Bout of Books 31: Wrap-Up

 I did pretty well during this bout of books. I was reading for research, with a little of fiction reading in the morning...as a treat. 

During the week, I finished Kim Stanley Robinson's Ministry for the Future by reading about 50 pages a day. 

I also finished the much-hyped Lockdown by Peter May, during bouts of insomnia, and have to say it was just awful. The representation of the lockdown itself was OK, but the rest of the story was unbelievable. Without revealing too much *SPOILER ALERT*  here's a question that you will probably ask if you get more than halfway through: "could a person really walk around doing evil villainous stuff if they had been so badly burned that they were literally missing all of their skin?" 

I listened to 12 hours or so of the audio version of Ann and John Tusa's The Nuremberg Trial. I highly recommend this audiobook. It's already a good narrative history of the trial, and Cosham is a really good narrator for it. 

I finished Robert Paxton's excellent book on Vichy France, most of a fascinating edited collection on the U.S. relationship with Charles de Gaulle, and got about 80 pages into a book on the history of Denazification in Germany by Perry Biddiscombe.  I'm finding the Biddiscombe book annoying, unfortunately. It lacks adequate citations and is written from an anti-left point of view.  Despite that, it's a relatively recent synthesis of existing scholarship, so it's useful for getting an overall sense of where the field is on this subject right now. I've ordered a bunch of other books from the library based on reading it. I also started reading an ethnographic study of contemporary Italian fascists by MIT professor, Alessandro Orsini. It's one of those rare academic "page-turners," that provides some interesting insights into the worldviews of European fascists today. Not surprisingly, anti-immigrant racism is the dominant platform.   

Overall, I'd say it was a good week of reading, but I didn't keep track of how many pages I read. 

Bout of Books 31 - Day Five Update

 It's already day five! Well - that went fast. Today I'm reading a biography of Gaetano Salvemini, an Italian socialist who was central to anti-fascist politics in the U.S. starting when he arrived from Europe in 1927. So far this year, I've seen a lot about Salvemini:  I've read his first book on Italian fascism, and have come across stories about him in other books on Italian Anti-fascism as well as newspapers from the 1920s, but I still haven't read this biography, which is pretty fascinating. He was one of the early socialist intellectuals in Italy, and was popular with Gramsci and other left socialists in the 1910s prior to the founding of the Italian Communist Party after the Bolshevik Revolution.  He's relevant to multiple chapters of my current book project, because of his role both in agitation against fascism in the 1920s-1930s and his efforts in the post-war era when he returned to Italy.

On day four, I listened to more of the audiobook of the Tusa's Nuremberg trials book, read a little bit of Biddiscombe's book on DeNazification, and finished up reading relevant chapters on the relationship between the United States and Charles De Gaulle, including an article by Ronald Steel about Walter Lippman's promotion of De Gaulle's ideas through his newspaper column in the early 40s.  

On day three, I read the first half of the De Gaulle book, and listened to the Tusas on Nuremberg, but I was too distracted by the ongoing disastrous events in Israel and Palestine and spent too much time reading news. 

Each day, I started out with about 40 -50 pages in Kim Stanely Robinson's Ministry for the Future, so I'm now just a little over 100 pages from finishing that tome. It continues to be good, though some of the chapters with long lists of things are a little bit of a slog. In those wee hours of the night when I can't sleep, I've been reading Peter May's Lockdown, which I'd bought as a cheap ebook when it became a brief sensation for presciently setting a mystery in quarantined London during a bird flu pandemic.  The pandemic setting is fairly good, but the mystery itself is absurd. Not up to the level of May's Lewis novels at all, but at least I'm close to done with it. 

Overall, I'd say that I've read a couple hundred pages over the last few days and listened to four hours of the audiobook. I'm hoping to read more over the weekend. 

For today's listening to go with the reading, here's some traditional Pizzica music from Southern Italy, the region where Salvemini grew up, and which he (and his biographer) see as a crucial element in his character and political views. It was unusual for someone to become a professor in Florence with with what Killinger describes as Salvemini's "peasant mannerisms" and "rough hewn ways." 

Bout of Books 31 - Day 2 update

I've been reading every day for work, so I'm getting a fair amount of reading done. I finished reading Robert Paxton's classic work, Vichy France: Old Guard New Order this afternoon. I've been working with a pomodoro timer this week to reduce my social media time-wasting and "self-interruption."  in general. I think it's helping.   After finishing the Vichy book, I started another Paxton book. This one is an edited collection co-edited with Nicholas Wahl, called De Gaulle and the United States: A Centennial Reappraisal. I'm about 80 pages in, and I'm learning a lot. This book is quite interesting in its structure, because it follows a French conference model that combines presentations from professional historians with presentations by people who participated in the events, and gives both historians and participants opportunities to correct each other's recollections or work. The content of both books is also very good. Paxton was already one of my favorite historians, based on his short book The Anatomy of Fascism, but his book on the Vichy government is probably what made his reputation as a scholar. Paxton was the first historian to use German records to analyze Vichy - so his book, first published in 1972 completely overturned a lot of the more apolegtic legends about the collaborationist government that had been published up to that point.  

   Before reading these two books,. I didn't know that much about either the Vichy government or the U.S. relationship with De Gaulle and the Free French, but let's just say it wasn't really like what you see in Casablanca, though the American public was more favorable to De Gaulle than most of the U.S. government, or even a lot of the French population of the U.S., which like the French population, generally supported Petain, at least in the beginning.  The U.S. also maintained positive relations with the Vichy government even after entering the war in 1941. People in the State department saw De Gaulle as a "dictator in the making" and/or a "creature of the British." At one point, U.S. Secretary of State, Cordell Hull referred to US citizens' support for De Gaulle as "softheaded idealism." I'm learning now how the tide finally turned to get the U.S to support De Gaulle, and it seems related to the growing understanding that the French Resistance backed him.  

    I'm also listening to the audiobook of Anne and John Tusa's book on the Nuremberg Trials, which is beautifully read by Ralph Cosham. I've never listened to a book that was part of an academic project before - but this one is already meant for popular audiences. I found a used hard copy that I can use to review details, and meanwhile, I can feel like I'm working on my project when I'm exercising and doing chores.

    My other book this week is my slow morning reading of Kim Stanely Robinson's Ministry for the Future which is our local SF bookclub pick for this month. I'm a little more than halfway through it and am finding it to be the best Science Fiction book I've read in a long time. It's a near-future book about various efforts to address already catastrophic impacts of climate change. 

 So for today, I'd say I read about 210 pages, and I'll probably read another 40 or so before the day is over. And since this blog is for reading and listening, here's a song to go with today's reading: