More Book Recommendations
Spring edition
Following the pattern of January’s book recommendations, here is the spring edition. Once again, in no special order:
The Coming Caesars by Amaury de Riencourt. I have cited this a few times and will certainly do so again. Published in 1957, it is a comparative history of the modern and classical worlds and reveals some remarkable parallels. In Riencourt’s reading, Europe plays the role of Greece while the United States corresponds to Rome. Britain lies somewhere in between. It is America which primarily occupies the author’s interest here. He traces its origins back to England and the early settlements of the seventeenth century, through the colonial era, the Revolution and post-Revolution period, Jacksonian democracy, the Antebellum period, the Civil War, Reconstruction, the Gilded Age, the First World War, the 1920s boom and subsequent Great Depression, the Second World War and the early stages of the Cold War and the great prosperity of the 1950s. In its evolution he sees strong parallels with Ancient Rome and its trajectory from kingdom to republic to empire. As the title suggests, Riencourt saw the office of the Presidency acquiring more and more powers to itself over time to the point that he predicted that the President might well one day be a modern Caesar. What is Caesarism? “Caesarism is not dictatorship, not the result of one man’s overriding ambition, not a brutal seizure of power through revolution. It is not based on a specific doctrine or philosophy. It is essentially pragmatic and untheoretical. It is a slow, often century-old, unconscious development that ends in a voluntary surrender of a free people escaping from freedom to one autocratic master.” An important thing to add is that Riencourt was not a fatalist and did not see this particular destiny as inevitable. His comments on the future of the world at large arguably provide the only significant flaw of the book, as he demonstrates an all too typical mid-century faith in the United Nations as a political ideal that must be realised, even if he accepted its many practical weaknesses. In spite of this lapse, The Coming Caesars is an important book.
The Europeans by Luigi Barzini. This is a book which ought to be read by anybody interested in the fascinating diversity of European culture and character. Barzini hailed from a time when journalists could actually be interesting and insightful. In 1964 he wrote his most famous book The Italians, in which he endeavoured to explain his native country to outsiders. The Europeans, published in 1983, does the same for the continent at large (or at least for six countries). As with Riencourt before him, Barzini makes the obvious comparisons with the United States. The Americans, he writes, “may appear comfortably tactless and arrogant at times”, whereas the Europeans “have the contrary defects” and are “pessimistic, prudent, practical, and parsimonious, like an old-fashioned banker.” The book is divided into seven character studies: “The Elusive Europeans”, “The Imperturbable British”, “The Mutable Germans”, “The Quarrelsome French”, “The Flexible Italians”, “The Careful Dutch” and “The Baffling Americans” (the latter used as a New World extension of the Old and to add contrast). The book contains a treasure trove of insights backed with extensive knowledge of history and plentiful anecdotes. Commenting on the British, Barzini agrees with Lord D’Abernon’s assessment that “an Englishman’s mind works best when it is almost too late.” On the French, he cites Alexis de Tocqueville that “France is the most brilliant and dangerous nation in Europe, best suited to become in turn an object of admiration, hatred, pity, terror, but never of indifference”. For this reason, Barzini considered it necessary to study France constantly “as seismologists study the trembling of their needles on the white paper.” However, the chapter that is arguably the most fascinating is that on the Germans. Barzini had spent considerable time in Germany in the 1920s and 1930s and his insights on the jarring contrast between the two periods is haunting. In Weimar Berlin in 1931 he saw its “disarray, civil strife, moral decay, violence, inflation, misery, unemployment, and hunger”. When he returned in 1934 he found it clean and tidy and orderly: “It was definitely and bewilderingly another country.” As a journalist, Barzini met Hitler a few times over the coming years and returned to Germany on a number of occasions: “I saw the strangely malleable country given a new shape by the Nazis. The phenomenon was disturbing.” It would have been interesting if the author had included chapters on the Scandinavian countries, as well as Spain and Portugal. Furthermore, written as it was during the latter stages of the Cold War there is nothing on Central or Eastern Europe, but these are minor points. The Europeans covers significant ground as it stands. Very much in favour of the “dream” of a united Europe, Barzini’s comments on European political integration appear very dated forty years on. But on those aspects of character and national personality which shift little over the course of time, his insights make fascinating reading.
Lee Kuan Yew: The Grand Master’s Insights on China, the United States, and the World, edited by Graham Allison and Robert D. Blackwill. Lee Kuan Yew (1932-2015) was one of the most important and successful statesmen of modern times. As Prime Minister of Singapore between 1959 and 1990 he transformed the city-state into a highly efficient and prosperous economy. This book contains selections from various interviews with Lee over the years on topics such as China, America, India, geopolitics, Islamic terrorism and the future of democracy. It provides a good window onto his worldview and political outlook. A cautionary note is necessary, however. Quotes are taken from many interviews taken over long periods of time (see the references at the end) and are then pieced together according to theme, which obviously loses the original context. If not understood at the outset, this has the potential of giving a somewhat misleading picture.
The Lusiads by Luís Vaz de Camões. This poem is the Portuguese national epic, first published in 1572 and aiming to do for Portugal what Virgil’s Aeneid did for Rome. As with all epics of this kind—the Iliad, the Odyssey, the Aeneid, the Nibelungenlied etc.—my personal preference is for the prose versions rather than poetry. In this case, the version in question was William C. Atkinson’s 1952 translation published by Penguin Classics. It immortalises the story of Vasco da Gama’s epic journey across the world and how Portugal, a small nation of little over a million, spread its wings across the entire globe in a brief but bright flash across the pages of history. As Atkinson writes in the introduction, “If they temporarily exhausted themselves in the process, they left the world as seen from Europe a very different place, and the whole course of subsequent history bears the imprint.” Camões was writing a classical epic for the new Age of Discovery and The Lusiads, divided into ten cantos, consciously echoes its ancient forbears to the point of incorporating the classical deities of Apollo, Venus et al. into the narrative, blending reality and fantasy. Above all, this is a celebration of adventure and the sort of spirit with which a determined few can alter the course of history. As the poet announces at the beginning:
“This is the story of heroes who, leaving their native Portugal behind them, opened a way to Ceylon, and further, across seas no man had ever sailed before. They were men of no ordinary stature, equally at home in war and dangers of every kind: they founded a kingdom among distant peoples, and made it great…Let us hear no more then of Ulysses and Aeneas and their long journeyings, no more of Alexander and Trajan and their famous victories. My theme is the daring and renown of the Portuguese to whom Neptune and Mars alike give homage. The heroes and the poets of old have had their day; another and loftier conception of valour has arisen.”