Katherine Addison's Blog, page 9

Review: Sears, Lincoln's Lieutenants (2017)

Lincoln's Lieutenants: The High Command of the Army of the Potomac by Stephen W. Sears

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


This is a MASSIVE group biography of the generals of the Army of the Potomac. It is very readable (at 766 pages, it had better be) and is not hagiographic about any of the generals, including Grant. Sears offers clear accounts of the battles fought by the Army of the Potomac and clear (sometimes scathing) accounts of the politicking and cliques and bad behavior of the generals (also the egregious Edwin Stanton). Also the endless frustrations of President Lincoln. It is not and does not attempt to be anything but well-researched biographical military history.



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Review: Korda, Alone (2017)

Alone: Britain, Churchill, and Dunkirk: Defeat Into Victory by Michael Korda

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This is definitely the backstage-gossip history of Dunkirk. Korda is focused on the individuals who were making decisions and he writes about them as if he knew them all personally. He also writes about his own experiences as a small boy in a very wealthy and powerful family (his uncle DID know Churchill personally). He is a very vivid writer and an excellent storyteller, and it's a cliche to say he makes the story of Dunkirk "come alive," but because he's relying wherever possible on someone's first-hand account, HIS account has a great deal of immediacy. This is a very engaging read.



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Review: Roland, Nazi Women of the Third Reich (2018)

Nazi Women of the Third Reich: Serving the Swastika by Paul Roland

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Capsule biographies of a variety of women in Hitler's Germany, some of them fanatical supporters, some of them fellow travelers some of them opposed to him. It's packaged as popular history, divided within each chapter into short sections, each with its own title, with pull-quotes every few pages and pictures scattered generously throughout, but I'd never heard of most of the women he discusses, so I learned a great deal.



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Review: Mandell, The Nazi Olympics (1971)

The Nazi Olympics by Richard D. Mandell

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


This is a sardonic blow by blow account of the 1936 Berlin Olympics. Mandell discusses both the Olympic Games and their modern "re-creation" and the ways in which the Nazis turned the Games into a celebration of the German volk. He is a cynical observer of the confluence of two ideologies that, in their different ways, require idealism to work, and he talks a lot about the way those two idealizing ideologies used each other to create the '36 Games. Enjoyable and thought-provoking.



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Review: Lipstadt, Denying the Holocaust (1994)

Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory by Deborah E. Lipstadt

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I came at this book backwards, because I've previously read a couple of books about the Irving libel trial, where David Irving tried to sue Deborah Lipdstadt for accurately calling him a Holocaust denier. Bascially, that's what this book is: Lipstadt accurately calling people Holocaust deniers and laying out their methodologies and pet fallacies and so on. It is, of course, almost 30 years out of date, so more a primary text about the history of Holocaust denial in the 1980s than anything else. But it was still engaging and interesting (and infuriating) and I'm sure that though the players have changed, the script is still relevant.



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Review: Koonz, The Nazi Conscience (2003)

The Nazi Conscience by Claudia Koonz

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This is a very interesting book about how Nazi Germany (meaning not just those in the Nazi Party, but Germany under the Nazis) came to believe that genocide was morally right. Koonz lays it out very carefully, so that although it's an alien thought-process, you can follow the logic step by step. You have to start by believing that your Volk, your people, is more important than anything else, including yourself. And YOUR Volk is of course better than anyone else's Volk. Once you believe that, believing that anything that strengthens the Volk is good and anything that weakens the Volk is bad, is a pretty easy next step, and the language of social Darwinism---the idea that your Volk is in competition with all these other Volks---is a comfortable fit. And since your Volk is the best Volk, anything you have to do to ensure its superiority is morally right, up to and including mass murder. The rhetoric, used by Nazi propaganda, of the Jews as a disease, as a threat to the health of the Volk is easy to see (and was apparently easy to believe). Koonz shows all the links in the chain.



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Review: Kendi, How To Be An Antiracist

How to Be an Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Does what it says on the tin. Kendi, like Coates using his autobiography as a platform to build off of, goes through patiently, step by step and aspect by aspect and using himself and his own attitudes as an example, how to turn racism (or its passive twin I'm-not-a-racist) into antiracism, at every decision point reiterating that racist policies arise out of self-interest rather than ignorance, and it's the racist POLICIES that have to change, because it's policy that drives social change, not individual enlightenment

Kendi is very clear about defining his terms; racism is anything that promotes inequity between racial groups; antiracism is anything that promotes equity between racial groups. He talks about class racism and gender racism and queer racism, places where racism intersects with classism, sexism, and homophobia, and in fact, following Black feminist theory, argues that the various -isms can't be separated out one from the other: that's a divide-and-conquer strategy that works well for racist power and is disastrous for antiracist power. Everyone's identity sits at the intersection of race and class and sex and sexual orientation; you can't treat one if you don't consider the others.

This book starts from Kendi's personal journey, but his belief that change must come at the level of policy means that it is always looking outward toward social change and how social change can be achieved. Autobiography as extremely well argued polemic.



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Review: Arntfield & Danesi, Murder in Plain English (2017)

Murder in Plain English: From Manifestos to Memes--Looking at Murder Through the Words of Killers by Michael Arntfield

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


This is not a very good book, which is disappointing, because the idea---that murderers (by which they mostly mean serial killers and mass murderers) have particular stories they tell about themselves and that those stories can be analyzed to tell us more about how murderers think---is great. (I love close readings.) Unfortunately, Arntfield & Danesi aren't very nuanced readers, and they never really get in there and close read a text the way I was longing for them to do. I think the points they make about the possibilities of literary forensics are intriguing, although there's a creepy Philip K. Dick/Minority Report vibe to their idea that murderers can be detected by their writing BEFORE they commit murder. To be fair to Arntfield & Danesi, I think what they mean is that people (mostly male) likely to become serial killers or mass murderers can be detected in adolescence (by teachers who magically have the time and training to close read their students' work for signs of schizoid or other personality disorders) and (magically) successfully intervened with by social workers or psychiatrists, not that they should be pre-emptively incarcerated.

In the last chapter they try to prove that literary forensics is useful in cold cases, but in none of the cases they look at (O.J. Simpson, Jon-Benet Ramsey, and April Tinsley) does their analysis of the writing involved get us any closer to justice. Their close reading of Simpson is sort of nice as corroborative evidence, but it's nothing new or surprising. They point sort of vaguely at Patsy Ramsey as being involved somehow in the ransom letter, but it's very vague and of course she's dead. And their not-very-close close reading of April Tinsley's murderer accomplishes nothing.* (Interestingly, in that case, the only case where they have made any effort to get involved in actually SOLVING a crime, the information they give the Fort Wayne police---to which the Fort Wayne police do not respond---is geographical profiling, which they do not talk about at all in the entire rest of the book, not literary analysis. So they're severely undercutting their own argument.)

In summation, this feels like a case of academic scholars trying to join the bandwagon of unlikely specialties that turn out be forensically useful and trying to prove that they have special skills that are uniquely suited to solving---or preventing---crimes. On the one hand, people have been close reading the writings of murderers for decades, even if they don't call it that, so there's nothing really new here, and on the other, their argument for the unique suitability of trained literary scholars to fight crime is unconvincing.

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*In 2018 a man named John Miller was successfully prosecuted for April Tinsley's murder, but he was caught by genetic genealogy and DNA profiling, not by literary analysis of his writing.



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Review: Coates, Between the World and Me (2015)

Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


This is an autobiography, written as a letter to his fifteen-year-old son, talking about how dangerous and damaging racism is to the literal, physical bodies of Black people. He is talking especially about Black men, especially YOUNG Black men, the specific group into which his son is emerging and who disproportionately end up incarcerated or dead. He's also talking about the toxic nature of the American Dream, which silently reinscribes racism in the way that it lets one side of the equation (white people) simply ignore the existence of the other side (Black people) as they strive selfishly toward an implicitly white-only utopia. (Black people have no such luxury about white people.) The Dream is the thing that white fragility (cf. Robin diAngelo) is there to protect, the unspeakably privileged ability NOT TO KNOW.

This is beautifully written and deeply thought-provoking.



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Review: Reiterman, Raven (1982)

Raven: The Untold Story of the Rev. Jim Jones and His People by Tim Reiterman

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This is a massive biography of Jim Jones and Peoples Temple. (Yes, "Peoples Temple" is correct. No apostrophe, no definite article.) Reiterman was one of the reporters who went with Congressman Leo Ryan to visit Jonestown, which was the precipitating incident for the mass murder-suicide that, tragically, made Jonestown famous. So Reiterman actually MET Jim Jones and was nearly killed by his followers, which gives the biography a certain authority.

Reiterman has also done his homework through interviews and FOIA and digging in newspaper archives, so really presents the best and most rounded picture possible of a secretive paranoid megalomaniac.

I find Jim Jones fascinating in a trainwreck sort of way, because his ideals seem to have been genuine---he DID work for racial equality, although PT itself reinscribed the same old racial hierarchy, and he did passionately believe in socialism (which for me counts in the plus column when it's practical boots on the ground everybody-has-enough-food-and-a-place-to-sleep socialism)---and yet he is one of the most evil people of the 20th century. He twisted everything he touched---and was doing so basically from the beginning of his career as a preacher---until it turned into the horrifically egalitarian massacre at Jonestown. The people who committed the murders followed through and killed themselves. SOMEONE killed Jim Jones, which Reiterman speculates was not his actual plan. Jones talked about mass suicide a lot before he made it happen, and he always said that someone had to stay alive to explain, and who better than Jones himself? And there are some weird things about what he did at the end---sending a couple of guys off with briefcases full of money and guns, his murderous goons leaving the Cessna untouched although they shot out one of the engines of the larger plane (Jones had at least one person in his inner circle who could fly a Cessna), and although Jones died of a contact gunshot wound to the temple, the gun was found twenty feet away from his body, as if someone else made sure he carried through with the master plan.

That's one of the many unknowable things about Jonestown, including exactly how many people died and who they were. The US government and the legal system did a terrible job with the aftermath: "The authors had intended to include a complete list of the Jonestown dead but discovered that no such roster had been compiled. A list supplied by the court-appointed Peoples Temple receiver in February 1982 contained only 883 names---those 660 people whose bodies were positively identified and 223 who were presumed to have died at Jonestown. Receiver Robert Fabian said there was no way to account for the other 30 bodies found at Jonestown but suggested that many were children who had been born there. The authors decided against using the list, however, because it contained many omissions, some inaccurate entries, and other errors in the case of adult membership" (592).

The massacre at Jonestown is horrific and tragic all on its own, but it's also a sad fact that it eclipses the good that Peoples Temple did. The evil in Jim Jones ultimately overwhelmed the good.

This is a good, solidly written biography. Reiterman does his best to explain the unexplainable.



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