Hitler's Pope

by John Cornwell

Alright, I just finished this one last weekend.

First, the title is inflammatory, which bother's me. It's a common publisher's trick: Put "Hitler" or "Shakespeare" in your book's title and it will sell more. The actual text of this book is much fairer to the character of Pius XII than this title implies.

Anyway, Pius XII became Pope in 1939 and therefore bears the brunt of historical scrutiny in regards to what the Vatican did and did not do during the Holocaust. The author of this book points out the dishonest back-and-forth that has gone on between this Pope's supporters and detractors, with most texts being extremist reactions to the other side, making them either unfairly judgmental or blindly supportive.

Because Cornwell purports to offer a more balanced assessment of Pius XII, the title seems dishonest. But enough about that.

In the end Cornwell does indeed come down on the side of condemning Pius XII and calls him "Hitler's Pope" not because he was Hitler's pawn per se, but because his attitudes, personality, priorities and circumstances made him an inadvertent enabler of Hitler's rise to power. In other words, there couldn't have been a Pope more suited to Hitler's agenda.

These are, of course, controversial things to say. Bear in mind that I am not saying them, just reporting on a book that I read.

I am inclined to take Cornwell's position, however, but not because this book says things that I want to believe. I am not Catholic, but I am also not some anti-religious cynic who latches on to every bit of slander thrown towards the Vatican. I am inclined to believe Cornwell because he has written a fine piece of academic history: rigorously researched, well-organized, includes many interpretations of events, admits faulty knowledge, and supports arguments by finding suitable examples and counter-examples. I believe what this book says because it is very convincing, and not emotionally tainted.

This does mean the book is a bit dry. I can stomach dry history. Maybe you can't. I found it fascinating at first because I was learning so much about Vatican politics and history, subjects I knew basically nothing about before now. This is one of those books that reminds me that history is so much more intricate and intersting and nuanced than your war-obsessed high school teachers ever let you realize.

Anyway, Cornwell takes a different approach to the Pius XII controversies in that he writes a biography of the man, not so much a chronicle of the events. This is a useful approach because Eugenio Pacelli, the man who would become Pius XII, was an influential Vatican politician well before he ever became Pope and his influence on Church history - and the Vatican's relationship with Germany - began decades before World War II.

There is a lot of content covered in here, and even summarizing it would exceed the scope of this blog post. I feel the most important points to stress are that Pacelli is painted as a driving force in the Vatican's push for autocracy and heirarchy. This coupled with a legitmate fear of violent, atheistic communism caused him to make the same mistake nearly every world leader made during that era: They assumed Facism was the lesser of two evils when compared to Communism.

After that, Pacelli's silence during the holocaust is a many-layered thing. First there was the reality that the Vatican, being surrounded by Facist Italy, simply did not have the diplomatic freedom to speak its mind without fear of reprisal. The Pope certainly had no military solution against Mussolini or Hitler if they ever decided he was causing too much trouble by weilding his moral authority, and this is fair enough.

Second, however, is evidence of mild anti-semitism in Pacelli, distorted as it was by the mistaken belief that a Jewish conspiracy lie behind international Communism. The argument that Pacelli kept quiet against the Facists for the sake of peace falls apart when compared with his vocal stance against oppressive Communist regimes after WWII. In the years after the Holocaust, Pius XII demonstrated the Catholic Church's historic ability to resist inhumane oppression on a global scale, so why not the Nazis? (Bear in mind I am oversimplifying matters in ways the Cornwell does not).

Anyway, if you like your history dry and well-researched, and want a definitive volume on this subject, I highly recommend this book.

I'm a Stranger Here Myself

by Bill Bryson

Meh. It is rare that I bother to start, much less finish, a book I don't end up liking, but lo! it happened here. To compare this offering to yesterday's author, Bill Bryson loses the Battle-of-the-Baby-Boomers-Who-Complain-About-Society, (Which is a very serious competition I just invented).

I don't want to sound too hard on Bryson, really, because I can't read this book and tell you that he isn't a good writer - he is. I can't tell you that he isn't funny either because I certainly got worked up to a proper LOL from time to time while slogging through this. This is the only book of his I've read, so if a fan of his were to assure me that any of his others was much better, I would be willing to give them the benefit of the doubt. And certainly Mr. Bryson comes off as charming. I'm sure I'd absolutely love to have a barbecue with him sometime. It'd be a blast.

But this book still sucks. Allow me to explain.

I picked it up because the premise sounded great: A man grows up in America, spends twenty adult years in Britain, then moves back to America and chronicles the culture shock. By all accounts this book should, at worst, make for good fluff. But too much is going against this thing.

First, unbeknownst to me when I started reading, this is a collection of newspaper columns. Y'know, newspapers? Those hoary old ink-and-paper jobs? No matter how smart Bryson is, you can't change the fact that newspaper columns, especially newspaper humor columns, are basically watered down pap designed to incubate people who still haven't discovered the Internet.

To compare him with another popular humor columnist, Dave Barry, I will say that he is less formulaic, though still prone to the overuse-of-hyperbole-for-comic-effect, and much more thoughtful. But that only goes so far.

The real problem is that these columns were written in the nineties. This is a bigger deal than you think it is. If you're a Baby Boomer in the nineties and not an unashamed technophile like my father was, chances are you're going to write a bunch of columns that smugly dismiss new technologies. Baby Boomers in the nineties talked about computers like they were pogs, and waited impatiently for them to go out of style.

What this means is this book will subject you to such dead horse jokes as "Computers are supposed to save us time, but I can't get the printer to work." "Cell phones make me uncomfortable." and the immortal "VCRs are hard to program." Hur hur hur.

What I'm getting at is this book is only ten years old and it has already fallen down the abyss of antiquity. One's inability to program a VCR has already achieved old-timey camp status, a joke meant to place us squarely in 1991.

Much of this book has no cultural currency anymore, even to people the author's own age. The Baby Boomers aren't complaining anymore. They all have Netflix and Blu-ray and small business websites. Bill Bryson himself is, right now, deftly programming his TiVo while uploading twitter feeds to his Facebook profile from his Blackberry cell phone, (It might be something like "Bill Bryson isn't going to miss an episode of House this season!") In 2009, Bill Bryson is awesome. In 1999, he's an idiot.

A Year at the Movies

by Kevin Murphy

Here's the premise: the author vows to see a movie in a theater every day for an entire year, (The year in question, as it happens, is 2001). To ensure that an interesting book falls out of this idea, Kevin Murphy, (Yes, that's Kevin Murphy), travels the world while he's doing this and many shenanigans ensue.

I picked this book up thinking it would make for some light entertainment. I suppose it is that, but it's also quite a bit more. I was very pleasantly surprised at the intelligence and wisdom on display here. It also makes for some good travel writing, if you're into that sort of thing.

The format is 52 chapters, one for each week of the year. Each week has some sort of theme, so when he's not traveling far away he's ruminating on something ridiculous or interesting, like the multiplex phenomenon, or holiday films, or kung-fu film clubs or whatever.

Regardless of where he is or what he is doing or what he is watching, he spends the bulk of his time critiquing the theater-going experience itself, not so much the films he watches. If you're picking this book up as a Mystery Science Theater fan hoping to read what good ol' Kevin Murphy has to say about a bunch of crappy Hollywood films then you'll be sorely disappointed. He does have a few choice words to say about the likes of Jurassic Park 3 and Dude, Where's My Car? but that's not really what this book is about. What you get if you read this is something much richer. (Besides, there are only so many ways you can creatively label something as crap before you sound repetitive).

To pique your interest, a partial list of the countries and events Murphy attends includes:

Australia - for the world's smallest movie theater.
Quebec - for a theater made entirely out of ice.
Sundance Film Festival - for a diatribe against Hollywood jerks.
France - for the Cannes film festival.
England - for a Sound of Music sing-a-long in London!
Finland - for the "Festival of the Midnight Sun" - an event staged in northern Finland during summer, where the sun never sets and the audience never sleeps.
Italy - just because.
A tiny Pacific island - which is where he is during the September 11 attacks.

What makes this book so good is how Kevin Murphy's personality comes through. He's a very mature and wise person, with a broad palette and great skill at expressing his thoughts and feelings. He's opinionated without being preachy or imbalanced. He's also good at writing setting. I don't count myself a travel fan, but he certainly makes me want to visit all the places he did.

Also, I like that Murphy is a man brave enough to criticize mainstream films for being misogynist. And actual use the word "misogynist." It make me, the feminist male, feel like less of a freak.

I think all this book was intended to be was a simple little trinket to be sold to MST3K fans, but that process was subverted by the fact that Kevin Murphy is actually a good writer and thinker.

Like any good book, there are many parts that have stayed with me after it has finished. (Let me step down for a moment - I don't want to oversell this thing. This book is not a paragon of literature. It is good, however). In fact the most memorable content can have nothing to do with movies at all.

For me I'm struck most by an account of his trip to Finland where he encountered the "real" Santa Claus - that is, the one from Scandinavian folklore. By this I mean he encountered a talkative naked man in the frozen woods wearing antlers. Awesome.

Murphy was also after my own heart when he complained of the egregious misuse of the word "ultimate" in modern marketing. I will now fairly use a quote from the book:

Here's one such menu's description, exactly as printed, of the ultimate nachos:

Tortilla chips toped with your choice of beef, chicken or plain, covered with Monterey jack cheese, lettuce, tomato's, onions, black olives with Jalepenos and salsa on the side.

Ultimate nachos tend to appear everywhere, and once again I'm reminded that nobody knows what the word "ultimate" means, or it wouldn't be on a menu. "Ultimate," even broadly defined, means last, final, altogether remote in the universe. That's not how I like to think of my nachos. I don't want to look at that massive platter of corn chips, "toped" as they are with beef, chicken, or plain, thinking they may be my last nachos. ... I don't want any food I put in my own personal mouth to be described by any restaurateur as the last of that particular dish I'll ever eat.

The above is also a good preview of Murphy's humor at its most sarcastic. He succeeds at other modes of humor and other emotions as well, just so you know.

Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea

by Charles Seife

It's history! And science! It's the story of the number zero! Did you know that the number zero wasn't always around? That's why the Gregorian Calendar is so bad! For that matter, did you notice that you never had to use it in Geometry class? Neither did the Egyptians nor the Greeks, because plots of land are never nothing! And did you know that Greek cults would kill you for discussing irrational numbers in public? Or that Arabic numerals are actually Hindi? Or that the Babylonians had a sexagesimal number system? (That means base-60!) If you're not bored yet, maybe this book is for you.

I found everything about the history of zero fascinating up to the invention of Calculus, but then this book got a little tedious. Once zero had shouldered its way into the dominant paradigm, all the conflict and sexiness was gone. Seife did not need to spend some 60 pages talking about blackholes and string theory and the big bang and how zero is integral to all these ideas. There are better books on holes and strings and bangs to be read, if you ask me. However, Appendix E: Make Your Own Wormhole Time Machine is pure gold, the kind of stuff your light-hearted high school science teacher dreams of.

There is a lot of good stuff in here about how math and science can influence culture and vice versa, and it makes for a good story. In many ways the history of zero is the history of math, and glimpsing the zero-less world does make you realize how much we really take for granted. Math used to be so clunky! (Case in point: Roman numerals).

I want to summarize the book, but doing so would probably qualify as the geekiest plot spoiler ever. I'll leave it to you to discover yourself.

My biggest criticism of this book would be its occasional sensationalism. Seife makes broad cultural claims sometimes to dramatize the idea that zero stood in stark opposition to dominant social institutions. Some of this conflict rings true enough, and indeed the Aristotilean paradigm did hold back the acceptance of zero, but Seife very often paints the picture that Kings and Churches were shaking their fists directly at the concept of zero, when the reality was probably different.

The void and the infinite were certainly controversial subjects for a time, theologically and philosophically speaking, and the introduction of Algebra, (and therefore, the number zero), to Western Civilization had a huge cultural impact, but Seife manufactures his own conflict by pretending that the two things are one and the same. He leans too heavily on the relationship between zero the number and the philosophical idea of nothingness and often implies that one was the harbinger of the other.

It makes for a more entertaining read I suppose, which is important when trying to make your dorky math book more accessible to the public, but this discerning reader sniffs the taint of a lie.

Left Hand of Darkness

by Ursula K. LeGuin

I only just read this book recently, after years of wanting to. I had no doubt that it would be good, but I also feared it would be preachy. It has notoriety as a "gender-bender" and the people who recommend this book can seem very attached to that notion. One typically has to be in the mood for such things.

What I forgot to take into account was that LeGuin is an excellent writer. I don't know why I keep forgetting. I don't read her often enough. Each time I do I go through the same shock, like I have stumbled upon this great unknown talent. Her prose is so good it makes me want to stop reading and go write something of my own in challenge.

Maybe this book was preachy back in 1969 when "grudging tolerance of homosexuality" was an edgy enough idea, let alone something crazy like "an entire planet of genderless hermaphrodites." Forty years later we, (thankfully), live in a more libertine society where vampiric romance is not only acceptable for kids, it merits bank-busting mainstream acceptance and success. Nowadays LeGuin's ideas can seem sort of par for the course, especially in the arena of speculative fiction.

To use workshop parlance, The Left Hand of Darkness is neither a mileu story nor an idea story, and thank goodness for that. If it were it might not have endured the way it has, perhaps instead finding itself banished to the reading lists of Women's Studies courses alongside the likes of Charlotte Perkis Gilman's Herland - remembered for being feminist, but not for being particularly good.

As is the charge of any speculative fiction author, LeGuin puts a lot of effort into fleshing out her world, (a planet named Gethen in this case), using the idea of a genderless society not as a plot device, but as color. Equally important to the Gethenian cultures, (that's plural), is the fact that the planet is amidst an ice age, and LeGuin explores how harsh climate on a global scale might influence society just as much as she examines the gender issue. Factor in religion and government and architecture and how they all affect social mores, and Gethen really comes to life.

Additionally, LeGuin may explore the idea of genderless society, but she does not make it seem especially Utopian. Gethen is a far cry from perfect, from its two-faced propaganda machines to its debilitating government bureaucracies to its Soviet-style gulags. Even at the social level there still exists sexual prejudice - Gethenians who, by genetics or by choice, become permanently one sex or the other are labeled as perversions and, while not completely ostracized, are subject to the same fringe treatment homosexuals, transgenders, androgynes and the like are on our heteronormative planet Earth.

The plot is at turns political suspense and survival adventure. The early parts of the book are more plot oriented and world-building, but by the end we are left to focus more on the relationship between outsider protagonist Genly Ai, (gendered male), and Estraven, a Gethenian politician-turned-outcast. Here is where gender issues touch the plot most directly, as Genly is made to examine his feelings for Estraven as both a friend, romantic partner, and most importantly, the idea that maybe those two options are a little limiting - that there can be love without the qualifier of romance.

LeGuin herself has lamented that she did not explore feminine behavior more in this novel and that is not an entirely unwarranted concern. I say nothing's perfect, this book is still excellent, get over it. I also say that the female gender is more constructed than the male, and many feminists might agree with me. I think there is much less missing from Gethenian behavior than LeGuin might fear.

How I Purchase and Review Books

I have a reserve of books that I intend to read left over from my days working in a used book store. Used book stores, ultimately, are the primary source of my books. I read both fiction and non-fiction. My criteria for purchasing a book is that it looks interesting to me. What you are left with is eclecticism.

Sort of.

My non-fiction tastes have narrowed to history first and science second. I'm not just reading "Rise and Fall of the Third Reich" over and over again, however. Sure, war can be interesting, but there is much more to human civilization than its occasional fits of self-destruction. I try to keep things a bit more broad. In general I'm guided by a desire to know more about the things I don't know anything about.

My fiction tastes generally see me reading science fiction and fantasy. If you are unwilling to accept these as literature, than you and my blog are probably not going to get along. Not to say that some of the books I read aren't fluff, (this goes for non-fiction as well). God forbid I ever enjoy myself.

I move from book to book guided simply by what I feel like picking up next. Often this is influenced by some little idea the previous book got in my head. In fact this thread of thought might yet make for an interesting post some day.

The early days of this blog will give off the impression that I am a reading machine. I am not. I simply have a backlog of books to review. Given my goal of making this place an "archive" I can't imagine a problem.