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by Alden Mudge

Some readers may not feel the United States today is quite the unum that Simon Winchester declares it to be in his engaging and informative The Men Who United the States. But after living in many places around the world and traveling extensively in the United States, the English-born Winchester became a U.S. citizen on Independence Day 2011, so he should be allowed a sparkler-flare or two of unalloyed, optimistic patriotism.

Besides, the unity he writes about so well is not political or cultural. Rather, Winchester believes “the ties that bind are most definitely, in their essence, practical and physical things.” He is most interested in the continent-spanning technologies—canals, railroads, highways, electricity, telegraph, radio, telephones and television—that have brought Americans together over vast distances.

Winchester tells the stories of the continent-spanning technologies that have brought Americans together.

What makes this book so enjoyable is that he ties the development of these advances to some brilliant but idiosyncratic personalities. Clarence King, the first director of the U.S. Geological Survey, exposed the Great Diamond Fraud and later led a fascinating secret life. The abstemious Nikola Tesla may have had a greater impact on modern uses of electricity than Thomas Edison. And who knew that Theodore Judah, the possibly mad son of a Connecticut preacher, successfully promoted a transcontinental railroad route but died before it was completed?

Winchester draws, too, from his own travels in the U.S. In one of the book’s best segments, he recounts a cross-country road trip using Dwight David Eisenhower’s 1919 diary from the U.S. Army’s Transcontinental Convoy, sent to assess how quickly troops could be deployed across the country. Not very quickly, it turns out, giving rise to President Eisenhower’s commitment to building the interstate highway system.

As a new citizen, Winchester also notes something that is far more controversial than it used to be: the important role of big government in forging e pluribus into unum. Without a lot of fanfare, he reminds us that for all its flaws, American government is not them; it’s us.

Biography, Nonfiction

Nonfiction Biography

What made Manson

Review by Alden Mudge

by Alden Mudge

It has been 44 years since Charles Manson manipulated members of his so-called Family into murdering pregnant actress Sharon Tate and eight other people in a delusional attempt to spark “Helter Skelter,” the end-of-the-world race war that Manson had convinced his followers would lead to their rise as saviors of the world.

Crazy stuff like this has a long shelf life. In the almost half-century since, rivers of ink have flowed in the attempt to understand how this diminutive ex-con could have lured normal-seeming middle-class youngsters (mostly girls) into savagery. In fact, so much has been written about Manson and his followers that it’s easy to wonder if there’s anything new to say.

It turns out there is. Jeff Guinn managed to track down and interview Manson’s older cousin, with whom a young Charlie Manson had lived when his mother was in prison, and his younger sister, adopted, to Manson’s great dismay, while he was imprisoned at McNeil Island, Washington. Neither of these women can shed light on the ultimate source of Manson’s dysfunction—he apparently was a sociopath from a very young age—but they do clear up much of the misinformation about his childhood and help Guinn offer a richer understanding of Manson’s early life. Guinn also interviewed former cellmates, Manson Family members, prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi (who wrote the definitive book on the murder trial), and a host of others. The result is that Guinn’s well-researched biography, Manson, offers many new details about Manson’s life and enhances our understanding of him in several ways.

It turns out that Manson, who hated formal schooling, was a serious student of manipulation. Though functionally illiterate, he worked his way through Dale Carnegie’s books about the arts of persuasion, investigated Scientology not for its dogma but for its methods of captivating followers and sat at the feet of pimps to learn techniques for manipulating women, and through them, men. Guinn also shows Manson to have been a guru worried about losing his followers. His need to bind them to him, Guinn suggests plausibly, was part of his path to murder.

Finally, Guinn does an excellent job of placing Manson in the context of the tumultuous 1960s. In some circles, Manson and his followers are thought to be the logical end-product of those wild times. But Guinn offers a more nuanced view: “Charlie Manson is a product of the 1960s—and also of the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s,” he writes. In what is probably the fullest biography of Manson to date, Guinn shows that Manson the murderer is not just a creation of the ’60s but the unfortunate sum of all his parts.

Social Science

Social Science

Americans and their guns

Review by Alden Mudge

by Alden Mudge

In a postscript to Gun Guys written after the murders at Sandy Hook Elementary School (and after his manuscript had gone to galleys), Dan Baum offers “three modest suggestions” for improving gun safety. These suggestions—good (and mandatory) safety training for anyone who owns a gun; holding gun owners criminally liable for crimes committed with guns stolen from their houses; and better background checks—will surprise no one who has read all the way through this well-written, thought-provoking and often humorous account of his road trip through America’s gun culture.

Baum, a progressive Democrat who describes himself as “a stoop-shouldered, bald-headed, middle-aged Jew in pleated pants and glasses,” has been a gun enthusiast and collector since he was young. As such, he felt he was a gun guy who didn’t really belong to the country’s gun culture. So in 2009, just after President Obama moved into the White House (and set off a gun-buying frenzy), Baum set out to explore that culture. He stopped at gun shops and gun shows across the country, and talked with all manner of gun enthusiasts, a victim of gun violence and even a reformed gangbanger who had shot and killed a rival. He visited both NRA headquarters and the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence. As an experiment, he openly wore a handgun into a Home Depot, an Apple store and a Whole Foods store in his hometown of Boulder, Colorado (and was surprised and a bit disappointed that no one reacted). Later he applied for a concealed carry permit, then observed the rather counterintuitive psychological effects that carrying a concealed weapon had on him.

Because he is curious and observant and because he straddles a sort of invisible line (not in favor of gun bans, but appalled by the Second Amendment absolutists of the NRA and their blatant fear-mongering), Baum is an excellent companion on this road trip. Part of his project is to find data about what works and what does not work in efforts to reduce gun violence. Even those who favor a complete ban on guns like the AR-15 should read the chapter “The iGun,” which goes a long way toward explaining the appeal and versatility of the weapon and the not-so-implausible arguments of those who believe they should be able to own one. In fact, Gun Guys is the sort of readable, information-rich book that could change minds and help bridge the huge national divide over guns. Let’s hope it finds the readership it deserves.

History, Nonfiction

Nonfiction History

Plotting our place in the world

Review by Alden Mudge

by Alden Mudge

“Maps hold a clue to what makes us human,” Simon Garfield writes in the introduction to his lively, loose-limbed exploration of our seemingly tireless quest to visually represent the lay of the land. Garfield’s interest in the human side of mapmaking—the personalities, anecdotes, curiosities—is what makes On the Map such an enjoyable read.

Garfield’s 22 chapters follow a rough chronology, beginning with the Great Library of Alexandria, where Eratosthenes of Cyrene in the third century B.C. came remarkably close to calculating the true circumference of the earth, and ending with contemporary medicine’s attempt to map the human brain. In between, he regales readers with tales of mapmakers and map thieves, treasure maps, the origins of the atlas and the development of the beautiful schematic map of the London tube. Who was Mercator and why do we think his distortion-filled map is so important? How did the Americas come to be named after Amerigo Vespucci, a former bank clerk who sailed for South America nearly a decade after Columbus reached the Caribbean? Why did a nonexistent mountain range remain on maps of Africa for almost a century? The answers can be found in On the Map.

An Englishman, Garfield’s topic selections skew toward the British, but On the Map also includes chapters on the grid map of Manhattan and the mapping efforts of the Lewis and Clark expedition (with an interesting aside on Native Americans’ evanescent sand maps). So On the Map is capacious rather than comprehensive. It is also vastly entertaining.

Memoir

Memoir

Didion’s year of grief

Review by Alden Mudge

by Alden Mudge

After 40 years of marriage, writer Joan Didion did not have a single letter from her husband, writer John Gregory Dunne. This was because, with rare exceptions, the pair was together 24 hours a day. They worked together in California hotel rooms on movie scripts or down the hall from one another in their New York apartment on their respective essays and novels. "I could not count the times during an average day when something would come up that I needed to tell him," Didion writes. Returning home alone from the hospital where she has learned Dunne is dead – he collapsed and died as the couple was sitting down to dinner on December 30, 2003 – Didion remembers "thinking that I needed to discuss this with John."

The Year of Magical Thinking is Didion's slender, intensely personal, deeply moving and stylistically beautiful account of the year following her husband's death. It was a year in which Didion struggled with the belief that she could have and should have done something to prevent her husband's death ("I was thinking as small children think, as if my thoughts or wishes had the power to reverse the narrative, change the outcome."). It was a year in which she was constantly swept into a vortex of memories of the couple's former life. It was a year in which grief came in recursive, paralyzing waves. It was also a year in which the couple's only child, daughter Quintana Roo, was twice in a coma and not expected to live. [Tragically, Quintana died in late August, just weeks before Didion's book was published.]

At the hospital on the night Dunne died, the social worker sent to be with Didion refers to her as "a pretty cool customer." Didion is surely one of the best prose stylists writing today, and her account is almost clinically precise. She is unsparing in her examination of the "derangement" she experienced after her husband's death and during her daughter's illness ("So profound was the isolation in which I was then operating that it did not immediately occur to me that for the mother of a patient to show up at the hospital wearing blue cotton scrubs could only be viewed as a suspicious violation of boundaries."). But The Year of Magical Thinking is anything but "cool." Instead, the book reverberates with passion and even, occasionally, ironic humor.

"Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it," Didion writes. In The Year of Magical Thinking, she offers a powerful, personally revealing description of that place.

Memoir, Nonfiction

Nonfiction Memoir

Looking into memory’s mirror

Review by Alden Mudge

by Alden Mudge

In January 2011, a month before he turned 64, Paul Auster began working on Winter Journal, his remarkable meditation on “what it has felt like to live inside this body from the first day you can remember being alive until this one.” Notice his use of the second person? One of the first pleasures of Winter Journal is its feeling of immediacy, as if we are inside Auster’s head staring with him into memory’s mirror, listening to him talk to himself.

Another great pleasure of the book is the modulated bravado with which he deploys and enlivens age-old literary techniques. In this unconventional memoir, for example, Auster catalogs his memories with all the entertaining artistry of the best medieval poets. He takes an inventory of all the scars on his face and their origins (many having to do with an all-American boyhood on the baseball field). Looking at his right hand and thinking of Keats, he lists all the activities of that hand, from zipping up his pants to wheeling suitcases through airports. He catalogues his travels in the world—and, later, in New York City. He remembers and describes the events and feelings he experienced in the 21 permanent addresses where he has lived from birth to the present.

In less able hands, this could feel like gimmickry. But Auster, author of highly regarded novels such as Sunset Park and The Brooklyn Follies, somehow uses this literary prestidigitation to take a reader very deep into the heart of the matter. He writes movingly about his emotionally complicated mother. His love for his second wife and the central importance of their 30-year marriage glows on almost every page. He uses a brilliant exposition of the 1950 movie D.O.A. to explain how he physically experiences his panic attacks. And near the end of Winter Journal, he describes “the scalding, epiphanic moment of clarity that pushed you through the crack in the universe that allowed you to begin again.”

In the end, Auster says to himself: “You have entered the winter of your life.” But this is less elegiac than it sounds. Auster, like all of us, has been scarred by life. But growing old also means that he has accumulated experiences and memories. And memory, experience and love trump scars, pain and disappointment in Winter Journal.

Biography, Nonfiction

Nonfiction Biography

Frozen food’s eccentric genius

Review by Alden Mudge

by Alden Mudge

Yes, Virginia, there really was a man named Birdseye behind the Birds Eye® frozen food brand.

Clarence Birdseye, who was born in Brooklyn at the end of 1886, did not originate the idea of fast-freezing food—he always credited the Inuit for the concept. But as Mark Kurlansky points out in this charming biography, Birdseye “changed our civilization. He created an industry by modernizing the process of food preservation and in so doing nationalized and then internationalized food distribution.”

Locavores certainly won’t think that’s such a great legacy. Fresh food is definitely better than frozen, but Kurlansky notes that at the time, many people, especially the urban poor and middle classes, were eating canned food of inferior quality. Before Birdseye began tinkering with food-freezing processes in 1923, attempts to freeze fish, meat and vegetables often turned to rancid mush. As a result, consumers were extremely skeptical about frozen foods. So Birdseye pushed relentlessly for a high-quality product, which he marketed with energetic creativity. Just before the 1929 stock market crash, Birdseye sold his company to what would soon become General Foods for the astonishing sum of $23.5 million. He stayed on with the new company as an executive, and later as a consultant, continuing to invent new products and processes.

Birdseye was 37 years old when he began trying to preserve food by freezing it. Before that his life seemed to be an almost random assortment of efforts, beset by failure. He liked to tinker and invent. He liked to hunt and was always interested in food. He was insatiably curious and eager for adventure—first in the territories of the western U.S. (where he often worked in life-threatening circumstances as a U.S. Department of Agriculture researcher) and later in the iced-in reaches of Labrador (where he tried and eventually failed to build a fox-farming business). He believed in taking risks; rather than being defeated by failures, he culled from them the lessons he needed to bring his grandest project to fruition.

In Kurlansky’s telling, Birdseye was both ahead of and a product of his era. A prodigious inventor/marketer, he rarely recorded anything about his personal thoughts or inner life. He wore a necktie while gardening, for heaven’s sake. But the prolific Kurlansky, whose marvelous bestsellers Salt and Cod demonstrate a knack for discovering the vibrant details that bring a subject to life, manages to correct many of the myths that have accreted to the Birdseye story. And while he does not solve all the mysteries of Clarence Birdseye’s personality, he offers an account of his life and accomplishments that is sympathetic, informative and eye-opening.

Yes, Virginia, there really was a man named Birdseye behind the Birds Eye® frozen food brand.

Clarence Birdseye, who was born in Brooklyn at the end of 1886, did not originate the idea of fast-freezing food—he always credited the Inuit for the concept. But as Mark…

American History, History, Nonfiction

Nonfiction History American History

Cleaning up a seedy NYC

Review by Alden Mudge

by Alden Mudge

As evident from his book’s subtitle, “Theodore Roosevelt’s Doomed Quest to Clean Up Sin-Loving New York,” Richard Zacks has a pleasingly colorful writing style. Luckily it is a style that mirrors, especially at the outset of this little-known and somewhat dappled adventure, the brashness of its central historical figure, Theodore Roosevelt.

In the early 1890s, a few short years before the city of Brooklyn joined with New York to become what we now know as the five boroughs of metropolitan New York City, a political and moral reform movement arose in the city, especially among well-heeled (and largely Republican) civic leaders. The city then had a population of roughly two million people, among them 30,000 prostitutes. To summarize in a blander manner than the lively Mr. Zacks: A series of investigations revealed that prostitution had links to police corruption, which in turn had links to Tammany Hall, the largely immigrant, working-class political machine that controlled New York City. The result was that in 1894, voters threw the bums out and installed a reform mayor, who appointed 36-year-old Teddy Roosevelt president of a four-man, bipartisan-at-least-in-name police commission to clean things up.

The ambitious Roosevelt, who had been wasting away in a Washington, D.C., civil service post, leapt at the chance. At first his vigorous efforts and his widely reported nighttime rambles in the city’s rollicking, vice-ridden neighborhoods were very popular. But then Roosevelt decided the police should enforce the laws against selling alcohol on Sundays. Roosevelt’s ethical (and valid) point was that allowing police to selectively enforce or ignore the alcohol ban led to favoritism and corruption.

The problem was, Sunday was the only day off for working people, and enforcement deprived them of a customary form of entertainment—socializing in the city’s saloons. Meanwhile the law did not prohibit sales of alcohol in hotels and the clubs of wealthy gentlemen. Class warfare? Tammany Democrats thought so, and they used Roosevelt’s efforts to thoroughly whip the city’s Republicans in the next election. For the remaining years of his term, Roosevelt was mired in grinding conflict with fellow commissioners and undermined by upstate Republican politicians who distanced themselves from him in order to maintain their own political power. He finally sought escape in a political patronage job in Washington.

Theodore Roosevelt’s term as police commissioner was, as Zacks entertainingly points out in his layered and well-researched Island of Vice, a significant learning experience for the future president. And probably also for residents of New York City, who never gave their native son a majority of their votes.

History, Nonfiction

Nonfiction History

A modern look at medieval Venice

Review by Alden Mudge

by Alden Mudge

We moderns often view the past through the warm mists of over-idealization or the dark clouds of easy condemnation. The past is either impossibly great or astonishingly primitive. In either case it is hard for us to recognize it as human experience, as complicated and as bafflingly rational and irrational as our own.

One of the outstanding virtues of City of Fortune, Roger Crowley’s wonderful new history of 500 years (1000 AD to 1500 AD) of Venice’s rise and decline as a commercial, seafaring empire, is that he sees Venice as “almost shockingly modern.” He writes vividly about Venice’s remarkably sophisticated management and trading systems and their skillful diplomacy in an era when the Venetian republic struggled—often violently—against economic competitors like the Byzantine Empire, the Genoese and the Ottoman Empire to control and profit from worldwide trade, especially trade with China and India.

Venice was a city of the water, rather than the land. It was, Crowley writes beautifully, “a city grown hydroponically, conjured out of marsh.” As such, it organized itself communally, with a modern, rather than feudal, desire to dominate international commerce. And that commercial instinct made it an open society, very willing to bend or evade the religious proscriptions of the Pope and to deal with so-called infidels. Still, it was the Venetian willingness to underwrite Pope Innocent III’s Fourth Crusade that led to its early dominance, fascinatingly detailed in the opening section of City of Fortune. But Venice’s economic interests unhappily shifted the focus of the Fourth Crusade from conquering the Islamic-controlled Holy Lands to extracting concessions from the Christian Eastern Orthodox empire headquartered in Constantinople. As Crowley writes, “the sack of Constantinople burned a hole in Christian history; it was the scandal of the age and Venice was held deeply complicit in the act.”

That, of course, is only the beginning of the story of Venice’s remarkable rise, triumph and downfall. But in that early victory Crowley sees the seeds of the republic’s tragic demise: Venice’s subjugation of Constantinople opened space for the rise of the Ottoman Empire, which would eventually rein in—sometimes brutally—Venice’s commercial empire.

And, as Crowley, who also wrote the New York Times bestseller Empire of the Sea, points out near the end of City of Fortune, there were other contributing factors at work. Portugal’s success in sending ships around the Horn of Africa to Kolkata, for example, was a paradigm shift in international trade that undermined Venice’s position in the inland Mediterranean and Black Seas.

The “lessons of history” are often not as obvious as we would hope. But Roger Crowley’s vivid City of Fortune offers a contemporary reader a compelling narrative and many lessons to think about.

Classics, History

History Classics

Classic mythology for the modern reader

Review by Alden Mudge

by Alden Mudge

The gods of ancient Greece and Rome were not, shall we say, moral exemplars. They waged brutal intergenerational warfare (“Father Sky hated all his children”; Zeus, “raised on Crete hidden from the eyes of his father [Cronus],” led an ultimately scorched-earth revolt to overthrow him). They mated indiscriminately with close relatives (Zeus married his ever-and-rightfully jealous sister Hera), as well as mere mortals (poor Leda, raped by Zeus disguised as a swan). They played favorites (Hera tried to impede or kill Hercules—her husband’s bastard son—at every turn during his attempt to redeem himself after a murderous psychotic break, while Aphrodite watched fretfully over the fate of her mortal son Aeneas, refugee-founder of Rome). These gods philandered on an epic scale. They countenanced or encouraged murder. They feuded and fought. In other words, they bore little resemblance to the Judeo-Christian God of scriptures. But they sure do make for a heck of a story.

A virtue of Philip Freeman’s unembellished modern retelling of the classical myths is that he doesn’t pretty these stories up. Oh My Gods does not reduce these myths to children’s fairytales, nor does it seek a prurient narrative line. Instead these retold tales usually excite wonder and questions, such as “What does such a story mean to me?” Occasionally the shorter tales feel flat, lacking in drama or emotional depth. Oh My Gods is best when it tackles longer narratives such as the labors of Hercules, the fall of Troy and the voyages of Odysseus and Aeneas, near the end of the book.

Oh My Gods is probably not a book to read from start from finish in successive sittings. While it is too reader-friendly to be a reference book, it is just the book to dip into when one comes across a mention of an unfamiliar or barely remembered myth. Freeman, who has a Ph.D. in classics from Harvard and chairs the classics department at Luther College in Decorah, Iowa, writes, “my goal in this volume is . . . modest. I simply want to retell the great myths of Greece and Rome for modern readers while remaining as faithful as possible to the original sources.” In that he has largely succeeded.

Social Science

Social Science

Not with a bang but with a whisper

Review by Alden Mudge

by Alden Mudge

Maybe you lack the instinct for self-promotion. Maybe you can’t muster your employer’s rah-rah-rah-sis-boom-bah attitude. Maybe you’d rather stay home and read a novel instead of going out to the party of the year. So? Something’s the matter with you, and you should feel ashamed, right?

Wrong, says Susan Cain, author of Quiet, a vigorous, brainy and highly engaging defense of introversion. A self-proclaimed introvert herself, Cain examines in the first part of her book how our one-time “Culture of Character,” which gave roughly balanced respect to the positive characteristics of both introverts and extroverts, shifted to our contemporary “Culture of Personality,” a culture of marketing and self-marketing that almost exclusively (and to our peril) favors the risk-takers, the quick-decision-makers: in short, the extroverts.

Drawing on cultural histories and fascinating recent research in psychology and brain-function science, Cain challenges such misconceptions as “the myth of charismatic leadership,” the utility of group brainstorming and the idea that introversion is the result of bad parenting instead of an innate personality characteristic. “Probably the most common—and damaging— misunderstanding about personality types is that introverts are antisocial and extroverts are pro-social,” she writes. “But as we’ve seen, neither formulation is correct; introverts and extroverts are differently social.” In the final section of her book, she offers sensible advice on strategies that introverts can use to succeed in a society that operates within a value system she calls the “Extrovert Ideal”—without betraying their essential selves.

Cain enlivens her discussion with road trips and case studies. She skeptically enrolls in a seminar given by Tony Robbins, who is probably the extrovert ideal incarnate. She visits students and professors at Harvard Business School and Asian-American students in Silicon Valley. She cites the experiences of Rosa Parks and Mohandas Gandhi. She interviews husbands and wives, parents and children.

Cain says her “primary concern is the age-old dichotomy between the ‘man of action’ and the ‘man of contemplation,’ and how we could improve the world if only there was a greater balance of power between the two types.” Hers is surely an argument worth talking about.

History, Nonfiction

Nonfiction History

Four journeys into the unknown

Review by Alden Mudge

by Alden Mudge

In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue. Most of us know that. But few of us know that Columbus made three additional voyages to what he believed until the end of his life was an outpost of India, a gateway to China. These subsequent voyages were, as Laurence Bergreen writes, “each more adventurous and tragic than those preceding it.” Columbus’ final voyage, made between 1502 and 1504 when he was crippled by arthritis and other infirmities, is an astonishing tale of shipwreck and rebellion, and because of its hardships it was the journey, Bergreen says, that was Columbus’ favorite.

Bergreen has written highly praised books about other explorers—Over the Edge, about Ferdinand Magellan’s circumnavigation of the globe, and Marco Polo. That background allows him to provide both historical and psychological context in his portrait of Columbus. For example, knowing that Columbus was shaped by his youth in Genoa, at the time a fascinating but rapacious city-state that practiced slavery, casts his appalling enslavement of the native populations of the Caribbean in a somewhat different light. And Bergreen helps us understand the revolutionary nature of Columbus’ accomplishments, despite the fact that Columbus himself never quite grasped where he really was.

The Columbus who emerges here is an ambitious, adventurous, often autocratic man who has a “penchant for self-dramatization.” Deeply mystical, he believed he was on a mission from God, and through his knowledge of navigation he sometimes tricked his crews and the native populations into believing that too. On his third voyage he seemed delusional. “An aura of chaos hovers over his entire life and adventures,” Bergreen writes. In fact, one of the biggest surprises in Columbus: The Four Voyages is the discovery that Columbus was just as vilified in his own day as he has become in some quarters today.

In the end it is possible to respect but hard to admire Columbus. But it is easy to admire Bergreen’s account of Columbus’ life and his four voyages to the New World.

History, Nonfiction

Nonfiction History

The voices of World War I

Review by Alden Mudge

by Alden Mudge

Peter Englund is “an academic historian by training” and the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, which each year awards the Nobel Prize in Literature. In his compelling “intimate history” of the First World War, The Beauty and the Sorrow, Englund purposefully bends toward the literary and away from the academic to focus on the “everyday aspect of the war” and “depict the war as an individual experience.”

To that end, Englund draws from the memoirs, letters and diaries of 20 individuals who wrote about their experiences during the war. These include a former American opera star married to a Polish aristocrat, a 12-year-old German schoolgirl, an Australian ambulance driver in the Serbian army and soldiers and sailors from every theater of the war. Although several of the memoirists were prominent in their day—a Belgian flying ace, a French writer and civil servant—none of the people are well known today, a fact that not only burnishes the book’s luster of authenticity but also allows the details of ordinary lives lived in extraordinary times to surprise and even shock a reader.

In weaving his almost day-by-day narrative, Englund more often summarizes than directly quotes from his sources. The downside of this is that a reader is sometimes uncertain whether the opinions being expressed belong to him or his characters. But this approach enables Englund to create a coherent story and, more importantly, to suffuse that story with the always interesting results of his exacting research. And he manages to do this without obscuring the hearts and souls of his main characters.

Most of these individuals were enthusiastic about the war at the outset, certain of the justice of their cause and confident of victory. By the end, after years of hardship and privation, most were completely disillusioned, both with the war and with those who brought them into the conflict. One German sailor, for instance, a super-patriot at the beginning, joined a widespread rebellion near the end, furious at the arrogance and incompetence of the aristocratic military leadership. Thus The Beauty and the Sorrow begins as a narrative of war as experienced on the battlefield and on the home front, and ends as a remarkable chronicle of the physical and psychic collapse of the Old Order.

Alden Mudge

The journey to become one nation

What made Manson

Americans and their guns

Plotting our place in the world

Didion’s year of grief

Looking into memory’s mirror

Frozen food’s eccentric genius

Cleaning up a seedy NYC

A modern look at medieval Venice

Classic mythology for the modern reader

Not with a bang but with a whisper

Four journeys into the unknown

The voices of World War I

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