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Amsterdam: a Brief Life of the City, by Geert Mak, translation by Philipp Blom
I picked this up to read on a recent trip to Europe to visit relatives (more details will appear elsewhere on the website shortly) and generally see more of Europe than just Warsaw. A highly readable overview of the history of Amsterdam that closely mirrors the contents of the Amsterdam Historical Museum (in that if you go the museum, you'll see a lot of the artifacts and art referred to in the book), Mak conveys both admiration for the city and its people and a rather ruthless reappraisal of its behavior during and after WWII.
Empires, and ex-empires rarely want to admit how much of their wealth and stature comes from the oppression of other peoples. Furthermore, they will generally use their school system to ensure that future generations don't ask too many unpleasant questions. All this I know. But my experience at Anne Frank House and the Resistance Museum was much modified by reading Mak in advance of those visits. While I had always had a sneaking suspicion all was not right with the focus on Anne Frank (her family just seemed too well-off to be very representative), I must admit to complete shock at discovering the true scope of the horrors of Amsterdam's response to German occupation.
A few days later, and after talking to a very nice girl from Terschelling, I decided that as appalling as these discoveries were (they really did help the Germans collect and murder more Jews proportionally than any other country in Europe, even Poland), they are understandable. Adammers are some of the most civilized people I've ever met, not physically aggressive, and of course the tolerance of the Netherlands in general is legendary. So what if these characteristics are more through expedience than a belief in moral rectitude. Going along to get along is bound to get one into trouble in an encounter with tyranny in any form, but I don't see any reason to blame the victim exclusively, or even primarily.
Just make sure you aren't a targetable minority in the event of the next round.
Paris: A Traveller's History, 3rd ed., by Robert Cole
Odd to read two books of this sort back to back, and conclude that the translated volume is much better written. Paris presents some appalling problems to the historian -- a much longer history than Amsterdam's, and a much more eventful 19th Century. As an active 19th Century will tend to overwhelm architecture from the more distant past, so too will events in general overwhelm a history spanning a longer time frame. Cole fights the tendency, but there are just too many stories to tell. That said, he does a nice job of giving the backstory on the sights one might see and answers to the questions one might have, as long as one is strictly looking to the past. I picked up another book to answer my questions about Paris (and France) in the present. This is far from a great book.
Night Watch, by Terry Pratchett
Pratchett simultaneously turns out a good time-travel/alternate history tale within the Discworld Milieu, a paean to those heroes and mentors who formed us, however imperfect they were and therefore we are as well, and a good hard look at the crises men are subject to at the birth of their first child and mid-life (for Vimes, happening more or less at the same time, which is increasingly common). Good stuff. As always, humanist to the core, and riotously funny at times.
War of Honor, by David Weber
I don't know whether to blame Robert Jordan, J.K. Rowling or both, but this Honor Harrington checked in at over 900 pages. As is almost always the case with Weber novels, one can safely page through some of the longer speechifying bits, checking in periodically for plot points and to make sure that someone else hasn't chimed in with another point of view. I had two major problems with the plot of this one. First, I just could not bring myself to believe that Giancola would really be a single point of contact throughout the negotiation process. And if he wasn't, someone would have been able to expose his behavior, and I think that Eloise would have been able to use that evidence to torpedo him and possibly end the war even as it began. Possibly this will come up in the next book, although I sincerely doubt it. Because I couldn't believe that, the machinery marching everyone to war, despite no one wanting it, just fell apart for me. Second, and arguably a lot less important, given how many people throughout the planning process on the Republic side knew that the Protector's Own was out of Grayson system for five months, and given that everyone knows where Honor fits into the Grayson political order, it should have occurred to someone that they might be hanging out at Sidemore. No one seems to think Benjamin is a total moron, and given the march to war was in play when the Protector's Own headed out, someone should have thought there must be more to the training mission than met the eye, but everyone was quite happy to completely write those squadrons off as non-players right up to just after the last possible moment. To be fair, people were motivated to want to believe they weren't in play, but still. It was awfully convenient.
Other than that, and Emily being a bit of a cardboard cutout character (who am I kidding, this is David Weber -- it usually takes him three novels to develop a character anyway), I'll probably continue to read this series, which is saying something for me, given that this entry was over 900 pages long. Hopefully the next one will be more moderate in size.
Plane Insanity: A Flight Attendant's Tales of Sex, Rage and Queasiness at 30,000 Feet, by Elliott Hester
Black, straight man becomes flight attendant, and what with one thing and another, continues to be a flight attendant for over sixteen years. Needless to say, he has a number of juicy stories to pass along. I laughed repeatedly, and kept wishing he wasn't quite such a pushover, but given the job description, I don't think he'd have kept doing it so long if he weren't. I particularly liked the stories about the $99 flight from NYC to Puerto Rico.
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Copyright Rebecca Allen, 2002.
Created: January 30, 2003 Modified: January 8, 2004