“Bright Young People: The Lost Generation of London's Jazz Age”, by D.J. Taylor

384 pages, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, ISBN-13: 978-0374532116

Throughout much of the 1920s, Londoners had a front-row seat to the antics of a small group of socialites-about-town. These young men and women staged lavish parties, disrupted activities with scavenger hunts and other stunts, and provided fodder for gossip columnists and cartoonists. This group, dubbed the “Bright Young People”, was fictionalized in novels, recounted in memoirs, and is now the subject of D. J. Taylor's collective history of their group, Bright Young People: The Lost Generation of London's Jazz Age.

Britain’s “Lost Generation” grew up immediately after World War I. Too young to take part in the fighting, their childhoods were scarred by loss and privation. Its small wonder that in the early 1920s these young men and women began to make their marks as brainless partiers intent on having a good time, unchecked by the influence of older brothers (dead on the battle field) or parents (somewhat poorer and definitely out of fashion). D.J. Taylor does an excellent job of chronicling the lives of these men and women through the 1920s and 1930s and then beyond.

Many of the Bright Young People were highly gifted writers, like Evelyn Waugh, Harold Acton, and Nancy Mitford. They began producing novels and thinly disguised memoirs of the Bright Young People while the group was still in its heyday. Others, like Elizabeth Ponsonby and Brian Howard, squandered whatever creative talent they possessed in a fog of booze, drugs, and ceaseless but purposeless activity. I enjoyed reading the many anecdotes with which Taylor enlivens his text, describing elaborate masquerades or complicated and sometimes cruel practical jokes, but it grew wearisome to think that the people participating kept it up unceasingly for more than a decade. Often what seems like a good idea and a lot of fun at 21 begins to seem rather dull and pointless by 25 and unbearable by 30, but that never seemed to dawn on many of the Bright Young People, making that sobriquet seem even sadder and more ironic. Taylor thoughtfully provides us with an afterword in which he summarizes the later careers of the Bright Young People, some brilliant and many more banal.

Bright Young People is an entertaining work which will appeal to social historians and scholars of twentieth century English literature, as well as anyone who enjoys reading about gifted and talented young people and their less brilliant but still amusing hangers-on.

“Don't Tread on Me: A 400-Year History of America at War, from Indian Fighting to Terrorist Hunting”, by H.W. Crocker III

452 pages, Crown Forum, ISBN-13: 978-1400053636

For anyone educated by today’s milquetoast academia, Don't Tread on Me: A 400-Year History of America at War, from Indian Fighting to Terrorist Hunting is a painful reconstruction of the American military in all of its politically incorrect might. Crocker’s book is a page-turner for anyone interested in a chronological (though incomplete) history of the most formidable military in history. More recent generations of graduates of American learning institutions would do well to read a historical portrayal of America’s Best, sans the airbrush.

With that said, this book is not without its flaws. While it provides a fine overview of the many conflicts in which American soldiers have participated, it suffers from a lack of substantive discussion or analysis. The author loudly states his reverence for the average American grunt, but uses precious little in the way of primary sources to illustrate his point and spends most of the book talking about overarching political events or critiquing the actions of the generals and politicians. He seems to take many of his own presumptions for granted – for example, the South had a right to secede from the Union, or the U.S. should have been pursued a more aggressive imperialist policy in the antebellum period – without supporting his claims with evidence. The author seemed to suffer from bipolar disorder, vacillating between a factual overview of American military efforts and a conservative rejection of politically correct liberal histories.

However, one of the reasons I like this book is because the author chose not to go through the politically correct route, and his book is refreshingly different from most other books because of its admitted bias. For all that, any history buff reading this book will probably learn something new, and while I think the author has done an honest job in researching and presenting his facts, his interpretation of certain facts may serve to take away from his work in the great scream of things. But then, this is how history is to be told; give the honest facts, both positive and negative, and let the chips fall where they may.

“Cathedral, Forge & Waterwheel: Technology & Invention in the Middle Ages”, by Joseph Gies & Frances Gies

368 pages, Harper Perennial, ISBN-13: 978-0060925819

Conventional wisdom once told us that there the Middle Ages was a time of stagnation rather than of innovation, but Frances and Joseph Gies make a strong argument, with many examples, in their book, Cathedral, Forge & Waterwheel: Technology & Invention in the Middle Ages, that technological developments from 500 to 1500 AD transformed Europe and enabled both the Renaissance and the European conquest of the rest of the world.

At the fall of the Roman Empire around 500 AD, Europe was little more than an illiterate, rural backwater. Except for a few items left behind by the Romans, virtually all of mankind's significant technology was in the hands and minds of the Chinese, Indians and Arabs. European towns north of Rome were small and dirty, and produced little except subsistence level farming. However by 1500, the end of the Middle Ages, Europeans had thrown back a major Muslim invasion, lived in large cities and fortified castles, carried on an active trade with China, India and Arabia, had developed full-rigged ships and navigation instruments capable of crossing the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, and developed weapons that would soon enable them to conquer almost every other civilization on Earth. Admittedly much of the new technology originated in China and Arabia, but the Europeans refined it, improved upon it, and put it to practical uses such that by 1100 AD Europe surpassed its eastern neighbors in sea faring, agriculture, armaments and day-to-day business practices. Even mundane skills like bookkeeping, credit, and insurance proved important in that they created the means to finance undertakings far beyond the capabilities of any one merchant family or sea captain.

That said, Cathedral, Forge, and Waterwheel is a book that will appeal mostly to those who have an interest in the subject. It largely ignores the wars and plagues of the Middle Ages and concentrates instead on technological development and the lives of common people. The first two chapters (there are only seven chapters in 300 pages of text) are mostly background information on the beginning of the Middle Ages and the migration of technology from Arabia and China into Europe, and can be a little tedious to read. The text picks up in the third chapter when the authors begin to describe peasant life in the medieval villages, and these descriptions are at least as interesting as the technology improvements. Each chapter builds on its predecessor and we learn why women carried the ubiquitous spinster around all day; of the prestige of being the village blacksmith or master mason; of the impact of the first printed books; and how the appeal of a trading economy spurred changes that improved everyone's life. Well, almost everyone’s.

Because the text addresses both people and technology, it is not necessarily riveting for every reader. You have to wade through descriptions of technology and engineering to get to the good stuff about the people – or read through stuff about medieval villagers to get to the good parts about technology, depending on your point of view. But Frances and Joseph Gies know their stuff and this is a great description of the impact of developing technology. Between them they have authored or co-authored more than twenty books on European and American history, and are among our foremost scholars on Europe in the Middle Ages.