Review: Baldwin, The Fire Next TIme (1963)

The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


The terrible thing about The Fire Next Time is how much it sounds like Between the World and Me, a book written 50 years later. This is beautifully written, sad and angry and a little wry, about race in America (and the terrible blind "innocence" of white people) and also about religion. Baldwin writes about preaching as a teenager and about meeting Elijah Muhammad, the then-leader of the Nation of Islam, and about a whole bunch of other things, but I think Baldwin's failure to be converted by Elijah Muhammad (a conversion which he both yearns toward and recoils from) is the heart of "Down at the Cross." (I can't help wondering if Louis Farrakhan was one of the serious young men Baldwin describes meeting in Elijah Muhammad's house.) But religion is always in the context of race because it has to be, because Baldwin's whole LIFE is in the context of race. He doesn't have the luxury of pretending otherwise.



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Review: Baldwin, The Cross of Redemption (2010)

The Cross of Redemption: Uncollected Writings by James Baldwin

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


This is a collection of Baldwin's previously uncollected essays, letters, book reviews, and a short story. The essays are painful because they could have been written yesterday, so little has changed for Black Americans in the last fifty years. The reviews are mostly scathing (the way he deals with James M. Cain is especially delightful), and if I had been one of his contemporaries, I would have gone in mortal dread of a James Baldwin review. Overall, I find that I simply enjoy his voice, even when he is telling horrible truths. (I was meh about the short story, but I am meh about most fiction these days; even James Baldwin cannot offer a miracle cure.)



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Review: Fitzharris, The Butchering Art (2017)

The Butchering Art: Joseph Lister's Quest to Transform the Grisly World of Victorian Medicine by Lindsey Fitzharris

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This is basically a biography of Joseph Lister and his invention of antisepsis, so the title is a little bit misleading. It's a perfectly fine biography, only slightly hagiographic (and honestly how can you not be slightly hagiographic about a Quaker surgeon who revolutionized medicine and was friends with Louis Pasteur?), and certainly hammers home the importance of germ theory in making surgery a survivable experience. Fitzharris gets some facts wrong about Burke & Hare (the only place where I have the knowledge to fact-check), and I came away from the book feeling slightly disappointed, although I'm not sure why. Maybe just that I really wanted a book about "the butchering art," not a biography of the man who made it something else.



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Review: Rankine & Loffreda, eds., The Racial Imaginary (2016)

The Racial Imaginary: Writers on Race in the Life of the Mind by Claudia Rankine

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


This is a collection of open letters about writing and race with an excellent critical/theoretical introduction. Perspectives range widely, both racially and in terms of the individual writer's understanding of how race affects their work. I particularly liked Rachel Zucker's letter, in which she responded and then went back and footnoted her response extensively, interrogating basically everything she'd said, deconstructing her own response to the question of race and writing.



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Review: Stargardt, The German War (2017)

The German War: A Nation Under Arms by Nicholas Stargardt

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


This is an excellent and thought-provoking book about how the German people understood their part in World War II and the Holocaust. Obviously, there are going to be exceptions to everything Stargardt says, but he's quite good at tracking those down and presenting a spectrum of opinions, from Victor Klemperer to Joseph Goebbels. The most surprising thing about what he finds (for me) is that the Germans believed Hitler's lie about Poland attacking first. It's such an obvious. clumsy, amateurish lie---but the Germans believed from the beginning that they were fighting a *defensive* war, and then, when they'd conquered all of their immediate neighbors, that it was *England*'s fault, for rejecting Hitler's generous offers of peace. And an astonishing number, including people who were fervently anti-Nazi, believed that the bombing of German cities was retaliation demanded by "world Jewry" for "what we did to the Jews." (Never mind "what we did" to the Poles and the Ukrainians and the rest of the untermenschen.) Stargardt is particularly good at showing the way Goebbels' propaganda machine fostered a culture of complicity without ever admitting that anybody knew what was happening. It was all rumor and half-truths and knowing nods. Between the bombing and the horror of the Russian invasion at the end of the war, Germans in general believed that their suffering was equal to the Jews, and that somehow this should let them off the hook. (I don't want to get into ranking atrocities, but being the victim of one atrocity does not cancel out perpetration of another.) Germany's collective narrative of victimhood proved horribly resilient and resulted ultimately in the failure of the Allies' de-Nazification efforts. (The Nazi leaders who weren't executed immediately and didn't fall into Russian hands were mostly back in German society, being judges, mayors, etc., just like they were before the war, by the 1950s. Because Germany's indelible belief was that they didn't do anything fundamentally wrong. Not unlike Trump saying there are "fine people" on both sides. In fact, the parallels between the failure of Reconstruction and the failure of de-Nazification are striking and bone-chilling.)

Stargardt is an excellent writer who presents his complicated and diverse evidence clearly and effectively.



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Review: Koonz, The Nazi Conscience (2003)

The Nazi Conscience by Claudia Koonz

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This is a very interesting book about how Nazi Germany (meaning not just those in the Nazi Party, but Germany under the Nazis) came to believe that genocide was morally right. Koonz lays it out very carefully, so that although it's an alien thought-process, you can follow the logic step by step. You have to start by believing that your Volk, your people, is more important than anything else, including yourself. And YOUR Volk is of course better than anyone else's Volk. Once you believe that, believing that anything that strengthens the Volk is good and anything that weakens the Volk is bad, is a pretty easy next step, and the language of social Darwinism---the idea that your Volk is in competition with all these other Volks---is a comfortable fit. And since your Volk is the best Volk, anything you have to do to ensure its superiority is morally right, up to and including mass murder. The rhetoric, used by Nazi propaganda, of the Jews as a disease, as a threat to the health of the Volk is easy to see (and was apparently easy to believe). Koonz shows all the links in the chain.



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Review: Lipstadt, Denying the Holocaust (1994)

Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory by Deborah E. Lipstadt

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I came at this book backwards, because I've previously read a couple of books about the Irving libel trial, where David Irving tried to sue Deborah Lipdstadt for accurately calling him a Holocaust denier. Bascially, that's what this book is: Lipstadt accurately calling people Holocaust deniers and laying out their methodologies and pet fallacies and so on. It is, of course, almost 30 years out of date, so more a primary text about the history of Holocaust denial in the 1980s than anything else. But it was still engaging and interesting (and infuriating) and I'm sure that though the players have changed, the script is still relevant.



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Review: Mandell, The Nazi Olympics (1971)

The Nazi Olympics by Richard D. Mandell

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


This is a sardonic blow by blow account of the 1936 Berlin Olympics. Mandell discusses both the Olympic Games and their modern "re-creation" and the ways in which the Nazis turned the Games into a celebration of the German volk. He is a cynical observer of the confluence of two ideologies that, in their different ways, require idealism to work, and he talks a lot about the way those two idealizing ideologies used each other to create the '36 Games. Enjoyable and thought-provoking.



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Review: Roland, Nazi Women of the Third Reich (2018)

Nazi Women of the Third Reich: Serving the Swastika by Paul Roland

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Capsule biographies of a variety of women in Hitler's Germany, some of them fanatical supporters, some of them fellow travelers some of them opposed to him. It's packaged as popular history, divided within each chapter into short sections, each with its own title, with pull-quotes every few pages and pictures scattered generously throughout, but I'd never heard of most of the women he discusses, so I learned a great deal.



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Review: Korda, Alone (2017)

Alone: Britain, Churchill, and Dunkirk: Defeat Into Victory by Michael Korda

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This is definitely the backstage-gossip history of Dunkirk. Korda is focused on the individuals who were making decisions and he writes about them as if he knew them all personally. He also writes about his own experiences as a small boy in a very wealthy and powerful family (his uncle DID know Churchill personally). He is a very vivid writer and an excellent storyteller, and it's a cliche to say he makes the story of Dunkirk "come alive," but because he's relying wherever possible on someone's first-hand account, HIS account has a great deal of immediacy. This is a very engaging read.



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Review: Sears, Lincoln's Lieutenants (2017)

Lincoln's Lieutenants: The High Command of the Army of the Potomac by Stephen W. Sears

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


This is a MASSIVE group biography of the generals of the Army of the Potomac. It is very readable (at 766 pages, it had better be) and is not hagiographic about any of the generals, including Grant. Sears offers clear accounts of the battles fought by the Army of the Potomac and clear (sometimes scathing) accounts of the politicking and cliques and bad behavior of the generals (also the egregious Edwin Stanton). Also the endless frustrations of President Lincoln. It is not and does not attempt to be anything but well-researched biographical military history.



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Review: Heath, Hitler's Girls (2017)b

Hitler's Girls: Doves Amongst Eagles by Tim Heath

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Unfortunately, this book turned out to be exactly what I expected after reading the introduction: amateur English historian of the Luftwaffe meets some nice elderly German ladies, gets them talking about their childhoods, and thinks, Hey, I should write a book! The book is mostly the women's stories about their childhoods, about the Jungmadel and the Bund Deutscher Madel, about their war experiences., with some pretty amateur history thrown around them. (I still almost can't believe Heath had never heard of Sophie Scholl before one of his interview subjects mentioned her.)

So as a source of primary information about what it was like to grow up in Hitler's Germany, this is okay. Where it really falls apart is where Heath makes a mistake that a lot of professional historians have also made, which is that he goes in for comparative atrocities. I understand his impulse. He's grown very fond of his interview subjects and they have told him some truly horrible things about the Russian invasion of Berlin. It's human nature to want to defend them. But nothing you can put forward makes the Russian invasion of Berlin worse than the Holocaust---or even the German invasion of Russia. My point is not that the German people somehow "deserved" what happened, any more than the Russian people "deserved" what happened. My point is that you can't do some kind of moral calculus and decide that what happened to the Germans was less deserved than what happened to the Russians (or the Poles or the Slavs or...) Heath's interview subjects are not, by virtue of being nice elderly German ladies, more innocent than the Russian people he doesn't go interview. What happened to German girls and women (and boys and men) in the Russian invasion of Germany was horrible. Full stop. It was not more horrible or less horrible than what happened to Russian girls and women and boys and men in the German invasion of Russia. You can say (as he does) that more German women were raped than Russian women: "It is certainly true that the Russians, civilians in particular, did suffer terrible cruelty at the hands of certain units of the German army during its victorious early successful campaigns on the eastern front, especially the SS, who were responsible for the murder of thousands. However, there was nowhere near the number of sexual violations carried out against very young girls and women, as there were by the Red Army in Berlin and surrounding Soviet-occupied territories clawed back from the Germans in the Second World war [sic]" (203)* But, even assuming that's true---and he doesn't offer any source for his information---how does mass rape stack up against mass slaughter? (And it's not thousands, Mr. Heath. It's millions.) How does it stack up against a deliberate policy of starvation? Rape is an atrocity. Murder is an atrocity. There isn't a point-system that lets you grade them and compare, and the attempt to do so merely shows a naivete that I (obviously) find both annoying and morally suspect.

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*Also, he's wrong about the details. The Einsatzgruppen (which is what he means by "certain units of the German army") were NOT part of the Wehrmacht. They were part of the SS, which was a paramilitary organization answering to Himmler.



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Review: Trethewey, Memorial Drive (2020)

Memorial Drive: A Daughter's Memoir by Natasha Trethewey

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


I've tried to start this review 3 times and each time come up empty-handed.

So. This is a book by Natasha Trethewey, a former US poet laureate. It is centered on her mother's murder. One strand is talking about family history and about who Gwendolyn Turnbough was. One strand is about domestic abuse and how Trethewey's stepfather went from faintly creepy to abuser to murderer. And one strand is about Trethewey, as an adult, trying to come to grips with a chunk of her life she has tried strenuously to forget but which she cannot shed. And, I think, trying to figure out how her mother ended up there, on that day, how she came to be murdered.

Trethewey's stepfather is a perfect example of why asking why don't women leave abusive partners? is asking the wrong question. Because it's not that she didn't leave. She did. It's that he wouldn't let her go, that to him killing her was (a) a reasonable option and (b) preferable to acknowledging in any way that she did not belong to him. The most harrowing part of the book is the seemingly endless transcription of a telephone call in which he shows himself incapable of recognizing, never mind respecting, that his ex-wife has a subject position of her own, that she exists outside his desires. Their conversation is a death spiral, going over and over the same ground, and ending finally in murder.

This book is full of regret and grief. It is beautifully and lucidly written. It is unsparing.



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Review: Alexander, The New Jim Crow, rev. ed. (2012)

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


So this is a book about what the War on Drugs accomplished, which is not any significant decrease in drug use but instead an almost unfathomably massive explosion in the prison population and the trapping of millions of people in what Alexander calls an "undercaste" (even once you get out of prison, if you're branded a felon, mainstream society and the mainstream economy are effectively closed to you, and you are caught in a vicious circle that puts you right back in prison). Also the militarization and corruption of the police. I didn't realize I needed another reason to hate Ronald Reagan, whose administration created the billions of dollars juggernaut War on Drugs out of essentially nothing, but hey, have one anyway. Although the War on Drugs is nominally "colorblind" (itself an exceedingly problematic idea), in practice, the police target people of color (in particular young Black men) and leave young white (middle-class, college-attending) drug dealers alone. This is a perfect example of Ibram X. Kendi's argument that policy leads public opinion. The Reagan administration said, "Look! Black drug dealers everywhere!" and everybody looked and saw Black drug dealers. Clinton also comes out looking very bad through this lens, and Obama doesn't look so hot, either. (And of course she was writing in the era before Trump and 2020 and George Floyd---although not, let's note, before Black men started dying in police choke-holds---so everything looks a little odd.)

This is a horrifying book and rightly so. The most horrifying part is perhaps the section where she talks about what it's going to take to UNDO the War on Drugs, which has wound itself through the justice and penal system in ways that are both jaw-droppingly blatant and terrifyingly subtle. And of course the work that will have to be done to ensure that ANOTHER racial caste-making system doesn't replace the War on Drugs the way the War on Drugs replaced Jim Crow and Jim Crow replaced slavery.



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Review: Chee, How To Write an Autobiographical Novel (2018)

How to Write an Autobiographical Novel: Essays by Alexander Chee

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


In a lot of ways, this collection of essays IS an autobiographical novel, told out of sequence and very subtly. You have to be watching the details to see what he's doing.

Chee is a literary writer, and it always amazes me to get a glimpse into that world, where novels are expected to take years to write (as opposed to commercial publishing, where publishers would really like authors to produce a book a year) and the thematics of the novel are almost more important than the story. Writing a novel is a deep dive into the writer's own psyche; that's what it's FOR. It's not how I think about writing a novel at all, but it's beautiful.



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