No comments about James Joyce (Very Interesting People Series).

No comments about REFLECTIONS ON A QUIET REBEL..

1 comments about Rossiya: Voices from the Brezhnev Era.

1. Alex Shishin's Rossiya: Voice from the Brezhnev Era is a great travel book with wonderful conversations and descriptions. His narrative of crossing Siberia is especially brilliant. Yet, everywhere Shishin went, people shared wonderful stories with him. His own story as a Russian-American discovering his roots through speaking to many Russians in Russian, which he learned in childhood, is a compelling story throughout the book. Anyone who is an immigrant or a child of immigrants can identify with Shishin. The language sparkles throughout the book! Though this is a story that is about the Soviet Union and Poland in the late 1970s, the intimacy of the writing makes you feel like it happened just yesterday.

No comments about Ulster and the Isles in the Fifteenth Century: The Lordship of the Clan Domhnaill of Antrim (Maynooth Historical Studies).

No comments about Roger Casement (Penguin Classic Biography).

5 comments about London: A Biography.

1. For the life of me, I can't figure out why this book gets so much good press. Ackroyd has clearly never met a metaphor that he didn't like, and apparently feels that the frequent (and often bizarrely misplaced) use of such can replace good writing. The whole book reads like a giant editorial which has no point, and facts merge too subtly into half-truths, suppositions, and out-and-out falsities without any guidance to navigate through through them. If you're looking for a good history of London, look elsewhere. If you're looking for good commentary on London society throughout the ages, tough luck.



2. This book is at times very interesting. At times it is a chore to wade through the attempts to link places and times throughout history. The author really reaches for connections through history as if making them is the only point of the book. I wonder if he was just trying to find something to link the various subjects so that the book didn't feel completely disjointed. The organization by theme instead of chronology sometimes gives the book this feel. I personally liked that it was not a simple chronology, however.
   
   Some of the other reviewers have mentioned the lack of maps. I can't stress enough the need to have some on hand while you are reading this book! If you are genuinely curious you will find it maddening not be able to see the streets and places so picturesquely described.
   
   Having said all of that, I have certainly learned quite a bit. The poor are often not much recorded in history and there is a lot to be found about them in this book. Certainly, the poor are discussed far more than the wealthy, but their numbers and thus their impact was greater.
   
   Ultimately, this book is like an impressionist painting. If you look at the details it doesn't always seem clear. But the whole is an intriguing image of a massive and ever changing subject.



3. This 773-page book is a good 500-page history waiting for an editor.
   
   Too much rambling and philosophizing without enough history and geography.
   
   About 300 pages in, the reader begins to realize that Ackroyd is never going to settle down to writing enough history or geography to make the subject really meaningful, and begins to feel cheated by this unnecessary waste of time.
   
   It should have been better.
   
   Ackroyd also edited a set of photgraphs of Dickens' London: An Imaginative Vision



4. This book was fantastic. I could hardly put it down. Since I'm a history buff and London is one of my favorite cities, reading this book was a real treat.



5. Meet the family of characters and events that go to making up the world's most easily recognised name . This book invites you in and sits you down , to eat of the feast of interesting and intriguing characters that are London .

No comments about The Piper Of Cloone: Father Keegan and the Early Gaelic Revival (Irish Research Series).

5 comments about The Collaborator: The Trial and Execution of Robert Brasillach.

1. This is a fantastic book and should be read together with Patrick Modiano's "Dora Bruder" and Hannah Arendt's "Eichmann in Jerusalem."



2. France has certainly been taking stock of its own behavior lately--both good and bad--during WWII. The Vichy Regime was complex--denounced as collaborating with the German Socialists by some, accepted as a pragmatic answer to the survival of French culture by others. Many were caught in the middle, and this is a superb book about one such person. Kaplan's analysis is sensitive, brilliant, clear-eyed. She can tell a good story, too. Highly recommended.



3. Brasillach was a political (anti-semitic, racist) commentator and novelist in France before and during WWII.
   As we can read in his memoirs, he was intellectually seduced by the racist and nationalistic work of Charles Maurras (L'Action Française). He had probably homosexual tendencies.
   After the war, he was condemned (3 against 1) for high treason and executed.
   For me, the author proves convincingly that the trial was excessive and unfair - the Liberation courts were essential Vichy courts! Brasillach was guilty for his writing, but should not have been shot. There was no strict cause-effect relationship between Brasillach's words and the murders and deportations that did take place in France.
   But I agree also with the author that with this trial there was much more at stake: free speech, the capacity of language to do real evil, the accountability of writers and intellectuals. It was a warning by the political power elite at that moment.

   Good portraits of Albert Camus and Simone de Beauvoir.

   A model study. Nearly every sentence in this book is supported by a reference.
   It is a signing on the wall that this book was written by an American. The ghosts and demons of WWII are still not dead in Europe.




4. This biased and rather mean-spirited investigation of the life and trial of French author Robert Brasillach is an attempt on the part of the author, Duke University professor Alice Kaplan, to establish the guilt of her politically-incorrect target.

   Robert Brasillach (1909-1945) was a French author, critic, and (need I say?) idealogue. Guilty not of acts but of expression, his death at government hands might be just another sad addition to the crimes of totalitarianism - except that Brasillach was a RIGHT-winger, condemned and executed by the post-liberation French authorities. Brasillach was among many accused collaborationists (or suspected conservatives) who were 'purged' following the liberation of France, often by leftists with old scores to settle. There are two important issues this affair raises for me: what regard for justice can we expect in a passionate time, and why do people embrace extreme views? These are not Kaplan's concern. She wants us to consider the profound question: why can't people whose views I hate just keep their damn mouths shut?

   Brasillach neither served the Germans in any official capacity nor participated in any war crimes. Nevertheless Kaplan claims that Brasillach is guilty, although hedging that his punishment was excessive. She accuses Brasillach of three crimes: denouncing French citizens to an enemy of France (punishable by death under a 1944 revision to article 84 of the French penal code), treason (article 75), and calling for the death of French politicians. The accusations never get off the ground.

   While it is fair to denounce Brasillach's anti-semitism and hostility to democracy, Kaplan presents no proof that he denounced fellow citizens personally, except for politicians already imprisoned by the Vichy government. There are serious legal and even ethical problems in condemning a man for sympathizing with foreign agents whose authority is sanctioned by his own government. The closest Kaplan comes to a justification of Brasillach's legal guilt is when she quotes the damning remark (left out of Brasillach's compiled works!!!): "One was asked to point out the Jews." Kaplan, who expends several pages in interpreting the quote as meanly collaborationist, says "It is a fudge, a syllable away from a confession that he did..." Perhaps just a bit more than a syllable: a verb, a personal pronoun or two, maybe a conjunction...

   Kaplan's aggressively prejudicial interpretations are the body of the work, together with some irrelevant detail about contemporary events. Her argument is simple: Fascists are bad, so what they do is bad. If a Fascist goes for a walk, he walks in a bad way. Brasillach wrote several books; one was nominated for the Prix Goncourt, France's highest literary award. Kaplan says they were all bad books, so THERE!!!

   The valueless childishness of this sort of thinking seems self-evident to me. The 20th century political arena showcased an endless parade of troupes of righteous zealots, all convinced that they had identified the Bad Guys responsible for humanity's woes, all shouting down any questioning voices, each exiting the world stage disgraced by odious crimes - to become the bad guys of the NEXT troupe!

   The job of the thinking man is to gong this crap, without falling into the trap of ideological despair. We need to blame crime, not opinion, and if we disagree with opinion we need to present a case that is not based on ad hominem attacks on our opponent's character! As U.S. political debate slides into steadily increasing invective, the need for fair-mindedness is getting greater.




5. The most compelling part of this study of Robert Brasillach for me was not the courtroom rhetoric - framed as the payoff of this book - but the contextual descriptions of the open anti-Semitic and pro-fascist political advocacy of pre-war France.
   
   It's important to be reminded that anti-democratic and racist thought was not confined to Germany in the 1930s. I found, however, that the more I read about Brasillach the less pivotal a character he became. Here was a clever but sad follower of the dashing fascists, but a follower whose chief weapons were mockery and verbal attack. Brasillach may have become a martyr for the right, but only for being in the wrong place at the wrong time, not for being a philosophical or popular leader.
   
   Kaplan has done an excellent job in presenting a relatively dispassionate report on the case, but the case itself is more a fluke than an historic watershed.

2 comments about Eminent Georgians: The Lives of King George V, Elizabeth Bowen, St. John Philby, and Lady Astor.

1. John Halperin takes Lytton Strachey as his model and provides four short lives of people he views as emblematic of the "second Georgian" era - King Geroge V himself, Elizabeth Bowen, St. John Philby and Nancy Astor. The results are interesting without being particularly memorable. Halperin tells his stories in a plain documentary fashion, without much analysis and with none of the mordant wit or strong opinions of Strachey's nasty little classic. Such a straightforward approach works best if bolsered by extensive research, but the slim bibliography indicates a newspaper profile rather than an original and insightful work. All this being said, Bowen, Philby and Astor are interesting enough as people to making reading "Eminent Georgians" worthwhile. As for the good King George, it will take a much more persuasive writer to bring that admirable but dull monarch to life on the page.



2. This certainly isn't Lytton Strachey. Like Strachey and Richard Holmes, however, Halperin well realizes the inherent great enjoyability of very short biographies of extremely interesting people. There seems to be almost no original research here, and Halperin is willing to make an extremely shallow and lazy transition to an anecdote just to squeeze it in, but he does write with grace (and has an eye for a great story). Oddly, there's a running theme throughout the book: the perfidy of what Halperin extremely loosely calls "treason," although what he means by treason seems so broad at times as to be almost meaningless. The best lives here are of the stodgy George V and the hilariously irreverent Nancy Astor, because with both Halperin seems really to have a new angle he wants to bring out; while his willingness to applaud the late king for his steadfastness and decency as compared to his eldest son's thorough rottenness, it does not seem to occur to Halperin that Edward VIII's character might be in part due to his parents' legendarily neglectful cold and neglectful care. Halperin's extremely heavyhanded evaluations of Elizabeth Bowen's novels are also a bit puzzling, although Bowen's exceptionally eventful life and character make up for his judgmentalism towards her fiction.

2 comments about The Victorian Translation of China: James Legge's Oriental Pilgrimage.

1. This book takes a detailed look at the Victorian-era translation of China in the context of both a symbolic and literal pilgrimage to the Orient. It may be said to be an intellectual biography of James Legge. I liked the book because of the extensive, well-researched footnotes. I would fully and unreservedly recommend this book to anyone with an interest in the trials and tribulations of the Victorian-era translation of China. While the book requires a small commitment of time from the reader, it provides in return a unique and fully formed picture of an interesting subject.



2. In an ambitious yet rippingly successfull break from the staid academic tradition of endnotes, Dr. Girardot delivers a veritable tour-de-force with his latest scholarly work, "The Victorian Translation of China: James Legge's Oriental Pilgrimage." The reader will delight in literally hundreds of footnotes detailing the Missionary James Legge's symbolic and literal pilgrimage to the China of yore, detailing and amplifying on such electrifying subjects such as: "How does Legge relate to Confucianism through Christianity?"; "What is Max Müller 'Motto'?"; and finally, "Who is General Tso, and why is his chicken so good?". Not since "An Annotated Transliteration of the Alphabet", by Dr. Farles Pikquens (ret.) has such a well-researched book so thoroughly expanded vistas of hermeneutical inquiry into this otherwise "forgotten Victorian sage".