Friday, August 28, 2015

“Blood & Beauty: The Borgias; A Novel”, by Sarah Dunant


528 pages, Random House, ISBN-13: 978-1400069293

Blood & Beauty: The Borgias is the story of the Borgia family from the election of Cardinal Rodrigo Borgia as Pope Alexander VI in 1492 through to the announcement of Lucrezia Borgia’s third marriage in 1502; besides the Pope, the other main characters are his extremely ambitious son Cesare and his daughter Lucrezia. This was a tumultuous time in Italian history and the Borgias were strong and fascinating characters, with ruthless ambitions and enormous sexual appetites, and the novel is meticulously researched and detailed, a credit to the author, whose reputation as a historical novelist is well established.

However, it is hampered by the fact that though there is a great deal of scheming, murder, betrayal and (this being a novel about the Borgias after all) sex, there is not a lot of drama. I wanted to read about the Borgias because what little I do know is mostly sensationalist rumor and innuendo, especially surrounding Lucrezia. But the viewpoints portrayed in Dunant’s novel are always at a remove from the characters; while we are told what they were like, what they were thinking from one moment to the next, what their ambitions and passions were, etc., we don’t get a glimpse into what might have been their actual emotions and reactions to the blows dealt them. Particularly Lucrezia: though she is sympathetic, she is also nothing but a pawn, always playing third fiddle to her father and brother in the narrative. Of course, being a noblewoman in 15th-and-16th-Century Italy, she was expected to further her family’s ambitions by being married to the most viable candidate possible at the time, so her freedom was naturally curtailed. But this does not make up for Dunant’s inability to flesh out her character and make her more than a mere marionette.

While we can’t truly climb inside of the heads of people long dead, that is the art of the historical novelist: attempting to put the reader in the heads of characters in the book. The book is long, but only half the story, apparently, and doesn’t provide a real ending; rather, at the end we are told there will be another book to finish the story. So, in effect, stay tuned – and buy the next book. Yes, there is a lot of material to cover, but clearly the choice was to hold a magnifying glass over all the content to provide material for two books. Worthy material, to be fair, but still unsatisfying. I just hope I have the interest to wait for the second half of the story.


Tuesday, August 25, 2015

“The Atlantic and Its Enemies: A History of the Cold War”, by Norman Stone



712 pages, Basic Books, ISBN-13: 978-0465020430

Norman Stone’s book The Atlantic and Its Enemies: A History of the Cold War brings that lamented conflict to life through detailed and penetrating descriptions of everything from the ruins of Germany to Ronald Reagan’s White House, all with a wonderfully waspish turn of phrase; i.e.: Nikita Khrushchev, unlike his colleagues, “did indeed have a human face, though pachydermic”; or this lyrically surreal description of the funeral of the Haitian president “Papa Doc” Duvalier in 1971:

He lay in state in the presidential palace for rather too long, given the heat and the power cut, and was then escorted to a vast mausoleum. There were some alarms in the crowd as it shuffled through the dust and the ruts…the wooden balconies, overloaded with spectators, sometimes let out pistol-like cracks; and a little gust of wind, a miniature tornado, suddenly swept the street rubbish into a column.

Often relying on first-hand observation, Stone captures, in the manner of a novelist, the fleeting epiphanies that accompany public events, and by the end of this book you will have learned a great deal about Europe, about the Cold War, and about Stone himself. But the book has a rather careless air about it; the prose reads as if it had been dictated rather than written and was then sent straight to the printers; the word “besides” appears with alarming frequency as a way of linking page-long paragraphs; colloquialisms that would be charming once become grating and lazy when you meet them page after page; episodes that normally count as rather important – such as the Polish shipyard strikes in 1980 – pass in a blur, whereas hobby-horses such as the decline of British universities get an energetic ride.

But this rather adds to its charm: it is as if you are not reading a bone-dry epistle about a long-dead conflict, but rather that you are in the midst of a dinner party full of historians – amateur and professional – discussing-and-debating this-and-that over wine and hors-d’oeuvres, with facts, anecdotes, bons mots and sparkling insights swirling past in a bewildering but entertaining array. The conversation continues on a punt, then on a brisk walk, then over tea, which slips into (more) wine and hors-d’oeuvres, and afterwards a splendiferous “high table” dinner. Late at night you wobble through the darkened streets, still talking, feeling pleasantly at one with the world. It is great fun, but no substitute for actually studying history. It is entertaining history, sure to cause arguments heartburn, sure, but anything but boring.

A beguiling mix of grand narrative and autobiographical vignettes, The Atlantic and Its Enemies is the one book that anyone who wants to understand the Cold War as it developed must read. Using his vast but lightly worn learning, Stone conjures up the winter of 1946-47, the Marshall Plan, the death of Stalin, Khrushchev and Berlin-Cuba-Vietnam, the Sixties, Nixon in China, “The British disease”, Reagan and Thatcher, the collapse of communism and the non-ending of history that ensued. Pretty much everything of importance that transpired during these years is covered, with extensive sections also devoted to Turkey (where the author now lives). Perhaps the most annoying of all is the lack of a conclusion: the book ends with a garbled account of the downfall of Margaret Thatcher and the limp observation that the 1980s were by far the most interesting part of the post-war era. In spite of that, however, this is a grand and glorious history of perhaps the most misunderstood and misrepresented conflicts in history, one the Western Democracies won hands-down – but which doesn’t feel that way.

Tuesday, August 18, 2015

“The Thirty Years War”, edited by Geoffrey Parker


368 pages, Routledge, ISBN-13: 978-0415154581

Another of my (many) Barnes & Noble overstock finds from the late 90’s, The Thirty Years War is a concise (though dry) introduction to the subject, due to the fact that its target audience is, I suspect, advanced undergraduates, graduate students and scholars specializing in other areas seeking an entry into the extensive literature on the Thirty Years’ War. It is not a comprehensive and detailed narrative history, and military history aficionados, in particular, will be disappointed because there is little coverage of campaigns and battles (although there is a good chapter analyzing the nature of warfare during the Thirty Years’ War). The book is devoted primarily to political history, diplomatic history, and the structural effects of the Thirty Years’ War on the European State System and the organization of individual states.

Of particular interest to the authors is the question of why the Thirty Years’ War lasted as long as it did. Wars were very common in Early Modern Europe both before and after this conflict, but usually of shorter duration. The answer(s) appear to be a combination of factors, including changes in military technology, the organizational immaturity of states that precluded decisive victory, the religious dimension of the war, and unwillingness of key actors to compromise. Often presented as a pointless and exhausting conflict, the Thirty Years’ War did produce lasting effects: for example, while the Austrian Habsburgs would never again try to impose hegemony on Germany, their grip on the core lands of Austria, Bohemia, and Hungary tightened. Another example is how the alliance between the Austrian and Spanish Habsburgs – ostensibly the same family but with quite differing goals and aspirations – was severed, allowing France to emerge as the preeminent continental European Power. One aspect that the author makes sure to highlight is the international aspect of the Thirty Years’ War; implicit in the narrative is the fact that events all over the world – such as conflict between the Dutch and Spanish/Portuguese in South America – and Ottoman-Persian rivalries in the Near East had a huge impact on the conflict.

Do not let the complexity of the Thirty Years’ War scare you; it is a fascinating conflict, one that is essential to understanding European history, military evolution and the emergence of the modern state. If you’ve got the stomach to read two or more books on the subject, you will be richly rewarded, and taken in conjunction with other works, Parker’s book can add enormously to your understanding of a seminal event in world history.