Barbara Tuchman "The Guns of August"

As I have previously argued, World war I, not World war II, is the formative event of our era. Its effects, which include the Second World War are still being played out in Russia, the Balkans and the Middle East.

One of the most famous works on World War I is Barbara Tuchman's Pulitzer Prize-winning book The Guns of August. This work deals with the circumstances and events leading up to the outbreak of the First World War and the stalemate along the Western Front that ensured a war of attrition settled only by the historically contingent and by no means inevitable intervention of the U.S. in 1917.

Tuchman's book is excellent not only as history, but also as analysis and even as drama. Not a work of art, its artistic touches include grand aphoristic language and a sense of suspense that reads as much like narrative fiction as it does a clinical account.

Neither the actual outbreak nor the course of the war was predetermined. Even up to mobilization the war could have been averted, although, Tuchman argues, the principles often did not see this. Although the reader knows the outcome, through the first half of the book one is kept turning the pages, hoping that war will be avoided. As diplomats and European royalty work sometimes diligently and sometimes fecklessly to achieve some accomodation, others argue that once the wheels are in motion it would be suicide to attempt a delay of action. The Kaiser is shown as too week to avoid a war (one that he both feared and longed for) as well as too conflicted to win it. The effect of Bristish diplomacy was to support France well enough morally that she would not seriously seek to avoid war with Prussia, but not well enough materially to break the German lines once that war broke out. "No more distressing moment can ever face a British government than that which requires it to come to a hard, fast and specific decision," says Tuchman.

One particularly tragic event that Tuchman documents is the bombardment of the Belgian city of Louvain and the destruction of its university library, the oldest in Europe, with the loss of countless unique treasures. Cardinal Désiré Mercier, author of the Manual of Modern Scholastic Philosophy would arise as a hero of the Belgian resistance and of civilzed Europe.

This best-seller has been in print continuously since its publication in 1962. Tuchman's interpretation has influenced historians and the work played a pivotal role in the Kennedy Administration's handling of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Read it as drama, as history, and as a book of ideas.

Pictured are the iconic "you country needs you" poster with Lord Kitchener, killed in WWI, The Kaiser in his warlord costume and the ruins of the library of Louvain University.

Dog's Best Friend — Ratchet's Reprieve

The dog was first domesticated 15,000 years ago in north-east Asia by the ancestors of the Eurasiatic and Amerind Peoples. (The Eurasiatics are the ancestors of the Indo-European, Uralic, Altaic and Eskimo peoples, among others, while the Amerinds are the ancestors of most of the Natives of the Americas.) Both evolved from pack animals, men and dogs have a similar primitive social hierarchy. The dog adapts well to human companionship, and man accepts the dog and bonds to him as family. The strength of that bond is rivalled only by that between man and horse, another pack animal.

There are people who don't like dogs. I won't go so far as Simon Marchmont to argue that they should be shot. Only people who actively dislike dogs arouse my suspicion. The love of dogs seems to be something natural to the military mind. The military does not normally allow soldiers to adopt pets overseas or to ship them home, but there is one recent happy exception.

Above is a picture of Seargeant Gwen Beberg with the puppy Ratchet she rescued from a burning trash pile in Iraq. And here is the story at FoxNews, but I think the picture says it all.

Citizen of the Galaxy

While usually considered one of his "juvenile" books, Citizen of the Galaxy is one of Robert Heinlein's best. A boy sold into slavery is purchased by a legless mendicant who teaches him what amounts to the rational egoism of a Stoic, a Jesuit, or perhaps a Randian. The beggar is more than he seems, and so is the boy.

Leaving the slave planet, a world of Levantine decadence, the hero becomes a passenger on a family-owned trading spaceship where the crew speak what happens to be Finnish and live according to a two clan phratry system divided as well from outsiders, the "Fremdi." The social rules are very complex, one may not fraternize with the other clan, but when it comes time to take a wife, one may not marry within one's own clan. Heinlein does not make the fact that the ship members are Finns living according to ancient folk custom explicit, and I only figured this out after I had studied archeology and anthropology and then re-read the book after about a decade.

Having lived under a Middle Eastern-style despotry and aboard a clannish trading vessel with a gypsy-like attitude toward strangers, the hero then makes a transition into an British style navy where again he must learn a totally new way of life. He not only learns Western values, he learns his own birth identity and the role he can play, should he choose to, as a citizen of the galaxy.

The book is quite a broadening experience, for its hero and for the reader, and Heinlein's research and fidelity to the systems he describes is impressive. Except for the space element, the story might have been set on 19th century Earth. One of the best aspects of Heinlein "science-fiction" is that it is not alien or technology driven, but plot and character driven. Some of Heinlein's books have the flaw that they lack endings. Yet this story is fully integrated and does not disappoint. Do not be put off by the fact that the main character is an adolescent. The book is fully suitable for adults and I have read it three times. Heinlein's love for humanity, his cosmopolitan sophistication and his nevertheless unending advocacy for the superiority of universal liberal values show that Heinlein himself most assuredly deserved the title Citizen of the Galaxy.