In the year 1683, a vast Ottoman army is laying siege to Vienna, the heart of the Hapsburg Empire. The Ottoman army was subsidized in part by the king of France, who although Catholic, opposes the also Catholic Hapsburg Emperor. Then, from the wooded heights, the famous Polish winged hussars smash into the Ottoman army and from another direction troops from Franconia, northern Italy, Bavaria, and Saxony break the Ottoman flank. Vienna was saved and from that day forward the Ottoman Empire begins to degenerate and weaken until at the end of World War I it finally falls.

For anyone who has read books which deal with how men react in wartime, this novel is often referred to as a realistic description of military life. In a sense, it could in certain parts, be an English version of Joseph Hellers novel, Catch-22 with better character development and a darker form of humor. Evelyn Waugh is best known for his novel, Brideshead Revisited, but this novel is a semi-biographical account of his war time experiences as well as his relationship with his Catholicism (he converted to Catholicism in 1930 after the failure of his first marriage).

Harrison Salisbury was the first NY Times correspondent stationed in Moscow after World War II and wrote a number of both fiction and non-fiction books about life in the Soviet Union, including a classic on the siege of Leningrad, The 900 Days. Unlike Walter Duranty, the besotted and compromised NY Times reporter who won a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the Soviet regime, Salisbury was not compromised by the system and was often criticized by the Soviets.

This novel tells a familiar story; a young Soviet citizen who somehow runs afoul of the Soviet system. He is pulled from front line service against the Germans and run through the hands of the Soviet secret police (including at Lubyanka prison, also known as the gates of hell) and the Gulag system. Along the way, his life is destroyed; his wife (at his request), divorces him so she may continue her schooling (being married to an enemy of the State would hinder her), his best friend after serving his time becomes a supporter of the State, his dreams of a better world are destroyed.

Despite it all, the main character survives and becomes a major dissent against the system. With the publication of his main book outside of the Soviet system, and, given the timing of its publication, he manages to salvage his dignity and resurrect his dreams of a better world.

Is this book a thinly covered version of the life of Solzhenitsyn (written in a clearer manner than Solzhenitsyn would have ever done)? More likely it is a composite character of survivors of the Gulag system who were able to maintain their humanity and hope for the future.

If you are not familiar with novels about the Soviet system, this is an easy read and should give you an idea of the brutality and craziness of a system which promised utopia but neglected to remember human nature.

In December 1936, the United Kingdom was rocked by the abdication of King Edward VIII.  Shortly thereafter, he married a twice divorced American woman, Wallis Simpson. For decades, the former King was viewed as a weak-willed man, dominated by a self-centered gold digger who thought she could marry the King and become Queen of England.  The story is much more complex, and Anna Pasternak takes a much different view of the entire episode; fortunately, she provides excellent support to her contention that Wallis Simpson was battled to keep the King, who was weak willed, on the throne.

There was a seried called “Wolf Hall” on PBS which painted a vavorable impression of this man who has been painted as the arch-enemy of a saintly Thomas More.  I have read two bios of Thomas More and have come to see him as an early totalitarian; he dogmatic, given to wearing horse hair shirts, and given to burning heretics while enjoying the company and debates with Erasmus. In “A Man for All Seasons”, Cromwell was painted as the money grubbing, sneaky servant of the King, so I looked forward to this book. If the movies favorable to More could be so slanted, what is the truth about Cromwell?

      Borman paints Cromwell as a complex, self-made man in an age where such talents and drive, coming from a “common man” were seen as a danger to the established order, represented by the old noble families in Europe.  Yes, he was corrupt but not outside the accepted bounds of his time.  Yet he was generous to the poor and helped even the families who fell from favor (often with his help) of an egotistical, paranoid and shallow king.

      A fighter who succeed despite the prejudices of his day, he was a faithful servant of the king as the king only realized after Cromwell’s fall from power. 

      A well written book, the hardest part reading some of the passages written in Old English (if you read quickly Old English is not that difficult, it is merely that the words are often spelled according to the writer; it is before standardized English was adopted).  One comes away with a respect for the man who survived in a harsh political atmosphere; his faults were exaggerated by history and his enemies.  A worthwhile read.

Born in the late 18^th century, Francois Eugene Vidocq began life poor and uneducated and spent many years in various types of petty crime.  He shunned violence and spent years as a pickpocket, army deserter, grifter and convict.  His numerous escapes from all sorts of prisons, attempted to lead a “straight” life but was always sucked back into the criminal life, sometimes by his own weakness, sometimes by circumstance. His fame among the underworld was turned to his advantage as he become first a police informer, responsible for the capture of dozens of his former associates, then as head of detectives.  Forming his own person group, he worked both sides of the street, moving against the worse criminals while hiring himself out to the growing middle class and upper classes as local businessmen and others attempted to gain advantage over rivals.

Balzac, Dumas and Victor Hugo freely borrowed from his memoirs to create many of their most famous characters, including Valjean in Les Miserables’ while Conan Doyle used Vidocq’s techniques to create the enemies of Holmes.  Other authors who used his exploits included Melville, Poe and Dickens.

An interesting look at the underworld of France at the time; a time of anarchy, corruption, brutality and a society in which class and circumstance cemented one into a life cycle that had little opportunity for self-improvement.

Several years ago, I read Luigi Albertini’s massive, three volumes, 1800-page work, The Origins of the War of 1914. It was a heartbreaking work as it laid out a chain of events beginning about thirty years prior to the outbreak of the war which seen from today, clearly pointed to the start of that terrible war.  Misunderstood actions, political snubs and fumbles, conflicting personalities, etc., seem to drive the Western powers toward a cliff from which none could turn.

In a sense, this book gives one the same feeling, only you reach the conclusion by about page 80; you want to put the book down and wonder how so many poor decisions could be made by so many policy makers and leaders. Anybody with even a rudimentary knowledge of asymmetrical warfare, can see the fundamental errors which turned a solid opportunity into a fiasco.

It has been said that Henry Ford was a genius who expanded the horizons of the average American.  In “Slaughterhouse”, Dr. Pacyga tells the story of the Chicago stock yard and the world that it made.  In fact, the stock yards of Chicago did much more than industrialize the slaughter of cattle, sheep and hogs, they were responsible for increasing the diet of Americans and Europeans by providing meat products in a timely, cost effective manner.  They also were instrumental in the invention and improvements in rail transportation including refrigerated cars, smoother rides, etc. 

Richard Rhodes is a winner of the Pulitzer Prize and has written both fiction and non-fiction, on topics as diverse as the Donner Party, the invention of the Atom Bomb and the Audubon Society.  In this work, he traces how the Einsatzgruppen were organized, their scope of activity, their relationship with the Wehrmacht and the impact of mass killings on the individuals within the units.

Originally deployed in Poland at the start of the war, their primary directive was the murder of the leaders of Polish society; lawyers, doctors, educators, political leaders, etc. as the conqueror Poles were destined to be a source of ignorant slave laborers who did not need to count much above 100 in their future live.  The “special action groups” also targeted any Poles who offered any resistance either real or imagined.  At the same time, they went after suspected communists and finally, the Jews of Poland.  As the original plan was to move the Jews out of Europe, the concept of committing mass murder of the Jews was not in their primary list of objectives.  Yet once the killing began, and they were under the protection of SS-Reichsfuehrer Himmler, their murderous campaign quickly expanded.