book reviews:

The Yacoubian Building

Travels with Herodotus

Dreams and Shadows—the Future of the Middle East

Anna of the Russias

Infidel

The Last Mughal

Indian Summer

Maria Antoinette

The Force of Destiny

Amie Semple McPherson and the Resurrection of Christian America

An Extraordinary Life—an essay on the life of Paul Bowels

Carthage Must Be Destroyed

Catherine the Great

Circe

Cleopatra—a Life

Nine Lives

The Collector

The Secret Life of Marilyn Munroe

The Real Lolita

Golden Empire

The Lost City of the Monkey Gods

The Monk of Mokha

The Perfect Nanny

The Yacoubian Building, a Novel

by Alaa Al Aswan

published in Arabic in 2002, in English by the American University, Cairo Press in 2004

reviewed by Jane Madson McCabe

When the great Egyptian novelist, Naguib Mahfouz, (winner of the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for literature and best known in the West for The Cairo Trilogy), died last year his literary heir, Alaa Al Aswany, was already in place. Available now to Western readers is his second novel, The Yacoubian Building, which has been translated from Arabic to English by Humphrey Davies and published now by Harper Press.

Both authors are residents of Cairo. Whereas The Cairo Trilogy gives readers a portrait of Egyptian society during the British Occupation (1883-1936), Aswany’s work gives us an even more valuable portrait—that of modern Egyptian society, including a glimpse into the radical fundamentalism that has griped the country during the past twenty years.

Considering how strict and puritanical are the values of the Muslim Brotherhood, Westerners might be led to believe so are Muslims in general. During the summer of 2004 when I visited Egypt, when my friend and I traveled by bus to Alexandria, I was entertained watching Egyptian soap operas on the bus’s video screen. If anything, these programs were comic, melodramatic, slapstick, and sometimes women triumphed over hapless men.

To my way of thinking, well-written foreign novels sometimes offer fuller portraits of societies than we might get from watching news reports on television. Such is the case with The Yacoubian Building.

It is a novel to be savored from start to finish. It is richly peppered with a complex cast of characters. All manner of flawed and fragile humanity resides in the Yacoubian building, a once-elegant temple of Art Deco splendor, now slowly decaying in the smog and bustle of downtown Cairo. Among its residents are:

·       Zaki Bey of Dessouki, an aging playboy with inherited wealth

·       Hatim Rasheed, the editor-in-chief of Le Caire, A French language newspaper, and closet homosexual

·       Hagg Muhammad Azzam, a wealthy businessman who makes Souad Gaber his second wife

·       Taha el Shazi, the son of the building’s doorkeeper, who when denied entrance into the police academy because of his father’s lowly status, become a radical Muslim

·       the lovely Busayna, whom Taha loves but who compromises herself to support her family.

Robert Siegel of NPR’s All Things Considered, says it’s “packed with uncomfortable truths,” and this is true. Modern Egypt has been dominated by Mubarak’s suppressive regime in which corruption is rife and which has taken extreme measures to suppress the Muslim Brotherhood, often subjecting members to torture and death. But, Aswany is a master of showing the temptation to yield to personal corruption that affects all people, especially they who are oppressed and live in poverty:

• Abaskharon, Zaki Bey’s servant, whose right leg was amputated when he was young, kowtows to his master as means of ingratiating himself.

• Abd Rabbuh, a police officer from southern Egypt, yields to Hatim Raheed amorous intents because Hatim gives him money and a kiosk where he can make enough to support his family.

• When Azzam’s second wife Souad becomes pregnant against his wishes, he hires thugs to overcome and sedate her and an abortion performed. When given a lucrative business contract, he required to pay one third of his profit to the Mafia-like powers that protect his interests.

• Busayna allows herself to be sexually violated by her boss in order to support her family.

• Sadly, when Taha is denied entrance into the police academy because of his father’s lowly status, he comes under the influence of a radical sheikh. After he takes part in a student rally at the university he is arrested, imprisoned and sexually humiliated by the Egyptian police, creating in him such melancholy and a desire for revenge, that he is fodder for a camp preparing young men for martyrdom. . . .

Reader, do not despair! This novel is also contains some surprises that will delight you and make it as satisfying as consuming as a delectable feast.

The Yacoubian Building is one of the best novels I have read in a long time. I wanted consume it in small sips, like one would an expensive tea, in order to prolong the pleasure of reading it, knowing full well that when I had come to its end I would have trouble finding something this good again to read. In the end I found it so compelling that I took it in, in large gulps.

I read it the way one reads something that one is sure is going to provide the answer to an important question one is asking. In my case, the question was, is religious fundamentalism the answer for Muslim societies after all? Though Aswany kindly leaves us to draw our own conclusions, I concluded from having read it, that no, the best of societies are those which are just and accommodate to some extent the varieties in human behavior.

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Travels with Herodotus

by Ryszard Kapuściński

translated from the Polish by Klara Glowczewska

First Vintage International Edition, 2008

Reviewed by Jane M. McCabe

What a pleasure it is to review a book by one of my favorite writers, Ryszard Kapuściński. Travels with Herodotus is the last book Kapuściński wrote. After a long career as Poland’s most celebrated foreign correspondent, when he died in 2007, he had spent four decades reporting from Asia, Latin America and Africa and had written other six books, all worth reading: The Shadow of the Sun on his travels in Africa; Imperium, an account of the Soviet occupation of Pińsk in eastern Poland in 1939, culminating fifty years later with a trek across the Soviet Union; The Soccer War; The Emperor; Shah of Shahs on the overthrow of the Shah of Iran; and Another Day of Life.

I would highly recommend any book written by Ryszard Kapuściński. Each is embedded, page by page, with golden nuggets of information and insight, but then I would read a grocery list if he wrote it. Tom Bissell in his New York Times Book Review of Travels with Herodotus wrote, “When the last page of this book is turned note how much smaller and colder the world now seems with Kapuściński gone.”

What makes Kapuściński such a great writer? It’s because he’s one who can be relied upon for intellectual companionship, a man who has compassion for the common man, and one who writes of diverse cultures with an unassuming honesty and insightfulness.

He was born in 1932. After he completed his studies he began working at a Polish newspaper, Sztandar Mŧodyck (The Banner of Youth.) Poland then was dominated by the Soviet Union. His job was to follow letters to the editor back to their points of origin. When Stalin was alive, he comments, “One couldn’t write that a store was empty—all of them, no matter how empty their shelves, had to be excellently stocked, bursting with wares.”

The closer one got to a border, the emptier grew the land and fewer people one encountered. His greatest desire then was the modest act of crossing the border. Tormented by this desire, one day he said to his editor, “One day I would very much like to go abroad.” A year later he was sent to India. He spent the rest of his life traveling the world and writing poignant descriptions of what he encountered.

From India comes this description, for example, of the Sealdah Train Station in Caluctta:

On every square inch of the enormous terminal, on its long platforms, its dead-end tracks, the swampy fields nearby, sat or lay ten of thousands of emaciated people—under streams of rain, in the water and the mud; it was the rainy season and the heavy tropical downpour did not abate for a moment, I was struck at once by the poverty of these soaked skeletons, their untold numbers, and perhaps most of all, their immobility. They seemed a lifeless component of this dismal landscape, whose sole kinetic element was the sheets of water pouring from the sky. There was of course a certain, albeit desperate, logic and rationality in the utter passivity of these unfortunates: they sought no shelter from the downpour because they had nowhere to go—this was the end of their road—and they made no exertion to cover themselves because they had nothing to cover themselves with.

Such descriptions by Ryszard Kapuściński have a way of searing themselves into my memory. I remember reading, for example, of when he lived in Laos, Nigeria, but not in comfortable lodgings for foreigners, rather in a hovel of an apartment he had taken in a poor section of the city where he was constantly robbed. I remember his telling of a woman whose sole support was the beans she cooked and sold from her single worldly possession, her pot. One day he saw her wailing in the street because her pot had been stolen.

Since Travels with Herodotus tells of traveling with one Herodotus, who was this person?

Herodotus was a 5th Century BCE Greek historian, sometimes called “the father of history.” A contemporary of Socrates, Sophocles and Pericles, he traveled along the coast of Asia Minor to the shores of the Black Sea and visited Mesopotamia, Babylon, and Egypt. The “histories” were the first comprehensive attempt at secular narration, written in a richly anecdotal style, the starting point of Western history writing. They mostly concern the Persian Wars, particularly the Greco-Persians Wars.

A Polish translation of Herodotus’ travels appeared in a bookstore in Warsaw two years after the death of Stalin in 1955, and Ryszard Kapuściński was able to buy it. He carried this book written 2500 years ago with him on his travels and this is how an ancient historian became his traveling companion.

When I think of people who lived 2500 years ago I almost expect them to be primitives and their thought processes not nearly as sophisticated as ours, so it is a pleasant surprise to find that is impression is false, that the people who lived so long ago were quite sophisticated.

Herodotus is the prototype for a modern journalist, double-checking his facts and often cautioning his readers that reporting is often the result of hearsay and therefore may not be completely accurate.

If a writer approaches a topic with certain questions  to which he is seeking answers, these questions provide a framework to which he can relate the information he gains, making his work all the more relevant, especially if his questions are the important ones that have troubled us since we have been inhabiting the planet. A reader likewise does better if as he reads he conducts a dialogue with the writer and is not just the passive recipient of what he reads.

The questions most important to Herodotus were where did the conflict between East and West originate, and why does hostility exist?

Since he sought understanding he let others do the talking. Those with whom he talked were the learned Persians, and they said neither the Greeks nor the Persians were the instigators of the conflict but a third people, the Phoenicians, the sailor-merchants who when they kidnapped women triggered a global storm. The most famous story of such abduction is that of Helen of Troy. Homer’s Odyssey recounts the wanderings of Odysseus after the fall of Troy. He went there to reclaim Helen, his brother’s wife, who had been kidnapped not by the Phoenicians but by the Trojans.

From the material he gathered Herodotus tried to formulate his first law of history, the eternal law of revenge, reprisal, an eye for an eye, revenge not only as a right but as a scared obligation: whoever does not fulfill this charge will be cursed by his family, his clan, society.

Were revenge a simple matter of evening the score, of setting right some grievance, then a balance might struck and people could live, once a crime is avenged, in peace, but such is not the case. More often it sets in motion an endless cycle vengeance that stretch for generations, even centuries. As Kapuściński says, “Misfortune suddenly falls on you and you cannot fathom why. What happened? Simply this: that you have been revenged upon for crimes perpetuated ten generations ago by a forefather whose existence you weren’t even aware of.”

The second law of Herodotus is that human happiness never remains long in the same place. He uses King Croesus as his example, a man who accumulated great riches but then was plunged into despair over the murder of his favorite son and following that was humiliated in defeat. Herodotus quotes Solon here: Anyone who lives for a long time is bound to see and endure many things he would rather avoid.  The third law Herodotus articulates is that not even a god can escape his ordained fate.

Here’s a technique from the 5th Century BCE that might be employed in a modern espionage movie: When Darius was at war with the Scythians one Histiaseus shaved the head of a messenger, tattooed a message on the man’s scalp, waited for his hair to grow back and then sent the man to Miletus, who could read the message by shaving the messenger’s scalp.

While reading of the Greco-Persians wars Kapuściński experienced more dread of its approach than the actual conflict he was witnessing in the Belgian Congo at that time.

If anyone asks, as I have done, why African nations, after they won their independence from colonialists, fell into so many wars and conflicts, the answer can be found in the writings of Kapuściński. There were 10,000 tribes in Africa 150 years ago, each with its own language, rituals, gods, and reasons for enmity and fighting. In 1960 in the Belgian Congo he writes this of the people:

Fugitives. Suddenly, everyone has become a fugitive. The Congo’s independence in the summer of 1960 was accompanied by the eruption of tribal strife, and eventually warfare, and ever since the roads have been filled with fugitives. Gendarmes soldiers and ad hoc tribal militias engage in the actual fighting whereas civilians, which usually means women and children, flee. The routes of these flights are often difficult to re-create. Generally, the goal is to get as far away as possible from the battle, though not so far as to lose one’s way and later be unable to return. Another important consideration is whether or not one will be able to find something to eat along a particular escape route. These are poor people, and they have but a few belongings: the women, a percale dress; the men, a shirt and a pair of pants. Other than that, perhaps a piece of cloth for cover at night, a pot, a cup, a plastic plate, and a basin to carry everything.

Kapuściński writes this about the kinship he grew to feel for Herodotus:

As time went by and I kept returning to The Histories, I began to feel something akin to warmth, even friendship, toward Herodotus. I actually became attached not so much to the book, as to its voice, the persona of its author. A complicated feeling, which I couldn’t describe fully. It was an affinity with a human being whom I did not know personally, yet who charmed me by the manner of his relationships with others, by his way of being, by how, wherever he appeared, he instantly became the nucleus, or the mortar, of human community, petting it together, bringing it into being.

…He must have had a phenomenal memory. We modern folks, spoiled by the power of technology, are cripples when it comes to recollection, panicking whenever we do not have a book or computer at hand.

In 485 BCE Darius died and Xerxes assumed the throne. He wanted to avenge his father by capturing Athens. He was counseled by his uncle Artabanus, “Unless apposing views are heard it is impossible to pick and choose between various plans and decide which one is best.”

After the council met Xerxes thought about the views expressed and decided that it was not in his best interests for him to march on Greece. But that night he dreamt that a handsome man stood over him and counseled him to stay the course.

Come daylight Xerxes reconvened the council and announced that he had changed his mind, there would be no war. But that night the same apparition appeared before him, saying more forcefully than before that he must press his war against Greece. So, he went to Artabanus, who calmed him by persuading him that dreams don’t come from the gods. But then Artabanus too was visited by this messenger, threatening to burn out his eyes, unless he persuaded Xerxes to go to war against Greece. It was his fate to do so.

Xerxes spent four years creating his army. When he arrived at the Hellespont and saw that the bridges he had built to allow his army passage to Macedonia and Greece had been destroyed by a storm he punished the sea by having his soldier strike it with their whips.

Ultimately Xerxes was not successful in his war against Greece. This war, that was his fate to conduct, between the David, Greece, and the Goliath, Persia, determined the fate the world—the hegemony that the West established over the East that persists to this day. Another law Herodotus might have formulated might be that nations like people grow old and when they do they are easily supplanted by younger nations. We have seen this phenomenon again and again, as when in the 7th Century ad Muslim armies overran the Middle East, Persia, North Africa, and Spain, or when in the 13th Century the Mongols supplanted much of area the Muslims had conquered.

In closing please let me mention one more thing for how happy it made me when I read it.

The sight of the Hellespont completely covered by his ships and the coast and plains of Abydus totally overrun by his men first gave

Xerxes a feeling of deep self-satisfaction, but later he began to weep. (Italics—quote from Herodotus)

The king is crying?

His uncle, Artabanus, seeing Xerxes’ tears, spoke to him thus: “My Lord, a short while ago you were feeling happy with your situation and now you are weeping. What a total change of mood!”

“Yes,” Xerxes answered. “I was reflecting on things and it occurred to me how short the sum of life is, which made me feel compassion. Look at all these people—but no one of them will still be alive in a hundred years’ time.”

Why would knowing of a conversation between the great Persian emperor Xerxes and his uncle Artabanus that took place 2500 years ago make me happy? It’s because it proves that that the people who lived then aren’t all that different from us today. For that I’m grateful to Herodotus and Ryszard Kapuściński for making Herodotus accessible to me.

Dreams and Shadows—the Future of the Middle East

by Robin Wright

published by the Penguin Press, New York, 2008

reviewed by Jane M. McCabe

During the 1970’s I attended Luther Seminary in St. Paul, Minnesota. There I developed an interest in Islam and have studied it ever since. In 1996 I purchased a Koran and diligently studied it verse by verse, surah by surah, comparing various passages to their biblical counterparts. In 2001 I published a book on religion called Revelation! The Single Story of Divine Prophecy to Abraham and His Descendants—the Jews, Christians and Muslims.

Its lengthy sub-title is not as happenstance as it might sound, as all three of the great monotheistic religions of the world claim Abraham as their father. He lived around 2000 bc, migrating from Ur in present-day Iraq to present-day Israel. He was the father of both Ishmael, from whom the Arab people are descendant, and of Isaac, from whom the ancient Hebrews and thus the Jewish people are descendant. Both are races of Semites. Because of this, I think of the Jews and Arabs as cousins, long-lost cousins, who share the same ancestor.

Christianity emerged from Judaism in the first Century ad and spread to the surrounding gentile nations. Christians also claim Abraham as their father but in a spiritual rather than a biological sense.

The Koran tells of Abraham and Ishmael building the Kaaba in Mecca and of Ishmael handing the black stone to Abraham to place in its niche there. The Bible neither confirms nor denies this.

Though it may be naïve of me I reason that since the Jews and Arabs are long-lost cousins, so to speak, if they would acknowledge their common paternity, tensions might lessen.

I think of the Jews, Christians and Muslims as three brothers—the Jews the oldest, the Christians the middle son, and the Muslims the youngest.

Islam did not emerge until the 7th Century ad—when the Prophet Mohammed received Revelations in a cave near Mecca, the recitation of which were compiled into the Koran.

When Mohammed died in 632 AD, he designated no heir to lead the small community of Muslims residing in Medina. Immediately a dispute arose among them that has haunted Islam ever since. Some felt that their leader should be Mohammed’s closest living male relative, which would have meant the mantle of Islam would have fallen to his son-in-law Ali. The prevailing group wanted their leader to be elected by the community. The first three caliphs were elected democratically. The breach among them has divided Muslims ever since.

Shiite means “follower of Ali.” In the greatest schism ever within Islam, the Shiites broke away within 30 years of the Prophet’s death. Ali eventually became the fourth caliph, but after his murder in 661, the issue of political succession again arose. The Shiites wanted Hussein, the Prophet’s grandson to be caliph, but the more numerous Sunnis wanted to pick again from outside the family. A battle ensued near Karbala in today’s Iraq, in which Hussein was brutally murdered by Ummayad troops. He thus became the supreme Shiite martyr. Each year on the anniversary of his death, Shiites reenact his struggle during the ten days of Ashura.

Why mention this? It’s because animosity between Sunni and Shiites is still germane today. Without this understanding one cannot understand the politics of the Middle East, where most countries are Sunni, but southern Lebanon, southern Iraq, and Iran are Shiite. If you wonder why the war in Iraq has waged senselessly for the five past years, it’s because Sunni Baath party, a minority, controlled the country under Saddam Hussein. Once the country was “liberated” and democracy imposed the Shiite majority gained power, setting off waves of reprisals.

In recent years I despaired the lack of enlightened voices in the region, but it was a case of my not knowing of them rather than because they don’t exist. I am informed and encouraged because of reading Dreams and Shadows. Ms Wright strikes an optimistic note in her introduction:

…Islamic extremism is no longer the most important, interesting or dynamic force in the Middle East…Regimes have been forced to adopt the language democracy whatever their real intentions or conniving to prevent it…activist [are] now trying to hold them to account…The new momentum has spurred talk of mahda (Arabic for “awakening,” or “renaissance.”

…The challenge of change is today tougher then anywhere else in the world…The region has the largest proportion of ruling monarchies (eight) and family political dynasties (four) in the world…Democracy unleashes existential dilemmas.

A major engine of change is young people hungering to be part of the modern world. Information technology provides access to the outside world as never before. Satellite television means that the news cannot be controlled by local governments. Greater exposure is helping to inform and change public attitudes. The osmosis of globalization has spurned a rich discourse in democracy and other ideas.

The Middle East has already gone through enormous change. In the 20th Century, three pivotal events redefined the region. The collapse of the Ottoman Empire, which dominated the Middle East for five centuries, redrew (actually, it was the Balfour Declaration that redrew the map) and gave birth to modern states after World War I. The creation of Israel in 1948 changed the region’s political dynamics and spawned the world’s longest conflict. (Please keep in mind that 1948 was also the year the United Nations was established. More about that later.) And the 1979 Iranian revolution introduced Islam as an alternative political idiom. (parentheses mine.)

Ms Wright is a reliable guide to current Middle Eastern politics, as complicated and contradictory as they are. An American, she first landed in 1973 in Beirut during the outbreak of the civil war there. During the next 30 years she has lived in and traveled throughout the region, often to visit heads of state or dissidents who are influencing events. She covered the Shah of Iran and the revolution that ousted him, Yasser Arafat as the world’s most notorious terrorist of the 1980’s, the Palestinian-Israeli peace accord during the 1990’s, Saddam Hussein’s war with Iran in the 1980’s and with Kuwait in the 1990’s. She has traveled with Secretaries of State—Henry Kissinger, Madeline Albright and Condoleeza Rice.

In the introduction she says, “This is a book about disparate experiments with empowerment in the world’s most troubled region. My goal was to probe deep inside societies of Middle East for the emerging ideas and players that are changing the political environment in ways that will unfold for decades to come.”

THE PALESTINIANS

When Zionists captured Palestine in 1948 thousands of Palestinians fled to neighboring countries. Others were quarantined either on the West Bank or Gaza strip, thus sparking the hostility that has dominated the political landscape since. Because of Israel’s tiny size and strategic location giving the Palestinians their own homeland has proved almost impossible.

Of interest is that 1948 is also the year when the United Nations was established, BECAUSE only when there was a collective body of nations who would protest if one nation infringed on another could the ancient law of those who conquer rule could be challenged. The Israeli takeover of Palestine is arguably the last time one nation could take land from another without outside protest. When Saddam Hussein overran Kuwait in 1990 it set off a storm of protest at the UN. It bears saying that the boundaries for nations in the Middle East, as they were in Africa after the colonists left, were artificially drawn by Westerners after World War I.

The Palestinians were so over-whelmed by Israelis technological and economical superiority that for many years they were helpless victims of this coup. Initial protests were little more than bands of disaffected youth throwing rocks at Israeli soldiers. Then in the 1980’s along came Yasser Arafat who emboldened the Palestinian Liberation Army and established Fatah as its military wing.

There are two Palestine’s today, and they are very different from one another. Fatah controls the West Bank with Ramallah as its capital, and Hamas controls Gaza. Arafat’s government is considered to be corrupt. Hamas is an offshoot of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood (more about them later) and emerged as a credible political and security alternative to Fatah’s long standing dominance.

Recently, Israeli invaded Gaza, a small strip of land on the Mediterranean, where there is already extreme poverty and high unemployment, in response to Hamas’ lobbing rockets into Israel. Hamas’ charter gives reason for Israel to protect herself: it echoes the PLO’s original covenant pledge to obliterate her. Hamas leader Sheikh Ahmed Yassin says, “Martyrdom operations are the result of Jewish Nazism.”  

EGYPT is the heart and intellectual center of the Arab world. Since the assassination of Anwar Sadat in 1980 it has been ruled by Hosni Mubarak, whose regime has continually imprisoned and tortured dissidents. Now, however, once passive individuals, particularly women, are daring to become whistle-blowers.

Actually, since the early part of the 20th Century (after Egypt achieved independence from Great Britain) there were those who advocated governing according to the precepts of the Sharia, namely Hassan al Bana, who founded the Muslim Brotherhood in 1928, and Sayyid Qutb. Qutb’s writing has inspired countless Muslims world-wide.

The Muslim Brotherhood is arguably the most effective political movement in the Middle East. Their creed can be best summed up as “Islam is the solution,” yet they seem to understand the pragmatic realities of the 21st Century. After a devastating earthquake in Cairo in 1992, the Brotherhood and other Islamist groups were the first to respond with food, blankets, and welfare for thousands left homeless. Engineers put up temporary shelters; medical staff treated the injured. The Ikhwan also gave a thousand dollars to each family to rebuild. The government’s reaction, like here after Katrinna, was belated and limited.

Their support among Egyptians is such that if there were a truly democratic election instead of the farces that Mubarak orchestrates, the Muslim Brotherhood would most likely win, and it would establish the Sharia as the basis for government, something the United States, for all its talk about democracy being the answer, wouldn’t be happy to see happen.

In 1954 President Nasser charged the Brotherhood was trying to assassinate him and jailed thousands of it members. Among those jailed was Sayyid Qutb, the most influential ideologue that the Brotherhood has ever produced. Qutb was radicalized in the United States in the early 1950’s when he was dispatched to a small teachers’ college in Colorado. The American experience repelled Qutb because of what he viewed as its excesses and materialism. “Humanity makes the greatest of errors and risks losing its account of morals,” quipped Qutb (couldn’t resist that one) “if it makes America its example.” My God! If Qutb already ascertain the materialism of American culture in the 1950’s, what would he have thought of the 1990’s?

In his book Milestones, Qutb calls on the faithful to topple illegitimate regimes and create pure Islamic states to free mankind “from every authority except that of God.” In 1966 he was hanged for treason, but his legacy is scarily enduring, as he influenced Zawahiri, Khomeini, and indirectly Osama bin Laden.

Recently Egyptian women have formed organizations to monitor fraudulent elections. The name of one is We’re Watching You!

LEBANON has been called the Switzerland of the Middle East. Its population is the most diverse of any Middle Eastern country, comprised of Christians—Maronites and Catholics; Muslims—Shiites and Sunnis, Druzes and Armenians. As such, it is a maelstrom of diversity, but in the 1070’s the various forces erupted into a civil war that tore the country apart and destroyed much of Beirut, the capital. Things were further complicated by Israeli incursions when Yasser Arafat’s PLO made its home in the southern part of the country.

Thomas Friedman made his career as a journalist and spokesperson on Middle Eastern affairs with his book, From Beirut to Jerusalem. In it he tells not only of the ravages caused by the October, 1983, bomb explosion at Beirut’s International Airport, which killed thousands of Americans, but of Syria’s hold on Lebanon. From it I learned that Syria’s president Hafez al Assad sent troops to kill his own people in Hama when they dared to oppose him.

The Lebanese people hold the Syrian government responsible for the 2008 Valentine’s Day assassination of Rafiq Hariri, a politician who did more to help Lebanon’s flagging economy than any other. Hariri’s assassination not only turned him into a martyr, it has become the rallying cry for millions who insist on their independence from Syrian domination.

Shiites control southern Lebanon’s suburbs (dahiya) and from them has arisen Hezbollah (“Party of God”) and a leader by the name of Skeikh Hassan Nasrallah. Nasrallah has been able to accomplish things Arafat and others could not, namely forcing the withdrawal of Israeli troops from Lebanon.

After Hezbollah captured two Israeli soldiers in 2006 raid into Israel it prompted another Israeli invasion. A year later the Israeli army was still in southern Lebanon and Olmert’s plummeted to less than three percent. Nasrallah produced what three generations of Arabs have yearned for: military effectiveness. When Israeli forces withdrew his popularity soared—he has been called “The Hawk of Lebanon.”

SYRIA is the most medieval of any Middle Eastern country, a country whose leaders cling to draconian, Soviet-style repression to quell dissidence. Despite Syria’s strategic and historical importance (home to the Umayyad mosque built in the 7th Century, crossroads for trade) it remains one of the least modern of Middle Eastern countries. This is because of the iron grip of its previous president, Hafez al Assad, whom Henry Kissinger called the “shrewdest Arab leader.” When Assad died in 1999 his son Bashar assumed the throne. He promised reform and is of a milder temperament than his father, however, alas, when his regime is challenged he resorts to his father’s methods. The clan has been compared to the Corelone family in The Godfather.

Yet the Syrians love to debate and has many reformers. Before Bashar clamped down there was talk of “The Damascus Spring.” They urge change but the change they desire may have to wait until the Assad’s are deposed. Thousands of Iraqis fled into Syria as violence in Iraq escalated. The regime’s biggest critic is a man by the name of Riad al Turk, who has spent the greater part of his life in prison yet still has the courage to speak out.

IRAN is perhaps the most interesting of Muslim countries. I say Muslim rather than Arab because the people of Iran and Iraq are not Arabs but the descendants of the ancient Persians, who were the most powerful people on earth in the millennium before the birth of Christ. Alexander the Great invaded and brought Persia under subjugation in 330 bc. Persia gave birth to Zoroastrianism, a precursor to Christianity. Muslim armies took over the area in the 7th Century, the Mongols under Genghis Kahn in the 12th Century, and following them Tamberlane. Baghdad was a center of science and culture in the 10th Century.

The character of the Persians is considerably different from that of austere Arabs—they are gregarious, artistic, and pleasure and debate loving.

Ms Wright begins her second chapter on Iran by using Teheran’s irreverent, free-for-all traffic as a metaphor for Iranian politics.

Western perceptions of a country are often monolithic when in fact it often contains considerable diversity; in no country is this truer than in Iran, where the society is split between the reactionary clerics and progressive thinking youth and intellectuals. The pendulum of powers swings between these two opposites.

This review is very difficult for me to write, simply because of the surfeit of information contained in each chapter. After having carefully read it, when I went back to gather the information I wanted to present, many chapters were a blur in my mind. So, rather than recount all the presidents Iran has had since the 1979 revolution after the Shah was deposed that brought Khomeini to power, let me focus on just two men, Abdolkarim Soroush (because he’s after my own heart) and Iran’s current president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejah, the dark-horse major of Teheran who beat the sophisticated, demure Ali Akbar Hashemi Rajsanjani (I could go around all day saying his name because it’s so euphonious) in Iran’s 2005 presidential election, another example of the pendulum swinging back to the puritanical, conservative camp. The skinny short man with a populist economic message appealed to Iranians made poorer by the revolution.

Soroush is a reformer who says, “The essence of religion will always be sacred, but its interpretation by fallible human beings is not sacred—and therefore it can be criticized, modified, refined, and redefined.” Soroush argues that there is no single right path in Islam—and no single right religion. “…I’m trying to say that Christians and members of other religions are well guided and good servants of God.”

Readers may recall Ahmadinejah’s visit in 2007 to the United States to address the United Nations and where he gave a speech at Columbian University.  He had already offended Jews by denying the Holocaust and by saying Israel should be wiped off the face of the earth. When confronted by the indignant president of the university, the skinny, five foot, four inch little man who favors wearing clothes that make him indistinguishable from a street sweeper, reprimanded the president for his lack of graciousness to a guest.

All of this might be amusing were it not that now Iran has been elevated to foremost enemy of the United States, because of its uranium enrichment program and the fear it intends to develop a nuclear bomb.

Ahmadinejah warns that the United States has lost its way and alienated the entire Muslim world. In a televised interview he opined that our current economic crisis is the beginning of the fall of Western civilization.

MOROCCO is another Middle Eastern country still controlled by a monarchy, although in 1999 when, following the death of his father Hassan II, Mohammed VI assumed the throne, initially it seems as though his would be a more lenient reign than the 38-year reign of his father. In Egypt and Syria, one a ruling dynasties, the other a monarchy, leaders may talk the democratic talk but they are reluctant to relinquish power. When the voices of dissidents become too vociferous they resort again to jailing and torturing those who oppose them.

You’ll just have to read the book if you want all the information Ms. Wright imparts, as it’s impossible for this reviewer to give you much more than a taste of its contents.

Some Moroccan women have become spokesmen for women’s rights. I read Fatima Mernissi’s memoir, Dreams of Trespass: Tales of a Harem Girlhood, in which she tells of her mother’s longing to escape beyond the confines of the hudud (sacred fortress) where she was restricted to the women’s quarters along with her husband’s other wives, sisters, cousins, grandmothers, and children, to be let out only on religious holidays when they had to be veiled and accompanied by a male family member.

Fatima’s mother dream was fulfilled in her. Her mother persuaded her father to send her to school. She was then allowed to go to college, to the Sorbonne in Paris for graduate work, and obtained her doctorate from Brandeis University, where she wrote her doctorate on harem life and how to break out of it.

Mernissi maintains that practices discriminating against women are misinterpretations of the Koran, which has many verses supporting women’s rights. The first convert to Islam was Khadija, a prominent business woman who ran a caravan trade across the Middle East. She hired Mohammed, eventually proposed marriage to him. After his Revelations she became the first Muslim convert. His third wife Aisha provided one forth of the hadiths, or traditions still considered authoritative in guiding Muslims. Islam’s core egalitarian values, she believes, are the best vehicle for change.

“Equality isn’t a foreign idea (neither is democracy) and doesn’t need to be imported from other cultures. It is at the heart of Islam. Allah spoke of the two sexes in terms of total equality as believers.”

This statement reminds me of a verse from Galatians: “There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male or female, for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.” —Galatians 3:28

 Anna of All the Russias—The Life of Anna Akhmatova

By Elaine Feinstein

Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2006

Reviewed by Jane M. McCabe

While reading Anna of All the Russias I couldn’t help contrast the difference between how the Russian people feel about poetry and their poets with how Americans tend to feel. For, Russians love poetry as much as they love their mother country, which is to say passionately. They revere their poets, memorize their poems, and consider poetry the highest form of art. Here, sad to say, people tend to view poetry as though it is a foreign language and for the most part are indifferent to it. In Russia poetry matters a great deal, as it is seen as the voice of the people; here it doesn’t matter at all.

I suppose there are reasons for this. Except for entertainment and perhaps film, most arts and the artists who have created them have been relegated to the sidelines while materialism reigns supreme and the order of the day is consumption. As the person in the street to name a recent American poet and he might become stymied after he names Robert Frost. Ask a Russian and perhaps the first name that comes to his lips might be that of Anna Akhmatova, and he might recite a couple of lines of her verse. He would be able to tell you the general outline of her life.

Since Akhmatova was born in Bloshoy Fontan on June 23rd, 1889, lived most of her life in St. Petersburg (later named Leningrad and now again St. Petersburg), and died in Domodedovo on March 5, 1966, her life spanned Tsarist Russia, the Bolshevik revolution of 1917, the Stalinist purges, World War II, the Cold War, and the thaw initiated by Khrushchev following his denunciation of Stalin as murderer at the 22nd Congress of the Communist Party in October, 1961. During those years, except for the last five of her life, the Russia people endured tremendous deprivation, terror and hardship, and the life of Akhmatova was no exception. Her first husband, Nikolay Gumilyov was executed in August, 1921, and he only child, Lev, an important scholar in his own right, was sent to Siberia several times simply because Gumilyov was his father and Akhmatova his mother.

Life style of the intelligensia

Praised and denounced. The executive committee of the Writers’ Union were summoned to Moscow in 1946 and she was expelled from the Union and her work denounced: “Anna Akhmatova is one of the representatives of a reactionary literary quagmire devoid of ideas . . . one of the standard bearers of a shallow, empty, aristocratic salon poetry which is absolutely foreign of Soviet Literature.” P. 222 “I experienced great fame, I experienced great disgrace, and I have come to the conclusion that, in essentials, it is all the same.”

INFIDEL

by Ayaan Hirsi Ali

The Free Press, 2007

reviewed by Jane M. McCabe

The late Orianna Fallaci’s (1930-2006) last clarion call was to alert Westerners to the danger of making too many concessions to Muslim immigrants and to warn us that the ultimate goal of radical Islam is not to adapt to Western life but to convert the West to Islam!

My personal interest in Islam began when in the 1970’s I studied theology at Luther Seminary in St. Paul, Minnesota. In the course of my now 30-year study, I have gone from incomprehension to fascination to outrage. Incomprehension fueled my study, and I diligently read four or five biographies of Mohammed, various histories, and finally did a verse-by-verse study of the Koran, comparing its Biblical references to those in the Bible. Fascination increased as my knowledge increased. I loved Islam’s pristine absoluteness, in contrast to the ambiguities of Christianity. I even considered converting to Islam.

My study led me to write a book on religion: Revelation! The Single Story of Divine Prophecy to Abraham and His Descendants—the Jews, Christians, and Muslims. The thesis of this work is:  If God has periodically imparted knowledge to humankind through chosen prophets, then Mohammad is either a true prophet or he is not. I still think he is though my faith in this has been shaken because of the implacable stanch of modern radical Islam.

In recent years, fascination has turned into outrage—outrage because of Muslim oppression of women, its fanaticism and sexual paranoia, and the continuing violence in Iraq. Westerners are beginning to recognize that Muslims do not share our values and don’t think the way we do. Muslim countries did not have an Enlightenment, therefore, have not made many scientific advances we have, and our progress is a humiliation to them.

Nor is the Muslim world willing to accept criticism from Westerners, whom they consider infidels, therefore corrupt and decadent. Ms. Fallaci was Italian, an atheist but nevertheless a product of the Christian tradition. Her voice was therefore more easily dismissed by Muslims.

 Because of this I have been waiting and hoping for voices, voices of reason, from within the world of Islam. Such is the voice of AYANN HIRSI ALI!

You may recall that Ms. Ali was elected to the Dutch parliament during the 1990’s. She was also associated with the murder of Theo Van Gogh, who in 2004, was assassinated while riding his motorcycle in Amsterdam by a Muslim fanatic. This murder was in retribution for the perceived blasphemy, committed by Van  Gogh and Ms. Ali, because they produced a film in which verses from the Koran were written on a woman’s naked body.

How did a Muslim woman go from being a tribal girl in Somali to being elected to the Dutch parliament? Infidel is Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s story. With clear-sighted prose and carefully-reasoned honesty Ms. Ali tells of early life in  Somali and Kenya, her flight from an unwanted marriage to Holland, her rise within the Dutch political system, her election to parliament, her fight for human rights, particularly the rights of Muslim women, and of the necessity of going into hiding because of threats against her life. Ms. Ali is an extraordinary woman, and Infidel is an extraordinary story!

Students of world history will recall that during the fifty years since Somali achieved its independence, it was governed by the autocratic Siad Barré, but since his overthrow in 1991, it has been thrown apart by civil war. Ms. Ali father was the leader of one of the factions opposing Barré. In 1990 with her mother and sister she fled to Kenya.  Because of the deluge, some refugees were prevented from crossing into Kenya, and the border area was in chaos.

Less than 20 years old, Ms. Ali proved her mettle when a man named Mahamuud pleaded with her brother to go to the border and help bring his family out of Somali. When he refused, Ayaan went in his stead. She successfully bribed the Kenyan soldiers at the border and helped Mahamuud rescue his family.

Early in 1992 Ayaan’s father arranged for her to marry a Somali man who was living in Canada. It was a marriage that she did not want; nevertheless plans were made for her to fly to Dusseldorf, Germany, and from there to Canada, where the marriage would take place.

Ayaan had spent her entire life in Somali and surrounding countries. Her first glimpse of Europe, as seen in Dusseldorf, seems worth recording:

Everything was so clean, it was like a movie. The roads, the pavement, the people—nothing in my life had ever looked like this, except perhaps Nairobi Hospital. It was so modern it seemed sterile. The landscape looked like geometry class, or physics, where everything was in straight lines and had to be perfect and precise. The buildings were cubes and triangles, and they gave me the same neutral, almost frightening feeling.

Rather than to fly to Canada, Ayaan secretly took a train to Holland:

It was Friday, July 24th, 1992, when I stepped on the train. Every year I think of it. I see it as my real birthday: the birth of me as a person, making decision about my life on my own. I was not running away from Islam, or to democracy. I didn’t have any big ideas then. I was just a young girl and wanted some way to be me; so I bolted into the unknown.

Ms. Ali later says of Holland, and this quote is of particular interest to me:

This was an infidel country, whose way of life we Muslims were supposed to oppose and reject. Why was it, then, so much better run, better led, and made for such better lives than the place we came from? Shouldn’t this places where Allah was worshipped and His laws obeyed have been at peace and wealthy, and the unbelievers’ countries ignorant, poor, and at war?

I wanted to understand the conflict. In 1992 and 1993, it seems as if they whole world outside the West was breaking out in civil war and tribal conflicts. The end of the cold war had unfrozen old fault lines of hatred. And of all the countries where war had broken out, so many seemed to be Muslim. What was wrong with us? (italics mine) Why should infidels have peace, and Muslims be killing each other, when we were the ones who worshipped the true God? If I studied political science, I thought, I could understand that.

While still a Dutch parliamentarian she was successful in getting the government to acknowledge female circumcisions were being preformed on young Muslim girls and to keep track of the number the number of honor killings. There is no practice more barbaric, dangerous, and detrimental to the health and well-being of a woman than female circumcision. In one year over 300 honor killings were reported in Holland.

Let Ms. Ali speak for herself:

For centuries we had been behaving as though all knowledge was in the Quran, refusing to question anything, refusing to progress. We had been hiding from reason for so long because we were incapable of facing up to the need to integrate it into our beliefs. And this was not working; it was leading to hideous pain and monstrous behavior….

We Muslims had been taught to define life on earth as passage, a test that precedes real life in the Hereafter. In that test, everyone should ideally live in a manner resembling, as closely as possible, the followers of the Prophet. Didn’t this inhibit investment in improving daily life? Was innovation therefore forbidden to Muslims? Were human right, progress, women’s right all foreign to Islam?

By declaring our Prophet infallible and not permitting ourselves to question him, we Muslims had set up a static tyranny.

True Islam, as a rigid belief system and a moral framework, leads to cruelty. The inhuman act of those nineteen hijackers was the logical outcome of this detailed system for regulating human behavior. Their world is divided between “Us and Them”—if you don’t accept Islam, you should perish.

There’s more that Ms. Ali has to say, but I’ll stop here and let interested readers read her wonderfully relevant book for themselves.

The Last  Mughal—The Fall of a Dynasty, Delhi, 1857

by William Dalrymple, Bloomsbury Publishing, London, 2006

Indian Summer—The Secret History of the End of an Empire

by Alex von Tunzelman, Henry Holt & Company, New York, 2007

—reviewed by Jane M. McCabe

It isn’t often that readers of history are offered two excellent histories published within the same time-span that if read back to back add enormously to one’s understanding of the events that shaped a country’s destiny.  This is what we have with The Last Mughal and Indian Summer, two recent histories of India. The first chronicles the Indian Uprising of 1857 and the second Britain’s departure from India in 1947, after having controlled it for nearly 250 years, and the Partition, which divided India into two countries, India and Pakistan.

Early in The Last Mughal Mr. Dalrymple tells us that rather than a biography of Bahadur Shah Zafar II, the last of the Great Mughals, he is writing a portrait  of a time, 1857, when after 200 years of being subjugated by Britain, Indian sepoys rose  up and attempted to overthrow their overlords.

But before proceeding further a little background information might be helpful. The Mughals, Muslims who conquered and ruled much of northern India for more than 300 years, from 1526 to 1858. The Mughal Empire was founded in 1526 by Babur, a Central Asian Turk after he subjugated Delhi. His grandson Akbar is sometimes considered the true founder of the Empire as he consolidated it. Despite marked differences in the belief system of Hindus and Muslims Akbar is known as a liberal ruler who accommodated the Hindu majority of the population.  In an effort to be accepted into Hindu society the Mughals adopted some Hindu rituals and customs, such as tika, a mark made on the forehead using dye. Other Mughal rulers may not have not as enlightened as Akbar, however, throughout their rules there tended to religious tolerance.

The arts, particularly architecture, flourished under the Mughals, their crowning achievement being the Taj Mahal, built in Agra by Shah Jahan (1526 to 1558) as a mausoleum in memory of his wife, Arjumand Banu Bagam. Another important structure is the Red Fort built in Delhi, a building complex that factor in both books.

In 1497, approximately 40 years before Babur conquered Delhi, a Portuguese sailor, Vasco da Gama, sailed around the Cape of Good Hope and established an sea route to India. For, once introduced to it, Europeans developed a taste for pepper. Though we consider pepper such a pedestrian spice, the engine that drove explorers and merchants in the 15th and 16th Centuries was to obtain this precious commodity for European markets.

Any number of commercial enterprises formed in Western Europe during the 17th and 18th Centuries to further trade. The most important, the East India Company became a major force in the history of India for more than 200 years.  It original charter was granted by Queen Elizabeth I on December 31, 1600.

The company was granted a monopoly of trade by Charles II (1630-1685) including sovereign rights in addition to its trading privileges, and, as such, began its long rule of India. This development might be seen today as tantamount to Walmart governing Mexico.

By 1774 the company consolidated its possession and established a civil service in which Indians were subservient. The casual demolishing of revered temples and mosques to make roads gives witness to the degree of chauvinism on the part of the British. Antagonism was accumulating toward Christian missionaries whom the natives felt were subverting their culture and disrupting their lifestyle.

Mr. Dalrymple comments, “The histories of Islamic fundamentalism and European imperialism have very often been closely and dangerously intertwined. In a curious but very concrete way, the fundamentalists of both faiths have needed each other to reinforce each other’s prejudices and hatreds. The venom of one provides the life blood of the other.”

By 1852 a kind of apartheid existed, the British and the Mughals in an uneasy equilibrium living parallel lives. The Mughals had been all but striped of any real power except in the imaginations of their subjects. Zafar was but a puppet ruler living his increasingly anachronistic existence in the Red Fort. He was an aristocratic, philosophical, gentle man, more given to writing poetry than dealing with the harsh realities of a dying empire.

“So removed had the British now become from their Indian subjects and so dismissive were they of Indian opinion that they had lost all ability to read the omens around them or to analyze their own opinion with any degree of accuracy. Arrogance and imperial self confidence had diminished the desire to seek accurate information or gain real knowledge of the state of the country.”

Had they bothered to inform themselves the Uprising of 1857 would have come as less of a surprise to them. The sepoys, Indians soldiers serving under British command, were discontented—their pay had declined, and they feared the Company was actively conspiring to whittle away their status and demean their religion. Deep disaffection had caused them to organize a secret rebellion.

Like most rebellions the Indian Uprising had a precipitating incident, the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back. In this case it was sepoy outrage over being made to chew bullet casings made from pigs and cattle, if of pigs an insult to Muslims, and if of cows, an insult to Hindus.

If I were to sum up what happened in India in 1857 in one brief sentence, it might go something like this: The Indians rose up against their British overlords and four months later were they were put down, but such a description doesn’t do justice to the reality of what happened.

The mutineers caught the British off guard. On Monday, May 11, 1857, they swarmed into Delhi, captured and killed many British administrators and their families. By lunchtime virtually all the British people within the city who had not reached Vibrant’s shaky bridgehead at the Kashmir Gate had been killed and in less than two hours the great and prosperous city had been turned into a war zone.

In his account of the events of May 11th, the Muslim journalist, Muhammad Baqar, wrote, “Truly the English have been afflicted with divine wrath by the true avenger. Their arrogance has brought them divine retribution, for as the Holy Koran says, ‘God does not love the arrogant ones!’ God has given the Christians such a body blow that within a short time this carnage will utterly destroy them.”

The poet Azad wrote a ghazal containing these lines: “All their wisdom could not serve them.  Their schemes became useless, their knowledge and science avail them nothing.”

Sad to say, this bluster amounted to so much wishful thinking, for though the sepoys greatly outnumbered the British forces, this did not prevent the British through greater organization, more sophisticated weaponry, and scientific know-how eventually overcoming the mutineers. So, while they muttered that time had arrived to avenge themselves on those who had subverted their caste and religion, through lack of organization, leadership, and supplies they succumbed.

As for Zafar indecision was perhaps his greatest weakness. Though he was initially horrified by the rough and desperate sepoys who barged into his palace, he ultimately agreed to give them his blessing, perhaps hoping that by so doing he would save his great dynasty from extinction. It was a decision he would come to bitterly regret.

Knowledge of the savagery with which the British put down the Uprising once they gained the upper hand rendered a blow to my Anglophilia. When one reads history he cannot remain deluded for long concerning the violence that has been wreaked on the planet time and time again. Though no doubt an exaggeration on their part, ancient historians claim when the Christians finally conquered Jerusalem in 1099 during the First Crusade, the blood flowed in the streets several stanchions high. (In contrast , when the Muslims had conquered Jerusalem in 637 they had been lenient.) A common practice during the exploits of Tamerlane was to pile the skulls of his victims in mountains outside the conquered cities. ETC.!

Given the British provoked the Uprising with their pitiless chauvinism and attitude of racial superiority, were they at all reasonable, you’d think they would acknowledge their own culpability and treat the insolence of the sepoys with leniency. But this they did not do. They conducted themselves as though they were the innocently aggrieved party and came down on the mutineers with horrifying brutality. There must be a psychological term for such a phenomenon.

Dear  reader, The Last Mughal is such an elegantly paced and richly nuanced history that this review cannot do it justice. There simply isn’t space here to write of all the people, British and Indian, within Zafar’s court and without, who played their parts in this drama.

Despite initially overwhelming odds by August of 1857 the British triumphed over the mutineers and recaptured control of Delhi. Division among Muslims and Hindus eroded the cohesiveness of insurgents and they lacked adequate leadership to direct their efforts. Despite their persistent courage, shortages of food and basic necessities soon enough sapped their strength. Delhi had become wrecked, semi-derelict and starving city.

The British showed no mercy, killing even those who had once been their faithful servants. “In the eyes of Victorian Evangelicals, mass murder was no longer mass murder but instead had become divine vengeance, and the troops were thus the executers of divine justice.”

Zafar and his entourage were rounded up and accused of treason. He was tried in something of a kangaroo court, found guilty and exiled to Rangoon, Burma, where he lived before dying ignobly five years later on Friday, November 7, 1862. The night of September 16, 1857 had been his last spent in the Red Fort. He said then, “. . . I have seen the writing on the wall. I see with my own eyes the fast approaching tragedy which must end the glory of my days. Now there is not a shadow of doubt left that of the great House of Timur I am the last to be seated on the throne of India.”

Delhi was so devastated and depopulated by the Uprising that for a while the British considered just plowing it under.

“Only ninety years separated the British victory at the gates of Delhi in 1857 from the British eviction from South Asia through the Gateway of India in 1947. But while memories of British atrocities in 1857 may have assisted in the birth of Indian nationalism, as did the growing separation and mutual suspicion of rulers and ruled that followed the Uprising, it was not the few surviving descendants of the Mughals, nor any of the old princely and feudal rulers, who were in any way responsible for Indian’s march to independence. Instead, the Indian freedom movement was led by the newly anglicized and educated colonial service class who emerged from English-language schools after 1857, and who by and large used modern Western democratic structures and methods – political parties, strikes, and protest marches – to gain their freedom.”

That story is told by Alex von Tunzelman in  Indian Summer. From the book’s jacket is this quote: “At the stroke of midnight on August 15, 1947, one of the twentieth century’s defining moments came as the sovereign nations of India and Pakistan were born, and 400 million people gained independence. With the loss of India, its greatest colony, the British empire gave up its centerpiece.”

There are significant contrasts from what had occurred in 1857, the most marked being that the relinquishing of power on the part of England, however delayed, was entirely voluntary and peaceable. Now the British involved were as benevolent parents helping birth two new nations, India and Pakistan, and guide them towards successful governments. Sad to say their joy was short lived, as newly-born nations no sooner received their slaps on the butt to accelerate their breathing when they exploded into violence reminiscent of the Uprising. Only this time it was Indian against Indian, as Muslims, Sikhs, and Hindu engaged in clashing waves of slaughter, rape, and carnage, and Delhi and the Punjab to the northwest were turned into wastelands.

 This time there were a few enlightened individuals who, if they could not stem the violence, nevertheless were shining lights through the darkness of a second Indian holocaust. The key players in the drama that unfolded were both Indian and British—Mohandas Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, Mohammad Ali Jinnah, Dickie Mountbattan, and his wife Edwina.

As eccentric and sometimes impossible as Gandhi was, given to the practice of satyagraha or “truth force,” his term for passive resistance or militant non-violence or for passive resistance (a practice followed under the leadership of Martin Luther King, Jr. during the American Civil Rights Movement of the 1960’s) and to going on fasts to influence public opinion, he remains the spiritual father of modern India. Nehru was greatly influenced by him.

Nehru was the only child of a privileged family. Sophisticated and Cambridge educated (where he had studied law) when he returned to India in 1912 he developed an interest in politics. He became the guiding light in bringing independence to India and establishing governing policies for the newly-formed nation.

The austere and determined Jinnah was the Muslim leader responsible for the Partition and formation of Pakistan. He is described as cadaverous. He was an elegant and austere man whose clear-sighted vision of a Muslim nation apart from India brought it into being.  Yet he was not a fundamentalist. His Islam was liberal, moderate and tolerant.

 Dickie Mountbatten, the man who oversaw the transfer of power to the Indians and who helped in the early days of the new nations, was the England’s last Indian viceroy. A cousin to the king, a handsome and elegant gentleman, his intelligence and forbearance saved India from splintering into diverse entities and his own marriage—he was a far cry from the British officials who had acted so brutally during the Uprising. His wife Edwina was one of England’s richest and most glamorous women.

At the heart of Indian Summer is a love story. Before coming to India Edwina was a seemingly frivolous and bored wealthy woman; she had affairs, to which her dashing husband had cast a blind eye rather than to lose the woman he adored. But, when she came to India with Dickie, she fell in love with Nehru and he with her. Their love was based on the kind of rapport two people sometimes have which is as much spiritual as physical. After Nehru’s wife Kamala died (she was the mother of Indira Gandhi, who followed her father to power), despite the heavy burdens he bore, he was essentially a lonely man. His loneliness was alleviated by Edwina, who, it is said, was the only person who could make him laugh or influence his politics. Their love caused this once heedless socialite to turn into a heroine who risked her life repeatedly to help the victims of the partition wars.

Mountbatten’s and Nehru’s bond was strengthened because of their love for the same woman. Edwina did not take care of herself and at the relatively young age of 52 in 1960 she preceded both of them in death, dying from heart failure.  She had asked her husband to be buried at sea. To accommodate her wish, HMS Wakeful offered by the Admiralty sailed from Portsmouth. “Mountbatten, in tears, kissed a wreath of flowers before throwing it into the sea. The Wakeful was escorted by an Indian frigate, the Trishul. Jawaharlal Nehru had sent it all the way to the English Channel, just to cast a wreath of marigolds into the waves after Edwina’s coffin.”

Romantic that I am I cried when I read this. Gandhi had been assassinated by a disaffected Hindu shortly after the formation of Indian and Pakistan on January 30, 1948. Dickie Moutbatten visited Nehru lying in state after he died in 1964, and himself was killed in a boating accident (he had wanted to die at sea) in 1979, the last of this core of enlightened people to had helped to birth two nations.

Nehru’s daughter, Indira Gandhi, won a massive victory in the elections of 1971. That year East Pakistan rebelled against West Pakistan and the following year East Pakistan seceded from Jinnah’s dream to become Bangladesh . . . .

With the Partition Pakistan received the short end of the stick, as it lacked the abundance of India’s resources. Today India’s star seems to be rising—she has attracted multinational investors allowing her to create growing middle and upper classes of Indians, while Pakistan struggles against poverty and stress caused by militant Muslim fundamentalists.

In recent times several times the world has seen various area break into bloodbaths of sectarian violence following the departure of a strong ruling force, notably in the Balkans and now in Iraq. The parallel between what happened after the Partition of India and what might happen when the United States troops finally leave Iraq is worth considering. Accumulated hatreds of people of different religious persuasions tore India/Pakistan asunder following Partition. Though it’s hard to imagine the situation in Iraq getting any worse, without American forces to quell some of the sectarian violence, we may not have seen the worst of what might happen in Iraq.

I highly recommend both of these excellent histories of India.

Word count—2,925

Marie Antoinette—the Journey

By Antonia Fraser

New York: Random House, 2001

Reviewed by Jane M. McCabe

Seeing Sophie Coppola’s engaging and controversial film Marie Antoinette whetted my appetite for more and so I read Antonia Fraser’s biography, from which the movie was fashioned. Like most people I held the common parlance with regard to Marie Antoinette: that she was the frivolous and extravagant French Queen, who, when confronted with the fact that the French people were without bread, uttered the words that have followed her into modern times, “then let them eat cake,” and who was ignominiously beheaded at the storming of the Bastille on July 14th, 1789, the event which launched the French Revolution. The Marie of the film portrayed her as a sweet and winsome individual but completely ignored the transformation in her character wrought by the hardships she endured after the overturn of the monarchy.

Has there ever been a historical character that has been as uniformly and maligned and pilloried as has Marie Antoinette? Working from a blizzard of sources Antonia Fraser has helped set the record straight and has crafted a biography that is elegantly paced and engrossing. 

Posing this question gave my reading a certain dramatic tension: in the years prior to the Revolution, did the Versailles court have any idea of what was in store for it?—apparently not.

In 1770 the 15-year-old daughter of the Austrian Empress Marie Theresa, a pawn of her mother’s matrimonial alliances, married the French Dauphin, who upon the death of Louis XV in 1774 became the last King of France, Louis XVI. At first the new reign was immensely popular, causing Marie Antoinette, to exclaim, “How fortunate we are, given our rank, to have gained the love of a whole people with such ease.”

Neither the King nor his Queen was the haughty individual history claims them to be. An impulse towards compassion was deeply rooted in Marie Antoinette’s character. If she spotted a child in the crowd, she might send to ask its name. In the beginning of their reign Marie Antoinette was quite beautiful but the people loved her for her tears.

King Louis XVI too was a gentle if indecisive soul. It took him seven years before their union was consummated, during which time Marie Antoinette was continually upbraided by her mother for her failure to produce an heir to the French throne.

Students of history will recognize that the clock was ticking: in 1776 the American colonists revolted and rejected the authority of King George III. Louis XVI unwittingly seeded his own downfall with the expense of sending thousands of French troops and ships to fight in the New World, thus plunging the country into a spiraling deficit, which in turn seeded the Revolution and gave a model to those who wanted to bring the monarchy to an end.

By 1785 the popularity of the royal family had declined significantly. Troubles were rooted in the worsening financial crisis. The poor as usual suffered the most. France was thrown into chaos and bankruptcy. Marie Antoinette, who felt ill-fated and doomed, was now referred to as “Madame Deficit.” French libelles portrayed Louis XVI as an impotent drunkard and Marie Antoinette as a lascivious adulteress and a lesbian.

In April of 1789 serious riots broke out in Paris over wage reductions and rising prices. Three hundred people were killed and those still alive were unmanageable. Marie Antoinette, that Austrian woman, became the scapegoat for their woes as public derision for the King was yet eschewed.

In October the market women marched from Paris to Versailles, the king and queen’s body guards were slain, the palace trashed, and the royal family was carted off to Paris to be house in Tuileries Palace.

Marie Antoinette expected they would be rescued by foreign powers, particularly by Austria, but they showed indifference to their plight. In 1790 an ill-fated escape was attempted: due to bungling on the parts of their rescuers, they were apprehended at Varennes and returned to Paris, to be housed at the Palace of the Temple and in August, 1792, in the Tower. At the age of 36, Marie Antoinette had become a haggard, middle-aged woman, who hair had gone white, as does sometimes the hair of people who have undergone severe trauma. The frivolous queen had become pious and a formidably hard worker.

Revolutions are it seems inevitably messy, violent affairs. By August of 1792 Paris was one huge abattoir. Louis XVI was declared no longer the King of France—in a moment of prescience, he called Voltaire and Rousseau, philosophers of the mid-18th Century Enlightenment, the ruin of France. Governor Morris commented to Thomas Jefferson, “. . . it would seem strange that the mildest monarch who ever filled the French throne . . . should be prosecuted as one of the most nefarious tyrants that ever disgrace the annals of human nature.”

By August 10th all 691 members of the new French parliament voted that he had conspired against the state and he was sentenced to die on the scaffold. On January 21, 1793, Louis was beheaded, leaving behind “the Widow Capet” and their two surviving children. Her circumstance was drastically reduced. Even her beloved children were taken from her, and she was imprisoned in the Tower to be brought before the Revolutionary Tribunal.

Marie Antoinette’s mild answers to the Tribunal indicate the stature to which she had risen. In the two long days of interrogation at no point did she incriminate those who had plotted to free her. To the allegation she had sexually molested her own son, an idea placed in his head by his sadistic captors, she replied mildly, “How easy it is to make a child say what one wants, even things he does not understand.” When asked about sedition to overthrow the Revolution and restore the monarchy, she replied, “I regard as my enemies those would do harm to my children.”

At 12:15 p.m. on Wednesday, October 16, 1793, nine months after her husband, Marie Antoinette was beheaded. Public reaction was ecstatic. In the 200 years since the French Revolution ushered in new forms of government for Europe and the world, although she has had her admirers, she has continued to be vilified. I am glad for the information gained through reading this insightful biography and grateful to Ms. Fraser for having told her story so beautifully.

Words —1072.

The Force of Destiny—A History of Italy Since 1796

By Christopher Duggan

Houghton Mifflin Company, New York, 2007

Reviewed by Jane M. McCabe

On May 13th or 14th of this year Shimon Peres, the ninth and current president of Israel, gave a speech to Israeli youth in which he said, “Forget history. It doesn’t matter.” He encouraged them to do unimaginable things and told them that they live in an altogether new age, the age of technology, in which the old paradigms are no longer relevant…

Mr. Peres may have been speaking more figuratively than literally. In any case, I beg to differ because I believe knowledge of history is vitally important in order to interpret present reality and thus be able to effectively deal with it. If you don’t know where you come from, how can you know who you are?

Reading Christopher Duggan’s masterful and detailed account of the formation of modern Italy, The Force of Destiny—A History of Italy Since 1796, has been instructive.

Countries can be compared to individuals—each has its own history, idiosyncrasies, strengths and weakness. In 1796, when Napoleon invaded the Italian peninsula, Italy as we know it today did not exist, rather was made of up a collection of municipalities: the Duchies of Savoy, Milan, Parma, Modena, Ferrara, and Grand Duchy of Tuscany; the Republics of Genoa and Venice, the Papal States, and the Kingdoms of Naples, Sicily, Sardinia, and Corsica, each with its competing interests and allegiances.

Most people remember Italy as the greatest power in the ancient world during the time of Roman Empire, from the 3rd Century bc until its collapse in the 5th Century ad. At its height the Roman Empire encompassed all of Western Europe, including Great Britain, North Africa and the Middle East including Iraq.

The Romans are remembered for their organizational genius and bureaucratic acumen, for building roads, aqueducts and walls, for instituting the first mail delivery system, for establishing parliamentary government made of senators, and for establishing laws that still influence our legal system today. The Roman Empire casts a long shadow.

The fall of Rome occurred in 410 AD when Rome itself was sacked by the Visigoths and was subsequently overrun by Huns, Lombards, Byzantines, Arabs (Sicily), Normans, Hofhenstaufens, and Aragonese, ushering in what is commonly referred to the Middle (Dark) Ages, when Europe reverted to a more primitive, superstitious and barbarian time. Each invading group settled and established its own culture.

Therefore, when Italy again rose to preeminence during the Renaissance of the 14th, 15th, and 16th Centuries, it was not a nation but a collection of city states, which were centers of trade and the exchange of ideas. The Renaissance started in Italy and from there spread to Germany, the Netherlands, France, Spain, England—in short, to all of Western Europe. It was a revival  in interest in Ancient Greek and Roman culture, but it inspired a new things: a new philosophical movement, humanism (from which developed the Enlightenment); new literature with the writing of Petrarch, Machiavelli, Dante, Eramus, Rabelais, and Shakespeare; new styles in painting (including the use of perspective in two dimensional representation), architecture, and music with the creative works of Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, Titian, Botticelli… The list goes on and on.

People tend to think that nations as they exist today existed in previous times when this is not often the case. Between 1100 and 1500 nations arose in Europe—in England, France, Spain, Portugal, and Russia—but, Germany and Italy were latecomers to the tribe of nations and did not become unified until late in the 19th Century, Germany in 1870 under  Bismarck and Italy after a protracted struggle in 1860. The countries that had long been nations had a head start. France had its Revolution, the Enlightenment encouraged scientific, rational thought, affecting the Industrial Revolution that propelled these countries into material prosperity. By the 19th Century the nations of Europe were becoming Empires—they were acquiring under developed parts of the world as colonies, which they exploited for natural resources. Small countries such as the collection that made up Italy simply could not compete on the world stage.

The first part of The Force of Destiny concerns itself with Italy’s struggle to achieve unification. From 1796, when Napoleon’s armies overran the Italian peninsula, until modern times, Italy was governed first by the French, then by the Austrians. After achieving unification in 1860, it became first a parliamentary monarchy (with competing factions), then a dictatorship, and finally a democracy.

In modern times Italy has had something of a inferiority complex. Its reputation was for laziness, decadence, and the inability to fight. The attempt to shake this sleeping beauty from her lethargy was extremely difficult and calls to mind an analogy of a thousand drones trying to move a Queen bee. Most of the population in 1796 wasn’t very interested in unification. They were content to live as they had for centuries.

Risorgimento is the term Italians use for the resurrection of Italy, the a-wakening of Italian nationalism culminating in unification and independence. It was an idea, a dream first proposed by intellectuals, those privileged to travel to England and France where they saw first-hand the affects of progress and wanted these things for Italy. They understood that Italy could never achieve her place in the modern world and become an empire again unless she was unified.

Italy looks like boot, a long boot, with Rome located almost dead center. Northern Italy is industrialized (its people tend to be better-educated and have a higher standard of living) while southern Italy is agricultural. Its people are poor, poorly-educated, and insular. In the early 19th Century they weren’t interested in unification. The intellectuals who promoted the idea of unity came mainly from the north.

Italians honor three men above all others as the founders of modern Italy— Mazzini, Cavour, and Garibaldi. Mazzini was the prophet, preaching the gospel of freedom, Cavour the statesman, devising a practical political program, and Garibaldi, the picturesque military adventurer, recklessly leading his followers to victory. They never liked or trusted each other, but each in his own way contributed to Italy’s unification.

No country likes to be subjugated by another nation, but things are often gained from one’s oppressor. Being governed by France, Italy was exposed to tenets of the Napoleonic Code: the equality of all citizens before the law, the right of an individual to choose his profession, supremacy of the lay state, and freedom of the individual conscience. When Napoleon was defeated in 1812 control of Italy was given to Austria. It’s less clear what benefits Italy derived from Austrian management but it lasted for the next 50 years.

During this time secret societies arose in opposition to French then Austrian rule, literature circulated, and art, particularly opera, was created whose purpose was to instill national pride, but hope of unification remained thwarted. Central to Giuseppe Mazzini’s crusade was the belief that Italians must fight for their nation from a sense of religious duty rather than for economic betterment or because of social issues. God, he claimed, had ordained Italy to be a great nation with a great mission in the world, so it was incumbent for Italians to unite in order to implement his will.

After travels in Britain and France, Camillo Benso di Cavour returned, fascinated with progress and convinced the best way to advance Italian civilization was by steering a middle path between political extremes. Cavour was a hard-headed politician, the Disraeli, who maneuvered Italy from Austria’s grasp.

Garibaldi collected fellow adventurers, provided them with arms and red shirts. On May 5, 1860, this famous company of the “One Thousand” set sail from Genoa for Sicily in two small steamers to overthrow the king. The enterprise was foolhardy, but it succeeded, because neither the people nor the soldiers were loyal to their monarch. Garibaldi was so revered by his compatriots that when a bullet was removed from his ankle souvenir hunters were willing to pay huge sums for the relic.

After unification was achieved Italy didn’t have an easy go governing herself, as unification did not mean all her factions would automatically come together. The new kingdom of Italy was parliamentary monarchy. For the next sixty years she was an impoverished nation with factions competing for power, a situation which students of history will recognize often leaves a country ripe for a strong man, a dictator, to take control. After World War I such a man emerged in the form of Benito Mussolini.

One of the hardest terms I’ve ever tried to understand is fascism. During the time I used attend lectures at New York City’s West Side Marxist Center, about the worst thing anyone could call you was “a fascist.” For years it has defied my understanding. Definitions in dictionaries left me scratching my head. So, I welcomed the section on Mussolini’s Fascist Italy to help me understand fascism.

The symbol of fascism is bundle wheat stocks tied together. The best definition I find comes from Word’s dictionary:  “any movement, ideology, or attitude that favors dictatorial government, centralized control of private enterprise, repression of all opposition, and extreme nationalism.”

By 1919 there was a fascist movement in Italy but they lost the 1919 elections. They were led by Benito Mussolini, who had come through ranks of the Italian army during World War I. Fascists believed that violence was an appropriate means to an end, a brutal necessity to affect change on a national or an international level. Mussolini created squads (“black shirts”) to assault their enemies—proponents of the left and members of the church. Violence was more than just a tool of war—it was an instrument of propaganda, a means of generating a spirit of virile idealism, the conviction that force ultimately determines the course of all human affairs!

A strong man in charge often answers a heart-felt need in the people who accept him, even though it is at the sacrifice of their liberty. A dictator is in effect a parent—the people are children and they are obliged to do the will of their father. If they do so, they will achieve their goals. Don’t forget the desire the martyrs of unification instilled in Italians, that Italy regain her status as a world power. Mussolini’s rhetoric plugged right into this desire.

In speeches he constantly referred to the importance of discipline, order, and hard work; he touched on the leitmotifs of patriotism, the need for Italy to be “reborn,” to shake off the old vices and become strong, feared and respected, the search for moral unity, AND to regain the status she had in her previous eras of glory.

Liberty was attacked as a bourgeois ideal. As soon as Mussolini became prime minister in 1922, freedom of speech was denied, and opposition to fascism was repressed. The Fascist government undertook the molding of fascist minds. Teachers were required to wear uniforms. Physical training (as preparation for war) was mandatory. Racism was encouraged. The only art tolerated was propaganda promoting fascism.

Since population growth was encouraged, a tax was levied on unmarried men. The “ideal” woman was the one who bore and raised children and kept the home. While exposing moral virtues, fascism also had an erotic component—Mussolini was a respectable married man, but the idea was promoted that he had a fatal allure to women and was sexually voracious, making love to a different woman every day.

Soon Italians referred to Mussolini as DUCE. He was elevated to the status of a demigod, compared favorably to Socrates, Caesar, Washington, Napoleon, Lincoln, even Jesus Christ. Fascism was not only a party, a regime, but a faith, a religion!

The Italians believed the DUCE connected them to the nation, which would enable Italy to fulfill her rightful destiny as a force in the world. Fascism was the epitome of dynamism and modernity that would spearhead an economic miracle. Italy would become an Empire again, like it had been in ancient times!

 Sound familiar? Totalitarianism seems to breed such phenomenon. In the 20th Century alone we have seen the likes of Adolph Hilter (whose propaganda was similar to that of the Fascists); Joseph “Papa” Stalin (who killed more Russians than people killed in the Holocaust); Chairman Mao (under whose auspices during the “Cultural Revolution” Chinese were encouraged to rat on their neighbors and humiliate anyone who deviated from the party line); Idi Amin, Saddam Hussein, and a host of petty tyrants.

The growing gap between the fascist ideal and reality was denied. The epitome of Mussolini’s approval came when he invaded Ethiopia. The adulation he received belied the financial burden he had incurred.

Germany’s course under Hilter ran parallel to Italy’s under Mussolini, so it comes as no surprise Hilter was soon courting Mussolini. Hilter didn’t understand how impoverished Italy had become under Mussolini and how weak and ill equipped she was militarily to support the Axis cause. In 1943 Italy was overrun by Allied forces. Mussolini’s Fascist government collapsed, and he was forced to resign.

On April 27, 1945, Mussolini, disguised in a German greatcoat and helmet (so he would be permitted to cross the border), and his mistress were apprehended on the shore of Lake Como.  They were killed by Italian soldiers, and their bodies hung upside down. The Italian people were quick to recognize that they had been duped by Mussolini. Fascist Italy was over.

Italy emerged from the Second World War, as it had from the unification process in 1860 and the First World War, deeply split and uncertain as to its identity. In the space of a decade, however, an extraordinary surge in manufacturing transformed Italy from a relatively backward agricultural country into one of the world’s most powerful modern economies. If it never attains its preeminence, to have twice ruled the world is more than most nations achieve.

If one seeks to understand what life is like for people living under a totalitarian regime that controls all aspects of their lives and thus to understand the value of living in a free society, a democracy, where one can do what he wants and be whom he wants to be, the section on fascism alone in The Force of Destiny is worth reading.

Forget history? I think not!

Aimee Semple McPherson and the Resurrection of Christian America

by Matthew Avery Sutton

Harvard University Press: Cambridge, Massachusetts; London, England

2007

reviewed by Jane M. McCabe

Having never heard of Aimee Semple McPherson when Fred Beauford, editor of Neworld Journal, asked me to read and review a book on an American evangelist by this name, I thought I would be in for a boring read. Such was hardly the case, for as it turns out McPherson was one of the most dynamic and influential Americans of the 1920’s and 1930’s. In parts it read as though it were a harlequin romance (not that I read them) replete with a still-famous kidnapping and a trial that provided daily fodder for the news media, particularly in her home town of Los Angeles. The book also provided me with a glimpse into American society of those times.

It is generally helpful to know something about the author of book, where and when it was published. Matthew Avery Sutton Sutton teaches courses in 20th Century United States history, cultural history, and religious history at Washington State University. Aimee Semple McPherson and the Resurrection of Christian America is his first book. It won the Thomas J. Wilson Memorial Prize from Harvard University Press, awarded annually to the best book in any discipline by a first-time author. The book also served as the basis for the Public Broadcasting Service documentary Sister Aimee, part of PBS’s American Experience series. You know Harvard University Press is not going to publish a poorly written book, so I knew that I was in good hands with this author; I found his account of McPherson’s life to be balanced one.

The book interested me as soon as it arrived and I thumbed through the sections of photographs—Aimee as a child preaching to her dolls, Aimee next to her “gospel” car, the exterior of her unique mega church, the Angeles Temple, in Los Angeles, McPherson and William Jenning Bryan, both anti-revolution crusaders, Aimee dressed in her milk maid outfit that she used when preaching one of favorite sermons, “The Story of my Life,” and so forth.

She was born in 1890 and died in 1944. During her 54 years she probably accomplished more towards resurrecting Christian America than any other evangelist. After her first husband, Robert Semple, also an evangelist, died, and after several years of traveling back and forth across the country to revival meetings, she and her mother decided to settle down and buy a piece of property on which to construct a tabernacle. They recognized that Los Angeles had become a tourist attraction and so purchased a piece of property on Glendale Boulevard in Echo Park. What was to be a simple wooden tabernacle became the Angeles Temple with its sloping domed roof, “half like Roman Coliseum, half like a Parisian Opera House.”

Los Angeles in the 1920’s was the product of rapid evolution where railroads competed for riders. What had been a sleepy agricultural town was now advertised as an Edenic paradise with a fabulous climate and it generated a flood of migrants. The country’s first motion picture studios had selected southern California as their home, and real estate tycoons divided and subdivided the region into small cities, fattening their wallets as they met the demand for affordable housing. Blossoming religious movements set the tone for post WWI Los Angeles, and McPherson took the city by storm. Soon the Angeles Temple was one of the “must-see’s” in Southern California.

Dazzling religious theatrics and a penchant for publicity made McPherson one of the most famous American personalities of the interwar years, and evangelicalism, with its integration of cutting-edge technology, patriotism and social conservatism became an influential force in United States history. McPherson couldn’t have chosen anywhere better for her dramatic flair to flourish.

She used the stage at the temple as platform for her dramatic sermons. Most often dressed in virginal white McPherson would appear as an angel of God. A superb director and producer with an uncanny dramatic instinct, she used animals on stage—lions, camels, monkeys—motorcycles, touching the Angelenos’ loneliness and drawing them to her temple. In so doing she won the hearts of the community and soon even well known celebrities were among her audience. When she was in Paris and looked up Charlie Chaplin, they became instant companions.

The 1920’s was a time of boom in this country with rapidly changing mores and new technology—cars, highways, airplanes, radio, and motion pictures were changing the American landscape forever. McPherson recognized that the new technology could be used to increase the fold of Christian believers. “If Jesus were alive today, I think he would preach parables about oil wells and airplanes,” McPherson commented. The advent of radio provided an unparallel opportunity to convert the world and reach those who could not leave their homes to attend church and those who chose not to. What broadcasting jazz can do for the feet, broadcasting the word of God could do for the heart. Soon McPherson had her own radio station. She used airplanes flying over the city to drop leaflets.

On 22 November 1859 Charles Robert Darwin, the great English naturalist published his famous book, On the Origin of Species. Darwin had delayed its publication because he understood that the theory of natural selection would fly in the face of traditional Christian religious belief. Indeed, Darwin’s theory that life on earth had evolved and adapted over time and that the species that survived were often those who adapted most efficiently to their environment, the so-called “survival of the fittest” theory, caused a maelstrom of controversy, especially among  Christians, because they were as threatened by his theories, just as he knew they would be.

 By the summer of 1925 the famous “monkey trial” was being conducted in Tennessee and William Jennings Bryan was working to convict high school teacher John Scopes for teaching evolution in his classroom. McPherson with a deep abiding hatred for evolution organized all night prayer services to pray for his conviction.

KIDNAPPING THE BRIDE OF CHRIST

When McPherson returned from her travels thousands of Angelenos would gather at the train station to welcome her home. Shortly after her return from a crusade to establish the nation in the firm foundations of Christian fundamentalism, the religion of our forefathers, and fight against the forces that would compromise it, on May 16th, 1926, McPherson and her secretary checked into the Ocean View Hotel in Venice Beach for a rest.

McPherson went swimming and disappeared. Newspapers carried the scoop, calling it the biggest Los Angeles mystery in years. Some thought it another of McPherson’s publicity stunts. The LA Times noticed that her radio engineer, Ken Ormiston, whose wife was divorcing him, had also disappeared, not reappearing in Los Angeles until late May.

In the early hours of June 23rd McPherson appeared in the Mexican border town of Agua Prieta with marks of torture on her and with the story of having been kidnapped from Venice Beach. She said a man and woman had met her when she came out of the water and begged her to go to their car to pray for their dying baby, but once there they had shoved her in and gave her an anesthetic that rendered her unconscious, then tried to secure a ransom from the Angeles Temple. They kept her a hostage, she said, until one day she freed herself by rubbing her wrists on the jagged edge of a large tin can, jumped out a window and accomplished the desert trek to Aqua Prieta. Her surprise resurrection reinvigorated the newspapers.

Neither captors nor the hideaway was ever found. When she arrived back in Los Angeles, 30,000 people greeted her at the train station, more people than had turned out for President Wilson’s visit to the city. Many Angelenos called for a full inquiry and on July 8th, 1926, McPherson made her first appearance before the Los Angeles grand jury. As the trial went on and on, the correspondence received by the newspapers revealed a divided public. On July 20th the grand jury issued its decision: 14 of 17 jurors did not believe her story, because no hard evidence had been produced.

The papers confirmed that Ormiston had been in a Carmel cottage with an unknown, heavily-disguised woman, referred to as “Miss X.” McPherson was vilified by many, who saw her as sex-starved and felt sure she was the Mysterious Madame X. McPherson blamed the devil for her troubles —it was  Satan’s plot to undermine one of the most extraordinary religious movements in history.

The 1920’s was time when the roles of women were changing; they had thrown off their Victorian garb, bobbed their hair, and had taken to smoking cigarettes, chewing gum, and wearing make-up. The “flappers” rushed to McPherson’s defense, as they rightfully saw in her an advocate for women’s rights.

Nothing was ever proved one way or another, and on January 20, 1927, all charges against her were dropped. In the 80 year since most Americans assume she had an affair with Ormiston. Speculation continued to be revisited in the novels, films and songs. The Scopes Trial was the basis for Inherit the Wind. Upton Sinclair wove McPherson’s story into his novel, Oil, and in Sinclair Lewis’s Elmer Gantry, Gantry encounters a traveling revivalist, Sister Sharon Falconer, on her rise to fame. Lewis based his character on McPherson, portraying Falconer as highly desirable, beautiful and eloquent, but a promiscuous hypocrite. These artists believe that religious demagogues took advantage of new technology to dupe an ignorant public.

McPherson had emerged from the kidnapping a superstar, but she was exhausted and took refuge in her exotic new home on Lake Elsinor southeast of Los Angeles. She remarried, this time to the man who had played the Pharaoh in her movie (she also tried to make some religious films) about Hebrew captivity, The Iron Furnace, but the marriage was unhappy and short-lived. When it ended in divorce, McPherson never found love again. She threw herself back into her work, returning to her Pentecostal roots, and in so doing earned her salvation.

The 1929 stock market crash and ensuing Depression meant hardship for many Americans. The Angeles Temple put the gospel into practice by opening a dinning hall, a soup kitchen, and a commissary to serve the city’s homeless and those living in want. Focusing especially on the needs of women and children, it was the most effective and inclusive welfare institution in Los Angeles at that time.

After her return to Pentecostalism no one accused McPherson of leading a double life. She believed the biggest threat to American Christianity was evolution because she felt that it and atheism produced a brutal, inhumane advocacy of survival of the fittest, making social reform and charity work pointless.  She remained committed to Prohibition and believed that Depression-era strikes signaled communist infiltration of the labor movement. Soviet-style communism, she believed, was the philosophy of the Antichrist; her fixation of the imminent Second coming of Christ made her wary of those she saw as the emissaries of the Antichrist.

As I read Aimee Semple McPherson and the Resurrection of Christian America I kept thinking about the similarities and differences between the 1930’s and the 2000’s today, some seventy years later. I was surprised by the number of issues that are still the same. Darwin’s theory of evolution has come to be accepted by most people but not those on the religious right. Prohibition seems to be rendered as a quaint interlude in a country that likes its booze. Some could argue that we have turned into a more brutal and inhumane society due to the degree to which we have become secularized. Worry about Communist infiltration has been replaced by worry of terrorist infiltration, and our foremost enemy is now Muslim radicals rather than communists. The religious right is as convinced as they were then that we are living in the end of times, the days before Christ’s return, but while they were more mainstay in McPherson’s day, they now have become  more and more marginalized as our culture has become more and more secularized.

The Angeles Temple has been made a historic landmark and it still holds weekly services. When in Los Angeles recently, I made it my aim to go to a service there. Though I was staying but a short distance from the temple, because I am unfamiliar with Los Angeles, I got so lost that by the time I finally found the temple, the service had been going on for an hour. Upon entering the church, I was politely told by an usher that the downstairs section was full and was shown to a seat in the balcony, where I noted that the majority of parishioners were mostly Hispanic and black people.

Pastor Matthew Barnett, dressed in a blue shirt, blue-jeans and spiffy grey sneakers, was near the end of his sermon. On stage he was surrounded by young musicians with an array of instruments—an electric keyboard, guitars, drums and a piano. Beyond them was a curtain containing a neon light assemblage suggesting Los Angeles. His image could be seen on open circuit TV, as several large screens were positioned about. On the screen was written, “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever.” –Hebrews 13:8. Though Pastor Barnett told us that, “Greater things are yet to come,” and urged us to make a difference in our communities, I could not help but feel a little sad, knowing what the Angeles Temple had been in the days of Aimee Semple McPherson and seeing what it is today, but could not the same be said for many institutions in our country today?

A Tale of Love and Darkness

By Amos Oz

Translated from the Hebrew by Nicholas de Lange

Harcourt Books

I chose to read this book for this reason: I was interested in what it was like to grow up, like its author did, in Israel. I figured the book would be good because Oz is Israel’s most widely-published novelist. This book, however, is not a novel; rather it’s a memoir mostly about his childhood and early adulthood.

I was not disappointed—from its first pages I was enchanted and felt as though I was reading the writing of a kindred spirit. I had the same experience as he had when as I child: I was so deeply absorbed in reading Little House on the Prairie that I thought I was there and when called to dinner it took a few seconds to return to the “real” world. Oz writes of his own absorption in a book as follows: “When my father asked me, half angrily, half affectionately, what was the matter with me this time, it took a while for me to come back to this world…of everyday chores.”

Amos Oz’s parents were European Jews who settled in Jerusalem in the 1930’s. His father’s family was from Odessa; they were a family of scholars. His great uncle, Dr. Joseph Klausner, was a famous Israeli linguist. Arieh’s great disappointment was his inability to get a teaching position, however, in those days Israel was rife with scholars. His father’s brother David had refused to leave Odessa and was killed by the Nazis.

His mother family was from Rovno, Poland. She was middle sister of three; her father became wealthy and purchased a large home in Rovno. Their mother was something of a harridan. Fania’s psychological disposition was delicate, causing her greater problems as she grew older.

Though Oz supplies the reader with plenty of information about the nascent state of Israel, the book is primarily about his mother’s suicide.

After long being tormented with bouts of medical depression and insomnia on January 6th, 1952, she ended her life at the age of 38 in the apartment of her sister Haya on Ben Yehuda Street, Tel Aviv, by means of an overdoes of sleeping pills. Oz was 12 years old.

He comments, “It rained heavily almost without break all over Israel through that winter of 1951-52.”

If there’s a human action I most disdain it’s suicide. Though I understand that those who resort to it have been, as Fania Klausner was, long tormented by their mere existence, still I find it hard to forgive them because of what it does to those whom they have left behind. In Fania’s case I think her suicide was calculated—she figured those whom she most loved could get along without her, her husband and her beloved son Amos.

As it turned out within a year Arieh had remarried and had in time two children with his new wife—so, it would seem he had determinedly carried on without Fania, and yet “in the last years of his life his shoulders slumped. He had grim fits of rage when he would hurl rebukes and accusations at anyone around him….” Eighteen years after his first wife died, on October 11, 1970, four months after his 60th birthday, after buying some stationery from a store in Jerusalem, he wished the clerk good day, greeted two strangers who were in line behind him, stepped outside the shop and dropped dead of a heart attack.” I don’t think he ever truly recovered from Fania’s suicide.

As for Amos Oz, at the age of 15 he joined a kibbutz, where he remained for the next 30 years. At that age he knew he wanted to write but thought he had to go to some exotic location to do so—London, Paris, Milan.

“It was Sherwood Anderson,” he writes, “who got me out of the vicious circle and freed my writing hand.” When he read Winesburg, Ohio, which is a string of stories revolving the trivial, everyday happenings in a small town, it opened his eyes to write about what was around him!

By now Oz has written 13 novels, four books of non-fiction and one children’s book. He is happily married to a remarkably happy woman named Nily, to whom he was attracted because she was always singing. They have several children. He has received numerous awards for his work. This is the first book I’ve read of his, and I found it to be wonderfully satisfying—I’m glad for his happiness and hope Nily continues to sing.

—Jane M McCabe is an associate editor and frequent contributor to the Neworld Review.

An Extraordinary Life—the Life and Times of Paul Bowles

Lately, I’ve been in love with Paul Bowles. For those of you who don’t know him, he’s that illusive writer who lived mostly in Morocco during the 1940’s until his death in 1990, in Tangier, where he was visited by the beats (remember the beats were the precursor of the hippies) and others. His best-known novel was The Sheltering Sky, which was made into a movie, a rather poor movie however, by Bernardo Bertolucci.

His first career was composing for the scores for films and plays, but he was also a first-class writer. But I’m getting ahead of myself, so let me back up a pace.

Paul Bowles was born on January 30th, 1910, in Jamaica, New York. His father, a dentist, considered him an intrusion in his life and disliked him. I wondered how this marked Bowles’ character; perhaps it contributed to his independence of character. He was a handsome boy with blonde curls, and there was no doubt that he was extremely intelligent.

When he was old enough to escape from his family, he went to Europe, to Paris, where he was introduced to Gertrude Stein and the coterie of artists surrounding her. He studied music with Aaron Copland, who also introduced him to sex. It was Stein who suggested that he go to Morocco.

During the winter of 1936-7, when he was 27, he met and married Jane Auer, “whose red hair, pointed nose and slight limp attracted him.” Theirs was an open marriage—Jane often preferred women, and Paul was bisexual. Often they lived apart. Yet their bond was durable and lasted until her death in 1973. Jane too was writer, although her work is not as well-known as his.

They were part of that enviable time when artists hobnobbed with one another and traveled to exotic places. Bowles was successful as a composer though he was inadequately compensated for his work. He returned to Tangier many times before finally settling there with excursions to Ceylon (where he bought the island of Taprobane!), Madeira and elsewhere.

When I first heard that Bowles bought an island, I assumed he must have come from a very wealthy family, but such was not the case. He was able to buy Taprobane for $6000, less than a car these days. It was lovely place with an unusual house, but it lacked electricity and its only access was to wade there. Jane wasn’t thrilled and not many friends visited.

Morocco was his first love—he felt at home there and was able to work. Jane liked Morocco too. Bowles learned Arabic and explored the country and the Algerian Sahara. He was particularly fond of Fez, the setting for The Spider’s House.

Bowles took up writing to supplement his income, but, since he was a careful observer and a natural storyteller, he excelled in this profession. His travel writings are non parel.

The Sheltering Sky is a stunning piece of work. It shook me to my core. It’s the story of young American couple who venture into the Algerian Sahara, where Port, the character patterned after himself, dies, leaving Kit in shock to wander from the compound where they were staying and attach herself to band of traveling Arab merchants. She becomes the lover of Belqassim, the leader of the expedition. When they arrived at the town where he lives, she is housed in a labrynthian house and is the object of jealousy from his other wives, so she leaves…. By the time she is found and brought back to civilization she is mad. Nothing like it has been written before or since.

In the 1960’s and ‘70’s people were testing the boundaries of acceptable behavior, reverting in our times back to more puritanical mores. The Bowles ceased making love shortly after they were married, yet their bond persisted undiminished. Paul always loved jane, liked spending time with her; whenever she was in trouble, especially in her later years when her health was failing, he would always go to her as quickly as possible.

Bowles was convinced that his smoking kif was essential to his creative process and was an integral part of the composition technique. He enjoyed introducing his guests to the pleasures of smoking kif.

In 1956 Jane, barely 40, suffered her first stroke. She was treated in England and given electric shock treatments, but then suffered from convulsions on their ship out of London back to Tangier.

In 1959 Bowles was notified that he had received a Rockefeller grant of $6,500 to fund a project to record Morocco’s indigenous music, so he travelled to the outlying area with this purpose in mind. Many things interfered with his obtaining his purpose—being in areas where there was neither electricity nor battery generators, heat up to 135 degrees Fahrenheit, and natives who expected more than he had planned to pay them for their performances.

Bowles had a talent for traveling, and his home in Tangier was the go-to place for the invasion of beats—Tennessee Williams, Christopher Isherwood, Truman Capote, William Burroughs, Gregory Corso, and Allen Ginsberg.

Jane died on May 4, 1973, at the age of 55 in Malaga, Spain, where she had been hospitalized for the last few years of her life. After her death Paul continued to live on in Tangier, writing to friend, “There is nothing to keep me here now, save habit.” Her death took the wind out of his sails. In the years following he continued to live in a small flat in Tangier with more books and papers than he room for.

In the fall of 1984, he had treatment prostrate cancer in Switzerland and several years later an operation in Rabat to sever his sympathetic nerve his right leg. Although he kidded that when he died, he wanted to be buried in the pet cemetery outside of Tangier, his body was returned to New York where he was cremated and laid to rest next to his parents. He was not alone when he died in Tangier at 11:10 a.m. on November 18, 1999, at the age of 89 years. His friend Abdelouahaid Bouliaich and his cook Souad were by his side. He was perfectly lucid to the end. He wrote:

“If I knew I were going to die tomorrow I’d think, so soon?
Still, if a man has spent his life doing what he wanted to do,
he ought to be able to say goodbye without regrets.”

His was a life well lived. His ashes were interned in the Lakemont Cemetery overlooking the Seneca Lake, where the bodies or ashes of many members of his family had been interned.

When Port dies in The Sheltering Sky, Bowles writes, “A black star appears, a point of darkness and gateway to repose. Reach out, pierce the fire fabric of the sheltering sky, take repose.”

CARTHAGE MUST BE DESTROYED—THE RISE AND FALL OF AN ANCIENT CIVILIZATION

By Richard Miles

Viking, 2010

Reviewed by Jane M McCabe

Although I didn’t see all the places on my wish list to visit—Istanbul’s San Sophia or the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus, to name a few—I did see Carthage. To see the ruins of this once great, ancient city was on my itinerary when I visited North Africa during the summer of 2004.

The tragic story of how this lovely and powerful country situated on the southern Mediterranean coast of what is now Tunisia was destroyed in 146 BC by the Romans stirred my imagination—knowing how pitiless was their destruction—they salted the ground so that it could never rise again—I expected that Carthage would be a place of desolation…

But such was not the case. Carthage was built on a isthmus made up of a series of sandstone hills that jut into the sea. From Tunis, the modern capital of Tunisia, one can take a train to Cap Bon, a pretty town of white-washed villas covered with bougainvillea, perched at its northern-most point, and then travel south along the eastern sea-board through Roman ruins and the ruins of Carthage. Because of the gentle breezes that waft in from the sea and the agreeable temperatures, Carthage would have been a pleasant place in which to live.

Apparently, the ancient Phoenicians thought so too. An ancient people who originated in the Levant around what is now Beirut, Lebanon, they were known for ship building, sea-faring and mercantile abilities. The Mediterranean was their apple, so to speak, as they traded all along its coasts from Beirut to eastern Spain, where they established numerous colonies. But Carthage became their capital city, and they became the Carthaginians.

This is from the book’s jacket: “Richard Miles teaches Ancient History at the University of Sydney and is a Fellow of Trinity Hall, Cambridge. He has written widely on Punic, Roman and Vandal North Africa and has directed archaeological excavations in Carthage and Rome. He is currently filming Ancient Worlds, a new six part series on the Ancient World for BBC.”

Centuries before Christ’s birth, Carthage grew into a powerful city-state. For one hundred years Carthage and its northern rival, Rome, battled for dominance of the Classical World. The devastating struggle between the Carthaginians and the Romans was one of the defining dramas of the Ancient World. In a series of epic and sea battles, both sides came close of victory before Carthage was finally defeated.

Someone recently told me that there’s a story that aliens decided not to inhabit planet earth because its people are too war-like. To be sure history proves this so. Though not a historian, I’ve observed that most wars were fought because one people desired the resources of another people’s territory. (This was so until the formation of the United Nations in 1948, when the nations agreed that the borders of countries are sacrosanct and shall not be violated by other countries.)

This was the motivation that caused the increasingly powerful Rome to covet the lands controlled by the Carthaginians—particularly in Spain, Sardinia, and Sicily. When the Carthaginians restricted them from the silver-rich east coast of Spain, Rome went to battle.

CMBD is a scholarly book perhaps written more for other scholars than the lay public. As such, certain things are presupposed, things that the lay reader may or may not know. This caused me to revert, as I sometimes do when I want a summary of information, to a high-school world history book given to me years ago by a Brooklyn history teacher. Here’s its summary of the clash between Rome and Carthage:

The Roman conquest of Italy brought them in contact with Carthage, a powerful city on the coast of North Africa. Carthage had been founded by the Phoenicians about one hundred years before the village of Rome was established. By the third century BC it had become the center of a rich and powerful commercial empire.

At first, Rome was untroubled by the power of Carthage. Later, Carthage angered the Romans by refusing to permit them to trade in the western Mediterranean area. Finally, when Carthage tried to occupy northeastern Sicily—dangerously close to the coat of Italy—the Romans turned to war in an effort to crush this new threat. The three wars fought between Rome and Carthage are the Punic Wars (Punic meant Phoenician in Latin.)

Rome Wins the First Punic War

In the First Punic War (264-241 BC) the Romans built ships, learned how to maneuver them, and finally defeated Carthage on the sea. As a result of her victory, Rome gained control of a major part of the island of Sicily. She also won additional freedom to travel on the Mediterranean Sea. The First Punic War had not settled the basic issues between Rome and Carthage. Both sides knew that the struggle would continue, and each used the period of peace to prepare for further war.

Hannibal Crosses the Alps

Carthage soon sought revenge for her defeat by Rome, and war again broke out. The Second Punic War (218-201 BC) was marked by the extraordinary exploits of Hannibal, a great Carthaginian general who decided to march an army over the Alps to make a surprise attach on the Romans! In 218 BC Hannibal led a force of 40,000 foot soldiers, 87 African elephants carrying supplies, and 8000 horsemen through Spain and southern Gaul (part of modern France) until he reached the Alps. Then, in the month of November, he stated the dangerous 10,000-foot climb over the mountains.

It was a disastrous journey, but Hannibal refused to give up. “No part of the Alps reaches the sky,” he shouted to his men and promised them that they would cross the top. And cross it they did—although only one half of them made it safely to the plain of northern Italy. Here Hannibal rested his men, drew up his military plans, and prepared to fight.

The Second Punic War Ends

The Romans sent an army to meet the Carthaginians, but Hannibal’s troops crushed them and moved forward. Lacking the equipment needed to batter down the walls of Rome, the Carthaginian leader could not take the capital. Instead, he remained in Italy over fifteen years and caused much destruction.

Finally in an effort to draw Hannibal from Italy, the Romans ordered an army under Scipio to attack Carthage directly. The Carthaginians sent a hurried call to Hannibal to return home at once to defend his people. He did—and at the Battle of Zama (202 BC) the great Carthaginian general was at last defeated. The defeat of Hannibal ended the Second Punic War. Carthage was forced to disarm and to give up most of its possessions.

As well-written as this book is I would only recommend it to those who have a taste for scholarly, historical works and the patience to wade through them, for Carthage Must Be Destroyed is a weighty tome. If one can get through its first half he will be rewarded in the second half, especially once Hannibal, the mighty, charismatic Carthaginian general, enters the stage when the story becomes intensely interesting. Who can forget the story of Hannibal taking 40,000 foot soldiers, 87 African elephants carrying supplies, and 8000 horsemen over the Alps in the dead of winter to launch a surprise attack on Rome? We talk of pyrrhic victories and Herculean tasks—I’m surprised there’s not a phrase for doing something quite extraordinary requiring huge effort and largely succeeding in it—as, say, “a Hannibalian effort” would be.

But, military geniuses are not necessarily good statesmen or politicians—Hannibal lost the support of the fickle Carthaginians because he was too strict a moralist, and he was ostracized from Carthage. He fled east into Asia Minor. Rather than be captured he took poison and died condemning the Romans for their vindictiveness, impiety and lack of faith.

Carthage in fact became prosperous again after the Second Punic War, causing Rome once again to worry about her re-establishing military strength. Cato in the Roman Senate rallied for her complete destruction—he “presented the infamous dossier of Carthage’s six reputed transgressions of its obligations to Rome” and stated that “Carthage must be destroyed!”

It was a case of hype and skewed information but won the day. Soon all the might of the Roman Empire came down on Carthage. Hardly a blade of grass was left growing in Carthage after Rome’s destruction of it.

The Punic Wars were extremely important as they established Rome as the foremost power in the known world. Following them the Romans referred to the Mediterranean as mare nostrum, “our sea.”

“Rome’s newly found status was expressed not only in the power to obliterate, but also in the power to justify the unjustifiable.” To justify their perfidy in such a pitiless destruction of such a great civilization the Romans vilified Carthage, self-righteously proclaiming its supposed transgressions. Sound familiar?

With the destruction of Carthage the Romans became the makers of history.

Had Carthage been the victor of the Punic wars the history of the world would have been considerably different. Perhaps it was Carthage’s fate. In the Aeneid, penned by Vergil in the first century BC, Aeneas, the forefather of the Roman people sails to Carthage where he has a love affair with Dido the Queen of Carthage. When he abandons her, she is so desolate from her loss that she commits suicide.

As it was, Rome continued her expansion into Gaul, Spain and Great Britain. She ruled the known world until her fall in 410 AD when overrun by barbarian hordes. The panoply of Roman gods were replaced by Christianity after the conversation of Constantine in 325 AD.

Catherine the Great—Portrait of a Woman

by Robert K. Massie

Random House, New York, 2011

reviewed by Jane M McCabe

What better endorsement can a reviewer give a book than to recount the many hours of pleasure brought in reading it? And so it is with Robert K. Massie’s biography of Catherine the Great, who ruled Russia for 34 years, from 1762 to 1796.

Catherine was the enlightened empress who governed ten million Russian subjects during the last half of the 18th Century, during the time of the Enlightenment leading up to the French Revolution. She was the spiritual heir to Peter the Great, who had wrested Russia from being a primitive, medieval backwater into a modern European nation.

As if the world had not been sufficiently enriched by Robert Massie’s masterful biography of Peter the Great, one of the best biographies I’ve ever read (for which he deservedly won the Pulitzer Prize,) I suppose it inevitable that he would one day also write the biography of Catherine the Great. If Peter’s biography was somewhat flawed to a reader not terribly interested in the detailed military maneuvers of Russia’s wars with Turkey and Sweden, Catherine’s biography is seamless.

Peter the Great was born in 1672 and he died in 1725. Peter was tsar of Russia from 1682 to 1725. His self-given title was Peter the Great though he was officially Peter I.

Peter the Great is credited with dragging Russia out of the medieval times to such an extent that by his death in 1725, Russia was considered a leading eastern European state. He centralized government, modernized the army, created a navy and, alas, increased the subjugation of the peasants. His domestic policy allowed him to execute an aggressive foreign policy.

Peter the Great had two wives, with whom he had fourteen children; three of them survived to adulthood, including a son, Alexei, and two daughters, Anna and Elizabeth.

Peter was succeeded by his wife Catherine who had the aid of the imperial guards. Upon her death in 1727, she was succeeded by Alexei’s son, Peter II. His daughter Elizabeth seized power in a coup d'état in 1741. Elizabeth’s sister Anna was married to a minor German noble and she had given birth to Peter III, who became Elizabeth’s designated heir.

Peter III was a queer duck of a man no more suited to be emperor of Russia than Donald Duck. It was imperative that he marry and produce an heir. Since he was half-German, Sophia of Anhalt-Zerbst, the daughter of penurious Prussian nobleman, was chosen as his bride. Once married to Peter III she was renamed Catherine. It was this obscure German princess who had traveled to Russia at the age of fourteen who became Catherine the Great.

Not a blood relative of Peter the Great, Catherine shared characteristics with him—a brilliant mind, an insatiable curiosity, an intense interest in the emerging philosophies of the Enlightenment, and the desire to make Russia an intellectual center and part of Europe—and so she rivaled Peter as the greatest of Russian monarchs.

In the pantheon of great female rulers Catherine’s closest company is Elizabeth I, who ruled England from 1558 to 1603, and achieved preeminence for England as a European power toppling Spain’s dominance. But, these two great female rulers were at opposite ends of the spectrum when it came to sexual proclivities. Elizabeth was the celibate, virgin Queen who rejected all who sought her hand in marriage, as though fearing alignment with a male consort would interfere with her ability to carry out her duties; Catherine, on the other hand, had many lovers and seemed not to be able to do without sex. It’s ironic that such a reasonable and calm lady should have had such a voracious sexual appetite. Rumors of her nymphomania, which was common knowledge, may be as exaggerated as those of Marie Antoinette’s excesses—despite Antoinette’s essential loyalty to her husband, she was accused of debauchery and of having multiple affairs.

Mr. Massie portrays Catherine so sympathetically that soon enough this kid was rooting for her and feeling defensive on her behalf. In almost every instance she proved to be more level-headed and reasonable than her temperamental lovers, they the divas who stormed about the palaces she had given them while complaining of their lowly status.

Her husband Peter III was a buffoon—emotionally immature, sexually incompetent, frivolous, and probably a little mad. His loyalty was to the Prussian emperor Frederick the Great. His favorite activity was play-acting battles with his men dressed his Prussian uniform. His marriage to Catherine remained unconsummated after nine years. (This is reminiscent of Marie Antoinette’s marriage to Louis XVI but eventually the dauphin discovered the joy of sex and fathered three children.)

Catherine gave birth during this time but the father of the son she bore was not Peter’s but that of Sergei Saltykov, a charming philanderer who bore her no abiding affection. Her son Paul was whisked away from her and raised by Empress Elizabeth, so Catherine was not even allowed to enjoy the comfort of motherhood. Despite common knowledge that Paul was not Peter’s son, he was proclaimed heir following Peter himself.

Catherine’s luck with men and with life in general improved as time went by. Her third lover, if Peter III can be called a lover, was Stansilaus Poniatowski, by whom she bore another child, a daughter who survived only fifteen months. Poniatowski remained firm in his affection for her but when he became more a liability than an asset (once she became the empress) she banished him to Poland and made him king there.

Catherine seized power from Peter III shortly after the death of Elizabeth in 1762. She would not have been able to do this without the help of Orlov brothers. Predictably, Peter proved to be a disaster as emperor—almost every policy he instituted, whether remaking the age-old Orthodox Church in the Protestant model, demanding that priests shave their beards and abandon their long brocaded robes, or insisting that soldiers wear Prussian style uniforms, soon alienated the entire population. When his six-month reign was over and Catherine was enthroned, no one complained. Frederick the Great said of him, “He allowed himself to be dethroned like a child being sent to bed.”

Gregory Orlov then was Catherine’s fourth lover, to whom she bore a third child, another son, Alexis. She rewarded Gregory and his brothers, to whom she owed her ascension to the throne, with properties and honors. Gregory was none too happy when he was displaced in the queen’s affections by Gregory Potemkin, who of all her lovers was most worthy of her and whom she actually married.

I was happy for her when she called Potemkin to St. Petersburg and began her affair with him—at last, I thought, Catherine has a lover who is her equal in intelligence and capability, but, soon enough Potemkin proved to be as temperamental and demanding as were her less talented lovers.

Potemkin was also the most enduring. Catherine relied heavily on him and respected most of his opinions. She made him adjutant general of the Russian army, gave him the title Prince of the Holy Roman Empire and then appointed him commander of Russia’s second war against the Turks.

I believe Catherine’s happiest time was the journey Potemkin arranged for her through Crimea, where along the Dnieper River he had built ports, warships and shipyards. It has been described as the most remarkable journey ever made by a reigning monarch and Potemkin’s greatest public triumph, but it has been disparaged as a gigantic hoax: the prosperous villages the empress saw were said to have been made of painted cardboard, the happy villagers marched from place to place, appearing and reappearing, waving and cheering as Catherine passed. These accusations are the basis of the colloquium, “Potemkin villages,” signifying a sham or something fraudulent.

The Catherine was inspired by the philosophers of the Enlightenment. Her friendship with Voltaire, whom she never met but with whom she carried on a voluminous correspondence, caused her to believe the best form of government was a benevolent autocracy. When Voltaire died she purchased his library.

Denis Diderot, the founder and chief editor of Encyclopedia, visited Russia at her invitation and stayed for four months. Later he assisted Catherine in buying a number of European art collections.

Catherine’s embrace of Enlightenment principles made her an advocate for the abolishment of serfdom and prompted her, like the 6th Century Byzantine Emperor Justinian, to write her own legal code, called Nakaz or Instruction.

She began with Locke’s belief that in an ordered society, law and freedom were necessary to one another, since the latter could exist without the former. She defined Russia as a moderate monarchy and said that the laws ought to be so framed as to secure the safety of every citizen as much as possible.

She rejected the use of torture and sought to abolish serfdom—when Diderot had criticized the squalor of the Russian peasant, she replied bitterly, “Why should they bother to be clean when their souls are not their own?” It fell to Tsar Alexander II to finally emancipate the serfs in 1861, one hundred years later. In 1863, Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation freed America’s black slaves.

The French Revolution had a profound impact on all the monarchs of Europe, not the least of which on Catherine. As reports of the atrocities committed—of the property of the nobility being seized, the defacement of Versailles, the imprisonment of the royal family and the eventual beheadings of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette—trickled into Russia, Catherine was aghast, fearing this “poison” might spread into Russia and cause uprisings there. Now she fond the idealism of the philosophers of the Enlightenment more flawed than she originally thought, and she censored publications that a decade before she would have welcomed.

She was right to fear but what she feared would not happen in her own lifetime—Russia would be ruled by the Romanovs until the Bolsheviks seized power in 1917.

Catherine became a great patron of the arts. She commissioned many buildings to be built in St. Petersburg, including the Hermitage, originally an art gallery in which to hang the new collections of paintings which she had purchased and a private retreat. The Hermitage, with its Rembrandts, Hals, Van Dycks, Rubens, and a Caravaggios, is now acknowledged as one of the great art museums of the world.

About the last work to be commissioned by Catherine (completed by Etienne Maurice Falconet in 1787) was the equestrian statue of Peter the Great, which still stands along the Neva River in the middle of the city which Peter founded. Its inscription reads simply, “To Peter the First from Catherine the Second.”

Catherine, the great tsar’s true political heir, decided that there should a visual tribute to the figure that had made Russia a great European power. She considered herself as resuming his journey to civilization and greatness. Perhaps she wanted people to understand and accept this connection—as indeed we do!

Circe

By Madeline Miller

Published by Little, Brown & Company

Reviewed by Jane M McCabe

Of the season’s new books, Circe by Madeline Miller taught my eye because of its attractive jacket cover. I recognized Circe’s name as among the patheon of Greek gods and goddesses but didn’t remember exactly which one she was.

Circe, as it turns out, was a witch who lived mostly alone on the island of Aiaia; she was the daughter of Helios and the nymph Perse. In the Odyssey she turned Odysseus’ men into pigs, but more about that later…

Usually I read history. When I read fiction, I prefer realistic stories, so to delve into a book of fiction, supposedly narrated by the goddess Circe, was a bit of stretch for me, however, not far into the book I was hooked and remained enthralled until the story’s end.

Circe had unusual powers. She was banished to Aiaia for the offense of pharmaka—she gathered flowers, herbs and roots and ground them into potions, which she used to turn lower gods into monsters and humans into lesser mammals. Jealous of the nymph Scylla, she turned her into the monster who hid in the cave on one side of the straits, across from the whirlpool Charybdis, and devoured sailors who passed through. Threatened, Zeus banished her to the deserted island, where she continued to ply her craft, tame wild beasts and crossed paths with some of the most famous figures in Greek mythology—Hermes, Athena, Dionysus, Achilles, Daedalus, Heracles, and, of course, Odysseus.

She witnessed her sister Pasiphae, queen of Crete, giving birth to the Minotaur.

She lived in lovely home on Aiaia, possessed a loom made by Daedalus, and had pet lions as her favored company, hiking about this paradise, gathering herbs to use for her spells. It’s probably not hard to see why Ms. Miller picked her to narrate her story and why it appeals especially to women—how wonderful it might be to command the winds and, above all, to be able to turn offensive men into pigs!

One of the things I noticed was neither Circe nor any of the other characters in the book ever seem to be cold, even when washed ashore or nearly drown, but then being cold must be a characteristic reserved for humans alone.

I am reminded there was a time when Greeks sincerely believed in this panoply of gods and goddesses. From them, we inherited some of our deeper understanding of psychology—the word itself from Psyche and the Oedipal complex from Oedipus. The Romans likewise admired them and renamed the gods, giving them Latin names, but when their practical mentality won, they deemed all this so much poppycock and were rudderless until Constantine established Christianity as the state religion in the Fourth Century AD, which scholars like Gibbons deemed the death blow to the Roman Empire. Sorry for the digression…

Circe, this woman, this goddess, who stood against the world, had a weakness for morals, and when the sole ship among those that had set sail from Ithaca, landed on Aiaia, Odysseus and his men were exhausted and battle-weary. At first Circe turned his men into pigs but when he came and requested the she reverse this spell, she compiled and fell into love with him. They lingered with her for a season before setting out once again for Ithaca; by then Circe was pregnant.

I think the last section of the book may be Ms. Miller’s construction. After a difficult pregnancy, she gives birth to Telegonus. Finding that Athena wants to destroy him she does all in power to ensure his safety.

Not wanting to spoil the story for those of you interested, I’ll only say that, when grown, despite Circe’s objections, Telegonus sets sail for Ithaca to find his father, and from there interesting events ensue.

I felt empowered reading Circe. When finished, I missed its characters. What better recommendation is that?

--Jane McCabe is an associate editor of the Neworld Review and a frequent contributor.

CEOPATRA, A Life

By Stacy Schiff

Published by Little, Brown and Company, 2010

Reviewed by Jane M McCabe

When Alexander the Great died in 323 bc in Babylon, his far-flung kingdom came to be divided into four parts—the Ptolemic Kingdom of Egypt, the Seleucid Kingdom including Syria and Palestine, the Kingdom of Pergamon in Asia Minor, and the Kingdom of Macedonia. Within months of Alexander’s death Ptolemy, the most enterprising of his generals, laid claim to Egypt, the wealthiest of his territories, the bread basket of the ancient world. He and his successors built Alexandria into the most cultured city of its time, replete with a gymnasium, the biggest library in the known world, the splendid boulevard, Canopic Way, the fabled Lighthouse of Pharos, temples and palaces. The Ptolemies re-established the Hellenistic culture of Athens in Egypt. They ruled Egypt for nearly 200 years, until Cleopatra VII, its last ruler, died in 30 bc.

When Ptolemy I founded its library, he set out to gather every text in existence, some 100,000 scrolls.[*] Alexandria’s patron saint was Aristotle. In Alexandria Euclid codified geometry. Homer’s work was the Bible of the day. Eminent men in their fields wrote prolifically on medicine and maladies, on eye and lung ailments. “A curious cure for baldness [Caesar was bald] was credited to Cleopatra; she was said to counsel a paste of equal parts of burned, mice, burned rag, burnt horse teeth, beer, grease, deer marrow, and reed bark. Mixed with honey, the salve was to be allied to the scalp and rubbed until it sprouted.” The Talmud hails her for her “great scientific curiosity.”[†]

The Ptolemies carried on the Egyptian practice of family marriages between brothers and sisters. Intermarriage consolidated wealth and power but lent new meaning to sibling rivalry and fratricide. Cleopatra was born in 69 bc—all five of her siblings, two of which she was briefly married to, came to violent ends.

Cleopatra was not a beautiful woman. She was small and dark, slight of build. Surviving busts show her with a hooked nose, razor sharp cheekbones, and an air of severity. What she lacked in physical beauty, however, she made up in charisma, intelligence and shrewdness—she was well educated and spoke five or six languages, including Egyptian, a language other Ptolemaic rulers had not bothered to learn. From an early age she enjoyed the best education available at the hands of gifted scholars in the greatest center of learning in existence.

When Ptolemy Auletes died in 51 the new queen was 18, her brother eight years younger. She ruled for 22 years.

In 48 Caesar dealt Pompey a crushing defeat. Pompey fled to Egypt where he was stabbed and decapitated on an Egyptian beach at the order of Ptolemy XII.

Ms. Schiff complains that her sources may be flawed but they are the only ones we have. After Pompey’s assassination Julius Caesar ventured ashore and installed himself in a pavilion on the grounds of the Ptolemy palace. Legend has it that in order to gain audience with the great Roman general the 21 year old Cleopatra had herself rolled into a carpet which was carried into his quarters and unfurled.

To Caesar Cleopatra was a strong link to Alexander the Greek, the product of a highly refined civilization and heir to the dazzling intellectual tradition. The young monarch he encountered was to this man of curiosity irresistible and bewitching. It’s unclear who seduced whom just as it’s unclear how quickly Cleopatra and Caesar fell into each other’s arms.

For all its philosophic wisdom Greek culture lacked the moral compass of the Jews. Alexandria sported an extravagantly hedonistic culture, lavish excess and a party-till-dawn mentality.

No Hellenistic monarchs did opulence better than the Ptolemies—among the greatest hosts in history, after sumptuous banquets they sent their guests stumbling home with gifts. No wonder the great Julius Caesar dallied in Egypt. When he finally returned to Rome Cleopatra was pregnant with their child, Caesarion.

Compared to Alexandria Rome was still something of a backwater, a crowded and dirty city, lacking in refinement.[‡] On neither of the two visits Cleopatra made to the city, each taking months getting to and fro, was she particularly welcome. The greatest orator and senator Cicero despised the arrogant young Queen, called her “the Egyptian harlot” but then he may have been intimidated by her wealth and because she, a woman, was his equal in eloquence of discourse.

During her second visit, on the 15th (the Ides) of  March, 44, the great Caesar was assassinated by his colleagues in the Roman Senate. Cleopatra fled back to Egypt.

Ms. Schiff’s account is bit bumpy at first and contains some non-sequiturs, but she hits her stride when describing the shifting alliances of those vying for the throne and maelstrom of events set in motion by Caesar’s death. Her masterful narration becomes intensely interesting and is sustained to the book’s end.

On the one hand the assassins, Cassius and Brutus, who had more wealth at their disposal, opposed Octavian and Mark Antony. Octavian , Caesar’s appointed heir, was a sickly young man of twenty years. Though he was popular among the Romans he had little experience governing an empire the size of the Roman Empire.

Mark Anthony was his senior by about twenty years. As a military general he was a seasoned warrior, but he was a wastrel who enjoyed women and levitation and was in Cicero’s eyes, “the belching, vomiting brute, prone to spewing rather than speaking.” I struggle to describe the character of the handsome Mark Anthony—on the one hand he was exuberant and generous but his judgment was often rash and faulty.

Despite the poverty of their financial reserve the alliance of Octavian and Mark Antony proved successful at Philippi. They defeated Cassius and Brutus—both assassins committed suicide, Cassius on the very sword with which he had speared Caesar. Their victory raised Mark Antony to the seat of power because Octavian was but an inexperienced young man. As history has shown, however, it was invariably a mistake to underestimate Octavian.

Here the narrative grows dense. There are many interesting details that time and space do not permit me to include. From Philippi Mark Anthony requested audience with Cleopatra. She took her time in coming to him. When she finally arrived, she floated up the river through the plains in a blinding explosion of color, sound and smells. She reclined beneath a gold spangled canopy, dressed as Venus, while beautiful young boys like painted Cupids stood at her side and fanned her—the spin was that Venus had arrived to revel with Bacchus for the good of Asia.

Plutarch pays tribute to Cleopatra’s irresistible charm and the persuasion of her discourse. She knew of Mark Anthony’s reputation, a messy reputation, and his tendency to be given to theater if not melodrama. What ensued was a series of dinners hosted by Cleopatra and Anthony—Anthony returned on his fourth evening to Cleopatra’s barge to become knee-deep in an expanse of roses.

Her effect was immediate and electrifying. Mark Anthony followed Cleopatra to Alexandria, where she labored to provide him a magnificent reception. He proved to be an expensive houseguest. His capers went over well. He was all muscle and mirth and liked nothing more than to make a lady laugh.

By the end of 41 Cleopatra gave birth to twins, Alexander Helios and Cleopatra Selene. Alexander had Anthony’s build and curly hair. Throughout Italy Anthony and Octavian were praised to the skies for bringing peace but trouble was brewing between the two victors.

After years of pretending they were friends, they became increasingly at odds. The stakes were high, nothing else than who would rule the Roman Empire, including Syria and Egypt. Caesarion posed a threat to Octavian as the future heir. Anthony had moved his forces into Parthia where he suffered heavy losses (Parthia, or Persia, was Rome’s age-old enemy. Fighting between the two empires stretched until the time of Mohammed in the 6th Century ad.).

In 37 Cleopatra ruled over nearly the entire eastern Mediterranean coast, from present-day Libya to southern Turkey. Anthony needed a navy, and she knew how to build ships.

For a while the two seemed invincible. Their combine power was such that when Anthony made what is referred to as The Donations, he parceled out the East, including lands that were not strictly in his possession. The message was clear—whatever they intended did not include Octavian. The insult was such that he denounced Mark Anthony in the Roman Senate and declared war on Cleopatra. His rallied his troops to march on them. Insults flew back and forth between the two leaders.

As though they had not a care in the world, Anthony and Cleopatra partied in Ephesus, continuing to throw lavish banquets, as was their custom.

The confrontation took place at Actium in 31. All was at stake, the entire future of the ancient world. When Anthony’s fleet was destroyed, Cleopatra hurried back to Alexandria. Anthony’s legions surrendered to Octavian. Anthony followed Cleopatra. He fixed for himself a modest hut near the foot of the lighthouse and hoped he might live days in exile. Octavian marched on Alexandria.

August, 30 bc—Cleopatra knew she could not hold out against Octavian. On August 1st he arrived at the gates of Alexandria. The city was his. Cleopatra holed up in a newly-built mausoleum. Anthony tried and failed to kill himself. His body was dragged to the mausoleum’s roof and lowered to her. He died in her arms.

It was to Octavian’s advantage to take Cleopatra alive, but she outfoxed him. He allowed her to purify Anthony’s body and bury him. Legend has it that an asp was smuggled to Cleopatra in the mausoleum in a basket of figs. It is more likely that she and her two maid servants, Iras and Charmion, drank one of her poisonous concoctions. By the time Octavian’s soldiers broke in, they were dead.

Caesarion was murdered. Cleopatra’s three other children were raised by Octavian’s sister and Anthony’s wife, Octavia. Egypt became a Roman province and didn’t gain its independence until the 20th Century. (It was conquered by th Muslims in 639 ad.)Caesar Augustus, as Octavian was named, ruled the Roman Empire for the next 44 years. The sickly Octavian proved to the best ruler Rome ever had—his reign is referred to at the Roman Pax.

As a student of history I mark certain watershed dates in order to better arrange events that preceded and followed. Fourteen ninety-two was the year Columbus sailed to the New World and the year the Moors and Jews were expelled from Spain at the hand of Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand. Fourteen fifty-three was the year that Constantinople fell to the Muslims, and so forth.

Likewise, I like to compare simultaneous events in history. For example, when in the 6th and 5th Century bc Greek philosophers were formulating their principles, the Buddha was living in India.

Ms. Schiff thinks 30 bc is a watershed date, the beginning of modern times. I cannot help but note that Anthony and Cleopatra died about thirty years before the birth of Jesus. Given the treachery and violence of the times it would seem the world was in need of a gospel of peace and forgiveness. King Herod factors in Ms. Schiff’s account as the murderous tetrarch of Palestine. The gospel of Luke mentions that Mary and Joseph traveled to Bethlehem to enroll the census ordered by Caesar Augustus and that they fled with baby Jesus to Egypt to escape Herod’s decree that all new-born male babes be killed, returning after his death. The wise men to came to pay homage to Jesus were most likely from Parthia (Persia) and India.

Overlapping events continue into modern times. In 320 ad after the Emperor Constantine converted Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire. The great Gibbons who wrote The Rise & Fall of the Roman Empire thought this seeded Rome’s demise…

Such speculations are numerous and fascinating. Surely Cleopatra was one of the most powerful women too have ever lived, rivaled only by Queen Elizabeth I, and like Queen Elizabeth, deserving of our respect. It can be argued that the coffers of Cleopatra supplied the monetary resources that allowed the Roman Empire to stabilize and reach its zenith.

The new information presented in this book makes it a feast for the lovers of history. This is a must read!

[*] This library was unfortunately destroyed by the Romans. Its exact site is unknown. When I visited Alexandria in 2004 a new modern library had been built over the believed site.

[†] I am constantly amazed by the sophistication of ancient peoples, but then 2000 years in terms of the age of the planet isn’t all that long a time.

[‡] Ironically, it was the wealth confiscated from Egypt after Cleopatra’s death that allowed Rome to be built into the magnificent city it became.

My Nine Lives – A Memoir of Many Careers in Music

By Leon Fleisher and Anne Midgette

Doubleday, 2010

Reviewed by Jane M McCabe

Since opening an art gallery in Taft, California, (of all places!) one of my favorite things to do is to listen to music while I paint. In so doing, I’ve come to a new appreciation of my collection of classical music and jazz. So, when a musician friend recommended the book she had read, a memoir by Leon Fleisher, the well-known American pianist and conductor, I wanted to read it.

The Child Prodigy

Leon Fleisher was born on July 23, 1928, in San Francisco, to Jewish immigrants. His father was born in Odessa and his mother, in Chelm, in Poland. She had big dreams for him—she wanted him either to become the first Jewish president or a great concert pianist. They purchased a piano, and he started studying at age of four. When other children his age were attending public school or playing ball, Leon was practicing the piano.

He made his public debut at age of eight and played with the New York Philharmonic under Pierre Monteux when he was sixteen. Monteux called him “the pianistic find of the century.”

He became one of the few child virtuosos to be accepted for study with Artur Schnabel, considered the greatest living exponent of the German repertoire. When he was nine years old, Leon traveled with his mother to Lake Como in Italy work with Schnabel. About this he says:

There’s a genealogy of pianists and their teachers, like the “begats” in the Bible. Beethoven taught Carl Czerny. Czerny taught a whole roster of notable students, including Franz Liszt and Theodor Leschetizky. Leschetizky, a brilliant teacher, taught Padereswki, the phenomenally popular virtuoso of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century who became prime minister of his native Poland, and he taught the young Artur Schnabel. And Schnabel, of course, taught me. So in the family tree of teacher-student relationships, I am in a line going back to Beethoven.

Schnabel discouraged sentimentality in his student’s playing. He said it should be “like liquid gold” and metephors meaningful to the young Fleisher.

By the age of sixteen Fleisher was playing at Carnegie Hall, and by twenty, his career as a concert pianist was established. He was meeting and playing with the most famous musicians and conductors in the world.

Brahms Piano Concerto No. 1 in D Minor

Brahms’ first piano concerto is Fleisher’s signature piece, one he loves and has played his entire life. It’s wonderful to read a première musician’s comments on music:

Brahms has always spoken to me in a special way. There’s the warmth, the richness in the music. There’s the sheer brilliance of the way he writes for the piano. There are little references to other works, to other composers, buried in the score, winking out at you like in-jokes, or favorite combinations of notes that he returns to and uses over and over again, like old friends. Nothing he does is unconsidered. The more you look, the more you find.

Take his first piano concerto, the D Minor, my lifelong companion. The first movement begins with the sound of a fist defiantly thrust up at the heavens. The second movement, The Adagio, or slow movement, is a prayer, gentle and soft.

But go to the printed music and look at the beginning of that Adagio. The violins and violas open the movement by playing a melody, in unison, that’s noted in half notes and quarter notes. (Half notes are held long than quarter notes: on the page, they appear while, little circles with stems, as opposed to the black dots of the quarter notes.) If you look only at the white notes and disregard the black ones, you suddenly see the fierce opening theme of the first movement staring out at you, like a secret sign. I couldn’t sleep for a week after I found that out.

Maybe the D Minor is a young man’s concerto. It certainly seized my imagination when I was young with its bigness, its huge ambition, its nobility—and its immediate impact. If you’re in a performance and this music doesn’t rouse you within the first forty-five seconds, you might as well just walk off stage and call it a night. It tries to hit you in the face…

Fleisher goes on for another five pages on the D Minor; if you want to read further exposition, you’ll have to read the book.

His Life as a Concert Pianist

He married for the first time in 1951. His wife and young family lives overseas more than in the United States, in Holland and then Rome. When they returned, besides a busy schedule of concerts, he began teaching at the Peabody Institute of Music in Baltimore, where he met and fell in love with his second wife Rikki.

Catastrophe

As can be imagined, the hands of pianists, especially concert pianists who practice six or seven hours a day and are required to play demanding works using repetitive movements, are subject to ailments. They must take care to protect their hands from injury. More strain is placed on the right hand than the left because a great deal of the work must done by the third and fourth fingers.

In 1963 Fleisher’s right hand started to feel numb and then, much to his horror, his third and fourth fingers began to cramp, curling towards his palm, until he was unable to open them.

It was tantamount to the greatest tragedy that can befall a concert pianist, reminiscent of Beethoven losing his hearing. Fleisher was flung into an anguished despair. He began a merry-go-round of consultations with doctors, psychologists, and various therapists, including a hypnotist, seeking a proper diagnosis and cure. His career was a standstill, and he now had five children to support.

A Teacher, a Conductor, and a Left-Handed Pianist

Fleisher found that music isn’t in one’s hands—it’s in one’s heart and soul. Through the many years when he was unable to play with both hands, he increased his teaching load, worked as a conductor, and became a left-handed pianist. Then he was offered a position as the Artistic Director at prestigious Tanglewood, where he worked for eleven years. Though he never completely regained the use of his right hand, shots of Botox helped him to play with both hands again. He has lived as rich a life as any musician.

Listening to Leon Fleisher

Looking through the my repertoire of Brahms CD’s I found that it didn’t include the Fleisher recording of the First Concerto in D Minor, so I ordered. It’s currently my favorite CD.

Leon Fleisher is now someone I feel like I knew. What a delight! After the long orchestral prelude the piano breaks in with electric beauty and precision.  It must be a joy for an orchestra to follow him as his leadership is striking.

I would highly recommend this book both to musicians and to people who want to know more about music and how American culture has been enrich by it.

Word count—1,190

The Collector—the Story of Sergei Shchukin and His Lost Masterpieces

By Natalya Semenova with André Delocque

Translated by Anthony Roberts

Yale University Press, 2018

When I first saw The Collector in the arts section at Vromans Bookstore in Pasadena, it might as well have been flashing, “Read me.” Trusting my instincts, I put a hold on the book at the library and with a week it was in mine to read. It’s a book right after my own heart—I loved reading it.

What a turbulent century the 20th was! starting in 1914 with the assassination of the Arch-duke Franz Ferdinand and start of World War I, then the Russian Revolution of 1919, and following that, Germany’s invasion of Poland in 1939 and the beginning of World War II; following that the Cold War with its tensions between Russia and the United States, Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989, leading to 9/11 in 2001. Throughout the century Russia led the way in radical changes; much of the action has had to do with the struggle between capitalism and communism.

What with Expressionism and Impressionism, the end of the 19th and early 20th Centuries saw huge changes in the way art was rendered. Paris, France, was at the center of the art revolution. But art needs buyers to flourish. Foremost among the foreign buyers was the middle, sickly son of wealthy merchant capitalists, Ekaterina and Ivan Shchukin, Sergei Shchukin.

All the five Shchukin sons were collectors. Nikolai, the oldest, collected silverware and old paintings, Pietr, history and art. He had an underground tunnel gallery built from his house to another wing of it. Dimitry, an effeminate bachelor, collected old masters. Despite the enormous wealth at their command, Ivan, the youngest, was the only wastrel of the group, living a lavish life in Paris before his untimely death.

Sergei alone collected the modern art of his time—the work of Monet, Derain, Degas, Renoir, Courbet, Pissarro, Matisse, Gauguin, and Picasso. He housed his burgeoning collection at his Trubetskoy Palace, 8 Zamanensky Lane, Moscow, not far from the Cathedral of Christ the Savior. He sired four children with his wife Lydia, a famous beauty, and another child, a daughter, Irina, with his second wife, Nadezhda.

Collecting new paintings was Sergei’s passion, and in this occupation, he showed remarkable discernment. He would often place a newly acquired painting in his palace and live with it until interest was converted to love. Perhaps the most difficult painting to acclimatize himself to was Matisse’s La Danse, that abstract painting of five red nudes dancing in a circle with a blue and green background.

Sergei endured his sorrow over losing his wife Lydia by taken a safari across the Sinai Peninsula.

Early in the 20th Century, the Russian Revolution loomed, casting its shadow especially over Russian kupechestvos, (capitalists.)

In the wake of the revolution, Sergei and his family fled to Nice, then to Paris, where he bought a large apartment in the sixteenth arrondissement and where he and his wife Nadezhda continued to entertain other members of the white Russian expatriate community. There he was obliged to resume buying modern art for its walls, much to the delight of the artists from whom he purchased work.

On January 8th, 1936, 17 years after the revolution forced his family to flee, at the age of 82, Sergei Shchukin died in Paris. He had never returned to Russia again. His only worry had been that the Bolsheviks might sell off his collection, as they did that of the czar’s family. He got his wish—the wonderful paintings he had collected are now part of the Hermitage collection in St. Petersburg.

My criticisms of this wonderful book are few. I wish it would have included more photographic plates, especially of paintings discussed in the text. And, occasionally the text seemed to be clumsily translated.

All in all, I would highly recommend this fine book to all with an interest in modern art and the fine art of collecting it. The book gave me new insight into the Russian soul.

—Jane M. McCabe is an associate editor and frequent reviewer for the Neworld Review

The Secret Life of Marilyn Monroe

by J. Randy Taraborrelli

Grand Central Publishing

New York, NY: 2009

526 pages, $15.99

Reviewed by Jane M McCabe

Marilyn Monroe came from ordinary if somewhat odd people. Born on June 1, 1926, in the charity ward of Los Angeles General Hospital, she was the illegitimate daughter of Gladys Monroe, a woman whose mental instability was such that by the age of three Norma Jean, as she was called, was placed in the foster home of Ida and Wayne Bolender, where she remained until she was nine years old. She was befriended by a friend of her mother’s, Grace McKee, who took custody of her. When Grace remarried she felt she had no choice but to place Norma Jean in an orphanage. It was Grace who saw her potential for show business and encouraged her to become an actress.

Despite the phenomenon that Marilyn became and her extraordinary career in show business her life was marred by tragedy, drug addiction and the kind of insecurity a person feels when abandoned at an early age. Both her grandmother and mother were mentally ill; her mother was diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic and spent most of her life in mental institutions. Both were given to hearing voices. Marilyn feared that this too would be her fate. For all her fame and adulation, she didn’t seem to enjoy much personal happiness. 

Sometimes I think it’s possible to learn more about history through reading biography than by reading history, for a good biography is like a window, a bird’s eye view, if you will, onto the place where and times when the person lived. Jan Swafford’s biography of Johannes Brahms is a window into 19th Century Venetian society. Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin’s biography, American Prometheus, the Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, not only chronicles the life of the brilliant American physicist who headed the United State effort to produce the atom bomb but his betrayal by the United States government in the 1950’s when the country was gripped by a fear of communism and anyone thought to be associated with it.

As much as Taraborrelli’s recent biography reveals about Marilyn and the American film industry of the 1950’s and 1960’s it also gives unflattering portraits of some of the people who dominated that era—the Kennedys, Frank Sinarta, Joe DiMaggio and Arthur Miller (Marilyn’s second and third husbands) but more about them later. It also reflects how psychotherapy was practiced during that time.

 In the wake of Sigmund Freud’s founding of psychoanalysis, his promulgation of the Oedipal and hysteria theories, in the 1950’s psychiatry was a respectable field of medicine. Marilyn was one of a number of famous people who underwent years of psychoanalysis with somewhat dubious, perhaps even destructive, results. In her case, endless discussion of the traumas that had marred her childhood only furthered her confusion and anxiety. Since then long-term psychoanalysis has ceased to be a common practice replaced by short-term therapy and prescription medications.

Due to her insecurities Marilyn became overly dependent on those to whom she turned for help, whether it was her initial acting coach, Natasha Lytess, or her later coach, Paula Strasberg, the daughter of the famous Lee Strasberg who established the “method” school of acting. When on the set she often felt as though she couldn’t say her lines without her coach there.

If one knows anything about the danger of transference between a therapist and his patient, one has to wonder about Marilyn’s relationship with her psychiatrist, Dr. Ralph Greenson, and might find it bizarre that he encouraged her to live at his home (so that she would have a feeling of family.)

Marilyn was not only exceptionally beautiful and extremely sexy; for the most part she was a kind-hearted and likeable person, someone who genuinely loved her mother despite her deficiencies (she consistently paid for her mother’s hospitalizations), her half-sister Bernice, and her friends. Yet she still felt alone and abandoned.

Early in her career she discovered that medications could help her sleep, quell the voices in her head and allay her anxieties. As time went on she became more and more dependent on them. If she couldn’t get the medications she sought from one doctor she would go to another, and if denied again she would buy them in Tijuana.

Of her three husbands, only the second two merit discussion here. In 1952, when Marilyn was 26 years old and her career as a film star was ascending, she began dating the famous baseball player, Joe DiMaggio. The irony here is that Joe was not only Italian, he was the son of Sicilian immigrants. She could have hardly found a man with a more macho sensibility, someone who wanted his woman to stay home, bear children, cook and clean. By the end of the summer he asked her to give up her career for him. She refused. Marilyn may have been weak and vulnerable but she wasn’t stupid and she wanted to be a star more than anything.

On January 14th, 1954 this mismatched couple, for whom the sexual attraction was intense, married in a civil ceremony in San Francisco. As much as they loved each other, their marriage was made unhappy by Joe’s demands and even violence, so that by October Marilyn petitioned for divorce.

One might think Arthur Miller, in contrast, would understand the importance of her career and therefore make a better husband to her, but such was not the case. They married in 1956. Miller was perhaps the greatest of American playwrights—I consider Death of a Salesman the greatest American play, a poignant commentary on the ugliness of the capitalist system. As a husband to gentle, vulnerable Marilyn he was something of a cold fish, seemingly lacking in the empathy she needed. At times he was even cruel. He picked on her a lot and by 1961 they too were divorced.

As it turned out, Joe DiMaggio came back into Marilyn’s life when she was incarcerated in the mental ward of Payne Whitney in New York City. She was beside herself and was allowed to make one call. So, she called Joe at the motel room where he was staying in Florida. He showed up at Payne Whitney that very night and demanded that Marilyn be released in his custody. This cemented their friendship but they did not become involved again romantically.

Pat Kennedy Lawford, sister to JFK and Bobby Kennedy and the wife of Peter Lawford, became one of Marilyn’s best friends. Pat was drawn to the glamour and glitz that was Marilyn’s, whereas Marilyn longed for the security and financial stability enjoyed by Pat. The Lawfords owned a home on the Santa Monica beach where they often entertained.

In July, 1960, Pat invited Marilyn to be present when her brother, John F. Kennedy, accepted the Democratic nomination for president. Through Pat Marilyn met and dated both Bobby and JFK. Though the drugs she was taking had pretty much taken over by then, JFK may have precipitated her ultimate downfall. She only spent a couple of nights with him but she fell in love. His rejection of her may have been the final abandonment which precipitated the overdose of drugs that killed her.

On May 19th, 1962, a birthday party was thrown for JFK at Madison Square Garden. It was attended by many celebrities, including Marilyn Monroe. Engraved in our national memory is that of Marilyn, dressed in a white sequined dress that looked as though she had been poured into, singing, “Happy birthday, Mr. President” to JFK. In less than three months she would be dead.

I do not believe that Marilyn was murdered by the Kennedy’s or anyone else. By the time she died, on August 4th, 1962, she was taking enough drugs to kill a horse.

          JKF was a notorious womanizer who often entertained women in the White House when Jackie was away. I cannot help contrast the complicity of the White House staff then to the televised senate investigations Bill Clinton was subjected to because of his furtive, unrewarding liaison with Monica Lewinsky thirty years later, surely an indication of how prurient our society has become.

Our fascination with MM has diminished little since she died 48 years ago. Just as there are plenty of Elvis look-alikes but only one Elvis, so there have been plenty of look-alikes but only one Marilyn. No other actress has her combination of vulnerability, gorgeous looks and sex appeal. No other woman has ever been as photogenic nor had as many men fall in love with her as Marilyn Monroe. She is as much an American icon as Coco Cola and Mickey Mouse. No other actress had a sadder life.

Marilyn’s mother outlived her by 40 years. Both Joe DiMaggio and Arthur Miller lived to ripe, old ages, DiMaggio dying at 85 in 1999, and Miller at 89 in 2002. Miller married a year after his divorce from Marilyn, but DiMaggio never remarried.

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Jane M McCabe is a writer and painter who recently opened an art gallery in Taft, California.

The Real Lolita—The Kidnapping of Sally Horner and the Novel that Scandalized the World

By Sarah Weinman

Harper Collins

When I read the review of Ms. Weinman’s book in the Los Angeles Times I wanted to read it because I hold the belief that often great art draws its inspiration from real-life events, or, as is the case with James Joyce’s Ulysses from mythology or other well-known stories; so, I wanted to see to what extent Vladimir Nabokov may have been influenced by the kidnapping of Sally Horner, a widely-published event of which he was aware.

First, I read The Real Lolita and then reread Nabokov’s Lolita.

In March of 1948 11-year old Sally Horner was accosted when she attempted to shoplift a five-cent composition notebook from a Woolworth’s in Camden, New Jersey, by a stranger who said he was an FBI agent but was in fact Frank LaSalle. Later, her mother, thinking he was the father of one of Sally’s friends, was persuaded to let her go on a trip to Atlantic City with him. She then was kidnapped and kept by LaSalle for the next two years. As Lolita had with Humbert Humbert, they traveled cross country together until finally, when they were living in a mobile park in San Jose, California, Sally told a neighbor by the name of Ruth Janisch of her plight, and Ruth alerted the authorities. After she was freed, LaSalle plead guilty to kidnapping and was sentenced to no less than thirty and no more than thirty-five years in prison.

As for Sally she was reunited with her family but tragically died in a car accident with a boyfriend on August 18, 1952, only two years after her release from LaSalle clutches. I couldn’t help but think she might have been spared the worst of the consequences she might have suffered as the result of her kidnapping.

Vladimir Nabokov published Lolita in 1955. He was born in St. Petersburg, Russia, into an aristocratic family in 1899 that fled Russia in the wake of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, making their way to Paris, as did many families of “white” Russians. The family spoke three languages—Russian, French and English. He studies French and Russian literature at Trinity College, Cambridge, lived in Berlin and Paris, where he launched his literary career. In 1940 he moved to the United States, where he taught literature at Wellesley, Stanford, Cornell and Harvard. In 1961 he moved to Montreux, Switzerland, where he died in 1977. He dedicated his masterpiece, Lolita, to his devoted wife Vera. They had one son, Dmitri, who became a musician. Nabokov was passionate about lepidoptery; he and Vera took several trips across the United in pursuit of rare butterflies.

Nabokov was toying with the idea for Lolita, the self-told account of a pedophile, before he learned of Sally Horner’s case. He tended to deny the degree to which he mined information from it, maintaining that art supersedes influence.

There is no doubt in my mind that Nabokov was a literary genius, and Lolita is his masterpiece, deserving of its place in the circle of best-novels-ever-written, right up there with Madame Bovary and Moby Dick.

Who can forget its first paragraph?

“Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of my tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.” (Please notice its alliteration).

Nabokov dares to do what few writers dare—he plays with language, making up words along the way, inventing the names of people and places, either as a means of camouflage (or perhaps because his memory was faulty); he takes a playful delight in writing—there’s hardly a page that does not contain French phrase or two sprinkled in.

And then there the scandalous content of his story. As he tells of it—the 40-year-old Humbert Humbert receives a stroke of luck when Charlotte Haze, the woman he has married in order to be close to her eleven-year-old daughter Dolores (Lolita), accidently dies, leaving the field open for him, as her legal guardian, to take charge of the child. With Lolita he embarks on travels across the United States and back.

Lolita is supposed to be Humbert’s confession from prison, if you will.

It is sensational because he has dared to ignore an important societal convention requiring that adults not take advantage of children sexually, that they be protected from the vicissitudes of sex until they have matured sufficiently to handle them. He was broken this cardinal rule of adult conduct and has done so with impunity.

In his favor, I think it should be said that he truly loved Lolita; he showered her with presents and gave her all that a child of her age might require. Therefore, she seems less harmed by her experience than she might otherwise have been. And yet, it is a story of unrequited love, as she, of course, lacked the capacity to return his love or to share in any of the responsibilities of their cohabitation. Yet, this does not seem to bother Humbert in the least.

Nabokov describes Humbert, despite his rich capabilities and education, as sometimes having a slim grasp of reality; in fact, when his beloved Lolita disappears (she is rescued by the dentist friend named Clare Quilty) he falls into a state of despair and paranoia and swears his revenge.

When he finds Lolita again, she has married a rather good-natured but average sort of man and is pregnant. Nabokov kills her off by having her die giving child-birth. I guess it just wouldn’t do to write of her as a mother to her own children.

In the end he hunts down Quilty and kills him. He sent to prison not for kidnapping but for murder.

The question that arose in my mind as I reread Lolita was not the degree to which he may have been influenced by the Sally Horner case but how he could have consistently known how a child of her age would behave, her passion for things like paper dolls and such:

“Naked, except for one sock and her charm bracelet, spread-eagled on the bed where my philter had felled her—so I foreglimpsed her; a velvet hair ribbon was still clutched in her hand; her honey-brown body, with the white negative image of the rudimentary swimsuit patterned against her tan, presented to me its pale breastbuds; in the rosy lamplight, a little public floss glistened on its plump hillock.”

With this attention to detail, and, of course, his marvelous use of language, Lolita would not be the masterpiece that it is.

—Jane M McCabe is an Associate Editor of the Neworld Review

Golden Empire—Spain, Charles V, and the Creation of America

By Hugh Thomas

Random House, 2010

Reviewed by Jane M McCabe

When I was in the fourth or fifth grade (in Billings, Montana) I became excited when the teacher charted on a map of the world Columbus’s voyages to the New World beginning in 1492, Cortez’s defeat of Montezuma and conquest of Mexico, and Pizarro’s of Peru, and Magellan’s voyage around the world. Ponce de Leon and Coronado were names that were music to my ears as I envisioned what it must have been like to be a Conquistador!

Many years later when I was in Spain it occurred to me that the Spanish have had a huge impact on the world—its customs, language, architecture, and religion spread throughout Mexico and South America. Its influence is rivaled only by that of the British.

My love of history is, I suppose, born out of a life-time curiosity about the world, its peoples and their stories. But, sometimes my knowledge is very simplistic—I only know the outline of what occurred. Such was the case with the Spanish conquest of the new world…

Hugh Thomas is a consummate British historian who specializes in this area. He wrote two previous volumes: Rivers of Gold—the Rise of the Spanish Empire and Conquest: Montezuma, Cortés, and the fall of Old Mexico. The Golden Empire picks up where the previous two left off, in1521 following Cortés’ conquest and the rebuilding of Mexico-Tenochtitlan (Mexico City today), and stretching until 1558 and the death of the Spanish Emperor, Charles V, (which, incidentally, was also the year when Elizabeth I ascended to the throne of England.)

Four books are listed in its contents. Book I is entitled “Valladolid and Rome;” Book II, “Peru;” Book III, “Counter Reformation, Counter Renaissance;” and Book IV, “The Indian Soul.” Of these four books I found Book II on the conquest of Peru of the greatest interest.

I think it worth commenting on the character of the Spanish conquistadors, for they were intrepid adventurers and stalwart explorers, who occupied a male-dominated world, as few women accompanied them on their conquests. A resilient, hardy, and courageous breed, they were also intensely pious men, who as much as conquering were intent on evangelizing the Indians and converting them to Christianity. During the 16th Century the Inquisition was in full throttle and anyone suspected of secretly practicing Judaism or Islam was hideously tortured. (Jews and Moors were restricted from going to the New World.)

They, the conquistadores, were unwaveringly loyal to the Spanish crown, which received 20% of whatever riches they seized. The galleons which returned to Spain were heavy-laden with gold and silver, riches that Charles used to finance his wars against Turkey, France, and the forces of the Reformation.

The conquistadors were ruthless and at times brutal to their Indian subjects. Having conquered it was incumbent for them to govern, and in this they proved to be able administrators. They imported their love of pageantry from Spain. In contrast to the British who rarely married Indians, the Spanish intermarried to such a high degree as to create a new race of people—the Mexicans, Hispanic Americans or Latinos.

This book constantly amazed me.

For example, there were a lot more Indians and tribes in the New World than I previously thought. The Aztecs and Incas were but two tribes of hundreds that lived in the Americas. My ignorance here is partly justified because so much of the native Indian culture in North America has been all but erased.

The conquests were much more extensive than I realized, indeed, throughout Mexico, Central and South America, and into what is now the southern United States. They went on throughout the first half of the 16th Century.

One of the most remarkable battles ever fought was fought by Pizarro: On November 15, 1532, having travel along the west coast from Panama to Peru, the Pizarros (there were four brothers) with 168 men, of whom 62 were horseman, defeated Atahualpa, the Inca king’s army of 40,000 soldiers.

In Jared Diamond’s book, Guns, Germs & Steel, he argues that advanced weaponry were responsible for the victories the European forces achieved during these times. Pizarro’s men carried harquebuses, heavy portable matchlock guns we now consider primitive, but then they were lethal against Indian fighters using mostly bows and arrows.

Nevertheless, the Indians would not have lost this important battle had it not been for a loss of faith on their part. As was the case with Cortez and the Aztecs, the Incas readily capitulated to the culture imposed upon them by the Spaniards. In a subsequent battle the Spaniards conquered Cuzco, the Inca capital, and seized enormous amounts of gold and silver that had been used to build their temples. Soon this bounty was on its way back to Spain, and Christian cathedrals were built atop the temples.

Included in this book is Valdivia’s conquest of Chili. So many stories were told that I can only skim the surface of this dense account, in which some of the battles fought were with Spanish rivals. I often marveled at the hardiness and resolve of these men, so far away from the motherland and yet determined to civilize the natives and bring honor to the crown. Had it not been so, the course of history would have been different.

Lucky for us some of these men left records of their adventures, and in doing so preserved the memory of such adventures as Orellana’s trip down the Amazon River.

In late 1540 Francisco Pizarro named his young brother, the charming and valiant Gonzalo, governor of Quito (in Peru.) He devoted himself to arranging an expedition whose aim was the search for cinnamon on the eastern side of the great Andes. His force was joined by those of Francisco de Orellana. High in the Andes Orellana took a group of men and went in search of food, but he never returned, much to Pizarro’s chagrin. What happened was that Orellana and his men unknowingly found the headwaters of the Amazon and before they knew it their canoes were being carried rapidly downstream, where they were assaulted again and again by hostile Indians who shot poisonous darts at them. (Here the text reads like something out of Indiana Jones.) Eventually they reached the mouth of the Amazon and the Atlantic Ocean, having survived one the most harrowing adventure of any of the conquistadores.

Another ill-fated adventure recounted was that of Coronado into what is now New Mexico and Arizona. Imagine these men’s amazement as they peered into the Grand Canyon, the first white men ever to see it. The year was 1541.

Back in Spain at the court of Charles V and in the Council of Indies, how Indian subjects should be treated was argued. One Dominican monk wrote, “Indians are not stable persons to whom one can entrust the preaching of the Holy Gospel. They do have the ability to understand correctly and fully the Christian faith nor is their language sufficient and copious enough to be able to express our faith without great improprieties, which can easily result in great errors.” Of course, history proved this chauvinistic monk quite wrong.

The last several chapters deal with the death of the Emperor Charles in 1558, who for forty years had overseen with diligence and fastidiousness the affairs attenuating the conquest and development of the Indies.

Great sums of silver and gold from Mexico and Peru had come to Spain aboard galleons. “Between 1551 and 1555, the Spanish Crown imported from the Indies more than three and a half million pesos and private people imported more than 6 million. Charles, the mirror of chivalry and the inheritor of the great Burgundian traditions, spent hours puzzling over these figures and sums.”

Charles never visited New Spain and his other American protectorates. At his death he left his empire in Europe restored. In 1559 an elaborate funeral was held for him in the new cathedral in Mexico. An empty sarcophagus covered in black cloth and a cushion on which a crown rested was placed before a procession of all the Spanish dignitaries, monks, and members of the indigenous population, all of whom prayed for the soul of the conquering emperor Charles.

Now, here we are nearly four hundred years later. Spain is one of the least important of European countries with a high rate of unemployment; Mexico is a populous, poor country with a high homicide rate due to the infighting among drug cartels; the lands conquered by Spain in the 16th Century are still very much Catholic; Peru, Chili and Argentina struggle economically, and the mighty United States is faltering with high unemployment and a middle class that is rapidly losing ground. The descendants of the conquistadors and Indians have so multiplied that they are most rapidly growing ethnic group in North America today, a poetic justice of sorts, I suppose. The machismo of Spanish American men is a remnant from their conquistador forbearers.

This ambitious book is a treasure-house of information. We owe Hugh Thomas a debt of gratitude for having written it and for his other books on the history of Spanish America.

The Lost City of the Monkey God

By Douglas Preston

Reviewed by Jane M McCabe

Desperate for something interesting to read, I was pursuing the shelves of a well-known bookstore in Pasadena when my eyes fell upon a book called The Lost City of the Monkey God. With a title like that at first I thought this must be adventure fiction like Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, but this proved not the case, as it is in fact a true story about finding a lost civilization in the mountainous jungles of Honduras, a civilization whose remains were so covered by overgrown jungle vegetation that it had remained untouched for the past five hundred years!

Imagine! A civilization rivalling the Mayans in terms of sophistication unknown to civilization until the modern technology helped uncover it! This is the true story of the brave men and women who ventured into Mousquitia to unearth the biggest archeological find of the 21st Century, as admirably told by Doug Preston.

Mr. Preston has worked as a writer and editor for the American Museum of Natural History and taught writing at Princeton University. He has written extensively including contributing to The New Yorker, Natural History, National Geographic, the Smithsonian, and The Atlantic.

In 2012 Preston joined a team of scientists on their quest to find the White City, climbing aboard a rickety plane whose historic flight would change everything. Using a space-age technology called LIDAR they were able to map the terrain under the dense jungle canopy that revealed the remains of a lost civilization.

Actually, they discovered several sites. In order to explore them, they—the team of scientists, journalists and some soldiers from the Honduran army—were required to fly helicopters in, drop men with machetes to clear the forest before they could build camp. Once they had done this the first team stayed in the area for three weeks and reported their finding to the scientific community.

During this time Preston slept in a hammock strung across two trees. He was bothered, as the rest of the team were, by bug bites during the night. When they returned to their headquarters along the coast of Honduras, they congratulated themselves because of having survived the wiles of the primitive jungle no worse for wear. They spoke too soon….

The archeologists involved with the expedition were able to determine that the people who lived in Mousquitia had vanished about five hundred years ago, so the question was, what had caused them to disappear?

Let me remind the reader that five hundred years ago at the end of the 15th Century, beginning in 1492, Columbus discovered the New World. In October of 1493, he set sail on his second voyage to the New World. The aim of the first journey had been exploration; that of the second was of subjugation, colonization and conversion. One of the places to which Columbus’s flotilla visited was the coast of Honduras.

“Columbus’s enormous flotilla on that second voyage consisted of seventeen ships carrying fifteen hundred men and thousands of head of livestock, including horses, cattle, dogs, cats, chickens, and pigs. But on board those ships was something far more threatening than soldiers with steel arms and armor, priests with crosses, and animals that would disrupt the New World ecology. Columbus and his men unwittingly carried microscopic pathogens, to which the people of the New World had never been exposed and against which they had no genetic resistance.”

The genocide experienced by the indigenous communities exceeded the worst horror show imaginable. “It was disease, more than anything else, that allowed the Spanish to establish the world first imperio en el que nunca se pene el sol, ‘empire on which the sun never sets,’ so called because it occupied a swath of territory so extensive that some of it was always in daylight.”

On that voyage Columbus himself became ill. In a few years, fully half of his 1500 soldiers would be dead of disease. But that was nothing compared to what happened to the native populations. By 1520 epidemics merged into a plague—measles, mumps, yellow fever, malaria, chicken pox, typhoid, diphtheria, whooping cough, tuberculosis, and, deadliest of all, smallpox—had decimated 85% of the Indian populations of Mexico and Central America. Small wonder that Cortes was able to conquer Tenochtitlan and murder Moctezuma. “The worst effect of smallpox was the complete demoralization of the Indians.” Therefore, Preston concludes that the probable cause of the desertion of the Indian population of Mousquitia was that they had fled in the face of this powerful enemy.

But Moctezuma’s revenge was to come to the explorers of Mousquitia. After they returned to the states many were to find that the bites they had received from the sand flies while they were camping would not heal. They, including Preston, had contracted a mysterious, and incurable, parasitic disease—leishmaniasis, which had been injected into their bloodstreams from the bites of the sand flies. Some died from their wounds. Preston did not or has not yet. He even paid a returned to Mousquitia on a second voyage of exploration but this time was better equipped to protect himself from the deadly sand flies.*

I found The Lost City of the Monkey God to be a fascinating story and would highly recommend it to anyone seeking to inform himself or herself concerning the findings of modern expeditions to areas of the world previously unknown.

*Belize and Honduras are notorious in the Caribbean for their sand fly populations and travels pages frequently warn tourists to bring bug spring containing high concentration of DEET.

—Jane M McCabe is an associate editor and frequent contributor to The Neworld Review.

The Monk of Mokha

By Dave Eggers

Published by Alfred A. Knopf, 2018

Reviewed by Jane M McCabe

The Monk of Mokha is a good read, probably because it’s a real-life story told by a skilled writer, Dave Eggers, the author of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius and other good reads. He keeps the story moving along at a nice pace.

The Monk of Mokha is the true story of a young Yemeni-American man, raised in San Francisco, who dreamt of resurrecting the ancient art of growing coffee in Yemen and had the willingness to put a plan into action. Mokhtar Alkhanshali is 24 years old when the story begins and is working as a doorman when he becomes fascinated with the history of Yemen’s place in the development of coffee as beverage enjoyed the world over daily by millions of people.

Ask historians where the drinking of coffee started, and some will say it began in Ethiopia in the 9th Century, however, others might say it began as early as the 6th Century, 575 AD in Yemen.

According to the Ethiopian apocryphal story, Kaldi, an Abyssinian goal herder from Kaffa was herding his goats through the highland near a monastery, when he noticed they were jumping about in an excited manner, bleating loudly and practically dancing on their hind legs. He found a small shrub nearby with bright red berries and tried some himself, finding that the consumption helped him stay awake. So, he took some home to his wife, who took them to the monastery. The monks called them “the devil’s work” and threw them onto the fire. The aroma caused the monks to remove, crush and cover them with hot water, hence our first cups of coffee.

The Yemeni maintain coffee was discovered by a Sufi mystic, Ghothul Akbar Nooruddin al-Hasan al Shadhili, a disciple of Sheikh Omar. Gradually the custom of brewing coffee took hold and spread—by the 13th Century it was revered as a potent medicine. By the 15th Century it was shipped to other countries from the port city of Mokha, and by the 17th Century it had spread to Europe, and from there to the New World.

Given the complications in the production of coffee, it’s a testament to just how beloved a beverage it is that people are willing to go to all the trouble it takes to produce coffee. Most are unaware that five outside layers must be removed to get to the bean, which is then roasted and crushed.

During the middle part of the 20th Century consumption of coffee was standard in the United States beans were imported from various locations around the world, roasted, ground and sold by such megalithic American companies as Hills Brothers and Folgers. In the 1980’s a better-quality coffee was sold by companies such a Starbucks and Peets. Despite the increased cost, Americans took to it, just as they had to better-quality, more expensive ice cream from Hagan Das. Taking their cue from the success of Starbucks, coffee specialty cafes arose, such as the Blue Bottle in the Bay Area, where a cup of high rating coffee might cost as much as $12.

When Mokhtar first went to Yemeni to travel to the coffee-producing areas of the country he found more acres were given over to the cultivation of qat (a form of marijuana that is chewed in Yemen) than of coffee. Mokhtar wanted to change all that.

His plan required that he learn all he could about coffee and how it is rated, then to return to Yemen to convince farmers to resume growing coffee, teaching them how to properly sort the beans so only the ripe and best quality would be processed. He left San Francisco and traveled deep into his ancestral home—I didn’t know Yemen was such a varied and interesting country—to tour terraced farms high in the country’s rugged mountains, where he talked to farmers about the glories of Yemen’s past as the world’s principle producer of coffee.

But this was the 2000’s, when the northern Houthis, much like the Taliban in Afghanistan, took over much of country and forced President Saleh into exile. Because they felt that the Houthis were backed by their arch-enemy Iran, the Saudi began bombing the country. Mokhtar got caught in the crossfire—as war engulfed Yemen and Saudi bombs rained down, he found a way out of Yemen by taking a small boat from Mokha across the Red Sea to Djibouti City in Eritrea, with his wares on his back.

Despite the continued bombing shiploads and airplane loads of Yemini coffee have made their way to Oakland, California, where it is sold in specialty stores, such the Blue Bottle, where for $14 a cup coffee aficionado can enjoy a cup of Yemenite coffee.

—Jane M McCabe is a frequent contributor to the Neworld Review. 

The Perfect Nanny

By Leila Slimani

Translated by Sam Taylor

Reviewed by Jane M McCabe

When I read Lauren Collin’s column, “Letter From France” in the January 1, 2018, New Yorker about the literary sensation Leila Slimani, a 35 year-old Moroccan woman (and long-time resident of Paris), has become in France, with the publication of her second novel, Chanson Douce (Sweet Song), soon to be published in the United States under the title The Perfect Nanny, I knew this was book I must read.

Slimani has won the Concourt, France’s most prestigious literary prize, which counts its laureates Proust and Malraux. More often the prize goes to middle-aged white men, so the committee had broken its history, making Slimani the new face of French literature

When I was at the main branch of the Los Angeles Library downtown a few days later, I was able to put a reserve on the soon-to-be-released book, and thus became the first person in Los Angeles to read the library copy.

It’s a slender volume—only 278 pages. The Perfect Nanny is more than a psychological thriller—it depicts the lives of an ordinary, professional couple, Paul and Myriam, their two children, Mila and Adam, and their nanny, a frail-looking white woman named Louise. Ultimately, the nanny kills the children. The New Yorker article says that Ms. Slimani was inspired by a news item about a New York nanny who killed two children in her care.

The book begins with one of most memorable lines in all of literature: “The baby is dead.”

Slimani’s style is to write short, factual sentences that punctuate a given situation and accumulate the tension. She tells a dark story in a rather bleak, reporter-like style (think Hemingway or Hillebrand), describing Paul and Myriam’s decision to hire a nanny—Paul says they will hire no one “too old, no veils, no smokers.”

Louise soon makes herself indispensable—not only does she give the children excellent care, she also puts the apartment in order, cooking and cleaning, even mending. She is, in short, the perfect nanny.

Had I fewer responsibilities to tend to, I was so riveted that I would have read this book in one sitting…

I don’t mean to take anything away from Ms. Slimani’s enormous talent, but if she wanted to show the development that brought Louise to the execution of this horrible deed, I think she failed. In the actual story we are told that the nanny was upset at having to take on cleaning duties. In The Perfect Nanny Louise is worried that she may have outlived her usefulness to the family—so, she wants Myriam to have another child, as this would secure their need for her for many more years. Perhaps she was disturbed that this hasn’t happened. She obsesses over this child she wants her employers to have…

“She feels sure that Paul and Myriam don’t have enough time to themselves. That Mila and Adam are an obstacle to the baby’s arrival. It’s the children’s fault if their parents are never alone together.”

Louise is portrayed as a disturbed woman, but she doesn’t seem to possess a murderous rage within. And, we are not shown how she is lead to do away with the children she dearly loves. Furthermore, Louise is not stupid, so, surely, she would have understood the murder of the Massé children would hardly endear her to their parents—she would be about the last person they would hire to watch over a new child.

I may be a stickler for verisimilitude, but, ultimately, I don’t think Louise’s murder of them adds up.

Nevertheless, I highly recommend this novel to all who would like to be spellbound by this highly unusual book.

J. M. McCabe is an associate editor of The Neworld Review.