Late Victoria Holocausts by Mike Davis - 2002

Late Victorian Holocausts by Mike Davis (2002, 470 pages)

Posted in Observation of Indian Independence Day, August 15

If you have any illusions that British rule in India had any positive side,Late Victorian Holocausts by Mike Davis will totally relief you of that opinion.  I recently read a very good history of the Irish famines in which the author said in terms of sheer numbers it was not as bad as the famines in Russia and China in the 20th century but never mentioned  that there was a far worst famine in India famines  in the  1870s in which 60 million people died   I think what shocked me so much in this book was that it exposed the depth to which my view of history has been shaped by historians who see the process of "westerning" the world as progress.

 If I were to divide my five decades plus of near compulsive reading, one decade at least would have been devoted reading history but I was completely stunned by the revelations in this book.    Most people have no knowledge of these famines and those few who do, as Davis shows us, attribute them to bad weather.   Davis explains that very few of the great famines of modern  history were caused by a lack of food. It is caused by the poor not having the means to buy the available food.   (There was plenty of food to feed the Irish but social planners  thought giving out free food would encourage idleness. ).   Indian troops with English officers stood guard in front of huge granneries while millions starved.   Indian land was planted in cotton to be either shipped to the UK or sold in India.   This was part of the cause of the famines.  I know now Gandhi knew this.  Davis explains how El Nino weather patterns worked to limit the rainfall in India, China and Brazil.   He also talks of large scale famine deaths in the Philippines in the 1870s under Spanish rule (I live in the Philippines and have read many books on it history and this not in any of the standard histories..  The old ones were all written by Spanish clerics.)

Davis begins his book with a horrifying description of the famines.  I do not want to get into a "whose famine was worse" contest but my first impression was that that in India was worse than Ireland in terms of human suffering and in terms of the moronic and immoral way the country was administered by the British.   At the height of the famine Lord Lytton, ruler of Indian, and his staff were only concerned with not turning Indians into idlers by giving them free food.   When he did give free food to those in work houses, he gave less than was given in German concentration camps.   The rulers of Indian puppet states were all lackeys of the English and were often worse then them in terms of their indifference to human suffering.

Davis explains how much of the suffering was caused by the transition of India, China and Brazil from small subsistence farmer economies to capitalistic societies.   The famines had large scale social consequences.  The spawned the Boxer rebellion in China and created many religious cults.  Before around 1776 the average Indian peasant lived better than an English or European slum dweller or tenant farmer .   This began to shift as England took more and more of the resources of India.  

Davis expands history to explain how these famines brought in the poverty of the third world and contributed to their stagnation and decline.   Davis in one the most shocking parts of the book explains that from 1759 to 1947 when India was freed the per capita income stayed the same.   Before colonial masters took over, Indian and China had a good record in dealing with famines, better than Europe.   Under British rule in India there was a famine every four year, but in the previous two thousand years there was only one famine a century.

Davis shows how Indian was made to pay for the cost of the British army and when their planners tried to impose European systems of agricultural management the results were disastrous.

Davis backs up everything he says.    I was amazed by how much I did not know but even more amazed by how much of what I though I knew was wrong.    Davis also gave me lots of good reading ideas about Indian history.   He also talks extensively about famines in Africa and Brazil.

This a very serious book which destroys the myths prevalent in western societies about the causes of poverty in the third world.   I am quite sure that many western politicians including recent American presidents and presidential candidates subscribe to the idea that people in the third world are "poorer" than westerners because they are somehow lazy, decadent and in many cases non-Christian.   Davis also explains the terrible way China treated its people during the great leap forward period so he is not just a "left historian".

If you want to understand much of what is going on  the world today, this book is a good place to start.

My great thanks goes out to Max u for providing me with a gift card that allowed me to read this book.

Mike Davis
Named a Macarthur Fellow in 1998, he was also honored for distinguished achievement in nonfiction writing this past fall by the Lannan Literary Foundation. Professor Davis is the author of more than 20 books and more than 100 book chapters and essays in the scholarly and elite popular press. His scholarly interest span urban studies, the built environment, economic history and social movements. Perhaps his best know book, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles was named a best book in urban politics by the American Political Science Association and won the Isaac Deutscher Award from the London School of Economics and has been translated into eight languages

Mel u

The House of Rothchild: Volume 1:Money’s Prophets 1798 to 1848, by Niall Ferguson, 1999, 522 Pages

An Autodiactic Corner Primary Pick

The House of Rothchild: Volume 1: Money’s Prophets 1798 to 1848 by Niall Ferguson is close to essential reading for anyone into not just 19th century European history, banking history, Jewish history but much of 
European literature, especially that of Balzac (who fashioned an important character in La Comedie Humaine on James Rothchild), Emile Zola, and Marcel Proust.  

As Ferguson says in his introduction there is a great deal of web space devotrd to the Rothchild’s and it is all pretty much trash.  The Rothchilds are part of the fantsies of the right and the left.  Ferguson’s work gives the truth about the history of what by around 1850 was the richest family in the world. He explains how they became so wealthy in fascinating detail.  We learn of their government contacts, their private information networks, how governments received loans, how the bond market worked and also currency trading.  We learn about how laws dictating where Jews could live impacted them.  Rothchild sons were not permited to marry outside the family.

Ferguson explains how business was run and how politics impact the family.

Volume One covers from 1798 to 1848.  I hope to read Volume Two soon and will post more then.

This is an elegant history, extremely well documented.  My only quinble is that when Ferguson tells us that in 1845 the London Branch made a profit of £1,500,000 I cannot relate that to now.  You can find this through Google but I think a Conversion chart would have been helpful.

Niall Ferguson, MA, D.Phil., is the Milbank Family Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and a senior fellow of the Center for European Studies, Harvard, where he served for twelve years as the Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History. He is also a visiting professor at Tsinghua University, Beijing, and the Diller-von Furstenberg Family Foundation Distinguished Scholar at the Nitze School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, DC. 

He is the author of fourteen books. His first, Paper and Iron: Hamburg Business and German Politics in the Era of Inflation 1897-1927, was short-listed for the History Today Book of the Year award, while the collection of essays he edited, Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals, was a UK bestseller. In 1998 he published to international critical acclaim The Pity of War: Explaining World War One and The World’s Banker: The History of the House of Rothschild. The latter won the Wadsworth Prize for Business History and was also short-listed for the Jewish Quarterly/Wingate Literary Award and the American National Jewish Book Award. In 2001, after a year as a Houblon-Norman Fellow at the Bank of England, he published The Cash Nexus: Money and Power in the Modern World, 1700-2000.  More detail can be found at niallferguson.com

Mel u

The Red Prince: The Secret Lives of a Hapsburg Archduke by Timothy Snyder - 2010

An Autodidactic Corner Selection

The Red Prince:  The Lives of a Hapsburg Archduke by Timothy Snyder is a beautifully crafted work of biography by a leading American historian who focuses  on Central Europe and the Holocaust.  Prior to this Mel read his essential Holocaust studies, Black Earth:The Holocaust as History and Warning and Bloodlands:Europe Between Hitler and Stalin.

Wilhelm Von Hapsburg (born in Losing, Austro-Hungary 1895, he died 1948 in Kiev, Ukraine in a Soviet prison awaiting transportation to Siberia)

was among the last of the Hapsburg dynasty. The Hapsburg family ruled much of Central Europe from 1273 to 1926. He was a walking argument in favour of the end of rule by hereditary monarchs.

We are way behind on posting so I will just say I greatly enjoyed this book and let the publisher sum up the book.

“Part of the family that ruled much of central Europe since 1273, Wilhelm von Habsburg (1895–1949) came of age during the last 23 years of the dynasty's rule. Von Habsburg lived a nomadic and tragic life; he was a bisexual and a political chameleon (including a brief pro-Nazi period) who was implicated in a major financial scandal in Paris during the 1930s. But during WWI, he had become a fervent Ukrainian nationalist, and this became his life's one constant, culminating with efforts to help formerly pro-German Ukraine turn to the West at the end of WWII. As Yale historian Snyder (Sketches from a Secret War) shows, his efforts were futile; he was charged by the Soviets with spying and died in prison. Snyder hews closely to his subject, so that the complexities of 20th-century Ukrainian history sometimes get short shrift, e.g., he devotes only two sentences to the 1933 terror famine that killed three million peasants. Generally, though, this is an interesting biography of a man whose colorful life embodied many of the tensions that plagued Europe in the early 20th century.” - from the publisher 

Avant Bousweau 

Consultant Upon the legacy of the Austro-Hungarian Empire 

The Other Slavery-The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America by Andres Resendez

The Other Slavery-The Uncovered Story of Slavery in America by Andres Resendez (2016) should be on Reading list of anyone with a serious interest in the colonial era history of Spanish ruled South American, the Caribbean Islands and the western United States.  All teachers of history should read this book and all libraries that are able should stock this book.  It is a very illuminating account of what Resendez calls “The Other Slavery”, that of Indians, largely but not entirely by colonists from Spain.  He correlates this to transportation of Africans into slavery in much detail, as he knows this is what most will think about when they hear the words “Slavery in America”.  He estimated about four millions Indians were enslaved by the Spanish  colonists, as everything from sugar mill workers, silver and gold mine workers, House servants of all sorts 

beasts of burden, concubines (the Spanish came without women), and agricultural labourers.  Slaves were even used as foot soldiers in raids to acquire other slaves.

Slavery was widely practiced throughout Pre-Columbian America, which made it easier for the Spanish to enslave natives.  There were numerous variations of slavery, from outright chsttel slaves, to those sentenced as slaves for punishment to those in debt bondage.

Resendez tells us a full history of Indian slavery would require a book at least thirty times as long as The Other Slavery-The Uncovered Story of Slavery in America.  Instead he focuses on selected places and times detailing How slavery functiioned in a variety of social and economic circumstances.  The Spanish Crown was actually against the enslavement of Indians so we see the many ways the for from Spain colonists kept slaves, using The many loopholes in the regulations.

We get to know several leading colonial slavemasters, we go along on slaving raids, we learn the value of different types of slaves.  We also learn How slavery played a role in the very diverse Indian  societies.  Resendez takes us everywhere from the huge Mexico City area to small pueblos in what is now The American southwest.

Indians were often shipped for from home, I was shocked to learn of 1000s of Indians taken from the Carolinas to work in the deadly sugar fields on the Caribbean Islands, in the 1600s. Resendez in a fascinating page even talks about slavery as a pre-colonial part of Society in The Philippines.  

Indians societies were ravaged by European diseases to which they had no immunity, especially smallpox.  It is not possible to give exact numbers but Resendez says the combined impact of slavery and disease reduced indeginous populations in many areas to less than ten percent.  In Florida The death rate was close to 100 percent.  He tells about how the early Mormans looked at the Indians and spends a good bit of time in old California, showing us how Indian slaves labored but did not profit from the gold rush.  We learn how Indians treated their own slaves and traded in captured colonial children.  

Resendez takes us up to The American Civil War Era and in his very interesting epilogue talks about slavery in the 21st Century.

The Other Slavery-The Uncovered Story of Slavery in America by Andres Resendez is a very well constructed narrative, fully documented.  There is much more than I have mentioned in this book.  

I highly recommend this book.  

The author’s self description from his Amazon page

I grew up in Mexico City where I got my BA and worked in various capacities--the best job I ever had was as a historical consultant for telenovelas (soap operas). After getting a PhD in history at the University of Chicago, I taught at Yale, the University of Helsinki, and UC Davis. My latest book, The Other Slavery (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016), tells about the enslavement and trafficking of hundreds of thousands of Indians in North America from the time of Columbus to the late 1800s. I have also written about the dawn of European colonization as seen through the eyes of the last four survivors of a disastrous expedition to Florida in the 1520s (A Land So Strange--Basic Books, 2007); and another book that explores how Spanish speakers, Native Americans, and Anglo-American settlers living in Texas and New Mexico came to think of themselves as members of one national community or another in the years leading up to the U.S.-Mexico War (Changing National Identities at the Frontier--Cambridge University Press, 2005).

Mel u

Gay Berlin - Birthplace of a New Identity by Robert Beachy (2014, nonfiction)

Updated detailed Bio Data on Robert Beachy

A Highly Informative Session with Richard Beachy at The American Academy in Beflim

A delightful conversation with Robert Beachy on Gay Berlin

 Gay Berlin by Robert Beachy is a work anyone into the Weimar Period in Germany (1918 to 1933) must read and take seriously.  It is a very detailed well documented account of the open homosexuality of the period.  With state censorship relaxed there were open sex shows of all sorts in the nightclubs, sexual identities became blurred.  Berlin was the place where gay male sex tourists went for rent boys.  As Christopher Isherwood put it “Berlin is for boys”.  There were vast homosexual subcultures.  The streets were full of prostitutes of all sorts.  The activity ranged from scandals in the court of the Emperor to the back alleys of Alexanderplatz.  The classic novel of this period is Berlin Alexanderplatz by Alfred Döblin.  Some say as many as a third of Berlin women worked at least part time in the sex trade.  The police commissioner monitored these activities and more or less did not interfere.  It as still socially unacceptable for married men to have same sex relations so for the wealthy blackmail was a danger.

Robert Beachy details the start of scientific studies attempting to explain homosexuality.  The biggest concern was for men but lesbian relations also were openly practiced.  His thesis is that it was in Weimar Germany that the notion of an exclusively homosexual man was first articulated.  He suggests it was here where men and women first declared themselves gay.  

The Nazis used what was to them the extreme decadence of the Weimar period  as one of their “selling points”.  They suggested Jews had intentionally destroyed the economy of Berlin by hyperinflation to drive young men and women  to commit cheap sex acts with them.  

The question for serious readers and autodidacts is why was this period so productive of great art and literature. This is a huge question not touched much by Beachy.  I think the answer lies in the quote below.

“UNCHARTED LIVES is a fascinating study by gay psychotherapist Stanley Siegel and straight Newsday columnist Ed Lowe. This data is balanced with Siegel's own dramatic mid-life coming out story. When asked why such a seemingly disproportionate number of creative men are gay this was Siegel's response—" I think that because gay men live in a society that is hostile to them, because they are oppressed, have few role models, and in most cases have no legal rights or institutions that support and honor us we became extraordinarily inventive in the ways we live our lives. The process of become gay, of accepting one's sexuality, is a process of living an extremely original life. The apparatus of a creative life begins early, when we feel we are different in some way but have no language to explain the difference. Young gay boys feel that almost always and consequently they often isolate themselves or are isolated by the outside world. Isolation presents a creative world. Sometimes in fantasy we deal with separation by becoming highly productive—drawing, writing, creating. Usually this stays with the person the rest of their life and is only enhanced by the challenges they meet later on."

Weimar Germany freed people from old strictures and this opened up the gates of creativity as artists and writers struggled to create their own identities.

I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in Weimar Germany, gay studies and German Literature and Art

Robert Beachy was trained as a German historian at the University of Chicago, where he received his Ph.D. in 1998. He is presently Associate Professor of History at Goucher College in Baltimore.

Mel u

Empire of Guns: The Violent Making of the Industrial Revolution by Priya Satia (Forthcoming 2018)

Empire of Guns: The Violent Making of the Industrial Revolution by Priya Satia is an extremely informative fact rich book that anyone at all interested in the 18th century, The Industrial Revolution in England, the history and social implications of mass production of guns will find fascinating and may well change your entire overview of the period, as it did mine.  I have been an on and off again amateur student of 18th century world history for over fifty years.  I was amazed and humbled by this book.  

Satia structures her narrative around an 18th century Birmingham England Quaker family, The Galtons, heavily involved in all aspects of the gun trade, from manufacturing to sales.  The family came under severe criticism in the Quaker community, with an ethos of peace and nonviolence for their involvement in the Gun Trade.  The Galton’s responded by saying the English economy and the empire is founded on violence and almost anyone involved in large scale manufacturing was involved the trade supporting violence.  Birmingham England was the Center of gun manufacturing.

England needed many thousands of guns to fight her almost nonstop colonial and European wars.  In the old days, going back to about 1400, guns were made by individual gun makers, by order of elite customers, as near works of art. A single craftsman did all the work.  In order to produce guns on a grand scale The Galtons set up factories where parts were made by different workers, then assembled.  They developed supply lines for the metal and coal needed for the mass manufacturing of firearms.

Satia goes into great detail about the day to day operations of the gun business, describing the work routines of craftsman up to the finances of the business.  The gun trade was international, it was fascinating to learn that intentionally inferior guns were sold to traditional European enemies.  

We see how the mass availability of guns changed English society.  Now anyone could kill anyone.  

There is just a wealth of wonderful information in this book.  I was particularly fascinated by her interlude chapter in which she talks about the role guns played in The African Slave trade.  Guns were highly valued by tribal leaders who would trade war captives for guns.  The guns used in the slave trade were more for show than killing.  The British had no intention of arming Africans with guns they could turn on them.  The mass availability of guns in the hands of Europeans made the slave trade possible. 

Empire of Guns: The Violent Making of the Industrial Revolution by Priya Satia covers an amazing amount of material, it was many years in the making.  

All teachers of history should read this wonderful book.  All libraries that can should purchase this book.  If you are at all interested in world history, you will be glad you read this book.

Priya Satia

Author; Professor of history, Stanford University

Priya Satia is Associate Professor of modern British and British empire history at Stanford University. Her first book Spies in Arabia: The Great War and the Cultural Foundations of Britain's Covert Empire in the Middle East (OUP, 2008) won the 2009 AHA-Herbert Baxter Adams Book Prize, the 2009 AHA-Pacific Coast Branch Book Award, and the 2010 Pacific Coast Conference on British Studies Book Prize. Her work on the British empire and the way it continues to shape our present has appeared in a range of scholarly and popular media. She is currently finishing her second book, Empire of Guns: The British State, the Industrial Revolution, and the Conscience of a Quaker Gun-Manufacturer. Prof. Satia also plans a future work on the Partition of British India in 1947.

Mel u

The Weeping Time: Memory and the Largest Slave Auction in American History by Anne C. Bailey (forthcoming, 2017,from Cambridge University Press)

The Weeping Time:  Memory and the Largest Slave Auction in American History by Anne C. Bailey focuses in a very illuminating fashion on a huge slave auction held on a plantation on an offshore island in Georgia.  It took two days, March 2nd and 3rd in 1859 to auction the 456 persons held as slaves on the Butler Plantation, including not just men, women and children (who were put to work in the fields at around six years old) but thirty babies.  The owner of the plantation Pierce Butler lived in Philadelphia in grand style on the earnings of the plantation, the labor of the slaves.  He was a gambler and a stock market speculator and got himself in serious financial problems.  He decided to sell the bulk of the slaves on his plantation to raise funds.  Most of the slaves had lived on the plantation all their lives.

Bailey lets us see the terrible trauma and degradation of being treated like livestock, examined, prodded and commented upon by the auctioneer.  One of the greatest fears was being sold away from your families, never to see them again.  Married couples were kept together but non-married couples, siblings, parents and grandparents had no such protection.  Young women were judged as breeding stock and sly comments were made about "the lucky master" who bought them.  The main business of the plantation was growing rice, a very  labor intensive enterprise.  Cotton was a sideline.  Of course there were house hold slaves also.  At the auction a slave would be briefly described by their Occupation and condition.  

The owner of the plantation married, in Philadelphia, a former Shakespearean actress who was opposed to the institution of slavery.  Bailey shows us how this divide in thinking wrecked the marriage, just as it was to nearly destroy the country in a few years.  

Bailey covers a lot of ground in her work, from marriage customs, African heritage, music and religion.  I learned something about my own heritage in her discussion of food.  Long ago, pushing sixty years ago, my grandmother would serve on New Year's Day a mixture of rice and black eyed peas she called "hoppin John".  It was explained that this was thought to bring good luck in the coming year.  I did not until I read  Bailey's wonderful book realize that this was a dish derived from African food traditions, that the black eyed pea much beloved by my ancestors (since my grandmother passed long ago no one has the time or will to shell the peas) and the rice we ate every day came from seeds brought from Africa.  Bailey tells us the slaves were fed rice as the thinking was they would be more docile if they had familiar food.  

Bailey goes into details about the lives of the once auctioned and now free slaves after the civil war, she lets us see how hard the formerly enslaved worked to reunite with loved ones and keep their families strong.  She extends her story up to the current day where the consequences of slavery are still strongly impacting American society.

I really have just one change or addition I would have appreciated in this book.  When we are told a prime rice worker was sold for $1200.00 we don't have a frame of reference for what that amount of money represented in 1859.  Just a brief presentation of the costs of items in society would have helped me a lot.

In reading Bailey's book I learned a lot about Southern USA history.  This is an academic work, meticulously documented, but fully accessible to general readers.  I totally endorse it to all interested in slavery, African American history, or the old south.  You cannot begin to understand American history without understanding the  role the slave trade played in the country.  

ANNE C. BAILEY

is a writer, historian, and professor of History and Africana Studies at SUNY Binghamton (State University of New York). In her works of non- fiction, she combines elements of travel, adventure, history, and an understanding of contemporary issues with an accessible style.  She is a US citizen who grew up in Jamaica, WI and in Brooklyn, New York. 

Bailey is committed to a concept of “living history” in which events of the past are connected to current and contemporary issues.  She is also concerned with the reconciliation of communities after age old conflicts like slavery, war and genocide. Her non-fiction book, African Voices of the Atlantic Slave Trade: Beyond the Silence and the Shame (Beacon Press) and her current work,  The Weeping Time: History, Memory and the largest slave auction in the United States, (forthcoming Cambridge University Press, fall 2017) reflect that commitment.  From annecbailey.net

Mel u

Bolshoi Confidential Secrets of the Russian Ballet From the Rule of the Czars to Today by Simon Morrison (forthcoming October, 2016, 512 pages)

I

Bolshoi Confidential Secrets of the Russian Ballet From the Rule of the Czars to Today by Simon Morrison will become the book to read on the Bolshoi Ballet.  The book opens with a coverage of the current cultural importance of the Bolshoi to Russia.  Morrison tells us that the Bolshoi did not emerge to be called The Bolshoi Ballet until the theater where performances were held was rebuilt after being burned in 1812 during Napoleon's invasion of Moscow.  

Morrison begins his history with an account of an Englishman who was the first true manager of the theater to run it both as a business and as a ballet company.  We learn a good bit about the business side of running the Bolshoi in the 1830s.  In the opening years, dancers, male and female, were often orphans or had been basically purchased for the theater from owners of serf theaters.  Most lived under very poor conditions.  The ballet needed not just dancers but musicians and story lines to preform.  The ballet was subject to censorship and many very patriotic works resulted from this.  Only the most affluent members of Russian society took an interest in the ballet and attended performances.  Of course a near starving peasant did not often ask "I wonder what is on at the Bolshoi j tonight".  Ballet performances were often very high end social events, especially when the Czar and his ministers were in attendance.  Ballet dancers often became celebrities and Morrison very interestingly profiles a number stairs.  Some became the mistresses of wealthy men, some got state pensions upon the end of their dancing years.  Most dancers barely made a living, some took in laundry, kept cows, or entered the demimonde world.

The theaters were wooden structures and their were several terrible fires  but always the Bolshoi survived.  Morrison very interestingly explains how the Russian revolution transformed the Bolshoi, an institution steeped in Czarist tradition, seemingly completely elitist. The book explains the great cultural importance of Bolshoi to Russia.  Morrison closes with an account of the grand reopening of a fabulous new theater for the Bolshoi under Vladimir Putin.  

In any book such as this a lot of space must be devoted to social and political history and Morrison does a good job with this.  

Bolshoi Confidential Secrets of the Russian Ballet From the Rule of the Czars to Today by Simon Morrison is a book those very into Russian culture, the history of dance and music history  will greatly enjoy.  

I would recommend this book to well endowed libraries.  As to individuals, the $35.00 initial price seems daunting to me.  This aside, if you want to read what will surely be the definitive English language work on the Bolshoi, then this is the book for you.  

I was kindly given a review copy of this book. 

Simon Morrison is a professor of Music at Princeton 

Mel u

The Story of the Jews Finding the Words 1000BC to 1492AD by Simon Schama (2013, 512 pages)

The Story of the Jews Finding the Words 1000 BC  to 1492 AD by  Simon Schama is a first rate work of history aimed at the general reader with a serious interest in Jewish history and culture.  It is a companion text to a B B C series on the subject. (A second volume is in the works.) This is the fourth book by Schama I have read.  Previously I have read his very interesting and insightful book, Landscape and Memory, his work  on the French Revolution, Citizens:  A Chronicle of the French Revolution, and Embarrassment of Riches An Interpertation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age.  I found all of these works to be richly informative and a pleasure, though a challenging one, to read.  I received an E mail advising me that his The Story of the Jews was marked down from $14.99 to $1.99 so I purchased this also.  

Schama begins the story at roughly the time he thinks Jews came to develop a sense of cultural identity.   He ends it in 1492 A D when the Jews were expelled from Spain.  The text is a mixture of history, scholarship of the Torah, art, literature and archeological discoveries.  He also brings the story to life by talking about ordinary people as revealed in ancient texts.  The historical culture of Judasim is very much one of respect for the written word and learned interpretations and, as reflected in the subtitle, Finding the Words, Schama focuses a lot on the importance of the study of the Torah.  

Schama also, as anyone must,talks  about the rise of anti-Semiticism, the portrayal of Jews as the killers of Jesus, as Devils, as aliens with no right to exist  anywhere.  The history is one of long troubles but it is also a reflection of the triumph of the human spirit.  He talks about how Jews made a living in the big cities of Europe, with many occupations legally closed to them.  

I am looking forward to volume two which will, I believe, take us up to 1946.

I recommend this book to all with an interest in Jewish history.  It is a serious work of nonacademic history.   Perhaps those very into the subject will not find a great deal new but the weaving of the facts into a narrative made it a for me an edifying pleasure.

Simon Schama is a professor of art history and history at Columbia University 

Mel u

The Sleepwalkers How Europe Went to War in 1914 by Christopher Clark (2012)

World War One 

July 28, 1914 to November 11, 1918

Estimated deaths around thirty million, some say as high as forty million

Resulted in the ending of the Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman, German and Russian Empires

Brought America to a position of dominance and out of isolationism

Set the stage for WW II and the Holocaust

"Prussia, the ruler of Germany, was always an enemy of the intellect, of books, of the Book of Books—that is, the Bible—of Jews and Christians, of humanism and Europe. Hitler’s Third Reich is only so alarming to the rest of Europe because it sets itself to put into action what was always the Prussian project anyway: to burn the books, to murder the Jews, and to revise Christianity."  Joseph Roth 1933

Recently I read Christopher Clarke's very comprehensive book on Prussia, The Iron Kingdom The Rise and Decline of Prussia 1600 to 1947.  There is more to German history than Prussia but for sure Prussia was the dominating force in German politics until the defeat of Germany in World War Two.  Understanding Prussia is essential to understanding European history from 1600 on.  Recently I received an E mail saying another history by Clark, The Sleepwalkers How Europe Went to War in 1914 was for a short time available as a Kindle edition for $1.95 so I quickly acquired this book.  

War War One has been called "the war of cousins" as tne combatants were headed by royals descended from Queen Victoria.  The taught in school version is that it started when the heir to the Thorne of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated.  Of course the reasons why this political murder by anarchists without any real national affiliation led to the Great War are very complicated and rooted in the past.  Clark does a wonderful job of explaining why the war happened.  He explains the structure of decision making in the various countries, the relationships involved.  There is just a huge amount to be learned from this book.  

I really liked it when Clark made references to the work of Stefan Zweig and Joseph Roth, both were.Viennese Jews but was a bit surprised he made no reference to Herman Broch's classic novel about Germany between the wars also called The Sleepwalkers.

If you seek a real understanding of why the war occurred, I highly recommend this very serious book.  

For more of a popular history you might first read The Guns of August by Barbara Tuchman.

Wikipedia also has a very good article.

Without understanding  World War One you cannot fathom why World War Two happened, the holocaust and in fact much of the international political drama that dominates the world today.

Mel u

Four Sisters: The Lost Lives of The Romanov Grand Duchesses by Helen Rappaport (2014, forthcoming)

I have long been fascinated by the final years of Tsarist  Russia.  I have read Robert Massie's Nicholas and Alexander, biographies of Rasputin, and Prince Felix Yosupov.

Rappaport's book focuses on the lives of the four daughters of Nicholas and Alexandra  We go through the agony of Alexandra as she deliverers four daughters before giving birth to a son, the hemophiliac Alexey.  The focus of this book is on the upbringing of the girls and the day to day life of the royal family.  Rappaport makes it clear that Nicholas was not suited to be Czar, he should have been, as he wished he was, a gentleman farmer.  It was a very dangerous time to be an Eastern European or Russia Royal with assassins everywhere.  The girls do not have any great intrinsic interest.  Their lives were lessons, family outings, fun times on royal yachts, and petty squabbles and childish misbehavior.  The terrible shadow over the family was the life threatening illness of the son, the generally poor health of their mother and the terrible events to come.  The girls do not come across as intrinsically interesting and no real sense of personality develops.  Of course Rasputin plays an important part in the story and we see the families total faith in him.  We see as the girls begin to mature, the inner workings of royal match making, four royal weddings could set up much needed bonds.  We see what a terrible Czar Nicholas was as WW One lingers on and millions of Russias die.  The girls were trained as military nurses and preformed very well in that role.  The last chapters are devoted to the captivity and execution of the royal family.

This book is for people like me who are seriously into the history of this era. Most of the big scale history, potential readers probably already know.  It was to me interesting to learn details of how the four princesses were raised, most of the rest of the history I already knew.   I admit my interest is heightened by being the father of three of my own Princesses.   I am not sure those without such an interest will be able to wade through it.  

I was given a free copy of this book.

Mel u