Category: History

The epic life of Dmitri Shostakovich and his music offers a window into the terror of Stalin’s purges and the cruelty of the Nazi blockade of his beloved Leningrad (St. Petersburg) during World War II. In Symphony for the City of the Dead, M. T. Anderson begins with Shostakovich’s early life and development, taking us step by step to the climactic composition and performance of The Leningrad Symphony in the midst of the city’s starvation.

Along the way we see the narcissistic paranoia of Stalin that led him to kill millions of his own people–most of whom had not been anti-Soviet or anti-Stalin. His fear made him kill many of his own military officers as well, leaving a huge leadership vacuum when Hitler attacked that almost cost them the war.

During those pre- and post-war purges, Shostakovich survived as many did by attempting to play a life-and-death game of agreeing with the powers that be while composing mostly as he wanted. Though he did not try to defend himself much and seemed often to capitulate, he endangered himself by using his notoriety to advocate for friends and family who had been arrested.

The story of the siege of Leningrad is horrific and graphic–people eating shoe-leather, leaves, wallpaper paste and each other in desperate attempts to survive. Yet, amazingly, the symphony was written and then smuggled out on microfilm and played around the world in the early months of 1942 giving hope to the Allied nations when the Nazi’s seemed invincible.

Even more amazingly, the symphony was performed in Leningrad itself in August 1942, with the city still surrounded. Musicians could barely play and even fainted from hunger during rehearsals. The military initiated an offensive on the other side of the city so the performance could go on uninterrupted.

M. T. Anderson is a well-know author of excellent juvenile fiction. Though this book is labeled juvenile non-fiction, it is an fine example of narrative non-fiction on par with McCullough and Meacham.

I confess I have never been fond of the music of Shostakovich, it being too abstract for my taste. But M. T. Anderson’s tour de force compelled me to listen to the Leningrad Symphony multiple times. Each time I found it to be every bit as powerful as the story behind it.

Next: Why Hitler Lost

Henry Kissinger (now age 92) has been a prominent international figure since I was in high school when he became Nixon’s National Security Advisor and later Secretary of State. He seemed to me to be an urbane realist then and an elder statesman now. By looking deeply at Kissinger’s early writings and the record of his actions as filled out by declassified top secret documents from previous decades, historian Greg Grandin offers a very different picture in Kissinger’s Shadow.
Continue reading “Kissinger’s Shadow”

Eric Larson achieves the drama and suspense of a political thriller in his book on the sinking of the Lusitania in 1915. This is a remarkable achievement because everyone knows how it ends before they start–a German U-boat sinks the ship. How was he able to do this? When I read the acknowledgments at the end of Dead Wake, I found out. He listened to his editor.
Continue reading “How Did He Make It So Suspenseful?”

What might an incoming president learn from a biography of Thomas Jefferson? Much indeed.
Continue reading “Learning from a Presidential Biography”

In the 1970s a friend gave me a copy of Kenneth Bailey’s The Cross and the Prodigal. I was blown away. It transformed my understanding of how to read the New Testament. Later I devoured Poet and Peasant and Through Peasant Eyes. Bailey’s basic thesis was that Middle Eastern peasant culture changes only very slowly. So if we want to understand the world that Jesus lived in, we should get to know Middle Eastern peasant culture today.
Continue reading “Kenneth E. Bailey, 1930–2016”

Franklin and Winston is a delightful piece of narrative history from one of the masters of the genre. By focusing on the relationship of these two titans rather than the massive array of events that was World War II, Meacham gives us, just as the very apt subtitle promises, “An Intimate Portrait of an Epic Friendship.”
Continue reading “Dance of the Titans”

The Wright Brothers, by David McCullough, paints a portrait of two heroes and celebrities who stand in sharp contrast to those of today. The brothers didn’t look to maximize their fame; they simply wanted due credit. They didn’t try to amass enormous wealth; they simply ran a business.
Continue reading “The Right Brothers”

As we come

up on the 150th anniversary of the end of the Civil War, a must read is April 1865: The Month That Saved America by Jay Winik. An historian and diplomat, Winik had the opportunity to see first-hand how civil wars around the world so often end so badly–either in the genocide of the losing side or an interminable guerrilla insurgency. Neither happened in the United States. This the remarkable story of why.

How did we come to think that the Pilgrims

• were rugged individualists when they were strongly bound to community?
• were patriots first and committed Christians second?
• would support Thanksgiving Day football even though “the 1650s the Plymouth General Court prescribed fines for individuals who engaged in sports on days of thanksgiving” (p. 145)?

Continue reading “The First Thanksgiving 3: How the Story Was Misremembered”

The First Thanksgiving by Robert Tracy McKenzie corrects a lot of the errors and myths that surround that original celebration by the Pilgrims in 1620.

In telling us the real story, McKenzie points us to more fruitful lessons we might learn than the warm feeling we get when we think about those independent-minded Pilgrims seeking new lands and freedom, and thanking God for helping them on the way. For example:
Continue reading “The First Thanksgiving 2: What We Don’t Know Is Inspiring”