Book Review

1000 Years of Annoying the French, by Stephen Clarke.

At the very outskirts of the world, at least until America was discovered, a narrow channel of water separates the misty island of Britannia from the continent. Although both the British and the French were once a part of the Roman Empire, they have come to develop significantly different ways and customs over the years. Like a pair of young siblings who can´t agree on who gets to play with the train set, the history of these two countries is one fraught with gleeful taunts, tears, loathing, betrayal, treachery, regicide, backstabbing and murder.

When the Chancellor of the Exchequer declared in the recent British election that a vote for the opposition would result “Rising unemployment … as seen under France´s socialist president”, he was merely continuing a proud British tradition of bashing the French whenever possible. For those who lust after a detailed and humorous account in the same vein, stretching across a thousand years, this book is most definitely for you.  

As a Briton who has spent several years living in France, Mr. Clarke is ideally suited to writing a through historical account of the two countries shared history. His bestselling A Year in the Merde depicted his struggles when he had arrived in Paris fresh from the Eurostar, and in this new book he brings his familiar humorous and irreverent, yet diligently researched style, to bear.

It should be noted that Mr. Clarke is by no means anti-French and that this book is written as a labor of love rather than a reason for Britain to leave the EU. Not hating the French meant that he took some flak when he was promoting A Year In the Merde in the US back in 2005.  Following their invasion of Iraq, anti-French sentiment was running high, and a radio presenter got so upset with Mr. Clarke when he wouldn´t call the French “uncivilized froggies” the he promptly cancelled their interview. A noble gesture to be sure, although I suspect he is still waiting for his Legion d´Honneur.  

The first piece of cherished French history Mr. Clarke tears into is the Norman invasion of 1066, when the namesake of yours truly, William the Conqueror, invaded England. As the writer frequently reminds us throughout the book, there is a French version of what happened, and then there is the truth. If you were to stop a perfumed Parisian strolling down the Place de la Concorde, he would probably tell you that the William and his Normans were French and that ever since their invasion Britain has, de facto, been ruled by Frenchmen. Before our Parisian friend could light up a Gitanes and take a delighted puff, Mr. Clarke would point out that the Normans were anything but French. Back in the days when an enfeebled French king could barely hold onto half of modern day France, the savage successors of the Vikings who roamed the northern coasts were a serious threat to his somewhat feeble kingdom. Even though our Parisian friend might spill some ash over his Louis Vuitton shoes when he gasps in shock at that bold statement, the Norman invasion of England set the stage for a thorn in France’s side that continuous to sting to this day.

The hundred year’s war saw the flower of France’s nobility, resplendent in their shining armor, slaughtered time and time again by English peasants wielding longbows. One has to assume that the sparkly luster the most ornate cuirass rather goes away after it´s been pierced by a bodkin arrow and it´s owner has died in a muddy field outside Agincourt. While the flower of France was repeatedly deflowered, a succession of English monarchs happily plundered and rampaged through their country. When Joan of Arc, France´s great saint and savior, was captured by Burgundians, the French king saw this as an opportunity to remove a growing threat and promptly allowed her to be ransomed to the English. Her archenemies were naturally not disposed to showing her any clemency, and our unfortunate Joan was promptly burned at the stake for wearing men´s clothing.  To say that the thirty year´s war ended with a French victory, Mr. Clarke suggests, is a bit like saying that every outbreak of the bubonic plague has ended in a human victory.

The most striking British triumph, by a country mile, is the fact that they delivered the coup the grace when France was poised for world domination. That Napoleon´s hundred days return to power was brought to an end at Waterloo is common knowledge, but the story of the suspicions deaths of the Grand l´Empereur and his descendants has enough drama in it to deserve a novel of its own. Not one, not two, but three Napoleons have all died in British custody under suspicious circumstances. Napoleon I died on the distant pacific Island of Saint Helena. The official cause of death was stomach cancer, but suspicion has long abounded that he died due to the poor care of the British, arsenic poison being a stubborn conspiracy theory that refuses to go away. Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, or Napoleon III, also died while in British care, residing in a manor in Chislehurst outside London after he had fled France following the disastrous battle of Sedan. The exact cause of his death remains unknown, but the lead water pipes in the villa is the chief suspect. Louis Napoleon´s son, the hapless young man who was later nicknamed Napoleon III ½, died in an ambush while serving with the British in the Anglo-Zulu war.  Accidents, as the saying goes, happen all the time.

Fascinating facts leap at you from every page of the book and the stories I have just told are but a tiny fraction of the thousand year feud. If I were to share all the gems from the book we would be here all night, but it will suffice to say that Mr. Clarke must have gone through a legion of musty tomes when he did his research. His uniquely British sense of humor ensures that six hundred plus pages passes by in a blur and the book manages to be both highly entertaining and provide a comprehensive lesson in European history. My only question is how differently the story would have been told if it had been written by a Frenchman? That, however, is a question that will remain unanswered until some enterprising Frenchman, possibly our Parisian friend, decides to take up the pen in anger and strike back at Mr. Clarke. 

Book Review 

A Fighting Chance, by Elizabeth Warren 

Elizabeth Warren is the Senator of Massachusetts, and something of a political rock star in America. YouTube videos where she tears into hapless Wall Street bankers has attracted several millions of views and when she recently appeared on The Daily Show, John Stewart asked her what if felt like to have her own wing of the Democratic Party. This Teddy Roosevelt-like progressive zeal naturally means that Warren has her fair share of enemies as well as a given place in the media spotlight.   

Mrs. Warren´s story seems inextricably tied with the concept that her country has always held most dear, that of the American dream. Born in Oklahoma in 1949 to working class parents, Warren´s lofty aspirations of going to college and becoming a teacher seemed far out of reach for her family´s modest means. Coming from a country where all education, including university, is free, I was already misty-eyed and rooting for Warren at this point. Her mother, as she explains, was neither cruel nor did she doubt her daughter´s potential, she merely thought that the life of a housewife would be a much safer bet. Warren did marry and have children at an early age, but when her father gave her a fire-extinguisher for Christmas after she had set the kitchen on fire while trying to make toast, she decided to give her lifelong dream another go. The married suburban bliss of the nuclear family´s housewife, that Don Draper and his cohorts from Madison Avenue where peddling in their glossy 1960s ads, clearly wasn´t meant for her.       

Warren graduated law school and eventually ended up as a professor with a burning passion to teach. In 1995 she found herself working on the National Bankruptcy Review Commission. This was where her interest in politics was born when she fought a long drawn out rearguard action to try to prevent tougher bankruptcy laws that would be a severe blow to those who needed a fresh start in life. At first, Warren writes, she viewed these people as irresponsible, their undignified shuffle to the bankruptcy court being due to a carelessness with money and a lack of responsibility. Many of those she met, however, were just regular people who had fallen on tough times. A job lost or a sick family member could mean that someone who had worked hard and played by the rules their whole life was suddenly standing on the precipice of a vast economic abyss. Their only hope to escape the steadily growing tide of bills they couldn´t possibly afford to pay, was to take the plunge and wipe their slates clean. As Warren painfully admits, those who fought the good fight were not nearly as well funded as their adversaries, and the pressure from a Republican held congress to sign the new bankruptcy legislation was mounting steadily. Bill Clinton vetoed the bill in the final days of his presidency, but a newly inaugurated W signed it into law with the stroke of a pen shortly thereafter. Nevertheless, thanks to Warren and her colleagues dogged determination, they managed to hold off the poisonous bill long enough to save thousands of families. Despite their bitter sweet loss, Warren didn´t lose faith. Assuming the mantle of David fighting against a well-heeled Goliath had only whetted her appetite for public service. I suspect that her go to rallying cry of “The system is rigged in favor of those with money and power”, originated from this desperate yet noble struggle.

A few years after her doomed fight for bankruptcy legislation, events conspired to place Warren in the spotlight once more. This time she would come face to face with Timothy Geithner, whose biography, Stress Test, was the first book I reviewed on this blog. After the financial meltdown of 2007, senate majority leader Harry Reid placed her on the TARP oversight committee, her task being to oversee the implementation of the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act. I remember from reading Stress Test how Geithner felt that Warren was out of her depth in this role, and that her senate hearings were geared more towards YouTube-sensationalism than serious inquiry. The YouTube bit may not have been entirely false, but Geithner never seems to have gotten on very well with Warren, nor did he seem to take her very seriously. In his mind she was more or less the kind of swivel-eyed lunatic who tells the mob with pitchforks to burn down the witch’s hut.

The humble and unassuming Geithner who featured in Stress Test is, however, suspiciously absent from Warren´s account of the TARP-proceedings. She tells us a gem of an anecdote about how Geithner invited her to a lunch meeting at a nearby restaurant in the capitol. They were both seated in the back of Geithner’s colossal SUV, with a couple of burly Secret Service men by the wheel. Since they were going at a breakneck pace, Warren had wisely fastened her seatbelt, and advised the Secretary of the Treasury to do the same. When he responded smugly that both his bodyguards carried firearms and were trained to use them, Warren sensibly pointed out that wouldn´t help him if the SUV got into an accident and rolled over. Geithner, Warren notes dryly, didn´t fasten his seatbelt until they had already eaten lunch and were on their way back.

Although the two of them didn´t see eye to eye on most things, there was something they both agreed on, that the Dodd-Frank legislation passed after the crash was not enough to reign in the excesses of the big banks. They may very well be right in their jointly held assumption, but all was not doom and gloom. One has to assume she liked to make toasts when the oversight panel took their afternoon break, since her old misfortune with the toaster that caught fire during her housewife days came back with a vengeance.  In the years that followed those perilous times when you could smoke in your car and drink scotch and soda in your office, someone founded a government agency responsible for making sure that toasters didn´t catch fire. Why was it, Warren asked herself, that same protection didn´t apply to mortgages and other financial products? Surely you should be able to expect that, as a consumer, the financial products you buy doesn´t have a ticking time bomb buried among all the fine print? The same people who had lobbied for the cruel bankruptcy bill were obviously opposed to this as well, but luckily this time she had President Obama and several other influential people on her side. Initially Warren was poised to lead this agency, but powerful voices opposed her. This turned out to be a good thing, because if they hadn´t you wouldn´t be reading this review. 

The bankers, thinking they had finally gotten rid of Warren, praised their luck and continued business as usual. Their capitalist nirvana of long days spent fundraising, golfing, laughing out loud for no apparent reason and gradually picking away at Dodd-Frank, however, turned out to be short lived.

A long time ago (2013), in a land far away (Massachusetts), Republican senator Scott Brown sat on the senate seat that the late Ted Kennedy had occupied for forty seven years. Kennedy, a renowned liberal lion, had been one of Warren´s few allies when she fought the bankruptcy bill. The seat had been narrowly lost to the Democrats and the people one Wall Street who Warren fought on a daily basis now had a stern ally in Scott Brown. Brown was a former National Guard colonel who had previously served in the Massachusetts House of Representatives and won Cosmopolitan Magazine´s America’s sexiest man competition in 1982. He was the kind of square jawed jock who drives a Ford Mustang convertible and dates the prom queen in every High School film that´s ever been made. Even the Massachusetts firefighters association, who later endorsed Warren in the election, admitted that they would rather sit down and have a beer with Scott Brown than with Mrs. Warren. Holding one´s liquor, however, is not the only skill a Senator has to master, even though it is certainly more impressive than balancing the budget.

The long and tough senatorial campaign of Warren vs Brown garnered national attention and Scott Brown´s affluent supporters poured untold millions of dollars into his campaign. The mood turned ugly quite a few times and every aspect of Warren´s life was examined by her opponents in search of something they could smear her with. Super Pacs led by Karl Rove, a longtime conservative strategist, attacked her Native American ancestry as well as her policies, which they tried to paint as a greatest hits compilation of Karl Marx and Joseph Stalin. In the end Warren prevailed, Massachusetts was in Democratic hands once more and her fiery rhetoric would continue to be viewed by millions of people on YouTube.

Warren´s autobiography is a thrilling read. Small wonder, since her life could more or less be made into a rags-to-riches Hollywood film without any airbrushing. Just like you would expect from a book in this genre, A Fighting Chance is written in clear, simple language with an emphasis on ease of reading instead of Shakespearian flourish. The plot may be on the serious side, but it´s filled with enough anecdotes and wry humor to liven things up after all the misery of inhuman bankruptcy laws and financial meltdown. Ultimately, it tells the tale that people have always found fascinating, that of an underdog and an unlikely hero, and it does it remarkably well. 

Book Review

Stormbird, by Conn Iggulden

In the world of historical fiction, Conn Iggulden is a well-established heavyweight. His previous work includes two best-selling novel series about the lives of Julius Caesar and Genghis Khan. The plot of Stormbird centers on the so called Wars of the Roses, which was fought in England between 1455 and 1487. The war was called thusly because of the main combatants, the houses of York and Lancaster, both had a rose on their coat of arms, a white rose for York and a red one for Tudor.    

With all the horticulture you could possibly need to know dispensed with, we must now briefly turn to the conflict itself. The Wars of the Roses was a bitter and bloody epoch in England´s history, yet it is one that has not been very prominent in popular culture and I suspect most people would struggle if asked to describe what the conflict was about. Even for myself, who loves to study and read about both history and military history, the Wars of the Roses seemed to have been an exceptionally drawn out, complicated and messy conflict. When you first open the book to smell the fresh ink, presuming you order a second-hand copy from Amazon, you are assaulted by several pages of family trees showing the royal houses of England. These are a winding, byzantine mess that would make George RR Martin himself proud. The gist of it is that after the strong warrior king Henry V dies, the crown passes to the runt of the litter, his weakling son Henry VI. The perils of a hereditary monarchy are thus clearly illustrated to the reader, much like when Warren buffet once said that it is like choosing the 2020 Olympic team by picking the eldest sons of the gold medal winners from the 2000 Olympics. He was talking about the perils of not having an effective estate tax, but his metaphor seems applicable in Stormbird´s case as well.

With a naive boy prone to fainting sickness sitting on the throne of England, vultures and opportunists were bound to pounce sooner or later. Richard, the Duke of York, was a warlike man of great swagger who rather fancied a more powerful ruler of England, preferably himself, and so the stage was set for a devastating civil war that ravaged England and pitted the distant, blue blooded relatives of the previously mentioned family trees, against each other.  

As the drama unfolds, we are introduced to a host of characters who all inhabit the damp and misty island of Britain. Besides the young king, Henry VI, there is his young and headstrong French queen and a grizzled old spymaster who is, like Danny Glover in Lethal Weapon, too old for his job. This trio faces off against the house of York and their many allies. Truth be told King Henry VI also has a large number of loyal noble houses and barons he can count on for support, but the delicate power balance between York and Lancaster tips ever so slightly in the favor of the latter after our poor boy-king isn´t man enough (boy enough doesn´t sound very forceful) to rise to the occasion and prevent the lion´s share of England’s French provinces from being lost. 

I told you earlier that Richard was the head of the house of York and King Henry´s deceitful nemesis. I only know this because I looked on the back of the cover. This is unfortunately one of the reasons why Stormbird doesn´t quite live up to Iggulden´s previous novels. With the exception of young French queen injecting some Gallic passion into the storyline, none of the characters were particularly memorable. As soon as I had put down the book they more or less disappeared completely from my memory. I never felt that I was particularly moved or invested in any of them, truth be told.

For someone who is writing about the lives of Genghis Khan and Julius Caesar, like Iggulden has done, there is a treasure trove of material, a veritable smorgasbord of epic battles, larger than life characters and world-changing events. I didn´t read any of those books to revel in Iggulden´s writing, is what I have come to realize. My interest was piqued by Caesar and Genghis and their extraordinary lives. This, I believe, cuts to the heart of the matter of why Stormbird isn´t quite up my alley. The events and characters Iggulden has chosen to write about this time are nowhere near as colorful or epic as those he has tackled in the past. The Wars of the Roses was a conflict played out on an infinitely smaller scale than the conquests of Genghis, where his Mongol hordes conquered the largest empire in history, stretching from China all the way to Central Europe. Bernard Cornwell, I have long argued, is a titan among men when it comes to writing historical fiction due to his effortless prose and ability to tell a great story. Even though he wrote more Sharpe novels than there are grains of sand in the Kalahari Desert, he always managed to deliver.  

Stormbird is certainly interesting from a historical perspective and this conflict is very different from anything Iggulden has written about in the past. Unfortunately it fails to excite me as much as I had thought it would. I read Stormbird while waiting to catch a flight at the airport, and that is probably where is best suited, to whittle away an hour or two until the tax-free shop opens.