Neal Bascomb. Red Mutiny. This is the full story of the 1905 mutiny on the Potemkin, a Russian battleship in the Czar’s Black Sea fleet. The action begins in the Potemkin’s home port of Odessa and ends when the crew accepts amnesty in the Romanian port of Constanta. There was unrest everywhere in Russia in 1905, and the Potemkin crew hoped that they could get other ships in the fleet to join them and then take their revolution ashore. Workers were already demonstrating and the sailors thought they could unite with them and then persuade the army to join them. They hoped to go all the way to Moscow and St. Petersburg. Mutinies on other ships failed to materialize and after ten days the Potemkin crew, low on food and fuel, had no chance of survival if they stayed with the ship. Many of them later returned to Russia as revolutionaries. When you read what Russian sailors, peasants and workers had to endure; you can’t help but sympathize with them. One wonders what would have happened, if they had succeeded. Would the results of a successful 1905 revolution been better than those of the 1917 revolution in terms of lives lost and lives lived in freedom and comfort. When I finished reading the book, I watched Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin from 1925. You get only bits and pieces of the story and there is the feeling all the way through that Soviet censors are looking over Eisenstein’s shoulder as he directs the action. March 2013
Brian Greene. The
Hidden Reality, Parallel Universes and the Deep Laws of the Cosmos. I spent a few hours with this and learned a
lot, but eventually found I could not follow the explanation as it got more and
more complex. Finally I concluded that
if I wanted to know more about quantum mechanics, string theory, Hilbert space
et al, I should take one or maybe several college courses in physics, or at
least get a print copy of the book so I could refer back and reread until the
material sank in. The presentation of
the subject matter is straightforward and clear but would require time and
effort that I might expend more usefully on subjects I know more about, perhaps
history, art history or economics.
March 2013
James M. McPherson. Tried
by War. After reading this, I
have a better sense of the chronology of Civil War battles, so many of which
were fought just across the Potomac from where I live. What comes through the narrative more than
anything else is the difficulty Lincoln had in getting his generals to engage
the enemy and to press their advantage when they had it. The most basic principal of warfare is that destroying
the army of the enemy takes priority over all other objectives. Lincoln’s generals, particularly in the Army
of the Potomac, had many opportunities to destroy Confederate armies and
shorten the war, but they repeatedly failed to press the advantages they had in
numbers and position. When Lincoln was
sworn in as President, he had had no meaningful military experience, but he
taught himself to be a better general than any of the professional soldiers
available to command his armies. The
only one who came close was Grant, and once Grant took over, Lincoln pretty
much let him run the war. March
2013
Gore Vidal. Inventing
a Nation. Gore Vidal always had
a new slant on whatever he wrote about, and he usually embroidered his work
with fascinating little asides. In this
book on the founding of our nation he takes time out to tell us that George
Washington was rumored to be Alexander Hamilton’s father, that Aaron Burr
carried General Montgomery off the field at the battle for Montreal, that the
French secret police reported that Benjamin Franklyn’s underwear was the
whitest they had ever seen and that the Hessians were the best soldiers to take
the field during the Revolutionary War but that their main contribution was to
provide handsome husbands for America’s young women. On the
serious side he rambles through our whole history with insights on major events
and ideas. He writes that while Franklyn
fully supported the idealistic principles that formed the basis for our
constitution, he did not think the system would endure and foresaw the
corruption of our democracy into a system of privilege. Franklyn was right, as usual. Vidal notes that three of the great political
thinkers of the 18th century, Franklyn, John Adams and Jefferson
were absent in Europe while the Constitution was conceived and developed by
Madison and Hamilton. He has some bitter
words about the strict constructionists on the Supreme Court who studiously
avoid the ideas laid out in the Federalist Papers. He notes John Adam’s major contribution – he kept
us out of war with France in 1800. His
account of the Louisiana Purchase is the best I can recall. He finishes with reminiscence about a conversation
with JFK at Hyannisport about the great men of history. Their joint conclusion was that the men they
admired were the ones who took time to think.
March 2013
Nicholas Wade. Before
the Dawn, Recovering the Lost History of Our Ancestors. Recently I read Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel and was fascinated
by how much he could tell us about our past and why we are what we are by
synthesizing developments in medicine, linguistics, archeology and
anthropology. Nicholas Wade adds a whole
new dimension by introducing genetic analyses based on compilations of DNA
samples from an ever expanding list of sources. He notes that about 50,000 years ago the
founding population, from which all humans are descended, numbered about 5000
and that about 175 of these crossed the Red Sea at its mouth and spread along
the coast of Asia Minor on into India and from there to the whole world outside
of Africa. Contrary to what
archeologists and anthropologists like to tell us, he believes that people were
universally warlike and only began to become less so as they developed complex
civilizations. He spends a lot of time
describing chimpanzee society to support this conclusion . He believes that abandonment of nomadic life
and formation of permanent settlements preceded the development of agriculture
and animal husbandry. He notes that
genetic developments based on natural selection can happen much more quickly
than is generally supposed. As examples
he mentions the development of lactose tolerance in what is now the Netherlands
about six thousand years ago and the intellectual development of Ashkenazi Jews
as a result of being forced to pursue a limited number of occupations for a thousand
years or more. Their average IQ is 115,
which is an order of magnitude higher than the general population. While linguists generally maintain that it is
not possible to reconstruct languages spoken more than 5000 years ago, Wade believes
that methods used for genetic analyses can push that back to 10,000 or even 15,000
years ago. Perhaps the most important
thing that Wade has to say is that evolutionary change can happen relatively quickly. Wade has included quotes from Darwin
throughout, and it is amazing to learn how prescient he was. March 2013
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