Published in the United States in 1943, this interesting novel the decline of the French intellectual class prior to the outbreak of World War II.  Not all of the characters are French, for we also find a Soviet Ambassador, paranoid and corrupt, an elderly Russian Revolutionary who is only a seeking a quiet exit from a life and efforts that he has come to doubt and a young Soviet secretary who loves to buy Paris clothing but keeps trying to convince herself that life in the Soviet Union of 1938 is better and happier than Paris.

If you like history, you probably feel comfortable in a discussion about most Western European states including their history.  But how much do you really know about the real foundations upon which the modern states were built?  Norman Davies has put together a book which is exhaustive in detail about those communities, smaller states and some greater states which are bypassed in most history courses.  What role did the Kingdom of the Rock play in the formation of Scotland?  Did you know that Prussia was once a fiefdom of Poland (a fact which most German history tends to miss)?  How about the long history of Burgundia which covered over thirteen hundred years and yet is seldom taught? Of course, you do not want to miss the history of Litva which was a Grand Duchy with Kings.

Although Valentin Berezhkov was not Stalin’s primary interpreter, he did attend many important meetings with Stalin during the Second World War, including Yalta and in Moscow.  With a natural flair for languages, Berezhkov found that he was chosen for important work by Molotov and was suddenly thrust into the middle of history making events.  His memoirs are interesting as they reflect the mind set of suspicion, fear and ambition at the very highest levels of Soviet government. The leaders of the State were constantly looking over their shoulders and testing the ground beneath their feet as their leader, Stalin, the consummate politician watched them for any inking of disloyalty or lack of duty.

From the early 1960s through 1973, the U.S. was engaged in a secret way in Laos.  While President Kennedy and Khrushchev signed accords in Geneva to ensure the neutrality of Laos, the accords were immediately violated by the North Vietnamese.  The Ho Chi Minh Trail ran the length of Laos and was key to supplying their forces in South Vietnam and Cambodia.  The government of Laos requested help and the result was a group of air force flyers who volunteered for a secret and dangerous mission.  Their goal was to help the Hmong tribesmen (aka Meo which was a Chinese term meaning barbarian) in their fight against the NVA.  The Hmong army led by General Vang Pao was outnumbered, out gunned and poorly supplied.  It suffered huge casualties, and, in the end, the army consisted of boys as young as thirteen who carried M-16s almost as long as they were tall.

The belief that certain people(s) are inherently superior to others and that “lesser” peoples need to be controlled did not begin with the Nazis.  Margaret Sanger, Woodrow Wilson and other Americans joined together with others in Europe decades before the Nazis to argue that birth control would help to control the “lesser” peoples, that blacks could not learn mechanical skills and that somehow the “superior” white race which had created Western Civilization needed to control the animalistic reproductive urges of the “lesser” peoples before they swamped the civilized world.

There are a few novels that I will read more than once, for the simple reason that most novels are poorly written or predictable. I have just re-read this novel for the third time, the first time was in 1977, the last in 2007. I have found that each reading is a treat as the story and characters are realistic. This is a story about a man, Sam Damon, the product of small-town America. We follow his journey as he joins the U.S. Army during World War I and makes a career with all of it’s mind numbing stupidities, undying loyalty and honor and knowledge that the real reward is in his sense of his own identity and purpose.  Although a novel, it was written during the height of the Viet Nam war and is required reading by Marine officers and occasionally used in leadership courses at West Point.

A few years ago, I was in St. Petersburg and on a tour to the Hermitage.  The guide was a big man, over six feet tall, impressively built with a scar on one cheek.  I was able to ask him a few questions about his life and I found that he had been a Colonel in the Soviet nuclear missile forces stationed in Siberia. When asked why he left such a responsible position to end up on a bus loaded with tourists, he explained that when the Soviet Union collapsed, he was deactivated and yet he preferred his new job.  Why?  As he explained, his base was in the middle of a great forest, snowed in for most of the year, surrounded by vicious bears and all there was to eat was gruel.  The look on his face and the way he said the word “gruel” brought home to me more than any book what his life, which was relatively privileged must have been like for those who were imprisoned in the Gulag.

I have always found it interesting that some of the very best histories are written not by professors, but rather by individuals who have not spent their entire lives studying a specific field or discipline.  Journalists can very often write fine histories, perhaps because they are used to looking at everyday people earlier in their careers.  Rick Atkinson, a former staff writer and editor at The Washington Post has won Pulitzer Prizes for history and journalism and his trilogy on the U.S. war effort in World War II is an example of research and writing at it’s finest.  In this book, the first of a trilogy on the American Revolution, Mr. Atkinson has again created a work that is unusually fine in the quality of the research, evenhandedness and writing.  In fact, he has created a history that reads more like an adventure novel, filled with tension, humanity, pain and relief. I believe that even a well-read historian of the period will find much that is new and well balanced in this book.

One of the joys of visiting New Orleans is the ability to wander in wonderful book stores; not the chain stores that are in malls, but in quirky little hide shops where you have to walk sideways through stacks and columns of books that can tower above you.  There you find treasures that have been passed down from reader to reader, sometimes with their names on the inside cover, sometimes with a birthday wish or a wish for recovery from some momentary disaster.  It was in one such book shop where I ran across a 1935 edition of this book which I had seen mentioned in both fiction and non-fiction historical volumes.  The illustrations are pen and ink and the editor takes care to place each section in proper context so that you feel you are getting the essence of the writer’s thoughts and feelings.

It is difficult to write an interesting book on politics when 1) the national politics in question cover a country unfamiliar to the reader and 2) included individuals from an obscure past, yet Professor Craig managed to create a history that is lively and very informative.  We tend to think of Prussia as a militarized state, going back to the time of Frederick the Great, and yet there were several attempts by both the civilian and military leadership to exert civilian control over the military (primarily the officer corps).  Each attempt failed due to either poor and uncoordinated political moves, foreign wars or the revolution of 1848.