Technical Difficulties

A Fatal Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum: Murder in Ancient Rome by Emma Southon

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


This is a smart, funny, angry book about murder in ancient Rome, and about what counted as "murder" and what didn't. (Most of the anger comes from the fact that killing an enslaved person didn't count as murder.) It's "popular" history, but history that doesn't cut any corners on that account. Southon does a great job of explaining the ins and outs of Roman history quickly and entertainingly. She does, of course, spend a great deal of time with the Julio-Claudians, both as murderers and murderees, but she also spends a lot of time talking about less visible murders, and she paints a vividly three-dimensional picture of life in late-Republican and early-Imperial Rome.



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An Honorable Defeat: The Last Days of the Confederate Government by William C. Davis

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


My primary takeaway from this book is that Jefferson Davis was a pig-headed nightmare.

This is a step-by-step recounting of the flight of the Confederate government from Richmond. William C. Davis's two principal characters are Jefferson Davis and John C. Breckinridge, whom he depicts as locked in an almost-unacknowledged struggle for how the Confederacy was going to end the war. Or, in J. Davis's case, NOT end the war. He was talking up to the moment he was captured by the Yankees about going to Texas and raising another army, and the fact that he apparently could not understand that this was impossible is actually one of the things I found most frightening about him. Against him, Breckinridge's determination to end the war and end the Confederacy in a way that provided maximum protection for both soldiers and civilians does look honorable.

I think W. C. Davis is wearing rose-colored glasses in a couple of places. He asserts that Robert E. Lee waffled about telling J. Davis that the war had to end because the "old warrior" couldn't bring himself to admit defeat, whereas I've read enough about Lee to know that he waffled because that was what Lee DID---given almost any moment at which he needed to provide a clear statement of his opinion, he equivocated and sidestepped, was vague where he needed to be specific, etc. It was the nature of the beast.

And W. C. Davis is definitely wearing rose-colored glasses in his conclusion, where he tries to argue that BOTH Breckinridge AND Davis provided good examples for the South after the Civil War. Breckinridge I'll give you---when he came back to the US after the amnesty, he stayed away from political office, he supported the enfranchisement of Black men, when he said anything it was about reconciliation. But Davis?

"If the Confederate president never accepted defeat gracefully, and even if he fell into the bitter post war squabbles that helped to make so many Southerners look foolish and spiteful, still he always rose above the mendacity and rank falsehoods to which the others repeatedly sank. If he never inspired his people with love, still by his conduct as a prisoner and for twenty years afterward, he gave an example of unbending pride and refusal either to supplicate or apologize" (397), and I'm sorry, but how is this a good thing? Also, I'm not quite sure I understand the difference between "mendacity and rank falsehoods" and what he says about J. Davis's memoirs: "What he did not wish to admit, he simply wrote out of his history. Inconvenient facts he ignored, and embarrassing incidents he expunged. His failures were really those of others; his only mistakes had been putting faith in subordinates who then let him down" (395). It seems to me like W. C. Davis is splitting hairs, just as I think he's splitting hairs when he tries to argue that J. Davis wasn't a fanatic. J. Davis's complete divorce from reality seems to me to be the essence of fanaticism.

So I think W. C. Davis needed to think through what he was saying about J. Davis a second time. I would also have liked a slightly more heads-on acknowledgement of chattel slavery as a primary cause of the Civil War---he doesn't deny it, or try to ignore it out of existence, but he doesn't address it, either. I know, it's so much easier to talk about the Confederacy if you don't, because then it DOES almost look as simple as a disagreement over the Constitution, and words like "honor" don't have such an uneasy footing, but the fact is that the liberty that white Southerners were so loud about wanting was specifically the liberty to own other people, and while I understand that most of them didn't see it that way, I also don't think it's something that we should move past. We have the example of the abolitionists to show us that it's also NOT simply a matter of imposing 21st century values on 19th century people, and as I said in some other review, I think about Frederick Douglass and what HE would say. And that tends to cut through the rhetoric pretty quickly.



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The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution by Christopher Hill

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Justifiably classic work on the explosion of radical sects that occurred during the English Civil War. Nowadays, we only know about the Quakers (and Hill talks about why it is that the Quakers survived), but there were Diggers and Levellers and Ranters and Grindletonians and Muggletonians... And the thing about them that Hill conveys very well is that, along with being radical religious groups, they were all Utopian experiments, trying to imagine a better system than what they had. Some of what they came up with, especially Gerrard Winstanley, sounds shockingly modern and Marxist---the abolition of private property was one a lot of them had in common, and they were trying to figure out what do you do NEXT? Unfortunately, the answer is, you get betrayed by the generals, and the power that almost shifted in your favor shifts back, and before you know it, the world turns "right side up" again and hello, Charles II.

Hill is an excellent writer, and he writes about his very dense subject matter very clearly.



Four and a half stars, round up to five.



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With My Face to the Enemy: Perspectives on the Civil War by Robert Cowley

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Anthology of essays about the American Civil War from MHQ: The Quarterly Journal of Military History. As is to be expected, they vary in quality, but the good ones---like James M. McPherson's essay about Grant---are very good.

(I think the editor is wrong to call Raphael Semmes, the captain of the CSS Alabama, a "genuine American hero" (429), first because Semmes was a traitor---I know the Confederates had many arguments to prove that they weren't traitors, and I don't buy any of them, especially not for men who were in the US armed services before secession---and second because, while he achieved amazing things, he achieved them in support of the Confederacy and therefore in support of chattel slavery. I ask myself whether, say, Frederick Douglass would have called Semmes a "genuine American hero," and the answer is a resounding no. I think in talking about the Civil War it's important not to keep erasing the subject position of Black people, and one of the things that means is that your definition of "American" can't have a hidden (white) in front of it. I feel the same way about the essay on Sheridan and its enthusiasm for his victories against the Native American tribes he persecuted. I digress, but it's, unfortunately, the thing about the book that is staying with me most vividly.)

Overall, none of the less good essays were terrible, and the good ones made the book worth reading.

Three and a half stars, round up to four.




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Haunted Property: Slavery and the Gothic by Sarah Gilbreath Ford

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Literary criticism, focusing on the link between slavery and the gothic: "Just as the American dream of working your way to success is evidenced by property, the American nightmare that your success was stolen from others is evidenced by haunted property. The dream house with the picket fence and the haunted house with broken windows are part of the same narrative" (5). For the most part I found this a very solid piece of work, carefully thought through and carefully written. (I object a little bit to labeling Octavia Butler a "postmodern" writer because she writes about time travel, but on the other hand, whatever keeps people reading her books, and the chapter on Kindred and Natasha Trethewey's Native Guard: A Pulitzer Prize Winner---which I now need to find and read---is a good chapter.)

My favorite observation: "Characters often make stupid decisions in gothic narratives because they do not perceive that they are in a gothic narrative" (80). This explains just about every horror movie ever made.



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The American Civil War: A Military History by John Keegan

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This book is uneven. Most of it is what the subtitle promises, a military history of the American Civil War, but at the end it devolves into a collection of random essays on the Civil War. I observe from the copyright page that "portions of this book originally appeared in The Civil War Times and Military History Quarterly," and that's what they read like: magazine articles that have a set word limit and thus only so much space to delve into their subjects, with the result that these chapters feel superficial and, as I said, random---there's one about Whitman, and one about Black soldiers, and one on "the home fronts," which includes a paean to Southern womanhood (or perhaps I mean Southern Womanhood) that I found so bizarre it is going to be one of my lasting memories of the book.

Which is a pity, because most of the book is extremely interesting. John Keegan was, of course, the great English military historian, and his view of the Civil War is fascinating, both because he is, obviously, not American and looks at the progress of the war with a detachment that American historians, even now, do not have. (He is also the first historian I've read who buys Major General Dan Sickles's argument (promoted tirelessly after the fact) that he was the hero of Gettysburg for disobeying orders on the 2nd day.) But also because he really is writing a military history and thus spends a lot of time talking about geography, particularly rivers, in a way I had not thought about before. Keegan has ensured that I will now think of the Civil War as a war about rivers---the Mississippi, most obviously, and the Tennessee and the Cumberland and the Ohio, but also the Rappahannock and the Rapidan and that series of parallel rivers between Washington and Richmond.

So three and a half stars, round up to four.



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The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma by Bessel van der Kolk

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Famous book about healing trauma, organized around the apparently radical notion that trauma causes long-term problems, physical as well as mental. Van der Kolk is an engaging writer, excellent at making individual patients both vivid persons and useful examples (both these things are necessary in a book like this). He also describes the various treatment types (EMDR, IFS, neurofeedback, yoga, etc.) clearly and succinctly, and makes a persuasive case that the first thing we ALL need is awareness of self and awareness of body.

Four and a half stars, round up to five.



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The White Tecumseh: A Biography of General William T. Sherman by Stanley P. Hirshson

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


This is a mediocre biography of William Tecumseh Sherman. I was hoping (expecting?) that the title was being used ironically, or at least with self-awareness or at LEAST quoting something said about Sherman during his lifetime, and nope. So that's cringeworthy. Otherwise, Hirshson seems to be an honest biographer, not trying to cover over any of the giant flaws in Sherman's character, and following his subject faithfully through pre-Civil War, Civil War, and post-Civil War life. He's just not a very interesting writer (it's possible he comes off particularly badly against Reading the Man: A Portrait of Robert E. Lee Through His Private Letters, which is the book I finished immediately prior). This book plodded along from birth to death.

It's a pity, because Sherman himself was such a firecracker of a person, exploding here in a nervous breakdown, there in a fantastically ill-advised attempt to dictate terms, not just to Johnston and the Confederates, but to the Union government in Washington D.C. And of course burning Atlanta and marching through Georgia. "War is cruelty," he said at one point (also "War is hell"), and for someone who does not seem to have been particularly self-aware, he understood war in a searingly honest way that few generals on either side did. (Grant did. Jackson did.) Sherman was also appallingly racist (although not more racist than a lot of other white Americans in the second half of the nineteenth century), and is one of the many white men who should not be forgiven for their treatment of Native Americans. (When your opinion is, "Yes, well, it's a pity we're committing genocide but (a) it has to happen and (b) they asked for it," you really need to sit down and think about your choices, which of course Sherman never did.) He was also a petty bitch (egged on by his wife, whom I disliked immensely) and a father of a rather selfish stripe. (When his elder surviving son decided to become a Jesuit instead of a lawyer, Sherman took it as a personal, devastating insult and swore enmity to the Catholic Church. He seemed to feel that Tom OWED it to him to become a lawyer and it just unhinged him that Tom was determined to do something else.)

So a rather boring biography about an interesting person.



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A World on Fire: Britain's Crucial Role in the American Civil War by Amanda Foreman

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


This book is SO GOOD.

I hoped it would be interesting, but it is both fascinating and beautifully written. Foreman discusses Britain's role from the governmental to the personal level, tracking the careers of several people, mostly diplomats and politicians British, Federal, and Confederate and British volunteers with the Union or Confederate Army---of which there were way more than you would think---but also people like Rose Greenhow and Belle Boyd. Foreman writes about diplomats and privates with the same care and focus and has done a wonderful job of ferreting out letters and memoirs, both of the people she is following and of the people they interacted with. She also does a really excellent job of guiding her readers through the Civil War. I never felt lost or confused, and my attention did not flag through the whole 800 page* book

Highly recommended and obviously five stars.

___
*not counting endnotes and the glossary which, as with so many glossaries, would have been more helpful if I'd known about it on page 1, instead of on page 917



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General Lee's Army: From Victory to Collapse by Joseph T. Glatthaar

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


This is, as the title suggests, a history of the Army of Northern Virginia. It is partly based on socioeconomic data analysis, so Glatthaar can, based on his sample of 600 soldiers, talk about what percentage of soldiers were slaveholders, how much wealth they had (which ranged dramatically from $0 to over $10,000), etc. He does a good job of explaining why the South thought the war started without falling into the error of defending their point of view. This is a history, not an apologia.

Talking about the Army of Northern Virginia is difficult because the soldiers suffered dreadfully---from lack of basic equipment like shoes and pants, from disease, from the awful meat grinder that was a Civil War battlefield---and they sincerely and passionately believed that they were fighting for liberty. And could not see that fighting for the liberty to own other people is the cruelest of paradoxes, just as they could not understand why their slaves fled to the Northern lines by the thousands. Maybe it's that disjunct that fascinates me.

Considered as an army, the Army of Northern Virginia accomplished amazing things, and Glaatthaar does a great job of describing what battles looked like from the South's point of view, which I found an interesting..."corrective" is not the word I want, but it's like reading about the Civil War backwards.

Four and a half stars, round up to five.



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