Sarah Blackwell. At the existentialist cafe.

The well-written book tells you next to nothing about existentialist philosophy and its influence on XX century culture but plenty about the characters involved. One sentence: "It is the single documented example I have come across of Heidegger actually doing something nice" (asking a bookseller to prominently display Paul Celan's book before his visit to town) is worth the price of admission.

P.S. Now you understand where James Dean comes from. 

Juliet Barker. 1381. The Year of the Peasants' Revolt.

A nicely written piece of historical fantasy, in the spirit of Game of Thrones. Her late 14th century English commoners live to their late fifties despite three large waves of bubonic plague and staggering death rate at childbirth, eat hi-protein diets straight from a London supermarket, understand the connection between infection and bodily hygiene and some even have indoor plumbing. Did I forget domestic servants saving to buy stone houses? Strict enforcement of municipal edicts in an almost illiterate society? She herself mentions that an ability to read a psalm by heart was considered a sufficient evidence of clerical vocation.  Barker announces an entirely different popular image of the Middle Ages "a nineteenth-century invention."

There is little explanation how this squares with (a well-documented) meager yields of crops (1:3-1:5) in Medieval England and other mainstream economic histories. If there was such a disparity in the living conditions between Late Medieval British Isles and the rest of the world (including lands with much more temperate climes), what is the particular reason?

Her book can be read as a page-turning novel but given her fast and loose treatment of facts (an army of 36,000 French facing 6,000 English at Agincourt based on a single line of pro-British historian) I cannot say how accurate it is.

Niall Ferguson. Kissinger: 1923-1968: The Idealist.

Niall Ferguson is a Harvard worthy who obtained his position without any recognizable body of scholarly work, probably due to the sheepish desire of the regents of the Bush-Cheney era "to get us some neocon." Next time, if he, for the replenishing of his already deep pockets decides to issue another long and highly inaccurate compilation about Rodrigo Borgia, he might call it "Alexander VI, The Celibate."

Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands.

In view of immensity of the Nazi crimes very few even among Europe's right wingers deny the Holocaust. Only in Canada and Australia--the lands of asylum of many Eastern European Nazi criminals--old style denial is still extant. However, there are more sophisticated forms of whitewash of the history of the Nazi Europe. It can be classified into four tropes:

1. Victims were much fewer than it is thought;
2. Victims largely brought it upon themselves;
3. Perpetrators were motivated by noble goals and/or coerced into their crimes--in truth SS could not find enough spots for volunteers;
4. Perpetrators themselves were dealt with in inhuman and barbaric ways.


We leave now in a virtual world. There is no actual need to make anything for the nation to live well, thank you. Wealth is created out of nothing by the Wall Street investment banks and hedge funds, and material production is only a distraction from this "creation of value." Twenty-year olds (think Bristol Palin) write memoirs about how they got pregnant; even stranger that these memoirs are bought by somebody. Who may be interested in a ghostwritten life experiences of a twenty-year old brat? We fight virtual wars, in which there is no victory and no defeat, only a few rednecks dying to kill a few hundred thousands unarmed natives for whatever purpose the people, usually youngsters, who never fought or led soldiers in battle view as vital to our national security in their Foggy Bottom or Washington Mall offices.

This virtual world created a virtual history: the one in which WE (i.e. the Anglo-Saxon world, Captain America, Private Ryan, etc.) defeated Hitler and Stalin. Strangely enough, unlike the Third Reich, after its crushing defeat, USSR did not disappear but on the contrary, occupied Eastern Europe for half-a-century. One version is that there was evil Hitler and his comrades and a good Wehrmacht--who the commander-in-chief of that may be?--which invaded Eastern Europe exclusively to save it from the clutches of barbarian Russian Communism. Then it turns out that may be the fuhrer was not that bad, certainly better than the Uncle Joe, if it were not for his pathetic obsession with killing Jews. And so on, so forth. This version is not so new (e.g. see my review of S. Nelke http://oldpossumsbookreview.blogspot.com/2008/04/sonke-neitzel-tapping-hitlers-generals.html) and was invented by German generals in Allied captivity already during WWII. Equally probable is that this was an invention of the intellectuals of Oswald Moseley's party (K. Chesterton, J. F. C. Fuller etc.), when, after the Blitz, their base of working-class hoodlums could have provided them with a fair correction with metal chains and bars instead of cheering. Or "Generalissimo" Franco in dire need for postwar American aid. So what?

      Of course, most support for this garbage was taken straight from the lore of Eastern European supplicants of the Third Reich whose political heirs are now ruling the majority of the "New Europe" NATO members, who send mercenaries for America's colonial wars. But I cannot suspect that much Macchiavellianism in these opuses. Coddling the puppet regimes in Eastern Europe is a pure waste of effort: they are already being paid in hard currency.
      I suspect that the main motive behind such re-writing of history is the same as the motive behind military monuments in Vienna. Almost all of them were built not when the Empire was a continental superpower but after ignominious defeats, which started to pursue Austrians in the second half of the XIX century. And again, once Soviet Union started to succumb to bureaucratic senility of the late Brezhnev era, the erection of war monuments acquired monstrous scale. The decline of American Empire, probably, is the main cause of re-writing history of the World War II so as to present it as a unique American achievement.

Mary Beard, SPQR

I praised her Confronting the Classics: Tradition, Adventures and Innovation for naught. Her next opus is not so much a revisionist study of Rome as advertised on the cover as a hackwork (this is my imperfect translation of Russian khaltura, having no English equivalent). While most of her judgments on Roman history are sound, the book is so disjointed and garbled that its 600 pages cannot be viewed other than series of amusing anecdotes.

There is little a reader can learn from Mary Beard's about administration, economics or military affairs of the Roman Empire. Again, when she touches these subjects, her opinions--except for the military--are usually competent but there is no way one can get any coherent picture from her book.