“Paris: The Biography of a City”, by Colin Jones

592 pages, Viking, ISBN-13: 978-0670033935

Paris: The Biography of a City is the literary equivalent of bubble-gum pop, or a shoot-em-up action flick, or that stupid TV show (you know the one) that you can’t admit to watching but do so, religiously. While it can be infantile and annoying (as you’ll see below), it is also enjoyable and a good, light read. As Parisian history is so very varied, rich, and long the best Jones can do is give us the cliff-notes history of Paris – that’s 487 pages long (indeed, Jones admits in the preface that he’s had to work really hard to focus his information just on Paris itself, eliminating anything that doesn’t relate directly to the city and the changes that it and its people have gone through over time). The result is that Jones has to completely ignore anything that didn’t happen in Paris, meaning that great swathes of French history are skipped, especially the reigns of Louis XIV-to-Louis-XVI, as the monarchy was based in Versailles at the time. The Revolution doesn’t even get a whole chapter, the Romans are basically a footnote, and we go from Henri of Navarre to the Sun King in ten pages.

Throughout all of this, Jones sprinkles the book with annoyingly tantalizing bits of stories that he doesn’t have the time to go into, like this: “In the mid-to-late 1880’s, however, this moment of relative calm in Parisian politics was overturned by a political shooting star, General Boulanger, a kind of intellectually challenged Napoleon. His call for constitutional revision and a war of revenge against the German empire won a good deal of electoral support among working as well as middle-class Parisians. By 1891, however, the general had shot his bolt (and indeed himself, on his mistress’s tomb) but the 1890’s would see the emergence of new sources of political instability.” Wait a minute, go back! He shot himself on his mistress’s tomb? I want to read more about that…But you can’t, because that’s the first and last that we hear about General Boulanger, and before you can say “slow your roll, Jones” we’re moving on to the Dreyfus Affair – all lone paragraph of it.

The book does have some good things going for it: first, Jones devotes an impressive amount of space (especially considering how quickly he has to go through all his information) to discussing the emergence and growth of the banlieues, the Parisian suburbs that have, by this point, become larger than Paris itself. It was nice that he didn’t just focus his story on the tourist idea of Paris, but acknowledged the less-picturesque aspects of it. Don’t worry, though; those famous landmarks get a showing, too: Notre Dame, the Eiffel Tower, Sacre Coeur, the Centre Pompidou, and the Louvre, controversial glass pyramid and all. While some of these landmarks were much maligned in the beginning, Parisians soon embraced them, and as Jones shows, Paris would not be Paris without them. Paris also would not be Paris without the Seine, as Jones consistently reminds us. One of my favorite sections came towards the end of the book, when Jones discusses the Algerian fight for independence and how the residents of Paris reacted to the conflict. Did you know that there was a massive pro-Algeria demonstration in Paris in 1961, and the police killed almost 200 protestors, either by beating them to death or drowning them in the Seine? Did you know that the French government didn’t even acknowledge that this had happened until 1999? I didn’t, and it was mind-blowing.

This book is a confusing array of dates, arrondissement numbers, and street names. To get the most out of it, one must either be intimately familiar with Paris or have a good map to consult. Jones provides several maps at the back of the book that chronicle Paris at various time periods, but they are only moderately helpful. A glossary, illustrations, an extensive bibliography, notes, and a list of characteristic buildings with their construction dates are all included to give a more thorough examination of Paris. Jones also includes special highlighted sections in each chapter that detail people, places, and things that helped shape Parisian culture. These sections break up the continuity of the chapters, and are probably best saved for reading after the chapter is completed. For any lover of history, or any lover of the City of Light, Paris: The Biography is a City it is an essential book. While it cannot possibly cover absolutely everything in Paris’s two-thousand year history, it is a valiant effort.

“The History of Ancient Israel”, by Michael Grant

317 pages, Scribner, ISBN-13: 978-0684180816

In The History of Ancient Israel, the late Michael Grant offers a typically clear and uncluttered – to say nothing of brief – history of the ancient Jewish kingdom from (approximately) the 19^th Century B.C. (the life of Abraham) to 73 A.D. (the fall of Masada). A brief survey of the Neolithic and Early and Middle Canaanite Ages of ancient Israel, the Bar Kochba Revolt of 132-36 A.D., and the foundation of modern Israel in 1948 round out Grant’s book. Israel is a light read that covers a lot of historical areas, but not in much detail, as is typical with most of Grant’s works. Grant begins his account using the Bible (as would be expected) and he does so with an admirable blend of scholarly scrupulousness and sensitivity to the religious and literary character of the text. Both believers and non-believers can, I think, rely on his conclusions due to this even-handedness. He deals with such complex problems as the historicity of the patriarchs, the sources of the Pentateuch, conflicting traditions in 1 Samuel’s treatment of Saul, the chronology of Ezra and Nehemiah, Jesus’ relationship to Judaism, and so on, without oversimplifying or getting bogged down in pedantic detail. He is consistently tactful, as in this concluding judgment of Herod the Great, the brilliant, bloodthirsty Idumean: “If his domestic catastrophes are left to one side, he attained almost as much greatness as was possible for any man of his epoch who was not a Roman”. Backhanded compliments this fair are rare.

This book is not without its controversies, however, as Grant floats a number of interesting theories: Zilpah (Leah’s handmaid and a wife of Jacob and bears his sons Gad and Asher) and Bilhah (Rachel’s handmaid and a wife of Jacob and bears his Dan and Naphtali) were of “mixed race”; the tribe of Levi never went to Egypt at all; boiling a kid in its mother’s milk was a Canaanite, magic fertility rite; the possible split authorship of Isaiah, 1-39 and 40-66; among others. Grant provides a good short bibliography, helpful maps, and a table of dates, as well as appendices to handle subjects like Hebrew love poetry, short stories (the Books of Ruth, Esther, Judith, and so forth), or the minor prophets, which would have clotted up his narrative. Overall The History of Ancient Israel is an outstanding introductory study – except perhaps for conservative believers – and a superlative tool for teaching the Bible.

“The Dark Side of Camelot”, by Seymour M. Hersh

498 pages, Little Brown & Co., ISBN-13: 978-0316359559

Books about John F. Kennedy usually fall into one of two groups: the scholarly, mostly admiring “serious” books which concentrate on the issues Kennedy dealt with as President and look only briefly at his many personal flaws; and the so-called “sensationalist” books that focus primarily on JFK’s wild private life and only briefly examine the major historical events of his term of office. With The Dark Side of Camelot, Seymour M. Hersh has written a kind of hybrid account of the Kennedy Presidency, and while I think that many of Hersh’s allegations are true and there’s little doubt (as many other books and sources have since confirmed Hersh’s allegations) that JFK was anything but a saint in his private life, I'm still not convinced that his private behavior had much effect on his judgments and decisions in the historical moments of his brief Presidency.

Hersh does a workmanlike job illustrating the apparently undeniable fact that Kennedy had medical, integrity, and personal problems that the country would probably not have tolerated in a president. This book appears to be well-researched and well-documented and does not present a flattering portrayal of Kennedy – nor does it intend to. Hersh goes into depressing detail as to his theme that JFK’s marriage was a sham; according to Hersh, JFK never missed an opportunity to philander whenever Jackie Kennedy was away (and sometimes when she wasn’t). Much of JFK’s inner circle conspired with him in this regards (according to Hersh) to a degree that is hard to imagine. Hersh further speculates that part of Kennedy's abnormal libido was induced by various drugs he took for his Addison’s condition, and develops this theme further in his discussion of the Cuban Missile Crisis and speculates that the cocktail of steroids and other drugs that Kennedy evidently needed to get through the day affected his judgment and his willingness to take risks. This in turn may have caused him to be more prone to the kind of brinksmanship that Hersh claims characterized Kennedy's handling of the Missile Crisis.

Personally, I’m not so sure: despite the fact that the US had an overwhelming nuclear and overall military superiority over Soviets in 1962, Kennedy did not bomb the missiles out but instead negotiated their removal, although from a position of weakness. Here I felt Hersh was unfair to Kennedy: the record seems clear that Kennedy was acutely aware that the world was on the brink of a nuclear confrontation and he was determined to avoid a holocaust while forcing the removal of the missiles. On the other hand, it seems clear that Kennedy’s marriage was a sham and his image of youthful vigor was a brilliantly conceived and flawlessly executed BS campaign. Hersh is convincing that Kennedy could not get through the day without a battery of probably illegal and unhealthy drugs. Kennedy was suffering from Addison’s disease, along with a host other health issues – including the famous back problem which couldn’t have been helped by all of the tail he was getting – which put him in constant pain. All of this must have affected his deliberating powers on some level...but to what extant?

This is not a balanced study of the Kennedy administration, but rather the work of an investigative reporter to put names, dates and facts to the rumors and stories that began to circulate in the years after Kennedy’s death. How these things remained secret for so long amazes me – how the standards of the press have changed! – and the overall view presented here is very bleak; if one takes this book as the whole story, one would believe that Kennedy was the most despicable sort of politician, with little regard for the law, no moral sense, and no interest in policy, especially domestic policy. Certainly this book is a legitimate contribution to the history of the era, but only one piece of the puzzle, and a much-needed remedy to the constant hagiography of a slain, flawed President.