“Legionary: The Roman Soldier's (Unofficial) Manual”, by Philip Matyszak

224 pages, Thames & Hudson, ISBN-13: 978-0500251515

Want to know what it would be like to serve in the Roman army? Then this is the book for you. Legionary: The Roman Soldier's (Unofficial) Manual by Philip Matyszaka is a very quick read, but it covers a lot: from recruitment to retirement and everything in between (training, armor, weapons, organization, administration, battle tactics, enemies, etc), Matyszak uses an entertaining, lighthearted and often humorous approach to his subject, but backs it up with references to the primary sources he used to compile his Manuel (including Polybius, Livy, Tacitus, etc.). Overall this is a fun, but accurate and detailed account of what it must have been like to serve for the glory of Rome. For all that, this is a surprisingly solid and accurate overview of the Roman army c.100AD for a book written in such a breezy, tongue-in-cheek style (which I loved). The illustrations, both line drawings and reenactment photographs, are very nice and (generally) accurate and provide a wonderful complement to the text, which packs in a surprising amount of detail for its brevity. Are there more encyclopedic books out there? Yes. Is this a good book for an overview of the Roman Republican (or later Imperial) army? No, and it's not meant to be. But it does what it sets out to do quite well. The author covers recruitment, training regimens, equipment and armament, the officer corps, daily camp life, basic tactics and examples of different types of combat situations the soldiers might encounter, along with various enemies of Rome. All of this is done through prose that is brisk and exceedingly droll. It really comes across like the advice of a canny old veteran to a newbie, giving the raw recruit the inside dope on how to successfully shirk where possible and definitely how to both avoid the attention of officers and to stay alive in battle.

I do have a few small criticisms: 1) The assertion that it's "unusual" that Roman stabbing swords didn't have a fuller ("blood runnel" in the text, and I would like that phrase stricken from the English language). It is a thoroughly debunked myth that lack of a fuller will create a vacuum seal upon stabbing. What fullers actually do is create a lighter, possibly more flexible, stiffer-feeling blade without sacrificing too much strength; they're simply a technological innovation in bladesmithing, and as such, not universal. 2) Since the book focuses on the Roman army c. AD 100, the section on the "Picts" is misleading; the term "Picti" does not appear until late in the 4th Century A.D. Prior to that, the Romans referred to many (but not necessarily all) British tribes north of Hadrian's Wall as "Caledonii" (Caledonians). 3) I would personally have liked a little more information on command structure, especially in the auxiliaries, and perhaps a little mention of numeri and foederati, but I suppose there was only so much space, and we know even less about those than about the auxiliaries.

Summing up, if your interest is ancient Roman, this is a great little guide about life in the army. If you've enjoyed the HBO miniseries about Rome, or if you have read Colleen McCullough's excellent series about the end of the Roman Republic, then you're going to want this book for your collection. It helped me fill in a few gaps, gave me quite a few laughs, and has spurred me on to read more about Rome's armies.

“Vermeer's Hat: The Seventeenth Century and the Dawn of the Global World”, by Timothy Brook

288 pages, Bloomsbury Press, ISBN-13: 978-1596915992

Every once in a while, a book comes along that really surprises me with its excellence; Vermeer's Hat: The Seventeenth Century and the Dawn of the Global World by Timothy Brook is one of those books. This book is a look into a changing Europe of the 1600s but, as a hook, the author uses a series of eight 17th Century works of art by dutch artist Johannes Vermeer to tell us something about the era in which they were created. And this is what makes the book so very interesting: it covers events and phenomenon that are rarely discussed in other books, such the movement of goods between Europe, Spanish America and China, the spread of tobacco, and so much more.

Of course, it's not really about Vermeer's hat - or Vermeer's fruit bowl or the two sturdy ships moored together at the right edge of Vermeer's View of Delft. What it's really about is, as the subtitle says, "the dawn of the global world"; the other things are objects in the paintings, props or, as Brook likes to call them, the "doors" that open up in the paintings and let their confined domesticity escape into the outer world and the fresh air of innovation and discovery flow back in, rather like the window that partially frames the hat in the painting. Don't expect detailed art history from this book; Timothy Brook is not an art historian, but a distinguished historian of China and Shaw Chair of Chinese Studies at Oxford University. It is as such that he approaches the material; an historian of Europe or of Western Art would have viewed the international cultural and commercial exchanges he analyzes as European exports to the global community, whereas Brook tends to view them more as imports from Europe. Finally, of course, it is interactivity that makes globalization a two-way street, as symbolized by that open window and all the other open windows and doors in 17th Century Dutch painting.

So, in a sense, the book IS about Vermeer's art after all; the presence of the hat, the bowl and other "doors" in the pictures is a result of the Dutch Republic's central position in that process of globalization and indicate the source of the enormous commercial wealth that was its foundation. Without that position, Vermeer's paintings would not have been his paintings at all, because his world would not have been what it was. There is not a lot of hard-core art history here, but after reading this book, we will no longer be able to look at the Frick's Officer and Laughing Girl naively, i.e., without knowing that the man's wonderful hat was made possible only because Samuel Champlain was just then trying to find a Northwest Passage and able to finance his explorations by sending tons of beaver pelts back to Europe.

And those are not just generic boats; they are a pair of Haringbuis, manufactured for herring fishing in the North Sea, moored here in Delft for refitting or repair and, thus, appropriate symbols of the maritime origins of Dutch prosperity (and the fortuitous nature of all commercial prosperity). If the most generally calamitous event of the 17th Century - that would be the "Little Ice Age" of 1550-1700; climate change is neither new nor man-made - had not caused extensive freeze-up of the Norwegian coastline and pushed the traditional base of the herring fishery south to Baltic waters controlled by the Dutch, that little windfall might not have developed into the financial foundation of a bourgeoisie sufficiently prosperous to afford fashionable hats and the paintings of them.

Vermeer's Hat is filled with unexpected insights and suggestions like that, and as they are quite imaginatively and indelibly presented, they should henceforth inform our viewing of these paintings. Above all, it took great insight and historical skill to conceive and structure this book; the result is a tour-de-force that proves the possibility of producing a book that is simultaneously scholarly and a fantastic, fast-paced read.

“The People's Tycoon: Henry Ford and the American Century”, by Steven Watts

 

656 pages, Vintage Books, ISBN-13: 978-0375707254

Of the countless Ford Biographies out here, The People's Tycoon: Henry Ford and the American Century by Steven Watts is perhaps one of the more balanced. The author has done his research and has presented his material in a manner which is not only quite readable, but quite informative; I especially like the way in which Watts has given us numerous examples of his sources, i.e. different publications, speeches, newspaper articles, etc., all in order to give the most balanced of perspectives. For this is no whitewashed life of Henry Ford: Watts has given us both the good and the bad of the man, and we find that the subject of the book is much like all of us...both good and bad. I did enjoy and appreciate the fact that the author does not seem to have a particular social or political ax to grind, but rather gives us the facts and gives credit to the reader's ability to make up his or her own mind. This is refreshing. Far enough time has passed so that now historians can make some judgements and observations as to the overall impact and ramifications of the actions taken during the Ford years, by both Ford and his contemporaries, have upon our society today. Not until recently have historians been able to do this.

Henry Ford did not invent the automobile, but he invented something bigger - 20th Century America. It is no exaggeration to say that without Ford's system of production - without his understanding of the mass market, without his Model T - that the American Century would have been a very different phenomenon. Ford epitomized the contradictions, complexities and confusions of that America. Self-taught and utterly confident in what he knew, he also despised what he did not know. A radical who created an industrial cornucopia for workers by introducing the $5 daily wage, he was an industrial tyrant who hired organized criminal gangs to intimidate labor union organizers. Steven Watts offers a new way of looking at the facts, and at Ford - and does so with engaging style. But The People's Tycoon is so much more than the life story of Henry Ford. Early in the book Watts poses the question, "Did Ford create the phenomenon of consumerism or did the onset of consumerism create the phenomenon of Henry Ford?" Although Watts never answers this rhetorical question, he provides exactly enough insight into both the times in early 20th Century America and Henry Ford to help us debate the issue for a long time. 

I liked the way the author organized the book not by timeline, but rather by events (which just happened to be linear, for the most part). The book had me looking at the past but also the issues of today; you can bet that Ford would have had much to say about the current state of the economy, our health care issues, education, personal responsibility and so much more. The way he often carried out most of his ideas did not always appeal to me, but his ideas were brilliant. Not only did I enjoy reading the book, I also enjoyed thinking about the issues he thought about. If you like history, politics and the story of an amazing family, this is the book for you.

“Bismarck: A Life”, by Jonathan Steinberg

 

592 pages, Oxford University Press, ISBN-13: 978-0199782529

No single person was more responsible for the creation of Germany in 1871 than Otto von Bismarck. First as minister-president of Prussia, then as chancellor of the German Empire, he shaped and guided the creation and development of the country for over a quarter of a century. Yet as Jonathan Steinberg points out in the introduction to Bismarck: A Life, he was a ruler without any sort of sovereignty or popular support, a fact that makes his achievement all the more remarkable. How Bismarck came to occupy this role and stamp his will on Germany is detailed in this perceptive book, which provides an understanding of his achievements within the context of his life and times.

Little about Bismarck's early years indicated the outsize role he would play in history. Born to a Prussian landowning family, he benefited from the opportunities open to him as a member of the Junker class. Drawn to politics in his early thirties, he soon made a name for himself as a staunch supporter of the Prussian king, Frederick William IV, and in 1851 was named the Prussian representative to the Diet of the German Confederation. It was here that he developed his famous pragmatism as a politician, as well as fostering an image of recklessness he felt would serve him well in his political dealings. Yet he desired to be at the heart of power, and he succeeded in winning appointment as Prussia's Minister-President in 1862 thanks to the active support of Albrecht von Roon and other members of a conservative camarilla.

Once in power, Bismarck began a remarkable transformation of European politics. The key to his power, as Steinberg notes, lay not with party support or military backing, but from his ability to dominate Frederick William's brother and successor, William I. With the king's backing, Bismarck was able to remake the map of Europe, forging the German Empire from the disparate states that survived the Napoleonic era. Yet the governing system he constructed was one designed to maximize his authority as chancellor, thwarting the demands of liberal politicians for a greater voice in parliamentary democracy. This system proved to be a double-edged sword, however, as Bismarck found out when William's grandson, William II, ultimately took the throne. Lacking the hold that he had on the new emperor's grandfather, Bismarck's resignation was finally accepted in 1890, leaving the governing power of the advanced industrial state in the hands of a mercurial young monarch and his independent and assertive military.

Steinberg's book is an excellent account of Bismarck's life and times. He offers a fascinating portrait of a dramatic politician who dominated the politics of his nation as few have before or since. By setting Bismarck's life into the context of its times, he demonstrates well the impact Bismarck's policies had - for better and for worse - on the development of Germany as a nation. Unfortunately, this does come at a cost, as Bismarck's private life is generally given short shrift outside of its impact upon his temperament, but such a sacrifice is understandable given the challenge of summarizing such a long career within the confines of a single volume. Steinberg succeeds in providing readers with what is likely to be the best single-volume biography of the "Iron Chancellor" for decades to come, one that should be read by anyone seeking to understand this fascinating and important figure.

"Three Armies on the Somme: The First Battle of the Twentieth Century", by William Philpott

 

656 pages, Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., ISBN-13: 978-0307265852

William Philpott's Three Armies on the Somme: The First Battle of the Twentieth Century is an outstanding example of historical revisionism at its finest. In the course of 656 pages he not only manages to provide an extremely readable account of the Somme Campaign, but he also brings to light the heretofore nearly unknown (and largely successful) contributions of the French Army to the battle. If this were all he did, Philpott's book would be a worthwhile read, but he goes even further to provide an excellent account of the strategic context of the Somme Campaign (which lasted some 140 days, from July 1st, 1916 to November 18th, 1916). A myriad of factors which shaped the Allied strategy are described and put in the proper context, including the German offensive at Verdun, the state of training of the British Army and the French Army's creation of an effective offensive doctrine. Philpott also examines why the Somme was sine qua non not only to the German withdrawal to the Hindenburg Line in the Spring of 1917, but to the ultimate Allied victory in November of 1918.

While previous histories have documented the missteps of British command, no account has fully recognized the fact that allied generals were witnessing the spontaneous evolution of warfare even as they sent their troops “over the top”. With his keen insight and vast knowledge of military strategy, Philpott shows that 20th Century warfare as we know it simply didn’t exist before the Battle of the Somme: new technologies like the armored tank made their battlefield debut, while developments in communications lagged behind commanders’ needs. Attrition emerged as the only means of defeating industrialized belligerents that were mobilizing all their resources for war. At the Somme, the allied armies acquired the necessary lessons of modern warfare, without which they could never have prevailed.  

The author considers the planning, the changes in planning and the strategy of the Entente and the Central Powers, leading to attrition being used on a wide scale. He argues the pros and cons of what went wrong, including, the chances of a breakthrough on the Somme, and persuasively shows exactly what went right for the Entente and why the Somme Campaign features some of the most important battles ever fought, even though the political actors at the time exploited the battle or failed to see that, while it damaged their forces, the German Army was crushed and only depth, quality, availability of men and material, inertia and lack of initiative kept it from being destroyed.

Finally, the book looks at how the Somme is perceived since 1916 and how that effects our historical understanding of what actually happened and what people who fought there thought they were doing. Before the Somme, the Western Front was a siege war which could have lasted far longer than it did; after the Somme, the war became more mobile as first the French and later the British, Germans and Americans adopted use of massive firepower and large sector advances to defeat the enemy, leading to the end the war.

"The Tyrannicide Brief: The Story of the Man Who Sent Charles I to the Scaffold", by Geoffrey Robertson

 

448 pages, Pantheon Books, ISBN-13: 978-1400044511

Geoffrey Robertson has a long and distinguished record as a barrister in the field of human rights, and in The Tyrannicide Brief: The Story of the Man Who Sent Charles I to the Scaffold he turns constitutional historian to raise awareness of the significance of one John Cooke for English legal history. It is startling to realize that the only written constitution England has ever had was a republican one, for the duration of Cromwell's Protectorate 1649-1660. Its roots were shallow, and its fate was sealed with the death of Cromwell himself during a ferocious storm in 1658, widely touted as an omen. Nevertheless, the law and polity of England under the Stuart kings were a sickening morass: James I, founder of the dynasty, had indoctrinated his son Charles from boyhood with the doctrine of Divine Right, under which the monarch was allegedly above the law. This convenient theology was understood by Charles, literally and unquestioningly. He did not even pretend to think that his agreements were binding on himself; he was unencumbered by scruples in the matter of raising taxation, he was indifferent to the death of one in every ten of his male subjects in the civil wars that he incited and, when pressed on such matters at his trial, he asserted sublimely that he embodied the security of his people, whatever this concept may have conveyed to him. 

Robertson writes as an advocate: he is not trying to rescue Cooke's reputation, Cooke having very little reputation in the first place (if Cooke had significant character-defects, we don't read about them here and he emerges as something of a secular saint). However, the basic objective seems to be to argue for Cooke's unrecognized importance in the precedents he set. English Common Law is all based on case-law and precedent. I'm not myself clear to what extent Cooke's judgments stuck for posterity, but in the least he is presented as having a mind-set ahead of his time. A liberal lawyer of our era has recognized a kindred spirit in a less enlightened age; indeed, some of Cooke's views verge on welfare socialism with legal aid for the poor and something like a health service (unsurprisingly, this did not make him popular with everyone). Giving judgments in favor of tenants in Ireland didn't endear him to the rapacious landlords whose ideas of their own rights in this matter were the mirror-image of the King's. Belief in religious tolerance upset those who had recruited the Creator of Heaven and Earth to their own vested interest or at least to their own ideas of how He ought to see the matter. The Protectorate was certainly an improvement on the Stuarts in the matter of basic fairness, but Cooke was always a bit of a loner, and to stigmatize him as "radical" (on top of his obscure origins) was condemnation enough for the self-complacent and partisan.

Cooke's rigid belief in due legal process led him to accept as his duty the prosecution of the King when barristers of greater eminence wisely took cover. Robertson recounts the trial as a professional and connoisseur, and trials make good drama. Charles was well advised, and it is beyond a legal layman to judge of the legitimacy of the arguments by which Cooke prevailed. Trials under the Stuarts, with their packed, suborned and bullied juries and their rigging of the law, are a clear affront to ordinary human notions of equity, but it's hard to see that the King's trial was any model of modern rectitude or due process, either, and Robertson seems to me to sail perilously close to arguing "That's just the way it had to be". His prejudices are basically mine too, but that is not really the issue. The doctrine that national leaders are above the law was later re-enshrined in the Treaty of Westphalia, and it took new legal ingenuity to get around that when it came to the post-WWII trials (indeed, at the trial of the Japanese leaders the Indian judge dissented from all the guilty verdicts as being victors' justice). 

Part of Robertson's own self-brief is to measure Charles' trial against those of modern monsters. How the trial of Saddam Hussein may have concluded is anyone's guess, but conventional thought in 1649 dictated that if the prisoner refused to enter a plea then that was equated with an admission of guilt, and this cramped Cooke's style. Robertson rightly commends Richard May for directing a plea of not-guilty to be recorded when Milosevic took the same line of refusing to recognize the court, but faults him for allowing an indictment so long that the trial promised to go on indefinitely, this being an error that the King's judges had avoided. The Tyrannicide Brief makes for an excellent read for a layman: it is patently fair and the partisanship, though obvious, is rational. How it will all play out for the next putative King Charles, I can't tell, but I suggest this book for the defendant's reading list.

“The Longest Night: A Military History of the Civil War”, by David John Eicher

 

992 pages, Simon & Schuster, Inc., ISBN-13: 978-0684849454

Although I have read many books on the Civil War, The Longest Night: A Military History of the Civil War by David John Eicher is perhaps the best single volume (actually big enough for two) history on the American Civil War. This book will appeal to someone who has not had the opportunity to appreciate the complex nature of the war that spread completely across the country from Virginia in the East to Fort Craig, New Mexico in the far west, from Robert E. Lee to Kit Carson. While there may not be new ground for the seasoned CW veteran reader, there is no doubt that this book will appeal to an aspiring CW historian that wants the total picture of what occurred during the war.

Eicher provides detail on virtually every major battle, including substantial skirmishes, along with the identification of every major General, down to the division level with short biographical sketches on the main participants. The detail is somewhat overwhelming, but for seasoned CW readers, there is some useful material as one can actually follow the names of generals that disappeared or were banished from the eastern theater, such as Magruder, Slocum, Hooker, Rosecrans, Butler, Pleasonton, Loring, Colquitt, D. H. Hill, Holmes, and so on. In addition, Eicher clarifies the true rank status of Generals, provides historical updates such as the recent discovery of the Hundley and maintains an objective point of view, particularly on Grant, Sherman, Longstreet, Forrest and many others.

Although descriptions of the major battles are somewhat difficult, due to the compressed nature of this single volume (as all CW books would benefit from maps galore to understand troop movements), the best part of this big book are the descriptions of raids, small battles such as Ball's Bluff and other interesting actions, such as the daring sinking of the ironclad "Albemarle" by Lt. Cushing, with his nighttime mission involving a small sleek boat with a torpedo as a spar. Eicher even includes details on the Vermont bank raids by Confederates, the attempts to burn NYC and Confederate attempts to spread yellow fever. There are some small mistakes to be found, such as the author siting Booth's death near Port Tobacco he meant Port Royal (or maybe that was the original name) and there may be others - I wasn't aware that Picket had 19,000 men at Five Forks (with a number that large it seems that A. P. Hill should have commanded it).

This is a huge book that takes some patience to read and it sometimes is tedious in detail but even for a veteran CW buff it can be rewarding. For the CW veteran it may be like a referee rereading the rules to see if you really do know it all.