wahistorian's Reviews (506)

Hercule Poirot is asked by American millionaire Rufus Van Aldin to investigate the murder of his daughter, Ruth Kettering, killed on The Blue Train on the way to Nice with her priceless collection of rubies. This is a Hastings-free inquiry, so interestingly the brilliant detective enlists the help of two young women, recent heiress Katherine Grey and her cousin Lenox Tamplin, who do actually help him with pieces of the puzzle. Not only does M. Poirot work with these would-be junior sleuths, he demonstrates a terrible temper when questioning one suspect, actually shaking his fist and yelling at him. And the book is notable for the first mention of St. Mary Meade, later Miss Marple’s hometown. Beware the maids and clerks—they are not to be trusted in the 1920s!

This was apparently Agatha Christie’s least favorite of her novels and I can understand why. The plot is tangentially connected to ‘The Secret of Chimneys,’ with the same poorly drawn international criminal conspiracy and Inspector Battle investigating. Inspector Battle isn’t much of a character and the series of young people drawn into the mystery are pretty unmemorable as well. Not much to recommend this one.

Ruth Ben-Ghiat surveys 100 years of authoritarians, how they came to power, how they stay in power, and what resistance and removal look like. Much of it is hard to read, but we’ll worth doing so, because ultimately it is a handbook to spotting dictators and pushing back against them before they begin to consolidate power. ‘Strongmen’ is a complement to Timothy Snyder’s book, ‘On Tyranny,’ because both agree that individuals have a role to play in putting down authoritarianism by resisting from the start, strengthening institutions like good journalism and the courts, demanding transparency, and behaving ourselves with honesty and empathy. Ben-Ghiat adds radical love to the list of countermeasures, encouraging those suckered in by tyrants to become part of a democratic polity again. The scary question she poses in the Afterword to the paperback edition remains to be answered, however: “What happens in a bipartisan system when one of two parties turns toward autocracy?” (266). “The time-tested methods of autocracy—electoral manipulation, voter suppression, the criminalization of protest, political violence, and disinformation—are now part of the way the GOP conducts its business as a far-right party,” she writes (271). Are we going to reward that?

This little novel takes on some big issues: the intersection of race, gender, and class that results in a mass murder in a small French town. Told in a matter-of-fact style, the novel explores how one man perceives the arrival of an outsider as the beginning of the end of what little dignity and self-regard he has left. He does what he knows how to do to try to restore his world as he understands it, but nothing ultimately suffices but his own rough justice, administered in an incomprehensible explosion of violence. Samira Sedira seems to be saying that it is this need to “restore order”—or at least a particular order rooted in retrograde ideas about what is right and fair—that gets us in trouble, when what we ought to be striving for is restoring one another’s humanity.

This little book is full of wisdom—some uncomfortable, some confounding, but all of it profound. It combines works by Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, and Epictetus into a sort of handbook for would-be Stoics, stoical in the sense of being steady, self-directed, and unshaken by fear or pain or challenging circumstances. There’s much to chew on here, particularly for us moderns who want to believe that we can change things and that our lives make a difference. “Don’t hope for Plato’s utopian republic,” Marcus Aurelius cautions the reader, “but be content with the smallest step forward, and regard even that result as no mean achievement” (104).

Finally, after all the books I’ve read in the past year and even before, to try to understand the Putin’s inexplicable impulse to invade Ukraine, Masha Gessen’s book explains not just what’s motivating the Russian leader, but the mindset that allows Russians to accept the unforgivable. 60,000 to 70,000 Russians killed in the first year of war, plus 8000 Ukrainian civilians, but the war goes on. Gessen published this book in 2017, after the seizure of Crimea, and her analysis still holds. She follows seven Russians and their families, from the fall of the Soviet Union to the invasion of Crimea in 2014, minutely dissecting their experiences navigating the creation of a new society that ends up looking remarkably like the old. She also draws on insights from Erich Fromm, Hannah Arendt, Victor Frankl, and others trying to understand totalitarianism. She describes Yuri Levada’s Homo Sovieticus,’ “the successful member of Soviet society…[who] believed in self-isolation, state paternalism, and what Levada called ‘hierarchical egalitarianism,’ and suffered from an ‘imperial syndrome’” (59). These qualities created a society incapable of the trust necessary to sustain a democratic system; again and again, Gessen describes corrupt elections, abuse of citizens,and capricious laws, all of which make Russians hunger for a strong man to depend upon, whether he lives up to his promises or not. “Perhaps terror was necessary for the establishment of a totalitarian regime,” Gessen writes, “but once established could it be maintained by institutions that carried within them the memory of terror” (205). The harassment of LGBT people, journalists, and intellectuals incapacitated anyone who might challenge Putin’s rule, strategies that Republicans are beginning to transplant to the U.S. An important and incredibly well-researched book that has lessons for Americans.

Published in 1977, ‘A Judgment in Stone’ starts with the shocking revelation that domestic Eunice Parchman killed the entire Coverdale family for whom she worked. “There was no real motive and no premeditation,” Rendell writes. “She accomplished by it nothing but disaster for herself, and all along, somewhere in her strange mind, she knew she would accomplish nothing” (1). This is a quietly psychological novel: we know what’s coming, the question is how and, more importantly, why. Middle-aged and taciturn, Eunice has several secrets to cover up; most shameful to her is her inability to read or write, which today we might perceive as a marker of a deeper, more humiliating kind of childhood abuse. The Coverdale family is well-meaning, but perhaps clueless in their privilege; nevertheless, Rendell creates them as likable, even occasionally comic, characters. The book is a slow-rolling crash of cultures, exacerbated by Eunice’s only friend, Joan Smith, a somewhat fanatical gossip and adherent of a religious cult. There’s a lot to unpack here, about class, modernity, and irrational fear. My first Rendell, but I’ll definitely read more.

This beautiful story provides real insight into what the people of Ukraine have suffered through since 2014 and before. Sergey Serveyich and his frenemy Pashko are the last two residents of Little Starhorodivka, a village in Ukraine’s grey zone between Russian troops and Ukraine loyalists. They reach an uneasy detente by neglecting to talk about political sympathies and sharing resources. When Sergey decides he needs to move his beehives for the summer to an environment healthier for the production of honey, the novel opens the question of what constitutes a home, with the bees as a metaphor for community. Sergey and his hives go on walkabout, looking for a safe and suitably rural setting. Sergey crosses multiple checkpoints and meets people on all sides of the crisis, encountering power outages, food shortages, political persecution, and nonsensical regulations. He’s an admirable character, maintaining his equanimity for the sake of his beloved bees. “He left behind him a war in which he had taken no part, in which he had simply happened to have found himself dwelling… [B]ees don’t understand what war is. Bees don’t switch from peace to war and back again” (143). His dedication is a reminder of the resilience of people who commit themselves to life and community.

This gut-wrenching little book was written in four weeks following Kristallnacht, the German pogrom against Jews in November 1938; the afterword indicates it is likely the first literary account of Jewish persecution in WWII. Ulrich Boschwitz drew from his own experiences to create a week in the life of Otto Silbermann, a German-Jewish businessman who flees his home one step ahead of the SA. The book traces his desperate attempts to make a plan for survival while coming to terms with the unthinkable: that in a civilized modern society, he suddenly has no business, no rights, and no way to leave the country. He spends much of his time on trains, riding from one city to another, trying to figure out what to do next. Along the way he meets sympathetic strangers, terrifying officials, and Jew-haters, and it is fascinating to watch these strangers as they also come to terms with a new reality. This book is never more relevant than right now; when authoritarians appeal to the worst parts of human nature to get and keep themselves in power, it is up to each of us to make humane choices.