wahistorian's Reviews (506)

In a Sept. 5 , 2018 op-ed in the New York Times, “Anonymous,” a high-level White House staffer in the Trump Administration, reassured the American people that even if the President appeared to be hinged, cooler heads prevailed. They regularly ignored or countermanded Trump’s orders in favor of their own good judgment, he insisted, keeping the Administration from going off the rails into illegality, revenge, or downright disaster. Fast-forward a year, and the result is a mea culpa in the form of ‘A Warning.’ (Apparently Sept 2018 - Jan. 2019 was the turning point.) Turns out, your average “Steady Stater” can only endure chaos, insults, tantrums, and lies for so long before they throw up their hands or quit or both; the result is a government of apologists and sycophants. Anonymous admits s/he was wrong about the ability of dedicated professionals to mitigate Trump’s worst impulses and now what the author fears most is a second, unleashed term. Not much is actually new here—perhaps the author feared outing his/her identity with concrete details—but the sheer cataloguing of Trump’s assaults on democracy, foreign policy, norms, and ethics is shocking and depressing. Anonymous outlines in each chapter how Trump has corrupted and distorted the Framers’ well-designed Constitution and repeatedly suggests how much worse it could get if Trump is re-elected. He ends with a thought experiment that imagines this President coping with a foreign and domestic policy disaster like 9/11. “Imagine that, as smoke arose from the Twin Towers, he questioned whether al-Qaeda really orchestrated the attacks; he dismissed the intelligence community’s conclusions as ‘ridiculous’... and he urged Americans that it would be a mistake to go after al-Qaeda because the United States had the potential for a ‘great relationship’ with them” (251). And finally Anonymous challenges all of us to hold ourselves to a higher standard that would make his re-election odious, to stop blaming the swamp in DC, and recognize that we make the government with our votes and our voices. We can only hope this works and that Trump’s horrors become a distant nightmare and a cautionary tale.

The remarkable story of Arthur Conan Doyle’s defense of convicted murderer Oscar Slater weaves together so many topics that need contextualizing: the state of early 20th-century forensic science; British anti-semitism; ideas about race and criminality; and the waning of Victorian elites in the Edwardian period. As a result Margalit Fox’s book is a bit slow in the first third, with so much backstory needed. But once the plot picks up, ‘Conan Doyle for the Defense’ is an extraordinary tale. None of these historical actors are unmitigated heroes—the police especially—but even the detective writer shows himself a bit of a crank toward the end. Nevertheless the story of Slater’s unjust conviction and its eventual overturning is a compelling story of persistence and a belief in justice. Fox has mined an extraordinary set of sources, including almost 20 years of letters from Slater to his family back in Germany through two World Wars. Ultimately she even ventures a guess as to who *really* murdered Miss Marion Gilchrist. Well worth a read.

A fun read, but maybe not a stand-out mystery. A group of passengers are thrown together when their train is stopped in a snowstorm; rather than await their fate after 24 hours on a freezing train, they set off to find Hemmersby station, where they hope to continue their journeys. But they snow forces them to take shelter in an empty country home, mysteriously set up for tea and visitors. From there the mystery unwinds, with unexpected visitors, a spooky portrait, a bread knife dropped on the kitchen floor, an empty garret room (or is it?), and other developments too numerous to mention. The snowy setting is used to good effect and the mystery is solved just in time for Christmas dinner.

A fun series of stories, all touching on Christmas and its darker (and some lighter) themes. Included here were seven dwarf burglars, snowy evenings, plotting carol singers, greedy family members, and other holiday fun. Each story is prefaced by a brief biographical intro to the authors, all members of Britain’s golden age of detective novels. The only thing that would have enhanced these stories was their original dates of publication.

A fascinating character study of one man under Nazi occupation of France, although Simenon seems to leave the question open as to whether protagonist Frank Friedmeier would have been any different without the war. Frank was a young teenager when the war began, we are told, which became an excuse for him not to return to school; now he is 18 or 19, living in his mother’s tiny apartment brothel, with a series of starving teenage prostitutes rotating in and out. His preoccupations are crime, cruelty, and, most importantly, the Holsts—father and daughter—who live a respectable life across the hall; he has never known a father or any kind of caring relationship not based in manipulation. A series of escalating (and inexplicable) crimes finally brings Frank to the attention of the authorities, with what Simenon suggests is an inevitable conclusion in a corrupt system. William Vollman’s Afterword somewhat misses the mark, intent as he is on measuring this against other noirs rather than absurdist or existential novels (although he does mention Camus’s ‘The Stranger’). It is a Bildungsroman, but it also a political novel about how ordinary *and* unsavory characters navigate a totalizing system, and what it does to even the most personal aspects of their lives.

A week in the life of Brooklyn’s Parnassus Used Books, written and set in 1919, included romance, intrigue, German spies, and, of course, bibliophilia and bibliomania. A fun read, with the exception of the understandable German stereotypes leftover from the war.

One the most tender tributes to a family member I’ve ever read, and one of the most thoughtful. Cummings opens her book with the disappearance of the child who would become her mother from a Lincolnshire beach in 1929. Three-year-old Betty Elston stays missing for a few days before police return her to her concerned mother. But the incident is only one of many secrets that shapes Betty’s life and that of her daughter, who decides in the 1980s to help her Mum get to the bottom of this and many other inexplicable occurrences in her young life. Photographs are a key source in this detection—Betty’s father George was a keen amateur photographer—and Cummings uses these scraps of history to good effect, informed by art history and theory as well as common sense. The story ties the Elstons and others to Lincolnshire’s cultural history, contextualizing their troubles in a dense historical story without losing its uniqueness. I’ll think about this one for a long time.

This book is so fascinating that I wanted it to be longer, but that’s also one of its problems; I suspect some pretty ruthless editing has truncated some of Lewis’s stories of the Trump Administration’s subversion of government data collection, which left me wanting more. Lewis profiles tens of federal agency innovators who, as he explains it, are “in it for the mission” and not “for the money” (191). He contrasts them with Trump cronies like Barry Meyers, CEO of AccuWeather, who would requisition taxpayer-funded weather info for paying customers only, forcing the rest of us to double-pay to avoid life-threatening weather incidents. The contrast is stark: between people motivated by a love of science, data, and its potential, and people whose only vision consists of how to monetize information. ‘The Fifth Risk’ documents the ignorance and venality of the Trump administration in ways that historians will depend on in the future and in ways that point to a better path for the rest of us.

Rebecca Solnit has made sort of a cottage industry of republishing in slim volumes essays previously published elsewhere, packaged around a theme. As a museum professional, the storytelling theme is of particular interest to me, but this book is really only tangentially connected to the theme. Solnit proposes that previously unheard narratives—of women and people of color—have recently moved to the center of public life and that people in power (mostly white men) are moving to shut them down. Her aim is both to life these stories up and to point out how they have been silenced. This is a fresh and interesting idea; I only wish the book had lived up to it.

This is a bit of a silly book and totally lacking the drama that the title suggests. Published in 2016 on the eve of Donald Trump’s election, Tevi Troy’s perspective in some areas seems almost quaint: in the face of disasters, natural or man-made, Presidents have to worry about the national debt and deficit while they comfort and reassure the nation. Debt? Deficit? President Donald Trump would have to divert resources from the Wall and his Space Force to even begin to address any crisis, actions he has proven himself unwilling to do in Puerto Rico and other hard-hit areas. As a former advisor to George H. W. Bush, Troy’s take is solidly conservative, and as a result the book is packed with helpful advice for surviving a crisis on your own when the President fails to come to your rescue (which with this President in charge is probably not so silly). His mentions of climate change’s effects in exacerbating natural disasters are extraordinarily delicately worded, unforgivable for any thinking human being. His analysis of historical Presidents are the best parts of the book, but there isn’t enough of this; I did enjoy his rehabilitation of Herbert Hoover’s reputation. And now I’m going to go re-supply my first aid kit and stock a month’s worth of food and water.