“The Boundless Sea: A Human History of the Oceans”, by David Abulafia

1088 pages, Oxford University Press, ISBN-13: 978-0199934980

Damn, what did I get myself into? David Abulafia’s The Boundless Sea: A Human History of the Oceans is 1000+ pages of (very small and very compact) text that seeks to give an all-encompassing and all-inclusive history of when and how humanity began to traverse the waters of the world – and I mean ALL the waters of the world: the book is divided into five sections and 51 chapters, each of which deals with the Pacific Ocean, the Indian Ocean and the Atlantic Ocean, along with all of the interconnected seas, to boot. Any and every culture that had contact with a puddle is reviewed here, an impressive task considering the age of the world and the comings and goings of people all about. While obviously a testament to the author’s erudition, The Boundless Sea is also that rarest of things: a detailed history on a massive subject that is also enjoyable as heck. No, really, even though this thing is as big as a cinderblock and took me 51 days to read (a chapter a day, sport), I was never once bored or thought that Abulafia should have cut this piece or that paragraph. This is good stuff, right here.

As stated above, the erudition displayed by Abulafia (the Professor of Mediterranean History at Cambridge University) is, in a word, astonishing, and he sails his ship in a way that effortlessly displays the multiple links that have combined to bring political, economic and religious change to the world, as well as trade, for without sea trade, the ability to exchange ideas and knowledge on Planet Earth is necessarily confined. It is easy to forget that, for all of the combined joy and dismay that today’s global economy may bring to modern consumers, this is, in fact, not a modern-day phenomenon. Humanity the world over has always been interconnected and traded goods and ideas with aplomb; it has only been during the 20th and now 21st Centuries that this interconnectedness has been thrust into overdrive, with modern governments evidently unable to stop the spread of merchandise and ideologies (or diseases; thanks, Coronavirus). This has the makings to undermine totalitarian regimes while also undercutting free societies, as ideas are spread and adopted without compunction as to their origins or their ultimate conclusions.

The best history entertains as well as informs, and The Boundless Sea is no exception to this oft-ignored rule, as when Abulafia tells us that Columbus was disappointed (to say nothing of delighted) to find naked natives on his travels, rather than the dog-headed horrors he had expected, and recorded in his logbook: “I have not found any monstrous men, as many expected; rather, they are all people of very beautiful appearance”. Good for you, Chris. Or when he writes that pirates the world over really did wear red cloths upon their heads and drink bottle after bottle of rum (Yo-Ho-Ho). Abulafia’s balance in painting his portrait, warts and all, is displayed as he notes the fact that “black rulers sold slaves to white merchants has not come easily to historians of the slave trade”, or the fact that agents of the East India Company were instructed to treat slaves humanely because “they are men”, not for compassion’s sake but because dead slaves were a waste of a perfectly good commodity. As has been stated before, facts are facts and don’t care about your feelings.

In his preface, Abulafia swears that he hasn’t “attempted to write what pretends to be a complete or comprehensive history of the oceans”, a claim he proceeds to bury over the next thousand pages, give or take. The good professor shouldn’t feel any sense of false modesty, however, for The Boundless Sea opens one’s eyes to the vast vistas of ocean-bound exploration, trade and travel that all of humanity has engaged in for as long as our species learned to float.

“The Arabian Nights: Tales from the Thousand and One Nights ”, illustrated by E. J. Detmold

248 pages, The Folio Society

The Arabian Nights: Tales from the Thousand and One Nights was first published by Hodder and Stoughton way back in 1924, complete with a dozen paintings by Edward Julius “E. J.” Detmold, a prolific Victorian book illustrator; The Folio Society reprinted this edition in 1999 (although mine is a second printing from 2000). A little background: One Thousand and One Nights is a collection of folktales from the Middle East first compiled during Islam’s Golden Age, corresponding in the Western calendar from the 8th to the 14th Centuries. The West first became aware of these tales sometime in the early 18th Century, and from then on they have more or less remained in the Western conscience in one form or another. The subtitle to this particular edition is telling, for these are merely selected Tales, not a complete collection:

• The History of Codadad and His Brothers and of the Princess Deryabar
• Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves
• Sindbad the Sailor
• The Story of Prince Assad and the Fairy Perie Nashara
• Aladdin and the Wonderful Lamp
• The Three Calendars
• The Story of the King of the Ebony Isles
• The Story of Baba Abdalla
• The Story of Ganem, the Slave of Love

Some of these Tales are recognizable to a Western audience, while some are not; as to why these were chosen over others, that remains a mystery to all but the powers that be at Folio. I have to say that, out of literally 1001 stories to chose from, I see no rhyme or reason as to why these nine were chosen over all others; not that they're bad stories by any stretch, its just that, as with all folk tales, its the moral, or the landscape, or some other message being conveyed that is of importance, rather than character development or what have you. But it is what it is, and The Arabian Nights, along with E.J. Detmold, presents each tale respectfully and beautifully.

“Churchill’s Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare: The Mavericks Who Plotted Hitler’s Defeat”, by Giles Milton

 

384 pages, Picador, ISBN-13: 978-1250119032

When I reviewed Rogue Heroes: The History of the SAS, Britain’s Secret Special Forces Unit That Sabotaged the Nazis and Changed the Nature of War by Ben Macintyre on January 8th, 2019, amongst my complaints was that the book had no narrative arc or central character or even a group of central characters (I should also add that it seemed to have been written for an Eighth Grade audience, to boot). Well, we have non of these deficiencies in Giles Milton’s Churchill’s Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare: The Mavericks Who Plotted Hitler’s Defeat. The narrative arc follows the “ministry” through its foundation, its evolution, its triumphs and tragedies, and finally to its transformation into the modern-day British special forces. As for central characters, well, hell, take your pick: Winston Churchill, Cecil Clarke, Colin Gubbins, Millis Jefferis, Stuart Macrae, Joan Bright, Eric “Bill” Sykes, William Fairbairn, Norman Angier, Ralph Tarrant, Gus March-Phillipps, Eddie Myers, Chris “Monty” Woodhouse, Harry Ree, Tommy Macpherson - this is as complete a list of British eccentrics as you can find, and the story of their mad plans and plots to disrupt Hitler and his thousand-year Reich using what were really homemade devices and off-the-shelf explosives would seem outrageous and unbelievable if it all hadn’t actually happened.

And it wouldn’t have happened if Churchill hadn’t brought his maverick tendencies to No. 10 Downing Street: in the face of what seemed certain defeat in 1940, he immediately sought out and encouraged other lateral thinkers, men willing to be “ungentlemanly” by fighting off what seemed their inevitable doom with any and every ingenious new trick possible; these men, in turn, recruited other like-minded men and women - each of them gifted with fiendishly clever imaginations - to devise new weapons and techniques of with which to fight some of the greatest criminals and thugs of the 20th Century in an underhanded (read: ungentlemanly) manner. These weapons (often made from benign over-the-counter items like candies and condoms) were then put into the hands of men who had been trained in unexpected ways to murder and maim their enemies. Its been said that all’s fair in love and war, and Churchill and the men of his special ministry set out to prove the axiom right, as the men of this special and not-well-known branch of the intelligence services brought the war to Hitler and the Nazis in their own backyard.

Need some examples of what I’m talking ‘bout? ‘kay:

• The ambush and assassination of Reinhard Heydrich in Prague, one of Hitler’s most feared and ruthless executioners;
• The audacious St. Nazaire Raid that blew up the largest ship dry dock in the world, leaving the mighty German battleship Tirpitz quite marooned in it’s Norwegian fjord;
• The destruction of the Gorgopotamos Viaduct in Greece, thus depriving Rommel’s Afrika Corps of its principle supply link;
• The sabotage of the Norsk Hydro plant at Rjuka in Norway, keeping heavy water and, thus, the atomic bomb out of Hitler’s hands;
• The pre-invasion drops into Normandy where the men raised all sorts of hell, including delaying up to 1400 Panzers for a full 17 days;

And so on and so forth. Every chapter of Milton’s book works as a vivid short story made up of extraordinary characters, intense planning, exhausting rehearsals, crazy new weaponry and heart-stopping action; anyone interested in this little-known aspect of the Second World War, Churchill’s motivations and the founding of western Special Forces will love this book. While it doesn’t take away from the bravery, sacrifices and courage of the regular forces of the Allied nations, it does shine a light on the shadow warriors who helped to ease the way for their conventional brethren utilizing their ungentlemanly ways, while also rescuing these men and women from obscurity, which was their government’s intention when they were summarily dismissed without so much as a how do you do (a knighthood here and a check there just doesn't cut it in my book). A wonderful addition to one’s knowledge of the worst war of the 20th Century.

“Wild Bill: The True Story of the American Frontier’s First Gunfighter”, by Tom Clavin

368 pages, Griffin, ISBN-13: 978-1250178169

Really, now, who hasn’t heard of James Butler “Wild Bill” Hickok? American legend, drover, wagon master, soldier, spy, scout, lawman, gunfighter, gambler, showman and even (bad) actor. All I knew of the man came from Hollywood, especially the 1995 movie “Wild Bill” starring Jeff Bridges in the title role, and the first season of the TV series “Deadwood”, with Keith Carradine as Hickok. We shouldn’t be surprised that this Gunslinger from the American West has stayed with us for all this time, for, as Clavin reminds us in Wild Bill: The True Story of the American Frontier’s First Gunfighter, Hickok was already a bigger legend to the people of his day than Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett or Kit Carson ever were, and by the time he was thirty, to boot. Make no mistake, though: Boone, Crockett and Carson were legendary in the minds of their countrymen, and rightly so, but Hickok was the first national celebrity to come along after the end of the Civil War, and only his good friend, the showman extraordinaire William Frederick “Buffalo Bill” Cody, would even come close to reaching that kind of celebrity – but barely two months after his 39th birthday, Wild Bill Hickok was dead.

I’ll admit right away that I was somewhat put-out by the fact that, according to Clavin, his biography mainly skims the surface of his subject’s life, due to the fact that it’s difficult to separate fact from fiction when it comes to ole’ JB. Hickok didn’t necessarily mythologize his own life – although he was known to tell a tall tale or two around the campfire – but he didn’t discourage others from doing so, either, to every historian’s curse to this day. It appears he was a normal enough frontiersman (albeit particularly fast and accurate with his pistols); but when an Eastern reporter profiled him for a piece in Harper’s magazine, there was no turning back, and James Butler “Wild Bill” Hickok became a legend in his own time. Clavin is a good storyteller, but I think sometimes he lets his quest for a well-told tale override the facts, his claims to the contrary otherwise; however, for the most part he seems to stick to facts better than most who have written about Wild Bill, and succeeds in separating the wheat from the chaff.

Clavin ends Wild Bill with an interesting theory that, even had Wild Bill lived, he wouldn’t have aged at all well in a post-gunslinger America: there was no practical occupation for Hickok, he wasn’t a very good gambler or any kind of prospector whatsoever, and he was slowly going blind, besides. This is perhaps why Wild Bill tarried in Deadwood instead of returning to his wife in Cincinnati: he was ashamed of what he’d lost.

“Beethoven: The Universal Composer”, by Edmund Morris

256 pages, Eminent Lives, ISBN-13: 978-0060759742

Edmund Morris’ Beethoven: The Universal Composer is part of the “Eminent Lives” series of books which seeks to enlighten the masses as to the lives of eminent folk (that was rather circular, wasn’t it?). I picked this thing off of Barnes & Noble’s overstock shelf and, thus, didn’t pay a lot for it, for which I am glad, for it didn’t take me long to realized that Morris relied too much on the psychobabble pushed by Editha and Richard Sterba in their Beethoven and his Nephew: A Psychoanalytic Study of Their Relationship, and accepted without questioning some of the more controversial aspects in the writings of Maynard Solomon, many of which were addressed in Barry Cooper’s (far superior) biography, in which he investigated and put into proper perspective everything his predecessors did not. For a book that was written with the idea of for introducing Beethoven to the general public, this one falls far short of its mark. Beethoven is, of course, the Greatest Ever Composer (yeah, I said it) about whom many excellent books have been written – but THIS book is not one of them. I’m sure Morris thinks he writes beautifully, but I find it often pompous and extremely inelegant. Some examples:

“The paradox of Beethoven’s ‘bigness’ is that it is not always measurable in time or decibels”.

“So a brilliant green butterfly metamorphosed from the shabby cocoon of Ludwig’s schooldays”.

“His preferred data bank was to remain the twelve tones of the scale – so much closer, in their logical order, to the ten digits of mathematics than to the twenty-six mutable ciphers of the alphabet”.

“The fugue that ends the Hammerklavier sonata takes…sometimes all three processes going at once: the musical equivalent of trigonometry”.

“If he had to choose between the charm of a seductive tune and a figuration built out of integral coefficients, mathematical beauty won out every time”.

And so on and so forth. How can a biography of Beethoven practically ignore not only the Missa solemnis but his Ninth Symphony? While there are some interesting business and social stories here, there is actually very little in this book about, well…BEETHOVEN’S MUSIC! (I betcha Morris mentioned Beethoven’s diarrhea more times than the Ninth Symphony; he shoulda called his book “Beethoven: Chronic Bowel Irritation”). For a more accurate, better-written biography of Beethoven that incorporates his life and works (one without the other is meaningless), I would suggest the Biography by Barry Cooper (which I should probably review soon).

“Elizabeth I: A Novel”, by Margaret George

688 pages, Viking, ISBN-13: 978-0670022533

Remember when you got in trouble in school and your teacher or the principle or whomever told you that they “weren’t angry; just disappointed”? Remember that? No? Oh. Well, anyway, that’s just what I felt while reading Elizabeth I: A Novel by Margaret George. I wasn’t angry; just disappointed, because I had such high hopes from the author of the novels The Autobiography of Henry VIII, With Notes By His Fool, Will Somers (reviewed on March 7th, 2012) and Mary Queen of Scotland and the Isles (reviewed on April 10th, 2012), two absolutely brilliant works of historical fiction. One of the ways in which Elizabeth I differs from her other works is that it doesn’t give a womb-to-the-tomb account of the title character’s life; rather, George chose to start in 1588 when the Virgin Queen’s reign was half-over (maybe she thought that Elizabeth’s early life and reign had already been well-covered in historic fiction?) The trouble is that while this was by no means an uneventful period (Spanish Armada, anyone?), there wasn’t all that much happening that the middle-aged, female monarch directly took part in – which, when you consider that she’s the narrator of the book, rather drastically puts a kibosh on the story. Thus, we witness scene after scene in which Elizabeth anxiously waits for news about some crisis or other, and then hearing an account of what happened from some other character. Riveting.

George is a great historical novelist, and Elizabeth I is not without its good moments, but it often feels like she’s marking time with a series of episodes that, while interesting to a point, do not advance the story at all (like the invention of the indoor toilet!) rather than fill in historical gaps with invented, but plausible, scenarios that serve to advance the plot. Not to mention the (for George) uncharacteristically sloppy writing, anachronistic language and narrative gaps, such as when, over the course of a few pages, Elizabeth goes from barely knowing who Essex is to being as intimate with him as any she ever was with Robert Dudley. Or the out-of-left-field, what-in-the-HELL moments that burst fully formed from her mind, as when she has Lettice Knowles sleep with William Shakespeare (?!). One would be forgiven in thinking that George became rather overwhelmed by her subject – whom she dubs “the supreme mystery woman” – and was rushed to make her publisher’s deadline before she’d fully digested and figured out her take on Elizabeth, but, really, this lets her off the hook, I think. After one brilliant historical novel after another, this effort is quite beneath George’s abilities and all are justified in their supreme disappointment. Instead of a grand Tudor feast, we have been served a half-baked pudding.

“Himmler”, by Peter Padfield

656 pages, MJF Books, ISBN-13: 978-1567311181

Of all the creeps, psychos, weirdos, neurotics and nutjobs who surrounded Adolf Hitler during his rise to power – and who helped him wreck Europe – perhaps none was weirder than Heinrich Himmler, the unsmiling Reichsführer-SS, the organizer and commander of the German police, concentration camps and mastermind behind the Holocaust. Himmler by Peter Padfield is the first full-length biography of the most powerful and coldblooded of Hitler’s lieutenants; impeccably documented yet compulsively readable, this book has it all. The son of a schoolteacher (who rather looked like a schoolteacher himself), Heinrich Luitpold Himmler was, second only to Hitler, the most powerful man in the Third Reich and probably the most thoroughly evil. Before his suicide in 1945, Himmler had ruled the SS and Gestapo, headed German intelligence services, ran the slave-labor system in the Reich and directed the death camps in Poland…oh, and he also was responsible for the pseudo-medical experiments in those self-same death camps. But it gets worse, for not only did he create the hell of Auschwitz, he even went there several times to inspect its operations: one day in 1943 – according to the testimony of an Auschwitz prisoner named Rudolf Vrba – one of the gas chambers was packed with prisoners by 8:45 so that Himmler could watch a mass killing at 9…but Himmler dawdled over breakfast, so the increasingly frantic prisoners had to wait inside the chamber until the Reichsführer-SS arrived at 11:00, took his position at the peephole and observed the gassing. “What he had seen seemed to have satisfied him and put him in good humor”, Vrba recalled, “he accepted a cigarette from an officer, and…laughed and joked”.

Delving into the family background and upbringing of this terrible – yet strangely ordinary – man, Padfield analyzes the master-race theories that inspired Himmler and comes impressively close to explaining how a priggish, idealistic Bavarian boy turned into history’s most ruthless slaughterer. Passionately devoted to Hitler, to the Nazi theories of Nordic racial supremacy and to the 18-hour workday, Himmler tirelessly expanded his power until he controlled not only the private empire of the SS, with all its prisoner-operated factories and mines, but also the battlefields where his Waffen-SS divisions fought ferociously against the Allies. Buttressed with excerpts from diaries, letters and speeches, the author examines each phase of Himmler’s life in detail. Padfield describes, for instance, how Himmler expanded Hitler’s personal bodyguard (the original SS) into the all-embracing state-within-the-Nazi-state used to terrorize the party hierarchy as well as occupied Europe. The book even sheds light on Himmler’s 11th hour attempt to make a separate peace with the Allies, and on the details of his final hours. Scary stuff, but the truth must out.