9.28.2023
A Death In Brittany, Bannalec - B+
Commissaire Dupin has been sent off from Paris for insulting the mayor, who is now the President of France. After three years in Brittany, he has come to appreciate the culture, language, food, and people, although, to all true Bretons, he will always be an outsider. A local legend is murdered at 91. Pierre has been running a hotel that had been started by his grandmother. The hotel is famous as it was a watering hole a long time ago for Paul Gauguin and other 19th century painters. Indeed, Pierre's murder, and all of the intrigue and duplicity here, is occasioned by the fact that hanging in the restaurant is a 130 year old undiscovered original Gauguin. Somehow, Dupin guesses at its provenance and solves the crime on the fourth day after the murder. This is the beginning of a promising series.
Spider Woman's Daughter, Hillerman - B
Between 1970 and 2006, Tony Hillerman wrote eighteen novels featuring Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn of the Naval Tribal Police. We read and loved most of them. They received innumerable awards and brilliantly introduced us to the world of the Four Corners where the Navajo nation resides on a massive reservation situated mostly in Arizona and New Mexico. The cultural education was priceless. I just learned that his daughter, Anne, began a continuation of the series a decade ago.
The young officer who Leaphorn trained is Jim Chee, still on the force and married to Officer Bernadette (Bernie) Manuelito. One sunny morning, long retired Joe is breakfasting with the old gang and is the first to leave the diner. Bernie follows him outside only to see him shot in the head by someone who drives off. Both the Navajo Police and the FBI begin to investigate. They learn that Joe was doing some insurance/valuation work for a local museum. Although the shooter used a car that leads both agencies to investigate a false lead, Jim eventually deduces it's the museum director who is behind it all. The director almost does in Jim and Bernie, but of course, justice is done, and the principals survive to move on. Happy to have some old friends back.
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9.24.2023
The Last Stand: Custer, Sitting Bull, and the Battle of the Little Bighorn, Phibrick - B+
"In defeat the hero of the Last Stand achieves the greatest of victories, since he will be remembered for all time."
After finding gold in the Black Hills, the US launched a war against the Sioux in 1876. From Ft. Lincoln in the Dakota Territories on May 17, the 7th Cavalry headed west. The regiment consisted of 1200 men and 1600 horses, divided into twelve companies. Custer was accompanied by his two brothers, a nephew and a brother-in-law. His brother Tom had received two Medals of Honor in 1865. Far to the west, Sitting Bull dreamed of the upcoming attack by the soldiers and envisioned that they would approach from the east. The Sioux conducted their annual Sun Dance, during which Sitting Bull dreamed of vast amounts of dead soldiers. On June 17th, the Sioux and Cheyenne fought on the banks of the Rosebud River with soldiers heading north from Wyoming under the command of Gen. George Crook. Although the Sioux and Cheyenne retired first, victory was theirs as Crook retreated south to reprovision his command. He would not move again for six weeks, and did not report his battle to anyone in the 7th Cavalry. It was the first time in history that Indians had sought out and fought the US Army on an open field.
Further north, at the confluence of the Yellowstone and Rosebud Rivers, Custer met with Gen. Alfred Terry on the evening of the 21st. Terry ordered Custer to head south then west and to meet Terry and Gibbon's Montana troops in the vicinity of the Little Big Horn. However, Terry also gave Custer enough leeway to attack the Indians if the opportunity arose before the planned meet-up. Many have suggested that Terry, a lawyer before the Civil War, wrote out a plan whereby he would look good regardless of what Custer did. Custer was desperate for a successful engagement. He was in trouble financially, and his career was in tatters. Notwithstanding that many conceded that he had carried July 3rd at Gettysburg by holding off an attack by Jeb Stuart, he had recently offended Grant and was thinking about resigning and either going into business or running for office.
Because the last remnants of the northern plains' buffalo herd was congregating south of the Yellowstone, thousands of Indians headed to Sitting Bull's camp. It is believed that as many as 8,000 men, women, and children were at the camp on the western side of the Little Bighorn River.
Custer was upset as he headed south. He was annoyed at Terry, whom he felt had belittled him at the meeting. He struggled with the fact that he despised his two highest ranking subordinates, Maj. Marcus Reno and Capt. Frederick Benteen. Indeed, the egotistical and self-absorbed Custer spent a vast amount of time providing the New York Herald with anonymous dispatches demeaning his officers. On the night of the 24th, he ordered a night march to get closer to the camp his scouts had observed on the Little Big Horn. Concerned about Indians escaping to the south, Custer sent Benteen off in that direction with approximately 20% of the 7th. He ordered Reno and 150 men to move ahead of the main column. When the 7th crested the ridge that looked over the Little Bighorn, the officers were awed by the sight of the largest Indian village ever seen. It was two miles long, a quarter of a mile wide and was composed of 1,000 teepees. Reno crossed the river and galloped north intending to scatter the Indians ponies. Reno, however, was drunk, halted the charge, and established a skirmish line a quarter of a mile from the campsite. The Indians attacked Reno's position, while to the northeast, Custer was approaching and could now see the village. Crazy Horse attacked Reno's line, which broke and ran into nearby woods. Soon, Reno's men were hastily retreating in a rout. The Indians were in hot pursuit. Reno had lost almost half his men when he met Benteen and his brigade. Neither knew where Custer was.
At 4:25 PM, Custer's battalion attacked the Sioux and the Cheyenne. Reno and Benteen considered going north to where Custer was engaged. However they were soon entrenched and engaged in battle. Reno and Benteen's men spent the night dug in and faced the Indians on the morning of the 26th. The assault continued all day. In the evening, the soldiers were shocked to see 8,000 people and an estimated 20,000 horses moving away from the Little Bighorn. With fewer than 400 men, they had held off 2,000 warriors. On the 27th, the relief column from the north headed by Gen. Terry discovered 197 bodies on a ridge overlooking the valley. The later native accounts told that the 7th charged, Custer was one of the first mortally wounded and the leaderless and overwhelmed, the men of the 7th were killed off in twenty minutes. The evidence on Last Stand Hill showed otherwise. It indicated a battle of 2 hours, and that Custer fired his rifle for a considerable period of time. In the end, the truth will never be known. Custer and his brother Tom were buried together.
The army pursued the Indians and most of them, including Crazy Horse, surrendered that fall. Sitting Bull retreated to Canada and didn't surrender until 1881. News of the Last Stand reached Bismarck on July 5th and soon spread around the country. Libbie Custer was notified the following day. She "spent the rest of her life playing out her grief and widowhood before a national audience." She had a hagiographic biography published almost immediately and in it blamed Reno. It should be noted that Terry's official report blamed Custer for the disaster. Grant concurred. But in the end, Libbie prevailed over a long life that did not end until 1933. She was aided by Buffalo Bill Cody's show, which toured the world and reenacted the Last Stand. America loved the heroics of Long Hair. This is an excellent book and probably has the most expositive series of maps I can remember.
A Line In The Sand, Powers - B+
This superb novel is set in and around Norfolk, VA about fifteen years ago. Arman, an Iraqi in the US on a Special Immigration Visa because of his work as an interpreter for the army in Mosul, finds a body on the beach. As he and two detectives talk through some issues, the police realize that there are two other men in town who, like the decedent, appear to be ex-military, and are looking for someone. It turns out that they are looking for Arman because he had videotaped a massacre committed by US contractors. Those contractors had by now grown their business to the point that they were taking their company public and have a fortune on the line. Those who are looking for the video are skilled, ruthless, and have a very deep bench. Murder and mayhem prevail as the detectives pursue the case, and try to protect Arman. In the end, a police detective takes matters into her own hands. The ending fizzled a bit, but nonetheless, this is a good read.
It Ends With Knight, Angoe - B+
Nena has been promoted to head of Dispatch and taken out of field ops. She and a team are sent to Tanzania to observe negotiations among the government, the locals on whose land minerals have been found, and a rapacious US mining company. Complicating matters is the fact that the wife of the mining company's CEO is a woman, Bridget, who had trafficked Nena two decades ago. Matters spin out of control after an accident at the mine, the murder of the PM and the kidnapping of the PM's niece. Nena's team extracts the nine year old niece, and realizes that the mining CEO is behind it all. The Tribe team pulls off protecting the innocent and offering up the American to the authorities. This is, unfortunately, the third in the trilogy. Yes, the bad guys are almost always caricatures, and Nena's ability to 'dispatch' people with panache and every conceivable type of weapon adds up to a predictability that is far from great literature. But it's fun.
9.13.2023
A Chateau Under Siege, Walker - B
A wealthy and important Frenchman, a very high up member of the DGSE, is stabbed at a re-enactment of a medieval battle. Both Bruno and the national authorities try to ascertain if it was intentional or an accident. As it turns out the injury was faked as a cover for Brice Kerquelen to travel to Taiwan in an attempt to negotiate with TSC about building a plant in France. The charade is an attempt to protect the Taiwanese undertaking from the Russians and Chinese. However, the Russians have men on the ground in the Perigord. Bruno and a squad of special force soldiers capture them to end the matter.
A Symphony of Secrets, Slocumb - A*
Dr. Bern Hendricks, a U.Va. musicologist, is asked to come to the Delaney Foundation offices in NY. The foundation was founded in the 1930's by America's greatest classical composer, Frederic Delaney. The foundation has found the famous missing Red Symphony, which Delaney had lost in the 20's. As Hendricks and a friend, Eboni Washington, a gifted computer specialist, pore over the notes that accompany the symphony as they try to prepare it for publication, they notice a few scribbles that attract their attention. Delaney was famous for indecipherable doodles that were interspersed with his writings. The letters J-o-R do not fit into anything that Bern has ever seen in decades of working on Delaney material. Bern and Eboni do some digging and ascertain that almost a century ago Delaney shared the same address as a Josephine Reed, a Black woman who had come to NY from the deep South.
Jo Reed and Freddy Delaney had met in a Harlem jazz club in 1918. As the only white player in a group, Delaney was about to get kicked out for sloppy playing until the remarkably talented Reed began to instruct him on the piano. Soon she was living in his apartment and they worked together to embellish a song that Josephine had written. Freddy sold it, under his name, to a Tin Pan Alley publisher. Soon, Jo's music and his lyrics were selling so well that he set up his own shop to enter the publishing business. As Fred become more obsessed with success, Josephine withdrew into her own world as this new go-go era was not to her liking. The two began to drift apart.
Bern and Eboni travel to Reed's hometown and come away with a century old trunk filled with Delaney doodles. They realize that the doodles are not Delaney's, they are Reed's. It slowly dawns on them that Reed was, at a minimum, a co-creator of all of the early work attributed to Delaney. Both Bern and Eboni decide to continue to make inquiries, and not to advise the foundation. The foundation eventually figures out what they are up to and calls in their heaviest firepower. Lawyers threaten draconian enforcement of the NDA's and the board assures Bern they'll destroy his career if he publicizes Josephine Reed's role. That said, they do not fire him and he continues to work on Red. He realizes that it wasn't just Delaney's show tunes that Reed had composed, it was also his masterpiece symphonies, including Red. Delaney was a fraud, his reputation unjustified, and the foundation could be exposed to major losses and lawsuits. Taking advantage of an uneducated woman of color was never acceptable. Eboni and Bern research the board members and the remaining Delaneys and come up with enough dirt to compel a sit down. In the end, justice is done. Josephine's heirs are compensated, and the appropriate credit is given to her. Just an awesome novel.
The French Religious Wars 1562-1598, Knecht - B
"At the beginning of the 16th century France was among the most powerful kingdoms in Western Europe. By the end, it had become perhaps the weakest." The reason was three and a half decades of civil wars. The country was not yet fully formed but was relatively prosperous. There were 16 million people in France with about 300,000 in Paris. Part of the king's coronation oath was to "root out heresy." "A number of Frenchmen, known as Christian humanists, were already thinking along the same lines as Luther. "John Calvin formulated a more extreme version of Protestantism from his perch in Geneva. Protestantism appealed to all social strata, and was particularly strong south of the Loire. It is estimated that 10% of the population was Huguenot.
"In 16th-century France the religious wars began as a conflict between two groups of French nobles, one consisting of Catholics loyal to the king and the other Protestants, who wished to secure religious freedom for themselves and their followers. Over the half century or so that the Wars of Religion lasted patterns of motivation changed and new warring sides came into being, prompted by some new political crisis or other." The uprising in 1562 began when Protestant Louis prince de Conde attacked and occupied Orleans. Tours, Blois, Lyon and other towns in the south fell to the Huguenots. Both sides attacked and marched throughout the country and came to a decisive battle at Dreuz in December. The Crown prevailed as the Huguenots withdrew. A peace in March 1563 allowed limited Protestant rights to worship. Neither side was happy with the outcome but peace prevailed for four years. In 1566, a Calvinist uprising in the Netherlands spread to France. The fighting was brief and ended at year end with no change in the status quo. The third war broke out two years later with the Protestant side aided by German troops. At Moncontour in October, the king again prevailed. The following year the Huguenots recovered and marched north toward Paris. The Peace of Sant-Germain in August provided expanded rights of worship for the Protestants. Violence returned in 1572. Both sides were depleted and the fighting was on a much smaller scale. When this outbreak was settled, the Huguenots were provided the right to worship throughout the realm, with the exception of Paris. After another round of campaigning, peace came to France in 1577 for eight years.
"The last of the French Wars of Religion was prompted by a succession crisis." Henry III died without an heir and Henri de Navarre, the next in line, was Protestant. Henry IV received help from England, Switzerland, and Germany in his battles with the Catholic League. Henry prevailed in the field but was unable to capture Paris. The country was exhausted and starving. Henry resolved matters by converting to Catholicism, suppressing the Huguenots, and making peace with the invaders. The wars highlighted the weakness of the monarchy and only partially resolved the country's religious challenges. Indeed, in the next century under Louis XIV, the revocation of Protestant rights set in motion a mass exodus.
Goodbye, Eastern Europe, Mikanowski - B-
"This is a history of a place that doesn't exist." That is because no one identifies as East European, but rather as Poles, Bulgarians, etc. It is a region once defined by communism, and long ago, as a religious borderland. Paganism lasted longer there before it was replaced by Latin and Orthodox Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. Religious pluralism dominated the region. It was a world of "incredible variety." It was like "a multicolored tapestry" but one ruled by people far away in Vienna, Istanbul, and St. Petersburg. "The storms of the twentieth century destroyed the age-old fabric of Eastern European life."
"As far as the Romans were concerned, these cold and rather frightening lands were the sources of two things and two things alone: inexhaustible hordes of enemies, and a lightweight precious stone called amber." History only arrived with Christianity. We know virtually nothing of the first millennium in the east. "In what is now Estonia, Latvia, northern Poland, and the former East Prussia, Christianity was imposed by force." Lithuania held out until 1387. However, pieces of paganism beliefs and rituals survived in the local cultures. Jews came to the east after their expulsions from the Mediterranean area and Western Europe. The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth welcomed all to its wide open spaces. By 1600, it was considered the "Paradise of the Jews." Many Jews also found a home in the Ottoman Empire after Spain expelled them in 1492. Jews dominated, and prospered in the small towns of the east. By the closing decades of the 19th century, there were 5 million Jews in Russia's Pale of Settlement. The 14th century Ottoman invasion of the Balkans brought Islam to Eastern Europe. At the Ottomans high water mark, the Balkans were Muslim, as was most of Hungary and parts of Romania and Ukraine.
"It was a region defined by being part-but never at the center-of empires." The Ottoman domination of the Balkans was a function of their superbly organized army and civic bureaucracy. They were "unrivaled masters of supply-chain logistics." They built magnificent roads and bridges, maintained meticulous records, efficiently collected taxes, and recruited for their army and bureaucracy. Another dominating empire was the Russians. Part of its Orthodox inheritance and experience as a victim of the Mongols was unitary rule. The Czar was in charge and did not have to deal with the many intermediaries that Western Europe considered normal. Moscow expanded east to Siberia, west to the Baltic, and as far south as they could against the Ottomans. They eventually dominated the Black Sea. By the time of the third partition of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in 1795, the empire stretched across the entire Eurasian landmass. The third empire was the Hapsburgs. Its realms were varied and diverse. It was once characterized as a "mildly centripetal agglutination of bewilderingly heterogenous elements." The ruling family was its only common thread, as it had no "shared language, religion or history."
Eastern Europe was racially and linguistically diverse. In the west, states ensured that everyone spoke the same language and identified with their homeland. In the east, it was exactly the opposite. This hodgepodge of peoples also saw travelers criss crossing it because of wars on its periphery and its many transient groups, particularly the Roma. All of these complexities led to revolts in the 19th century as nationalism became a force in Eastern Europe. The Poles, Serbs, Greeks, Wallachians, Moldavians, Bosnians, Hungarians, and Bulgarians all tried to free themselves. What constituted a people deserving of independence was a common language. "Eastern European nationalists worshipped language." The nationalism within the Ottoman, Russian, and Austro-Hungarian empires would be the catalyst for the cataclysms of the twentieth century.
Europe's Indian summer of peace and prosperity ended dramatically on June 28, 1914 in Sarajevo. "For all of Eastern Europe's empires, regardless of which side they fought on, the war proved a death blow." The postwar years were "a time of profound crisis in Eastern Europe." In Ukraine and Poland, the war continued for another three years. The disparate peoples of the Balkans were put together in the conglomeration of Yugoslavia. Austria, Hungary and Bulgaria, losers in the war, lost vast amounts of territory. There was little if any political stability after the war. And soon the forces of fascism and communism were butting heads. Germany not only slaughtered Europe's Jews but also empowered local fascist allies to indiscriminately kill their enemies as well. Eastern Europe was the scene of endless death, deprivation and destruction. War's end, however, brought more sorrow as Stalinism descended over the region. "By 1950, all of Eastern Europe belonged to a single integrated social, political, and economic system." Communism rebuilt, albeit shabbily, the region. The housing, roads, city centers and factories were substandard. Stalin's 1953 death led to a somewhat lighter form of socialism throughout the east. It meant the end of feudalism and the concept of equality for all people. Of course, the total lack of freedom, the constant shortages of food, inadequate housing and cars, etc. led to the end of communism in Europe. When it collapsed, there was nothing that Gorbachev's USSR could do to save it. A few years later, Yugoslavia, cobbled together at Paris and held in place by Tito for decades, collapsed in civil war. "The shift from socialism to capitalism left deep scars across Eastern Europe." It took decades for easterners to be happy about their lives. Eastern Europe was kind of a "ramshackle topic" where people coexisted, and today's Europe should "not lose sight of its promise."
Fixit, Ide - B
While Isaiah is in a hospital in northern California recovering from injuries and there are wanted posters (from crooks not the police) of him all over south LA, he gets a call that his girlfriend Grace has been kidnapped by someone he sent away to prison. He races back, collects Dobson, and begins to try to find Grace. Just as he is about to free her, Manzo, the man behind the wanted posters, intervenes and he carries Grace off. He in turn sells her to the Sinhala cartel. Isaiah quickly recovers her and settles into some quiet time. However, the two men he has defeated come back for one more try, and fail again. Great characters from the underside of LA life throughout the latest in this series.
9.02.2023
The Middle Kingdoms: A New History Of Central Europe, Rady - B+
"Central Europe rests on its western edge against the Rhine River, which joins the North Sea to the Alps, but its eastern boundary has no obvious physical marker. The Carpathian Mountains, which start northeast of Vienna, in modern-day Slovakia, curl around Hungary and Transylvania, forming a border in the southeast. But further north there is just open country."
"Broadly, the book covers the area now included in modern-day Germany, Poland, Hungary, Austria, Slovenia, and western Romania or Transylvania, but its scope is as fluid as Central Europe's historical parts, venturing at times into the territory of today's Ukraine, Croatia, Switzerland, and the Baltic states."
At its height, the Roman Empire encompassed much of Central Europe. In the fourth century, the peoples of the east began to enter the empire, not as raiders, but as occupiers. They were fleeing the Huns, who remade Central Europe by reducing it to poverty. The Franks influenced the east by introducing the "code of kingship, Catholic Christianity, law, knighthood, and chivalry." Charlemagne was the monarch who pushed the Franks east to the Elbe River, and made Aachen the capital of his empire. Further to the east, the Slavs became the predominant ethnic group. Notwithstanding competition from Constantinople, the Latin church succeeded in bringing Bohemia, Croatia, Poland and Hungary into the fold by the end of the millennium. "By embracing Catholicism and rejecting Orthodoxy, Central Europe was drawn culturally westward. Russia and the Balkans went off in a quite different direction." The region began to divide between French and German speaking regions, and soon added Hungarians, who arrived around the 10th century.
Beginning with Charlemagne in 800, Europe's leading monarchs sought to be crowned Roman Emperor by the pope. This tradition continued for decades, until eventually there coalesced in Europe the concept of the Holy Roman Empire. In England and France, power became concentrated at the top. In the HRE, this was not the case as hundreds of duchies, principalities and kingdoms retained their identity and privileges. The empire did not have a capital and its monarchs journeyed from place to place. The empire pushed east of the Elbe and absorbed portions of newly converted Poland.
In the thirteenth century, Central Europe was threatened by the arrival of the Mongols. They occupied and ransacked Hungary, killing a third of the population. After they departed, Hungary welcomed German immigrants, who settled in significant numbers in Transylvania. Hungary and the other lands to the east westernized by encouraging heavy cavalry, allowing the construction of castles and requiring a feudal military structure to help strengthen the community from further attack. The death of the last Hohenstaufen led to the election, by the established seven electors, of Rudolf of Hapsburg in 1273 as HRE. A century later, the King of Bohemia established Prague as a major metropolitan center and Bohemia as the the most important elector in the empire.
Further to the east there lay hundreds of miles of marshes and forests between the lands of the Latin church and Russia. The area we know now as the Baltics was then called Old Prussia. Conquest and conversion required military skills and Conrad, a Polish duke, called on the Teutonic Knights to civilize the east. By the end of the thirteenth century, Prussia was conquered and under the undisputed control of the Knights, who had negotiated with the emperor and the pope that they would have a free hand. German immigration soon overwhelmed the indigenous locals. The Knights would spend the next century and a half conquering Lithuania. The Knights freedoms and independence eventually succumbed to the merger of Poland and Lithuania in a new Commonwealth.
In the early sixteenth century, Frederick III and Maximilian cemented the empire and the Hapsburgs in power to such an extent that their line would rule for another four centuries. Utilizing aggressive marriages of their heirs, they were able to bring their family to power in the Netherlands and Spain, and then in Hungary. They also manipulated the electoral process to the point that an emperor could have a king appointed who would succeed him as emperor.
Martin Luther and his preachings survived because Frederick the Wise and his son, John, Duke of Saxony felt obligated to protect him because he taught at a university Frederick sponsored. Luther penned over 80,000 pages over four decades, breathing life into his ideas and helping them spread. Lutheranism was soon established in Northern Europe, and was beyond the capabilities of the Catholic Hapsburgs to control. "Luther's reformation was not only a German Reformation but also a Central European one. It struck deep roots in Transylvania, ...in northern Hungary and in Poland." Only Bavaria and Austria remained Catholic. The Peace of Augsburg in 1555 left it to the local ruler to determine the religion in his realm. Throughout the realm there was toleration of different religions particularly as Protestantism fractured into various different sects. As the region entered the 17th century, toleration was the dominant political approach. However, Catholic reformers began to vigorously push back against the Protestants. A Counter-Reformation was on the horizon. Catholicism's champion was Ferdinand II, who initiated the Thirty Years War in 1618 by crushing Bohemia and Prague. It "was a Central European Civil War that became continental and even global. It was a harbinger of other, more modern conflicts, which started in Central Europe and had consequences for the whole world." Ferdinand was successful for the first decade until Sweden invaded. The war became one of "comprehensive slaughter. On top of casual slaughter came dislocation, famine, and the plague." The war became less about religion and became a political contest between France and the Hapsburgs. Seven million died before the Peace of Westphalia in 1648. The northwestern sections of the empire were primarily Protestant and the southeast Catholic.
The Muslim world and its encroachments in Europe were at the forefront of Christian thought for centuries. And after the Turks took Constantinople in 1453, Europe knew they would threaten again. The Sultan's wealth allowed him to raise armies of more than 100,000 men and supply them over a thousand miles away. In 1521, they conquered Belgrade. Hungary and Buda fell next. The Turks would occupy Hungary for 140 years. In 1683, the Turks invaded Austria and besieged Vienna. A Polish army saved Vienna at a crucial point and the Hapsburgs began to push back the Turks. Both Buda and Belgrade were recovered within five years. The Hapsburgs continued to push the Turks as far south as they could for they recognized that the Russians would attempt to take the Balkans if they didn't.
In 1701, Frederick crowned himself as King of Prussia. His grandson, Frederick II, known to history as 'The Great' became king in 1740 and immediately embarked on a course of conquest by seizing Silesia. Three wars with Hapsburg Austria ensued. Frederick prevailed with considerable financial assistance from the UK. Prussia grew and Frederick created a highly regulated state, one that most of Central Europe tied to emulate. Indeed, "the state was swallowing society, through regulation, taxation, and conscription..." The state that did not centralize and modernize was Poland and Lithuania. The Commonwealth weakened in the later years of the 18th century as Russia, Prussia, and Austria began to intervene and carve off pieces of the country. In 1772, the three countries took over one-fourth of the Commonwealth's land and a third of its citizens. The rump state created a new constitution, Europes first, but partitions in 1793 and 1795 eliminated the country from the map. "The partition of Poland and Lithuania was a disaster for Central Europe." It made the carving up of countries and the moving of boundaries acceptable diplomatic activities. And it brought Russia 600 kms. west.
"From 1792 to 1815, Central Europe was almost continually at war." The Hapsburgs "bore the brunt of French and Napoleonic fury." The Holy Roman Empire was abolished. Napoleon defeated, humiliated, and stripped Austria of territory. The Congress of Vienna reinstated the status quo ante. "Napoleon released the genies of nationalism and liberalism on Central Europe, but, unlike Napoleon, they could not be exiled." The Revolutions of 1848 turned Central Europe into a firestorm. Galicia was the first to attempt an insurrection when the peasants attacked noblemen and women before the state crushed them. The French overthrew King Louis-Philippe. Riots in Vienna led to the resignation of Count Metternich, and the ascendancy of twenty-one year old Franz Joseph to the throne. In the end though, the forces of tradition and suppression prevailed, particularly in Hungary. Hungary declared its independence from Austria, and with the assistance of Russian troops, independence was crushed. History may have "failed to turn" but the forces of nationalism were now in the forefront of everyone's minds.
"The rise of Prussia and its eventual transformation into the German Empire was by no means a foregone conclusion." The booming economy and the ambitions of Otto von Bismarck were the driving forces. He lured Austria into war in 1866, and crushed the outmaneuvered and outgunned Hapsburg army. "He dissolved the German Confederation and annexed to Prussia most of the territory north of the River Main." Four years later, the Germans humiliated the French, captured Louis-Napoleon, and announced the creation of an empire. Bismarck never addressed the issue of what role in Prussia the ten million Germans in the Austrian Empire should play. The combination of military defeats and financial stress led Franz Joseph to allow a parliament and the duality of the Austro-Hungarian Empire with a partially liberated Hungary. "Hungary was given complete home rule but would pool military matters and foreign policy with the rest of the empire." Although Germany, Austria, and Hungary now had parliaments, power remained where it had always been - in the bureaucracy and the monarch.
The economic, demographic, and military rise of Germany in the later portion of the 19th century threatened the world order. Central Europe was no longer a backwater, but rather threatened Britain and France. Germany was tethered to the Austro-Hungarians, regarded as the 'sick man' of Europe. Britain, France and Russia had agreed to an entente. In August, 1914, tensions spiraled out of control into a world war. The war in the west was stalemated by the fall of 1914. In the east, the Germans pushed deep into Poland and Russia, and defeated the Serbs and Romanians. The 1918 peace treaty with Russia gave Germany a massive amount of land and allowed them to move forces to the west. But it was too late. The Wehrmacht was exhausted and the American push proved its frailty. Armistice came in November. "The Versailles Conference of 1919-1920 reordered Central Europe, but in its attempt to balance principle with expediency it did so at the expense of an enduring peace." The interwar years were filled with violence and poverty. "Across Central Europe, democratic politics buckled."
War returned in September 1939. Germany and the USSR re-partitioned Poland and both counties subjected it to unspeakable racial, ethnic and class violence. Two years later, Germany invaded the USSR. Slavs, Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, the intelligentsia, alcoholics, and the disabled were put to death by the invaders. The Holocaust claimed six million murdered Jews. Additionally, the Germans murdered an estimated three million Poles. "By the time of Germany's surrender in May 1945, the Soviet Union was in possession of a large part of Central Europe..." Within a few years, every occupied country was run by a Communist. After decades of immeasurable suffering, the people of Central Europe were subject to Soviet communism and the harsh imposition of want and poverty. The Soviets enforced their dominion by putting down nascent freedom movements in Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968. Poland was the first country to move back the restrictions communism imposed. With the support of a Polish pope, the Solidarity movement proved communism to not be monolithic. The whole Soviet artifice collapsed in Europe in November 1989.
The transition to a free market economy was not easy. Communism was an extremely destructive force. By the new century, Central Europe was moving forward economically and socially. Many former communist states are in the EU and NATO. Historically, threats to Central Europe have come from the east, and in Putin's Russia that has not changed. I love long well-written broad stroke histories and this one qualifies.
The Stolen Coast, Murphy - C
This novel is set in a small town near Cape Cod. Jack is in the business of helping people disappear with new identities in new places or countries. Elena, an old friend, shows up after a 5 year absence with a plan to rob her boss, an old line Harvard aristocrat who is a lawyer in NY and the owner of a beachfront residence. She pulls it off and swaps a bag of fake diamonds for millions of dollars of real ones. Very soon though, a private investigator appears and tells Jack that she knows what they did. He helps Elena take off into the Caribbean and returns home. Beyond befuddled.
A Palestine Affair, Wilson - C
This novel is set in and around Jerusalem in 1924. All of the Brits are remembering their losses from the war, and the local Jews and Arabs are arming in expectation of a future clash. Joyce Bloomberg, American wife of an older Londoner, has a torrid affair with a local policeman and runs guns for an American Zionist. Quite frankly, not much here.
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