The Last Crusade: The Epic Voyages of Vasco Da Gama. Nigel Cliff. Harper Perennial, 2012. 560 pages.
If you ever need feel the need to pick up a readable historical text that covers the Age of Exploration, specifically Portugal's rise and fall as a world power, then Nigel Cliff's The Last Crusade is the book for you. It reads like a novel, but it is a thorough history European exploration and imperialism in the 15th and 16th centuries. The main focus is Vasco da Gama and his voyages to establish a Portuguese trade route to and relationship with India, voyages that led him to be the first European to successfully reach the subcontinent by sailing around Africa, but da Gama is not even mentioned until about page 150. First, Cliff relates the history of the rise of Islam, Islam's movement into Europe, the European resistance, and the series of Holy Wars launched by Popes and Kings to destroy Islamic control over the Holy Land. Eventually, Portugal and Spain emerged as the self-appointed chief defenders and promoters of the "True Faith." Cliff argues that Vasco da Gama's voyage to India wasn't just driven by the desire for spices and other riches for the Portuguese Crown. In fact, da Gama was tapped to lead a new Crusade against Islam, with orders to destroy Muslim military and commercial influence in East Africa and Asia.
What transpired was one misadventure and misunderstanding after another. Da Gama mistakenly believed that India was full of Christians. OK, they were strange Christians that treated cows with reverence and decorated their temples with strange "saints" and "angels" with multiple faces, heads, limbs, but they had to be Christians, right? I mean, there were only Christians and Muslims in the world, right? The luxury goods the Portuguese brought to trade for spices, gold, and precious jewels, were sneered at viewed as garbage by the Indians.
The Last Crusade is an epic history of the "Age of Discovery" and a new interpretation. It is as history should be, great storytelling.
Dark Tide: The Great Boston Molasses Flood of 1919. Stephen Puleo. Beacon Press, 2003. 280 pages.
On January 15, 1919, a huge tower in Boston's North End collapsed. It contained 2.3 million gallons of molasses - 26 million pounds. The result was a 50-foot tidal wave of molasses moving at 35 mph and crushing everything and everyone in its path. The death toll was 21 with 150 injured, many permanently disabled. As rescue and recovery efforts were made over the next hours, shouts of rescuers and screams of agony of survivors were punctuated by gunshots as Boston police shot dozens, if not hundreds, of struggling horses. Dogs, cats, and even rats in the neighborhood disappeared in the sticky goo.
The tank was built to hold molasses from the Caribbean until it was transported by rail to factories where it was processed into alcohol for use in making explosives and munitions, generating huge profits for the United States Industrial Alcohol Company (USIA) which supplied the belligerents of WWI. Molasses had been an essential part of Boston's development from colonial times, the days of the Triangular Trade. New England slave ships sailed for Africa with rum to trade for enslaved Africans, transported them to the Caribbean for sale, filled their holds with molasses, and sailed back to New England where the molasses became rum, ready for the next trip.
The North End of Boston was picked as the site of the tower largely because it was populated by Italian immigrants who had no political or economic standing to stop it. The North End was also home to a large and violent anarchist movement that regularly made threats and took action against war industries as well as government and police targets.
Author Stephen Puleo weaves together all these threads to tell the story of the disaster and the legal battles that stretched over the next ten years. It really is a moving and informative story about a disaster that is largely forgotten and ignored today.
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Chernobyl Trailer (HBO 2019)
Midnight in Chernobyl. Adam Higginbotham. Simon & Schuster, 2019. 560 pages.
A few years ago, I was totally enthralled by the HBO series Chernobyl, about the world's worst nuclear disaster in 1986. It's an incredible production, one of the greatest series I've ever seen.
In 2019, journalist Adam Higginbotham published Midnight in Chernobyl, the product of a years-long investigation into the incident itself and the intense behind-the-scenes propaganda effort and the resulting cover-up, and it's a fantastic look at the inner workings of the Soviet Union and its impending collapse.
This is definitely one of those books that proves that history is always stranger and more horrible than fiction. Even Kafka and Orwell could never have imagined the story told here. The reader is taken through every detail of the incident and the aftermath. There is a lot of scientific background, but never did I feel overwhelmed by the science. Higginbotham also succeeds in telling the stories of the people whose lives were turned upside down. The workers and their families who were just living their lives like families around the world, the managers driven by constant demands from their superiors who routinely cut corners, falsified results, and flat out lied to protect their party status and careers, the military and political decision makers whose priority was promoting the USSR's image around the world, and the thousands of men and women drafted into clean-up service. Even in the midst of the crisis, there were people who refused to believe that their government would ask them to do anything dangerous, and there were people who saw their service, and their radiation dosage, as their opportunity to serve their beloved state as their parents and grandparents had done in the "Great Patriotic War" (WWII) and the Revolution.
There are so many great stories in the book. I don't know why these stood out, but there are two indelible images for me. One involves the woman who was the official architect and city planner of Pripyat. After the plant accident, she worked around the clock organizing the evacuation which meant that she had to draw dozens and dozens of city maps freehand for the various groups patrolling the city. Why freehand? Because in the USSR, photocopiers and mimeograph machines were strictly controlled and rationed by the KGB because they could be used to disseminate anti-state propaganda. Then there's the unnamed woman trudging along the town streets dragging her suitcase after everybody else was evacuated. She had been out of town the weekend of the accident, and nobody bothered to stop train service to Pripyat. She had no idea anything had happened and got off the train to head home, bewildered that she was so alone.
Midnight in Chernobyl is a great book.
The Slave Who Inherited a Fortune
Woman of Color, Daughter of Privilege: Amanda America Dickson, 1849-1893. Kent Anderson Leslie. University of Georgia Press, 1996. 248 pages.
Antebellum Hancock County Georgia was one of the wealthiest counties in Georgia, one of the wealthiest states in the union. Part of the "black belt" of central Georgia, Hancock County's wealth was produced by enslaved plantation workers who greatly outnumbered the white population. Amanda America Dickson was owned by her father who had raped her 12-year-old mother, impregnating her with Amanda. David Dickson was one of the best known slaveowners of Georgia, nicknamed "the Prince of Georgia Farmers." As a child, Amanda was taken from her mother forced to be a domestic servant in her paternal grandmother's household. From the time she was weaned up to the time of her grandmother's death, she slept in her white grandmother's bedroom. Her father and grandmother showered her with affection, and she was taught to read, write, and play piano. She also learned the rules of etiquette and fashion. Still, Georgia law made it next to impossible to manumit, or free, and enslaved person, so Amanda remained technically enslaved until the 13th amendment was ratified. She "married" twice, first to a white first-cousin and then to a mixed-race man. She couldn't legally marry her first husband because of state law, but they lived as man and wife for a few years. When her father died in 1885, he left her his estate in his will. Of course, that led her white relatives to challenge the will in court, and shockingly, the Georgia Supreme Court upheld Amanda's inheritance. As a result, she became one of the wealthiest women of color in19th century America. To distance herself from the white Hancock County relatives, she moved to Augusta Georgia where she became a leader of an elite black society, and she even found limited acceptance in a white society that extended limited acceptance to mixed-race descendants of the planter class, provided they had enough money and social grace.
Amanda Dickson's story is one of those stories that one seldom hears, and there is not a great amount of information. She never wrote her memoir, and there are few first person accounts, but I'm glad Kent Anderson Leslie told as much of her story as he was able.
Author at 2011 National Book Festival
The School of Night. Louis Bayard. Henry Holt and Co., 2011. 352 pages.
My first Louis Bayard historical fiction, The School of Night, is an historical mystery told in two timelines: 1603 in the laboratory of Thomas Harriott, renowned English mathematician, astronomer, chemist, and alchemist friend, of Sir Walter Raleigh and Christopher Marlowe among other characters viewed suspiciously as heretics by the Crown and 2009 as an Elizabethan scholar finds himself drawn into a deadly adventure with numerous twists and turns.
This was a cheap find at a library book sale and a very quick poolside read. Verdict: ok. 3 out of 5 stars I guess. Pretty typical of the genre. I've read at least a dozen books that are very similar. You take your damaged, downtrodden hero with problems including one or more of the following: alcoholism, professional failure, poverty, romantic loss, dead lover, child, or friend, and/or depression and throw in a mysterious and sexy woman with whom he falls madly in love/lust. People around them start to be murdered and/or valuable and historic things are stolen or threatened, and they find themselves running for their lives from some malevolent villain who is certain that they have access to what he wants. Twists and turns. Surprises and betrayals. Yada yada. Finale. The world is saved.
This kind of novel is pretty popular, and Bayard is pretty popular. I think it's popular with some book clubs. I think I'll give him another shot, but Night doesn't quite convince me by itself. However, it served its purpose, quick and easy read, good for beach, pool, or plane.
"Pale Blue Eye" Trailer, Netflix
The Pale Blue Eye. Louis Bayard. Harper, 2006. 432 pages.
This was Louis Bayard's second and last chance to impress me. Meh. The Pale Blue Eye, published in 2006, is enjoying a revival lately because it was made into a Netflix movie starring Christian Bale in 2022.
In 1830, respected and retired New York constable Augustus Landor is summoned to the United States Military Academy at West Point to investigate the death of a cadet, first thought to be a suicide. However, within hours, his body was mutilated, and Landor suspects that there is much more afoot. He soon finds an eager assistant among the cadet corps, a brooding misfit poet named Edgar Allan Poe.
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