Grand unified books thread

[Sheilbh]

Extraordinary piece by Adam Tooze on Vasily Grossman who I've meant to read but not got round to. Strong impetus to go for it now:
https://adamtooze.substack.com/p/chartbook-21

[Gups]

Life and Fate is amazing. Very long but very readable. I must get round to Stalingrad soon.

[Malthus]

I loved Life and Fate!

Made into a pretty watchable mini series, as well.

[grumbler]

I loved Life and Fate!

Made into a pretty watchable mini series, as well.

Life and Fate implies Death is Freedom.  That was such a powerful book.

[Sheilbh]

That's something Tooze sort of touches on directly:

But, if the beleaguered fortress of House 6/1 becomes a place of free debate, and critical reflection about Stalinism, about collectivization and the terror, the condition of that freedom is precisely that the garrison know full well that there is virtually no chance of their surviving. Given this fact, the law has lost its grip.

With this grim logic in mind, we realize the significance of Grossman's title. If "life and fate" share the same path, so too, do "death and freedom".

One can agree with Jameson that the affirmative politics of Life and Fate is not liberalism or individualism so much as a kind of anarchism. But this is not a naive individualism. Grossman's insistence on the freedom impulse is always cross cut with an awareness of the power of the Soviet state and its historical project.

What the books unsparingly lay out is the working out of a brutal dialectic. The war could only be fought through freedom, through the willingness of millions of ordinary men and women to abandon life. Ordinary heroism drove the Red Army, as it drove the Wehrmacht. Power needs agency. What sustains an army's offensive is death-defying attack after attack. It was strong point after strong point resisting beyond the point of reason that held the line. At its limit this action defies all authority. What threat after all, can be made against someone already fated to die. The war was thus a gigantic assertion of freedom. That freedom could be expressed everywhere. Even in a camp. In the last steps towards the gas chamber. In the decision to lash out against a German guard, but also in the decision not to bid for life by volunteering to serve as a "dentist", but rather to stay with a child in need of comfort. One can imagine that a world governed by nothing but that logic would be radically different. But Grossman does not hold out utopia. The triumph at Stalingrad was made by freedom in synthesis with power. The heroism of the Red Army soldiers and the relentless German offensives they fought off, had material conditions. Grossman's books are amongst other things a memorial to the material culture of Stalinism.

Even in his plea to Khrushchev on February 26, 1962 to permit Life and Fate to be published Grossman invoked precisely this connection: "The strength and courage of your speech give reasons to think that the norms of our democracy will grow just as production norms of steel, coal, and electricity grew after the days of economic collapse accompanying the Civil War. After all, the essence of a new society is even more [manifest] in the growth of democracy and freedom than in industrial development and economic consumption. I believe a new society is unthinkable without continuous growth of freedom and of democracy."

But Grossman was denied his wish. The regime that Grossman understood as having been carried to victory by freedom was determined to impose discipline at any cost. The Partisan spirit could not be tolerated behind one's own lines. And in that battle for control, death, ultimately, was the state's ally. If refusing to cling to life was the precondition of true freedom, death itself was freedom's ultimate negation. In death we become matter to be reworked. Literally or metaphorically.

At Stalingrad, the rebellious commune in House 6/1 was erased by a devastating German bombardment. That enables it to be subsumed into the official Soviet narrative as a heroic outpost. Perversely, Krymov, the Commissar who was sent to discipline the outpost is thrown onto the wrong side of power. He finds himself in the Lubyanka under interrogation.

[Eddie Teach]

I loved Life and Fate!

Made into a pretty watchable mini series, as well.

Life and Fate implies Death is Freedom.  That was such a powerful book.

Dead people do have nothing left to lose.

[jimmy olsen]

Anyone read this? Sounds brutally hard to read to me. Is it realistic that 80 years of a mad maxian logan run future populated only by children and teens would have the English language go absolutely off the rails? Of course, do I want to read 600 pages narrated like that? No.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/jun/25/country-ice-cream-star-sandra-newman-review-sf-epic

[garbon]

I'm not sure what would be appealing about a book about black children who have terrible lives/sometimes enslaved by white people and written in the author's take on AAVE.

[Syt]

Weird that the article doesn't reference A Clockwork Orange, another book set in a dystopian future and told through invented futuristic youth vernacular.

[The Brain]

Got a shipment from Verlag Militaria.

The German Colonial Troops from 1889 to 1918: History - Uniforms - Equipment

The French Army in the First World War - 1914 to 1918: Uniforms - Equipment - Armament

Gas Warfare in the First World War: Gas Masks and Gas Defence Equipment of the Armies of the German Empire, Austria-Hungary and Italy

They're all big fat books, 600+ pages with lots of photos (all in color except of course period B/W pics). The photos form the main content, but the Colonial book also includes some history (since it's not as well known to the general public).

[The Brain]

Finished God's Chinese Son: The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom of Hong Xiuquan. I've known about the Taiping rebellion and that the leader thought himself the younger brother of Christ since I was a kid, but I haven't read any details about it until now. A very readable book. It deals mostly with the development of Hong's religious views and the "inner world" (if you will) of the Taiping leaders, and while it does describe the military campaigns it doesn't get into great detail and several of them are just mentioned briefly. Hong's story is a fascinating one.

[Sheilbh]

Yeah - it's an incredible story. And the scale is probably one of the biggest wars in the 19th century but barely known outside of China.

And just fascinating in the context of the cross-cultural aspects. It's extraordinary.

[The Minsky Moment]

Oex or anyone else who has read them:

Any reviews/thoughts on Robert Parkinson's books on the American Revolution?

[Oexmelin]

Disclaimer: Rob is a friend, so you are asking a more complex question than you know 

The Common Cause is driven by the idea that, while complex political ideas certainly animated the debate for a bunch of curmudgeon people interested in politics, the Revolution itself needed to coalesce around much "baser" impulses, that the creation of a "common cause" required simplistic narratives which may have concerned the British, but more often than not, rather stoked the fears of Indigenous people and slave insurrection. So, he shows how "low-level" communication - i.e., the bulk of the info beyond the big shiny declarations - was quite often about Indigenous violence, or the threat thereof, and that much of that communication was pushed by some of the Revolution's main actors.

The book has received wide acclaim and won prizes. It's also really, really long, and few people have the patience (or the need) to wade through all of the pages. I think at some level Parkinson knew the book would be contentious among certain influential historians of the Revolution (*cough* Gordon Wood) and would go against certain still-lingering interpretations of the Revolution, so felt he needed to just lay the whole thing there, and make the argument ironclad. That being said, between the moment when he began writing, and the moment the book was published, the context had shifted. But it has now shifted again... and the centrality of race as a motivator *for* the revolution is back in he news...

This explains why his 13 Clocks is more or less the same argument repackaged in much shorter form, in order to gain readers (and gain classroom adoption) that were discouraged by the length. If you are curious about the argument, I'd pick up 13 Clocks (though I myself haven't had a chance to read it yet - will do so in the fall). 

Now, my sense of it is a bit warped. I came to the historiography of the American Revolution after having read, and having thoughts about revolutionary violence, emrge from the French Revolution, the heritage of which has always been much more contested... I have always felt that the dominant readings of the Revolution were quite naive (with some notable exceptions), making it into a much more consensual affair, usually crushed under the weight of the Founding Fathers, and, while it has provided us with great histories in the "history of ideas" genre (and debates), it hasn't looked a lot at the inherent social tensions, the process of politicization, that always accompanies revolutionary violence. This is the historiographic tradition that Parkinson is attacking. 

In a weird way, I think Parkinson's argument is at times more simple (and sometimes a bit blunter) than the source material could have allowed, and I would personally have preferred more sociology of communication deployed to sustain or inform his demonstration. I think the gist of the argument is right, but he deploys it at a level where the previous historiography operated (Patriots, Founding Fathers, etc.).
But I think the genre of writing about the American Revolution, because of the nature of the beast, often seems to require either big arguments (or some minuscule focus). That being said, this approach has the merit of making us wonder whether the centrality of slave insurrection or indigenous violence was simply erased from previous narratives because it wasn't revolutionary / inspirational enough, or just considered as business as usual.

So yes, you should definitely buy it. Buy one copy for a friend. Maybe a few dozens more for the family. They make great Christmas gifts and wonderful door stoppers.

[grumbler]

Is Parkinson able to show that news creating fear of a slave revolt was more prevalent in ant-British than pro-British newspapers?  The big obstacle I see to my accepting his hypothesis in toto is that the areas with the most to fear from slave revolts seemed to be the areas that most supported the British.

I think that the case for fear of native attacks is much more easily made, if more noted by the standard accounts.