GREAT LINE:
Winston Churchill warned publicly in 1901: “The wars of people will be more terrible than those of kings.”
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The Nineteenth Century had been the greatest era of human progress in history: the near-worldwide abolition of slavery and serfdom, the advancement of liberal democracy in Europe and America, the invention of steamships and railways, the beginning of modern medicine. As the Twentieth Century opened, most of the world’s leaders felt sure that progress in the lives of ordinary people could only continue. And for many it did. Yet for others – perhaps for half the world – life descended into unimaginable wars, tyrannies, and mass murders. How that happened, how the Twentieth Century was at once both a fulfillment of moral and material progress for some and an absolute catastrophe for others, is the subject of this book. Martin Gilbert is a professor at Oxford and the world’s greatest student of modern political history. Throughout the book, he tries to select key events that drove progress and failure. Of course, in some sense the question he poses in unanswerable by any single book, but you come away with at least an idea what went right and what went wrong, and what we can do to make the Twenty First Century better. This is a gigantic work, three volumes totaling some 3,000 pages, but since each chapter covers exactly one year, it is easy to choose the parts that interest you the most.
Check the BPL catalog for this title: A History of the Twentieth Century
GREAT LINES:
“Why did you come to Gorazde?”
“Why? Because you are still here, not raped and scattered, not entangled in the limbs of thousands of others at the bottom of a pit. Because Gorazde had lived.”
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Joe Sacco’s explanation for why he came to Gorazde, one of the UN-declared “safe areas” in Bosnia, which I quote above, flutters down the page in small rectangles of text across a two-page drawing of life going on – two men and an elderly woman chop firewood, a group of boys circle a soccer ball, two young women wearing knapsacks amble past tight hay mounds, while above the people small apartment blocks bear pockmarks from shrapnel and bullets. Joe Sacco started doing comics in the 80s, crafting wild tales of indie rock bands. He reinvented himself as a war correspondent, starting with a series on the intifada in Palestine. Sacco’s informants in Gorazde often seem as baffled as anyone as to how their home became a battleground. Many remember strong friendships that crumbled when ethnic lines became sharpened and uncrossable. Visual detail is often striking, from the weary faces to burnt-out cars in the street. On one page Sacco draws a series of ad hoc water wheels tethered beneath a bridge. “They were fashioned out of wood, barrels, parts of cars, bits of washing machines … Electric wire brought a modest current to a small percentage of Gorazde’s homes.” A portrait of war emerges from many stories, some modest, some harrowing, some merely eccentric. Whether the stories add up to an explanation for the killing, it’s tough to say. But there we go, trying to make sense out of it all.
Check the BPL catalog for this title: Safe Area Gorazde
GREAT LINES:
At 4:00, maybe 4:30, in the morning, they were standing in our room: Rolf Isaakson, another Jewish snatcher, and two SS men. They had come in through the bathroom window of the ground floor apartment, and their weapons were pointing at us.
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Gad Beck was born in 1923 to a Jewish father and Christian mother in Austria and as he grew so, too, did fascism, the Nazi Party, and the persecution of the Jews. His sexual awakening came without hang-ups, he says. One afternoon he rushed home to his mother and giddily announced that he’d hugged his gym teacher. “’Aha, I thought so,’ she answered dryly.” That Gad Beck came of age in a peculiarly frightening time, doesn’t mean he doesn’t also remember fights with the parents, first love, and looking for a way to fit in, the sorts of things we all go through. On the other hand, most of us aren’t growing up in a war zone, with friends and family among both victims and perpetrators. Beck’s voice is personal and lively and it’s easy to get the feeling he’s telling you about something that’s just happened. He disguises himself in a Hitler Youth uniform (“It was at least four sizes too big … As makeshift alterations I tucked the sleeves and legs up on the inside.”); he makes arrangements with a smuggler (“Strunck was hardened and venal. It didn’t mean anything to him that he was saving Jews. He wanted thousands of marks per person.”); he laments the capture of a colleague bearing a list of people in hiding (“When I was in charge, there never even was a list; I always had all the names and addresses in my head. But of course, no one was really in charge anymore.”). A gay Jew in Nazi Berlin? A leader in the resistance? It is not a long book, but it gets intense. There were times I had to look again at the author photograph to reassure myself that he had survived.
Check the BPL catalog for this title: An Underground Life
GREAT LINES:
It’s unclear when we look at Detroit today whether we’re seeing the last spasms of America’s industrial past, or a harbinger of the nation’s urban future. But what is clear is that this is what the abject collapse of an industrial society looks like.
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Like many, I was surprised and saddened when the US Census Bureau announced in March 2011 that Detroit’s population had decreased by 25% since the 2000 census. I knew it was bad, but THAT bad? Thankfully, Scott Martelle has provided an in-depth and highly-readable history of the city and how it evolved from a swamp to a boom town to a ghost town, all in under 300 pages. Martelle tracks the birth of Detroit to a 1701 expedition to establish a hunting and trading outpost and follows its political and social history up through the present day. We get just enough historical context to give a clear understanding of how the city evolved without getting stalled in the details of a legitimately fascinating story. Because what I really want to know is how Detroit ended up as the city it is today; I don’t have time to learn about the War of 1812 or the nuances of the auto industry, as interesting as those may be. As a journalist, Martelle makes an early disclaimer that he didn’t set out to cover every angle of Detroit’s history, and thoughtfully provides an extensive bibliography for further reading. Music and sports are barely mentioned, and that’s ok. The auto industry and labor unions are featured as major players, but serve only as a backdrop for digging into the root of Detroit’s problems: class and race struggles.
Peppered in between chapters on the city’s history are mini-biographies of Detroiters, lending a personal context to the real-life effects of the decline. My favorite was about a guy who bought an old mansion and is fixing it up. Living in the Bay Area where there are small bungalows for sale for a million dollars, it’s dreamy to think about buying a mansion for the price of a new car. Until you understand how decidedly un-dreamy the reality of Detroit is. People work hard to eek out a living, and fight hard to keep their city from getting swept away (or bulldozed) by neglect and abandonment. With these people in mind, the trend of “ruins porn” in art photography – documenting the extreme decay and dilapidated scenes of former wealth and beauty – seems grotesque and intrusive, like making eye contact with survivors of a spectacular car wreck as you drive by. (see, for example, Detroit Disassembled) It’s fascinating and heartbreaking, just like Detroit.
What’s so different about Detroit that this could have happened? Turns out, not that much. A few bad choices and missteps over the years and Detroit became the poster child of urban decay. Martelle doesn’t set out to solve the problems, but simply lays out Detroit’s history for better understanding. With Detroit as an example, the hope is to prevent it from becoming the norm for post-industrial American cities.
Check the BPL catalog for this title: Detroit: A Biography
GREAT LINES:
Music makes us humans rich. It is the revelation of the divine. It takes us to paradise.
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Alice Herz-Sommer, born 1903 in Prague, is the oldest living Holocaust survivor. She is also an extraordinary pianist and teacher, whose skills were exploited by the Nazis to give concerts for prisoners at the Theresienstadt concentration camp where she and her family were imprisoned. Holocaust memoirs abound, but what makes Alice’s story unique is her unquenchable zest for and delight in life, and her fierce devotion to protecting her only child from the harsh realities of camp existence. Also unusual in many Holocaust memoirs, Alice’s life post-Liberation occupies nearly a third of the book, as she attempts to re-establish a life for herself and her son (her husband and mother died in the camps), first unsuccessfully in Prague before moving to Israel and finally London, where she now lives. There are many exceptional and unexpected turns to Alice’s life, but musicians in general and pianists in particular will love the section in which many of Chopin’s horrendously difficult and beautiful Etudes are analyzed for their musical content and how it reflects the events of Alice’s life at the time. 16 pages of photographs show Alice’s family, friends and career highlights but the most touching images in the book are a series of 4 photographs of Alice at age 102, listening to music in her home in Hampstead. She is thoughtfully and actively engaged with the music. The final photo shows her leaning back, hands on her cheeks, eyes closed, and a brilliant smile of rapturous delight. Inspirational to pianists, certainly, but it’s an unforgettable and uplifting story that will engage many.
Check the BPL catalog for this title: Alice’s Piano
GREAT LINE:
The socialists loved ideas, but Churchill, the unrepentant Victorian Tory, loved life.
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When a German-educated Oxford professor of physics was asked who was the smartest person he had ever met, he replied without hesitation, “Winston Churchill.” Churchill was undoubtedly also one of the most complex, and probably had more influence on world history than any other democratically elected leader in the last 100 years. He was born into privilege at the height of Victorian imperialism, educated in its best and worst ideals, and then tried to uphold and preserve those ideals (and that empire) against the terrible tragedies and absolute monsters of the 20th Century. Manchester was both an historian and a novelist and so does a wonderful job exploring Churchill’s psychology, how great strengths were the sources of both brilliant success and perplexing failure. This is a long two-volume work, but the first two chapters of Volume One summarize Churchill’s career and explain what it must have felt like to be a part of the British Empire in all its glory so these two chapters can be read as a stand-alone work. But readers wanting to know more have both volumes of Manchester’s work to educate them.
Check the BPL catalog for this title: The Last Lion
OPENING LINE:
We tend to think of mental hospitals as snake pits, hells of chaos and misery, squalor and brutality.
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I was gobsmacked by this book! This volume is filled with beautiful photographs of crumbling asylums. It is a form of photojournalism that tells of the majesty of asylums: their architecture, interiors, landscaping and purpose. And it also tells the story of their decline and decay: the shattered windows, peeling paint, abandoned suitcases and trees growing up through cement. The pictures themselves are stunning and the story they paint is equally moving. Coupled with an introductory essay by Oliver Sacks who clearly loves these facilities and what they represent for our society, the result is a marvelous book.
Check the BPL catalog for this title: Asylum
GREAT LINE:
If we could understand its loves, as well as its hates, we would be nearer to understanding the mystery of human life.
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Why did the great nations of Europe, enjoying the highest level of prosperity and freedom in the history of the world, suddenly throw themselves into war against each other? And why didn’t they stop before they were financially ruined, their leaders disgraced, their populations imbued with racial hatred, and 10-million of their finest young men dead on the fields of battle? Keegan, a teacher at Britain’s Sandhurst military academy, tries to make sense of it all, using episodes from the war to show how generals, politicians, and ordinary soldiers became caught in a tragic unfolding of plans they could neither foresee nor control. This is history at the highest level.
Check the BPL catalog for this title: The First World War
GREAT LINES:
You may be tempted to call it a work of art; as if something that began with civil engineering ended somewhat in the neighborhood of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony
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This surprisingly wide-ranging history of the creation of the most famous hydroelectric dam in the US opens with the night-time rail journey made by Franklin Delano Roosevelt to the dedication ceremonies of the “colossus” then known as Boulder Dam (later renamed for FDR’s predecessor in a bit of semi-comic back-and-forth intrigue only possible after FDR’s death). That ceremony marked the start of FDR’s reframing of the dam’s creation as emblematic of the great public works and jobs-creation projects that marked his first two terms in office, even though it had been in the works since the first decade of the century. Hiltzik amplifies this: “Hoover Dam was the first manifestation of the clamorous, ascendant West’s expanding influence in Washington…It’s water and hydroelectricity turned California into the most politically weighty state in the union, it fueled the development of the isolated cities of the Southwest into bustling Sunbelt metropolises, which continue today to drain Eastern cities of money, population, and talent.” In re-examining this massive project today, Hiltzik asks “other, darker questions” such as whether it was right to build the dam in the first place, and in the course of his investigation, describes historical connections and personages of a dazzling variety: the Wobblies last stand, LA Water and Power’s William Mulholland, Teddy Roosevelt, and CA’s Progressive Senator Hiram Johnson. Perhaps no other man-made object carries such symbolic weight and evokes so many tentacles of history.
A great read from many angles: labor and environmental history, political drama, social migrations, and gloriously recondite Californiana .
Check the BPL Catalog for this title: Colossus : Hoover Dam and the making of the American century