Book Review
The book “The age of astonishment” is the history of a century through the eyes of an ordinary man who lived through it. The author holds a low opinion of recent decades. “The difference between a buggy and a jet,” he writes, “is far greater than the difference between the rotary phones I grew up using and the smart phone I use today.” He maintains that the true miracle century was 1870-1970, and he makes a convincing case through the biography of his grandfather John Morris. His imaginative “mongrel” approach—“a mix of…biography, history, reportage, memoir, autobiography, and, when the record runs thin, speculation that flirts with fiction”—is successful. John was born into a slave-owning Virginia family. The end of the Civil War led to the departure of most of the plantation workers, so his father took a job as professor of English at the University of Georgia. Son John entered college in 1879 and proved an avid scholar while Thomas Edison and others were launching “the golden age of the independent American inventor.” John, an obsessive newspaper reader, undoubtedly soaked up these developments. After graduation, he drifted before deciding to attend the University of Berlin, where he discovered his life’s work: philology. His career as a professor writing scholarly articles for obscure journals does not seem like material for a page-turner, but his modest life, in contrast with the turbulent outside world, makes for an engaging read. The author cuts away regularly to recount other historical elements that were prominent in his grandfather’s life: electric light, flush toilets, the creation of modern medicine, radio, movies, TV, automobiles, two world wars, and the atomic bomb. Though the author offers few novel insights, he does a superb job of recounting a life amid a series of significant decades. TW
Blood and ruins
The book with more than 1,000 pages on World War II might seem overkill but not for one of the world’s leading military historians. The author disagrees with “the conventional view of the war,” which portrays “Hitler, Mussolini and the Japanese military as causes of crisis rather than its effects, which is what they were.” He emphasizes that historians describe World War I as the outcome of a 19th-century global imperial order dominated by the British and French and opposed by Germany, which considered itself a “have-not” nation whose survival depended on “conquering additional imperial zones of its own.” Few readers will quarrel with that assessment but they may be surprised with the author’s startling yet persuasive argument that the same description applies to WWII. The 1920s featured three unhappy nations—Germany, Japan, and Italy—who felt that their national identities were in danger unless they could expand their influences. First off the mark was Japan, which invaded China in 1931. The author emphasizes that Hitler had no intention of conquering the world. His view was that Germany, “as a vigorous, progressive and cultured people, lacked sufficient territory to…nourish a growing population.” Annexing Austria, the Sudetenland and Czechoslovakia were acts of an energetic imperial nation and it was no secret that Poland was next. Still, Hitler expressed surprise when Britain and France declared war. A master of technical detail, the author summarizes the campaigns but concentrates on the backgrounds and decisions of the leaders who, despite rhetoric about freedom, found themselves in a high-tech imperialistic war. Victory occurs halfway through and the author devotes the remaining chapters to other relevant imperial issues: Britain’s, France’s, and Holland’s violent efforts to preserve their empires did not peter out until the 1960s; China suffered civil war; and Stalin brutally took control of Eastern Europe. TW
