Book Review: The House of Government by Yuri Slezkine

The House of Government: A Saga of the Russian Revolution
by Yuri Slezkine
Princeton University Press

'The House of Government' is packed with a fascinating tangle of true, uniquely Russian stories

The book's title is an actual place: a vast apartment building – built in 1931 for the new Communist ruling elite – standing on an embankment in the Moscow River, just opposite the Kremlin. 

The subtitle of Yuri Slezkine's mammoth new book, The House of Government, is “A Saga of the Russian Revolution,” and this, combined with the book's wry variation on the standard opening disclaimer – “This is a work of history. Any resemblance to fictional characters, dead or alive, is entirely coincidental” – gives a clear indication of the nature of Slezkine's ambition here. The sheer size of the book, 1,000 pages in the US hardcover, shows the scope of those ambitions.

Published in the Christian Science Monitor, August 18, 2017

Book Review: The Seventh Function of Language by Laurent Binet

The Seventh Function of Language
by Laurent Binet
translated from the French by Sam Taylor
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2017

Laurent Binet’s previous novel translated into English, 2013’s HHhH, was a strange and weirdly memorable thing, a fictional representation of the 1942 assassination of arch-Nazi leader Reinhard Heydrich that was both powerfully impressionistic and scrupulously accurate. The book enjoyed a well-deserved success and still has what the publishing industry used to refer to as “legs.”

It’s tougher to imagine the same kind of long-term popularity for the newest Binet to be translated into English, 2015’s The Seventh Function of Language. 

Published in Open Letters Weekly August 8, 2017

Book Review: The Half-Drowned King by Linnea Hartsuyker

The Half-Drowned King
by Linnea Hartsuyker
Harper, 2017

For Linnea Hartsuyker’s impressive debut novel The Half-Drowned King (new from Harper with a stunning cover design by Milan Bozic) certain literary comparisons are going to be inevitable, or at least inevitable when the book is considered by long-in-the-tooth reviewers who’ll take one rheumy look at her book’s setting – ninth-century Norway – and immediately flash back to the dewy days of their reviewing prime and the appearance of Frans Bengtsson’s epic novel about tenth-century Vikings, The Long Ships, a book that follows the rollicking adventures of its sword-wielding hero Orm from roughly 980 to roughly 1010 and was published in 1955 in an English-language translation by Michael Meyer (and, delightfully, just recently given a natty paperback reprint by the folks at the New York Review of Books Classics line, so it could reach a whole new generation of Upper East Side book reviewers). Much like Hartsuyker, Bengtsson unabashedly if a trifle unwisely admitted to owing a great creative debt to Snorri Sturluson, the 12th-century Icelandic historian who in the course of his writing career generated so much bullhooey that the whole of Scandinavia has been fertilized with it ever since. Snorri’s book Heimskringla tells the stories of the old Norse kings, interweaves all its high and low deeds with charged drama and supernatural shadings, and exerts a hypnotic spell as powerful as that of any hoard-guarding dragon.

Published in Open Letters Weekly August  9, 2017

Book Review: Their Backs Against the Sea by Bill Sloan

Their Backs Against the Sea: The Battle of Saipan and the Largest Banzai Attack of World War II
by Bill Sloan
Da Capo Press, 2017

Historian Bill Sloan continues a string of detailed, even granular accounts of the Pacific Theater of the Second World War with his latest book, Their Backs Against the Sea. The subject here is the grueling Battle of Saipan, which Sloan characterizes as a key conflict: the island, at fourteen miles long the second-largest in the Marianas, would give advancing US forces a vital foothold, a base that was at last within striking distance of the Japanese home islands. And the Japanese forces on the island, under the command of Lieutenant General Yoshitsugo Saito, knew this perfectly well; they understood that they needed to hold the island at all costs. A large part of the significance of the Battle of Saipan derives from how literally “at all costs” was interpreted.

Published in Open Letters Weekly, August 14, 2017

Book Review: Midnight in the Pacific by Joseph Wheelan

Midnight in the Pacific: Guadalcanal – the World War II Battle That Turned the Tide of War
by Joseph Wheelan
Da Capo Press, 2017

August 7th of this year marked the 75th anniversary of the Battle of Guadalcanal, which was launched in an almost unplanned scramble in the summer of 1942, mainly out of US Admiral Ernest King’s ferocity to strike a blow against the Imperial Japanese Navy. King (the subject of an excellent biography by Thomas Buell called Master of Sea Power) warned that unchecked Japanese victories in the Pacific imperiled the all-important shipping lanes between the US West Coast and Hawaii and Australia. When King and Admiral Chester Nimitz learned of Japanese plans to construct an airfield on the island of Guam, the die was cast: they sent in the Marines.

Published in Open Letters Weekly, August 15, 2017

Book Review: The Paris Spy by Susan Elia MacNeal

The Paris Spy
by Susan Elia MacNeal
Bantam, 2017

“This is not my war” Susan Elia MacNeal’s redoubtable heroine Maggie Hope says at one point in the new series novel, The Paris Spy, and although the moment is deadly serious – she’s verbally sparring with a silky, venomous Obersturmbannführer in occupied Paris at the height of the Second World War, and if she slips up and breaks her cover (she’s in Paris to spy, of course, for the Special Operations Executive), she knows she’ll suffer the same fate as the Erica Calvert, the SOE agent whose recent disappearance in Paris has urgent relevance to the Allies’ advancing plans for the D-Day landing in Normandy – and yet the line will likely prompt a quick smile or laugh from long-time readers of MacNeal’s series. Ever since 2012’s Mr. Churchill’s Secretary, American-born Maggie Hope has been on half a dozen adventures with a cast of endearing supporting characters (including a good many well-drawn historical figures). She has fought, scrambled, connived, and sleuthed her way through more than enough adventures in hopes of thwarting the Nazis that it most certainly is her war – she owns it as thoroughly as any character in an ongoing mystery series.

Published in Open Letters Weekly, August 17, 2017

Book Review: One Summer Day in Rome by Mark Lamprell

One Summer Day in Rome
by Mark Lamprell
Flatiron Books, 2017

The briefest exposure to the day’s news headlines is enough; there’s scarcely an additional need to reach for the nearest novel that seems carefree, that promises whimsy with a touch of romance, and that breathes the worry-free airs of summer. And if the book in question has “summer” in the title, so much the better.

No shortage of such books, of course, regardless of the season, but Mark Lamprell’s new novel One Summer Day in Rome is just about as confident and winning an example of the type as readers are likely to encounter in bookshops before Labor Day shuts down the carnival for another year.

Published in Open Letters Weekly, August 17, 2017

Book Review: The World Broke In Two

The World Broke In Two: Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, E. M. Forster, and the Year That Changed Literature
by Bill Goldstein
Henry Holt, 2017

“The world broke in two in 1922 or thereabouts” – so Willa Cather wrote in 1936, and college undergraduates have been worrying it like a soup-bone ever since. That worrying writ large forms the kernel of Bill Goldstein’s new book The World Broke In Two, with its leave-nothing-to-the-imagination subtitle, “Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, E. M. Forster, and the Year That Changed Literature,” which centers on some of the key figures in the Western literary world in the year 1922. Goldstein, the founding editor of the New York Times books website, recounts the professional and personal lives of his main characters and a big cast of others in chummy detail (“Hearing of Virginia’s latest relapse in May, Tom wrote in sympathy to Leonard …”), all set against a backdrop of the WWI aftermath that Goldstein contends is psychologically crucial. . .

Published in Open Letters Weekly, August 20, 2017

Book Review: Bush and Cheney by David Ray Griffin

Bush and Cheney: How They Ruined America and the World
by David Ray Griffin
Olive Branch Press, 2017

Fifteen years ago, when the 9-11 “Truther” movement was in the full flush of its strength, David Ray Griffin was its most creditable and least likely mouthpiece. Griffin displayed none of the visual clues that came standard with most of his other conspiracy “researchers” – no thousand-yard stare of the perennially ignored, no permanent sheen of cold forehead-sweat, no foghorn-monotone honed over decades or entire lifetimes of speaking nonsense to power, and most noticeable of all, none of that furtive feel of opportunism that differentiates the con man from true believer.

Published in Open Letters Weekly August 23, 2017

Book Review: The Riviera at War by George G. Kundahl

The Riviera at War: World War II on the Côte D'Azur
by George G. Kundahl
IB Tauris, 2017

Even the title of George Kundahl's impressive new book, The Riviera at War, sounds fundamentally odd to modern ears; the gorgeous, sybaritic glories of southeastern France almost always strike their visitors as inviolable parts of the place, like the sea and the sunlight – the very idea that war could mar such a place seems untenable.

Published in Open Letters Weekly, August 22, 2017

Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World

Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World
by Laura Spinney
Public Affairs, 2017

Science journalist Laura Spinney's new book Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World details what she refers to as “the greatest massacre of the twentieth century”: [2] the wave of influenza commonly dubbed “Spanish flu” that swept across the entire planet in 1918, infecting one-third of Earth's population at the time, 500 million people, and killing somewhere in the range of 100 million of the infected before it began to abate in 1920.

Published in The National, July 25th, 2017