2 comments about Flee the Captor.

1. This book is very touching, inspirational, and gripping. It follows the experience of one man who would do anything to free as many Jews as possible in the Holocaust. It talks about those who helped him in his efforts, and how he himself escaped some very scary situations with the Lord's help. Everyone should read this book!



2. Herbert Ford succeeded to write an original book about World War II. His heros John Weidner created an underground network as soon as 1940 and saved a thousand people (Allied pilots gunned down by the Nazis and Jews) without ever wearing a weapon. The great originality of the network Dutch-Paris is its high morale standards and its efficiency in making fugitives escape occupied France, Belgium and Netherlands towards Switzerland and Spain. A great book about an unusual heroe that deserves to be better known.

5 comments about Hitler's Prisoners: Seven Cell Mates Tell Their Stories (Memories of War).

1. Once I picked up this book, I couldn't put it down. I was shocked by the plight of Erich Friedrich and his cell mates. A fascinating and intriguing real life story and account of the "Other" side of Germany that we so rarely hear about. I strongly recommend this book. For other readers please let me know of any other books similar to this one.

   Thanks




2. Having grown up in Germany during the Third Reich - I was nine when World War II ended- I have read obsessively about this subject. The question, " How did it happen"? has perhaps no answer. But this book offers a salutary counterbalance to Goldhagen's one-sided "Hitler's Willing Executioners." How many of us would follow our conscience into such a prison as Franzl, the Jehova's Witness and Conscientious Objector, Fritz Römer, the Socialist, or Erich Friedrich, the author, endured for their convictions? Friedrich was arrested for not giving the Nazi salute, and for making disparaging remarks about Hermann Goering. The government acted legally, because what these prisoners did was against German law at that time. This book shows the American reader, who has no personal experience of a totalitarian regime, what it means to resist such a government.



3. This is truly an amazing account of the hardships the average man and woman faced in Nazi Germany. This book is intriquing and a must read for anyone interested in a real life historical account of Germany during World War II. I strongly recommend this book.



4. Hitler's Prisoners offers great insights into the horrors of the Nazi regime's "other victims." Caught in Hitler's unthinkable plan to rule over Europe, seven German cell mates tell their stories of how a once ordinary life can become a twisted nightmare in an inescapable Nazi Prison. It is definately a war story of another kind. I highly recommend this book.



5. Persons interested in the rise of Nazism and World War II, who have read the general histories of the era will appreciate these personal stories by citizens who lived in Germany at the time. "Hitler's Prisoners," told by Erich Friedrich (edited by his daughter Renate)about his imprisonment for criticizing Hermann Goering and aspects of the war, also is the story of six others who defied or offended the regime in various ways. None were Jews or committed Nazis: Franz's "crime" was that as a Jehovah's Witness he opposed war; Fritz was a socialist, Gerhard an aristocrat, Alex a dilettante. Willi deserted from the Wehrmacht, so there may be some justification for his fate, but
   Richard's chapter is titled The "Good German." All the men experienced the pre-World War I years and the political, social and economic unrest that spawned Hitler's rise and Germany's militaristic conquest of Europe and Russia. These true accounts, from notes kept by the author, are written in the form of a novel: each man in turn tells the story of his life as he awaits trial and sentencing - usually execution. The author is last to tell of his upbringing in Thuringia, campaign service and wounding on the Russian front, and harrowing return to Germany, where he was subsequently arrested and imprisoned until July 1944. After the war's end, Friedrich was employed as a detective and civil servant, before moving to Virginia with his wife to live with their daughter's family. A must read for understanding the gradual eroding of law, justice and civility in the Germany of 1933-45.

5 comments about Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom.

1. Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom is a must read for all American history students and should be required reading at least at the high school level. This book gives the reader a first-person view of that "Peculiar Instition" known as slavery and to what lengths one will go to achieve personal freedom. This book will change your view of slavery forever.



2. While taking an African American literature course in college I was introduced to this novella written by William Craft. It is a must-read for American and African American history classes. The novella is a quick and easy read, with the capacity for great discussion and in-depth analysis. Humor, suspense, mystery and action is all provided in this wonderful tale of escape and hypocrisey.



3. This book is a captivating account of the injustices of slavery and a amazing story of two fugitives running for there freedom. This book is a great story that should be taught in schools and should not be ignored in American History classes. It opened my mind to the horrors slavery actually caused. It represents a part of our history that should never be repeated. 5 plus stars.



4. I read this for a college history survey course before it was mistakenly announced that the book was out of print. The book was dropped from the syllabus, but I am glad I read it anyway.

   The first and shortest part of the book is William Craft's powerful account of how he and his wife Ellen executed a daring escape from servitude in Georgia. Their plan was remarkable in its ingenuity: The almost white Ellen, outfitted with a master's clothes and a poultice on her face to prevent incriminating speech with strangers, and her husband William, disguised as a servant, escaped to freedom in the north. Travelling by rail, the pair exultantly crossed over into Canada and from thence headed for England.

   The second part of the book is a third person summary of the couple's travels after their ambitious escape. It follows them from Georgia through the slave and free states, in which they were well received and protected (especially in Boston), up to Halifax and across the water to England. I found the final two thirds of the book the most enjoyable, as it treated of foreign travel, in which I have a keen interest. Both portions of the book are beautifully written and often gripping. I hope a few of my classmates read this before that announcement. This book is both pleasurable to read and historically vital.




5. Ellen and William Craft were a young (mid-20's) slave couple who made a daring escape to freedom. Light-skinned Ellen cut her hair short and dressed in the suit and tophat of a white planter. Since she was illiterate, her husband William made a sling for her arm, so she had an excuse not to sign hotel registers. And since she had a womanly voice, the couple devised a poultice tied around her jaw indicating she had a bad toothache and could not speak. William played the role of his white massa's slave. And the couple traveled by train, steamship, and wagon to their destination in the north. They soon became popular lecturers in the United States and Europe. This is a remarkable story of daring and bravery and should be read by everyone. Anyone who wants to introduce their children to good historical fiction should get them The Journal of Darien Duff, an Emancipated Slave, The Diary of a Slave Girl, Ruby Jo, and The Journal of Leroy Jones, a Fugitive Slave.

3 comments about An Autobiography of George Washington.

1. I found this book to be really amazing and carefully researched. The authenticity is really incredible. It turned George Washington from a wooden stick figure, into the really amazing person he was. I know some people will question the authencity of the material. But, to me, the wealth of detail, emotions, make it an unquestionably good read.



2. This book was written several decades ago, but there was a small readership in those days for information channeled from the Other Side. Thanks to an ever-growing acceptance of this type of writing, we are able to gain access to valuable information.
   Here is the story of George Washington's life, told by the man himself from the Other Side. I was fascinated from start to finish. Perhaps there are those who would argue that this was not channeled, but that instead, Edith Ellis concocted the whole story. This seems implausible, given the wealth of detail and feeling that comes across. Of course, it is up to the reader to decide.
   I had Amazon send this book to my mother, and after she read it, she sent it to me. There was something strange in the ending of the book, and on closer inspection, I found that the last 2 chapters were missing, and the void was filled with a repeated section of pages from earlier in the book. I asked Amazon to replace it, and I also asked them to send me a copy as well.
   My copy had all the correct pages--but apparently Amazon sent my mother another defective copy; the important last 2 chapters are once again missing, thus cutting out Mr. Washington's presidency and his death.
   Of the three copies I requested, two were defective. I was surprised that Amazon did not take the trouble to see how many of these defective books they have in stock; they replaced a defective book with just another defective book. I wonder if they have notified the Hay House Publishing Company of this.
   Amazon's service is usually outstanding, but until they work this glitch out, save yourself a hassle and order it directly from Hay House Publishers.



3. Yes, this book is channeled literature. However, if you have an open mind and can get past the messenger, you'll find the message is both entertaining and enlightening. Personally, I find the realistic detail of this book to be very refreshing. It seems we all too often look upon George Washington as a hero and leader without par and forget to actually get to know the man. In this book you'll get to know the man and Mason that was the father of our country.

5 comments about Whittaker Chambers: A Biography (Modern Library Paperbacks).

1. Chambers' autobiography "Witness" had left me speechless. It was a magnificent book, but unknown in most circles. I was hungry to learn more about Chambers' own life and times. It didn't take me long to get to Tanenhaus's fine biography, which gave me an outside perspective and did not disappoint. Tanenhaus is at his most valuable recounting Chambers' post-Hiss-Case life, not covered in "Witness"; in fleshing out the HUAC cast like Nixon, Mundt and Hebert, putting their careers and ambitions into perspective; and in covering the seamier sides of Chambers' personal and family background in even greater detail than Chambers had.
   
   In "Witness", Chambers focuses on his spiritual journey, managing to keep a reader fascinated when that might easily have become eye-glazing. Tanenhaus pounds facts, availing himself of documents and accounts not available to Chambers in 1951. He remains objective about Chambers but ultimately finds little to criticize. Chambers was a man who put his career and life on the line to expose a conspiracy, as he saw it, threatening the world and eating away this nation from within. Despite circumstances strongly suggesting his veracity - would anyone throw away a lucrative career, as he did, to falsely accuse someone? - few believed him. History proved he was telling the truth - one worth hearing, since Chambers was the second-ranking U.S. man in the Communist underground espionage network.
   
   Certain striking aspects of Chambers' character emerge here, some suggested by his autobiography but better to have confirmed independently. He was one of the great intellectuals of his time, the equal of better known friends and contemporaries from his Columbia days - Mark Van Doren, Lionel Trilling and Clifton Fadiman among them. His command of languages was exceptional. (Fabulous piece of trivia: Chambers translated the novel "Bambi" from the German in the 1920s, later inspiring the Walt Disney film.) His command of the classics, ditto. This was a man who never finished college - when he died, he was enrolled in a local college attempting to finish - but who dropped Dante quotations into interviews with ham-and-egger newspaper reporters. He was one of the greatest writers Time magazine ever had, writing first-class cover stories on philosophy, religion and other intellectual pursuits beyond most journalists. I was inspired to search out an available collection of his magazine work.
   
   Chambers' continuing intellectual and political development did him credit. He became a father figure to the modern conservative movement, inspiring those like the young Bill Buckley who shaped it. But Chambers refused to follow them where his own conscience and intellect did not dictate. He wouldn't pursue a scorched earth policy against Republican moderates like Eisenhower in the mid-1950s, unlike Buckley and others, despite Chambers' personal closeness with them: Buckley had more or less rescued him from professional and financial oblivion in the 1950s. Chambers regarded the struggle against Communism as far more important than a Republican civil war over doctrinal purity. He backed Sen. Joseph McCarthy initially, but ultimately broke with him, fearing his recklessness "would lead him and us into trouble," jeopardizing the entire anti-Communist movement, Chambers wrote in declining to endorse Buckley's pro-McCarthy book.
   
   And Chambers was willing, in his later years, to seek a politics that did not rationalize away the world's woes in favor of purist conservatism. It would have been easy for a man treated like Chambers was - who had seen the blindness of liberalism up close in the 1930s and 1940s, and had felt the savagery and hypocrisy of its backlash during the Hiss case - to become more extreme in his rejection of it. But he did not. Chambers expressed, in dealings with young writers, a fascination with the Beat poets then emerging. He saw in Columbia-tied bohemians like Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg a reflection of his own distant youth. Very unBuckleyesque.
   
   Tanenhaus treats the Hiss case conservatively, letting the record speak rather than relying on Chambers' detailed account of it in "Witness". Chambers drew vividly his and his wife's close relationships with Alger and Priscilla Hiss, placing it chronologically in the 1930s when it happened. In contrast, Tanenhaus's treatment of Chambers' life in the 1930s mentions Hiss only in passing. He instead takes Hiss on in the context of the hearings and trials, as the two sides jousted over whether Hiss and Chambers, from very different walks of life, knew each other at all. The question was a proxy for the greater question of espionage, although Hiss was never tried specifically for that charge. He was, however, convicted of perjury in denying he had given Chambers government documents, which pretty much amounts to the same thing.
   
   It is sad we have had to wait so long to have this case studied in such fine perspective. The Hiss case put the New Deal itself on trial, asking whether its leadership was pervaded with Communists; whether those leaders had followed the Communist Party line in shaping U.S. policy; whether they had tainted American war and China policy during and after World War II. And whether liberals were either so blind to these problems or so secretly sympathetic to them as to forever render them incapable of loving and protecting their homeland as it was.



2. I grew up under the cultural shadow of Alger Hiss, stupidly thinking the term "commie" was a funny way to mock anyone concerned about the threat of Communism.
   
   But, being a victim of bad education, I knew nothing of the epic, mid-twentieth century showdown between Hiss (now known to have been a communist spy and traitor, though still, ludicrously revered as innocent by left intelligentsia) and Whittaker Chambers, the moral lodestone of the twentieth century ,who offered up his own life as a sacrifice of sorts to unmask and quell the poison tentacles of communist Russia that reached high into the U.S. Government of the New Deal era. And Chambers was not only a former communist spy himself, but a burgeoning literary icon. This is the history of a clash of ideas, submerged in the clash between two men caught up in the rush of modern history. The truth, as always, is right in front of us. Only ideological dogma can prevent one from pretending not to see it.



3. I cannot recommend this book highly enough for understanding the state of American politics, past, present and future. The inner turmoil of Whittaker Chambers is revealed to the world, leaving the reader without a shadow of a doubt as to his courage and greatness. His bitter childhood, his years as a Communist spy, his homosexual inclination, and ultimately his redemptive love for his wife and family, all lead to the climax of Chambers' courageous stance against Communism, which he wins despite all odds. This book fills in the gaps of Chambers' remarkable autobiography, "Witness," which I also recommend as essential political and moral reading.



4. Read this for graduate American history course. There are a few rare instances in American history when a court case grips the passions of its citizens and serves to define people's political or social beliefs based on which side they believed was in the right. The Sacco and Vanzetti case of the 1920's, the Rosenberg espionage trials of the 1950's, and the O. J. Simpson case of the 1990's were to some extent examples of this phenomena. However, the Hiss perjury trials of 1949-50 were the epitome of this phenomenon, and helped to create a divide between liberals and conservatives in American politics that is still evident to this day. During the Cold War era, one could easily identify the political persuasion of a person simply by asking them whether Hiss or Chambers had told the truth. Simply put, the innocence of Alger Hiss was embraced by liberals. If Hiss, a well respected New Deal advocate and important Roosevelt administration member, had actually been an American Communist spying for the Soviets since the 1930's, then a whole mass of conservative accusations would gain legitimacy, and all of FDR's New Deal programs and his foreign policy decisions at the Yalta Conference would become suspect. In addition, Hiss' guilt would call into question security breaches in the Truman administration, which was already being besieged by questions of "Who lost China." It is against this historical backdrop, that Sam Tanenhaus wrote Whittaker Chambers: A Biography; whose purpose was to make the first serious examination of the life and motivations of one of America's most contentious figures in the last half of the twentieth-century, Whittaker Chambers.
   
   Tanenhaus' description of Chambers' early life is an excellent insight into his psychological profile. Born Vivian Jay Chambers on April 1, 1901, (April Fools Day), he came from a middle-class family of meager means. Add to the mix a father who was bisexual and spent much time away from home, a mother who was paranoid, a grandmother who was insane, and his brother Richard who committed suicide, it is no wonder that you have the formula for a man who developed into a tormented soul and was generally estranged from the world and the people around him. In fact, throughout the book, Tanenhaus illuminates his theme, which is to examine Chamber's tormented life at key junctures; such as, when he joined and left the Communist party, when he became a reluctant informer against Alger Hiss and when he distanced himself from the political right near the end of his life. Chambers, who attended Long Island's South Side High School, showed himself to be academically brilliant and an exceptional writer. His parents had big dreams for their son's future. Chambers had dreams too but they did not involve college. Being too young to fight in World War Two, he decided to run away with a friend to see the world. They bummed around and worked their way to New Orleans--a city he fell in love with. "Chambers had discovered life as Hugo described it, a kind of prison, harsh and cruel, but lit from within by tender sentiment and from without by sudden shafts of illumination" (18). After a few months of life on the seedy side and running out of money, he returned home and changed his name to Charles Whittaker but went by Whittaker, and within six months entered Columbia University.
   
   A new world was opened to Chambers at Columbia with which he became enamored. He took English composition with Mark Van Doren, who later in life became a Pulitzer Prize winning poet. Van Doren quickly saw in Chambers a very talented writer and later remarked that he was the best writer among his undergraduate students in the 1920's. Chambers especially enjoyed the friendship of fellow students, mostly Jewish, whom he found brilliant such as Lionel Trilling, Meyer Schapiro, and Mortimer J. Adler to name a few. "It was the ernste Menschen" (serious men) "who shaped Chamber's idea, never altered, of the intellectual life" (22). However, academic bliss was not to be for Chambers. He ran afoul of the school administration for a play that he wrote which was deemed profane, and thus became despondent and quit going to class--eventually dropping out and never finishing his university education. He tried to travel to the Soviet Union to help build a new nation on the advice of Van Doren, but he only made it to Germany before returning home. He took a job at the New York Public Library which fed his autodidactic nature, and he started to consort with many women. It is at this stage in Chambers' life in 1925, that he joined the 16,000 member Communist Party of the United States, (CPUSA). "So much the better. He was used to being outnumbered. He had at last found his church" (46).
   
   Tanenhaus paints a portrait of a man who dove into his new life as a Communist with a religious fervor. Chambers became a much-respected writer for several party newspapers, which brought him to the attention of party apparatchiks in 1932. Chambers also met Esther Shemitz a Socialist, and they married in 1931. It was after his marriage that he accepted an assignment to go underground and actively spy for the Party. He was made the courier of the "Ware cell" in Washington D.C., whose mission was to pass sensitive information from Communist party members who had infiltrated various departments of the U. S. government to Boris Bykov, a Soviet intelligence agent. One of the best-placed spies in the "Ware cell" who provided information to Chambers, then using the alias George Crosley, was Alger Hiss. However, Chambers became so disillusioned by Stalin's purges and his nonaggression pact with Hitler, that in 1938, he quit the party. Fearing for his life and his family's safety, Chambers turned informer and confessed all of his activities to Assistant Secretary of State Adolf Berle, Jr., who forwarded his notes of the meeting to the FBI, which did not follow up on the case until several years later. In addition, an old friend recommended Chambers for a job at Time magazine, which he was elated to have since he was broke. Tanenhaus once again shows that Chambers' literary acumen and zeal for any new project he took on, propelled him to become one of Time's top editors in the 1940's. The magazine's owner Henry Luce said, "Chambers was the best writer Time ever employed" (165). While a writer and editor at Time, Chambers became a most vociferous anti-Communist.
   
   Soon after Stalin reneged on his Yalta Conference promises, a conference that Alger Hiss played a key role in for the State Department, the U. S. government finally moved to ferret out Communist infiltrators in the government. The FBI finally conducted extensive interviews with Chambers. This led to Chambers becoming a government informant in one of America's most dramatic congressional hearings and court cases of the twentieth-century. Tanenhaus' research shows Chambers' denouncement of Alger Hiss was a stinging indictment of the Roosevelt and Truman administrations, since it cast doubt on American liberals' willingness to conduct espionage investigations during the war years. The contrast between Hiss and Chambers could not be starker. Hiss was a Harvard graduate with impeccable looks and a sterling reputation as a government servant. He clerked for Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes. His character references included Justice Felix Frankfurter, and John Foster Dulles, who was to become Secretary of State in the Eisenhower administration. Chambers was an overweight plain looking man who did not dress well, a self-confessed Communist and government informant. Tanenhaus did not write about the relationship between Hiss and Chambers until he wrote about the Hiss perjury case, near the end of the book, which made the book a bit awkward to read. However, Tanenhaus does a good job of retelling the facts of the perjury case and Chambers' testimony to the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), as well as his extensive cooperation and long and friendly relationship with Richard Nixon. One finds that Chambers was much more revealing of his own motivations in his critically acclaimed autobiography Witness, which was written in 1952 after the Hiss perjury trial. It was also disappointing that Tanenhaus did not cover more of Chambers' writings and views about Stalinism and his very prescient views of the Soviet-American confrontation that led to the Cold War. Tanenhaus' research does agree with other historians work. John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, in their book Early Cold War Spies: The Espionage Trials That Shaped American Politics, written some ten years after this book, proved that their was a preponderance of evidence showing that Hiss was a Communist and did commit espionage against the U. S. government. Hiss was not charged with espionage because the statute of limitations protected him. The first Hiss perjury case ended in a hung jury. The second ended on January 20, 1950 with his conviction on two counts of perjury and a sentence to serve five years in jail--he only served forty-four months. Hiss went to his grave denying the charges against him. Haynes and Klehr wrote that he gained much sympathy with the political left again in the wake of the Watergate scandal claiming, "that a government conspiracy had forged evidence and coerced false testimony against him."
   
   Although Chambers was vindicated by Hiss's conviction, Tanenhaus showed that Chambers entered into a self-imposed exile on his farm in Maryland. However, for the rest of his life Chambers was visited by a small coterie of friends with whom he enjoyed lengthy discussions about world affairs. "Still convinced he had left the winning side for the losing one, Chambers foretold a global Communist victory. Gloomy as his predictions sounded, he was not devoid of hope" (450). He believed that the primary way the West could defeat Communism was with morality and religion and not militarily. Needing to earn money, Chambers went back to what he did best. He wrote his autobiography Witness, which occupied the top of the New York Times best seller list for several months in 1952, and gave him the financial security he desired. More importantly, Witness was an anti-Communist manifesto that for Chambers described, "a struggle between the force of two irreconcilable faiths--Communism and Christianity." Witness was a powerful exposé of Communist activity in America and changed the life of one future president, Ronald Reagan. Reagan remarked that Witness was his favorite book and pointed to, "Witness as the book that would shape his political outlook." In 1984, President Reagan posthumously awarded Chambers the Presidential Medal of Freedom. The other person of note that Witness made a huge impression on was William F. Buckley, Jr., who befriended Chambers and offered him the position of senior editor of his fledgling conservative magazine National Review. Both men maintained a very friendly relationship up to Chamber's death in 1961. Though Chambers would write articles for the National Review, he turned Buckley's offer down due to his poor health and his growing reluctance of the tactics that the political right was using--especially those of Senator Joseph McCarthy. Near the end of his life, Chambers became friendly with another former Communist and imminent writer, Arthur Koestler. Koestler wrote of Chambers upon receiving news of his death: "I always felt that Whittaker was the most misunderstood person of our time. When he testified he knowingly committed moral suicide to atone for the guilt of our generation. The witness is gone, the testimony will stand."
   
   In all, Sam Tanenhaus did an excellent job using primary and secondary sources, trial transcripts, and personal interviews to write an engaging biography of Whittaker Chambers. In his book, he provides informative notes and a thorough index; all of which helped to provide readers with a better understanding of the political mood in the country at the time of the Hiss-- Chambers case. The book would have been better organized had Tanenhaus placed the Chambers Hiss relationship information in its proper chronology and not moved it from the 1930's into the Hiss trial period of the 1950's. That small criticism aside, Tanenhaus' biography of Chambers is an important scholarly work for anyone wishing to gain a better understanding of CPUSA activities in U. S., the work of HUAC, and especially its star member, Richard Nixon, and the political left/right divide that was at the center of the Cold War era.
   
   As a graduate student in philosophy and history, I recommended this book for anyone interested in American history, foreign policy, Cold War history.



5. Chambers's life is characterized by a constant effort to combine some kind of religious faith with social messianism. His trouble came from not being able to achieve what is not possible. He took in as much from Spengler's The Decline of the West as from Tolstoy's The Kingdom of God is Within You, and he made a mess of them. He did not heed Jesus' words in Matthew 16:24 recommending to deny oneself first, then to pick up each one's cross and follow Him. Chambers ignored the first part. Neither did he understand what it meant by giving God what is God's and Caesar's what is Caesar's. He mingled all, he messed it all. The man had a terrible and frustrated life: full of unbridled passions, carnal as much as intellectual while a communist; and after his defection he led a resigned (to what, the author doesn't say) life, a sort of Christian mediocritas, in peace with himself, seemingly, and looking for understanding amid the new conserative movement he had inspired.
   
   I found much more interesting the first 100 pages or so that deal with his personal and family life. A more sad and frustrated life is hard to find. He found in communism that valve to let out his anger and resentment against social and personal misery. His view on life is similar to his suicidal brother, only he took it on promiscuous sex and politics. His brother took it on alcohol and finally suicide. Instead of looking at the evil around, in their family and society, a look at themselves might have induced them to start working from within.
   
   The rest of the 400+ pages is a total brick. I had to scan through the pages and so practise my fast-read technique. It is so full of irrelevant minute detail, information that the general reader cannot care for. The author does not offer a summary of a life here; he pours all his data collected as a lawyer would. Browsable but not enjoyable.

3 comments about Beloved Emma: The Life of Emma, Lady Hamilton.

1. I discovered Emma, Lady Hamilton, whose great beauty and drive helped her rise to the highest ranks of Napoleonic England, thanks to Susan Sontag's The Volcano Lover. Since then, I have seen her pictures in the Tate, and read about the period, Nelson and Josiah Wedgewood to learn more about her. This is, however, the book that gave me the context for understanding who she was and how she got there, and how she ended up penniless and alone. As only makes sense, given Ms Fraser's distinguished family of strong women, Beloved Emma is a fabulous portrait of an incredibly strong woman who overcame phenomenal odds, and succeeded so completely against her era's odds that even she could not sustain her success. Worth reading and, now that there is a paperback edition, rereading!



2. The author takes a fastinating life and makes it into tedious reading. If you like dull endless detail, this is the book for you. I couldn't even finish and I am an avid reader!



3. Flora is NOT Antonia Fraser. She can't write her way out of a hole in the ground. This book was one of the most boring accounts of Emma that I have ever heard! There was nothing fascinating, exciting, or even eventful in this book. I could barely finish this, and some important aspects of her life are glossed over in such a boring fashion that one who didn't know any better would wonder how important they were. Boring, worse-than-textbook reading, if you must read this, buy it used.

5 comments about Mozart: A Penguin Life (Penguin Lives).

1. Commissioned by James Atlas as part of the 'Penguin Biography ' series this short biography of Mozart by historian Peter Gay is balanced, transparent and clear. In other words it partakes of some of the Classical qualities which so distinguished Mozart's work. And this when one of Gay's major points is to stress that Mozart's dark side was a very great part of his music. Gay traces the story of the child prodigy who unlike most child prodigies continued his complex development throughout his working life, creating in the course of this a vast body of work at the highest level in all the musical genres of the time. Two of his friends Johann Christian Bach and the great Haydn helped him on his way. Haydn told Mozart's proud, overbearing, pushy father,"Before God and as an honest man I tell you that your son is the greatest composer known to me either in person or by name: He has taste, and, furthermore, the most profound knowledge of composition."
   Gay dispels a number of popular myths including the one which is the basis of the film 'Amadeus' that Salieri poisoned Mozart. He makes use of his psychoanalytic training to explain the relationship between Mozart father and Mozart son. He dispels the myth of Mozart's abject poverty and rejection. He provides a very readable narrative of the lives of one of mankind's great God - gifted geniuses.
   But he also does not do what I had hoped he would i.e come close to revealing the secret or secrets of Mozart's genius. So many others have written music and so many others at the same time were writing music. Reams and reams of it. What gave Mozart the ability to do this on a level beyond the others? And what in the music itself is so beyond the others? Words like 'lightness' and ' complexity' and 'depth' and 'lyricism' and 'fluency' and 'powerful feeling' and 'emotive expressionism' and ....All the words do not say it.
   I would have liked to have read more about what we 'hear' in Mozart that we can hear nowhere else.
   Gay does a good job telling the life, and especially I think the relationship between father Leopold and the much- demanded- of genius son. But he does not, and perhaps no one can, tell us the real secret of why this musician and this music have been for so many, of another realm entirely.



2. It takes one genius to write about another genius.
   Peter Gay is so very well respected for his insites and work for many years. He tackles the complex life and mind of Mozart with eloquence and with a prose that is engaging and fluid.
   I think I am off to listen to my old records of Mozart.
   Exceptional read, that captivates the reader.
   Love The Written Word



3. Peter Gay's `Mozart' is the sort of book a heavy-hitting historian like Gay writes while on holiday at the beach. Lite, witty and short, but still substantial enough to satisfy. (The same could be said for many of the excellent volumes of the Penguin Lives series--alas, now defunct.)
   
   As nearly every other reviewer has pointed out, this slim volume treats Mozart's correspondingly brief life with Gay's celebrated prose style. No new details are introduced, at least nothing destined to alter Mozart scholarship (for all the details, you'll want the much longer `Mozart: A Life' by Maynard Solomon). What Gay brings to Mozart's life is readability, historical context (this is PETER GAY, after all) and a nice quick summary for those readers who have an interest in Mozart but may not care to spend more than a few hours studying him.
   
   One nice advantage of the book, especially for those looking to gain a better understanding of Mozart's music, is that Gay connects the events of Mozart's life to the production of some of his musical masterpieces. With Gay's book and iTunes, you can quickly build a "best of" Mozart library as you read along.



4. Somewhere between Maynard Solomon's 650-page opus Mozart: A Life and the Mozart write-up on Wikipedia, there is Mozart by Peter Gay.
   
   Mozart's story should lend itself to the Penguin Lives series of short biographies. It was a remarkable life in spite of its brevity. Mozart gifted the biographer with a voluminous correspondence and Gay makes extensive use of it. If it sometimes seems as if the narrative consists of epistolary excerpts strung together, they do communicate some aspects of Mozart's character, particularly as regards the increasingly difficult father-son relationship.
   
   Gay also enjoys quoting the vulgar witticisms that frequently occur in the correspondence. Peter Gay is also the author of a biography of Sigmund Freud, so the character analysis was perhaps bound to take a psychoanalytic turn. For example, vis-à-vis the penchant for vulgarity, Mozart "yielded more readily than many others to the regressive pull of early fixations." His adolescent attraction to Aloysia Weber was the expression of "agreeable rescue fantasies". It's hard to say what, if anything, these observations add to the reader's insight into Mozart the man. In the end, while we learn the important facts about Mozart's life, we don't really get a clear sense of character from this book.
   
   Not to say that the author fails to recognize and carry out his writerly duties. In a biography of Mozart, or of any famous person, the author is required to engage with the standard mythology, and Gay dutifully sets the record straight. Mozart was in fact dismissed from the Archbishop of Salzburg's service with a kick in the rear end, and he did once write a full symphony in four days (No. 36). He was not, however, poisoned to death by Salieri (rheumatic fever was the culprit) and he was not just taking straight dictation from God - his original manuscripts bear much evidence of rewriting and revision. (Unfortunately, Gay does not address the implicit charge of alcoholism in the film "Amadeus".) As far as Mozart's famous arrogance, Gay's account perhaps affords an improved perspective: "He had no false modesty about his gifts; since they were God-given, it would be sacrilegious, he thought, to make light of them."
   
   To a great extent the story of Mozart's life is the story of his musical compositions. He began to compose in early childhood; by his death in 1791 the corpus had grown to some 600 works - among them, of course, a number of the signal works of the classical era. Gay cites most of the appropriate pieces - the "Turkish" violin concerto, composed at 19; the piano concertos; the great late symphonies including the No. 41 "Jupiter"; the Requiem Mass. Others could have been mentioned, some excluded; it's pointless to quibble. The important thing is that our author should write well about them.
   
   Unfortunately, Gay isn't very good at writing about music. His musical discussions tend to lapse into praise rather than interpretation: "To experience [the late symphonies] is to enjoy a spectacle of energy translated into beauty." He finally throws up his hands: "...how puerile these common metaphors are compared to the experience of *listening* to Mozart!"
   
   The musical analysis we do get generally comes in the form of quotations from other people - established critics and scholars like Alfred Einstein and Charles Rosen. These, along with the bibliographical essay, are helpful for those seeking more substantive discussion.
   
   Character analysis and musicology aside, what we really want from a Mozart essay by Peter Gay is a discussion of the composer's place in the great intellectual movement of his time: the Enlightenment. Gay is the author of a magisterial two-volume survey of the Enlightenment which runs to some 1,650 pages and is considered definitive. So we make our way through the present narrative patiently waiting for the part where Gay reveals his expert insights into Mozart's role in the Age of Reason. In vain. The benefits to Mozart of Emperor Joseph II's reformist policies are briefly acknowledged. Hope glimmers with Mozart's induction into Freemasonry, but Gay pretty much dismisses this as a networking maneuver. The Magic Flute is characterized as "a rationalist Mason's celebration of truth, love, and human warmth", but the analysis goes no further. If the Penguin Enlightenment Reader is correct on the matter, The Magic Flute's libretto "distills the essence of the Enlightenment"; so it's particularly disappointing that Gay has nothing much to say about it here.
   
   Come to think of it, it's hard to say what advantages Gay's book really has over the Wikipedia essay. After all, they offer substantially the same information; Wikipedia includes color pictures of the composer, his family, and his native Salzburg; you can click to hear the musical pieces discussed; and you can save $[...] to spend on something else. Like some music by Mozart, for example.



5. Peter Gay's book on Mozart is truly utilitarian, just a short book with all the facts and a few minor clarifications on the folklore surrounding Mozart. The author follows his subject chronologically, with a special emphasis on the familial relationships and Mozart's unusual correspondence.
   
   Gay suggests that Mozart's achievements as a child prodigee may have been partly the work of an ambitious father. Gay also puts to rest the enduring rumours that Mozart was poisoned, murdered by a patron, or buried in a pauper's grave. None of these actually happened, despite what we have seen on the silver screen the last 30 years.
   
   The book is well written, Gay is an entertaining and thorough author, but dont expect anything really new or controversial here.

5 comments about The Meinertzhagen Mystery: The Life and Legend of a Colossal Fraud.

1. Brian Garfield is a supurb writer. It doesn't matter if he is writing fiction (Death Wish, the book behind the Charles Bronson movie), military history (The Thousand-Mile War about the part of World War II in the Aleutians), or a non-fiction book like The Meinertzhagen Mystery. His writing style is captivating and even otherwise dull subjects come alive. Any book is highly recommended.
   
   Col. Richard Meinertzhagen left a history of heroic deeds so dramatic that he was used as the model for Ian Fleming's 'James Bond.' Or at least it is so rumored. His diaries are full of stories so outrageous that you'd think they have to be made up.
   
   It turns out that most of them now appear to have been made up indeed. The difficulty is to split out what is true from what is false. And then we need look at what historians have reported as fact based on what is now seen to be false. It's enough to make you wonder about all of history.



2. Col. Richard Meinertzhagen's exploits are those of either the greatest and most daring man ever to wear a British Military Uniform, or that of the most whopping fraud to walk the earth. Excellent research and a great read.



3. Richard Meinertzhagen was a military hero, explorer, spy, friend of Israel, diarist, world renown Ornithologist and prevaricator. Unlike most people, he reveled in the lies that he told and the reactions of those he told them to. He left an 82 volume library of his 'life', much of which was wishful thinking or down right false, but like Dr.Goebbels he believed that if you tell "The Big Lie" forceful enough and long enough, people will begin to believe.
   
   Why would a man who was respected as a world class ornithologist, get himself barred from the British Museum for stealing? Was it for the notoriety? Having re-written his diaries (in some cases many times) and destroying all the previous versions, did he want to be caught after his death? Like publicity, being remembered, whether for good or bad, is still being remembered.
   
   Garfield, who admits the man was one of his heroes as a child, spends a lot of time trying to find back-up information to prove RMs tales. But the more his digs, the more his finds that it like digging a hole in the dessert, it buries you. When RM writes that he did so-and-so, Garfield is able to find that not only wasn't he involved, but that RM might not have even been anywhere in the area (much less on the same continent) when the event occurred.
   
   Ian Fleming had written that RM was the archetype for "James Bond". He could not have known how right he was in basing his fictional spy on a real-life falsified spy. The sad part is, had RM just written about his real accomplishments, his story would still be one of an outstanding personality; it just wasn't outstanding enough for him.



4. This is not so much a biography of Richard Meinertzhagen as it is an attempt to destroy his reputation. Meinertzhagen was a warrior, a famous collector of rare bird specimens, supporter of Zionism, African hunter and war hero from the First World War. Most of all he was an adventurer. He had a keen sense for history and felt sympathy for the Jews and deep hatred for Hitler.
   
   But all this has been stolen from him because of a number of allegations of impropriety. There are the stuffed birds that he is alleged to have stolen and re-labeled. There is the fact that no one recalls him being in Haifa in 1948 (although who would have?). Most of all there is the controversy over his diary and his meetings with T.E Lawrence. Meinertzhagen was sure that people would 'find out' about Lawrence and his having made things up and it seems that Meinertzhagen may have fabricated a number of diary entries including meetings with Lawrence.
   
   This book attacks Meinertzhagen even for the exploits that are widely known to have been his most brave and audacious. He once dropped fake plans behind Turkish lines in order to deceive them in the battles for Beersheba and Gaza in 1917. He is attacked here for having not come up with the original idea. But the proof for this is that other people claimed to have had the same idea. But why believe their claims and not Meinertzhagen's?
   
   Most of the rumors and stories about Meinertzhagen cannot be proved and neither can most of the allegations. For those such as T.E Lawrence the legend has remained, why there is so much interest in dismantling the reputation of a minor player such as Meinertzhagen is not clear, if anything he deserves more mention in history books on the Middle East, not less. The best place to start is to read his diary, Middle East Diary, 1917-1956 and then Warrior: The Legend Of Colonel Richard Meinertzhagen.
   
   Seth J. Frantzman



5. In Kenya Diary, Meinertzhagen lists game counts throughout the book to the nearest animal, an impossible achievement when animals and observer are in motion. I've tried. Some years ago I asked the University of Nairobi's Mathematics Department to confirm that the game count totals are random. They are not. Meinertzhagen had "favourite" numbers that recur in a non random fashion. Perhaps this is a small matter, but it is yet another small matter.

5 comments about Photographing Montana 1894-1928: The Life and Work of Evelyn Cameron.

1. Evelyn Cameron left her English home to become a rancher in Montana in the late 1800s: she used her photography skills to help support her family, and captured Montana life in the process. Photographing Montana gathers photos which portray early Montana life and deserves a spot in any Montana history collection as well as in art libraries seeking examples of regional photographic talent. Excerpts from her diaries and letters include plenty of autobiographical insights.



2. I live in the area of the photographer's subjects, and totally enjoyed the book and its' subject. The photographs, along with Evelyn Cameron's diary accounts of daily happenings, gave a captivating decription of what many of our homesteading ancestors endured. This is very enjoyable reading for anyone.



3. This work is a treasure. Evelyn Cameron and her husband, born into English society, established a ranch in eastern Montana early in the development of that part of the west. A need for additional income and a love of photography lead Evelyn to produce a large number of high quality photographs. Those photographs represent a historical archive of enormous value. The photos show the people of the time, how they made a living, and the tools that they used. My personal favorite is a photo Evelyn took of herself in her kitchen; she sent it to relatives in England to show them her life on the Montana frontier. It was a life of hardship, but also of achievement. The quality of Cameron's work is the equal of other great western photographers of the era, such as Jackson or Huffman, and it records a side of life not represented by anyone else. There is a balance in this book between text and reproduced photographs. It is a biography of Evelyn Cameron, including excerpts from her journals, as well as an exhibition of her photographs. A museum and gallery in Terry, Montana, is a repository of Evelyn Cameron's work and the total number of photographs is several times what this book is able to present. One hopes that other volumes of Cameron's photos will be published in the near future.



4. This book, by Time-Life books editor Donna Lucey, has some very interesting photographs of Montana, taken about halfway between the Lewis and Clark expedition of two hundred years ago and today. Yes, the early 1900s were right in the middle of Evelyn Cameron's career.
   
   Cameron, nee Flower, was one tough and talented lady. She moved to Montana with her husband Ewen, going there initially in 1889, on a hunting trip for their honeymoon. I found the stories and pictures of life in Montana fascinating. Much of the book deals with the growth of Terry, a town in the eastern part of the state, on the Yellowstone river.
   
   At the time, the Kodak camera was the instrument of choice for most American photographers, however Cameron did much of her work with a 5x7 Graflex. There are dozens of her photos in this book.
   
   Although Cameron died in 1928, Lucey was lucky enough to obtain many of Cameron's photos from one of Cameron's friends, Janet Williams, who was 95 years old by the time Lucey met her in August of 1979.
   
   In 2002, PBS began shooting a documentary about Cameron, and it was released last year. It includes over 200 of Cameron's photos (over 100 of which are not in this book), and it won four regional Emmy awards. It was the first high-definition documentary for Montana PBS.
   
   I recommend this book.



5. The main feature of this book is its 150 photographs taken by photographer Evelyn Cameron in eastern Montana during the years of its earliest settlement, first by ranchers in the late 19th century and then by streams of homesteaders in the early decades of the 20th century. In the latter regard, it is an excellent companion to Jonathan Raban's "Bad Land." Most amazing is the vast range of photographs, including family portraits, group shots of cowboys, threshers, and sheep shearers, ranch buildings, open prairie, wild life, store fronts, wild horses, herds of sheep and cattle, badlands, social gatherings, and farm equipment.
   
   We get glimpses into the lives of the wealthy and the dirt poor. None of the photographs were shot in a studio, and taken together they represent a broad sweep of frontier life across a handful of decades. The text provides a detailed life of the photographer herself, a remarkably spirited and self-sufficient English woman who has left us this marvelous and revealing record of a time long passed.

5 comments about The Invention of Solitude: A Memoir.

1. I'll go out on a limb here, diasgree with the hagiographic tone of preceding reviewers, and say that only half this book is worth reading - the first half. When Auster writes about how he feels after his father's death, he makes universal the sorrows, guilts and uncertainties of losing a parent. But the second half - "The Book of Memory" - gets very tedious very quickly. Real feeling is replaced by real showing off, with pages of literary criticism masquerading as fiction. If you thrill to "isms" - structuralism, deconstuctionism - there may be something here for you. But for the rest of us...



2. The first part of this book describes Auster's reaction to the sudden death of his father. His portrait of his detached divorced father who remained alone in the house his family once lived in, and spent fourteen lonely years there is restrained and moving. The portrait becomes at a certain point an extended family history and reveals a great family secret, the shocking murder of Auster's grandfather by his grandmother. The detached father who is the central figure is described as an extremely colorful character, a lonely ladies man who thrived on quick passing affairs and hard work. Auster's effort to sort out his own emotional connection to his father makes a sincere, honest record. The father- son relationship here is the heart of the story, and Auster tells the one he has with considerable skill and feeling. And this when the father- son relationship does not here have the kind of charged emotional complexity the great tormented depth that Kafka reveals in his immortal ' Letter to his Father'. It too does not come close to the kind of liveliness and depth that Philip Roth reveals in description of his relationship with his father in ' Patrimony'.
   The second part of the work in which Auster is now a divorced father meditating on his own life and literary work is less humanly interesting. Its abstract literary reflections may have a Pascalian value of their own but they do not hang together as the first part does.



3. Paul Auster's The Invention of Solitude, split as it is between a half that could be great fiction and a half that could be pure philosophy (or, if you'd like, pure rambling), is unlike anything I've ever read. In its first half, "Portrait of an Invisible Man," he not only gives a compelling, fully human rendering of a cold, unexpressive father, he makes us fully aware of the consciousness watching him, struggling to make sense of the place he still occupies in Auster's mind as he attemps fatherhood himself. The second half, "The Book of Memory," takes that death into the most mystical realm possible, discussing the way motifs, rhymes, themes, and coincidence merge to create a life, and in its brain-scrambling way of taking quotes, allusions, and personal tales into describing the ramblings on life after personal upheaval, it responds in a way most writing never can to understanding the whole complex fabric of existence. Auster's literary expertise is extensive and his prose is transporting, together these halves, moving from corporeal to penetratingly ethereal, respond to questions and evoke emotions in a way that neither fiction nor poetry can, making the book a transcendent experience - a vivid rendering of a mind hurtling, with precise diction, into the depths and implications of why and how we have lives in the first place.



4. "Portrait of an Invisible Man" starts as a reflection on the nature of life as an experience of solitude. Auster's father appears to have lived in a state of perpetual withdrawal from his self. It is for this reason that writing about him becomes eponymous with writing in an absurd world, after Becket. The task of writing has no ultimate goal; life itself is full of hollow spaces, so why would we want to transcribe it into a work of art? Why should Auster have wanted to write about his father who lived not a life inside himself? Why are we reading this book? Reading, writing and living are all part of the same ludicrous, meaningless wandering.
   
   Fortunately, just before the hollow corridors of emptiness cease to reverberate there is something that captures our attention. A murder! One almost wants to thank Auster's grandmother for rescuing the narrative from its postmodernist drift into nothingness. And the author himself for allowing us to open his grandma's hidden trunk in the attic. Yet after this exciting brief interlude, Auster returns to muse over his father's quirks of personality, and the first section finishes.
   
   "The Book of Memory" starts as a tract on writing: the craft of a man sitting alone in a room for long hours. Filling a room with thoughts is "real spiritual work", the result of an inner struggle in which the mind is made to conquer the dreariness of the surrounding world. It is also about finding oneself before looking for anything else.
   
   The section is composed of various parts distinguished by different thematic links. We have the paragraphs on Memory and the reflections on Chance and assorted instalments on a number of family-related and other themes. Auster is making himself up as a writer, and trying to say something substantial about the workings of reality or European art at the same time.
   
   To withdraw into a room does not mean that one has been madened. It is the room that restores the person, to health and to safety. The modern nothingness can be best confronted from a room or from a position of parenthood... The Book of Memory is concerned with the process of thinking, this is, with mind travel.
   
   References to the Book of Jonah introduce the theme of sleep as "the ultimate withdrawal from the world." Is sleep an image of solitude? By eating him, the fish saves Jonah from drowning in the sea. The depth of the belly is the depth of silence, the refusal to hear and to speak. It is about seeking a separation even from the conversation with God. It is a death before a life that can speak. One learns to speak in solitude. But what is the purpose of speaking? A prophecy remains true when it isn't told. After that first silence one may die, and in death learn to speak. So that a book can be written, a book that will always be closed.



5. Having been, to some extent, in the same situation as Auster with relation to his father, I sympathize with him. What's more, I understand him. And his memories. His feeling of emptiness and sadness when he finds out that his father - who was never physically there - is gone spiritually too. It's one of his best, perhaps because it dealt with a personal theme of his life, and he didn't have to use the imagination so much...
   
   I must sincerely say that this novel made me understand my father, and his 'absenteeism', much better. It provides a framework of memories, emotions, relics in which one can maneuver and come to realize that: we are all human, and we all need other human being, even if they have disappointed us, others, or people in general. Auster found that he had missed his father much more than he thought - he came to terms with what his father was and what he wasn't, and saw the world from his perspective.
   
   It absolutely goes without saying that this book, this meditation on life, family, and the inevitability of the unknown is worth reading. Twice.