“Anything You Can Imagine: Peter Jackson and the Making of Middle-earth”, by Ian Nathan

 

592 pages, HarperCollins, ISBN-13: 978-0008369842

Having read The Lord of the Rings (reviewed on October 1^st, 2022, God Help Me) and watched all the extensive DVD material of all six Middle Earth films, I thought I had learned everything there was to know about the story of Peter Jackson and the making of “The Lord of the Rings” – and then Lo, what do I find but Anything You Can Imagine: Peter Jackson and the Making of Middle-earth by Ian Nathan. There’s lots to like in Nathan’s book, a British Filmographer, the material of which was gleaned primarily from his own experiences in covering the making of the “Fellowship of the Ring”, “The Two Towers” and “The Return of the King” (and the three “Hobbit” films, but those things have been relegated to a single chapter).

From the beginning the choice of Jackson to direct Tolkien’s much loved if flawed masterpiece was…peculiar, considering his filmography: from warped horror comedies like Bad Taste and Braindead (Dead/Alive in the States), to the drama fantasy Heavenly Creatures (with Kate Winslet in her first-ever role), to the Michael J. Fox vehicle The Frighteners, this was a man with an individual taste in subject matter. Also, in learning his craft on the go, he was able to make connections with a variety of different creative craftsmen over a range of genres, connections especially that helped him build his special-effects studio, Weta Workshop, without which LOTR would never have been made.

Nathan presents Jackson’s trials in bringing the books to film like a spy thriller, full of false leads, breathtaking amounts of work against seemingly impossible deadlines, studio intrigue and, mostly, dumb luck. The complex web of events could have been impossible to understand, but Nathan moves the events along with nail-biting urgency. My inner geek thrilled at the numerous anecdotes featuring behind-the-scenes goings on, such as when Sean Bean and Orlando Bloom were forced to seek shelter in an old woman’s cottage for four days when their car was caught in a flood while driving between locations.

Ultimately Nathan is able to evoke the wonder that accompanied the making of the movies, wonder at the ingeniousness of the production and design crew, the ability of Jackson and co-writers Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens to reduce the essence of Tolkien’s epic into three films, and the fact that these got made at all.

“The Lord of the Rings”, by J.R.R. Tolkien

 

440 pages, Houghton Mifflin Company, ISBN-13: 978-0395193952

Ummmmm…sooooo…it’s okay if I criticize J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, right? I mean, it’s not like it’s a perfect story or a faultless book without stain or errors, right? RIGHT?! Like, it’s not every day that one can say that the movies were better than the book, but…um…okay, here it goes: “The Lord of the Rings” movies were better than the books. Now, now, now cosplayers, put down your rubber swords and take off your elven ears and listen for a minute, okay? There can be no doubt that Tolkien’s magnum opus established a whole genre of fantasy storytelling and launched a new industry in fantasy gaming, and his epic Epic of Good versus Evil and the bonds of friendship and how the most inconsequential-seeming person can have an importance beyond the obvious and that one must never give up and fight the good fight though the heavens fall…and so on and so forth, is a wonderful message and one that shouldn’t ever be forgotten.

But, damn, brah, who new an epic Epic could drag on and on and on and make one wish for a Nazgûl dagger right between the eyes? Why none of his editors was on the case is beyond me; I mean, do we have to stick with Frodo and Sam for page after page after page?! Can’t we have a break and see what’s happening elsewhere in Middle Earth? Endless descriptions of walking and where the hills over there were in comparison to their location here became tiresome, at best. I get it: Tolkien was an old-school English Country Gentleman Wannabe who saw the glory of creation in England’s Mountains Green and saw evil in all of those dark Satanic Mills, but I could have done with fewer descriptions of scenery and after a while began to just skim over those parts and hope for some action to come – and when the action did come…well, it wasn’t very actionful, was it?

And I’m not alone in this, either: Judith Shulevitz of The New York Times said that Tolkien “formulated a high-minded belief in the importance of his mission as a literary preservationist, which turns out to be death to literature itself”, while Richard Jenkyns of The New Republic thought that Tolkien’s characters were “anemic...lacking in fiber” and overall the book lacked psychological depth. Michael Moorcock, the British-though-transplanted-Texan science fiction and fantasy author in his essay Epic Pooh equated J.R.R.’s work to Winnie-the-Pooh and criticized it for his “Merrie Olde Englande” viewpoint. Even Hugo Dyson, a member in good standing of The Inklings (Tolkien’s literary and debating group at The Eagle and Child in Oxford) had not-good things to say about it, lolling on the couch and shouting “Oh God, no more Elves!” every so often (I feel ya, Hugo).

Okay, okay, okay, it’s not all bad. The sheer creativity in calling forth a world and populating it with peoples and places and history and languages (even if most of the Quenya was cribbed from Old Finnish) is not to be lightly laughed at. I mean, the man wrote out thousands of years of backstory for his world; tales and myths and legends that are mentioned or hinted at in The Lord of the Rings weren’t just throw-away lines, he actually wrote the damn stories down, just to flesh everything out. The problem is, if you don’t read all of those tales and myths and legends, a lot of this detail is lost – but damn, did Christopher Tolkien try to get it all out, what by publishing The Silmarillion in 1977, Unfinished Tales in 1980 and The History of Middle-earth in 12 volumes between 1983 and 1996. But am I really going to read these 14 books just so I can understand Aragorn’s tossed off comment to Arwen Undómiel? Ahhhhh…nope.

And while all of those descriptions of mountains high and valleys low and forests deep and hillocks round can grate after a bit, they do form a kind of poetry for which Tolkien gets almost zero credit for. There were times – and I mean it now – when I could almost see the landscape as he described it, independent of any Rankin-Bass drawing or Jacksonian cinematography. And the messages of hope over despair and friendship against impossible odds are grand and universal and must never leave us. It’s just those instances are strung together in long-winded and overly-important passages that seem never to end. Seriously, Dear Reader, editors are supposed to edit, and if only someone over at Allen & Unwin had taken a red pen to at least some of these wordy passages, then a more tightly constructed and eagerly paced book would have been the result.

Despite all of this, go out and read The Lord of the Rings, anyway; you’ll find plenty of cheap copies that were brought to used bookstores and put up on Amazon after scads of the damn things were printed and sold and went unread after millions of people discovered what a slog it was compared to the movies. I mean, you almost have to read it now, seeing as it’s a cultural milestone and whatnot. If nothing else, you’ll have one over on all those cosplayers who, despite what they say, haven’t read it either and wouldn’t know the difference between Gondor and Gondolin.

“The Story of Civilization. Volume 11: The Age of Napoleon”, by Will and Ariel Durant

 

872 pages, Simon & Schuster, ISBN-13: 978-1567310221

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 11: The Age of Napoleon was originally published in 1975, and centers on Napoleon and his times; it would also prove to be the last volume in the series (although a further two volumes were planned at the time of the author’s deaths: Volume 12: The Age of Darwin and Volume 13: The Age of Einstein, which would have taken The Story of Civilization right up to 1945). This volume covers, as compared to other books in the series, a relatively scant number of years in the history of Europe (The Age of Faith spanned almost a thousand years, for instance). But, oh, what momentous years they were, what with the French Revolution and the rise and fall of one Napoleone di Buonaparte (interesting note: I actually started reading The Story of Civilization in junior high with this volume, not knowing at the time that it was the last of an 11-part series; whoops).

The Durants open with a more involved chronicle of the French revolution that concluded Rousseau and Revolution, this one making more obvious that the revolution was a slow but quickening crumbling of royal legitimacy that collapsed into the chaos of revolution after a few sudden shocks. The king’s decision to attempt to escape France in fear of his life was one such shock, demonstrating that he was and remained an actor – not a prop. From here, the Durants follow the Wars of the Coalitions, as the various nations of Eurrope fell in to and out of alliances with or against France, with the enmity between England and France being the only fixed point. In 1807, with Napoleon enjoying one of his greatest triumphs – the subjugation of Prussia, and the pretended friendship of Russia – the Durants pause to cover both French and English culture, including one hundred pages on English poetry alone. They then alternate sections on the culture of Germany, Russia, Italy, Iberia, etc., and sections on the Napoleonic wars as they encompassed these regions.

Related to this volume’s unusual dominance by one person is the unusually heavy amount of military coverage here. The Durants typically dispatch wars in a few sentences, concerned with them only as a background to the social or political events that develop as a consequence. There’s no getting away from battles and Napoleon, though, even considering the energy he poured into the political administration of France and Europe, and the long-term effects that energy would have. The result is not a military history, however; there are no maps of battles. Instead, the Durants treat the readers with their usual balance of literature, science, economics, etc. (there is even a section on Jane Austen. Whoop!) Another prominent author, Germaine de Staël, maintained a long rivalry with Napoleon; she wrote a celebratory survey of German culture that pined for more amity between France and the Germans, and was present in Russia when Napoleon drove towards Moscow. Beethoven, of course, merits a full section of his own.

Napoleon reliably described himself as a Son of the Revolution, even though his policies ended some revolutionary dreams. His concordant with Rome, for instance, re-established the Catholic Church in France, albeit in a corralled form. That was a far cry from the total secularization (or de-Christianization, depending on the revolutionary), dreamed of by many – those who redrew the calendar and butchered France’s artistic legacies, those who in a just heaven will be consigned to war forever with the whitewashing Puritans and the sculpture-smashing Wahhabis, as well as others who would destroy art and heritage for ideology. Napoleon did apply much of the revolutionary, modernizing spirit to those parts of Europe he conquered – overwriting their ancient laws and traditions with constitutions from his own pen. Although Napoleon kept faith with some of the past as convenient – his concordant with Rome, for instance – the Durants observe that in his army and state, merit reigned, allowing even commoners to advance.

Liberty and equality are enemies: the more freedom men enjoy, the freer they are to reap the results of their natural or environmental superiorities; hence inequality multiplies under governments favoring freedom of enterprise and support of property rights. Equality is an unstable equilibrium, which any difference in heredity, health, intelligence, or character will soon end. Most revolutions find that they can check inequality only by limiting liberty, as in authoritarian lands.

Yet, even after his brief exile to Elba (well after he had failed them as Emperor), we read that the revolutionists of Lyons “[m]any of them ardent Jacobins, part of an underground current that now rose to the surface to welcome Napoleon in the hope that he would lead them back to 1789”. Frankly, I find this amazing (rekindling memories of standing in front of the monument in Cannes where his return was immortalized) that this de facto monarch should engender such loyalty, even enough that Marshal Ney would first promise to bring Napoleon back to Paris as a prisoner and then, transfer his loyalty and his men to the former Emperor. Reading descriptions of the Emperor’s death on St. Helena makes me understand even more how the slow poisoning with cyanide theory gained such credibility over the years: all that vomiting, stomach pain, and inability to ingest/digest food. Yet, the Durants do not address this conspiracy theory and judging from recent forensic efforts, it now seems unlikely that Lowe really did poison the Emperor with a slow increase in cyanide.

No individual has ever dominated a single volume in this fashion (even Charles V, in The Reformation, would disappear in chapters chronicling Persia and Arabia). But Napoleon’s story encompasses not just France and England, but Spain, Italy, Germany, Austria, and Russia. The Emperor does move backstage at times – in the chapters on English poetry and novels, for instance – but he is never completely gone. This final volume manages through Napoleon’s person to be just as comprehensive, but more tightly bound. I think that it is obvious that the Durants are unabashed admirers of the Little Corsican, and I have to say that their enthusiasm for their subject is infectious – so much so that I have read countless biographies of the brilliant sonovabitch in no small measure due to having read The Age of Napoleon at such an impressionable age. After having read and reread all eleven volumes of The Story of Civilization, I can only bemoan the fact that these two paradigms of the American intellectual ferment could not complete their Great Work. We must, sadly, make do with what we have, which is as masterful a compilation of Western History as has ever been written.

“American Moonshot: John F. Kennedy and the Great Space Race”, by Douglas Brinkley

 

576 pages, Harper, ISBN-13: 978-0062655066

An important – nay, vital – fact that one must realize when one picks up and reads Douglas Brinkley’s American Moonshot: John F. Kennedy and the Great Space Race is that this is a work of Presidential history and not of technical achievement (although there’s still a lot of that discussed within). Rather, Brinkley has in fact written a chronicle of the founding of NASA, of JFK’s evolving attitudes toward space initiatives, his reasons and motivations for pursuing the space race and how he and his Administration reacted to the many successes and not a few failures of the same. Talk of booster rockets and computer systems and space capsules and Tang are all left for other, different books.

Kennedy saw the space program as both an adventure producing heroes to be admired (the astronauts were his kind of guys) and a way to jump start American technology for the latter half of the 20^th Century (and incidentally, bring high tech to parts of the Democrat-controlled South). By the fall of 1963, Apollo was well on its way, Kennedy would look over the Gemini spacecraft under development in St. Louis, see the firing of an early version of the Saturn engine and check out the Manned Spaceflight Center in Houston. There he got into a long conversation with Gordon Cooper and invited him to accompany him to his next stop, but Cooper had to beg off (after all, he was participating in an important, long-scheduled test the next day).

The much cited Rice University speech – “We choose to go to the moon and do the other things not because they are easy but because they are hard” – is now, perhaps, as familiar as the Inaugural (or indeed any bit of public rhetoric since World War II), and marked the culmination of all of Kennedy’s efforts to get his pet project off the ground (as it were). Even those familiar with Kennedy and the Apollo Program will find fresh threads in Moonshot: for instance, while still in the Navy, Kennedy took private flying lessons, or the expression “Moonshot” itself, which was coined by Dodger announcer Vin Scully to describe not very deep fly balls hit by Wally Moon that nevertheless cleared the forty-foot high screen the Dodgers put up to prevent cheap shot home runs in the L. A. Coliseum, where the left field stands were only 250 feet down the line. FYI.

Brinkley’s central thesis is that the moon landing would have taken place much later without Kennedy’s determination to set a “hard” goal and carry it through, and that even after the initial cheering for a moon landing “before this decade is out”, Congress began to waver. Ike came out of retirement to oppose the Apollo Program, Goldwater wanted the Air Force to take over all space operations, and while LBJ was always strong for manned space flight he perhaps was not willing to go quite as boldly as Kennedy (he would as faithfully carry on Kennedy’s Apollo legacy as he did his civil rights legacy). What American Moonshot ultimately accomplishes is to parallel the progress in rocketry with Kennedy’s political career until they would interact so fatefully in 1961.

“Scarface and the Untouchable: Al Capone, Eliot Ness, and the Battle for Chicago”, by Max Allan Collins & A. Brad Schwartz

 

736 pages, William Morrow, ISBN-13: 978-0062441942

I have been told that there are two kinds of biographies: thumbnails and portraits. The thumbnails are pithy and to the point – think Eminent Victorians by Lytton Strachey – and rarely dig too deeply into the subject at hand; the portraits, meanwhile, delve deeper than the Mponeng gold mine – think The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York by Robert Caro (reviewed on February 18^th, 2013) – and uncover everything imaginable about the subject and bring it all to light.

I bring this up in relation to Scarface and the Untouchable: Al Capone, Eliot Ness, and the Battle for Chicago by Max Allan Collins & A. Brad Schwartz because we get both: a thumbnail biography of Eliot Ness, the agent with the Bureau of Prohibition tasked with enforcing the Volstead Act, and a portrait biography of Alphonse Gabriel “Scarface” Capone, the boss of the Chicago Outfit and Ness’ Enemy Number One. Perhaps it is because there is more information on Capone than on Ness, or that as a criminal Capone’s actions have been documented to such a degree that there is just more information to plum from…ah, hell, we both know it’s because the crook is always more interesting than the hero, which is why I’d say that Capone probably receives maybe 75% of the author’s attention because, ultimately, he is a more interesting character than Ness. Nice guys really do finish last, y’know.

But there is more to it than that, for Capone went out of his way to portray himself as a Robin Hood-type gangster, a kind of super-successful hustler trying to make a buck during difficult times while undermining an unpopular law. Ness, meanwhile, by necessity worked behind the scenes and under the radar to gather information to convict Scarface, keeping out of the public eye as much as possible. Not until Capone was indicted did people even learn of the identity of the investigators who a newspaper reporter dubbed “The Untouchables”. In strictly chronological fashion, Collins and Schwartz detail the Ness/Capone feud as they advance inevitably, so it would seem, towards the showdown in a federal courtroom in Chicago where the gangland overlord – who was responsible for murders, prostitution, racketeering and any other exploitation of other people’s vices – would infamously be put away for…tax evasion.

Collins and Schwartz make the interesting point early on that there were a number of similarities between Scarface and the Untouchable: both were first-generation Americans, the sons of immigrant fathers who were bakers in their respective countries of birth; Capone’s father became a barber while Ness’ remained a baker, both becoming successful businessmen; Capone and Ness sought to modernize their respective professions, with Capone adapting the methods of the corporate world to organized crime and Ness bringing modern technology and scientific techniques to police work; both men were hard-working and successful at young ages, Capone becoming Capo dei capi of a multi-million-dollar crime organization at only 26 while Ness took charge of a taskforce that was formed to bring Capone to justice at 27. History truly does make some strange bedfellows.

The saga of the battle between Ness and Capone has been well-documented in books, movies and television (most of which are caca; indeed, the authors open their book by informing us that much of what we think we know about this particular War on Crime is, in fact, wrong). Collins and Schwartz’s account, at more than 700 pages, is, I think, the definitive work on this battle, one without unnecessary drama or meaningless diversions. They make clear that the effort of law enforcement to bring Capone to justice was more than simply proving that he failed to pay his income taxes; it was a vigorous effort to bring an evil criminal to justice and, in the end, it succeeded brilliantly in that goal.

“Fierce Patriot: The Tangled Lives of William Tecumseh Sherman”, by Robert L. O’Connell

 

432 pages, Random House, ISBN-13: 978-0812982121

Way back in the long long ago (that would be September 28^th, 2016), I reviewed American General: The Life and Times of William Tecumseh Sherman by John S. D. Eisenhower and found it lacking, which prompted me to seek out a better biography of my favorite Civil War general and, lads, I was successful. Fierce Patriot: The Tangled Lives of William Tecumseh Sherman by Robert L. O’Connell is a conversational work that argues that the best way to understand old Cump is to follow him as he traverses three different paths. The First path is that of Sherman the grand strategist of Manifest Destiny and of the generation that saw the United States expand from Atlantic to Pacific. The Second path focuses on Sherman the general and the army he built and used in the west to bring an end to the Civil War. The Third path focuses on Sherman the (very flawed) man and examines his personal life, from his family upbringing and the impact it had on him and his relationships with his wife (and mistresses) and his children through his post-war years and ultimate retirement.

As to why Sherman is my favorite general in Blue, perhaps it is because he has never received a fraction of the attention the Big Three of the Civil War have warranted (y’know, Grant, Lee and Lincoln). While it is hard to get angry at the attention these Belles of the Ball have received – they were the men in charge, after all – they didn’t do everything by themselves. Perhaps it is because he was not as flamboyant as his Southern counterparts? Perhaps it is because for most of the war he operated in lesser-known theaters than the legendary Army of the Potomac and the Army of Northern Virginia? Perhaps it is because that is just how he wanted it: after all, war is hell. But as O’Connell so ably describes, Sherman was the ideal wingman to the more volatile Grant; not that there was no lack of volatility in Sherman; he just did a better job of keeping it in check, and was more than willing to play second fiddle in Lincoln’s orchestra.

But it’s still is a shame, for Sherman was a highly complex, fascinating figure and, it is safe to say, this most brutal of all of America’s wars would have dragged on substantially longer without Sherman’s unglamorous and uncompromising generalship. When given free reign with his own command, Sherman instituted a number of tactical and strategic reforms, unique to his time, that are still studied in military academies. His men loved their “Uncle Billy” as he preferred to maneuver and outflank his opponents to suicidal frontal assaults (starting with the horrors of Shiloh, Sherman had witnessed enough carnage and futility to form his own distinctive command techniques that did not involve useless sacrifice).

But it is in the area of grand strategy that Sherman made the greatest impact. A civil war is just that, a war of one population against another and, in order to win such a war, one population must have war made against it so that their army in the field can be at last defeated. This is what Sherman knew in his very bones, and it is the way in which war has been waged ever since. Fierce Patriot shows Sherman for what he was, warts and all, which is all one can ask of a biography.

“Great Lakes Shipwrecks & Survivals: Edmund Fitzgerald Edition”, by William Ratigan

 

384 pages, Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, ISBN-13: 978-0802870104

Great Lakes Shipwrecks & Survivals: Edmund Fitzgerald Edition by William Ratigan is best classified by the world at large as a book with mere “Regional” interest that can probably still be found in museum gift shops anywhere along the coasts of the Great Lakes. Originally published in 1960, the edition I picked up at my local library for a mere 50¢ had been updated to include perhaps the most famous of Great Lakes wrecks, the Edmund Fitzgerald, which sank in Lake Superior with all hands-on November 10^th, 1975. Ratigan, a journalist whose father was a steamboat engineer, wrote a romantic, blood-curdling maritime history of the Great Lakes, starting with Champlain’s canoe as it ventured out onto Lake Huron and ending with the thousand-foot bulk freighters that now churn our waters.

This is a collection of stories about those mariners who met their doom or their greatest moment while sailing the Great Lakes. People from other parts of the country cannot fully appreciate the uniqueness of the Great Lakes and the tales of sailing vessels and storms; for instance, it’s somewhat peculiar (if not darkly funny) that the very first ship ever floated by white men on the lakes, The Griffin, never completed its maiden voyage and sunk after just getting underway. There are certain times of the year when the lakes are more dangerous than others, with November being the worst month for wrecks (“Remember, Remember, the Gales of November” – am I right, Michiganders?). But wrecks can and did happen almost any time of year, even when skies were clear; an explosion, a miscalculation, or any other mistake could prove fatal. Given the tendency of each lake to have its own personality and unique challenges to mariners, there is never such a thing as a guaranteed safe journey. True, ships are more sophisticated today, but it may well be only a matter of time before the next big boat goes down.

In his introduction, the author warns his readers that even the biggest freighter is not guaranteed a safe return to port:

These great ships sail Great Lakes that can swallow them in one black moment without a trace. Storms exploding across hundreds of miles of open water pile up mountainous seas that strike swifter, and more often, than the deadliest waves on any ocean. Before the ship has a chance to recover from the last blow, the next is upon her. The Lakes captain has no sea room in which to maneuver; unlike his salt-water counterpart he must stay on course throughout the storm; he must weather the teeth of the gale.

Would that more people knew the reputation of North America’s great inland waterways.