Further entries on the B&T reading list

(Richard J here). Sundry capsule reviews of recent reading...

David Edgerton - Britain's War Machine - Chris W has alluded to his work here and there recently, and this book appears to form a handy precis of his arguments, which truly change how I thought about WW2 - epitomising perhaps a tad too much, it's not that Britain underestimated technology and the quality of its war machines, but that it made (perhaps forgiveable in context) errors in what areas it chose to focus on before the proving began. Also, Corelli Barnett can go fuck himself. Perhaps slightly too much of an otherwise puzzling axe to grind against leftist historians (given the leanings of his implicit targets) but definitely worth reading.

Jill Lepore - The Whites of their Eyes - The Tea Party's Revolution and the Battle over American History - disappointingly unreflective. Short, and expanded from a New Yorker article, which summarises the errors and fallacies in the Tea Partier-view of the American Revolution, but is disappointingly light on any real analysis as to why such errors find resonance with such a wide section of the American population. (Top fact: 'Founding Fathers' wasn't coined until 1916.)

Nigel Hamilton - American Caesars- light, gossipy, noticeably inaccurate in several obvious places, fun. Pretty much like the Suetonius model, in actual fact.

Timothy Snyder - Bloodlands - If you only want to read one book this year about the agonising deaths of millions through callous and deliberate starvation, make it this one.

Anna Reid -Leningrad: Tragedy of a City under Siege. Alternatively, make it this one. I wish I could be anything other than remorselessly trivial and bad-taste jokey about these books, because both of them are superb, if grim, reading, with an obvious passion and empathy for the human beings unfortunate enough to be living in that particular place at that particular time.

China Mieville - Kraken -  I always want to like Mieville more than I actually do, and this, sadly, is no exception.

Ben Aaronovitch - Rivers of London - similar theme to the above (the intersection between the police and the supernatural in London), and, TBH, much less well executed than Mieville's take on the theme, but if I had to read one again, well...

Comments

[Cian]

but is disappointingly light on any real analysis as to why such errors find resonance with such a wide section of the American population.

Because they were taught it at school probably. And because its a comforting myth. This country's no different. I mean Britain hasn't been successfully invaded since 1066. Total bollocks, but almost everyone believes it. Or all that stuff that I learnt at school about the huge threat of the Aramada, brave Drake, etc. Tudor propoganda that we choose to believe.

[Cian]

And oh yeah, I agree on the book. I heard her interviewed somewhere and she seemed remarkably uncurious about why they believed this stuff (is it ideology, bad teaching), or who they were.

[Barry Freed]

Somehow I'm not surprised, loosely speaking I find those type of books to be seldom illuminating. Perhaps we'll have to wait for Rick Perlstein to get around to the topic.

That book on Leningrad has been on my shortlist for a while, here's a link to a review with a photo of one of those acoustic radars that Jamie posted about a few months back

[Richard J]

Also recently read, Lloyd Clark's Kursk: The Greatest Battle. As someone who can (as the above may suggest) grognard with the best of them, can someone please just definitely establish what exactly the hell happened at Prokhorovka so we can now move on now, please?

[Barry Freed]

Sorry no, but IIRC it's thanks to one of your tweets a few weeks ago that I now know how to properly check and adjust the track tension of a Tiger tank.

[Dan Hardie]

Strongly recommended: Frank Ledwidge, 'Losing Small Wars: British Military Failure in Iraq and Afghanistan'. I think you might guess the subject matter from the subtitle.

The first few chapters are excellent narratives of what happened in Basra and Helmand: much of it has been said before (there is plenty of approving citation of Stephen Grey, Anthony King, Adam Holloway and Matt Cavanagh, inter alia), but I don't think it's been backed up by such a combination of research and first-hand experience. (Ledwidge is a barrister, and was a naval reservist who served as an intelligence officer in the Balkans and Iraq, and then worked as a civil adviser in Afghanistan.) His diagnosis of why recent British military leadership has been so awful is largely convincing. (I won't be responding to arguments of the type 'I haven't read this book, so I don't know what it says, but it's wrong because...')

Probably also very good: Jack Fairweather, 'A War of Choice: The British in Iraq, 2003-9'. My review copy arrived this morning- the book's published next Thursday. It looks extremely promising.

Very over-rated: Sherard Cowper-Coles, 'Cables from Kabul'. Filled with 'charming' FCO anecdotes, largely lacking rigorous argument, by an author distinctly too impressed by himself.

[Dan Hardie]

Interesting review of Edgerton's book here, by Ben Shephard (who has written at least two books that I really should read).

[JamesP]

I have a mixed record with Mievelle: I liked PERDIDO STREET STATION much more on a reread, and love IRON COUNCIL, but Kraken was ... well, it's a parody of the urban fantasy genre to some degree, and it suffers from that. (Un Lun Dun is perhaps over-sincere, but much more fun.)

I'm enjoying the Aaronovitch (brother of David!) series - light urban fantasy, no surprises, no disappointments.

[JamesP]

Also, Shephard's book on shell shock is quite good.

[Martin Wisse]

The Aaronovitch book is much better than it needed to be, as e.g. reading any of Simon R. Green's novels in the same subgenre will quickly reveal.

Mieville is one of the more important science fiction/fantasy authors of the past decade, but his books can be difficult to handle and he's certainyl an acquired taste.

Kraken I found to be one of his more accessible books, something I read in one or two sittings.

[Richard J]

I think my difficulty with Mieville is the lack of empathy he shows with his characters - this isn't, despite how it may sound, a whinge about the absence of happy endings, but the rather flat way in which he brutalizes/rewards his characters. Compare and contrast with Roald Dahl, who was a sadistic fuck who nonetheless appeared to enjoy the company of the characters he was subjecting to various unpleasant fates. I suppose i have a similar reaction to Martin Amis - I admire the cleverness, but both's books feel, to me, rather like one of those magnetic toy theatres our parent's generation used to play with.

(BTW, Martin, I saw your blog last night. My deepest sympathies to you and your wife.)

[BenSix]

If you only want to read one book this year about the agonising deaths of millions through callous and deliberate starvation, make it this one.

Onto the Christmas list it goes...

[Chris Brooke]

(BTW, Martin, I saw your blog last night. My deepest sympathies to you and your wife.)

Seconded. I'm so sorry.

[Barry Freed]

Martin, I'm so very sorry for you and yours.

[Cian]

Martin I'm so sorry. That's a horrible thing to happen.

[Cian]

The Aaronovitch book is indeed way better than it needs to be, and he's also a nice guy. I'd kind of describe it as sub-Gaiman.

Two SF writers I'd recommend to anyone who likes that kind of thing are Daryl Gregory, and Felix Gilman's last book (Half Remembered World). I also liked "John dies at the end" (soon to be a movie directed by Don Coscarelli). Though that may be more a reflection on my immature sense of humour.

[Cian]

Also read David Graeber's book debt, which is good when he's dealing with ideas (he's very good at that), but distinctly dodgy when he tries to fit stuff into an overarching narrative (which is not really necessary for his thesis). Worth reading, but skim the history and be prepared to throw it across the room a couple of times (I think his earlier work on value is probably the more valuable read).

The Crisis of Neoliberalism by Levy and Dumenil which is very very good (it has facts, and data and hard analysis - plus Duncan Foley likes it) hard look at what neoliberalism is, what it is done and where the fractures are. Pretty dry and tough going, but well worth it.

The book I really want to read is Corey Rubin's latest, "The Reactionary Mind" which looks great. Very underrated thinker on the American right.

[Barry Freed]

Cian, have you read his book on Fear? I'm just familiar with him through his articles though (minor nitpick "Robin" not "Rubin").

[Cian]

No I haven't, though I do own a copy of it.

[ejh]

I've been reading The Great Gatsby and Wuthering Heights, and I am bothered by the following passage in the latter:

There was a manservant left to keep the house with me, and we generally made a practice of locking the doors during the hours of service; but on that occasion the weather was so warm and pleasant that I set them wide open, and, to fulfil my engagement, as I knew who would be coming, I told my companion that the mistress wished very much for some oranges, and he must run over to the village and get a few, to be paid for on the morrow.

It's 1784 and this is rural Yorkshire. Would oranges have been so easily obtainable as Nelly Dean, narrating, suggests?

[Barry Freed]

This website would seem to supply the answer you seek. Especially the section "The Arrival of Oranges in England" but also throughout. And I thank you for supplying a diverting question that I might occupy myself with instead of getting my work done before the library closes.

[JamesP]

http://www.harkavagrant.com/index.php?id=323 - Kate Beaton's take on Wuthering Heights. "It's not what you asked for at all! It's an angry boy I picked up in a gutter!"

[Martin Wisse]

Thank you guys. All sympathy is appreciated.

[belle le triste]

Emily B was the one who never really left home -- she was briefly a teacher in far-off exotic Halifax -- so I'd expect her to be knowledgeable about life in rural Yorkshire during her lifetime (which 1784 isn't, quite: it's too early).

Also of course the sisters never really stopped writing stories about Gondal, their shared vast imaginary country, so maybe the teenage orientalist wish did push the empiricism a bit here.

[ejh]

This website would seem to supply the answer you seek

Maybe, but maybe not. I was aware that oranges were known in England long before the relevant period, but it doesn't follow that because they were available in Drury Lane in the seventeenth century, they were available in rural Yorkshire in the eighteenth. All the geographical references I found in the piece are to London or Surrey, and I'm not sure the claim

soon after oranges were becoming a familiar fruit to the general population

is justified by the evidence provided, at least not if "familiar" means "something they could expect to eat" as opposed to "something they could be expected to have heard of", like a giraffe or a zebra.

I'd assume that by the time Emily Brontë wrote, it was possible to obtain oranges reasonably easily in that part of the world, but sixty years earlier? I'd want to know more about the social history of citrus fruit in Yorkshire before I'd be sure.

[ejh]

I'd expect her to be knowledgeable about life in rural Yorkshire during her lifetime

This posted while I was composing my post! Yeah, to be sure.

I meant to say that while I was reading Wuthering Heights, I was working in Jaca, a small but not tiny town in the Spanish Pyrenees. During this visit I made an unsuccessful attempt to purchase a mango. None to be found in the supermarkets of Jaca - and it's not the first place I've had the same problem. But I bet you can get them in Madrid or Barcelona without difficulty all year round. (Or in most Spanish cities, for that matter.) This may have been what sparked my train of thought.

[Chris Brooke]

OK. Get out your copies of William Combe's History and Antiquities of York, first published in 1785, so exactly the period we want, and turn to volume three, pages 274-5.

He reprints there a statute from the 1720s, "for improving the Navigation of the River Owze, in the County of York". And reading on, we find it fixes a toll of 2s 6d on every ton of trade goods, with oranges specifically listed (along with three or four dozen other commodities).

Now that's not clinching evidence for oranges in Yorkshire, as it could just be a generic list of trade goods that gets printed in any similar statute. But it suggests to me that it's not entirely weird to think of oranges being transported up rivers and along canals throughout the eighteenth century, and even getting as far as Yorkshire.

[ejh]

That's not bad at all, is it? But of course, having set out on this trail, "clinching evidence for oranges in [that specific part of] Yorkshire is what I'll ultimately need....

Note: when Nelly refers to "the village" (which I assume to be Gimmerton, which I understand, unless I'm corrected, to be Haworth) what would she mean? A village shop? Presumably, "paid for on the morrow" because the Grange had an account?

(I see my link isn't working: does this?)

[Chris Brooke]

Well, the Bradford Canal opened in 1774, which would have passed pretty close to Haworth.

[Chris Brooke]

But I suppose what puzzles me is why for you the period between the 1780s and the 1840s makes all the difference. If it isn't odd to have oranges in Yorkshire in the 1840s, why is it odd to have them there in the 1780s?

More generally, though, I entirely agree that we need to know more about the history of citrus fruit in Yorkshire than we do.

[Barry Freed]

Now I'm puzzled, surely you mean the 1740s and not the 1840s? (pardons for the nitpicking).

[ejh]

But I suppose what puzzles me is why for you the period between the 1780s and the 1840s makes all the difference. If it isn't odd to have oranges in Yorkshire in the 1840s, why is it odd to have them there in the 1780s?

Well, it doesn't make all the difference really, although sixty years may be a particularly long time in the country's development at that particular period (how much Manchester was there in 1784 compared to 1847?).

But part of it was the recollection that - if I recall - some time in the eighteenth century, the Navy, facing a problem with scurvy, discovered that it could be avoided by the consumption of citrus fruit. (I suppose I concluded from this, that at the time citrus fruit wasn't a normal part of the everyday diet, or else this would already have been known, but it might of course be that citrus fruit was part of the normal diet domestically, but not necessarily on board ship.)

Or generally, oranges not normally being grown in England, there has to have been some period of time where they passed from being a luxury item to being commonly available (which time would come rather later in rural Yorkshire than in London, I think). My gut feeling was that the 1780s was rather early for that to be the case, because I'd have expected fruit and veg to be relatively locally produced (and to be honest I'd have said so about the 1840s too, but quite reasonably we're trusting Emily on this). Seems that my gut feeling may be wrong, because possibly the cost of importation and (with the development of the canals) transportation wasn't so much. And of course oranges take a long time to go off.

(Barry - no, 1840s is correct. The point is that the book was published in 1847, so Emily Brontë's contemporary knowledge of the area at time of publication is important.)

[Barry Freed]

Right, of course; thanks for the clarification (in other words: D'oh!)

[Richard J]

The Leeds-Liverpool canal had gone from Leeds to Skipton by the mid-1770s, and from Keighley (mid-route) to Haworth is only a four mile walk along the Worth valley floor. Anne Curry, from memory of a talk she gave to us in sixth form, is very good on just how unisolated Haworth actually is...

[Igor Belanov]

It just seems like it's cut off from civilisation. Keighley's the same, though fortunately they manage to transport Timothy Taylor's ales to Leeds in good time.

[belle le triste]

Oranges lemons and limes were all a staple of imperial trade: they grow well in the Caribbean, for example (which has semi-subtextual in Jane Eyre, though not I think Wuthering Heights). The Royal Navy/citrus aspect is really more about official recognition and widespread application of knowledge that may have been available in non-navy circles for centuries (Lappish and other arctic circle nomads had been using eg cloudberries against scurvy since time immemorial). Once it was discovered by an able and energetic RN doctor (whose name I'd have to google) in the late 18th century, the deployment of lemon juice WAS made policy, to good effect; later, possibly for reasons of storage, it became lime juice (oranges being much less effective, because less rich in Vit C?). Later -- for convenience and/or cost -- bottle or canned lemon juice, via a processing that rendered the anti-scorbutic properties much less effective . And then medical fashion shifted, and scurvy was taken to be product of taint and toxicity, rather than a deficiency disease (all this before the discovery of vitamins): hence the tendency of eg British polar explorers to suffer quite unecessarily from scurvy, and sometimes perish -- an earlier knowledge, apparently quite secure, had simply been forgotten, at least institutionally. Which is an elaborate way of saying "It's complicated!"

This is why books called Sugar and the like aren't always worthless: they can cut down through historical zigs and zags (economic and cultural) in interesting ways.

[belle le triste]

(His name was James Lind)

(and "semi-subtextual" s/b "semi-subtextual presence")

[jamie]

I read somewhere that the use of Sicilian lemons by the Navy was in some way important in Britain's support for the Kingdom of the two Sicilies during the Napoleonic wars, which culminated in Nelson's role in the massacre of the Neapolitan liberals. Though of course Britain was following a generally legitimist foreign policy then.

[Barry Freed]

I recall recently reading our very own ajay in some comment thread on some blog somewhere (I think it was LG&M though maybe CT or even unfogged) point out that it was fortuitous that guinea pigs were used in the early experiments to prove the vitamin C deficiency theory of scurvy (or rather lack of citrus causes scurvy because before the discovery of vitamins) since it turns out that guinea pigs share the human susceptibility to scurvy unlike rats and mice.

[Dan Hardie]

I've just read Martin's blog. That is dreadful news. I am so sorry for you both.

[Dan Hardie]

Strong agreement with this, from belle: 'This is why books called Sugar and the like aren't always worthless: they can cut down through historical zigs and zags (economic and cultural) in interesting ways.'

I think that books like that are also an effort to make social and economic history attractive to a popular readership. Which is a worthwhile task, especially given how much of the popular or semi-popular history published in the UK is about war, and particularly the Second World War (or the Third Reich). I would argue that while war was a central agent of change in earlier eras- Hegel's 'midwife of history'- it's been much less so if you look at the history of the world, perhaps especially of Europe, since 1945.

A good popular history of Dien Bien Phu, say, deservedly sells a lot of copies. But a good popular history of antibiotics doesn't, so far as I know, even exist. And yet which has been more important in creating the world we live in?

[Phil]

the deployment of lemon juice WAS made policy, to good effect; later, possibly for reasons of storage, it became lime juice (oranges being much less effective, because less rich in Vit C?)

AIUI (or at least As I Heard Somewhere), the switch from lemon to lime juice was purely political, lime juice being supplied from the British colonies & lemon juice from Europe; lime juice wasn't even as good a source of vitamin C. This may of course be all wrong.

[Chris Williams]

Martin - I'm so sorry to read your news.

[ajay]

Lime juice was a terrible source of Vitamin C and Phil is correct.

There is a good post about it here: http://idlewords.com/2010/03/scott_and_scurvy.htm

Discussing things like "why was the cure discovered and then forgotten again?" Another problem was, as he points out, that you get vitamin C in so many things - fresh meat, for example - so it wasn't easy to identify the cause. (I would be surprised if Lapps needed a specific antiscorbutic, given how much fresh meat is presumably in their diet. Maybe they eat a lot of smoked meat in winter.)

And the point that guinea pigs were used in the discovery of vitamin C in the 20s, but not by Lind in the 18th century.

But a good popular history of antibiotics doesn't, so far as I know, even exist. And yet which has been more important in creating the world we live in?

There's a few good histories of medicine generally; try Roy Porter's "The Greatest Benefit to Mankind". Can't think of a good one specifically about antibiotics though.

[Dan Hardie]

Yes, I've read rather a lot on the history of medicine, though Porter frankly strikes me as rather uncritical in his approach to (say) Foucault. (J.G. Merquior's book on, or rather demolition of, Foucault, is well worth reading.)

But antibiotics is just one example of what I'm talking about: that popular history just ignores most of what is most important in the post-1945 world.

Write a book about a battle or a war or the Third Reich and you have at least some chance of selling well. So authors of popular history do write a lot of books on those subjects. But comparatively few popular histories deal with economic, or social, or demographic, or technological themes: which strike me as being, for the most part, far more important in explaining the history of the last 66 years.

[Alex]

I recommend David Wootton's Bad Medicine: Doctors Doing Harm since Hippocrates.

Very good on debunking Fleming and looking into the prior (but failed) discoveries of antibiotics and the role of relatively unknown students in making penicillin work.

[Barry Freed]

That reminds me of Ivan Illich's "Medical Nemesis" (which seems to have been published in the UK as "Limits to Medicine"). At a quick glance he seems to admit of many of Illich's findings but I take it he rejects his central thesis. Of course Illich published that back in the mid 70s.

[Cian]

I was also going to recommend David Wootton's book, though possibly not on its own as he goes too far in many of his arguments. But as correctives to the whigish kind of history you normally get, very useful.

Barry, its years since I read it. Remind us, what was the central thesis of the book?

[Barry Freed]

Right, apologies. It’s been a very long time since I’ve read him as well but he made quite an impression on me back in my twenties. It’s an application to the field of medicine of Illich’s central thesis which is that all institutions necessarily become counter-productive of the very values they are originally set up to uphold and propagate. So here modern medicine, primarily through iatrogenic disease, makes us sicker. He deplores the medicalization of every last aspect of our lives and, as I recall, especially the medicalization of the very experience of our lives. The book was amazing for its footnotes alone a few of which went on for several pages (IIRC, I think there’s even a page or two of the book which is entirely made up of a footnote continued from the preceding page which was already quite long and then went on to take up most of the page after that), they were notable for their wit and breathtaking erudition as well, positively Gibbonian.

I had the opportunity to spend the greater part of an afternoon with him at the house of a professor/mentor of mine as they were good friends and had known each other in Tehran for many years. He practiced what he preached as when I met him he had a large tumor on the side of his head, the size of, well, a large navel orange, that had been growing for many years by then and he refused to have it operated on. I was told that he had physician friends who examined it and that they said he had already outlived the life expectancy of patients who had it surgically removed. It was obvious he was in great pain, he spoke with great deliberation and every so often he would hold his head in his hands and remain silent for several minutes – as did we all – then it would pass and he would pick up where he left off. (Afterwards I drove him to the Algonquin and, in retrospect, mostly wasted my time with him like the tyro I was by talking some bollocks about Heidegger whom he had no time for - one of the many regrets of my life). A truly remarkable man.

BTW, I see you mentioned an upcoming film of Don Coscarelli’s way upthread. I’ll be looking forward to it as I greatly enjoyed his Bubba Ho-Tep.

[Cian]

I wonder what he'd have thought of Latour, or Don Ihde. The thing about Heidegger is that most of what's good about him he took from elsewhere; that which is original to him is largely romantic tosh. Well that's my jaundiced take on him anyway. Great quote mine though.

I don't think Wooton really rejects, or admits, the thesis. Not exactly what his book is setting out to do. He reckons that medicine makes a difference, but its comparatively minor (about 20% if memory serves. My copy is currently in a box) and that until fairly recently it probably made things worse.

He's fairly unimpressed by doctors as a profession - but then, that's fair enough really.

Don Coscarelli's new film should be epic. Thing has cult classic written all over it. It will probably suck...