Punctuation, grammar, and like that
Anyone who comes to History in the Margins solely for historical tidbits may want to abandon ship today. Instead of committing my usual history-geekery, I intend to talk about the most appealing book I’ve ever read about the mechanics of writing.*
One of the things that instructors of writers say with some frequency is that before you break the rules of grammar (or story structure, or punctuation or physics) you need to know them. Mary Norris, the author of Between You and Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen, knows the rules: she’s been a copy editor at The New Yorker for some thirty years. That’s a credential that would earn her book a place on my reference shelf alongside Fowler, Strunk and White, and the Chicago Manual of Style--or at least as close as the rules of alphabetizing allow. But credentials alone wouldn’t inspire me to read Between You and Me over meals instead of my current meal-time novel--or to bring it to the attention of the Marginites with evangelical zeal.
Norris is witty, irreverent, and a world-class storyteller. Between You and Me is as much memoir as it is grammar guide. There is plenty of practical information, presented with absolute clarity; in the future I’ll turn to Norris when uncertain about the correct use of my personal bête noir, the hyphen. But the grammatical advice is given almost as if it were the punchline to a personal story or the jumping-off point for an essay on a larger subject.** Along the way, Norris takes the reader on engaging side trips: Noah Webster and spelling reform, the invention of the comma in the Renaissance, the Paul A Johnson Pencil Sharpener Museum (now on my road-trip list).
In short, Norris takes what is often the driest of subjects, written in the most pedantic style, and makes it sparkle. If writing is an important part of your life, you need this book.
*Those of you who read History in the Margins via e-mail may not realize it, but the subtitle reads “A blog about history, writing, and writing about history.” If you want to verify this, just click the header in your e-mail and it will take you to the History in the Margins site. This trick is useful to remember when I embed a video or a bit of music.
**I draw your attention to the chapter titled “The Problem of Heesh”--an extended consideration of the larger questions of gender in language and society that begins with the vexed problem of the third personal singular pronoun in English.
A Good Place to Hide
In A Good Place To Hide: How One French Village Saved Thousands of Lives During World War II, Peter Grose describes how a population with its own experience of religious persecution and two charismatic pastors with unlikely international connections turned isolated community in the upper Loire Valley into a haven for Jews and other refugees during World War II.
A Good Place To Hide combines solid historical research with the narrative tension of a spy novel. Grose roots the story of Le Chambon and its neighboring villages in the experience of French Huguenots as a religious minority, the relationship between the Vichy government and Germany, and growing French resistance against the Nazis. He traces the communities' gradual shift from hiding refugees to helping them escape into Switzerland. But the heart of the book lies in the stories of individuals, often told in their words, using journals, letters, memoirs and interviews. A 17-year-old Jewish office machine repairman who became a master forger of identity papers. A teenage girl who carried money from one Resistance cell to another, right under German noses. A mother of five who scoured the countryside for safe houses. Middle-aged refugees who disguised themselves as Boy Scouts and hiked toward freedom. The activist pastor who inspired the community to offer sanctuary with a literal reading of one Old Testament verse.
In the vein of Schindler's List, A Good Place To Hide is an inspiring account of the extraordinary courage of ordinary people.
This review appeared previously in Shelf Awareness for Readers
“Closing” Japan
Curious Japanese watching Dutchmen on Dejima. Katsushika Hokusa. ca 1802.
In 1853 , Commodore Matthew Perry and his squadron of four “black ships of evil mien” opened Japanese ports to trade with the United States, a literal example of “gunboat diplomacy”. * Most historically literate Americans are aware of Perry’s expedition in broad terms, even if they don’t know any of the details. Western accounts of Perry’s success treat it as a major step for both the United States and Japan’s development as modern powers, a triumph of modernity over traditional culture, a triumph of free trade over protectionism.* Popular accounts of Japanese history treat it as the first step in the Meiji Restoration.
These accounts generally slide over the question of how, when, and why Japan was “closed”--itself an interesting episode in early east-west relationships.
As in India, the first Europeans to reach Japan were the Portuguese, who reached the islands by accident when a ship was blown off course in a storm in 1543.** Soon Portuguese merchants were trading Western firearms and Chinese silk for Japanese copper and silver . At the same time, Portuguese and Spanish missionaries converted hundreds of thousands of Japanese, including at least six feudal lords, to a form of Catholicism that was filtered through Buddhist concepts.***
The arrival of Europeans to Japan coincided with a period of political upheaval in Japan, known as the period of the Warring States. In 1600, the warlord Tokugawa Ieyasu defeated his rivals, using modern Western weapons such as cannon and muskets. He declared himself shogun, the first of the dynasty of Tokugawa shoguns who would rule in the name of puppet emperors for more than two hundred years.
Ieyasu immediately moved to consolidate his power. He disarmed the peasants and decreed that only members of the samurai warrior class would be allowed to carry swords. More important in terms of Japan’s relationship with the outside world, he ordered the country closed to Europeans.**** Christianity was outlawed and the missionaries were expelled. Tens of thousands of Japanese Christian converts were killed.***** Trade with Europe was limited to the Dutch East India Company, which was allowed to dock once a year at the man-made and closely guarded island of Dejima in Nagasaki harbor. After 1639, no Japanese were permitted to go abroad, Japanese ships were forbidden to sail outside Japanese waters and any Japanese sailor caught working on a foreign ship was executed.
Closing the ports against “contamination” by Western ideas is often presented as evidence of Japanese backwardness. After all, the Japanese missed the Scientific Revolution, the Industrial Revolution, the Enlightenment, and the rise of the middle class. On the other hand, during much of the Tokugawa shogunate, Japan enjoyed a period of peace and order, secure from being taken over by Western powers. And as we shall see in a future post or two, once the doors were open, Japan was quick to catch up.
*Like the Opium Wars between Great Britain and China, Perry’s expedition can also be seen as an example of international bullying if you look at it from the other end of the cannon.
**Just to give you an historical framework, Vasco Da Gama reached India in 1498.
***Estimates range from 250,000 to 500,000 thousand, making Japan the most successful of the Asian missions.
**** It is important to point out that Japan maintained contact with both China and Korea, countries with which they had long, complicated relationships.
*****This was not a simple case of martyrdom, nor is it parallel to the Roman response to Christians. In 1637, Japanese peasants in Shimbara Peninsula rebelled against heavy taxation and abuses by local officials. Because most of the peasants in the region had converted, the Shimbara Rebellion soon took on Christian overtones. In one of the ironies with which history is rife, the Japanese government called in a Dutch gunboat to blast the rebel stronghold.