Series Review

The Sharpe Series, By Bernard Cornwell

Bernard Cornwell’s Sharpe series tells the story of Richard Sharpe, a foundling who fled the workhouse to join his majesty’s Britannic army. Fighting under the command of Arthur Wellesley, the future Duke of Wellington, Sharpe’s life of soldiering covers an exhaustive twenty-one novels, during which he fights in both the Indian and European theater. The first novel, Sharpe’s Eagle, was written in 1981 and the last one, Sharpe’s Fury, came out in 2007. The novel series also saw a popular television spin off starring Sean Bean. Bernard Cornwell has written a great many excellent novels, but his own and Sean Bean’s careers both took off thanks to Sharpe.     

Having joined the army at a tumultuous time for the British Empire, Sharpe had his work cut out for him. During the early nineteenth century, Europe was ravaged by war. Conscription allowed massive armies, on a scale that had not been seen before, to be raised and deployed on the battlefield. After the turmoil of the French Revolution, a young artillery officer from Corsica named Napoleon Bonaparte distinguished himself as a brilliant military leader, and crowned himself emperor of France. The British, ever fretful about the balance of power on the continent (see my review of Henry Kissinger’s World Order), aligned themselves with a series of coalitions in order to defeat the French. Dire socio-economic conditions forced a young Richard Sharpe to join the army, and geo-political ones necessitated that the French were to become his enemy.

As a young man Cornwell fell in love with an American woman and moved to the United States. He lacked a job to support himself but had grown up reading C.S Forester’s Hornblower novels, and had always wanted to be a writer. With Horatio Hornblower serving in the Royal Navy, Cornwell seized the opportunity to write a series of novels centered on a soldier fighting the Napoleonic Wars on dry land. With the stout work ethic that is expected of immigrants to the USA, Cornwell sat himself down at his kitchen table in New Jersey and started clicking away on his typewriter. After the successful publication of his first novel, Sharpe’s Eagle, which centers on the Battle of Talavera in 1809, Cornwell became a full time writer. Chronologically, it falls somewhere in the middle of the series, when Sharpe has already risen to rank of captain and established himself as a shrewd commander.

The bulk of the series finds our intrepid solder fighting for Wellesley’s peninsular army in Spain and Portugal, but later additions tells the story of a young private Sharpe fighting in India against a slew of local warlords, including the feared Tipoo Sultan of Mysore. Visitors to the Victoria and Albert Museum in London can gaze upon the Tipoo’s macabre toy featured in Sharpe’s Tiger, an intricate automaton in the shape of a metal tiger sinking its teeth into a luckless redcoat’s throat. Turning the handle causes one of the redcoat’s hands to flap uselessly while a faint sound resembling a tortured scream emanates from the exhibition's mechanical innards.

Having survived the Tipoo and his tiger, Sharpe takes part in the battle of Trafalgar before the series turn to Europe and the long and harsh Peninsular war. The dramatic climax is, obviously, Sharpe’s Waterloo, which I am very much looking forward to. A prospective reader would be well advised to start with Sharpe’s Tiger, since it is the chronological beginning of the story as well as being a thumping good read.

I have praised Cornwell’s writing before on this blog. His language is relatively straightforward and accessible, yet he manages to capture the smell of gunpowder and the sound of the drummer boys sounding the charge. The only way you could possibly get closer to nineteenth century warfare would be to take part in the annual re-enactment of the battle of Waterloo, but then you would have to travel to a muddy field in Belgium and subject yourself to dodgy catering. Being British, however, it is not surprising that he is ever so slightly partial, and most of the French marshals are portrayed as foppish braggadocios.

A recurring theme through the series is the unfairness of British society at the time, particularly its military. This was an age where commissions tended to be sold to the highest bidder, and were very seldom awarded on merit alone. As a no nonsense career soldier Sharpe frequently clashes with incompetent officers fresh from England, who know nothing of war, and whose immaculate uniforms are better suited to the officer’s mess than the front line.

Through a combination of plundered French cash, bravery and dogged perseverance, Sharpe nevertheless manages to slowly and painstakingly rise through the ranks and become an officer himself. This was something that was slightly frowned upon at the time, since people thought that men promoted from the ranks would turn to drink. Sharpe’s first command as an officer is a detachment of Riflemen, where he meets the Irishman Patrick Harper, who becomes his steadfast companion for the duration of the war and helps him capture the eagle standard in Sharpe’s Eagle.   

Bernard Cornwell is one of the great writers of historical fiction, who manages to cater to a wide audience. His Sharpe series would be the perfect read for lazy days on the beach during the upcoming summer holidays.

Book Review: The Confidence Game: The Psychology of the Con and Why We Fall for It Every Time

By Maria Konnikova

During the height of the Korean War, a wreck full of gravely injured North Korean soldiers desperately hailed a passing Canadian navy vessel, the HMCS Cayuga. They had been wounded in an ambush, and the crew were in dire need of medical attention. The Cayuga had only one sawbones onboard, the intrepid Dr. Joseph Cyr, who rose to the occasion. Over the next forty-eight hours Cyr performed nineteen surgeries and helped save just as many lives. Aided by a medical field guide he had persuaded a fellow doctor back in Ontario to create “for the troops”, Cyr soon became a celebrity in the press. There was, however, one small niggle. Joseph Cyr was actually Ferdinand Waldo Demara from Massachusetts, a notorious impostor who didn´t know the first thing about medicine. Aided by his field guide he nonetheless managed to carry out the surgeries with some degree of success. So successful was he, in fact, that when he offered his biographer to deliver his wife´s child many years later, he almost managed to persuade him. The North Koreans had survived, after all, so what could possibly go wrong? Throughout his life Demara also masqueraded as a Texas prison warden, a Benedictine monk, a Trappist monk, a civil engineer, a doctor of psychology, and much else besides. He was the consummate con artist, a man with supreme confidence who could fool anyone and got away with it, time and time again.

Robbers hold you at gunpoint and force you to turn over your valuables, burglars break into your home in order to steal your television and bank robbers smash open armored vaults to plunder the treasure trove within. Con artists, however, never resort to violence. In the pecking order of the underworld, they are the aristocrats of crime. They make you trust them, believe them, love them even. Then you willingly hand over your life´s saving as well as every single material possession that isn´t nailed down. When their act is blown you will either stand by them and defend them against all accusations, or you will be too ashamed to speak up, your reputation in tatters and your life ruined. That´s when they toss you aside and move on to the next mark. Maria Konnikova´s The Confidence Game tells you all you need to know about how these people operate and why one of the world´s oldest professions is unlikely to disappear   

If you think you are too smart, well educated, savvy and metropolitan to fall for a confidence trickster, think again. The Ivy league stockbroker from New York who gave away hundreds of thousands of dollars to a fortune teller certainly never suspected she was being ripped off. Neither did the French aristocratic family who were persuaded by a charismatic impostor that they were the victims of a masonic plot, and over the curse of ten years made them part with millions of dollars as well as the family estate.

 How is it, then, that these people keep succeeding time and time again? For a harmonious society, Konnikova explains, it is essential that we trust one another. Con artists prey on that trust and tries to use it for their own nefarious ends. The first part of any successful con is knowing who will be the most susceptible mark, and no one is better at reading their fellow human beings than a confidence trickster.

Deceit and trickery thrives in times of uncertainty and upheaval. Wars, revolutions and famines attracts con artists like moths to a flame, and the same is true for people who are emotionally unstable, be it because of a breakup or a death in the family. Even someone who is educated and has both feet firmly planted on the ground can, under the right circumstances, fall for cons that they would otherwise laugh at. The true con artist knows this, and knows how to pick out susceptible individuals from the crowd.

After the con artist has picked out his mark, it is time to introduce himself (Most con artists are men, Konnikova writes), and make a good first impression. The grafter is acutely aware of both the discreet signals that the victim is unwittingly sending out, and how he himself is perceived. An error at this stage is not an option. Otherwise, the mark will never be convinced that you are in fact a wealthy German industrialist offering a once in a lifetime investment opportunity. Once the mark has been identified and contact has been made, the con artist must spin a convincing tale and lure his unsuspecting mark into doing what he wants them to do and believing what he wants them to believe. The most diligent con artists can spend a considerable amount of time building trust and convincing his mark.

Eventually, a breakdown will occur, when the mark is presented with evidence that the magical 

investment opportunity might not be all that it´s cranked up to be.  You might think that anyone who isn´t a complete imbecile would cut their losses and back away at this point, but that isn´t how human psychology works. Positive illusions serve as a defense mechanism when we are faced with threatening circumstances. If all that we have been led to believe is suddenly being questioned, human beings tend to double down and reaffirm their certainty that everything will turn out for the best. This sets the con up for its final phase, that Konnikova dubs “the send and the touch”. This is when the con finally comes to fruition, the send is when the mark is recommitted to the con artist’s tall tale, and the touch is the part when the mark gets robbed blind and (quite possibly) sees his or her life ruined.

While reading The Confidence Game, you frequently have to fight the urge to yell at the hapless victims to not give their life´s savings away to someone who´s an obvious charlatan, yet the flaws in human psychology that makes it all possible are explained in all their embarrassing depth. A lot of research went into writing the book, and Konnikova conducted dozens of interviews all over the world with con artists, victims and psychology professors. She skillfully weaves together tales of real life cons with an explanation of the science behind it that´s understandable to a layman. Like a magician´s tricks being laid bare, Konnikova lets the reader gain an insight into their fascinating world and hopefully helps us prevent being conned in the future. For that purpose alone, The Confidence Game is well worth reading.

   

Book Review: Listen, Liberal -or- What Ever Happened To The Party Of The People?

By Thomas Frank

When Barack Obama was sworn in as the forty fourth president of the United States, on a cold January morning in 2009, the country was descending into a financial crisis the likes of which had not been seen since the Great Depression of 1929. Back then, Franklin Delano Roosevelt embarked on a sweeping legislative agenda in order to do battle with the economic malaise that had led to nearly one in four Americans being unemployed. Relief, recovery and reform was the medicament that Roosevelt prescribed. The financiers responsible for the crisis were thrown in jail, tough new regulations were imposed on the financial sector and a massive federal jobs program built roads and bridges that led to a quarter century of great prosperity. Barack Obama was faced with a situation that was every bit as serious as the one FDR had confronted eighty years previously, his party controlled both houses of congress and the American people clamored for bold reforms. Having assumed the mantle of leadership during this pivotal time in American history, Obama could have done what FDR did, what needed to be done, yet that transformative change never came to be. It is easy to blame others, republicans first and foremost, but Thomas Frank lays the blame squarely at the Democrats themselves. In Listen, Liberal, he tells the sad tale of how the party of the people lost their way when they adopted a more affluent and tech-savvy constituency.

For nearly five decades after FDR ushered in his New Deal, the Democratic party was the party of Americas emerging middle class. It was the party of unions, Medicare and Social Security. Their leaders were progressive firebrands tougher than a two-dollar steak, who berated and harangued their opponents until they finally got what they wanted. Ralph Nader and other activists forced Richard Nixon to create the Environmental Protection Agency, Lyndon Johnson wasn’t afraid to twist arms if necessary when passing the legislation for his Great Society, and of course there was FDR himself, who bragged that he welcomed the hatred of the economic royalists. The Democrats of today do not oppose these royalists and their allies in congress, instead they have pretty much surrendered and are meekly hoisting a white flag, Frank writes with a palpable sense of disgust.  

How can this be, you might ask? Towards the end of the nineteen seventies, something changed within the Democratic party. In the aftermath of the 1968 election, which a demoralized democratic party lost to Richard Nixon (for the details of this period see the review of Pat Buchanan´s The Greatest Comeback), the party squabbled amongst itself as to how they were to move forward. Standing amidst the rubble, various groups of democrats, such as the McGovern Commission and the Democratic leadership council, agreed that it was time to abandon the New Deal and kick organized labor to the curb. Instead the party started to cater towards a new constituency, that Frank characterizes as the” Liberal Class”. Highly educated professionals such as doctors, lawyers and computer programmers, the liberal class represents the top ten percent of the United States population, and they are certainly not feeling the aftermath of the 2008 crisis. The magical recipe to success for the 1990s and beyond was innovation, a word parroted and bandied about by just about anyone in the liberal class with a form of reverential awe. In a meritocracy, the cream inevitably rises to the top, as happened with Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. Frank delves deeply into both of their presidencies and finds striking similarities between them. They are the two democrats who have held office since their party ditched the New deal, and so to study them is to study what has happened to the party of FDR.

The card carrying members of Clinton and Obama´s party are highly qualified knowledge workers who vacation at Martha´s Vineyard, a small Island of the coast of Massachusetts where 41 and 44 themselves can often be found enjoying a round of golf. It is where, Frank asserts with caustic wit, the executives of the tech industry rubs shoulders with Hollywood stars and competes to see who´s thatched roof cottage has the largest organic vegetable plot. Meanwhile workers in rural Massachusetts a few miles away trod forlornly among the decrepit ruins of factories whose production has long since moved to China. The liberal class are eager to give microloans to subsistence farmers in Burundi, but their compassion stops well short of providing good middle class jobs at home. As Bill Clinton once said “What you can earn depends on what you can learn”, and Frank would argue it´s pretty clear the new order of democrats doesn’t value the skills of someone who has been operating the spinning jenny at a textile mill for forty years. If you don´t have the right academic credentials and don´t know how to develop the next hot app, then you have only yourself to blame for staring down the barrel of inequality.

Both Clinton and Obama were both born into humble circumstances yet they were plucked out of obscurity and went on to attend the nation´s most prestigious universities. They surrounded themselves with the alumni of Ivy League universities and favored the financial industry and tech companies over labor unions. While Obama´s top advisors all come from pretty much the same prestigious universities, FDR´s famous brain trust brought together a ragtag band from all walks of American lives. People that Obama and Clinton would never have touched even with a set of pliers were let into the halls of government and enacted bold reform that transformed the country. Henry Wallace may have been the finest agriculture secretary there ever was, and may have single handedly saved the agricultural industry in the United States, but before FDR appointed him he went to Iowa State and wrote a monthly farmer´s almanac. In Obama and Clinton´s view, those who graduate from an Ivy League school are the best of the best, period. They are the cream that has risen to the top, and no one else need apply. That unfortunately means that they are only ever going to get someone who is adept at thinking inside the box. People who have climbed to the top of the greasy pole because they were are at internalizing the orthodoxy of their respective fields. They are professionals, people who Frank describes as those who jealously guard their credentials and trumpet their expertize.

It is because of this love of expertize that we see the complexity of Obama´s Dodd-Frank Wall Street reform bill. While FDR enacted the Glass- Steagall act to build a wall between Wall Street and your local savings bank around the corner, Dodd-Frank is many thousands of pages long and nearly incomprehensible. While Harry Truman dreamed of universal health care, Obama brought us the Affordable Care Act, which is if anything more complicated than Dodd-Frank, yet doesn’t guarantee coverage to all Americans. In the olden days, if the trading patterns of a bank were too complex, this was seen as an indication of fraud, and you would have had a Democrat yelling himself hoarse over the need for reform. These days, however, this is just a sign of their sophistication.

Therein, Listen, Liberal argues, lies the explanation to the fact that Obama never acted as decisively as he could have done. It wasn´t because he was scared of the big bad banks and their CEO, it was because he admired them. After all, if he jailed a Wall Street executive, that would make for some awkward conversation at the golf club the next time he visited Martha´s Vineyard. When this love of professionalism and meritocracy is combined with an assumption that the poor and downtrodden have nowhere else to go anyway, it becomes a recipe for disaster.

Thomas Frank´s book is a must read for those with an interest in politics. For Democrats it may be a bitter pill to swallow, but the soul searching that it offers is absolutely crucial heading into a hotly contested election year.   

Book Review: Destiny and Power, The American Odyssey of George Herbert Walker Bush

By John Meacham

Destiny and Power is Pulitzer Prize winning writer Jon Meacham´s splendidly detailed and thoroughly researched account of a life that spanned most of the pivotal events of the twentieth century. Having previously written a biography about Andrew Jackson, American Lion, as well as several other best sellers, Meacham was in all likelihood the perfect man for the job.

From 1988 to 1992 George Herbert Walker Bush served as the 41^st president of the United States. Unlike the slew of freshman senators who threw their hats in the ring for the GOP nomination this election cycle, Bush 41 had an impressive résumé of both business success and public service before he ascended to the presidency.

As a millennial I peruse the pages of Meacham´s biography with a sense of mild wonder. The fact that Bush the elder is somewhat perplexed by the tone and substance of this election cycle is not difficult to imagine. A republican who was willing to compromise, he raised taxes on the wealthy, legislated to protect the nation’s waterways from pollution and the disabled from deprivation, while calmly managing the end of the cold war without a single nuclear bomb going off. It seems like fiction, but I assure you that this is a biography, and one that is well worth reading at that.

It goes without saying that Bush got off to the very best start imaginable, he came from a wealthy family and his father was a senator as well as Eisenhower´s golfing companion. With kindness to others, ambition, confidence and intelligence, however, Bush consistently managed to make the most out of the favorable hand he was dealt.

As a young man George Bush was horrified by the attack on Pearl Harbor and out of a genuine sense of duty and patriotism he decided to do something about it. At the tender age of 18 he served as a naval aviator flying bombers in the pacific, and was awarded the distinguished flying cross, among other accolades, for his bravery. During a mission over the Japanese held Island of Chichi Jima, his plane was shot down by an anti-aircraft battery and Bush was the only survivor. After clambering out of the wreckage he was eventually rescued by a lifeguard submarine, the USS Finback, and later returned to active duty. All in all he flew 58 combat missions during the war. The contrast is stark when you look at his son´s military record, who never fought in Viet Nam and was satisfied with a spell in the Texas Air National Guard.

Returning home after the war, the elder Bush married the raven haired Barbara Pierce after a whirlwind romance, and the two of them remain together to this day. He also studied at Yale University, where he made it into the prestigious skull and bones secret society, just like his father did. Bush’s future, should he so wish, could be a very safe and comfortable one from here on out. With his many connections he could have worked as a New York banker until he retired, a career that would have involved the occasional spot of banking before drinking a couple of martinis over lunch and then heading off to the golf course. Instead, he chose to set out on his own and take a risk, albeit with the family treasury and overflowing rolodex at his back. Drawn to the excitement of the oil industry in Texas, Bush moved south together with his small family and eventually started Zapata Oil. The name came out of the need to be either first or last in the phonebook directory.

The business was profitable and grew steadily, but Bush never made it into the top echelon in the oil industry. This may be because his thoughts seems to have strayed to politics from the nineteen sixties and onwards. With a record of business success he became involved in the local Republican Party and won a congress seat in 1966. He served to the best of his ability, but with his ambition he was never going to be a congressman until retirement.

After losing a senate race in 1970, Bush´s political career seemed over. He contemplated returning to Texas and resuming his business career, but rumors of his political demise proved premature, and he was soon back in the thick of it. Bush held a plethora of important jobs throughout the nineteen seventies, including ambassador to the UN, Chairman of the RNC and director of the CIA. When nineteen eighty rolled around he was ready to make a run for the presidency, and squared off with the former governor of California, Ronald Reagan, in the primaries. Reagan was the darling of the party´s far right, and Bush was seen as a moderate, despite the fact that he was to the right of his father, a good Eisenhower Republican. Bush eventually lost the nomination to Reagan, but was offered the vice presidency over his longtime rival Donald Rumsfeld. Even though he had given it all and lost, Bush´s sense of service and loyalty made him a fine vice president. He had previously disagreed with many of Reagan´s policies, and had even gone so far as to call his economic plan “Voodoo economics” during a heated debate, but he supported the administration and never questioned him in public. Meacham makes the interesting case that Bush was willing to compromise on his own views and principles in order to gain power, since he could then then exercise his authority in the interest of the public good. For him, the end justified the means, and that would be a very handy way of viewing things for any politician.

Running against Michael Dukakis in the 1988 general election, Bush´s staff, which included Roger Ailes, the CEO of Fox News, wasn´t afraid to fight it out in the gutter. Portraying Dukakis as soft on crime in the now infamous Willie Horton ad, which has since been criticized for racist undertones, Bush was dirtying his hands in the hope of giving them a thorough wash once the election was in the bag. He prevailed against Dukakis, but found himself the steward of an ailing economy and hobbled by his promise to not raise any taxes. Luckily his talent for diplomacy meant that he got on well with the democratic opposition and the moderates in his party, even though he privately muttering about the antics of the “right wing”.

Historians tend to regard the fall of the Berlin Wall and the invasion of Kuwait as the defining moments of Bush´s presidency.  The former was a complex and possibly volatile situation many years in the making. I don´t have time to fully delve into the situation, but Bush contributed to a peaceful German reunification and developed a god working relationship with Mikhail Gorbachev. His hand on the tiller was a steady one, even though many will rightly point out that it would have been best if NATO was disbanded once it had served its purpose. Gorbachev went out of his way to give the nod to a reunification of Germany on the condition that NATO wasn´t expanded one inch eastwards. That promise was later broken by Bill Clinton and by Bush´s own son.

Operation Desert Shield/Desert Storm was widely hailed as a great success, and it was said that the US had shaken off its Vietnam syndrome. On the face of it, Bush successfully brought together a large coalition which managed to drive Saddam out of Kuwait with much fewer casualties than expected. The clean exit after the successful campaign stands in stark contrast to the later Bush president´s invasion of Iraq, the consequences of which still affect us today. As so often in life, however, nothing is black or white. Bush´s rhetoric implied that Saddam was a new Hitler and that appeasement was not an option. Stone and Kuznick´s The Untold History of the United States (previously reviewed on this blog), paints a slightly different picture. Iraq’s economy was hurting badly from a UN embargo and its oil exports had nearly dried up. Seeing as they didn´t invade Kuwait for the sunshine, continued sanctions could have prevented the need for war end ensured and Iraqi withdrawal. Former secretary of defense Robert McNamara thought so at the time, and former Carter advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski cautioned that an invasion could turn the Arab world against the United States. Indeed, Usama Bin Laden later said his indignation when US troops were posted on Saudi Arabian soil was a contributing factor behind his hatred of America.  

After his victory against Saddam, Bush enjoyed a surge in popularity that he himself was all too aware could not last forever. He eventually reached a compromise with democrats over the budget, but the right wing of his party, who had always thought him a poor successor to Reagan, weren´t pleased. Meacham writes that it was clear Bush was never as enthusiastic about domestic affairs as he was about foreign policy. This showed, especially because Bush was at his best when he was genuinely interested in whatever was on his plate. Given this admission, one might wonder if Secretary of State would have been Bush’s ideal job, if his great ambition could have stomached it. As things were, Bush could never quite shake off his lord of the manor approach to dealing with his subjects, and in one televised debate during the 1992 election he fouled badly when he looked at his watch and couldn´t answer a young woman´s question about how the economic downturn had affected him personally. Bill Clinton seized the moment and gave a convincing reply about how he could feel her pain all too well as the governor of a small state. Bush wasn´t indifferent to the suffering of others, but Bubba was much more adept at getting his message through on television and appearing relatable.

When Bush lost the election he was cut adrift, a statesman in the autumn of his prime who instantly came to miss carrying the weight of the world on his shoulders. His legacy was initially not that highly praised by pundits, but as the GOP has gone further and further to the right, history has begun to view his presidency in a much more favorable light.

It is certainly the case that Bush was, and still is, a very interesting man, seemingly full of complexities and contradictions. In public life, he was wise and kind, yet capable of great cunning and not above compromising his ideals in order to get ahead. He was humble and down to earth, yet never managed to shake off his patrician air and behind all the civility he was ruthless about achieving his goals. Yet he was undoubtedly also a statesman, who wanted to govern and realized that compromise didn´t always have to mean a betrayal of what he stood for. His party would do well to learn from Bush, not as the milquetoast inferior to Ronald Reagan, the great communicator, but as an equally accomplished leader in his own right.

Meacham´s biography tells you all you could possibly want to know about Bush´s life and by extension the times he lived in. Even though Meacham seems to be a great admirer of Bush and his appreciation of the man and his presidency shows, he is also reasonably critical and honest about his deeds. I would strongly recommend Destiny and Power to anyone interested in politics or history.

Book Review: The Revenant

By Michael Punke

The Revenant is a thrilling tale of hardship, betrayal and survival against all odds, set in a ruggedly unforgiving milieu. Last fall saw the premier of a film adaptation featuring Leonardo DiCaprio and Tom Hardy. 

The plot centers on veteran trapper Hugh Glass, who is savagely mauled by a grizzly bear when undertaking an expedition with the Rocky Mountain Fur Company. His comrades do their best to patch him up, but his situation looks dire. The financial underpinnings of their company are rather shaky, and with winter rapidly approaching they are desperate to get on with the business of depopulating the wildlife. Otherwise bankruptcy await. Glass is left behind, abandoned by the men he thought he could trust. Against the odds he manages to cling on to life, and he soon sets out on a quest for revenge. If the story had been set today, the sympathy garnered from their predicament would no doubt have secured the crowdsourced funding required to keep the company afloat, but no such option existed in 1821.

Michael Punke is a member of a fairly exclusive club. He is currently serving as the US ambassador to the World Trade Organization and has previously worked on the White House National Security Council staff. Like Winston Churchill and Boris Johnson, the mayor of London, he manages to combine his day job with a spot of writing on the side. A quick peek through his bibliography reveals that the great American outdoors of the nineteenth century seems to be his great passion.   

The story in The Revenant is partly based on real events, although Punke has made some changes in order to make the narrative more suitable for a novel, as most writers of historical fiction are wont to do. I must say I was slightly surprised when I learned that Hugh Glass and his survival story was real, it seemed too unbelievable to be true. As so often is the case, history is full of riveting stories that are way more unbelievable than what any screen writer could come up with.

The story of Hugh Glass seems to perfectly embody that most cherished and hallowed of heroes in the American psyche. The hardy Yankee, born in a log cabin he built himself, who traverses the Wild West with a Kentucky rifle slung over his shoulder and his steely eyed gaze fixed on the horizon. Everywhere he looks there is a new oil well to drill, new southern belles to rescue from distress, and a pouch full of chewing tobacco to spit into the fire while talking like Jeff Bridges in True Grit. Jeremy Clarkson once remarked while testing a Dodge pickup truck that all Americans secretly dream of being rugged outdoorsmen, and that understanding is key to grasping their appeal. I am starting to think that for once in his life, he was right.

It is fair to say that the Mid West of the early nineteenth century was a pretty rough place, where the strong did what they could and the weak suffered what they must. For my own part, I am fascinated by the allure of the Wild West and the open frontier, but I would have preferred to have spent the early nineteenth century in London, eating a seven course lunch at a gentlemen´s club before taking a cab to the opera house. Despite my distinct lack of longing for sodden underwear and grizzly bears, The Revenant is a riveting read. Punke delights in picturing the savage hardship of the frontier, and I keep turning the pages at a breakneck pace, wanting to see how it will all turn out.

Punke skillfully brings an epic real life tale from this period to life, and even if the steam runs out a little towards the end, I would strongly recommend The Revenant. I haven’t yet seen the film, but it will certainly be interesting to see how it compares to the novel.    

   

Book Review: SPQR, A History of Ancient Rome

By Mary Beard

More than 1500 years have passed since Alaric and his horde of rampaging Visigoths sacked Rome in 410 CE, yet the Roman Empire lives on in the public conscience. So much of our language and our culture stems from the ancient Romans, and everyone ranging from artists to Fortune 500 CEOs are influenced by their words and deeds. From the popular French cartoon Asterix to the ubiquitous “Even you, my Brutus”, that someone might say when he or she is betrayed by a close friend and about to be stabbed in the back, ancient Rome lives on in our modern era. SPQR is an ambitious work that attempts to get to the bottom of what it was that made Rome so special, how it came to pass that the republic was replaced by a dictatorship and how the Romans thought of themselves and their empire.

Mary Beard is a professor of classics at Newnham College, Cambridge, who has spent more than five decades researching ancient Rome with great fascination. Her passion and great interest in the subject is clear from the very first page and the book is a splendid love letter to her field of academic excellence. Beard is a thoroughly modern historian. What I mean by that might not be obvious, so allow me to explain. Since I am utterly devoted to my readers, I have spent some time leafing through a couple of musty old history books about Rome written during the middle of the last century. Generally, historians of yore were rather boring, with the possible exception of Edward Gibbon. They treated history very seriously indeed, and never thought to sprinkle their pages with a bit of dry humor. What´s more, they made sweeping and more or less untrue declarations that ran something like “Compared to Greek, the Roman language is straightforward and simple, reflecting the Latin people´s hard work ethic, discipline and stoic demeanor.” I improvised that last sentence myself, but it´s what an old-timey historian would have said with a straight face. Beard writes about such well known characters as Julius Caesar and Marcus Tullius Cicero, but she also writes about the common men and women who lived their lives cheek by jowl in Cicero´s ramshackle housing. One of the old tomes called Cicero “the greatest orator of ancient Rome”, which he certainly was. But he was also a rapacious slumlord who built such shoddy tenement flats that they frequently collapsed and killed scores of hapless tenants. Beard will also remark on the hilarity of a half-mad Commodus clutching a severed ostrich head while berating his long suffering colleagues in the senate.

The origins of Rome are shrouded in mystery, but Beard reasonably points out that Aeneas fleeing the sack of Troy to seduce a Carthaginian queen and then proceeding to be the bottom most root of Romulus and Remus´s family tree might not be entirely true. What we do know, however, is that Rome started out as a fairly unremarkable city state in central Italy. Rome waged several wars against neighboring states, and eventually went on to be the master of the Italian peninsula. Beard points to Rome´s political system, where conquered cities and peoples were allowed to keep their local deities and go on with their lives as long as they payed taxes to Rome and supported her when she needed able bodied men to wage war. It is impossible for us to know exactly how Roman these people felt, but the Social War of BCE 90-88, when numerous Italian cities, including Pompeii, rose in revolt against Roman rule, shows us that people did not become Roman simply because they lived on the red bits on the map.

Contrary to what many may think, there probably wasn´t any manifest Roman destiny from the beginning, nor was Rome always the bloodthirsty aggressor attacking peaceful neighbors in opportunistic land grabs. Sometimes neighboring states asked for Roman assistance when confronted with dangerous rivals, sometimes Rome was threatened by bloodthirsty enemies at the gate, and sometimes, obviously, an insecure emperor needed to add a bit of martial glory to his name and went off to conquer and plunder. Before they knew it, the Romans had themselves an empire, and empires, as the late Gore Vidal warned, are dangerous things, and very hard to get rid of.   

Roman institutions during the late republic never adapted to these vastly changed circumstances. The soldiers of the legions were loyal to their commanders first and foremost, since they were the ones who fixed them up with a plot of land upon their retirement. A couple of senile old men in the senate telling their beloved commander to stand down and hand over his commission was hardly something they cared about. First Sulla, and then Caesar, defied the senate and marched their soldiers into the city. The century before the birth of Christ saw violent civil wars that nearly tore the Roman world asunder, until Caesar´s adopted son, Octavian, emerged as the ultimate winner and came to rule over a vast empire as the first among equals. Octavian assumed the mantle of Augustus, this came as a surprise since no one really knew what the word meant, and the template that he laid down for autocratic governance lasted the following two centuries.

There were a couple of bumps in the road during these heady days of the Pax Romana, such as the occasional mad emperor clutching severed ostrich heads and the infamous year of the four emperors in CE 69, but the Roman Empire effectively became a hereditary monarchy. The most dangerous part of this process, Beard argues, was when the old Caesar lay on his deathbed. As long as there was someone nearby who was not mad and either related to or adopted by the incumbent emperor, everything was good and well. However, barbarian incursions, inequality, infighting among the roman elites and ambitious commanders with a couple of loyal legions at their back and a lot of charisma eventually took their toll. There is no single explanation for the downfall of the Roman Empire, the subject would require a book in itself, and Beard even goes so far as to suggest that the Empire may not even have declined, it just morphed into something else. SPQR covers so many interesting topics that I am quite unable to dive into every one of them, but it would suffice to say that Beard has hardly been dragging her feet.   

I would heartily recommend SPQR to anyone who is interested in ancient history and probably also to those who aren´t but are feeling adventurous. The book may be several hundred pages thick, but as someone who wasn´t Roman once said “a good book always ends too soon”. Beard sheds new light on fascinating topics that scholars have long discussed, and does this with plenty of humor, passion and accessibility.   

Trilogy Review, The Karla Trilogy: Tinker, Tailor, Soldier Spy, The Honorable Schoolboy and Smiley´s People

By John le Carré

I thought it would be fun to shake things up a bit and try something new, that´s why I intend to not just review one book, but a whole trilogy in one fell swoop. I’ll write a little bit about the author and the individual parts of the trilogy before I move on to explaining why I think that the trilogy in question deserves to be on your reading list. There will probably be some minor spoilers but I’ll try my best to make sure that readers whose interests are piqued can still pick up Tinker, Tailor and enjoy it like le Carré intended.

John le Carré (that´s his pen name, his real name is David Cornwell) was born in Dorset, England in 1931. After graduating from Oxford he started working for British intelligence, at a time when the Cold War was threatening to become hot. He wrote his first novel, The spy who came in from the cold, in 1963 while still working for MI6, hence the need for a pen name. After the successful publication of his first novel he left the service and became a full time writer.

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier Spy

The first installment in the Smiley trilogy went up on the silver screen in 2011, Directed by the brilliant Tomas Alfredson, and featured an all-star cast of Gary Oldman and Benedict Cumberbatch among others. Many people complained that the film was too slow paced, yours truly remains adamant that they should have slowed down a bit and made it at least an hour longer. The film is one of my favorites, and the book it´s based on was an instant classic that turned the espionage genre on its head.

The plot is set in the rain soaked London of the early seventies. Master spy George Smiley has been let go from the “Circus”, Le Carré´s synonym for British intelligence, after his long time mentor, a man known as Control, has passed away. Smiley is soon called back from retirement, however, when a British agent is contacted by a soviet defector with a shocking revelation. A soviet mole has penetrated the highest levels of British intelligence, it´s someone who has been there for years and it´s likely that Smiley knows the mole personally. This devious double agent has been planted there by Smiley´s nemesis, the mysterious Karla, head of Soviet intelligence´s Thirteenth Directorate. Working under the radar with a small but dedicated cadre, it falls to Smiley to uncover the identity of the mole and redeem his old mentor.  

Tinker, Tailor is in my opinion an absolute literary delight. It´s possibly one of the most riveting spy stories ever written, even though you have to stay on your toes to be able to follow all the twists and turns in the plot.  

The Honorable Schoolboy

After having exposed the mole within the British Secret Service, George Smiley is placed in charge of a gravely compromised Circus. Due to spending cuts they can barely afford to keep the kettle turned on. Yet when Moscow is planning something big in war torn Southeast Asia, Smiley dispatches the failed spy and man perennially looking for his big break, Gerald Westerby, to pose as a journalist and expose whatever devilry Karla is up too. While Westerby is dodging shells in the jungle, Smiley grapples with his colleagues in U.S intelligence and plans a joint operation together with his overseas colleagues.

The Honorable Schoolboy is a compelling novel of daunting scope and complexity. True to his tradition, le Carré doesn´t lend the reader a helping hand, which might have been useful for understanding all the nuances of the plot. Alfredson and the film team intends to skip this one and proceed directly to Smiley’s People. Even though it´s a great novel, the narrative may be a bit sprawling at times and it´s certainly the leased focused of the three.          

Smiley´s People

When a washed up old spy is found dead in the middle of London, George Smiley is once more called out of retirement. A seemingly million to one shot, uncovered by an old war hero written off by the Circus ages ago, might just be the ticket to a final showdown with Carla. Like Michael Bloomberg pondering a 2016 presidential bid, the lure is irresistible for Smiley to throw all the chips onto the table in the autumn of his life and battle it out one last time with his old nemesis.

The conclusion of the Smiley trilogy is riveting and spellbinding. It might just be the best book of the three, if only because you can always feel how high the stakes are personally for Smiley as he draws ever nearer to a final reckoning with Karla. Gathering his old colleagues for an espionage operation that everyone knows beforehand will go down in Circus lore, Smiley embarks on the last and greatest undertaking of his life.      

Le Carré´s words and world

Ian Fleming served in British intelligence during world war two, perhaps the last time in modern history when there was such a thing as a “good” war. John le Carré joined the service during the Cold War, when the line between friend and foe was blurred and everyone looked anxiously over their shoulders. The former lived in a time of heroes and villains, the latter in a brown and beige postwar England where there was still rationing well into the nineteen fifties. I previously reviewed Trigger Mortis on this blog, and the difference between Le Carré and Fleming is so vast as to be almost laughable. They both manage (or managed in regards to Fleming) to bring great suspense and memorable characters to life, but they do so in starkly different ways. James bond is the suave, good looking ladies’ man who shoots Russians in the face and drives exotic sports cars. George Smiley is none of the above. A balding and diminutive old man who polishes his spectacles on the fat end of his tie and never raises his voice above a whisper, his enemies are of a different breed entirely than a megalomaniacal villain living in a volcano. One of the central tenets of Le Carré´s stories is that the spy trade is a morally ambiguous one. Just because someone was born on the wrong side of the iron curtain doesn´t mean that they are bad people, and vice versa. Smiley even muses privately that, had he not been born in England, he might have become something very similar to Karla. 

The pipe smoke, the wallpaper, the corduroy trousers, everything in George Smileys world is either brown or grey. There is a palpable yet hard to define sense of danger and unease that permeates every page. Set during a time when the British Empire was dissolving and her Majesty´s government no longer wielded the power in once did, the embattled Circus is always short on funds and the golden days during the war when everything was black and white are long gone. The decline of the west is in full swing and for Smiley, his own home is just as threatening an environment as the world of international intrigue. His wife Ann only features sporadically, and her incessant philandering is always there in the back of Smiley´s head, as is the knowledge that he will never be able to work up the courage to leave her. In the end he might not even want to, despite all they have been through. Smiley is the last of a dying breed, and his colleagues as well as himself knows this.

Le Carré is a master in the art of delivering great suspense through small means. The reader is fed tales of international intrigue one tiny teaspoon at a time, and will have to read between the lines to fully understand what is going on. Even though I have just praised the Smiley trilogy, I would paradoxically recommend you to not start reading Tinker, Tailor just yet. Le Carré´s debut, The spy who came in from the cold, is much more accessible and straight forward, as well as a classic in its own right. Start with his first novel and you can´t go far wrong. If you find it to your liking you will definitely love the rest of his works. His most recent novel however, A delicate truth, is unfortunately not that great, and represents a sad blip on his otherwise impressive resumé.