Caroline
I wavered between 3 and 4 stars for this book. On the one hand it's an excellent, searing indictment of food politics in the US, and how government and big business uses food to both deliberately and indirectly perpetuate racial inequalities. My disappointment mainly stems from the lack of historical content - from the title I expected more of an historical overview, but that's mostly done in the first two chapters. I think there's so much to be said historically about food in history, that I was greatly disappointed in the relatively sparse treatment it got in this book, in comparison to the 20th/21st century assessments.
This book is as good an example as any of the oxymoronic nature of that old phrase, ‘historical fact'. There is of course no such thing. History is written by people, by cultures, by civilisations, and as such is subject to a huge array of prejudices, biases, grudges and agendas. Western history tells us almost nothing about Genghis Khan, short of casting him in the role of the stereotypical Eastern barbarian. Western history lauds the achievements of conquerors such as Alexander the Great or Julius Caesar, and says nothing of the man who came from nowhere to singlehandedly conquer and establish one of the largest empires in history.
Genghis Khan, or Temujin, his actual birth name, is an amazing figure. Considering his family were outcasts, herders, the lowest of the low, from a minor tribe in Mongolia, the fact that he rose to become one of the greatest figures of the past 1000 years is astonishing. Add that to his achievements as Great Khan - the establishment of a paper money currency, the promotion of global commerce, the rule of international secular law, the promotion of freedom of religious worship, the idea that not even a ruler was above the law, his role in the creation of the modern states of Russia and China - and it seems truly criminal that such an important figure was ever dismissed as a ‘barbarian'.
This is a wonderful book. I honestly couldn't put it down. Weatherford writes with such evident love and enthusiasm for his subject, and whilst I did have to reserve a certain skepticism for some of his claims for the Mongolian Empire (the influence on the European Renaissance, for one) he has certainly convinced me of the greatness of the Great Khan.
A really valuable addition to Indigenous-European history. Too often this history is one-sided, very much the perspective of those Europeans encountering Indigenous people for the first time. Part of this is, of course, the difficulty of the historical record - few Europeans bothered to record Indigeneous thoughts, words or even their very presence, and little in the way of Indigenous records survived the genocide that accompanied the Colombian age, and even archecological records were intepreted, coloured and confused by European perspectives and beliefs.
This book highlights just how much trans-Atlantic traffic there was, how much of an Indigenous presence in Europe has gone ignored and neglected by European historians, beyond those individuals highlighted as ‘curiosities', ‘savages' or ‘spectacles', and how this skewed European focus turned many of these vibrant, still-living cultures and cvilisations into the stuff of museums and curiosity cabinets, the ongoing legacy of which still damages many Indigenous descendant cultures and communities today.
Everyone knows the story of Lady Jane Grey, the ‘Nine Days Queen', the innocent who was maneuvered into claiming the throne by her husband and family and executed by a vengeful Mary Tudor. In this book de Lisle argues that Jane was no innocent and no victim, that she was raised from birth fully conscious of her royal blood, her position as heir to the throne under Henry VIII's will and her role at the forefront of the struggle between Protestantism and Catholicism. Jane was an exceptionally educated, strong-willed and determined woman, who went to her death willing to serve as a martyr to her cause if she could not be queen.
One of the things this book highlights is how much of a curse royal blood was for women in the Tudor days. After the death of Edward IV, with nothing but female claimants, it was a dangerous time for women like the Grey sisters. Jane was executed for claiming the throne, arguably rightfully under the terms of Parliament and Henry VIII's will, which had excluded both Mary and Elizabeth on grounds of illegitimacy. Her sisters were both imprisoned for much of their lives for daring to marry for love without the Queen's knowledge and against her wishes, for the danger of them producing a son and heir for the throne was too much for Elizabeth.
This is a really good book, as engrossing and fast-paced as a novel. It may take a certain amount of literary license with some scenes or facts, but it does bring to life two marginalised historical figures in Mary and Katherine, whom I knew nothing about, and explodes a few myths about the Nine Days Queen, who was in fact queen for over two weeks. But nine days sounds better, right?
My abiding impression of this book? I'm impressed the author manage to cope living so long in the company of the various Adams men of the third and fourth generations (the first two were Presidents John and John Quincy Adams). Because, for real, the Adams men were DICKS. Entitled, self-absorbed, emotionally stunted dicks.
It seems like everyone is digging into their family trees these days, hoping to uncover something fascinating, something strange or novel, or even someone famous. I can't imagine what it must feel like to go back and find out that a member of your family, not even an ancestor, but someone as close and as memorable as a grandfather, was a Nazi and participated in the most horrific genocide of our time. And not only that, but didn't seem to repent, didn't consider what he had participated in as wrong. I can't imagine how you could reconcile your repulsion and horror at what your grandfather had done, with the love and affection you would bear him as a grandson growing up ignorant of such facts.
This is a brave book, on a difficult subject, and it's fascinating to read it from such a close perspective. Whilst it isn't ‘classic' history and doesn't pretend to be, it somehow makes it all more immediate, and more horrifying for that, to read about such an ordinary man, from the perspective of his grandson. Definitely worth the read.
Limited in scoop and not a great deal of depth to it. Focuses on the lives of some of the children of senior Nazis (Mengele's son, Hess' son, Goring's daughter etc), but it's all based on second-hand material and doesn't spend a great deal of time on any of them. Very little attempt at any kind of real psychological insight on the impact crimes of this nature have on a child. Overall an interesting topic but disappointing in execution.
I, like many liberals, have struggled since the election of Donald Trump to understand just how someone like him can appeal to so many people, how people can accept, tolerate, even approve of his behaviour - his racism, his sexism, his lack of empathy, his stoking of aggression and division, his demagoguery, his lack of respect for the norms of the democratic process. How can people think like this? I wonder. How can anyone approve of this? I just cannot understand it.
That division, the lack of ability to scale what Hochschild calls the ‘empathy wall', is the subject of this book. Using the issue of environment pollution as her keystone concept, something that affects the lives of everyone, not just left and right, blue and red, she spends time deep in Louisiana oil country, getting to know the residents of small communities often blighted by pollution. Her keystone concept is an attempt to understand how people can be made ill, forced from their homes because of pollution caused by massive corporations and yet still support the rolling back of environmental protections, the gutting of the EPA, the cutting of funding for programmes designed to improve environmental quality.
Is she successful? I don't know. Her reasons for why these people think the way they do, her ‘deep story' of feeling left behind in the queue for the American Dream, of other groups like women, African-Americans, immigrants cutting in the queue ahead of them, certainly seems to resonate with her subjects. But personally I just can't get past the lack of understanding of white privilege in her subjects, their lack of understanding that the American Dream was always a myth, that they're ‘entitled' to nothing, that they are focusing on what they feel they're owed rather than the privileges they already enjoy, that the only reason people like them are as far ahead in the queue as they are is by actively trampling on those below them throughout history, that all their privileges is on the backs of those they disdain now (said African-Americans, immigrants, women etc).
And the shortsightedness, the voting against their own interests, the willful blindness to the evidence in front of them - the fact that in the long run, the damage their elected officials will cause will impact them just as much as everyone else who didn't vote for it - I can't get past that enough to have empathy with these people. Or I empathise. But I still think they're wrong.
Elizabeth and Leicester, the Virgin Queen and her ‘sweet Robin', are one of the great romances of history, immortalised in history books and Hollywood movies alike. Most people have some awareness of their relationship: the great queen and the man she loved but could never marry; the age-old question of whether the Virgin Queen truly was a virgin and whether she and Leicester were lovers...
Unfortunately much of what is known about their relationship is little more than myth, fabricated over the years to fit the romantic narrative. There's the youthful passion, the drama of the death of Leicester's wife, the on-off-on-off nature of their entanglement, Elizabeth's dangling of foreign marriages, Leicester's covert relationships with other women... No wonder Hollywood loves Elizabeth, enough to make several movies about her and Leicester.
In this book Sarah Gristwood sets out to get to the truth, charting their decades-long relationship whilst cleaving as close as possible to documentary fact. It's a thoroughly enjoyable read, well-written, comprehensive, and with an ever so slightly sentimental style that suits the topic.
However, apart from the enjoyability of the read, as history it concerns me. The author's training as a journalist and not an historian is obvious. The lack of foot or end-notes in this book particularly - I have no problem with history aimed at the lay reader but when an author is writing on a topic as smothered in historical supposition and amorous gauze as Elizabeth and Leicester, the very lack of that academic supporting evidence only weakens the impact. A section on sources and further reading does not quite suffice to make me feel I could rely on this book with any certainty. In large part this book is based on other secondary sources, with little primary material and nothing new in the way of historical research.
Read any history of World War 2 and it'll probably finish up in the summer of 1945, maybe with VE Day, perhaps with Hiroshima and Nagasaki. There might be an epilogue chapter, a wrapping up that encompasses Nuremberg, the Marshall Plan, the Iron Curtain and the Cold War. But what is rarely addressed is what this book is entirely concerned with - the sheer staggering scale of the numbers of dislocated and dispossessed people, the refugees, the homeless and the stateless, some innocent, some not, some Jewish but most not.
Determined not to repeat the mistakes of the First World War, when disease and famine had stalked a devastated Europe and in many ways contributed to the chaos and disruption that gave rise to Hitler, the Allied powers tried to cooperate in strategies to stabilise conditions and repatriate the many millions living in camps across Europe. A civilian agency was created, UNRRA (United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Agency), to take over responsibility for the DPs (displaced persons) from the military and bring some humanity and compassion to the treatment of these shocked and traumatised masses.
But what to do with them was a logistical challenge for the Allies every bit as daunting as the war itself. Saving only America, most of the Allied powers had difficulty feeding their own populations, let alone the DPs and the starving Germans; indeed, it was in this period that for the first time bread began to be rationed in Britain. Many of the DPs were ethnic Germans expelled from newly-Soviet Poland and Czechoslovakia; many others were citizens of those latter countries who refused to return to homelands under the communist boot. The vast majority of the Jews wanted only to emigrate to Palestine, and this the British government would not permit. Many others wished to emigrate to an America that did not want any immigrants at all. Other countries would take only DPs who could work, stepping in to industries desperate for labour in the push to get economies moving again - and yet few DPs were in a physical condition to labour in fields, mines or forests.
It was a logistical, administrative nightmare, and it largely on the logistics and administration that Ben Shephard focuses. Whilst there are voices of the DPs themselves in these pages, it is very much more a tale told from the perspective of the helpers, not the helped. There was never enough money, never enough personnel, or trucks, or blankets, or shoes, or food, never ever enough food for people who have starved near enough to death. And UNRRA was subject to the inherent poor organisation, petty bureaucracies, infighting, racketeering and corruption that plagues any altruistically-minded body set up in a hurry and staffed by well-meaning but inexperienced volunteers.
UNRRA did its best, but it could have done more, had it been properly staffed, funded and organised. But alas, altruism on the scale we are talking here is very rarely without an element of self-interest on the part of the governments funding it, and even the very best of humanistic endeavours can be overturned in a heartbeat by politicians concerned first and foremost with their own constituencies and parochial concerns. American senators and congressmen were particularly guilty of this, until they began to see an anti-communist benefit to it.
This is an excellent book, a real eye-opener, that ably fills in the gaps between the end of WW2 and the opening of the Cold War. It's also gives a fascinating insight into the role that the camps and the DPs played in the creation of the state of Israel, and also the creation of the concept of ‘the Holocaust', which as Shephard points out, was not considered by contemporaries and those who survived it, as we ourselves see it now. One definitely worth a read for anyone interested in what comes after the cataclysm of war...
I dithered over my rating for this book, because on the one hand I did really enjoy it, but there were a few things that I felt hindered giving it a higher rating. For example, every so often a bit of Australian slang creeps in, which really should have been dealt by the editor - anyone else know that ‘stoosh' means ‘fight', for example? It also wasn't as comprehensive as I would have liked, either - being very much a mainstream, history-lite overview of Britain's health during WW2.
It takes a thematic approach, each chapter being devoted to a different aspect - blood banks; rationing; finding alternative home-produced sources for previously imported medical products; combating communicative diseases in circumstances where people were so heavily packed together, such as air raid shelters; how Britain's mental health would hold up to the prolonged tensions of war; how all levels of society, from Scouts to the WI, were involved in scouring the countryside to supplement medical and food supplies. But it's all very interesting, and in many ways my complaint about its lack of comprehensiveness is evidence that I wanted more of a good thing!
However, it does neglect some aspects of the health situation that perhaps wouldn't have painted such a rosy picture - it's all very well talking about how well rationing worked in ensuring a healthy populace, but one shouldn't neglect the role the Empire played in making up the home-grown shortfall or how placing the British fighting forces and home front at the forefront of the food queue exported shortages elsewhere in the Empire. 3 million people died of starvation in Bengal whilst the British population experienced at worst a lack of choice, but never severe hardship and were never even close to starving.
So in many regards, this book is better than my rating reflects, but with the issues mentioned I felt I couldn't give it any higher.
I picked up this book hoping for a biography of John Charles Frémont, a man whose exploits and explorations I'd come across numerous times in other biographies, other history books. An explorer, a presidential candidate, a Civil War general - a fascinating figure for a biographer! What I got was a book very much more about Frémont's expeditions than it really was about the man himself - which wasn't entirely disappointing, don't get me wrong, because what is here is an excellent read. It just left me feeling the book was incomplete.
A good two thirds of this book is devoted to Frémont's four expeditions into the American West, the explorations that made him famous and earned him the nickname ‘Pathfinder'. The moniker isn't entirely accurate: Frémont very rarely ventured into completely unexplored territory and usually relied on guides or trails already established. He was, however, the first to map and survey these regions, and it does not diminish or obscure the very real hardships and dangers of these expeditions. Tom Chaffin devotes a great amount of detail to recounting Frémont's journeys, and herein lies one of my major criticisms - I only wish he had devoted this amount of time to the rest of Frémont's life.
Frémont's candidacy for president in 1856, the first Republican candidate, is dealt with in one chapter. Frémont's experience as a Civil War general is also dealt with in one chapter. In fact, Frémont's entire life after 1854, some 36 years, is covered in little more than 80 pages. I appreciate that some episodes in a person's life are more eventful than others, and biographers will inevitably dwell more of these - but as a reader I wanted to learn about Frémont the man, about his entire life, and so to skip over almost half his life in just a few short chapters leaves me disappointed. As I said, this is a book more about Frémont's expeditions than him - and in that regard, it's a fine book, well-researched, well-written, engaging. But I wanted more.
The First World War looms large in our collective cultural memory, arguable even larger than the Second World War, though more people died in that conflict. This has been ascribed to a multitude of factors - the pointless, the waste, the static pace, the fact that the ‘War to End All Wars' only served to give rise to another, the disappointed promises, the harsh peace. But regardless of the reasons, WW1, and its ‘Lost Generation', stands as one of the colossal tragedies of the twentieth century, remembered every year, mourned, vowed to never be forgotten.
What is curious, however, is that there was another colossal tragedy, another episode of futility and helplessness and waste, that killed many more people, ten times as many, and did more to decimate the young and fit and contribute to the ‘Lost Generation' than the War did. And yet this event has been forgotten, or at least ascribed to the footnotes of history. Every schoolchild learns about the Great War; many schoolchildren learn about the Black Death. But many people know nothing at all about the Spanish Flu outbreak of 1918, that infected one in five people around the globe and killed somewhere between 50 and 100 million people, some 3-5% of the world's population. One would think that such a cataclysm, an event that may well have been the biggest disaster in human history, would embed itself in the world's memory just as deeply and painfully as a war, and yet...not.
In this engrossing and thoroughly interesting book Laura Spinney traces the course of the influenza epidemic across the globe, rather than focusing on any particular country. She explores the origins of its name, Spanish Flu; debates the three competing theories on where it originated; explains the epidemiology of the influenza virus itself and how it evolves and adapts; details that attempts by science and medicine to understand and treat the virus; and explores the accounts of those who experienced it firsthand, many painful and heartrending to read, of entire families, entire communities wiped out.
It is curious that an event that shaped the world as much as, perhaps arguably more, than the First World War, has been so neglected by history. I remember looking for a book on the Spanish Flu a few years ago, before this was published, and being surprised at how few titles were on the market. This is a welcome addition to a thin field, and serves as a fine overview to get anyone started. I'm on the hunt for more books on this topic now - so authors, get writing!
This final volume of Blanche Wiesen Cook's three-part biography of Eleanor Roosevelt disappointed me. Not so much for the writing or research or approach, all of which are just as good in this book as the previous two, but purely for reasons of content.
For all intents and purposes, Cook finishes up with FDR's death in 1945 - the remaining 17 years of Eleanor's life are dealt with in a single relatively short epilogue chapter. Yet arguably some of Eleanor's most important work was done in these years, such as her work with the UN, human rights and civil rights, and these were the first years of her life when she stood independent and free to act as she chose, not bound by family ties or political expediency. And bear in mind that the entirety of the rest of the book covers just six years otherwise, from 1939 to 1945. So why skate over 17 years of Eleanor's life in one chapter?
How did Eleanor mourn and move on after FDR's death? You won't find that here. How did she cope with moving out of the White House? What did she do with the apartment she had bought for FDR's retirement? No idea. Cook mentions that in her later years Eleanor was devoted to Dr David Gurewitsch, but who he was and how they met remains a mystery in this book. The death of Eleanor's lifelong secretary and companion Tommy is dealt with in a single sentence. Who was with Eleanor when she died? What did she die of? What was the funeral like? What was the reaction to her death? Nothing. There's enough material here for an entire other volume, but it's as though Cook got bored of her subject mid-way through this book and just couldn't be bothered anymore.
When a woman's biography effectively finishes with the death of her husband, even when she lived close to another two decades after him, it's hard to escape the implication that her only significance came through that husband, rather than her own merits. This seems like a betrayal, almost, of everything Eleanor Roosevelt stood for. Eleanor Roosevelt was standing up for causes, fighting for social justice, for the poor and the oppressed, long before FDR became President. She was so much more than just FDR's wife, America's First Lady. She was important in her own right, earned the respect, authority and affection bestowed on her by her own actions, not's FDR's. This is supposedly a biography of her life, not her marriage, so to effectively stop writing in 1945 and just ‘sum up' everything that came after is immensely disappointing.
This book, the second volume of Blanche Wiesen Cook's three-part biography of Eleanor Roosevelt, covers the first five years of her role as First Lady of America, from 1933-1938. It's quite a brief interlude in a life, considering the first volume covers the first forty-plus years of ER's life before the White House, and the final volume covers the next thirty-odd years of ER's life up to her death in 1962. But in many ways these five years were the central years of ER's life, setting a pattern and pace that would define not just her but America itself.
Eleanor Roosevelt had always been a champion of the downtrodden and oppressed, had always been a voice for the voiceless, a champion of freedom and liberalism - but FDR's election to the Presidency, and the desperate poverty and hardship of the Depression, gave her a position and an authority to really make a difference, and she took full advantage of it. As a result of FDR's disability, Eleanor was his eyes and ears across the country, and she took that initial role and made it something entirely her own.
She disagreed with her husband on many occasions, publicly and vehemently at times, and scarcely ever felt constrained by his position or politics to self-censor herself. One notable exception was in international affairs, and Eleanor was noticeably silent on the issue of Germany's treatment of the Jews. Yet she had other ways of making her feelings known, and she was incredibly active on behalf of organisations championing tolerance - whether that was combating anti-Semitism, racism, sexism, anti-communism. At times this drew an immense amount of conservative criticism, yet by the close of 1938 Eleanor was outpolling FDR in terms of approval ratings.
These years were also defined by Eleanor's intensely close relationship with Lorena Hickok, a newspaper reporter, who became one of ER's closest friends, perhaps more. Certainly their letters display an intense love, tenderness and passion for one another, but as with so many aspects of ER's internal emotional life much is still left a mystery. But Wiesen Cook handles the potentially controversial issue with great respect and delicacy, and it only serves to illustrate just what a complex, fascinating personality Eleanor Roosevelt was. Roll on the final volume!
It's a rare individual for whom I could stand to read a three-volume biography but I think Eleanor Roosevelt deserves one. Her life was so full, so involved and dynamic and controversial than any less would simply not be doing her justice. In many ways Eleanor's life can very easily be divided into three parts this biography takes - her early life and developing political awareness, her years as wife of one of America's most prominent politics and subsequently President, and the years after FDR's death, as the grand dame of American politics.
She is still the most controversial and talked-about of First Ladies, loved and loathed in equal measure, who in many regards set the tone for all the First Ladies who came after her. Before her First Ladies were ornaments, hostesses, who rarely involved themselves in politics. But afterwards, a political role was expected for the First Lady - indeed, it is no doubt because of Eleanor Roosevelt blazing the trail that First Ladies now have their own offices and chiefs of staff and are expected to get involved in women's issues. Well, apart from Melania Trump, but let's not go there...
However, this book deals with Eleanor's life up to FDR's election as President, some 40+ years. They were not easy years for Eleanor, but with the benefit of hindsight it is clear that the trials and tribulations were necessary in order to shape the woman she became as First Lady. It is hard to see how else a woman born into such privilege and wealth could have emerged as the great feminist and radical champion of the poor and downtrodden during the Depression years.
I've really got no complaints or criticisms for this book, and in many ways it's difficult to review each volume in isolation, because each forms part of the whole. My one tiny nitpick is the author's decision to refer to Eleanor both as Eleanor and ER - it's hard to really see the logic of this. It's not as though there were multiple other Eleanors in her life that might cause confusion, and Cook uses both terms in the same paragraph and even sentence. It doesn't detract from the hugely enjoyable read, but it's a curious choice and one I couldn't help but find jarring at times.
I've long been intrigued by the theory that Edward II did not die in Berkeley Castle, that he lived on in secret and may well have ended his days in Italy as a hermit. It's one of the ultimate what-ifs of English history. Ian Mortimer is the most prominent advocate of this theory and has mentioned it in several of his books, so when I came across this title, an entire book devoted to exploring the evidence, I was very keen to read it.Sadly, it was a tremendously disappointing read. I have read [a:Kathryn Warner 8367732 Kathryn Warner https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1434111630p2/8367732.jpg]'s previous biography of Edward II, [b:Edward II: The Unconventional King 22674550 Edward II The Unconventional King Kathryn Warner https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1404821786s/22674550.jpg 42180045], and thoroughly enjoyed it, so I don't know what went wrong here. I found this book a slog from start to finish, poorly written and edited, repetitive, threadbare in places and overwhelming with unnecessary detail in others. At times I was almost despairing when faced with yet another paragraph full of ‘Edward may have crossed paths with A, who was sister of B, who was the daughter of C, niece of D, whose first husband's sister's brother's grand-nephew was King of Aragon' and so on. Thinking I'm exaggerating? Chew your way through this paragraph, as an example.“Luca's brothers Federico and Carlo and his nephews were also acknowledged as Edward I and II's kinsmen, but his father Niccolo, Count of Lavanga, and uncles (who included Ottobuono Fieschi, elected Pope Adrian V shortly before his death in 1276) were not. The family connection tro the English royal family therefore must have come from Luca's mother, whose name was Leonora or Lionetta but whose family background is uncertain. Manuele Fieschi, a cousin of Luca but not descended from Luca's mother, was thus not related to the English royal house; neither was he Luca's nephew, as some English historians have claimed. Luca Fieschi also claimed kinship to Jaime II, King of Aragon in Spain (born 1279, reigned 1291 to 1327), and the only family relationship which would connect him to both Edward II and Jaime II came via the houses of Savoy and Geneva. Edward I's mother Eleanor of Provence, Queen of England and wife of Henry III, was the daughter of Raymond-Berenger V, Count of Provence, and her mother was Beatrice of Savoy, daughter of Thomas, Count of Savoy (Edward II's great-great-grandfather) and grand-daughter of William, Count of Geneva. Ian Mortimer has suggested that Luca Fieschi's mother Leonora/Lionetta was a daughter of the Italian nobleman Giacomo del Carretto, marquis of Savona, Noli and Finale (d. 168), who was a grandson of William, Count of Geneva and the first cousin of Edward II's great-grandmother Beatrice of Savoy, and was also related to Jaime II of Aragon (another descendent of William, Count of Geneva.) Giacomo del Carretto's daughter Brumisan addressed Edward I as her kinsman in 1278. Del Carretto's second wife Caterina da Marano (c. 1216/18-72) was one of the many illegitimate children of the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II (1194-1250), and was the full sister of Enzo, King of Sardinia and a half-sister of Konrad, King of Germany and Manfredi, King of Sicily. It is possible, though still only speculative, that Giacomo del Carretto and Caterina da Marano had another daughter, Leonora or Lionetta, who married Niccolo Fieschi and was the mother of Cardinal Luca Fieschi. If Luca was indeed to the grandson of Giacomo and Caterina, he would have the third cousin of Edward I ( they would both be great-great-grandsons of William, Count of Geneva) and the third cousin once removed to Edward II. Luca's Malaspina nephews Manfredi, Bernabo and Niccolo, who may have been in charge of Edward II in Italy on the cardinal's behalf, would have the former king's fourth cousins. The family link would make Luca a second cousin of Jaime II of Aragon, who was a grandson of Manfredi, King of Sicily and great-grandson of Emperor Frederick II, and also his third cousin once removed via comment descent from William, Count of Geneva. There was certainly a blood connection between Luca Fieschi and his brothers and nephews, and Edward I and II; although one of Edward I's great-uncles from Savoy married a Fieschi woman, a mere marital connection would not be enough for the Kings of England to address several of the Fieschi men as their relatives. Neither Edward I nor his father Henry III ever addressed any of the Fieschis before Luca and his generation as their kinsmen.”Lost the will to live yet?The evidence itself is compelling, what little of it there is. A letter in a French archive from a very well-connected Italian to Edward III, that may or may not have been sent. A reference in a letter from the Archbishop of York that states Edward II is alive well after the date of his supposed death. And the execution of Edward II's half-brother, the Earl of Kent, for rebelling against Mortimer and Isabella on behalf of his supposedly-still-living brother. It's thin evidence, to be certain, but so much evidence from the fourteenth-century is - the evidence of Edward II's death in 1327 that historians have relied on for centuries is equally as tenuous.So did this book convince me? No. I'm still open to the possibility - there is no such thing as historical fact, after all, merely a long-standing, plausible and largely accepted argument; and the evidence that argues for Edward II's survival relies on just as many suppositions and assumptions as the evidence for his death. The Fieschi letter is certainly curious and requires explanation, if one proceeds from the position that Edward II did die in 1327, as does Thomas Berkeley's statement to Parliament that he did not know Edward was dead until 1330, when supposedly he died in Berkeley's own castle. And just because something seems extraordinary or implausible doesn't negate its truth - history is chock full of extraordinary and implausible occurrences. If DNA evidence or some other irrefutable document appeared proving Edward II died years after his supposed murder in 1327, I'd be delighted, largely because of its implausibility! But on the basis of this book, I am still waiting for an historian who can spin me a convincing enough tale...
I'd come across references to Robert Smalls in quite a few books on the American Civil War in the past, so I was familiar with the bare outlines of his story and keen to learn more. When I came across this book I jumped at the chance to read it, since by and large historians of the period have been content to focus on the bigger picture and more famous names, and passing references to Smalls are often all one can find.
And what a remarkable story it is - born into slavery, he freed himself, his wife and children and a number of other slaves by stealing a steamship and sailing it right out of Charleston Harbour under the gaze of sentries and the batteries on Forts Sumter and Moultrie, before delivering it straight to the Union ships blockading the harbour. He and the other slaves were awarded the prize money from the sale of the ship, and Smalls joined the Navy, becoming pilot and later captain of that self-same ship. The prize money gave him a start in life and he prospered during the war, ending up buying the very house in which he and his mother had been enslaved and later even giving shelter to the mother of the man who had owned him! He became a politician and served as one of the very first African-American congressmen, for South Carolina.
So it's a hell of a tale, and it's well told in this book, for the most part. But it left me wanting more, as it only deals with Smalls' life during the four years of the Civil War. The years before Smalls' remarkable escape and the years after the Civil War are dealt with in little more than a chapter, and in order to fill a book there is a certain amount of repetition and needless ‘padding'. I appreciate that the title of the book pretty much spells this out: the ‘escape from slavery to Union hero' but I hadn't expected that to be literally all this book is concerned with. It seems such a wasted opportunity, when his exploits during the war were only a part of what made Smalls such a remarkable man.
I believe this is currently the only book dedicated to Smalls still in print, other than a few children's books, and that's a travesty and a shame - and only exacerbates my disappointment in this book, which I otherwise thoroughly enjoyed. A man like this deserves a full-length biography, deserves a host of them. Historians, take note!
The bubonic plague outbreaks of 1900-1908 are a forgotten footnote in San Franciscan history, lost amidst the drama of the city's early Gold Rush years and the trauma of the great earthquake of 1906. Yet for those eight years, the city was in the grip of the United States' first outbreak of plague, which affected almost all life in San Francisco, exacerbating existing tensions and highlighting smouldering issues of racism, xenophobia, greed, and ignorance.
This is largely the story of the public health officers who sought to understand and combat the disease, but at the same time it serves as a history in microcosm of the prevailing issues of the era - racism and xenophobia against the Chinese immigrant community, an already-insular community turning inwards upon itself in an effort to protect its sick and dying, cultural misunderstandings and lack of compassion towards an ‘alien' culture, misguided public efforts to quarantine only resulting in more prejudice and anger, a lack of medical understanding of disease transmission, the greed of tradesmen and merchants overcoming the public good.
It was a fascinating read, particularly when focusing on the early years of the outbreak, when the majority of plague cases were centred on Chinatown. Rather than investigate the causes and carriers of plague, as later public health officials were to do so successfully, the early efforts focused on quarantining the entire Chinese community, blaming poor hygiene, living conditions and different customs of the Chinese for the outbreak of disease and dangerously scapegoating an already much mistreated and vilified community.
Indeed, the legacy of those poorly handled, ignorant efforts to contain not the disease but its victims are with California still. Because of the political backbiting, greed of tradesmen and merchants, wilful denial and lack of support for the public health officials, the opportunity to contain the spread of the plague was lost. The bacteria spread from urban rats to country wildlife, and beyond and beyond. Even today plague exists across a broad swathe of the American South and West, largely borne these days by the ubiquitous prairie dog. The US is among the seven countries in the world that continue to report plague cases every year.
Any biography of Bobby Kennedy is very much a study in contrasts, a Tale of Two Bobbys, one might say. There is the early Bobby, McCarthy's attack dog, his brother's hatchet man, hard-edged and ruthless, not a man to be crossed. And there is the later Bobby - the liberal poster child, the man who embodied the hopes and dreams of a generation, the man who reached out to the poor and neglected groups on the margins of the American Dream.
So how to account for these two Bobbys? How to account for this revolution in personality and politics? For John Bohrer, the key to Bobby's transformation lies in the shattering, shocking murder of his brother Jack. Bobby became the symbol of the Kennedy legacy, the keeper of the flame, the heir to the New Frontier, automatically placed in unwilling opposition to the man who actually succeeded JFK in the White House, LBJ. Exiled from the centres of influence and power he had so long been used to occupying, Bobby struggled to find a new position for himself, a new identity and focus for the life that had so long been at the service of his brother.
In many ways Bobby's turn towards public service, striving to make a difference on a small scale, the ‘tiny ripples of hope', where he had been so used before to strategy and political manoeuvring on a national scale, shouldn't have come as a surprise. As JFK himself said years before, “Just as I went into politics because Joe died, if anything happened to me tomorrow, my brother Bobby would run for my seat in the Senate. And if Bobby died, Teddy would take over for him.” JFK probably didn't anticipate dying as early as he did, and Teddy had already taken his Senate seat for Massachusetts - but the principle remains. Bobby talked about moving to England, becoming a professor, writing a book - but he was a Kennedy, and politics was always the only option.
The revolution was in the scale. For the first time Bobby became exposed to the issues of the everyday, race and poverty and neglect, in a far more intimate and personal way than he had as Attorney General. He was no longer responsible for an entire nation, just the state of New York, and his immersion in local and regional affairs opened his eyes and changed his perspective. His famous speech in South Africa is indicative of that - not grandstanding, not major forces of history, not dominant personalities leading the way.
“Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.”
The Bobby Kennedy in the centre of power could never have made that speech, never realised that the powerless could make a difference. It took his brother's death and his own loss of identity and focus to realise that. His own revolution was only just beginning in 1968, and what it could have accomplished we will sadly never know.
Although you don't often hear it amidst all the enduring myths surrounding the American Revolution, more than anything else it was a civil war. The ‘rebellion against tyranny' was far from universal, and historians estimate as many as one third of the population of the colonies remained loyal to the Crown. It was a war of colony against mother country, brother against brother, friend against friend, and sons against fathers.
And nowhere was this more true than in the home of the most famous American, both at home and abroad, of his day: Benjamin Franklin. Franklin's deeds on behalf of the fledgling United States are too well known to go into detail here, but perhaps few know the story of Franklin's only son, William, governor of New Jersey and loyal to the Crown to his death. William Franklin lost everything as a result of his loyalty to his King - his family ties, his wife, his home and property, his position. He was imprisoned in squalor and isolation for over a year, and his father lifted not a finger to help him, even keeping his grandson, William's own son, from his father. William had chosen his path, and Benjamin Franklin was careful for his own position: a turncoat son was not looked upon fondly in the violent and treacherous days of the revolution.
But whilst Benjamin Franklin's deeds and exploits before, during and after the Revolution might be legend, he did not come across as an especially appealing character in this book. A genius, perhaps; a polymath, certainly; charming, charismatic and a tab hand at diplomacy, for sure. But he also came across as self-important, pompous, selfish and petty. His neglect of his wife certainly doesn't cover him in glory, and his persistent accounting of debts his son owed him, even into death, come across as spiteful. Reading this book I couldn't help but feel that the most important thing in Benjamin Franklin's life was Benjamin Franklin. And yet it is clear William adored his father, yearned for his love and approval, and never gave up hoping for the reconciliation that would restore them to the closeness of his youth.
I've read a number of Daniel Mark Epstein's books recently, most notably his book on the Lincolns' marriage, and I've yet to be disappointed. He has a particular knack for sympathetic portrayals of less than sympathetic characters, never judging or vilifying, yet somehow softening their flaws whilst still avoiding sycophancy or concealment. He made me feel for Mary Lincoln in his book about the Lincolns, and he made me care far more for William's fate than one might have expected. Indeed, I came away from this book with a far better opinion of William Franklin than I did of Benjamin. Perhaps that's partly a result of my being British - I'm not going to think badly of a man fighting against the Revolution and for the Crown, whereas an American reader with a different historical and cultural background might.
I would imagine that most people don't have a clue that the numbering of our Henrys is technically out by one - that there was a missing Henry III, crowned, anointed and yet somehow forgotten, and all the subsequent ones should go up a digit. Henry IX just doesn't sound right, does it? And yet, ‘tis true.
The Young King, son of Henry II, was crowned king in his father's lifetime - the only occasion in English history, although it was a relatively common practice on the continent - and should therefore be remembered in the regnal history of England as Henry III. But because he died young before his father, who was succeeded by the Young King's infinitely more famous brother Richard, known as the Lionheart, and because of the circumstances of his death (in rebellion against his father, no less) he has somehow slipped from the remembrance of history and is not included in any lists of the kings and queens of England that you'll find in textbooks and on classrooms walls.
Matthew Strickland has done superlative work restoring the Young King to history - it's hard to think of a more authoritative and well-researched biography of a figure so hitherto neglected. What little remains of the Young King in chronicles and documents tends to be relatively hostile - dying young in the midst of a rebellion against his father, and not the first either, will do that for a reputation, with no opportunity for years and decades of wiser, more responsible behaviour to correct the youthful mistakes.
And yet, as Strickland ably documents, the Young King was not entirely at fault - what is a king without a kingdom to do, after all? Henry II's greatest mistake was anointing his son with a crown but no authority, whilst his younger brothers may have lacked the crown but had lands and titles in which to base themselves and reward their followers. This fostered resentment among the brothers and frustration and aggression in an anointed king with no means to grow into the role he was expected to one day fulfil.
In Strickland's biography, the Young King comes across a far more appealing figure than his brother Richard or indeed his father Henry II - charming, amiable, open-handed, less aggressive and argumentative. It is one of the great what-ifs of history - what if the Young King had succeeded his father? He was already married, and his wife had borne one child, who died shortly after death, but would no doubt have born others. Would Richard the Lionheart still have become king? And at his untimely death, John? Without John, perhaps no Magna Carta? Alas, we shall never know, but that is no reason to forget what might have been so entirely as we have.
Royal women led lives at the very epicentre of the events that make up the history of this country, but all too often their stories are neglected. Partly, it's true, due to a lack of the records and documentary evidence that form the backbone of history, but partly because their lives are deemed less interesting, less influential, and therefore not of relevance when telling the story of the great events that shaped the history of England. And yet a women like Cecily Neville, mother of kings, a potential Queen of England herself, a figure at the very heart of the Wars of the Roses, connected by marriage or blood to almost all the major players - what a fascinating insight she could give us!
Cecily's life spanned some of the most tumultuous and significant decades in England history - born during the reign of Henry V, mere months before Agincourt, she was a granddaughter of John of Gaunt, great-granddaughter of Edward III, wife of Richard Duke of York, mother of Edward IV and Richard III, grandmother of the Princes in the Tower and Elizabeth of York, great-grandmother of Henry VIII. Her husband claimed the throne himself, and Cecily was within inches of becoming Queen of England before the Wheel of Fortune turned and Richard lost his life (and his head) at Wakefield Bridge, only to see her eldest son Edward IV triumph and become King. It's hard to think of another figure so utterly interwoven through these events, who saw them all and survived to tell the tale.
So Cecily is a figure ripe for biography, and Amy Licence does a decent job - as well as anyone can with such a dearth of resources. We can never know what Cecily truly felt or thought, how she really reacted to events that tore her family apart, how much influence she had on her sons, how much of a hand she herself had in Edward IV's winning of the throne from Henry VI, Richard III's usurpation of the throne. What did she think about the death of Henry VI, or George Duke of Clarence, or the Princes in the Tower? How did she feel seeing her granddaughter Elizabeth of York wed to the man who had invaded the kingdom and killed her son Richard III? We can never know, and to her credit Amy Licence does not overly speculate, in these areas at least. But, as with all historical biography to a greater or lesser extent, there is a large amount of speculation and supposition in this book - particularly as it relates to Cecily's belief in her family's royal destiny and her role in Richard's usurpation.
Licence also spends the majority of this book detailing Cecily's early life as wife and mother during the Wars of the Roses - understandably so - but the later years, particularly those during the reigns of Richard III and Henry VII are somewhat skated over. Richard III's reign is dealt with in one chapter, Bosworth barely lasts a chapter. And there is scarcely anything regarding what to me may be the most interesting chapter of Cecily's life - how she lived under the reign of Henry VII, having outlived her husband and all of her sons, their plans of a Yorkist dynasty come to ruin, and a man with a far lesser claim to the throne as King of England in their place. But alas, we shall never know...
There is a term in tort law known as ‘proximate cause', which effectively means an event closely enough related to an outcome resulting in an injury that it can be deemed the cause of said injury. Not necessarily directly, or even immediately obviously, but in law a narrative must start somewhere and end somewhere, and both of those somewheres must be identified and pinned down. A story must have a beginning and an end.
The concept does not exist in criminal law, as Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich so beautifully and movingly demonstrates in this book, so impossible to pin down and describe. In criminal law, the outcome, the injury is all that matters. The murder, in this case. A little boy was murdered. A man named Ricky Langley did it. Why the man did it is important, but not as important as establishing that he did, beyond a reasonable doubt. What made him do it, where his story starts, what made him who he was, what made what he was, the proximate cause of the murder he committed - in a criminal narrative, that is not important.
But in life it is. We want to understand why. Not just the who and the how, but the why. What makes a man kill? What makes a paedophile? Where does it start? For the author, the why becomes even more important and even more personal because of her own history of sexual abuse. What makes a paedophile? Did it start somewhere in their own childhoods? Did someone hurt them? Does it start before they're even born, in the history of their parents? How far back do you go, to understand what makes a person, what lies behind their actions and impules? It's important, Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich states at one point, the proximate cause of things, because “it's where you want to start the causal chain. Once you decide that, you have decided the whole meaning of the story.” Where does it start?
This concept, the proximate cause of things, links the murder of little Jeremy Guillory and the author's own childhood sexual abuse - her history colours her view of Jeremy and Ricky and it is in exploring that that she comes to term with her own past, her own experience with the harm of paedophilia. It's a book about a crime, yes; it's a true crime narrative - but it's more than that, much more. It's a personal memoir that becomes so interwoven with the crime that it's impossible to separate, the way our lives and our emotions do intertwine, the way we only ever experience the world around us through the prism of our own lives. And it makes for a moving, heartbreaking, horrifying and utterly unputdownable read. I felt at times reading this that I wasn't breathing, that too hard a breath would dispel the delicate structure of this book. And that something so beautiful can come from such an ugly beginning, wherever that may be, is a triumph.