Category: History

Augustine, the great church father, has been such a giant on the theological landscape for so many centuries, he has become a huge, lifeless statue to some. In The Mestizo Augustine Justo González pumps life back into our view with a fresh and fascinating look at the humanity and the competing cultures at work within Augustine.
Continue reading “What Augustine Offers Our Multicultural World”

God is active in all cultures around the world, even before Christianity or the Bible reach them. That’s what William Dyrness contends in Insider Jesus (which I discussed here). If he is right, the implications go far beyond missionary efforts. They encompass how we should view our own faith.
Continue reading “Insider Jesus 2: Did the Reformation Make a Misstep?”

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.

Study and learn from history. Jefferson didn’t come to the American Revolution as a blank slate. He had studied the successes and failures of Britain’s seventeenth-century anti-monarchical Cromwell revolution and subsequent restoration of the crown. He studied both the political philosophy and the practical political lessons of the era.

Invite your political opponents to dinner. Jefferson was courteous to everyone, including those of other political persuasions. When he met them in person, he inevitably charmed them, focusing conversation on what was of interest to his guests. He made a habit while President of inviting groups of those from the other party to dinner, allowing personal relationship to inform political discussion.

Be curious about everything. Jefferson wanted to know all he could about architecture, science, theology, agriculture, art. All this culminated in his final years when he founded an institution to educate others in all these disciplines and more, the University of Virginia.

Be willing to set aside political doctrine for the good of the country. Jefferson came into the presidency opposing those who advocated a stronger executive branch of government and especially those who supported a return to monarchy. While he never wavered on the issue of monarchy, he was quite willing to expand executive initiative and powers, notably in his pursuit of the Barbary pirates and the purchase of the Louisiana territory from France.

Jon Meacham’s readable biography, Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power, offers all this and much more. Meacham also doesn’t flinch from exploring epic contradictions in Jefferson. The author of freedom owned hundreds of slaves with one, Sally Hemings, bearing him several children. While he made a few efforts here and there against slavery in his career, when opposition emerged, he easily set those efforts aside.

Also the man who sought to be in charge of his political and physical environment was constantly under the pressure of creditors, much of it due to his own excessive expenditures. Indeed everything he owned, including Monticello, had to be sold on his death to meet his debts.

Why these inconsistencies? Meacham never explicitly identifies that Jefferson was a Southern Patrician. He was raised as defacto Southern aristocracy in Virginia and imbued deeply the culture of superiority over others layered with charm and grace. From this emerged both his overbearing debt (to sustain his class standing) and acceptance of slavery.

A couple other quibbles: Several times Meacham builds up to some key event but never fully resolves it. After pages of discussing Jefferson’s courtships, Meacham skips over the wedding which we don’t learn the date of until his wife dies. Likewise we never exactly learn how the efforts against the Barbary pirates were settled. Finally, not Meacham’s fault, after gentle use of my trade paperback edition, pages began to fall out.

Is history worthwhile? The cost of ignoring it is great. As Steve Turner says, “History repeats itself. Has to. No-one listens.”

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.