Tannin
Storage? I am Storage!
I was not feeling very well on Friday so I came home early and I seem to have fought off the cold I was coming down with. But I was horribly bored and grumpy. So I applied my usual cure: a large handful of money and a good bookshop. The results:
McCrum, MacNeil and Cran: The Story of English. A history of the English language. Looks interesting, particularly in the early part; the most modern sections threaten to be trivial and date quickly.
Peter Padfield: Donitz: the last Fuhrer. So far as I can tell from the cover notes, Padfield doesn't appear to be an academic historian, which is always something to put doubt in your mind, but he has spent quite some time researching the era (he's written biographies of Hess and Himmler) and flipping through the pages of this weighty tome (all 501 of them!) he seems to have command of the language, and it does include fairly extensive referencing. And then there is John Keegan's praise on the back cover. Any book that a historian of Keegan's stature praises has to be well worth reading. I think this might be a good one.
Robert W Gutman: Mozart: a cultural biography. Yet another Mozart biography, and over 700 pages of it. I seem to have about four of them now. No matter. I'm sure I will enjoy it.
Manyard Solomon: Beethoven. Apparently this is the standard work, newly revised. Time I rectified the large hole in my education and learned a little about this extraordinary man.
Sue Taylor: How many birds is that? A book about birdwatching and travelling in Australia. Quite a change of pace from all that heavier stuff!
Gordon W Prange: Miracle at Midway. Prange, Professor of History at the University of Maryland, spent a lifetime studying Pearl Harbour and the events surrounding it. He was the author of At Dawn we Slept that I wrote at some length about either here or over at SR six months or so ago - just before the MBF, I think it was. Like At Dawn we Slept this was a work he left uncompleted when he died in 1980, and it was finished off by two students of his. But where the earlier work is a masterpiece of research, this one is comparitively lightweight. Note that I say compartively - it is only the long shadow of the peerless scholarship in At Dawn we Slept that makes this seem a little underwhelming. It is, in fact, an excellent tying together of the threads of a very complex and confusing battle, and it tells the "what" of the story clearly and comprehensively. On the other hand, it doesn't get nearly as close to the "why" as the earlier work. The authors do attempt an anaylsis, but their conclusions are not as clearly reasoned and as well supported by the evidence as I would have expected.
At times it touches on the adulatory: to me, the way that Nimitz and Spruance are lionised detracts from rather than adds to their greatness. And it finds fault with others without troubling to bring evidence to support the conclusion: Fletcher in particular is dissmissed as a minor player for no apparent reason. It manages to be considerably less jingoistic than many an earlier work, but does not read like sober, balanced history. It is sprinkled with occassional outbursts of poorly-considered language; the sort of thing that was acceptable in 1948 when passions still ran hot, but not what one would expect from a professional historian writing forty years after the event.
I suspect that these are things that would not have made it into print had Prange lived to see publication: they are probably things he wrote years earlier and intended to revise, but Goldstein and Dillon, not wanting to interefere with Prange's original words, left in. This is a pity, as the telling of the facts is, so far as I can judge, as comprehensive and as balanced as one could wish for.
But still it leaves this battle - the single turning point of the entire war - in need of an explanation. There is some considerable effort put into getting at the state of mind of the Japanese, and yet it doesn't end up providing anything like the depth of understanding that Prange provided for the Pearl Harbor story. It's easy enough, and quite true, to say "they were careless", "they were overconfident", or "the Americans kept on trying and trying until they eventually got lucky", but a really good historian can get deeper than this, can tease out the underlying causes.
Of course, few books do manage such satisfying depth, and my dissapointment with Miracle at Midway is really a reflection of my delight with the superb At Dawn we Slept. It is in fact an excellent book and I recommend it unreservedly. I enjoyed reading it, learned a good deal, and now have still more curiosity about this crucial event in modern history than I started with.
And it provided something to do with the weekend.
McCrum, MacNeil and Cran: The Story of English. A history of the English language. Looks interesting, particularly in the early part; the most modern sections threaten to be trivial and date quickly.
Peter Padfield: Donitz: the last Fuhrer. So far as I can tell from the cover notes, Padfield doesn't appear to be an academic historian, which is always something to put doubt in your mind, but he has spent quite some time researching the era (he's written biographies of Hess and Himmler) and flipping through the pages of this weighty tome (all 501 of them!) he seems to have command of the language, and it does include fairly extensive referencing. And then there is John Keegan's praise on the back cover. Any book that a historian of Keegan's stature praises has to be well worth reading. I think this might be a good one.
Robert W Gutman: Mozart: a cultural biography. Yet another Mozart biography, and over 700 pages of it. I seem to have about four of them now. No matter. I'm sure I will enjoy it.
Manyard Solomon: Beethoven. Apparently this is the standard work, newly revised. Time I rectified the large hole in my education and learned a little about this extraordinary man.
Sue Taylor: How many birds is that? A book about birdwatching and travelling in Australia. Quite a change of pace from all that heavier stuff!
Gordon W Prange: Miracle at Midway. Prange, Professor of History at the University of Maryland, spent a lifetime studying Pearl Harbour and the events surrounding it. He was the author of At Dawn we Slept that I wrote at some length about either here or over at SR six months or so ago - just before the MBF, I think it was. Like At Dawn we Slept this was a work he left uncompleted when he died in 1980, and it was finished off by two students of his. But where the earlier work is a masterpiece of research, this one is comparitively lightweight. Note that I say compartively - it is only the long shadow of the peerless scholarship in At Dawn we Slept that makes this seem a little underwhelming. It is, in fact, an excellent tying together of the threads of a very complex and confusing battle, and it tells the "what" of the story clearly and comprehensively. On the other hand, it doesn't get nearly as close to the "why" as the earlier work. The authors do attempt an anaylsis, but their conclusions are not as clearly reasoned and as well supported by the evidence as I would have expected.
At times it touches on the adulatory: to me, the way that Nimitz and Spruance are lionised detracts from rather than adds to their greatness. And it finds fault with others without troubling to bring evidence to support the conclusion: Fletcher in particular is dissmissed as a minor player for no apparent reason. It manages to be considerably less jingoistic than many an earlier work, but does not read like sober, balanced history. It is sprinkled with occassional outbursts of poorly-considered language; the sort of thing that was acceptable in 1948 when passions still ran hot, but not what one would expect from a professional historian writing forty years after the event.
I suspect that these are things that would not have made it into print had Prange lived to see publication: they are probably things he wrote years earlier and intended to revise, but Goldstein and Dillon, not wanting to interefere with Prange's original words, left in. This is a pity, as the telling of the facts is, so far as I can judge, as comprehensive and as balanced as one could wish for.
But still it leaves this battle - the single turning point of the entire war - in need of an explanation. There is some considerable effort put into getting at the state of mind of the Japanese, and yet it doesn't end up providing anything like the depth of understanding that Prange provided for the Pearl Harbor story. It's easy enough, and quite true, to say "they were careless", "they were overconfident", or "the Americans kept on trying and trying until they eventually got lucky", but a really good historian can get deeper than this, can tease out the underlying causes.
Of course, few books do manage such satisfying depth, and my dissapointment with Miracle at Midway is really a reflection of my delight with the superb At Dawn we Slept. It is in fact an excellent book and I recommend it unreservedly. I enjoyed reading it, learned a good deal, and now have still more curiosity about this crucial event in modern history than I started with.
And it provided something to do with the weekend.
