Book Review: Milkweed, a novel by Jerry Spinelli (2003)

The cover of  Milkweed, a novel by Jerry Spinelli, 2003.

Milkweed by Jerry Spinelli might seem to have an unlikely plot for a young adult novel. It is set in the Warsaw Ghetto during World War II. The narrator is a young Gypsy (Roma) boy who thinks his name is “Stopthief,” since that is what people yell after him. Eventually his friend Uri gives him the name of Misha.  

Misha is an orphan and doesn’t remember much about his family. He lives with other orphan boys, who are all Jewish, and they steal whatever they need to survive. At the beginning of the novel, World War II has begun, but the Jewish ghetto in Warsaw has not been established yet.  

Misha is ignorant of the political situation brewing around him, and he swings from admiring the Nazis, whom he calls Jackboots, to wanting to be Jewish, and eventually he voluntarily enters the ghetto. Misha befriends a Jewish girl named Janina, and once he finds a place where he can sneak under the ghetto wall, his thievery of food helps her family survive.  

The novel succeeds in large part because of Spinelli’s ability to channel Misha’s voice. Every new experience stirs wonder in Misha, and Spinelli communicates this very well. Although the reader knows what the terrible fate of the Warsaw Ghetto will be, Misha has no idea. The mounting tension and dread are supplied not by the narrative itself, but by the reader’s own engagement with the text.  

Milkweed is a beautiful and haunting novel about a sad and difficult subject. Spinelli ably conjures up a bleak world where the most pressing concern is where your next meal is coming from.  

Book Review: Mistress of the Ritz, by Melanie Benjamin (2019)

Author Melanie Benjamin, and the cover of Mistress of the Ritz, to be published in May, 2019.

Melanie Benjamin’s previous historical novels have examined the lives of Truman Capote, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, and Hollywood star Mary Pickford. Her new novel, Mistress of the Ritz, will be issued in May, and focuses on Claude Auzello, the long-time director of the Ritz Hotel in Paris, and his wife Blanche. The novel skips around in time, but the main focus is the German occupation of France during World War II. 

After the French government surrendered to the Germans in June of 1940, the Nazis took over the Ritz and used it as a command post. Claude must decide how he will deal with the Germans. This was a question that millions of people throughout Europe had to deal with as the Germans invaded and conquered most of the continent. How will you handle the Germans? Will you collaborate with them or resist them? It’s a difficult question, made trickier by the moral obligation Claude feels towards the many people who work at the Ritz. 

Blanche must decide what course of action she will take as well. An American, Blanche met Claude in 1923, when he was working at Hotel Claridge, just before he got his job at the Ritz. Blanche and Claude have a fairly tempestuous marriage, as he clings to some of his French customs, like taking a mistress, and they argue frequently. 

Mistress of the Ritz paints a vivid picture of the luxurious life at the Ritz. As far as the plot of the novel goes, I found it quite engaging. However, I correctly guessed the two big plot reveals long before they occurred in the narrative. 

As an F. Scott Fitzgerald buff, I do have to point out one historical error. When Blanche comes back to the Ritz after a fight with Claude in 1937, she asks “Where’s Scott?” Ernest Hemingway then tells Blanche that Scott and Zelda have gone back to America. Which they did, back in September of 1931. Scott and Zelda never returned to Europe after that, which means that Blanche hasn’t seen Scott for six years. So she really shouldn’t be surprised that he isn’t drinking in the bar at the Ritz. Anyway, that’s a small historical quibble. 

If you’re interested in historical fiction, you should pick up Mistress of the Ritz when it comes out in May.

Book Review: 1939: Countdown to War, by Richard Overy (2009)

Cover of 1939: Countdown to War, by Richard Overy, 2009. My American paperback edition replaces Neville Chamberlain's picture with Winston Churchill, which doesn't make sense, since Chamberlain was Prime Minister in 1939. But Churchill's face is no doubt more familiar to American readers.

Neville Chamberlain, Prime Minister from 1937-1940.

Historian Richard Overy.

We all know how World War II started. Hitler invaded Poland on September 1, 1939. Simple, right? Well, like many events in history, there’s more complexity than we might think. In his 2009 book 1939: Countdown to War, British historian Richard Overy takes us through the final week before the invasion day by day. Even during those last days of August, there was still hope among many leaders in France and England that war could somehow be avoided. 

Forming the backdrop for the events of 1939 was the Czechoslovakian crisis of 1938, which had ended with the Munich Agreement. British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain famously said of the Munich Agreement, “I believe it is peace for our time.” Chamberlain hoped that Hitler would be satisfied after Munich, but instead, Hitler made it clear that Germany wanted the Danzig Corridor, former German territory that had become part of Poland after the Treaty of Versailles. Poland allied itself militarily with France and England in 1939, and those two countries pledged to come to the aid of Poland if Germany invaded. 

Throughout 1939: Countdown to War, Overy deftly explores the hour by hour diplomacy of the final week of peace. Overy makes it quite clear that Hitler never believed that France and England would actually keep their word to Poland. As always, Hitler used best case scenario reasoning to inform his planning. Since he thought that France and England wouldn’t actually fight him over Poland, then why not take Poland? Adding to Hitler’s hubris was the signing of the German-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact on August 23^rd, which ensured that, for the moment, the Soviet Union would not enter into a war against Germany. Hitler thought he could have a local war with no other countries interfering. The Non-Aggression Pact emboldened Hitler to go ahead with the invasion of Poland, which was scheduled to begin on August 26^th. However, Hitler soon canceled the invasion, which was then rescheduled for September 1^st. 

One thing I particularly enjoyed about 1939 was Overy’s nuanced portrait of Neville Chamberlain. Chamberlain’s historical reputation has ebbed and flowed, but I think in the minds of most people he remains the symbol of appeasement. Chamberlain remains fixed in memory as the man waving the paper saying “it is peace for our time,” in contrast to the pugnacious Winston Churchill saying “We will fight them on the beaches.” Of course, we in 2017 have the benefit of hindsight-we know that Chamberlain’s “peace in our time” will blow up in less than a year. But, as Overy shows, Chamberlain changed his mind about Hitler after Munich: “Neville Chamberlain is often painted as a man who searched for any way of evading conflict in 1939, but though he always thought peace preferable to war, he had few illusions about Hitler by the beginning of 1939. In March he described Hitler to a guest as ‘the blackest devil he had ever met.’” (p.15) Chamberlain was not going to back down if Germany invaded Poland, a point that he made clear in a letter he sent to Hitler on August 22, 1939.

Overy does an excellent job of describing the diplomatic exchanges among the countries during these days, and the back-channel attempts at brokering some kind of deal to avoid a war. There was hope on both sides that a major war could be avoided-some in England and France thought that standing firm would cause Hitler to back down, and Hitler remained stubbornly convinced that England and France would never honor their treaty obligations to Poland and actually fight. 

Overy unearthed an odd attempt at back-channel diplomacy by Birger Dahlerus, a Swedish businessman who had connections to English diplomats and also to Hermann Göring. Dahlerus worked furiously to bring both sides together to broker a deal, and he met with Göring early in August, but was unsuccessful.

Even after the invasion of Poland on September 1^st, there was still drama, as Chamberlain presented Hitler with an ultimatum demanding that German troops withdraw from Poland immediately. Originally, the ultimatum did not have a time limit, which left members of Parliament confused as to whether a state of war existed or not. A time limit was set for 11AM on September 3, 1939, and when there was no response from Germany; Chamberlain announced that England and Germany were at war. World War II had begun.

1939: Countdown to War is a slim volume, just 124 pages, not counting footnotes and index, but it tells the story of a momentous time in history, as Europe entered into another destructive war.

Book Review: Hiroshima by John Hersey (1946)

The updated paperback cover of Hiroshima, by John Hersey, originally published in 1946.

Author John Hersey, 1940's.

John Hersey’s 1946 book Hiroshima, an account of the aftermath of the dropping of the first atomic bomb, is a classic of non-fiction reporting. Many critics consider it to be the first work of “New Journalism,” as it contained detailed accounts from six survivors of the blast. Whether or not you agree with the decision by President Harry Truman to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, you should read Hiroshima to understand what the survivors went through. 

Hiroshima is one of those books that I’ve been aware of for a very long time, since middle school or high school at the latest, but I never read it for school, and for whatever reason I simply had never taken the time to read it. This spring, as I was teaching World War II to 10^th graders in World History, it occurred to me that I needed to fill this lamentable gap in my reading. I’m very glad I did, as Hiroshima is a short and powerful volume about the horrors of the atomic age.

Hersey’s prose is sparse and spare; there is never an extraneous word, or a florid description. Hiroshima heeds George Orwell’s famous quote, also published in 1946, that “Good prose is like a windowpane.” By that I think Orwell meant that the prose style should be clear and should not get in the way of the subject being viewed, and Hiroshima certainly is a great example of clear, concise writing. 

Hiroshima begins with examining where each of the six people it follows were at the moment the bomb detonated, and then traces their paths through the days that followed. Their stories occasionally intertwine throughout the book. 

Hersey made history as The New Yorker devoted the entirety of its August 31, 1946 issue to the full text of his article. Hersey added a long chapter, “The Aftermath” in 1985, which updated the survivors’ stories over the next forty years. 

It seems superfluous to have a long, drawn-out discussion about the merits of Hiroshima as a work of art. It is a beautiful, haunting book that should be read by anyone who wishes to engage with the many moral issues and complexities surrounding World War II.

Book Review: The Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War by Andrew Roberts (2011)

The Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War, by Andrew Roberts, published in the UK in 2009 and in the US in 2011.

British historian Andrew Roberts.

Andrew Roberts’ 2011 book The Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War is a superb and fascinating look at the deadliest conflict in human history. I previously read Roberts’ excellent 2014 biography of Napoleon Bonaparte, Napoleon: A Life, which I reviewed here. Roberts has a knack for choosing the telling historical detail that gets his point across in an entertaining way, and although he writes about very broad subjects, he never gets bogged down in historical minutiae.

I read The Storm of War because I realized recently, as I was teaching World War II to my 10^th grade World History students, that I had never read an overview of the war that examined all of the different fronts. So I picked up The Storm of War, in large part because I enjoyed Roberts’ biography of Napoleon so much. 

The Storm of War is an excellent read, as Roberts summarizes the military history of the war, while also examining the political currents that informed the actions of the major players. Roberts focuses more on the European theater than the Pacific, but for a British historian, that’s quite understandable. 

Roberts isn’t afraid to add his two cents when he feels it’s called for. Joseph Goebbels is described as “a man who fully deserves the cliché ‘evil genius,’” (p.23) and General Hans Krebs was “straight out of Nazi central casting.” (p.560) I enjoyed these little asides, as it added more color to the book.

Roberts is perhaps strongest in his writing on the Eastern front of the European theater, and he proves that Germany’s losses on the Eastern front doomed their war effort. Part of Germany’s losing the war was simple arithmetic. As Roberts writes, “In 1941 the USSR had more soldiers and more tanks than, and the same number of aircraft as, the whole of the rest of the world’s armed forces combined.” (p.139) When Hitler launched his invasion of Russia in June of 1941, the Wehrmacht was in much better shape than the Red Army, largely due to Stalin’s disastrous purge of the Red Army leadership in the late 1930’s, but the numbers were never going to be in Germany’s favor. The Russians were simply able to absorb a seemingly infinite amount of casualties and yet still keep reinforcing their troops. Stalin should not have been taken so much by surprise at the German invasion, since “…Stalin received no fewer than eighty warnings of Hitler’s intentions over the previous eight months.” (p.155) 

The chapter about the battle of Stalingrad is superb and haunting. The criticism that Roberts hands out to Stalin is well deserved, as he points out “During the battle of Stalingrad, the NKVD shot around 13,500 Russian soldiers-the size of an entire fully manned division-for treachery, cowardice, desertion, drunkenness and ‘anti-Soviet agitation.’” (p.326) For the average Russian soldier there was simply no alternative than to fight the Germans tooth and nail, street by street in places like Stalingrad.

Roberts puts Russia’s huge sacrifice in context, as he writes, “…between D-Day and VE Day {June 6, 1944 to May 8, 1945} the Russians suffered more than 2 million casualties, three times that of the British, Americans, Canadians and French fighting forces put together. It is worth considering whether democracies could ever have tolerated that level of sacrifice, or whether-as seems likely-it required the whole horrific apparatus of the NKVD and domestic terror to keep the Soviet Union in the war.” (p.520) That’s a sobering thought, but it’s certainly true, and it’s frightening to think how the war would have gone if Hitler had not made the disastrous decision to invade Russia and had instead been able to use the entire force of the Wehrmacht to repel the D-Day invasion. 

One thing I enjoyed about Roberts’ writing is that while he is by no means writing an alternate history of World War II, he is able to show how the Allies’ victory was by no means preordained, and he isn’t afraid to briefly explore alternate paths of action the main players could have taken. 

Examining these other paths of action inevitably means taking a look at how Adolf Hitler made decisions, since he made most of his decisions unilaterally, with a minimum of input from anyone else, usually to the detriment of the German war effort. Roberts also shows how Hitler’s Nazism led him to make decisions that ultimately undermined Germany’s chances of success. It would have been more beneficial for Germany to enlist the Slavic people of Eastern Europe to fight with Germany against the Russians, rather than make them victims of a horrific genocide, but that simply wasn’t how Hitler’s mind worked. 

Roberts relates some interesting anecdotes about the way Hitler’s mind did work, as he writes of Hitler at the Berghof: “Staggeringly beautiful scenery clearly had an effect on Hitler that was opposite to how most other people reacted: rather than softening and humanizing him it hardened his heart and filled him with power-lust.” (p.147) 

We also learn that Hitler had an amazing memory for random military facts, which I was not previously aware of:

 “Instances when Hitler displayed his technical interest in weaponry during the war are legion. When not asking pointed questions at his Führer-conferences with senior OKW figures and military commanders, he liked nothing better than showing off his detailed knowledge. Subjects upon which he would dilate included the horsepower needed for wheeled tractors to pull heavy field howitzers (85 hp); gearshift problems in the Tiger tank; the ricochet hazards associated with the 15cm anti-tank gun…” (p.50-1)

In another instance, “…when {Franz} Halder remarked that the Russians boasted 10,000 tanks, the statement ‘unleashed a more than quarter-hour retort from Hitler, in which he cited from memory the Russians’ annual production for the last twenty years.’” (p.140) Sounds like a fascinating guy.

During a war in which technology produced frightening advances in the ways in which men can kill each other, sometimes old-fashioned technology still played an important part, as during the battle of Berlin when “{German} Officers were reduced to telephoning numbers taken at random from the Berlin telephone directory, the Soviet advance being plotted by how many times the calls were answered in Russian rather than German.” (p.551)

One of Roberts’ wittiest lines comes late in the book, as he makes a reference to a famous line from Oscar Wilde’s play The Importance of Being Earnest, writing of Hermann Göring: “Since the Reichsmarschall was unquestioningly loyal to Hitler until almost the very end, his fidelity as a Nazi mattered more to the Führer than his competence as an air commander. Furthermore, after Rudolf Hess’s flight to Scotland, to lose one deputy Führer might be considered unfortunate, but to lose two might look like carelessness.” (p.587) If you can make people laugh when writing about Nazis, so much the better. 

The Storm of War is a marvelous book, one that captures the global scope and sweep of World War II while still reminding us of the stark tragedies that each one of the 50 million deaths in that conflict represent.