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.

Spoken Here: Travels Among Threatened Languages by Mark Abley

I was quite surprised to see the response to my last language-related post. I doubt I’ll get the same reaction for this one, but it’s as interesting a book as the other one was.

Spoken Here: Travels Among Threatened Languages by Mark Abley

Most books that deal with threatened or extinct languages set out from the start to demonise English. I’ve seen the words ‘parasitical’, ‘pernicious’, and ‘malignant’ used to describe the effect of the English language on other languages in the world. Mark Albey’s book does point to the spread and popularity of English as a significant factor in the decline of many languages, but instead of simply lamenting the loss of some of the world’s more complex tongues, he takes the time to go to places in the world where languages that were threatened with dying out have made a comeback, or are trying to make a comeback. And more importantly, he attempts to analyse the success stories, and see if there are ways that techniques used by revitalised language-speakers can be harnessed to save languages that have not been so fortunate in the past few decades.

In Spoken Here: Travels Among Threatened Languages, Abley travels to remote villages in Australia and the American Southwest, to the Isle of Man and to the south of France and to the Caucasus mountains in search of languages that are struggling against extinction. As well as indigenous languages, he also explores the languages of immigrant communities, most notably when he interviews a group of Yiddish speakers in his native Canada. And arguably the best parts of the book are the parts where he speaks about the languages themselves, describing patterns of speech and turns of phrase that would sound unutterably alien to a native English speaker but which are extremely revealing about a language’s history and its ties to the culture in which the language developed.

All in all, Abley argues, it is the linguistic ties to culture that makes the preservation of languages so important. The subject-verb-object structure of English says quite a bit about the importance of the self/subject to an English speaker, but what can be inferred about culture from a language where the subject appears in the middle of the verb, or where verbs can exist without separate subjects, or where the concept of both subject and verb don’t really exist in that language? Spoken Here is a travel book and a linguistics book combined, and the combination works well enough to make it worth looking at.

Letter from America by Alistair Cooke

I thought I’d posted this already, but it seems that I hadn’t yet. I need to start keeping closer track of the reviews I’ve posted compared to the ones I still need to post — now that I’ve cleared out a bit of my backlog, I may soon be able to start posting reviews of books I’ve read more recently.

Letter from America by Alistair Cooke

Depending on which side of the Atlantic Ocean you’re from, the name of Alistair Cooke conjures up a different set of sounds and images. For most people in the States, Cooke was the voice and image of PBS’s Masterpiece Theatre, his plummy tones borne through the television set on the regal trumpet fanfare of Jean-Joseph Mouret’s ‘Rondeau’. And because he hosted Masterpiece Theatre for the better part of two decades, to most Americans Cooke’s name is synonymous with high-brow costume dramas and classic British television imports. But for many British people, Alistair Cooke is best known for his ‘Letters from America’ — his weekly 15-minute broadcasts on Radio 4, a stunning 2,869 broadcasts in total that ran from March 1946 to March 2004. And it is these ‘letters’, or a good selection of them, that make up this book.

Five decades’ worth of broadcasts leaves a lot of material to choose from. Some of his letters had been published earlier, in books that are now out of print, but the letters from the 1990s and 2000-2004 had been uncollected previously. And it’s a sign of the editors’ skill in selection that there’s no sense of repetition in the selected letters, and that some of Cooke’s most powerful letters have their rightful place in this collection. His letters concerning the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Bobby Kennedy are masterful — particularly the latter, since Cooke was present in the hotel kitchen when the younger Kennedy was shot. He wrote about Vietnam and Watergate, about September 11th and the war in Iraq…but he also wrote about the beauty of Christmas in Vermont, about family holidays on Long Island, about life in America and how it changed in the years he lived there.

Letter from America is probably one of those books that you’d think to buy for someone else, or might see on a table in a bookshop and wonder if it’s worth purchasing or merely flipping through. But I’m glad to have purchased this book, because Alistair Cooke was, if nothing else, a cherished institution for Americans and Britons alike. And a collection of his broadcasts, even a partial one such as this, is fine reading material.

Collected Poems 1945-1990 and Collected Later Poems 1980-2000 by R.S. Thomas

A good friend of mine initially piqued my interest in the poetry of R.S. Thomas, but I never seemed to be able to find a copy of his works when I was looking for one. Yet in one of those happy coincidences that seem to happen most often when I’m book shopping, I was poking through the poetry shelves in Daunt Books when a minor book landslide nearly sent several volumes toppling onto my head. After a moment’s flailing, I stemmed the book-fall…and the book I ended up using to hold back the deluge was the collected poems of R.S. Thomas. I couldn’t just leave it on the shelf after all that, could I?

Collected Poems 1945-1990 and Collected Later Poems 1980-2000 by R.S. Thomas

Ronald Stuart Thomas was a Welsh clergyman who spent his working life in a number of rural parishes, and much of his poetry centres on religion, rural Wales, and the exploration of Welsh national and cultural identity. He was a fervent proponent of the Welsh language and Welsh culture, not least because he grew up speaking English and regretted the fact that he only came to learn Welsh as an adult. His outspoken views occasionally sparked controversy, most notably when he publically praised the arsonists who destroyed English holiday-homes in Wales in the 1980s. And there is a good deal of anger and resentment in his poetry, as well as frustration and sadness, as shown for example in the opening lines of ‘The Old Language’:

England, what have you done to make the speech
My fathers used a stranger to my lips,
An offence to the ear, a shackle on the tongue
That would fit new thoughts to an abiding tune?

It borders on cliche to describe his writing style as ‘flinty’ or ‘bitter’, but it’s a very apt description. The crisply lyrical quality of his poetry makes it wonderful to recite aloud, and its memorable sound and images even inspired a bit of gentle parody by another excellent Welsh poet, Harri Webb. They say that imitation is the highest form of flattery, but I think parody runs a close second at times.

The first Collected Poems isn’t the complete corpus of Thomas’s work. His Collected Later Poems covers his last five collections of poetry, and also includes several poems and fragments that he had written but not published before his death in 2000. There are a few points that bear mentioning with regard to this second collection. ‘The Echoes Return Slow’, the first section of the book, is an autobiography done in short snatches of stream-of-consciousness prose followed by brief poems. These later poems seem to have a more religious turn than those from his earlier collection. Most of the poems have a strongly Christian theme, musings on man’s relationship with God and how to make sense of religion and faith in a world where both are often tested. Compared to the first collection, there are certainly fewer rants (so to speak) about the decline of Wales and Welsh culture and language. And though I enjoy Thomas’s writing style, with its alternating crisp tones and slow, languid musings, I have to say that I prefer the poems of the first collection. Thomas’s poetic voice comes through more strongly, I think, in his writings about the Welsh people. But both volumes are collections of moving and thought-provoking poems by a very remarkable poet, and I’m glad I have a nice compact collection of his work.

The Portable Enlightenment Reader, edited by Isaac Kramnick

I may actually make a post that isn’t a review one of these days, but at the moment I doubt that anyone wants to read my ramblings about the Liberal Democrats’ leadership race. So I’ll set that aside for now in favour of something a little less topical.

The Portable Enlightenment Reader, edited by Isaac Kramnick

The Age of Enlightenment is a name commonly given to the philosophical and intellectual movements in Europe and in the American colonies during the eighteenth (and early seventeenth) century. A list of contributors to the ‘Enlightenment’ would have to include a remarkably diverse group of thinkers and writers who debated any number of philosophical, political, and social topics, many of whom disagreed vehemently with the writings of others. Whether it’s the pamphlets of Thomas Paine or the Encyclopédie of Denis Diderot, Mary Wollstonecraft denouncing Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s opinions on the education of women or Edmund Burke ‘reflecting’ on the French Revolution, Immanuel Kant’s critique of pure reason or the sheer prolific fury of just about anything written by Voltaire, the Enlightenment writers put their emphasis on reason, rational thought, scientific analysis, and the study of natural law in relation to the individual and society. The idea was to move away from irrationality and superstition (which some of these writers, though by no means all of them, attributed in part to the tyranny of organised religions) and towards a more unified framework for how the world operated. This intellectual framework helped form the basis for classical liberalism, democracy, and capitalistic thought — and by extension, formed the philosophical underpinnings of the American and French Revolutions.

The Portable Enlightenment Reader is a set of texts taken from the writings of the Enlightenment’s most notable philosophers, grouped by subject and topic and pulled together into a single volume. The texts chosen for this portable edition are, I’d have to say, a fairly good selection. All of the big names of the time period are there — Locke and Rousseau and Hume take up a decent amount of space, and the selections are usually long enough to provide a taste of the topic without taking up too much room. The idea in a book like this is to give the casual reader a sense of how each of these writers wrote and what they wrote about. For example, if you’ve ever wondered whether Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire is worth reading, then the selection provided in the Portable Enlightenment Reader may give you a sense of whether you think you’d like to try to tackle his prose.

Not all of the selections are weighty philosophical treatises or explorations of history. There’s a downright smutty snippet from John Cleland’s Fanny Hill, a work of erotic fiction billed as the memoirs of a ‘woman of pleasure’ — indicative of the interest that the Enlightenment writers took in the definition, understanding, and pursuit of pleasure. There are some noteworthy perspectives on the early women’s rights movement, including a short passage written by Thomas Paine that reflects on the unfortunate state of women as he saw it. The tail end of the Enlightenment saw some consideration on the nature of the slave trade and the position of the ‘Negro race’ (as many writers called it) with respect to white Europeans. The book as a whole is meant for dabbling — a means of tempting the appetite, as it were. Now that I know where to start from, the Portable Enlightenment Reader has given me a solid basis for continuing my reading of the works of writers who helped shape Western thought at a crucial moment in Western history.

Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison by Michel Foucault

Here follows my first attempt at reading and reviewing Foucault, completed earlier this year. Not a bad effort, I think, for a first attempt.

Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison by Michel Foucault

Before the early 19th century, European ideas of crime and punishment tended to involve very public displays of the power of the monarch and the power of the state against the offending individual. Nowhere was this tendency more evident than in the spectacle of public executions. Those convicted of murder, piracy, counterfeiting, or other notable capital crimes would be taken to a public place for hanging or decapitation, and certain kinds of crimes warranted particularly gruesome punishments. In England, for instance, until 1790 the official punishment for women convicted of petty treason — a wife who killed her husband or a servant who killed her master or mistress — was burning at the stake. The mass hangings of convicts were public spectacles, with public processions, viewing stands set up for spectators and an almost festival-like atmosphere on the day. For those who did not receive the death penalty, the prisons that existed were more like enforced stays in squalid communal housing, with very little distinction drawn between the treatment given to first-time and habitual criminals, as well as those who were clearly mentally ill. And yet in a relatively short space of time, the horrific public executions and communal prisons gave way to quiet and concealed executions and the far more orderly and regimented system of modern prison life, a trend that continues into the present day. Social historians tend to point to the writings of progressive reformers who advocated a more dignified and humanitarian approach to the punishment of offenders. But a more in-depth look at the history of the prison provides an alternate viewpoint — one that has less to do with purely humanitarian concerns and far more to do with the desire to establish a greater sense of control over society and those who would consider violating its laws.

In Discipline and Punish, social theorist Michel Foucault directly confronts and challenges a number of existing ideas surrounding the prison reforms of the late 1700s and early 1800s, and even into the twentieth century. By looking at the evolution of justice systems (focusing primarily on France), he suggests that the shift away from public executions and towards the idea of incarceration and reform within prison walls was a means of reframing the image of the power of society over the individual. Public executions often had the effect of making a criminal into a public martyr, and the ballads and broadsides printed for the common people did less to condemn the crime and more to glorify the criminal. By shifting the focus of justice into the prison and out of the public eye, authorities would have more direct control over the lives of those who had violated the norms of society.

Foucault compares prisons to other collective corrective organisations — convents and monasteries, military barracks, schools (both the regular kind and those formed for charity children or juvenile offenders), lunatic asylums and hospitals, workhouses for the poor, and even the large factory complexes of the early Industrial Revolution — and finds the common threads of common discipline, constant surveillance, enforced work and education, and strict adherence to an internal hierarchy in all of these institutions. The idea of correction and reform has shifted society’s focus from the individual’s body (i.e., the brandings, tortures, and hangings carried out on offenders) to the individual’s mind and soul. This shift in focus, Foucault claims, has not had the reforming effect that the authorities would hope. Instead, it has actually encouraged and refined criminal activity and behaviours.

Discipline and Punish is a very dense text, and I had to look up a summary outline of the book more than once or twice as I read to be certain that I was following the premise of his argument. In the end, I think I managed to follow Foucault’s line of reasoning, though I know I would have to go back and read this over again in smaller fragments to get all of the nuances and points that he makes in the text. But as an analysis of the creation of the modern prison and its effects on the changing nature of crime and criminality in modern society, Discipline and Punish adds to the powerful argument that others have made as well — the prison system, as it stands, is not as successful at punishing crime and disciplining offenders as we might like to think. And it’s a bit refreshing, in a way, that Foucault doesn’t actually offer possible ’solutions’ to this quandary.

Blood Lines: From Ethnic Pride to Ethnic Terrorism by Vamik Volkan

This article in the Guardian today put me in mind of this review I wrote a while ago.

Blood Lines: From Ethnic Pride to Ethnic Terrorism by Vamik Volkan

When writing about international relations, it’s often easy (and tempting) to write about countries as if they were people. Germany didn’t like the way France was doing this, China was upset and therefore — the point is clear enough. By extension, there are times when it is convenient to talk about various ethnic groups in a similar fashion, because the single-mind, single-person outlook makes describing behaviours that much easier. There are quite a lot of dangers inherent in this approach, most of which are self-explanatory and usually boil down to the fact that it’s all too easy to oversimplify matters and not take important but subtle outside factors into account. And yet in accepting this caveat, is it still plausible to look at ethnic groups and treat the group as a distinct ‘individual’ for a different reason? Is it possible, even, to take that ‘individual’ and use a very individual technique — psychoanalysis — to try to understand ethnic conflict from a perspective that’s one step removed from classic models of international relations thought?

Psychiatry professor Vamik Volkan has adopted this kind of psychoanalytial approach to ethnic conflict and international relations in his book Blood Lines: From Ethnic Pride to Ethnic Terrorism. Volkan has had very personal experience of ethnic conflict, having come from a Turkish Cypriot family who experienced the day-to-day pressures of living side by side with Greek majority on the island of Cyprus. As part of his psychological fieldwork, he has travelled to various places around the world that are caught up in ethnic conflict, attempting to speak to political representatives, smaller group leaders, and ordinary people to understand and interpret different perspectives on ethnic conflict. And on the whole, the addition of a more psychological context provides a different perspective on the standard arguments that tend to be thrown around in international relations studies.

I suppose the most obvious problem with Voltan’s psychological approach (one that I should mention first off, at least) is that you have to accept a lot of Freudian analysis to get through his arguments — and Freud is one of those authors whose writing is either loved or loathed. Even I had to grit my teeth a bit at some of Voltan’s interpretations that seem to veer a little too close to psychobabble for my liking, and there are times when his analysis seems disjointed, if not unconvincing. But some of the sample psychological profiles that Voltan puts together are really quite good and in some cases almost chilling. His analysis of an ideal terrorist leader, for one, provides a sound foundation for understanding the origins and driving forces of human behaviour — the personal factors behind the political violence. While Blood Lines definitely has its good moments and iffy moments, in general I think that the good parts are enough to make it worth reading and possibly going back to for future reference.

Lady Chatterley’s Trial: Regina v. Penguin Books, edited by C.H. Rolph

A little snip of a book today, from the Pocket Penguin series put out to commemorate the publishing company’s 70th birthday.

Lady Chatterley’s Trial: Regina v. Penguin Books, edited by C.H. Rolph (Pocket Penguin #1)

In 1960, Penguin Books Ltd. commemorated the 30th anniversary of D.H. Lawrence’s death by publishing an unexpurgated edition of Lady Chatterley’s Lover — and promptly found itself in the dock, accused of violating the British laws that forbade the publication of obscene literature. The Chatterley trial has been called a turning-point in the history of book publishing, and so it seems only fitting that the first book in the Pocket Penguins anniversary series should highlight this incident in Penguin’s history.

Lady Chatterley’s Trial contains selections from the trial transcripts of Regina v. Penguin Books, though perhaps it is not surprising that the book mostly focuses on the arguments for the defence. The opening and closing speeches for the prosecution and defence are included at the beginning and end of the book, and sandwiched in between are the testimonies of a number of notable figures who spoke in favour of publication. The writer and journalist Dame Rebecca West, future Poet Laureate Cecil Day Lewis, the Bishop of Woolwich, and future Conservative MP Norman St John-Stevas were amongst those who took the stand in defence of Lady Chatterley. The defence counsel’s closing speech neatly skewers a telling remark made by the prosecution at the beginning of the trial — ‘Is [Lady Chatterley's Lover] a book which you would wish even your wife or your servants to read?’ — with a few choice words:

I do not want to upset the Prosecution by suggesting that there are a certain number of people nowadays who as a matter of fact don’t have servants. But of course that whole attitude is one which Penguin Books was formed to fight against…the attitude that it is all right to publish a special edition at five or ten guineas so that people who are less well off cannot read what other people read. Isn’t everybody, whether earning £10 a week or £20 a week, equally interested in the society in which we live, in the problems of human relationships including sexual relationships? In view of the reference made to wives, aren’t women equally interested in human relations, including sexual relationships?

In all, Lady Chatterley’s Trial is just over 50 pages long, but it seems to tell a much longer story in a fairly short number of pages. And whether or not sexual intercourse truly began after the ‘end of the Chatterley ban’, as Philip Larkin so succinctly put it, the case of Regina v. Penguin Books certainly seems to herald the changes in social values and mores that were a hallmark of the 1960s.