Steve Goddard's History Wire

Out in Paperback / A Commonwealth of Thieves

A Commonwealth of Thieves -- The Improbable Birth of Australia by Thomas Keneally, Anchor Books '06, $15.95, 385 pages, ISBN #140007956X. Index, bibliography, source notes, unillustrated.

Thomas Keneally, best known as the author of Schindler's List, melds the storytelling abilities of a novelist with the scholarship of a historian in describing Britain's creation of a penal colony in Australia in 1786, headed by Royal Navy captain Arthur Phillip. Seems England was awash in criminals and convicts in those days and getting them off British shores would make life safer and more serene.

That's because the bad actors were now thousands of miles away, where they became Capt. Phillips' problem. As acting governor of what was called New South Wales, he had to cope with disease, food shortages, unruly convicts and sometimes hostile Aborigines.  Through it all weaves the story of men who were determined to make better lives for themselves in a new land.

Out in Paperback / Rails to the North Star

Rails to the North Star -- A Minnesota Railroad Atlas by Richard S. Prosser, Foreward by Don L. Hofsommer, UMinn. Press '07, $29.95, 283 pages, ISBN #0-8166-5267-8. Index, bibliography, list of statutes, voluminous maps.

Railroad history has been enhanced by the works of rail enthusiasts, usually trained outside the academy, whose enthusiasm more than makes up for any academic erudition. Such an independent scholar was Richard S. Prosser, who grew up near the Milwaukee Road in south Minneapolis. It's been more than four decades since his Rails to the North Star first appeared, tracing the historic routes of Minnesota's railways. This volume reprints that seminal work, adding a foreward by eminent rail historian Don L. Hofsommer.

The era of Congressional land grants to railroads began, for the most part, in the early 1860s. But as Prosser relates, the Minnesota Enabling Act gave the Territory of Minnesota authority to convey land within six miles on each side of a right-of-way to rail companies for construction. With that, the industry was off to the races, and Prosser charts the building of rails across the state, the street railway boom of the 1920s, and the decline of the industry and consolidation of companies in the 1960s in this coffee table-sized volume.

NOTE: Steve Goddard is the author of Getting There: The Epic Struggle Between Road and Rail in the American Century (Basic Books, 1994).

Book Alert / John Donne -- The Reformed Soul, A Biography

John Donne -- The Reformed Soul, A Biography by John Stubbs, Norton '07, $35, 565 pages, ISBN #0393062600. Index, further reading, source notes, unillustrated.

Polymaths always seem to evoke curiosity among the less gifted. How is it possible to sustain an intellectual focus in two or more unrelated areas? And, perhaps most fascinatingly, how does expertise in one field of study come to inform another?

British poet John Donne came from a long line of Jesuit missionaries, and it would have been natural for him to move to the fore of preserving the Roman Church from the onslaught of Queen Elizabeth's Protestantism.  But seeing up close the carnage wrought by religious conflict made Donne wonder if all that was really worth the candle. Wasn't it possible to find in the divine presence a God whose umbrella could encompass everyone?

Donne's rise to prominence was hardly conventional. He gave up career and social standing by marrying early and becoming a buccaneer. How unlikely it seemed to some that such a man would ever end up as the Dean of St. Paul's in London? But his diverse life experiences enriched his art there as an English poet whose work continued to encompass his spiritual devotion. This is the first work for author John Stubbs, who was educated at both Oxford and Cambridge.

Indonesia: Remembering Suharto

Newsweek.com:

"e ruled with an iron grip for a generation then spent the last decade of his life dodging prosecution for alleged human-rights crimes and corruption. On Sunday, Indonesia's former strongman Suharto, once one of Asia's most influential leaders, died peacefully in a Jakarta hospital from multiple organ failure. He was 86.
   
"Indonesia's reaction to the passing of its longest-ruling president was muted, and paradoxical. During the final weeks of his life, elder statesmen from across the region paraded past Suharto's sickbed to pay their respects. Yet several prominent domestic visitors emerged from Jakarta's Pertamina Hospital to declare that official investigations into alleged extrajudicial killings and ill-gotten family wealth should proceed even after the former strongman's death. From the halls of power to the streets, Indonesians praise today's democratic system without vilifying the leader ousted in a student-led uprising back in 1998. Suharto 'made mistakes,' said former president Abdurrahman Wahid, who was democratically elected and held the nation's highest office from 1999-2001. 'But he also did a great service to the nation.'

"Suharto loyalists credit him for rescuing the country and, by extension, greater Southeast Asia from chaos in the mid-1960s by establishing what the strident cold warrior himself called a 'New Order.' Its aim: build a modern, unified, anti-communist Indonesia. Its salient features included political repression of most dissent, discrimination against the country's ethnic Chinese merchant-class, virulent nationalism and a strong military hand in politics. In all, Suharto served seven terms as president and remained Indonesia's supreme leader for more than 32 years before being forced to resign after mass street demonstrations engulfed the capital Jakarta amidst the 1997-98 Asian financial crisis."

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1943 Casablance Conference Showed Shakiness Of Alliance With Stalin

AmericanHeritage.com:

"On January 24, 1943, Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill announced they had met in secret at Casablanca in Morocco for a week-long conference, code-named SYMBOL. Stalin had been on the original invitation list, but the Soviet armies were bearing the bulk of the fight against Hitler, and Stalin declined to attend. He was, nonetheless, very clear about what he wanted from his allies: an immediate Second Front against Hitler, which most Soviet and American strategists thought entailed a cross-Channel invasion of Europe.

"Although by January 1943, the Allies had secured North Africa, Great Britain and the United States had not been able to seriously divert Hitler’s attention from the Eastern Front, and some strategists feared that if Stalin was left to fight alone for too long, he might seek a separate peace. Roosevelt and the Joint Chiefs of Staff thought the urgency of relieving the pressure on the Soviets meant an invasion of France in 1943, just as they had contemplated a desperate invasion in 1942. Churchill and his advisers thought the contrary: any cross-Channel invasion in 1943 would prove disastrous; and to the disgust and, at times fury, of the American military, British strategy prevailed at Casablanca."

                                                         (Click above link to read more)

Book Alert / Due Considerations

Due Considerations -- Essays and Criticism by John Updike, Knopf '07, $40, 703 pages, ISBN #0307266400. Index, occasional sketches sprinkled through text.

This, his ninth collection of essays and criticism, John Updike dedicates to his multi-talented editors David Remnick and Henry Finder, "who kept me in the game into the late innings." This note of gratitude, of course, is merely a literary conceit, since by tradition, many New Yorker scribes have hit their longest balls late in the action.

Whatever elixir is dispensed from the water fountains at this iconic magazine has allowed many of its heavy hitters to still pad down the halls to collect their paychecks into their ninth decade. Consider the age some of them hung up their spikes -- William Shawn at 80, Brendan Gill at 83, Joseph Mitchell at 88. William Maxwell got away with working at home in his pjs until 91. And Roger Angell still contributes at 87.

Next to these, John Updike is middle-aged even though he's been publishing books now for a full half-century. I confess a big brotherly affection for Updike, whom I discovered in college while he was experiencing the angst of turning 30. For me, he's acted like a point man, returning through the underbrush to tell me what snares lie around life's next corner. Though I was not a high school basketball hero, I identified withthe Rabbit tetralogy and Harry Angstrom, as he experienced marriage, fatherhood and the vicissitudes of business and, predictably, was not pleased when my oracle killed off his character at age 56.

Writers like Updike do certainly seem to have a charmed life, contributing weekly to America's foremost literary magazine for what presumably is a handsome paycheck, then shipping an accumulated stack of essays and reviews off to the publisher every few years for yet another payday. Yet any writer who can pull off such a trick in this cutthroat industry deserves my applause, not my envy.

In his latest collection, Updike writes about life at The New Yorker, offers profiles of individuals as varied as Eudora Welty, Ted Williams and JFK, Jr.; reflects on such literary works as Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Blithedale Romance, Max Beerbohm's Seven Men, and Thornton Wilder's The Eighth Day; holds forth on the arts of American vs. English fiction, literary biography and non-fiction, and art, which he studied at Oxford from 1955-7, as we've learned in every jacket bio since The Poorhouse Fair in 1959.

Updike's final section deals with Personal Considerations, a potpourri of idiosyncratic essays. Consider: Summer Love, My Philadelphia, and various forewards and introductions to works of those lucky enough to win a John Updike contribution. If this prolific author considers himself to be in the late innings, I figure it can't be past the seventh, and with any luck the game will go into extra innings.

Photo Archive Cronicles The Last Days of Mahatma Gandhi

Slate.com:

Slate.com has gathered a photographic archives of the last days of Mohandas Gandhi, considered by many to be the father of modern India. The collection includes a photograph of the Mahatma on the day of his 1948 assassination.

Attention: Fans of John O'Hara and E. L. Doctorow

The New Yorker:

"E. L. Doctorow reads John O’Hara’s short story 'Graven Image' and discusses O’Hara with The New Yorker’s fiction editor, Deborah Treisman. 'Graven Image' was published in The New Yorker in March, 1943, and is collected in the Modern Library Classics’s 'Selected Short Stories of John O’Hara.' Doctorow’s most recent novel is 'The March.'

Listen to the mp3 on the player above, or right-click here to download.

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Book Alert / Edward VI -- The Lost King of England

Edward VI -- The Lost King of England by Chris Skidmore, St. Martin's Press '07, $27.95, 346 pages, ISBN #0-312-35142-9. Index, select bibliography, source notes, grouping of b&w glossy images.

Cautionary note to future world leaders: If you contemplate a monarchy, consider appointing an adult to head it. Not that adults are all they're cracked up to be, come to think of it. Take Britain's King Henry VIII, for example. During his reign, as author Chris Skidmore writes, "little had remained untouched: the monasteries and friaries had been ripped down, the pope's authority discarded, and new authoritarian laws had been introduced that placed his subjects under constant fear of death."

So understandably, not a few breathed a deep sigh on Henry's passing and hoped life under nine-year-old Edward VI would be better. But, as this Oxford honors graduate tells us, "True power lay in the hands of the boy's uncle, Edward Seymour, Duke of Somerset, and his Protestant sympathizers. Somerset's authority was challenged by his own brother, Thomas Seymour, who seduced and married Queen Katherine Parr, pursued Princess Elizabeth and was later accused of having kidnapped Edward at gunpoint." Both competitors for power lost their heads in the struggle.

On a policy level, Edward VI's reign is noted mainly for religious reforms, "how the Church moved so far along Protestant lines that Mary (Edward's sister) would be unable to turn the clock back." Through it all, the King showed himself to be a child prodigy, offering hope of a long, productive reign. Though its cause was illness, not the sword, Edward's untimely death at age 15 was a grievous loss for the nation.

Book Alert / My Enemy's Cradle

My Enemy's Cradle by Sara Young, Harcourt '07, $24, 365 pages, ISBN #0151015376.

Not an easy job, creating a master race. If you're Hitler apparatchik Heinrich Himmler, you realize you might meet resistance, so you'll lose some men to bloodshed. How to replace them? Create an organization with a high-sounding name, such as Lebensborn (Wellspring or Fountain of Life). Recruit German teenage girls by the thousands to conceive children. Invade other countries and select "suitably Aryan" girls to do the same. And if that doesn't yield enough, steal children from countries you occupy.

In her chilling new book, children's author Sara Young tells the tale. In a brief interview, she describes its writing:

Q. What led you to write this novel?

A. Several years ago, I took a walk with a friend who was a WWII buff. We were talking about issues of women and war, and he mentioned the Lebensborn Program of Nazi Germany. It was such an enormous program, affecting so many women and children, that I just couldn't believe it wasn't common knowledge. Soon, as a writer, I began to see that a Lebensborn home, specifically one in an occupied country, would be a compelling setting for a novel -- the home itself would act as a crucible for issues of responsibility, motherhood, loss, and what it might mean to carry an enemy's child. I couldn't stop thinking about it until I finally sat down and began to write the novel I wished I could read!

Q. When people think of war crimes, "reproduction" as a war crime does not seem to enter the conversation. Do you think the Lebensborn was a peculiar program of its time, or is this an ongoing crisis that is still happening in today's world with the current wars?

A. It's still going on. More often, the aim is for occupying or attacking forces to impregnate the women in order to alter their enemy's bloodlines and to make the women and resulting children outcasts of their societies. What the Nazis did was the opposite -- the saw the "Aryan"-looking girls of some of the countries they occupied and wanted children from them for their own citizenry, so they wouldn't leave any non-German blood to fight them in 20 years. The Germans had calculated their population and military needs up through 1980....they were very calculating about this.