Roy Miller's Blog, page 210
April 22, 2017
How the Charleston Elite Brought on the American Civil War
This content was originally published by DAVID GOLDFIELD on 21 April 2017 | 11:00 am.
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Banner of the Secession Convention.
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Fotosearch/Getty Images
MADNESS RULES THE HOUR
Charleston, 1860 and the Mania for War
By Paul Starobin
268 pp. PublicAffairs. $27
Readers of a popular travel magazine recently ranked Charleston as their favorite American city. Northern Democrats visiting the place in April 1860 for their party’s national convention would have demurred. Democrats had settled on Charleston in order to mollify Southern members and ensure a united front heading into the fall presidential election. The opposite occurred. Southern disunionists, emboldened by galleries packed with supporters, rigged the convention to split the Democratic Party — the only national party competing that year. The breakup would inevitably result in the election of the yet-to-be-named Republican candidate. A Republican victory, the radicals theorized, would galvanize white Southerners to form a new nation secure from the economic predations and racial terror that the new administration would inevitably unleash upon the South if the slave states remained in the Union.
“Madness Rules the Hour,” Paul Starobin’s fast-paced, engagingly written account of the hysteria that descended on lovely Charleston — where the unthinkable became the inevitable — is as much a study in group psychology as it is in history. Charleston’s course to secession a mere seven weeks after the election of Lincoln and more than two months before he took office was not a willy-nilly, mob-inspired dash to disunion, but rather a well-orchestrated movement (controlled chaos, if you will), extending from John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry in October 1859 to the fateful Secession Convention in late December 1860 that took South Carolina out of the Union.
The conductors of this movement were the city’s elite, whom Starobin presents in finely drawn portraits. Mobilizing the news media, especially the widely read Charleston Mercury (even Lincoln was a subscriber), staging boisterous military displays and mass meetings, and establishing secessionist organizations, the disunionists advanced their cause. If you were not with them, you remained silent. The elite ensured solidarity with the white working class by tightening restrictions on the city’s free black population, many of whom fled.
Secession was not a new fever in Charleston in 1860. Agitation had flared before: in 1832 in opposition to an allegedly punitive tariff, and in 1850 in the midst of the debate on the admission of California as a free state and related issues. But as Starobin notes, the itch to leave the Union was hardly a widely shared view elsewhere in the South, neither on those earlier occasions nor even in 1860.
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Why was Charleston so in advance of its neighbors? Starobin, the author of “After America: Narratives for the Next Global Age,” does not precisely answer this question, but part of the explanation lies scattered in his book. Charleston was one of the most prosperous cities in the country, a major port and a center for the lucrative Sea Islands cotton trade. But its economy was beginning to ebb, as ports to the north eclipsed the city. And a Republican regime that promoted economic nationalism would surely enrich its friends and beggar its enemies. Charlestonians viewed the Republicans as an existential threat not only to their livelihood, but also to their lives. Disunion was an opportunity to regain sovereignty, prosperity and security. Honor, the history of secession agitation and the memory of the failed Vesey slave rebellion of 1822 also figured into the equation.
But, as Starobin concludes his story, the equation blew up. Fast-forward to April 1865, and the ruins of this once beautiful city stood as testimony to folly. He appropriately leaves the coda to the Union general William Tecumseh Sherman: “Anyone who is not satisfied with war should go and see Charleston, and he will pray louder and deeper than ever that the country may, in the long future, be spared any more war.”
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Your Whole Family Will Love These Political Books
This content was originally published by ADAM MANSBACH and NA KIM on 22 April 2017 | 6:58 pm.
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A book called “Reasons to Vote for Democrats: A Comprehensive Guide” has become an Amazon best seller, scored an endorsement from President Trump and inspired several competitors. Spoiler alert: It’s mostly blank. Below, a few more blank books political figures could “write,” suggested by the author Adam Mansbach with cover art by Na Kim.
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CreditPhoto by Frank Fey/U.S. Senate
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CreditPhoto by Jessica Hill/Associated PressImage
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CreditPhoto by Russian Presidential Press and Information OfficeImage
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If the titles above aren't enough to keep you busy, here are some more ideas, sure to arrive soon at a blank bookstore near you.
“Trek for Success: My Life-Changing Hike Along the Appalachian Trail,” by Mark Sanford
“The Difference Between the Alt-Right and the White Nationalist Movement,” by Steve Bannon
“See Where Lincoln Slept! The Ultimate Insider’s Tour of the White House,” by Melania Trump
“Earning a Place at the Top,” by Jared Kushner
“A Treasury of Innocuous Reasons That One Might Have Numerous Lengthy Unreported Conversations With Russian Spies,” by Carter Page
“Life of the Party: How to Inspire, Invigorate and Energize,” by Hillary Clinton
“Ready to Serve: How to Become an Expert in Anything Overnight, With No Previous Experience at All,” by Ben Carson, Rick Perry and Rex Tillerson (with Tony Schwartz)
Share your suggestions for other book titles in the comments, or on Twitter using the hashtag #blankbooks.
Adam Mansbach (@adammansbach) is the author of the book “Go the F**k to Sleep,” and the screenwriter of the 2016 film “Barry.” Na Kim is a book cover designer and illustrator living in New York City.
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Weekly Round-Up: Just Keep Writing
This content was originally published by Karen Krumpak on 22 April 2017 | 1:00 pm.
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Every week our editors publish somewhere between 10 and 15 blog posts—but it can be hard to keep up amidst the busyness of everyday life. To make sure you never miss another post, we’ve created a new weekly round-up series. Each Saturday, find the previous week’s posts all in one place.
Keep Calm and Keep Writing
Any time you start to think about giving up on writing, stop yourself. Here are 7 Things To Do When You Want to Give Up (Instead of Giving Up).
When you do have success, don’t let it get in your way. Read How to Stop Yourself from Obsessing Over Duplicating Writing Success to learn how to keep writing and improving without unnecessary stress.
One factor behind finding writing success? You first have to Find Your Writing Voice. Learn about the importance of embracing your strengths and flaws in developing your personal voice.
History and Mystery
Interested in historical fiction but unsure of where to start your research or how much to include? Check out Taking the Mystery Out of Writing History for some helpful tips.
Get some insight into the ideas and inspiration behind Archer Mayor’s bestselling mysteries in The Corpse Stops Here.
Agents and Opportunities
This week’s new literary agent alert is for Joanna MacKenzie of the Nelson Literary Agency. She is looking for literary-leaning projects with commercial potential and epic reads that beat with a universal heart. She’s drawn to smart and timely women’s fiction, character-driven mysteries and thrillers, “child in jeopardy lit,” kick-ass mom heroines, and coming-of-age stories with confident voices and characters.
For a pitching opportunity, check out #DVpit Twitter Contest for Marginalized Voices and learn more on the event occurring next week.
Get It Together
Once you’ve finished revising and editing your manuscript, there’s another hurdle to cross before submitting: You still have to write the synopsis. Read Mastering the Dreaded Synopsis to learn how.
When it comes time to put your cover together, don’t forget overlook the importance of blurbs and testimonials. Here’s How To Get Book Blurbs/Testimonials For Your Book Cover.
Poetic Asides
We’re three weeks into our 10th Annual April PAD Challenge. Catch up on all of the prompts so far:
Day 15: Write a “one time” poem.
Day 16: Write a poem titled “(blank) System,” replacing the blank with a word or phrase of your choice.
Day 17: Write a “dance” poem.
Day 18: Two-for-Tuesday! Write a “life” poem, or write a “death” poem.
Day 19: Write a “memory” poem.
Day 20: Write a “task” poem.
Day 21: Write a poem using an object as the title.
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Letters to the Editor – The New York Times
This content was originally published by on 21 April 2017 | 12:00 pm.
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American Ideals in Asia
To the Editor:
Gordon G. Chang’s review of Michael J. Green’s “By More Than Providence” (April 9) reinforces the myth Green advances of a “long-term American commitment to supporting democratic norms in the region.”
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Down Chang’s memory hole has gone the Eisenhower administration’s refusal to abide by the 1954 Geneva Accords’ call for a national election in Vietnam because Ike feared Ho Chi Minh would win with 80 percent of the vote. Then followed the succession of American-backed dictators, the killing of some three million Indochinese and the poisoning of the land with Agent Orange and other defoliants in a futile war to prevent the reunification of Vietnam.
Would we describe the decades of American imposition of and support for military dictators in South Korea, or support for the Marcos dictatorship in the Philippines, as what Chang terms “sharing American ideals”?
America’s Asia-Pacific hegemony has been constructed via coercion: conquest, colonization, occupation and more subtle forms of imperialism. Building foreign and military policies on the basis of delusions and fallacies is nationally self-defeating and can only result in further tragedies.
JOSEPH GERSON
WATERTOWN, MASS.
The writer is vice president of the International Peace Bureau.
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To the Editor:
Gordon Chang, in his review, questions the objectivity of Michael Green. His main exhibit in support of this serious charge is that Green’s book does not take into account China’s aggressive conduct when its pilot tipped the wing of an American spy plane, forcing it to land in China. Chang accepts the official American account of what happened. Others suggest that the Chinese pilot inadvertently hit the American plane, though he was clearly buzzing it. In any case, it was one incident, not repeated, despite the fact that the United States conducts many thousands of such legal but provocative surveillance flights up and down the Chinese coast.
Chang dismisses the fact that the Bush administration apologized for the incident and offered compensation. The Bush administration rarely accepted blame for whatever went wrong overseas. The fact that it did so in this case speaks volumes.
More generally, China’s acts, which are often labeled aggressive (e.g. island building), do not meet the United Nations definition of aggression. And the only person who was killed — during all these acts — was the Chinese pilot! One wishes many more nations would not be more aggressive.
AMITAI ETZIONI
WASHINGTON
The writer’s most recent book is “Avoiding War With China.”
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What Fetish?
To the Editor:
I read with interest Sandra Tsing Loh’s review of “Drop the Ball” and “The Unmade Bed” (April 2). Both books address the issue of how to manage the pesky tasks of household maintenance. The observation that women, as they achieve financial independence, “fetishize nostalgic and unnecessary domestic arts like knitting and making candles” is misguided and insulting. Perhaps these women are interested in being creative in a manner that produces something beautiful, lasting and useful. Perhaps they are also learning to relax. As a lifelong knitter (but not candlemaker), I take exception to that characterization. And so do those enjoying my knitted scarves, sweaters, donated baby hats and knitted charity projects.
DOREEN HURLEY
PITTSBURGH
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Not Their Illness
To the Editor:
Your review of “No One Cares About Crazy People” (April 9) gives some insight into the pain of dealing with mental health challenges. But I would point out that the author’s sons were not their illness — i.e., they were not “schizophrenics” but lived with schizophrenia. As someone with bipolar disorder, I’m more than my illness.
ANNE WEIHER
BOULDER, COLO.
The Book Review wants to hear from readers. Letters for publication should include the writer’s name, address and telephone number. Please address them to books@nytimes or to The Editor, The New York Times Book Review, 620 Eighth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10018. Comments may also be posted on the Book Review’s Facebook page .
Letters may be edited for length and clarity. We regret that we are unable to acknowledge letters.
Information about subscriptions and submitting books for review may be found here .
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The Hermit-Burglar and the Optimistic Journalist
This content was originally published by JOSH TYRANGIEL on 21 April 2017 | 12:00 pm.
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At the jail, Finkel optimistically registers as a friend of the prisoner. He may as well be a torturer registering as a masseuse. Knight scowls through the partition glass at a point somewhere over the author’s shoulder, refusing eye contact or acknowledgment. “Rarely in my life have I witnessed someone less pleased to see me,” Finkel writes a little despondently. But what the hermit lacks in warmth he makes up for in self-awareness.
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Credit
Alessandra Montalto/The New York Times
Knight: “Some people want me to be this warm and fuzzy person. All filled with friendly hermit wisdom. Just spouting off fortune-cookie lines from my hermit home.”
Finkel: “Your hermit home — like under a bridge?”
Knight, after a Gene Wilder-worthy comedic pause: “You’re thinking of a troll.”
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Finkel shrewdly plays the punching bag while Knight alternates between jabs and details. We learn that the hermit had never spent a night in a tent before his abrupt departure from society at age 20, and that much of his survival depended on a miraculously hidden campsite. Tucked behind a tangle of brush and wind-breaking boulders, he spent decades just three minutes from the nearest cabin: “Towns and roads and houses surround his site; he could overhear canoeists’ conversations on North Pond. He wasn’t so much removed from humanity as sitting on the sidelines.” Finkel camped at the site and tells Knight he was enchanted by its tranquillity, to which the hermit responds: “Do you think I was engaging in feng shui?”
Once settled in, Knight treated the mostly empty vacation homes around him, as Finkel puts it, like his “own private Costco.” He slept under a camouflage canopy on a twin-size mattress with fitted sheets and Tommy Hilfiger pillowcases. There was Purell by the portable cooler. Wildlife was abundant, but he preferred peanut butter, frozen burgers and, above all, sweets. In a survey of the damage to nearby cupboards and psyches, Finkel notes, “One kid lost all his Halloween candy; the Pine Tree Camp was short an industrial-sized tub of fudge.”
Knight also stole epic quantities of books, and he roars to life through his taste. He quotes Freud, Marx and Woody Allen, and recognizes himself in the narrator of Dostoyevsky’s “Notes From the Underground.” His fetish for stillness results in a fondness for Emily Dickinson. He hates Thoreau (“a dilettante”) and fans of Kerouac, and may be the first person to have followed through on a threat to use John Grisham novels as toilet paper. Through culture and his opinions of it, Knight stayed in touch with the world and categorized it, without the vulnerability of human engagement. He was the Holden Caulfield of the woods.
Which is not to say he lacked perspective. Knight swears he suffered no childhood trauma. His family, which never reported him missing, was flinty, self-reliant and “obsessed with privacy.” (“They assumed I was off doing something on my own.”) He didn’t choose to become a hermit — he was born one, and the woods gave him exactly what he sought. “Solitude bestows an increase in something valuable, I can’t dismiss that idea,” Knight says. “Solitude increased my perception. But here’s the tricky thing: When I applied my increased perception to myself, I lost my identity. There was no audience, no one to perform for.…To put it romantically, I was completely free.”
In one of their sweeter exchanges, relayed in an epilogue on his reporting methods, Knight calls Finkel his Boswell and tells him he likes long books. Finkel admits that his will probably be short — and it should have been shorter. Only in the epilogue do we learn that author and subject had just nine one-hour prison meetings. It’s the kind of thing readers should know earlier, especially since the poverty of access leads to some bad decisions.
In a search for more motive and meaning than the hermit will provide, Finkel chats with psychologists who never met Knight, a seeming violation of psychiatry’s Goldwater Rule against diagnosing people from afar. There are also honkingly dull digressions into the spiritual meaning of becoming a hermit (“In Hindu philosophy, everyone ideally matures into a hermit”), some pseudoscience about solitude and brain function, and an unfortunate comparison with prisoners in solitary confinement, who hardly have the luxury of choosing their solitude.
All this seems like obvious padding, but to give Finkel the benefit of the doubt, it may simply be that his affinity for his amazing hermit got the best of him. He does a remarkable job persuading one of the world’s more recalcitrant individuals to open up, but Finkel wants more, and it’s strange that he doesn’t recognize Knight’s limitations. At one of their last meetings, when a wall no longer separates them, the journalist asks the hermit to shake hands. “I’d rather not,” Knight replies.
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2017 Man Booker International Prize Shortlist Announced
This content was originally published by on 1 January 1970 | 12:00 am.
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The six finalists for the 2017 Man Booker International Prize include two Israelis, a South American, and three Europeans. The shortlisted authors each receive £2,500; the winning author and translator will receive a further £50,000.
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Their Hours Upon the Stage: Performing ‘Hamlet’ Around the World
This content was originally published by STEPHEN GREENBLATT on 21 April 2017 | 12:00 pm.
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Naeem Hayat and Tom Lawrence as Hamlet and Laertes at the Odeon Amphitheatre in Amman, Jordan.
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Sarah Lee
HAMLET GLOBE TO GLOBE
Two Years, 190,000 Miles, 197 Countries, One Play
By Dominic Dromgoole
Illustrated. 390 pp. Grove Press. $27.
It began, we are told, as a whim lubricated by strong drink. In 2012 the management of Shakespeare’s Globe — the splendid replica of the Elizabethan open-air playhouse, built on the bankside of the Thames in London — was considering possible eye-catching new initiatives. In the midst of the merry collective buzz, the theater’s artistic director, Dominic Dromgoole, impulsively said, “Let’s take ‘Hamlet’ to every country in the world.” No doubt even crazier cultural ideas have been proposed, but this one is crazy enough to rank near the top of anyone’s list. Yet it came to pass. An intrepid company of 12 actors and four stage managers, backed up by a London-based staff that undertook the formidable task of organizing the venues, obtaining the visas and booking the frenetic travel, set out in April 2014, the 450th anniversary of Shakespeare’s birth. They did not quite succeed in bringing the tragedy to every country — North Korea, Syria and a small handful of others eluded them — but they came pretty close. One hundred ninety countries and a series of refugee camps later, the tour reached its end in April 2016, the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death.
While helping to run the busy theater in London, Dromgoole managed to venture off and see for himself some 20 iterations of the production he had co-directed and launched. “Hamlet Globe to Globe” is a compulsively readable, intensely personal chronicle of performances in places as various as Djibouti and Gdansk, Taipei and Bogotá. The book is in large part a tribute to the perils and pleasures of touring. The Globe troupe had to possess incredible stamina. Keeping up an exhausting pace for months on end — Lesotho on the 1st of April, Swaziland on the 3rd, Mozambique on the 5th, Malawi on the 8th, Zimbabwe on the 10th, Zambia on the 12th, and on and on — they would fly in, hastily assemble their set, unpack their props and costumes, shake hands with officials, give interviews to the local press, and mount the stage for two and a half hours of ghostly haunting, brooding soliloquies, madcap humor, impulsive stabbing, feigned and real madness, graveside grappling, swordplay and the final orgy of murder. Then after a quick job of disassembling and packing, they were off to the next country. When one or two of the company became ill, as occasionally happened, the group had rapidly to reassign the roles; when almost all of them succumbed at the same moment, as befell them after an imprudent dinner in Mexico City, they had to make do with improvised narration and zanily curtailed scenes.
Dromgoole explains that he set the troupe up in the full expectation that not everyone would last the full two years. Hence his insistence that all the actors learn multiple parts so that they could switch around at a moment’s notice. As it happened, the same 16 people miraculously made it through the whole tour. Perhaps changing roles from time to time helped them build the collective sense of trust that sustained them. Perhaps too, as Dromgoole suggests, they drew upon “the gentle support of each line of verse,” so that even in the most trying of circumstances Shakespeare’s iambic pentameters “kept them upright and somehow kept them moving forward, into the story and towards the audience.”
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Touring is particularly resonant for “Hamlet,” since Shakespeare’s tragedy features a traveling company of players who arrive in Elsinore and are greeted warmly by the prince. Hamlet makes clear that he has a lively interest in the theater, but that interest is not purely aesthetic. He asks the players to stage a court performance of an old play, “The Murder of Gonzago,” to which he says he has added a few lines. His secret intention is to see if the play triggers in his uncle an involuntary display of guilt, thereby confirming the charge of murder made by his father’s ghost. In the event, the uncle does arise in a rage and brings the performance to a halt, but like almost everything else in the tragedy, the signs are ambiguous. The poor players, in any case, could have no way to grasp why their show provoked such a response. A wonderful production I saw years ago showed them hastily packing up their bags in fear and rushing away.
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The Globe company, of course, was always packing up and rushing away to the next venue. They did not deliberately set out to provoke moral crises and confessions of murder, even in the most benighted of the countries they visited, but they certainly hoped that the tragedy’s celebrated interrogation of social and psychological ills — “Th’oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely, / The pangs of despised love, the law’s delay, / The insolence of office” — would have some beneficial influence. Tragedy, Shakespeare’s contemporary Sir Philip Sidney wrote, “openeth the greatest wounds, and showeth forth the ulcers that are covered with tissue”; it “maketh kings fear to be tyrants.” “Hamlet” seems particularly suited to this task because of what Dromgoole calls its “protean nature.” It seems to work equally effectively in the urban heart of the most advanced industrial country and on the shores of the remotest Pacific island.
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Pearson Strikes Textbook Rental Deal with NACS
This content was originally published by on 1 January 1970 | 12:00 am.
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As part of its effort to remake its higher education business, Pearson has struck a textbook rental deal with the National Association of College Stores subsidiary, indiCo.
Under the agreement, which goes into effect this fall, 50 Pearson titles will be available via a rent-only model from the 1,500 independent campus stores through indiCo. All titles will be available to rent for less than $100. To make it more affordable for stores to participate in the program, Pearson will sell the included textbooks on a consignment basis.
While students will be able to rent textbooks online, Bob Walton, NACS CEO, said he believes students will appreciate the chance to rent and return the books at the local campus store. “Rentals can provide a significant cost savings, but online returns can be a hassle. Additionally, it’s easy for students to select the wrong materials when shopping with online retailers.”
NACS remodeled indiCo this spring, making it a collaborative that an offers operational assistance to college stores in a bid to slow the loss of independent college stores.
After sustaining poor results in its North American higher education business in 2016, Pearson said in January that it was committed to finding ways to make its materials more affordable for students. In addition to its agreement with indiCo, Pearson has announced a series of new cost-cutting initiatives for students that will go into affect this year.
This article has been updated for clarity.
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2017 April PAD Challenge: Day 22
This content was originally published by Robert Lee Brewer on 22 April 2017 | 6:00 am.
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For today’s prompt, write a fable poem. A fable is a story that conveys a moral, usually told with animal characters.
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Revision doesn’t have to be a chore–something that should be done after the excitement of composing the first draft. Rather, it’s an extension of the creation process!
In the 48-minute tutorial video Re-creating Poetry: How to Revise Poems, poets will be inspired with several ways to re-create their poems with the help of seven revision filters that they can turn to again and again.
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Here’s my attempt at a Fable Poem:
“the north pole penguin”
An emperor penguin spoke with reindeer one day
& asked how they were able to pull Santa’s sleigh
to which they replied, “It’s a really simple goal:
Just leave this hemisphere to visit the North Pole.”
Because deer anywhere else are stuck to the ground,
the penguin thought their rationale sounded quite sound.
He purchased a one-way ticket to get him there
& was eaten for dinner by a polar bear.
The moral, of course, is not to venture too far
from what you know & to be happy where you are.
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Robert Lee Brewer is Senior Content Editor of the Writer’s Digest Writing Community and author of Solving the World’s Problems (Press 53). He loves reading fables to his children, because he loves reading fables to himself.
Follow him on Twitter @RobertLeeBrewer.
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About Robert Lee Brewer
Senior Content Editor, Writer's Digest Community.
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Keep Calm and Kiss the Cat Goodbye: Mass Pet Euthanization Before the Blitz
This content was originally published by ELENA PASSARELLO on 21 April 2017 | 3:28 pm.
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A cat is rescued.
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State Library, Victoria, Australia
THE GREAT CAT AND DOG MASSACRE
The Real Story of World War Two’s Unknown Tragedy
By Hilda Kean
Illustrated. 233 pp. University of Chicago Press. $35.
On Sept. 3, 1939, Neville Chamberlain announced on the BBC that Britain had declared war with Germany. In the week that followed, dutiful Britons returned library books, sewed blackout curtains — and had their pets euthanized.
This puzzling national moment, which dispatched a quarter of England’s pet population, is the titular event of Hilda Kean’s “The Great Cat and Dog Massacre.” Amid protests from government officials and animal charities, and despite the absence of any attack on British soil (the Blitz would not begin until 1940), an estimated 400,000 pets were killed in that first, silent week of war.
So many Londoners chose to give their pets “the gift of sleep” that half-mile-long lines stretched around clinics, causing both a chloroform shortage and a waste management crisis. Though the massacre was publicly lamented at the time, Kean claims it has since been erased from memory. In fact, companion animals rarely appear at all in historical discussions of this, “the People’s War.”
Using source material that includes advertisements, diaries, interviews, letters and editorials, Kean argues the massacre was not the result of a uniform domestic panic. She does point to the “black boredom” of the days after war was declared, and how mass euthanization was something citizens could do to prepare. But over all, Kean claims, perhaps too vaguely, that there was nothing “mass” about the thinking that led to this slew of pet deaths. Every decision to euthanize emerged from the context of a “particular prior existing relationship within a household.” Equally specific relationships also led to each decision not to do away with the family cat or dog, a choice made for three-quarters of England’s pet population. Kean says the singularity of these 400,000 decisions marks a key point in the history of Britons interacting with, and awarding agency to, animals.
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Kean then shifts to those spared pets, whose lives further intertwined with those of humans during the Blitz. Under rationing, the diets of pets and owners blended; cuts of the same horse or whale were rationed for all. A restricted diet prompted interspecies bargaining: A bone from the butcher meant for the dog might get rerouted to its owner’s soup, or a cut of eel sold expressly for human consumption was sneaked into a cat’s dish.
In addition to food, “experiencing bombardment was clearly a joint human-animal activity.” The corrugated iron shelters springing up in Londoners’ yards were new spaces to be simultaneously negotiated. Some animals’ airstrike anxieties kept humans from evacuating to larger public shelters; other humans felt their own fears assuaged by their furry compatriots.
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Kean makes these claims academically, arguing in the careful — even downright glacial — positing of a responsible historian. Still, her snapshots of life during wartime are engaging. In one chapter, a girl describes the sight of her dog’s paws digging away the earth to retrieve her from a buried shelter. In another, a rescued parrot treats its liberator to a run of hilarious obscenities. One woman has her day in court after striking an air raid marshal who banished her pet monkey from a public shelter. Midcentury pet names litter (and light up) the book: Peckle, Chum, Tish and Tosh, Winston Churchill. We meet Marx, George Orwell’s “subdued and uneasy” poodle, named for a philosopher Orwell had not yet read.
Many illustrations Kean includes are also telling. One P.S.A. for makeshift earmuffs to be tied, like a toothache hankie, around a dog’s head warns “few cats will tolerate anything of the kind.” The care expressed in this ad, Kean says, springs not just from observing the suffering of pets, but also from an empathy for a fellow Blitz-weary creature.
“I know raids … drove many dogs mad,” one interview subject notes. “The war’s done the same thing to everything and everybody.” Kean’s book suggests that history should acknowledge “everybody” to include bodies with four legs as well as two.
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