“1848: Year of Revolution”, by Mike Rapport

496 pages, Basic Books, ISBN-13: 978-0465014361

“The Spring of Nations”; “The People’s Spring”; Springtime of the Peoples”; “The Year of Revolution” – that is what the year 1848 was to many people of the long 19th Century, when a series of political upheavals tore through Europe, marking the first cracks in Metternich’s post-Waterloo reactionary order and making it the most widespread revolutionary wave in European history. The multiple insurrections and revolts in the European states – some old and venerable, others newly established at the Treaty of Vienna following the Napoleonic Wars – are recorded by Mike Rapport in 1848: Year of Revolution. Uprisings of varying degrees swept across much of Europe, including France, Italy, Germany, Prussia, Austria and Hungary. While no two revolutions were exactly alike, they all tended to be nationalist, liberal, democratic and sometimes even republican, in the sense of giving the heave-ho to the reigning monarch or at least attempting to rein in their reigns via constitutions. And the movements experienced exciting successes – exciting, but short-lived, for within a year most of the democratic and liberal advances had been swept away by counter-revolutions that restored power to conservative monarchs in nearly every country. Nationalism fared somewhat better, and the revolutions of 1848 arguably advanced the cause of first Italian and then German unification in the coming decades. Oh, and The Communist Manifesto was unleashed on the world, too.

1848 is a concise, readable summation of the events of this fateful year, from the glorious spring and summer that raised such high hopes for the cause of revolution and reform, to the gathering of the counter-revolutionary forces that slowly crushed resistance everywhere in the grim days of autumn. Due to its ubiquitous nature, a major event like 1848 poses special problems for any historian wishing to provide an account for the general public, but Rapport rises admirably to the task. For a variety of reasons, the Ancien Régimes either couldn’t or wouldn’t address the issues most affecting their peoples, from peasants seeking an end to serfdom and other feudal duties, to liberals who wanted sensible political reforms, to radicals who wanted republics instead of monarchies, to nationalists who wanted their own countries, i.e. Italy and Germany, especially. Despite the old order’s best efforts, long repressed grievances and issues came to a boil in 1848, and Rapport depicts the crucial moments in a year filled with high drama: the abdication of Louis Philippe, the last king of France (truly, this time); the fall of Metternich in Austria; the wars that raged up and down Italy with heroes like Garibaldi earning international fame; and the sad end of the revolutions when so many men died in a vain effort to hold onto their newfound gains. In this respect, the execution of Hungarian officers by the Austrians at the end of the rebellion stands out as particularly tragic and cruel.

Rapport’s greatest weakness is also his greatest strength as, like many academic historians, he is comprehensive and exhaustive to a fault, but his writing also makes you feel that you’re not missing out on any of the important events, even in a sweeping work like 1848. However, by seeming to include every fact (however insignificant it may be) and every person (however minor a role they may have played) in his story, what often comes across to the reader is a recitation of many facts, told about innumerable people, but with little explanation of their connection to the overarching narrative. Want to know what I mean? Okay, let’s play a little game, class: read the following sentence and count how many different pieces of information you can discern: “His [Count Josip Jelačić’s] dizzying rise began in the summer when [Count Lajos] Batthyány, well aware of Hungary’s shortage of munitions, ordered him to buy ammunition from abroad and to learn how percussion caps were made – a skill which, ironically, he duly studied at the imperial fireworks factory in Wiener-Neustadt”. I mean…dang. This authorial tick can sometimes have its brighter side, as when he introduces us to Ferdinand I of Austria: “Since 1835 the Emperor had been the mentally disabled Ferdinand (in one famous outburst, he yelled at his courtiers, ‘I am the Emperor and I want dumplings!’). He was loved by his subjects, who affectionately referred to him as ‘Ferdy the Loony’." I mean, that’s good stuff.

By recounting each of these stages in parallel across multiple countries, Rapport clearly establishes his thesis that what happened in 1848 was a European phenomenon, not a set of individual national events. This is not a work for the uninitiated, for the reader had best have a good grasp of European history before attempting to read this one as Rapport assumes a good amount of knowledge on this subject on the part of his readers, and his own analysis of the era is detailed and quite well done.

“The Intellectual Devotional: American History; Revive Your Mind, Complete Your Education, and Converse Confidently about Our Nation’s Past”, by David S. Kidder and Noah D. Oppenheim

384 pages, Rodale Books, ISBN-13: 978-1594867446

So, I buy lots of books every year, virtually all of them on sale, on clearance, or used, or whatever. And I fully intend to read each and every one of them. Someday. When I was cleaning my room the other day, I found this little gem, The Intellectual Devotional: American History; Revive Your Mind, Complete Your Education, and Converse Confidently about Our Nation’s Past, by David S. Kidder and Noah D. Oppenheim, with about an inch-worth of dust on the cover, but more interestingly with a voucher for something called “Watch Me Move: The Animation Show”, which was exhibited at the Detroit Institute of Arts (one of my many ex-jobs) from October 6th, 2013 through January 5th, 2014. So that’s how long this particular work has been awaiting my attention. It should consider itself lucky.

So, The Intellectual Devotional: American History is a kind of mini-encyclopedia with 365 entries across seven aspects of American History; these would be: Politics & Leadership; War & Peace; Rights & Reform; Business; Building America; Literature and Arts. The idea behind the devotional is to read one page per day, but I found myself so absorbed that I would typically read a whole week’s worth at a sitting. Naturally, you can’t fit much onto a single page – especially as the book is only about 8” tall – so each entry is brief in the extreme. And the print size! Jesus! It starts out small and gets ever-smaller as you move down the page! I get the constraints of the format, but maybe Rodale Books should have splurged and printed a larger book. I mean, I love to read, but the formatting of this thing made it a chore.

For what it is, the writing is agreeable enough, but what concerns me most is the accuracy of the information being imparted. For instance, according to Kidder and Oppenheim, John Smith and his followers, “[e]xhausted by the long voyage…landed on a small, uninhabited island in Virginia off the coast of Chesapeake Bay…” Um, the last I checked, Jamestown was built on the James River, not a minor mistake. But wait, there’s more: the Pequot Wars began in 1634 not 1636; the Haitian Revolution began in 1791 not 1793; and Ulysses S. Grant died in 1885 not 1855. I’m sure there are (many) other mistakes besides these, but I haven’t counted them all up. Yet. So I guess I will continue to read The Intellectual Devotional: American History, but with my cellphone by my side, ready to fact-check the authors at every turn.

“Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood”, by Todd McCarthy

768 pages, Grove Press, ISBN-13: 978-0802137401

Y’all know what an unreliable narrator is? No? Okay: an unreliable narrator is either deliberately deceptive or unintentionally misguided, forcing the reader to question their credibility as a storyteller. Think Baron Munchausen, or Becky Sharp, or any number of literary examples. I bring this up because Todd McCarthy tells us in the introduction to Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood that so many of the tales told by his subject about himself were…bullshit. Not malicious, perhaps, or even harmful, just…bullshit. I guess when you chose to make storytelling your life’s work it’s difficult to know when to stop? Anyway, Howard Winchester Hawks was a giant of Classical Hollywood, writing, directing and producing some of the legendary films of that era, such as *ahem* “The Dawn Patrol” (1930), “Scarface” (1932), “Today We Live” (1933), “The Road to Glory” (1936), “Bringing Up Baby” (1938), “Only Angels Have Wings” (1939), “His Girl Friday” (1940), “Sergeant York” (1941), “The Outlaw” (1943), “To Have and Have Not” (1944), “The Big Sleep” (1946), “Red River” (1948), “I Was a Male War Bride” (1949), “The Thing from Another World” (1951), “The Big Sky” (1952), “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes” (1953), “Land of the Pharaohs” (1955), “Rio Bravo” (1959), “Hatari!” (1962), “El Dorado” (1966) and “Rio Lobo” (1970), and those are just the ones I’ve heard of.

McCarthy gives us everything we ever wanted to know about Hawks’ professional and personal lives, his deals with the studios, his treatment of his cast and crew…and then it gives us more than we needed to know. The book is thoroughly researched and decently written, detailing the making of every film Hawks ever directed, the great, the good and the mediocre. And, we get to learn about the dirty underside to the man, the marriages, infidelities and all those damn lies he told about himself. Why should a man, born to wealth with a Mayflower pedigree to boot, feel the need to embellish and exaggerate his own life’s tale? McCarthy, too, seems at a loss to explain this odd personality tick. But the main focus of the book are the films, and it is structured almost like a reference work, with each chapter covering the making of a series of films and the events in their making, from casting, screenplay writing, producing and filming, as well as their box office performances and critical reviews. While informative, this can get rather tedious, as it sometimes descends into a simple “and then he made ‘Only Angels Have Wings’, and then he made ‘His Girl Friday’”, and so on. Not a bad book about one of Tinseltown’s overlooked (for some reason) masters, and a great introduction to the lost Golden Age of Hollywood.

“The Secret Voyage of Sir Francis Drake: 1577-1580”, by Samuel Bawlf

416 pages, Penguin Books, ISBN-13: 978-0142004593

As an interested non-expert on this subject, I found The Secret Voyage of Sir Francis Drake: 1577-1580 to be engaging and readable…HOWEVER, potential readers should be aware that how far Drake traveled up the west coast of North America and where he careened the Golden Hind are contentious subjects for historians. A little research reveals that many academics do not support Bawlf’s theory that Drake made it as far north as the Canadian coast – notably, in 2012, after undertaking their own extensive research, the U.S. Department of the Interior placed a Historic National Landmark at “Drake’s Bay” in northern California to mark the spot of Drake’s landing. The case for this site seems to be based primarily on the latitude from the official published account of Drake’s voyage and the discovery of some Chinese porcelain at the site, but from what I’ve gleaned on the topic, various theories have been floated (heh) and each theory has its own supporters who might have their own personal motivations.

And therein lies perhaps the biggest problem with Secret Voyage, in that Bawlf reveals no new sources, no new documents and no new evidence for his contentions; instead, he takes second-hand information about Drake’s voyage, attributes it to Drake himself and proceeds to weave what purports to be a new story. Bawlf was, incidentally, not the first to propose that Drake made it to Canada, and he seems to have largely avoided the harshest academic condemnations, like those that have been leveled at Gavin Menzies, another popular historian whose books 1421 and 1434 have been downright skewered. To me – again, no expert – Bawlf presents a tantalizing case based on a creative interpretation of a large amount of circumstantial evidence and inference. He makes it seem entirely plausible that Drake traveled farther up the coast than northern California, but I also find it unlikely that Drake was able to navigate among the treacherous straits of the Canadian coastal islands (one of the chief doubts raised by other historians), and there is a lot of conjecture in this section of the book.

And this is just for starters: this book is filled with errors, discrepancies and misstatements (at one point Bawlf refers to the “seven-and-a-half” month gap between Drake’s leaving Huatulco in modern-day Mexico and his arrival in the western Pacific; in fact, the period was April 16^th to September 30^th, 1579, about two months less than Bawlf states). Another example of sloppy scholarship is Bawlf’s definition of “knots” as “sailing speed in miles sailed per hour”; while the length of a nautical mile has changed in the last four hundred years, in Drake’s day it was 800 feet longer than a statute mile, or 6080 feet (at no time have knots been synonymous with miles). Bawlf also makes absurd claims about various mapmakers, suggesting relationships between them and Drake that are mere supposition, unsupported by any evidence…come to think of it, that might be the best description for this book, written by a failed Canadian politician.

“The Birth of the West: Rome, Germany, France, and the Creation of Europe in the Tenth Century”, by Paul Collins

496 pages, PublicAffairs, ISBN-13: 978-1610393683

Paul Collins seems to be a congenial enough writer, but with a strong bias against everything that isn’t Catholic; perhaps this is because when he began writing The Birth of the West: Rome, Germany, France, and the Creation of Europe in the Tenth Century, it was originally intended to be a history of the papacy during the same timeframe as this book. So there’s that. It’s an interesting thesis and decently written, as the author stated that he saw a need for a history of this era utilizing metanarratives – and before you can say Huh?!: metanarratives are narratives about narratives: of historical meaning, experience or knowledge, and which offer a particular culture or society the promise of legitimizing itself with the completion of a Big Deal (this is a thing in critical theory and postmodernism. Naturally). So The Birth of the West, then, is a modern-day attempt to explain and legitimize the way in which Europe came to be – not Europe the place, mind you, but Europe the idea and all that it’s supposed to entail. And in less than 500 pages, to boot.

How does he do, then? Well I tell ya: with the continental game of musical chairs occurring during the 9^th and 10^th Centuries, a book with 427 pages of text is at best an outline; not a bad outline, but an outline nonetheless. Collins weaves together a whole slew of narratives and problems from across Europe during this epoch, covering the civil upheavals in Rome, the Saracen incursions into southern Italy and France, the Magyar invasions and the collapse of central authority with the disintegration of the Carolingian empire. He then effectively narrates the rise of the Holy Roman Empire under the Ottonians so as to create something approaching political stability in central Europe. Collins’ writing style is well-suited to a popular history book, although he perhaps unwittingly describes it very well when he in fact complains about the style of a certain “naive young monk”: “Abbo seems to strain to impress us with his knowledge of arcane Greek and Latin words and phrases...all of which he hopes may find favor with his reader”. Right back atcha, Paul.

I know a bit of medieval history, and yet I kept reading this book because it presents a lively and engaging narrative of the age. It delves into personalities and quirky events – like the trial of Formosus (look it up) – in ways that other histories of the period underplay or cast to the sidelines. It gives prominence to the struggles over the control of the papacy that other works underplay (not surprising, as Collins has written extensively on the history of that office). We learn about powerful women and influential background characters, whether nobles, bishops, Viking lords, abbots or monks. And in the end I’m fascinated with Collins’ thesis that the rise of the Ottonians constitutes the Birth of the West; that is, the world as we know it (and see disappearing, bit by bit). Furthermore, it was the drive of two remarkable men – Pope Sylvester II (946 – 1003, born Gerbert of Aurillac) and the Holy Roman Emperor Otto III (980 – 1002) that did so much to lead this chaotic continent into the new millennium.

I, for one, normally tend to suspect these kind of all-encompassing claims – How Ireland save the World, How the Scots Invented Everything, etc. – but I think the author may be on to something here. It’s probably in the Ottonian age that the West recovered something of the late Roman balance of secular and sacred, with tolerance for outliers like Celts and Goths and Neoplatonists and whatnot. As Collins himself states, it was in the Tenth Century that Europe was born, and it was Christianity that was the midwife. He also states explicitly that he doesn’t want to live in a “global, secularist, multicultural, post-Christian society” (he’s not the only one), and that even if that is where we are headed, “[i]f we forget where we came from, we will simply drift into the future with nothing to offer it”. Truer words were never spoken.

“The Harper Encyclopedia of Military Biography”, by Trevor N. Dupuy, Curt Johnson and David L. Bongard

841 pages, Book Sales, ISBN-13: 978-0785804376

Fair Warning: The Harper Encyclopedia of Military Biography is just that: a useful reference tool profiling 3000 great military leaders from ancient times to the present and, as such, is best used as a research tool, rather than as a good book to curl up with. The following information is provided for each biographical entry: dates of birth and death (if known); nationality; rank or title; principal wars; nickname (if applicable); overview of the subject’s life; and an evaluation of the leader’s abilities and achievements. For most entries there is a list of books one can read for further information about the leader. As such, this book provides an incredible amount of information on each person and is an invaluable reference for any military historian – however, as I was perusing it on one of my many excursions between its covers, I discovered that several individuals were not included…like, A LOT of soldier/statesmen whom I believe, in my oh so ‘umble opinion, deserved some mention, if anything to see their treatment in a work like this. I understand size restraints and readers may agree or not with this list, but that is what reviews are all about, amiright? And so, forthwith:

How on God’s Green Earth did you miss ‘em…

Cyrus the Great, founder of the Achaemenid Empire; Epaminondas, Theban general and statesman; Attila, ruler of the Huns; Charles Martel, Frankish statesman and military leader; Alfred the Great, King of Wessex; Robert the Bruce, King of Scots; Josip Broz Tito, Yugoslav communist revolutionary…

If you’re gonna include (fill-in-the-blank), then why the hell not…

Louis IX, King of France and commonly known as Saint Louis; Francis I, King of France; Sir Martin Frobisher, English seaman and privateer; Sir Francis Drake, English sea captain, privateer, slave trader, naval officer and explorer; Dominique Martin Dupuy, French revolutionary general of brigade; Simon Bolivar Buckner, American and Confederate soldier and politician; John Buford, Jr. Union Army cavalry commander; Terry de la Mesa Allen Sr., senior United States Army officer; Sir Richard Nugent O’Connor, British Army officer; Hans-Valentin Hube, general in the Wehrmacht; Carl Andrew Spaatz, American World War II general; James M. Gavin, United States Army officer; Donn Albert Starry, United States Army four-star general; Frederick Melvin Franks Jr., commander of the Gulf War coalition VII Corps…

And hey, while we’re at it, why not…

John Graham Montrose Archibald Campbell Argyll Henry (Hotspur) Percy Charles Edward Stuart Ealdorman Byrhtnoth Canute Brian Boru William Marshall Robert Guiscard Harold Godwinson Harald Hardrada El Cid Boudicca Godefroy de Bouillon Raymond of Toulouse Bohemond I of Antioch Charles the Bold of Burgundy Holy Roman Emperor Sigismund Holy Roman Emperor Henry IV Henry the Lion Tokhtamysh Subutai Theodoric of the Visigoths Ramses II Antigonus Mithridates VI of Pontus Seleucus I Nicator Titus Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain Wilhelm Freiherr von Roggendorf…

Well, I guess you get the point; I guess you can’t have ‘em all. For all that, The Harper Encyclopedia of Military Biography is an invaluable resource for scholar and amateur alike; and if, like me, you’re ever bored one evening and in need of diversion, just flip this book open to a random page and start reading about some long-forgotten warlord and have at it.