Forgotten Voices of the Second World War by Max Arthur

An appropriate choice for Remembrance Sunday, I think.

Forgotten Voices of the Second World War by Max Arthur

This book is something of a sequel to Max Arthur’s Forgotten Voices of the Great War, and both books have a similar backstory. Arthur went to the Imperial War Museum’s Sound Archive, a repository for recorded interviews, broadcasts, speeches, and sounds that capture in audio format the experience of wartime. Soldiers and civilians alike had their stories recorded by interviewers and kept by the IWM, and for this book Arthur went deep into the archives and pulled together a truly remarkable collection of narratives that present World War II from an eyewitness perspective.

The selections are short, most under a page long and some only a few sentences in length. The majority of the snippets come from British people (and of those, mainly men), though voices from other nations are scattered through the book to provide a little contrast or alternate colour. But naturally, each story is different, and it’s truly fascinating to hear an Australian soldier talk about what it was like in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp, or read what an evacuated schoolgirl felt when she boarded the train and left her parents behind in London shortly before the Blitz. These personal stories bring the war to life in a way that a book of purely military, social, or political history couldn’t duplicate.

Reading this book does make me wonder what Arthur had to leave out, though, whether for reasons of space or other reasons. The selections in a book are on the whole very Anglo-centric, which is hardly surprising considering the source of the material and the book’s target audience. And the story of the war is certainly told through the British perspective, leaving out much of the war in Russia, China, and the South Pacific in order to focus on the fall of Singapore and the battles for control of Burma and Egypt and other colonial areas invaded by the Axis powers. But there’s enough of a narrative thread to make the book a fascinating work of ‘living history’, even though I hardly dare to think that a quarter of those interviewed in these pages are still alive today to read this book. If ‘living history’ or World War II history interest you, you’d be well-placed to enjoy the fruits of Arthur’s extensive work.

The First Guide to Prisons and Concentration Camps of the Soviet Union by Avram Shifrin

I was looking for a suitable book to post to commemorate the 90th anniversary of the beginning of the October Revolution, but it seems that I’ve already gone through and posted most of my previously written USSR-related book reviews…except for this one. And since I don’t have my copy of my perennial favourite title, Will the Soviet Union Survive Until 1984?, with me at the moment, this book is the next obvious candidate.

A bit of backstory on how I acquired it: When one of my undergraduate history professors retired, he invited those of us who were taking his class on modern Russian history to come to his office and take anything we wanted off his bookshelves. He’d already gone through and cleared out all the books he had room for and wanted to keep, and he figured that it would be a lot easier for his students to clear off the shelves for him before he took the rest of the books to be recycled or donated….and no, I didn’t actually trample anyone in my haste to get to his office once the lecture had ended. That said, one of the books I made off with was this one.

The First Guide to Prisons and Concentration Camps of the Soviet Union by Avram Shifrin

As the title says, it’s a guidebook, first published by a Soviet dissident in the early 1980s. And by a guidebook, I mean that it gives general (and sometimes quite specific) locations of Soviet prisons and labour camps, the remaining substance of the gulag, broken down by area and region and type of prison. The guidebook even goes so far as to mention the type of labour that is done or thought to be done at each prison, whether in heavy industry or manufacturing…or the ’special’ camps where prisoners worked to mine radioactive materials (without adequate shielding) or performed tasks that can only be described as murderous (such as cleaning the nozzles on nuclear submarines). Also included in the guidebook are the location of politico-psychiatric facilities where prisoners were often held, generally with no attempt made to separate political prisoners from the actually insane. And since the book is written and edited by a man who spent several years in the prison camp system, based on research he compiled with others who had fallen foul of the Soviet justice system, there’s an authenticity to it that has to be seen to be fully understood.

This book is almost certainly out of print, and probably only available in used bookshops if anywhere. I only managed to get my hands on a copy by chance. But it’s absolutely chilling to read, because it shows the depth and breadth of the prison camp system in the USSR years after Stalin’s death. When you look at the book and think that every little dot on the map represents anywhere from two dozen to several hundred human lives, many imprisoned for their dissenting opinions or even their well-meaning attempts to reform their political system…well, it wasn’t so long ago, historically speaking. Shifrin’s guidebook manages to bring home the reality of the gulag in a way that few purely academic texts can hope to emulate.

Works in Progress: InaDWriMo

(New and rather self-explanatory journal tag — works in progress.)

Academic Ronin has an interesting post about InaDWriMo (International acaDemic Writing Month), the scholarly equivalent of NaNoWriMo.

I have a few projects in the works, including an article I’ve just sent off to a journal for peer review. Clearing out these projects will be a major goal for this month, especially now that I have one conference I’m scheduled to present at next year and another conference that I’m working on a proposal for.

I’ll post more about my projects as I bring them closer to completion — here’s hoping that November will be a fairly productive month!

In the Heat of the Kitchen by Bernard Donoughue

Gearing up for another set of book reviews for the month of November. I may be able to post some more recently written ones very soon, once I sort through a few older ones that I haven’t yet had a chance to go back and edit.

In the Heat of the Kitchen by Bernard Donoughue

Bernard (now Lord) Donoughue served as a political advisor for Harold Wilson and Jim Callaghan from 1974 to 1979, and in that time he was in a perfect position to observe the workings of government and the ways in which individual personalities clashed over different issues. It’s something of a shame that this book doesn’t exactly do justice to either Labour Party history or Labour Party gossip.

Admittedly, it is an autobiography, and as such it is not meant to be a purely academic analysis of the author’s time in politics and public life. But the autobiographical sections veer sharply toward the mawkish, with a tendency to harp on about his own beliefs and political prejudices, and it is more than a little tiresome to be jerked out of what promises to be an interesting narrative by snide little side commentaries that are wholly unnecessary. A good (or bad) example of the narrative problems:

Of the half a dozen books in which I have been involved, Herbert Morrison: Portrait of a Politician is the one of which I am most proud. Morrison had of course been a great political figure during my childhood, one of my earliest heroes….But he was not a wholly attractive personality and his reputation dimmed after his defeat in 1965. Fortunately, interest in him revived somewhat in the early glow of achievement of his grandson Peter Mandelson, and the book achieved a reprint in 2001 with a fascinating foreword by Peter. But its sales were never great. Since it contains little ‘psychobabble’ or speculation about Morrison’s (undoubtedly thin) sex life, it might anyway be unsuited to the modern literary market.

(You need to imagine my raised eyebrow here.)

One of the more detailed chapters in Donoughue’s book relates how thoroughly Harold Wilson was cowed by his personal secretary Marcia Williams (later Lady Falkender). Although the tales that Donoughue tells are worthy of note in terms of understanding the power dynamics inside Number 10, the overall effect is to turn Marcia Williams into some sort of malicious, predatory she-demon and Harold Wilson into Richard Bucket from Keeping Up Appearances. Donoughue’s negative perspective is understandable, considering that Marcia Williams absolutely could not stand the fact that he was able to take a political policy line independent of hers and attempted to limit her influence over Wilson. But Donoughue unfortunately doesn’t make enough of an attempt to look back on events with a more detached eye, something that would have improved the quality of the writing and the substance of the text.

In the Heat of the Kitchen generally wavers between readable and unreadable, though I was able to plough through it and reach some sort of muddled understanding of Donoughue’s perspective on the high politics and various intrigues that characterised the Labour governments of the 1970s. I haven’t yet had a chance to read his Downing Street Diary, but I do wonder if that book will be even more tainted by the personal prejudices of its author. It’s rather a shame, really — for someone who had quite a few interesting political ideas and helped at least two prime ministers reach a better understanding of key policy issues, Donoughue does not really convey a good sense of his overall intelligence and scope of political awareness in this autobiography.

ADMIN: Start of November

So today begins a new month, and with it comes a shift in my review postings.

For a little more than two months now, I’ve been reposting reviews I wrote to a different blog quite a while back. Now that I’ve cleared out a good portion of those reviews, I am going to cut back on the postings — ideally to two or three per week, probably on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Sundays. It’ll give me a chance to go back and rework some of my older, less-polished reviews and type up some new ones…and possibly also add some new and interesting content to my blog as well.

Many thanks for reading thus far!