Category Archives: History

Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher

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I was disturbed by the celebrations in the streets of Britain when Margret Thatcher died, and I decided I needed to know more about the “Iron Lady.” I found this book and was instantly intrigued by the title. I expect Reagan fans, and I’m definitely in that camp, will enjoy the book more than those opposed to Reagan’s politics. Apparently there are many in Britain who are not Thatcher fans, and I will guess they won’t like this book. However, I think anyone interested in the history of the Cold War would enjoy reading or at least be interested in this book.

The subtitle of the Nicholas Wapshott book is “A Political Marriage,” and I found it remarkable how close Reagan and Thatcher were. I got the impression from reading the personal messages between them that they were uncomfortable with how close they were. Prime Minister Thatcher probably had to worry the most; her opponents tagged her as “Reagan’s Poodle.” The reality was that she often displayed the strongest will in disagreements and Reagan worked his personality overtime when he thought he taken a position that had disappointed or angered her. Reagan, to his credit, valued her directness and council. Continue reading →

Spending a Great American Fortune

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empty mansionsEmpty Mansions is a book about wealth and the eccentricity wealth enabled.  Bill Dedman became interested in this story when he learned of a mansion in Connecticut kept in pristine condition by a staff that had never seen their employer.  He learned this was not the only magnificent home kept, but never visited, by this particular heir.  His research led him to one of her relatives, co-author Paul Clark Newell, Jr., who provided his twenty years of research into the family:  documents, stories, and many pictures that fill the book.  (The EPUB book is 13,229 KB.) Continue reading →

A Family History of the Soviet Union

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mastering soviet cookingMastering the Art of Soviet Cooking by Anya Von Bremzen

“This is a work of non-fiction, woven from family anecdotes and historical facts spanning ten decades”, the author’s note begins.  Von Bremzen’s family was diverse, including Muslims and Jews, a Turkistan feminist, a preservationist at Lenin’s tomb, a dissident, and a spy.

The Soviet Union was also wildly diverse, a group of nations and ethnicities forced together: “Such was the bomb of diversity that began to explode in the [1990s].”

Von Bremzen’s mother brought her to the U.S. at the age of 11, long before the fall of the Soviet state.  They arrived in 1974 thanks to American-Jewish sponsors.  Today she is a travel and cookbook writer who visits Russia and other former Soviet republics regularly.  Von Bremzen decided to cook a meal to represent each decade of the Soviet Union and this forms a framework for her book.  She heard family tales from her mother as they cooked together.  Recipes for each decade are included in the back of the book, except for the 1940s, which is represented only by a war-time ration card.

Mother and daughter begin their cooking with the final decade of the czarist era.  The main course is a fish dish: a rich, multi-layered pie of fish liver, sturgeon, onions, eggs, giblets, mushrooms, and dilled rice, all dripping with butter.  Von Bremzen compares it to the Soviet version she remembered as a child in Moscow: a loaf of bread with a thin layer of ground meat or cabbage inside.  This is typical of the book.  Although organized by decade, Von Bremzen uses an informal, personal style and moves backwards and forwards through her own memories, family stories, and Soviet history. Continue reading →

Great Empires, An Illustrated Atlas

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I found this National Geographic book in the local library while searching for information about the Ottoman Empire. I read only that chapter and the one titled “Byzantium and the Arab World.” I did thumb through to look at the many colorful pictures and illustrations. The book presents a high level overview and often with little explanation. My interests in learning more about the Ottoman Empire were frustrated by the closing sentence that the “…once great empire had lost its way. But from its wreckage emerged a new nation, Turkey…” Nothing more is provided to explain what happened except for the closing lines that “…a democratic society that reached out to its old foes in Europe and forged close bonds with the West.” There is no mention of the fascinating story of how Mustafa Kemal and his supporters succeeded at ending the Empire to make the new country called Turkey. Continue reading →

Ecstatic Nation – before, during, and after America’s Civil War

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Ecstatic nation picSince I recently read 1858, reviewed here, I thought Brenda Wineapple’s  book Ecstatic Nation, Confidence, Crisis, and Compromise, 1848 – 1877 was a logical follow-up.  It is fairly long at 526 pages, and the 74 pages of notes are connected to the text via by page number rather than footnotes.

The enormity of the Civil War continues to amaze and horrify me.  Wineapple says the number of soldiers who died from a combination of battle and illness was recently revised upwards to over 750,000, “far greater than the number of men who perished or would perish in all other U.S. wars put together.”  According to the count on www.militaryfactory.com , with Wineapple’s “recent revision”, that’s true. Continue reading →

Nation Un-Building

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Ecstatic Nation CommentaryThis commentary is inspired by Wineapple’s book Ecstatic Nation, reviewed elsewhere on this blog.  While I marvel at America’s luck in ending the Civil War without an endless insurgency, in many ways our Civil War did not end in 1865.  For a hundred years Jim Crow laws continued the subjugation of black Americans, and the civil rights movement , which peaked in the 1960s, was very regional in America.  Even today some writers say two thirds of the members of Congress who figured in the recent U.S. government shutdown are from the old Confederacy.  (See http://bit.ly/1c4wJcc and scroll down to “Confederate Heritage”, or see the Atlantic’s count at http://bit.ly/1aTtqnu  )

The anti-government political position goes beyond any residual racism.  Consider that Wineapple says that, by the end of the Civil war, the Confederacy was ready to give up slavery but not their independence as a sovereign nation.

Today there seems to be an international anti-Union movement.  Continue reading →