Book Review - Passage to Juneau by Jonathan Raban

 Passage to Juneau: a Sea and its Meanings by Jonathan Raban

London: Picador, 2000 (first published 1999)     ISBN  0330346296

Why do we read the books we read? Sometimes it's because we desire the information it imparts. Other times it's because someone we respect has told us a book is worth reading. And sometimes we read a book just because we have admired the writing of the author through their other work, and want to enjoy being in their company once more.

Passage to Juneau, for me, falls into the last of these categories. Some years ago on a whim I read Raban's Bad Land and enjoyed the way he combined travel, personal experience, history, and skill with the written word. In fact I enjoyed it so much that when I saw Passage to Juneau in my local second-hand bookshop I bought it without even knowing its subject matter.

I can thankfully state that in Passage to Juneau Raban has done it again. He has turned a description of his sailing journey from Seattle to Juneau via the Inside Passage into a history lesson, a basic anthropology of the indigenous inhabitants, a social study of the fishing, logging and tourist industries, as well as a journey through personal tragedy.

Using juxtaposing sections, Raban describes sailing through the endless channels of the Inside Passage, with its unique tidal and weather systems. As he passes through each area, he describes the history of the local indigenous population through their artwork, myths, and stories - showing how contact with the white world has bowdlerized and distorted our view of what a traditional life must have really been like. Raban shows us that rather than a life in "harmony" with nature, the native stories tend to show us a people living in fear of both the sea and the forest, trying to propitiate the spirits of the weather and the ocean; to repel bears and attract salmon.

He goes into detail about the voyage of Captain George Vancouver, who was sent by England to accurately chart the area and search for the fabled North-West Passage. Raban tells of a cursed voyage, with the prickly and unpopular Vancouver at odds with his upper-class officers, and feared and hated by his crew. Vancouver's focus on trade was particularly looked down upon by them, and his predilection for flogging was looked on in horror by the Indians. Vancouver's differences with his younger midshipman allows Raban to discourse at some length on the Romantic ideal of unspoiled countryside versus seeing land and sea as a resource to be exploited.

The land and sea of the Inside Passage is unique - mountains on either side closing in on the sea creating narrow canyons which the tide races through, something Raban found continually fascinating, as he did the incredible depths of the ocean in some areas of the Passage. The vast areas of uninhabited countryside were offset by the constant passage of cruise ships which, Raban notes, are both a blessing and a curse to the local communities, many of which were at the time moving from an economy structured around fisheries, canneries and logging to having tourism as their economic base.

Raban writes about all this with feeling and intelligence, realising that he also was a tourist as he sailed by these communities, some of which were slowly decaying back into the primeval forest as their reason for being slowly dissolved owing to the shrinking access to fish and timber.

During the voyage Raban has to confront the death of his father. He breaks his trip to return to England to be at the death-bed and funeral. His father was an Anglican priest, and Raban muses on the meaning of faith, realising that what he saw as a yawning gulf between his and his father's beliefs was perhaps not so wide after all.

Raban's wife and young daughter are also a central part of the narrative. He has left them in Seattle while he sails, arranging for them to fly to Juneau to meet him there at the end of his journey. Early in the book we are told of his constant calls home, his joy at hearing his daughter's voice, and his concern that he has left his wife to cope with day-to-day life without him. After his return from England, these calls disappear from the story. The family re-unite in Juneau only for Raban's wife to inform him that she had decided to end the marriage. After this body-blow Raban sails back to Seattle, alone and introspective.

Passage to Juneau is a wonderfully written book: Raban takes the reader with him, whether he's battling dangerous conditions at sea, coasting with whales, encountering bears (there is a hilarious section where he takes his ship's bell with him on shore to scare them away, and only succeeds in convincing the locals that he's mad), his interactions with both the locals and tourists, and his reactions to both the death of his father and the dissolution of his marriage.

Even if you have no interest in the sea, or the history of British Columbia and Alaska, there is much in Passage to Juneau to enjoy. Highly recommended.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell

Book Review - Blood, Class and Nostalgia by Christopher Hitchens

 Blood, Class and Nostalgia: Anglo-American Ironies by Christopher Hitchens

London: Vintage, 1991 (first published 1990)       ISBN 0099878003

This is a fascinating book of inter-connected essays about the "special relationship" between the United States and Britain. It's a highly personal view and written as a polemic, but when that view belongs to, and the polemic is written by, Christopher Hitchens, you know it's going to be well worth reading.

While we might (up until Trump's second coming anyway) take for granted the very close geo-political ties between Britain and America, there was never a guarantee that those ties would ever form or be enduring. One look at American history shows us why - America threw off the British yoke in the 1770s, and fought them again in the early 1800s; and through most of the 19th century England did what it could to thwart American expansion across the continent. Britain also supported, for its own reasons, the Confederacy in the Civil War.  Given that history, it was not given that both America and Britain would forge such close ties in the 20th century.

The theme that runs through the essays, which roam from Rudyard Kipling to nuclear warfare, is the idea expressed by Harold Macmillan, and noted at the beginning of this book, that Britain, on losing their status as a first rank power would play Greece to America's Rome ("We...are Greeks in this American Empire. You will find the Americans much as the Greeks found the Romans - great big, vulgar, bustling people, more vigorous than we are and also more idle, with more unspoiled virtues but also more corrupt. We must run Allied Forces Headquarters as the Greek slaves ran the operations of the Emperor Claudius."). Hitchens goes on to explain that in his view this is not an entirely correct explanation of what was happening.

There was actually something much more subtle going on. Britain, clinging on the the vestiges of its empire, was coming to the realisation that it would have to let go, and formed the view that America was the obvious successor, and so if it could guide and direct them in how to have, hold and run an empire, they could be an indispensable partner - providing intellectual heft and skill to ensure that America's power and treasure could be spent wisely. So rather than Britain's Greece to the Rome of the USA, what was envisaged was the Roman centre moving across the Atlantic, but with Britain still very much part of the infrastructure.  

Unfortunately, as Hitchens points out, what sounds good in theory doesn't always work out in practice. There were many in Britain who didn't like this idea, and tried to cling on to bits of the Empire, until they couldn't, and then essentially ran to the US cap in hand to get help. This put America in a stronger position, and also reinforced the idea that was held by some in power that they were being used in a way that they didn't like or want. 

While we are bombarded at the moment with news about Trump cutting ties with Europe and other places with his trade policy, he is in some ways merely the latest iteration of American exceptionalism and isolationism. Hitchens explains that, between the wars, there was a significant part of the American polity that didn't like Britain (for example those of Irish descent), and certainly didn't want America to "take up the white man's burden", or begin its own empire building.

World War Two changed the dynamic of the relationship between Britain and the USA. Britain during the war did assist the USA greatly in the spheres of atomic weaponry, and in spycraft and intelligence gathering in general. These lessons were gratefully received, and while America was later on grudging in the way it shared nuclear information, the genuine camaraderie between intelligence services was often a major fixative in the "special relationship" during the Cold War years.

So from enemies, to a connection that led to semi-serious discussions of a political merger between the two states, Hitchens chronicles the demise of the "special relationship" to something that doesn't really have much power anymore, beyond nostalgia and what he calls kitsch. While Britain still feels the bond, America it seems sees Britain as one among many powers that they deal with, just easier to talk to because they speak the same language.

Blood, Class and Nostalgia is well worth reading not only for Hitchens insight into the relationship between Britain and the US, but also for the interesting bits of information he imparts. From Kipling's correspondence with Teddy Roosevelt, to Churchill's conversation with Mark Twain, there are many fascinating insights into how major figures have crossed paths during the last century or so, and what they thought of the "special relationship".

A good read. 

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell

 

Book Review - The Penguin History of the USA by Hugh Brogan

 The Penguin History of the United States of America by Hugh Brogan (Second Edition)

London: Penguin Books, 2001 (first published 1985)         ISBN 014025255X

"Anyone trying to make sense of the story of the American people must notice, I think, that two themes persist. One is continuity: this is a nation which, born in the seventeenth century, has developed along one line ever since. The other is challenge and response: changing times have periodically required radical alterations in the organization of American life. The alterations have seldom or never come in time to avert great troubles, but come they have, so that the great experiment of American freedom has been enable to continue."

Hugh Brogan makes this statement on page 644 of this edition, and in the preceding 643 pages he shows us how this unique mix of continuity and change turned a faltering English colony into the greatest world power in history. 

This history is mostly political, partly social and not un-opinionated - in fact Brogan has definite opinions on which moves by the United States were good and which were not so, and is quick to back up his opinions with well-chosen facts. With so many facts to chose from, even 700 pages isn't enough to be comprehensive, so Brogan choses his topics and themes carefully.

He shows how the democratic temper of the United States was formed right at the start of the white man's arrival. The earliest colonists needed to work together to survive, and they did so by getting together and making decisions by vote. So from very early times, the average American not only became skilled in working through ideas and compromising with others, but expected to be able to have a say in how his life and times were organised. From that everything flowed.

Brogan debunks the myth of the great progress of the United States - it was rare that the powers that be were able to gather together all the strands of government to move the country forward as a whole. In fact it was probably only FDR that managed to to that with anything approaching coherence, at the cost of skirting the edges of constitutional legality.

The early story of the United States is the story of the development of the land, which occurred in three fairly distinct ways. The Northeast was the home of the independent farmer; the yeomen of the US. The South became the home to the cotton barons, with their poisoned legacy of slavery. The West was the territory of the pioneers, and a theatre of broken dreams, with immigrants lured to poor country on false promises.

The legacy of those developments have been played out in ways both bloodily and politically challenging. The fight for equality between men has cost the US much - Civil War and the battle for Civil Rights rent the nation twice, a century apart. The Founding Fathers wrote many fine words, but when it came to the real world they wanted to maintain control of government and the country, and to do that they blinked when it came to slavery. The stain was expunged only through a terrible war which changed everything, but left the black Americans still benighted and under the yoke of their white masters.

The agricultural lobby also had a pernicious effect on the American polity - their votes meant more to potential Presidents and congressmen than those of the big cities, because there were more of them, and they were harder to corral into big blocs of votes which Tammany Hall practices made possible in the urban conglomerations.

The West in many respects could be ignored until War made it important. While the Civil War set the US on the path of modernism, it was World War Two which cemented not only America's power amongst nations, but the power of the Federal Government and the President.

Generally speaking up until the War the President did not have the overarching power and prestige that we know today. FDR, when tackling the Depression, unleashed the potential that always existed in the office, but had never been realised owing to the power of congressional lobbies and senatorial control. The Depression changed the balance of power, and with the creation of huge federal agencies, the central government finally became more important to the American people than their states.

As an Australian with only a basic grasp of the arc of US history, this book is both enlightening and entertaining. It busted a few myths and re-aligned my views of important moments in history. Reading the book in 2024 has helped me take a more sanguine view of the current Presidential race - there is nothing happening this time that hasn't happened before in US politics, and it seems that the system works its way slowly back to equilibrium after each shock. The fact that the Founding Fathers implemented a political structure that has no centre of power is both a frustration and a blessing for the US - it means that any rogue element in the system (President, Congress, Senate, Supreme Court) can be held in check by the other elements. That is a source of some solace.

If you like broad narrative histories with a political flavour and a strong authorial hand, you'll like this book. I did.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell

Book Review - A History of the Jewish People by James Parkes

 A History of the Jewish People by James Parkes

Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1964

This is a handy little crib on the history of the Jewish people, rather than the Jewish faith. Of course, it can be difficult to separate the two; as Parkes writes in his introduction, "[t]he history of the Jews is the story of a people inextricably interwoven with that of a religion. Neither can be told apart from the other. It is obvious that there would be no story of Judaism if there were no Jews; but it is just as true that Jews would not have survived the long centuries of their total dispersion had there not been the cement of a religion moulded to their need either to transform or to tolerate the conditions of their corporate and individual lives."

Parkes' history shows a long tradition of a people trying as much as they can to accommodate themselves to the situation in which they existed at any one time. From the earliest days there were geographically diverse groups of people practicing the religion of Judaism, with more or less oppression from the powers of the time. There have only been very short periods of time when Jewish people have had the capacity to control their own polity - very early and very late in their history.

The story of the Jews after Classical times is one of interaction with both Christendom and Islam, and the changing fortunes of those relationships. Christendom very quickly began oppressing the Jews, as they saw them as a threat to the growth of their own religion. The Jews were, in Christian eyes, apostates, Christ-killers, and subverters of fellow Christians. Islam initially treated Jews much better than did Christians, but as the Muslim world shrunk in the face of Western Christian dominance of Europe and Africa, and Islam withdrew into itself, that relationship too became poisoned and died. During the secular age, rather than religious scares, the route of anti-Semitism runs along the lines of finance and conspiracy - the forged Protocols of the Elders of Zion and Nazi rantings about Jewish control of finance took the place of older tropes of Blood Libel and miscegenation.

Parkes explains how the Jews developed their faith and ideas in separation from each other - the Sephardic Spanish versus the Ashkenazi Central Europeans. While non-Jews were the people's biggest enemy, they were not averse to internecine conflict either. The destruction of the Temple and exclusion from Jerusalem meant that the old ways of Jewish worship had to change, through a "democratic" system of congregationalism, through to a "professional" structure of paid Rabbis. This is not gone into in great detail, but is fascinating to a non-Jewish reader such as myself.

The final section of the book deals with the horrors and hopes of the twentieth century - the Holocaust, and the creation of Israel. Parkes focusses on the British Mandate in Palestine, how something that began with such high hopes ended in disaster, with the British washing their hands (a la Pilate) of the problems they had created with a poorly thought-out plan to let Jews come back home. Written in 1964, this book doesn't cover much of the ongoing disaster that has come out of this recent history.

If you are a person who doesn't know much about Jewish history this book, although dated,  isn't the worst place to start.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell

Book Review - The Last Stand by Nathaniel Philbrick

 The Last Stand: Custer, Sitting Bull, and the Battle of the Little Bighorn by Nathaniel Philbrick

New York: Viking, 2010                                                        ISBN 9780670021727

Could this be the definitive book on the Battle of the Little Bighorn? It may well be. Nathaniel Philbrick has brought his considerable talents to bear on the events that occurred between May 1876 when Custer and the Seventh Cavalry headed out to face the Lakota, and early July, when the news of Custer's defeat at the Little Bighorn became public. Along the way the reader not only gets an insight into Custer's character and history, but also those around him, and of the Indians, for whom this battle was also a "last stand".

While at times I felt the structure of this book was a little formulaic, with the narrative drive of Custer's demise interrupted by asides into history or culture, there can be no doubt that Philbrick has amassed voluminous sources and presented the reader with an account that has looked at all the evidence at hand (in a book of 466 pages, there are 92 pages of notes and a 27 page bibliography) and explained as near as can be known exactly what happened on the bluffs overlooking the Little Bighorn on 25-26 June 1876.

While many books about this subject have a barrow to push, either excoriating or glorifying Custer, Reno, Benteen or others, Philbrick has let the facts speak for themselves, noting when the "facts" might be passed down to us by someone with an axe to grind. No-one comes out of Philbrick's telling unscathed.

 Anyone who has read anything about Custer will know of his rashness and inability to follow orders: Philbrick emphasises that Custer had other worries than Indians on his mind in June 1876. He was seriously in debt after some disastrous investments, and as also in political trouble, coming out for the Democrats in opposition to President Grant. He needed a grand victory to secure himself both financially and politically. 

Major Reno perhaps comes out of this telling of the tale worst. His poor leadership and drunkenness during the battle led to the rout of his companies down on the plain, and if it wasn't for Benteen taking control on Reno Hill he too may have been lost with all his men. There is little to be said in his defence, and in fact the most interesting thing about his role in the battle is why Custer put him in charge of the left wing of his divided force to begin with, given the open hostility between the two. Reno could never surmount the misfortunes life threw at him, and died a drunk and broken man.

The most interesting character from the US Army side was Captain Frederick Benteen. A pathological hater, especially of Custer, his mix of disobedience, insubordination, lack of discipline and outright inspiration and bravery in those two days are breathtaking. He truly hated Custer and his decision to stay with Reno rather than go to Custer with ammunition is one of the great "what ifs" of the battle. While we will never know if it would have been decisive for him to join with Custer, we can be fairly sure that if he had moved on and left Reno to his own devices, Reno's battalions would have suffered a similar fate to those of Custer. In the end, it was Custer's desperation for a victory that he wanted to claim for himself and himself alone that led to disaster.

Philbrick, in my opinion, provides the clearest most easy-to-follow account of the fight on Reno Hill, and also reconstructs a very plausible account of what happened to Custer and his men. In the end, after all that has been written over the years, it is becoming clearer and clearer that Custer was simply outnumbered, and would most likely have been overwhelmed no matter what tactics he might have chosen to employ. That the situation came to that is a result not only of Custer's undoubted shortcomings and flaws, but of the machinations of Terry, the tentativeness of Crook, and even the actions of Sheridan and Grant.

What was meant to be a simple victory over a people being dispossessed became instead a symbol of hubris and mismanagement. The victory was merely delayed, and not by very long either. As Philbrick explains, most of the Indians involved in the battle were in reservations by the beginning of Winter 1876. He touches on the tragedy that was to follow, from the deaths of Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull to the tragedy of the massacre at Wounded Knee, and the end of a way of life, if not a people.

For those interested in the Battle of the Little Bighorn and in what actually happened on those summer days in 1876, I can highly recommend this book.

  

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell

Book Review - Son of the Morning Star by Evan S. Connell

 Son of the Morning Star: General Custer and the Battle of the Little Bighorn by Evan S. Connell

London: Picador, 1986 (first published 1984)                                       ISBN 0330293400

I wish I had read this book twenty years ago. Twenty years ago (give or take a few years), I had the fortune to visit the valley of the Little Bighorn, and walk over the battleground where Custer and so many of the Seventh Cavalry lost their lives that fateful June day in 1876. Evan Connell has written the most wonderful account not only of that day, but of Custer, the West as it came to be up to the battle, the white American mindset, and of the Indians, what happened to them up to and after the battle, and what now remains - the legacy of violence, misunderstanding and dispossession that continue to this day.

Connell was better-known as a novelist before this book was published, and he has used a novelist's mind to create this book, with its tangents, loose ends, unknowns and climaxes. While it covers much familiar territory to those of us with an interest in the battle and the American West more generally, it does so in new and different ways. The book begins with a description of Reno's fight on the bluff from the viewpoint of the soldiers, before segueing into the history of Reno himself, and on to Benteen, before taking a step back in time to see how the fates led Custer and co. to their destiny on June 25.

Connell investigates the "facts" that surround Custer and so many of the men and women associated with this story: sometimes the stories that cloud around these people obscure whatever truth there may have been to find (names in particular, not only of the Indians, but so many of the white participants seem to have varied names, names that changed or have been half-remembered... a kaleidoscope of faces that can't be pinned to a particular). He is not afraid to vent his opinion about some of the histories that have been written of those times, and can be scathing of those whom he thought had exaggerated in search of fame or a dollar.

Some surprising facts pop up throughout the text. One that struck me particularly is that the last living witness to the battle died the same year my wife was born. What seems like ancient history is only just out of reach really. The fog of battle is often impossible to pierce, yet it seems fairly certain that Custer was shot from long range and died "with a smile on his face". While it is pure speculation on my part, Connell describes a character in Custer, that may have been smiling because he knew his name would go down in history. There is no doubt that he was incredibly vain, self-centred and reckless, and it seems he deliberately disobeyed the orders given to him by Terry to wait for the main force to join him before attacking the Indians, most probably so that he could take all the glory for himself.

His wife burnished his legend (she died only in 1933) so that he seemed - until revisionists such as Connell appeared on the scene - like a god, a genius at battle, a wonderful leader to his men, as well as kind to animals, and the greatest Indian fighter of the US Army. That he was none of those things Connell makes clear. He was personally brave, of that there is no doubt, and he was assiduous in trying to work his good fortune in battle into promotions and appointments (it seems plausible that he was thinking of running for President at the time of Little Bighorn).

To his men Custer was a hard-driving martinet, not afraid to use the lash, or to punish them for minor misdemeanours, all the while working hard to minimize his own transgressions, which were not infrequent or insignificant. His leadership against Indians in battle was at best one-dimensional, which is what got him into so much trouble in June 1876. He should have been more circumspect and waited for Terry (although Connell seems to think that even the addition of Terry's men wouldn't have led to a US victory).

Connell spends as much ink on the Indian side of the story as he does on Custer. The Indians had a well-deserved reputation for savagery, which was partly due to their warrior culture, but mostly a response to unrelenting harassment by the white invaders. That they were invaders is without doubt, as it was the US Government itself that gave the lands around the Black Hills to the Sioux "for ever" eight years before the battle. Connell writes that even then, just before Little Bighorn, Indians were willing to negotiate, but the Army did not allow time for that to happen. In so many ways, the disaster was of white man's making...

Son of the Morning Star is very well-written, taking the reader on a journey into the West, and giving as many sides of the story as is possible, even to the point of four or five differing versions of the same story - although unlike an academic tome Connell is quick to let the reader know which version he favours. The book deserves the accolades it received, it is a hinge between "old fashioned" Custer history and the newer more nuanced writing, and is just a wonderful read! 

(This Picador edition suffers from the maps being almost illegible - the Bibliography is good, but the index is terrible.)

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell

Book Review - Nixon by Lord Longford

 Nixon: a Study in Extremes of Political Fortune by Lord Longford

London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1980                ISBN 0297777084

I picked this book up for nothing on a throw-out pile, and on balance it was worth the time it took to read. Of course much has been written and said about Nixon since this was published, not least from the man himself. The book under review is a short political life of Nixon, focusing mainly on his achievements in foreign affairs, and on the Watergate scandal that in the end finished his presidency.

Overall Longford sees Nixon's legacy much as we see it now - while his personal flaws brought him undone, his decisions and achievements in foreign affairs were for the most part prescient and correct. His incredibly unpopular decisions to do with the Vietnam War did bring the North Vietnamese to the table, and did allow Nixon to "end" the US war with some honour intact. As Longford points out, the eventual collapse of South Vietnam can be sheeted home to the failure of Congress to support that country when the North finally invaded, from the American point of view.

Likewise his arms talks with the USSR, and his renewing contact with China were both harbingers of a time of peace and prosperity for much of the world. At the time this book was written, Nixon was Watergate, and Watergate was Nixon. Like Longford, we now have a more nuanced view of the man and his time.

And what of Watergate? I think it's fair to state that Longford has much sympathy for Nixon throughout this book, and perhaps is a little too kind to him in this respect throughout these pages. Longford points out that Nixon didn't authorize the break-in, and indeed only found out about it well after the event. Where I think Longford lets Nixon off the hook a bit is in soft-pedaling on the notion that Nixon was responsible for an atmosphere of "whatever it takes" that pervaded the White House at that time. In fact in my opinion that is one of the sadder legacies of Nixon - of creating a feeling is now not only reflected in the White House, but within society more generally - the idea of doing what you need to, and justifying/explaining it away after the event. While Nixon's guilt in the Watergate saga was his complicity in the cover-up, the whole saga was a step toward increasing the dysfunction of US federal politics. Once the office of the President sullied itself in this way, life could never be the same. Nixon, although a great political operator, and at base not an evil or even amoral man, really dropped the ball on this one - he should have shut down the conspiracy the moment he first heard of it. Easier for me to say now that for him to do then, of course.

This book would I am thinking be hard to source now, but is still a worthwhile read, not least for the fact that it is written by an Englishman, who comes to Nixon's achievements and failures with a different worldview than most of the American authors or commentators. If you really want to go down the Nixon gopher-hole, there are probably better places to begin.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell

Book Review - Under the Banner of Heaven by Jon Krakauer

 Under the Banner of Heaven: a Story of Violent Faith by Jon Krakauer

London: Pan Books, 2004 (First Published 2003)              ISBN 9780330419123

Probably a strange book to be reading over Easter, but none the less fascinating for that. I've been a fan of Krakauer's writing for a long time, and this book, which is both a history of Mormonism, an investigation of the fundamentalist mindset, and the story of a heinous murder, does nothing to alter my opinion of his writing.

Krakauer explains in an afterword to this edition that he initially set out to write a book about faith, and particularly of the Mormon faith, but the murder of Brenda Lafferty and her 15 month-old daughter by two of her brothers-in-law led him to write the current book. Ron Lafferty, who was condemned to death over the murder, had received a revelation that he needed to kill his sister-in-law, with his brother Dan actually wielding the blade that killed mother and child. The story of this crime is Krakauer's entree into the world of the Mormon faith.

Krakauer uses the story of the murders and the ensuing trial as the spine of a story that investigates how Mormonism developed, and how fundamentalist Mormonism grew from the unusual way that Mormon belief has developed and grown from the initial revelation of Joseph Smith Jr. Those that are not part of a religious movement always see the incongruities and absurdities that are inherent in any religion, for of course one needs faith to believe. What is interesting about Mormonism, as Krakauer points out, is that the religion was born and grew during the modern age, the age of the printing press, the telegram, and widespread literacy. This has meant that the early growing pains of the religion are on show for all to see. We know that the early Christian church was beset with heresies and conturbation, but much of the detail has disappeared, either destroyed by time, or suppressed by the victors.

Krakauer shows us that the current Mormon church wishes the same to happen today, with its vigorous suppression of dissenters within its ranks, attacking those who would question church doctrine and motives (as they have with this book - the edition I read has an appendix where Krakauer defends himself against criticism from the Mormon church. Krakauer is never one to shy away from an argument!), and hiding away evidence of less-than-perfect behaviour  by its disciples. 

And less-than-perfect behaviour flows through this book, staining the history of Mormonism with the blood of its followers, enemies, and innocents alike. Joseph Smith Jr. himself was an interesting character: by turns crystal gazer and seer, his big break came when he dug up the gold plates shown to him by the angel Moroni and transcribed the stories on them that then became the Book of Mormon. While there is no doubting Smith's charisma and strength of personality, he was not above deceiving people and bare-faced lying if that was what it took to advance his cause.

There are many differences between Mormonism and mainstream Christianity, and one of them is that Smith in his early days of being a Prophet let it be known that anyone could and should speak directly to God, and to allow him (God is definitely male in Mormonism) to talk directly to them. While this support of direct revelation certainly helped Mormonism grow quickly (as did the fact that the Book of Mormon showed America as the home of faith - this is truly an American religion), it created a bit of an organisational and authoritarian problem - if everyone can hear directly from God, how can there be one leader?

This problem is the reason why Mormonism has become so very schismatic, with breakaway churches proliferating over the years, sometimes due to doctrinal differences, but also - it seems from Krakauer's book anyway -  due to personality clashes. One doctrine in particular has caused the Church much grief over the years, and was directly responsible for the murder of Brenda and her child: polygamy, or, as the Mormons have preferred to call it over the years, plural marriage.

This principle, revealed to Joseph Smith in the 1830s by revelation, has been the cause of much trouble within the Mormon church, and between the church and "gentile" society and government. It certainly seems, to an outsider, that Smith's revelation was very convenient, as he was a man who enjoyed the company of young women, and justified this enjoyment via his position of power within the church. The fact that he didn't publicly reveal the revelation until at least eight years after he started taking plural wives says a lot about just how controversial a doctrine it was. After Smith's murder in Illinois, the church was split apart by this issue. The mainstream church went down the polygamous route, with Brigham Young being a fervent supporter of the practice.

Obviously these ideas brought the Mormons into conflict with the rest of the United States, and even though their "exodus" into Utah bought them some freedom, it was only a matter of time before the US Government came and began a crackdown on such practices and in 1890 the then president of the church proclaimed a manifesto that required Mormons to comply with US law on marriage (although it seems that secretly some Mormons continued to take multiple wives).

For many Mormon fundamentalists, it is this manifesto that draws them away from the official church. What was given to Joseph Smith as a revelation from God could surely not be taken away merely because some earth-bound government said so. Or so the thinking goes. Which brings us back to the Lafferty brothers. The product of a strict but orthodox Mormon upbringing, the Lafferty brothers began to move in heterodox circles, and through their own study of Mormon doctrine and history, came to the conclusion that the current mainstream Mormon church was heading down the wrong path, and that the older strictures of Smith, including polygamy, were required to be lived out here on earth if one was to be truly among the saved. The Lafferty brothers formed a prayer circle, and were much influenced by another Mormon outcast "the Prophet Onias" (Robert Crossfield), who taught them how to receive revelations from God. Brenda Lafferty, wife of Ron and Dan's younger brother Allen, was having none of it, and was a forceful advocate within the family and especially with Allen for more orthodox thinking. Unlike the wives of the other brothers, Brenda had a good Mormon education, and could argue scripture with the men. Thus we come to Ron's revelation that both Brenda and her child were to be "removed", along with other people who had annoyed Ron (It is interesting that many of the revelations that we read about in this book just happen to solve problems for the people who receive them).

 There is much bloodshed described in this book, from the Mountain Meadows massacre, to the work of Porter Rockwell, the Mormon "avenging angel" who murdered those seen as inimical to the faith, to the idea of "blood atonement" which gathered strength within the Mormon religion after the murder of Smith. In many ways it is not a pretty story, and yet Krakauer reminds us that the vast majority of Mormons are hard-working, clean-living family people. Like all faith traditions, there is light and darkness within.

Krakauer has a wonderful knack (driven no doubt by many hours of thinking and drafting) of creating a story from many threads that flows cleverly together: the history enlightens the current time, the investigations of the sects reveals the meaning behind the murders, and we the reader are carried on a flow of words into (what for me was) a different world. There is much more to this book than I have described here. It's well worth reading.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell

Book Review - The lost thoughts of soldiers by Delia Falconer

 The lost thoughts of soldiers by Delia Falconer

Sydney: Picador, 2005                                       ISBN 0330421794

What a strange and interesting book. Is it a good book? Taken as a whole I think yes, although it's not without flaws. It's an interesting premise - an interior monologue from Frederick Benteen as he wanders through his house in Georgia one summer's morning, musing on a letter sent to him from a young man in Chicago who wants to write the ultimate history of Custer's Last Stand, and to clear Benteen from the opprobrium that clung to him over his activities on that fateful day.

The book proceeds in a series of vignettes, none really about the battle, but about Benteen and some other (mostly fictional) members of the Seventh Cavalry, about their lives in the countryside, about living from day-to-day, and also about Benteen's wife Frabbie, and his relationship with her.

The book has a dreamlike quality to it, it seems that the reader views everything through a muslin veil. One gets the sense that Benteen is trying to make sense of the world, and how his involvement in that one day has overshadowed the rest of his life where everyone else is concerned. But for Benteen it is all the other moments and feelings that are important, not the hours of terror on that famous battlefield.

Through this work Falconer has much to say about how history is made - how it is made of ordinary men (and women) who happen to be in a certain place at a certain time, but who for the rest of their lives are just ordinary - they fart, they love their pets, they can be cruel, they get drunk and do stupid things, they hate their Commander, they put their trust in him (sometimes).

I found myself drawn in to this narrative - Benteen is such a damaged character, still trying to make sense of what happened so many years after the event, but there is some unfortunate writing that occasionally jolted me out of the book. Some of it was technical (pretty sure Benteen would have used the word cartridges and not shells to describe his ammunition), and some of it, reading as a man, felt like a woman writing about a man - it just didn't sit right - men wouldn't think or do the things Falconer has written. Perhaps that is more a reflection on the reader than the book...

Really though, they are minor quibbles: this is an ambitious and even a brave book on such a topic, a book of vivid images, and a book that makes us question how we view history and man's place in it.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell

Book Review - Boomerang: the Meltdown Tour by Michael Lewis

 Boomerang: the Meltdown Tour by Michael Lewis

London: Allen Lane, 2011                                                   ISBN 9781846144844

A bit of fluff. Probably the best description of this book. Topical airport non-fiction might be another way to describe this fairly breathless wise-guy description of the aftermath of the GFC of 2008.

In a lightning tour of Iceland, Ireland, Germany and his home country the USA, Michael Lewis attempts to show us why those countries reacted in the way they did to the easy credit of the early 2000s, and how they were (in 2011 when this book came out) dealing with the consequences.

This is exactly the sort of book that really annoys me: shallow while seeming smart, full of pointless "colour", and leaving the reader none the wiser in any real sense when they finish. I guess one thing it does do is point the reader in the general direction of where they might look to find out the real story.

Lewis starts in Iceland, where he spends more time describing the social activities of Icelandic men and women than going into the details of exactly how the country effectively became bankrupt. He moves on to Greece, where he has fun describing their breakdown, and Ireland, where he does spend more time on the ins-and-outs of their banking problem, and on to Germany, where he marvels that a country so "smart" lent so much money on "dumb" schemes, and on the way buys into pretty much every German stereotype.

When he returns to the US, he shows how the financial crisis was hitting hardest at the smallest governmental units, using the examples of San Jose (which was going bankrupt) and Vallego (which had). He leaves the reader with the warning that what had happened overseas was coming for America.

It's such a shame that books like these get written for the lowest common denominator. I found myself wishing for less personal stuff (why did he interview Arnold Schwarznegger while riding a bike? I didn't pick up this book to learn about the Governator's riding style), and more in-depth analysis of what went wrong and why.

This was written to sell heaps of copies when it came out - it was not a book written with the future in mind, so I imagine only fools like me would be reading it ten years later. Needless to say, I'm not recommending it.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell

Book Review - Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant

 Memoirs and Selected Letters : Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant, Selected Letters 1839-1865

by Ulysses S. Grant

New York : The Library of America, 1990                                ISBN 9780940450585

Many times when I have been reading military history have I come across a statement alluding to the classic nature of the Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant. I have long been meaning to read them, and now I have. I should probably have read much more of the American Civil War before I did so: for while this is a great book, I struggled with the narrative owing to my lack of knowledge of the progress of that War, and of Grant's role in it. Despite that I found this book hard to put down.

While the book is entitled Personal Memoirs, it does not cover the whole of Grant's life, merely his life up until the end of the Civil War. He of course went on to become President of the United States for two terms before his death from cancer in 1885. The book focuses mostly on Grant's military career, from his enlistment through to the end of 1865.

Grant had a frontier childhood, where he learned to be self-sufficient at an early age (he was entrusted with overnight journeys to town in his early teens), and where he developed a love of horses. His father pulled some strings to enable him to enrol in West Point, where he was a middling to good student. Grant states that fighting was not something that really interested him, and in fact he spent the early part of his time as an officer trying to get the position of teacher of mathematics back at West Point. That did not eventuate, and soon enough he found himself fighting in Mexico, where he got a taste of what it was like to fight, and what it was like to command. 

Grant never saw himself as a leader, and in fact left the army after a period of time spent in Oregon and California. He worked in business with his father and brothers until the Civil War broke out. As a former regular army officer, he was asked by the Governor of Illinois to assist in gathering the militia units for initial training. At first Grant declined all offers to lead troops, but was eventually persuaded to fight, and soon became the commander of the armies in the West, where he won many victories and opened up the Mississippi for the Union.

He was then appointed to overall command of the Union troops and drove the Confederates to surrender with a strategy of denying them their supplies combined with relentless campaigning, relying on the Unions' greater numbers and industrial capacity to overwhelm the Confederates. In this he succeeded, and famously took General Lee's surrender at Appomattox to effectively end the War.

His Memoirs show Grant to be a man who, like many truly great generals, loathed the pain and wastage of war, and who was constantly seeking to find ways to reduce the carnage and to find peace. It seems ironic to write in such a way of a man who oversaw so much slaughter, but it's clear from his writing that at all times the battles he fought were fought for what he saw as good strategic reasons: on more than one occasion in the Memoirs he bemoans attacks and expeditions that he sees as merely a waste of lives and material without any advantage to be gained.

He also bemoans so many lost opportunities to follow up victories with action, missing the chance to perhaps end the war early. The failure to take Mobile when the Mississippi battles were won being a point Grant returns to in this book more than once. The politics of the Civil War were labyrinthine, intense and damaging, more so than many other conflicts: there were many reasons for this: obviously partly because the Civil War was truly a case of brother fighting brother (Grant knew many Confederate officers personally, and liked some of them on a human level) but also partly because of the way the Union army was raised and run.

Because much of the Union Army was comprised of volunteers, who enlisted on a state-by-state basis under officers who were often politicians or other leaders of society rather than military personnel, the command and control that Grant had over his forces was not absolute. Add to that the political interference from Congress, the President and other members of the executive, and Grant sometimes had a very hard task to implement strategies and even tactics that he knew were most beneficial. Time and again in the Memoirs we read of a General not obeying Grant's orders, or of Grant having troops taken away from his command when he was on the verge of a bigger victory. Sometimes the past is another country, and it bodes the reader of these Memoirs well to remember that while Grant was a General, he was not a General as we think of them now.

However, Grant is one of the major figures that imagined a time when modern generalship could come to be. He fully understood the importance of logistics, and while striving hard to destroy the logistical structure of the Confederate forces, he always was thinking carefully about the supply of his own troops. It was this attention to depriving the enemy of the tools of war while ensuring his own access to them that was decisive in his final victory.

While anyone who writes a Memoir is going to be self-serving, the Grant we get to know through these writings is essentially a humble man, who was trying to win a terrible war for the country that he loved. While he didn't hate the Southerners, he hated what they had done to his beloved Union. He wanted to win the war in the quickest way possible, and that led to him approving of the tactic of destruction undertaken by Sherman and Sheridan during their campaigns in the Shenandoah Valley and through Georgia. It was ugly, but it was effective in bringing the South to its knees without having to engage in huge set-piece battles. Grant knew he had to destroy the Confederate armies to win the war, but tried to do so without exterminating them.

This Library of America edition of the Memoirs contains much more besides: a selection of his letters, which show other sides to Grant than he chooses to reveal in his book, more political, more troubled about money and investments, as well as showing him to be a loving husband and father. There is a useful and detailed chronology of his life, as well as some of his final notes to his doctor, written when his throat cancer stopped him from being able to talk.

Which takes me to the final point that I think is worth making about this book: it is amazing that we have it at all. Grant had always said that he would not write a memoir or anything about the war, but his mind was changed by the fact that he lost all his money after a bank in which he had invested went bankrupt. He turned to writing to help pay his bills, firstly with some articles on the Civil War for magazine publication but then, encouraged by Mark Twain (who was a friend of his) he embarked on his memoirs. This was also about the time he learnt of his cancer, and it was literally a race against time for him to complete the work before his death. That he did so is a fact for which we can all be thankful.

I can see why many praise this book highly. This Library of America edition is wonderful, and after finishing it I realize that I have started my journey into the Civil War - I wonder where to next?

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell

Book Review - Made in England by David Malouf

 Made in England: Australia's British Inheritance (Quarterly Essay 12) by David Malouf

Melbourne: Black Inc., 2003                                      ISBN 1863953957

There is something about David Malouf's writing: clear-eyed and lucid, with a calm thoughtfulness that resonates with truth. This is so in his fiction, poetry, and non-fiction. One gets the feeling that spending an afternoon in his company would be a wonderful mind-expanding experience. Failing that, we read him, and this essay, discussing the English heritage and what it means in Australia.

Being a writer, Malouf uses language as the pivot to look at how Australia developed from an outpost created by British strategic needs of the time to the independent polity of today. Intriguingly, he argues that the change in English language between the time of the Puritan settlement of America and the convict settlement of Australia flowed through to influence the different ways our societies developed. The hard, combative English of the 1600s created the fractious American polity, while the more reasoned thoughtful language of the Enlightenment created in Australia a polity that was more open to compromise and arbitration. This is not the only accident of history that Malouf notes: surely, he writes, if Australia was settled earlier than 1788 the workforce would have consisted not of convicts, but slaves, which would have added a layer of history that would have resonated down to the present day as it has in America. We dodged a bullet of history there, he is suggesting.

Malouf also mentions things that have been forgotten by today's opinion writers and journalists: Australia had a lot to do with America since our formation. From the early visits of whalemen, through to the back-and-forth during the Gold Rush era, Australians and Americans were sharing lives, visiting each other, influencing each other's societies, building on the British foundations of both countries. 

For that is the nub of Malouf's essay - that the British inheritance of Australia is also the inheritance of much of the Empire - we, as Australians have a common inheritance with so many other countries. So much so that as Malouf travels the world of writer's festivals, he can have a conversation with writers from India, Africa, the Caribbean and Asia and find that they have the same literary touchstones as himself, which connect these diverse cultures with a common thread. The diaspora of Empire, so influenced by Britain in the past, now return the favour, by creating a new Britain, reflecting back to the centre the many different ways the British inheritance can shine.

That common inheritance was enabled by something unique to the British, compared to their European neighbours: the ability for the Britishness to be transported and live independently from the geographical Britain from whence it came. More so than in  France, or Germany, Britishness could exist in Melbourne, Auckland or Toronto virtually in the same way it existed in Manchester, Birmingham or Sheffield (although perhaps not so much in Delhi or Mombasa). Malouf makes the point that, even though Australia was on the periphery of Empire geographically, we were much more a part of the inheritance than our location may suggest. In Australia particularly, we were treated generously by the British Government, and allowed very much to develop on our own lines: our connection to America influenced our coming together as a Federation, when we took the best of the U.S. system and Westminster to create our own government.

The Quarterly Essay series has its ups-and-downs as a literary and cultural journal, but when it produces something good, it's really good. Malouf's essay is good in a way all good essays should be: it makes you think.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell

Book Review - The Eagle and the Serpent by John Selby

The Eagle and the Serpent: The Spanish and American Invasions of Mexico: 1519 and 1846

by John Selby                         London: Hamish Hamilton, 1978      ISBN 0241897475


A short and interesting book, reminding us that Mexico in the time of the Aztecs and the Spanish covered much of the Southwest of what became the United States. Selby describes in the first half of this book how Spain took over not only Mexico's heartland, but expanded into what is now Texas, California, Arizona and New Mexico, and, in the second half, how the United States took much of the aforementioned territory from them.

For this reader, the story of Cortes and his march on Tenochtitlan and subsequent overthrow of the Aztec Empire is a familiar one. It still boggles the mind that such a small group of Spaniards could overthrow such a civilization, albeit with help from local Indian allies. While the theory that personalities can shape history is these days seen as a dated way to look at the past, there seems little doubt that both Cortes' strength of will and Moctezuma's weakness of character bore strongly on the outcome of their clash.

Spanish reach soon covered most of today's Mexico, and expanded Northwards, driven by missionaries. While ostensibly part of Mexico, this Northern part was in many respects independent, being hard to reach overland owing to the desert country in between it and metropolitan Mexico, and through lack of population.

Mexico were keen to increase population in these areas, partly for development, but also to forestall the encroaching Americans from taking the land. Ironically, it was to the US that they looked for immigrants, and in the early 1800s quite a few people moved West to try their luck under the flag of Mexico.

It wasn't long before the "natives" got restless, and skirmishes developed between the new immigrants and those who had been there longer. The lack of effective governmental control did not help the situation, nor did the incursions of US "explorers", who were mostly military men with eventual conquest on their mind.

The banning of further US immigration into Texas began the break-up of this part of Mexico, with disaffected locals declaring the Republic of Texas, and,with US help, cementing their independence. Further unrest followed further West, with Americans in California working to undermine the sovereignty of Mexico and move to US control. The ascension of Polk as President, and his desire to acquire land, moved the conflict into open war.

Meanwhile, the Mexican government was very unstable, with Santa Anna the cause of much of that instability. His military efforts were mostly ineffective, and when the US Army invaded and took Mexico City, there was little the Mexican Government could do but accede to the US offer to purchase the land that became Arizona, New Mexico and California.

Selby's book is a clear, concise introduction to a period of history that non-Americans might be surprised to know occurred in the way it did. There is a useful (if now dated) bibliography as well.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell

Book Review - The Last Days of George Armstrong Custer by Thom Hatch

The Last Days of George Armstrong Custer by Thom Hatch

New York: St. Martin's Press, 2015                ISBN 9781250051028

Hagiography. The inherent danger in seeing no wrong in a person, especially if you are claiming to write history, is that you as historian may be hoist on your own petard. Thom Hatch, with his worship of Custer, has blown himself so high that he may never hit the ground. While the dust jacket tells us that Hatch will "set the record straight" all he actually does is make the reader question his interpretation of events.

And there is plenty of interpretation on offer to everyone, not only about the Battle of the Little Bighorn itself, but in many other aspects of Custer's career. Hatch, in every interpretation he makes, sides with Custer, and at times what he doesn't write in his book tells the reader as much as what he does.

Despite what the title suggests, this book not only delves into the last days of Custer's life, but also gives us over a hundred pages of preliminaries, covering most of the life and career of Custer. Hatch passes over Custer's less-than-stellar time at West Point, excusing his record number of demerits and low pass mark as the result of "youthful exuberance". Whilst not going into great detail, Hatch writes of Custer's Civil War as a triumphal progress as he does of his subsequent efforts against the Indians. By this part of the book it's clear to the reader that we are reading a one-sided account of events.

Hatch then goes on to describe the prelude to, and the Battle of, Little Bighorn relatively accurately. It is when he comes to his analysis that we again see his bias emerge. He is determined not to allow any opprobrium stick to his glorious General.

Hatch puts the entire blame for the failure of the Cavalry at Little Bighorn onto Major Reno's failed charge on the Indian village. While on one page he is equating Reno's failure to carry out Custer's order to the letter as a capital offence, in the next he incidentally shows us several reasons why Reno acted as he did: he thought Custer was coming along behind him, and Reno had no experience fighting Indians. One could, contra Hatch, just as easily argue that, given Custer knew Reno had not fought against Indians before, that he should have been much more explicit with his order, and in explaining what his tactics were to be. If - as Hatch contends - Reno's charge was the key to victory or defeat, it would have been well for Custer to do so. Reno was in fact second-in-command on the day and it would have been reasonable and even expected that Custer would discuss his overall tactics with him.

It is clear that Reno suffered from Battle Shock after the first contact at Little Bighorn, and his behaviour was far from what should have been expected from an officer, but it is a long bow to draw to place the entire failure of the Cavalry down to his ineffectual charge.

The irony of this excoriation of Reno for not following orders to the letter, after praising Custer for doing the same during the Civil War, is not lost on the reader, although it seems to be so to the author. Even with Hatch's idolisation of Custer throughout this book, it is clear in these pages that while Custer was no doubt personally brave, he was also reckless and impulsive. To attack what was as far as is known the largest Indian encampment ever seen on the Plains without even a reconnoitre of the lay of the land, or knowing if the River was passable, was reckless in the extreme, even if time was of the essence to catch the Indians by surprise.

Hatch describes how Custer almost had a "set play" for his battles against Indians - attack the front of the encampment with some troops, outflank and catch the Indians as they regroup or flee with the rest. This worked previously, but it seems that this time, under the aggressive leadership of Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse, and Gall the Indians had decided to stand and fight. They outnumbered the Cavalry by five-to-one.

There is no knowing what the outcome of the Battle would have been if Reno had continued his charge; Hatch assumes that Custer would have come in on the flank to an easy victory. An equally realistic scenario is Reno and his men being cut down in the maze of tepees while Custer was held off at the river before the weight of numbers forced him to retreat, or to suffer defeat.

The reality of course is that no one thing caused the disaster. If General Crook had notified Terry and Custer of his battle on the Rosebud, if Custer had better knowledge of the size and location of the village, yes, if Reno had charged into the village, if Benteen had kept moving toward Custer with the pack train, if Custer had retreated toward Benteen and Reno when he was still able, if Custer had got his men together in a defensive position early enough, if, if, if. The enormous amount of Little Bighorn literature spawns from these ifs, and a lot of it is better thought-out and argued than Hatch's book.

Hatch also, to my mind, borders on the offensive when he brands the Indians as enemies of the United States, and of progress, writing "The United States had every right to expand its boundaries to include the Great Plains West. Oddly enough, many moder scholars believe there was something honorable about the Sioux fighting to defend their right to roam free. The West was becoming too small and populated to allow a group advocating violence to close off thousands of square miles.....Peace entreaties had been made and were dismissed." The disingenuousness of this paragraph, the last sentence in particular, is astounding. Peace entreaties had indeed been made, and regularly broken, by the United States Government. The Black Hills had been given in perpetuity to the Indian tribes and then taken away, as had many other locations across the West. What resort did the Indians have but to try to keep what was theirs by force, as negotiation and treaty had failed time and again. And surely there is honour in fighting for your freedom: I have no doubt Hatch, a Vietnam Veteran, would claim that himself. To state that there is honour in fighting for your way of life is not to denigrate the bravery of Custer, or of the Seventh Cavalry, who were on the right and wrong side of history at the same time, as were the Indians. By pushing his feelings too far, Hatch undermines himself, the petard explodes again.

There are better places to start with the Battle of the Little Bighorn, Custer, and indeed the American West, than with this book.

Cheers for now, from
A View Over the Bell

Book Review - Dispatches by Michael Herr

Dispatches by Michael Herr

New York: Vintage International, 1991 (first published 1977)  ISBN 9780679735250

Vietnam Vietnam Vietnam, we've all been there. When Michael Herr wrote those words to end this classic book of reportage, I imagine he little thought that, thirty years later, many would indeed have been to Vietnam, on package tours or backpacker holidays.

Dispatches is a story of a different Vietnam to that seen today, a story of being in the midst of one of the worst wars of the Twentieth Century. Herr was a freelance correspondent, and Dispatches is not his account of this time in Vietnam, but more a reflection of the War: what it did to him, what it did to the US soldiers that were there, and in some ways what it did to the USA as a nation.

When it was first published in 1977 Dispatches was quickly hailed as the best book so far about the US involvement in Vietnam: that may still be the case thirty years later. It should be remembered that in 1977 the wounds that Vietnam had caused in America were still fresh: no heroes return for the troops, no victory - in fact an ignominious retreat and loss. Herr does not go into any detail as to why that happened, as his story is about the troops and the correspondents that wrote about them.

With a fine ear for the unintentional ironies of command-speak, Herr shows us that talk of "kill ratios", "pacification" and so on were meaningless to the "grunts" that risked all to retake Hue or who fought and died at Khe Sanh. It is the regular solider who is the hero of Herr's book, with his savagery, beauty and desire to go home (or, in rare instances, stay), described with respect and care.

Whether Herr supported the War - whether he was a "hawk" or a "dove" - is meaningless in the context of this book. He knew that many ordinary troops were suffering and dying for illusory gains on a map: that when the troops left the VC would return. The US military were like Canute, trying to turn back the tide of the North Vietnamese advance.

That there is in fact no meaning at all to this waste becomes clearer as the reader progresses through the book. The centre-piece of the book is the "siege" of Khe Sanh, a pointless exercise in waste. The Marines at the base die for lack of suitable cover ("Marines don't dig"), and the NVA die because they are told to. What is described by the Generals as a "keystone" to the defence of the South is, several months later, all but abandoned by both sides. Whenever a meaning for the War might be almost discernible through the mists of propaganda and psyops, it quickly disappears, like a night stoned on weed, or changes course like the tracer rounds that curl away from the target at the last moment.

Herr writes as well about his fellow correspondents. About how you only saw the War you wanted to see. About how he couldn't understand the way some could get anything useful from interviewing Generals, just as they couldn't understand how he could get useful material from being with the troops. He describes the soldiers disbelief that anyone could voluntarily spend time in Vietnam, he describes the fear engendered by close shaves, he describes the sadness at the loss of friends. It was a strange thing being a correspondent, the friendships, fear and dreams were similar to enlisted men, but the ability to fly out of the hot zone back to Saigon or China Beach, gave the war a surreal quality that Herr has done a lot to convey with the structure of his book, which moves from overhearing Marines talk during a firefight, to the conversations of "spooks" at HQ, to the chatter of fellow correspondents over drinks at the Continental Hotel in Saigon.

I read somewhere a description of Dispatches as an anti-war book. It is, in the sense that no-one who has been involved in battle could be pro-war, but the book is alive to the fact that there are things that happen during the horror of war that are meaningful, and even at times beautiful. He quotes Tim Page, after being asked by a publisher to write a book that would "once and for all take the glamour out of war."....[Page] "I mean, how the bloody hell can you do that?.....It's like trying to take the glamour out of sex, trying to take the glamour out of the Rolling Stones." This passage occurs late in the book, and by then the reader knows that Herr does not entirely disagree with Page on the issue.

What does stay with Herr are the memories - in the short last section of the book entitled "Breathing Out", he is trying to cope with the dreams, the loss (ironically) of meaning in life outside of Vietnam, and tries to find solace in his old friends. Herr was an advisor on the film Apocalypse Now, and it was a character in that film, Kilgore, who cryptically says "Someday this war's going to end." The final pages of Herr's book suggests that, for those that were there, it never will.

A classic.

Cheers for now, from
A View Over the Bell

Book Review - Culture of Complaint by Robert Hughes

Culture of complaint by Robert Hughes

London: Harvill, 1994                                       ISBN 0002730022

When this book was released in the early 1990s, during the height of the "cultural wars" of that time, it made quite a splash. Now, nearly twenty-five years later, much of what Hughes wrote seems to the current reader to be prophecy. The "culture of complaint" now seems to be dominant; turbo-driven by the advent of social media.

Hughes' book came out of a series of lectures he gave in New York, in which he discussed in turn politics, multiculturalism, and morality in art. One of the themes that weaves throughout the book describes the way in which both the Left and Right of the political spectrum are driving the breakup of US society into its constituent parts, creating ghettos of race, sex, sexual orientation and so on.

What Hughes does so well is punch holes in the idea that creating these ghettos actually "empowers" those who chose to identify with them in any meaningful way. While not for a moment suggesting that there hasn't been a hegemony of the "White West" for many centuries, the solution is not to retreat into a self-reflective circle of your own kind, or, conversly, to claim genius for works or ideas that don't deserve to be given that label. Hughes also exposes, in withering fashion, how those that would denigrate what has happened in the past use the same methods now to push their own barrows.

Unfortunately we have seen, since this book was written, an increase in the acceptance of the ideas that one can't criticise if you are not part of the "group" from which the work or history eminates, or that the idea of quality when it comes to art is a suspect notion that smacks of old-fashioned imperialism. We have now entered a world that Hughes predicted in this book: groups of artists and politicians speaking only to themselves, in a language only they understand, and blaming the "other" - whoever that might be - for their lack of success.

Hughes goes on to explain that this "culture of complaint" has also had an effect on those institutions that exhibit. Caught between the faux moral and religious outrage of the Right, and the equally prudish theorising of the Left, museums and galleries have played it safe with what they exhibit.

As one would expect from Hughes, it is the section on visual art that has the most meat. Hughes gives us a potted history of how art has been absorbed in America, and why it is in that place in particular that art is seen as something that should be morally uplifiting and therapeutic. Hughes doubts that art can ever have those properties, in fact he believes that art is justified by its beauty alone, and that any other claims it might make - particularly political claims - are tendentious. Art doesn't change history.

His final few pages explain the irony that, at the moment in history when the West has never been more open to accepting great art without any baggage of racism, sexism or homophobia, many of these previously repressed groups have retreated from the idea of entering a mainstream of cultural life. The Balkanisation of American political and cultural life does no-one any good, least of all those who were in the past marginalised.

As Hughes writes, we happily accept, in the world of sport, that there are players of genius and that a rigorous selection process leaves the best at the top. The same should occur in art: new art should always be compared to the best, and strive to be the best.

For those who wonder how we got to where we are today, this book is worth reading. It has aged well.

Cheers for now, from
A View Over the Bell