Caesar and Christ, A History of Roman Civilization and of Christianity from their beginnings to A.D. 325 (The Story of Civilization Volume III) by Will Durant (1944)

"We look on past ages with condescension, as a mere preparation for us . . . but what if we're only an after-glow of them."  J.G. Farrell, as quoted by Robert Harris as an introduction to his historical novel, Conspirita.

The Black Holes in my Knowledge, or, Why I Read this Book.    

"Education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance."  Will Durant

In recent years, my readings on various historical subjects of personal interest have, again and again, led me back to Rome.  I have come to realize that, in the West, the men and women who peopled most historical eras since 300 AD were, themselves, studiously interested in the classical world, and so, to understand the viewpoints of prior generations it is imperative to know at least some of the basics of Greek philosophy and Roman history, together with Biblical religion, which influenced so much of the worldview of all those who came after.  The medieval Christians, for example, in addition to their reliance on the Biblical revelations of Jerusalem, plumbed (albeit selectively) the philosophy of Athens and the literature of Rome for their moral, ethical, and legal precepts.  The nation builders of the same era constantly sought to revive the dream of a new, but holier, Roman Empire. Later, the architects of the Renaissance saw their chief mission as bringing a "new birth" of Hellenized Rome's scientific and artistic achievements to a benighted world.

In the 18th Century, the English-speaking world was intensely interested in Roman history, knowledge of which was considered by our nation's founders to be essential as a guide to informed self-government.  A young John Adams practiced for future rhetorical glory by reciting Cicero's Catalinian Orations in front of a mirror and Thomas Jefferson used Cicero's "The Case Against Verres" as a model and template for his own case against King George in the Declaration of Independence.  It is impossible to understand the founders or the Revolution without understanding, among other things, the history of Rome and the lessons the founders derived for the future, right or wrong, from that history. Jefferson's life-long distrust of standing armies was grounded in the many examples afforded by Roman history of such armies, from Julius Caesar to the Praetorian Guard, seizing control of the civil government. And Adam's lifelong belief that an aristocracy would inevitably develop in America, whose interests would need to be checked and balanced, was similarly based on his knowledge of Rome, and of what came after.  [Endnote 1]

As historian Bernard Bailyn has pointed out, "Knowledge of classical authors was universal among colonists with any degree of education, and references to them and their works abound in the literature" of the revolution. [2]   The founders of our Nation were especially enthralled by that period of classical history in which the Roman Republic made its last valiant stand before falling into libertine anarchy and civil war, which ended via the imperial dictatorships of the Roman Empire [3] established by Julius and then Octavius Caesar, fulfilling one of the Platonian patterns of history. The revolutionary colonists saw their own struggle against British tyranny as akin to that of the Roman generation which had unsuccessfully attempted to forestall the overthrow of the Republic and its replacement with a military dictatorship.  [4]  Thus, when a beleaguered Washington wanted to improve the morale of the troops at Valley Forge, he arranged for a showing of his favorite play, Joseph Addison's popular drama, Cato, about the Roman Senator's principled stand against the tyranny of Julius Caesar.  (It had been from this play, earlier in the war, that captured colonial spy Nathan Hale had drawn his famous last words, before being hung by the British: "My only regret is that I have but one life to lose for my country").  And when a victorious Washington, at the end of the war, returned his commission to the Continental Congress, both he and the world were keenly aware that he was acting in the role of an American Cincinnatus, the General of Republican Rome who had taken up the sword and the mantle of leadership to save his people from peril, and then relinquished that power and returned to his farm. [5]

But in our own time, any description of the fall of a republic and the rise of an empire is far more likely to be understood as an allusion to Star Wars, than as a reference to Rome. After decades of relentlessly and ruthlessly utilitarian educational "reforms," of which the common core is only the most recent example, most Americans no longer know anything about Rome.  Why this came to be, and how modern Americans were cut off from vast swathes of a historical heritage which earlier generations considered their intellectual commons, is a story for another day. For present purposes, it suffices to say that I count myself one of the victims of this imposed ignorance and deliberate policy of abetting historical illiteracy.  My religious upbringing has given me some grounding in one leg of what has been called the three legged stool of Western Civilization: the biblical theology of Jerusalem.  But as for the other two legs of the stool, the philosophy, art, and science of Athens; and the legal principles of Rome and the lessons of Roman history, I must learn of those on my own, having been exposed, instead, to hours of mindless fluff in the formal education of my youth.  Hence my interest in this book. [6]

The Third Book in the Durants' Series.

Caesar and Christ, subtitled, A History of Roman Civilization and of Christianity from their beginnings to A.D. 325, is the third volume in Will (and eventually Ariel) Durant's famous 11-volume series, The Story of Civilization, written between 1935  and 1975, and introduced into thousands of middle class American homes as the bonus for joining the Book of the Month Club.  This volume, published in 1944, is the first and only book in the series I have ever read cover to cover.

Will Durant's Wisdom

The author, Will Durant, is as congenial a guide through this history as anyone is likely to find, and he knows just where to pause for asides and personal commentary and observation that overcome the dustiness one usually finds in chronological summaries of history.  Indeed, it is his authorial asides which make the book most worth reading, raising its value as a storehouse of not just knowledge, but also of wisdom, and demonstrating why bland, committee-written, textbook history, has done so much to kill off historical interest in our public schools.  A few examples of Durant's asides, which are what really make the book worth reading:


-On the inherent conflict between security and freedom:

"The principle of democracy is freedom, the principle of war is discipline; each requires the absence of the other."

"Caesar returned to the task of persuading the Gauls that peace is sweeter than freedom."

"We must reconcile ourselves to the probability that whatever power establishes security and order will send taxgatherers to collect something more than the cost."

-On Cicero:

"Not since Plato has wisdom worn such prose."

"Next to Cicero, [Seneca] was the most lovable hypocrite in history."

-On human nature:

"The constitution of man always rewrites the constitutions of states."

"[I]t is as difficult to forgive forgiveness as it is to forgive those whom we have injured."

"Sanity, like government, needs checks and balances; no mortal can be omnipotent and sane."

"[O]nly youth knows better than twenty centuries."

- On the patterns of history:

"Democracy had fallen by Plato's formula: liberty had become license, and chaos begged an end to liberty.  . . .  Dictatorship was unavoidable."

"The very peace that Augustus had organized, and the security that he had won for Rome, had loosened the fibre of the people.  No one wanted to enlist in the army, or recognize the inexorable periodicity of war.  Luxury had taken the place of simplicity, sexual license was replacing parentage; by its own exhausted will the great race was beginning to die."

"When great men stoop to sentiment, the world grows fonder of them; but when sentiment governs policy, empires totter."

"In every epoch something is decaying and something is growing."

"History, like the press, misrepresents life because it loves the exceptional and shuns the newsless career of an honest man or the quiet routine of a normal day."

"Nothing reaches maturity except through the fulfillment of its own nature."

Balance

Durant's writing reveals him to be a man of great Aristotelian medians.  Balance seems to be the governing principle of his writing, which goes to some length to avoid extremist positions.  Even in describing the worst and most notorious of Rome's post Augustan despots, for example, Durant gives them credit, where it is due, for their administrative achievements:  "There was something good in the worst of these rulers -- devoted statemanship in Tiberius, a charming gaiety in Caligula, a plodding wisdom in Claudius, an exuberant aestheticism in Nero, a stern competence in Domitian.  Behind the adulteries and the murders an administrative organization had formed which provided, through all this period, a high order of provincial government."  Durant suggests that the the most salacious details from accounts of the more tyrannical leaders' lives, as written by ancient Roman historians with political axes to grind, should be taken with some grains of salt; and argues that the circumstances of the despots' lives, explains their behavior as almost rational:  "The emperors themselves were the chief victims of their power. . . . Seven of these ten men met a violent end; nearly all of them were unhappy, surrounded by conspiracy, dishonesty, and intrigue, trying to govern a world from the anarchy of a home.  They indulged their appetites because they knew how brief was their omnipotence; they lived in the daily horror of men condemned to an early and sudden death.  They went under because they were above the law; they became less than men because power had made them gods."  Still, he rejoices when a sensible emperor now and again comes along, in the middle of a series of arbitrary and capricious despots, beginning his account of Vespasian's reign with the remark: "What a relief to meet a man of sense, ability, and honor!"

The book's final chapters are a description of the life of Jesus of Nazareth, and the founding of Christianity, in a Hellenized world which was bound to influence its doctrine.  (Tad R. Callister's The Inevitable Apostasy,  quotes frequently from this volume, in support of the Mormon sense that Christianity soon became unmoored from revelation and too influenced by the philosophies of men. Durant takes that idea even further than most Latter-day Saints would be willing to do, arguing for example that the Gospel of John is an essentially Platonic, rather then Hebraic, document, suggesting that the influence of Greece arose even while the canonical scriptures of Christianity were being transcribed.)  When writing on the life of Christ, the missions of Paul, and the founding of the Christian faith, Durant writes as a non-believing scholar, but not as a scoffing skeptic.  He offers, for example, a psychosomatic explanation for Jesus's miracles.  However, he rejects the claim of Higher Criticism that Jesus never even lived, noting that this theory would require the early Christians to have created the Jesus personality in one generation, which he finds absurd; and agreeing with another historian's suggestion that, if the tests against Christ's historicity were applied with equal fervor to other historical figures, they would erase from the record many of history's most prominent persons.  He accepts the likely accuracy of most of the Gospels on the grounds that writers of inspirational fiction would have kept out the squabbling among Christ's apostles, and Christ's agonized query from the Cross as to why he had been forsaken. The religious reader, like myself, will not be strengthened in their testimony by this book.  But they will also not be weakened, nor offended. Indeed, I came away from my reading grateful for the much deeper understanding the book provided me of the historical context of Paul's epistles, and the rift between Jewish Christians and Gentile Christians which was occurring while they were written, which I find helpful to understanding the doctrinal points Paul was asserting.

The Fall of Rome

Political observers have, for centuries, looked to Rome's fall as a source for prescient observations about their own society's shortcomings.  Durant makes no such attempts at modern political application, but he does describe various causes of Roman decline, leaving the future reader of some declining world to draw his own parallels.  Rome actually went through two falls: the fall of the Roman Republic into class strife and civil war, leading to the restoration of stability and order via the establishment of an Empire led by autocratic military dictators; and the subsequent fall of that Empire itself, a fall which Durant notes lasted three centuries, longer than many nations' entire history, from their rise to their decline.

Here are some passages on the decline of the Roman Republic, implicating all of the usual suspects: easy money, luxury, immorality, corruption.  Certainly glad nothing like this is happening anywhere near me:

"As currency multiplied . . . the owners of realty in the capital tripled their fortunes without stirring a muscle . . . .  Industry lagged while commerce flourished. . . .  Rome was becoming not the industrial or commercial, but the financial and political, center of the white man's world. . . .
[T]he Roman patriciate and upper middle class passed with impressive speed from stoic simplicity to reckless luxury; . . . .   Houses became larger as families became smaller; . . . .  [T]he old simple diet gave way to long and heavy meals . . . .  Exotic foods were indispensable to social position or pretense. . . . Drinking increased; goblets had to be large and preferably of gold; wine was less diluted, sometimes not at all.  . . . .

The individual became rebelliously conscious of himself as against the state, the son as against the father, the woman as against the man. . . .  Prostitution flourished.  Homosexualism was stimulated by contact with Greece and Asia;  . . . .  Women . . . divorced their husbands or occasionally poisoned them . . . .  Cato and Polybius . . . noted a decline of population and the inability of the state to raise such armies as had risen to meet Hannibal.  The new generation, having inherited world mastery, had no time or inclination to defend it. . . . [T]he Roman landowner disappeared now that ownership was being concentrated in a few families and a proletariat without stake in the country filled the slums of Rome. Men became brave by proxy; they crowded the amphitheater to see bloody games.  . . .

In the upper classes manners became more refined as morals were relaxed. . . .  Everyone longed for money, everyone judged or was judged in terms of money.  Contractors cheated on such a scale that many government properties . . . had to be abandoned because the lessees exploited the workers and mulcted the state . . . .  [The] aristocracy . . . accepted presents and liberal bribes for bestowing its favor upon men or states, . . . .  It became a common thing for magistrates to embezzle public funds and an uncommon thing to see them prosecuted.
Marriage, which had once been a lifelong economic union, was now among a hundred thousand Romans a passing adventure of no great spiritual significance, a loose contract for the mutual provision of physiological conveniences or political aid."

And here are some passages on the decline of the Empire.  Once again, any similarities to times being lived in by the reader are likely purely coincidental:

"A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself within.  The essential causes of Rome's decline lay in her people, her morals, her class struggle, her failing trade, her bureaucratic despotism, her stifling taxes, her consuming wars.

A serious decline of population appears in the West after Hadrian. . . .  The holocausts of war and revolution, and . . . the operation of contraception, abortion, and infanticide had [their] effect. . . . The dole weakened the poor, luxury weakened the rich; . . . .  [Immigration occurred too quickly to allow] time [for] a leisurely assimilation [in which the immigrants] might have reinvigorated the classic culture . . . .  [Instead], the rapidly breeding [immigrants] could not understand the classic culture, did not accept it, did not transmit it; . . . were mostly of a mind to destroy that culture; the Romans, possessing it, sacrificed it to the comforts of sterility.  Rome was conquered not by barbarian invasion from without, but by barbarian multiplication within.  Moral and esthetic standards were lowered by the magnetism of the mass; and sex ran riot in freedom while political liberty decayed.

The political causes of decay were rooted in one fact--that increasing despotism destroyed the citizen's civic sense and dried up statesmanship at its source. Powerless [politically] the Roman lost interest in government and became absorbed in his business, his amusements, his legion, or his individual salvation.  Patriotism and . . . religion had been bound together, and now together decayed."

Surely none of that sounds familiar to modern ears.

Still, there is room for hope in Durant's writing, even on Rome's decline and fall, perhaps explaining why that fall took so long: "Around the immoral hub of any society is a spreading wheel of wholesome life, in which the threads of tradition, the moral imperatives of religion, the economic compulsions of the family, the instinctive love and care of children, the watchfulness of women and policemen, suffice to keep us publicly decent and moderately sane."

And perhaps, in any event, it is not the fall of Rome that we should fear most.  But, rather, its new rise.  The fact of the matter is that, for all of their contributions to science, art, literature, and the theory of law and jurisprudence, and for all of the graceful prose, poetry, and philosophy offered up by their most noble citizens, from Cicero to Marcus Aurelius, and for all of the best traits which marked the best of Roman society, as outlined in the final pages of this book, the Romans were a brutal and in many ways a despicable people.  Maybe everyone else was back then as well, and maybe the order they imposed upon their time allowed the growth of a stable society which would shun their excesses, and embrace the beauties of Christianity. But even still, their excesses were notably horrifying.  The Romans were politically corrupt; practiced the horrors of slavery and infanticide and pederasty without any apparent moral qualm; entertained themselves with bloodthirsty spectacles which were even worse than our most violent horror films, because they were real; and engaged in war with a relish and callousness difficult for us to fathom. This rottenness in the Roman soul was true even in the days of the Republic, or the years in which they were ruled by benevolent monarchs (Durant quotes Gibbon on the pinnacle of society reached before the end of the reign of Marcus Aurelius: "If a man were called upon to fix the period in the history of the world during which the condition of the human race was most happy and prosperous, he would without hesitation name that which elapsed from the accession of Nerva to the death of Aurelius.  Their united reigns are possibly the only period of history in which the happiness of a great people was the sole object of government.").  The story of the Roman Republic's dealings with Carthage immediately before and during the utter destruction of that City by Roman troops is, simply, horrifying.  And in the most prosperous and peaceful years of the Empire, the Colosseum continued to be a place of vileness and violence.  Thus, as much as I loved this book, and consider it one of the most intriguing and fascinating volumes I will ever read, I must disagree with the author's final, elegiac statement, in which he wishes that Rome may rise again.

I certainly hope it will not.  Indeed, if the book taught me anything, it is to treasure and be grateful for our current relatively stable and free society, in the knowledge that such societies are the exception not the rule, and that while our society is in obvious decline, there is still some chance its ultimate fall may at least be postponed. Historically, this book caused me to reflect, slavery is more to be expected than freedom; poverty more to be expected than prosperity; greed and stupidity in political leaders more to be expected than wisdom and beneficence; corruption in government and commerce more to be expected than honesty; vice more to be expected than virtue; and war more to be expected than peace.  It would be wonderful if the best of Rome could rise again, and her worst stay in the past. But I'm not holding my breath.  

Endnotes

1. Gordon S. Wood, Revolutionary Characters: What Made the Founders Different  Chapter 6 "The Relevance and Irrelevance of John Adams" (The Penguin Press 2006)

2. Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution p. 23 (Harvard University Press 1967, 1992).

3. Id. pp. 24-26.

4. Gordon S. Wood, The Idea of America  Chapter 2 "The Legacy of Rome in the American Revolution" (Penguin Books 2011)

5.   Gordon S. Wood, Revolutionary Characters: What Made the Founders Different  Chapter 1 "The Greatness of George Washington" (The Penguin Press 2006)

6. An attempt to learn more about the classical world could start chronologically, with Greece.  But trying to understand that era by slogging through Greek history, drama, and literature, is a bit like trying to get into Tolkien via the Silmarillion.  There are elements of the Greek mind that are simply . . . alien.  Try for example to read some Greek play, like The Libation Bearers, which might as well have been written by Martians, and you'll see what I mean.  Marcus Aurelius's Meditations, or Plutarch's Lives, by contrast, are remarkably accessible to a modern reader.

Revolutionary Characters, by Gordon S. Wood

Although my sympathies were not always in the same place as the author’s, I found this short book to be a wonderful and vitally important read for anyone wishing to understand the revolutionary period, and the founding of the United States.  It sets the stage with an introductory chapter on the Enlightenment, and then gives us brief vignettes of eight of the leading figures of the founding era: Washington, Franklin, Jefferson, Hamilton, Madison, Adams, Paine, and Burr.  It then concludes with a chapter on public opinion, describing how the founders established a democratic nation which abolished the very system which had made their own elitist class, and its contributions, possible.

The book is clearly meant as primarily an intellectual history.  This should not be surprising. Gordon S. Wood is one of America’s most lauded and well respected academic scholars of the Revolutionary era, and he is as interested in the historiography of the time--the history of how historians, and Americans in general, have treated and seen their founders in subsequent decades-- as he is in the founders’ actual lives.  He is steeped in the scholarly and academic debates over this time period which university professors, writing for a limited audience, each other, in scholarly journals, have engaged in both recently and in the past.  He sees himself as one who can be an arbiter in these issues (as in his treatment of whether there is “a James Madison problem”). He is also less interested, at least in this volume, than a popular historian (McCullough, for example) might be, in the events which the founders lived through and influenced, and also less interested in their personalities, than he is in their intellectual writings and contributions and the value and effects of their political and philosophical ideas.  One major exception to this is Washington, who was not a deep thinker, but a man of action, whose importance Woods nevertheless explains in one of the first chapters of this volume, entitled simply and without irony, "The Greatness of George Washington."

The impression left by this approach is far different than that which would come from reading a lengthier biography of any of these men.  And it has its pros and its cons.  There is, after all, more to a person than merely their ideas.  McCullough’s John Adams is a personal hero of mine, for the way he lived his life, and the beauty and sincerity of his writings on a variety of subjects, reaching far beyond politics.  Wood’s John Adams becomes irrelevant after his contributions to independence, because his constitutional theories had become obsolete (with no connection to the more important Federalist Papers) by the time he wrote them down, in a post-aristocratic America.

On the other hand, the chapters on Jefferson and Hamilton, focused as they are on these two men’s political ideologies, provide an extremely handy primer and distillation of where and how they and their fellow Republicans and Federalists differed from each other.  It would have been helpful to have read these chapters in this book before reading any of the much lengthier biographies of Hamilton and Jefferson currently available, to better understand why those biographies matter.  As anyone who starts reading heavily about the founders will soon learn, to understand the differences between Hamiltonians and Jeffersonians is a key to understanding much of our history.  Theodore Roosevelt once claimed that Lincoln had bridged the gap between these two philosophies, finally giving us a united Hamiltonian Nation, but founded on Jeffersonian democracy.  TR’s statement requires a lot of background knowledge and information to even understand, let alone agree or disagree with.  And this book provides the shortest possible method for understanding what he meant.

Key takeaways and/or my own personal impressions developed while reading this book:

-Washington’s greatest deed, which brought him international fame and established the basis for a free American republic, was the return of his commission to the Continental Congress, after successfully winning the revolutionary war.  America is one of the only nations on earth which, after experiencing a military or otherwise violent overthrow of the existing order, did not find itself led by a despotic military dictator, installing himself into office for life.  There would be no Cromwell, no Napoleon, no Lenin, Castro, Pol Pot, or Saddam Hussein in America, and this would be the case for one reason: George Washington’s greatness in refusing to pursue any such course.

-Franklin, like Hamilton, rose through the ranks of his society due to the patronage of wealthy and well-placed men, in a system of patronage which was a key feature of the society at the time, and its primary method for lifting talent out of obscurity.  He loved Britain, and after gaining the wealth and fame which allowed him to retire in his 40s, he aspired to a position of rank and importance within the British Empire, which would allow him to positively influence its continuing success.  He was Americanized when these hopes were denied.

-The great irony of the FDR-created shrine to Jefferson in Washington D.C. is that none of its quotes include the theme which was nearest and dearest to Jefferson’s heart and about which he wrote as much as anything: the need to keep the United States government small, its judiciary weak, and the focus of power in all but foreign affairs in local State hands.  Still Jefferson probably qualifies as a modern day liberal.  His affection for the French Revolution, despite its excesses, and his alignment with Paine’s views on religion and criticism of Washington (though he would never have written about either of these subjects with the directness or viciousness Paine employed), and his belief in the future rather than the traditions of the past, all make him look very much like a forbear of later American Marxists, willingly blind to the evils of Communism.

-Hamilton wanted America to be a great nation, like unto Britain, a fiscal-military state.  He would have loved the modern United States.  He would have loved our sophisticated banking system and stock exchanges and financial institutions.  He would have cheered the independence and strength of our judiciary (if not all of its decisions). He would have loved the social mobility afforded by free enterprise and business.  He would have loved our strong and well funded military and the taxes which allow its strength, and he would have been immensely proud of our CIA and our Pentagon.  He would have loved that most Americans think of themselves, first and foremost, as Americans, and that their patriotism is generally directed at their nation rather than their State.  He would have loved that we abolished slavery.  But he would have been horrified by how democratic and egalitarian we have become.

-Madison was more nationalistic, and a bigger advocate of centralized government, than even Hamilton, going into the Philadelphia Constitutional Convention, and the Virginia plan which he sought to pass at that convention was even more federalist than anything the federalists would have dreamed of, reducing the States to what Woods describes as little more than bureaucratic administrative units of the Federal Government.  Nevertheless, after the Constitution was enacted, he quickly allied himself with the small-central government, pro-states-rights Jeffersonian Republicans.  This inconsistency is the “Madison Problem” which Woods tries to argue, but not very convincingly in my opinion, doesn't really exist.

-While many would criticize Madison’s inept handling of the War of 1812, which led to the burning down of the American capitol, Madison was extremely proud that the nation made it through the crisis without devolving into a fiscal military state.  (Here is a great mystery of American history.  The founders feared the threat to liberty represented by a standing army.  America today has the largest standing army in the world. But, unlike many other nations which have experienced various military coups, our military has, for decades, served us well, and never posed any real threat to our liberty that I can think of.  Why is that?  This would be a topic worth someone writing a book about.)

-The one virtue/ideal/ideology on which all of the founders seem to have agreed was the importance of what they called disinterestedness: that is to say, their duty to involve themselves in public affairs for the benefit of the public, and of the entire nation, without the hope of thereby acquiring personal or financial gain, beyond an honorable reputation.  If the greatest thing Washington ever did was to imitate his Roman hero Cincinnatus, by returning his commission at the end of the revolutionary war, it was based on this value and virtue.  Similarly, the greatest thing Hamilton may have ever done, motivated by the same virtue, was to work tirelessly to keep the Federalists in congress from throwing the tie vote between Jefferson and Burr towards Burr.  Despite his own fears that Jefferson’s political ideology might undo everything he, Hamilton, had accomplished through his Federalist allies in the Nation’s first twelve years, Hamilton believed there was something even worse that could happen to America than the election of a President whose political views were radically different than his own: the election of a President, Burr, whose every instinct was to use political office for personal gain, and who did not believe in disinterestedness.  That’s a great story, and one that all Americans, Jeffersonian or Hamiltonian, can appreciate, as a part of our legacy we ought to be proud of, and, to the extent necessary, try to reclaim.

The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, by William L. Shirer

What can be said about this book?

It deals with some of the most important subjects a person can study in this lifetime: (a) the causes of WWII, in simple numerical terms, the single most catastrophic event in human history, causing the death of 60 million people, more than any other plague, war, or catastrophe on record; (b) the attempted, and almost successful, genocide of the Jewish people in the world's most horrifyingly bureaucratic holocaust; (c) the simply incredible methods and means by which, in one of Western Civilization's great stronghold's, a government and a ruler who were dedicated, wholly and openly and overtly, to monomaniacal evil, came, through bluff, aggression, and dark luck, to seize and then maintain absolute power over an enthralled populace; (d) the equally incredible methods and means by which that government and that ruler, aided and abetted at every turn by its own neighbors' greedy participation, or war-wary appeasement, took control over a large section of central Europe without having to fire a single shot, in a series of coups which could have been turned back at any time by a single act of intestinal fortitude on the part of France or Britain, had they been willing to exercise it; (e) the waging of a total and complete war, for the purpose of killing off and/or enslaving the "lesser" Slavic peoples of Europe; (f) the abject ruination of the lands and people of Poland and other Eastern European states as they were first divvied up by the Germans and the Russians, and then used as their battlefields; (f) the nature of totalitarian government; (e) the setting of the scene for the establishment of the iron curtain and the beginning of the cold war.

The book tells this story from a very focused perspective.  We don't learn much about what is going on in the U.S. or in Britain or the Soviet Union during these years, except as they relate to events in or caused by Germany.  It is Germany's history we are learning, but not from a friendly source.  William Shirer does not pretend to be writing a detached, objective, or academic history.  He is telling an amazing story and doing so as accurately and as compellingly as he can. That's not to say he is sloppy or breaks any rules.  If the specifics of an event are disputed, he'll give us more than one account and tell us the sources and offer his own take on which version may be the most accurate and why.  But he is not interested in academic debates about economic or philosophical causes and effects. He is a working journalist, who was living in and writing from Berlin during most of these events, and he is willing to relate his own personal reactions, and to describe his perception of the German people's moods and responses.  He takes sides.  He despairs at the stupidity of the allies at certain key moments.  He is appalled by the Germans.  (When translated, the book was not well received in Germany.  Its author was accused of being anti-German by West Germany's prime minister. The book clearly discomfited the German people, who wanted to believe that Nazi-ism was a phenomenon which could arise among any people, given the right conditions, and was not a peculiarly German evil.  The German people may have been right about this  -- that is an argument for another day. But the point here is that Shirer tells a great story, because he isn't afraid to call it like he sees it.)  

Most importantly, Shirer did his homework.  He dug through the Nazi journals, diaries, and official but secret histories in the archives which the allies seized at the end of WWII, rifled through briefly for the trials at Nuremberg, and then stuck in a warehouse somewhere until Shirer, Indiana-Jones-like, came along to dig in and find their treasures.  We know what key German leaders were thinking before and after the major events.  But our narrator, having lived also through these events, can still get us emotional about them.  It is the best of both worlds: a personal account, with footnotes.  The book is a page-turner.

Yes.  It's very, very, long.  Any given chapter could have been made, with a few more paragraphs, into its own short book, which would have stood as one of the most detailed accounts ever published of any particular portion of this history.  Yes, even though it was always a compelling page-turning read, I set it aside for a few months at least twice to read other books that were of more immediate interest to me in a particular time period, and then came back to finish it later.  But that may have had more to do with the book's subject matter than its length.  The book deals with a great deal of darkness.  Sometimes I just needed to read something else for a while, instead of a book that made me want to puke.

There are some books that I feel each of my children should read. Some books that I think it would be wonderful if every American could read.  This is a book that everyone on the planet ought to read, at some point in their lives.  It's that important to know what happened here and to come to terms with it.

The Storm of War, by Andrew Roberts

"The real reason why Hitler lost the Second World War was exactly the same one that caused him to unleash it in the first place: he was a Nazi."  (That may be the best final sentence in any book I've ever read.)  It was, in short, the shortcomings of Nazi ideology which led to Hitler's stupidest decisions of the War.  These would include Hitler's belief that his soldiers were racially superior to the slavic foes they would face in the East, and the anti-semitism which led his nation's brightest Jewish scientists to defect to and assist the West during the conflict.

I've always wondered about the central paradox of WWII.  In fighting to free Western Europe from a totalitarian dictatorship, why did we ally with another totalitarian dictatorship, and allow that dictatorship to take over Eastern Europe?  This book's anglo-centric, and therefore euro-centric, view of the war went a long way to helping me understand the whys and the wherefores that led to that particular outcome.  The Soviets suffered 90% of the Allied casualties, and inflicted the vast majority of the casualties suffered by the Germans, during the war.  In short, the Allied Nations couldn't have won WWII without Hitler forcing the Soviets' involvement by launching a premature and ill-fated invasion of that nation, whose citizens suffered terribly under Nazi siege, and whose soldiers would ultimately avenge that suffering in terrible acts of retribution against the women of East Berlin.  (Plenty of war crimes to go around in this, at times, extremely depressing read.)  At the end of WWII, who would have wanted to suffer the same fate the Germans had just suffered by launching a war against the Russian empire?  Better to contain and hold them at bay as best we could for another 60 years of cold war. 

This was an amazing book about a subject that we can never do enough to understand: the costliest and bloodiest conflict in all of human history.

Completed: 2012
Rating: 8/10

The Adventure of English, by Melvyn Bragg

I remember once on my mission being flummoxed while trying to explain, in German, the concept of understanding something spiritually, rather than intellectually.  I was teaching the school teacher of the St. Gallen Gemeinde's Bishop's daughter, in the Bishop's home, near Appenzell.  Bishop Edwin Koch understood the linguistic difficulty I was having and explained to me that, in German, the word I was using ("geistig" if I remember correctly) could refer to both spiritual and mental processes, such that my word choice was obscuring the very distinction I was trying to draw.  He helped me out of my perplexity with some wording which I no longer remember, but which I do remember feeling, at the time, lost something in translation.  It was one of many moments during my time in Switzerland when I realized how important it is, while speaking a foreign language, to try to think in that language, using its own idioms and expressions, without mentally translating back and forth into my native English.  Because the truth of the matter is, when getting beyond communicating rudimentary facts, and when talking about more ethereal concepts or feelings, something is almost always lost in translation.  I always know, for example, when I hear a lawyer demand from a translator an "exact, word-for-word, translation" of deposition or trial testimony, that the lawyer only speaks one language.  There is no such thing as an exact translation from one language to another of any very interesting concept, and some languages are better at conveying certain ideas than others.  (Oh how I miss the German "doch" or swiss-German "mohl".  There's just no pithy English word that accomplishes the same thing.  And "namely" will never do justice to "und zwar". )

The English language is an amalgamation of so many other tongues that its spelling will forever be senseless.  But what it loses in phonetics it gains in richness of expression.  English has so many "near synonyms" taken from different languages over its history, that it allows for a precision in connotation and nuance that I doubt any other language can match.  The Adventure of English, by Melvyn Bragg, tells the story of how this came to be.

A book about the history of the English language had better, first and foremost, be really well written. Its prose ought to exemplify the many stylistic variations the language allows, with memorable similes, metaphors, and turns-of-phrase jumping off the page. This book definitely succeeds. ("The English language by now was a thickly plaited rope, a rope of many strands, still wrapped around the Old English centre, still embellished with Norse, lushly fattened and lustred with French . . . .")  

The chief linguistic tool used by the author is personification, as should be expected in a book subtitled "the biography of a language." Thus, the story of the Norman invaders' impact on the language is told from the point of view, not just of a people, but of a language, which resisted obliteration, while at the same time hungrily consuming new words. The story of martyred protestant reformers and their attempts to translate the Bible into English is told from the point of view, not only of those reformers, but of the language itself trying to assault the citadel of faith (and Latin) which violently fought back but ultimately embraced the invader and left both faith and the invading language richer for the outcome:

"It is impossible to over-praise the quality of Tyndale's writing. It's rhythmical beauty, its simplicity of phrase, its crystal clarity have penetrated deep into the bedrock of English today wherever it is spoken. Tyndale's words and phrases influenced between sixty and eighty percent of the King James Bible of 1611 and in that second life his words and phrases circle the globe."

"English at last had God on its side. the language was authorised by the Almighty Himself."

English has become such a global language today (see another good book on this subject, Globish by Robert McCrumb) that it may start to fragment, like ancient Indo-european, into new languages around the globe. Such new splinter languages would share the common root of a language which is itself made up of many different sources, all contributing to a language which, while phonetically non-sensible, is otherwise, in my opinion (reinforced by this hagiographic "biography") the greatest instrument of communication ever known.