Sailing from Byzantium

Posted on December 17, 2014 by smellincoffee
Sailing from Byzantium: How a Lost Empire Shaped the World
© 2005 Colin Wells
368 pages           



       Isaac Asimov referred to Byzantium as a forgotten empire, lost and dismissed to the western mind as a decayed remnant of a once-great power. But Byzantium had a greatness of its own that inspired civilizations around it, even its enemies. Sailing from Byzantium  examines the literary, political, scientific, and other influences the Eastern empire had on the western Renaissance,  Eastern Europe, and even the nascent Islamic civilization.  Though somewhat impaired by being name-dense and not giving sketch of the Byzantines in brief, Sailing  does deliver a sense of the eastern empire as an inspirational fount during the long millennium that followed its western antecedent’s demise.  The three civilizations drinking from its waters took different elements of the Empire home with them, with some sharing; to the Italians, Byzantium was the temple of Greek civilization, its scholars the teachers of the first medieval humanists, including by extension Erasmus.  Islam cut its imperial teeth when it seized some of the East’s richest provinces, and  Byzantine notions about politics, law, and the aesthetics of royalty became incorporated into the Islamic civilization as it came of age. This lessened somewhat after the conquest of Persia, pursued after Constantinople proved too tough to crack.  The Russians, too, were initially rivals of their southern neighbors, making their introduction with a good old-fashioned Black Sea raid;   having common enemies and rivals, however, pushed the two together, and  as the tribe of Russians matured into a state of their own, their religion was that of Byzantium’s. Later, once Constantinople had fallen to the Turks, Russia would even claim to be the inheritors of the Empire; just as it moved from Rome to Constantinople, so it now had moved to the third Rome, Moscow.  The marriage of a Russian potentate to a Byzantine princess even attempted to give such a claim practical validation. In examining the Byzantine influence on these three powers in turn, Wells not only demonstrates the richness of its culture, but pries open worlds probably mysterious to western readers,  connecting exotic history with some slightly more familiar. It’s quite fascinating, though readers would be better served reading an overview of Byzantine history before launching in. 
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The Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc

Posted on December 12, 2014 by smellincoffee
The Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc
© 1896 Mark Twain
455 pages       



 In 1428,  a young French teenager arrived at the court of Robert Baudricourt and announced that she and he were to be allies in a mission from God: a mission to save France from conquest and disillusion.  The girl, Joan, was to lead an army to the besieged city of Orleans, but she needed first men to take her to Chinon, the residence of king in exile. Skeptical at first, then persuaded by an apparent prophecy,  the astonished Baudricourt sent Joan on her mission, where she took center stage in a complete reversal of the ninety-year conflict between the nobles of England, Orleans, and Burgundy.  Though eventually captured and burned alive by a small council of hostile Anglo-Burgundian partisans,  within a few years of her death Paris was captured,    England’s alliance with Burgundy abandoned,  and France on its way to salvation. Joan would be hailed as France’s savior, declared a saint by the Church, and serve as a icon of hope to the French French in World War 2. Perhaps more remarkable than her military victories, however, is her complete conquest over the melancholic heart of one Samuel Clemens, better known as Mark Twain.

 The Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc is a  biographical novel,  the story of her life as told through a childhood friend.  Sieur Louis de Conte thought she was a marvel even as a child, enchanted with her dreams and startled by her courageous intelligence. When the local priest attacked a ‘fairy tree’ that the children enjoyed spending time in, delighting in the company of gentle spirits, she argued him into abashedness.  When she confided to Louis that God had spoken to her in a vision and told her she must inspire the dauphin — the rightful heir to France’s throne, disavowed by his mother in the Treaty of Troyes — to claim his crown by leading an army against the English, he was among the first to join her. Fighting in her every campaign, and then infiltrating Rouen during her trials, securing a position as an assistant court clerk, Louis delivers a full account of her life.  Based on Twain’s twelve years of research into  her life, it’s remarkable in many respects.  It’s easily the most personable biography of Joan I’ve read;   Louis allows the reader to not just admire her from afar, or idealized her as a remembered saint, but to love her as a friend.  Such adoration is startling from a man like Twain, known for his irreverence and cynicism.  There are traces of the familiar Twain here,  as Louis describes how men are inheritors of their beliefs and foibles, repeating a sentiment expressed more stridently in A Connecticut Yankee in  King Arthur’s Court.  But this is a story replete with the miraculous;  Joan’s visions extend not just to commanding her to battle and giving her moral courage, but she’s an intermittent prophet, predicting her own death within a year and — at the trial — announcing to her captors that within seven years’ time,  disaster will strike and English power in France will be broken for a thousand years.  Louis does not doubt Joan’s word; he has no reason not to believe, for throughout the tale she demonstrates foreknowledge. 
Joan’s story is easy to enrapture; how could a girl so dramatically change the course of history? There are circumstances Twain overlooks, of course;  the Duke of Bedford is mentioned, but not his marriage to a Burgundian princess that knit England and Burgundy’s interests together, turning a French succession war into a very happy phase of England’s on-again, off-again attempt to secure its ancient territory in France by subduing the whole of France.  And yet Joan inspires, both as an ideal — the quinessence of strength, wisdom, courage, innocence, and purity, all at the same time —  and in practice. The trial transcripts do reveal a staggeringly intelligent and feisty woman.  Yes, her family had repute on its own; Jacques d’arc was no struggling peasant, but a man commendable enough to be named the mayor of a village he had immigrated to, how much of his strength had he imparted to Joan, and how much did she create from her own life?  Even if Joan were the purest of fiction, this tale would be a lovely one,  depicting as it does how a band of grizzled war veterans who had known only defeat could become pious, reverent, and driven in her presence; how  masses could leapt to their feet and throne to touch her banner, fixating on a child as their hope. We are strange creatures, we humans, strange and marvelous. Such is are The Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc.    Highly recommended for anyone interested in Joan or the tender side of Mark Twain.

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The Strange Career of Jim Crow

Posted on December 12, 2014 by smellincoffee

The Strange Career of Jim Crow
© 1955, 1965 C. Van Woodward
245 pages


            Fifty years ago, racial and civil unrest swept the United States as organized resistance to the morally outrageous and legally dodgy practice of segregation strengthened throughout the country. Ten years before the Civil Rights movement hit its apogee, C. Van Woodward penned a history of segregation as public policy that offered grounds for hope. Far from being a natural and deeply rooted product of the South, Jim Crow laws were a relatively new creation. Dating in the South only to the late 19th century, Jim Crow’s claims to southern stock were shallow indeed, and could theoretically be destroyed as quickly as it had been instilled.

            Laws prescribing racial separation were not native to the South, Woodward writes, and would have been utterly untenable in the plantation atmosphere where blacks and whites alike ‘worked’ together.  Blacks and whites were accustomed to one another, familiar even. In the north, however, blacks remained a strange ‘other’ that whites sought distance from, and so codes prevented too much social mingling between the two races.  Northerners visiting the South immediately after the war were astonished by the lack of racial uproar.  It took decades for the dust to settle after the war,  for a new universal race-relations norm to be established throughout the region;  unfortunately for blacks, and for the country, such norms were set in an atmosphere toxic to harmony.

            The latter half of the 19th century was one of constant, dramatic change; the pace of the industrial revolution quickened, throwing all the developed world into an uproar. Millions streamed from the farms into the cities,  national economies reeled in prosperity and fraud; an entire economic system was being rebuilt in the United States as power shifted fully from the farms to the factories, from plantation lords to captains of industry and coal-barons.  Black Americans would feature in this chaos,  as they were seized on as a pliable voting bloc. The alliances that courted them were both strange and hopeful. Not only did the old plantation caste solicit the support of their former slaves against their mutual antagonists, the burgeoning commercial and industrial class that had its own means of exploitation, but the Populists sought to unite poor blacks and whites alike against their foes, both the plantation elite and the railroad titans.  But blacks, like any Americans, could not be counted on to vote universally alike, en bloc – and if they could not be conveniently used , the reconstructionists had little interest in bothering with them. When the old aristocracy returned to the ballot boxes and overturned many of the laws and institutions that maintained civil rights,  nothing was said.  At the same time, the United States had become a global empire,   seizing Cuba and the Philippines from Spanish hands; its civil and military leaders were cast into the positions of being the white masters of colonial inferiors. Just as the power of the slaveholder poisoned him against his fellow man, so to did colonial power poison the soul of America in general,  penetrating not just in the extremities of empire, but shaping racial attitudes in the heartland. As the United States’ leadership grew accustomed to seeing itself as a superior white few managing with benefaction the affairs of a colored multitude, and having to endure the multitude’s constant ungrateful troublemaking,  racial relations in the United States took a dive.  Race codes multiplied and strengthened within a generation’s time.

     That it happened so quickly gives Woodward hope;  surely peace and justice could be restored as quickly as the northerners had adopted the plantation mindset; surely southern society could dismantle its codes as quickly as it had put them up. Segregation could be a momentary madness, a fever like Prohibition;  hate need not be the last word. Indeed, in the reprint of Strange Career produced in the 1960s, Woodward is able to track the history of the Civil Rights movement. Over a half-century old at this point, Strange Career remains of interest to American historians interested race relations, but especially southerners curious about reconstruction; both will find this look at politics and culture quite insightful. 


            
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This week: Christmasish

Posted on December 9, 2014 by smellincoffee

It’s been a quiet week for me, most of my time being spent in bed — stomach viruses are no fun at all! I’ve been too weak and bedridden to do any real reading, though I did finish two short Christmas-related works. The first was The Forgotten Man of Christmas, ostensibly about Joseph, but more about the spiritual import of his dreams. Relatedly, The Handmaid and the Carpenter is a novel based on the relationship between Joseph and Mary, which I found little of interest in. The characters are neither true to tradition nor to life, as Mary acts like a 21st century teenager — sensual and flighty.  Joseph, for his part, is no more likable, being an overly strict scold and a pious fraud, revealing on his deathbed that he never believed that bit about Mary and the Holy Spirit. “It was a Roman soldier, wasn’t it?” he asks. I suppose it’s nice that he raised Jesus as a son despite believing he was cuckholded, but there’s little inspirational about it. The prevailing spirit of the book is one of resignation; Mary resigning herself to being married,  Joseph resigning himself to being the dutiful partner to a ditzy harlot. Rather disappointing for a Christmas read.  

Now recalled to life, covered from that little bug, I’m within a hairsbreadth of finishing The Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc;  when I broke away to go to work, she was just about to be fixed to the stake.  After that will be Sailing from Byzantium, and I’ll be investigating Kent Haruf’s Plainsong, per WordsandPeace‘s recommendation.  I should be thinking about seriously digging into Galileo’s Finger, at least if I want to wrap up that TBR list before the year’s end.

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The Wild Birds

Posted on December 9, 2014 by smellincoffee

The Wild Birds
© 1989 Wendell Berry
160 pages




            Within the membership of Port William, a close knit farming village, lays another  more intimate still. It is the membership of a neighborhood of families who, working adjoining lands, make it their business to help each other through life. They help sow one another’s fields, and help reap them.  Hannah Coulter, the story of a young widow adopted into this private membership, introduced it; in Wild Birds, Wendell Berry delivers six stories about its other members,  advancing through the years, and delivering a sense of real people developing through time and through their relationships with one another.  The young mature into older adults; Wheeler Catlett opens the piece as a young newlywed, tasked yet again with hunting down his drunken uncle, and closes it as an older  lawyer contemplating retirement.  There’s a prevailing theme of coming of age and owning one’s responsibilities here, though as always Berry creates a sense of timelessness: his characters have moments in which every season of their life is being lived simultaneously  This is best exhibited in “The Boundary”, which for me is the most tender piece I’ve ever read by Berry, about an aging farmer who decides to go on one last patrol of his fields to inspect a boundary fenceline. Leaving home, he departs from his wife with  a hug, noting that she seems to have changed while he held her from schoolgirl to grandmother, a lifetime lived in one another’s embrace. As he eases down a hill he scrambled down as a child, he relives the many times he and his fathers before him, and he and his sons after that, had walked those paths before, tended those places together.   Berry is a master at creating intimacy, inviting the reader to draw close to his characters, so endearing even in their flaws.  To read these stories is to take a deep draft of the milk of human kindness, to be loved almost by an author who delights in stirring one’s soul and bringing to remembrance a sense of being at home in the world.  

Related:
Hannah Coulter, Wendell Berry
Jayber Crow, Wendell Berry


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Where the Red Fern Grows

Posted on December 5, 2014 by smellincoffee

Where the Red Fern Grows
© 1961 Wilson Rawls
245 pages

“I suppose there’s a time in practically every young boy’s life when he’s affected by that wonderful disease of puppy love. I don’t mean the kind a boy has for the pretty little girl that lives down the road. I mean the real kind, the kind that has four small feet and a wiggly tail, and sharp little teeth that can gnaw on a boy’s finger; the kind a boy can romp and play with, even eat and sleep with.”


Few books bring back memories of boyhood as swiftly as Where the Red Fern Grows. I can still remember my third grade teacher beginning to read this out loud, and my having chills as soon as the narration opened on an older man rescuing a tired hound dog and fingering a trophy on the mantle, thinking of two dogs he had loved fiercely as a child.   Where the Red Fern Grows is a classic story of a boy’s yearning for puppies, and the adventures taken on once such friends were found.


 Billy Coleman, the narrator, is a remarkable boy:  raised in the wooded foothills of the Ozarks, a hunter and trapper from the day he could walk, he wants nothing more than a faithful hound at his side.  The price of a hound bred for hunting matches that of a mule, though, and is beyond his family’s means. Undaunted,  Billy earns money  hunting crawdads, picking blackberries, and selling small furs until he has the funds – and then, when there is delay about sending off for the puppies, takes off into the wilderness and advances into the big city of Tahlequah to take delivery of them personally.   Training them personally, teaching them every trick he’s heard of and witnessed in his long hours watching and trapping on his own,  he and they become an inseparable trio, utterly devoted to one another. When the hounds Big Dan and Little Anne tree their first raccoon, Billy keeps his promise to them  to ‘take care of the rest’ by laboring several days and nights at the tree, hatcheting away, and when his strength fails he prays for more.  The dark nights and fast-moving creeks of the Ozarks provide danger aplenty, but they whether it together, even becoming regional champions of coonhunting. Every story has its ending, though, every childhood must end, and so does Billy’s in a violent altercation with a mountain lion. Billy himself survives, but his remembers the losses.


 Where the Red Fern Grows has a brutal ending, especially for young boys who, like me, doted on their own dogs, and felt the desperate pain of separation from them when life’s twists and turns made it so.  Reading now as an adult, I expect the ending, and so it is not quite gut-wrenching. Rather, like the narrator, the ending frames all of the fond memories that unfold in the story that is told before, putting them into focus. I only read this book once or twice in my youth, during the early 90s, but its scenes have buried themselves in my brain. For me this was a visit with an old friend, whose face I have not seen in decades, but not forgotten a line of.   The boy is everything a boy could hope to be — courageous, intelligent, and beloved, with a pair of friends and a family who cannot be bettered.  This is a book filled with love and adventure, and often the two are intertwined to great effect.  It’s also a look back at an America with a frontier, where civilization is contained within scattered sanctuaries and the woods filled with danger and excitement. There are few stories that can be more enticing for a young reader, especially boys!  

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Race with the Devil

Posted on December 3, 2014 by smellincoffee

Race with the Devil: My Journey from Racial Hatred to Rational Love
© 2013 Joseph Pearce
264 pages

How does a neo-Nazi become a Catholic literary critic?  An act of God?   Joseph Pearce would surely make the claim, his life having become a miserable shambles before he heard the booming voice of Gilbert Keith Chesterton from beyond the grave (albiet through books).  In his youth, Joe Pearce was an influential white supremacist, rising through the ranks of the National Front through his one-man newsletter, Bulldog. Building success by appealing to football hooligans  and punk rockers, it caught the attention of not only the National Front, but of the British government, which twice threw Pearce into prison for inciting racial hatred.  His first time in chains only deepened Pearce’s conviction that the state was out to ruin the English race; by his second imprisonment, Pearce was already in turmoil, already doubting the path he had chosen. Turning prison into a spiritual retreat, he emerged from bars and from his own dark night of the soul to a new life.

In his new life, Joseph Pearce is a distinguished author and scholar, having held positions at institutions like Ave Marie University, Thomas More College, and Aquinas College. He has produced not only biographies of men like G.K. Chesterton and Alexander Solzhenitsyn, but works that delve into the deeper meanings of The Lord of the Rings and Shakespeare. This hunger to know the human soul through literature is partially responsible for Pearce’s salvation. Although as a teenager he was caught up in reaction against the upswell of immigration, and the enervating influence of modernist politics,  he found little to build on there. His life was filled with passion as he roamed the streets looking for migrant gangs or football clubs to mix it up with, and even some purpose as he became a shaper of the nationalist thinking, but pessimism was a bitter gall to sallow.  Works like Orwell’s 1984 diverted his course from fascism, awaking him to the danger of an all-power state,  but unsettled him with its dark vision of Winston Smith’s defeat, the spirit of humanity crushed underfoot.  Pearce could not live with it, but an abiding thirst for literature would offer him glimpses of a better world — particularly Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago, a retelling of the author’s years spent in the Soviet prison-camp system, which he survived, humanity intact.

 Pearce spent four hours a day reading on trains as he traveled for his duties with the National Front,    but literature took him places he surely never meant to go, like Rome. So against popery was Pearce that he traveled to northern Ireland to work with the Ulster Loyalists and joined the Orange Orange, dedicated to ensuring Protestant supremacy over Irish Catholic culture. As much as Pearce despised the Catholic church, he had a grudging respect for John Paul II’s fight against the Soviet system. It was G.K. Chesterton who coaxed him into the Tiber, however, by presenting an argument against the centralizing tendencies of both capitalism and socialism.  Chesterton offered a third way in which the ownership of the means of production – of shops, farms, tools, and the like – is widely as distributed as possible. Pearce, having grown up in ‘the shire’, a quiet arcadian community far removed from much of modernity, saw in Chesterton an argument for what he longed for.  Pearce’s love for his country, warped by racism,  was redeemed by Chesterton, refashioned into ideals of peaceful cooperation.  Delighting in Chesterton’s personality, Pearce  read everything he could by the man, and through his study came to appreciate the Catholic faith and its transcendent moral order that shed insight on not only personal morality, but our socio-economic structure.

Race with the Devil is a powerful story human redemption, part biography and part literary reflection. While the aspects on British culture were fascinating in themselves, particularly the political loyalties of football clubs and musical subcultures,  Pearce’s journey itself is the wonder. Consider how powerful ethnic nationalism can be, that potent mix of primal clannishness and modern ideology; it intoxicates both the brain and the blood. Yet Pearce resisted. Having approached the abyss, he stepped back. Despite all of the anger and fear he subjected himself to, there still remained some shades of grace, memories of that childhood steeped in ordinary decency.  When racial turmoil still fills American papers, it is a comforting notion that there still remains some escape route to sanity and healing.

Race is an extraordinary read.

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This week: saints of war

Posted on December 2, 2014 by smellincoffee
Dear readers:
What a week passed these last few days! In the United States, we celebrated Thanksgiving on Thursday, and therein followed three days of bedlam as people acted like chimpanzees descending on a pile of fruit for Black Friday stores.  How people can simultaneously be thankful while spend the day eagerly dwelling on how much they want this or that once the stores open at six is beyond me.  The month’s end also saw the conclusion of NaNoWriMo, which I completed again albeit at a limping pace.

Yesterday was the first Sunday in Advent, the start of those four weeks of anticipation before Christmas. Traditionally it’s a time of penitence as people remember the preparation of Mary for the birth of her child, and orthodox Christians likewise prepare for the second coming of Christ. Personally, penitence in the weeks approaching Christmas is a hard sell, but I appreciate the season considering my own horror at the triumph of consumerism over every aspect of human lives, and look to honor the spirit of Advent in some way. I’m ordering an interlibrary loan on Being Consumed,  and have checked out a collection of Advent meditations by Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

More immediately, I’m reading a biographical novel of Joan of Arc by Samuel Clemens (of all people!), and then…well, who knows? I’ve changed my Great War reading plans for this month up a bit; since reviews of the Christmas truce novel I was thinking about are so poor, I’ll be reading about the British home front instead.  Reviews are pending for a handful of books, including a collection of short stories by Wendell Berry  and a work in southern history. I probably won’t be commenting on A Fatal Advent, a murder mystery I picked up yesterday. Someone keeps stealing things and lethally whacking people on the head with Scotch tape dispensers in an Anglican church, and at the last the main character walks in on the perpetrator threatening another character with murder. There’s no sleuthing and the only thing of interest is the main character’s occupation:  though ordained, she works as a counselor attached to the church.

My hope for myself and you is that we all stay grounded in what will come a frenetic season of shopping, partying, and other activities.  Good luck!

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Twilight’s End

Posted on November 28, 2014 by smellincoffee

Star Trek: Twilight’s End
© 1996 Jerry Oltion
279 pages

Somewhere in space lies a planet that’s not spinning, and that just shouldn’t be so.  Tidally locked, it poses a great inconvenience to the colonists who occupy the permanent perimeter between frozen wastelands and scorched deserts. Their swelling population of 2 billion has destroyed what fragile biosphere there was, and rather than deciding to stop with the whole being-fruitful-and-multiplying business, they have decided instead to litter the planet with great big engines and then turn them on. The planet doesn’t want to spin? Too bad, because they’re going to MAKE it spin, and Captain Kirk is going to help.

Twilight’s End is a classic Trek adventure in which the Enterprise attempts to come to the aide of a world president/damsel in distress. Smooching with Kirk before he’s even gotten his bearings, her plan  for spinning the planet is scoffed at by a full panel of naysayers.  While there exist sensible opposition (attempting to force a planet to spin is rather drastic) and somewhat more suspect opposition (Denialists who contend the poisoning of the atmosphere is perfectly natural and will correct itself eventually),  there are others who are on the crazy violent side, those who believe this is Fate, that mother nature has decided that any race that could break two planets is just begging for extinction. (The colonists fled to this planet after stripping their last planet of all resources, then accidentally rendering it inhabitable when they hijacked an asteroid and directed it their way to mine it.)  The crazy violent ones in due course kidnap a scientist, attempt to blow the Enterprise up, and give all the characters something to do while they are waiting for the planets to align the correct way. The sensible opposition, with McCoy on their side, believe that bioengineering is eminently more practical and less likely to blow the planet up:  simply pore through the major plant species’ genomes, find genes that would make the plant hardier, turn them on, and hey presto! An elegant solution to the problem. The plants will correct the toxicity by dumping oxygen into the atmosphere. Can McCoy find a suitable breed of tree before the engines start up? It would be nice if he could do it before, because  between the crazy-violents and class warfare,  this place won’t stay peaceable for long.

Written in 1996, the book’s tone seems vaguely reminiscent of the then nascent arguments about global warming, though the baddies are less global warming deniers and more ecological nuts, the kind who believe that human beinsgs are a cancer on the body of Earth who need to be eradicated. The leading opponent of the spinning planet is personable enough, and even causes some friction on the Enterprise when Kirk realizes his chief medical officer agrees more with the opposition than the people the Enterprise is helping.   It’s a fun novel, sometimes on the silly side; the author is obviously partial to beer, since characters throughout the story comment on their favorite kinds, and Kirk at one point comes up with an escape plan that involves brewing  beer and getting some hostiles good and drunk.  In the end, of course, technology saves the day; this is Star Trek, after all, where technology can do anything. The dialogue produces a few good moments between the core characters, and all told it’s a fun bit of light reading.

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Gates of Fire

Posted on November 27, 2014 by smellincoffee

Gates of Fire: An Epic Novel of the Battle of Thermopylae
© 1998 Steven Pressfield
442 pages

When Xerxes, Ruler of Asia, god-king of men, finally stood over the bodies of the few Greeks who had withstood his hordes drawn from half a world, he could not understand. Hailed as all-knowing,   he could not fathom why a few hundred men would have opposed his army of millions, even after they were offered the greatest seats of influence in the Empire.  Finding a Greek still holding on to life,  the Persians looked for answers; nursing him back to health, they coaxed out this, the story of the Spartans. The story of an orphaned boy who fled to the strength of Sparta after his parents and home were destroyed by the Argives, Gates of Fire is his growing up among them, his quest to become like them, to be the quintessence of strength and valor, unbreakable.

Though not born of Sparta, Xeones lived in awe of them from his youth. So fiercly did he admire them that after war turned him into an orphaned child, wandering the wilderness with a cousin, he left her behind to pursue the Spartan way.  He could never be one of them; criminal violence had robbed him of the strength needed to wield the heavy oaken shield and the lance. He could string a bow, however, and let it fly with accuracy, and so he devoted his life to the service of Sparta.  He is motivated by youthful admiration, but also haunted by the memory of his parents, ashamed of not having been there to defend them,  agonized by knowing he ran away from his conquered city. In the Spartans he looks for the strength and fortitude he missed in himself, and when he takes his stand among them at the last, it is quite personal.  

Through Xeo the reader is introduced first to a harsh world in which children can be reduced to scrounging about the countryside, begging and stealing food, and then to the Spartan soul. The Spartans are different than other Greeks;  even when the Persian hordes threaten to reduce Hellas’ cities to ashes, its women and children to slavery, the Spartans sneer and laugh while other cities kneel in the dust in homage. There are fates worse than death for a Spartan.   The proud city is a severe place in which the souls of men are tempered like steel against the vagaries of fate, against pain;  these  cannot be avoided, but they cannot be allowed to rule. Discipline must rule; loyalty to the clan must prevail.  Xeo, like all men of the city, becomes subject to Spartan law, a demanding law that forces greatness of the soul even from the lowly.  Having found a place in the ranks as a squire to one of Sparta’s knights, Xeo lastly becomes the narrator of the battle of Thermopylae This is the finale, a last  stand so audacious in courage that its telling has survived through the centuries, wherein 300 Spartans and a few thousand Allied Greeks attempted to stop the Persian millions in their tracks.

Although it lives on in the western imagination like no other battle, Thermopylae was for the Greeks a defeat: the Persians broke through after losing thousands upon thousands every day of combat to a mighty, valiant few heavy infantry, and Xerxes swept across Greece, burning even proud Athens. For those who remain, however, for those who later rose against the Persians, for any number of people who have protected a flicker of hope against the gaping maw of darkness–   the British expeditionary force standing in Belgium against the German invasions of 1914 and 1940, for instance — Thermopylae was a triumph of the human spirit. Pressfield does a magnificent job of giving it poetic due; perhaps, considering the drama of the situation, an artful rendering of it is unavoidable. Time and again Pressfield ensnares the reader in the glorious action, or awes the soul is descriptions of the great slaughter. This he does without much hyperbole; the Persians are not demonized, nor are the Spartans lionized; the two sides meet repeatedly before the slaughter, emissaries hailing on another as brothers. The Spartans, whom  we grow to know through Xeo,  have a severe discipline, but even though they seem to fight like demigods they are still human, and herein they weep, laugh, and love fiercely Their antidote to the fear of battle is fear of failing one another, of failing to give selflessly to their brothers-in-arms.  It’s an extraordinary work, as gripping for the martial telling as for the exposure to a culture whose stoic-like dedication is staggering.

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