5 comments about Witness to Nuremberg.

1. Barbara Schlang's review.....Richard W. Sonnenfeldt's just published book (Witness to Nuremberg) reveals personal conversations with the top Nazi defendants at the Nuremberg trials, shedding a merciless light on their criminality, but it is also a tale of adventure never told before. He was just twenty-two when he became Chief Interpreter for the American prosecution at the War Crimes trials of 1945-46.
   Born into a Jewish family in Germany, he fled to attend school in England in 1938, to escape the Nazi terror. But when the Germans conquered France two years later, his erstwhile hosts interned him as a German national and deported him in a prison ship, that was torpedoed by a German U-boat, but made it to Australia. The British then realized their mistake and ordered him back to England to be freed, but now his boat was diverted to in Bombay, India. Instead of returning to England he managed to go to the United States, all solo, at age seventeen. On arrival in New York he became a media celebrity in April 1941. Two and a half years later he was an American citizen and combat soldier who fought in France, Germany and Austria. He was one of the first to see the concentration camp of Dachau and its prisoners, too stunned amid mountains of corpses to grasp that freedom was theirs.
   
   General "Wild Bill" Donovan, the head of OSS (predecessor to the CIA) who was organizing the American prosecution for the Nuremberg trial then picked up him as his interpreter.
   At Nuremberg, directing a staff of fifty, he produced over 10,000 pages of sworn testimony, interpreting and later himself conducting interrogations of the twenty top surviving Nazis. He had Goering, the No.2 Nazi, acknowledge his signature on the order of July 1941 to organize the holocaust. He extracted from Hoess, the commandant of Auschwitz, a detailed statement how three and one half hapless victims were exterminated at Auschwitz, at a rate over 20,000 a day.
   After the verdicts, which punished ten of the defendants by hanging them, he returned to America, served on the team that created color TV and became a noted executive. To celebrate his fiftieth year in business he crossed the Atlantic in his sailboat, also celebrating his 75th birthday.
   He was invited to return to the small German town where he grew up and his reports of interaction with the citizens there are no less interesting than his recollections of Nuremberg. He was then invited to speak at a principal cathedral in Berlin, and at Hitler's erstwhile Nazi headquarters in Nuremberg. Soon he was feted by the German national press and became a sought after personality on German television and radio.
   His book "Witness to Nuremberg" published by Arcade Press, follows his German bestseller "Mehr als ein Leben." I could not put the book down. It is full of many thrilling and some dangerous adventures, but most of all it is a tale of the zest of life and it is all true!



2. During 1945-46, Richard Sonnenfeldt, age 22, was the chief interpreter on the U.S. prosecution team at Nuremberg. In this role, he served U.S. Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson, the chief U.S. prosecutor, and his interrogation team as the lead interpreter in the pre-indictment interrogations of many imprisoned Nazis, including all 22 who became Nuremberg defendants.
   
   Sonnenfeldt actually was much more than the U.S. prosecution's lead interpreter at Nuremberg. Because of his German and English language skills, his smarts and maturity, and his surprising rapport with and control over many of the prisoners, Sonnenfeldt actually became a de facto senior interrogator. His work and successes as interpreter and interrogator are recorded in the many thousands of pages of interrogation reports that are central parts of the Nuremberg trial and historical record. At the end of the Nuremberg trial year, Justice Jackson saw to it personally that Sonnenfeldt received a military decoration for his work.
   
   But that's actually not the half of it. In outline form, this is Richard Sonnenfeldt's quite amazing life story:
   * born Jewish, son of two physicians, in Gardelegen, a town in north central Germany, in 1923;
   * happy, assimilated boyhood until Nazism and Nuremberg laws change everything, including shutting down his parents' work;
   * getting out of Germany, along with his younger brother, to a boarding school in England;
   * being interned in England as an enemy alien once active war with Germany started in 1940;
   * being shipped with other internees and German POWs from England to Australia;
   * being paroled from Australia to India, and making it on his own there;
   * getting passage from India to the U.S. (His parents, in a separate miracle, had made it from Germany to Sweden and from there to Baltimore);
   * becoming, as his ship docked in New York, a media event because he was an unsupervised boy who had survived all of these "adventures";
   * working, while still a teenager, as an electrician in Baltimore and entering Johns Hopkins night college;
   * being drafted into the U.S. Army, becoming a U.S. citizen, and fighting in Europe as a combat soldier;
   * entering the Dachau concentration camp in April 1945;
   * in May 1945, being called out of a motor pool in Austria, because of his bilingual skills, to serve as General William J. ("Wild Bill") Donovan's OSS interpreter;
   * moving with Donovan into the Justice Jackson/war crimes project that became Nuremberg;
   * serving as the principal and preferred interpreter of each prisoner, including Hermann Goering;
   * playing a significant role in interrogating and studying each of them;
   * being half of the 2-man team that served the October 1945 indictment on each Nuremberg defendant;
   * working for the U.S. prosecution throughout the trial;
   * returning to Baltimore and succeeding as a Johns Hopkins engineering student;
   * becoming a distinguished engineer with RCA, where he was part of the team that invented color television;
   * working on NASA projects;
   * working as an executive at NBC;
   * obtaining patents on numerous inventions;
   * becoming a husband and very proud father;
   * sailing three times across the Atlantic; and
   * never talking much about his past until his grandchildren started to interview him for school projects and papers.
   
   Richard Sonnenfeldt's life is an extraordinary true story, and he has written it modestly and well. His book deserves to reach a very large general audience, and I am confident that any reader, from children through seniors, will find it to be relevant, exciting and inspiring.



3. I bought Witness to Nuremberg after reading the other "Amazon" reviews and I was not disappointed. I could not put the book down! I want to comment on the writing. Sonnenfeldt's story of incredible adventure is told in a most captivating way with flashes of humor and never a boring moment!
   
   There emerges a teen and later, a man who turns adversity to his advantage, who always looks forward. Just 22 at Nuremberg, after a solo trek through five continents, he is the chief interpreter for the American prosecution who becomes a star interrogator to unmask the groveling and miserable personalities of the Nazi defendants. He tells us who ordered the Holocaust and why we did not know its true dimension until eleven months after the war ended. Even more remarkable is his return to Germany, fifty years after the Nuremberg trials, where he became a media celebrity as he related his conversations with the Nazis. This book is a worthy companion to the many books of Holocaust survivors. You must read it.



4. This is an interesting and well-written account of the young man who was the Chief Interpreter at the Nuremberg trials of the Nazis.
   
   But the aforementioned is only half the story, because the author also tells us about his life in Germany both before the Nazis too power and after. His tales of escape from Germany are so amazing and remind me of a children's book I read as a child called "When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit" a fictional account of becoming a Jewish refugee in the 1940's. Who knew that fiction could be beaten by true-life!
   
   I found this book very compelling and a great yarn. Truly, after seeing the author on Charlie Rose I became interested in reading the book. I was not disappointed. I am sure you won't be either.
   
   By the way, his accounts of the Nazis he interviews are very compelling! Truly, as has been said before that evil is so often banal!
   
   When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit



5. I saw Mr. Sonnenfeld interviewed on Charlie Rose last year and had this book on my wish list. I finally got around to ordering it and dived into it the day it arrived. I was disappointed to find that only the first quarter of the book (if even that) dealt with Mr. Sonnenfeld's translating work at the Nuremberg Trials, i.e. "Witness to Nuremberg". The remainder of the book is autobiography, from childhood to the present. Granted, it is an interesting life to read about, but for those seeking a book dedicated to the "Nuremberg experience" you will be disappointed, as I was. I could have gone on reading more about Nuremberg. Nonetheless, it is a well written interesting read.

5 comments about A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier.

1. An inspirational story. This young man lost his family, his home, his innocence, but managed to start over.



2. I was really interested in this book and thought it was very well written. I would have given it 5 stars, but it was very disappointing how Ishmael ended the book!



3. This was a very heart wrenching book. A recommend for everyone so people are made aware of the atrocities of war. Even thought you are made aware of the terrible situations you understand how people cope in how ever bizarre a manner.



4. This book has good description and is an 'easy read'. It had a very interesting story about a boy in Sierra Leone and what changes his life.



5. A fascinating and well written account of a phenomenon few of us know much about. What an extraordinary young man.

3 comments about Simon Girty Turncoat Hero.

1. I have read almost all of the books and articles about Uncle Simon and I must say this book by Phil Hoffman is the most accurate in-depth account of Simon Girty , his life and the Girty family of the 1700s that I have had the plesure to read. I highly recommend it to anyone interested in Early America and its heros. Kenneth E Girty Renfrew, Pennsylvania



2. Phillip Hoffman's book, "Simon Girty Turncoat Hero," is the culmination of 19 years of research into the history of the lesser-known but pivotal Frontier warfare that took place during the Revolutionary War.
   
   Hoffman shows us that the Revolutionary War was not just an East Coast war about taxes on tea and obedience to the king, it was also (perhaps mainly) about the British attempt to control the development of the West by joining with numerous Indian tribes to keep American settlers from streaming into Kentucky and Ohio and on to the West Coast which, of course, they eventually did.
   
   Three prominent figures in the Frontier war were Simon Girty, Alexander McKee and Matthew Eliott, all American agents stationed at Fort Pitt (Pittsburgh) who, after working for the colonists, decided to throw in on the side of the Indians and the British, in part due to the treacherous way the Indians were being treated.
   
   This triple defection was a serious blow to the Americans, since all three men were fluent in the Indian languages (Girty and McKee had both been young captives; Eliott was a trader), very useful as translators and spies for the British.
   
   If the British had won the war, these men would have been hailed as heroes. The Indians, it goes without saying, would have ended up being screwed either way. As it was, the three were branded as traitors and Girty, "Dirty Girty," took the brunt of the colonists' wrath, wrongly blamed for every atrocity. Over a century after these events, my mother remembered being told, "You'd better behave or Simon GIRTY will get you," as if he were the bogeyman personified.
   
   My great-great-great-great grandmother, Margaret Paulee Erskine, was captured by a group of Shawnee Indians in 1779 and lived in Shawnee towns in Ohio until her ransom in 1783.
   
   Margaret's narrative mentioned all of these men (who lived in close proximity and had Indian wives) in positive terms. Simon Girty had assured her she would not be forced to marry or cohabitate; McKee had saved her life. I've been waiting for a book that told the true story and here it is.
   
   "Simon Girty Turncoat Hero" is a scrupulously researched, fascinating account of the events surrounding the Frontier war in general and an exoneration of Simon Girty in particular.
   
   Phillip Hoffman has managed to take a mountain of raw data (battles, treaties made and broken, both sides floundering through the woods with short supplies, runners routinely sent on 100-mile foot-journeys to deliver messages) and turn it into a very readable account of "how the West was lost."
   
   Hoffman's career as a screenwriter served him well in this endeavor. Girty, his friends, members of his family, and the Native Americans they lived and fought for, spring to life on the pages of his book, which, in other hands, might have come across as dry as dust.
   
   Simon Girty, "The Most Hated Man on the Early American Frontier," a man with a large price on his head and a gash in it as well (coshed by an Indian chief during a drunken brawl), emerges as a person both tender and tough, who loved his family and was a champion in the Indian cause to hold onto their land.
   
   It may perhaps be a small choir that Hoffman sings to, but for anyone interested in the history of the Revolutionary War, this book is a must-read.



3. After years of anticipation, Phillip Hoffman's book "Simon Girty Turncoat Hero" has finally made it to press and into my hands. Phillip Hoffman has spent 19 years in meticulous research and turned it into a fascinating, and probably the truest account of one of the most "misunderstood" historical figures on the American frontier, Simon Girty.
   
   Mr. Hoffman gives us great insight into the British, American, and Indian politics, Simon's contemporaries, and life and war on the frontier. Mr. Hoffman's adept writing skills have taken a much vilified and hated individual and given us another side of Simon's complicated personality; a side of Simon Girty that other writers either ignored or never understood.
   
   As an amateur genealogist, researching the Girty name including my fourth-great grandfather, Simon Girty, I have had numerous occasions to research Girty papers and have read most of the major works that have been written about Simon. I always came away feeling that no one knew the true Simon Girty until Mr. Hoffman came along. Now the Girty family and frontier enthusiasts probably have the most accurate account of Simon Girty and the role he played on the American frontier.
   
   I know there are many American Revolution and frontier enthusiasts, having met them at the frontier reunions, who will enjoy reading this book and adding it to their collections.
   
   Stephanie Thalman
   Simon Girty's fourth great granddaughter

No comments about Stealth Boat: Fighting the Cold War in a Fast Attack Submarine.

5 comments about The Genius of Alexander the Great.

1. This is the last book written by Prof. Hammond on ATG and it really is a nice piece of work. Some people may claim that he tends to over-glorify Alexander but I don't believe so. His analysis is very balanced and his criticism is not based on 20th Century values and ideals, which is a problem with other authors on the same subject.

   If you're looking for a good book on Alexander the Great, do start here.




2. Few figures in the history of the world have attained the mythical status and timeless quality of Alexander The Great. The man and myth continue to fuel the imagination of every new generation. This is no surprise when one reads about the man's achievements and how they changed the world. The lore of the story relies in the classic, epic sense of adventure that courses through it, it is a tale that takes us through various cultures, characters and to the stretches of the known world. N.G.L. Hammond is clearly an admirer of Alexander and tells his story here with the flare of homage and reverence. "The Genius Of Alexander The Great" gives us a story of boldness and the quest for knowledge and truth. Alexander comes off as a highly intelligent, cultured commander who embarks on a quest to defeat a mammoth Persian empire and bring Greek culture into the civilisations of Asia and beyond and to also introduce their cultures to the Greeks and Macedonians. Hammond describes in great detail the battles Alexander wins against Persian king Darius, who is ruler of the world before the Macedonian king steps ashore. The book is also a fascinating exploration of Greek history, taking us deep into the cultural traditions and aspects of Alexander's world. One realizes you cannot judge Alexander by the standards of our time, this is one figure that demands to be judged by the standards of his own time and era. If one takes the book to heart with careful attention, you realize what sets Alexander apart from conquerors like Caesar, Napoleon and Hannibal is that his goal was simply to achieve a sort of greatness in the style of Achilles ("The Iiliad" was a constant companion during the Asiatic campaign). Hammond's book is also a wonderful gallery of characters. The most memorable aside from Alexander would have to be his free-spirited mother Olympias, who here is depicted dancing wildly in Dionysian cults, handling snakes and indulging herself in orgiastic rituals such as the "Bacchae." There is also Alexander's talented, brilliant father Philip, the philosopher Aristotle and others. It's evident that Alexander lived in special times for the history of civilisation and he was simply there to add his mark. And Hammond writes it all with a novelistic style that engrosses the reader and transports you there clearly and vividly. From Macedonia and Persia to Egypt and India, Hammond takes us on a journey to understand how there are daring, epic moments in history that live on forever. A wonderful read and memorable book.



3. In recent years, there has been a positive fashion for writing about Alexander the Great, particularly after the mid-century arguments from scholars who wanted to view him either as an evil tyrant, or a sort of proto-Christian examplar of conquering chivalry. Hammond's book is obviously part of this all-or-nothing trend in Alexander studies.
   
   I read N.G.L. Hammond's book, The Genius of Alexander the Great after reading numerous other biographies including Fox, Green, Wilcken, and others, largely due to my appreciation of Hammond's status as an Oxford scholar with thirty years of solid publication on Alexander, Macedonia, and the Greek Hellenistic world. Although his credentials are impeccable, almost from the first chapter I realized that I was reading one of those scholars who felt they had to take a stand on the issue of Alexander-the-Good, Alexander-the-Bad. And Hammond definitely comes down on the side of Alexander the decent, good well-meaning chappie, who was a military genius. To me, this kind of selective biography becomes increasingly irritating, although to the brand-new student of Alexander, his summary of the known facts about Alexander's life is meticulous and quite helpful - except for his bias.
   
   Reading this book will give you the Alexander basics, but from Chapter 1, Hammond feels authoritively able to simply discount sources he dislikes (i.e., ancient sources who brought up questions concerning Alexander's temper, violence, cruelty, drunkenness, and less-than-altruistic motiviations). So we regularly hear that such-and-such a source may be "dismissed" as a complete or partial fabrication. Apparently, Hammond particularly loathes Curtius, but Diodorus Siculus is also regularly dismissed out of hand. Instead, he quotes extensively from sources such as Ptolemy, Aristobulus, and their heir, Arrian, showing Alexander in the best possible light.
   
   In any book, whether it's Tarn or Badian, I am deeply suspicious of selective source-hunting, and I'm afraid that Hammond's regular choice in this regard grew irksome to me. I would say this is a good, steady view of Alexander's life and works with the proviso that the reader must be aware of all that is being bowdlerized from the ancient sources. I, personally, believe in a decent Alexander who also could do awful things, but scholars who ignore contradictory sources to present him do his genius no good service. In so saying, I mean no disrespect to Hammond's obvious expertise in the area and his long history of scholarship in this field. I simply wish he could have brought his expertise to bear in accepting both the good AND the bad about Alexander.



4. I have read many books about Alexander and unfortunately most of them misrepresent him as a Tyrannt or whatever the authors feel that can diminish a great personality through exaggeration.
   However, Hammond has broken away from the micropolitics and has gone one step further and asks the question of why Alexander acted in this way. You could say that the book is an answer to the misinformed scholars about Alexander the Great. In other words, I found that the book is Alexander's "Apology" for his actions.
   Being of a Greek background, I found that the translations of the sources are accurate and not misinterpreted. Hammond's knowledge of the Ancient Hellenic civilization have helped him understand what we as Greeks know about Alexander and his role in the Ancient Hellenic civiliztion.
   I recommend this book to serious history readers who don't want distorted facts and events.



5. Nick Hammond's "The Genius of Alexander the Great" is the best history of the subject available. It is tightly written and the sources are effectively documented and brilliantly analyzed. His knowledge goes far beyond the typical Athens-centered perspective, as he is uniquely knowledgeable of the entire region around Greece and Macedon. Best of all, his understanding and presentation of Alexander's military history is unexcelled.
   
   Of course, there are many contemporary accounts and all suffer due to the weakness of ancient sources. We have no history from Alexander's time, as all the ancient sources are actually secondary sources writing at least a Century later. Choosing among these ancient sources is such an unstable enterprise that most modern authors find themselves selecting this or that version of Alexander based on their own emotional whim or ideological predisposition. What generally emerges is a sort of historical miasma, and the deeper the reader goes into these other studies, the less substantial Alexander and his time appear.
   
   Not Hammond. How did he avoid the problems and write such a solid history?
   
   First, his strategy is to strip away all the peripherals from the narrative and nail the essential story. Next, rather than encumbering this book, Hammond cross-references all his previous scholarship. Hammond and other scholars he cites have in other works analyzed all the ancient sources and documents where each, in turn, got his material. Hammond in this book is able to give the briefest summaries of the reasons he selected the content he uses, confident that the student interested in sources will go to the documentary works. Those interested in just the pure narrative of what can be known of Alexander can simply read this book. Hammond may appear too quick to judgment to students who don't have Hammond's grasp of the sources (as you may see from some of the breathless reviews), but he makes the story both thrilling and solid.
   
   Hammond's knowledge of the history and geography of Macedon makes his description of Phillip -- and the state Alexander inherited -- brilliantly exciting. Deftly, he shows what an astonishing force of history Phillip was, how he stabilized and remade Macedon, how he transformed Macedon's relationship with the Greek states and how he reorganized the small states around Macedon, Thrace and northern Thessaly as a basis for Macedonian power.
   
   Hammond also shows without comment how vulnerable and foolish the Greek states had become. The multi-generational, internecine warfare produced exactly the constant instability and waste of warfare you would expect. It is painful for the reader to once again see that democracies work when the citizens are conscientious, but can be pathetic when the citizens are foolish and vain. Nonetheless, it could have been no simple thing for Phillip and Alexander to have managed the mix of diplomacy, politics and military force required to so quickly master these rich and resourceful city states. More than any other, and without gushing, this clear book simply demonstrates the brilliance of Phillip and Alexander's politics.
   
   If Hammond has a bias, it is toward historians of Alexander who have military experience themselves. But unlike most military historians with personal military experience, Hammond does not wallow in warfare. What he does, as throughout the book, is write the clearest and most reasonable explanations of the military tactics and strategy, how (and exactly where) each battle was fought, what the strengths and uses of each army were, and how well Alexander understood how to use his army and how brilliantly Alexander was able to assess a tactical situation and respond.
   
   This is an exciting, clear, well documented analysis of great confidence and authority. For now, there is no better book with better judgment out there.
   
   
   
   
   
   

5 comments about A Sense of Duty: My Father, My American Journey.

1. The book "A Sense Of Duty: My Father, My American Journey" is really an American story about coming of age and about father son relationships but with a huge twist of circumstances. We are dealing with a family torn apart by the loss of the Vietnam War and their subsequent separation. Author Quang X. Pham is shipped to the USA after the fall of Saigon with his siblings and mother. His father who is a member of the South Vietnamese Air Force stays behind doing his duty to the very end. Thus begins 12 years of imprisonment in the so called "re-education camps" while his family adjusts to a new life in America.
   
   The author deals with cultural and language issues and some degree of racism and bigoted treatment. However, the deeper issue for him is not having his father there for him. There is also his lack, at that young age, to fully realize the significance of what his father had done with his life and how well he had served his old country. The book is an eye opener for those of us who have wondered what it was like for these new comers to our shores.
   
   When his father does come to the USA after being released from the "camps" he found it tough going. His marriage fell a part and he found that all those lost years with his children, who had grown up without him, haave created a huge gap between them. His children do not really know or understanding who is or even who he was.
   
   The book follows the growing appreciation and understandings that Quang eventually gains for his dad. As he learns more about his father's past and sees his personal courage and sense of duty and what drove him to become the man he was. When the author himself wears the uniform of Marine aviator and fights in the Gulf War, he begins to gain more insights on the sacrifices that his dad had made for his own country of South Vietnam. We take this spiritual and emotional journey with the author as he gradually begins to sense what factors and motives drove his father on his own personal journey.
   
   The book also details and addresses some old history from that time period and that war. Most Americans have either forgotten or never knew about our national attitudes and polices with regard to the war and lack of regard for our allies the South Vietnamese. It may make for some interesting but uncomfortable reading.
   
   It is a well-written and poignant story that embraces two very different wars. His story unites two different generations into an emotional bridge between father and son. It is touching and deeply moving. The author does a great job of making the reader feel a part of the experience. This book receives the Military Writer's Society of America's highest book rating of FIVE STARS!
   
   This book also receives my personal endorsement!



2. i enjoyed this book vey much. being a veteran of the vietnam war it helped me to understand the vietnamese side to the war more than i had before. i salute quang x pham for delivering his account in such an honest trully interesting way.
   
   semper fi



3. What or who makes us who we are? The choices we make, our families make, or fate simply dispenses all help to create the individuals we are. However, we must make the journey of discovery to find our individual selves. Quang Pham shares with us his journey of discovery.
   
   The author was born in Vietnam and left around the fall of Saigon. His father was a pilot in the Vietnamese air force and after getting his family to safety, was not able to get out. He would spend many years in prison and re-education camps. The author grew up in the United States and would later serve in the United States Marine Corps. Pham takes us through his journey for identity as a Vietnamese American, a family member, and as an individual.
   
   Is he Vietnamese, American, or Vietnamese-American? This is a question that flows throughout the book, which signifies a tough question. As a United States Marine, Pham honorably served our country as a helicopter pilot. He went to an American high school where he played sports and went to an American university. He delivered newspapers. Through his choices, he is just as American as anyone, but because his appearance was not as common, he spent a lot of time branded as different or non-American. Although born in Vietnam, he chose to be an American. This book gives the reader a glimpse into the struggle to determine who we are as Americans.
   
   As well as our nationality, our family provides us with insight into who we are. For Pham, his father was still in Vietnam during the author's formative years of childhood and early adulthood. Pham looks back in the narrative at what his father must have gone through and what his father had done to help get an understanding of who he is. As a fellow military pilot, he has some understanding, but he is not able to get all the information he wants as his father was trying to put the past behind him and then later, died. The author acknowledges the difference between his father and him by using the Vietnamese tradition of family name first when referring to his father, but using his first name when referring to himself. Even with differences, our families help ground us.
   
   As an individual, we have to explore what makes us different from the other members of the family and the community. The author illustrates this by discussing how other pilots are trying to give him a call sign (since he is a military aviator), but none of the names seem to reflect him. They are names that many others have had or names that reflect either a generic Asian association or the wrong ethnic association. None of these names helped identify Pham as Vietnamese or American. His eventual call sign does blend both in its simplicity.
   
   To function with any amount of clarity and sense of self, we must think about who we are. I would recommend this book not just for people who wish to understand what someone of foreign birth must go through to become an American, but I would also recommend this book for anyone who is struggling to make a personal discovery. Although our own journeys will be different, this book reassures us that others are making journeys also.



4. Quang X. Pham's moving memoir, "A Sense of Duty: My Father, My American Journey," reads like a modern Horation Alger success story. But more than that, it is a rare look into the difficult private lives of one fragmented and frightened family who barely made it out of Saigon during those infamous "last days." Pham's father, a South Vietnamese AF pilot, stayed behind, a victim of his own sense of duty, and paid a heavy price. In cuttingly clear and elegantly simple prose, Pham tells of his life, from the refugee camps of Guam and Arkansas to the working-class "mean streets" of Oxnard, California, and of the ceaseless toil and sacrifices made by his mother in a strange land. "A Sense of Duty" also tells of Pham's hard-won transformation from a ragged refugee boy to UCLA graduate and decorated USMC pilot and Gulf War veteran. But underneath it all is an aching yearning to know a father who was lost and then found again. Pham's story is indeed an "American Journey," one that will be read, and read again. This is more than a memoir; this is personal history at its very best.
   
   - Timothy James Bazzett, author of "Love, War & Polio: The Life and Times of Young Bill Porteous" and "Soldier Boy: At Play in the ASA"



5. A Sense of Duty is a superbly written, multilayered story of war and remembrance set against the backdrop of the tumultuous Vietnam era. It reveals one of the least publicized and even less understood themes emerging from the Vietnam experience: the South Vietnamese contribution to the war effort and the disappointment many Vietnamese-Americans feel as a result of their countrymen's role in the conflict being minimized or simply overlooked.
   
   Not content to only detail his father's selfless sacrifice and heroic exploits as a Vietnamese Air Force pilot flying missions in support of U.S. forces, the author, Quang Pham, offers great insight into the significant, but underappreciated, role South Vietnamese forces played in stemming the tide of communist aggression. In this sweeping account of his experiences first as a child growing up in the war-wracked country of his birth and then as an immigrant facing a less-than-tolerant America, Pham's story is both timely and edifying.
   
   Given the many challenges he faced, readers would expect a cynical, even bitter Pham in A Sense of Duty. Instead we are treated on one level to an uplifting story of a young man's coming of age and emerging from his father's larger-than-life shadow. Like many of us, Pham is challenged into his adulthood to reconcile his deep respect for his father with the recognition that he needs to become his own man. After they are reunited, Pham also discovers his father's considerable flaws which cause him to recast his father in the role of human, not hero.
   
   On another level entirely, A Sense of Duty is a classic Horatio Alger story involving an immigrant shedding the identity of his country of origin, developing a love for his adopted America, and successfully pursuing the American dream.
   
   Perhaps the most improbable turn of events in this amazing story, Quang eventually seeks a career as a U.S. Marine and pays homage to his father's intense love of flying by becoming a pilot himself. Quang's story comes full circle when, like his father, he flies missions supporting Marines in ground combat. While his father's missions are in fighter and transport aircraft over the treacherous jungles and rice paddies of South Vietnam, Quang's are in helicopters over the vast, unforgiving deserts of Saudi Arabia and Kuwait.
   
   Quang acquits himself quite admirably as his father's son, every bit as courageous but perhaps a bit less brash. Quang exchanges the swashbuckling boldness of his fighter pilot father for the cool steadiness of the helicopter pilot he decides to become. Great stuff!
   
   For this reader, it is Quang's patriotism and, well, sense of duty that make his story such an interesting one. As a friend of Quang's, I can attest to his devotion to his adopted country and, despite some trying experiences with intolerance and bigotry, his basic belief in the American ideal and the essential goodness of the American people. It is clear from reading Pham's account of his father's 12-year struggle in communist 'reeducation' camps that the American withdrawal in 1973 left an enormous vacuum from which many thousands of South Vietnamese never emerged. For this and other more personal indignities, Vietnamese-Americans have every right to be bitter and resentful.
   
   A Sense of Duty brings to light the second and third order effects - some not evident for years down the road - of our government's foreign policy decisions. Quang Pham very ably elucidates, through his family's remarkable experiences, the downstream impact of our involvement in Vietnam on successive generations of South Vietnamese immigrants.
   
   Surprisingly, Quang is neither bitter nor resentful. He does not dwell on tragedy and disappointment. Indeed, more than just another Vietnam literary catharsis or a querulous tale of one man's exorcising his demons, A Sense of Duty inspires us to recall what makes our country great: immigrants like Quang Pham who venture to our nation's shores and who pull themselves up by the bootstraps to pursue America's bountiful opportunity. Thankfully, many, like Quang, choose the military as their springboard to success. They serve nobly and honorably, defending the many liberties of our "shining city on a hill."
   
   We certainly know where Quang gets his strength and internal fortitude! Like his father, Quang's mother demonstrates an uncommon tenacity, industriousness, and indomitable will to succeed. No whiners here! Remarkably, despite her many struggles to raise 3 children alone in her often inhospitable adopted country, Quang's mother eventually volunteers to serve for 2 years with the Peace Corps in the former Soviet Union. Incredible!
   
   It is Quang's family's selflessness that ultimately makes them so endearing. At a time when immigration remains a divisive issue in this country, we read A Sense of Duty, and we are brought together. We rally behind a great American and a proud family tradition of serving a cause greater than oneself. Finally, through the Phams we celebrate the seemingly limitless and enduring gifts immigrants continue to bestow on our great country.
   
   This is a tale of grit and determination and, in the face of much adversity, striving to succeed!
   
   Thank you for your service, Quang, and for a profoundly inspiring story!

5 comments about The Nature of Sacrifice: A Biography of Charles Russell Lowell, Jr., 1835-64.

1. Ms. Bundy paints an exceptionally fine picture of the Boston cultural and political scene in the pre-war years. She clearly knows the Lowell family's story (she's a descendent) and she also is a good writer.
   
   However, when she gets away from that and into the details of the war, she falls very short. Her information on Ball's Bluff, for example, contains several errors. Capt. Caspar Crowninshield did not command the 20th Massachusetts and was not the only officer from that regiment to make it back from Ball's Bluff.
   
   On three occasions, she describes California governor Leland Stanford as a "copperhead" or a southern sympathizer though Stanford helped found the Republican party in California and was an ardent Unionist.
   
   She notes Sen. Henry Wilson of Massachusetts as Chairman of the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War, though Wilson was not even a member of that committee.
   
   She treats the tactic of fighting cavalry dismounted almost as if it were invented by Col. Lowell instead of being an old and well-known dragoon technique.
   
   There are numerous other small mistakes like that which some fact-checking or a little more research would have let her avoid. I give the book three stars instead of two only because it is very well written and because the mistakes she makes are not central to the story she is trying to tell about Lowell. They are very jarring, however, and the reader should be prepared for them.



2. I first became interested in the career of Charles Russell Lowell Jr., when earlier this spring I saw the author, Carol Bundy, speak about him and read from her book on TV, on a fourm provided by the Public TV station Boston's WGBH. For this reader Boston visits always include at least a few hours spent curled up in front of a high-definition TV and turning on the public station, for it seems nowhere else in the country do the arts get such play. Nor the humanities, including the utterly humane biography that Bundy has written of a man she says is her great-great-great-great uncle I think. She was amazed when, after her grandmother died, among her trunks and effects out tumbled the clattering sword of Lowell, as well as his dress uniform, preserved through generations who had relished remembering him as their fallen hero.
   
   As though honoring this family mandate, Bundy has done her level best to help preserve his memory for at least another generation. For on the one hand although Lowell was a forgotten soldier, dead before he was thirty, he fought with distinction at a number of pivotal sites in the War Between the States, at one point serving with "Mosby's Marauders." He was a curious chap, as Bundy relates. While his peers and elders were romantic dreamers-transcendentalists, really-who swore by the abolitionist movement and excused the barbarities of some of its activists as examples of ends justfying means, Lowell took the middle ground, sort of turning his nose up at the ideals in question, while cherishing a different set of ideals, by and large culled from a classical education and a tour of Europe on the grand scale. On this extended sojourn, the privilege of young gentlemen of the 19th century, Lowell became haunted by Michelangelo's painting of the three fates. Later on in the annals of art scholarship, ironically enough, it emerged that the painting was not by Michelangelo at all-not even close. But such is its power that it made Lowell sort of an ironist, and a fatalist too.
   
   Bundy brings the War alive as Shelby Foote did, though from the union side of course. The sights and sounds of the battlefield waft over the reader who dares finish this exhsuaring biography all the way through, not only the sounds of glory but the rotting flesh of the dead and the mad faces of the survivors. Like Shakespeare, Lowell begs the question. No wonder his funeral was attended by so many notables, still spooked by him, for none could follow the oddments and the contours of his soul. Today his distinguished descendant has widened the field of inquiry, allowing us to see the lineaments of a brief life with tantalizing hesitance.



3. This is a three way review, along the lines of "readers who enjoyed this book also enjoyed....." Each of these books enriches reading of the other two. They are, in order of publication (and the order in which I read them), The Metaphysical Club, by Louis Menand, The Dante Club, by Matthew Pearl, and The Nature of Sacrifice, a biography of Charles Russell Lowell, by Carol Bundy; These three fit together like birds in an Escher sketch. The many other reviews of each of these three explore their focus, their scholarship, their pace, breadth and depth, skillful turn of phrase and weaving of ideas: all of them excel in every way that their respective genre demands. What has intrigued me is how each, from their own genre and viewpoint, contribute to a fuller picture of the ideas and times that the others explore and a more informative and enjoyable total reading experience.
   
   Briefly, The Metaphysical Club is primarily about ideas, and secondarily about their men: Oliver Wendell Holmes; William James; Charles Peirce and John Dewey, but Menand also necessarily explores the milieu from which these men and their eyes emerged. Holmes and James received the lion's share of delving into their history, as I recall from my reading several years ago, principally their lives as sons in their natal families, and their experiences with the Civil War: Holmes' an intimate, lucky survivor's life emerging from the corpses of a great many of his boyhood and college chums, James', a more distant, detached view. Menand explores how these war time experiences, as well as their exposure to zealous causes, such as abolition and the copperhead reaction thereto, shaped their approaches to life, to dealing with ideas, with movements, how Holmes applied these ideas in his jurisprudence and James in his philosophies. The Metaphysical Club is dense, tersely but often breezily written, requiring frequent re-readings of paragraphs and sections. If you let your mind wander for a sentence, you must retreat and reread. Menand also follows their ideas into the twentieth century, and their effects on public and higher education and other important areas in our country. We learn quite a bit about Boston, Cambridge and New England.
   
   The Dante Club is fiction, which takes place within the boundaries, both geographical and temporal, of the Metaphysical Club. The club members tickle but do not overlap with the Metaphysicals: O.W. Holmes' father, the "diminutive doctor," as famous in his day as his son came to be in his; Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, the key figure, then widowered, and bringing forth his English translation of Dante's Inferno, with the help of Holmes Sr., and James Russell Lowell, poet, critic, and a founder of the Atlantic Monthly magazine, among other things, (including the uncle of Charles Russell Lowell, subject of the third book); and Charles Washington Green. The Dante Club is an exciting, interesting, chatty, rather informative and fast moving murder mystery, set mostly in Cambridge in the first few years after the Civil War had ended, partly in Boston, with forays to Boston's north shore, to civil war battle grounds south of the Mason Dixon line, and an occasional mention of Italy. Cameo appearances of Holmes Jr and his friends, his wounds and his ideas give hints of the developments of the Metaphysical Club, which was just then perhaps starting to take form. The Dante Club is a refreshingly easy reading barnstormer, a nice, light dessert after the Metaphysical Club. It inks a palpable picture of Cambridge after the civil war, and is great fun to read while sitting in a park along Brattle Street. J. R. Lowell enjoys a large role in it, and to understand its mystery, and the resolution thereof, it is helpful to know something of the lives, privations and crises of the everyday civil war soldier, and his officers. This then brings us to the missing piece in the puzzle, The Nature of Sacrifice.
   
   The Nature of Sacrifice is Bundy's first published book, as the Dante Club is Pearl's. (Menand has several books to his credit, but he is mostly known for his remarkably wide ranging articles, essays and other short pieces that have established him as one of today's leading public intellectuals.) Bundy's biography of Charles Russell Lowell, J. R. Lowell's nephew and sometimes housemate, uncannily fills in territory left open by both these books about non-existent clubs, almost as if her book were written just for me, so that I could enjoy the other two more. Bundy's book is at once more compact, more potent than both, because her subject died before his 30th year, and also because he was a real live hero. She writes of the sounds, smells and sights of soldiering and battle with such vigor, organization and thrust that images and whole scenes arise in the mind's eye, as well as the mind's ear, and the mind's nostrils. Bundy's prose soars and charges, leaving the reader with no doubt that it tells the story of a flesh and blood man who lived earnestly, and died violently, leaving a family and community eviscerated by his death; and not only his death. Portrayal of His death stands as the synechdoche, the one death, put before us to call forth every single death in every family that lost a son to the Civil War adding up to the over 600,000 civil war deaths, and with just a little imagination, to all deaths, in all wars. Bundy gives us the catalogue of Boston and Cambridge families who sent their treasure to war, and lost that treasure, their individual names, their beautiful faces, the faces of their sisters, their playmates, the lists of places where they died, the lists of names who died in the same battles, or the same years; families with two sons dead (as was the case for the Lowells); She depicts the normal, daily childhood these boys led before they went off as men to kill and be killed. Bundy provides the real raw material for Holmes' pragmatic views, and James' different pragmatic views, for the motivations behind the actions of the main characters in the Dante Club, a picture of Dante's Hell, as well as really helping the reader to understand the insanity of the action in the Dante Club as something other than insanity, rather as a reaction to civil insanity that is beyond sane and insane, beyond good and evil as opposites. Bundy's descriptions also of the social and political background of the Civil War is very helpful to understand that war at at least a casual level. It certainly isn't and doesn't try to be an in depth study of those backgrounds, which studies have been done again and again. But it helped to get a picture of the country before the Civil war on many levels. Bundy's book is also a real counterweight to the other two, because much of the story is gleaned from sources written by or to women: Lowell's mother, his sister, his wife, wives of his comrades. Not to be simplistic, but mothers and sisters do have different views about war, risk and death than do most men.
   
   These 3 books also reinforce each other, because they feel to be pieces of the same cloth. Nothing, or hardly anything in either of them contradicts matters in another, or jars the sense of the places and times established by the others.
   
   So, I heartily recommend all three of these books to anyone interested in any one of them. And, I think that reading in the order of publication, or probably even better, its reverse, is the way to go, keeping Dante in the middle as a quick, driving light weight, between the two much more serious, albeit compelling and exciting non-fictions.



4. Drawing her story from hundreds of family letters, Carol Bundy describes with vivid detail the life and death of Charles Russell Lowell. She is a fine writer, and this, her first book (amazingly), is a remarkable achievement. I found it totally absorbing. Yes, Bostonian readers especially will discover many familiar names, but Bundy's viewpoint is neither partisan nor provincial. I highly recommend this book as one of the best I've read in a long time. Just one caveat: it is very, very sad.



5. The Nature of Sacrifice: Charles Russell Lowell's Civil War
   The Nature of Sacrifice: A Biography of Charles Rusell Lowell, Jr. 1835-1864, Carol Bundy, Farrer Strauss and Giroux, 560pp., endnotes, index, 2005, $35.00.
   
   Within the first several chapters, this reader found Charlie Lowell a 'child of the(19)sixties living in the 1850s and not the Brahmin snob that he thought he would encounter.
   
   Born in 1835, immediately before his family slipped from high social standing and wealth and into the 'poor cousins' category, Charlie the grew up in the 'high'culture' of Boston of close-knit kinship relations and opportunities.
   
   With Transcendentalists and Abolitionists as neighbors and relatives, with books and debate as a part of family dinner discourse, and with newspapers and current bestsellers as a part of the table top literature of the household, Charlie grew into an apparently aimless but articulate Harvard student. Slight in build and height, surpassed all, after giving the commencement day address at Harvard in 1856, he took a manual laborers job on the Boston wharfs.
   
   He approached manual labor and business in general with the soul of a philosopher and philanthropist. He was a subversive idealist in the workplace, a worker with a social conscience, and a son who wished to succeed where his father failed. Charlie chose the iron industry as his place in the world. By 1860, after an interlude in Europe recovering from tuberculosis, he was managing an iron foundry, west of Sharpsburg, Maryland. Voting Republican in the presidential election, he watched the secession crisis from western Maryland. The attack on Massachusetts troops by a Baltimore mob in the spring of 1861 brought him into the ranks of the Union army as a cavalry captain.
   
   By 1863, after seeing action on the Peninsula and serving on McClellan's staff during the Sharpsburg campaign, Charlie Lowell commanded the 2nd Massachusetts cavalry in what he considered a 'backwater' assignment, Mosby's Confederacy. It was difficult and distastefull duty for him but one at which he excelled. Lowell collected near missed throughout the war; on the Peninsula he shook out his bedroll from behind his saddle and minie balls dropped out. At Antietam, he discovered his horse to be winded and removed the saddle and found the beast hit several times under it. As a colonel of a brigade during the 1864 Shenandoah campaign, he participated and rationalized the destruction of civilian farmsteads. He finally received a wound from a ball that clipped his elbow, traveled up his sleeve,crossed his shoulder, traveled down and cut a small portion of his spine. He died within 24 hours; he was survived by his wife whom he married in 1863 and was seven months pregnant.
   
   The nature of Charles Russell Lowell's sacrifice was multi-faceted: the happy bachelor who left a wife and child, the workplace manager with a heart for the workers, sleight twenty-somenthing who had become a leader of cavalrymen, and the intellectual who became a anti-guerrilla fighter.
   
   This biography surprises in many ways. Charlie Lowell is put in the context of a family on economic decline, of a social conscience within the environment of the empheral ideas of Transcendentalism, and of a top achieving Harvard student who condemns the college's curriculum of constant mind-numbing rote memorization. In 1861, few would have picked Charlie Lowell become a successful leader of cavalrymen. Appreciated by McClellan, Stanton, and Mosby, Lowell became a hero. The nature of Lowell's sacrifice was the loss of a future earned by a man who believed that there are no problems, only solutions and seized his duty to find a way to succeed.

3 comments about Meade's Army: The Private Notebooks of Lt. Col. Theodore Lyman (Civil War in the North).

1. Too often when we read a book on the CW it is just a rehash of the same old facts presented as if the author has found "new evidence".
   Too often when a diary or notebook is found and brought to light it is so poorly edited that is is almost unreadable. Here IS presented new ecvidence in the form of Lyman's notebooks.
   Here is where David Lowe excells. Not only is much of this being brought forth for the first time, it is done in a manner that will satisfy the casual reader as well as the professional historian.
   The inclusion of Lyman's period maps in their proper context increases one's understanding of the campaigns and the flow of the notebooks.
   Well done and a great addition to anyone's library.



2. Meade's Army is more that just an edited version of Theodore Lyman's experience with the Army of the Potomac. As one moves through the pages of Lyman's journal and flips back to the accompanying footnotes, one begins to appreciate the relationship between the editor and Lyman. While Lyman provides astute observations on everything from the flora and fauna of the battlefield to the chaos of fighting, the editor's annotations serve to link Lyman back to his social milieu. Classmates, relatives, and the social elite of Harvard University and Boston all meet at various times during the war and on the battlefield and the editor reminds the reader that Lyman is a product of his times and social status which color his observations. Such insights provide a deeper contextual layer to what is already a fascinating real-time account of the war.



3. "Meade's Headquarters, 1863-1865", a collection of letters written during the Civil War by Lt. Col. Theodore Lyman to his wife while on General George Meade's staff during the last year and a half of the Civil War, has long been a valuable resource for those interested in the Virginia Campaigns of 1864-65. "Meade's Army: The Private Notebooks of Lt. Col. Theodore Lyman" is perhaps even more valuable, as Lyman was more free and expansive in his notebook observations than in his letters home. In the privacy of his own notebooks, Lyman allowed himself to record incisive observations of various commanders, not always to their credit. Something which came as a surprise to me that Lyman indicated that although he felt sorry for Gouverneur K. Warren being relieved of his corps command at Five Forks, Lyman seemingly felt that the action was justified based on Warren's personality and past performance. The book has a real "you are there" immediacy in detailing the last year and a half of the Army of the Potomac's war in the Eastern Theater (after the end of the war Lyman rewrote the notebooks dealing with the 1864 campaigns, but he fully retained the day-to-day flavor of being on the spot during those titanic stuggles). David Lowe has done an excellent job in editing Lyman's notebooks covering his service on Meade's staff (the notes are presented essentially without abridgement, although Lowe faced a Herculean task in tracking down and identifying the numerous persons referred to in passing by Lyman).

1 comments about An Unpopular War.

1. An Unpopular War
   
   This interesting book consists of a series of first-person vignettes provided by individuals who had served on the South African side in South Africa's Border Wars in the 70s and 80s. The accounts seem to be in the language and words of those who provided them, save for their translation in some instances from Afrikaans to English. As such, they are provided with no contextual supporting text, except for an appendix of slang words and their meanings. A reader coming into this material for the first time may be puzzled at times but the intention of the editor was clearly to provide an authentic `voice' to the protagonists without any comment or interpretation of her own. The individuals who provided their stories varied from army chefs to helicopter pilots to conscious objectors , and each have a story to tell, sometimes funny, sometimes poignant and sometimes macabre. For this reason the material will be of interest to a broad readership anywhere in the world. Although not an historical account of events at all (for which the reader should seek some other source, such as Wikipedia, or The Silent War by Peter Stiff) the situations and events reported appear to be accurate, and are certainly consistent with other accounts with which I am familiar. A recommended read.

5 comments about Marlborough: His Life and Times, Book One.

1. Winston Spencer Churchill's biography of his ancestor, John Churchill First Duke of Marlborough, stands out as a restoration of Marlborough's reputation, an account of England under the reigns of Charles II, James II, William III and Queen Anne, and an in-depth military and political history of the War of Spanish Succession.
   
   WSC gives us a picture of the whole man, including his faults. One of WSC's purposes is to rescue Marlborough's reputation from the attacks of generations of historians. The book becomes a brilliant defense and of course it cannot be unbiased. WSC is Marlborough's defense attorney, not his judge.
   
   By the 1920s, Marlborough had been called miserly, greedy, ambitious, duplicitous, disloyal and treacherous. As he recounts Marlborough's life, WSC continually picks up an episode that seemingly illustrates one of these traits, but turns it around.
   
   Where unsympathetic historians saw miserly habits, WSC saw thrift and WSC goes further. Marlborough was miserly when it came to his own needs, such as when he insisted surgeons cut his stocking along the seem so that it could be resown. Yet he paid his army's bills and wages on time; apparently this was unusual in those days. He paid, from his own discretionary funds, which other generals often pocketed as a matter of course, for military intelligence that proved crucial to securing many of his victories.
   
   Where accusers saw ambition needlessly prolonging a difficult war, WSC presents Marlborough has being bound by duty to achieve the best results possible, and to reject a timid peace, which would have left Europe in the hands of a despot.
   
   WSC has a more difficult, but no less successful time defending Marlborough's continued correspondence with St-Germain, the exiled English court of James II and later his son, as recognized by Louis the XIV. The problem here is that today such acts would indeed be treason, but in the seventeenth century they were part of the normal workings of diplomacy, war time or not. After all, if passports and safe conduits were routinely given to enemies to allow them to rest and confer in between campaigns, it could not have been that unusual to keep in touch with people one knew, even if they were officially enemies.
   
   WSC also presents Marlborough's most important relationships: with his wife Sarah Jennings; with his military ally Prince Eugene, with whom he won at Blenheim; with his political colleague Godolphin, who secured funds for his military work; with the kings and queen of England from James II to George I;
   
   But WSC does accuse Marlborough on occasion of having been unwise. He is particularly critical of the Duke's obsession with his palace at Blenheim (where WSC himself was born). Marlborough didnft want an opulent residence, rather he wanted to leave a monument that would survive centuries and remember his name to future generations. WSC writes that as such Blenheim was a failure: it added nothing to the Duke's reputation and the worries it caused may have taken years from his life. Winston Churchill must have felt his biography was a better memorial to his ancestor.



2. John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough, is the uncontested military genius of late Stuart England, the uncrowned political/military heir to William of Orange and the famous ancestor of Winston Churchill. In tandem with Austria's general, Eugen of Savoy, he led the coalition armies in the War of the Spanish Succession, defeating in detail several of Louis XIV's French and Bavarian armies, most famously at Blenheim, but also at Ramilles, Ourdenarde and Malplaquet. Meanwhile, on the domestic front, his wife, the beautiful but intemperate Sarah Jennings, later Duchess of Marlbourough, became a "favorite" of Queen Anne and secured for him (at least for most of the war) the political support that necessary for him to field an army on the Continent for the many years.

   As a writer of history, Churchill ranks with Gibbon for his mastery of prose and his ability to use vivid imagery to hold the reader's attention to minute detail. For each year of the Spanish Succession War, Churchill opens with a strategic appreciation of how the Anglo-Austrian forces plotted out each year's campaigns, and goes to great pains to explain the reasons behind Marlborough's various deployments. And he paints on a simply massive canvas: he begins with a detailed account of Charles II's Restoration, of James II's abortive reign (and Marlborough's role in ending it), of William III and Mary II's joint reign (Churchill is NOT a fan of William and Mary) and of the underlying workings of the French monarchy. He is not afraid to address the various failings in Marlborough's character, particularly his secret negotiations with both the enemy and the exiled Stuarts, but does seek to defend Marlborough (and Sarah) from the more libellous charges.

   This book was written in the 1930s, politically Churchill's decade of exile (and personally, his worst years of depression). If everyone turned unemployment, financial crisis and depression to such good use, the world would be a far better place.




3. Winston Churchill was a man who rarely met a topic upon which he didn't harbor a strong opinion that he was willing to share. The Duke of Marlborough is no different. Churchill is clearly enamoured with this relative of his and lets it show. That said, Churchill plainly states that there are two camps on Marlborough and tells the world which camp he falls into. By doing so, he opens up the reader to get a feel not just for Marlborough and his times, but also for the debate by historians that rages around a polarizing historic figure like Marlborough. (Sound familiar to anyone else?) The result is a richly layered work.
   
   Winston Churchill viewed history as something that was alive and tangible and his historic writings capture that feeling for readers. Marlborough's battles - both military and political - come to life in the hands of Churchill. We get to see one of the great military minds of the 18th century push military science closer and closer to its modern form. We also see him perform less well on the political front against his foes there.
   
   Through the entire book, we get to listen to Winston Churchill in his element, telling us a story about a topic he feels passionately about. So many of the trials, trevails, and reactions that Churchill ascribes to Marlborough are so obviously parallels to Churchill's life and his reactions that the book has a clear autobiographical tone to it as well.
   
   Highly recommended for history buffs and for people who want to understand Churchill more deeply.



4. Winston Churchill, in a relatively well-known bad patch during the 1930s, began to write this history of his famous and much maligned ancestor. The first volume contains the first two books of the original four book set. The life of John Churchill, Duke of Malborough, is both a fascinating look at an historical era as well as a personal portrait of a great military general. Book One consists of a large chunk of history, spanning the downfall of Charles I through Cromwell, to the Restoration of Charles II, through the overthrowing of his brother, the Catholic James II by William of Orange married to James II's daughter, Mary, to the crowning of Queen Anne. The second Book of Volume one concentrates on a mere 3 years of Anne's rule.
   
   I will not reiterate what other reviewers have already said. However, I would add that in the writing of this book, Winston Churchill prepared himself to become even greater than his general ancestor. It can hardly be surprising that as this history was being written, events were conspiring to lead Winston Churchill into the biggest world confrontation ever. After studying the campaigns in Europe of Lord Malborough, it can hardly be surprising that Churchill fully suspected the coming of the war long before his fellow MPs.
   
   This is a scholarly work and shouldn't be undertaken without serious patience. Each of the two volumes are in themselves close to 1,000 pages long. The history is written from the point of view of a defender, though Winston Churchill is careful not to gloss over details that might cast an unfavorable opinion of his ancestor. Well worth the effort.
   
   BOOK TWO -
   
   Since I reviewed Book One, I felt it was important to follow up with a review of Book Two of this work. My initial comment is that sticking with something this huge is a task in itself, but often the reward is hard to describe. For me, I feel each time I finish a huge work like this (or Hegel, or Kant, or ... well, anything "Big") I sense my own mind has been exercised a bit. It's a reward in and of itself.
   
   Firstly, like Book One, this is really Volume Three and Volume Four of the a Four Book series bound together in Two mammoth volumes. Reading these 2000 plus pages is like running a marathon: the beginning is difficult, then you break the pain barrier and coast for quite a long while until the last staggering climb to the finish. In Book Three we continue with the war of Spanish Succession. These 500 pages are essentially concerned with the gigantic battles Marlborough fought. It was a time in which his glory was highly esteemed. As we get into Book Four, much like Book One, the narrative returns to the over all political scene which dominated and brought down the Great Duke. It is also the point where the reader might become overwhelmed again by both the multifaceted political machinations as well as the constantly revolving names (John Churchill becomes the Duke of Marlborough, etc.)
   
   However, for all these difficulties, the overall sense from both volumes is as thorough and detailed and enthralling as history can be written. There can be no doubt that Winston Churchill, as he surveyed the ever-mounting rearmament of the Germanic states and looking over the ancient maps of Europe imagining both the current and past, felt an immense burden of responsibility. By undertaking the task of "reforming" The Duke of Marlborough's image, he delved deep in to the vaults of history and warfare. It was not surprising that at the same moment he should be the first to recognize (at least in Britain) the significance of Hitler's intensions.
   
   One other thing struck me as fascinating about this era. The whole course of European politics, war, peace, and financial stability were tied up in the lives of three bickering women: Sarah (Marlborough's wife), Abigail (cousin to Sarah), and Queen Anne (whom both served and guided with gossip and whisperings.) Out of this small time period bore the seeds of Napoleon, the American discontent with England, and Slavery. Big stuff.
   
   I recommend these Four volumes (two books). The paperbacks are perhaps overstuffed, though. Book One split right down the middle. I was more careful with Book Two, though my hands suffered from it. Perhaps spending the money for the hardback editions in this case is worth it?



5. Winston Churchill wrote this book during the 1930's while in political exile. His masterful handling of Hitler, Roosevelt, and Stalin is presaged as he tells the tale of John Churchill, who overcame party strife in England, baseness and shortsightedness in coalition partners, and (finally) Louis XIV of France. WSC tell the story with his brilliant flair and style, but he also pauses with the reader to reflect on such matters as how to blunt a violent political storm without being yourself destroyed, how best to handle superiors who will hold you responsible for results but will not let you do the job, and how to act honorably when all of your life's work is thrown away by your enemies. These trenchant insights were pertinent in 1700, in the 1930's, and today. You are in for a treat, read this one.