Madness visible

di Giovanni, Janine. (2003). Madness visible: a memoir of war. New York: Knopf.

I saw her on the Charlie Rose show last week, along with three other guests, all discussing Syria. I found each of them smart and interesting. I got this book, opened it, read the first tow paragraphs of her introduction, and got chills: I can not read about war and cruelty so very easily any longer.

Lord of War

Drek. Mierda. Shit. Had read about it in a New Yorker article ("Disarming Viktor Bout" by Nichols Schmidle, 5 March 2012 issue), so I tried it: BIG MISTAKE.

Tea with Mussolini

A oldie, a goodie.

A war on punctuation

America’s next president, Newt Gingrich, is also a prolific author of poorly reviewed historical fiction. As it is the 70th anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor, it seems as good a time as any to remember Newt’s own book about the subject—a novel that The New York Times called a “war on punctuation.” The first 23 pages are available online

US President? Whoa there, Nellie! if he gets nominated by the Republicans, and that is still a big if, he does an election to contest (and I can only begin to imagine how much Bill Clinton looks forward to that –sparing all the obvious metaphors,too).

Up Periscope

Saved Friday night. James Garner plays what amounts to a Navy SEAL sort, who has been assigned to slip into a Japanese-held island from which the enemy is transmitting, take pictures of their code, and slip out. He is transported on a submarine commanded by a hard-bitten (yet something of a sensitive soul of a) captain played by Edmond O'Brien. Everyone smokes. The medic is played by Ed Byrnes (Cookie of 77 Sunset Strip). The film works.

A bridge too far

Film version of Cornelius Ryan's book. Cast includes Dirk Bogarde, James Caan, Michael Caine, Sean Connery, and Edward Fox, as well as Elliot Gould, Laurence Olivier and Liv U. Not a happy story, but a good war movie.

3 films

The Darjeeling Limited - mediocre, at best. Waste of time. Three brothers are on a train in India in some sort of quest, that, inexplicably, involves consuming cough syrup and pills, as well as smoking an endless stream of cigarettes. This nonsense exemplifies Hollywood in one of its ceaseless impulses, and it is not a pretty sight. Owen Wilson plays the eldest of the three brothers, wearing head bandages and a domineering streak that is baffling. Adrien Brody is stuck in a time warp, it seems, and wearing oversized glasses he keeps flipping onto his forehead. Jason Schwartzman plays the third brother, who lusts after the waitress/stewardess that serves them lime drinks. The film meanders, and then flops.

Manchurian Candidate - very good. Denzel turns in a stellar performance as a Desert Storm veteran, rather than a Korean War vet, played by Frank Sinatra in the original film version (1960). Meryl Streep plays the bitchy mother to perfection. The film veers on the melodramatic or absurd, but the action and the acting, especially the acting, pull it back, and make it work.

Adaptation - too much Cage. Way too much. Even Streep and Chris Cooper, in the end,, can not overcome that hurdle, good as they are.

Books on Statesmen

Evan Thomas chooses distinguished books on statesmen

1. Present at the Creation. Dean Acheson. Norton, 1969. [327.73 A (International Relations) and  973.918 A (North American history)]

Most people, when they are in the midst of history being made, are too caught up in the moment to see its larger meaning. Not the great American statesman Dean Acheson: His aptly named autobiography captures the precise date, on Feb. 27, 1947, when the duties of Pax Britannica passed to Pax Americana. Britain on that day told the U.S. that the British were no longer able to help protect Turkey and Greece from Soviet expansion; America was on its own. "We drank a martini or two to the confusion of our enemies," recorded Acheson, who would go on to become secretary of state (1949-53). Written with grandeur, verve and a certain puckish delight, "Present at the Creation" is the frankest and most gripping work by a statesman since Ulysses S. Grant's 1885 autobiography.

Grant's work is magnificent.

2. Passionate Sage . Joseph Ellis. Norton, 1993.      973.4409 E

Over the past decade or so, the best-seller lists have included some big and wonderfully readable biographies of the Founders, but the best portrait of a Revolutionary-era statesman is this slim, dense and relatively little known volume about John Adams. Written by Joseph Ellis before his own blockbuster biographies of Thomas Jefferson and George Washington, "Passionate Sage" is structured thematically. It demands a reader's close attention, but the reward is great. Ellis shows that Adams was able to use his shrewd understanding of human vanity, especially his own, to shape a government system of checks and balances. Ellis has fun with the irrepressible Adams, who like his old friend and rival Jefferson was obsessed with his place in history. "I thought my Books, as well as myself, were forgotten," Adams joked to Jefferson in 1813. "But behold! I am to become a great Man in my expiring moments."

3. Master of the Senate.  Robert A. Caro. Knopf, 2002.   B Johnson C

The United States Senate is, generally speaking, a boring place. On most days the chamber is empty, or a single senator drones on as others wander in and out. Yet Robert Caro—researching "Master of the Senate," the third volume in his magisterial series "The Years of Lyndon Johnson"—sat day after day high in the public galleries, conjuring the drama of an earlier time when giants, or one particular giant, strode the Senate floor. Caro's LBJ cajoles, whines, blusters, deceives, intimidates—and gets the Senate, still dominated in the 1950s by Southern Democrats, to pass the first-ever civil-rights bill. Johnson is crude, to put it mildly—Caro describes him on a "monument of a toilet," browbeating secretaries, assistants and other lawmakers. But if only we had someone like LBJ in Congress today.

4. The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt. Edmund Morris. Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, 1979.  B Roosevelt M

Edmund Morris virtually inhabits his subject in "The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt" (the first book in a three-volume series that will conclude later this year). His feel for Roosevelt—a bragging, bullying, bellowing, yet somehow tender and always steadfast young man—is so tactile that it verges on the sensuous. "He was dubbed 'The Chief of the Dudes,' and satirized as a tight-trousered snob given to sucking the knob of his ivory cane," Morris writes. This volume, about the pre-presidential Roosevelt, is more engaging than the one that followed. Presidential biographies are almost inherently heavy going because presidents must always be doing too many things at once. But Morris, like TR, is never dull.

5. The Proud Tower. Barbara Tuchman. Macmillan, 1962.    901.941 T (also 909.82, and 940.28, and 940.311)

The turn of the 20th century was a great age of statesmen, or so it seemed. Dressed handsomely in frock coats, cutaways and top hats, they gravely, pompously, naïvely held international conferences that vowed to put an end to war, forever. Reading Barbara Tuchman's collection of elegant, elegiac essays about this period, you can almost hear the ice cracking beneath their feet. (The title comes from an Edgar Allan Poe poem, "While from a proud tower in the town / Death looks gigantically down.") One portrait is particularly captivating: the tragedy of Thomas Brackett Reed, the House speaker who tried to stop America from lunging into the race for empire in the last years of the 19th century. Reed was brilliant and indomitable, but he was unable to stand in the way of the lust for conquest and dominion that seized America and much of the civilized world on the eve of World War I.

—Mr. Thomas is the author of  The war lovers : Roosevelt, Lodge, Hearst, and the rush to empire, 1898. 973.891 T


Printed in The Wall Street Journal, page W8

The things they carried

The things they carried: a work of fiction. Tim O'Brien. New York: Broadway Books, 1998.

Just could not get into it. Tried, and tried, but couldn't.

Hubris of a Man Who Thought He Was Napoleon

This review of the book Russia against Napoleon in the Times seems to take the same tack as the reviewer in the Journal (cf. post below) points out as being erroneous. This reviewer is John Steele Gordon. His history of the national debt, “Hamilton’s Blessing,” has just been released in a updated edition by Walker & Company.

In the Journal review, Jennifer Siegel states: In Mr. Lieven's eyes, this story has two great heroes, and neither is Mikhail Kutuzov, the Russian general lionized by Tolstoy and, later, Stalin. Mr. Lieven praises Kutuzov, the commander in chief of the Russian forces, for his courage, skillful soldiering and mastery of public relations, but the author does not consider him the military genius that tradition has trained us to see. Rather it is the czar, Alexander I, and the historically undervalued Mikhail Barclay de Tolly, minister of war and the commander of the Russian forces before and after Kutuzov, who inspire Mr. Lieven's admiration.

In this review, Gordon states: With greatly inferior forces, Russia could not afford to confront Napoleon head on. Instead, the Russian commander, Mikhail Kutuzov, of necessity adopted Fabian tactics, harassing the invaders but avoiding pitched battle when possible. The one really big battle, Borodino, was more or less a draw, after Napoleon gave up personal command for reasons never satisfactorily explained. On Sept. 14 Moscow fell to Napoleon, and he sent peace overtures to Alexander, thinking the czar had no option but to negotiate. The Russians stalled and hinted but never gave a firm answer, seeking to keep Napoleon in Moscow as long as possible. On Oct. 19, with the czar still dawdling, French food supplies dwindling rapidly, and the Russian winter closing in, Napoleon had no choice but to begin withdrawal.

Kutuzov is painted as decisive, Alexander as indecisive. Stein sees it differently. Nonetheless, both  priase the book.

Moscow on the Seine

How a czar and his army saved Europe from France's Grande Armée.


After two years of nearly continuous fighting against Napoleon in the longest campaign in European history — a campaign that had marched the Russian army from Vilna in the west, eastward to Moscow, then all the way to Paris — the end to the conflict seemed for the first time to be as close at hand as the city rising on the horizon.

Dominic Lieven relates the tale of this campaign with masterly skill in "Russia Against Napoleon." It is a story that students of European history and admirers of Russian literary classics think they know well: Napoleon invaded Russia in 1812 and stayed too long; was trapped by the Russian winter and stymied by the nationalistic heroism of the Russian people; destroyed his Grande Armée in an ill-timed retreat across the snow-covered, war-ravaged fields; and was slowly pushed back to Paris by the re-formed and newly invigorated coalition of Great Powers (Britain, Austria, Prussia and Russia). In 1814, as every schoolchild once knew, Napoleon was dispatched to Elba, leaving open the possibility that Russia would dominate the recently liberated Continent.

Mr. Lieven, a professor of Russian history at the London School of Economics, paints a far more textured picture of Russia's crucial role in halting Napoleon's advance and containing France within its historic borders. "Russia Against Napoleon" is informed by Russian sources and focuses not only on Russia's oft-praised people but also on the country's oft-underappreciated leadership in the early 19th century.

In Mr. Lieven's eyes, this story has two great heroes, and neither is Mikhail Kutuzov, the Russian general lionized by Tolstoy and, later, Stalin. Mr. Lieven praises Kutuzov, the commander in chief of the Russian forces, for his courage, skillful soldiering and mastery of public relations, but the author does not consider him the military genius that tradition has trained us to see. Rather it is the czar, Alexander I, and the historically undervalued Mikhail Barclay de Tolly, minister of war and the commander of the Russian forces before and after Kutuzov, who inspire Mr. Lieven's admiration.

Russia Against Napoleon   940.2709 L

Dominic Lieven
Viking, 618 pages, $35.95

Barclay de Tolly was responsible for Russia's successful strategy of "deep retreat," which he had recommended as early as 1810. The idea was to lure the French far into Russia's heartland, stretching out their supply lines and making a potential French retreat crippling and costly. He was under constant criticism in his day for abandoning Russian ground to the French in 1812 without any real resistance, and he was under perpetual suspicion from the "Old Russian" camp at court and in the army because of his "foreign origins"—even though his family, of Scottish descent, had lived in the Russian Empire since the mid-17th century. In Mr. Lieven's hands, Barclay de Tolly comes across as tireless, dedicated, brave and strategically sound.

And Czar Alexander, often portrayed as unpredictable and ungrounded, frequently shows good leadership and diplomatic finesse in Mr. Lieven's telling. Despite ... constraints, Alexander proved an effective wartime leader, particularly after 1812, when the conflict moved out of Russia and diplomacy became paramount. He recognized that only a peace signed in Paris could guarantee the restoration of order in Europe and the security of Russia; but he also saw that Russia alone could never defeat the French forces. A victory over Napoleon was possible only because Alexander managed to form a grand alliance and keep it intact. This coalition-building, Mr. Lieven argues, was the czar's greatest achievement.


Russia's triumph is also a story of logistics, supplies and, above all, the horse. The country's leaders mobilized what Mr. Lieven calls "the sinews of Russian power": its vast population (although much smaller than the combined numbers at Napoleon's disposal); its outstanding and plentiful horse stock; its arms manufacturing; and even the sometimes unstable Russian economy. Of these, it is the horse, and Russia's ability to mobilize its light cavalry to harass Napoleon's rearguard as it retreated across the great European plain, that receives the greatest attention in "Russia Against Napoleon." Coming in a close second to the horse in significance were the victuallers who managed to feed and supply more than a half-million troops during the two-year campaign.


Mr. Lieven ends by arguing that in 1814, as in the present day, the security of Russia and the security of Europe were interdependent. True enough, but he also shows in this absorbing book that the defeat of Napoleon hinged on the resources, leadership and sacrifice of the Russian empire.

Ms. Siegel is a history professor at Ohio State University.

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."

Surviving in the City, Against All Odds

Kidder, Tracy. (2009). Strength in what remains : a journey of remembrance and forgetting. New York : Random House.



Mr. Kidder’s subject, Deogratias, whom he calls Deo, arrives at Kennedy Airport with $200 in his pocket. He speaks no English and knows no one. Lost, homeless and haunted by nightmares, he squats in abandoned Harlem tenements and later sleeps in Central Park. He becomes suicidal.

“Better, he thought, to be in Burundi, if Burundi were at peace, than to live on the wrong, impoverished planet in New York,” Mr. Kidder writes. “This place made you feel like you were simply not a human being.”

Mr. Kidder’s book is a story about survival, about perseverance and sometimes uncanny luck in the face of hell on earth. Deo is a Tutsi who managed to escape the vicious civil war between his people and the Hutus in Burundi and neighboring Rwanda in 1993 and 1994. Being a Tutsi was a distinct liability; the Hutus were at this point killing Tutsis indiscriminately.

It is just as notably about profound human kindness. It is about the selfless strangers who helped Deo in America, who gave him places to live, helped him find jobs and ultimately helped him attend Columbia University and Dartmouth Medical School.

Tracy Kidder


If “Strength in What Remains” is slightly less immediate than those earlier books, it may be because, paradoxically, Mr. Kidder is too fine a writer. Like John McPhee, whom he has acknowledged as an influence, Mr. Kidder makes a fetish of the nonfiction writer’s craft, generally for the better but occasionally not. His clear, perfectly buffed, shyly self-satisfied sentences can be curiously distancing.

I'm going to look at his books.

Mr. Kidder doesn’t push too far, doesn’t linger on horror and insanity. You feel safe in his hands; he’s not going to push your face into the mire or insert atonal notes into his score. Thus you occasionally long for a pricklier, less predictable writer, a Paul Theroux or a William T. Vollmann. A writer acquainted with his own dark impulses, that is, who can let out, when needed, a sickening howl.

Excerpt: ‘Strength in What Remains’ (August 30, 2009)
The Sunday Book Review on ‘Strength in What Remains’ (August 30, 2009)
Paper Cuts Blog: Questions for Tracy Kidder (August 28, 2009)


A clinic in Burundi opened by Deo, the subject of Tracy Kidder’s “Strength in What Remains.”

Grace is gone

Good story of a father of two daughters who can not find a way to tell them their mother, s soldier, was killed in action in Iraq. Cusack is good. Shélan O'Keefe, whoc plays the older daughter, is a gem.

In the valley of Elah

A father, himself a former military MP during the Viet Nam War, looks for his son, and finds him dead, butchered. Investigating

Redacted

Showing war from three perspectives, this film uses hand-held cameras, in-your-face violence, and the horror, boredom and grittiness of everyday Iraq.

A company of GIs mans a checkpoint bristling with guns, barbed wire, and signs in English and Arabic, intended to control vehicle and human traffic and stave off the flow of arms and explosives. Much of the time they sit and watch, laden with uniform, bullet-proof gear, knee pads, and their ammunition and weapon. Bored, from time to time they nod off or find distractions to occupy their minds.

Around them, Iraqis carry on their lives, going to school, to work, herding goats. When young females need to walk past the checkpoint, they are subjected to being frisked by male soldiers, who in turn, in some cases, can use the procedure as an opportunity to touch a female body.

There are also insurgents, or terrorists, who wait for opportunities to kill American soldiers. An improvised explosive device (IED) is set among rubble. monitored remotely, ready to maim or kill.

Off duty, the soldiers read, film video with small, hand-held recorders, play cards, drink. Boredom and tension are constant. On duty, they sit and wait. Once, an innocuous incident results in a sargeant being blown up by the IED. A misunderstanding at the checkpoint results in a pregnant woamn being killed. Boredom and alcohol result in the hatching of a plan to go back to a house, where the soldiers had arrested a man, and rape a 15-year old.

Rape they do, as well as kill and burn her body. Revenge is exacted by the kidnapping of a GI by an anonymous group of presumably, but not certainly, Iraqis, who film his beheading, and leave his body and head to be found.

Technically, the film uses interesting devices: a documentary is presumably being filmed by a French crew; Iraqi television journalists interview and report.

The film is meant to shock, and does.

Stop-loss

Excellent. Powerful. Impressive.


I really liked this movie: the action was continuous and evocative, vigorous and compelling; the acting was superb.

Ryan Phillippe has quickly become a favorite: even his accent was good. Abbie Cornish, Channing Tatum, and Joseph Gordon-Levitt, all were quite good, as was, in fact, all the cast.

Stop-loss refers to soldiers who are sent back to war after their tours of duty ended. The brutality of that, the impact of the life of a soldier, is demonstrated graphically. This is a major film, an important war film.

Peter Travers, of Rolling Stone, gave it 3.5 stars; I give it 4.

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.

Blood Diamond

Excellent film. Serves as a metaphor for the ages-long tragedy of war in Africa; kudos to DiCaprio, a big Hollywood star, for making such a film. This film should be a wakeup call to white American and European audiences, especially, to the ravages of endless fighting, ceaseless killing, and perpetual damage to an entire continent and its peoples. I was moved to tears by the tragedy of a family torn asunder by violence they had nothing to do with. In Tim Butcher book, Blood River, I read about Belgian colonialists chopping off hands of Congolese as a means of exercising control and instilling terror; in this film that fact is spoken by a character, but one so minor that it could well get past most people. It is shown graphically.

DiCaprio are Djimon Hounsou are magnificent in their roles. Leo actually manages to pull off an accent quite well (his character calls it Rhodesian). Djimon is flawless in showing pathos, bravery, defiance, perseverance. Jennifer Connelly's performance is mediocre, and her character is a two-dimensional stereotype. Too bad; she can act well. Overall, a stirring, disturbing, excellent film.

A cultural and literary historian

The Great War and modern memory. (1975). Fussell, Paul. New York: Oxford University Press.




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