This is my review of Wagons West: The Epic Story of America’s Overland Trails by Frank McLynn.

I was inspired to read this after watching the recent film about "Meek's Cutoff" in which a small number of pioneers hire an unreliable guide to show them a short cut on the Oregon Trail. The true story proves to have been much more dramatic, involving more than 1000 people and perhaps 300 wagons. Soon clearly lost, the party ran dangerously low on food and fresh water at times, or found more than they bargained for in the form of torrential rivers which could only be crossed by dismantling their wagons piece by piece. Resentment against Meek rose so high at one point that he came close to being hanged from a gibbet made from raising up the tongues of three wagons and tying them together in the kind of summary justice often practised in a society which had to maintain its own system of law and order. In fact, the travellers were often remarkably lenient. The punishment for killing a man in angry self defence might be expulsion from the group, perhaps to be readmitted fairly quickly.

"Wagon's West" provides a useful history of the background to the great pioneer movement which began in earnest in the 1840s. The young nation of the United States did not yet clearly control the western part of the continent: Oregon was still effectively a British province, and California part of the decayed Mexican Empire. The first pioneers were neither religious refugees – apart from the Mormon trek of 1847 to establish Salt Lake City – nor were they the poorest elements of society. It took moderate means to assemble a wagon and provisions for the trek along the Oregon Trail, or to branch off it at the staging post of Fort Hall to reach California.

I agree that the "blow by blow" account of the first great treks from 1841 is repetitive at times, and includes far too many characters for one to absorb. Clearer, better positioned maps would be helpful, together with a few more photographs, although Google images provide a fascinating accompaniment to descriptions of landmarks like Chimney Rock, or the many rivers, mountains and forts described en route.

McLynn conveys well the courage and resilience of people who would set out with only sketchy knowledge of a route which would cover hundreds of miles and take weeks. It helps one to understand why so many modern-day Americans are so opposed to the idea of relying on state aid. Of course, the travellers were mostly farmers or skilled craftsmen like blacksmiths, and used to living off the land. Descriptions of encounters with vast herds of buffaloes, using their droppings as fuel in the absence of timber for firewood, rattlesnakes bunking with prairie dogs, Indians who wanted some compensation for encroachment on their territory, stole horses or shot at oxen so they would be abandoned to provide them with food, the petty bickering triggered by the sheer boredom of travelling mile upon mile, or the hardship of running short of vital supplies, the crazy jockeying for position to take the lead, rather like the road rage of car drivers today – all this makes for a fascinating read.

Just when you feel that you have had enough, McLynn changes tack slightly, with a chapter on the infamous "Donner Party" who became stranded in snow on a treacherous cut-off, and may have resorted to cannibalism: other sources now dispute this horrific twist which McLynn presents as Gospel. The chapter on the Mormon Trek is particularly interesting, showing how an autocratic, manipulative leader, Brigham Young, maintained discipline to provide an impressive example of rapid colonisation. The Epilogue ends with the Gold Rush of 1848, which disrupted the former relatively orderly pattern of migration. McLynn describes how, in the craze to get to the riches first, people set out with too many goods and abandoned them after only a few miles, littering the landscape, so that the traders who had sold them could easily collect them up again for resale. The Westerns with which we are so familiar do not appear at all far-fetched.

⭐⭐⭐⭐ 4 Stars

This is my review of China: A History by John Keay.

This thorough, systematic history provides an informative and readable textbook.

I like the introduction which challenges the myths which have arisen over The Great Wall, the Grand Canal, the Long March and even the Giant Panda. Although I appreciate the author's point that a history of China calls for a focus on the distant past because its culture is so "historically conscious" that "the remote is often more relevant", I am not sure that the author actually identifies this relevance very often! Yet it is salutary to realise how relatively advanced the Chinese have been for so long, compared to the west.

However, taking 300 pages to cover the first two thousand years without quite reaching the date of the Norman Conquest of England proved too much detail for me to absorb. My solution as a "general interest reader" was to move to Chapter 14 on "The Rites of Ming", the time span 1405-1620, i.e. contemporaneous with the late Renaissance in Europe. Although the characters do not come alive as individuals like, say, the Tudors, it is interesting to read about the size and scale of the Chinese voyages of the famous eunuch Zheng He with up to 300 ships, the largest over 130 metres long compared with the pioneering voyage of Columbus with only three ships, none longer than 20 metres. Yet, rather than dominate the seas, the Chinese fleets were laid by to rot, after the emperor's decision (or was it that of the scholar-bureaucrat mandarins?) to turn his back on overseas enterprise. The conflicts between the emperor, who despite his "heavenly power" could only "dispose", and the mandarins who "proposed" his actions are also intriguing.

It is hard to keep track of the various states, so that more small maps at relevant points would have been useful.

I recommend this book as a useful text to have on one's shelf for reference, although I am personally more interested in the last couple of centuries of Chinese history i.e. its contact with the west.

⭐⭐⭐⭐ 4 Stars

This is my review of Russia: A 1,000-Year Chronicle of the Wild East by Martin Sixsmith.

This is popular history at its best.

Selection of the key points from the past millennium of Russian history is made to seem deceptively simple. Sixsmith continually makes connections to bring characters and events alive. For instance, his description of Ivan the Terrible veering from "pestering" Elizabeth 1 with marriage proposals to raining insults on her following a trade dispute made me realise that their reigns overlapped.

Sixsmith consistently draws parallels between events, enabling us to see patterns. In the C9, the Slavs of Novgorod begged the Viking Rurik of Rus (hence the modern name for Russia) to rule over them, just as many Russians welcomed the strong line taken by Putin in 1999, as he rolled back the "liberalising" measures of the 1990s, arguing that a more autocratic "managed democracy" was necessary to maintain order in a vast country where liberal values lacked "deep historical traditions".

The author cites how, way back in 1015, after King Vladimir naively left his kingdom to be ruled equally by his twelve sons, two of them submitted to being murdered rather than risk a civil war by resisting their brother Svyatipolk's bid for power. This sacrifice of the individual for the sake of the group is likened to the action of Komarov, the veteran cosmonaut who set off on a Soyuz flight dogged by technical faults, which he did not expect to survive, because otherwise "they" would send Yuri Gargarin (the first Russian in space) instead of him.

Yet again, links are made between the chaos after the 1917 Revolution, and the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991. In 1917, there was the confused period of "dual power" when, both occupying the same building, the liberal "Provisional Government feared the raw strength of the Soviet Worker's Deputies, but the Soviet apparently feared the responsibility of governing", until the Bolsheviks "hijacked ..freedom and democracy" and imposed a centralised dictatorship even harsher than the one they had overthrown" . In 1991, having let the genie of pressure for democratic freedom out of the bottle, and survived an attempted right-wing coup, Gorbachev was pushed out of the presidency by the shrewder popular hero Yeltsin, although the latter's liberal reforms were doomed to fail.

This is the clearest explanation I have read of both the 1917 Revolution, and the chain of events of the last two decades, including such misjudgements as the valuation of state assets at only 9 billion dollars (150 million people receiving a 60 dollar voucher each which they of course sold off for short-term gain to a handful of oligarchs like Abramovitch) and the scandal of the "sale for loans" of the residual industries to Russian oligarchs.

Sixsmith seems quite hard on Lenin, and no doubt experts will find much of his analysis simplistic. However, I recommend this very readable and informative overview of a fascinating country – the kind of book I would retain as part of a permanent "personal library".

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ 5 Stars

This is my review of Russia’s Cold War: From the October Revolution to the Fall of the Wall by Jonathan Haslam.

This deeply serious history, unadorned by any photographs, even on the cover, is distinctive for presenting the Cold War from a Soviet perspective, and for making use of “previously inaccessible” archives. It increased my understanding of, say the level of US ignorance of European geopolitics during and just after World War II, and of Stalin’s machinations, largely based on fear of the intentions of any person or state that might threaten his power. It contains many pithy and revealing quotations. The extent of leakage of British and US correspondence and plans via Russian spies is also intriguing.

However, I found this a hard read. The author makes little attempt to consider the needs of his readers. Some of the main events, such as the terms of the Yalta Agreement are referred to as if one is already familiar with them. This rather begs the question as to why one would need to read the book. Space which could have been used for brief explanations is instead taken up with a string of “minor characters” who, when they prove hard to recall on an unforseeable reappearance, sometimes cannot be found in the rather inadequate index. I also found a few distracting typos e.g. 1939 instead of 1919. I formed the impression that this book has been culled rapidly from copious notes by a busy academic, with the result that some paragraphs seem full of non sequiturs, which even after several readings may remain fairly unclear. For instance, on page 72 a paragraph begins:

“In March 1946 London and Washington finally cemented intelligence cooperation with the UK-USA agreement which updated its predecessor, BRUSA, concluded in 1943. Kennan’s long telegram relaunched his idling career. It arrived just as the White House had to make sense of continued failure to redress Truman’s attention.” Why is this section separated by a good deal of digression from that on page 71 which explains some of the contents of the telegram?

Likewise, on page 82, a section headed “The Truman Doctrine”, does not clearly explain what this is. “The Truman doctrine was thus proclaimed in a ‘panic move’. Addressing Congress on March 12, Truman anathematized communism in general on the false assumption that it was entirely directed from the Kremlin as it had been before 1941.” Very interesting, but what exactly was the Doctrine, and why should communism be condemned on the above grounds?

Worse than this, on page 95, a section headed, “No more communist uprisings for now” launches into references to the PCF and PCI policy (whatever they are) and references to Thorez, without making the context at all clear, even after the reader has struggled to work it out using the index. It all makes for a confusing read.

Owing to the need to cover systematically the period from 1917 to the fall of the Berlin Wall, this boils down to a rather dense poitical history of modern Russia, often jumping from one sub-section to another with a very different theme, rather than a succinct analysis of the “Cold War”.

With better editing, this could be an excellent book. As it stands, it calls for a reader with a good deal of time and patience. Perhaps its value is mainly as a reference book for students. I have made a note to return to it after I have tried a few other takes on Soviet Russia, and the “Cold War” to see what it may add at that stage of my understanding

⭐⭐⭐ 3 Stars

 

This is my review of The Scramble for China: Foreign Devils in the Qing Empire, 1832-1914 (Allen Lane History) by Robert Bickers.

"The scramble for China" must be culled from "the scramble for Africa" but seems less apt since the British, French and American officials were sent to nineteenth century China not to colonise a disparate group of kingdoms and tribal areas, but to infiltrate the coastal regions of a vast area under the centralised if sclerotic control of the Qing dynasty.

This book contains a good deal of social history which seems fairly unremarkable and so of limited interest. For instance, it seems only natural that British workers sent to China should send for familiar products from home. The author's tendency to switch backwards and forwards in time with frequent digressions makes for a confusing read.

I was most interested in the major historical events – the Opium Wars or Taiping Rebellion – for the issues they raised. How could the upstanding Victorians possibly think it was in order to purchase Chinese goods with opium? To what extent did exposure to Christian missionaries trigger rebellion that was so troublesome to the Qing? However, too many very condensed sentences, weighed down with detail, in which it is at times hard to work out who or which settlement is being referred to tried my patience too far, and I have reluctantly set this book aside. The subject matter is potentially fascinating and the author clearly very knowledgeable and unpretentious, but the tortuous written style is hard going.

⭐⭐⭐ 3 Stars

This is my review of Vaux le Vicomte by Jean-Marie Perouse de Montclos.

I read this as an introductory guide prior to a visit to the palace of Vaux-le-Vicomte. The large number of high quality photographs of plans, internal rooms, details of artwork and external elevations and vistas past and present combine to give a good overall impression.

I found the opening sections on the background history the most interesting part. The work was commissioned by Foucquet, the ambitious bourgeios financier who bought his way to high office as Louis X1V's Superintendent of Finance, embellished the palace to entertain the king in grand style in 1661, only to be charged with corruption and imprisoned soon afterwards. It seems that jealous rivals such as Colbert traded on the King's unease over the possible threat posed by such a wealthy and able subject not to mention the rumours of Foucquet's interest in his mistress Louise de la Vallière. So, Foucquet may have been no more corrupt than other holders of high office – clearly not much has changed….!

Details of the recent restoration of the palace are also informative.

⭐⭐⭐⭐ 4 Stars

This is my review of Why The West Rules – For Now: The Patterns of History and what they reveal about the Future by Ian Morris.

It seems that modern historians often feel the need to Brian Coxify themselves by producing very fat books which set out to make complex topics accessible to the general reader, using lots of chatty language and references to popular culture.

The rise of the east would seem a more relevant theme at present than the past dominance of the west, but perhaps because the former has been quite well-covered recently , Ian Morris has chosen to focus on "why the west rules – for now". This is potentially a very interesting subject and I wanted to read a coherent analysis of the difficulties of defining precisely "east" and "west", and of the shifting relationships between the two, but this work frustrated me so much that I had to abandon it.

It all seems very wordy, sometimes stating the obvious, often switching from one field of study to another, say from astrophysics to paleoanthropology on the same page. Yet, although Morris gives more than three pages to the (to us) little known Zhou Dynasty in China, some time in the distant past, he makes only a passing reference to say, Singapore, surely a very interesting example of recent development to rival many western states?

Judging by the large number of catchily titled subheadings – "The Elephant in the Room", "Hotlines to the Gods", "The Gods made Flesh" or "The Wild West" to take the first four in the chapter on "The East Catches Up" (referring to a past period), perhaps we are only meant to dip into the book. But that surely means losing sight of the "unifying theory" – whatever that is. I felt I was being patronised by an attempt to popularise challenging concepts e.g. Neanderthal man grunting "Me Tarzan you Jane", past figures likened to Mafia bosses, even Indiana Jones, those subheadings again such as "Mice in a Barn", or entitling a graph on the health of US army veterans, "Be all that you can be". Yes, the range of topics covered is mind-boggling.

Then there are the meaningless maps, say Figure 5.4, "The chill winds of winter: climate change in the early first millenium BCE" which includes arrows which do not show any climatic change at all. Or Figure 1.2 defining the Movius Line, an early division between west and east according to types of stone axe used – only why does the line run so precisely through the middle of what is now France, and why say that the eastern dwellers didn't need elaborate hand-axes because they had access to bamboo when this may have been the case in east Asia, but hardly seems likely in, say modern Denmark? I could go on for ever, like this book. Take Figure 5.1, "The dullest diagram in history, social development" which shows an upward trend for the west, consistently above the east for 1000-100 BCE. My question is, how can you have such a precisely calibrated vertical axis to show social development – why not just say it doubled, and the west as a whole consistently had the edge?

This book seems to be an over-ambitious, rambling mess. Select a page at random and find the author galloping through, often back and forth between, several centuries. There are some interesting facts and anecdotes on the way, but some of the simplistic theorising got my hackles up. "There are basically two ways to run a state…high end and low end strategies". This is expanded at some length (compared with the usual grasshopper approach), but left me unconvinced

Buried within its 645 pages, there may be a valid theory. However, it is lost through a lack of editing and self-restraint – all too frenetic and chaotic.

Reading a thorough well-written history of say, the United States or the Soviet Union or China or Byzantium seems to me to contribute much more to one's overall understanding of changing fortunes between the elusive concepts of east and west. And what about the Aztecs and the Incas?

⭐⭐ 2 Stars

This is my review of Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin by Timothy Snyder.

"The Bloodlands" are the areas of western Russia, the Ukraine, Poland, Belarus and the Baltic States (like Lithuania) where 14 million people were starved, shot or gassed as part of Stalin's and Hitler's inhuman policies in the period 1933-1945.

You may avoid some confusion by reading first the final short sections "Numbers and Terms" and "Abstract". When reading the main text, I often felt uneasy when trying to grasp to which area or time period a specific gruesome statistic applied. I appreciate that Snyder needs to be accurate for academic reasons, but his obsession with numbers, which are not always expressed very clearly, soon becomes oppressive.

Surely, the main point is that the death toll was appalling whatever the precise figures involved, and one's sole justifiable motivation for reading the book is to gain a better understanding of how and why these terrible things happened, partly so that one will judge more clearly and not slip blindly into being part of the same kind of mad folly.

Again with academic reputation in mind, Snyder labours to provide theories to compare and contrast the various types of horror perpetrated by Hitler and Stalin. However, I often found these arguments quite opaque, in a text that is generally rather long-winded and repetitive.

I hoped for more insights in the final conclusion but was frustrated with such sentences as "Grossman (a novelist of the period) extracted the victims from the cacophony of the century and made their voices audible within the unending polemic" – sounds great, but what does it really mean? I could cite many further examples of windy rhetoric.

The events speak for themselves – the Ukrainian peasants forced to meet impossible quotas, even when it meant parting up with their seed corn, those who survived only because they were prepared to resort to cannibalism when weaker relatives died, Jewish "collaborators" forced to collect up and burn the bodies in the Warsaw ghetto, only to be shot and thrown on the fires themselves. These events do not need to be wrapped up in waffling verbiage, although I would have found it useful to know more about theories on the psychology of crazy leaders and the misguided people who follow them and about the economic and social conditions which led to some of the policies pursued.

Despite this, "Bloodlands" is informative e.g on Stalin's attempts to collectivise the peasants of the Ukraine, the difference between the German concentration camps and grimmer "extermination facilities" often "hidden" from western eyes behind what became "the Iron Curtain", and the shifting occupation of Poland, for a time even split between the Germans and the Russians. "Bloodlands" makes sobering reading (for which I have given it four stars) but could have been better written with more lucid analysis.

⭐⭐⭐⭐ 4 Stars