Empires Of The Dead, Crain - B +

                                                This superb book is about Great Britain's transformation from a nation with little enthusiasm or interest in its foreign wars and it's victims to a country that reveres the memory of those lost and takes devoted care of over a million overseas graves.  This is the history of Britain's war cemeteries and the man responsible for them.  "The man who made it possible for a country to come to terms with the slaughter and unbearable debt it owed its dead, is scarcely better known than the unidentified thousands whose graves bear the inscription 'Known unto God'. His name was Fabian Ware."  He had served in the Boer War, had established a reputation for administrative efficiency and was appointed as the Major-in-charge of the Graves Registration Commission (GRC), a hybrid Red Cross/Army entity, early in the War. By 1915, he had convinced the French government to grant land in perpetuity to Great Britain, which would assume responsibility to forever maintain the cemeteries. Reconstituted as the Imperial War Graves Commission,  Ware and his colleagues were entrusted with endless decisions: how to layout the cemetery, what kind of foliage and shrubbery (maples for the Canadians), which direction would the graves face (east to face the enemy), crosses or stones (stones), whether to allow repatriation of remains(no), whether to make the usual class distinctions between the officers and the ranks (no), how to segregate and respect the Muslims and Hindus from the colonies, how to denote regimental affiliations, and on and on.
                                              After the war, the battle became one of personalization and the ability of wealthy families to memorialize individually.  In the Commons, the matter reached an end when an MP suggested that men who had died together should not be separated by their fathers. In the end, the IWGC prevailed in its theme of uniformity for the graves.  Another vexing problem was how to memorialize the 'unknown' graves and how to honor by name those who were never found. Rudyard Kipling, member of the commission and poet of the Empire, lost his beloved son Jack and never knew where he lay. He came up with the phrase 'A Soldier of the Great War known unto God' which can be found on 180,000 headstones. The Army identified eighty-five distinct battles and for each one a memorial was constructed and the names of those believed lost were listed. The most famous is the Memorial to the Missing of the Somme. "On it are inscribed the names of 72,085 soldiers who were killed on the Somme and Ancre and have no known graves." Beyond the western front, the commission memorialized and buried the dead around the world and, most importantly for New Zealand and Australia, at Gallipoli in Turkey.
                                               For a hundred years, as Americans, our primary insights into the horror of the Great War have been the histories, poems and fiction written by the British. This is not a great book and certainly will not achieve any kind of immortality. But, it is very, very good at conveying the unfathomable hell of mud and death that was WW1.

Jack of Spies, Downing - C, Inc.

                                             Downing is the author of an interesting six-book series, each named after a Berlin train station and set around WW2.  The lead character in those books was an Englishman, John Russell, a journalist and part-time spy. This novel is apparently the beginning of a new series, one about Jack McColl,  international traveling auto salesman and budding British spy.  The time is just before WW1 and the book follows McColl from China to San Francisco and onto NY.  The Germans are wise to him in Shanghai, where he's trying to find out their naval dispositions in the Pacific. In SF,  he looks into supporters of unrest in India and in NY, into Irish republican activities. That said, two-thirds of the way through, I kept hoping I was closer to the end than I was, and I've concluded it's not worth finishing.

The Discovery Of France, Robb - B +

                                                This fascinating book is subtitled 'A Historical Geography From The Revolution To The First World War' and is somewhat hard to characterize.  I suppose it's a wandering sort of social history. The startling ( at least to me) premise is that as recently as the Revolution, the state we know/perceive of as France did not exist. It may have existed on maps and national taxes were exacted, but only the folks in and around Paris considered themselves Frenchmen.  The geographic diversity was substantial, villages were isolated from each other, there were hundreds of dialects, few people knew about the nation and according to the author, the tribal divisions were such and there was so much self-sufficiency that folks seldom ventured more than a few miles from where they were born and they married locally.  France was still a medieval country.  Indeed, the Revolutionaries initiated a report on 'The Necessity and Means of Exterminating Patois and Universalizing the Use of the French Language', as they were fed up with the expense of translating their decrees into Catalan, Picard, Basque, Provencal, Alsatian, Occitan, Flemish and Breton.  The linguistic divide was so substantial that ninety years later, in 1880, only one-fifth of the nation was "comfortable" with French.  Linguistic differences were indicative of social ones, as well as political and legal ones. The author spends a great deal of time discussing the pre-Industrial Revolution countryside that was certainly agrarian and rooted in the distant past. On more than one occasion, he points out that Caesar, who conquered it and Pliny, who wrote about it, could easily wander about 19th century Gaul and think that not much had changed.  However, change did arrive." In the century that followed the Revolution,  the national road network almost doubled in size and the canal network increased fivefold. There were fourteen miles of railways in 1828 and twenty-two thousand in 1888." Mapping the country became something continuously pursued, but without effectiveness or vigor.  Napoleon III was defeated at Sedan in 1870 for number of reasons, not the least of which was that the French had inadequate maps and were not sure where they were going or what was there.  The Third Republic that followed the defeat in the Franco-Prussian War began to build a nation around compulsory education, the eradication of patois as a first language, and revenge and recovery of Alsace and Lorraine.  The author contends that August 1, 1914 was the first time in the history of France that the entire country simultaneously learned of an important event - war.  Essentially, France became a modern nation only to be irrevocably torn asunder.
                                             This has been a thoroughly enjoyable, yet challenging read. I clearly do not know enough about France to fully comprehend this book.  The country he presents is so unlike the American or the immigrant-American world I know.  The colonists came to Virginia and kept going to Kentucky, Ohio and Illinois. The Germans, Irish, Scandinavians, Italians and Jews came to America and again, they kept going west.  Our national story is one of near-constant motion. This is about a country, society and culture  where people stay in their own villages and towns for hundreds and hundreds of years. The land is prosperous enough and safe enough that the need to keep migrating is not present.  That stasis leads to change 'in situ', a sort of  organic evolutionary process.

The Guernsey Literary And Potato Peel Pie Society, Shafer & Barrows - B

                                                This is a delightful  novel, set in 1946 London, that looks back on the occupation of the Guernsey Islands.  The story of the Germans five-year presence is told through a series of letters posted to a London author by the members of the society in the title. The author becomes so enthralled with the islanders that she moves to Guernsey. The occupation was light, probably the lightest of the war.  Nonetheless, it was not without death, starvation, betrayal and hardship.  This book is a superb evocation of a place and time. The Channel Islands were bypassed by the Allies when they invaded France. Liberation came after the war was over the following May.  I believe that only Norway, Poland and Czechoslovakia were occupied longer. Thanks, Marce, for the recommendation and your ongoing editorial assistance here.

Red Fortress, Merridale - B

                                                This interesting book ties together the history of Russia with that of the Kremlin, along with the famous fortress's role in the Russian national psyche.  The 47-acre fort atop a hill in Moscow was first enclosed in a stone wall six and-a-half centuries ago.  As the Lords Of All The Rus consolidated power when the Mongols finally drifted away, they also began to construct a sophisticated fortress at the Kremlin.   The reign of terror that was the rule of Ivan The Terrible was succeeded by a Time of Troubles so severe that " in 1611, the state of Muscovy ceased to exist.  The capital was occupied by foreign troops. Smolensk had fallen to the Poles. Novgorod was in Swedish hands."  Stability began to take hold in 1613 with the Romanov ascension and their assertion of a Russian style of absolutism.  In the 17th century, Russia expanded her borders east to the Pacific and west into the heart of Europe as Russia became a European state.  Exposure to modernizing Europe through trade, diplomacy and culture led to a collision with the old ways of the Russians.  The young Tsar Peter would literally smash Russian society in his attempt to modernize the state.   The following century was an interlude for Moscow and the Kremlin ; the hierarchy and influence of the church were diminished as Russia's capital moved to Peter's spectacular new city on the banks of the Neva.  "By mid-century, the Kremlin was decaying into Russia's Fontainbleu, the poor relation to St. Petersburg's Versailles."  After its partial destruction by the French in 1812, the Kremlin received a massive forty-year overhaul and started to become a symbol of the state, and in the second half of the century, Moscow itself came to represent the culture and tradition of Russia, while 'Peter' was it's European face. Moscow and the Kremlin were restored to their primacy when the Bolsheviks moved their capital in Feb. of 1918. The Kremlin became both the house of government and the home of the nation's leaders. Over the centuries, the Kremlin was home to churches, cathedrals, icons, religiously-themed buildings, arches and monuments.  The Soviets stripped the fort of all religious decorations and destroyed or altered most of the offending buildings.  Stalin's death led to archaeological research and even tourism in the Kremlin.   Under his successors, it remained and still remains  the center of the Soviet, then Russian, state, and symbol of the country.

Midnight In Europe, Furst - B -

                                                Cristian Ferrrar is a partner in the Paris office of Coudert Brothers in 1937.  As a twelve-year-old, he left Catalonia with his parents and grandmother during civil unrest in 1909.  He remains a Spanish citizen and responds positively to a request from the Spanish Embassy for help during the Civil War. He is asked to purchase arms in Czechoslovakia from Skoda and ship them to Spain.  And so off goes a respectable lawyer into the  role of arms smuggler on a trip to Danzig and a successful  shipment of anti-tank weapons to Spain.      That success is followed by sneaking arms out of Odessa and shipping them too to Spain. 'Midnight In Europe' is the 12th novel in the series, occasionally called the Night Soldier novels, all set in Europe in the thirties.  The novels are extraordinary in their ability to convey  fear and anxiety as the Fascist storm gathers.  The novels have no continuing lead  character nor are they sequential.  They range  from Hungary to Greece to Poland to Yugoslavia to England to Switzerland and often stop in Paris. Furst is so good that you can see the fog and hear the train whistles. This book is probably not as good as some of the others, but was nonetheless, a pleasant respite.

Asia's Cauldron , Kaplan - B

                                             This book is subtitled 'The South China Sea And The End Of A Stable Pacific'.   Kaplan is considered one of America's greatest strategic thinkers, has been an Atlantic Magazine foreign correspondent for decades, a Pentagon advisor and most importantly, a great writer on the topic of the role of the physical world in defining the political one.  The South China Sea is strategically important because of energy, specifically, oil.  Almost all of the oil consumed by Japan, China and S. Korea is shipped through these waters. A total of 60,000 ships and 13 billion barrels of oil pass through the Sea annually. Also, as many as 130 billion barrels may lie beneath its waves.  The Chinese have aggressively taken the position that their maritime rights extend far into the Sea. The British Empire's dominance of the sea lanes passed to the US Navy after WW2 and we have been in complete control since then.  With China's naval ascendancy, or at least equality, on the horizon, the inherent natural rivalries between China, Vietnam, the Philippines, Taiwan, Indonesia, and Malaysia will come into play. The concern is that without Pax Americana all hell may break loose and the Chinese won't be the benign maintainer of peace and order that we have generally been.  The Chinese view their role today as reversing the depredations of the west in the 19th and 20th centuries and restoring the Middle Kingdom.  A state by state review of China's maritime neighbors shows that none of them can really stop the Chinese if they wish to take all of the disputed islands.  What the US will or won't do seems to be the million dollar question.  The author concedes that regardless of our "pivot", we will have to share hegemony in the western Pacific with China.  One would hope that that could be done on the basis of both sides mutually guaranteeing free navigation rights and open sea lanes.