WHAT IS IT THAT DRIVES THE SUCCESS OF AMERICA AND THE IDENTITY OF ITS PEOPLE? ACCLAIMED WRITER AND CONTRIBUTING EDITOR TO THIS AMERICAN LIFE JACK HITT THINKS IT’S BECAUSE WE’RE ALL A BUNCH OF AMATEURS.

America’s self-invented tinkerers are back at it in their metaphorical garages—fiddling with everything from solar-powered cars to space elevators. In Bunch of Amateurs, Jack Hitt visits a number of different garages and has written a fascinating book that looks at America’s current batch of amateurs and their pursuits. From a tattooed young woman in the Bay Area trying to splice a fish’s glow-in-the-dark gene into common yogurt (all done in her kitchen using salad spinners) to a space fanatic on the brink of developing the next generation of telescopes from his mobile home, Hitt not only tells the stories of people in the grip of a passion but argues that America’s history is bound up in a cycle of amateur surges.

Beginning with Ben Franklin’s kite and leading all the way to the current TV hit American Idol, Hitt argues that the nation’s love of self-invented obsessives has always driven the country to rediscover the true heart of the American dream. Amateur pursuits are typically lamented as a world that just passed until a Sergey Brin or Mark Zuckerberg steps out of his garage (or dorm room) with the rare but crucial success story. In Bunch of Amateurs, Hitt argues that America is now poised to pioneer at another frontier that will lead, one more time, to the newest version of the American dream.

About Jack Hitt

JACK HITT is a contributing editor to the New York Times Magazine, Harper’s, and public radio’s This American Life. He also writes for Rolling Stone, GQ, Wired, and, of course, Garden & Gun. He has won the Peabody Award, as well as the Livingston and Pope Foundation Awards. His stories can be heard on This American Life’s greatest hits CD, Lies, Sissies & Fiascoes, and The Best Crimes and Misdemeanors: Stories from The Moth. He is the author of a solo theater performance, currently touring, entitled Making Up the Truth.

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Click here to view the video on YouTube.

Editorial Review

Veteran journalist Hitt (Off the Road: A Modern-Day Walk Down the Pilgrim’s Route into Spain, 2005, etc.) posits that various brands of amateurism conceived in the interest of advancing knowledge offer meaningful insights into a uniquely American character. The narrative thread holds together nicely through chapters focusing on the legendary amateurism of Benjamin Franklin, birdwatchers seeking the ivory-billed woodpecker, inventors of various gadgets, genealogists, archaeologists, astronomers and linguists. Hitt wisely concedes that other nations harbor amateurs, as well, but he maintains that American amateurs are notable for their comfort with exploration and with rebelling against authority. Elsewhere in the world, where socioeconomic status is often hardwired at birth, the word “amateur” suggests class warfare. In the United States, the word often carries a hint of adventure. Searching for lasting answers, Hitt studies business theory, providing a serious explanation that outsiders are often not hidebound by the curse of knowledge. In other words, when it comes to reconceiving a workplace, an industry, a charitable endeavor or some other institution, perhaps ignorance sometimes can be considered bliss. Knowing almost nothing about something can become the catalyst driving breakthrough discoveries. When talented amateurs receive positive recognition for their accomplishments, such as the “genius grants” provided annually by the MacArthur Foundation, the white heat of innovation might be kindled further. Hitt inserts himself into the narrative as he meets with living amateurs and discovers newly released material about deceased amateurs. The first-person approach is usually effective because it generates passion about the possibilities of the intellect. – Kirkus Reviews

Americans: A ‘Bunch Of Amateurs,’ And Proud Of It

NPR Book Review – May 19, 2012 (Excerpt)

Jack Hitt says if you drill down into the American spirit to find out what makes Americans so American, you’ll find it’s the fact that we’re all amateurs at heart. In his new book, Bunch of Amateurs: A Search for the American Character, he pinpoints the first American to use the amateur label to his advantage: Benjamin Franklin.

Flash back to the early days of the Revolutionary War. Franklin has traveled with John Adams to France, and they’re both trying to convince the king to spare the American military some cash. Franklin insisted on wearing the outfit of an American frontiersman — complete with a Davy Crockett-style coonskin cap. Adams hated Franklin’s get-up — he wrote about the ridiculous outfit in letters to his wife, Abigail.

Franklin and Adams met at the gates of Versailles for a meeting with the king, says Hitt: “I just love this image of Franklin stepping out of his carriage in his coonskin cap, while Adams is in his silks and his breeches and his waistcoat and his feathered hat and looking at Franklin like:What are you doing? And Franklin [being] like: You don’t get it, John, this is who they think we are. This is how we’re going to get the money. And of course, Franklin did get us the money.” [Read the full article...]

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THE BLEEDING HILLS
A Novel by Wilfried F. Voss

I have fought a good fight,
I have finished my course,
I have kept the faith.
- 2 Timothy iv. 7

The Irish War is officially a part of history, but not for Finnean Whelan, an IRA veteran of almost 40 years. British Intelligence has produced evidence that he is the mastermind behind a conspiracy to assassinate the First Minister of Northern Ireland. For Whelan this is not only a mission of revenge, but marks the beginning of a journey into the past and the return to the one true love: Ireland. [More...]

The Bleeding Hills is available at Amazon.Com, Amazon.co.uk, Barnes & Noble, and any other good bookstore.

In February 1943, a group of journalists—including a young wire service correspondent named Walter Cronkite and cub reporter Andy Rooney—clamored to fly along on a bombing raid over Nazi Germany. Seven of the sixty-four bombers that attacked a U-boat base that day never made it back to England. A fellow survivor, Homer Bigart of the New York Herald Tribune, asked Cronkite if he’d thought through a lede. “I think I’m going to say,” mused Cronkite, “that I’ve just returned from an assignment to hell.”

During his esteemed career Walter Cronkite issued millions of words for public consumption, but he never wrote or uttered a truer phrase.

Assignment to Hell tells the powerful and poignant story of the war against Hitler through the eyes of five intrepid reporters. Crisscrossing battlefields, they formed a journalistic band of brothers, repeatedly placing themselves in harm’s way to bring the war home for anxious American readers.

Cronkite crashed into Holland on a glider with U.S. paratroopers. Rooney dodged mortar shells as he raced across the Rhine at Remagen. Behind enemy lines in Sicily, Bigart jumped into an amphibious commando raid that nearly ended in disaster. The New Yorker’s A. J. Liebling ducked sniper fire as Allied troops liberated his beloved Paris. The Associated Press’s Hal Boyle barely escaped SS storm troopers as he uncovered the massacre of U.S. soldiers during the Battle of the Bulge.

Assignment to Hell is a stirring tribute to five of World War II’s greatest correspondents and to the brave men and women who fought on the front lines against fascism—their generation’s “assignment to hell.”

About Timothy M. Gay

Timothy M. Gay is the author of Satch, Dizzy, & Rapid Robert: The Wild Saga of Interracial Baseball before Jackie Robinson and Tris Speaker: The Rough-and-Tumble Life of a Baseball Legend. His essays and op-eds on American history, politics, public policy, and sports have appeared in the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, USA Today, and many other publications. A graduate of Georgetown University, where he majored in American history, Tim lives in Virginia with his wife and children.

Editorial Review

Gay (Satch, Dizzy, and Rapid Robert: The Wild Saga of Interracial Baseball Before Jackie Robinson, 2010, etc.) ambitiously reconstructs the events of WWII through the eyes of the reporters who were on the ground (or in the air) trying to get the scoop first. The New Yorker’s A.J. Liebling fled Paris in advance of the invading Nazis; the AP’s Hal Boyle covered Operation Torch in North Africa; Stars and Stripes cub reporter Andy Rooney accompanied bombing missions to Germany; the New York Herald Tribune’s Homer Bigart witnessed the horrors of the Sicily invasion; and UP correspondent Walter Cronkite got a front seat at the Normandy landings on D-Day. Gay chose these five correspondents over, say, Ernie Pyle, who was already hugely famous, or Martha Gellhorn, because the five were “a journalistic band of brothers” (although one feminine point of view would have added a fresh perspective). Cronkite, Bigart and Rooney had all been trained in the Air Force and formed the core of the ill-fated Writing 69th, while Gay simply admires the work of Liebling, who was one of the oldest reporters. The author considers their newspaper beginnings in forging their styles: Cronkite the “meatball journalist” from Kansas City; how Bigart’s harsh Calvinistic Pennsylvania upbringing and speech impediment helped fashion his taut, wry sentences; Rooney, conscripted from Colgate University, brash and clueless at the Stars and Stripes, went on to make his mark “saluting the unsung grunts behind the scenes.” Boyle, also from Kansas City, worked his way up at AP and established a column while in Morocco, “Leaves from a Correspondent’s Notebook.” – Kirkus Reviews

“Assignment to Hell: The War Against Nazi Germany with Correspondents Walter Cronkite, Andy Rooney, A.J. Liebling, Homer Bigart, and Hal Boyle” by Timothy M. Gay

The Washington Post Book Review – May 18, 2012 (Excerpt)

The cause of 60 million deaths, World War II remains the greatest cataclysm the human species has inflicted on itself: an exhibition, if the gods were watching, of humans at their most depraved, but often their most noble. No wonder that seven decades later historians are still toiling to convey the dimensions of that horror, and the glory that often shone through it.

Timothy M. Gay believes that some glory belongs to the daring correspondents who covered the fighting in Europe against Nazi Germany. Five Americans among them are handsomely celebrated in Gay’s “Assignment to Hell” — Walter Cronkite, then of the United Press wire service; Hal Boyle of the Associated Press; Sgt. Andy Rooney of the U.S. Army newspaper Stars and Stripes; A.J. Liebling of the New Yorker magazine; and Homer Bigart of the New York Herald Tribune.

The stories they hammered out on portable typewriters, close to — sometimes amid — the actual fighting, their copy wangled through the censorship and somehow back to the United States, established reputations that grew into dazzling postwar careers and lasting fame. [Read the full article...]

THE LONDONDERRY AIR

Testament of an Ulster Gunman
A Novel by Garrad Gawler 

It all changed for Charles Cunningham, a Physics teacher at the local College of Technology in the County Derry town of Maddenstown, on a June afternoon in 1973 when a bomb exploded in his neighborhood. He answers an advertisement by the UDR, the Ulster Defence Regiment, but, in the time to come, he will experience the consequences of his decisions, and how his involvement complicates matters with family and friends, Protestants and Catholics alike, to an unexpected degree.

With “The Londonderry Air – Testament of an Ulster Gunman” Garrad Gawler describes in minute detail and with an astonishing level of authenticity not only the inner workings of the Ulster Defence Regiment, but also the activities of underground paramilitary groups of regular citizens who planned and carried out the assassination of suspected Republican terrorists in their neighborhood.

The Londonderry Air is available at Amazon.Com, Amazon Kindle (US), Amazon.co.uk, Amazon Kindle (UK), Barnes & Noble, smashwords.com, and any other good bookstore.

For more information on Garrad Gawler and to read an excerpt of “The Londonderry Air,” please see the author’s section on this website.

The author of the highly acclaimed Founding Gardeners now gives us an enlightening chronicle of the first truly international scientific endeavor—the eighteenth-century quest to observe the transit of Venus and measure the solar system.

On June 6, 1761, the world paused to observe a momentous occasion: the first transit of Venus between the earth and the sun in more than a century. Through that observation, astronomers could calculate the size of the solar system—but only if they could compile data from many different points of the globe, all recorded during the short period of the transit. Overcoming incredible odds and political strife, astronomers from Britain, France, Russia, Germany, Sweden, and the American colonies set up observatories in remote corners of the world, only to have their efforts thwarted by unpredictable weather and warring armies. Fortunately, transits of Venus occur in pairs: eight years later, the scientists would have another opportunity to succeed.

Chasing Venus brings to life the personalities of the eighteenth-century astronomers who embarked upon this complex and essential scientific venture, painting a vivid portrait of the collaborations, the rivalries, and the volatile international politics that hindered them at every turn. In the end, what they accomplished would change our conception of the universe and would forever alter the nature of scientific research.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

About Andrea Wulf

ANDREA WULF was born in India and moved to Germany as a child. She lives in London, where she trained as a design historian at the Royal College of Art. She is the author of The Brother Gardeners, long-listed for the Samuel Johnson Prize in 2008 and winner of the American Horticultural Society 2010 Book Award, and of Founding Gardeners; she is the coauthor (with Emma Gieben-Gamal) of This Other Eden: Seven Great Gardens and 300 Years of English History. She has written for The Sunday Times, the Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal, and the Los Angeles Times, and she reviews for several newspapers, including The New York Times, The Guardian, and The Times Literary Supplement.

Editorial Review

Until this busy narrative, Wulf had turned her eyes more earthward with three previous outings about gardens (The Founding Gardeners: The Revolutionary Generation, Nature, and the Shaping of the American Nation, 2011, etc.). Here she glides easily into the heavens, where she clearly explains how Venus’ transit across the sun, which occurs every 105 years (and each time does so twice, at eight-year intervals—one will occur in June 2012), gave Enlightenment astronomers a chance to figure out such things as the distance between the earth and the sun. Their 1769 calculation—transit-derived—was quite close. The author follows the two international attempts, in 1761 and 1769, to accomplish the measurements from various global viewing points, describing in grim detail the vast difficulties of travel and communication, the geopolitical complications (wars didn’t help) and the various personalities of potentates and scientists that characterized the endeavor. The 1761 transit occurred before everyone were sufficiently ready, and the measurements were disappointing; 1769 was better—though poor Guillaume Le Gentil of France, who’d spent nine years devoted to the projects, saw only clouds at his observatory in Pondicherry, India. Worse, Jean-Baptiste Chappe d’Auteroche died of typhus only days after his successful recordings. The author notes the imprecision of the instruments, the difficulties of determining precisely when the dark spot of Venus began and ended its journey across the sun’s yellow wafer and the arduous treks Enlightenment men (yes, all men) undertook to Lapland, Tahiti, Hudson Bay and Baja. More than 100 pages of back matter reveal the sturdy research undergirding the lively narrative. – Kirkus Reviews

Perilous Crossing - ‘Chasing Venus,’ by Andrea Wulf

The New York Times Book Review – May 18, 2012 (Excerpt)

Next time you find yourself grousing when the passenger in front reclines his seat a smidge too far, consider the astronomers of the Enlightenment. In 1761 and 1769, dozens and dozens of stargazers traveled thousands of miserable miles to observe a rare and awesome celestial phenomenon. They went by sailing ship and open dinghy, by carriage, by sledge and on foot. They endured discomfort that in our own flabby century would generate years of litigation. And they did it all for science: the men in powdered wigs and knee britches were determined to measure the transit of Venus.

That beautiful name, transit of Venus, describes the hours-long passage of our nearest planetary neighbor across the face of the sun. Transits occur in eight-year pairs followed by interludes of more than a century. Their rarity highlights the news hook for Andrea Wulf’s account of this ur-Big Science project: the next transit of Venus happens to be soon, on June 5 and 6, 2012. For a writer, that’s deadline pressure on a cosmic scale.

So get ready for transit-themed crossword puzzles and astronomers on “Good Morning America.” On the day itself, count on a tsunami of Twitter and Tumblr feeds. But from June 7, 2012, until Dec. 11, 2117, all that publicity goes away. [Read the full article...]

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QUEEN OF MISFORTUNE
A Lady Jane Grey Novel by Peter Carroll

A Love Story of Shakespearean Dimension!

Queen Of Misfortune is the fictional story of Lady Jane Grey as told by her beloved tutor, John Aylmer. At the time of her execution a stranger is recorded to have assisted her when, blind folded, she lost her way upon the scaffold. Was it the same strange who was also recorded to have visited her when she was imprisoned in the Tower? Little is known of this unfortunate girl who was beheaded for treason in the 16^th Century. She was only 16. She is omitted from the list of monarchs but was actually queen for nine days. Author Peter Carroll, in his novel, follows John Aylmer’s close relationship with Jane as her tutor and later, as she grows up, her lover. [More...]

Available at Amazon.Com, Amazon.co.uk, Barnes & Noble, and any other good bookstore.

The surprising truth behind Barack Obama’s decision to continue many of his predecessor’s counterterrorism policies.

Conventional wisdom holds that 9/11 sounded the death knell for presidential accountability. In fact, the opposite is true. The novel powers that our post-9/11 commanders in chief assumed—endless detentions, military commissions, state secrets, broad surveillance, and more—are the culmination of a two-century expansion of presidential authority. But these new powers have been met with thousands of barely visible legal and political constraints—enforced by congressional committees, government lawyers, courts, and the media—that have transformed our unprecedentedly powerful presidency into one that is also unprecedentedly accountable.

These constraints are the key to understanding why Obama continued the Bush counterterrorism program, and in this light, the events of the last decade should be seen as a victory, not a failure, of American constitutional government. We have actually preserved the framers’ original idea of a balanced constitution, despite the vast increase in presidential power made necessary by this age of permanent emergency.

About Jack Goldsmith

Jack Goldsmith is the Henry L. Shattuck Professor of Law at Harvard University. From October 2003 to June 2004 he was assistant attorney general, Office of Legal Counsel. He lives in Newton, Massachusetts.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

Editorial Review

From the beginning, the Bush administration viewed the 9/11 attacks not merely as a crime, but as an act of war, justifying the full deployment of the president’s powers as head of the U.S. military. From this increasingly controversial premise flowed a series of aggressive and much-criticized counterterrorism measures: the military detention of terror suspects and the device of military commissions to prosecute them, the unchecked discretion to choose among a variety of forums for trying terrorists, the construction of the so-called “black site” prisons around the world, the targeting and killing of enemy suspects, the liberal use of rendition, the increased surveillance at home and abroad and the enhanced interrogation techniques to elicit intelligence. How is it that three years into the succeeding administration virtually all talk about “shredding the Constitution” has vanished, that these bitterly decried practices have either been only marginally curtailed or even expanded? Goldsmith (The Terror Presidency: Law and Judgment Inside the Bush Administration, 2007, etc.), a former Bush Justice and Defense Department attorney, rejects the cynical explanation that it’s all politics, a case merely of the vocal left giving a pass to the Obama administration. Rather, he insists that our system of checks and balances is working just fine, if not precisely in the way the framers imagined, to curb the predictable wartime excesses of the executive branch. Yes, to some extent since 9/11, the congress, courts and establishment press have caught up, reining in the president, but Goldsmith points to something unprecedented in our history: the emergence of what he terms the “presidential synopticon,” the many watchers of the executive branch—lawyers, inspectors general, human-rights activists—aided by new information technologies and the Internet and empowered by law to limit unilateralism, require accountability, force reform and help generate a consensus about legitimate practices. – Kirkus Reviews

Power and Constraint: The Accountable Presidency after 9/11 by Jack Goldsmith and Democracy’s Blameless Leaders: From Dresden to Abu Ghraib, How Leaders Evade Accountability for Abuse, Atrocity, and Killing by Neil James Mitchell

The Washington Post Book Review – May 18, 2012 (Excerpt)

Many people expected a sharp change in America’s approach to counterterrorism when Barack Obama became president. But as Obama approaches the end of his first term, the continuities between the framework he inherited from President Bush and his current policies are more striking than the differences.

It is true that Obama ended the CIA’s secret detention program and overturned a series of legal guidelines on interrogation, but in practice the Bush administration had already moved away from the use of “black sites” and more extreme interrogation techniques such as waterboarding. On Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, the use of military commissions, and targeted killing of terrorist suspects away from any conventional battlefield, Obama has largely maintained and even expanded his predecessor’s approach.

One of Jack Goldsmith’s aims in his new book, “Power and Constraint,” is to explain this apparently surprising outcome. Goldsmith — a conservative legal scholar who headed the Office of Legal Counsel for a time under the Bush administration — argues that Obama has been unable to shift U.S. counterterrorism policy very far because, by the time he took office, it was already pitched at the center of gravity of American political society. According to Goldsmith, it is misleading to portray Bush’s “war on terror” as an illustration of unbridled presidential power. Although the Bush administration set out to expand the scope of executive action in the field of national security, it was ultimately forced back by a framework of checks and balances built into the American political system. The restrictions imposed on Bush and his officials were frustrating, but the policies that emerged enjoyed a degree of legitimacy and collective endorsement that made it hard for the new administration to abandon them. [Read the full article...]

THE LONDONDERRY AIR

Testament of an Ulster Gunman
A Novel by Garrad Gawler 

It all changed for Charles Cunningham, a Physics teacher at the local College of Technology in the County Derry town of Maddenstown, on a June afternoon in 1973 when a bomb exploded in his neighborhood. He answers an advertisement by the UDR, the Ulster Defence Regiment, but, in the time to come, he will experience the consequences of his decisions, and how his involvement complicates matters with family and friends, Protestants and Catholics alike, to an unexpected degree.

With “The Londonderry Air – Testament of an Ulster Gunman” Garrad Gawler describes in minute detail and with an astonishing level of authenticity not only the inner workings of the Ulster Defence Regiment, but also the activities of underground paramilitary groups of regular citizens who planned and carried out the assassination of suspected Republican terrorists in their neighborhood.

The Londonderry Air is available at Amazon.Com, Amazon Kindle (US), Amazon.co.uk, Amazon Kindle (UK), Barnes & Noble, smashwords.com, and any other good bookstore.

For more information on Garrad Gawler and to read an excerpt of “The Londonderry Air,” please see the author’s section on this website.

From the American and British counter-insurgency in Iraq to the bombing of Dresden and the Amristar Massacre in India, civilians are often abused and killed when they are caught in the cross-fire of wars and other conflicts. In Democracy’s Blameless Leaders, Neil Mitchell examines how leaders in democracies manage the blame for the abuse and the killing of civilians, arguing that politicians are likely to react in a self-interested and opportunistic way and seek to deny and evade accountability.

Using empirical evidence from well-known cases of abuse and atrocity committed by the security forces of established, liberal democracies, Mitchell shows that self-interested political leaders will attempt to evade accountability for abuse and atrocity, using a range of well-known techniques including denial, delay, diversion, and delegation to pass blame for abuse and atrocities to the lowest plausible level. Mitchell argues that, despite the conventional wisdom that accountability is a ‘central feature’ of democracies, it is only a rare and courageous leader who acts differently, exposing the limits of accountability in democratic societies. As democracies remain embroiled in armed conflicts, and continue to try to come to grips with past atrocities, Democracy’s Blameless Leaders provides a timely analysis of why these events occur, why leaders behave as they do, and how a more accountable system might be developed.

About Neil James Mitchell

Neil James Mitchell is Professor of International Relations in the School of Public Policy at University College London and author of Agents of Atrocity: Leaders, Followers, and the Violation of Human Rights in Civil War.

Editorial Reviews

“Neil Mitchell’s provocative new book, Democracy’s Blameless Leaders, should be must reading for those concerned about the operation of democracy and the accountability of its leaders.In a series of probing case analyses of human right atrocities committed by those from the United States, Britain, and Israel over the decades, Mitchell deftly shows how leaders often escape accountability for such actions.To the extent that accountability occurs, the “fall guy,” an individual at a lower level of responsibility, not the leaders, takes the blame.His conclusions are equally revealing—why democratic polities, whether parliamentary or presidential systems, often find it difficult hold their leaders more accountable for such actions.”-James M. McCormick,author of American Foreign Policy and Process

“Although accountability lies at the heart of the ideal of democracy, leaders rarely accept blame for human rights violations. The Bush administration famously dismissed the abuses at Abu Ghraib as a result of ‘a few bad apples,’ deflecting blame to the individual soldiers involved, and denying any responsibility for the actions. This insightful book is essential reading for all scholars interested in agency and incentives in the use of violence.”-Kristian Skrede Gleditsch,author ofAll International Politics Is Local

Power and Constraint: The Accountable Presidency after 9/11 by Jack Goldsmith and Democracy’s Blameless Leaders: From Dresden to Abu Ghraib, How Leaders Evade Accountability for Abuse, Atrocity, and Killing by Neil James Mitchell

The Washington Post Book Review – May 18, 2012 (Excerpt)

Many people expected a sharp change in America’s approach to counterterrorism when Barack Obama became president. But as Obama approaches the end of his first term, the continuities between the framework he inherited from President Bush and his current policies are more striking than the differences.

It is true that Obama ended the CIA’s secret detention program and overturned a series of legal guidelines on interrogation, but in practice the Bush administration had already moved away from the use of “black sites” and more extreme interrogation techniques such as waterboarding. On Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, the use of military commissions, and targeted killing of terrorist suspects away from any conventional battlefield, Obama has largely maintained and even expanded his predecessor’s approach.

One of Jack Goldsmith’s aims in his new book, “Power and Constraint,” is to explain this apparently surprising outcome. Goldsmith — a conservative legal scholar who headed the Office of Legal Counsel for a time under the Bush administration — argues that Obama has been unable to shift U.S. counterterrorism policy very far because, by the time he took office, it was already pitched at the center of gravity of American political society. According to Goldsmith, it is misleading to portray Bush’s “war on terror” as an illustration of unbridled presidential power. Although the Bush administration set out to expand the scope of executive action in the field of national security, it was ultimately forced back by a framework of checks and balances built into the American political system. The restrictions imposed on Bush and his officials were frustrating, but the policies that emerged enjoyed a degree of legitimacy and collective endorsement that made it hard for the new administration to abandon them. [Read the full article...]

THE LONDONDERRY AIR

Testament of an Ulster Gunman
A Novel by Garrad Gawler 

It all changed for Charles Cunningham, a Physics teacher at the local College of Technology in the County Derry town of Maddenstown, on a June afternoon in 1973 when a bomb exploded in his neighborhood. He answers an advertisement by the UDR, the Ulster Defence Regiment, but, in the time to come, he will experience the consequences of his decisions, and how his involvement complicates matters with family and friends, Protestants and Catholics alike, to an unexpected degree.

With “The Londonderry Air – Testament of an Ulster Gunman” Garrad Gawler describes in minute detail and with an astonishing level of authenticity not only the inner workings of the Ulster Defence Regiment, but also the activities of underground paramilitary groups of regular citizens who planned and carried out the assassination of suspected Republican terrorists in their neighborhood.

The Londonderry Air is available at Amazon.Com, Amazon Kindle (US), Amazon.co.uk, Amazon Kindle (UK), Barnes & Noble, smashwords.com, and any other good bookstore.

For more information on Garrad Gawler and to read an excerpt of “The Londonderry Air,” please see the author’s section on this website.

The definitive account of North Korea, its veiled past and uncertain future, from the former Director for Asian Affairs at the National Security Council

Though it is much discussed and often maligned, precious little is known or understood about North Korea, the world’s most controversial and isolated country. In The Impossible State, seasoned international-policy expert and lauded scholar Victor Cha pulls back the curtain, providing the best look yet at North Korea’s history, the rise of the Kim family dynasty, and the obsessive personality cult that empowers them. He illuminates the repressive regime’s complex economy and culture, its appalling record of human-rights abuses, and its belligerent relationship with the United States, and analyzes the regime’s major security issues—from the seemingly endless war with its southern neighbor to its frightening nuclear ambitions—all in light of the destabilizing effects of Kim Jong-il’s recent death.

How this enigmatic nation-state—one that regularly violates its own citizens’ inalienable rights and has suffered famine, global economic sanctions, a collapsed economy, and near total isolation from the rest of the world—has continued to survive has long been a question that preoccupies the West. Cha reveals a land of contradictions, one facing a pivotal and disquieting transition of power from tyrannical father to inexperienced son, and delves into the ideology that leads an oppressed, starving populace to cling so fiercely to its failed leadership.

With rare personal anecdotes from the author’s time in Pyongyang and his tenure as an adviser in the White House, this engagingly written, authoritative, and highly accessible history offers much-needed answers to the most pressing questions about North Korea and ultimately warns of a regime that might be closer to its end than many might think—a political collapse for which America and its allies may be woefully unprepared.

About Victor Cha

Victor Cha is the former Director for Asian Affairs at the National Security Council, where he served as an adviser to the president from 2004 to 2007. The recipient of two Outstanding Service Commendations during his tenure at the White House, Cha is also the award-winning author of Alignment Despite Antagonism: The United States-Korea-Japan Security Triangle and Beyond the Final Score: The Politics of Sport in Asia. His writing has appeared in Foreign Affairs,International Security, and Political Science Quarterly, among other journals. Cha currently holds the D. S. Song Chair in the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University and is a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

Editorial Review

Cha (Foreign Service/Georgetown Univ.; Beyond the Final Score: The Politics of Sport in Asia, 2008, etc.) first visited North Korea during George W. Bush’s second term with then-governor of New Mexico Bill Richardson to try to defuse nuclear-testing tensions. The author was amazed at the chasm between party haves and everybody else, confirming all that he knew about the authoritarian country. Cha aims to get at some of the pressing questions since Kim Jong-il’s death and the succession of the utterly unknown younger son, Kim Jong-un—e.g., what happened to this once-vigorous dictatorship, and why does the populace do nothing about it? How can the West know so little about what really goes on there? For Cha, the key that unlocked the regime’s secrets was its nostalgia for the good old days of the 1950s and ’60s, when China and the Soviet Union were bolstering North Korean industry and military, while the South was still an agrarian backwater. American aggression during the Korean War left a lasting bitterness, and while the South was grappling with American ambivalence toward its leaders, the North under Kim Il-sung embraced the ideology of juche, or self-reliance, and the cult of the Great Leader. As a result, writes Cha, the North Koreans are simply too oppressed to revolt—not to mention the devastating effects from “Olympic envy” of trying to catch up to Seoul’s 1988 hosting, and the terrible famine of the mid ’90s. The author looks closely at the Kim family, the terrible economic decisions that plunged the country into poverty, the shocking gulag system, its paranoid nuclear proliferation program and the tenuous relations with South Korea. – Kirkus Reviews

“The Impossible State: North Korea, Past and Future” by Victor Cha

The Washington Post Book Review – May 18, 2012 (Excerpt)

Victor Cha can’t easily forget the desolation he encountered on his first visit to North Korea. “As the plane taxied on the tarmac, there was no flight traffic to be seen,” he writes in “The Impossible State.” The fields were “barren and gray,” and during the long drive to his lodgings, he saw only one tractor; he soon discovered that there was no BlackBerry service to distract him from the diplomatic mission he was on for the George W. Bush White House. Officially he was in Pyongyang to press for the return of the remains of prisoners of war and soldiers missing in action from the Korean War. While the elusive country reveals little of itself to visitors who are carefully monitored by minders, Cha delivers an up-close, insightful portrait of this “land of contradictions.”

Cha’s extensive years writing on U.S. policy in Asia for a variety of journals and his service on the National Security Council in the Bush administration give him a rare perspective on North Korea’s past and present. He draws upon this expertise to assert his central thesis that the state newly installed leader Kim Jong-Un has inherited is “not sustainable.”

In order to understand the future of North Korea, Cha begins with its relatively more prosperous past during the Cold War years when the country had reliable heating and electricity and a growing high-tech industry bolstered by the patronage of China and the Soviet Union. In contrast, South Korea struggled under a corrupt government and poverty, remaining primarily an agrarian society. [Read the full article...]

THE LONDONDERRY AIR

Testament of an Ulster Gunman
A Novel by Garrad Gawler 

It all changed for Charles Cunningham, a Physics teacher at the local College of Technology in the County Derry town of Maddenstown, on a June afternoon in 1973 when a bomb exploded in his neighborhood. He answers an advertisement by the UDR, the Ulster Defence Regiment, but, in the time to come, he will experience the consequences of his decisions, and how his involvement complicates matters with family and friends, Protestants and Catholics alike, to an unexpected degree.

With “The Londonderry Air – Testament of an Ulster Gunman” Garrad Gawler describes in minute detail and with an astonishing level of authenticity not only the inner workings of the Ulster Defence Regiment, but also the activities of underground paramilitary groups of regular citizens who planned and carried out the assassination of suspected Republican terrorists in their neighborhood.

The Londonderry Air is available at Amazon.Com, Amazon Kindle (US), Amazon.co.uk, Amazon Kindle (UK), Barnes & Noble, smashwords.com, and any other good bookstore.

For more information on Garrad Gawler and to read an excerpt of “The Londonderry Air,” please see the author’s section on this website.

The definitive history of American postwar liberalism, told through the lens of those who brought it to life.

Liberalism stands proudly at the center of American politics and culture. Driven by passion for social justice, tempered by respect for the difficulty of change, liberals have struggled to end economic inequality, racial discrimination, and political repression. Liberals have fueled their cause with the promise of American life and visions of national greatness, seeking to transform the White House; the halls of Congress, the courts, the worlds of entertainment, law, media, and the course of public opinion. Bestselling author, journalist, and historian Eric Alterman, together with historian Kevin Mattson, traces the history of liberal ideals through the lives and struggles of fascinating personalities. The Cause tells the remarkable story of politicians, intellectuals, visionaries, activists, and public personalities battling for the heart and soul of the nation.

The first full-scale treatment of postwar liberalism, The Cause offers an epic saga driven by stories of grand aspirations, principled ambitions, tragic flaws, and the ironies of history of the people who fought for America to live up to the highest ideals of its history.

About Eric Alterman

Eric Alterman is Distinguished Professor of English and Journalism at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism. A columnist for The Nation, The Forward, and The Daily Best, he is senior fellow of the Center for American Progress, the Nation Institute, and the World Policy Institute. The author of eight previous books, including the national bestseller What Liberal Media?, Alterman is the winner of the George Orwell Award, the Jack London Literary Prize, and the Mirror Award for media criticism. A graduate of Cornell, Yale, and Stanford universities, he lives with his family in Manhattan.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

Editorial Review

Before the book was finished, Mattson (Contemporary History/Ohio Univ.;“What the Heck Are You Up To, Mr. President?”: Jimmy Carter, America’s “Malaise,” and the Speech that Should Have Changed the Country, 2009, etc.) left the partnership with the Nation contributor Alterman (Kabuki Democracy: The System vs. Barack Obama, 2011, etc.), who wrote the final draft. A chronicle of liberalism’s successes and failures, the text travels the labyrinthine road from the New Deal to the rise (and fall) of unionism, the theorists of the 1940s and ’50s (Dean Acheson, George Kennan), the battle against McCarthyism and the failures of Adlai Stevenson, whom Alterman writes helped create the notion of the effete intellectual. The author then charts the rise of the Kennedys, the tragic assassinations of the ’60s, civil rights and Lyndon Johnson, Betty Friedan and the feminist movement, the campaign and electoral failures of Eugene McCarthy, McGovern, Carter, Dukakis, Gore and Kerry. Alterman pauses often to visit relevant cultural history—the emergence of influential journals, Mailer’s writing, DeVoto’s criticism, Elia Kazan’s films, Cheever’s stories, the various liberal contributions of actor Sidney Poitier, novelist William Styron, filmmaker Oliver Stone and—in a long section—rocker Bruce Springsteen. Alterman points out continually how liberals have often been their own worst enemies—failing to stand up to the violence of the far left in the ’60s, fearing being branded “anti-American” in the face of war (Iraq), failing to confront the Tea Party and the ever-more-rightward GOP. Unfortunately, Alterman too often quotes others and only rarely flashes the scimitar wit he displays in the Nation. - Kirkus Reviews

Loving Liberals - ‘The Cause,’ by Eric Alterman and Kevin Mattson

The New York Times Book Review – May 18, 2012 (Excerpt)

The trouble with liberals, Robert Kennedy complained in 1964, was that they were “in love with death” — they romanticized failure, finding greater nobility in losing the whole loaf than in winning half of it. In the years since then, liberals have not only lost a lot of loaves but have acquired a mess of other troubles, among them the difficulty of getting anyone to admit to being a liberal. To wear the label today seems an act of defiance, much as members of the gay rights community have appropriated, from their antagonists, the epithet “queer.” Liberalism — for decades (centuries, even) the prevailing philosophy in American political life — has become the creed that dare not speak its name, except late at night on MSNBC.

Enter Eric Alterman, defiant to the last. In 2008, this columnist and media critic published a handbook called “Why We’re Liberals,” a crisply written and emphatically argued retort to the Coulters, Hannitys and others for whom liberalism is a strain of fascism, totalitarianism, socialism and overmothering (why choose?). Alterman’s new book, “The Cause,” written with an assist from the historian Kevin Mattson, is something of a companion volume: a history of liberalism from Franklin Roosevelt to the present. (Mattson’s role is a bit ambiguous; in the book’s acknowledgments, Alterman credits him with providing “raw material.”) [Read the full article...]

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THE BLEEDING HILLS
A Novel by Wilfried F. Voss

I have fought a good fight,
I have finished my course,
I have kept the faith.
- 2 Timothy iv. 7

The Irish War is officially a part of history, but not for Finnean Whelan, an IRA veteran of almost 40 years. British Intelligence has produced evidence that he is the mastermind behind a conspiracy to assassinate the First Minister of Northern Ireland. For Whelan this is not only a mission of revenge, but marks the beginning of a journey into the past and the return to the one true love: Ireland. [More...]

The Bleeding Hills is available at Amazon.Com, Amazon.co.uk, Barnes & Noble, and any other good bookstore.

In this revealing social history, one remarkable White House dinner becomes a lens through which to examine race, politics, and the lives and legacies of two of America’s most iconic figures.

In 1901, President Theodore Roosevelt invited Booker T. Washington to have dinner at the executive mansion with the First Family. The next morning, news that the president had dined with a black man—and former slave—sent shock waves through the nation. Although African Americans had helped build the White House and had worked for most of the presidents, not a single one had ever been invited to dine there. Fueled by inflammatory newspaper articles, political cartoons, and even vulgar songs, the scandal escalated and threatened to topple two of America’s greatest men.

In this smart, accessible narrative, one seemingly ordinary dinner becomes a window onto post–Civil War American history and politics, and onto the lives of two dynamic men whose experiences and philosophies connect in unexpected ways. Deborah Davis also introduces dozens of other fascinating figures who have previously occupied the margins and footnotes of history, creating a lively and vastly entertaining book that reconfirms her place as one of our most talented popular historians.

About Deborah Davis

Deborah Davis is the author of six narrative non-fiction books, including the upcoming The Oprah Winfrey Show: Reflections on an American Legacy, the authorized history of twenty-five years of the landmark television show and its legendary host (Abrams, 2011) and Guest of Honor: Booker T. Washington, Theodore Roosevelt, and the White House Dinner that Shocked a Nation, which tells the story of the remarkable event that ignited a racial storm, divided the country, and threatened to topple two of America’s greatest men (Atria/S&S). Her other works include Strapless: John Singer Sargent and the Fall of Madame X (Tarcher/Putnam, 2003), the story behind the legendary John Singer Sargent painting that propelled the artist to international renown but condemned his subject to a life of public ridicule; Party of the Century: The Fabulous Story of Truman Capote and His Black and White Ball (Wiley, 2006), which transports readers to the Oz-like splendor of New York in 1966, where Capote, at the pinnacle of his fame, threw himself the party to end all parties; The Secret Lives of Frames: 100 Years of Art and Artistry (Filipacchi Publishing, 2007), a history of the picture frame, the beautiful, hardworking, and frequently overlooked Cinderella of the art world; and Gilded: How Newport Became the Richest Resort in America (Wiley, 2009), a colorful history of the fabled city from its first colonists to its new millennium millionaires. She has also written for the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Magazine Antiques, and Art and Antiques. Prior to becoming an author, she was a story editor and story analyst for several major film companies, including Warner Bros. Miramax, and Disney. Davis lives with her husband in Montclair, New Jersey and is the mother of two children.

Editorial Review

It was a typical gesture for the impulsive Roosevelt, who had been made vice president in hopes that his progressive ideals would wither in the largely impotent position. But the assassination of William McKinley made Roosevelt president, and the Republican establishment’s nightmares began. Washington was the embodiment of the rags-to-riches American dream, an ex-slave risen to become the head of the Tuskegee Institute. Davis (Gilded: How Newport Became America’s Richest Resort, 2009, etc.) weaves together the two men’s biographies with a portrait of their era—simultaneously a time of immense progress and widespread bigotry. Roosevelt was convinced that the nation’s growth required African-Americans to take a fuller role in national affairs; he also saw the black vote in the South as a key ingredient of Republican power. Shortly after assuming the presidency, he began quietly to consult Washington on political appointments in the South. The dinner seemed a natural outgrowth of that relationship, and it went smoothly enough. However, after an Atlanta reporter wrote about it, the South erupted in fury; a line had been crossed. The dinner became an excuse for lynchings and other racial persecutions and led to a cooling of what had been an important working relationship. Some progressive blacks, including W.E.B. Du Bois, criticized the dinner as setting back racial relations. On the other hand, Scott Joplin used it as the theme of an opera, A Guest of Honor. Davis gives a clear overview of race relations in the closing decades of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th, with plenty of additional detail on the times. – Kirkus Reviews

Teddy Roosevelt’s ‘Shocking’ Dinner With Washington

NPR Book Review – May 14, 2012 (Excerpt)

In 1901, President Theodore Roosevelt invited African-American educator Booker T. Washington, who had become close to the president, to dine with his family at the White House. Several other presidents had invited African-Americans to meetings at the White House, but never to a meal. And in 1901, segregation was law.

News of the dinner between a former slave and the president of the United States became a national sensation. The subject of inflammatory articles and cartoons, it shifted the national conversation around race at the time.

NPR’s Neal Conan talks with Deborah Davis, author of Guest of Honor: Booker T. Washington, Theodore Roosevelt, and the White House Dinner That Shocked a Nation about the dinner that she believes changed history. [Read the full article...]

THE LONDONDERRY AIR

Testament of an Ulster Gunman
A Novel by Garrad Gawler 

It all changed for Charles Cunningham, a Physics teacher at the local College of Technology in the County Derry town of Maddenstown, on a June afternoon in 1973 when a bomb exploded in his neighborhood. He answers an advertisement by the UDR, the Ulster Defence Regiment, but, in the time to come, he will experience the consequences of his decisions, and how his involvement complicates matters with family and friends, Protestants and Catholics alike, to an unexpected degree.

With “The Londonderry Air – Testament of an Ulster Gunman” Garrad Gawler describes in minute detail and with an astonishing level of authenticity not only the inner workings of the Ulster Defence Regiment, but also the activities of underground paramilitary groups of regular citizens who planned and carried out the assassination of suspected Republican terrorists in their neighborhood.

The Londonderry Air is available at Amazon.Com, Amazon Kindle (US), Amazon.co.uk, Amazon Kindle (UK), Barnes & Noble, smashwords.com, and any other good bookstore.

For more information on Garrad Gawler and to read an excerpt of “The Londonderry Air,” please see the author’s section on this website.

Before Madeleine Albright turned twelve, her life was shaken by the Nazi invasion of Czechoslovakia—the country where she was born—the Battle of Britain, the near total destruction of European Jewry, the Allied victory in World War II, the rise of communism, and the onset of the Cold War.

Albright’s experiences, and those of her family, provide a lens through which to view the most tumultuous dozen years in modern history. Drawing on her memory, her parents’ written reflections, interviews with contemporaries, and newly available documents, Albright recounts a tale that is by turns harrowing and inspiring. Prague Winter is an exploration of the past with timeless dilemmas in mind and, simultaneously, a journey with universal lessons that is intensely personal.

The book takes readers from the Bohemian capital’s thousand-year-old castle to the bomb shelters of London, from the desolate prison ghetto of TerezÍn to the highest councils of European and American government. Albright reflects on her discovery of her family’s Jewish heritage many decades after the war, on her Czech homeland’s tangled history, and on the stark moral choices faced by her parents and their generation. Often relying on eyewitness descriptions, she tells the story of how millions of ordinary citizens were ripped from familiar surroundings and forced into new roles as exiled leaders and freedom fighters, resistance organizers and collaborators, victims and killers. These events of enormous complexity are nevertheless shaped by concepts familiar to any growing child: fear, trust, adaptation, the search for identity, the pressure to conform, the quest for independence, and the difference between right and wrong.

“No one who lived through the years of 1937 to 1948,” Albright writes, “was a stranger to profound sadness. Millions of innocents did not survive, and their deaths must never be forgotten. Today we lack the power to reclaim lost lives, but we have a duty to learn all that we can about what happened and why.” At once a deeply personal memoir and an incisive work of history, Prague Winter serves as a guide to the future through the lessons of the past—as seen through the eyes of one of the international community’s most respected and fascinating figures.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

About Madeleine Albright

Madeleine Albright served as America’s sixty-fourth secretary of state from 1997 to 2001. Her distinguished career also includes positions on Capitol Hill, on the National Security Council, and as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. She is a resident of Washington, D.C., and Virginia.

Editorial Review

Albright’s (Memo to the President Elect: How We Can Restore America’s Reputation and Leadership, 2008, etc.) parents had never told her of her Jewish heritage, and in January 1997 she had only recently learned of it when a Washington Post reporter broke the larger story. She spent the ensuing years researching her family’s history and the history of her native Czechoslovakia. She was aided in her endeavors by family material she found stored in boxes in her garage—and by a small research team. Born in 1937, the author naturally doesn’t remember the war’s earliest days, so the initial sections are principally a summary of history of the region and the rise of Hitler and the Nazis. Occasionally, she slips into the first person to talk about the activities of her father, a career diplomat, and her mother, a diplomat’s wife but also a woman very interested in the supernatural. The most gripping parts are those personal stories; the others mostly repeat what can be found in many histories of the war and Holocaust. Retellings do not, of course, diminish the horror, but Albright sometimes focuses more on the politics and the war than on the remembrance. The personal passages increase in number and detail as she grows older. Also engaging are the later sections, which deal with the postwar politics in Czechoslovakia, especially the communists’ moves to subvert the fledgling democracy. – Kirkus Reviews

“Prague Winter : A Personal Story of Remembrance and War, 1937-1948” by Madeleine Albright

The Washington Post Book Review – May 11, 2012 (Excerpt)

On the first page of her new memoir, Madeleine Albright writes, “I was fifty-nine when I began serving as U.S. secretary of state. I thought by then that I knew all there was to know about my past, who ‘my people’ were, and the history of my native land. I was sure enough that I did not feel a need to ask questions. Others might be insecure about their identities; I was not and never had been. I knew. Only I didn’t.”

Albright (née Korbelová) was born in Prague, Czechoslovakia, in 1937 when the country had been independent for just 20 years. Her father, Josef Korbel, was a Czech diplomat and democrat who fled to Great Britain with his family following the Nazi invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1938, and again in 1948, following a democratic election when the country was effectively gifted into the murderous hands of the local communist party. Korbel and his family were granted political asylum in the United States in 1949, and Albright became a U.S. citizen in 1957. Josef Korbel became the Dean of the University of Denver’s school of international studies, where he taught another future secretary of state, one Condoleeza Rice. [Read the full article...]

Madeleine Albright’s ‘Prague Winter’ Reveals Family Secrets (EXCERPT)

The Huffington Post – April 30, 2012 (Excerpt)

What does it feel like to be told your entire perception of your family and your childhood was wrong? Madeleine Albright, former U.S. secretary of state from 1997 to 2001 and the first woman to hold that position, knows first hand. Here, in an excerpt from her new book Prague Winter, Albright shares the family secret that shocked her when it was uncovered in her late 50s.

I was fifty-nine when I began serving as U.S. secretary of state. I thought by then that I knew all there was to know about my past, who “my people” were, and the history of my native land. I was sure enough that I did not see a need to ask questions. Others might be insecure about their identities; I was not and never had been. I knew.

Only I didn’t. I had no idea that my family heritage was Jewish or that more than twenty of my relatives had died in the Holocaust. I had been brought up to believe in a history of my Czechoslovak homeland that was less tangled and more straightforward than the reality. I had much still to learn about the complex moral choices that my parents and others in their generation had been called on to make — choices that were still shaping my life and also that of the world.

I had been raised a Roman Catholic and upon marriage converted to the Episcopalian faith. I had — I was sure — a Slavic soul. My grandparents had died before I was old enough to remember their faces or call them by name. I had a cousin in Prague; we had recently been in touch and as children had been close, but I no longer knew her well; the Iron Curtain had kept us apart.

From my parents I had received a priceless inheritance: a set of deeply held convictions regarding liberty, individual rights, and the rule of law. I inherited, as well, a love for two countries. The United States had welcomed my family and enabled me to grow up in freedom; I was proud to call myself an American. The Czechoslovak Republic had been a beacon of humane government until snuffed out by Adolf Hitler and then — after a brief period of postwar revival — extinguished again by the disciples of Josef Stalin. In 1989, the Velvet Revolution, led by Václav Havel, my hero and later my cherished friend, engendered new hope. All my life I had believed in the virtues of democratic government, the need to stand up to evil, and the age-old motto of the Czech people: “Pravda vítezí,” or “Truth shall prevail.” [Read the full article...]

THE LONDONDERRY AIR

Testament of an Ulster Gunman
A Novel by Garrad Gawler 

It all changed for Charles Cunningham, a Physics teacher at the local College of Technology in the County Derry town of Maddenstown, on a June afternoon in 1973 when a bomb exploded in his neighborhood. He answers an advertisement by the UDR, the Ulster Defence Regiment, but, in the time to come, he will experience the consequences of his decisions, and how his involvement complicates matters with family and friends, Protestants and Catholics alike, to an unexpected degree.

With “The Londonderry Air – Testament of an Ulster Gunman” Garrad Gawler describes in minute detail and with an astonishing level of authenticity not only the inner workings of the Ulster Defence Regiment, but also the activities of underground paramilitary groups of regular citizens who planned and carried out the assassination of suspected Republican terrorists in their neighborhood.

The Londonderry Air is available at Amazon.Com, Amazon Kindle (US), Amazon.co.uk, Amazon Kindle (UK), Barnes & Noble, smashwords.com, and any other good bookstore.

For more information on Garrad Gawler and to read an excerpt of “The Londonderry Air,” please see the author’s section on this website.

Long neglected by European historians, the unspeakable atrocities of Franco’s Spain are finally brought to tragic light in this definitive work.

The remains of General Francisco Franco lie in an immense mausoleum near Madrid, built with the blood and sweat of twenty thousand slave laborers. His enemies, however, met less-exalted fates. Besides those killed on the battlefield, tens of thousands were officially executed between 1936 and 1945, and as many again became “non-persons.” As Spain finally reclaims its historical memory, a full picture can now be given of the Spanish Holocaust-ranging from judicial murders to the abuse of women and children. The story of the victims of Franco’s reign of terror is framed by the activities of four key men-General Mola, Quiepo de Llano, Major Vallejo Najera, and Captain Don Gonzalo Aguilera-whose dogma of eugenics, terrorization, domination, and mind control horrifyingly mirror the fascism of Italy and Germany.

Evoking such classics as Gulag and The Great Terror, The Spanish Holocaust sheds crucial light on one of the darkest and most unexamined eras of modern European history.

About Paul Preston

Paul Preston, author of The Spanish Civil War, Franco and Juan Carlos, and The Spanish Holocaust, is the world’s foremost historian on twentieth-century Spain. A professor at the London School of Economics, he lives in London.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

Editorial Review

Scholar Preston (London School of Economics; We Saw Spain Die: Foreign Correspondents in the Spanish Civil War, 2009, etc.) uses the word Holocaust self-consciously but deliberately in this exhaustive treatment of the horrendous violence the Spanish waged against each other to annihilate mutually “undesirable” elements. The friction between the agrarian oligarchy and the landless day laborers and radicalized leftists had been escalating throughout the 1920s, culminating in the establishment of the Second Republic in 1931. However, the reactionary defenders of order, alarmed by the fall of the monarchy and breakdown in status quo, believed the new regime was a “Jewish-Masonic-Bolshevik conspiracy to take over Spain”—therefore violence against it was justified. While the Socialist leader Francisco Largo Caballero propounded revolutionary slogans that incited the hungry masses, the fascist Falange led by General Franco spoke repeatedly of the conspiracy masterminded by the Jews and international foreigners (the contubernio, or “filthy cohabitation”). Preston concentrates on the systematic spread of terror and repression by forces of the right in specific areas of Spain; they moved from town to town, hunting out “reds,” often with the enthusiastic collaboration of the local landowning class. (During this time the poet Federico García Lorca was dragged out and shot.) The right-wing uprising particularly targeted leftist women, who had enjoyed new status and rights under the Republic. Using techniques of terror perfected against the Moroccan population, Franco and his hardened Africanistas moved to subjugate Madrid by slaughter, dismemberment and rape. Preston focuses on the staggering toll of the violence and the Francoist spin that stretches well into the present without proper reckoning. – Kirkus Reviews

Process of Extermination - ‘The Spanish Holocaust,’ by Paul Preston

The New York Times Book Review – May 11, 2012 (Excerpt)

In “Homage to Catalonia,” his memoir of the Spanish Civil War, George Orwell remarks that Francisco Franco’s military uprising against Spain’s elected government “was an attempt not so much to impose fascism as to restore feudalism.” Paul Preston’s magisterial account of the bloodshed of that era bears this out. Fascism may belong to the 20th century, but Franco’s grab for power evokes earlier times: the parading soldiers who flourished enemy ears and noses on their bayonets, the mass public executions carried out in bullrings or with band music and onlookers dancing in the victims’ blood. One of Franco’s top aides talked of democratically chosen politicians as “cloven-hoofed beasts,” and anything that smacked of modernity — Rotary Clubs, Montessori schools — seemed to draw the regime’s violent wrath. Echoing the Inquisition, Franco ordered particularly despised foes put to death with the garrote, in which the executioner tightens an iron collar around a person’s neck.

There’s also something medieval in the fierce class divisions of 1930s Spain, with its great latifundistas, whose estates were worked by landless peasants so hungry they stole acorns from pigs’ troughs. Preston describes the “near racist” loathing Franco’s officials had for the lower classes; one contemptuously referred to unionized farmworkers as being like “Rif tribesmen.” Indeed, Franco’s leading commanders were mostly, like him, Africanistas, veterans of Spain’s bloody colonial wars in North Africa. As a young man, the generalissimo himself led troops on a raid that brought back the severed heads of 12 Moroccan tribesmen. [Read the full article...]

THE LONDONDERRY AIR

Testament of an Ulster Gunman
A Novel by Garrad Gawler 

It all changed for Charles Cunningham, a Physics teacher at the local College of Technology in the County Derry town of Maddenstown, on a June afternoon in 1973 when a bomb exploded in his neighborhood. He answers an advertisement by the UDR, the Ulster Defence Regiment, but, in the time to come, he will experience the consequences of his decisions, and how his involvement complicates matters with family and friends, Protestants and Catholics alike, to an unexpected degree.

With “The Londonderry Air – Testament of an Ulster Gunman” Garrad Gawler describes in minute detail and with an astonishing level of authenticity not only the inner workings of the Ulster Defence Regiment, but also the activities of underground paramilitary groups of regular citizens who planned and carried out the assassination of suspected Republican terrorists in their neighborhood.

The Londonderry Air is available at Amazon.Com, Amazon Kindle (US), Amazon.co.uk, Amazon Kindle (UK), Barnes & Noble, smashwords.com, and any other good bookstore.

For more information on Garrad Gawler and to read an excerpt of “The Londonderry Air,” please see the author’s section on this website.

Were Thomas Jefferson to walk the grounds of Monticello today, he would no doubt feel fully at home in the 1,000-foot terraced vegetable garden where the very vegetables and herbs he favored are thriving. Extensively and painstakingly restored under Peter J. Hatch’s brilliant direction, Jefferson’s unique vegetable garden now boasts the same medley of plants he enthusiastically cultivated in the early nineteenth century. The garden is a living expression of Jefferson’s genius and his distinctly American attitudes. Its impact on the culinary, garden, and landscape history of the United States continues to the present day.

Graced with nearly 200 full-color illustrations, “A Rich Spot of Earth” is the first book devoted to all aspects of the Monticello vegetable garden. Hatch guides us from the asparagus and artichokes first planted in 1770 through the horticultural experiments of Jefferson’s retirement years (1809–1826). The author explores topics ranging from labor in the garden, garden pests of the time, and seed saving practices to contemporary African American gardens. He also discusses Jefferson’s favorite vegetables and the hundreds of varieties he grew, the half-Virginian half-French cuisine he developed, and the gardening traditions he adapted from many other countries.

About Peter J. Hatch

As Director of Gardens and Grounds at Monticello since 1977, Peter J. Hatch has been responsible for the maintenance, interpretation, and restoration of its 2,400-acre landscape. He has written several previous books on Jefferson’s gardens and is an advisor for First Lady Michelle Obama’s White House kitchen garden. He lives in Charlottesville, VA.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

Thomas Jefferson’s Vegetable Garden: A Thing Of Beauty And Science

NPR Book Review – May 10, 2012 (Excerpt)

When you listen to All Things Considered host Melissa Block’s story about Thomas Jefferson’s garden, you’ll hear how he cared about putting peas on the table and sharing seeds with his friends. He also set loftier goals for his vegetable garden: Monticello’s south-facing expanse was a living laboratory for a lifelong tinkerer and almost obsessive record keeper. Jefferson was, in many ways, a crop scientist.

After Jefferson retired from public life to his beloved Virginia hilltop plantation, the garden “served as a sort of this experimental testing lab where he’d try new vegetables he sought out from around the globe,” says Peter Hatch, the estate’s head gardener. Hatch recently wrote a book about Jefferson’s garden and its history called A Rich Spot of Earth.

Somehow, the author of the Declaration of Independence and the nation’s third president found spare time to meticulously document his many trials and errors, growing over 300 varieties of more than 90 different plants. These included exotics like sesame, chickpeas, sea kale and salsify. They’re more commonly available now, but were rare for the region at the time. So were tomatoes and eggplant. [Read the full article...]

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QUEEN OF MISFORTUNE
A Lady Jane Grey Novel by Peter Carroll

A Love Story of Shakespearean Dimension!

Queen Of Misfortune is the fictional story of Lady Jane Grey as told by her beloved tutor, John Aylmer. At the time of her execution a stranger is recorded to have assisted her when, blind folded, she lost her way upon the scaffold. Was it the same strange who was also recorded to have visited her when she was imprisoned in the Tower? Little is known of this unfortunate girl who was beheaded for treason in the 16^th Century. She was only 16. She is omitted from the list of monarchs but was actually queen for nine days. Author Peter Carroll, in his novel, follows John Aylmer’s close relationship with Jane as her tutor and later, as she grows up, her lover. [More...]

Available at Amazon.Com, Amazon.co.uk, Barnes & Noble, and any other good bookstore.

Educator, writer, critic, intellectual, film-maker—Henry Louis Gates, Jr., has been widely praised as being one of America’s most prominent and prolific scholars. In what will be an essential volume, The Henry Louis Gates Reader collects three decades of writings from his many fields of interest and expertise.

From his earliest work of literary-historical excavation in 1982, through his current writings on the history and science of African American genealogy, the essays collected here follow his path as historian, theorist, canon-builder, and cultural critic, revealing a thinker of uncommon breadth whose work is uniformly guided by the drive to uncover and restore a history that has for too long been buried and denied.

An invaluable reference, The Henry Louis Gates Reader will be a singular reflection of one of our most gifted minds.

About Henry Louis Gates Jr.

Henry Louis Gates, Jr. is the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and Director of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard University. He is the author of numerous books, including Colored People, Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man, In Search of Our Roots, and the American Book Award-winning The Signifying Monkey. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

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Editorial Review

Most notably in the academic world, Gates (Life Upon These Shores: Looking at African American History, 1513–2008, 2011, etc.) excavated and promoted the significant original mid-19th-century African-American women’s narratives Our Nig by Harriet E. Wilson (rediscovered in 1982) and The Bondwoman’s Narrative by Hannah Crafts (first published in 2002). The author’s insightful introductions to both works are reproduced here. He has been instrumental in reinvigorating the African-American literary tradition by drawing on these and other little-known or otherwise lost contributions—e.g., work by early poet Phillis Wheatley, who was writing at a time when the absence of black writing proved to many the inferiority of the race. Yet for Gates these long-lost writings proved both their “certificate of humanity,” by embracing the European tradition, and their utter distinctness, especially in terms of language. As director of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard, he has co-edited important volumes dear to the legacy of Du Bois such as African America Lives and Africana: The Encyclopedia of African and African American Experience, the prefaces to which also appear here. In his persistent delving into genealogical research of his own family and those of famous others such as Oprah Winfrey, he has made some fascinating and troubling disclosures—e.g., outing Anatole Broyard and Jean Toomer for “passing” for white. Finally, he demonstrates in numerous journalistic pieces that he is an engaging and accessible writer, especially in interviews with Josephine Baker and James Baldwin and with Condoleezza Rice. – Kirkus Reviews

Henry Louis Gates Jr.: A Life Spent Tracing Roots

NPR Book Review – May 8, 2012 (Excerpt)

For more than 30 years, Henry Louis Gates Jr. has been an influential public intellectual with a distinct style, who makes complex academic concepts accessible to a wider audience.

Gates — known widely as “Skip” — may be best known for his research tracing the family and genetic history of famous African-Americans. “There are just so many stories that are buried on family trees,” Gates tells host Neal Conan. “My goal is to get everybody in America to do their family tree.”

With a number of PBS programs and books, he has traced the roots of prominent Americans — including Oprah Winfrey, Yo-Yo Ma and Stephen Colbert — and uncovered surprises about many families, including his own.

He says his goal in this work is twofold: “First, to show that we’re all immigrants, and secondly, that we’re all mixed — that we all have been intermarrying, or interrelated sexually from the dawn of human history.”

His most influential writings on race, politics and culture appear in a new volume, The Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Reader. Gates, the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor at Harvard University, discusses the new compilation and how his fascination with genealogy began. [Read the full article...]

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I have mentioned Lawrence of Arabia in passing in this blog because he was a boyhood hero of Robert Nairac GC. This emerges clearly in Luke Jennings’ memoir Blood Knots, when the eighteen year old Nairac asks the younger Jennings about his favourite books. Nairac’s regard for Lawrence stood the test of time. He evidently spoke of Lawrence while he was on his last, fatal undercover assignment in Northern Ireland in 1977; one of his former colleagues recalls hearing another soldier saying “he thinks he’s Lawrence of bloody Arabia!” There were similarities. There was also a tenuous Irish connection in both cases:  Lawrence’s father, Sir Thomas Robert Chapman, Baronet, of Westmeath, had been part of the Anglo-Irish ascendancy though he had little or no native Irish blood. T E Lawrence, his second son, never set foot in Ireland but was conscious of his Irish heritage. One of his unrealised literary projects was a biography of the executed Irish revolutionary, Sir Roger Casement, in whom he developed a serious interest.  Casement was fairly clearly gay, although some of his defenders are still in denial over this.

A man’s heroes, real or fictional, can provide indicators of his own character. An adult who continues to admire Biggles or Bulldog Drummond may in some important respects be still an adolescent at heart.  An outspoken admiration for dictators like Hitler or Stalin suggests an anti-democratic mindset.  Admiration for Oscar Wilde, Ronald Firbank, or Sir Roger Casement, may indicate sympathy for gayness; if not simply gayness, in the admirer.

What were T E Lawrence’s notable characteristics? He was a type of soldier that was more common in the Second, than the First, World War. A convenient term might be “the all-purpose irregular regular”. Lawrence, a historian by training, was a guerrilla soldier; an expert explosives officer; allegedly a master of disguises and languages; reportedly very brave. He did not fit in easily with the regular military establishment and did not pursue a conventional military career after the Great War had ended. Had he lived to experience the Second World War, he would have seen other men, who often looked to him for inspiration, conducting similar types of campaign. They included his second cousin Orde Wingate the Chindit commander; Lt-Col Billy McLean; Patrick Leigh Fermor; “Mad Mike” Calvert and the Stirling brothers.

Another characteristic of Lawrence was his tendency towards “romantic autobiography”; or, as his great friend Charlotte Shaw (Mrs Bernard Shaw) once put it: he was “an INFERNAL liar!” Bernard Shaw however protested that he was not a liar; Lawrence was an actor. This may be sophistry; there is a fine line between lying and acting a role. Unfortunately Lawrence   became so good at lying or acting that he himself had difficulty in disentangling the fact from the fiction in his own life: his autobiographical writings and remarks are often unreliable. However Lawrence had reasons for becoming a liar or an actor.  He was sensitive about his illegitimacy (as were others of his family); when he became famous, he put out misleading personal information, including in Who’s Who.  This suggested inter alia that he was descended from Sir Henry Lawrence, the British statesman and soldier in India, who died defending Lucknow during the Indian Mutiny, and/or his brother Sir John Lawrence (the first Baron Lawrence), who became Viceroy of India. This was not the case, although these Lawrences were also of Irish origin. T E Lawrence’s father, Sir Thomas Robert Tighe Chapman, had assumed the surname Lawrence in order to keep secret the fact that he and T E’s mother, “Mrs Lawrence”, were not married.  The need for deception was maintained by an unspoken threat from disapproving relations of Sir Thomas Chapman. These included his deserted wife; influential cousins, such as Sir Robert Vansittart, Permanent Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office from 1930 to 1938 and  later Chief Diplomatic Adviser to the British Government; and Sir Reginald Wingate, the British General and administrator in Egypt and the Sudan.  They regarded the illegitimate Lawrence family as a disgrace.

This was not entirely reasonable. The five Lawrence sons were clearly very accomplished. The eldest, Bob, became a medical missionary in China. T E Lawrence, “Ned”, was the second son. The next two brothers, Frank and Will, both promising young men, died in the Great War. The youngest, Arnold, became a distinguished academic. During World War II he appears to have engaged in secret intelligence work.  He was the only Lawrence brother to marry and father a child. I met him a few times. He was the brother who most closely resembled T E Lawrence, facially and in mannerisms. These included the famous disconcerting giggle and the mischievous teasing.

Another reason for the elaborate and misleading facade was that T E Lawrence was gay. Pages have been covered with ink by his detractors and defenders on this issue. However, as a gay man, I have no doubt of it. The signs are there, but they are not prominent. Lawrence died in 1935. In Lawrence’s lifetime gay sex between men; even between two consenting adults in private, was a criminal offence and remained so until 1968. It was also grounds for disgrace and dismissal from the armed services, in which Lawrence spent the greater part of his adult life. This was the case until 2000. In addition, his family’s feelings had to be considered. In response to this Lawrence, who had no interest in marriage, constructed another facade: the celibate ascetic. He put it about that he was sexless, or had no interest in sex. He also claimed never to drink alcohol. Neither was really true. What is not clear is when Lawrence accepted that he was gay or how often he indulged in gay sex. He almost certainly never had sex with a woman, although Luke Jennings in Blood Knots suggests a possible candidate.  Lawrence’s opportunities for gay sex in his youth were limited:  his unmarried parents were devout evangelical Christians. He and his brothers lived mainly at home during their school and university years. However there were potential opportunities afforded by cadet force camps; cycling holidays abroad and in the UK; later on archaeological digs in the Near East; and occasional encounters with the gay intelligentsia who frequented Oxford. One of these was the author “Baron Corvo”; another was the artist Henry Scott Tuke.  But at this distance in time we cannot know whether anything ever occurred.

Lawrence’s mental development parallels my own and that of other gay men.  There was the recognition of the truth in early adolescence, followed by denial, in which he may, like me, have told himself “it’s only a phase”. This was succeeded by growing resentment against his controlling parents; basically his mother, who would not let him be himself and which led to some kind of showdown with them and a nervous breakdown. As a result of this a bungalow was built in Lawrence’s father’s Oxford back garden, into which “Ned” moved – not the eldest son – and where he enjoyed greater privacy. His movements were no longer monitored. There are also unconfirmed rumours (originating with Lawrence himself) that Lawrence may earlier have run away and tried to join the army in the ranks, to be “bought out” when his true age and lack of parental permission came to light. Again, the attempted flight to a comfortingly all-male environment has parallels with my own experience.  Desmond Stewart, one of Lawrence’s best biographers, believed that Lawrence, while he had had a sentimental relationship with Dahoum, a young Syrian Arab, before the First World War, was finally initiated into both gay sex and sado-masochistic practices one orgiastic evening by the handsome Sharif Ali, one of the cousins of his friend Prince Faisal. This was later transformed into Lawrence’s beating and rape by evil Turks at Deraa in Syria, which is one of the most shocking passages in The Seven Pillars of Wisdom.  It also ensured that The Seven Pillars of Wisdom both enjoyed a succes de scandale but was also unpublishable in his lifetime in the UK and in unexpurgated form.  A private subscription edition appeared in 1926. Revolt in the Desert, an abridged and expurgated edition, was published in 1927. The first full public edition of The Seven Pillars appeared in 1935, after Lawrence’s death. The Deraa incident never happened as described: it did happen, but in Arabia; it was inflicted by a friend and ally, not an enemy; and Lawrence enjoyed it. He might have felt guilt or remorse afterwards, but he now knew beyond doubt what he wanted and needed. At some point in this process came the “rebirth” experience, when the gay man “dies” or casts off the false persona that others – usually his family – have imposed on him, and comes back to life again as himself. The experience can be exhilarating, traumatic or both. Now it is usually followed by “coming out”. In Lawrence’s time this was not possible, nor something that he could have shared with many people. He does however seem to have been frank with the Bernard Shaws, who respected his confidence while he lived.

After the Arabian campaign had ended, Lawrence attended the Paris Peace Conference of 1918-19; saw that most of the benefits that had been promised to the Arabs had not been delivered; wrote The Seven Pillars of Wisdom; briefly served in the administration of the Trans-Jordan Mandate; later served in the ranks of the Army and the RAF. After 1918 he used more than one alias, one of which was John Hume Ross; another was T E Shaw. Eventually he adopted the latter name by deed poll.   Nothing was ever said, but it seems that he wanted to make himself a surrogate son to Bernard and Charlotte Shaw, who were childless, and to replace his real parents (father now dead; mother alienated and in China) with the Shaws.

For the rest of his active life, until retirement, Lawrence served in the ranks of the Army and the RAF. In the latter, he gathered the material for his book The Mint, which was published twenty years after his death, in 1955. This delay was at the request of Marshal of the Royal Air Force Lord Trenchard. It contains some searing, and arguably homoerotic, descriptions of rough life in the ranks. During this time he employed handsome, muscular young men to beat him; sometimes at his spartan cottage, Clouds Hill, in Dorset. They were often soldiers or airmen. Clouds Hill is conveniently near Bovington Army Camp. A few years after Lawrence’s death Robin Maugham, the future second Viscount Maugham, was undergoing training at Bovington. He was befriended by a sergeant who confided over a drink that he had both beaten and penetrated Lawrence. He became visibly excited when recounting this story.  Maugham had difficulty in getting away. At the time he dismissed the story as “bullshit”. Later, however, he came upon information that appeared to confirm the sergeant’s story.

Lawrence retired in February 1935 with literary and political projects in hand. Once more the problem arose from the Government’s point of view: what to do with a maverick hero? What controversial things would Lawrence do now? His planned autobiography of Sir Roger Casement could prove very embarrassing indeed, if it rehabilitated the executed hero of the Easter Rising;   whose execution had been facilitated by the leaking of his private diaries. These revealed numerous homosexual encounters.  If E M Forster is to be believed, Lawrence was also becoming more indiscreet in his pursuit of pleasure, at home and in London.  More than one visitor to Clouds Hill records the presence of handsome, muscular soldiers or airmen visiting Lawrence; sometimes sunbathing naked in the orchard. He had acquired a “bodyguard”, the son of a neighbour, whose job it was to see off reporters and other intruders but who was also ruggedly handsome and muscular. Young Mr Knowles was apparently deeply attached to Lawrence, whom he knew as “Mr Shaw”.  Worse still, Lawrence had been approached by Henry Williamson, the author, to discuss involvement in the British Union of Fascists.  Lawrence was interested.

On 13 May 1935 Lawrence was involved in a motor-cycle crash whose details are far from clear and may never be fully elucidated.  He lingered for a few days but died without regaining consciousness. The circumstances surrounding his death are very mysterious. It probably was not an accident.  I will explain why I think this in a later post.

For more information on the subject see:

• T. E. Lawrence 0n Wikipedia.org
• T. E. Lawrence on PBS.org

The Indigo Bird

An Erotic Novel by Max Markham

James Graveney, a young Major in a respectable regiment, is outwardly conventional. In private James is bisexual, with a strong urge for his own sex. Gay sex, however, is illegal in the Army, so he is discreet about this.

James’ world is turned upside-down when he meets Lieutenant Richard Finch. Richard is intelligent, charismatic and exceptionally handsome.  He doesn’t mess around. He gets what he wants, and is completely unscrupulous about how he gets it. Richard will stop at nothing to achieve this, including Machiavellian deception and a cunning and brutal murder.  James starts responding to Richard, cautiously at first, then gets swept along on the great love affair of his life.

The Indigo Bird is a rollercoaster of surprises set against backdrops varying from the jungles of Belize to London, the English countryside, and Ireland, and the scene is set for more shocks and adventures. [Read more...]

One of the books to which I referred in my post on 24 April was Nicky Curtis’ Faith and Duty (Andre Deutsch, London, 1998, ISBN 0-233-99415-7). This book, a “soldier’s eye view” of the Troubles in Northern Ireland, seems to be out of print but copies are available from Internet booksellers.  It ought to be required reading for anyone with a serious interest in that Province. It is a good read and makes sense of a lot of things that were previously incomprehensible to me.

The title may require explanation. “Faith” refers to the author’s Catholic faith, which initially caused him to be sympathetic to the Catholic Nationalists, whose denial of civil rights sparked the first protests in 1968. “Duty” refers to his duty to the Army and his regiment, the Green Howards. 1968 was a year of protest all over the world: African-Americans were marching in the USA; students were protesting in Paris; in the UK the LSE was a focus of dissent and protest. Why should Northern Ireland be any different? Mostly, the world’s eyes were fixed on Paris, where a real revolution at one moment seemed possible. Ulster seemed merely a sideshow.  The difference was that the almost-moribund IRA took a new lease of life from the unrest in the North; infiltrated and took over the civil rights movement; and threatened to start a civil war in the Province. The Royal Ulster Constabulary, mainly Protestant and Unionist, could not and did not contain the unrest.  The British Army was sent in to keep the two sides apart. Welcomed at first as rescuers by the Catholic population, this goodwill did not last. The soldiers became terrorist targets from 1970, when the Provisional IRA stepped up their campaign, and the situation degenerated further after 30 January 1972 “Bloody Sunday”.  The increasingly barbaric war in Northern Ireland tested Curtis’ Catholic faith and eventually he lost it. When Faith clashed with Duty, Duty finally won.

Nicky Curtis is one of the most highly decorated British soldiers to have served in Northern Ireland. Throughout his service he was an NCO: initially a Corporal, later a Sergeant. He turned down the chance to be commissioned as an officer, having decided to leave the Army, in 1976. In this remarkable book he portrays his experiences in the Province during the turbulent years of 1969-1976. After surviving nearly 2,000 fired rounds, Curtis’s duty as a uniformed soldier ended and he received the Military Medal from the Queen for acts of bravery in the field. He returned to the Province to serve in undercover operations, liaising closely with such figures as Captain Robert Nairac; a legend for his undercover work against the IRA. Hard-hitting, uncompromising and frank, Nicky Curtis’ account of his life in Northern Ireland encompasses the extremities of urban civil war, the intrigues of undercover operations, and the political machinations that helped to form them.

If Curtis became disillusioned with the Catholic Church and with God, his dislike and contempt for many of the officers under whom he served stands out clearly. This is somehow shocking: were they truly that useless and out of touch? What had gone wrong at Sandhurst? The uniformed troops’ war in Ulster is portrayed as a “corporals’ war” in which officers were seen as an encumbrance, rather than an asset.  They reportedly usually stayed behind and sent their men out to suffer. When they did involve themselves, the results could be fatal for the men on the ground, if Curtis is to be believed. Naturally there were exceptions: two whom he mentions at length are his platoon commander, Lt Chris Mather MC, and Robert Nairac GC, with whom he worked undercover. He has unlimited admiration for their courage and intelligence: “the same officer-bred authority at odds with a squaddie’s natural toughness in the eyes… Nairac and Chris obviously shared more than just a certain demeanour: their balls must have been forged in the same steel mill as well”: high praise, from a man who is sparing with it. Both officers came to bad ends: as is well-known, Nairac, another Catholic, was abducted, tortured and murdered by the IRA in 1977. Mather suffered post-traumatic stress disorder; seriously ill and unable to work, he was forced to sell his Military Cross to pay his bills. He received almost no support, financial or moral. This is a sickening indictment of the UK’s disregard of its soldiers’ welfare at that time. Things may have improved somewhat, but there is plenty of scope for further improvement.  Curtis himself suffered and describes his nightmares in horrific detail. You could not make them up. He too had difficulty in securing help and support. It seems that “Tommy Atkins is always shat on once he’s protected your arse and that of any other fucker who wants power without responsibility”, to quote another soldier.

For those looking for information on Nairac, the book offers some insights into that complex man. For all Curtis’s admiration for him, he admits that Nairac could be deceitful, devious and manipulative: “a slippery- tit”, and rarely took Curtis completely into his confidence. Sometimes he played cruel practical jokes: for example insisting on taking Curtis for a drink in a known Republican haunt, McCrory’s Bar in Coalisland. Curtis was instructed not to open his mouth, as he could not mimic an Irish accent, which Nairac could. He was horrified and afraid. Why could they not go to a safe Protestant bar? Soon after they arrived, Nairac disappeared, as did McCrory. Curtis became very worried and went for a discreet reconnaissance. He eventually saw them in an inner room, hunched over a table like old pals. What was their relationship, the undercover Guardsman and the Republican IRA sympathiser (to put it no more strongly)?  Curtis did not know and we still don’t know. Had Nairac recruited McCrory? It seemed unlikely. Was Nairac a double-agent? Curtis eventually dismissed that idea too, but a nagging doubt remained for some time. Nairac said that he was ‘just passing the time’, which was clearly untrue.

The secret world is a horrible place; no-one can operate there and keep their hands clean. Unsurprisingly, Nairac does not emerge as a selfless knight in shining armour. He clearly got a kick out of intrigue, risk and danger. Possibly more than that: after his own murder, a collection of gory “scene of the crime” photos of dead terrorists was found in his room, verging on the morbid. Why did he amass them? In particular, and if Curtis’ account is correct, two assassinations, of which Nairac has been accused by the IRA and of which others have exonerated him, cannot be quite discounted. One is the murder of an IRA commander within the Republic: John Francis Green.  It seems that Nairac and  others, probably including his immediate superior, Tony Ball, had staked out the Carville farm house where Green was eventually assassinated; watching it from a hide for days before the killing. The fatal shot appears however to have been fired by a Loyalist paramilitary. Had Nairac tipped him off? Peter Cleary, another senior IRA commander, was kidnapped and ‘shot while attempting to escape’ by an SAS soldier. However the soldier admitted to Curtis that he had been more-or-less instructed to shoot Cleary, whatever happened, by a “RUC Special Branch officer “with a strong Irish accent, whom Curtis immediately recognised from the description as Nairac, although he was using another name and identity. It is however clear that Nairac was not involved in the “Miami Show Band massacre”. One suspects that, had he been involved, there would have been no survivors or witnesses and the incident would have taken place outside Northern Ireland. The loyalist paramilitary who shot Green evidently was involved; the same gun was used in both incidents.  This person’s identity is known; he is now dead. We should not feel much grief for Green and Cleary; both were clearly nasty pieces of work and their elimination represented real progress in the war against terrorism in Ulster.  Of course, they both had grief-stricken families and friends: so, probably, had Hitler.

From another source it has emerged that the “English officer with a clipped accent” heard giving orders at scene of the “Miami Show Band massacre”, to which Nairac’s name has often been linked, was not Nairac but a Loyalist paramilitary and Ulster Defence Regiment soldier. This man was Irish but had lived long enough in England to have acquired an English accent.  He too has now been identified. Curtis’ grief at Nairac’s death, which occurred after he had left the Army and the Province, is real and his “Epilogue” rings true. However he adds that “my gut feeling had been that it was a death waiting to happen”.  The mysteries that surrounded Nairac in life have simply deepened with his death.  Curtis sums it up: “about the only thing that anyone agreed on (including, amazingly, the IRA) was that the courage of the man was unquestionable and evident in the way that he faced his death”.  He mentions, and discounts, the theory, which many Loyalists still seem to believe, that Nairac was indeed a double agent and that he was spirited away after a staged abduction and murder. Returning to Ulster as a civilian businessman in 1995, Curtis makes the mistake of drinking a Guinness in a Republican bar in Armagh. There he narrowly escapes the same fate as Nairac, having been identified as a “Brit bastard”.

What Curtis does not reveal is whether he and Nairac ever discussed their common Catholic faith. Yet they surely must have done. Curtis used to discuss his faith, or loss of it, with Chris Mather, who was at that time an atheist. I have a strong suspicion that Nairac, whose faith was described as being traditionally Catholic, of an almost mediaeval intensity, when he left Ampleforth, may have undergone a similar process of disillusion to Curtis: partly no doubt as a result of Vatican II (1962-65), but mostly as a result of his experiences in the Province.  There are indications from third parties who met him in the Army that he had ceased to be a regular churchgoer and latterly did not come across as being very religious at all. It would follow from this that moral restraints, previously held tightly in check by his faith, might by this time have been jettisoned as well.

For expatriate Irish with a sentimental regard for the IRA as freedom fighters, this will make salutary, unpalatable reading. Curtis pulls no punches. The description of an IRA “romper room” in which someone had recently been tortured to death, is stomach-churning. “No room to swing a cat, you might say, but the poor sod’s torturers had obviously found just enough room to swing the axe, the shovel, the claw-hammer, breeze blocks, or whatever they’d used as they laid into him on all sides. In  a space this confined they must have left splattered from feet to face….I didn’t even want to think about the discoloured meat hook that hung from the ceiling like a dead question mark.”

It would be good to think that this dark chapter has finally closed: I don’t think that it has, yet.

Faith and Duty – The True Story of a Soldier’s War in Northern Ireland by Nick Curtis is available at:

• Amazon.Com
• Amazon.co.uk

The Indigo Bird

An Erotic Novel by Max Markham

James Graveney, a young Major in a respectable regiment, is outwardly conventional. In private James is bisexual, with a strong urge for his own sex. Gay sex, however, is illegal in the Army, so he is discreet about this.

James’ world is turned upside-down when he meets Lieutenant Richard Finch. Richard is intelligent, charismatic and exceptionally handsome.  He doesn’t mess around. He gets what he wants, and is completely unscrupulous about how he gets it. Richard will stop at nothing to achieve this, including Machiavellian deception and a cunning and brutal murder.  James starts responding to Richard, cautiously at first, then gets swept along on the great love affair of his life.

The Indigo Bird is a rollercoaster of surprises set against backdrops varying from the jungles of Belize to London, the English countryside, and Ireland, and the scene is set for more shocks and adventures. [Read more...]

Author Peter Carroll

Peter Carroll is the author of Queen of Misfortune – A Lady Jane Grey Novel. For more information, see his website.

Looking into the past, discovering the so different lifestyles of our forebears, attempting to understand how it was for them, when the poor had hardly any help except to rely on kindly charity groups borne out of the quest for religion and how much more we were God-fearing in those days – yet it all seemed to play an extensive part in those gloomy days gone by when , for example, it was  deemed shameful to conceive out of marriage , when such a person could well be thrown out of her family and given to the horrors of the workhouse in a vain effort to maintain an unwanted child.

Such was the case of the wretched Mary Jane Harris in February 1865 when she could no longer keep herself alive let alone that of her four month old son, who was found wrapped in a copy of the Western Times beside a road in Torquay in the county of Devon, England.

Women like the ruthless Charlotte Windsor ran a contemptuous business in taking in young children and babies for the sum of 3s a week, Mary Jane Harris ‘farmed’ out her own son having first resisted Mrs Windsor’s offer to smother him, but when she was unable to keep up her payments she stood by and watched Mrs Winsor smother her baby and wrap his naked body in an old newspaper. The body was later found dumped on the roadside.

Testimony revealed that Mrs Windsor conducted a steady trade of boarding illegitimate infants for a few shillings a week or putting them away for a set fee of £3-£5.

The facts of this case and many others eventually led to the amendment of the Infant Protection Act in 1897. The new Act empowered local authorities to actively seek out baby farms and lying-in houses, to enter homes suspected of abusing children and to remove those children to a place of safety. It also redefined the improper care of infants.

Windsor – who lived at Lawes Bridge, Torquay – was only one of many baby farmers. As Victorian Torquay had possibly hundreds of prostitutes, the babies left to die were also likely to be the unwanted consequence of the local sex trade.

However, though she did take in illegitimate infants, many of those murdered by the baby farmers were just the children of the poor who could not support additional children whether they were part of a traditional family unit or not.

Even in my lifetime I have known about how disgraceful it was deemed to sleep with a member of the opposite sex without the marriage cloak.

My own mother in the 1920’s – on announcing she was pregnant with my late elder brother – by her sweetheart – whom she loved -  was obliged to marry before the birth of the child, else be thrown out by her family in contempt. On seeing her wedding photograph she would never tell me why she didn’t have a white wedding, but then of course it was unheard of to marry in white if pregnant.

But my mother was lucky, she had found a good man and they were happily married until her death in 1959.

Yet my grandmother was not so fortunate, having been left with five children when my grandfather died in his early twenties, she was out on a limb, was forced to work in the proverbial workhouse of the time, when her boys sent to a boarding home, sadly she died without knowing what it was like to see her children grow up.

But worst of all, the 1800’s were never a good time to be an unmarried mother or a good time to be born a bastard.

I will always believe my generation were among the most fortunate, despite our early childhood days in living through a terrible war, to be living in the second part of the more civilised twentieth century.

But maybe now, just maybe; lifestyles have gone absolutely overboard with how things are, or it is just that us ‘olden’s think that because of the way we were brought up when those Victorian virtues were still very much alive?

For more information on the topic see:

• Baby farming
• List of Acts of the Parliament of the United Kingdom, 1880–1899

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QUEEN OF MISFORTUNE
A Lady Jane Grey Novel by Peter Carroll

A Love Story of Shakespearean Dimension!

Queen Of Misfortune is the fictional story of Lady Jane Grey as told by her beloved tutor, John Aylmer. At the time of her execution a stranger is recorded to have assisted her when, blind folded, she lost her way upon the scaffold. Was it the same strange who was also recorded to have visited her when she was imprisoned in the Tower? Little is known of this unfortunate girl who was beheaded for treason in the 16^th Century. She was only 16. She is omitted from the list of monarchs but was actually queen for nine days. Author Peter Carroll, in his novel, follows John Aylmer’s close relationship with Jane as her tutor and later, as she grows up, her lover. [More...]

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A narrative like no other: a cultural history that explores how cars have both propelled and reflected the American experience— from the Model T to the Prius.

From the assembly lines of Henry Ford to the open roads of Route 66, from the lore of Jack Kerouac to the sex appeal of the Hot Rod, America’s history is a vehicular history—an idea brought brilliantly to life in this major work by Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Paul Ingrassia.

Ingrassia offers a wondrous epic in fifteen automobiles, including the Corvette, the Beetle, and the Chevy Corvair, as well as the personalities and tales behind them: Robert McNamara’s unlikely role in Lee Iacocca’s Mustang, John Z. DeLorean’s Pontiac GTO , Henry Ford’s Model T, as well as Honda’s Accord, the BMW 3 Series, and the Jeep, among others.

Through these cars and these characters, Ingrassia shows how the car has expressed the particularly American tension between the lure of freedom and the obligations of utility. He also takes us through the rise of American manufacturing, the suburbanization of the country, the birth of the hippie and the yuppie, the emancipation of women, and many more fateful episodes and eras, including the car’s unintended consequences: trial lawyers, energy crises, and urban sprawl. Narrative history of the highest caliber, Engines of Change is an entirely edifying new way to look at the American story.

About Paul Ingrassia

Paul Ingrassia is the former Detroit bureau chief for The Wall Street Journal. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1993 (with Joseph B. White) for reporting on management crises at General Motors, Ingrassia has chronicled the auto industry for more than twenty-five years. His latest book, “Crash Course: the American Automobile Industry’s Road from Glory to Disaster,” is the first book published about the 2009 bailouts and bankruptcies of General Motors and Chrysler. The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, Meet the Press, the PBS Newshour, CNBC, National Public Radio and more. He’s a frequent op-ed contributor to The Wall Street Journal, Edmunds.com and other publications.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

Editorial Review

Car nut and Reuters deputy editor in chief Ingrassia (Crash Course: The American Automobile Industry’s Road from Glory to Disaster, 2010) makes it clear that he’s not writing about the best cars in American history, but the ones that have had the most impact on American culture (which also doesn’t always mean American-made cars). Beginning with the most obvious choice, Henry Ford’s Model T, Ingrassia proceeds to make his case for the cultural relevancy of Cadillac tail fins, the Honda Accord, BMWs, the Volkswagen Beetle, the Chrysler Minivan and more. Some of his more entertaining and informative stories are about automotive failures—e.g., hipster car-industry kingpin John DeLorean and his once-promising career at Pontiac, a tenure that ended with ugly, impractical cars and a botched cocaine deal. Ingrassia plays up the colossal technical flop that was the dangerous, rear-engine Chevy Corvair as the second-most influential car of all time, considering its unintended role as the car that sparked huge legal reforms in the automobile industry and launched Ralph Nader’s career. Perhaps the book’s most interesting section examines the improbable metamorphosis in public perception of the Volkswagen Beetle, which went from Hitler’s favorite ride to a 1960s hippie-chic countercultural statement on wheels. The same kind of socially conscious symbolic value resurfaced decades later in the form of the hybrid Toyota Prius, the ride of choice for left-leaning, eco-friendly affluence. Ingrassia succeeds in fashioning well-researched, swift-paced narratives around each of these 15 select automobiles. Using colorful detail, he effectively recasts these significant driving machines in their respective cultural contexts and brings to life the eras they influenced. – Kirkus Reviews

In ‘Engines,’ A History Of America Through Cars

NPR Book Review – May 5, 2012 (Excerpt)

You may know America by its cars. Sure, they suck up gas and promote suburban sprawl. But they also help drive the economy, and drive families from home to school to the soccer field. Cars also help spark another thing: imaginations.

Paul Ingrassia, who won a Pulitzer Prize at The Wall Street Journal for his reports from Detroit, has written a book about cars that may not include all the cherished classics or engineering marvels, but have earned a place in America’s scrapbook.

His new book, Engines of Change: A History of the American Dream in Fifteen Cars, explores how the automobile industry defined — and revolutionized — trends in American culture. Ingrassia notes it was difficult to narrow down the list to 15, but in the end, he chose to feature cars that had a “definable impact” on Americans.

“When I looked at modern American culture, I sort of viewed it as this unending tug of war between the practical and the pretentious, between the ordinary and the ostentatious,” he tells NPR’s Scott Simon.

“And a lot of these forces that are reflected in society as a whole are actually reflected and symbolized and captured by different automobiles over the century-plus of America’s automotive history.” [Read the full article...]

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THE BLEEDING HILLS
A Novel by Wilfried F. Voss

I have fought a good fight,
I have finished my course,
I have kept the faith.
- 2 Timothy iv. 7

The Irish War is officially a part of history, but not for Finnean Whelan, an IRA veteran of almost 40 years. British Intelligence has produced evidence that he is the mastermind behind a conspiracy to assassinate the First Minister of Northern Ireland. For Whelan this is not only a mission of revenge, but marks the beginning of a journey into the past and the return to the one true love: Ireland. [More...]

The Bleeding Hills is available at Amazon.Com, Amazon.co.uk, Barnes & Noble, and any other good bookstore.

How an oddly attributed $19,000 picture proved to be a $100 million work by Leonardo da Vinci—a true art-world detective story

In late 2010, art collector Peter Silverman revealed that a “German, early 19th century” portrait he had bought for $19,000 was, in fact, a previously unknown drawing by Leonardo da Vinci—an exquisite depiction of Bianca Sforza, rendered 500 years ago. In Leonardo’s Lost Princess, Silverman gives a riveting first-person account of how his initial suspicions of the portrait’s provenance were confirmed repeatedly by scientists and art experts. He describes the path to authentication, fraught with opposition and controversy. The twists and turns of this fascinating, decade-long quest lead from art history to cutting-edge science, and from a New York art gallery to Paris, Milan, Zurich, and ultimately a Warsaw library where the final, convincing evidence that the portrait was indeed by da Vinci was found.

• Takes an up-close look at the workings of the art world and at figures ranging from dealers and connoisseurs to a suspected forger
• Discusses current scientific techniques used to investigate and authenticate works of art, such as carbon dating and cutting-edge photography
• Uses Silverman’s drawing as an entree into Leonardo da Vinci’s world: his studio, his style, and his methods
• Explores the intersection of art and science in the authentication process, involving the work of a man who embodied that intersection

Unearthing the secrets almost lost to history, the book is ideal reading for art lovers and anyone interested in an astounding case of “whodunit.”

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

The memory had haunted Peter Silverman for nine years. In 1998, he had seen an exquisite nine-by-thirteen-inch portrait of a lovely young woman in a richly detailed costume. As much as he was captivated by its beauty, he was intrigued by the catalog annotation, which said it was “German, early 19th century.” He was certain that the piece was either a genuine Renaissance work or a brilliant forgery. He resolved to pay up to twice the minimum estimate for this extraordinary jewel at auction, but when the time came, he lost his nerve at $17,000. Now, nine years later, here it was again, for sale in a Manhattan gallery. It would not escape his grasp this time. Still, he had no inkling of the momentous discovery he was about to make or the great controversy that would follow.

In Leonardo’s Lost Princess, Silverman tells the riveting story of how his initial suspicions of the portrait’s provenance grew as one art expert after another confirmed his view that this haunting image was, indeed, created in the fifteenth century, that the artist was certainly left-handed, and that the quality of the work was extraordinarily fine. Few, least of all Silverman himself, were willing to even hint that it was the rarest of all finds, an original masterpiece by the greatest painter in history. More proof was needed, but where could it be found?

Silverman’s account of the cutting-edge science used to authenticate the portrait—from radiocarbon dating to multispectral photography—is as fascinating as it is convincing. Not only were scientists able to prove that the materials dated from Leonardo da Vinci’s lifetime, an analysis of photos taken of the portrait using thirteen different light spectra revealed beyond doubt that the work was made by the master himself. They also provided hints to the drawing’s history over the intervening centuries.

Still, many questions remained unanswered. Who was this poised and beautiful young woman? Why had Leonardo, who was very busy at the time with multiple projects for his patron, the Duke of Milan, and others, spent valuable time making this small and modest portrait in chalk and ink? Where had it been hiding for five centuries? The answers to these questions could only be found through good, old-fashioned research and legwork, which would take investigators from Paris to Milan to, improbably, Warsaw. The answers they found are surprising, revealing, and often moving.

Complete with vivid accounts of the art-world controversy sparked by Silverman’s claim, similar controversies over the authenticity of works supposedly by Leonardo, and the very different lives of Leonardo and the lovely young woman who was his subject, Leonardo’s Lost Princess is part whodunit, part revealing exposé, and all-enthralling tale of an impossible dream come true.

About Peter Silverman and Catherine Whitney

PETER SILVERMAN is a noted art collector. Among his significant discoveries are three miscatalogued works by Van Dyck and a wooden cross attributed to Michelangelo.

CATHERINE WHITNEY has written or cowritten more than fifty books in a variety of fields.

“Leonardo’s Lost Princess: One Man’s Quest to Authenticate an Unknown Portrait by Leonardo da Vinci” by Peter Silverman with Catherine Whitney

The Washington Post Book Review – May 4, 2012 (Excerpt)

In her portrait, she is young, with cherry blossom skin, glimmery long hair and eyes the color of Anjou pears. When Peter Silverman first saw the drawing (in chalk, pen and ink on vellum), he was entranced by the sitter’s beauty. But something seemed off. The Christie’s auction house catalogue described the 9 inch-by-13-inch work as that of a German artist from the early 19th century. Impossible, Silverman thought. Owing to its exquisite detail, the portrait appeared to be the work of a genuine master, perhaps even the master of them all, Leonard da Vinci.

In his new book, “Leonardo’s Lost Princess,” written with Catherine Whitney, Silverman recounts his journey to vindicate his hunch. A serious art collector with serious funds, Silverman bought the drawing in the winter of 2007 at a private gallery in New York for $19,000. Many art critics scoffed at his notion of who had made the portrait, which came to be known as “La Bella Principessa.” But Silverman persevered, consulting with many of the art world’s top Leonardo experts. He found through carbon-14 dating that the vellum dated not from the early 19th century, as Christie’s had reported, but from between 1440 and 1650. He found more evidence supporting Leondardo as the artist by using high-tech cameras to take images that peeled the painting away layer-by-layer. [Read the full article...]

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QUEEN OF MISFORTUNE
A Lady Jane Grey Novel by Peter Carroll

A Love Story of Shakespearean Dimension!

Queen Of Misfortune is the fictional story of Lady Jane Grey as told by her beloved tutor, John Aylmer. At the time of her execution a stranger is recorded to have assisted her when, blind folded, she lost her way upon the scaffold. Was it the same strange who was also recorded to have visited her when she was imprisoned in the Tower? Little is known of this unfortunate girl who was beheaded for treason in the 16^th Century. She was only 16. She is omitted from the list of monarchs but was actually queen for nine days. Author Peter Carroll, in his novel, follows John Aylmer’s close relationship with Jane as her tutor and later, as she grows up, her lover. [More...]

Available at Amazon.Com, Amazon.co.uk, Barnes & Noble, and any other good bookstore.

“It is possible to invent a single machine which can be used to compute any computable sequence,” twenty-four-year-old Alan Turing announced in 1936. In Turing’s Cathedral, George Dyson focuses on a small group of men and women, led by John von Neumann at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, who built one of the first computers to realize Alan Turing’s vision of a Universal Machine. Their work would break the distinction between numbers that mean things and numbers that do things—and our universe would never be the same.

Using five kilobytes of memory (the amount allocated to displaying the cursor on a computer desktop of today), they achieved unprecedented success in both weather prediction and nuclear weapons design, while tackling, in their spare time, problems ranging from the evolution of viruses to the evolution of stars.

Dyson’s account, both historic and prophetic, sheds important new light on how the digital universe exploded in the aftermath of World War II. The proliferation of both codes and machines was paralleled by two historic developments: the decoding of self-replicating sequences in biology and the invention of the hydrogen bomb. It’s no coincidence that the most destructive and the most constructive of human inventions appeared at exactly the same time.

How did code take over the world? In retracing how Alan Turing’s one-dimensional model became John von Neumann’s two-dimensional implementation, Turing’s Cathedral offers a series of provocative suggestions as to where the digital universe, now fully three-dimensional, may be heading next.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

About George Dyson

George Dyson is a historian of technology whose interests include the development (and redevelopment) of the Aleut kayak (Baidarka), the evolution of digital computing and telecommunications (Darwin Among the Machines), and the exploration of space (Project Orion).

Editorial Review

The author establishes late 1945 as the birth date of the first stored-program machine, built at the Institute for Advanced Study, established in Princeton in 1932 as a haven for theoreticians. It happened under the watch of the brilliant mathematician John von Neumann, fresh from commutes to Los Alamos where the atom bomb had been built and the hydrogen bomb only a gleam in Edward Teller’s eye. Dyson makes clear that the motivation for some of the world’s greatest technological advances has always been to perfect instruments of war. Indeed, von Neumann’s colleagues included some who had been at Aberdeen Proving Grounds, where a dedicated-purpose computer, ENIAC, had been built to calculate firing tables for antiaircraft artillery. The IAS computer, MANIAC, was used to determine the parameters governing the fission of an atom device inside an H-bomb that would then ignite the fusion reaction. But for von Neumann and others, the MANIAC was also the embodiment of Alan Turing’s universal machine, an abstract invention in the ’30s by the mathematician who would go on to crack the Nazi’s infamous Enigma code in World War II. In addition to these stories, Dyson discusses climate and genetic-modeling projects programmed on the MANIAC. The use of wonderful quotes and pithy sketches of the brilliant cast of characters further enriches the text. Who knew that eccentric mathematician-logician Kurt Gödel had married a Viennese cabaret dancer? – Kirkus Reviews

Unleashing the Power: ‘Turing’s Cathedral,’ by George Dyson

The New York Times Book Review – May 4, 2012 (Excerpt)

It’s anyone’s guess whether our digital world ends with a bang, a whimper or a singularity. One thing’s for sure: It began with a double entendre.

The digital age can be traced to a machine built circa 1951 in Princeton, N.J. That machine was given the bureaucratic-­sounding name the Mathematical and Numerical Integrator and Computer, and was known by the acronym Maniac, meaning something wild and uncontrollable — which it proved to be. But the crucial double entendre was contained in the computer’s memory. For the first time, numbers could mean numbers orinstructions. Data could be a noun or a verb.

That turned out to be incredibly important, as George Dyson makes clear in his latest book, “Turing’s Cathedral,” a groundbreaking history of the Princeton computer. Though the English mathematician Alan Turing gets title billing, Dyson’s true protagonist is the Hungarian-­American John von Neumann, presented here as the Steve Jobs of early computers — a man who invented almost nothing, yet whose vision changed the world.

Von Neumann was no stereotypical mathematician. He was urbane, witty, wealthy and (literally) entitled. At his 1926 doctoral exam, the mathematician David Hilbert is said to have asked but one question: “Pray, who is the candidate’s tailor?” He had never seen such beautiful evening clothes. [Read the full article...]

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THE BLEEDING HILLS
A Novel by Wilfried F. Voss

I have fought a good fight,
I have finished my course,
I have kept the faith.
- 2 Timothy iv. 7

The Irish War is officially a part of history, but not for Finnean Whelan, an IRA veteran of almost 40 years. British Intelligence has produced evidence that he is the mastermind behind a conspiracy to assassinate the First Minister of Northern Ireland. For Whelan this is not only a mission of revenge, but marks the beginning of a journey into the past and the return to the one true love: Ireland. [More...]

The Bleeding Hills is available at Amazon.Com, Amazon.co.uk, Barnes & Noble, and any other good bookstore.

The discovery of King Tutankhamen’s tomb in 1922 was perhaps the world’s most important archaeological find.  The only near-intact royal tomb to be preserved in the Valley of the Kings, it has supplied an astonishing wealth of artifacts, spurred a global fascination with ancient Egypt, and inspired folklore that continues to evolve today.  Despite the tomb’s prominence, however, precious little has been revealed about Tutankhamen himself.  In Tutankhamen, acclaimed Egyptologist Joyce Tyldesley unshrouds the enigmatic king.  She explores his life and legacy as never before, and offers a compelling new window onto the world in which he lived.

Tutankhamen ascended to the throne at approximately eight years of age and ruled for only ten years.  Although his reign was brief and many of his accomplishments are now lost to us, it is clear that he was an important and influential king ruling in challenging times.  His greatest achievement was to reverse a slew of radical and unpopular theological reforms instituted by his father and return Egypt to the traditional pantheon of gods.  A meticulous examination of the evidence preserved both within his tomb and outside it allows Tyldesley to investigate Tutankhamen’s family history and to explore the origins of the pervasive legends surrounding Tutankhamen’s tomb.  These legends include Tutankhamen’s “curse”—an enduring myth that reaffirms the appeal of ancient magic in our modern world

A remarkably vivid portrait of this fascinating and often misunderstood ruler, Tutankhamen sheds new light on the young king and the astonishing archeological discovery that earned him an eternal place in popular imagination.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

About Joyce Tyldesley

Dr. Joyce Tyldesley holds a first class honors degree in archaeology from Liverpool University, and a doctorate from Oxford University. She is currently a lecturer in Egyptology at the KNH Centre for Biomedical Egyptology, Fellow of the Manchester Museum and Honorary Research Fellow at Liverpool University. She has acted as consultant on several television projects and has excavated extensively in Egypt and Europe. Her previous books include a sequence of popular biographies of Egyptian pharaohs, with particular emphasis on the lives of prominent Egyptian women. She lives in Bolton, England.

Editorial Review

The search for the probable “truth” behind King Tutankhamen’s short reign (1336–1327 BCE) continues in this engaging reconstruction of his tomb discovery, family and life. Fluent in her subject, Tyldesley (Myths and Legends of Ancient Egypt, 2011, etc.) gives her own spin to the story in order to get beyond the sensational nonsense. She first looks at Howard Carter’s remarkable pinpointing of the tomb named KV 62 in the Valley of the Kings. The 18th Dynasty kings had broken with the earlier tradition of building enormous pyramids in the deserts of northern Egypt and chose instead the remote west-bank valley, clustered around the temple of the ascendant deity of the time, Amen. Bankrolled by George Herbert, aka Lord Carnarvon, Carter discovered in 1922 a tomb improbably crammed with royal objects inscribed with the names of the various 18th Dynasty kings and queens, as well as intact seals of the residing king, Tutankhamen, and his untouched burial chamber. The tomb had apparently been protected and hidden from sight by a flood shortly after burial, then forgotten; moreover, evidence suggested that Tut’s successor, Ay, inheriting the throne as an elderly man, had swapped Tut’s original, large tomb for the one intended for him. Deceptions and lies abound, not only in Carter’s discovery (removal and rearrangement of objects), but in the ensuing autopsies (a missing penis, two mysterious female fetuses). The handling of the artifacts strikes us now as shockingly casual, while the supposed curse of the mummy is merely silly. – Kirkus Reviews

Who Was That Masked Man? ‘Tutankhamen,’ by Joyce Tyldesley

The New York Times Book Review – May 4, 2012 (Excerpt)

Since the discovery of his richly furnished tomb in 1922, Tutankhamen has ascended to an afterlife no pharaoh in ancient Egypt’s 3,000-year civilization could have imagined. His reign was brief, circa 1336-1327 B.C. Historians had previously known so little about him that they were not sure if he had died young or come to the throne as an old man. But the sight of his golden death mask provoked a media frenzy, and the wild conjecture has continued down to our time of high-tech studies of the Tut mummy.

Today, Tut the boy king — about 18 at death — is the superstar of museum and touring exhibitions, one of antiquity’s celebrities, sharing a firmament with the likes of Nefertiti and the ever lusty Cleopatra. Indeed, he is so much a celebrity that Joyce Tyldesley, an Egyptologist at the University of Manchester who wrote a biography of Cleopatra four years ago, says that for some aloof colleagues, confessing an interest in Tutankhamen is “the equivalent to confessing a preference for television soaps over Shakespeare.” Nonetheless, she evidently believes the moment right for a book rethinking the Tutankhamen craze and assessing new biological and archaeological evidence for perspective on his place in Egyptian history. In “Tutankhamen: The Search for an Egyptian King,” Tyldesley has written a crisp, well-researched account of emerging insights into both the life and times of the young king and the modern response, nonsense and all, to his resurrection, as it were, in the modern world. [Read the full article...]

THE SABRINA STRONG SERIES by LORELEI BELL

Book One: Vampire Ascending [More Info...]

Book Two: Vampire’s Trill [More Info...]

In the light of what is now happening  in our world and the concerns attributed to it, the credit crunch, repetetive recession  and so forth, the warnings come daily now – I truly believe there is good reason for it all and religious or not, someone up there knows exactly the reasons why.

For too long the rich countries have had it so good and maybe many of the younger generation would not realise this, because those of us who remember past recessions and how it was in the middle of the last century will remember..

The nation seems generally to have become a lot more uncaring and apathetic since I was a lad – in a way we are all mollycoddled in the way we live now and looking around, social disorder, the ills and problems of our present time are widespread – as we search for answers to cure the frightening problems in a society in which many are scared to even step outside the door.

Unfortunately, things have changed for the worse and sooner or later the bubble had to burst.

There is a lot of doom and gloom about the world just now but if we, in the western world, count our blessings – perhaps we would be more prepared to face what I believe is just around the corner.

Perhaps one of the most serious things to happen would be increasing costs of food products which could well spiral in the next few months. We all need to eat in order to survive of course – but where are the pennies going to come from? One can hear the cries already from many who for a start simply need to change their luxurious lifestyle (compared with that of our ancestors) and make certain sacrifices.

It is interesting to note that cooking programs on TV are always popular yet many still buy ready cooked meals and the like. Real food for thought though was taking in a recent BBC TV series presented by Julia Bradbury which aptly showed how our meat and poultry are killed. I was astounded when I learned that some of our young parents were unaware that a pea came from a pod and they never stopped to think just how many of our products originate and   and how they derive.

If food does become a problem just take a look see at how they managed in the 1940’s for example when food rationing was in. I came from a very poor family and somehow my mum managed to keep five bellies full despite the scarcities. We’d grew our own vegetables which was a must, and with those vegetables mum would simmer the left over bones of the Sunday joint for a night, add  vegetables and stock and come up with a wonderful nourishing broth which would keep us going for a few meals. And that followed with suet puddings and treacle, baked jam rolls and the like would satisfy our hunger.

I can’t remember just how many slices of bread and dripping I had in a week – and sometimes with a bowl of winkles which were always cheap – but although we were poor and dad struggled to be a sufficient breadwinner, we were all happy and thankful too – looking to just how some people were suffering elsewhere.

Okay so I am living in the past, and so many things have improved for the better, but to what cost? – But that apart, , perhaps the stresses and strains of modern life are equally as grueling. Difference was we did care more about others and were not half so selfish. We were all in the same boat and spirits remained high despite the horrors of war.

Waste not, want not was the slogan. Just think of how much food we waste now in this throw away world!

With all that is going on attributed to climate change and the seemingly degradation of our species, perhaps a real deep recession will ultimately be for the good of all!

For more information on the subject see:

• 2008–2012 Global Recession
• Definition of ‘Recession’

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QUEEN OF MISFORTUNE
A Lady Jane Grey Novel by Peter Carroll

A Love Story of Shakespearean Dimension!

Queen Of Misfortune is the fictional story of Lady Jane Grey as told by her beloved tutor, John Aylmer. At the time of her execution a stranger is recorded to have assisted her when, blind folded, she lost her way upon the scaffold. Was it the same strange who was also recorded to have visited her when she was imprisoned in the Tower? Little is known of this unfortunate girl who was beheaded for treason in the 16^th Century. She was only 16. She is omitted from the list of monarchs but was actually queen for nine days. Author Peter Carroll, in his novel, follows John Aylmer’s close relationship with Jane as her tutor and later, as she grows up, her lover. [More...]

Available at Amazon.Com, Amazon.co.uk, Barnes & Noble, and any other good bookstore.

In my novel The Indigo Bird I have made passing reference to the disbanded Irish regiments of the British Army, especially the Connaught Rangers.  They feature more importantly in the sequel, The Vertical Land.

Following the Irish War of Independence six Irish regiments of the British Army that had recruited mainly in the counties that would now form the Irish Free State were disbanded. On 12 June 1922, at a solemn ceremony at Windsor Castle, King George V received the colours of five of these Regiments and a regimental engraving on behalf of The South Irish Horse, since they possessed no colours or standards. King George then made the following promise:

”I pledge my word that within these ancient and historic walls your Colours will be treasured, honoured and protected as hallowed memorials of the glorious deeds of brave and loyal Regiments”.  The colours are still there. I saw them recently at Windsor. The regiments in question were:

• The Royal Irish Regiment
• The Royal Dublin Fusiliers
• The Royal Muster Fusiliers
• The Connaught Rangers (aka “The Devil’s Own”)
• The Prince of Wales’ Leinster Regiment
• The South Irish Horse (which had no colours but presented an engraving to the King).

The future of the Connaught Rangers was in any case in doubt, given that on 28 June 1920 five men from C Company of the First Battalion at Wellington Barracks, Jalandhar, India, had decided to protest against the effects of martial law in Ireland by refusing to soldier. They were soon joined in their protest by other Rangers, declaring that they would not return to duty until British forces had left Ireland. The protest spread to the Connaught Ranger company at Solon.  However the third Connaught Ranger company at Jutogh remained loyal. A party of men led by Private James Daly made an attempt to recover their arms, storming the armoury. The loyal guard successfully defended it; two of Daly’s party, Privates Patrick Smythe and Peter Sears, were killed in the firefight. Within days both garrisons were occupied by loyal troops; Daly and his followers surrendered and were taken prisoner. Eighty-eight mutineers were court martialled: nineteen men were sentenced to death (eighteen later had their sentences commuted to life imprisonment). 59 were sentenced to 15 years’   imprisonment and ten were acquitted. Daly was shot by firing squad on 2 November 1920. The Rangers became Irish Nationalist heroes. The remains of Daly, Smythe, Sears and two comrades who died in prison were repatriated to Ireland in 1970, where they received an official funeral.

In fairness to the Connaught Rangers it should be stated that the Second Battalion remained loyal and that during the 1916 Easter Rising there had been no desertions or mutinies, despite the fact that the Rangers were soon deployed to Ireland to fight against the rebels. None of the Connaught Rangers were killed but one was wounded. In the days after the Rising the Connaught Rangers patrolled the Irish countryside and raided Irish homes. They captured hundreds of rebel volunteers and their weapons. A number of Connaught Rangers, who were in Dublin at the time that the Rising broke out, immediately volunteered to join other British army units, including the Royal Irish Fusiliers and the Royal Dublin Fusiliers, to fight against the rebels.  But by 1920 their loyalty was under great strain.

There was always a tension at the heart of these regiments. The soldiers were not immune to Nationalist sentiment. They handled it by cultivating a fierce loyalty to the regiment and, until that became impossible, to the King or Queen, while often disliking intensely the British Government; its policy towards Ireland; and the Anglo-Irish ascendancy.

The loss of these regiments must have had a significant impact upon the British Army, when one considers that the army commanded by the Duke of Wellington in the early 19th Century was comprised of one third Irishmen. During the First World War half a million Irishmen served voluntarily in the British Army, representing about one eighth of the total population of Ireland. In the Second World War the majority of the British Army’s Field Marshals were of Irish extraction. They included: Alanbrook (born in France, but the youngest child of Sir Victor Brooke, Baronet, of Colebrooke, Co. Fermanagh); Alexander (born in London, but a son of an Irish Peer, the Earl of Caledon, whose seat was in Co. Tyrone); Auchinleck (born in England, but his family were also from Co. Fermanagh); Dill (born in Lurgan, Co. Armagh); Gort (born in London but a member of the Prendergast Vereker family, an old Anglo-Irish noble family); Templer (born in Ulster and first commissioned into the Royal Irish Fusiliers); and Montgomery (born in England but the family seat was at New Park, near Moville in Co. Donegal). Although independent Ireland remained neutral – and, in the view of General Eisenhower, far too sympathetic to the Third Reich – and while there was no conscription in Northern Ireland, very large numbers of Irishmen, Northern and Southern,  volunteered to fight in the British forces against the Axis powers.  On their return to the Republic  they often suffered discrimination in jobs and housing and in some cases were shot by the IRA. So much for fighting against fascism!  The Irish soldiers who fought for Britain in its imperial wars and the First and Second World Wars were known for their dash and bravery.  It is not surprising, although it is also ironic, that some of the earliest SAS soldiers, like Roy Farran and “Paddy” Mayne were Irish.

Irish regiments continued to serve with the British Army, based in Northern Ireland but in practice recruiting all over Ireland. They included the Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers, the North Irish Horse, the Royal lnniskilling Dragoon Guards, the Royal Irish Hussars in addition to the Royal Ulster Rifles, the Royal Irish Fusiliers and the London Irish Rifles.  As a result of swingeing cuts and mergers, there are now only two left: the Royal Irish Regiment, which has been reborn phoenix-like, following the merger of the Inniskilling Fusiliers with the Ulster Defence Regiment, and the Irish Guards, who are part of the Household Division. The London Irish Rifles, a Territorial regiment, survives – just – at company strength.  They were based in Duke of York’s Headquarters until 2000, when they moved to Flodden Road TA Centre, Camberwell.  They still wear the Irish caubeen beret. In addition, many Irishmen serve in parts of the armed forces that are not specifically Irish by designation.

The divorce between Britain and Ireland was prolonged and painful; particularly in the Army. As recently as the 1970s, I was training on Salisbury Plain where the demonstration battalion at the School of Infantry was the Royal Irish Rangers. They were not permitted to serve in Northern Ireland and tended to get given this type of role.  Speaking to some of the soldiers, I was struck by how many were from Dublin and places in the Republic. I had to be tactful when asking them about their reasons for joining the British Army, but the answer was usually “my father (or my grandfather) was a British soldier”.  It was the family tradition and it was being kept alight, even though they faced potential difficulties when home on leave. None of them seemed to take the Irish forces seriously. The modern Irish Army has not inherited the traditions of the old Irish regiments.

For more information on the subject, see also:

• The Royal Irish Regiment
• The Connaught Rangers Association
• The Royal Dublin Fusiliers
• The Prince of Wales’s Leinster Regiment Association

The Indigo Bird

An Erotic Novel by Max Markham

James Graveney, a young Major in a respectable regiment, is outwardly conventional. In private James is bisexual, with a strong urge for his own sex. Gay sex, however, is illegal in the Army, so he is discreet about this.

James’ world is turned upside-down when he meets Lieutenant Richard Finch. Richard is intelligent, charismatic and exceptionally handsome.  He doesn’t mess around. He gets what he wants, and is completely unscrupulous about how he gets it. Richard will stop at nothing to achieve this, including Machiavellian deception and a cunning and brutal murder.  James starts responding to Richard, cautiously at first, then gets swept along on the great love affair of his life.

The Indigo Bird is a rollercoaster of surprises set against backdrops varying from the jungles of Belize to London, the English countryside, and Ireland, and the scene is set for more shocks and adventures. [Read more...]

The untold story of the extraordinary queen who championed Joan of Arc.

Politically astute, ambitious, and beautiful, Yolande of Aragon, queen of Sicily, was one of the most powerful women of the Middle Ages. Caught in the complex dynastic battle of the Hundred Years War, Yolande championed the dauphin’s cause against the forces of England and Burgundy, drawing on her savvy, her statecraft, and her intimate network of spies. But the enemy seemed invincible. Just as French hopes dimmed, an astonishingly courageous young woman named Joan of Arc arrived from the farthest recesses of the kingdom, claiming she carried a divine message-a message that would change the course of history and ultimately lead to the coronation of Charles VII and the triumph of France.

Now, on the six hundredth anniversary of the birth of Joan of Arc, this fascinating book explores the relationship between these two remarkable women, and deepens our understanding of this dramatic period in history. How did an illiterate peasant girl gain access to the future king of France, earn his trust, and ultimately lead his forces into battle? Was it only the hand of God that moved Joan of Arc-or was it also Yolande of Aragon?

About Nancy Goldstone

Nancy Goldstone‘s previous books include Four Queens: The Provençal Sisters Who Ruled Europe and The Lady Queen: The Notorious Reign of Joanna I, Queen of Naples, Jerusalem, and Sicily. She has also coauthored five books with her husband, Lawrence Goldstone. She lives in Westport, Connecticut.

Editorial Reviews

A French noblewoman arranged Joan of Arc’s miraculous career. So argues popular historian Goldstone (The Lady Queen: The Notorious Reign of Joanna I, Queen of Naples, Jerusalem, and Sicily, 2009, etc.), who contends that Yolande of Aragon was deeply influenced by The Romance of Melusine, the story of a fairy aiding a young nobleman that she took as a blueprint for what needed to be done to goad France’s indecisive Charles VII into battle against English invaders. The author presents no hard evidence that Yolande even read the book, but Joan of Arc’s short life is nicely contextualized within the story of Yolande’s astute maneuvers among the shifting political currents of the Hundred Years War. It’s particularly valuable since there is no biography in English of this remarkable woman, thrown into the thick of European politics by her marriage to Louis II, a member of the French royal family who was also King of Sicily. Yolande administered her husband’s French possessions while he was consolidating his claim to Sicily, and she saw that her family’s security and prosperity depended on bolstering the resolve of Charles VII. Goldstone strongly suggests that Yolande was responsible for the prophecy that began to circulate around this time—“France, ruined by a woman, would be restored by a virgin from the marches of Lorraine”—though she’s too conscientious a historian to state outright that the prophecy prompted Joan’s hearing divine voices. It’s possible that Yolande smoothed Joan’s path to Charles and encouraged his acceptance of her as literally heaven-sent, though again there’s no hard proof. Nonetheless, Goldstone’s vivid retelling of Joan’s astounding victories and her capture and martyrdom by the English is as gripping as ever, and she brings Yolande back into the narrative following Joan’s death in 1431 to spur Charles to a truce with the powerful duke of Burgundy, which ultimately led to the French victory. – Kirkus Reviews

oan of Arc’s visionary leadership and legendary courage exemplify the medieval belief in the power of divine revelations and miraculous events that alter human history. At the height of the English siege of Orléans in 1428, a young woman mysteriously appeared in the court of Charles VII, urging him to march against the English troops and reclaim the crown of France. Yet, as Goldstone so forcefully reminds us in this tale of madness, mysticism, intrigue, and courage, we might never have heard of Joan of Arc if Yolande of Aragon, Charles’s mother-in-law and powerful queen of Sicily, hadn’t needed to convince him of his legitimate claim to the throne and bolster his courage in battle. Influenced by her reading of the popular Romance of Melusine—which featured a half-human, half-fairy heroine who helped a king achieve political success—Yolande chose Joan and her visions from God to help Charles triumph. With compelling storytelling, Goldstone (Four Queens: The Provençal Sisters Who Ruled Europe) colorfully weaves together the tales of these two women—one rich, one poor; one educated, one illiterate; one worldly, one simple—whose powerful personalities and deep allegiance to France helped shape the country’s future. – Publishers Weekly

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QUEEN OF MISFORTUNE
A Lady Jane Grey Novel by Peter Carroll

A Love Story of Shakespearean Dimension!

Queen Of Misfortune is the fictional story of Lady Jane Grey as told by her beloved tutor, John Aylmer. At the time of her execution a stranger is recorded to have assisted her when, blind folded, she lost her way upon the scaffold. Was it the same strange who was also recorded to have visited her when she was imprisoned in the Tower? Little is known of this unfortunate girl who was beheaded for treason in the 16^th Century. She was only 16. She is omitted from the list of monarchs but was actually queen for nine days. Author Peter Carroll, in his novel, follows John Aylmer’s close relationship with Jane as her tutor and later, as she grows up, her lover. [More...]

Available at Amazon.Com, Amazon.co.uk, Barnes & Noble, and any other good bookstore.

According to tradition, the First Crusade began at Pope Urban II’s instigation and culminated in July 1099, when western European knights liberated Jerusalem. But what if the First Crusade’s real catalyst lay far to the east of Rome? Countering nearly a millennium of scholarship, Peter Frankopan reveals the First Crusade’s untold history.

About Peter Frankopan

Peter Frankopan is the Director of the Center for Byzantine Research at the University of Oxford.

Editorial Reviews

In this fluent and dramatic account, Peter Frankopan rightly places the Emperor Alexios at the heart of the First Crusade and in doing so skillfully adds a dimension frequently missing from our understanding of this seminal event. Frankopan illuminates the complex challenges that faced Alexios and deftly depicts the boldness and finesse needed to survive in the dangerous world of medieval Byzantium. - Jonathan Phillips, author of Holy Warriors: A Modern History of the Crusades

Filled with Byzantine intrigue in every sense, this book is important, compellingly revisionist and impressive in its scholarly use of totally fresh sources. It refocuses the familiar western story through the eyes of the emperor of the east and fills in the missing piece of the puzzle of the Crusades. - Simon Sebag Montefiore, author of Jerusalem: The Biography

In a field near Clermont, France, on November 27, 1095, Pope Urban II issued a rousing call to arms, a march to Jerusalem to retake the Holy City from the infidel Muslims who for more than 20 years had been invading and conquering lands belonging to Christians. Four years later, European armies arrived in Jerusalem and drove out the Muslims, retaking the city for Christendom. Yet, as historian Frankopan, a fellow at Oxford, so forcefully reminds us in this cracking good story of political and religious intrigue, the real reason that Urban II rallied the forces that day was an urgent message from Alexios I Komnenos, emperor of Byzantium, whose political authority had begun to decline and whose empire was under attack on all sides by Muslim forces. Alexios called upon Urban, who sent troops immediately. Frankopan draws deeply upon the Alexiad, written several decades later by Komnenos’s daughter, Anna, and he presents a vivid portrait of a man whose early political ineptness created division in his empire, but whose boldness launched the Crusades and changed the shape of the medieval world by expanding the geographic, cultural, and political horizons of Europe. – Publishers Weekly

‘The First Crusade: The Call From the East,’ by Peter Frankopan

The Washington Post Book Review – May 2, 2012 (Excerpt)

“Deus vult!” — God wills it! — was the battle cry of the First Crusade, in which armies of Europe, at the very end of the 11th century, marched off to liberate the holy city of Jerusalem and conquer the infidel Turks, who were then sweeping all before them in Asia Minor.

Whatever God’s actual intentions in the matter, and He is known to move in mysterious ways, His representatives on earth, Pope Urban II in Rome and the Emperor Alexios in Constantinople, quite clearly fostered this great martial enterprise for political purposes of their own. The emperor, assailed by enemies on his frontiers and by rivals within his family, was desperate for military aid, just as the pope was comparably eager for a galvanizing cause that would confirm his primacy as the leader of the Christian world.

Older studies of this complex military venture — merely one in a series of clashes between “Europe” and “Asia” that goes back as far as the Trojan War and continues to this day — often tend to emphasize its romantic character. In this view, Pope Urban’s electrifying call to arms at Clermont in 1095 is regarded as the starting point for years of heroism and self-sacrifice. That day, in a field in France, the pontiff thundered out that that the Muslims, “a foreign people and a people rejected by God, had invaded lands belonging to Christians, destroying them and plundering the local population.”  [Read the full article...]

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THE BLEEDING HILLS
A Novel by Wilfried F. Voss

I have fought a good fight,
I have finished my course,
I have kept the faith.
- 2 Timothy iv. 7

The Irish War is officially a part of history, but not for Finnean Whelan, an IRA veteran of almost 40 years. British Intelligence has produced evidence that he is the mastermind behind a conspiracy to assassinate the First Minister of Northern Ireland. For Whelan this is not only a mission of revenge, but marks the beginning of a journey into the past and the return to the one true love: Ireland. [More...]

The Bleeding Hills is available at Amazon.Com, Amazon.co.uk, Barnes & Noble, and any other good bookstore.

“I hope we’re as good friends when you finish your book as we are now,” Ben Bradlee, the legendary former executive editor of The Washington Post, told Jeff Himmelman in March 2010. “But I don’t give a [expletive deleted] what you write about me.”

So begins Yours in Truth, an intimate portrait of a fixture on the American scene for nearly half a century—a close friend to John F. Kennedy; the center of D.C. social life; and a crusty, charismatic editor whose decisions at the helm of the Post during Watergate changed the course of history. Granted unprecedented access to Bradlee and his colleagues, friends, and private files, Himmelman draws on never-before-seen internal Post memos, correspondence, personal photographs, and private interviews to trace the full arc of Bradlee’s forty-five-year career—from his early days as a press attaché in postwar Paris through the Pentagon Papers, Richard Nixon’s resignation, the Janet Cooke fabrication scandal, and beyond. Along the way, Himmelman also unearths a series of surprises—about Watergate, and about Bradlee’s private relationships with Post owner Katharine Graham and President Kennedy and his wife, Jackie.

“Don’t feel that you have to protect me,” Bradlee told Himmelman whenever the reporting started to strike close to home. “Follow your nose.” Those instructions, familiar to any Post reporter, have resulted in this thoughtfully constructed and beautifully written account of a magnetic man whose career has come to define the golden age of newspapers in America, when the press battled for its freedom—and won.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

About Jeff Himmelman

Jeff Himmelman has worked on two national bestsellers, Bob Woodward’s Maestro and Tim Russert’s Big Russ & Me, and was the co-author of A Different Life with Quinn Bradlee. He has written for The Washington Post and The New York Times Magazine; his work with Woodward and a team of other reporters helped The Post secure the national reporting Pulitzer Prize for its post-9/11 coverage. He is also a professional musician who writes, records, and performs under the name Down Dexter. He lives in Washington, D.C., with his wife and daughter.

Biography of Editor Keeps Watergate Twists Coming

The New York Times – May 1, 2012 (Excerpt)

It might say something about the state of politics that the biggest story in Washington on Monday happened 40 years ago. And it involves a potted plant.

In a new authorized biography of the journalism legend Ben Bradlee, “Yours in Truth,” by Jeff Himmelman, Mr. Bradlee is quoted expressing some anxiety over some of the most provocative and enduring details of “All the President’s Men,” the famous unfurling of the Watergate scandal by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein.

While Mr. Himmelman uses material from Mr. Bradlee’s old memos, letters, interviews and photos to write a “personal portrait” of the former Washington Post editor, the source of the Watergate conversation was an unpublished interview conducted in 1990 by Barbara Feinman, who was working with Mr. Bradlee on his memoir.

At one point, Mr. Bradlee told Ms. Feinman, “You know I have a little problem with Deep Throat.”

“Did that potted [plant] incident ever happen? … And meeting in some garage,” Mr. Bradlee said, according to Mr. Himmelman’s book. “One meeting in the garage? Fifty meetings in the garage? I don’t know how many meetings in the garage. … There’s a residual fear in my soul that that isn’t quite straight.” [Read the full article...]

‘Yours in Truth’ by Jeff Himmelman: Bob Woodward is the star of new Ben Bradlee book

The Washington Post Book Review – May 4, 2012 (Excerpt)

Jeff Himmelman uses his new book, “Yours in Truth,” to take shots at Bob Woodward, Carl Bernstein and their 1974 book, “All the President’s Men.” But Himmelman’s fire does not come from the usual redoubt of Watergate revisionism. He is a former researcher for Woodward, one who worked so diligently on “Maestro,” the reporter’s 2001 book about Alan Greenspan, that Woodward gushed about him in his author’s note.

“Jeff Himmelman,” he wrote, “was my full-time collaborator at every step of this book — reporting, writing and editing. . . . A truly remarkable man of unusual maturity, brainpower and charm, Jeff is an original thinker who retains a deep sense of idealism. . . . This book would never have been completed without him, and it is his as much as mine. I consider him a friend for life.”

After he finishes reading “Yours in Truth,” Woodward will probably consider a different sort of life sentence for Himmelman.

Although former Washington Post executive editor Benjamin C. Bradlee gets top billing in Himmelman’s book, he plays a supporting role, not the lead. The book is chockablock with Bradlee — drawing on more than 60 boxes containing his papers and other private archives, and countless hours of interviews with him and his colleagues, to tell the story of his life, which Bradlee already covered in his 1995 autobiography, “A Good Life.” But the genuine subject is Woodward. [Read the full article...]

All the Protégé’s Men

The New York Times Book Review – May 11, 2012 (Excerpt)

WATERGATE made The Washington Post’s Bob Woodward and Ben Bradlee household names, but it also established them as icons in perhaps the only city where journalists can be at the peak of the social establishment.

While Mr. Woodward’s Watergate reporting partner, Carl Bernstein, moved on to New York, Mr. Woodward and Mr. Bradlee, the newspaper’s editor at the time, endured as Washington’s permanent celebrities, one of them producing a stream of best-selling books, the other, even in his 90s, the same charismatic figure portrayed by Jason Robards in “All the President’s Men.” Few challenged them, and nothing came between them, so closely had their Watergate experience and years at The Post bound them.

And that is why a new biography of the former Post editor by a former assistant to both men has caused a sensation far beyond the vanishing Georgetown world Mr. Bradlee and Mr. Woodward have long inhabited.

In “Yours in Truth: A Personal Portrait of Ben Bradlee,” the 36-year-old former assistant, Jeff Himmelman, suggests that Mr. Bradlee has questioned Mr. Woodward’s and Mr. Bernstein’s reporting methods, and reveals intimate details of his family life, including piecing together a letter Mr. Bradlee once wrote to Sally Quinn (then his girlfriend and now his wife), ripped up and filed away without sending. [Read the full article...]

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THE BLEEDING HILLS
A Novel by Wilfried F. Voss

I have fought a good fight,
I have finished my course,
I have kept the faith.
- 2 Timothy iv. 7

The Irish War is officially a part of history, but not for Finnean Whelan, an IRA veteran of almost 40 years. British Intelligence has produced evidence that he is the mastermind behind a conspiracy to assassinate the First Minister of Northern Ireland. For Whelan this is not only a mission of revenge, but marks the beginning of a journey into the past and the return to the one true love: Ireland. [More...]

The Bleeding Hills is available at Amazon.Com, Amazon.co.uk, Barnes & Nobel, and any other good bookstore.

This fascinating and groundbreaking work tells the remarkable story of the relationship between Americans and their trees across the entire span of our nation’s history.

Like many of us, historians have long been guilty of taking trees for granted. Yet the history of trees in America is no less remarkable than the history of the United States itself—from the majestic white pines of New England, which were coveted by the British Crown for use as masts in navy warships, to the orange groves of California, which lured settlers west. In fact, without the country’s vast forests and the hundreds of tree species they contained, there would have been no ships, docks, railroads, stockyards, wagons, barrels, furniture, newspapers, rifles, or firewood. No shingled villages or whaling vessels in New England. No New York City, Miami, or Chicago. No Johnny Appleseed, Paul Bunyan, or Daniel Boone. No Allied planes in World War I, and no suburban sprawl in the middle of the twentieth century. America—if indeed it existed—would be a very different place without its millions of acres of trees.

As Eric Rutkow’s brilliant, epic account shows, trees were essential to the early years of the republic and indivisible from the country’s rise as both an empire and a civilization. Among American Canopy’s many fascinating stories: the Liberty Trees, where colonists gathered to plot rebellion against the British; Henry David Thoreau’s famous retreat into the woods; the creation of New York City’s Central Park; the great fire of 1871 that killed a thousand people in the lumber town of Peshtigo, Wisconsin; the fevered attempts to save the American chestnut and the American elm from extinction; and the controversy over spotted owls and the old-growth forests they inhabited. Rutkow also explains how trees were of deep interest to such figures as George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, Teddy Roosevelt, and FDR, who oversaw the planting of more than three billion trees nationally in his time as president.

As symbols of liberty, community, and civilization, trees are perhaps the loudest silent figures in our country’s history. America started as a nation of people frightened of the deep, seemingly infinite woods; we then grew to rely on our forests for progress and profit; by the end of the twentieth century we came to understand that the globe’s climate is dependent on the preservation of trees. Today, few people think about where timber comes from, but most of us share a sense that to destroy trees is to destroy part of ourselves and endanger the future.

Never before has anyone treated our country’s trees and forests as the subject of a broad historical study, and the result is an accessible, informative, and thoroughly entertaining read. Audacious in its four-hundred-year scope, authoritative in its detail, and elegant in its execution, American Canopy is perfect for history buffs and nature lovers alike and announces Eric Rutkow as a major new author of popular history.

About Eric Rutkow

Eric Rutkow is a graduate of Yale University and Harvard Law School. He has worked as a lawyer on environmental issues across three continents. He currently splits his time between New York City and New Haven, Connecticut, where, in addition to writing, he is pursuing a doctorate in American History at Yale. This is his first book.

Editorial Reviews

“Right from its quietly shocking prelude–the cavalier and surprisingly recent murder of the oldest living thing in North America–Eric Rutkow’s splendid saga shows, through a chain of stories and biographical sketches that are intimate, fresh, and often startling, how trees have shaped every aspect of our national life. Here is the tree as symbol and as tool, as companion and enemy, as a tonic for our spirits and the indispensable ingredient of our every enterprise from the colonization voyages to the transcontinental railroad to Levittown. The result, both fascinating and valuable, is a sort of shadow history of America. Toward the end of his finest novel, F. Scott Fitzgerald writes that the ‘vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby’s house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of human dreams.’ AMERICAN CANOPY retrieves those trees and does full-rigged (on tall, white pine masts) justice to the dream.” - Richard Snow, author of A Measureless Peril and former Editor-in-Chief of American Heritage

“AMERICAN CANOPY marks the debut of an uncommonly gifted young historian and writer. Ranging across four centuries of history, Eric Rutkow shows the manifold ways in which trees–and woodland–and wood–have shaped the contours of American life and culture. And because he has managed to build the story around gripping events and lively characters, the book entertains as much as it as informs. All in all, a remarkable performance!” - John Demos, Samuel Knight Professor of History at Yale University, and author of Entertaining Satan, winner of the Bancroft Prize in American History, and The Unredeemed Captive, which was a finalist for the National Book Award

Review: ‘American Canopy’ by Eric Rutkow should get out more

The Los Angeles Times Book Review – April 29, 2012 (Excerpt)

Every book has its quirks. In the case of the newly published history “American Canopy: Trees, Forests, and the Making of a Nation,” the prevailing eccentricity is that it’s not primarily about trees. The leitmotif of author Eric Rutkow is wood, chiefly how North American virgin forest gave rise to a new nation, and how the U.S. has reduced that resource from close to a billion acres of ancient woodland to what is now more like 750 million acres of often young trees.

As Rutkow tells it, timber is so basic to the American story that it even drove colonization. Seventeenth century Britain needed massive old pines to sustain its tall ship navy. “Pilgrims and Puritans may have arrived in America to discover an uncorrupted life,” Rutkow notes, “but that didn’t mean their backers shared this enthusiasm.” Soon the Eastern seaboard colonies were rotten with shipwrights. American independence did nothing to stall consumption; a young nation ran through pristine woodland at such a rate that by the1840s in Concord, Mass., when Henry David Thoreau retreated from civilization to contemplate nature, whistles of Boston-bound trains echoed across Walden Pond. [Read the full article...]

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THE BLEEDING HILLS
A Novel by Wilfried F. Voss

I have fought a good fight,
I have finished my course,
I have kept the faith.
- 2 Timothy iv. 7

The Irish War is officially a part of history, but not for Finnean Whelan, an IRA veteran of almost 40 years. British Intelligence has produced evidence that he is the mastermind behind a conspiracy to assassinate the First Minister of Northern Ireland. For Whelan this is not only a mission of revenge, but marks the beginning of a journey into the past and the return to the one true love: Ireland. [More...]

The Bleeding Hills is available at Amazon.Com, Amazon.co.uk, Barnes & Nobel, and any other good bookstore.