The Presidents of War

 

The Presidents of War – by Michael Beschloss

Michael Beschloss is one of my favorite historical authors, and the subject of U.S. Presidents is one of my favorite topics, so I had pretty high expectations for this one.  Fortunately, Beschloss didn’t let me down.  This was one of the most enjoyable historical accounts that I’ve read for quite some time.

When looking at the tenure of any U.S. President, their legacy seems to be mostly defined by the particular travails the country is experiencing, and the more serious the travails are, the sharper the presidency seems to be defined.  Often when a commander in chief serves over a period of time where nothing substantial seems to happen, history seems to mostly forget the individual.  I’m guessing most Americans aren’t familiar with names such as Benjamin Harrison or Calvin Coolidge.   Other names, though, such as Franklin Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln, seem to be known by all including young children in grade school.  Would history remember these two presidents had they not presided over the American Civil War and World War II?  I doubt it.

Some of the lesser known wars, though, coincidentally have modern day citizens draw a blank if you were to ask them who the president was, or even what the war itself was about.  Names such as James Polk and William McKinley are not on most people’s radar, and the more time slips away, the more inconsequential those names tend to be.

What Beschloss does in this book is give a short history of the country’s 8 major wars (from The War of 1812 through Vietnam) with the main focus being on the commander in chief, and the particulars of the role the man played getting us into the war, and how they navigated the country through the conflict.  This is not a very easy task to do.  Take FDR and World War II for example.  My guess is that there have been hundreds of books written on Roosevelt and thousands written on the second world war, so how can one pick and choose to come up with a concise, yet detailed summation to include here?  Fortunately, Beschloss highly succeeds with this task.

He manages to lead of each chapter devoted to the start of each war with a memorable, everyday man anecdote, and then manages to also give a bit of history of each president.  We then learn a bit about the particular conflict, and how the president got the country involved, and how the leader carried the country through the entire conflict – good, bad, and ugly.  It’s interesting to learn just how little things have actually changed over 200 years when talking about politics.  No matter how a war might need U.S. involvement, whichever party is on the opposite side of the political fence always has to grandstand and gripe about everything the president does.  The only exception could be the second world war, yet Roosevelt had plenty of adversaries during the first three years of that war before the U.S. was attacked and became involved.  There were many who didn’t like many aspects of how Roosevelt navigated the tough waters of neutrality while trying to help cross-continent allies defend themselves against tyrannical dictators, so there was still plenty of political bickering going on.

Then, of course, we must face the ugly fact that not all wars that the country entered had altruistic motives. A particularly harsh example is President James Polk and how the country got involved in the Mexican-American War during the 1840s.  The author alleges that Polk was simply greedy and wanted to acquire more land under the U.S. umbrella, so why not take advantage of a neighboring fledging country that seemed to be led in a rather backwards fashion?

Of course, Vietnam is still present in many readers’ memory, so we get to relive that sad part of history again. I also thought that this was the best part of the book. By ‘best’, of course, I mean the detail of Lyndon Johnson’s involvement, not that the war is anything that the U.S. should look back on fondly in any means.  Ironically, though, The Korean “Police Action” seems to be represented rather thin here.  It could be that there simply wasn’t much “history” to write about, especially President Harry Truman’s involvement. (In many ways, the bulk of that war was mostly a stalemate at the 38^th parallel, so there probably weren’t that many details to relive.)

I would highly recommend this book for all, but being the history geek that I am, I would honestly prefer someone with no knowledge to read a separate volume devoted to each of the conflicts, and each of the presidents who presided. If, however, that’s too much for one’s palate, this book serves as a good “Cliffs Notes”. It may even stir the reader’s interest to want more.

Note: The George W. Bush Afghanistan and Iraq conflicts are mentioned in this book’s epilogue and only a brief summary is included.  Even though these wars were long, there was relatively little combat, injuries, and (thankfully) death, so this might be why Beschloss decided to basically skip these. Although these wars (particularly Iraq) did shape the Bush 43 presidency, the conflicts seemed to be on the back pages of the newspapers during most of the U.S. involvement, so most remember these wars as an unpleasant undercurrent as opposed to a radical struggle with worldwide consequences.

The Rebels of Ireland

 

The Rebels of Ireland – by Edward Rutherford

After the first 300 pages of this 900-page novel, I had high hopes.  I thought Mr. Rutherford may have finally seen the light.  I thought maybe he finally overcame some of the obstacles that he encountered in his earlier works that prevented his “really good books” from being “great”.  I was so excited.  Alas, it was not to be.  Once the first 1/3 of the book had been complete, he regressed right back into, what I think, are major hindrances to his work.

Rutherford writes about places.  In this case, Ireland. This was actually the second part of a two book series.  His books span centuries, sometimes millennia, of said location.  We observe the place he is writing about from long ago, and as the book progresses, we advance decades, or even centuries rather quickly.  As we meet new characters, they’re all relatives of the ones in past chapters.  So essentially we have an enormous family (families, actually) tree that must be assimilated while reading.  As his books progress, we don’t just get to read about the characters in his novels, yet the events of the geographical location and how they shaped history, and therefore the characters as well.

After reading several of Rutherford’s books, I’m not really sure this is as great an idea as it seems. Maybe it is, but Rutherford loses focus, and his books tend to become (boring) history lessons as opposed to enchanting stories.  If you do simple math, you can see that it’s no easy task to tell such enthralling tales within such rigid parameters.  Example: Let’s say one of his books covers 1,000 years. The book is, say, 1,000 pages.  If the book is divided into 10 chapters, each lasting 100 years, that comes to 100 years of story crammed into only 100 pages.  When you have five or six families involved, you can see that this can simply be too much.

Well, this book was only about 400 years of history, and after 300 pages, the reader was kept in a relatively smooth time transition.  So we had a chance to know the characters.  We had a chance to feel the characters, study their nuances, and experience their joys and sorrows.  These are the very things that a good novel should do, and Rutherford does an excellent job as long as he doesn’t feel obligated to cram too many centuries in.

Sadly, this is exactly what happens during the last two thirds of this book.  Many of his chapters feel like they’re nothing other than two main characters having a political discussion while sitting at a table.  Do we know and feel the characters?  No, we don’t.  Rutherford loses his focus, and his characters just ramble at each other about the particular historical events of the time.  It’s quite sad and maddening and not predominantly interesting.

For this particular book, the main area of contention is the ongoing fight between Protestants and Catholics. Yes, this is a big part of Ireland’s history, but the particulars of the conflict and how it evolves over centuries simply don’t make for enjoyable reading when one wants to read a novel for…you know… a story.  When we quickly jump forward by decades and centuries with new family members crowding the pages, it’s simply too much.  In fact, I basically gave up by the time I got to the last chapter.  I think I just skimmed the pages. I was so ready to be done with this thing.

Rutherford has written 3 latter books (as of the time of my review) since this one, and I don’t know if they suffer from the same issues as many of his earlier ones, but I would offer the following suggestion to him if he’s out there reading this:   Instead of 5 or 6 families with dozens and dozens of characters related to each other over the span of several hundred years, maybe limited the overall time to maybe a couple hundred years.   Then, have maybe 2, no more than 3 families.  You can have more characters outside of these families, but this is really the limit you should try to achieve.  This seemed to be where this book was going, as I said, early on, and for a while it really was a great story.

Maybe, it’s just me, but I really don’t like having to flip back to the family tree that he included after reading every 20 pages to try to remember who was who.  It doesn’t help my memory at all when he keeps describing the characters over the centuries as having “bright green, emerald eyes” in an attempt to show relations.   Sadly, I can’t remember who had “bright green, emerald eyes” several hundred pages into this thing, so these descriptions that are supposed to somehow make the reader remember who their ancestor was in a preceding chapter does absolutely no good at all.

Rutherford is a fine writer when he focuses on story and characters.  His attempt to stuff his books with mundane history, though, sadly brings his work down several notches.  This has been an issue for most of his books, some worse than others.  I’m hoping his latter books allow the story to breathe a bit better.

The Bible

 

The Bible – Karen Armstrong

First, I have to confess that this book was not what I thought it was going to be, so I was somewhat disappointed.  My experience, though, really shouldn’t taint the quality of the book nor the reading experience necessarily.  I was hoping that this book would be a deep dive into the Bible.  How did it get written? How was it compiled?  How was it decided what should and should not be included?  What were the inner workings and debates of the Council of Nicea in the 4^th century?  How did Martin Luther decide which books to remove after he changed it?

I really didn’t find answers to most of these questions.  If they were answered, they were done so in not as much detail as I would have liked.  What this book seems to be, is a history of the Judaism-Christian faith from its earliest days up to the present.  That in itself is not without rewards. After all, the Bible IS the cornerstone in which all the Judeo-Christian faith is based. But I was wanting more specifics on the Bible and less of the history of the faiths.

Part of my discouragement is that I recently completed another work by Karen Armstrong, “A History of God” and at many times, I felt like I was reading that book all over again.  That particular book also focused on Islam along with Judaism and Christianity, so “The Bible” at least is somewhat shorter and more concise since Islam is rarely mentioned here.  Still, though, I can’t help but feel like I was reading the same things over again with this one.

She does introduce some controversial subjects that many mainstream Christians probably don’t agree.  She claims, for example, that the Pentateuch was not entirely written by Moses and was, in fact, written by (at least) 3 authors who scholars refer to as “J”, “E”, and “P”.  This is an interesting (and not new) assertion.  She does go into some detail as to why many scholars believe this, and she makes good points.  Yet I found myself wanting more.  I really felt like to do this book justice, she needed to spend more time on her topics.  She’s written masses of books, though, on similar subjects, so she may have this ground covered in some of her other works.

Some good things within the pages, I just wanted more focus on the ins and outs of how the actual “Bible” was brought to light as opposed to a history of the nations and people that hold it in high regard.