“Ex-Friends: Falling Out with Allen Ginsburg, Lionel and Diana Trilling, Lillian Hellman, Hannah Arendt and Norman Mailer”, by Norman Podhoretz

256 pages, Pocket Books, ISBN-13: 978-0684855943

Allen Ginsberg, Lionel and Diana Trilling, Lillian Hellman, Hannah Arendt, and Norman Mailer, all are ex-friends of Norman Podhoretz, the renowned editor and critic and leading member of the group of New York intellectuals who came to be known as “The Family”. As only a family member could, Podhoretz tells the story of these friendships – once central to his life – and shows how the political and cultural struggles of the past 50 years made them impossible to sustain. With wit, piercing insight, and startling honesty, we are introduced as never before to a type of person for whom ideas were often matters of life and death, and whose passing from the scene has left so large a gap in American culture. Podhoretz was the trailblazer of the now-famous journey of a number of his fellow intellectuals from radicalism to conservatism, a journey through which they came to exercise both cultural and political influence far beyond their number. With this fascinating account of his once happy and finally troubled relations with these cultural icons, Podhoretz helps us understand why that journey was undertaken and just how consequential it became. In the process we get a brilliantly illuminating picture of the writers and intellectuals who have done so much to shape our world.

Combining a personal memoir with literary, social, and political history, this unique gallery of stern and affectionate portraits is as entertaining as a novel and at the same time more instructive about postwar American culture than a formal scholarly study. Interwoven with these tales of some of the most quixotic and scintillating of contemporary American thinkers are themes that are introduced, developed, and redeveloped in a variety of contexts, with each appearance enriching the others, like a fugue in music. It is all here: the perversity of brilliance; the misuse of the mind; the benightedness of people usually considered especially enlightened; their human foibles and Olympian detachment; the rigors to be endured and the prizes to be won and the prices to be paid for the reflective life.

Most people live their lives in a very different way, and at one point, in a defiantly provocative defense of the indifference shown to the things by which intellectuals are obsessed, Norman Podhoretz says that Socrates' assertion that the unexamined life was not worth living was one of the biggest lies ever propagated by a philosopher. And yet, one comes away from Ex-Friends feeling wistful for a day when ideas really mattered and when there were people around who cared more deeply about them than about anything else. Reading of a time when the finest minds of a generation regularly gathered in New York living rooms to debate one another with articulateness, passion, and a level of erudition almost extinct, we come to realize how enviable it can be to live a life as poignantly and purposefully examined as Norman Podhoretz's is in Ex-Friends.

“Ancient Greece: From Prehistoric to Hellenistic Times”, by Thomas R. Martin

288 pages, Yale University Press, ISBN-13: 978-0300067675

In Ancient Greece: From Prehistoric to Hellenistic Times Thomas Martin manages to present a cohesive and fundamental narrative. His synopsis is brief but to the point and provides an excellent building block for further inquiry, while his prose maintains the reader’s interest in a superior way without overly technical terminology. Encompassing the Paleolithic through the Classic era, Martin artfully presents the politics, the economy, the confrontations, and the everyday life of Greece and its inhabitants, it is, overall, a worthwhile overview of the cultural history of Greece.

However, in my opinion it is a bit weak in some areas. There is a lot on Greek plays and philosophers and a lot on Greek government and religion, but book contains almost nothing on the military history of Greece. While the wars between the Greeks and Persians and those between Athens and Sparta are discussed, the discussions are brief; furthermore, the history per se is focused mostly on Athens with a bit on Sparta, and while other city-states are mentioned, they are discussed almost entirely in the context of their interactions with these two. Unfortunately, even the histories of Athens and Sparta are not discussed in very much depth: for instance, while the defeat of the Spartans at the Battle of Leuctra is mentioned, there is no mention of the fact that Epaminondas led the victorious Theban army into the Peloponnese, freeing the Messenian helots from over 200 years of virtual enslavement by the Spartans.

The good thing about the book is that the author quotes many primary sources, unlike many others who quote secondary sources, while the use of maps and time lines help to put events into perspective. Overall it is a useful source for a student, but it is not a leisurely read; rather, one must reflect on and often stop to think about and to decipher the language used by the author. The book could use a good editing to clean up the language and sentence clarity if the author wishes for a broader audience than undergraduates.

“Castles of Steel: Britain, Germany, and the Winning of the Great War at Sea”, by Robert K. Massie

880 pages, Random House, ISBN-13: 9780679456711

Anyone who read and liked Massie’s Dreadnought: Britain, Germany and the Coming of the Great War should appreciate his new Castles of Steel: Britain, Germany, and the Winning of the Great War at Sea. As in the earlier book, although the ships and navies of the two rival nations are always at center stage, it is the people who built those ships and directed their activities and operated them and – in this book – fought them that really make the text vivid.

And what personalities! Winston Churchill; the extraordinary Jacky Fisher, the true father of the Dreadnought-type battleships that defined the era; the glamorous Admiral David Beatty, who captivated the British public; Kaiser Wilhelm; Admiral Franz von Hipper, and so on and so forth. If anything, the narrative in Castles of Steel is even more compelling than that of the first book because it deals with the drama and chaos of the Great War itself. Massie’s narrative lucidly explains the course of the naval war from the very opening days until the German High Seas Fleet scuttled itself after the conclusion of hostilities to prevent its delivery to its enemies. Along the way, several complex, controversial episodes are examined, including the disastrous Gallipoli Campaign and the Battle of Jutland, the great clash of battle fleets towards which decades of naval technical development had been aimed.

Massie does not shy away from exploring the bitter in-fighting that erupted after the guns of battle had fallen silent, and he appears to present the arguments on both sides of controversies fairly. Although his portrait of Winston Churchill as First Lord of the Admiralty is as an ambitious politician whose directives sometimes seeded chaos rather than order, Massie by no means holds Churchill solely or perhaps even chiefly responsible for the Gallipoli debacle. The admirals and generals on the spot are shown to have repeatedly erred and provided London with faulty advice. With Jutland, Massie’s basic sympathy is clearly with the quiet, somewhat cautious Jellicoe rather than with his flamboyant subordinate, David Beatty, who according to Massie later did much to rob Jellicoe of deserved credit while evading blame for his own errors.

Castles of Steel will thoroughly dispel the notion that the two great fleets were largely passive throughout the war (excluding Jutland) and that the naval war was a bit of a sideshow to the real action on land. He shows how decisive even an indecisive result at sea could be (as long as Britain could maintain its blockade on Germany while avoiding strangulation of its commerce by the U-boat campaign). Massie is also strong on showing how Jutland – whatever its tactical outcome – must have been a strategic defeat for the High Seas Fleet, since it left the U-boats as Germany’s only offensive option at sea. That in turn led to America’s entry and Germany’s certain defeat on land. Massie is not as interested in the details of the U-boat war; although his chapter on the subject is able and informative, he does not attack it with the same passion and detail as he does the surface ships. In that he resembles his hero in this book, Admiral Jellicoe, a master of surface warfare who respects and fears these new weapons, but does not really make them his own.

A masterful story-teller, Massie’s prose easily takes the reader in and makes it hard to set this book down. I recommend this monumental achievement, even if you are not at all interested in military history. This is history as high adventure.