3 comments about The Wilderness World of John Muir.

1. Whether you are interested in John Muir specifically or just want to read about an interesting life, this book is an excellent place to start.

   John Muir had an incredible and important life, and it is told here succinctly in his own words, excerpted to emphasize the profound. It is a glimpse into a lifestyle 99.9% of us will never know, yet it is truly important to our times. His love of nature, adventure and exploration is a reminder of why we need to experience more than our 9 to 5 workdays and why we need to apply ourselves to the protection of the Earth.

   Muir was a gentle but strong man, a genius with simple needs, solitary yet influential. This book is a terrific way to look into his life and his time and to gain some inspiration into our lives and our times.




2. I am often asked for a recommendation of what among Muir's writings, or writings about him, one should first read. After spending more than 30 years appreciating both his writings and most of the books about Muir that have been published during that time, and after ten years editing the John Muir Exhibit online, I can only turn to the same book that originally enthalled me with John Muir: The Wilderness World of John Muir, edited by Edwin Way Teale.
   
   This book was edited by someone who was himself an able naturalist and nature-writer, and therefore someone who could understand Muir in a way that most academics, whether professors of literature or historians, cannot. Edwin Way Teale (1899-1980), has been ranked as a nature writer with been ranked with Henry David Thoreau, John Burroughs, as well as John Muir himself. His honors include being elected as a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, receiving the John Burroughs Award in 1943, and the Pulitzer Prize in 1966. He was the author of 32 books. Teale's sympathy for Muir's message is shown in the book's Dedication page, which is "Dedicated to The Sierra Club, The Wilderness Society, The National Parks Association, and all those who are fighting the good fight to preserve what John Muir sought to save."
   
   This book serves as both an anthology of the very best of Muir's writings, and also a biography, compellingly provided by Teale.
   
   The biographical value of this work is often under-stated, even by the publisher. The book is typically viewed as an anthology, and indeed it is, primarily; but it also contains a wealth of biographical information, far more than the typical anthology.
   
   Teale commences his book on John Muir with an authoritative 10-page Introduction, that not merely identifies the key events in Muir's life, but provides an assessment and perspective of how Muir stacks up with other nature writers. He provides facts you won't find elsewhere: "While visiting friends, Muir sometimes would talk four hours at breakfast." Teale, writing in 1954, was able to talk with several people who knew Muir personally. He noted that everyone he talked to had a different view of which phase of natural history held first importance in Muir's mind. Some thought it was trees; another thought it was geology, another plants. Teale points out the fourth view, probably the nearest right of all: "... the whole interrelationships of life, the complete rounded picture of the mountain world. Today, Muir probably would be called an ecologist." Teale 's assessment of Muir as an "ecologist" pre-dates the "ecology movement" of the 1970s by at least 15 years. Teale admirably tells of the scope of the places, glaciers, plants, and animals named after him, and Muir's contributions to science and conservation. Although public appreciation for Muir has grown dramatically since Teale's book was first published in 1954, The Wilderness World of John Muir still provides the best introduction to Muir's life and writings.
   
   Following the admirable Introduction, each of the 51 excerpts from Muir's writings commences with a preface by Teale, of up to a page in length, presenting in chronological order the story of Muir's life, and putting each of Muir's writings into context.
   
   Although serving as a biography, the Wilderness World is, in fact, primarily a superb anthology. Rather than simply re-printing the full text of such of Muir's works as The Story of My Boyhood and Youth, A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf, My First Summer in the Sierra, Travels in Alaska, Our National Parks , and the Journals, Teale provides short snippets from the best of Muir's writings, arranged into seven broad categories:
   
   I. Memories of Youth - reprints Muir's writings about his boyhood in Scotland, life on the Wisconsin Farm, seeing immense flocks Passenger Pigeons, nearly dying of choke-damp while digging a well, his inventions, and his enrollment at the University of Wisconsin.
   
   II. University of The Wilderness - Excerpts from A Thousand Mile Walk, including people by the way, camping among the tombs of Bonaventure Cemetery in Savannah, Georgia, and Muir's visit to Cuba and New York.
   
   III. The Range of Light - Muir's adventures in the Sierra, including his first glimpse from Pacheco Pass and crossing the bee pastures of the Central Valley, his first visits to the High Sierra, climbing on the brink of Yosemite Falls above the Valley, tributes to wildlife including bears and grasshoppers, and his telepathic experience sensing the presence of his former University Professor Butler in the Valley.
   
   IV. The Valley - Muir's glorious tributes to Yosemite Valley's waterfalls, the water ouzel, the earthquake, and Ralph Waldo Emerson's visit.
   
   V. Forests of the West - Including Muir's adventure high atop a Douglas fir during a wind-storm, and writings about Silver Pine, the Douglas Squirrel, Sequoia, Nevada Nut Pines, and Muir's clarion call to protect the forests, "Any Fool Can Destroy a Tree."
   
   VI. Glacier Pioneer - Muir's discovery of the Sierra glaciers, his climb of Mount Ritter, his perilous night on Mount Shasta, and his travels in Alaska, including his discovery of Glacier Bay and his adventure with Stickeen.
   
   VII. The Philosophy of John Muir - excerpts from many scattered sources focusing on Muir's views on mankind's relationship to Nature. For many, this is the favorite part of the book, the part one returns to again and again for inspiration.
   
   Despite this, the book does have some failings. The book belies the importance of Muir's family and friends, which becomes so evident upon reading his extensive correspondence. Nor does the book do more than barely mention some important places in Muir's life, such as his global travels to such places as the glacial mountains of Europe, the forests of Siberia, the Himalayas and forests of India, Australian and New Zealand forests, and, the fulfillment of his life-long dream, his last trip to see the forests of South America and Africa. The book emphasizes Muir's appreciative writings about Nature, and only briefly mentions the conservation battles which consumed so much of his life, including his long campaign to protect Hetch Hetchy. To obtain a whole picture of Muir, the reader will need to also read another work about Muir's conservation campaigns, such as Roderick Nash's chapter on "John Muir: Publicizer" in Wilderness and the American Mind, Stephen Fox's John Muir and His Legacy: The American Conservation Movement, or John Muir and the Sierra Club: The Battle for Yosemite by Holway R. Jones.
   
   Since the book was originally published in 1954, it is not informed by some of the more recent research resulting from Muir's unpublished journals and correspondence, published in the John Muir Papers in 1980. Given the popularity of this book, fifty years after its first publication, the publishers should consider a second edition, again using a nature writer rather than a literary critic or historian to update the book.
   
   Overall, in this book Muir comes alive, as someone who can can at once write inspiringly and poetically about trees, storms, mountains, glaciers, and forests, but yet also show the attention to detail of an analytical scientist. Muir is revealed as adventurer, a lover of nature, a person who can still excite the imagination of readers. As Teale concludes, "Rich in time, rich in enjoyment, rich in appreciation, rich in enthusiasm, rich in understanding, rich in expression, rich in friends, rich in knowledge, John muir lived a full and rounded life, a life unique in many ways, admirable in many ways, valuable in many ways.... In his writings and in his conservation achievements, Muir seems especially present in a world that is better because he lived here."
   
   August, 2004



3. I really enjoyed this book as it was focused on plants and animals. My favorite chapters were "The Water Ouzel" (a bird) and "Stickeen" (a dog). However, the whole book was interesting and enjoyable, including chapters about different people he met along the way ("The Robber" and "The Blacksmith"). This book is titled as "a selection from his collected work." I enjoyed his writing so much that I will look for a complete volume of his works so I don't miss out on any other great stories.

No comments about The Man Who Believed He Was King of France: A True Medieval Tale.

1 comments about Civil War Hospital Sketches (Dover Evergreen Classics).

1. This book was short and gave some insight, but was a little disappointing since I had just finished reading Civil War Nurse: The Diary and Letters of Hannah Ropes. Both Louisa May Alcott and Hannah Ropes were assigned to the same hospital. Hannah Ropes' book is more in depth with the day-to-day details and her feelings than Hospital Sketches. Louisa May Alcott's book makes you think it was written specifically for a certain reading audience in mind and was found lacking in some respects.
   (signed LAS)

4 comments about Madame Chiang Kai-shek: China's Eternal First Lady.

1. It's surprising to note that this is the first biography of one of the most politically influential women of modern times, but MADAME CHIANG KAI-SHEK: CHINA'S ETERNAL FIRST LADY remains the only title to provide the complete story of a woman who seized unofficial and official power during China's civil war. Her position against Chinese Communism and her diplomatic relations affected decades of Chinese-American relations, so this book is key to a thorough understanding of not just the woman, but Chinese politics and influences in particular.
   
   Diane C. Donovan
   California Bookwatch



2. This is a book to dive into, and lose yourself for days. Madame Chiang Kai-Shek is that good a story, and this is that good an account of her life. Madame Chiang used her political cunning and legendary drive to seduce supporters to her side of China's epic civil war during the middle part of the 20th century.
   
   The Nationalist regime, headed by her husband, was hated by the Chinese people for its notorious brutality and corruption. But as portrayed by Madame Chiang, especially to American audiences, Chiang Kai-shek's government was a modern, educated bulwark of democracy and freedom for a country whose history had allowed little of either. Indeed, Madame Chiang personified the vaunted hopes, bitter disappointments and complex misunderstandings of the U.S.-China relationship, which vacillated wildly during her exceptional 105-year lifetime. Laura Tyson Li's incisive new biography, rises to the tall task of capturing this pivotal figure in all her splendor and humiliation, against a backdrop of war, revolution and unending political turmoil. Li, a journalist with a decade of experience in Asia, accurately portrays her as "beautiful, vain, witty, spirited, capricious, scheming, selfish, and driven."
   
   What a character. What a tale.
   
   The book opens in the waning days of China's second-to-last emperor in the late 1890s, when Mayling Olive Soong was born in Shanghai, the youngest daughter of a businessman who had made a fortune selling Bibles and presided over a family of savvy, idealistic and recklessly ambitious children. One married Sun Yat-sen, China's first president. Another became finance minister and acting prime minister of Nationalist China. Another became one of China's richest women. Mayling became Madame Chiang Kai-shek.
   
   In an era when few girls learned to read and fewer traveled, Mayling was schooled in Georgia, then graduated from Wellesley College, where she excelled at French, violin and religious studies. She returned to Shanghai in 1917 just as China lurched into a bloody warlord period, and soon she was courted by the most severe warlord of all, Chiang Kai-shek. He divorced one wife and sent another off to Columbia University before Mayling agreed to marry him.
   
   During World War II, Madame Chiang became a superb envoy to the United States, where her address to Congress in 1943 thrilled Washington, and her barnstorming across the country won renewed support and money to defeat the Japanese. In China, she was a poised partner to her husband, softening his imperiousness while sharpening his political machinations.
   
   In Li's telling, husband and wife (who shared a bedroom with a screen separating their beds) could not have differed more. He was an early riser; she stayed up late watching movies. He was ascetic; she insisted on luxury. Still, they called each other 'Dar' (short for 'darling') and for years collaborated to cement fragile political alliances and keep a shaky hold on power.
   
   The book has delicious tidbits, such as an affair with Republican presidential nominee Wendell Wilkie and her insistence on getting silk sheets when she stayed in President Franklin D. Roosevelt's White House.
   
   Overall, Li delivers a thoughtful portrait of a complex woman and resists the considerable temptation to crucify her. That is a refreshing contrast to the shock-and-awe approach seen in so many recent books on prominent figures in China's recent history. Li deconstructs critical historical events with skill: the Xian Incident, when Chiang Kai-shek was kidnapped by rebellious generals; the 50-year house-arrest of the leading kidnapper, with whom Madame Chiang developed a curious friendship; Madame Chiang's mysterious disappearances for months at a time, caused, Li thinks by physical and mental illnesses, including debilitating hives, breast cancer and nervous breakdown.
   
   More reporter than writer, Li assiduously draws on Madame Chiang's extensive personal correspondence, from archives around the world, to explain each stage of her drama. It's a spellbinding period of history. And it does not end well for the Chiangs. The Nationalist regime crumbled to the Communists in 1949. The Chiangs fled to Taiwan, admitting no fault, but blamed President Truman and vowed to retake the mainland. That dream faded gradually after Chiang Kai-shek died in 1975.
   
   Madame Chiang's antagonistic stepson, Chiang Ching-kuo, would oversee a murderous suppression of dissidents as head of Taiwan's intelligence network. Paradoxically, as president, he later paved the way for the launch of Taiwan's democracy just before his death in 1988. That year, at age 90, she tried to rally Taiwan's Old Guard and prevent the onset of democracy she once spoke of so often. She failed.
   
   Madame Chiang lived out her days in New York, watching China and Taiwan as one became capitalist and the other became a democracy. Despite her illnesses, she lived until 2003.
   
   Ultimately, Madame Chiang was "a deeply flawed heroine," Li writes, "that rare creature who stuck resolutely to her beliefs, however misguided some of them may have been, through the decades and the trials."



3. Reading "Madame Chiang Kai-shek: China's Eternal First Lady" was like going through everything in the attic and leaving nothing unexamined. Tyson-Li covers every aspect of Madame Chiang's life without ever letting us forget that life's relevance for today. The "Dragon Lady's" significance never disappears in the wealth of the personal, historical, political, psychological, medical, and religious dimensions of her complex life. Her fanatical anti-Communism calls to mind Richard Nixon's personal crusade. Her use of religion to define her and her husband's sense of destiny parallels certain leaders who employ religious language for similar ends. Her manipulation of people and events exceeds the ambitions of any demagogue who has come to believe his or her own public statements.
   
   All this and more the author achieves with vivid prose that takes you into private parlors where Madame Chiang herself has invited you to tea, but leaves you feeling that just maybe everything you've heard is really true and that your hostess is neither monster nor statesman, but an enigmatic individual using the world as a stage to work out her insecurities.



4. 
   Laura Tyson Li has assembled a spectacular bio. It's page turner with the authority and detail of an encyclopedia. LTL has managed to keep her opinions out of the text. It isn't until the last chapter when through an informed discussion on the Madame's possible motivations that LTL becomes subjective.
   
   While almost every aspect of this life is intriguing, certain people and episodes stand out. I had forgotten Zhang Xueliang until he emerged after a 50 year house arrest, after which he & his wife move to Hawaii. Apparently he was able to keep his pre-war fortune, or had been cared for financially; he is deemed a friend of the Madame. (Another 5 year house arrest of a physician who botches an operation of the General suggests house arrest is a common punishment for "friends" and other professionals.) Madame's war time US appeal for funds, with its cross country caravan of staff whom MCKS treats "as coolies" is certainly an episode worth a small volume. (The $800,000 she raises goes to her personal account.) While the Wendel Wilkie relationship (true or false) is intriguing, I fixed on the William H. Donald relationship, which may have been a professional friendship and refuge from her husband's authoritarianism, but her end of life treatment of him suggests something else.
   
   There are a host of issues worthy of their own books. Perhaps these books exist but I don't know about them. One issue is the "arrival" of 2 million mainlanders to the island of Formosa, who's 7 million citizens seemed to have some degree of prosperity under the Japanese. While the Chaings arrive with resources, others huddle in makeshift places and cry at night. "Invasion" appears to be a better word for this arrival (particularly after 2/28), but it is certainly not portrayed as such (or allowed to be portrayed as such) by the Nationalists who felt entitled to rule and had the resources to make it so. Even later, Madame objects to the appointment of Taiwanese to government posts.
   
   Another issue deserving its own book is Madame's money. Whether or not the NYC exterminators actually saw it, a closet of gold bars is not far fetched. For maybe 30 years, Madame's "charity" received a % of all imports to Taiwan. There were several "vacation" homes in Taiwan, one built at a cost of $2 million. Then, the resources brought from the mainland to Taiwan. This money provided Madame with luxury and a large staff until her death. How large was it? How was it acquired (any from the US war assistance?) and where did it go?
   
   MCKS can be noted for her longevity alone. There must be something Guinness-worthy about her survival despite many years in a war zone, continued medical treatments, operations including several for breast cancer, nervous afflictions, a late in life automobile accident, lifelong cigarette smoking (and potential drug abuse) and at least one assassination attempt. Any one of these factors would tend to predict an early demise, not a life of 103 years.
   
   If you read this book, it's riveting, so be prepared to give it time. Also, the level of detail might make continuity difficult if you have to make gaps in your reading time.

5 comments about Fragments: Memories of a Wartime Childhood.

1. It is in Fragments now, a total hoax.

   A Holocaust survivor memoir that has received prestigious literary awards and lavish praise has been exposed as a hoax.

   In Fragments: Memories of a Wartime Childhood, Binjamin Wilkomirski describes his ordeal as an infant in the Jewish ghetto of Riga (Latvia), where his earliest memory is of seeing his father being killed. Wilkomirski also tells how he survived the terrible rigors of wartime internment, at the age of three or four, in the German-run concentration camps of Majdanek and Auschwitz.

   First published in German in 1995, Fragments has been translated into twelve languages. In Switzerland, the country where Wilkomirski lives, the book has been a major best-seller. Two documentary films and numerous personal appearances by the author in schools throughout the country have helped promote the memoir.

   The American edition was published by Schocken, an imprint of Random House, which heavily promoted the book with teachers' study guides and other supplementary materials.

   Jewish groups and major American newspapers have warmly praised Fragments. The New York Times called it "stunning," and the Los Angeles Times lauded it as a "classic first-hand account of the Holocaust." It received the 1996 National Jewish Book Award for Autobiography and Memoir, while in Britain it was awarded the Jewish Quarterly Literary Prize, and in France the Prix Memoire de la Shoah.

   The US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC -- a federal government agency -- was so impressed that it sent Wilkomirski on a six-city United States fund-raising tour last fall.

   This past summer, though, compelling evidence came to light exposing Wilkomirski's memoir as an literary hoax.

   Although he claims to have been born in Latvia in 1939, and to have arrived in Switzerland in 1947 or 1948, Swiss legal records show that he was actually born in Switzerland in February 1941, the son of an unwed woman, Yvette Grosjean. The infant was then adopted and raised by the Doessekkers, a middle-class Zurich couple. Jewish author Daniel Ganzfried, writing in the Swiss weekly Weltwoche, also reports that he has found a 1946 photo of the young Bruno Doessekker (Wilkomirski) in the garden of his adoptive parents.

   Comparisons have been drawn between Wilkomirski's Fragments and The Painted Bird, the supposedly autobiographical "Holocaust memoir" by prominent literary figure Jerzy Kosinksi that turned out to be fraudulent.

   Reaction by Jewish Holocaust scholars to the new revelations has been instructive, because they seem more concerned about propagandistic impact than about historical truth. Their primary regret seems merely to be that the fraud has been detected, not that it was perpetrated.

   In an essay published in a major Canadian newspaper (Ottawa Citizen, Nov. 18, 1998), Jewish writer Judith Shulevitz arrogantly argued that it doesn't really matter much if Fragments is authentic. Her main misgiving, apparently, is that the deceit was not more adroit: "I can't help wishing Wilkomirksi-Doesseker [sic] had been more subtle in his efforts at deception, and produced the magnificent fraud world literature deserves."

   Deborah Dwork, director of the Center for Holocaust Studies at Clark University (Worcester, Mass.), and co-author of Auschwitz: 1270 to the Present (Yale Univ. Press, 1996), agrees that Fragments now appears to be fraudulent. At the same time, though, she expressed sympathy for Wilkomirski, saying that when she met him he appeared "to be a deeply scarred man." Amazingly, Dwork does not blame him for the imposture, "because she believes in his identity." Instead, she takes the publishers to task for having "exploited" Wilkomirski. (New York Times, Nov. 3, 1998).

   Deborah Lipstadt, author of the anti-revisionist polemic Denying the Holocaust, has assigned Fragments in her Emory University class on Holocaust memoirs. When confronted with evidence that it is a fraud, she commented that the new revelations "might complicate matters somewhat, but [the work] is still powerful."

   Daniel Ganzfried reports that Jews have complained to him that even if Fragments is a fraud, his exposé is dangerously aiding "those who deny the Holocaust."

   American Jewish writer Howard Weiss makes a similar point in an essay published in the Chicago Jewish Star (Oct. 9-29, 1998):

   Presenting a fictional account of the Holocaust as factual only provides ammunition to those who already deny that the horrors of Nazism and the death camps ever even happened. If one account is untrue, the deniers' reasoning goes, how can we be sure any survivors accounts are true ... Perhaps no one was ready to question the authenticity of the [Wilkomirski] account because just about anything concerning the Holocaust becomes sacrosanct.

   Wilkomirski himself has responded to the new revelations by going into hiding, although he did issue a defiant statement describing the climate of discussion about his memoir as a "poisonous" atmosphere of "totalitarian judgment and criticism."




2. When I read this book several years ago, I did not understand how anyone could have believed it. Having known several true Holocaust survivors, and heard their stories, I certainly didn't.
   
   Now, there have now been several clear and thorough exposes of the fraud perpetrated by Bruno Grosjean Dossekker, who falsely claimed here to be one Binjamin Wilkomirski, a child survivor of the Holocaust. Stefan Maechler, The New Yorker, 60 Minutes and several other publications prove beyond any doubt that Wilkomirski is no such person and that Fragments is a fiction.
   
   Every possible lead has now been followed; each detail in Dossekker's narration of "events" has been compared with historical records from such leading Holocaust scholars as Raul Hilberg and Lawrence Langer, accounts of other child survivors, interviews with members of the Dossekker and Grosjean families and more.
   
   The strongest evidence, unearthed by Stephan Maechler, is the fact that in 1981, Dossekker/Wilkomirski contested the will of Yvonne Grosjean, whom, in a letter to officials in Bern Switzerland, he called "my birth mother." Dossekker/Wilkomirski received a third of her estate.
   
   Other evidence includes Dossekker/Wilkomirski's use of Laura Grabowski to "corroborate" his story. Grabowski claims to have known him in a children's home in Krakow. In fact, Grabowski is an American citizen of Christian faith who has since her youth fabricated stories about her victimhood, the most well-publicized being a book called Satan's Underground.
   
   The Social Security number of said Lauren Stratford is the same as that of Grabowski, who subsequently used it to make a false survivor's claim. Furthermore, Satan's Underground and this volume contain startling similarities.
   
   --Alyssa A. Lappen



3. Just follow the money trail, the political bantering and incessant self-victimization (which always seems to lead into getting paid one way or another) and you'll see why the most powerful of the jewish lobby (yeah, I'm not afraid to say it) will still ENDORSE IT after it has been proven to be a complete fabrication.
   
   And they wonder why the "extremists" have so much credibility even before people look at all the facts. I've read this book and got a great laugh out of the rediculous claims, and the writings of a man obviously an older version of someone whom would be on the Jerry Springer show today if faced with a different self-victimization issue.
   
   I was already well informed this book was a fabrication in advance, so I can't say "I'm smarter than you all whom were fooled"...heck, even Elie "Weasel" fooled me the first two times around. Looks like his credibility is crap as well. I'mglad I have relatives that were on both sides of WW2; as camp munitions auditor, fitness/activity trainer (A Sergeant's job! He was denied citizenship in US but later came from Canada in about '80), a Luftwaffe infantryman whom both stayed at the conc camps, and himself taken POW when wounded in Belgium (yes many Luft Inf exist so stop emailing me, you don't know history) and a US liberator of Buchenwald...I'm glad REALITY doesnt match the whining stories of crybaby rich jews exiled after the war...so many millions of survivors all rubber-stamping eachothers stories about human soap and lampshades, all proven false by MAINSTREAM science. Like I said, follow the money trail...



4. After some investigative reporting by the media, it was discovered that this alleged "true story" of a Holocaust survivor was anything but. The facts? Binjamin Wilkomirski is actually Swiss-born Bruno Grosjean Doessekker, and his experience was about as real as that of the supposed "fellow survivor" who corroborated his story, Laura Grabowski.
   
   How did Grabowski play an indirect role in unmasking the author? She claimed to be an orphan who suffered torture at the hands of Nazi war criminal Josef Mengele and was later adopted by an American couple, only to have these stories be exposed as equally untrue (her childhood photos show a happy, healthy American girl w/not even hints of the emaciated sate commonly associated w/those who spent time in concentration camps). Additionally, she was revealed to actually be Lauren Stratford, author of the equally fictitious-but-presented-as-a-true-story "Satan's Underground", which detailed her alleged involvement in Satanism and the sexual abuse she endured from the time she was a young girl (something she'd also had a history of lying about since her late teens); as it turns out, "Grabowski" was actually the surname of her maternal grandparents.
   
   Don't the Wilkomirskis and Grabowskis of this world realize that their exploitation of one of the most despicable events in history is not only self-indulgent and unbelievably selfish, but giving credibility to those misguided Holocaust-denying racist groups? Such lies will allow these scumbags to convince the lesser-informed folk out there that the attempted extermination of an entire race was also nothing but lies, which I'm sure never occured to these self-indulgent storytellers as they proceeded to betray countless REAL survivors, who have already suffered enough as it is.



5. I read the book and believed it.NOW IT TURNS OUT TO BE FICTION!!!!
   MORE AMMUNITION FOR THE HOLOCAUST DENIERS.
   IF AMAZON IS TO SELL...PLACE IT IN FICTION PLEASE...!!!!

1 comments about Blood and Whiskey: The Life and Times of Jack Daniel.

1. A double shot of a biography on whiskey magnate Jack Daniel with hard-work and determination as the foundation to his life and principles.
   Born in the mid-1800's and orphaned at the age of fifteen, JD immediately found himself working in a local Tennessee distillery manufacturing some of the highest quality spirits in the region from men who were the best in the business. He was known as the boy distiller.
   In his early twenties, he had the opportunity to partnership with his mentor and the rest as they say is history.
   It was not easy though. For decades he battled revenuers, the government, corrupt officials, temperance groups and later the prohibition movement. Even with these many adversities throughout his life, philanthropy was his middle name.
   Peter Krass has uncorked an imbibing read of a unique man and the times in which he lived.

5 comments about The Prophet Armed: Trotsky 1879-1921.

1. For nearly all its existence since Lenin's death in 1924 Trotsky (aka Lev Davidovich Bronstein) was Satan in the Bolshevik's manichean view of the world. Most of the purges of the 1930s were allegedly meant to cleanse Soviet society and its key institutions (the Communist Party, the unions, the Red Army, the intelligentsia) of the Trotskyte taint that, like some sort of Original Sin, pervaded the proletarian dictatorship. Stalin tried to erase Trotsky from the history of the Revolution. He even erased Trotsky's physical attributes, not just by killing him in 1940, half a world away, but by obliterating his likeness wherever it might have been found.
   
   This book, published fifty years ago, tried to counter the Stalinist plot against Trotsky by vindicating his key role in the 1905 and 1917 revolutions, in the Civil War and in the establishment of the Red Army and the Soviet state. The author partially succeeds. Here we see Trotsky in all his glory, as perhaps he would have liked to be remembered, as a child prodigy who from humble rural beginnings quickly found his way in the world, as a professional revolutionary, as a brilliant polemist and orator, who even as a young man was seen as worthy counterpart to Lenin, and far above the rest of the Party, as a good hearted man who tried to promote harmony within the Party and failed at it, as a cultured, civilized "westernizer", much more appealing than the brutal Stalin, who came straight from the "log cabin" of czarist barbarism. He also came up with many good ideas, such as Lenin's New Economic Policy. Deutscher also gives us some of the darker sides to Trotsky's scintillating personna. He was proud and haughty, but brittle. He was abusive to others, often unnecessarily. He often let abstractions and daydreams take the place of reality. And he came up with many bad ideas, such as War Communism and the Militarization of Labor.
   
   But, given Deutscher's profile (he was a Trotskyte) the book is often a competent whitewash. The author shares Trotsky's (and the Bolshevik's) worldview to a great extent, and sees the October Revolution as a worthy action. Mostly, he takes Trotskyte and Bolshevik motives as justification for their actions. He portrays opponents (such as the White Guards and nationalist Ukrainians and Poles) as illegitimate. Nowhere does the awfulness of Soviet rule, and the brutality of the Bolshevik leaders come through, except perhaps in their remarkably abusive writings. To find such bitchiness nowadays one would have to refer to the academic world, where the nastiness is commensurate to the irrelevance of that which is being discussed.
   
   Also, the book is often not very readable as history. The author will often refer to future or past events in a single page, without indication of the precise dates, which makes this a hard book to read for someone not familiar with the October Revolution.
   
   Having said this, a good reason to read this book is that it is beautifully written, and that the author really does get very close to his subject, which is mostly a negative in that he lacks perspective, but does bring the advantage of great liveliness which makes this a very good read. This reminds me of Preston's life of General Franco. Preston hated his subject and was unable utterly to develop any empathy with him, so the book was fairly arid and not insightful. Deutscher has the opposite defect: he gets too close, as perhaps does Nicholas Farrell to Mussolini. The ideal would be like Kershaw's Hitler or Short's Mao: far enough to look the monster in the eye, but not close enough to kiss him.
   
   At this book's end, Trotsky is at the apex of his power, from which he would begin to slip during Lenin's final year. But this is better left to volume II, which I also hope to review.
   
   So read the book, but don't take Deutscher at his word. Complement this with Volkogonov's Trotsky. And with Trotsky's own voluminous writings, which are often very amusing (particularly his biography of Stalin).



2. It is indeed odd to read the early life of Leon Trotsky up to 1920 now, fifteen years after the collapse of the Soviet Union he saved from civil war 88 years ago. The reissue of this classic work, written right after WWII to vindicate the man who had done the most to give birth to the Soviet experiment and had been written out of its history by Stalin and his henchmen, is welcome. We are allowed to remember what we would rather forget, that despite our difficulties with Boshevism it did seek to right the wrong of Tsarism, one of the most backward, brutal, and desensitizing systems of oppression known to European man up to that time. Trotsky was unquestionably a genius, a hero, and of course also a man of weaknesses and ego who set the Soviet Union on a path which he could easily justify but which could also be used for more narrow and nefarious purposes by his old enemy, Joseph Stalin. Stalin in fact, while opposing Trotsky at almost every turn before and after Lenin's death, managed in the end to adopt Trotsky's economic policies with a ruthlessness which Trotsky would have approved had he not been forced to disapprove of it as a proscribed enemy of Stalinism.
   
   Trotsky demonstrates that a certain logic of history, in this case Russian history, a history half-European and half-Asiatic, forced the liberation of Russia to become its subjugation to a tyrrany more verbally benevolent but no less horrible than Tsarism. Trotsky was undoubtedly a more enlightened and humane man than the half-barbarian Stalin, but it is not clear that had he beaten Stalin he would have been able to do better than Stalin in two tasks: setting Russia on a path of industrialization and modernization and defeating Hitler. For Stalin, lest we forget because of his crimes, Stalin did these two important things and did them very well indeed.
   
   To relive the heroic days of the Russian Revolution is to be reminded that once Russian Socialism (including Bolshevism) deserved the respect of the onlooking world. The Cold War has distorted much about this history and hidden much from our eyes. We have allowed ourselves to adopt the counter-revolutionary ideology of the reactionary classes when it comes to the birth of Soviet Russia. Isaac Deutscher deserves praise for not only restoring our view of Trotsky but for having restored our view of the Russian revolutionary tradition.



3. Firstly, it's necessary to keep in mind that Deustscher was not trying to write a biography of Trotsky- if by that is meant an account of his life for its own sake- nor was he trying to write a history of the Russian Revolution and its leaders as a self-contained account. Deutscher's goals where twofold: to vindicate Trotsky's early opposition against Lenin's conception of the revolutionary party as well as his later opposition to Stalin's policies _in the long run_ and at the same time to acknowledge the necessity of Leninism and Stalinism _in the short run_. However objectionable such a view is today, Deutscher's political dialogue with Trotsky's ghost is superbly argued and documented, and anyone, no matter one's political views, will finish reading this work feeling one knows more about the subject than beforehand. In all the languages this work was translated (and I remember the ruckus produced in Brazil by the 1960s Portuguese trans.) it played havoc with accepted Left commonplaces.
   
   There are many faults in this new Verso edition: first, its paperback binding is atrocious (after a first read, I have already a couple of loose pages); secondly, there lacks an introduction that sets the work in perspective 50 years after its publication, as well as a glossary of unusual terms for today's conservative age (such as comissar, soviet, etc.) and, perhaps, some short biographies of the smaller characters,with dates of birth and decease, positions held, whereabouts, etc.However, the work can still be enjoyably read on its own, even if you miss some (admittedly small) points.



4. THIS YEAR MARKS THE 66TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE ASSASSINATION OF LEON TROTSKY-ONE OF HISTORY'S GREAT REVOLUTIONARIES. IT IS THEREFORE FITTING TO REVIEW THE THREE VOLUME WORK OF HIS DEFINITIVE BIOGRAPHER, THE PROPHET ARMED, THE PROPHET UNARMED, THE OUTCAST.
   
   Isaac Deutscher's three-volume biography of the great Russian Bolshevik leader Leon Trotsky although written over one half century ago remains the standard biography of the man. Although this writer disagrees , as I believe that Trotsky himself would have, about the appropriateness of the title of prophet and its underlying premise that a tragic hero had fallen defeated in a worthy cause, the vast sum of work produced and researched makes up for those basically literary differences. Deutscher, himself, became in the end an adversary of Trotsky's politics around his differing interpretation of the historic role of Stalinism and the fate of the Fourth International but he makes those differences clear and in general they does not mar the work. I do not believe even with the eventual full opening of all the old Soviet-era files any future biographer will dramatically increase our knowledge about Trotsky and his revolutionary struggles. Moreover, as I have mentioned elsewhere in other reviews while he has not been historically fully vindicated he is in no need of any certificate of revolutionary good conduct.
   
   At the beginning of the 21st century when the validity of socialist political programs as tools for change is in apparent decline or disregarded as utopian it may be hard to imagine the spirit that drove Trotsky to dedicate his whole life to the fight for a socialist society. However, at the beginning of the 20th century he represented only the one of the most consistent and audacious of a revolutionary generation of mainly Eastern Europeans and Russians who set out to change the history of the 20th century. It was as if the best and brightest of that generation were afraid, for better or worse, not to take part in the political struggles that would shape the modern world. As Trotsky noted elsewhere this element was missing, with the exceptions of Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Liebknecht and precious few others, in the Western labor movement. Deutscher using Trotsky's own experiences tells the story of the creation of this revolutionary cadre with care and generally proper proportions. Here are some highlights militant leftists should think about.
   
   On the face of it Trotsky's personal profile does not stand out as that of a born revolutionary. Born of a hard working, eventually prosperous Jewish farming family in the Ukraine (of all places) there is something anomalous about his eventual political occupation. Always a vociferous reader, good writer and top student under other circumstances he would have found easy success, as others did, in the bourgeois academy, if not in Russia then in Western Europe. But there is the rub; it was the intolerable and personally repellant political and cultural conditions of Czarist Russia in the late 19th century that eventually drove Trotsky to the revolutionary movement- first as a `ragtag' populist and then to his life long dedication to orthodox Marxism. As noted above, a glance at the biographies of Eastern European revolutionary leaders such as Lenin, Martov, Christian Rakovsky, Bukharin and others shows that Trotsky was hardly alone in his anger at the status quo. And the determination to something about it.
   
   For those who argue, as many did in the New Left in the 1960's, that the most oppressed are the most revolutionary the lives of the Russian and Eastern European revolutionaries provide a cautionary note. The most oppressed, those most in need of the benefits of socialist revolution, are mainly wrapped up in the sheer struggle for survival and do not enter the political arena until late, if at all. Even a quick glance at the biographies of the secondary leadership of various revolutionary movements, actual revolutionary workers who formed the links to the working class , generally show skilled or semi-skilled workers striving to better themselves rather than the most downtrodden lumpenproletarian elements. The sailors of Kronstadt and the Putilov workers in Saint Petersburg come to mind. The point is that `the wild boys and girls' of the street do not lead revolutions; they simply do not have the staying power. On this point, militants can also take Trotsky's biography as a case study of what it takes to stay the course in the difficult struggle to create a new social order. While the Russian revolutionary movement, like the later New Left mentioned above, had more than its share of dropouts, especially after the failure of the 1905 revolution, it is notably how many stayed with the movement under much more difficult circumstances than we ever faced. For better or worst, and I think for the better, that is how revolutions are made.
   
   Once Trotsky made the transition to Marxism he became embroiled in the struggles to create a unity Russian Social Democratic Party, a party of the whole class, or at least a party representing the historic interests of that class. This led him to participate in the famous Bolshevik/Menshevik struggle in 1903 which defined what the party would be, its program, its methods of work and who would qualify for membership. The shorthand for this fight can be stated as the battle between the `hards' (Bolsheviks, who stood for a party of professional revolutionaries) and the `softs' (Mensheviks, who stood for a looser conception of party membership) although those terms do not do full justice to these fights. Strangely, given his later attitudes, Trotsky stood with the `softs', the Mensheviks, in the initial fight in 1903. Although Trotsky almost immediately afterward broke from that faction I do not believe that his position in the 1903 fight contradicted the impulses he exhibited throughout his career- personally `libertarian', for lack of a better word , and politically hard in the clutch.
   
   Even a cursory glance at most of Trotsky's career indicates that it was not spent in organizational in-fighting, or at least not successfully. Trotsky stands out as the consummate free-lancer. More than one biographer has noted this condition, including his definitive biographer Isaac Deutscher. Let me make a couple of points to take the edge of this characterization though. In that 1903 fight mentioned above Trotsky did fight against Economism (the tendency to only fight over trade union issues and not fight overtly political struggles against the Czarist regime) and he did fight against Bundism (the tendency for one group, in this case the Jewish workers, to set the political agenda for that particular group). Moreover, he most certainly favored a centralized organization. These were the key issues at that time. Furthermore, the controversial organizational question did not preclude the very strong notion that a `big tent' unitary party was necessary. The `big tent' German Social Democratic model held very strong sway among the Russian revolutionaries for a long time, including Lenin's Bolsheviks. The long and short of it was that Trotsky was not an organization man, per se. He knew how to organize revolutions, armies, Internationals, economies and so on when he needed to but on a day to day basis no. Thus, to compare or contrast him to Lenin and his very different successes is unfair. Both have an honorable place in the revolutionary movement; it is just a different place.
   
   That said, Trotsky really comes into his own as a revolutionary leader in the Revolution of 1905 not only as a publicist but as the central leader of the Soviets (workers councils) which made their first appearance at that time. In a sense it is because he was a freelancer that he was able to lead the Petrograd Soviet during its short existence and etch upon the working class of Russia (and in a more limited way, internationally) the need for its own organizations to seize state power. All revolutionaries honor this experience, as we do the Paris Commune, as the harbingers of October, 1917. As Lenin and Trotsky both confirm, it was truly a `dress rehearsal' for that event. It is in 1905 that Trotsky first wins his stars by directing the struggle against the Czar at close quarters, in the streets and working class meeting halls. And later in his eloquent and `hard' defense of the experiment after it was crushed by the Czarism reaction. I believe that it was here in the heat of the struggle in 1905 where the contradiction between Trotsky's `soft' position in 1903 and his future `hard' Bolshevik position of 1917 and thereafter is resolved. Here was a professional revolutionary who one could depend on when the deal went down.
   
   No discussion of this period of Trotsky's life is complete without mentioning his very real contribution to Marxist theory- that is, the theory of Permanent Revolution. Although the theory is over one hundred years old it still retains its validity today in those countries that still have not had their bourgeois revolutions. This rather simple straightforward theory about the direction of the Russian revolution (and which Trotsky later in the 1920's, after the debacle of the Chinese Revolution, made applicable to what today are called "third world" countries) has been covered with so many falsehoods, epithets, and misconceptions that it deserves further explanation. Why? Militants today must address the ramifications of the question what kind of revolution is necessary as a matter of international revolutionary strategy. Trotsky, taking the specific historical development and the peculiarities of Russian economic development as part of the international capitalist order as a starting point argued that there was no `Chinese wall' between the bourgeois revolution Russian was in desperate need of and the tasks of the socialist revolution. In short, in the 20th century ( and by extension, now) the traditional leadership role of the bourgeois in the bourgeois revolution in a economically backward country, due to its subservience to the international capitalist powers and fear of its own working class and plebian masses, falls to the proletariat. The Russian Revolution of 1905 sharply demonstrated the outline of that tendency especially on the perfidious role of the Russian bourgeoisie. The unfolding of revolutionary events in 1917 graphically confirmed this. The history of revolutionary struggles since then, and not only in `third world' countries, gives added, if negative, confirmation of that analysis.
   
   World War I was a watershed for modern history in many ways. For the purposes of this review two points are important. First, the failure of the bulk of the European social democracy- representing the masses of their respective working classes- to not only not oppose their own ruling classes' plunges into war, which would be a minimal practical expectation, but to go over and directly support their own respective ruling classes in that war. This position was most famously demonstrated when the entire parliamentary fraction of the German Social Democratic party voted for the war credits for the Kaiser on August 4, 1914. This initially left the anti-war elements of international social democracy, including Lenin and Trotsky, almost totally isolated. As the carnage of that war mounted in endless and senseless slaughter on both sides it became clear that a new political alignment in the labor movement was necessary. The old, basically useless Second International, which in its time held some promise of bringing in the new socialist order, needed to give way to a new revolutionary International. That eventually occurred in 1919 with the foundation of the Communist International (also known as the Third International). Horror of horrors, particularly for reformists of all stripes, this meant that the international labor movement, one way or another, had to split into its reformist and revolutionary components. It is during the war that Trotsky and Lenin, not without some lingering differences, drew closer and begins the process of several years, only ended by Lenin's death, of close political collaboration.
   
   Secondly, World War I marks the definite (at least for Europe) end of the progressive role of international capitalist development. The outlines of imperialist aggression previously noted had definitely taken center stage. This theory of imperialism was most closely associated with Lenin in his master work Imperialism-The Highest Stage of Capitalism but one should note that Trotsky in all his later work up until his death fully subscribed to the theory. Although Lenin's work is in need of some updating to account for various technological changes and the extensions of globalization since that time holds up for political purposes. This analysis meant that a fundamental shift in the relationship of the working class to the ruling class was necessary. A reformist perspective for social change, although not specific reforms, was no longer tenable. Politically, as a general proposition, socialist revolution was on the immediate agenda. This is when Trotsky's theory of Permanent Revolution meets the Leninist conception of revolutionary organization. It proved to be a successful formula in Russia in October, 1917. Unfortunately, those lessons were not learned (or at least learned in time) by those who followed and the events of October, 1917 stand today as the only `pure' working class revolution in history.
   
   An argument can, and has, been made that the October Revolution could only have occurred under the specific condition of decimated, devastated war-weary Russia of 1917. This argument is generally made by those who were not well-wishers of revolution in Russia (or anywhere else, for that matter). It is rather a truism, indulged in by Marxists as well as by others, that war is the mother of revolution. That said, the October revolution was made then and there but only because of the convergence of enough revolutionary forces led by the Bolsheviks and additionally the forces closest to the Bolsheviks (including Trotsky's Inter-District Organization) who had prepared for these events by the entire pre-history of the revolution. This is the subjective factor in history. No, not substitutionalism, that was the program of the Social Revolutionary terrorists and the like, but if you like, revolutionary opportunism. I would be much more impressed by an argument that stated that the revolution would not have occurred without the presence of Lenin and Trotsky. That would be a subjective argument, par excellent. But, they were there.
   
   Again Trotsky in 1917, like in 1905, is in his element speaking seemingly everywhere, writing, organizing (when it counts, by the way). If not the brains of the revolution (that role is honorably conceded to Lenin) certainly the face of the Revolution. Here is a revolutionary moment in every great revolution when the fate of the revolution turned on a dime (the subjective factor). The dime turned. (See review dated April 18, 2006 for a review of Trotsky's History of the Russian Revolution).
   
   One of the great lessons that militants can learn from all previous modern revolutions is that once the revolutionary forces seize power from the old regime an inevitable counterrevolutionary onslaught by elements of the old order (aided by some banished moderate but previously revolutionary elements, as a rule). The Russian revolution proved no exception. If anything the old regime, aided and abetted by numerous foreign powers and armies, was even more bloodthirsty. It fell to Trotsky to organize the defense of the revolution. Now, you might ask- What is a nice Jewish boy like Trotsky doing playing with guns? Fair enough. Well, Jewish or Gentile if you play the revolution game you better the hell be prepared to defend the revolution (and yourself). Here, again Trotsky organized, essentially from scratch, a Red Army from a defeated, demoralized former peasant army under the Czar. The ensuing civil war was to leave the country devastated but the Red Army defeated the Whites. Why? In the final analysis it was not only the heroism of the working class defending its own but the peasant wanting to hold on to the newly acquired land he just got and was in jeopardy of losing if the Whites won. But these masses needed to be organized. Trotsky was the man for the task.
   
   Both Lenin's and Trotsky's calculation for the success of socialist revolution in Russia (and ultimately its fate) was its, more or less, immediate extension to the capitalist heartland of Europe, particularly Germany. While in 1917 that was probably not the controlling single factor for going forward in Russia it did have to come into play at some point. The founding of the Communist International makes no sense otherwise. Unfortunately, for many historical, national and leadership-related reasons no Bolshevik-styled socialist revolutions followed then, or ever. If the premise for socialism is for plenty, and ultimately as a result of plenty to take the struggle for existence off the agenda and put other more creative pursues on the agenda, then Russia in the early 1920's was not the land of plenty. Neither Lenin, Trotsky nor Stalin, for that matter, could wish that fact away. The ideological underpinnings of that fight centered on the Stalinist concept of `socialism in one country', that is Russia going it alone versus the Trostskyist position of the absolutely necessary extension of the international revolution. In short, this is the fight that historically happens in great revolutions- the fight against Thermidor (from the overthrow of Robespierre in 1794 by more moderate Jacobins). What counts, in the final analysis, are their respective responses to the crisis of the isolation of the revolution. The word isolation is the key. Do you turn the revolution inward or push forward? We all know the result, and it wasn't pretty, then or now. That is the substance of the fight that Trotsky, if initially belatedly and hesitantly, led from about 1923 on under various conditions until the end of his life by assassination of a Stalinist agent in 1940.
   
   Although there were earlier signs that the Russia revolution was going off course the long illness and death of Lenin in 1924, at the time the only truly authoritative leader the Bolshevik party, set off a power struggle in the leadership of the party. This fight had Trotsky and the `pretty boy' intellectuals of the party on one side and Stalin, Zinoviev and Kamenev (the so-called triumvirate).backed by the `gray boys' of the emerging bureaucracy on the other. This struggle occurred against the backdrop of the failed revolution in Germany in 1923 and which thereafter heralded the continued isolation, imperialist blockade and economic backwardness of the Soviet Union for the foreseeable future.
   
   While the disputes in the Russian party eventually had international ramifications in the Communist International, they were at this time fought out almost solely with the Russian Party. Trotsky was slow, very slow to take up the battle for power that had become obvious to many elements in the party. He made many mistakes and granted too many concessions to the triumvirate. But he did fight. Although later (in 1935) Trotsky recognized that the 1923 fight represented a fight against the Russian Thermidor and thus a decisive turning point for the revolution that was not clear to him (or anyone else on either side) then. Whatever the appropriate analogy might have been Leon Trotsky was in fact fighting a last ditch effort to retard the further degeneration of the revolution. After that defeat, the way the Soviet Union was ruled, who ruled it and for what purposes all changed. And not for the better.
   
   In a sense if the fight in 1923-24 is the decisive fight to save the Russian revolution (and ultimately a perspective of international revolution) then the 1926-27 fight which was a bloc between Trotsky's forces and the just defeated forces of Zinoviev and Kamenev, Stalin's previous allies was the last rearguard action to save that perspective. That it failed does not deny the importance of the fight. Yes, it was a political bloc with some serious differences especially over China and the Anglo-Russian Committee. But two things are important here One- did a perspective of a new party, which some elements were clamoring for, make sense at the time of the clear waning of the revolutionary ebbing the country. No. Besides the place to look was at the most politically conscious elements, granted against heavy odds, in the party where whatever was left of the class-conscious elements of the working class were. As I have noted elsewhere in discussing the 1923 fight- that "Lenin levy" of raw recruits, careerists and just plain thugs which enhanced the growing power of the Stalinist bureaucracy was the key element in any defeat. Still the fight was necessary. Hey, that is why we talk about it now. That was a fight to the finish. After that the left opposition or elements of it were forever more outside the party- either in exile, prison or dead. As we know Trotsky went from expulsion from the party in 1927 to internal exile in Alma Ata in 1928 to external exile to Turkey in 1929. From there he underwent further exiles in France, Norway, and Mexico when he was finally felled by a Stalinist assassin. But no matter when he went he continued to struggle for his perspective. Not bad for a Jewish farmer's son from the Ukraine.
   
   The last period of Trotsky's life spent in harrowing exiles and under constant threat from Stalinist and White Guard threats- in short, on the planet without a visa -was dedicated to the continued fight for the Leninist heritage. It was an unequal fight, to be sure but he waged it and was able to cohere a core of revolutionaries to form a new international, the Fourth International. That that effort was essentially militarily defeat by fascist or Stalinist forces during World War II does not take away from the grandeur of the attempt. He himself stated that he felt this was the most important work of his life- and who would challenge that assertion.
   
   But one could understand the frustrations, first the failure of his correct analysis of the German debacle then in France and Spain. Hell a lesser man would have given up. In fact, more than one biographer has argued that he should have retired from the political arena to, I assume , a comfortable country cottage to write I do not know what. But, please reader, have you been paying attention? Does this seem even remotely like the Trotsky career I have attempted to highlight here? Hell, no.
   
   Many of the events such as the disputes within the Russian revolutionary movement, the attempts by the Western Powers to overthrow the Bolsheviks in the Civil War after their seizure of power and the struggle of the various tendencies inside the Russian Communist Party and in the Communist International discussed in the book may not be familiar to today's audience. Nevertheless one can still learn something from the strength of Trotsky's commitment to his cause and the fight to preserve his personal and political integrity against overwhelming odds. As the organizer of the October Revolution, creator of the Red Army in the Civil War, orator, writer and fighter Trotsky he was one of the most feared men of the early 20th century to friend and foe alike. Nevertheless, I do not believe that he took his personal fall from power as a world historic tragedy. Moreover, he does not gloss over his political mistakes. Nor does Trotsky generally do personal injustice to his various political opponents although I would not want to have been subject to his rapier wit and pen. Politicians, revolutionary or otherwise, in our times should take note.
   
   REVISED JULY 25, 2006



5. This first of 3 volumes in Deutscher's biography is an astonishing and captivating achievement. Deutscher weaves together character study, drama, and historical narrative to give an authoritative account of Trotsky's life and the Russian Revolution from Trotsky's birth up through the quickening bureaucratization of Soviet Russia in 1921.
   
   Deutscher's deft handling of the facts, personalities, ideas, and situations of the time is simply unparallelled, and makes for a tremendously enjoyable and informative read.
   
   Essential material for anyone exploring the question of where socialism went wrong in the 20th century.

5 comments about The Colonel and Little Missie: Buffalo Bill, Annie Oakley, and the Beginnings of Superstardom in America (includes 16 pages of B&W photographs).

1. If you are a fan of the old west or not, this book will entertain you and make you one. I now know more about buffalow bill and annie oakley along with a deeper understanding of that last period of the wild west and the characters that made it such a wonderful exciting time in america.



2. Being a complete sucker for his western fiction, I was surprised at how slim a book this is. There a more than a few good stories to tell about Americas' first media star, but the chapters are so short, McMurtry never gets any momentum going.
   It's surprising too that while the book is supposed to be about the two title characters, Cody gets the lions share of attention, while Annie Oakley gets only a handful of chapters.



3. This book is presented in true McMurtry style showing careful research, painstaking attention to facts vs. fiction, identifying what could be fictional about the people being discussed, and the wonderful McMurtry style we all expect with each publication. Having visited Buffalo Bill's gravesite and the small museum there, this book rounds out the images I have of the man, the performer, and the first superstar of North America.



4. This slender volume conveys the slightest amount of information about its subject in a confused, repetitive, meandering style. Surely there is more to the story than this.



5. Echoing some of the other reviews - it's 'thin', disorganized and has a large Bill:Annie ratio. McMurtry's point is that, per the title, BB & AO were among the 1st superstars in America & he repeats it every other chapter or so. It reads like something that was whipped up over a weekend. The style & depth of the book are intentional on McMurtry's part but readers should be forewarned that this isn't a traditional biography.

5 comments about Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant.

1. It is surprising that the most balanced and impartial view of U.S. Grant should be written by Grant himself. His style of writing is clear and sparse, recounting fact as fact and without lengthy editorializing. A must read for any civil war buff or serious historian.



2. This has long been regarded as one of the better memoirs to come out of the post-Civil War period and I can see why. Grant seemed convinced that the course he was on, and more importantly, the course the Union was on, would lead to eventual victory. Grant wrote his memoirs in the hope of providing some financial security for his wife and family upon the event of his death, which came very soon after finishing his memoirs. This is a refreshingly honest, fair, and generally unpretentious account detailing his own role in this pivotal event in American history.
   
   We get a brief glimpse into his early years, his time as a student at West Point, his military service in the Mexican American War and the most well-known period of Grant's life, his service in the Union army during the Civil War. I found the early part of the book to be very illuminating as I did not know that much about his life before the Civil War. He could be very self-effacing, could admit weaknesses, in other words he just seems to come across as plain spoken and honest about himself. Throughout the book he utters what I considered to be very insightful and thoughtful comments. For example, he admitted the reputation attached to Lee by the Northern press and other Union commanders, but he realized that Lee was still human. He also relates his first encounter as a commander in the Union army as he's about to face the enemy and finds that the enemy was just as frightened as he was. Grant's attitudes toward the earlier war with Mexico and the Southerners' attachment to their cause also offer revealing sentiments.
   
   I'm not going to describe every campaign Grant was involved in, but you will encounter Grant in the western theatre first, with notable successes achieved at Forts Henry and Donelson, Shiloh, Vicksburg, Chattanooga, and etc., up to his appointment as Lieutenant General and head of all U.S. armies in the field. The nearly epic battles fought between Lee and Grant in Virginia from the spring of 1864 up through Lee's surrender at Appomattox in April 1865 are obviously covered, though we also get information on Sherman's movements in Georgia and the Carolinas and other important sections where the war was being waged. I think it's fair to say there is a certain amount of spin or a sort of expectations game being displayed in Grant's memoirs, for example, how the Union armies usually always inflicted heavier casualties on the Confederates, how the North, despite its superiority in numbers, actually had many disadvantages and etc. Some of his points are very valid, but there can also be no doubt that his victories in Virginia came at very heavy costs in terms of Union casualties.
   
   Grant offers opinions on the quality of the soldiers and officers, both North and South. He also demonstrates throughout his memoirs his rather magnanimous feelings toward his opponents, the rights of Southern citizens and their property (i.e., showing restraint in terms of looting and wanton destruction of private property and etc.). Some of this, I'm sure, was an attempt to improve his own image, but no doubt, there had to be some truth in his sentiments expressed. The maps included in this volume are very detailed, but often difficult to read. As a military narrative of the movements, battles and strategies of the Union armies, this is a must read.



3. Grant finished this lengthy memoir on the eve of his death from throat cancer. Impoverished at the time, the ex-President made his wife rich from the proceeds. Simple, straightforward, earnest narrative, sometimes ironic, sometimes colorful, always unpretentious. Inevitably self-justifying, but candid nonetheless.
   
   The most memorable anecdote describes his first action in the 1861-65 war. Although he was a combat veteran of the Mexican War fourteen years earlier, he was scared, almost frozen, as he led his men against the enemy position. When he arrived, the enemy had evacuated. "The reb commander was as scared as I was. It was a lesson that served me well for the next four years."
   
   Excellent general's-eye descriptions of the battles for Fort Donaldson, Shiloh, Vicksburg, Cold Harbor. His proudest contribution to the Union victory seems to be his strategy of "coordinated attack". He believed the early rebel success was due to the fragmentation of the National fources, which allowed the outmanned rebels to concentrate on one fragment at a time.
   
   Grant is full of forthright and fascinating judgments: he revered Lincoln and Sherman, detested Hallek, disliked Stanton but respected him.
   
   Civil war buff? Don't neglect this.



4. Written by the dying hand of one of the chosen men of his time. For any scholar of Grant, Civil War or Military History, these readings are a must. Grant's military genius was without equal. Had his superiors, early on, had his keen foresight, the Civil War could have ended a year or two earlier. Another great read is "Grant" by Jean Smith.



5. Very detailed and complete rendition of the chronology of his personal life as well as his military life. I learned details of both aspects of this era in history.

5 comments about The Man Who Made Lists.

1. A good utilitarian biography about a figure in history whose contributions are little thought about today. Roget, who created the Thesaurus at a time when there was nothing close to it and the need was great, also invented the modern slide rule led major scientific societies, and contributed to the natural sciences. A good handling of an unusual man, and well worth the time to learn about the man. My only real complaint is that Kendall seems to apply a 21st century sense of judgement on Roget's relationships (and difficulties therein). This sense may be somewhat due to the lack of cited evidence when such opinions are interjected.
   
   Still, a recommended read for a word maven, list keeper, organizer, or just to fill in a hole in one's knowledge of the movers and shakers of the early days of what became modern science.



2. [review of first hardcover edition]
   A good utilitarian biography about a figure in history whose contributions are little thought about today. Roget, who created the Thesaurus at a time when there was nothing close to it and the need was great, also invented the modern slide rule led major scientific societies, and contributed to the natural sciences. A good handling of an unusual man, and well worth the time to learn about the man. My only real complaint is that Kendall seems to apply a 21st century sense of judgement on Roget's relationships (and difficulties therein). This sense may be somewhat due to the lack of cited evidence when such opinions are interjected.
   
   Still, a recommended read for a word maven, list keeper, organizer, or just to fill in a hole in one's knowledge of the movers and shakers of the early days of what became modern science.



3. Interesting book abut the Peter Roget, the creator of the ubiquitous Thesaurus, but it is a dry read, jumps around. At times the book feels as if it were written by the Peter Roget it describes: emotionally absent the author simply narrates events in Roget's life.
   
   In the hands of a more skilled writer like Eric Larson this would have been a most excellent book. Like other reviewers have said, finishing it was a struggle, which I did out of interest purely in the subject matter.



4. I picked this one out because I loved The Professor and the Madman and thought the story of thesaurus-making might be similarly interesting.
   
   It's not.
   
   In fact, I bailed about 1/3 of the way through. The Man Who Made Lists turns out to be a fairly average biography with lots of amateur psychology and tales of young Roget's early life. His family was prone to depression and madness, his mother was clingy and lived her life through him (Behind every great man is a needy mother?) and etc. Pretty much the usual stuff, and not terribly well told. Oh, the prose is good enough, at least I didn't notice any glaring errors, but the author utterly failed to make me care at all about Roget or his list making.
   
   Pity.



5. Couldn't put the book down. Peter Roget's life was fascinating, there were many historical facts intertwined that made the book an even more interesting read.