Alex's Reading List - October 19th, 2020
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** Alex's Reading List - October 19th, 2020
Hello everyone, I had great conversations with several of you in the past month resulting from the newsletter. Thank you to everyone who reached out! In September I slowed down to a read a couple of ponderous but rewarding biographies. I found a lot of inspiration and perspective about the present by considering how men like Churchill and de Gaulle faced dire situations with determination and honor.
Here are the 5 books I read in September. I hope that something here catches your interest. Be safe, read something old, and remember to VOTE! The Last Lion: Visions of Glory: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874-1932 by William Manchester (https://bookshop.org/a/14192/9780385313483) ”It is very vexatious to me, and hard to bear. The capacity to run risks is at famine prices. All play for safety. The war is certainly settling on to a grim basis, and it is evident that long vistas of pain and struggle lie ahead… I toil away.” WSC, 1915
This lengthy book is eminently readable in part because Manchester makes no pretensions to inhuman impartiality or political balancing - his admiration for his man is obvious. It is also kept lively by the almost unbelievable adventures of its subject, Winston Churchill. From a punitive mission into the Hindu Kush to the last cavalry charge of Kitchener’s Nile campaign, escaping a POW camp in the Boer war to the Queen’s final jubilee, he managed to be omnipresent. The author recreates just how hard he worked every social privilege of his class and position to be so. Despite some transparent myth-making, Manchester retains the ability to clearly identify and dissect Churchill’s flaws and lapses in judgment: high finance, women’s suffrage, and policies towards Ireland and India come to mind.
Winston Churchill had the rare ability to confidently make and execute weighty decisions, aware of risks but never paralyzed by them. While the fallout of significant failures could be as harsh then as it is now, he possessed uncommon privileges and talents that let him bull through the opposition and recrimination any doomed experiments caused. From his first election at 26, he remained a prominent member of Parliament for nearly all of the next sixty years - an astonishing career in any age. Throughout it all, he was never the type of politician willing to bend with the whims of an electorate or even to the direction of a party.
Manchester does an admirable job of assessing Churchill’s failures by the values of the time but informed by the perspective of a later historian. This approach recasts some failures as the brilliant but unsuccessful endeavors they were, rather than the follies his peers could perceive. In particular, his last-ditch defense of Antwerp, the ill-fated but visionary Dardanelles campaign, and his early boosting of the development of the tank illustrate his willingness to take positive actions regardless of political repercussions. In each case, the contrast between Churchill venturing at risk of failure, and his political enemies playing it safe and surviving to say ‘I told you so’, is palpable.
If I can be so bold as to draw a single political lesson from this chapter of Churchill’s life, it is that we should be more forbearing towards elites who venture to make risky attempts at progress, even if they fail; and we should be utterly ruthless towards elites who will not take risks, who will pass the buck, who will appease or treat the status quo as practicable when it is insane.
Bonus: Manchester has fantastic taste in maps, choosing perfect ones to feature alongside his text, and describing the terrain in question in admirable ways (this was also a favorite aspect of his MacArthur biography). This book could double as an ‘end of empire’ geographic introduction, cogently explaining territories that the English later washed their hands of in more or less honorable ways, from Pakistan to Palestine and Ireland to the Sudan. Discovery of France by Graham Robb (https://bookshop.org/a/14192/9780393333640) "In many respects, the more accurate the map, the more misleading the impression. Most official, political definitions of a country are quite useless for describing the world if its inhabitants.”
Robb’s travelogue through history is a wonderful exploration of just how unique, disunited, and un-‘civilized’ nearly all of France remained straight into the twentieth century.
We are so apt to judge a proud culture like France, the nation-state par excellence, the (self-described) crown of European civilization and rationality, by her own bellicose myth-making. Yet when we do, we lose sight of much that makes the culture interesting, and much that it could teach us about our own country. Robb retraces the linguistic, ethnic, religious, commercial, and political fault lines of France, from the early eighteenth century to the dawning of the twenty-first. His histories of the many proto-French languages, the geographically disparate regions, the poor connections or sympathies between the capital and the ‘provinces’, explodes any easy preconceptions, logo maps, or neat, potted history I’ve ever felt I knew about the country. Looking back on all the rest of my reading, how did I think I understood the Revolution, the Empire, the Restoration, the Commune, or nearly anything else, through the lens of such shallow assumptions about the unity or self-similarity of this ‘undiscovered continent’? This is an essential and fun read, for the perspective shake-up alone - but along the way you’ll find dozens of facts to regale anyone nearby (Kirsten) with… I’ll start you off! Bonus: DID YOU KNOW that less than 20% of French people spoke Français on the eve of the Great War? Or that there were shepherds in the southern coastal plains who galloped on stilts? Or that nearly all French communities discriminated against a group called ‘cagots’ for nearly 800 years, but no one really knew who they were? Or that the largest canyon in Europe, in south-central France, was only ‘discovered’ in the mid-twentieth century!? Skin in the Game by Nassim Nicholas Taleb (https://bookshop.org/a/14192/9780425284643) "Contemporary peers are valuable collaborators, not final judges."
I made it to the end of Taleb’s canon and... the thrill is gone. This book builds more on the polemics than the foundations of its three excellent preceding volumes. To begin with the organization is nonsensical and haphazard: Taleb starts off with three prologues and an appendix before launching into seven other, mostly unconnected ‘Books’, though mercifully all in under 250 pages. Each of these chapters begins with Taleb heartily flinging his notion of 'skin in the game' at another discipline, industry, or concept, and reporting back anything it stuck to. In style, it is more a Twitter rant than a book. There are echoes of his idiosyncratic and thought-provoking brilliance here but on the whole this is a disappointing change from the quality of his earlier (and hopefully any later!) works. Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tukarczuk (https://bookshop.org/a/14192/9780525541332) (2019 Nobel in Literature) "My belief is that the psyche evolved to keep us from ever seeing the truth. To prevent us from catching sight of the mechanism. The psyche is our defense system - it makes sure that we’ll never understand what’s going on around us.”
I remember smirking at this title in Blackwell’s with Kirsten some time ago - she has a theory that I will buy any depressing title to spite her (Every Man Dies Alone, The Earth is Weeping, A Happy Death (https://alexandermcauliffe.com/f/mersault-is-not-alright) , The Demon-Haunted World…). After being burned several times, I am normally wary about books with Nobel or Man Booker on the cover, unless they are followed by more reassuring words like ‘Hilary Mantel’. I should have listened.
Drive Your Plow is a dream-like, first-person mystery novel set in the Polish highlands, just by the border with the Czech Republic. Our protagonist is a retired engineer, a woman who lives alone tending vacation houses through the difficult mountain winters. Her narration centers on a love of Animals, calculation of Horoscopes, mitigation of Ailments, disgust with People, an emphasis on unusual Capitalizations, and the poetry of her dearly beloved William Blake (the title is taken from his Proverbs of Hell).
Our narrator’s voice and circumstance are odd, in a way that is superficially interesting, yet the reader witnesses little transition or development. I suppose any ‘real’ change is hidden from the reader as a device to further the plot. Tukarczuk gives the reader no reason to care about the lives or fates of the characters that populate this story. Meanwhile, there are intense passages on the subjects of certain Outrages that are clearly directed at the Reader and not the other Characters: cruelty of eating meat or hunting Animals, the blind assent to immoral Rules, the prejudice that keeps anyone from listening to the elderly, and so on. All this results in a narrative that feels more like a dream or simulation than a novel. The characters have only their circumscribed bits to play, as if they are governed by planetary motions... A Certain Idea of France: De Gaulle by Julian Jackson (https://bookshop.org/a/14192/9780674241459) “Behaving like a great power was De Gaulle’s way of becoming one.”
Jackson takes his book’s title from the opening line of De Gaulle’s war memoirs, which perfectly captures the suggestive, vague convictions that Charles de Gaulle lived, thought, and led by: “All my life I have had a certain idea of France.” Jackson takes it as his task to elucidate this Certain Idea, and therefore the man holding it. This serves as a useful lens by which to recollect this most unusual, most proud, most French of leaders.
June 1940 saw De Gaulle as a newly promoted general and the most junior minister of the entire staggering Third Republic. As the government disintegrated and the Petain armistice was prepared, De Gaulle made his way to London, without forces, without money, with only the barest authorization. There, he traded on his nominal authority and military rank to gain an interview with Winston Churchill, and parlayed that interview’s ambiguous outcome into a single broadcast on the BBC. Thus, on the 17th of June 1940, in a speech he declared the armistice illegitimate. He declared the French had lost the battle, but not the war. He asserted the ‘legitimacy’ of the ‘French who fight’. By this pronouncement, known more widely as rapidly spreading rumor, he became the Voice on the radio, the General De Gaulle was born.
Over the next four dark years, he would fight his allies more than his enemies to safeguard the ‘legitimacy’, the ‘grandeur’ and the ‘pride’ of France. By his force of personality, by his immense obsession with the prerogatives due to France, he made the Americans and the British treat him as such, and ultimately treat France as one of the victorious powers. There was little other reason that they should do so; indeed, FDR desperately wanted to dictate terms to the French as was done to the defeated Italians, to usher in a postcolonial world. Yet by his arrival on the Champs D’Élysées with French soldiers around him, he assured his vaunted legitimacy among the French, for all time. He never for a moment forgot that in a moment of military catastrophe and political vacuum he had ‘been France’ - and the French did not forget, either. To this day he is often ranked as the most popular historical figure in France.
I’ve already written too much, so I’ll say nothing of De Gaulle’s tremendously long and important post-war career, which Jackson writes with equal vim. At times this is the biography of a symbol as much as a man - but how else can you speak about a man who could leave a European conference muttering, "I have been telling them for a thousand years"?
Reading this biography I often thought of the old bartering game trope - you trade a paperclip for a box of pencils, the pencils for a backpack, through enough iterations and you can end with a car or a house. De Gaulle was the shrewdest, most committed player that game ever had. He never had a paperclip handy, but he ended his career as the president of a nuclear power. That's the list! Thank you for reading. If you have a friend who you think would enjoy this, please feel free to forward it along.
Alex
These books, and those from previous lists, can be viewed or purchased here (https://bookshop.org/lists/monthly-reading-lists-47779f1d-fd8c-41fc-bdad-862493e5cf59) .
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P.S. - if you have any feedback about the format or recommendations I make here, I’d love to hear it. Read More (https://alexandermcauliffe.com)
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