This Christmas give a book or two
In recent months I’ve had occasion to mention two books by the great Rick Atkinson, a former newspaperman and a Pulitzer winner for his reporting of the first Iraq war.
More about The British Are Coming and The Guns at Last Light in a moment.
But first, with Christmas just days away, I thought it might be useful to recommend books as gifts. I can recall a long-ago Christmas when I received a two volume biography of a renowned Churchill relative by Sir Winston himself. They were my first hardbacks. I can’t tell you how thrilling it was. A book at Christmas can make all the difference.
Now, here are several possible surprises for beneath the tree.
First, “The Trees.” Some time ago David McCullough wrote a magazine piece about the author Conrad Richter, whom he described as being in love with “the great mainstream of early life in America”; and in love with the words, phrases, and regional dialects deployed by the pioneer men and women who hewed west in the earliest days of the Republic.
“The Trees” is the story of one such family of pioneers trekking over the Allegheny Mountains from Pennsylvania to the dark woods we know as Ohio, in the vicinity of today’s Parkersburg, West Virginia, only then it was new and mysterious and not a little frightening and dangerous.
The book’s tale of struggle, loss, constant labor and vigilance, and (some) joy is told by Richter in the voices, idioms, and rhythms of speech peculiar to that family living in that time and place.
It is a brilliant performance, from first to last.
While I’m at it, let me plug the McCullough collection in which he discusses Richter. The book is “Brave Companions.”
McCullough, of course, is a master stylist, but what’s also admirable is the diversity of the stories he tells in “Brave Companions,” ranging from the early botanist who cast a spell over President Jefferson and the 19th century sculptor who largely shaped the popular imagine of the American West to more contemporary figures (just so you known, “contemporary” is a relative term, since Brave Companions was first published in 1992).
My favorite piece, “The Treasure from the Carpentry Shop,” is a classic that deserves to be read at least yearly.
Eric Foner’s academic speciality is Reconstruction. In “The Second Founding,” his newest, he dives into the passage and the subsequent ups and downs of the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments to the U.S. Constitution, each of which followed the Civil War and each designed to ease the way of former slaves into the world of equality which the war arguably essayed.
As you might have heard, things didn’t work out as planned.
“The Liberation of Paris” by Jean Edward Smith concerns the freeing of the City of Lights from the Nazis in the final summer of the European phase of World War II.
Smith, who taught at Marshall University and wrote esteemed biographies of Generals Grant and Eisenhower, provides a crisp, clear picture of the Parisian saga. Unaccountably, the German general placed in charge of the city by der fuhrer defied Hitler and surrendered Paris largely undamaged to the Allies.
Miracle of miracles.
Onto the Atkinson books. I always suffered from a vague idea of the American Revolution which included a child-like notion of happy colonists waging a bloodless war against their British cousins.
“The British Are Coming,” 1775-1777, dispels that in a hurry. The revolt against King George and the masters of Parliament was full of cruelties and blood-letting, even if the casualties were relatively few (compared to later U.S. wars).
Moreover, the Americans were a braying, contentious lot, and not a few sided with the British.
Lastly, “The Guns at Last Light,” the final gem in Atkinson’s World War II trilogy about the war in Europe, is highly instructive, hugely entertaining, and sublimely horrific.
Atkinson really brings the horror of it all home in the final chapters when discussing the subhuman conditions prevailing at the Nazi death camps liberated by Allied soldiers in the spring of 1945.
After seeing the camps and ministering to the needs of the emaciated and dying, an Army nurse wrote her husband, “I haven’t words to tell you how horrible it really is.”
Another nurse cried out, “God, where are you?”
“A final monstrosity awaited discovery by American soldiers (at Dachau),” Atkinson writes, “not only further confirming the Reich’s turpitude but the moral corrosion of war, which put even the righteous at risk.”
As for Hitler, “the chief instigator” of the madness, Atkinson writes that he was “a narcissistic beerhall demagogue” who bent an entire nation to his evil will.
All of the books here are in print. Good reading.
Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown. He can be reached at dick.l.robbins@gmail.com.