“They believed in the righteousness of their cause, the inevitability of their victory, and the immortality of their young souls. And as they wheeled around to the east and pulled out their Michelin maps of Tunisia, they believed they had actually been to war.”
From An Army at Dawn: The War in North Africa, 1942- 1943. Rick Atkinson.
I’ve been on a World War 2 kick recently, and have now connected it with the remains of the 2015 Reading Challenge. An Army at Dawn, the first in a nonfiction trilogy about the liberation of Europe from Nazi oppression, begins with the Anglo-American invasion of Africa. I’m halfway through to finishing my Pulitzer-prize winning book, leaving only “A Classic Romance” and “Title with Antonyms” as the only categories needing any real attention. This 1942 work skews my WW2 set a bit, as I’d been trying to generally follow the course of the war, but no matter. As it continues I’d like to poke into areas of the conflict I know virtually nothing about, like the Nazi/Soviet invasion of Norway/Finland respectively, and the early stages of Axis involvement in Africa. In 2016 I should return to the Great War, as the titles I listed last year will then be selling cheaper, or at the very least, no longer on the ‘new releases’ shelves and thus barred from interlibrary loan.
My WW2 kick has extended to movies, as well. In the last couple of weeks I”ve watched two titles new to me: The Scarlet and the Black, featuring Gregory Peck as an Irish priest hiding Allied P.O.W.s from the Nazis, and Good, the descent of a German literary professor into Faustian moral degradation. I bought these two together, intentionally; I knew Good would be utterly depressing, and needed some good old-fashioned heroics to recover from it. The central character is an professor approached by the SS: they liked his novel about a man who killed his wife to save her from a prolonged and painful death by cancer, and want to enlist his services in promoting the Reich’s euthenasia programs. Bit by bit he drifts into the Nazi camp, losing his wife and best friend in the bargain, until at movie’s he finds himself supervising a death camp, an SS-skull perched stop his head, and realizes that hell is real and it owns his soul.
..it’s a bit of a downer, so if you watch it I advise you to take my remedy, and follow it immediately with something inspiring or at the very least funny. As the theme of Good was that evil triumphs when good men do nothing, I had in The Scarlet and the Black a good man doing..something, and it’s a true story to boot. (It’s worth watching, incidentally, just for Peck doing an Irish accent.) I have a few more WW2 movies on the way, including The Battle of Britain, Run Silent Run Deep, and A Bridge Too Far.
This being November, I’m doing NaNoWriMo for the third year in a row, but it’s nothing serious. I’m doing a…video game fan fic with Maxis as my source material. It’s really just for fun. Honestly, in the years I’ve done NaNoWriMo I’ve not yet done a proper story. I just sandbox around for 50,000 words and collect my “WINNER!” graphics.
Well, it’ll be an interesting month, that’s for sure!
Images of America: Selma
© 2014 Sharon Jackson
168 pages
When I heard that the Images of America series had commissioned a book on Selma, I stood midway between excitement and dread. The series offers a pictoral recounting of small-town America, an experience overlooked by standard histories, but Selma for most is less a town and more an image — a memory of violence. This collection of photographs was done by an author who loves the town, however, and accords her a just tribute. While not overlooking the role of Selma in the Civil War and the Civil Rights movement, Images renders a view of the town itself, a booming center of agriculture and wholesale commerce, a place that generations have cared for and loved. Long before nation-wide political movements decided to use the town to make history, Selma had its own proud history. Sited upon the bluffs of the Alabama river, it found early success as an agricultural boomtown, and the aggressive pursuit by city fathers of railroads ensured it commercial prosperity throughout the 19th century, surviving even the arson of an invading army during the Civil War. Selma’s industrial importance to the Confederacy was then second only to Richmond, a fact lost on modern residents who see it as a chronic small fry. Selma attracted its fair share of immigrants during the gilded age, especially Jewish families from central Europe, whose shops lined the stretch of the city’s central Broad Street. The city these residents across the generations built was utterly beautiful, and though some of that has faded through the years — the trees lining Broad Street lost to utility poles, the magnificent Hotel Albert deemed too costly to maintain and bulldozed — the city still boasts one of the largest intact historic districts in the nation. There is no shortage of homes whose stately columns and beautiful cornices make one feel like a Goth wandering amid the ancient beauty of Rome. Selma is not merely a celebration of beautiful architecture and booming enterprise, however. Like another book in this series, Montevallo, this is something of a family album. People, not buildings, dominate the pages — from city fathers to contemporary politicians, each with their story. Jackson integrates the lives of Selma’s citizens with nation-wide social movements, particularly women’s suffrage and the Civil Rights movement. Jackson does not shy away from the darker side of Selma’s history, its agricultural expanse going hand-in-hand with a massive population of people held in slavery, people whose ancestors remained held back by Jim Crow legislation for a full century after the war. Those who fought in ’65 — in both centuries — are honored for defending their homes and and personhood. Images of America: Selma is markedly balanced and contains photographs that even someone who collects them — someone like me — hasn’t seen.
The Way: What Every Protestant Needs to Know About Orthodoxy
© 2007 Clark Carlton
222 pages
After easing readers into the book with his conversion story, which unfolded amid a fundamentalist takeover of a southern baptist college in the 1980s, Carlson shifts to theology. The Trinity is a crucial concept to Orthodox theology, as it establishes God’s nature as rooted in relationship. “God is love” does not simply mean that person called God happens to be loving; His very nature is bound up in the act of the Incarnation, just as the Church’s nature is contained within the Eucharist. The Church, Clarkton writes, is not a body of people who believe the same thing, but a community which shares in the living body of Christ. In less heady chapters, Carlton argues against sola scripture from various grounds, namely that no one interprets scripture without a tradition; Calvinists read the bible through Calvinism, Lutherans through Lutheranism, Arians Arianism, etc. The Catholic-Orthodox tradition at least has the merit of being the source of the scriptural compilation, as it took several hundred years for a definitive collection to be established by the Church. The Eastern Orthodox church has no qualms regarding protestant rebellion of papal authority, for they too reject it; but in Carlton’s view the protestants have erred seriously in rejecting all authority. Scripture alone is insufficient; every heresy has come armed with its chosen scriptural arguments, and the massive variety of commentaries on the scriptures demonstrate how subjective readings can be. The leadership of the Church resolves heresies not simply by finding scripture, but interpreting them in the light of the Church’s nature. Arianism was a heresy not because it chose the “wrong verses”, but because it effectively denies the Incarnation, and with it the church’s very life. If the Bible were so important to Protestantism, why then did they modify it — dropping books as desired? Christ left a Church, not a book, writes Carlton, and sola scriptura reduces the Bible to a rule book and Christianity an ideology, while the Orthodox faith is a life lived in Jesus, through the Eucharist.
Carlton has a talent for making theology comprehensible, though he is an author who frequently bares his teeth, with a contempt borne of familiarity for aspects of modern Protestantism. Sola scriptura no doubt dies hard, just as strict Constitutionalism dies hard: how easy it is to endue an object with objectivity, in the hopes of satisfying our need for something that is wholly True. But the Bible is not God; it is merely inspired by him, writes Carlton, and to worship it is to commit idolatry. In a finishing touch, Carlton scrutinizes the creeds of Protestant sects to point out what they truly worship, comparing the opening lines of the Nicene Creed (“I believe in One God”) with articles of faith like the Westminister Confession, which open placing scripture at the forefront and then address God. If nothing else, The Way does much to demonstrate that the Eucharist was far more important to the early church than a once-a-year knocking back of grape juice does credit.
I Saw It Happen in Norway
© 1940 C.J. Hambro
292 pages
I Saw it Happen in Norway is a rare account of Hitler’s early expansion, the story of a nation’s downfall told first-hand from a surviving member of its government and published during the war’s dark hour of 1940. The account exposes Hitler’s war as nothing but naked, brazen aggression from the beginning. Germany had no historical grudge to settle or land to ‘redeem’ from Norway as it did with France and Czechoslovakia; relations between the two northern powers were nothing but amicable. And yet, in the early spring of 1940, German troops materialized from false-flagged commercial transport ships, and the Luftwaffe began reducing the land’s cities and towns to ashes. This was more than war; this was treachery. In I Saw it Happen, a leading member of the Norwegian governments records how he and other officials realized nearly too late that they were being attacked, and records the first weeks of resistance. Coordination at first reduced to shambles by the concentrated Nazi attack on Oslo, the Norwegian army nonetheless managed to re-form enough to fight a rear-guard action, allowing the King, the crown prince, and leading officials to take a government-in-exile out of the country. The Norwegians were not alone in the defense of their nation, aided by British and French troops who crossed the North Sea in early recognition that the phony war was over. Before the first month was over, however, the Wehrmacht’s invasion of France forced Allied retreat and Norwegian recognition that overt military defense would not long be practicable; without munitions, resistance sustained by the hope that the tide would turn would be Norway’s best option. Brief as it is, I Saw it Happen demonstrates how quickly the brutality of World War 2 began, and how immediate heroic resistance could be.
Battle of Britain
© 1980 Len Deighton
224 pages
“When I told them that Britain would fight on alone, whatever [the French] did, their generals told their prime minister and his divided cabinet, ‘In three weeks England will have its neck wrung like a chicken.’ Some chicken! Some neck!” – Winston Chuchill,
In 1940, the whole of Europe lay under the flags of brutal tyrannies, fascist and Soviet alike. Having rolled over France with ease, Hitler bid the English to lay down their arms; acknowledge him as master of Europe, and the struggle would be over. Hitler, it seems, skipped Napoleonic history altogether; not only did he miss l’empereur’s blunder in Russia, but the fact that Britain was no stranger to defying a continent arrayed against it. Such defiance could be broken, however, through force of arms: Britain’s army had barely escaped the continent via Dunkirk and left much of its equipment behind. Its only hope lay in the Royal Air Force, protecting both the Isle and a Navy shielding convoys and guarding against invasion. Through a long summer, young men took to the air for the frantic defense of their home, fighting a battle so vicious that mere survival counted for victory. The Battle of Britain is justly called, however, for it summoned to action civilian and servicemen alike. As sons and brothers fought in the air, those unable to fight stood their ground below, watching for the enemy and turning back the flames of war, both parties enabling Britain to carry on. Len Deighton’s Battle of Britain offers a day-by-day account of the summer and brims over with information valuable to younger research students and casual readers alike.
Battle of Britain is nearly less narrative than reference material. There is a story here, not nearly as tightly told as With Wings as Eagles, but delivered ably. What jumps out here is information — orders of battle, tables of planes produced and destroyed, schematics of Spitfires, Hurricanes, and ME-109s, illustrations of how radar worked on both sides of the Channel, and gobs of photographs. There are photographs of letters and generous excerpts from after-action reports and diary entries from both sides of the conflict. The layout is impressive, too; all these graphics are not cordoned off by themselves, or simply stuck in every now and again; Deighton integrates the two, so that a chapter on Operation Sealion begins set against a photograph of German troops practicing beach landings. There are generous maps, and even full-spread illustrations of a typical RAF base. At times there’s so much competing information that one loses track of the narrative – tables! Photographs! Sidebars! — but only occasionally.
There is a story, however: after a brief history of military aviation during the Great War and afterward, Deighton leads into the months of constant struggle. He focuses more on tactics than strategy, but essentially Dowding’s accomplishment was to prevent the RAF from perishing by attrition. British factories were humming with production, but Germany’s war had been a long time in the making and its Luftwaffe out-gunned the competition. The RAF proved discretion the better part of valor; not by running, but by choosing the best ground and best time to fight. Earlier in the year, at Dunkirk, British leadership had made the choice to use airmen only sparingly, knowing what lay ahead. Here, too, the RAF is used with caution. Had Fighter Command heeded the impulse to make an all-out defense of the nation, Britain may have very well been “bled white”, its planes exposed and devoured: instead, the Germans were allowed to fly in force, and the fighters scrambled to make the best of opportunities, making quick stabs instead of prolonged duels. Deighton also gives generous space to the civilians and troops on the ground, who defended Britain in their own way — spotting the enemy so the RAF could intercept them and restoring order to the chaos German bombs attempted to create. As summer gave way to fall, the season for invasion passed, and the Germans increasingly distracted themselves by bombing cities. The darkest hour was not yet over, but the RAF had seen the nation through the worst of it.
“I have always loved England, but now I am in love with England. What a people! What a chance! …we shall, by our stubbornness, give victory to the world.” – Harold Nicolson, July 1940.
Related:
With Wings Like Eagles: A History of the Battle of Britain, Michael Korda
The Seven Deadly Sins: A Tomistic Guide to Vanquishing Vice and Sin
© 2015 Kevin Vost
224 pages
In the first centuries of the Christian epoch, devotees retreated into the desert wastes to flee temptation. Even away from the cry of the maddening crowd, however, they found themselves struggling with the everyday vices of mankind — tendencies toward pride, apathy, lust, envy, gluttony, anger, and sloth, and so on. In an attempt to organize a campaign against them, the monk-progenitors first had to identify the enemy, creating a list of the chief frailties that all others stemmed from. These seven enemies of the soul are not uniquely Christian sins; they are universal problems of the human condition, and Vost draws on classical sources (Aristotle and the Roman Stoics — Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius) for both insight and remedy. The remedy is only partially philosophical, however, as Vost also counsels readers to seek help in the sacraments of the Church, especially Confession and the Eucharist. Written in three stages, Vost first reviews how these seven in particular were singled out, shares patristic thought on the progression of vice from initial impulses to behavioral habit, and then offers a “Jacob’s ladder” route away from downfall. These include practices useful against every vice, while some are sin-specific. A few of the ‘rungs’ — an examination of conscience, mental awareness of drifting into vicious habit, and the deliberate cultivation of each vice’s counter-virtue, could easily be found in a book like A Guide to the Good Life.The master here, however, is not Epictetus, but Thomas Aquinas. It is Aquinas’ study of the desert fathers that produces a list of seven sins, and not eight — and Aquinas who offers advice for remedy, himself bringing together both the Hebrew and Greek wisdom traditions — harnessing both mindfulness and prayer, contemplation and action, philosophical principle and sacrament. The Seven Deadly Sins is thus true to its name in being a ‘Tomistic’ guide to vice and virtue, in effect offering laymen a guide into the theological expanse of Aquinas. Few people commit great evils, but we all hindered by the same seemingly minor snares. It is those small seed which can produce horror if left unchecked, however, and so this tidy little volume seems most valuable in the pursuit of spirituality, especially Christian.
Hitler’s Undercover War: The Nazi Espionage Invasion of the U.S.A.
© 1989 William Breuer
358 pages
Wars are not confined to battlefields, even when the fields of conflict are as wide-open as the open oceans and the very sky itself, as they were in World War 2. Victories and defeats can be effected in the quiet of the night, by men and women ostensibly noncombatants, whose intelligence and skillful deceit is applied in just the right areas to supply vital information, or sabotage endeavors. Hitler’s Undercover War is a rare history of German intelligence operations before and during the Second World War, ending only in the total defeat of the Nazi state. It is doubly a history of the growth of the FBI, from suited cops chasing bootleggers to sophisticated intelligence men vying to out-maneuver devils most devious. Written by a soldier of the war, heart fully on his sleeve, it has the immediate excitement of a spy thriller with a most satisfying conclusion.
The story begins long before the rise of the National Socialists, just after the peace of Versailles which concluded the Great War by dismembering Germany’s army and forcing its new civilian leaders to accept the Allied costs of fighting the war, and responsibility for starting it in the first place. In an age of constant militarism, surrounded by powers which hated her, Germany’s disarmament wouldn’t last long. Soon into the 1920s, in fact, programs were being developed to keep the German army up to speed — through whatever means necessary. If Germans could not refine military aviation at home, they would watch other nations’ progress with great interest….and appropriate it when necessary. This was made easy, Breuer writes, by the fact that the United States was utterly naive in the area of espionage and counter espionage; at one point Customs agents literally discover a briefcase full of military blueprints, give the nervous man carrying them a stern reminder to come in for questioning next week, and let him go. The German ‘Abwehr’, its military intelligence group, created separate and later coordinating spy circles to collect and funnel war-related R&;D Germany’s way.
Things grow darker once the Nazis assume power and begin plotting nothing less than world domination. The United States’ status as a nation of immigrants is no less impactful here than it was in the leadup to the Great War, when immigrants of competing parts of Europe protested the thought of their new nation waging war on their homeland. The Abwehr capitalized on the fact that many Americans were German who still wanted the best for their native land, even if they had left it behind. The German-American Bund, for instance, led the way in protesting the thought of the United States getting into another of “England’s wars”, labeling Roosevelt a warmonger. They were aided by Nazi agents with press connections, who flooded areas with isolationist propaganda. Hitler’s intelligence handlers were far quicker to resort to violence; once a man or woman had been vouched as a Good German, worthy of serving the Reich and presented with an offer to spy, they and their family on both continents were threatened with harm if they did not answer the call. (Such arm-twisting would eventually backfire, when one German-American immediately became a double agent, allowing the FBI to penetrate and take down one especially prominent intelligence cell.)
As the “New Germany” realized war with the United States was inevitable, its spy networks widened and readied for direct action. They remained at work tracking military developments, attempting to steal plans and parts for items like the Norden bombsight, and continually forwarding to Germany details on American troop strength and deployment. Once the war began, however, they began actively attempting to sabotage factories and misdirect shipping. (Shipping information was especially vital given the American lend-lease programs, which sent arms and other equipment to both Britain and the Soviet Union. With U-boats prowling right off the coast of the Atlantic seaboard, loose lips truly did sink ships.) On one especially dramatic occasion, a boatload of Nazi agents disembarked on a beach with trunks of explosives, with plans to disperse throughout the United States and cause pandemonium by blowing things to pieces. They were partially undone by the fact that a Coast Guard seaman just happened to chance upon them burying their explosive booty and chattering in German.
Hitler’s Undercover War will definitely interest readers with a taste of intelligence operations; here we have men creating and applying vintage spy paraphernalia, like matchbooks with secret codes, microfilm captures of confidential documents rolled into pens, and buxom blonde fatales flirting with guards so co-conspirators can do some snooping. The period charm extends to the unfiltered adoration of the FBI: J. Edgar Hoover is described as a “lantern-jawed supersleuth” who abstains from dating on the grounds that it will distract him from his work. His determined avoidance of taking the Mafia seriously, and his antagonist role during the Civil Rights movement make his star shine far dimmer these days, so the Captain American-esque descriptions are little much. To give Breuer’s treatment of him and his team credit, however, they were fighting the Nazis, some of whom were authentic Judases in selling out American troops for money, with no genuine love for the country of their youth to excuse them.
Related:
Downtown: Its Rise and Fall (1880 – 1950)
© 2001 Robert Fogelson
544 pages
Just listen to the music of the traffic in the city!
Linger on the sidewalk where the neon signs are pretty
— how can you lose?
The lights are much brighter there, you can forget all your troubles, forget all your care…
(“Downtown”, Petula Clark)
When Petula Clark sang that she knew a place you can go, she may have well been speaking of downtown, for it used to be the place to go. Downtown chronicles the decline of American city centers, from Gilded Age preeminence to steady 20th century decay. Though ostensibly concerning the local politics of major cities (New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles especially), this is in a sense a social history, the complete transformation of how Americans lived, shopped, and traveled told through the decline of city centers. The author writes without any apparent agenda, something of an accomplishment given the central subject of public policy. Despite the role played by city, state, and the national government in hastening the disintegration of American cities, even unintentionally, Fogelson’s conclusion is that the state of urban development in the United States has more to do with an instinctual aversion to crowded city centers than public policy. While that’s an unsatisfactory explanation of suburbia, it doesn’t diminish Downtown as a gold mine of information about the gradual transformation of transportation, housing, and public policy.
A city is nothing less than an economic engine, a place formed by the coming together of producers and merchants to trade. So it was with American downtowns; commercial enterprises preferred to congregate one another. The reasons were simple: prior to telecommunications and rapid transportation, business transactions were handled in person, and companies preferred to be close to their supporting services — to their bankers and insurance agencies, for instance. What transportation systems existed at the time favored central locations for streamlined delivery and sales. Given the eagerness of enterprises to acquire land close to the action downtown for commercial purposes, land values there rose, and residents who could cashed in to settle in the country. From those elevated land prices grew elevated buildings, when the arrival of industrial steel manufacturing allowed for it: landowners wanted to maximize the use of the land they were paying so dearly for, and so the towers soared. Downtown was not exclusively commercial; apartment buildings took equal advantage of the Bessemer process to compete with offices in the climb toward the sky. Though some city-dwellers complained about the towers blocking light, few attempts to limit the height of buildings took; even what scant regulations appeared were quickly riddled through with variances.
The commericial life of the city would involve political meddling, however. The attempt of an entire a metropolitan area to conduct its shopping, banking, and theater-going in one relatively small area lead to chronic congestion. This is a congestion beyond levels appreciable by Americans today, even those who sit in LA traffic jams. Photos show pedestrians shuffling down sidewalks cheek-to-jowl, trolleys crammed like sardines and the streets utterly filled with these as well as horse carriages, rag-wagons, and delivery carts. That traffic was the economic life of the city, but the thought of competing in such crowds could fill some with despair: was it really worth it? What it was worth is a question pursued by city governments who attempted to find some better way of transportation in and to the city center, either elevated or underground train lines. (Trolleys were nice, of course, but the glorious chaos of city streets meant they were frequently slowed and altogether blocked by pedestrians and carts.) Such prospects were expensive undertakings for private enterprise, and required considerably more politcking — getting permissions from landowners to dig under them, for instance — and so city governments themselves often had to take on the burden of attempting them. The el-lines were not altogether popular, casting a constant gloom over the streets and treating pedestrians to showers of sparks and cinders. Subways were much more expensive and time-consuming to build, a daunting fact given periodic economic downswings, but little by little the major cities edged into using them.
Change was in the air, however. Frustrated with the chronic congestion of the city center, made worse now by construction in the rights-of-way, some urbanites began shopping closer to home when they could. Soaring land values also tempted start-up businesses into offering their goods outside the city center, as well; other residential areas might not deliver as much traffic, but concentrated near the trolley lines as they were, a go could still be made. Soon downtown apartment stores were joining them, sending out colonies — branches — to do business to residents who didn’t want to come to them. Technology was allowing for more distance between residents and businesses, too; a man could now telephone his accountant, or extend his traveling range in a relatively cheap automobile. The arrival of automobiles into the downtown core only worsened congestion, however, consuming much more space than pedestrian traffic, especially when parked. They arrived at the worst possible time, too, when the economic life of American cities was threatened by the worse economic disaster in its history. The Great Depression, which would break the back of American urbanism, arrived in 1929.
The calamitous effects of the Depression were not limited to the economic havoc itself. Land values fell, and under unrelenting property taxes — constituting the bulk of municipal budgets — more than a few landowners torn down their towers to build parking lots instead. Requiring zero labor and taking in fees from automobiles, such holes in the urban fabric were known as ‘taxpayers’. As people continued to shop on the outskirts instead of the center, downtown merchants decided their problems were two-fold. First, there was there was the problem of accessibility; no one wanted to come downtown because it was too crowded, as Yogi Berra might have put it. Elevated lines were too unpopular, trolleys increasingly in dire straits because of overzealous expansion and a public that didn’t want to pay for the privilege of traveling like a mobile sardine, and subways too expensive. Secondly, as the upper and middle classes drifted out of the city into the rail suburbs, they left a vacuum filled with the kind of riff-raff that scared off good customers. Who would come downtown when they had to pass through tenement blocks filled with gangs of working men, immigrants, and mobs of un-supervised youngsters? Several factors conspired against these tenements: Reform movements, which saw the tenements as unfit for human life; the downtown businessmen, who wanted to distance the rabble from their shoppers, and the government, which needed to create jobs. Together a plan was born: seize the land, tear down the tenements, and build things like freeways and ‘modern’ housing projects. Government involvement was now quite beyond municipalities: the Federal government itself was active in urban areas, deciding what buildings should go and what kind should remain. FDR’s new government programs effectively encouraged urban decentralization by subsidizing developing outside the city, and impeding private development within it by refusing such largesse, especially when minorities were involved. The damage done by this kind of improvement — the erection of wall-like freeways gutting the city and directing activity into the suburbs — continued to sap the strength of the once dominant city center. It had already fallen from THE place to do business to merely the main place for business; now it lost even that as the future of America became written in interstates, parking lots, and strip malls.
Downtown is a a wealth of information, and remarkably varied — covering in different chapters the politics of subway construction or housing policy. It is a dispassionate obituary, even if it misdiagnoses the cause of death.
Related:
Napoleon’s Buttons
384 pages
© 2003 Penny LeCouter
Napeolon’s Buttons is microhistory in the truest sense of the world, a mix of science and history that not only dwells on the historical impact of various substances (cotton, sugar, chloroflourocarbons, silk), but examines the science behind their invention — presenting a diagram of a silk molecule, for instance, to explain why it is so smooth and lustrous. At times, the connections to global history are a bit of a stretch, as when the author repeats speculation that lead poisoning brought down the Roman empire and leads off with musing over the prospect that decaying lead buttons doomed Napoleon’s winter expedition. At other times, there is no denying the impact; Britain’s interest in southeast Asia, for instance, involved three resources of import: opium, caffiene, and tobacco, and as covered by John Keay’s The Spice Trade, interest in nutmeg (among other spices) spurred on the age of discovery. LeCouter’s chosen topics interact with one another, however, and the chapter she leads off with (abscorbic acid) informs the latter section on the age of discovery. An era inaugurated by the search for one topic was made possible only through another: if scurvy had continued to claim the lives of European seamen, such extended voyages would not have been possible. Buttons combines the usual close-to-home historical interest of works like Salt and An Edible History of Humanity with a strong dose of chemistry.
Reading Freely 