The Future of an Illusion and Civilization and Its Discontents by Sigmund Freud

Doubling up on two of Freud’s works here. It’s quite interesting to read the full text of these works after having read bits and selections of them in various school texts over the years. (Even if some people think Freud is an utter miseryguts no matter what work of his you happen to be reading.)

The Future of an Illusion by Sigmund Freud

Sigmund Freud wrote The Future of an Illusion (Die Zukunft einer Illusion) in 1927, after he had spent several years considering the idea of religion from a psychoanalytic perspective. He had examined religion from a more anthropological perspective in his work Totem and Taboo (1913), looking at possible connections between the beliefs of aboriginal socities and the influence that these beliefs may have had on the construction of religious ideas in the history of human civilisation. In The Future of an Illusion, Freud turns his earlier thoughts into a more systemic study of the role of religion in human behaviour and shaping the human experience, particularly with regard to how religious belief influences and regulates human behaviour.

Freud describes religion as an ‘illusion’ — in other words, a belief that is grounded in personal wish and desire. (Illusions are not necessarily false, he points out, but they are nonetheless grounded in wish and intended to fulfil a personal need.) As Freud sees it, ‘It would be very nice if there were a God who created the world and was a benevolent providence, and if there were a moral order in the universe and an after-life; but it is a very striking fact that all this is exactly as we are bound to wish it to be.‘ He regards the illusion of religion as a creation of man’s unconscious desire for a protecting, guiding father-figure and as a social construct designed to curb the destructive instincts that would make civilised society untenable (such as cannibalism and incest). And though Freud does not advocate an absolute, wholesale jettisoning of the entire structure of the civilisation that currently rests upon a religious base, he claims that human beings are nonetheless capable of moving beyond this infantile kind of wish-fulfilment and towards a more mature and scientific understand of the universe and our place within it.

The Future of an Illusion is a very Freudian book; that is, it is very much a piece of self-analysis, a little like listening to someone who is a bit too fond of the sound of his or her own voice. He contradicts several of his own initial assertions, particularly towards the end of the book, and even someone who isn’t especially ‘religious’ (as Freud would define it) would be quick to point out Freud’s analysis is based more in his anthropological studies and his experience with psychoanalysing patients whose internal struggles with religious beliefs might have contributed to their troubled mental and emotional states. As a book, it is a very good indication of Freud’s personal opinions on religion and its role as the illusion that helps to underpin civilisation. As a treatise in favour of atheism and scientific rationalism…well, I can think of a few other authors I’d rather read on this subject. (Bertrand Russell, for one.)

Civilization and Its Discontents by Sigmund Freud

The title of Sigmund Freud’s Das Unbehagen in der Kultur is a little tricky to translate idiomatically from German. A more literal translation of the title might be “The Uneasiness in Culture” or “The Discomfort in Culture”, but flipping the order of the words places more of the emphasis on the source of the uneasiness — culture, or as it might also be translated, civilisation.

Civilization and Its Discontents is Freud’s attempt to address the tensions that he sees between the instincts and impulses of the individual and the greater conformity required by civilisation. One of the most basic instincts present in human beings is aggression, an instinct that by its very nature is destabilising and impulsive and (in a word) antisocial. Coping with, controlling, or redirecting this aggressive instinct is vital to forming relationships with other human beings — indeed, doing so mitigates one of the three aspects of the human condition that Freud believes prevent individuals from being happy (the other two being exposure to the external world [i.e., weather and nature] and the fraility of the human body against aging, injury, and disease). The individual connection to this civilising force is not always very strong — as evidenced, for instance, by the number of people who will violate society’s norms if they think they can get away with it. Yet the human mind has come up with a means of internally enforcing civilisation: the power of guilt, which is controlled by an aspect of personality that Freud calls the super-ego.

According to Freud, the constant conflict between instinct and the super-ego is responsible for much of the discontent in man’s relationship to civilisation. One of the greatest societal tensions, he says, comes from civilisation’s deeply misguided commandment to ‘love your brother as you love yourself’ — a demand that not only contradicts our fundamental instincts of aggression, but also tends to be extremely difficult to put into actual practice. And when the super-ego chides us for failing to live up to these internalised expectations…well, Freud based quite a lot of his psychology on what can happen when individuals are unwilling or unable to reconcile instinct with the demands of society.

There are other side arguments in Civilization and Its Discontents, further thoughts on the often strained relationship between the individual and society. It is worth remembering that Freud wrote this book in the late 1920s and early 1930s, a time of great social instability in the wake of the Great War that would eventually lead to the series of historical events that ended with Freud fleeing his native Austria for England in mid-1938, where he died in September 1939. Even if Freud’s primarily psychological and rather pessimistic interpretation is no longer as influential as it was in his day, Civilization and Its Discontents provides a fairly concise summary of Freud’s thinking on the relationship between individual and society and the relative thinness of the veneer that provides the gloss we call modern civilisation.

Sailors: English Merchant Seamen 1650-1775 by Peter Earle

A few months ago, I was doing a bit of reading on the shaky financial status of British East India Company in the years leading up to the American Revolution. Intriguing subject, but somewhat out of my usual areas of research interest, and so I was glad to have this book to look to when I needed to check a few day-to-day details about what it meant to be involved in merchant shipping in that particular time period.

Sailors: English Merchant Seamen 1650-1775 by Peter Earle

From what I can tell, most of the fictional accounts of life on the seas in the Age of Sail tends to focus on two perspectives: pirates and navies. The careers of Horatio Hornblower and Jack Aubrey make for good sea-tales, as do the adventure stories of pirates and privateers on the high seas, where everyone is out for a good fight and a well-taken prize. Merchant shipping, on the other hand, doesn’t appear to have as much of the romance and glamour associated with navies and pirates. As such, a history book that focuses specifically on merchant shipping — whether of one or two ships owned by a single small-businessman to the vast fleets operated and administered by the powerful Dutch, French, and British East India Companies — doesn’t seem as easy to come by. Merchant shipping shared many aspects of lifestyle with the different navies or famous pirates, but there were also some noted and notable differences to consider. In this case, Peter Earle’s brief but detailed Sailors: English Merchant Seamen 1650-1775 provides a sound introduction to the workaday life of the men who all but created the concept of international trade.

The book covers the many different facets of a typical merchant sailor’s life, with chapters that examine the routine (the daily workload and general prospects for advancement) and the basic financial (possessions and general wealth) aspects to the more extraordinary situations (shipwrecks, punishments, mutinies, and court trials) that a sailor might face. Earle draws mostly on the primary sources of trial records from the Admiralty courts, as well as various logs and journals and accounts of the day. One such set of accounts is the Lloyd’s List, by now one of the world’s oldest continuously-running journals (dating back to 1734), which features shipping news and other market information of interest to the merchants, traders, brokers, and insurance underwriters who frequented Lloyd’s Coffee House in the City of London. As such, Earle is able to examine the relationships amongst members of the crew and between the crew and the officers — mainly because important and enlightening information tends to come out in the middle of court case testimonies. The chapters are short and straightforward, generally free of nautical slang and jargon and quite accessible even to those who have only a basic knowledge of seafaring life.

One aspect of this book that I found particularly interesting but rather understated was the differences between general trading ships and slaving ships. I think Earle could possibly have looked into slaving ships in more depth, perhaps even devoting a specific chapter just to the social history of life aboard a slaving ship during the various stages of its route. The history of merchant shipping in the late seventeeth and early to mid-eighteenth centuries really can’t be studied without looking at the slave trade, and I think Earle’s book is at a bit of a disadvantage for not devoting more time or page-space to looking at it. It isn’t a disadvantage that truly detracts from the book, but I do think that the book really would have benefitted from a study of that particular aspect of trade in human cargo. In general, though, Sailors does just what it sets out to do, and the information within on the social history of English merchant shipping might easily appeal to anyone interested in a more rounded picture of life at sea the Age of Sail.

Europe at Home: The Family and Material Culture, 1500-1800 by Raffaella Sarti

I always enjoy a good social history book, one that doesn’t necessary focus on political squabblings or the usual things that the standard historical survey books tend to cover. This one was a bit pricey when I bought it, but I think it was decent value for the cost.

Europe at Home: The Family and Material Culture, 1500-1800 by Raffaella Sarti (translated by Allan Cameron)

Raffaela Sarti’s book is translated from the original Italian, so it’s no surprise that the greater part of her research centres on the home life of Italian families throughout the time period her book covers. But Italy certainly doesn’t dominate the text — there is quite a lot of truly valuable and interesting information on the development of family structure and family life from the end of the Renaissance period through the beginning of the industrial age. Sarti touches on all the topics one might expect from a survey book: clothing, food and dietary patterns, the changing position and status of children and women in the European family, the effects of exploration of the New World on European daily life, and any number of other aspects of day-to-day existence in different regions of Europe.

Quite a few of the facts and anecdotes in the text seem almost meant for good dinner-table conversation, such as the intriguingly misogynistic reason why male cooks were vastly preferred over female cooks in most wealthy European families of the period (’Everyone knows that generally the dirtiest man is cleaner than the cleanest woman’, according to 17th-century author Francesco Tanara of Bologna’s book The City-Dweller’s Organization of a Villa). There are also any number of facts that probably shouldn’t be mentioned at table, however; certain Basque peoples believed that only mature and virile men should be allowed to participate in the process of cheese-making, since they thought that the procession of human reproduction involved a ‘coagulation’ of male seed and female menses in the womb, just as rennet coagulates milk to make cheese. Anecdotes such as these highlight Sarti’s central and rather broad thesis, which emphasises the roles played by production, consumption, and reproduction in the maintenance of European family life. Even if Sarti’s thesis seems to be a little too broad at times, the span of the survey nonetheless allows the reader to take in a wider picture of domestic life, rather than forcing the focus of the book into an overly narrow set of conclusions.

Regrettably, one of my first impressions of my edition of the book was the sheer number of typographical errors included in the pages. I can’t tell whether I’ve become more irritated by them of late or whether I’m simply noticing them more often, but I’ve also become far less forgiving of them — especially in the paperback edition of a translated book. (Thankfully, Sarti has assembled a Web page for the errata.) But I only mention them because they are a minor but noticeable distraction from what is otherwise a very good translation of a fine study in social history.

Never Again: Britain 1945-51 by Peter Hennessy

Running into a few Internet troubles with my laptop really ought to have made me more productive — less time wasted browsing for books I can’t exactly afford on Amazon.co.uk and from the London Review of Books shop, right?

Never Again: Britain 1945-51 by Peter Hennessy

At the end of World War II, one theme was very much on the minds of the people of Great Britain, from political and military leaders to old age pensioners: never again. Never again should the world have to suffer through another war like the one that had just ended. Never again should dictators-in-the-making be able to take advantage of mass unemployment that left millions of able-bodied men out of work, unable to support themselves or their families. Never again should the sick be unable to obtain medical treatment for lack of money to pay for it, or lack of doctors available to treat them. Never again should children go seriously malnourished or ill-educated, never again should working men and women have to live in shacks patched together from the rubble of bombed-out buildings. Even though food and other consumer goods were still being rationed, and the British military was spread out all over the world, Clement Attlee’s Labour Government (elected by a landslide on 5 July 1945) was determined to put Britain back together again and, in the words of William Blake, build a new Jerusalem on the Labour Party’s socialist principles. The British experience, from everyday domestic life to complicated questions of international relations, in the early postwar years is the focus of Peter Hennessy’s Never Again: Britain 1945-51.

I’ve written glowing reviews of several other books by Peter Hennessy, including The Secret State and The Prime Minister: The Office and Its Holders Since 1945. He’s certainly one of my favourite historians of any age and period, and I’ve thoroughly enjoyed reading any number of books and articles he’s written over the years. But Never Again, I regret to say, was a very disappointing book. In addition to the often startlingly clunky writing, the narrative had a tendency to feel disorganised and uneven, lurching along as ideas and themes were picked up for brief periods of time and then discarded. Even the sections that contain some noteworthy quotations and little-known bits of intriguing historical information have to contend with sentences such as the following: ‘Since the final end of Empire in the 1960s, the economic historians have discovered a rich seam of retrospection as they mercilessly subject this kaleidoscopic phenomenon to the spartan rigours of cost-benefit analysis.‘ Granted, this book was first written and published back in the early 1990s, but surely another readthrough would’ve flagged sentences like that one for deletion, or possibly even revision.

Authorial voice is a difficult thing to find when writing history, especially when writing for an audience that is not necessarily a specialist audience already acquainted with most of the material. When done well, it produces the kind of history book that simply immerses the reader in the time period and subject to hand. When done less than well, it makes reading a struggle and finishing a chore. As I see it, Never Again mainly has its problems in the authorial voice — the unevenness of the narrative, leaping from topic to topic and from casual conversational or anecdotal style to professorial lecturing tone without a lot of apparent thought put into smoothing the transition, makes it jarring and occasionally difficult to follow. I suppose I keep stressing my disappointment because I know that Hennessy is more than capable of drafting a truly well-written history book. I already own the next volume in this series; I’ll have to see if that one has more of the Hennessy style that I’ve grown to enjoy.

The Clumsiest People in Europe, or: Mrs Mortimer’s Bad-Tempered Guide to the Victorian World by Mrs Mortimer (edited by Todd Pruzan)

A bit of humour for this Sunday’s posting — not exactly social satire, unless you think that bad Victorian-era writing satirises itself. In this case, it might just qualify as such.

The Clumsiest People in Europe, or: Mrs Mortimer’s Bad-Tempered Guide to the Victorian World by Mrs Mortimer (edited by Todd Pruzan)

The word ‘Victorian’ can be and is often used as something of a perjorative term, with the meaning ‘narrow-minded’ or ‘prudish’. It’s safe to say that there’s a good reason for doing so at times, especially in connection with clothing styles, moral instruction, or anything related to Oscar Wilde. Victorian cautionary tales for children are as grim and ghoulish as the more traditional fairy-tales, always reminding the young that death is an ever-present part of life and that wicked boys and girls are always punished severely (and good isn’t always rewarded in equal measure). So in that respect, it may not be so surprising that a Victorian children’s book that talks about the various peoples of the world would be long on criticism and short on pleasantness.

This is where Mrs Favell Lee Mortimer’s books come in: three books, to be precise, all written in the mid-nineteenth century. Each book purports to be a guide to the different countries of the world and the people who inhabit those countries (one book deals with Europe, one with Africa and Asia, and one with the Americas and Australia), and Mrs Mortimer manages to find some kind of fault with just about everything and everyone. Each description of a country comes complete with a slew of disapproving comments. Norway might be a beautiful country, with kind and good-hearted and honest people, but ‘The greatest fault of the Norwegians is drunkenness‘. Amsterdam is noteworthy mostly because ‘there is no city in which there is so much danger of being drowned, because it is full of canals‘. The Irish are (horror!) Roman Catholic, which is ‘a kind of Christian religion, but it is a very bad kind‘. When Greeks are unhappy, they are known to ‘scream like babies‘. Mrs Mortimer doesn’t even have many kind words for her own countrymen, though she does take pains to remind her young and impressionable readers of a very simple thing: ‘What country do you love best? Your own country. I know you do‘. Not surprising, considering her overwhelmingly negative opinions on the various bits of Europe that aren’t England proper.

The world outside of Europe is really far worse, though, in her eyes. Most of Africa can be written off as a land of ignorant savages, nasty cannibals, and Mohammedians who read a very wicked book that is made of evil stories and lies. Australia is full of convicts and colonists, of course. The people of Siam resemble the people of Burma, ‘but they are much worse-looking‘. The Chinese are elegant people, but are quite mad. In North America, Washington, DC, is ‘one of the most desolate cities in the world‘ — and most Americans keep slaves, which is an abominable sin. The list goes on and on, to the point where you almost can’t decide whether to laugh at her opinions or bang your head against a wall to get her prissy, disdainful tones out of your ears.

Why is this book worthy of a read-through, then? Well, for starters, Mrs Mortimer wrote the book without ever having left England and with only a limited knowledge of England itself. All of her opinions came from other works and from a mass of different sources — one look at her writings gives a hint as to how respectable Englishmen and Englishwomen of the day looked at other countries within the comforting blanket of the waxing British Empire. Her books went through several editions in her lifetime, and it’s safe to say that Mrs Mortimer’s bad-tempered guides to the Victorian world had a marked influence on young children’s first impressions of other lands and other people. Echoes of her sentiments appear even today in classical stereotypes of ‘foreigners’. Sometimes, it’s a good idea to go back and see where and how certain stereotypes have been reinforced over the years…and with Todd Pruzan’s careful editing of these mostly-forgotten children’s books, it’s possible to look at the world through a decidedly ‘Victorian’ lens.

The Seven Basic Plots: How We Tell Stories by Christopher Booker

This book has been defying my attempts to write a review it for the better part of a month and a half — but I think I’ve managed to emerge victorious at last.

The Seven Basic Plots: How We Tell Stories by Christopher Booker

It’s a longstanding cliché that there are only really a handful of basic plots in the entire canon of Western literature. The cliché is so cliché that it’s somehow gone past cliché and come right out the other side in the form of a 700-plus-page analytical study by former Spectator columnist and Private Eye founder Christopher Booker. Booker suggests that storytelling serves to pass along moral lessons and models from the older generation to their children and successors, and as a result the basic lessons have coalesced over time into seven basic symbolic ‘plots’ that have formed the primary model for storytelling into the present day. These seven plots are as follows:

(1) Overcoming the Monster — Stories like Beowulf, ‘Little Red Riding Hood’, Jaws, and many of the James Bond films, where a hero must defeat a monster and restore order to a world that has been threatened by the monster’s presence.
(2) Rags to Riches — These stories feature modest, generally virtuous but downtrodden characters, who achieve a happy ending when their special talents or true beauty is revealed to the world at large. Includes any number of classics such as ‘Cinderella’, David Copperfield, and the Horatio Alger novels.
(3) The Quest — A hero, often accompanied by sidekicks, travels in search of a priceless treasure and fights against evil and overpowering odds, and ends when he gets both the treasure and the girl. The Odyssey is a classic example of this kind of story.
(4) Voyage and Return — Alice in Wonderland, Robinson Crusoe on his desert island, other stories of normal protagonists who are suddenly thrust into strange and alien worlds and must make their way back to normal life once more.
(5) Comedy — Not always synonymous with humour. Instead, the plot of a comedy involves some kind of confusion that must be resolved before the hero and heroine can be united in love. Think of Shakespeare’s comedies, The Marriage of Figaro, the plays of Oscar Wilde and Gilbert and Sullivan, and even War and Peace.
(6) Tragedy — As a rule, the terrible consequences of human overreaching and egotism. The Picture of Dorian Gray, Julius Caesar, Anna Karenina…this category is usually self-evident.
(7) Rebirth — The stories of Ebeneezer Scrooge and Mary Lennox would fall into this basic plot type, which focuses on a threatening shadow that seems nearly victorious until a sequence of fortuitous (or even miraculous) events lead to redemption and rebirth, and the restoration of a happier world.

Within these basic plots are smaller ‘metaplots’ that outline the general structure of these stories. Booker further identifies ‘dark’ versions of these basic plots, ones in which the happy ending is never achieved even though the characters go through all of the stages in the underlying metaplot. There are also a handful of other, smaller plots that are often incorporated into these larger overarching plots, such as the ‘Rebellion’ plot or the ‘Mystery’ plot. Booker looks at both plots and characters, identifying heroes and heroines and the figures who both help them (e.g., the Wise Old Man, the Good Mother, the Companion) and hinder them (e.g., the Dark Rival or Alter-Ego, the Temptress, the Tyrant). If many of these character figures sound like basic story archetypes…well, Booker says, that’s because they are. And he’s dedicated the entire book to determining and explaining how these combinations of plots and characters come together to create some of most well-known (and dare I say, archetypical) stories in the literary canon.

I’ve read quite a few reviews of The Seven Basic Plots, and most of them seem to say some variation on the same theme: The first 300 pages or so are great, but the book goes rapidly downhill from there. These negative reviews touch on the primary trouble with the The Seven Basic Plots. When a particular story does not seem to fit into the established patterns of Booker’s Jungian worldview, his seven basic plots, he immediately declares that the story is irrevocably flawed, defective, or otherwise a perversion of how stories ought to be. As a result, a significant portion of the literature written since about 1800 falls into this flawed or defective category — including stories such as Moby-Dick (because we don’t know whether the real Monster to be overcome in the story is the white whale or Captain Ahab) and Stendhal’s The Red and the Black (because he regards the main character, Julien Sorel, as little more than a portrait of egotistical cruelty and selfish ambition for fame and glory). Not even The Lord of the Rings, one of the stories that Booker points to as the ultimate example of his basic plot archetypes, is free from imperfections: Frodo remains an incomplete character because he never finds the feminine half that he needs to become a whole character. In cruder terms, he doesn’t ‘get the girl’, and therefore can never be complete, so he has to sail away as an incomplete and unresolved main character. Booker also has a disturbing prediliction to blame the author’s background for the flaws of his (or, on very rare occasions, her) stories — usually, in true Jungian fashion, by hinting at unresolved mother issues or sexual identity woes. Very rarely does he attempt to look at the story itself or attempt to understand why the author chose to break away from these archetypes. Without them, the author is flawed and the story is flawed, and as a result there is little room for debate.

It’s really a shame that Booker’s methodology falls apart through his sheer insistence on clinging to Jung. It would’ve been a far more fascinating study to explore why certain stories rebel against or subvert these archetypes, and how this deliberate rebellion or subversion makes these stories all the more powerful for the reader as a result. His writing style is an absolute model of clarity and careful word choice, making The Seven Basic Plots seem far less unwieldy for the general reader than its physical bulk might suggest. In the end, Booker’s magnum opus is certainly worth exploring by those who take an interest in the history of storytelling and in the underlying themes that define so many of our best-loved tales. I’m glad that I read it, in the end.

Geisha of Gion by Mineko Iwasaki

I borrowed this book from a friend during a trip to Japan a few years ago, primarily because my friend swore up and down that it was far and away the best and most truthful book about geisha life in Japan. I’d certainly have to agree with that assessment.

Geisha of Gion by Mineko Iwasaki

Geisha of Gion (the UK edition title; the US edition is titled Geisha: A Life) is by Mineko Iwasaki, who for many years was the preeminent geiko (’woman of art’, the preferred term for geisha in the Japanese city of Kyoto) in Japan. Having left her birth family at a very young age to train for her calling, Iwasaki devoted her life to the study of her art and worked her way to incredible success — only to retire at the very height of her fame when she realised that she could not tolerate the strictures placed upon her and her fellow geiko by the obsessively tradition-bound ways of her profession. Iwasaki wrote the book as a response to the publication of the highly fictionalised Memoirs of a Geisha, intending to give a more credible and truthful account of her life as the successor to her adopted family’s prominent okiya, or geisha house, in the Gion district of Kyoto.

The life of a geiko of Iwasaki’s stature was nothing short of gruelling, and Geisha of Gion gives as much detail about the geiko lifestyle as one might conceivably wish to know. Long hours and late nights, rigorous classes in dance and poise and fine arts, countless hours spent applying and removing layers of makeup and heavy silk clothing, and above all the constant knowledge that a geiko is always on display from the moment she leaves the house and goes out in public until the moment she steps back inside the relative sanctuary of the okiya. The book takes care to dispel many of the stereotypes of geisha life, particularly the belief that a geisha is little more than a cultured, high-class prostitute for the rich and powerful. Yet Iwasaki also criticises her former profession, pointing out that most girls who became geiko in her day left school at the age of fourteen, the minimum standard required by law, and that all of their training and hard work left them with few truly marketable skills to support them if they chose to retire or were compelled to stop working due to ill-health or other troubles. In her opinion, the ‘flower and willow world’ (as the geisha life is often called) did not do enough to adapt to changes in society, and one of her main fears was that the very rigidity that was meant to protect the practice of traditional arts in Japan would only end up leading to their permanent disappearance.

Having skimmed through bits and pieces of Memoirs of a Geisha, I have to agree that Geisha of Gion is most definitely the better book. Far less sensationalism, far more real story. And I think that this truthfulness also makes Iwasaki’s story that much more memorable, because you can tell that she really did love what she did as a geiko, and that leaving her profession, her beloved calling, was probably as difficult a decision as anyone can make.

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.

Religion and the Decline of Magic by Keith Thomas

I thought my review of this was longer, but I think it says pretty much all of what I wanted to say about this very good book.

Religion and the Decline of Magic by Keith Thomas

Keith Thomas’s book is a classic study of the effect that the social and religious upheavals of the Reformation had on traditional folk beliefs in England — the ‘magic’ of which he speaks. Magic, in this sense, was not necessarily the magic of evil witchcraft — maleficium, as it tended to be known in those days — but rather the span of the occult and esoteric that ranges from astrology and horoscopes to Christian prayers for the sick. Any serious attempt to change or determine the course of one’s life through supernatural means would fall under Thomas’s definition of magic. This mundane kind of magic was often an integral part of daily life in pre-Reformation England, and the changes in English society that took place between 1550 and 1688 soon meant that magic, in the traditional sense, would fade into little more than the folk sayings and superstition that remain with familiar today.

Religion and the Decline of Magic is a footnote lover’s dream, with copious citations of period sources and later commentaries woven into the text. Thomas provides fascinating insights into the origins of folk sayings and prevalent myths, as well as the prominence of horoscopes and star-gazing, which were used to learn the most auspicious day to do anything from setting out on a journey to having one’s tooth pulled. As a book about the history of the English Reformation and its effects on society — leading into Oliver Cromwell’s time — Religion and the Decline of Magic presents a particularly useful sociological study. It’s a lengthy work, but worth looking into if you have any interest in the origins of folk history and the deep and abiding connections between the sacred and profane worlds.

Rich Relations: The American Occupation of Britain, 1942-45 by David Reynolds

I first picked up this book for a course on Anglo-American relations from World War II to the end of the Cold War. I don’t normally look into military-type history, but I suppose it helped that this book happens to be more about military culture than on campaigns and battles.

Rich Relations: The American Occupation of Britain, 1942-45 by David Reynolds

The story of American GIs in Britain has two sides: that of the British military and civilian population, who often dismissed the GIs as ‘over-sexed, over-paid, over-fed, and over here’; and that of the GIs themselves, who returned the cutting remarks by claiming that the British military were ‘under-sexed, under-paid, under-fed, and under Eisenhower’. Some American soldiers got on very well with the British people they met, quite often with young British women whose heads were turned by the smartly-dressed Yanks. But the problems and conflicts between the British and the GIs created some very ugly incidents, especially when black GIs were involved. The official segregation of the American forces forced both the Americans and the British to go to extraordinary lengths to keep the races separate — because the sight of a white British woman and a black American soldier walking out together was all too often the spark for an explosive confrontation.

David Reynolds has done his research well for Rich Relations, and does his best to be balanced in interpreting the often conflicting information that comes out of official memos and personal recollections. He separates the book into sections devoted to the official information from the top brass and the collected experiences of the individuals involved. Some of the stories are funny and many are sad, but some are particularly touching — one black GI recalls how he became fast friends with an older British couple who lived near his base camp, including the birthday party they gave for him which featured a small iced cake they had baked from their meagre rations (no sugar in the cake, only in the icing). There are quite a lot of good stories of this nature, and the book is rich in detail and interesting to explore.

Rich Relations does suffers a little from repetition in certain parts — do we really need to be reminded four times in the space of about two hundred pages that the pre-war black population of Britain numbered around 8,000 people? I must also admit that I skimmed through the parts dealing with battles and troop mobilisations, the parts that a military historian or World War II buff would probably find more interesting. I would not have minded if the sections about the D-Day invasions had been trimmed slightly; after all, the book is supposed to focus on the experience in Britain, rather than on the Continent. Yet the book does its job extremely well, shedding light on a fascinating time in Anglo-American (or should that be ‘Yank and Limey’?) relations.