Some Old Favorites About World War I
"Cheshire Regiment trench Somme 1916" by John Warwick Brooke - This is photograph Q 3990 from the collections of the Imperial War Museums (collection no. 1900-13).
Recently I shared some of the most interesting new books about World War I that have landed in my mailbox.* Wonderful though many of the new books are, it would be a shame to forget the many excellent older books available.
Here are some of my favorites:
Paul Fussell's The Great War and Modern Memory (1975) is a rich discussion of the intersection between World War I (specifically the British experience on the Western Front)and literature: both the literature that came out of the trenches and subsequent attempts to remember and mythologize the war.
Robert Graves's Goodbye to All That (1929 or 1957--the two editions are very different) is one of the classic memoirs of the war--a bitter, unsentimental and darkly comic farewell to pre-war England. (On opening Fussell at random, I see that he describes Goodbye to All That as the "stagiest" of the war memoirs. Read it for yourself and tell me what you think.) Depending on where you hang out, you may know Graves as the author of The White Goddess, a poetic study of European myth and/or as the author of the popular novel I, Claudius, which the BBC turned into an equally popular television series in 1976. Personally, I found The White Goddess unreadable and only watched one episode of I, Claudius.** But I was totally absorbed by Goodbye to All That. Graves does not simply paint a picture of his experience of the trenches. He sets that experience within the larger context of his life before and after the war, showing what members of a particular class and caste lost in the war. Reading Graves, the phrase "the lost generation" takes on richer meaning.
Samuel Hynes's A War Imagined: The First World War and English Culture (1990) looks at what he calls the "Myth of the War", which he describes "not as a falsification of reality, but an imaginative version of it, the story of the war that has evolved and has come to be accepted as true." In many ways a pendant to Fussell's work, A War Imagined considers the construction of the war by contemporary artists and writers--both officially and unofficially--and the post-war construction of monuments and anti-monuments. This kind of thing is intellectual meat and drink to me.
Last, but definitely not least, Barbara Tuchman's The Guns of August (1962) remains the standard against which I measure popular history. If I could only have one book about World War I on my shelf, it would be this one.*** Writing with transparent, often witty, prose and an eye for the telling detail, she takes a familiar story--the first month of World War I--and makes it into a page-turner. Hmm, I think I know what I'm taking to read on the road in September.
Looking at this list, I realize that it is Anglo-centric, with a Western front bias--a reflection of my academic roots in British imperialism. Can you help me shake that up a little?
*One of the side benefits of writing History in the Margins is that publishers send me review copies of books. My basic policy on this is that I only review them if I honestly think they are good. On the other hand, just because I didn't review something I received doesn't mean it's not good: I simply may have gotten to it yet. Time is short and the To-Be-Read shelves bulge with choices.
**Though on later reflection, the soap opera qualities that put me off were in fact a pretty realistic depiction of Roman dynastic politics at the time. I wonder how many classicists write for the soaps?
***Though Peter Englund's The Beauty and the Sorrow would come a close second.
Shin-Kickers From History: Sojourner Truth
Sojourner Truth was born into slavery in 1797 as Isabella Baumfree. She spent her early life as a slave on estate in New York*--running away when her master failed to keep his promise to set her free. Active in both the anti-slavery and women's rights movements, she was one of the most important human rights activists of the nineteenth century.
Quite frankly, nothing I say about Sojourner Truth--or human rights--could be as powerful as a speech she made at the women's rights convention in Akron, Ohio:
Well, children, where there is so much racket there must be something out of kilter. I think that 'twixt the negroes of the South and the women at the North, all talking about rights, the white men will be in a fix pretty soon. But what's all this here talking about?
That man over there says that women need to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere. Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mud-puddles, or gives me any best place! And ain't I a woman? Look at me! Look at my arm! I have ploughed and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me! And ain't I a woman? I could work as much and eat as much as a man - when I could get it - and bear the lash as well! And ain't I a woman? I have borne thirteen children, and seen most all sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mother's grief, none but Jesus heard me! And ain't I a woman?
Then they talk about this thing in the head; what's this they call it? [member of audience whispers, "intellect"] That's it, honey. What's that got to do with women's rights or negroes' rights? If my cup won't hold but a pint, and yours holds a quart, wouldn't you be mean not to let me have my little half measure full?
Then that little man in black there, he says women can't have as much rights as men, 'cause Christ wasn't a woman! Where did your Christ come from? Where did your Christ come from? From God and a woman! Man had nothing to do with Him.
If the first woman God ever made was strong enough to turn the world upside down all alone, these women together ought to be able to turn it back , and get it right side up again! And now they is asking to do it, the men better let them.
Obliged to you for hearing me, and now old Sojourner ain't got nothing more to say.
As far as I'm concerned, that equals the Gettysburg Address for power and truth.
* A useful reminder that the northern United States was not innocent in the matter of slavery.
In which I consider soccer, or at least books about soccer
The World Cup is over and some of you are suffering from soccer* withdrawal. Unlikely though it may seem to those of you who know me in real life,I have some reading suggestions that will let you feed both lingering soccer mania and history curiosity.
Franklin Foer's How Soccer Explains The World: An {Unlikely} Theory of Globalization looks at soccer as both an international phenomenon and as rooted in "local cultures local blood feuds and even local corruption". (Think British soccer hooligans, the role of soccer in the Balkan Wars of 1990s, and the success of Jewish soccer clubs in 1920s Europe.) How Soccer Explains the World is a wonderful piece of social/historical reporting and totally accessible for the soccer-challenged.
David Goldblatt's The Ball is Round: A Global History of Soccer directly addresses historian Eric Hobsbawm's observation that "The twentieth century was the American century in every way but one: sport." Goldblatt describes his work as the only history of the modern world in which the United States is "a transatlantic curiosity rather than a central attraction." Beginning with ancient games involving a man kicking a ball and ending with soccer in Africa post-Cold War, The Ball is Round is an exhaustive account of history as a game, with a heavy emphasis on "American exceptionalism".*** At 900 pages, this is a work for the hard-core soccer fan, or perhaps someone with ulterior motives for learning more about the game.
A lagniappe: Nick Hornby's Fever Pitch is a brilliant account of one fan's relationship to the game, set in a specific time and space. This one is worth reading even if you are sports averse.
Score!
*Or football, depending on where you kick the ball.
**A term normally applied to the relative failure of socialism in America. And now that I think of it, there are some interesting parallels between the distribution of soccer and socialism in America. Any social scientists out there looking for a research topic?