Essays
Gays In The Military, Then & Now
The continuing debate over the status of gays in the U. S. Armed Forces might be illuminated by this interesting sidelight of ancient Greek military history. The Greeks had, of course, quite a different attitude toward male homosexuality than do we Judaeo-Christians. For them, the bond between lovers, typically a younger and an older man, was considered one of the strongest and noblest that human beings were capable of.
Victory in a battle between two massed phalanxes of heavy-armed spearmen (hoplites) depended absolutely on the front line not breaking up. When it did, rout and slaughter ensued. A regiment of paired lovers, therefore, where each would rather die than leave his partner's flank exposed to the thrust of an enemy spear, was unbeatable. As Plutarch explains in his Life of Pelopidas [ch. 18]: "a band [of soldiers] that is held together by the friendship between lovers is indissoluble and not to be broken, since the lovers are ashamed to play the coward before their beloved, and the beloved before their lovers, and both stand firm in danger to protect each other."*
In the early decades of the fourth century BC, Sparta held sway over Greece. That changed in 371 when a Theban army routed the vaunted Spartan phalanx at the battle of Leuctra—the first time in their history that the Spartans had been bested in a toe-to-toe hoplite battle. The secret of the Thebans' success was their "secret weapon"—the Sacred Band, a strike force of 300 paired lovers. There followed from this game-changing battle a generation of Theban dominance, which ended only when Philip of Macedon destroyed the Sacred Band at the battle of Chaeronea in 338. Plutarch recounts that, "when, after the battle, Philip was surveying the dead, and stopped at the place where the three hundred were lying...he was amazed, and on learning that this was the band of lovers and beloved, burst into tears and said: 'Perish miserably they who think that these men did or suffered aught disgraceful.'"
What has all of this to do with the current debate over "Don't ask, don't tell"? Well, at the very least, it should do damage to the stereotype, still persistent in some quarters, of gays as effeminate and unmanly. Those guys were fighters.
* Quotations from Plutarch are from the 1917 Loeb Classical Library edition, which is in the public domain.
The Scourge Of Piracy, Then & Now
Their home is a long, sparsely settled coastline, a lawless economic backwater racked with poverty. Their men are born sailors. They turn to piracy, ranging farther and farther afield until their fast-moving fleets are able to strike at will hundreds of miles from home. They prey on international shipping, they take hostages and hold them for millions in ransom. Their leaders are rich, enjoying wealth and power beyond their dreams. Everyday they grow more brazen, more audacious. And no one seems to know how to combat them.
Are we speaking of the present day scourge of Somali piracy? Certainly. But we are equally describing the Cilician pirates who terrorized the Mediterranean world and defied mighty Rome in the first century BC. Sailing out from the rugged shores of Cilicia (south-eastern Turkey), these corsairs spread chaos as far as the Straits of Gibraltar, sinking merchant ships, slave-raiding along the coasts, holding whole towns for ransom. Everyday came some new outrage. Even Roman Italy wasn't safe from them: they sacked villas, they kidnapped noble ladies and even two high-ranking Roman magistrates as they traveled on the Appian Way. Their chieftains became fabulously rich. Plutarch describes their ships adorned with "golden stern flag-poles, purple-died awnings, and silver-plated oars."*
Rome, which had sadly neglected its navy since the end of the Punic Wars in the preceding century, was at their mercy. That is, until 67 BC when the Senate—reluctantly—voted Pompey the Great a mandate to defeat the pirates with a super-command of the entire Mediterranean shore from Spain to Asia Minor to a distance of fifty miles inland together with a fleet of 500 ships and a land force of 125,000 legionaries and auxiliaries.
Today, we tend to remember Pompey as a loser because he was no match for Julius Caesar in the Roman Civil War. But he was, in fact, an extraordinarily gifted commander. As historian Lionel Casson explains, Pompey divided his command into thirteen maritime districts, each with its own fleet and commander. "[E]ach fleet was to attack the pirate nests in its sector simultaneously while Pompey, at the head of a mobile force of sixty vessels, swept from Gibraltar eastward, driving all before him either into the jaws of the forces on the shores or into an ultimate cul-de-sac off Cilicia." In three months he had put the Cilician pirates permanently out of business.*
The scope and complexity of Pompey's "area command," his "combined joint task force," has quite a modern ring to it. Still more modern-seeming was his treatment of the captured pirates. In a brilliant stroke of what today would be called "winning hearts and minds," Pompey settled them in towns in the interior where they learned to follow a peaceful and productive way of life. As a result, the Mediterranean remained virtually free from piracy for the next three centuries.
How does this compare with current efforts against the pirates of Somalia? A U.N. resolution has mandated a Combined Task Force with ships contributed by some fourteen nations to patrol the seas off Somalia but its effectiveness, as we all know, has been minimal. To paraphrase Demosthenes, this force reacts to pirate attacks "the way a barbarian boxes." That is, responding clumsily to each blow. If piracy is to be suppressed, then clearly what is called for is a coordinated and sustained sea-air-land initiative combined with economic development in the coastal towns and villages of Somalia.
Pompey, where are you when we need you?
*Life of Pompey, ch. 24
*The Ancient Mariners, ch. 14
Nationalism And The Olympics, Then & Now
When Baron Pierre de Coubertin founded the modern Olympics in 1896 he intended to honor what he considered the ancient Greek ideals of amateurism and sport for sport's sake. But it didn't take this wicked old world long to start compromising both of these goals. Today, with every repetition of the Games, we beat our breasts and bemoan what the Olympics have become: an unseemly tallying up of medals in a kind of virtual war for national prestige. How we have fallen from the ideals of those noble Greeks—right? Wrong.
De Coubertin wrote: "The important thing is less to win than to take part." This, however, was not—repeat not—a Greek sentiment. The Greeks would have wholeheartedly endorsed the sentiments of "Bear" Bryant and Vince Lombardi on the subject of winning: it was everything. And not only for the individual athlete but very much for his city state as well.
The ancient Olympics began in 776 BC and almost the first thing we hear about them is that the neighboring city states of Elis and Pisa fought a bloody battle over possession of the venue—the sanctuary of Olympian Zeus in the western Peloponnese. Elis won, but its ownership of the Games, a growing source of prestige and profit, never went unchallenged for long. In renewed fighting in 470 BC Elis obliterated its rival Pisa. Again, in 364, the Eleans, battling a force of Arcadians, shed blood in the very sanctuary of Zeus, while outside the pentathlon was in progress. For a modern parallel to this shocking event, one can only think of the slaughter of Israeli athletes by Black September at Munich in 1972.
Perhaps Elis was a special case, but no Greek doubted that a victory in the various contests brought glory to the winner's city. In the victory odes of Pindar and other poets it is first and foremost the victor's city that is praised for having bred him. In a well-known passage in Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War, the rich and flamboyant Alcibiades, when accused of extravagance for entering seven teams in the chariot race at the Games of 416, pointed out that his winning of first, second and fourth places served to convince Athens' enemies that the city was "even greater than it really is because of the splendid show I made as its representative."
In the same way, the Tyrants of Syracuse, among the richest rulers in the Greek world, advertised their power at the Olympics throughout the fifth and fourth centuries. (The magnificent bronze sculpture, The Charioteer of Delphi, was a product of their PR campaign.) Retaliation came at the Games of 388 when the orator Lysias provoked a near riot by urging the crowd to tear down the Syracusans' luxurious pavilion in the Olympic village.
So much for nationalism, but surely the personal enrichment of star athletes is an innovation of our crass modern age? Wrong again. Of course, Greek athletes didn't sign promotional contracts for shoes—competitors didn't wear clothes, let alone shoes. But a Greek athlete stood to win a great deal more than a mere olive wreath. As early as circa 590 BC we find the Athenian lawgiver Solon offering a purse of 500 drachmas to every Athenian victor. Later it became the custom in Athens, and perhaps elsewhere, to reward victors with a lifetime of free dinners at the public expense. Other perks included front row seats at the theater. Plainly, in the eyes of Greek politicians, Olympic crowns were well worth the cost.
When we beat ourselves up over the influence of politics in the modern Games we do a disservice both to ourselves and to the ancient Greeks. The word "politics" comes, of course, from the Greek polis, city state, and it is no exaggeration to say that politics deeply imbued every aspect of Greek life. In spite of de Coubertin's lofty ideals, we only follow in their footsteps.
Book Reviews
In the Grip of the Minotaur
Farnham Bishop and Arthur Gilchrist Brodeur. Black Dog Books, $19.95, pb 194 pp. ISBN 978-1-928-61998-7
The story is set in the Bronze Age Mediterranean, where king Minos rules the sea with his fleet and terrorizes his enemies with the threat of feeding them to the Minotaur. Troy, ruled by the pusillanimous king Dardanus, is a tributary state on the edge of the Cretan empire. Into this world sails Ragnarr, prince of the Swedish Goths, on a trading mission to Troy. Ragnarr is big, blond, handsome, chivalrous, and fearless in battle -- a precursor to Conan the Barbarian with a dash of Sir Galahad. As the story progresses, he is loved by two beautiful princesses - the winsome Ilia of Troy and the proud, headstrong Ariadne of Knossos. Entanglements ensue, with Ragnarr always struggling to do the right thing by both ladies. The story culminates with the Goths burning, Knossos to the ground (while being careful not to "dishonor" the women).
The book is a charming antique. Written by two young Americans who were Harvard roommates, and first serialized in 1916 in the pulp magazine Adventure, it belongs to the same era of perfervid prose as the Mars books of Edgar Rice Burroughs and the African adventures of H. Rider Haggard. A quote will give the flavor (Valgerd, Ragnarr's second in command, speaks): "I will endure it no more!" He cried fiercely. "For two days our lord has not been with us, and here we bide shut in like salmon in a weir, not knowing what they do to him. Mayhap these dogs have slain him and even now shout in triumph over his corpse! Force the door! Snatch up whatso ye find! We will avenge our master or die, taking some of these devils with us!"
They don't write them like that anymore. I smiled all the way through.
[Reproduced with permission from The Historical Novels Review]
Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition
Daniel Okrent, Scribner, 2010, $30 (Can, $34.99), hb, 468 pp, 978-0-7432-7702-0
When Wayne B. Wheeler died in 1927, an obituary in the Washington Post stated, "No other private citizen of the United States has left such an impress upon national history." Wayne who? Well, Mr. Willard was for a decade the chief lobbyist for the Anti-Saloon League and, indeed, politicians quaked whenever this small, unprepossessing man entered the room.
But Wheeler is not the only prohibition-era titan to have utterly vanished from our national memory. There was Frances Willard, "immortal founder" of the Women's Christian Temperance Union; there was Mabel Willebrandt, Assistant Attorney General for Prohibition Enforcement, whom Daniel Okrent in this fascinating new history calls "without question the most powerful woman in the nation." And there was Izzy Einstein, star prohibition agent who made over four thousand bootlegger arrests. (Eliot Ness of Untouchables fame was a pipsqueak.)
Okrent, in lively ironic prose, presents a detailed analysis of the interplay of class, ethnicity, and religion that made, and then unmade, the eighteenth amendment to Constitution. The reader will learn why German brewers and Jewish distillers failed to unite against the forces of temperance. And why prohibition was supported simultaneously by northern progressives and the Ku Klux Klan. The book is filled with jaw-dropping facts. How, for example, the loophole which allowed for the production and sale of sacramental wine to Catholic bishops and Jewish rabbis was turned into a gigantic swindle. And one could go on and on. For anyone with an interest in American history Last Call is a must read.
[Reproduced with permission from The Historical Novels Review]
Daughters of Gaia: Women in the Ancient Mediterranean World
Bella Vivante, University of Oklahoma Press, 2008, $19.95, papberback, 232 pp, ISBN 978-0-806-13992-0
The study of women in antiquity has already seen a great deal of important scholarship. In this book, the author undertakes a sweeping synthesis in a very small compass. She examines women's lives in ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, Greece, and Rome in a time span ranging from the Neolithic to the fifth century AD. The book is organized by topic: goddesses, women's religious rituals, daily life, health and medicine, the economic bases of women's lives, women rulers, women warriors, women philosophers, and women poets. The book's central theme is to 'accentuate the features that empowered women'. The treatment is necessarily compressed and a feeling of breathless hurry is unavoidable. Still Vivante manages to convey a great deal of information with clarity.
For this reader, the most interesting chapter is Health and Medicine. Here Vivante draws heavily on the fascinating "Gynecology" of Soranus of Ephesus (who objected to the prevailing theory that the womb wanders like a restless animal). Also enlightening is her discussion of woman philosophers ranging from Pythagoras' wife to the 'pagan martyr' Hypatia, an Alexandrian mathematician who was lynched by a Christian mob. For those wishing to go deeper into the subject, there is a useful bibliography.
[Reproduced with permission from The Historical Novels Review]
Eye of the Red Tsar
Sam Eastland, Bantam Books, 2010, $25 hardback, $15 paperback, 288 pp, ISBN 978-0-553-80781-3
This debut novel of intrigue centers on the execution of Tsar Nicholas and his family by the Bolsheviks in 1918. The hero is Pekkala, a stoical Finn with unbending principles and a photographic memory, who, prior to the revolution, is chosen by the tsar to be his chief counter-terrorist agent under the sobriquet "The Emerald Eye." The story unfolds in two parallel narratives. One is a series of flashbacks recounting Pekkala's rise and fall (after the revolution the Soviets send him to a Siberian labor camp where he is tortured by a young Commissar Stalin). The second narrative finds him released from the camp and enlisted by the Soviet secret police to help them discover what really happened to the Romanovs and their fabled treasure. Unfortunately, the novel's solution requires some major rewrites of history. The author's version of the execution diverges widely from all the known evidence; "historical" characters are freely invented while real figures such as Yakov Yurovsky, who commanded the firing squad, or Pavel Medvedev, who later wrote an account of his participation, are never mentioned. If read uncritically, the novel is passable and Pekkala holds promise as an interesting character in subsequent installments, but factual errors and improbabilities were too much for this reviewer's taste.
[Reproduced with permission from The Historical Novels Review]
Homer & Langley
E. L. Doctorow, Random House, 2009, USA $26.00, Canada $32.00, hardback, 208 pp, ISBN 978-1-4000-6494-6
For a review suited to this journal, it is well to begin by pointing out that the novel is not, and does not claim to be, an entirely factual biography of the Collyer brothers, who lived out their lives in a dark and decaying New York mansion surrounded by 130 tons of junk and old newspapers. (Interested readers may consult Wikipedia and other Google citations for the authentic background. For instance, the brothers, in fact, died in 1947 although Doctorow has them living on into the 1970s.)
But departures from fact should deter no one from relishing this fascinating meditation on the human condition. The story is narrated by Homer, the blind brother—appropriately a blind singer of tales, although his canvas is not epic but miniature. Through his words, we see the two young men, popular and sociable in the beginning, gradually retreat into eccentricity, reclusiveness, misanthropy, turning their parents' luxurious home into a rat's nest, a lonely fortress, and ultimately into a tomb.
Homer and Langley have been diagnosed posthumously as victims of obsessive-compulsive disorder, but Doctorow invests their condition with the trappings of a cockeyed philosophy. Thus, Langley collects newspapers by the ton in an effort to reduce all the world's news items to their Platonic forms, which he will publish in a universal newspaper valid for all time. And Homer's narrative voice, ever tolerant, sensitive, and affectionate, works a kind of magic on this craziness, drawing us into their solipsistic world until the abnormal begins to seem eerily normal.
Unlike the author's Ragtime or The March, this small book tells a very small story, but one that is wonderfully imagined, deeply felt, and wise.
[Reproduced with permission from The Historical Novels Review]
Roman Diary
Richard Platt and David Parkins, Candlewick, 2009, $18.99 US, $21.00 Canada, hardback, 64 pp, ISBN 9780763634803
The subtitle of this illustrated children's book is 'The Journal of Iliona of Mytilini, Who Was Captured and Sold as a Slave in Rome, AD 107." The intended audience is pre-teen and, considering that, the book is rather daring. Roman slavery was not pretty—in fact, Roman society was not pretty—but the author resists the temptation to entirely gloss over the unpleasant bits. Iliona , a Greek girl of about twelve, and her little brother Apollo are purchased by a Roman senator and separated, Apollo being sent to the country villa to perform grueling farm labor, while Iliona is kept as a girl-of-all-work in the family's townhouse.
Over the next months she experiences Rome's delights (the baths, a splendid triumphal procession) and its depravities. Taken to the arena, she is swept up by the excitement of gladiatorial combat, "but when the show ended, I felt ashamed." Taken to see a pantomime (a kind of Roman burlesque), "When some of the women in the cast took off their clothes, I covered my eyes." At home she is, momentarily, a victim of sexual abuse. The eldest son, a rough soldier, pinches her bottom and, when she protests, warns her, "...you are just a slave girl and I can do whatever I like." Strong stuff for a kid's book. Eventually, due to her pluck and good heart, Iliona wins freedom for herself and her brother—although 'freedom' in a Roman context means that they are still bound by duty to their former owner.
Young readers will learn a great deal about Roman daily life both from the text and from Parkins's superb illustrations. An appendix offers additional information on the Roman army, technology, religion, and other matters.
[Reproduced with permission from The Historical Novels Review]
The Cosgrove Report: Being the Private Inquiry of a Pinkerton Detective into the Death of President Lincoln
G. J. A. O'Toole, Grove Press, 2009, $14.95, paperback, 464 pp, ISBN 9780802144072
Originally published in 1979 and now reissued to coincide with the Lincoln bicentennial, the novel purports to be a manuscript written by one Nicholas Cosgrove, Pinkerton agent. In 1868, Cosgrove is assigned to determine whether John Wilkes Booth escaped from the burning farmhouse in Maryland and still lives. His report, having lain concealed for a century, now falls into the hands of private detective Michael Croft, whose job is to verify and annotate it.
Writing in a grandiloquent High Victorian style, Cosgrove tells a tale of switched identities, doctored documents, and bitter feuding within the White House as he pursues the elusive Booth. Historical characters, such as President Andrew Johnson, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, Alan Pinkerton, and many others make their appearance to either aid or thwart Cosgrove in his mission. And Cosgrove himself is an ambiguous figure with seemingly no family, friends, or worldly attachments. It all ends with a duel and a fatal balloon chase—or does it? One final plot twist turns the whole tale on its head. 'Croft's' annotations, like the footnotes in George MacDonald Fraser's Flashman novels, are, in this reviewer's opinion, the best part of the book. With impressive scholarship and sharp wit, O'Toole lays bare for the non-specialist the real and persistent mysteries that still surround the trial of the Lincoln assassins. Altogether, highly entertaining and highly informative.
[Reproduced with permission from The Historical Novels Review]
Wobble to Death
Peter Lovesey, Soho, 2008, $14.00, paperback, 234 pp, ISBN 9781569475232
It is a cold November morning in 1879 and a dozen 'pedestrians' in silk drawers and white tights gather at the Agricultural Hall in Islington, a structure so vast that it contains its own fog. The occasion is a 'wobble'—a grueling six-day marathon race. This is the setting of Peter Lovesey's first Victorian mystery, now reissued.
The competitors are rough working-class types except for Captain Chadwick, ex Guards officer and the favorite to win, and Mostyn-Smith, a puny self-styled doctor who arrives for the contest with a trunk full of mysterious potions. The race is only in its second day when Captain Chadwick's strongest competitor, Charles Darrell, dies of strychnine poisoning. Enter Detective Sergeant Cribb and his partner, the stolid Constable Thackeray. As Cribb sifts the evidence, the footsore contestants, fewer each day, slog on toward the finish line.
Lovesey, an expert in Victorian sports arcana, guides the plot with a deft touch and plenty of period atmosphere. Readers who have not yet made his acquaintance will find him a delightful companion.
[Reproduced with permission from The Historical Novels Review]
The Detective Wore Silk Drawers
Peter Lovesey, Soho, 2008, $14.00, paperback, 218 pp, ISBN 9781569475249
The second of Peter Lovesey's Victorian mysteries (now reissued) plunges Sergeant Cribb and Constable Thackery into the underworld of bare-knuckled pugilism. In 1880, fighting with "the raw 'uns" has been outlawed in England for a decade, yet matches in out-of-the-way locales still draw huge crowds. When the headless body of a man with scarred knuckles washes up on the Thames Embankment, Cribb recruits a young policeman, Henry Jago, to pose as one of these midnight pugilists. But young Henry, good-looking, fit, earnest and callow, is no match for the seductive, sadistic Mrs. Vibart, who manages a stable of brutal fighters on her estate. And when Mrs. V. is herself found brutally murdered in her bed, the evidence points to, of all people, Henry. Will Sergeant Cribb crack the case—and hopefully before the unfortunate Henry is beaten senseless in the ring? Read on.
Like all the Sergeant Cribb mysteries, this one is deftly plotted, lightly ironic, and full of the color of Victorian sport.
[Reproduced with permission from The Historical Novels Review]
The Private Papers of Eastern Jewel
Maureen Lindley, Bloomsbury, 2008, $14.00 US, $17.50 Canada, paperback, 288 pp, ISBN 9781596917033
In 1914, at the age of eight years, I was caught spying on my father Prince Su as he made love to a fourteen-year-old girl." This is the opening sentence of a remarkable novel: the fictionalized account of a real life Chinese princess who became a Japanese spy in the 1930s and 40s and finally died by the executioner's sword in a Chinese prison camp.
Banished to Japan for her childish indiscretion, she finds herself trapped in the loveless household of Baron Kawashima, a powerful and ruthless man who rapes her repeatedly. Her response to this is not the expected one. She enjoys the rough sex and, far from seeing herself as a victim, she learns to use her beauty as a weapon. Throughout her life, sex will be a tool of her trade as well as an anodyne for the depressions and nightmares that haunt her. She also develops an early taste for opium, alcohol, and male dress—not wanting to be a man but to enjoy a man's freedom and power. The ruling passion of her life, however, is Japan. She admires Japanese strength while she despises Chinese weakness. And her youthful predilection for spying will now be employed in Japan's interest. The requirements of her masters will send her to Mongolia, Manchuria, Shanghai, and Peking—always living the high life and leaving behind a string of lovers. But her own heart is broken too, and her depressions become deeper. Her motto had always been: "We are all animals and to survive well should be each individual's aim." But when Japan is defeated and her own life is in ruins, one supremely selfless act redeems her.
It is Eastern Jewel's self-knowledge and complete honesty that rescue her story from sordid tragedy. Lindley's writing is subtle and sensitive and every page shines a light into some dark corner of human nature.
[Reproduced with permission from The Historical Novels Review]
The Time Traveler's Guide to Medieval England
Ian Mortimer, Simon & Schuster, 2008, $26, hardback, 342 pp, ISBN 978-1-4391-1289-2
If I were going to write a novel set in Medieval England this book would be my bible. Mortimer packs an amazing amount of information into 340 pages (enhanced by sixteen full color plates). While he covers all the areas we expect in a "daily life" book, he goes well beyond them. He lays bare the social structure (far more complex than the idealized Three Estates), demographics (the median age was only twenty-one), mentalities—such things as sense of humor, attitudes towards women, violence, and credulity. The author's tone throughout is genial: he addresses the reader—the putative time-traveler—as "you" ("You would be crazy to engage a fourteenth century man in combat and have a chance of surviving. Most of them are much stronger than you."). Mortimer's focus is on the fourteenth century and, although this is the century that Barbara Tuchman in A Distant Mirror called "calamitous," the picture that he paints is not absolutely bleak. These were men and women who, even in the face of plague, famine, and peasant revolt, could still sing and dance and compose some of the finest poetry in our language. In fact, much of what we know about the age comes from Chaucer. And anyone who is planning to read or re-read the Canterbury Tales could find no better companion than this wonderful book.
[Reproduced with permission from The Historical Novels Review]
Pariah
Dave Zeltserman, Serpent's Tail, 2009, 256 pages, Paperback original, $14.95. ISBN 978-1-84668-643-6
There are novels that invite us to inhabit the mind of an amoral sociopath. (The Ripley stories of Patricia Highsmith are an excellent example.) Pariah, Dave Zeltzerman's latest crime novel, asks us to make ourselves at home inside the skin of one Kyle Nevin. Not everyone will feel comfortable there. Kyle is an Irish-American gangster from Boston's 'Southie.' His CV includes bank robbery, vicious beatings, prodigious drinking, a vocabulary limited to four-letter words, and the torture and murder of children—for none of which he feels a shred of guilt. The story is told through his first-person point of view.
We meet Kyle as he returns to Boston after an eight-year prison stretch for bank robbery and we learn that he was set up for the fall by Red Mahoney, the erstwhile leader of the gang in which Kyle was an enforcer. Red, it turns out, had betrayed his own men to the FBI in return for favors and is now hiding out somewhere in Europe. Kyle has sworn to track the 'rat-bastard' down and kill him. The plot is, of course, reminiscent of the career of Whitey Bulger, chief of Boston's notorious Winter Hill Gang. Kyle Nevin, himself, bears a passing resemblance to Bulger hit man, Kevin Weeks.
Kyle easily slips back into his old life—drinking vast quantities of Guinness and Bushmills at his local bar, where he is idolized; shacking up with a slumming nymphomaniac named Nola; and beating people to a pulp for the occasional snide remark. But Kyle needs money to track down Mahoney and so concocts a plan to kidnap the young son of a well-to-do suburban family. To help him he has to enlist his younger brother, Danny, a former thug who is now going straight and liking it. Kyle succeeds in winning Danny reluctantly back into 'the game.' But the kidnapping goes horribly wrong and it is Danny who suffers the consequences.
At this point the plot takes an unexpected turn. Kyle, having beaten the kidnapping rap, is invited by a New York publisher to write a novel, using a character similar to himself, as if he had done the crime. (Are we meant to think of O. J. Simpson's short-lived If I Did It?) The rest of the story follows this thread, indulging along the way in every writer's fantasy of being a best-selling novelist with a million-dollar publicity campaign and a spot on Oprah. But, alas, Kyle just can't catch a break and the conclusion is, not surprisingly, a blood-soaked catastrophe.
Zeltserman's style is unadorned but effective. However, whether or not one wants to spend a couple of days inside his hero's head, each reader must decide for himself.
[Reproduced with permission from ForeWord Magazine]
The Last Crusaders: The Hundred Year Battle for the Center of the World
Barnaby Rogerson, Overlook Press, Hardcover $35 (Canada $43.50). 512 pp, ISBN 978-1-59029-286-9
The world of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was shaped by two powerful forces: religion and gunpowder—a devastating combination. In The Last Crusaders Barnaby Rogerson paints a vivid canvas, sweeping in scope and full of memorable detail, of the hundred and fifty year struggle between the Hapsburg and Ottoman Empires for control of the Mediterranean.
The period from 1450 to 1590 changed the face of world history. It saw the creation of the first great nation states—Spain, Portugal, Austria, Turkey, and the countries of North Africa. The boundaries drawn then remain the national, cultural, linguistic and religious boundaries today. The author's purpose is to explain the "last great tectonic shift" in the balance of power in the Old World. "We should all hear these stories at least once," he writes, "if we are to have any understanding of our modern age."
Readers will indeed be struck by the similarities to our own day. Like the atom bombing of Hiroshima, the destruction of Constantinople by Turkish artillery in 1453 sent a shock wave around the world (the Turks' biggest gun could throw a 1200 lb. granite ball over a mile) and launched a ruinously expensive arms race. Cannons were the ICBMs of their day and there ensued a race among the great nations to forge as many as they could. Skilled weapons makers (many of them Jews expelled from Spain in 1492) were in high demand and often willing to work for the highest bidder. And, like uranium today, sources of saltpeter, an ingredient of gunpowder, were bitterly fought over. Terror, too, became a legitimate weapon of war. No captive city escaped savage pillaging and rape. Both sides routinely practiced impaling, dismemberment, flaying alive, enslavement or forced conversion of whole populations.
Against this background, we meet the great figures of the age: the intellectual Prince Henry the Navigator, the cunning and ruthless Ferdinand of Spain, the chivalrous Charles V, and the legendary sultans, Mehmet the Conqueror and Suleyman the Magnificent. But the minor actors are equally compelling—secret agents, pirate captains, and turncoats and traitors of every stripe. In colorful vignettes, we rub shoulders with Turkish Janissaries, Genoese mercenaries, Portuguese explorers, Moroccan corsairs, and galley slaves of every nation. The author is especially good at narrating in gripping, and often grisly, detail the great sieges and battles that punctuated this struggle.
The book is furnished with excellent maps, a useful chronological chart, numerous illustrations, and a very full bibliography. The writing is engaging and vivid, never pedantic. Any history buff will find this book a pleasure.
[Reproduced with permission from ForeWord Magazine]
