Category: Books

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Book Review: Amazons by Adrienne Mayor.

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Length : 536 pages
Publisher: Princeton University Press (9 Sept. 2014)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0691147205
ISBN-13: 978-0691147208
http://press.princeton.edu/titles/10302.html

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Amazons-Legends-Warrior-across-Ancient/dp/0691147205

It’s a colourful book, yellow with orange arrows symmetrically shooting towards a little Amazon on a horse. In feel it has a sort of magazine consistency. It feels like many American Books I’ve owned, robust and floppy. It’s the type of book that can take punishment, a proper reference book in other words, you could curl its covers back when reading it, leave it splayed and do what you might I feel sure it would recover. Just as easily it can be cared for and will look attractive on a shelf. So much for the cover.

Diodorus wrote that after the Trojan War the great histories of the Amazons, the fierce warrior women of ancient legend, had become so storied as to become nothing but fictions. It is startling, some might say, that ancient historians would write something like this. Arguing as it does by extension that these clans of savage women from the dark fringes of the civilised world, and indeed factual scholarship, were actually real, and not just some invention to spice up heroic poetry and song.
But they did. To the ancient Greeks, and practically most everyone else, the Amazons were or had been real people, part of history to be recorded and passed down. That men such as Diodorus and Herodotus believed in their reality proves that it wasn’t just crackpot writers who thought that Amazons belonged to history as well as to literature and art.
That isn’t how we see them today though. To most people an Amazon is a sort of a feminine ideal, a figment or a creation, and as such the amount of actual scholarship regarding them in an historical or archeological sense is nonexistent. True there are many books about, or that mention the myth, just like Heracles, or Jason in terms of Historiography they are a real part of Ancient Greek and Roman culture. But no one has really taken them seriously enough to devote a proper study to them, which is a great injustice, as anyone who reads Adrienne Mayor’s book will soon realise.

Diodorus really hit the nail on the head. Today the Amazons are so enmeshed in legend and myth that whatever history there was needs to be surgically seperated in order to understand it. And that is where Mayor’s Encyclopaedia Amizonica comes in. A treasure trove of historical, legendary, archeological and historiographical information, a practical Rosetta Stone of Amazon fact and fiction. With the renewal of the Wonder Woman Brand I feel certain that more people will be asking, “So were Amazons Real?” And thankfully now, we have this book to tell us resoundingly, yes!

However the actual reality is more complicated than that. Because essentially amazons of mythic lore were a correlation of practically everything that was known about real warrior women who lived on the Steppes of ancient Scythia. A Greek geographical name tag for a great sweep of land stretching from the Balkans, across Ukraine and Southern Russia, down into the Caucuses and into Turkey and Iran. This Scythia was a land of nomads, horse people, scraping out an existence more ancient and mysterious than Greece civilisation itself. Indeed what Greeks would call Scythians formed part of a much wider, “Nomad Belt” that stretched from Europe to Mongolia and was composed of people and cultures that had adapted to survive in the endless grass prairies and deserts of the steppes, who knew the mountain paths and who were the terror of the civilised world for centuries.

It is no mistake that death rode a pale horse in the book of Revelation. The wild and warlike nomads would constantly strike terror into all the great empires of the lower, more fertile geographic sphere. The Persian empire, that vast melting pot was indeed formed out of a group of horse warriors. It was a collection of horse cultures that brought Rome to its knees, and it was the nomads of Mongolia that conquered the greatest continuous land empire ever seen.
Amazons tells us about these people, the women of Scythia, the real, the remains and the myths, all is examined. The author takes us right to the Hemp rich atmosphere of their campfires, were they share stories of raids, hunts and life with the men of their tribe, illustrating their stories with the tattoos that encircle their arms, that seem to dance in the firelight and come alive as more fermented mares milk is drunk.
Using the legends and the rich archeological evidence uncovered from their homeland Mayor gets to the roots of those legends and reveals some fascinating surprises. Not least of which is how Central the amazons were to Greek culture. They named cities after them, they propped up reputations on the strength of defeating them, they fantasised about them. But the difference between then and now is that the Greeks knew that they were real people, whereas today we don’t.

The real amazons Mayor tells us didn’t look like the scantily clad Greek Ideal, they wore long and beautifully decorated robes and distinctive pointed hats, they may well have invented trousers, and they fought and hunted alongside their men. I can’t actually even begin to say how great it is to have a book like this, because it’s exactly the kind of book I like. Not one that just dismisses old stories as being too tall or made up, but really gives them the benefit of the doubt and tries to correlate and reconcile them with hard evidence. This is brilliantly achieved in Amazons.

The format is encyclopaedic, but it is well written and not dry. There is a great emphasis put on highlighting the freedom, gender neutral role and apparent equality that these women enjoyed & as a result were endowed with by even Greek writers. True unless you are an archeologist or interested in the field, undoubtedly some will find the exhaustive examination of burial finds somewhat dragging. Also because a wide sweep of Amazon legends and stories are examined here, some will find some more interesting than others. By that I mean, those interested in Ancient Greece might not be so bothered with the Amazons of Asia. But to really get to grips with the subject it’s fascinating to read the parallels between the eastern and western Amazons. And it seems that every culture has their own versions, even if they don’t call them Amazons. Indeed the word Amazon here is used loosely to describe both the rigid mythological clans of savage women, and also to refer to any sort of woman warrior within a balanced society. Remember the Nomad belt stretched from the Black Sea to Mongolia, and women capable of fighting and defending themselves is just the most practical solution for a nomadic way of life, and would give such a clan or tribe a huge advantage over their enemies. Reading about the horsewomen of the Middle East and China was no less fascinating to me.

This in many ways is an exhaustive study, every facet that could be thought of has been included, and very little left out. From Ancient Greece right down to the Roman Mithradatic War, and across to ancient China, this is a photo collage of the place fighting women hold on our imaginations, and the truth behind the image. In movies and books today, audiences much prefer a strong, independent woman that can defend herself and pretty much kick ass, to the damsel in distress. That is a preference that goes right back to the Amazons. That the Amazons today are probably ranked up there in popular imagination with Cowboys and Pirates, speaks to the impact they had on the minds of the ancient world. Imagine the effect of seeing these raiders riding through your country, as a Greek used to demure matrons and maids, seeing that the barbarian horde was not just made up of male warriors, but perhaps up to a quarter or more of the fighting force were women, it was a culture shock that would not fade quickly. These women, who killed and hunted and rode, and who would look a man square in the eye without shame and talk to him as if he was just anyone else, held an endless fascination for the Greeks, just as they do today.

Josh.

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Book Review. The Last Royal Rebel by Anna Keay.

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480 pages. Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing (19 May 2016)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1408827824

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Last-Royal-Rebel-Death-Monmouth/dp/1408827824

The Duke of Monmouth was one of those figures, so seemingly common in the 17th century, whose life was made for novelists. However the interpretation of his life has varied greatly since his death. Much as if it was a work of imagination he is by turns useless, conniving or a paragon, and as such tends to be able to be crafted into whatever a given writer requires.

I know of him best as the leader of the rebellion that carried his name. Having already read a book about the last Jacobite Rebellion, it seemed almost fate that a biography of Monmouth should appear before me. In feel and look it is very similar to Bloomsbury’s other rebellious publication mentioned above. The same fine production standard is in evidence here, with a good selection of images to accompany the text. In both cases the central protagonist, the Prince in question, stares out from their respective dust jackets. The wigs are different but the purpose was much the same, they both had a claim to the throne.
The differences between Charles Edward Stuart, who is the only other contender to the title of “Last Royal Rebel” and his relative James Scott, Duke of Monmouth, who the author grants this title, were at once acute and similar. And we can allow ourselves a little comparison for amusement. Charles Edward was born with everything, he had a good education, his parents lavished him with whatever he wished, groomed from birth to fulfil a specific destiny. However he was terribly naive, immature and totally inexperienced with handling people. He had the Jacobite advantage of knowing he could depend on a small but important power base in Scotland, which almost guaranteed an experienced, if small army of effective fighters to support him.
Monmouth on the other hand was born with little. To begin with his father and mother were never married, and mother used him as leverage to maintain a standard of living. This prompted his father Charles II, to have him kidnapped, principally to shut up his embarrassing mother. Uneducated until he was about six, Monmouth was lucky enough to become closer with his father than any other living soul, and as a result was quickly lavished with titles, riches and, interestingly given modern conceptions of 17th century parenting, affection.
Monmouth at first showed little aptitude for anything other than soldiering and his military career coincided with an interesting early entente with France, while Charles II and Louis XIV fought the Dutch with rather mixed results. Unlike his Jacobite relative, Monmouth was a talented officer, he was also humble and quite good at summing up his own strengths and weaknesses. All in all, despite his lack of education and shaky beginnings by the 1670s he seemed to present a picture of a perfect Prince. And that was the problem.

Charles Edward was seen as a similarly perfect Prince, but he was legitimate if exiled. Monmouth was illegitimate, but actually he was a much more attractive package than the mercurial Bonnie Prince Charlie. Both were barred from the throne, but Monmouth never really seems to have plotted to attain it while his father was alive. Some people had other ideas however. Charles II’s brother James, Duke of York was an out and out catholic. Multiple times the Whigs attempted to remove him from the line of succession, and it was a more than popular idea that Monmouth would fill the gap admirably. Immensely popular with the people, but all too often a victim of those who would use him, due to his father’s irritating ambiguity regarding his birthright, Monmouth first fell out with James, his uncle and then his father and he had therefore essentially lost everything by the time Charles II died. A sense of duty, a sort of moral obligation and an undeniable gullibility allowed him to be talked into becoming the figurehead of a proposed and rather slap dash rebellion to unseat James, whose son it was feared would be raised a Catholic.

Militarily speaking Monmouth was capable of commanding a successful invasion. Logistically however the odds were stacked against him. Always popular with the people recruits were never a problem, but he was unable to draw any political support from the nobility. Also unlike later Jacobite rebellions which could count on the fierce fighting qualities of the Scottish highlanders all Monmouth could bring to the field were ill trained agricultural labourers and townsmen. No match in a stand up fight with the professionals of the Royal Army.

Anna Keay has provided a very welcome modern biography of the Duke of Monmouth. And in it she wishes to make several things clear. Monmouth was the last royal Rebel, and by that she means not the last man of royal blood to try for the throne, but the last of the accepted royal family. It is a narrow distinction in honesty. The successive Jacobite princes were accepted as King by many more people that Monmouth was, and by far more of the nobility. Monmouth had been part of the inner circle, but he was exiled like the Stuart’s and as such the assertion lacks some metal.
Another point stands on firmer ground. Monmouth by his presence caused a reaction that paved the way for the Glorious revolution. Without a Protestant alternative to the Catholic succession, the ground could not have been prepared for William and England’s second partial constitution.
The biography is a sympathetic one, certainly Monmouth has his share of critical biographies, and this one focuses mostly on his better points, which as I’ve said are fairly considerable. His greatest flaw, seems to have been his neediness, his filandering and the issue of often being lead around by the nose by whoever would show him kindness or support. Indeed if I’m not mistaken Royal Rebel strays into sentimental territory now and again, but it creates a very accomplished image of the man in question.
To say that it is well written almost goes without saying, indeed it’s quite lyrical in places, imbued with a humour not out of place with the subject of Charles II’s court.
This will be a must for all lovers of the 17th century and I enjoyed it immensely.

Josh.

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Book Review: The Cultural Revolution by Frank Dikötter.

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Hardcover: 432 pages
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing (5 May 2016)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1408856492

Red, yellow and Grey. Those are the colours that shine out from the cover of The Cultural Revolution: A People’s History by Frank Dikötter. The Green of the People’s army is missing but the Cultural Revolution didn’t start with the regular army. They are fitting colours. Fashion designer Guo Pei was born in 1967, while the revolution was at its height. In an interview with the BBC she said. “The Beijing of my childhood memory is very different from today, It was basically grey. The clothes people wore were mostly grey, there are not many colours. I remember clearly that I wanted to wear a yellow dress when I was a child, but my grandmother told me that normal people are not allowed to wear yellow.” Normal people? What is that one asks. Frank Dikötter has the answer.
That young monochrome woman, clenched fist upraised, her face firm and set forwards, who glares confidently out from under the title, was what you might consider one of those normal people. And red was the only colour that mattered (unless it was a hallowed mango,) the red of the armbands of the Red Guards, to whom the girl belongs, who were inflicted on the country by Mao Zedong to destroy all links with the past. It began with Khrushchev really, the day he denounced Stalin. On that day Communism was shaken to its core, and in China, sinking under the weight of state sanctioned famine, it got people thinking. Thoughts soon turned to words, fed by those in authority. Words would play a huge part in the revolution, every shift in gear was lead by a new slogan.

“Destroy monsters and demons”
“Remember the Class struggle”
“Sieze power”
“Making revolution is no crime”

These are just some of the slogans that Frank Dikötter highlights as the triggers and perpetuations of the next phase in 20th century China’s unrelenting series of disasters. All of which indeed stem roughly from the fall of the last Emperor and the rise of the nationalists and communists. The subsequent triumph of Mao and the attempt to usher in a new enlightened age, tried to change a centuries old culture and society in three years. “I’m afraid we Chinese never manage to live more than 50 years without some terrible cataclysmic event.” Dr. Tao Tao Liu of Wadham Colledge Oxford told Michael Wood in his recent documentary The Story of China.

Mao’s legacy is convoluted. Revered still by many in China, were in some quarters a great nostalgia exists for the Communist days, which is something akin to the western longing for the time depicted in Happy Days and evidenced in the popularity of retro diners. In an interview with the Radio Times, Joanna Lumley, spoke of the nostalgia for the old days she found as a tourist while filming her series on the Trans Siberian Railway.
“In Beijing we visited a Chairman Mao-themed restaurant. We had little Mao flags to wave, and it was partly an amusing thing to do. But I could see in the old people’s faces that they longed for those days back again because it was safe, and I thought that was fascinating. What Mao brought them was the same thing Stalin brought people in Russia – security… You had a home, you had a job. It might not be the best home in the world or the best job, but you were safe… If he wasn’t going to kill you, Big Uncle Joe Stalin or Chairman Mao would look after you. We look at things with our western eyes, but you’re confronted with the reality, which is that for them it’s far more complex.”
Open mindedness is applaudable from any visitor, or indeed outsider however safe is hardly the word to describe the events of this book. There is a stark and unstable reality when you scratch the surface, Celebrated Mao Biographer and former Red Guard, Jung Chang was at first pro Mao, yet became disillusioned after his death. She said to the Guardian “In the mad rush of high-speed growth people did the most devastating thing – they destroyed nature.” She asked why anyone would want to follow “…the road of the man of was responsible for the deaths of well over 70 million Chinese in peacetime.” Indeed as it turned out the revolution had two faces.
Dikötter’s picture of what China went through between 1962 and 1976 shows the calamity in a new and personal light. The Cultural Revolution, and the experiments that preceded it set back China’s economic prosperity, which the world so admires today, decades, and took the future away from millions. It is staggering to learn of the damage done not just to families and individuals but the economy, education system and agriculture. Whole generations have been scarred and affected by it, yet there is a trend in China and in other places across the Far East. India, Japan and China, (not least some countries in the West) to redraw history into more palatable terms, rubbing out cultures, atrocities and crimes to suit new and worrying agendas. Books like this then, though harrowing when they confront you with such blatant acts of inhumanity, told and described in terms of the people who had to endure them are vital. When Mao unleashed the Red Guards, and the country slipped into popular unrest, followed by the intervention of the military and the subsequent distancing from Maoism as the country clawed back its future, he created an indelible chain of misery and memory that Dikötter has tapped into, along with the hitherto restricted party documents, this is the flesh and bones story of the cultural revolution.
“The Cultural Revolution is not a mass movement. It is one man with a gun manipulating the people” said Wang Rongfen, a Foreign Language Student, quoted in the book, who saw too much of Nazi Germany in Mao’s China. It was a movement of chaotic proportions that bred more chaos. The Red Guards were students, who often in the 20th & 21st centuries have been catalysts of change and upheaval. I guess at the time they figured they were making China great. But the Red Guards really did their country a huge disservice. In the eyes of the world, Mao and his minions did inestimable damage to the reputation of China, not just as a nation but as a people, degrading them to an almost sub human cypher of senseless cruelty. Such brutal inhumanity fostered by the government and perpetrated by students and schoolchildren makes for grim reading. The list of what could get you denounced, imprisoned, murdered or executed was long and strange. The wrong haircut, the wrong clothes, the wrong shoes, the way you spoke, the furniture in your house right down to the colours you wore, such as a yellow dress. Everyone was some kind of specification, an ist, or a devotee of some kind of ism, and the most confusing thing one discovers here is that the tables turned and the current shifted, so that it is hard to keep track of who is on who’s side. It was hard enough at the time to figure out what was happening. 50 years on it is still bewildering and confusing. So many factions coalesced into roughly two large opposing parties, each convinced the other is counter revolutionary and each professing loyalty to Mao, eventually all kept in check by the military but the waters had been muddied. “It all seemed like an act with each one imitating the other” Ken Ling of the Red Guard is quoted as saying, describing a rally for the chairman, and in a way that fits much of the entire movement. Devotion to Mao was the only safe option for those trying to avoid denouncement, family ties were actively attacked in order to replace the chairman as the focus of loyalty. The Cultural Revolution rejected China’s ancient history & sought a new culture. Somehow Mao had managed to convince a whole generation to evince a great loathing for everything China had once been & in doing so almost destroyed its own soul. The longest uninterrupted civilisation in history was brought to the brink of utter ruin. All so Mao could dodge the blame for the failure of the Great Leap Forward, and sweep away those who might denounce him a la Kruschev after he was gone. He used his students to crush the “thinkers” who questioned him, and to cement his brand of communism on the country for ever. The method was simple, destroy the memory of the past and you only have the future, and as Dikötter notes, a common motto in the Soviet Union, appropriated in China was “today is our tomorrow”.
Yet there is more here than catastrophe. From a philosophic point of view there is will and struggle. For as always in China, disaster has been met by its people with courage. In this case, after pushing things too far with Britain, and the threat of war with Russia it was realised how weakened the country was. It is heartening to read how traditional ways of life were secretly safeguarded. No less how ordinary people began playing a game of duel identity, and in so doing managed to keep their values and heritage and yet still survive undetected, though never free of fear. Perhaps it is this resilience to constant and frightening change, which alongside the unspeakable horror of the events, shines through this book, that is the most positive testament of the Cultural Revolution. For indeed it was the people who dragged the country back onto the rails when it all went down the spout. As it is put in the Romance of the Three Kingdoms “It is a truth universally acknowledged. That everything long united will fall apart. And everything long divided will come back together again.” Indeed the historian Sima Guang agreed that “the periods of good order and harmony have been short in the history of China”. More simply observed by the Tang Poet Du Fu, “Nation shattered. Mountains and river remain.” Life goes on.
This book puts voices into people’s mouths, people who have long been considered mindless automatons, it shows that indeed people were not impressed by the one party state, but were helpless to do anything without being denounced and had to wait for Maoism to implode before they could bury it. Timed to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the beginning of the revolution, this is a timely, dramatic, and enlightening piece of research and an excellent finale to a memorable trilogy that will remain a basis for future scholars and readers for years to come.
Josh.

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Book Giveaway.

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THIS PROMOTION IS NOW ENDED. If you would like to buy the book, check out my review where you will find a link.

https://adventuresinhistoryland.wordpress.com/2016/05/05/book-review-the-cultural-revolution-by-frank-dikotter/

Bloomsbury has given me the opportunity to give away two copies of this great new book to lucky readers. If you’d like the get in the running, just leave a comment either here, on YouTube or Twitter and I’ll announce winners on or around the 5th of May when the book is released.

“Acclaimed by the Daily Mail as ‘definitive and harrowing’ , this is the final volume of ‘The People’s Trilogy’, begun by the Samuel Johnson prize-winning Mao’s Great Famine.

After the economic disaster of the Great Leap Forward that claimed tens of millions of lives between 1958 and 1962, an ageing Mao launched an ambitious scheme to shore up his reputation and eliminate those he viewed as a threat to his legacy. The stated goal of the Cultural Revolution was to purge the country of bourgeois, capitalist elements he claimed were threatening genuine communist ideology. But the Chairman also used the Cultural Revolution to turn on his colleagues, some of them longstanding comrades-in-arms, subjecting them to public humiliation, imprisonment and torture.
Young students formed Red Guards, vowing to defend the Chairman to the death, but soon rival factions started fighting each other in the streets with semi-automatic weapons in the name of revolutionary purity. As the country descended into chaos, the military intervened, turning China into a garrison state marked by bloody purges that crushed as many as one in fifty people.
When the army itself fell victim to the Cultural Revolution, ordinary people used the political chaos to resurrect the marked and hollow out the party’s ideology. In short, they buried Maoism. In-depth interviews and archival research at last give voice to the people and the complex choices they faced, undermining the picture of conformity that is often understood to have characterised the last years of Mao’s regime. By demonstrating that decollectivisation from below was an unintended consequence of a decade of violent purges and entrenched fear, Frank Dikotter casts China’s most tumultuous era in a wholly new light.
Written with unprecedented access to previously classified party documents from secret police reports to unexpurgated versions of leadership speeches, this third chapter in Frank Dikotter’s extraordinarily lucid and ground-breaking ‘People’s Trilogy’ is a devastating reassessment of the history of the People’s Republic of China.”

So if you have a UK or Ireland address My review of the book will be going up on the 5th, good luck and happy reading.

Josh.

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Book Review: Camden 1780 by David Smith.

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Author: David Smith
Illustrator: Graham Turner
Short code: CAM 292
Publication Date: 21 Apr 2016
ISBN: 9781472812858
Format: Paperback
Number of Pages: 96
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Camden-1780-annihilation-Gates-Campaign/dp/1472812859

The Battle of Camden occupies an odd place in the history of the American Revolution. It lies in a spot that is not difficult to scratch, but rather it lies in between places that draw more attention. After the drama of 1777 the intervening years between Valley Forge and Guilford Courthouse are never ignored but are understandably not something that many authors prioritise.

And why should they? Monmouth Courthouse was an instructive battle, but it achieved very little and was a stalemate. The low level fighting is difficult to incorporate into a narrative about big events. And the beginning of the Southern campaign was astonishingly successful for the British, which given their later total failure makes it a subject that is best covered as a prelude to the successes of General Greene, Morgan and Washington.

This book covers in pleasing Osprey detail the most successful British campaign of the war. The totality of the victory at Charleston and Waxhaws secured South Carolina at a stroke, and General Gate’s riposte ended in an equally telling defeat at Camden which left the entire south dangling by a thread. Yet there was hope, as the author shows us, while the British were effective at beating or destroying whatever field army they came across, and reducing whatever fort they besieged. They proved woefully ineffective at pacifying and securing their new conquest, this instability would lead to some unforeseen and costly choices that would effect the course of the war in America.

Because the battle of Camden was a simple affair deployment wise, and small by European standards, the 3D map seems almost like overkill, the one on the siege of Charleston is good, but I think putting the entrenchments and fortifications for both sides in red is a little confusing. 1D maps accompany to show geographic and campaign movements and in this book the art is supplied by Graham Turner.

Turner is best known for his work in the late medieval period, yet he has illustrated quite a few horse and musket books. Of late the American Wars have been a subject he has been able to return to a good few times, and in all of them he brings his trademark realism and skill. Here we have 3 full page spreads (some Don Troiani’s litter the rest of the pages) a simple composition showing an artillery officer viewing the bombardment of Charleston from the top of a gabion. A scene full of action, noise and movement depicting Banastre Tarleton’s horse going down during the decisive charge at Waxhaws. And a nice tight shot of the culminating action at Camden as De Kalb’s right flank Continentals become cut off and surrounded.

Topographical details of the battle are well covered by the author who seems to know his subject intimately. As is proper he treats Waxhaws as what it was, instead of the view presented by the one dimensional testimony of patriot propaganda, and is open minded about whether Tarleton could actually have done anything to control the battle after the order charge was given. By that token he does not outright condemn the almost pitiable General Gates, but sensitively shows us things from a contemporary perspective. Nevertheless while we can try to understand Gates’ motives, for the supposed victor of Saratoga, there is no real defence.

There is a very good further reading section which I have recently made use of and to sum up I was very satisfied with it and would definitely recommend it for those wishing to get some more detail on this grey area of the American Revolution. I can already say it compliments by ARW Osprey collection nicely and will serve as a good preface to their anticipated volume on the Battle of Cowpens.

Josh.

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Book Review: Princes at War by Deborah Cadbury.

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Hardcover: 432 pages
Publisher: Bloomsbury Circus (9 April 2015)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1408845245
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Princes-War-British-Familys-Private/dp/1408845245
Princes at war tells the story of the British monarchy from the abdication of Edward VIII to the death of George VI. More specifically it looks at the internal problems that the royal family had to deal with during this time. As the name suggests it focuses on the four sons of George V during World War Two. Principally it is driven by two of them. The two Kings. George VI or “Bertie” and the ex King, Edward VIII or the Duke of Windsor.
Deborah Cadbury merges together much of the recent scholarship, and deep research on the wartime royal family into one cohesive narrative, taking what is essentially the full cast of Edward and Mrs Simpson and The King’s speech and then tied that in together with all those documentary story lines that we are familiar with from ITV, Channel 4 and BBC, every time the Queen has a birthday. What emerges is the story that comes after the Abdication and after the Speech, which are the two stories that of course dominate the story to the royal family at this time.
A recurring theme is the rift caused in the monarchy by the abdication crisis. How Windsor distanced himself from the family by marrying Wallace Simpson. Then how the war irrevocably widened the gap, and ultimately how the Monarchy survived the conflict.

This is a cohesive and lively narrative of the Royal Family at war. A period of great significance to the monarchy and the nation itself, which has a great bearing on the longevity of the institution. It is dramatically written and flows well. Though it is true that I could not help but notice something of an over fondness for the use of hindsight now and again, one can’t help but be impressed at the great care and detail the author has put into it. Nor can one miss that a main thrust is the pros of having a constitutional monarchy.

In all three great emphasis’ emerge from the book. He first (very common nowadays I must admit) focuses upon the speech impediment George VI and how he felt this alone disqualified him from kingship and how he and Lionel Logue worked throughout his reign to correct it. It is surprising nonetheless how much this storyline is given space by the author here, not least how supposedly unfit his impediment made George VI feel.
The second is examining, or certainly giving a good stir-up of the evidence against the Duke of Windsor that implicates him of treason. There is no doubt that the case built up against the Duke of Windsor is a damning one here and precious little in his defence. Most people only know of him as far as the abdication but the continuing story paints a rather more troubling picture. Here we find not the noble prince but the weak willed lead man, a petty, gullible, vain and callouss man. Wallace Simpson a sort is nothing short of a black widow, much hinting at gold-digging are not far away, a selfish and self absorbed prima Donna interested in nothing but attaining rank and position at the cost of the greater good, and having bewitched her prince continued to lead him around by the nose, while both courted the protection of the Germans.
She almost comes off worse. As a schemer a intriguer bent on the throne. The book raises a highly arched eyebrow at them. And indeed the case presented leaves at best the fact that the Duke of Windsor was a dopey defeatist and at worst a weak willed sellout.
As a consequence the third emphasis emerges as something of the family drama, a royal Dallas one might say, the love to hate role is given to the playboy prince. The Duke of Windsor remains almost a central antagonist to the hero figure of the King. Meanwhile the two other brothers do their bit, but play very much second fiddle to the others. As of course does their wives, Queen Elizabeth is there in the background as the smiling encouraging cypher, in fact we emerge with a much fuller picture of the Duke of Kent’s Wife than the Queen Mother. It is with this I dare to add that perhaps due to constraints of space I found the main characters drawn as fairly one dimensional, which sadly due to my relative inexperience with the sources here I cannot properly explain. What I will say is that the Duke of Windsor was flawed, but I find the casting of him as an almost pantomime villain, troubling.

I must admit my almost total ignorance of the “Was Windsor a traitor” debate, which fuels much of the book that is not taken up with King George’s stolid performance, and his interaction with Winston Churchill. This therefore has made me tread warily with how much I took to heart. It is said that ignorance is bliss but I might add that a little knowledge, as well as going a long way, is also sheer torture when you are confronted with a wealth of possibly controversial information, in a narrative form, that you have no way of putting in perspective alongside the other arguments.
There is no smoke without fire, and given the whacking great clouds this book sends up there must have been something fishy going on in the Windsor Camp, most people agree to this. Certainly Windsor was not exactly the popular romantic figure he was imagined as. Properly speaking it clarifies that the Germans weren’t so much interested in George to broker a peace, but Windsor, yet I am still not entirely convinced.
However the door is left propped open. And I personally am left with giving him the benefit of the doubt as there is no conclusive proof of treachery. It is probable that Windsor’s instinct was for peace at all costs and that peace would have required him to treat the Nazis with an open mind and a friendly demeanour, which in itself would have been disastrous for Churchill. In fact it may well still be the same noble sacrificing prince of the abdication that shines through here. The act of abdication was after all an act of self interest of national interest. Certainly for the rest of his life he pandered to every whim his wife wished, and fought for her to be raised to an HRH even in the most insensitive moments. That much of what he did was probably then to do with love would seem to support the very cold fairly one dimensional view of Wallace Simpson, and others, that is presented here.

This then is the story of the Royal Family at War, it is perhaps a touch too polarising and not as wide ranging as one first expects, yet it does provide an insight into the collective effort of the male members of the royal family, their struggles, failures, losses and successes, personal and public during the most trying time in British History and in large shows us why Britain’s monarchy survived into the modern age.

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Book Review: The Forgotten Monarch by Matthieu Santerre.

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http://www.amazon.com/Forgotten-Monarch-Franz-Joseph-Outbreak-ebook/dp/B01CT0PD50/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1457964372&sr=1-1&keywords=The+forgotten+monarch

File Size: 593 KB
Publisher: Sainte-Ursule Books; 1 edition (March 15, 2016)
Publication Date: March 15, 2016
Sold by: Amazon Digital Services LLC
Language: English

Not a day ago I was asked to explain some of the reasons why Europeans went to war between 1745 and 1882. One of the common reasons I sighted was Dynastic interest. It was with some kismet perhaps that only a few hours had gone by before I was asked to review this book.

The most arguably devastating weapon ever made was a fairly commonplace pistol wielded by an obscure assassin in a street in Sarajevo in June 1914. This gun through a chain of events would trigger the machine guns a’rattling and the field guns a’roaring. Yet in the gap between that shot and then first battle was filled with letters and talking, it did not so much directly start the war, as it caused the crisis that prompted the decisions that started it all. It set the train in motion and although this belligerent locomotive, with death as the engineer, seemed to ride smoothly from station peace to station war, there were not a few stops in between that could have rerouted it or indeed derailed it.

In this book Matthieu Santerre forcibly argues, aided by a no nonsense bullet point style that suits the perimeters of the work well, that one of the key decision makers of the crisis was the Austro Hungarian Emperor, Franz Joseph. It is commonly understood that WW1 was fought against Germany, but Austro-Hungary was actually the catalyst that brought the world crashing down in 1914. Largely ignored by history Franz Joseph was actually at he heart of the fateful decision after the attack at Sarajevo.

Readers today will understand better than other generations how an act of political or religious violence directed in one direction can expand to engulf events with alarming speed. The author is at pains to explain that the Emperor here had warded off several descents into war in years previous, as the final arbiter of his country when it came to war, Franz Joseph was central to the outcome of the crisis, yet war was not a foregone conclusion, nor was it a snap decision.

Santerre begins by explaining the former and current academic views regarding the start of the war, this is ably done, he also wisely asserts that no historical work can be entirely devoid of bias, yet he makes his case clear when he says that he is not there to lay blame on Franz Joseph in any way, any kind of moral judgement is out of the question here as his aim is to replace the Emperor to the spotlight that he does seem to deserve.

I will admit that I am so out of the loop in terms of the debate of who did what in 1914, that I would be completely unable to give any sort of opinion on whether Franz Joseph deserves to be central to the play. Yet the author here lays out a convincing argument that to me echoes other instances of central players getting lost in the footlights.

The author ably constructs and then defends a course of events that begin with the infamous attack, to the search for options, to the agreed course to demand redress and the follow through. Franz Joseph’s motivation is clearly outlined and also how he kept his options open until the last, as he was very soon fully aware that military action might well endanger the peace of all Europe. Yet as we discover to a man like the emperor the Sarajevo incident was personal, and as the fateful events of that Summer took their course, it can reasonably be said that the great powers were watching Austria for their queue.

Yet although this would seem to condemn him at that point World War was not foreseen. The author demonstrates that until 3 days before the fatal ultimatum expired he had only decided to risk war, rather than being decided to embark upon it. Yet in the end having I think made his point, Santerre sensitively leaves the decision about whether or not to condemn Franz Joseph to the reader. Presenting a clear, concise but readable case for the emperor to be considered the principle decision maker in the road towards Serbian intervention. Therefore giving us a firm basis of fact with which to view the subject.

Although the tone throughout is terse and businesslike, I found the final chapter (there are 7) very touching. I think this is a useful work, that will be invaluable to anyone wishing to understand the roadmap of how Europe went to war in 1914. As it sheds light on a shadowy corner of the story, and in plain terms shows us why the days of monarchical control, based upon often very personal motives, that were connected to the good of the nation by the given monarch’s ancestral house, were numbered. And hammers home loud and clear that the awesome responsibility of guiding a nation, very often lay not upon the concept of divine rule in which rested the intertwined relationship between national identity, a ruling dynasty and the monarch, but very often on the shoulders of a very human man.

Josh.

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Book Review: Benjamin Franklin in London by George Goodwin.

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Hardcover: 384 pages
Publisher: W&N; First Edition edition (11 Feb. 2016)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0297871536
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Benjamin-Franklin-London-Americas-Founding/dp/0297871536

It is gently witty, it is cooly erudite it is in a word delightful. I will make no bones about it this book has confirmed to me, and will confirm to anyone else’s suspicion; more than ever, what made Benjamin Franklin a great man. The front cover shows one of my favourite images of Franklin, depicted in 1767 in a striking blue coat by David Martin and behind him is William Marlow’s view of Blackfriars Bridge and St Paul’s. The publishers have made a very nice product, and a sturdy one too, given the sometimes high standards of toughness I often expect from my books.

I don’t know that I realised quite how much I liked it until I got to page 117 (of the hardback). Unexpectedly I reached the bottom of the page that talked about his honest and open relationship with his wife, and his sometimes odd way of expressing it, and what I read next just krept up on me so that by the last word I was smiling, and a book that can make you smile is a book you must read.

“I fell in love with it at first sight; for I thought it looked like a fat jolly dame, clean and tidy, with a neat blue and white calico gown on, good natured and lovely, and put me in mind of – somebody”

Caught up as I was with absently considering the realities of what calico cloth looked like I read the last sentence with unguarded clarity, and instantly, an invisible hand snapped its fingers and 250 years instantly melted away.

This is the British life of America’s founding father, and it may come as a surprise to some that at some point every American had a British life. Yet if we really want to understand the American Revolution we need to try to get under the skin of the people of those times. We need to realise that America as a country did not exist in 1755, 1763 or indeed in 1776. This book as well as telling us about London and Benjamin Franklin is able to show us a deeper reason behind the old concepts of America against tyranny, for freedom’s sake. The colonies had reached a point by which they needed to either become closer to Britain or break away.

Benjamin Franklin is therefore the perfect conduit for us to see this time, a time when the Americans, who as yet thought themselves merely an extended form of Briton, reached out to become more so, yet refusing to surrender the rights that they had enjoyed as a separated entity for almost a century. And George Goodwin is an excellent guide. It is particularly enjoyable to read of events like the Boston Tea party not first hand from the American shore, but as it arrived in London. Through the eyes of Franklin and his associates, who were working hard to forge a closer union with the mother country, we see the political wrangling that occurred over the sudden colonial problem Britain was left with in the wake of the materially successful yet financially bruising 7 years war.

As well as that we get a picture the Benjamin Franklin who dreamed of a pan British partnership that included both the mother country and America. Despite this he was disillusioned with the queer prejudice he found against America in Britain, and embarked upon a perilous adventure to change the course of history. We follow him from his origins all the way to 1775 on a journey of self improvement, science, 18th century life and politics. By the end of the book we are left with the portrait of the man we recognise, and most often examine without much thought to the powers and forces that formed him.

The Book is very much charachter driven, and the people Franklin meet and interact with are a constant theme, thus the image selection is made up principally of fine portraits to give faces to the many names. In the rear section along with the usual things one expects to find back there, we get a nice list of Ben Franklin themed places to visit.

Because it shines a very personal light on British America, the book gives us a clearer understanding of the causes of the Revolution, and how we should look at it and the individuals who made it possible. This is a must read for those who strive to understand, not only the rise of Franklin, but the origins of America and indeed why it was possible for Britain and America to move forward afterwards.

Josh.