“The Spartacus War”, by Barry S. Strauss

264 pages, Simon & Schuster, ISBN-13: 978-1416532057

“I am Spartacus!” Who amongst us did not thrill to that scene of soldierly solidarity in the face of guaranteed doom, as thousands of slaves voluntarily gave up their lives to die on their feet (kinda) rather than to live as human chattel? In 73 BC, a Thracian slave named Spartacus led a group of his fellow gladiators in an escape from the gladiator school where they were held. As more slaves rallied to his banner, Spartacus began a war that raged up and down the Italian peninsula and tied up Roman Legions for two years in what came to be known as the Third Servile War – or, the Spartacus War. This excellent book tells the story of Spartacus and his war: what happened and why, and who did what.

Although I, for one, would have liked more of the backstory behind the Spartacus War (such as more details on the development of slavery in general and gladiatorial slavery in particular in ancient Rome), Barry S. Strauss in his The Spartacus War has given us an immensely readable and interesting look at the makings of a legend. Few of us have neglected the popular movie, Spartacus, and all of us have pondered the real story behind the Hollywood recreation, but Strauss gives us that real story, drawing from a multitude of resources as he tries to separate fact from fiction. As a master of unconventional warfare tactics, Spartacus challenged the Roman legions for a whole two years, but the shortsightedness of Spartacus (like so many other guerilla chiefs) was in understanding the limitations of fighting a guerrilla war. Spartacus was not entirely at fault, since recognizing those limitations was not always enough when his followers refused to understand and challenged his strategy. The heroism of the insurgent gladiators was infectious, leading many freemen to join their cause and earning respect from their opposition. This masterful telling of the story provides much food for thought to military leaders and military historians alike.

There is a good deal of speculation in this work that has been criticized by some reviewers, and I must admit that there is a good deal of speculative storytelling going on here. However, as Strauss points out, the few sources that any modern historian can draw upon were all written long after the Spartacus War, and the contemporaneous sources that they used are all (save for a few scraps to be found here and there) lost to us; thus, Strauss is forced to weave a story from these secondhand (and often contradictory) sources and more modern archeological artifacts. The result is speculation – but speculation that is clearly identified as such, for Strauss does not blithely speculate upon this or that action or outcome and declare it as established fact; rather, he shows why he has come to the conclusion that he did while further recognizing that other interpretations are possible.

Strauss has delivered an exemplary work by not simply presenting unfounded facts and theories about one of the most famous (but scarcely known figures) in human history, but by communicating to his readers what is known and what is probable about Spartacus and those around him. His enjoyment and enthusiasm of his chosen subject is obvious. A very informative and enjoyable read.

“A World Undone: The Story of the Great War, 1914 to 1918”, by G.J. Meyer

704 pages, Delacorte Press, ISBN-13: 978-0553803549

A World Undone: The Story of the Great War, 1914 to 1918 by G.J. Meyer takes a lens from far above what is happening, attempting to show the over-arching reasons why certain things happened. He is more likely to discuss the idea of Ludendorff creating a flexible defense, rather than having troops in a rigid and fixed front line, than he is to talk about what happened at a certain hill or dale. You get the overview – why were the Germans almost successful in 1918 after years of stalemate – rather than they took this town or this fort. When a city is mentioned, he tells you why this place was important (for example, Amiens is where most of the French Railways came together and had the town been lost, France would not have been able to move troops and might have needed an armistice).

Starting with a day-by-day account of the events leading up to World War I, these detail-packed chapters are interspersed with background chapters that, as each country/region/personality is introduced, give the reader additional details on the historical pieces that play a part, including outlines of the Hapsburg dynasty, the Tsarist succession, the French political situation pre-war, and much more. The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand as the catalyst for WWI wasn’t news to me, but the information woven in that covers the shifting powers in the region (who knew more about the planned assassination than they let on at the time) and the broader historical picture of the conflict between Serbia, Germany, and Austria-Hungary immediately provided a far more solid grounding in the lead-up to hostilities; particularly fascinating was all the points at which war could have been averted but wasn’t.

As the flow of battles and political wrangling reach the end of the first year of the war, the book pauses to briefly discuss the evolution of weaponry and why two critical inventions – the machine gun and barbed-wire – were partly responsible for extending the length of the war. Chapters covering the economics of funding the war, WWI and its impact on the poetry of a generation, and shellshock (to name just a few) were clear and concise interludes that often described individual experiences and those unexpected victories or defeats on a smaller scale, adding to my interest in the narrative and bringing the story to life to an even greater degree. The ponderous nature of the military infrastructure in place at the time is hard to imagine for a listener in the 21^st Century. Three nations whose military mobilization plans were so rigid that they simply could not be implemented without overreaching the lines drawn that might have minimized the scope of (or even prevented) the war was a mind-boggling thing for me to contemplate. That Germany could not mobilize without pushing troops across its borders, Russia couldn’t mobilize without (threateningly) staging troops on the German border, and Austria couldn’t mobilize into Serbia and hold the line in Belgrade (strictly as an issue of troop movement, not just orders) was appalling.

As the war begins and the troop movements and battles are described, the pacing was enough to keep me riveted. The shifting battle lines and various offensives were described clearly and concisely and held more than enough drama in their factual recitation without requiring dramatic phrasing or overly gruesome descriptions. In addition to the (for one primarily accustomed to news reports of modern warfare) unimaginable death toll on a sometimes daily basis, the scale of the weaponry described was unexpected (huge guns that took ten train cars to transport and fired ten shells per hour?) These types of details were woven into the stories of individual battles with perfect timing to keep this audiobook moving along. There was never a point at which the story bogged down and the audiobook didn’t seem as long as its run time. In fact, I was so caught up in the description of the initial battles between Germany and France (and the British Expeditionary Force) that I forgot about the Russians and when their troop movements were suddenly introduced, I almost groaned aloud on behalf of the Germans (as it turns out, of course, unnecessarily). Miscommunication, lack of communication, ambassadors with their own agendas who acted in an inflammatory manner – there are many examples of the all-too-human frailty of those who engage in war in this book, but the one that first struck me was the French general who asked for permission to move his troops because his study of German troop movements indicated that the Germans were moving into Belgium, not just with the intent of taking ground, but as part of a larger plan of wide encirclement of the French troops (which was exactly what they were doing). He was denied permission until it was mostly too late because of one man’s conviction, not based on study or actual troop movements, that the German troops simply wouldn’t do that.

Meyer takes on an enormous task in this book as he tries to tell not just what happened leading up to and through WWI, but the important historical background to give the events context; he does so by pairing a “Background” chapter with what we can call each “Events” chapter, and using this creative way to write about what is already a huge tableau. It provides the unfamiliar reader some context, but is inevitably frustrating to those who have gone deeper; by utilizing this structure, Meyer has taken on the task, for example, of summarizing the over 1000 year history of the Hapsburg Empire in ten or fifteen pages. So, over-generalizations and the occasional plain error creep in (for example, at one point Meyer states that Russia had never been made to compromise with other European states – apparently glossing over their defeats by Napoleon and the entire Crimean War). These grate on the reader who has read more on each of these Background chapters. That being said, in a book for a general audience for whom this is perhaps their first introduction to European history of the period, this is an enormous achievement. World War I was the death knell of one kind of civilization and the launching of several competing models of other ways to organize a national community. It deserves study, and this work is an excellent start.

“Fabergé’s Eggs: The Extraordinary Story of the Masterpieces That Outlived an Empire”, by Toby Faber

320 pages, Random House, ISBN-13: 978-1400065509

This is one of those books that it is easy to say, “Why? What’s the point of a study of a series of decorative objects that, while beautiful in and of themselves, serve no greater purpose than to glorify a dead monarchy and destroyed system?” Well, I’ll tell ya: Fabergé’s Eggs: The Extraordinary Story of the Masterpieces That Outlived an Empire brings to life this dead monarchy and destroyed system in ways that mere histories or biographies cannot, as the point of Toby Faber’s fascinating study is not the sparkle of these splendid (and somewhat preposterous) baubles, but the history behind them. He has, in many cases, told the stories of individual eggs and positioned them within the history of the last years of the Russian Empire before following them from the revolution to the present day. This, then, is a history book with a wide scope, using the eggs as a mere foundation for bigger themes that is full of remarkable stories from the royal family, as well as from the colorful subsequent owners of the eggs.

It all began in 1881 when Tsar Alexander III came to the House of Fabergé to commission a present for his wife, the Empress Maria Feodorovna; the result was the first egg, the Hen Egg, based on the design of an egg in the Royal Danish Collection (as Maria was born Princess Marie Sophie Frederikke Dagmar of Denmark, it was thought that such an object would remind her of her happy childhood there). Since then the eggs became an annual tradition, and each year Fabergé had more freedom about how to execute the commission; any worries he might have had of Nicholas II discontinuing the new imperial tradition were for naught as the new Tsar proved unwilling to change much of anything – a fatal trait, as Faber shows – and continued the tradition, with Easter eggs going not just to his mother but to his new wife, Alexandra, as well.

No two eggs were alike, and often reflected historical landmarks, anniversaries, or grand events in the Empire, such as the Trans-Siberian Railway Egg of 1900 that commemorated the newly-completed railway. Fabergé knew that he could please always please Alexandra with depictions of her children, and the famous Lilies of the Valley Egg of 1898 had a surprise of pop-out portraits of her husband and daughters. Faber demonstrates that the eggs could represent the alienation of the royals from the world around them and he contrasts these expensive and beautiful toys with the lot of the Russian people in order to increase our understanding of the revolution that brought the family down in 1918. After that, the new Soviet state, desperate for foreign cash from the capitalists to keep its communist system afloat, made the eggs available for sale abroad, where they were scattered like so much chaff in the wind (Malcolm Forbes collected quite a few – only to have his sons sell them to some Russian neotycoon, while Lillian Thomas Pratt, the wife of a GM executive, likewise acquired a fair amount).

As Faber points out, though, there is a kind of symmetry of the eggs ordered by the super-rich Tsar now being acquired and brought back to Russia by the Tsar’s super-rich oligarch successors. This is a fine history that tells a great deal more about characters and events than it does about mere ostentatious and whimsical jewelry.