Review: The Ark Before Noah: Decoding the Story of the Flood

The Ark Before Noah: Decoding the Story of the Flood

by Irving Finkel

Before 1872 everyone believed that the story of Noah and the Ark was unique to the Bible, a distinctive part of the story of the Jewish nation. That assumption crumbled one day when an assistant in the British Museum discovered a Babylonian version of the story from the city of Nineveh written on a clay tablet in wedge-shaped cuneiform, a full one thousand years older than the Bible version. It contained all the elements of the Genesis story: displeased by humans, the gods decide to drown everyone, acquiting only one man and his family from the deluge, enjoining him to build a mega-boat and fill it with plant seeds and a breeding pair of every species of animal. The museum assistant, overcome in his eureka moment, astonished his colleagues by running around the room and tearing off his clothes. During the next 113 years more small fragments of the Babylonian flood story were unearthed, and scholars peered at them, compared versions of the story, argued, and published their papers. In 1985 the world of ark studies was rocked again when a collector showed a cuneiform tablet to curator Irving Finkel at the British Museum. Not only did this tablet contain another thrilling version of the earliest Flood Story, but it also included detailed instructions for building an ark. Finkel dubbed it the Ark Tablet.

Rather than announcing his discovery modestly to the likes of Zeitschrift für Assyriologie und Vorderasiatische Archäologie, Finkel wrote The Ark Before Noah: Decoding the Story of the Flood for the general public as well as Assyriologists. It is written in such a pleasant, conversational style, always on the verge of humour or an outbreak boyish enthusiasm, that the sometimes arcane subject matter digests easily. The opening chapters on the rigors of learning cuneiform are so engaging (“Fellow students reading history or physics seemed to me frankly to be on a cushy ride”), and the pleasures of Babylonian scholarship are made so vivid that you wonder why you didn’t spend your life, too, squinting at clay tablets rather than doing other things.

Every possible implication is squeezed out of the Ark Tablet in The Ark Before Noah. All the cuneiform flood stories are scrutinized and compared, the subtlest contexts are unearthed, and words are held up to the light like diamonds. For each version of the story Finkel examines the shape and size of the ark, how it would have been built, what creatures were believed to have gone in to it, where it was thought to have landed. The boat in the earliest Sumerian story, for example, was shaped like a oversized reed boat from the marshes of southern Iraq, long and narrow, while in the later Ark Tablet the boat of Old Babylonian times was described as circular, a gigantic, basket-like coracle made of coiled rope smeared with bitumen for waterproofing. The ark in the Epic of Gilgamesh was cubic, it became oblong in the Bible and built of planks and nails in the Koran.

After proving that the Hebrew Bible story must have derived from its cuneiform predecessors, Finkel offers a fresh narrative of how the borrowing must have occurred. It happened, he says, during the Babylonian Exile, after Nebuchadnezzar had destroyed Jerusalem, capital of the kingdom of Judah, in 587 B.C. and carried off every important or skilled Judaean to Babylon. For about 70 years the deportees  lived in the new land not as slaves but as foreign workers, some of them assimilating. With the loss of Jerusalem and the temple, and with all the best people living within a much more powerful civilization, Judaean identity was in danger of disappearing. There was even the threat of rivalry in Babylonian religion, which was moving toward a kind of monotheism. One way to help save Judaean  identity would be to compile a book of sacred texts. Part of that project would include a national history, which could be traced back through existing Judaean and Israelite annals; and, indeed, passages in Kings and Chronicles list several such sources. But what if there was a desire to go back even further? Then it would only be natural, argues Finkel, for the compilers to consult Babylonian texts. The  Book of Daniel tells us that a number of the best and brightest of the Judaeans were taken into the king’s palace and trained in Babylonian language and literature. From the many surviving tablets left behind by Babylonian students we know that the Flood Story was a standard part of the cuneiform curriculum, so there was an easy path of transmission from Babylonian texts to the Hebrew Bible. Incidentally, the  cuneiform curriculum also included the story of an infant named Sargon whose mother set him adrift on the river in a basket from which he was rescued and adopted, as well as the idea that humans in the era before the great flood lived wonderfully long lives, like Bible figures such as Methuselah, Mahalaleel, et al.

The Flood Story was undoubtedly part of an oral tradition long before the invention of writing; however, once cuneiform was developed in Mesopotamia, three separate versions appeared, the oldest, from about 1600 BC, in the Sumerian language, the later two in Akkadian. In the Akkadian Atrahasis Epic junior gods went on strike over their workload, so humans were created as substitute labourers. Unfortunately, they were created without mortality, and their penchant for reproduction increased their numbers inconveniently. This got on the nerves of some senior gods, especially the prickly Enlil, who decided to wipe them out, saying, “The noise of mankind has become too intense for me. With their uproar I am deprived of sleep.” Later Genesis replaced Enlil’s aural sensitivity with moral outrage as God decided to destroy humans because they were wicked, not merely noisy. When the story was taken up by the Koran, another motivation was added, Allah being incensed by unbelief as much as by bad behaviour.

Because the story of Noah, the flood, the ark, and the animals is so important in Judaeo-Christian-Islamic cultures, what is exciting in the world of clay tablets can be exciting to the person in the street. Luckily, the Ark Tablet was discovered by a scholar inclined to reach out past museum walls, someone capable of writing clearly, accessibly and with panache.

Review: Shattered Sword

Shattered Sword
By Jonathan Parshall and
Anthony Tully
Potomac Books, Inc., Washington, D.C.
ISBN-10: 1574889230 ISBN-13: 978-1574889239


Few events in the Pacific War were more dramatic than the Battle of Midway. Within a few hours, the seemingly unstoppable wave of Japanese victories after Pearl Harbor was turned back once and for all, ending Japanese expansion in the Pacific and removing the threat of attack or invasion against Hawaii and the US west coast. It was certainly the most important naval battle of World War II, and perhaps deserves military historian John Keegan’s description of it as “the most stunning and decisive blow in the history of naval warfare.”

The Midway story tells how the Americans fought a vastly superior naval force, yet not only won the battle but dealt a catastrophic blow to the enemy, sinking four of six Japanese aircraft carriers. The U.S. victory, as startling to the Americans as to the Japanese, was partly achieved by American ingenuity, which broke Japanese naval codes, so that the attack was anticipated, a good guess was made as to its approach, and American carriers were able to position themselves in ambush. Equally important was a remarkable series of incidents in which sheer good luck stayed so consistently on the American side as to appear miraculous. The American dive bombers that devastated three Japanese carriers in a single attack arrived overhead at the most critical moment, in a miraculous five-minute window, when the Japanese were supremely vulnerable, their decks packed with fully fueled aircraft readying for take-off, fuel hoses scattered everywhere, the below-decks areas strewn with bombs and torpedoes because of a hasty refitting of aircraft caused by a sudden change in plans. In another five minutes, Admiral Nagumo would have been able to launch his planes and fend off the American attackers. Furthermore, the Japanese were caught off guard because, of the six scout planes they had sent out on a search pattern, the very one that would have discovered the Americans on time had had mechanical difficulties and had been delayed in taking off. Who can be blamed for suspecting the hand of Providence in such fantastic coincidences?

Over the past seventy years this Midway story has achieved legendary status, has been repeated countless times, officially and unofficially. The U.S. Navy’s history of World War II records it, it was re-told in the memoirs of Mitsuo Fuchida, coordinator and leader of both the aerial attack on Pearl Harbor and the Midway operations (who, interestingly, became a Methodist bishop after the war, touring the U.S. as a speaker and settling there), and it has been at the heart of every book written on the battle. After the 1976 Hollywood blockbuster, Midway, it became a staple of popular culture.

It’s a shame that so much of the beloved story is not true. The authors of Shattered Sword re-tell the Midway story, but this time from the point of view of the Japanese aircraft carriers, and a new picture emerges of what really happened on June 4, 1942. Basing their account on a careful study of Japanese sources, operational records, logbooks, naval manuals, writings on military doctrine — many of them newly translated and never before used in Midway studies — they show that a number of supposedly key facts about the battle need to be revised, some of them drastically.

One part of the miracle of Midway involves the huge imbalance between the adversaries, creating the image of a brave and plucky American David defeating a Japanese Goliath. It is true that, in June 1942, the Japanese had the greatest navy in the world, and that the Japanese armada sent out to attack and occupy Midway vastly outnumbered the American fleet. But the Japanese ships were so widely dispersed that many of them were hundreds of miles from the battle and took no part in it. Counting only the ships and planes participating in the fight, the battle was fairly evenly matched, with four Japanese carriers and its 248 aircraft pitted against 353 American aircraft, some from three American carriers, others land-based bombers from Midway.

What about that scout plane? Did the gods delay it to give an advantage to the Americans? Not really. A careful analysis of times and flight plans reveals that, in fact, the scout plane that should have discovered the Americans was a different one, and it missed them, probably because it flew too high, above the clouds. It’s truer to say that luck was with the Japanese in this incident, because it was the famously delayed scout plane that stumbled on the American task force, and that, only after going off its assigned search route. Without its lucky mistake, the American carrier group would have gone undetected until later, when its aircraft were even closer to pouncing on their Japanese targets.

Was there just a five-minute window of opportunity for the dive bombers, after which Nagumo would have launched his fighters and successfully defended his carriers? A clear understanding of operational processes and procedures aboard Japanese carriers buries that notion. The five-minute window was, in fact, a forty-five minute window. Far from arriving just in the nick of time, the Americans had more than enough time to attack without being harried by swarms of Zeros.

The simultaneous attack on Alaska’s Aleutian Islands, long viewed as a feint to draw American forces away from Midway, turns out to have been a genuine invasion attempt. And so on. The authors list eight significant misunderstandings that they have uncovered, and many more small corrections are made in the 613 pages of the book.

However, Shattered Sword is not focused on revising history. It is an important work of research, readable and compelling for the layman, detailed and well documented for the scholar. The careful depiction of life on a Japanese carrier, the extensive background and analysis, the maps, diagrams, and appendices, the naming of individual pilots, the granular description of events, sometimes minute-by-minute, make this book stand out from all the others on the Battle of Midway and make it a compelling read.

Review: Hypatia of Alexandria

Hypatia of Alexandria

by Maria Dzielska

A few women are known to have been scholars and philosophers in the ancient world, but none is even remotely as famous as the extraordinary Hypatia of Alexandria. Around the opening of the fifth century A.D., just before barbarians overwhelmed the western part of the Roman Empire, Alexandria was a leading centre of culture and learning, the third city after Rome and Constantinople, and Hypatia was a key figure in the civic and intellectual life of Alexandria. Her writings and lectures on Greek literature, mathematics, astronomy, and philosophy were so brilliant, and her charisma was so powerful, that bright aristocratic young men came from long distances to listen to her. Some stayed for years; most hoped to be invited to the special meetings she held in her home where students often became disciples of “the most holy and revered philosopher.” Her renown was such that it became protocol for newly arrived imperial officials, or those merely passing through the area, to pay a courtesy call on her. Her advice was sought by officials at all levels of government. Her terrible death at the hands of religious rioters in 415, so violent and so entangled with the larger conflicts of her time, has kept her name alive through the centuries, even after all her writings were lost.

The story of Hypatia’s life and death has been told many times by major writers such as Gibbon and Voltaire, by minor novelists and poets, and recently in the 2007 film Agora starring Rachel Weisz (yes, Hypatia was not only gifted but also beautiful—“the spirit of Plato in the body of Aphrodite”). Most re-tellings aim to score points against the Church, to serve as an object lesson in the cause of feminism, or to bemoan the loss of a great scientist. Yet, despite the various uses to which her story has been put, the original sources are scarce. The layers of special pleading added onto the scanty facts  have created a need for a volume like Maria Dzielska’s Hypatia of Alexandria, whose aim is to separate fact from fiction. This is not another rendering of the Hypatia story; rather, it is an academic’s careful examination of the sources in order to clarify exactly what is known, what may be fairly inferred, and what is not known, about history’s most famous woman philospher.

To understand the profound effect Hypatia had on her disciples Dzielska examines the letters of Synesius, a Christian, later bishop of the Libyan city of Cyrene, who attended her meetings in his younger years. For Synesius, Hypatia is “a blessed lady who radiates knowledge and wisdom from divine Plato himself and his successor Plotinus.” His 159 surviving letters, addressed to Hypatia and fellow disciples after he returned to Cyrene, reveal much about the meetings Hypatia held with her closest followers. Hypatia was a philosopher solidly in the Neoplatonic tradition for whom the purpose of life is the cultivation of a virtuous soul and the rigorous exercise of reason. She taught philosophy, astronomy and mathematics. Her mathematics focused on the algebra of Diophantus, geometry from Euclid and Apollonius of Perge, and the writings of Pythagorus. Her astronomy was that of Ptolemy. In fact, it is likely that Ptolemy’s Almagest, his important work on mathematics and the motions of the heavenly bodies,  survives today only because of Hypatia’s work as editor and publisher.

Yet it is wrong to think of her as a scholar in a university lecture hall. All the intellectual work and nurturing of one’s soul was a means to an end, mere preparation for the ultimate goal, which was to achieve a contemplative, mystical union with the divine, the One, “the most ineffable of ineffable things.” Synesius’s letters speak of experiences deeper than mere intellectual excitement. “It was granted to you and me,” he writes to a friend, “to experience marvelous things, the bare recital of which had seemed to be incredible.” However, Hypatia had no interest in divination, magic, rituals, or sacrifices, even though accusations of witchcraft were later used to whip up the frenzy against her which led to her murder.

The source documents do not agree in every detail about her death in March of 415, but they all agree that it was hideous. In the most oft-cited version, a gang of Christian thugs, followers of Cyril, the bishop of Alexandria, after accusing her of witchcraft, seized her, dragged her into a church, stripped her naked, tore the flesh off her bones with pottery shards, and burned the remains. No one was ever held to account for it. Cyril was later named a saint.

The significance of her death has been cast in many lights. It has been said that her death was a result of the clash of great historical forces, the final remnants of paganism submerged in the rising tide of Christianity, that her death was a Christ-like sacrifice on the altar of history enabling the ushering in of Christianity, that she was murdered out of misogyny, that her death put an end to Greek learning and marked the end of Classical antiquity, that the murder of “the most eminent woman scientist before Marie Curie” extinguished freedom of thought, freedom of inquiry, and natural reason in the West for a thousand years, that she was the innocent victim of religious fanaticism and the Church’s cruel and relentless quest for earthly dominance.

Dzielska argues that Hypatia was murdered for a simple reason, not because she was pagan or a woman, but because she was caught up in a power struggle between two men, Bishop Cyril and the imperial governor, Orestes, who opposed Cyril’s aggressive encroachments on civil authority. To break the influence Hypatia and her powerful friends had over Orestes, Cyril unleashed his strong-arm squad of parabolans (Christian brothers) on her. Defenders of Cyril say he did it inadvertently, but  Cyril had resorted to using his thugs before, first to defeat those he called heretics, then to expel all the Jews from Alexandria.

Hypatia of Alexandria is a fascinating read, not only for what it reveals about Hypatia and her times, but also as a case study in the methods scholars use to reconstruct our knowledge of the distant past.

Incidentally, when Hypatia was murdered, her age was probably a dignified fifty or sixty, not the ravishing  thirtyishness of Rachel Weisz in the otherwise quite authentic Agora.

Review: Shakespeare Saved My Life: Ten Years in Solitary with the Bard

Shakespeare Saved My Life: Ten Years in Solitary with the Bard

Laura Bates

Sourcebooks (March 26 2013)

ISBN-10: 1402273142

ISBN-13: 978-1402273148

The teacher sat on an overturned milk crate in an empty corridor. One by one the murderers shuffled to the seminar on Shakespeare, a guard on each side, shackled, handcuffed, on a leash, then locked in their cells. Kneeling on the concrete floor, they peered out through the handcuff ports, apertures the size of a large mail slot. Thus bizarrely did English professor Laura Bates of Indiana State University take Shakespeare to inmates at a maximum security prison in Indiana.

Shakespeare Saved My Life is no Oprah tale of a missionary from academia transforming the lives of depraved criminals through a love of high art. Rather than sentimentality, the story has dignity and gravitas  because of a central character of extraordinary abilities and motivation. With very little education Larry Newton began the Shakespeare program not quite knowing who Shakespeare was. Convicted of murder at age seventeen, sentenced to life imprisonment with no possibility of parole, categorized as extremely dangerous, locked up in “supermax” solitary confinement for over ten years, Newton immediately seized upon the  400-year-old texts with a frightening eagerness and a razor-sharp intelligence. At first he was all white-hot, if misdirected, intellectual excitement. Scrutinizing the witches’ scene in Macbeth, for example (Fillet of a fenny snake, / In the caldron boil and bake; / Eye of newt, and toe of frog, / Wool of bat, and tongue of dog), he strained to know whether Shakespeare could have intended a single creature comprised of all the individual animal parts and agonized over the culinary question of whether boiling and baking are possible simultaneously. Soon, however, he began to see pieces of his own life in the Shakespeare plays and was drawn into digging deeper. A microscopic reading of the prison soliloquy from Richard II turned up tiny phrases that to him signalled an understanding of solitary confinement so authentic it seemed preternatural, as if Shakespeare had himself lived what Newton had lived. And the mind of the murderer Macbeth he judged to be chillingly real, meeting the terrible touchstone of reality that he and his fellow murderers knew too well. Macbeth’s hallucination of the bloody dagger, he thought, was simply an externalization of his own experience as he had mentally rehearsed his crime, repeating it, obsessing over it, until the visualization grew more and more real, eclipsing everything else and drawing him almost hypnotically into the crime itself.

In a conventional classroom the deep issues of Shakespeare’s plays—ambition, honour, love, vengeance, violence, suicide—often appear as mere topics for discussion, themes for essays, intellectual toys. But for Newton they were living issues critical to the lives of convicts, fundamental ideas that set many of them on the path to prison. In Shakespeare he saw portrayals of the bravado of the streets, of neighbourhood turf wars, of fighting over women, and he asked the questions whose answers reach far beyond the plays. Why did Romeo attack and kill Tybalt? Would he have done it if not for his friends? Could Othello claim to be a victim because of Iago’s trickery, somehow less guilty of murdering his wife? Can the actions of other people ever relieve us from our own responsibility? What was honourable about Hamlet seeking vengeance for his father? What is honour, anyway?

Newton grappled with such questions so fearlessly and with such intense introspection that his own long-held views quickly came under scrutiny. “I was trying to figure out what motivated Macbeth,” he told Bates, “why his wife was able to make him do a deed that he said he didn’t want to do. As a consequence of that, I had to ask myself what was motivating me in my deeds.” And he discovered that Newton the  criminal was a mask. “I came face-to-face with the realization that I was fake, that I was motivated by this need to impress those around me, that none of my choices were truly my own.” Relentless questioning, sharpened by the Shakespeare texts, continued to erode his old personality, until he reached a truly astonishing conclusion. “I like my life,” he says.

I like being alive, I like my life, but what makes me the happiest is that I just really feel like I can go anywhere and do anything ... I have control of my life. I can be anybody I want to be. I don’t have to be some fake guy that my buddies wanted me to be ... I make decisions now ’cause I want to. Just the liberty in it, the freedom in it, that’s what makes me the happiest.

Larry Newton is a character you will not soon forget.

With his own demons exorcised, Newton went on to collaborate with Dr. Bates. He became the leader of the Shakespeare program and wrote workbooks for all thirty-eight of Shakespeare’s plays, tailored for inmates like himself but also used in some college classrooms. Hundreds of inmates enroled in the prison program. It was written up in academic journals and featured in countless media reports, including a documentary on Discovery Channel. Hollywood considered producing a feature film with Newton as the main character.

Then one day Newton was accused—falsely, he said—of illegally possessing a cellphone. He was removed from the program and transferred to another prison, where he was put into solitary confinement and subjected to constant, random searches that played havoc with his study routines. After a year of good behaviour, his solitary confinement ended, but for some unknown reason he was not allowed to return to the Shakespeare program. When the Indiana state legislature revoked funding for higher education in prison in 2010, he also lost his dream of getting a university education. Dr. Bates, however, plans to publish his writings as The Prisoner’s Guide to the Complete Works of Shakespeare.

Review: Exorcising Hitler: The Occupation and Denazification of Germany

Exorcising Hitler: The Occupation and Denazification of Germany

by Frederick Taylor

Bloomsbury Press

ISBN-10: 1608195031

ISBN-13: 978-1608195039

The sanitized story goes like this: After surrendering unconditionally in May of 1945, the German armies put down their arms, the country was occupied by the Allied forces, and the worst of the Nazi leaders were put on trial. Then Britain and the U.S. showed the Germans how to create a democratic government and, through the admirable Marshall Plan, the U.S. bankrolled an “economic miracle” for the defeated nation We victors really were jolly good-hearted. It’s a story that warm the cockles of one’s heart.

However, what really happened in Germany in 1944-46, as told in Frederick Taylor’s Exorcising Hitler, the picture that emerges is not quite so inspiring. We often forget the fury of the armies that fought their way into Germany, how enraged they were, at the years of war, but also at the stubbornness of the final resistance, with so much unnecessary blood spilled after D-Day. Then there were the revelations of the concentration camps. For the French, vengeance was the  goal after their brutal occupation by the Nazis. On the eastern front vengeance was, if possible, an even deeper driving force, all-consuming, a reflection of Hitler’s truly hideous “war of annihilation” against Russia. Spurred on by their commanders, the Soviet armies committed murder, rape and unspeakable atrocities on a vast scale along the entire trail from Stalingrad to Berlin and beyond, upon all Germans, both soldiers and civilians. Rape was hardly unknown among American and British soldiers. During the spring and summer of 1945, even after the surrender, on both eastern and western fronts, looting, robbery and rape were everyday occurrences.

The occupying powers did not come to liberate the German people or to put Germany on its feet; their clear and stated goal was punishment. All Germans, whatever their activities and attitudes under Hitler,  were going to suffer as others had suffered under them. An early American proposal known as the Morgenthau Plan recommended the total degradation of Germany, breaking the nation into pieces and reducing it to a permanent state of subsistence agriculture. By the time of the actual occupation that plan had been moderated, but its harsh spirit remained. Thousands of German industries were either shut down, destroyed, or dismantled and carted off to Russia and France as reparations. The French marched  740,000 POWs back into France for 2-3 years of forced servitude. The Soviets took hundreds of thousands of POWs back to Russia, most of whom never returned. The Americans, faced with the difficulty of caring for 5 million POWs and utterly fixed on the idea of not releasing a single war criminal, simply strung barbed wire around vast fields next to the Rhine, and left half a million prisoners to face the frosty nights, cold spring rains and disease without protection, some 50,000 of them dying. Because the Geneva Convention required that POWs be fed at the same level as one’s own troops, German POWs were given a newly invented classification, “disarmed enemy forces,” allowing rations to be kept miserably low. In the worst of the “Rhine cages” some prisoners deteriorated into skeletal figures like inmates of Nazi concentration camps. The British set up an interrogation centre at Bad Nenndorf that used Gestapo tactics, complete with thumb screws and shin screws. For civilians, hunger was used as a cudgel. One year after the end of the war the calorie allocation for Germans was less than half of what a person needs for a life of light activity. “Non-productive” adults, such as housewives and the unemployed, were issued a ration card that became known as “the death card.”

It was the Soviets who were quickest to establish democracy—Soviet-style democracy. German communist organizations provided them with ready-made political infrastructure, and as other parties were allowed to form, the Communist Party maintained dominance until finally all parties were merged into one. East Germany was born. Denazification was easy for the Soviets: since Nazism was regarded as an extreme form of capitalism, they simply killed the “class enemies,” such as industrialists and large landowners, or shipped them off to the gulag. As for lower-level Nazis, the Soviets were more tolerant than the British and Americans because, suggests Taylor, they were quite familiar with how little party membership could mean for people who joined just to advance their careers.

In the Western zones, denazification was an enormous problem, especially for the Americans, who took the hardest line. With a population in the tens of millions under their administration, they required every adult, under penalty of prison, to fill out a lengthy form about their activities during the Third Reich, with their answers subjected to cross-checks, investigations, interviews, and tribunals. It was a slow,  impossible task that slowly unraveled under the pressure of numbers, aggravated by inconsistency and incompetence. Denazification was eventually turned over to German courts, partly out of pragmatism, partly to reduce the resentment that might breed communism. But by then everyone had become so cynical about the many injustices, as well as the overall policies of collective guilt and collective punishment, that the German courts allowed the process to degenerate into corruption and farce. Another approach might have cultivated a mood of self-reflection among the Germans, but the opportunity was lost, and the Hitler generation entered a period of denial and “the sleep cure.” It took the next generation to ask probing questions about the past. Denazification was judged an enormous failure on all sides.

Did Germany need to be guided by the Western Allies in creating a functioning democracy? Probably not. Nazism was a spent force, and Germany reverted easily to the democratic system that had preceded the Third Reich. Was the Marshal Plan a major factor in driving Germany’s economic recovery? Scholars are no longer certain about that, either.

After 1945 the transition from war to peace was far more chaotic and ugly than is commonly believed. Mistakes were made, feelings ran high, few saints appeared on the stage, suffering was widespread. Exorcising Hitler shows only too clearly how, once the devils of war are set loose, they are not easily put away.

Review: The Secret Piano: From Mao's Labor Camps to Bach's Goldberg Variations

The Secret Piano: From Mao's Labor Camps to Bach's Goldberg Variations

by Zhu Xiao-Mei

2012

ISBN-10: 1455875163

ISBN-13: 978-1455875160

Born of bourgeois grandparents in China in the same year that Mao took control, Zhu Xiao-Mei was not likely to find life easy. Not only had both her grandfathers been businessmen before losing everything in  civil war, but both were also Westernized, one fluent in English, the other a former resident of an elegant home in the French Concession of Shanghai. Zhu’s mother grew up with a taste for French perfume and the paintings in the Louvre, which she loved and knew well from books. To such disadvantages was added an uncle who fled to Taiwan.

Before The Great Leap Forward, Xiao-Mei lived as a poor piano student, normal except for some Western artistic tastes. While she was bored by the Peking Opera, the day her mother brought home a piano and played for her a brief piece by Schumann, she felt on the brink of a thrilling new world. Piano lessons from her mother followed, at age six she was enrolled in a preparatory school for the conservatory, and by age eight she was giving concerts on radio and television, once even in the Imperial Palace.

Mao’s Great Leap Forward, his sweeping, misguided plan for China to catch up to the West, started dangerous new developments in China. It demanded complete ideological purity from every citizen. At the conservatory, purifying sessions of self-criticism and denunciations of others began, and Xiao-Mei sensed that her bad family background hung over her head like an axe. When she was thirteen, on the very day that she was to give her first conservatory recital, the axe fell. A simple joke she’d made among friends was overheard and misconstrued as a challenge to the government, her bourgeois background was revealed, and Zhu was cut off from friends, teachers, and music lessons. Then began the Cultural Revolution, Mao’s attempt to make himself through The Little Red Book the focus of all truth and loyalty, and repression ratcheted up more. First, Western music was banned at the conservatory, then the director was denounced for running a bourgeois institution. Soon afterward, teachers were forced to kneel on the running track, cruelly and hysterically denounced and beaten by Red Guards. Several committed suicide. It was the beginning of Xiao-Mei’s and China’s descent into the abyss.

The Secret Piano does not offer many new revelations about the Cultural Revoution, but it is effective in putting flesh on the bones of history. The details of Zhu’s ordeal—the five years in labour camps, the brutal deprivation, the narrowing of all thought and experience to a rigid orthodoxy, the unrelenting assaults on personality—show the abstract forces of history descending like a hammer on a single individual. Such a close-up view of Mao’s ruthless programme leaves one unable to stomach the view now current in China that “Mao was seventy percent right and thirty percent wrong.”

Zhu’s harrowing years in China take up the first half of the book. As China slowly began to open up after the death of Mao, she was able to get permission to study abroad and continue her studies at the New England Conservatory in Boston. Yet, coming from a society where money was unimportant,  America not to her taste. “In both the US and China,” she writes, “people had an unhealthy relationship to money.” After a few years she moved to France, which appealed to her for what she believes it has in common with China: a sense of humor, depth of feeling, and a genuinely artistic way of approaching life. Eventually, at the age of forty, after many difficulties, she managed to begin a performing career in Paris and became a teacher at the Paris Conservatory.

But even now Zhu has not escaped completely from Mao: in a final chapter entitled “A Wounded Life” she adumbrates the scars his Cultural Revolution left on her, from an inability to fully trust others to self-loathing over her own sometime complicity as a child, denouncing others, hardening against her family, losing her humanity, turning into what the philosopher of totalitarianism Hannah Arendt calls a “living corpse.” Of her feelings now about Mao she is clear: while acknowledging that he freed China from terrible injustices, she goes on, “Mao was a criminal. He was responsible for killing tens of millions of people, and for the moral deaths of hundreds of millions more. Therefore, yes, I hate him.” And she regrets that China has not yet absorbed its historical lessons to reach a common resolve of “Never again!”

The Secret Piano has more to offer than just the description of China’s years of darkness and the heartening story of an immigrant’s triumph over adversity. There is a great deal about music, about the sustaining power of music in difficult times, about the growth of a concert pianist, there are memorable portraits of great music teachers and insightful comments on the works of great composers. We also watch the fascinating process of Zhu first hearing from a foreigner about one of China’s greatest philosophers, Lao Tzu, and how his thought gradually became an important part of her own thinking. And one can enjoy the book as a work of art, divided as it is into chapters modeled on Bach’s Goldberg Variations and sprinkled throughout with quotations from great thinkers and writers from all over the world.

Zhu Xiao-Mei can be found on Youtube playing Bach’s Goldberg Variations.

Review: Soldaten: On Fighting, Killing, and Dying

Soldaten: On Fighting, Killing, and Dying, by Sönke Neitzel and Harald Welzer, translated from the German by Jefferson Chase, McClelland & Stewart, 2012

In 2001 historian Sönke Neitzel, a visiting lecturer from Germany at the University of Glasgow, was reading a book on the Battle of the Atlantic when was surprised to come across several pages reporting the secretly recorded conversations of POWs from German U-boats. Reports based on interrogations were well known to him, but not transcriptions of private conversations recorded by hidden microphones in POW camps. Intrigued, although expecting very little, he took a trip to London and requested the documents at the British national archive. A large bundle of 800 pages was delivered to his desk, covering September 1943. As he read through them, he wondered, Were there similar reports for October and November? For POWs from the army and the Luftwaffe? For the rest of the war years? By the end of his investigation, Neitzel turned up 48,000 pages of surveillance protocols in Britain and over 40,000 in the U.S., documenting the intimate conversations of tens of thousands of German POWs. The Allies had kept them classified for fifty years in order to keep their intelligence methods secret, not even providing them to prosecutors in war crimes trials. From the day they were declassified in 1996 until Neitzel unearthed them in 2001, they had lain forgotten in the two national archives.

Even though he specialized in World War II studies, Neitzel recognized that it would take more than a historian to tease out the complete meaning of the documents, so he partnered with Harald Welzer, a social psychologist with a background in the study of perceptions of violence and the willingness to kill. Working together they produced Soldaten: On Fighting, Killing, and Dying, an extraordinary study of soldiers at war chatting unguardedly—to each other, not to interrogators; while the war was still in progress, not afterwards with the benefit of hindsight and attempting to justify their actions.

By way of background the authors describe in some detail the world of the soldier and analyze the “frames of reference” of the conversations. For particular conversations they often provide analysis of the social setting and of the interpersonal dynamics. But at the heart of the book are the transcriptions themselves. Some chapters focus on the soldiers’ thoughts about their role as soldiers, about technology, about their knowledge of or participation in the Holocaust, their faith in victory, the extent of their belief in Nazism, and so on, all quite interesting. But most fascinating of all, fascinating in its horror, is the longest chapter, entitled “Fighting, Killing, and Dying.” We know the clichés such as “War is hell,” and think we know something of war from history books, novels, memoirs, and movies like “Saving Private Ryan,” but what we read in Soldaten can still come as a shock, as much for the soldiers’ attitudes as for the brutality of the deeds themselves.

MULLER: . . . near the junction of the Don and the Donetz . . .. It’s beautiful country; I travelled everywhere in a lorry. Everywhere we saw women doing compulsory labour service.

FAUST: How frightful!

MULLER: They were employed on road-making—extraordinarily lovely girls; we drove past, simply pulled them into the armoured car, raped them and threw them out again. And did they curse!

SOLM: We sank a children’s transport.

WILLE: Were they drowned?

SOLM: Yes, all are dead.

WILLE: How did you know that just this ship out of the 50 had the children on board?

SOLM: Because we have a big book. This book contains all the ships of the English and Canadian steamship lines. We look them up in that.

ENZIEL: Muller from Berlin was a sniper, he shot the women who went to meet the English soldiers with bunches of flowers . . . He took aim and shot civilians in completely cold blood.

HEUER: Did you shoot women too?

ENZIEL: Only from a distance.

It’s often said that it takes time and effort to change a peace-loving civilian into a killer. Not always.

POHL: On the second day of the Polish war I had to drop bombs on a station at Posen. Eight of the sixteen bombs fell on the town, among the houses. I did not like that. On the third day I did not care a hoot, and on the fourth day I was enjoying it. It was our before-breakfast amusement to chase single soldiers over the fields with machine-gun fire and leave them lying with a few bullets in the back.

Even in our most gritty movies, soldiers appear grim-faced or fierce in their killing. We rarely see the joy of killing.

BAUEMER: . . . we played a fine game in the “111.”  We had a 2-cm canon built into it in front. Then we flew at low level over the streets, and when any cars came toward us we put on the searchlights and they thought another car was coming toward them. Then we turned the canon on them. We had plenty of success like that. That was grand, we got a lot of fun out of it.

Küster: We didn’t fire on the people in the station; there wouldn’t have been any point in it until we had got rid of our bombs. But afterwards we shot up the town; we fired at everything that was there. At cows and horses, it didn’t matter what. We fired at the trams and everything; it’s great fun.

BUDDE: I’ve taken part in two intruder patrols attacking houses . . . Whatever we came across; country houses on a hillside made the best targets. You flew up from below, then you aimed—and crash! There was the sound of breaking windowpanes, and the roof flew off . . . At the marketplace, there were crowds of people and speeches were being made. They ran like hares! That’s great fun! It was just before Christmas.

Soldaten is a study of the mentality of the German POWs and includes few references to other conflicts. In a passage dealing with the lack of concern about killing the innocent, we learn that “There was an unwritten rule among U.S. troops in Vietnam: ‘If it’s dead and Vietnamese, it’s a Vietcong.’” But throughout the book the reader constantly has in mind My Lai, the Canadian Airborne Regiment, YouTube videos out of Afghanistan, Abu Ghraib, and so on.

V.GREIM: We once made a low-level attack near Eastbourne. When we got there, we saw a large mansion where they seemed to be having a ball or something; in any case we saw a lot of women in fancy-dress, and an orchestra. . . . We turned round and flew toward it. The first time we flew past, and then we approached again and machine-gunned them. It was great fun!

Wouldn’t such sentiments come easily out of the mouth of some Tom Cruise-like Top Gun pilot? And how do soldiers in any conflict deal with captured or surrendering enemy when it is impractical or impossible to deal with them according to the Geneva Conventions?

LEICHTFUSS: When a small detachment of about ten or fifteen soldiers was captured there, it was too difficult for the soldier or the Unteroffizier to transport them back 100 or 120 km. They were locked in a room and three or four hand grenades were flung in through the window.

There aren’t any other books like Soldaten. It offers insights, mostly ugly ones, into what can really happen in war, less biased than a memoir, more vivid, even more frank, than a veteran’s reminiscences recounted to you face to face.

Review: The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing To Our Brains

The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing To Our Brains
by Nicholas Carr
Published: June 7, 2011
Publisher: WW Norton
ISBN - 10: 0393339750
ISBN - 13: 9780393339758


The Shallows sets forth an apocalyptic but simple idea: the Internet is changing the way we read and consume information, conditioning us to read in fragments, impatiently, distractedly, skimming rather than reading, always looking for a hyperlink, a graphic, a video, anything to relieve us of the pain of extended text. The Net is ending the age of Gutenberg and, most importantly, stripping us of the values that have been at the core of our civilization for over five hundred years: the ability to concentrate, to read deeply, to reason carefully, to follow extended lines of argument, even to think deeply and contemplatively.

Written in an easy, journalistic style, the book includes a good deal of interesting material. Of special interest is a history of the technology of writing and its effect on people, from Sumerian cuneiform on clay tablets, to Egyptian papyrus, scrolls, Greek and Roman parchment, wax tablets, and finally the bound codex or book. Even at the time of the early codices, however, civilization remained an oral culture, the truly literate culture appearing only after the conventions of writing began to appeal to the eye rather than the voice. When words became separated from each other by spaces, when punctuation marks came into use and a standardized syntax replaced the rhythms of oratory, decoding the script was no longer the reader's primary occupation, and a more thoughtful form of reading began to take hold. Reading became a silent, private, individual activity. With decoding made easier, longer, more carefully organized texts were made possible, and the literate frame of mind took hold. Civilization finally overcame the natural human tendency to constantly shift attention. The norm became prolonged, attentive, disciplined reading, and as people read more deeply, they reflected on what they read, became critical, drew inferences, formed associations, absorbed the book into their own thinking. The book accustomed people to linear, sequential thoughts bound together by logic. In the last stage of the process, with the invention of Gutenberg's printing press, the literate culture spread rapidly and widely. It became the dominant culture of Western civilization.

Another great strength of The Shallows lies in its careful description of the myriad ways in which the Internet does the opposite of what the old culture did. The scattering of our attention is not just the result of reading from a screen being more tiring than from a page, causing us to spend less time with the text, or of the way hyperlinks are forever tempting us to move away from the current page to another page. And it's more than the way our attention is so easily disrupted and lured away by animations, video clips and sounds. All those distractions, even if we can manage to concentrate on our reading, are in our field of view as we look at a page and inevitably seize part of our attention. A web page bristles with options that our minds cannot ignore. Studies show, too, that even the increased physicality of reading from a screen compared with a book diverts part of our attention away from the text as we move and click a mouse or point and touch with a finger. And, of course, there are the off-page interruptions, such as alerts from our email account, Twitter, Facebook or RSS feeds. The reason no one likes to read an entire book on a Web page is not just because the light from the screen tires the eyes. The Internet is, by its very nature, an "ecosystem of interruption technologies."

Although The Shallows is readable, it does not state its arguments with great clarity and succinctness. Too much repetition and digression muddies the waters, and the author reaches too far to find evidence and explanations. Regrettably, he spends a lot of time trying to prove that our mental habits have real, physical effects on our brains, apparently to suggest that the Net's influence on the individual has a kind of permanence. However, he stops short, quite rightly, of claiming that the Net alters our genes, leaving it obvious that an intellectual diet that is not purely Net-based can avoid the pernicious effects of the Net, and even reverse them.

But what of the central thesis of the book? Has Carr demonstrated that the Net is becoming the new paradigm, stamping all our perceptions and modes of thought with its own image? The Net may be everywhere, yet many of us do not feel, as Carr does, that we are losing our ability to read deeply, ponder over what we read, and think sequentially. The Net's ubiquity has not prevented mathematicians from continuing to churn out watertight, logical proofs, and scientists do not appear, as a whole, to have been reduced to scatterbrains. There are still scholars, and books are still being published and read. Carr believes that the book will transform into the e-book and be cluttered with an array of distracting Net-like search features, hyperlinks, social media options, etc., but that hardly seems certain. And, for all his liking of studies and surveys, Carr provides little data on the large-scale, brain-altering, attention-shattering effects he believes are sweeping across society, other than his personal testimony and the example of an occasional like-minded professor or Rhodes scholar who confesses to no longer reading books. Yet the future may very well prove Carr right, and that possibility is deeply disturbing.

Whatever reservations one may have about some of The Shallows, it does serve as an important warning for us as individuals and as a society not to embrace the brave, new digital future thoughtlessly and to keep a critical eye out for its side effects. The field of education is under great pressure to "stay contemporary" by using the Net more and more in classrooms. As a counterweight, The Shallows should be required reading for all educational decision-makers, from teachers to cabinet ministers.

Review: Longing by J.D. Landis

Landis, J.D., Longing

Snowbooks (March 1, 2005)

416 pages

ISBN-10: 1905005059

ISBN-13: 978-1905005055

An ordinary novelist would be embarrassed to write a story as  overflowing with coincidence and melodrama as the true story of Robert and Clara Schumann. But such qualms do not apply to J. D. Landis, whose Longing, a “novelization” of their story, is based on unimpeachable sources—letters, diaries, court documents and similar materials. Truth, once again, seems stranger than  fiction.

Bored as a law student, Robert quits university and moves into the home of piano teacher Friederick Wieck, who has an eye for talent and promises to make him into a great concert pianist in only a few years. In the Wieck house Robert meets one of the daughters, the extraordinary Clara, age eleven, who is preparing for her first concert tour, which will take her  to Paris, then to Weimar to play for Germany’s greatest  poet, Goethe. Robert becomes impatient with his progress and tries a wooden finger-stretching machine. It damages a nerve in his left hand, in one blow putting an end to his future as a concert pianist. Still, he continues to study with Wieck, now as a composition student.

As Clara grows into adolescence, the two young people fall in love; but when her father finds out, he is furious, certain that Clara’s career will end if she marries this ex-piano student who offers her nothing but empty dreams of writing music for a living. Wieck angrily forbids Clara to see Robert and warns Robert that he will shoot him if he finds him approaching Clara again. For several years the lovers struggle to maintain their relationship by passing love-notes via sympathetic servants, managing only a few clandestine meetings. Finally, seeing Wieck reject all their efforts at peace-making, they sue in court for the right to marry without his approval. Wieck responds by sending venemous letters to friends and business contacts in an effort to besmirch Robert’s character and Clara’s musical abilities. EventuallyWieck loses the court case, is sentenced to a short jail term, and the lovers marry.

The marriage of Robert and Clara Schumann inaugurates one of the most remarkable artistic collaborations in history, with  Clara, one of the greatest pianists of her century, providing financial and emotional support to, and on concert stages  tirelessly promoting the music of, Robert, one of the greatest composers of his century. The collaboration is not only artistic; it produces eight children in the space of thirteen years.

Even during her years of child-bearing and domesticity, Clara continues her concert career, always successful, always a sensation, achieving enough credibility that her innovations on the concert stage—playing from memory, eliminating cheap entertainment acts, programming only music by the great composers—transform concert recitals and set the template that is still used  today. For Robert recognition comes much more slowly. While he associates with great musical figures such as Mendelssohn, Liszt and Chopin, he fails to gain much acceptance with the general public until many years after his death.

One morning there is a knock on the door of the Schumann house. It is a handsome young man carrying a knapsack full of his own compositions, come to pay tribute to his hero, Doctor Schumann. Robert invites him in and asks him to play something he has written. After hearing only a few bars, Robert tells him to stop and excitedly calls Clara from the other room. They invite the young man to stay with them for several days. His name is Johannes Brahms.

For many years Robert has been suffering from mental instability, but the disturbances are increasing, the hallucinations are getting harder to ward off. One rainy February night he runs out of the house in his dressing gown, races down to the Rhine, throws his wedding ring into the icy water and jumps in after it. Fishermen rescue him, and he is taken home. He asks to be taken to a mental asylum, saying he is afraid he might harm his wife and children. Brahms rushes back from Hamburg to help Clara take care of the household and the children. Although the asylum is only twenty miles away, on the advice of the doctors Clara does not visit Robert until a day or two before he dies. Clara and Johannes fall in love, but after Robert’s death they decide not to marry. They become the closest friends for the rest of their lives. Within months of Clara’s death, Brahms also dies.

Has the life of any artist offered richer material for books or movies? Hollywood did a creditable job in 1942 with Song of Love starring Catherine Hepburn as Clara, and more recently German cinema has made several attempts. But it took author J.D. Landis to give the story the treatment it deserves. From the mass of original documents he creates a gripping narrative that takes the reader into the Schumann home where you see things from such an intimate perspective that you are left feeling like a close friend of the family.

Landis’s style is sophisticated and literate, always finding the well chosen word, bold enough to use, where necessary, language that rises above our daily humdrum vocabulary. Now and again an historical personage has their moment on the stage, as do some historical events; and where an obscure reference, a point of law, or some oddity can use clarification, Landis supplies a helpful footnote. In a word, the book is a joy to read. Everyone who finishes it will feel compelled to search out, and listen afresh to, the music of Robert and Clara Schumann.

Review: Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think

Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think

Viktor Mayer-Schonberger and Kenneth Cukier

Eamon Dolan/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; 1 edition (March 5, 2013)

ISBN-10: 9780544002692

ISBN-13: 978-0544002692

ASIN: 0544002695

If we were previously unaware of the role big data plays in contemporary life, the revelation in June that the NSA vacuums up a billion domestic telephone records a day will have wakened us from our slumber. Something new and deeply unsettling is under way in the bowels of governments and corporations. And yet, as becomes very clear in Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think, the weakening of personal privacy is only one of the areas undergoing profound change as a result of the explosion of data.

It is difficult to grasp the amount of data being produced around us. Whatever statistics one chooses to quote (e.g. 90 percent of all existing data has been created in the last two years and the sum is doubling every two years) the amount of data is overwhelming. However, big data is about more than the volume of data. When that avalanche of data, stored in a host of databases, is sifted by smart computer algorithms, the effect is transformational. In terms of the attack on privacy, the threat goes far beyond simple surveillance, the mere tracking of individuals by means of their cell phone data, or credit card use, or Internet activity, or CCTV cameras that can  to recognize faces and gaits, etc. Information about a person can be extracted from many sources, often quite far-flung, and the combination is vastly more intrusive, more revealing, and more troubling. What emerges about us is not only a picture of our lives more complete than any of our friends know but also a platform upon which can be built frighteningly accurate predictions. In fact, correlations between information about an individual and the probability of their behaving in certain ways is so compelling that we need to worry about becoming a society like the one in the movie Minority Report, where people are arrested based on predictions, before they commit a crime.

Suspicions about a future society in which privacy has disappeared are commonplace, but Big Data anchors those suspicions in fact and delineates their connections to other developments. While the book gives a good deal of space to outlining the more neutral changes and the great benefits that big data will bring, particularly in health care, it at the same time carefully points out the dark side. A full chapter is devoted to recommendations for ameliorating the harmful effects of big data. Yet, ironically, that chapter is cold comfort, for the authors, after showing how extremely difficult it is to control what can be done with personal data, conclude that the most effective approach is to leave regulation in the hands of the corporate and government owners of the data, overseen in rather vague ways by general principles and “data auditors.” May better ideas be found soon.

The most enlightening parts of the book, however, are not about personal privacy, since so much has been written on that subject elsewhere. Separate chapters cover three fundamental transformations in our ways of thinking that are under way, which the authors describe as N=all, messiness, and the decline of causality. By N=all they mean our increasing ability to access more information on a topic until we begin to approach all the possible data. This overturns many of our current approaches to finding truth, particularly in the social sciences. In the past we have carefully selected samples from an overall population, generated a likely hypothesis or two, then subjected our samples to analysis in order to  produce statistical facts about the whole. That was the process in what the authors call “the era of small data.” For when enormous datasets replace those small samples, things change. For a start, the traditional small data tools— hypotheses dreamed up by humans, surveys,  questionnaires, analysis supervised by humans—become obsolete. And computers, rather than putting a small number of hypotheses to the test, can search through vast quantities of data and generate essentially all possible hypotheses. When, for example, the Google data scientists attempted to track the spread of flu by analyzing the search terms of its users (3 billion per day), it did not investigate only plausible search terms, such as “medicine for cough and fever.” Their computers looked for correlations between search queries and the historical data on the spread of the flu and came up with 450 million mathematical models or hypotheses. Testing each of those finally discovered a  combination of 45 search terms that produced results as good as, but faster than, the Center for Disease Control with its traditional reporting methods. Human-centred analyses cannot compete with that kind of thoroughness and the speed of those results. Another benefit of N=all datasets is that they provide accurate information about small subgroups in a way that the old sampling methods cannot. By messiness the book refers to errors in the data. As our data expands toward N=all, a certain amount of messiness in the data becomes acceptable, since it represents such a small proportion of the whole that it has no statistical significance.

Perhaps the most radical change will be the devaluing of causality. What computers find are correlations, not causality. They might search through data and find, for example, that people who consumed ginseng, aspirin, and fried earwigs experienced a remission of their cancer. The discovery of that cancer-curing diet would be of paramount importance, and the precise, cause-and-effect  mechanism would be of secondary interest. Psychologists have told us for some time that our need to see things in causal terms, while apparently hard-wired in our minds, often makes us see connections that are not there and fall prey to illusions. Perhaps, after all, causality doesn’t matter quite as much as we thought. As we discover truths more and more by correlation, a de-emphasis on the search for causality might be the most profound effect of big data.

In 1995 Nicholas Negroponte’s Being Digital taught us how to think less in terms of atoms and more in terms of bits. Big Data may serve as a similar guidebook to yet another fundamental change in our world.

Foreword

These book reviews were written for a publication for retired Toronto high school teachers named  After School. Rather than simply filing them away on my computer or deleting them, I am posting them to this blog for no particular reason. They were written with a limit of about 1,000 words.