“Battles and Leaders of the Civil War”, by Ned Bradford

640 pages, Plume, ISBN-13: 978-0452010048

Nothing like a little truth in advertising, eh? In his seminal work Battles and Leaders of the Civil War, Ned Bradford compiled a compendium of battle studies and reports was written by military commanders of all levels: Ulysses S. Grant, William Tecumseh Sherman, Robert E. Lee, James Longstreet, and many others besides, right down to lieutenants commanding companies for points of clarification on minor skirmishes or segments of the battlefield. The accounts were set down when the war was still fresh in their memories, yet when enough time had passed for reflection, and the fact that several viewpoints (some conflicting, naturally) are given for each major battle and campaign adds immeasurably to the value of this work. Of course, recent scholarship has eclipsed and corrected many of these accounts (the book was first published in 1956), you get the immediacy and vigor of the post-war controversies and the finger-pointing.

Battles and Leaders was for a long time the principle source for the early critical historians of the war, such as John Codman Ropes, W. Henderson (the pre-eminent biographer of Stonewall Jackson), as well as the generals themselves who wanted to cross-check their accounts. This was the case until well after the release of the Official Records some ten years later. There were inevitable lapses of style and critical ability in the original multi-volume edition; these, for the most part, have been weeded out from this accessible one-volume version. The great part about this book for me is that one can get the flavor of the passions still raging, even though the writers attempted a detached and clinical tone for credibility’s sake. Johnson and Buell made a concerted effort to elicit a well-rounded picture for battles and episodes which were the subject of intense debate. If you have any interest in the Civil War, and lack the time to sift through the voluminous post-war memoirs of the commanders, you'll want to keep Battles and Leaders handy.

“Camille Claudel: A Life”, by Odile Ayral-Clause

280 pages, Harry N. Abrams, ISBN-13: 978-0810940772

Camille Claudel: A Life by Odile Ayral-Clause is an extraordinary achievement after a decade in the making. A scholarly study of the French sculptress who was a disciple and mistress of Rodin and the subject of a popular 1989 film, Ayral-Clause’s book combines original research, vivid writing, and engaged though balanced judgment. Camille Claudel interweaves material from archival sources, unpublished letters and photographs, and an extensive range of secondary studies into a seamless narrative, all to tell the story of Claudel’s achievement and suffering, one which follows the familiar trajectory of a woman doomed by her talent and refusal to live life other than on her own terms. Without editorializing or exaggeration, Ayral-Clause takes the reader on a roller-coaster ride of hope, admiration, suspense, grief and outrage.

The book’s opening chapters chronicle the adventures of an extraordinarily talented girl from the provinces coming to live in Bohemian Paris during the 1880s – with the support of her family, no less; a singular achievement in itself, that. Its central chapters focus on her friendship with her fellow young sculptress, Jesse Lipscomb, and her turbulent relationship with Auguste Rodin. They also explain the development of her personal style and include interpretive descriptions of her major works, enriched with dozens of striking photographs. The final third of the book reads as a classic tragedy, beginning with the onset of mental illness and climaxing with an unforgettable account of Claudel being dragged off to an insane asylum at the insistence of her mother and brother at the moment that her protective father died – a moment which coincided with the outbreak of the First World War. The last few chapters, detailing her fruitless efforts to escape the horrendous conditions of her 30-year-long imprisonment, show how a strong family incapable of dealing with the mental illness of one of its members degenerates into a network of cruelty and betrayal.

In addition to biography and art criticism, Ayral-Clause’s book provides a 60-year survey of French social history that deals with politics, religion, gender and the economics of government-supported art. At the levels of state, family and individual, it delivers instructive parables about the workings of vanity, lust, bigotry, and greed, and among others, it paints memorable portraits of the two power players in Camille Claudel’s life: Rodin, the most celebrated artist of his generation, and her brother, Paul Claudel, a lionized writer and diplomat, revealing both “great men” as mere mortals after all.

“A History of the Habsburg Empire, 1526-1918”, by Robert A. Kann

646 pages, Barnes & Noble Books, ISBN-13: 978-0760710005

As dry as the Sahara and almost as lifeless is how I would most succinctly characterize A History of the Habsburg Empire, 1526-1918 by Robert A. Kann, who was a Viennese Professor of History and a recognized authority in his field who taught at several American universities during his career. But this book is a long, tedious study of what should be an exciting, dramatic story. While Kann clearly has great expertise and has mastered his material, his presentation suffers from a critique he himself offered of a Czech historian, Anton Gindely: “His sovereign command of sources was not entirely matched by originality of thought and stimulating presentation”. The text appears to be more of a historiological study of German-language books about the subject matter than a narrative chronicle of an enormous and complex multiethnic empire that survived against the odds for four centuries. One example: the author refers on 15 occasions to the Battle of White Mountain outside of Prague, but he never describes what actually happened; instead, he talks about how things changed as a result of this battle, which he refers to as decisive, important and historic. Another complaint is that about two-thirds of the book is on the period after 1740, and maybe half of the section is about Franz-Josef’s reign alone. It would seem that Kann mainly cared about the various “liberal” reforms that attempted to modernize and keep the Habsburg reams together and concentrates on this throughout the entirety of the book (perhaps this is why he such short-shrift to the early Habsburgs, because they weren’t evolved in liberal reform?) The other main problem with the book is that it isn’t very clearly written, with the format being a discussion of the various political, social, and cultural histories of each period; but someone who doesn’t know the history of the times will have difficulties following the line of reasoning. Kann is to be commended for including chapters on cultural issues, but he spends a great deal of time on novelists and dramatists who are unknown to all but a handful of the English-speaking community. The book only really shines when the author offers his own personal views, but this happens all too seldom.