“The Story of Civilization. Volume 5: The Renaissance”, by Will Durant

 

 

776 pages, Simon & Schuster, ISBN-13: 978-0671548001

 

The Story of Civilization is an 11-volume set of books by the American writer, historian and philosopher Will Durant that focuses on a philosophical understanding of Western history that was intended for the general reader. Written over a period of more than fifty years, Volume 5: The Renaissance was originally published in 1953, and covers the history of Italy from 1300 to the mid-16^th Century, focusing especially on the Italian Renaissance. Durant’s contribution to the Renaissance focuses on the art and the artists behind them, just like most histories of this era; AND, just like most histories of this era, this serves to rather slow everything down (although there are still fascinating thumbnails featuring the many often-wretched popes and princes that populated the era). But, if it is not too impertinent to ask: whence does great art come from, and does great art make a civilization great? Or the other way ‘round? Neither? The Renaissance that swept Italy did so during one of the most turbulent times the peninsula had ever suffered through, while (to quote Harry Lime), “in Switzerland, they had brotherly love, and they had 500 years of democracy and peace. And what did that produce? The cuckoo clock”. So, perhaps chaos is necessary for brilliant cultural ferment?

 

One cannot speak of the Renaissance without mentioning the Borgias, those Spanish interlopers who, in the persons of Rodrigo de Borja (Pope Alexander VI) and his son Cesare and daughter Lucrezia make for some…fascinating reading. All of the players are here, too, from Giuliano della Rovere (Pope Julius II) to King Charles VIII “the Affable” of France, and a score in-between, as well. Under both of these warlike Popes, artists such as Da Vinci, Michelangelo and Raphael flourished and left behind some of the masterpieces of the Western canon, while death, plague and misery stalked the lands around them. The sections focusing on these artists are some of the best I have read on them, such as this:

 

[Michelangelo] divided the convex vault into over a hundred panels by picturing columns and moldings between them; and he enhanced the tridimensional illusion with lusty, youthful figures upholding the cornices or seated on capitals. In the major panels, running along the crest of the ceiling, Angelo painted scenes from Genesis: the initial act of creation separates light from darkness; the sun, moon, and planets come into being at the command of the Creator – a majestic figure stern of face, powerful of body, with beard and robes flying in the air; the Almighty, even finer in form than in the previous panel, extends His right arm to create Adam, while with his left arm He holds a very pretty Angel – this panel is Michelangelo’s pictorial masterpiece; God, now a much older and patriarchal deity, evokes Eve from Adam’s rib; Adam and Eve eat the fruit of the tree, and are expelled from Eden; Noah and his sons prepare a sacrificial offering to God; the flood rises; Noah celebrates with too much wine. All in these panels is Old Testament, all is Hebraic; Michelangelo belongs to the prophets pronouncing doom, not to the evangelists expounding the gospel of love.

 

It’s a damn shame that Durant didn’t see fit to expand on their thought and write full-fledge biographies on them. But there are more Popes than these two sad examples, as the Medici Popes – they would be Giovanni de’ Medici (Pope Leo X) and Giulio di Giuliano de’ Medici (Pope Clement VII) – and their inabilities to do anything about, respectively, either the Protestant Reformation or the Sack of Rome are described in all their patheticness. And of course, there is the perpetually misunderstood Niccolò di Bernardo dei Machiavelli and his contributions to political philosophy.

 

But wait! There’s more: the bleak career of Girolamo Savonarola; the rise and fall of the House of Medici; the history of the Visconti and the Sforza and their rule over Milan; the infuriatingly single-minded merchants of Venice; the artists Bellini, Giorgione, Titian, Tintoretto and Veronese; the Cattedrale di Santa Maria del Fiore by Brunellesco, as well as Brunellesco’s many rivalries with other artists; Giotto’s breakthrough in painting; the perspective paintings of Masaccio; Guido di Pietro (Fra Angelico) and Fra Filippo Lippi and their lyrical paintings; the rise of humanism and, especially, the writings of Petrarch; Boccaccio’s Decameron; all ending with a section on Vasari and his architecture and paintings. All of this happening over the course of less than 300 years, and as Durant states

 

[I]t took more than a revival of antiquity to make the Renaissance. And first of all it took money – smelly bourgeois money:…of careful calculations, investments and loans, of interest and dividends accumulated until surplus could be spared from the pleasures of the flesh, from the purchase of senates, signories, and mistresses, to pay a Michelangelo or a Titian to transmute wealth into beauty, and perfume a fortune with the breath of art. Money is the root of all civilization.

 

“Money is the root of all civilization” – don’t let a Lefty hear you say that. That all of this creative flowering took place in the blood-soaked soil of Italy says, perhaps, something we may not want to hear about ourselves, and we must ask in all seriousness what is more important to people who want to live, thrive and survive without harm from anyone: what is more important, The Last Supper, or the cuckoo clock?

“How to Survive the Titanic or The Sinking of J. Bruce Ismay”, by Frances Wilson

 

352 pages, Harper, ISBN-13: 978-0062094544

Lord Jim is a novel by Joseph Conrad about the abandonment of a passenger ship in distress by its crew, including a young British seaman named Jim, who is then publicly censured for this action and who spends most of the book attempting to come to terms with himself and his past. I mention this because in Frances Wilson’s How to Survive the Titanic or The Sinking of J. Bruce Ismay the author spends an inordinate amount of time linking the trials and struggles of the fictional Jim with the trials and struggles of the very real J. Bruce. Too much, I would argue.

Several reviews of Lord Jim argue that the book, split into two broad sections, was rather too long, and that the second half didn’t really match up with the first. This is ironic, for I would say the same about How to Survive the Titanic; the first half recreates the night of April 15^th, 1912, and the life of Ismay, the chairman and managing director of the White Star Line (although at the time of the sinking, he had in fact sold his company to J. Pierpont Morgan’s International Mercantile Marine Company and was, as he argued, just another passenger).

The second half illuminates the inquires afterwards and J. Bruce’s life, but in such an odd, convoluted way as to make it almost unreadable; in linking Lord Jim with J. Bruce, Wilson gives a “compare and contrast” feel of an English Lit 101 exam to her book. The similarities between Conrad’s novel and J. Bruce’s life are time and again forced together with all the skill of a person using a hammer to assemble a jigsaw puzzle; sometimes it fits but, more often than not, the pieces come together only after having been bashed into place. An aside here or there would have gone a lot further in making her point, methinks.

This book shows just how J. Bruce has since gone down in history as a coward and the polar opposite of the proper Edwardian gentleman who should have gone into the drink so that women and children could live. After 100+ years, there is still a fair amount of mystery around the events of that night. Did J. Bruce push aside women and children in order to get a seat on a lifeboat, or, as he claimed, did he help women and children board lifeboats and then only took a seat when there were no other women or children about in the area? Was he pushed into the lifeboat by First Officer Wilde? Did he really row with his back to the wreck and, thus, not watch the “ship of dreams” perish?

Without question the best parts of the book were the descriptions of the sinking and the subsequent rescue of the survivors; the hour-by-hour account of J. Bruce’s activities during the whole ordeal are engrossing and absorbing, with Wilson providing some very moving and even heart-wrenching descriptions of the tragedy, even from the viewpoint of this most unsympathetic of persons. The biographical material on J. Bruce’s life serves the purpose of the book well which is, after all, to illuminate the case on how to successfully navigate the aftermath of a catastrophe like the sinking of the Titanic. The man’s thoughts and actions are analyzed and given a new perspective, thanks to insightful commentary from the author, even if, as I argued above, Lord Jim has little to do with J. Bruce.

But How to Survive the Titanic is still very much a peculiar book, attempting as it does to tie together several narrative threads into one all-encompassing and readable narrative of the life of one of the major figures in the story of the sinking of the Titanic. In the capable and guardedly sympathetic hands of Wilson, J. Bruce appears to have been, at best, a difficult man to deal with; undistinguished, diffident and introverted, inward-directed and almost incapable of empathy towards anyone not within his tight little family and social circle (and even not often then; just read about his relationship with his wife, Florence), and perhaps not very much empathy at that to those inside it. He was the unfavored son of an up and coming man, and if J. Bruce had all the advantages that wealth could bestow upon the son of a fantastically successful bourgeois industrialist of the mid-Victorian era, he did not wield them with much confidence.

If the Titanic had not struck an iceberg in the middle of the Atlantic on an April night of 1912, it is entirely possible that no one but history enthusiasts for the grand late 19^th and early 20^th Century’s luxury liners, or chroniclers of the Edwardian social scene, ever would have ever heard of J. Bruce at all. He probably would have preferred it that way, all things considered, but fate or circumstance had other plans for him.

“Anthology of Japanese Literature: from the earliest era to the mid-nineteenth century”, compiled and edited by Donald Keene

 

448 pages, Grove Press, ISBN-13: 978-0802150585

Anthology of Japanese Literature: from the earliest era to the mid-nineteenth century was originally compiled and edited by Donald Keene in 1955, although this edition is a reprint from 1994. Many of the poems and tales collected here were done so for the first time back in ’55, and Keene was keen (heh) to provide as complete an overview of Japanese literature as possible, from the Nō dramas from the 14^th Century to novels and poems up until the mid-18^th Century. And the collection is wonderful, as almost the whole of ancient and old Japanese literature is condensed into less than 500 pages:

• From the Ancient Period (prior to 800), “Man’yoshu”, or “Collection of Ten Thousand Leaves”
• From the Heian Period (794 to 1185), “Kokinshu” or “Collection of Ancient and Modern Poetry,” “The Tosa Diary” of Ki No Tsurayuki, “Yugao” from “Tales of Genji” of Murasaki Shikibu, and “The Pillow Book” of Sei Shonagon
• From the Muromachi Period (1336 to 1573), “The Tale of the Heike” from the Kamakura Period; Plan of the No Stage, “Birds of Sorrow” of Seami Motokiyo, and “Three Poets at Minase”
• From the Edo Period (1603 and 1868), sections from Basho, including “The Narrow Road of Oku,” “The Love Suicides at Sonezaki” by Chikamatsu Monzaemon, and Waka and haiku of the Tokugawa court

I know very little…okay, next to nothing…alright, NOTHING WHATSOEVER about Japanese literature, so this collection was a great introduction to this ancient civilization. While I have no ear for poetry, I found the works presented here appealed to me like no Western poems outside of Poe did, so for that, I am eternally grateful to the Japanese. So while I plan to continue studying Japanese history, this Anthology will, I believe, add another dimension to what is read.

“The Titanic Pocketbook: A Passenger’s Guide”, compiled by John Blake

 

128 pages, Naval Institute Press, ISBN-13: 978-1591148623 

I bought The Titanic Pocketbook: A Passenger’s Guide (compiled by John Blake) on June 17^th, 2012; I know this because I kept the ticket for the “Titanic: The Artifact Exhibition” when it came to The Henry Ford on the 100^th anniversary of the sinking (as I was an employee of the museum at the time, the ticket was free, to boot. Nice). The Pocketbook’s conceit is that it is a complete guide “such as could have been given to a passenger on board the RMS Titanic of the White Star Line on her maiden voyage from Southampton Docks on 10^th April 1912, to be read at leisure during the Atlantic crossing”. As such, the caveat that Blake has merely compiled the information therein is important, as the text has been reproduced from various primary sources from the era, such as technical publications and White Star Line publicity brochures. For such a small book (really, it’s not only 128 pages, it is also a mere 7.5”x5”; and the print is tiny!) it covers a ton: the design, construction and operations of RMS Titanic, as well as First and Second Class accommodations, facilities and services and countless period illustrations of the ship and her furnishings. A wonderful little collector’s item that is also jam-packed with useful information on the world’s most famous shipwreck.

“Ataturk: Lessons in Leadership from the Greatest General of the Ottoman Empire”, by Austin Bay, foreword by General Wesley K. Clark

 

202 pages, Palgrave MacMillan, ISBN-13: 978-0230107113

Austin Bay’s Ataturk: Lessons in Leadership from the Greatest General of the Ottoman Empire (with a foreword by General Wesley K. Clark) is part of a series published by Palgrave MacMillan called “The World Generals Series”, which includes biographies of Alexander the Great, Charles de Gaulle, Julius Caesar, Lafayette, Montgomery, Rommel and, perhaps, others, but these are all that I found. At a slim 202 pages, Ataturk is as brief a biography as can be found on the founder of the modern secular Turkish state, but seeing as Bay restricts himself to the military aspect of the man’s career, this is, perhaps, understandable.

My knowledge of the late Devlet-i ʿAlīye-i ʿOsmānīye (Ottoman Empire or, literally, The Sublime Ottoman State) is limited, as is the founding of the Türkiye Cumhuriyeti (Republic of Turkey), so much of what I read on these two topics was enlightening. But the focus is, of course, on Ataturk, and on how this driven individual, blessed with a probing intelligence, physical courage, relentless foresight and a drive to succeed recreated his nation. Each of his triumphs, from Libya, to Gallipoli, and Anatolia are recorded, as is the evolution of Kemal’s thinking (he was “Mustafa Kemal” before he was “Kemal Ataturk”) as a leader and tactician.

But perhaps Bay’s best accomplishment is to whet my appetite for more information on Ataturk, his life and accomplishments, as this tiny book just does not tell me enough. So here I go, off on another book hunt.

“The Martian Chronicles”, by Ray Bradbury

 

182 pages, Bantam Pathfinder, ISBN-13: 978-0553278224

Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles is a modern-day SciFi classic that records the human colonization of the red planet after Earth has been devastated by nuclear war. First published in 1950, the book features short stories written in the late 40s and other vignettes written to weave all the interconnecting tales together. But my first exposure to these stories was in 1980 with NBC three-episode, four-hour miniseries of the same name that starred Rock Hudson, Darren McGavin, Bernadette Peters, Roddy McDowall, Fritz Weaver, Barry Morse and Maria Schell (don’t worry; I had to Google all those names, too). Many years later, needing something to read during Study Hall (what, like I was going to do homework?), I found this in the library and decided, “what the hell?” I find it interesting that, from 1950, Bradbury imagined that, by the early 21^st Century, Mankind would have had the ability to travel to and colonize our closest celestial neighbor; all of us living now can only curse the fact that these tales are not, in fact, our new reality. Anyway, while The Martian Chronicles is not a conventional linear story or even episodic epic; rather, it is a series of stories loosely linked together to form a kind of scattershot tale told from many differing viewpoints:

• Rocket Summer (January 1999/2030)
• Ylla (February 1999/2030)
• The Summer Night (August 1999/2030)
• The Earth Men (August 1999/2030)
• The Taxpayer (March 2000/2031)
• The Third Expedition (April 2000/2031)
• …And the Moon Be Still as Bright (June 2001/2032)
• The Settlers (August 2001/2032)
• The Green Morning (December 2001/2032)
• The Locusts (February 2002/2033)
• Night Meeting (August 2002/2033)
• The Shore (October 2002/2033)
• The Fire Balloons (November 2002/2033)
• Interim (February 2003/2034)
• The Musicians (April 2003/2034)
• The Wilderness (May 2003/2034)
• Way in the Middle of the Air (June 2003/2034)
• The Naming of Names (2004-05/2035-36)
• Usher II (April 2005/2036)
• The Old Ones (August 2005/2036)
• The Martian (September 2005/2036)
• The Luggage Store (November 2005/2036)
• The Off Season (November 2005/2036)
• The Watchers (November 2005/2036)
• The Silent Towns (December 2005/2036)
• The Long Years (April 2026/2057)
• There Will Come Soft Rains (August 4, 2026/2057)
• The Million-Year Picnic (October 2026/2057)

As a chronicle of human ingenuity and adaptability, The Martian Chronicles is a hopeful yet cautionary tale of human survivability in that most trying of conditions: an alien world. Some of the stories are standard mid-20^th Century SciFi, but many others are a kind of mix of fantasy and weird fiction out of pulp magazines of the early to mid-50s. All are delicious feasts for the imagination. The only overarching story arc is of the long term event of colonization and decline told in a nostalgic and ethereal quality, much like a later-day fairy-tale; indeed, the Martians themselves are rather like the fairies you read about in ancient and medieval tales. Bradbury wrote these tales with an almost poetic quality, the poetry running like a burbling stream against the hard realities of the worlds and their challenges, and his tales have withstood the test of time, even though the human species has yet to fulfill his dreams of interstellar colonization

“The War Lovers: Roosevelt, Lodge, Hearst, and the Rush to Empire, 1898”, by Evan Thomas

 

496 pages, Little, Brown and Company, ISBN-13: 978-0316004121

The War Lovers: Roosevelt, Lodge, Hearst, and the Rush to Empire, 1898 by Evan Thomas is a history of the Spanish-American War, that late-19^th Century conflict that earned the United States Guam, Puerto Rico and the Philippines (for $20 million) while guaranteeing the independence of Cuba (the McKinley Administration also used the war as a pretext to annex the independent Kingdom of Hawaii. So there’s that, too). As an account of this splendid little war, The War Lovers succeeds admirably, with the unseemly “rush to empire” put on full display, along with the motivations of the principle movers and shakers. This is where Thomas’ book is best, as his history of the war doesn't even start until Chapter 15.

Until then, we get deep background on each of the men who sought to restore American manhood through a spot of war: thus, we get a proper psychological portrait of William Randolph Hearst, the American businessman, newspaper publisher and politician (and inventor of Fake News); Theodore Roosevelt, Jr., the American statesman, politician, conservationist, naturalist, writer and Rough Rider, who left the comforts of his job as Assistant Secretary of the Navy to rough it but good in war; Henry Cabot Lodge, the American Republican Senator and historian from Massachusetts and a member of the prominent Lodge family; Thomas Brackett Reed, or “Czar Reed”, American Representative from the State of Maine and Speaker of the House and an opponent of the war; William James, American philosopher and psychologist, considered to be a leading thinker of the late 19^th Century and one of the prominent James’ clan.

But for all that, Thomas’ portrayal of his protagonists is rather flawed, with his portrait of Roosevelt being particularly cutting and incomplete; his treatment of Hearst is better, strangely, considering that this provider of Fake News is most to blame for this conflict. Those on the other side – that would be Harvard Professor William James and Speaker of the House Thomas Reed – come across as suckers ripe to be rolled and are found wanting as compared to Roosevelt and Hearst. The most compelling sections, though, are his accounts of the war itself. Many other books have covered the same ground, but Thomas takes us through the haphazard organization of the Army, its chaotic trip to Cuba and the bumbling battles of Las Guasimas and Kettle Hill with admirable verve and detail. The only drawback is his glossing over the Filipino-American War, a topic where his connections to current events are more pertinent.

“Founding Myths: Stories That Hide Our Patriotic Past”, by Ray Raphael

 

331 pages, MJF Books, ISBN-13: 978-1567318869

I shoulda known that any book praised by Howard friggin’ Zinn would be suspect and, sure enough, Ray Raphael’s Founding Myths: Stories That Hide Our Patriotic Past seeks to de-mythologize the tales and stories of our collective history. And oh, does he de-mythologize with a passion, as any book that claims to be a “People’s History” is wont to do, what with its pretensions to Marxism and what not (Raphael has also written something called A People’s History of the American Revolution; I can guess just what that thing is like). I have to say that, in all honesty, much of what Raphael uncovers is factual and should be exposed to a larger audience. There were more riders than Paul Revere; there was more than one Molly Pitcher; the camp at Valley Forge wasn’t that bad; the Declaration of Independence had several antecedents that Jefferson drew upon; and so on and so forth. Correcting history is as important to an historian as recording it.

But Raphael dislikes heroes and heroic effort, for heroism begets hero-worship which begets propaganda which begets militarism which begets ethnocentrism, which is bad – from Westerners; China is the modern-day leader in all of these things and we hear nary a peep of criticism for the Middle Kingdom reborn from the occupiers of the Ivory Towers. Raphael’s disdain for individual effort and his obsessive belief that only “communitarian” effort has value comes off as heavy-handed propaganda itself, and his insistence that the People’s Will is the only legitimate criteria to judge history by becomes tedious. Thus, Paul Revere did make that memorable ride to warn patriots that the British were coming; that it wasn’t all that renowned until Longfellow wrote his poem and romanticized the episode doesn’t take away from Revere’s heroism. We only hear of those instances of collective do-goodery that he approves of, such as Shay’s Rebellion; I would really like to see his opinion of latter-day collective actions, like the Tea Party rallies; I suspect they would not pass muster with him.

“America, a Patriot’s Handbook”, compiled by Michael Kelahan

 

408 pages, Sterling, ISBN-13: 978-1435136144

America, a Patriot’s Handbook is a concise, handy volume that contains a series of famous and vital documents important to understanding the American Experience, such as the Declaration of Independence, Constitution of the United States of America, Bill of Rights, Emancipation Proclamation, Gettysburg Address, Pledge of Allegiance, Star-Spangled Banner, as well as other essential American writings by George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Ronald Reagan and even Barack Obama…for some reason. While this is advertised as “a Patriot’s Handbook”, I would argue that it is non-patriots who would gain most from reading this book; after all, a patriot is one who already sees worth and value in their nation and, thus, has no need for positive reinforcement. But anyway, this is still a handy reference for anyone who would like to keep a collection of the US of A’s most important and deciding documents handy in one convenient (and affordable) volume.