An epic joint biography, Masters and Commanders: How Four Titans Won the War in the West, 1941-1945 explores the degree to which the course of the World War II turned on the relationships and temperaments of four of the strongest personalities of the twentieth century: political masters Churchill and Roosevelt and the commanders of their armed forces, General Sir Alan Brooke and General George C. Marshall. Each was exceptionally tough willed and strong minded, and each was certain that he knew best how to win the war. Yet each knew that he had to win at least two of the others if he was to have his strategy adopted. Andrew Roberts traces the mutual suspicion and admiration, the charm and rebuffs, the often-explosive disagreements and wary reconciliations, and he helps us appreciate the motives and imperatives acting upon these key leaders struggling to destroy Nazism.
Drawing on newly discovered verbatim accounts of Churchill's war-cabinet meetings and on the private papers of nearly 70 contemporaries, Roberts reconstructs the lively debates of the 4 principals and other leading figures, and attempts to answer some of the key questions of Allied strategy. Why, when the most direct route from Germany to Britain was through north-western France, did the Western Allies launch attacks via North Africa, Sicily, and Rome? Why, if Operation Overlord in June 1944 was intended to be the start of the Allies' great thrust into Germany, did four hundred thousand men land 500 miles to the south, in southern France, two months later? Why did the Allies not take Berlin or Prague and allow the Iron Curtain to descend where it did?
Masters and Commanders: How Four Titans Won the War in the West, 1941-1945 dramatically re-creates the atmosphere and maneuverings through which Allied grand strategy was forged and reveals the profound impact of personality upon our history.
Any historian attempting a survey of Nazi Germany during the second world war confronts formidable challenges. First, the available literature is so vast that it almost defies synthesis in a single volume, however substantial. Second, the author needs to avoid writing yet another Hitler biography. Third, he is required to study the most appalling and dispiriting material. As Richard J. Evans writes in his preface, the subject is ‘sometimes shocking and depressing almost beyond belief’. Nevertheless, in this book (the third of his trilogy on Nazism) Evans achieves a remarkable degree of success in meeting the demands of this most intractable subject. He makes a sustained assault on the great mountain of published sources available and presents his summary in a remarkably lucid and vigorous narrative, mercifully free from theory. Instead, significant themes clearly emerge from a vast array of evidence.
Perhaps the most disturbing theme is the extent to which racialism in general and particularly anti-semitism permeated virtually every aspect of German society, policy and culture during the second world war. Evans draws on much recent research in the Federal Republic to bring out the direct role of the German army in many anti-semitic atrocities. On the Eastern Front it was commonplace for German soldiers to take part in the mass shootings of Jewish civilians. Some protested at the murders, like Colonel Helmuth Groscurth, a conservative opponent of the Nazi regime, but all Groscurth could achieve for the Jewish children in a village near Kiev was a brief delay of execution. Evans brings out the paradox that although Field Marshal Erwin Rommel was admired even by some in Britain, his victories opened up new opportunities for racialism. Together with military developments, Nazi genocide is a central focus of Evans’s account and there can be few more penetrating studies of the corrosive nihilism which results from these racialist policies.
In Sowing Crisis: The Cold War and American Dominance in the Middle East, Rashid Khalidi criticizes U.S. policies formulated to oppose the Soviets during the Cold War, which, “consistently undermined democracy and exacerbated tensions in the Middle East.” He maintains that militant political Islam was exploited as an “ideological tool” against Communism: “It may seem hard to believe today, but for decades the United States was in fact a major patron, indeed in some respects the major patron, of earlier incarnations” of Islamic fundamentalism.” He argues the problems that beset the Middle East today are in large part a result of the “blowback” from these Cold War policies.
This argument is very similar to the one made by Steve Coll, the Pulitizer Prize winning author of Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001 . In this book, Coll argues that the fires that fueled the growth of Al Qaida were fed by Cold War policies, again by supporting fundamentalism as a tool against the Soviets.
Whereas Coll won a Pulitzer Prize for his contentions, Khalidi has been demonized by the American press. An unfortunately typical example of the attacks he has endured was the allegations by the Republican nominees that Khalidi was a “radical” and “terrorist” equivalent to a “neo-Nazi”. Khalidi has also been barred from lecturing about the Middle East in the New York public-school system even though he holds the prestigious Edward Said Chair in Modern Arab Studies at Columbia University.
Khalidi is looking for solutions to the Palestinian situation. He asserts, “I wouldn’t ask an Israeli to feel misery at the establishment of his state, so I don’t see why a Palestinian should be asked to feel joy about the destruction of his society.” The reception accorded to Said raises the interesting question of how far academic freedom extends to those who advocate paradigm shifts, especially one so freighted with religious, cultural, and political meaning.
I've been waiting for this book since 2005. That's when The New Yorker published David Grann's article about explorer Percy Fawcett and his quest to find the mythic city of El Dorado in the Amazon. The story has everything to fire the imagination: Romance, nostalgia, bravery, monomania, hardship, adventure, science, tragedy, mystery.
Fawcett was last in the line of heroic explorers that included Henry Stanley, Richard Burton and Ernest Shackleton — men who left Europe in search of adventure and science in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Taking the Amazon as his specialty, Fawcett led a number of grueling expeditions before disappearing into the jungle in 1925, at the age of 57.
The mystery of Fawcett's last expedition, which also claimed the life of his 21-year-old son Jack, has proven an irresistible obsession. Dozens of explorers sought to follow his steps and find El Dorado, which Fawcett cryptically called "Z." Grann calculates 100 or more died in the expeditions.
A New Yorker who prefers elevators to stairs and doesn't even like camping, Grann came under Fawcett's spell as well. He examined the explorer's papers at the Royal Geographical Society in London. Through a Fawcett descendant, Grann uncovered a previously unknown cache of diaries that pointed to the actual path the explorer took on his last expedition.
The Lost City of Z does not disappoint. It is at once a biography of Fawcett, a science book on the nature, a history of the era of exploration, and ethnography of the Amazon, and a thrilling armchair adventure.
Grann induces awed respect for Fawcett's drive, energy, intelligence and physical abilities. He also knocks the romance off the proposition of tropical exploration. Fawcett and his underlings coped not only with exhaustion, starvation, disease, wild animals and hostile Indians, but also with an unending scourge of insects, including maggots that bored under the skin, causing a ceaseless discharge of slime and puss.
Blessed with athleticism and a near-superhuman resistance to disease and parasites, Fawcett drove his men mercilessly, viewing death as evidence of laziness. A man of his time, he respected Indians for their intelligence, physical strength and mastery of their environment, yet could not believe them capable of civilization without benefit of some ancient Caucasian influence.
Grann's own Brazilian adventures are mild compared with those of Fawcett. He does not find the bones of the great explorer, but using the tools of modern journalism — research, persistence, interviewing — he comes up with a highly plausible explanation of what happened to the expedition. Best of all, Grann finds El Dorado.
Actually, he finds University of Florida archaeologist Michael Heckenberger, who lives among the Kurikuro Indians and has uncovered evidence that an advanced civilization existed in the Amazon until European contact brought new diseases. This urban culture built bridges, roads and causeways but lived in harmony with nature, and left none of the monumental architecture Fawcett was looking for. Indeed, Fawcett frequently noted the widespread examples of sophisticated pottery in the jungle. It turns out he stood in the middle of Z. His preconceptions just prevented him from seeing it.
The suprises start right away in "Nixonland." It opens with the Watts riots, a singularly unconventional starting point for a narrative built around Richard M. Nixon, who was not in office and not involved with the 1965 events or their aftermath. But these passages in Rick Perlstein's rambunctious, ambitious, energetic tour through the Nixon era set both the tone and approach that distinguish this remarkable work.
As the initial setting makes clear, Perlstein is after something other than biography. The world almost certainly has enough Nixon biographies; few subjects have tantalized writers more than the troubled soul of Yorba Linda's favorite son. Instead, he tells the story of Nixon's America, a country of resentment and division, anger and jealousy, one where politics is brutal and psychological, where victors make the vanquished suffer. Perlstein, who covered some of this ground in "Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus," aims here at nothing less than weaving a tapestry of social upheaval. His success is dazzling.
His method is worth noting as well. "Nixonland" is not, fundamentally, a work of primary research. Its sources largely are news accounts and other books; although there are occasional citations to personal interviews and papers, this is a synthesis, not an investigation. Written with verve and a ranging, incisive intelligence, the book re-defines the fissures of that period as the product of conflict between two forces, which Perlstein dubs the Franklins and the Orthogonians after two fraternities that claimed opposite corners during Nixon's Whittier College days.
The Franklins were the dapper, refined Big Men on Campus; in the larger story of "Nixonland," they are the Ivy Leaguers, the U.S. Supreme Court clerks, men of privilege like Jack Kennedy and Alger Hiss, Jerry Voorhis and Eugene McCarthy. This was not Nixon, who co-founded the Orthogonians for the strivers and loners, the shirt-sleeved and tough. Nixon, as is known, met his wife by driving her on dates with other men, simmering and persisting until she eventually accepted him. He was drawn to others like himself, and he found them on the outskirts of every kind of organization, even in sports, where most observers saw fame or glamour. "It was an eminently Nixonian insight," Perlstein writes, "that on every sports team there are only a couple of stars, and that if you want to win the loyalty of the team for yourself, the surest, if least glamorous, strategy is to concentrate on the non-spectacular -- silent -- majority. The ones who labor quietly, sometimes resentfully, in the quarterback's shadow: the linemen, the guards, the punter."