Becoming FDR: The Personal Crisis That Made a President by Jonathan Darman

 

Spurred on by finally seeing the movie of the musical ANNIE of all things. Don't know much of the FDR story. This is interesting so far, if a little by-the-numbers on how polio drove him to do it all.

The People Immortal by Vasiliĭ Grossman

 

Vivid account of a Red Army group in Ukraine in 1943 as they finally begin to turn the tide against the Nazi invasion. Unusual, shifting pov style of narration. Grossman unknown to me, but was the first to publish acclaimed fiction about the war during the war, and was a national hero in Russia for inspiring hope in a beleaguered time.

If This Is a Man/The Truce by Primo Levi

 

This book (two books, actually) is amazing, a take on concentration camps unlike any other I've read. Levi was an Italian Jew who went to Auschwitz for the last ten months of the war. The first volume, IF THIS IS A MAN, contains his sociological, often clinical descriptions of the prison camp industry is astounding, how even with almost nothing the prisoners still had a "thriving" economy of barter and favoritism which seemed, perversely, to keep the survivors sane as 90% of the other inmates disappeared into the crematoriums. Sane in spite of the sickness, the filth, the freezing temperatures, the backbreaking labor.

The second book, THE TRUCE, follows his circuitous journey home after liberation, a winding trail through Eastern Europe and Russia which took over a year.

Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson

 

The Sun and Her Stars by Donna Rifkind

from The Sun and Her Stars: "Salka chose instead to adorn her house with people... There was a feeling of abundance here, but the extravagance was emotional rather than material..."

A valuable and graceful book that rescues Salka Viertel from being mostly famous as a minor character in Greta Garbo's life. Rifkind firmly establishes Viertel's unique place in history as someone who singlehandedly comforted a generation of European emigrees who made their way to Los Angeles in the 1930s to escape fascism and the murdering Nazis. The grace and richness of Rifkind's use of secondary sources is astounding, as she uses the words (from correspondence and memoirs, novels and films) of the dozens of distinguished writers, artists, actors who found a home in her home, to richly animate the life of the mind her house became for this embattled homeless group. Irwin Shaw, Thomas Mann, Heinrich Mann, Christopher Isherwood, Arnold Schoenberg, Billy Wilder are but a few.

For just one example, the following from the novel Prater Violet by Christopher Isherwood, about his character Friedrich Bergmann, based on Salka Viertel's husband Bertholdt: "The face was the face of an emperor, but the eyes were the dark mocking eyes of his slave." Or the title of this review, which Rifkind uses to describe Viertel's last view of Berlin when she left:  "Beware, o wanderer, the road is walking too," from a poem by Rilke, another Viertel acquaintance.

Rifkind, with verve, density and grace, makes what could have been an exercise in esoteric filmography into a gripping cultural history of a singular woman and her courage in a terrible time. Highest recommendation!

"See the black souls of the Jews fly away" p 131

Salka's son Peter's novel The Canyon. always mud, heavy and brown, that was the water's brother.

director Rouben Mamoulian, who used a metronome to time Garbo's movements in Queen Christina ("I have been memorizing the room")

Proof of Collusion by Seth Abramson

House of Trump, House of Putin by Craig Unger

The World As It Is by Ben Rhodes

Quick history of the Obama years by his principal speechwriter and an important foreign policy advisor.

Stalin's Curse by Robert Gellately

Dan Carlin's Hardcore History

Addictive for the lengthy commute. So far I've listened to:

Countdown to Armageddon (5 parts, WWI)

Radical Thoughts (on the evolution of the idea of a "Red Menace" in America)

Thor's Angels (4-hourson European tribes after the fall of the Roman empire in 472 and in the ensuing 1000 years, what used to be known as "The Dark Ages")

Logical Insanity (a history of aerial bombing between 1895 and Hiroshima)

Wrath of the Khans I & II (long series on Genghis Khan)

Of Kennedys & Kings by Harris Wofford

Great history of the civil rights movement and the Kennedy White House, and the post-JFK civil rights struggle.

Lincoln Observed: Civil War Dispatches of Noah Brooks

Blessed Unrest by Paul Hawken

To End all Wars by Adam Hochschild

Incredible documentation of the intersection of the war industry and peace forces mostly in Great Britain during the run up to World War I and throughout that horrendously destructive conflict.

The execution of several members of the Bantam Battalions, composed of men who were above 5 feet tall but less than 5 foot three inches tall, and so had missed the height minimum for the first round of conscription.

The proximity of the German and Allied lines during the first 18 months of the war, and how the opposing forces would declare impromptu cease-fires and socialize.

Then Everything Changed by Jeff Greenfield

Compelling "alternate history" of the second half of the 20th Century. What is JFK had been assassinated in December of 1960 (there was a planned attempt) rather than November 1963? What if RFK had NOT been assassinated. What if Gary Hart had been elected President in 1980?

BONUS INTERESTING THING: My father, Charles "Chuck" Enright is used as a character twice in the White House Situation Room scenes in the JFK section!

Washington Rules by Andrew Bacevich

John Adams and George III

I am no student of history. Rather, I am a lousy student of history, allowing the neat HBO John Adams series to drive me to the David McCullough book itself. And it might just have been Paul Giamatti's swell performance that made it so compelling, but I found particularly moving the moment when Adams goes to England after England has capitulated and surrendered and signed a treaty with the new United States. Adams must face the King in proper form and with due respect, and declare the United States' intention to become, if not at once, eventual fast friends with England.

Again, my poor historicism shows: I can't tell from the book whether Adams' remarks to the King are written down in the first place, and then recited to the King, or whether he just wings it in his audience, then later reconstructs the text in peace. Ditto with the King's words. But it's moving -- on both ends -- the words these two countries seemed to share in order to heal wounds and begin a reconciliation, the kind of moment that often must go forgotten in the forward rush of progress and time and rapid change.

First, John Adams to the King:

"The United States have appointed me their minister plenipotentiary to Your Majesty. The appointment of a minister from the United States to Your Majesty's Court will form an epoch in the history of England and of America. I think myself more fortunate than all my fellow-citizens, in having the distinguished honor to be the first to stand in your Majesty's royal presence in a diplomatic character; and I shall esteem my self the happiest of men if I can be instrumental in recommending my country more an dmore to your Majesty's royal benevolence, and of restoring an entire esteem, confidence, and affection, or, in better words, the old good nature and the old good humor between people who, though separated by an ocean and under different governments, have the same language, a similiar religion, and kindred blood. I beg your Majesty's permission to add hat although I have some time before been intrusted by my country, it was never in my whole life in a manner so agreeable to myself."

Then Adams, who had been closely watching the King as he spoke, noticed the King "was much affected, and answered me with more tremor than I had spoken with":

The circumstances of this audience are so extraordinary, the language you have now held is so extremely proper, and the feeling you have discovered so justly adapted to the occasion, that I must say that I not only receive with pleasure the assurance of the friendly dispositions of the United States, but that I am very glad that the choice has fallen upon you to be their minister. I wish you, sir, to believe, and that it be understood in America, that I have done nothing in the late contest but what I thought I owed to my people. I will be very frank with you, I was the last to consent to separation; but the separation having been made, and having become inevitable, I have always said, as I say now, that I would be the first to meet the friendship of the United States as an independent power.