leader's soul for eternity. Those granted immortality remain in the courtroom and may participate in subsequent trials, which leads to such unusual situations as Ramesses II confronting President Anwar el-Sadat. In the heated discussions that inevitably take place, Mahfouz shows how the defining ideals of a nation evolve. VERDICTCairo Modern reads like a classic, gripping the reader from the first pages, a testament not only to Mahfouz but to translator Hutchins. Newcomers to Mahfouz may wish to start with this more accessible novel or other works like the Cairo Trilogy and Midaq Alley. Despite its brevity and the experimental structure, Before the Throne is essential reading for anyone with a serious interest in Egyptian history or literature. It's a small gem.—Forest Turner, Suffolk Cty. House of Correction Lib., Boston

My Times in black and white: race and power at the New York times. Gerald M. Boyd. Chicago. Chicago Review Press. 2010.

B Boyd

Booklist Reviews
*Starred Review* Boyd's brilliant career as a journalist, from a reporter with the St. Louis Post-Dispatch rising to managing editor of the New York Times, will unfortunately be remembered for the Jayson Blair plagiarism scandal in 2003. In this powerful memoir, Boyd recalls his climb from poverty, love of journalism, and thirst for racial equality. From his college days, Boyd challenged the limitations set for minorities in journalism, helping to develop scholarships and training programs for minorities interested in journalism. But the newspaper he most loved proved to be the greatest challenge to his convictions. Boyd recalls racial animosity in the newsroom, tensions that came to a boil when he and Executive Editor Howell Raines were blamed as Blair's transgressions came to light and threatened the credibility of the venerable New York Times. Boyd, under whose tenure the paper won 10 Pulitzer Prizes, lays bare his own insecurities, the massive egos of some colleagues, and internecine battles over news coverage. He recalls his struggle to recover from his fall from grace as the first black editor of the paper in its 150-year history and with cancer (which took his life in 2006). Photographs, recollections of friends and colleagues, and an afterword by Boyd's widow, writer Robin Stone, add further dimension to this poignant memoir and candid look at race and newsgathering. Copyright 2010 Booklist Reviews.

Kirkus Reviews
Posthumous memoir of the first African-American managing editor of the New York Times.Boyd (1950–2006) was the youngest child in a poor St. Louis family, and his young mother died when he was three. The subsequent departure of his father caused the feelings of "fatalism" that would saturate his early adulthood. Raised by his stern yet loving grandmother, Boyd sought guidance and protection from his older brother, a cousin and, during his teens, the Coopers, a compassionate Jewish family. Through forced bussing and the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., Boyd emerged impassioned by writing and was awarded a scholarship to the University of Missouri, along with a copyboy job at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. As his confidence and professional acumen grew—along with his awareness of "openly racist attitudes and slights"—he fell in love with and married Sheila, a fellow writer. Though the marriage dissolved years later, Boyd's career blossomed—first as a White House correspondent, followed by years of laborious, racially challenging ladder-climbing he calls "the ugly underside of life at the Times." The author's courageous fight for racial equality both inside and outside the workplace never ceased, and he smartly remarks that in America's newsrooms, African-Americans "have been tolerated but rarely embraced." Eventually the fact-heavy text becomes consumed with episodes of newsroom drama, including his love/hate relationship with the Times' "pragmatic" executive editor Howell Raines. After remarrying and starting a family, Boyd's bubble burst with his involuntary resignation following the fallout from the Jayson Blair plagiarism scandal in 2003. Photographs and chapters prefaced by anecdotal commentary from peers and friends add integrity to a comprehensive, noteworthy memoir.An important, culturally sensitive portrait of success, failure and atonement. Copyright Kirkus 2009 Kirkus/BPI Communications.All rights reserved.

Publishers Weekly Reviews

Boyd's appointment to the role of managing editor of the New York Times in 2001 made him the first African-American to hold one of the paper's top two editing positions, and his leadership helped the Times garner numerous Pulitzers. But colleagues found him gruff and imposing—a perception he attributed to racial bias—and he was forced to resign after a young reporter named Jayson Blair was caught plagiarizing and fabricating stories in 2003. In this memoir, Boyd, who died in 2006, comes across as a relentlessly ambitious man who overcame poverty, racism, and a rocky personal life to become one of the most powerful newsmen of his day. Unfortunately, Boyd proves to be a merely competent narrator: the prose is smooth but lacks flair, and the vignettes themselves are disappointingly dry. The notable exception is the treatment of the Blair scandal: Boyd's blow-by-blow is animated by indignation and gives a rare glimpse into the rancorous world of newsroom politics. Although as a source of objective truth the memoir is more suspect than a news story, Boyd's perspective is crucial to understanding the crisis that unfolded at the Times in 2003.

The next hundred million: America in 2050. Joel Kotkin.
New York: Penguin Press, 2010.
307.7609 K

[300 is for Social Sciences in Dewey. 307 is for Communities]

Booklist Reviews
Assuming that America will increase to 400 million people in the next 40 years, Kotkin divines demographic consequences in this catalog of predictions. Optimistic in contrast to elite opinions on the Left and the Right that see America in decline, Kotkin's views are not certitudes: the author regularly cautions that if certain things are not done, such as ensuring an economic environment of upward mobility, his vision of the future may not come to pass. Caveats dealt with, Kotkin essentially asks where the extra 100 million will live. Because some of them are already here—those born or who have immigrated since the early 1980s—Kotkin tends to extrapolate present trends. After a career-starting stint in the big city, family-raising aspirations send people to the suburbs and, increasingly in the Internet-connected world, to small towns and rural areas. Describing specific locales, Kotkin anticipates a revitalization of older suburbs and even a repopulation of the Great Plains. As sociological futurists engage with Kotkin's outlook, the opportunity for critics lies in the author's lesser attention to the environmental and political effects of population growth. Copyright 2010 Booklist Reviews.

Kirkus Reviews
Think you have trouble finding a parking space today? Wait until 2050, when the American population will have grown by another 100 million.According to Forbes columnist Kotkin (The City: A Global History, 2005, etc.), that's good news. Indeed, he writes, "because of America's unique demographic trajectory among advanced countries, it should emerge by midcentury as the most affluent, culturally rich, and successful nation in human history." There are several arguments and bits of data bundled in that opener. As the author notes, most of the world's leading nations, particularly in Europe, are rapidly losing population and with it the prospect of future power and wealth. Russia's population, for example, could be one-third the size of the United States by 2050, and 30 percent of China's population will be over the age of 60 by then. Meanwhile, our future cultural richness will come from the fact that the greatest growth will be among groups that are now ethnic minorities, especially Hispanics and Asians. "Demographically at least," writes Kotkin, "America may have more in common with Third World countries with the developed world." The cultural shifts are likely to be dislocating to some, though the relentlessly optimistic author believes that the future will see a mix of traditional values and new ones leading to greater social tolerance. Whereas other nations are likely to decline precipitously, he adds, America will truly be in a position of economic dominance—though, admittedly, output might be high because no one will be able to afford to retire, given current trends. Less rosy is Kotkin's picture of a future America in which the leading cultural centers are likely to be—and elsewhere, to look like—places such as Phoenix, Dallas, Houston, Atlanta and Miami, "multipolar, auto-dependent, and geographically vast." So much for reversing climate change, even if the author does see the rise of "greenurbia" in years to come.A fascinating glimpse into a crystal ball, rich in implications that are alternately disturbing and exhilarating.Agent: Scott Moyers/The Wylie Agency Copyright Kirkus 2009 Kirkus/BPI Communications.All rights reserved.

Library Journal Reviews
There will be 400 million Americans by 2050, with profound socioeconomic consequences: the focus, says Kotkin, will be on local, energy-reliant communities. We'll see. Copyright 2009 Reed Business Information.

Publishers Weekly Reviews

Kotkin (The City) offers a well-researched—and very sunny—forecast for the American economy, arguing that despite its daunting current difficulties, the U.S. will "emerge by midcentury as the most affluent, culturally rich, and successful nation in human history." Nourished by mass immigration and American society's "proven adaptability," the country will reign supreme over an "industrialized world beset by old age, bitter ethnic conflicts, and erratically functioning economic institutions." Although decreasing social mobility will present a challenge, demographic resources will give the U.S. an edge over its European rivals, which will be constrained by shrinking work forces and rapidly proliferating social welfare commitments. Largely concerned with migration patterns within the U.S., the book also offers a nonpartisan view of America's strengths, identifying both pro-immigration and strongly capitalist policies as sources of its continued prosperity. However, Kotkin tends to gloss over the looming and incontrovertible challenges facing the country and devotes limited space to the long-term consequences posed by the current recession, the rise of India and China, and the resulting competition over diminishing energy resources. Nevertheless, his confidence is well-supported and is a reassuring balm amid the political and economic turmoil of the moment.

Fiction Liberation Front

A new book: Collected stories, by Lewis Shiner. On the jacket reference is made to a website.

Welcome to the online collection of works by Lewis Shiner. Read this manifesto for a quick explanation of what's going on here.

The manifesto begins: It's hardly news that the Internet Revolution has toppled the traditional short story markets. If you look through the periodical racks at one of the big chain bookstores (what passes for a newsstand in most of the US these days), you'll be hard pressed to find a magazine devoted to fiction. It's been a slow decline since the heyday of the pulps, true, but the last few years have seen even the remaining SF and mystery digests falling back to a subscription model.

What we don't know is what comes next. Some magazines, like Subterranean, have moved online; many have just gone under. Even the idea of a magazine may cease to be relevant. The only thing that seems likely is that whatever future the short story has, the Internet will be involved in it. The thing that's least clear is how--or whether--artists will be compensated for their efforts.

Dead Beat

The dead beat : lost souls, lucky stiffs, and the perverse pleasures of obituaries. Marilyn Johnson. 2006. HarperCollins.

On seeing a review of This Book is Overdue, I looked to see if the same author had another book, and this is it. On seeing it, I went to the shelves to get it.

World chronicler looks inward

“Why is it that here in the United States we have such difficulty even imagining a different sort of society from the one whose dysfunctions and inequalities trouble us so?”


A link to a video of Mr. Judt's Oct. 19 lecture.
"The Trials of Tony Judt," The Chronicle of Higher Education
"Night," The New York Review of Books



February 8, 2010
A Chronicler of the World Now Looks Inward
By PATRICIA COHEN

In one of the short personal reminiscences that the historian Tony Judt has been writing for The New York Review of Books he mentions that he was part of the “lucky generation” born in the affluent West after World War II, free to indulge in daydreams and passions.

Mr. Judt’s world, sadly, has contracted considerably. Now 62, he learned about 16 months ago that he has a form of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or A.L.S., commonly known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, and since then he has lost the ability to move nearly every muscle in his body, including those that help him breathe and swallow. As he unsentimentally detailed in the first of these reminiscences published last month: “I cannot scratch an itch, adjust my spectacles, remove food particles from my teeth, or anything else that — as a moment’s reflection will confirm — we all do dozens of times a day.”

In the current and forthcoming issues Mr. Judt has followed up with further autobiographical sketches — on the overboiled English food and Indian tikkas from his youth, the subtle and complex class relations among Cambridge students and their housekeepers, and his naïve revolutionary consciousness during the ’60s — that offer a window into Mr. Judt’s sensibility and the evolution of his views.

The reflections are partly a result of his constricted circumstances. Night is by far the hardest time to bear. Mr. Judt, who has two teenage children and is married to the dance critic Jennifer Homans, has a nurse to help him through the laborious process of getting ready for and into bed. From then on, he lies motionless “like a modern-day mummy, alone in my corporeal prison, accompanied for the rest of the night only by my thoughts,” he writes.

His survival technique has been to scroll through his life and imagination to divert his mind from his body. “This cockroach-like existence,” he writes, referring to Kafka’s “Metamorphosis,” “is cumulatively intolerable even though on any given night it is perfectly manageable.”

Some of these remembrances, captured by his increasingly keen memory, have been dictated to an assistant. Robert B. Silvers, editor of The New York Review of Books, had the idea of publishing them. “I asked to see them,” he said, “and then they came one after another, two and three at a time.” Writing them is “heroic, an incomparable act of courage,” said Mr. Silvers, who has been editing Mr. Judt for 17 years. The vignettes are a link to Mr. Judt’s past as well as to the world outside of his spacious Greenwich Village apartment.

“I would say that about one-quarter of the essays so far constitute self-explanation for curious outsiders,” Mr. Judt wrote in an e-mail message. “The rest are somewhere between self-indulgence, self-interrogation and an attempt to work in a rather different literary form, blending autobiography, history and social commentary.”

His last public appearance was in October, when he delivered a lecture on social democracy before an audience of 700 at New York University, where he is a professor of European history and the director of the Remarque Institute. Wrapped in a blanket and seated in a wheelchair with a breathing device attached to his nose, Mr. Judt started off by “shooting the elephant in the house.” Some of his American friends advised that seeing him talk about A.L.S. would be uplifting, he told the audience, taking a breath after every few words, but as Mr. Judt explained, “I’m English, and we don’t do ‘uplifting.’ ”

At the moment he is turning that lecture into a small book, “Ill Fares the Land.”

Mr. Judt no longer feels up to giving interviews, but he did respond to questions by e-mail, writing that, since his illness, “my priorities are slightly reordered: the things I write about are the things that seem to me more urgent, given not just my own reduced life expectancy but a sharper appreciation of which of our contemporary dilemmas and challenges matters most.”

He added that he’s had a lot more conversations with friends about life and death: “I’m not sure I’ve learned anything new about life; but I’ve had to think harder about death and what comes after for other people.”

Mr. Judt has written nine books and scores of essays. His 878-page 2005 book, “Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945,” was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize. But he is probably most famous — or notorious, depending on your point of view — for his position on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. A 2003 essay in The Review of Books in which he advocated a single binational state that Israelis and Arabs would share as equal citizens thrust him into the public eye and excited often vitriolic debates. His defense of others who have been attacked for criticizing Israel has only heightened his profile among its vocal defenders.

When The Chronicle of Higher Education published a long and moving profile of Mr. Judt last month, the online comments were dominated by a bitter back and forth about the one-state solution to the Mideast conflict.

“I feel that a lot of the reading of the work has been imprecise and unfair,” ignoring the differences between short-term objectives and long-term solutions, Mr. Silvers said.

Mr. Judt was a committed left-wing Zionist as a teenager. He spent summers in Israel on a kibbutz and was active in the Jewish youth movement. But he later soured on the Zionists’ utopian vision. As he recounts of the time he spent with young soldiers, “the insouciance with which they anticipated their future occupation and domination of Arab lands terrified me even then.”

Though still a leftist, he said that his brush with Labour Zionism turned him into a lifelong skeptic of the identity politics and left-wing -isms that seduced his contemporaries. Zealous and impractical idealism draws his rancor as much as expedient politics.

He nonetheless engages in a bit of both in the book he’s writing on social democracy. “Why is it that here in the United States we have such difficulty even imagining a different sort of society from the one whose dysfunctions and inequalities trouble us so?” he asked in his October talk. From his perspective, the problem is that the United States and the West in general have become so obsessed with efficiency and productivity that they have forgotten the importance of other moral considerations, like justice, fairness and individuals’ well-being.

At the same time he recognizes that the far better world one might imagine can lead to the terrifying disasters of the past century. In this age of insecurity, he argued in his talk, a “social democracy of fear” is all one can aim for. “Imperfect improvements upon unsatisfactory circumstances are the best that we can hope for, and probably all we should seek.”

It is an observation that can serve not only as Mr. Judt’s prescription for America, but as a daily watchword for himself.

Defiance

Based on the real-life Bielski brothers. A Hollywood version of a real life group of Jews who did not submit to Nazi oppression, but fought back. Of course there has been criticism of it, yet it, for me, was very moving.

Daniel Craig and Leiv Schreiber do magnificent work.

Allan Corduner plays Shamon Haretz, the old school teacher of the brothers. He played Monty Woolley in DeLovely.

A Chronicler of the World Now Looks Inward

Steve Pyke - The historian Tony Judt has A.L.S. and uses a device to help him breathe.

A link to a video of Mr. Judt's Oct. 19 lecture.
"The Trials of Tony Judt," The Chronicle of Higher Education
"Night," The New York Review of Books

February 8, 2010
A Chronicler of the World Now Looks Inward
By PATRICIA COHEN

In one of the short personal reminiscences that the historian Tony Judt has been writing for The New York Review of Books he mentions that he was part of the “lucky generation” born in the affluent West after World War II, free to indulge in daydreams and passions.

Mr. Judt’s world, sadly, has contracted considerably. Now 62, he learned about 16 months ago that he has a form of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or A.L.S., commonly known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, and since then he has lost the ability to move nearly every muscle in his body, including those that help him breathe and swallow. As he unsentimentally detailed in the first of these reminiscences published last month: “I cannot scratch an itch, adjust my spectacles, remove food particles from my teeth, or anything else that — as a moment’s reflection will confirm — we all do dozens of times a day.”

In the current and forthcoming issues Mr. Judt has followed up with further autobiographical sketches — on the overboiled English food and Indian tikkas from his youth, the subtle and complex class relations among Cambridge students and their housekeepers, and his naïve revolutionary consciousness during the ’60s — that offer a window into Mr. Judt’s sensibility and the evolution of his views.

The reflections are partly a result of his constricted circumstances. Night is by far the hardest time to bear. Mr. Judt, who has two teenage children and is married to the dance critic Jennifer Homans, has a nurse to help him through the laborious process of getting ready for and into bed. From then on, he lies motionless “like a modern-day mummy, alone in my corporeal prison, accompanied for the rest of the night only by my thoughts,” he writes.

His survival technique has been to scroll through his life and imagination to divert his mind from his body. “This cockroach-like existence,” he writes, referring to Kafka’s “Metamorphosis,” “is cumulatively intolerable even though on any given night it is perfectly manageable.”

Some of these remembrances, captured by his increasingly keen memory, have been dictated to an assistant. Robert B. Silvers, editor of The New York Review of Books, had the idea of publishing them. “I asked to see them,” he said, “and then they came one after another, two and three at a time.” Writing them is “heroic, an incomparable act of courage,” said Mr. Silvers, who has been editing Mr. Judt for 17 years.

The vignettes are a link to Mr. Judt’s past as well as to the world outside of his spacious Greenwich Village apartment.

“I would say that about one-quarter of the essays so far constitute self-explanation for curious outsiders,” Mr. Judt wrote in an e-mail message. “The rest are somewhere between self-indulgence, self-interrogation and an attempt to work in a rather different literary form, blending autobiography, history and social commentary.”

His last public appearance was in October, when he delivered a lecture on social democracy before an audience of 700 at New York University, where he is a professor of European history and the director of the Remarque Institute. Wrapped in a blanket and seated in a wheelchair with a breathing device attached to his nose, Mr. Judt started off by “shooting the elephant in the house.” Some of his American friends advised that seeing him talk about A.L.S. would be uplifting, he told the audience, taking a breath after every few words, but as Mr. Judt explained, “I’m English, and we don’t do ‘uplifting.’ ”

At the moment he is turning that lecture into a small book, “Ill Fares the Land.”

Mr. Judt no longer feels up to giving interviews, but he did respond to questions by e-mail, writing that, since his illness, “my priorities are slightly reordered: the things I write about are the things that seem to me more urgent, given not just my own reduced life expectancy but a sharper appreciation of which of our contemporary dilemmas and challenges matters most.”

He added that he’s had a lot more conversations with friends about life and death: “I’m not sure I’ve learned anything new about life; but I’ve had to think harder about death and what comes after for other people.”

Mr. Judt has written nine books and scores of essays. His 878-page 2005 book, “Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945,” was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize. But he is probably most famous — or notorious, depending on your point of view — for his position on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. A 2003 essay in The Review of Books in which he advocated a single binational state that Israelis and Arabs would share as equal citizens thrust him into the public eye and excited often vitriolic debates. His defense of others who have been attacked for criticizing Israel has only heightened his profile among its vocal defenders.

When The Chronicle of Higher Education published a long and moving profile of Mr. Judt last month, the online comments were dominated by a bitter back and forth about the one-state solution to the Mideast conflict.

“I feel that a lot of the reading of the work has been imprecise and unfair,” ignoring the differences between short-term objectives and long-term solutions, Mr. Silvers said.

Mr. Judt was a committed left-wing Zionist as a teenager. He spent summers in Israel on a kibbutz and was active in the Jewish youth movement. But he later soured on the Zionists’ utopian vision. As he recounts of the time he spent with young soldiers, “the insouciance with which they anticipated their future occupation and domination of Arab lands terrified me even then.”

Though still a leftist, he said that his brush with Labour Zionism turned him into a lifelong skeptic of the identity politics and left-wing -isms that seduced his contemporaries. Zealous and impractical idealism draws his rancor as much as expedient politics.

He nonetheless engages in a bit of both in the book he’s writing on social democracy. “Why is it that here in the United States we have such difficulty even imagining a different sort of society from the one whose dysfunctions and inequalities trouble us so?” he asked in his October talk. From his perspective, the problem is that the United States and the West in general have become so obsessed with efficiency and productivity that they have forgotten the importance of other moral considerations, like justice, fairness and individuals’ well-being.

At the same time he recognizes that the far better world one might imagine can lead to the terrifying disasters of the past century. In this age of insecurity, he argued in his talk, a “social democracy of fear” is all one can aim for. “Imperfect improvements upon unsatisfactory circumstances are the best that we can hope for, and probably all we should seek.”

It is an observation that can serve not only as Mr. Judt’s prescription for America, but as a daily watchword for himself.

Shadow of the Thin Man

Took it out because Stella Adler is in it. But it does not hold up very well. Young Nicky is a forced character; I suppose he was added for the cute factor. The film was strained, but it was still fun to watch.

Books read

Free For All: Oddballs, Geeks, and Gangstas in the Public Library

Clark Gable: A Biography

Homo Politicus, by Dana Milbank

Russia: A Long-shot Romance


The Producer: John Hammond and the soul of American Music

Travels with Herodotus

House of Strangers

Excellent film. Edward G. Robinson plays the patriarch of an Italian family (his accent is a little too obvious, but in 1948 that was okay) who has built a bank by sheer determination and hard work. He runs the bank as his fiefdom, doling out cash to neighborhood people according to his own calculations and whims. His interest rates are usurious (a man who wants to borrow $150 to buy a new horse gets $120 in cash, the other $30 kept as "interest"), his kindness equally large, in some cases. He runs his family with equal ruthlessness. Dinner waits for his favorite son, Max, to arrive. Opera plays loud. Spaghetti is served for dinner. He pays his oldest son $65 a week and treats him brashly. He calls his youngest son dumb and denigrates him, employing him as a gaurd at the bank.

A day arrives when he is audited by the government, and his bank shut for irregularities, including loans being made without collateral. The government then puts him on trial. Max is his lawyer. As the trial nears its end Max is sure the old man will be convicted. The only way to avoid that, Max tells his brother Joe, is to bribe the woman he considers a sympathetic witness. Joe refuses to do it, so Max undertakes the mission. The woman, a widow with young children, refuses the money. As he leaves the building, Max is arrested; he is sentenceds to seven years in prison.

Upon getting out, Max is bent on revenge. He visits his brothers at the bank, and none-too-subtly warns them he wants the seven wasted years back. He leaves. and goes to see his old flame, Irene Bennett. Glad to see him back, she implores him to go to San Francisco with her, and start all over. Max plots revenge, but before he can execute his plan his brothers ambush him. Pietro, the youngest, ana amateur boxer, beats him up. In the film's denouement, as Pietro hesitates in throwing Max over the balcony, Joe calls him dumb. They then realize they are playing out the familial drama.

Richard Conte plays Max; he'd play Barzini in The Godfather. He was also in Ocean's Eleven.
Susan Hayward played Irene Bennett. She did a good job.
Luther Adler played Joe. I do not know him; his biography states that he was the brother of Stella Adler, founded the Stella Adler Conservatory. (She wrote The technique of acting in 1988.)
Efrem Zimbalist, Jr. played Tony.
Edward G. Robinson played Gino Monetti.

A Collision of Church and State

This book review appeared in the Wall Street Journal's Bookshelf column on 30 January 2010. I suggested purchasing it for the library. It sounds fascinating, the historical period. The review was written by Michel Gurfinkiel. (Yes, that is how it is spelled; Monsieur Gurfinkiel is French.) A website called www.neoconeurope.eu describes him as a regular contributor to several neoconservative publications. His writings usually are a combination of the 'New Antisemitism' campaign with a mix of Islamophobia. That in itself is not surprising, for the article appeared in the Journal. Yet the book review lies outside that sphere.

A Collision of Church and State: War, revolution, Dreyfus and an era of religious and political turmoil

Two monuments in Paris are so prominent that they're hard to miss. One is the Eiffel Tower, of course, the all-iron tour de force of engineering, standing by the Seine amid the city's spacious and supremely elegant West End. Then to the north, atop Montmartre, there is the Sacré-Cœur: a tall, immaculately white Catholic basilica that looks like a digitized pre-Raphaelite set from "Lord of the Rings." What most visitors—and in fact most Parisians— don't realize is that both monuments were designed and their construction begun at about the same time, in the 1870s and 1880s. Even more surprising: The tower and the church were intended as antagonistic national symbols during times of cultural, religious and political conflict that roiled France for decades.

Frederick Brown tells the story of that tumultuous era in "For the Soul of France." From 1830, the historical moment he starts with, to 1905, his final station, France passed through no less than four different constitutions; three dynasties (the Bourbons, the Orléans and the Bonapartes); two republics; three revolutions (1830, 1848 and 1870); one coup that worked (Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte's in 1851) and two that were either merely attempted (in 1877) or fantasized (in 1889); two civil wars (the June crisis in 1848 and the Commune in 1871); one disastrous
A depiction of members of the Paris Commune in 1871 battling
government troops sent to quash their insurrection.
defeat to a nascent Germany (1870) that led to the momentary occupation of more than one-third of the country; two major financial scandals, in 1873 and 1892, that swept away most upper- and middle-class savings; and, finally, a turn-of-the-century judicial scandal (the Dreyfus Affair) that prompted a far-reaching law in 1905 mandating the separation of church and state.

Mr. Brown does not omit a single episode in this narrative, nor does he stint on the vignettes and human angles that bring the story to life. He is the author of noted biographies of Émile Zola and Gustave Flaubert, and "For the Soul of France" clearly benefits from his long immersion in the lives and works of these two great novelists, who flourished during the era he describes. Mr. Brown's storytelling is vivacious and fluid, but he also keeps a firm hand on his chronicle, bringing order and perspective to these often chaotic times. (Historian Theodore Zeldin, by contrast, allotted himself five volumes to cover the period 1848-1945 and still ended up concentrating on broad themes and dispensing altogether with chronology.)

Then again, Mr. Brown simplifies his task by operating with a single organizing principle: Most of the turmoil in France during this period stemmed from battles over the restoration of the Catholic Church as France's main societal institution. Under the ancien régime, the country was deemed the church's "elder daughter," and the French king's legitimacy was derived from being anointed at Reims Cathedral in a ceremony with biblical overtones. The Revolution in the late 18th century negated both royalty and the church. In the early 1800s, Napoleon fused the ancien régime and the Revolution, in both political and religious terms: He founded a new monarchy compatible with civic equality and representative government, and he re-established Catholicism as the national religion even as he made provisions for religious freedom.

Napoleon's arrangement more or less held firm for several decades, although tensions mounted between the clerical and secular camps. French Catholics generally were not averse to democracy and Enlightenment ideas, so long as the church's special status was recognized. But with the election in 1848 of Pope Pius IX, a dogmatic theocrat (he decreed papal infallibility in 1869), traditionalists in the church began agitating for a restoration of the ancien régime's power. In reaction, secular militancy increased.



For the Soul of France.
Frederick Brown. Knopf, 304 pages, $28.95

The two camps failed to reconcile when France itself was threatened by war with (Protestant) Prussia in 1870, but dire events soon followed: defeat, the partial occupation of France by the newly minted German Empire and the short-lived rule of Paris in spring 1871 by the left-wing Commune, followed by the slaughter of the communards by government troops. "Thousands had been given summary justice and brought before execution squads," Mr. Brown writes. "Blood ran down the gutters, coloring the Seine red."

Catholics took the disastrous events of 1870 and 1871 as an omen that France had strayed too far from its religious roots. "An observant tourist would have found ample evidence to support the view that God seemed happier in France during the early 1870s than He had been for some time," Mr. Brown says, noting that "many young people took holy orders after the war." Secularists insisted that France would betray the best of herself if she did not remain loyal to the Enlightenment thinkers who had fathered the Republic, but the die-hard clericals believed that France could be restored only through the divine grace that would be granted if she atoned for her sins.

Read an excerpt from 'For the Soul of France'

For a while, it looked as if the ultra-conservatives would win by democratic means: Though they were largely royalists, they won a majority in the National Assembly, which in 1873 authorized the construction of the Sacré-Cœur shrine as a national symbol of repentance. A reactionary regime known as L'Ordre Moral ("The Moral Order") was introduced. Then things turned sour for the clerical crowd. There were too many pretenders to the French throne, and the most legitimate of them, Count de Chambord, a Bourbon, was out of touch with the country's mood. He proposed, for instance, to replace the national tricolor flag with the ancien régime's white one. Perhaps not surprisingly, secular republicans came to power in two successive national elections in 1877. They soon ordered up a riposte to the Sacré-Cœur on the Parisian skyline: a tower designed by engineer Gustave Eiffel that would be a symbol of modernity and progress for the centennial of the 1789 Revolution.

With the tide of history against them, the clerically minded resorted to outlandish bids for power and influence. A misbegotten coup in 1889 ended before it began when its putative leader, the reactionary French general Georges Boulanger, fled to Belgium. In the mid-1890s, the clericals, hoping to rally the public's support for the church, launched an anti-Semitic campaign. Mr. Brown ably describes how a genteel theological and social contempt for Judaism was transformed into an unbridled hatred for Jews.

The crusade culminated in what came to be called the Dreyfus Affair. A French military officer named Alfred Dreyfus was convicted in 1894 of treason for passing secrets to Germany, though his only crime was being Jewish in late 19th-century France. The affair dragged on for years, with a retrial, in 1899, thanks largely to Zola's support for Dreyfus— who was eventually restored as a French officer in 1906. The sorry episode certainly didn't result in the abandonment of French anti-Semitism, but its clerical proponents—and their broader hope for the restoration of a royalist, anti-Enlightenment, anti-republican France—were discredited.

Alfred Dreyfus (1859-1935), the French army officer whose treason conviction in 1894 stirred a national soul-searching about anti-Semitism.

At times, it is true, one wishes that Mr. Brown had provided a wider comparative context. He might have contrasted the eruptions of reactionary French Catholicism during the 19th century with, for instance, the more progressive politics of Catholics in Belgium, Germany and Italy. And what about the faction within the French church that denounced its antiliberalism and anti-Semitism? Dissidents did exist—and were gradually to dominate French Catholicism in the 20th century. Still, "The Soul of France" offers a great deal of instruction and many narrative pleasures (even for a French reader). After reading it, visitors to the City of Light, and Parisians themselves, may never look at the Eiffel Tower and the Sacré-Cœur quite the same way again.

—Mr. Gurfinkiel, the president of the Jean-Jacques Rousseau Institute, lives in Paris.