1913: The World Before the Great War by Charles Emmerson – review

Kaiser Willhelm II with Winston Churchill at Lowther Castle, north-west England, 1906: were the signs of the conflict to come self-evident? Photograph: Corbis

Did you read the writing on the wall in 2012? Could you tell that a third world war would start in 2013 when Russia and Iran responded to the American attack on Syria? If a lack of restraint had pitched us into global conflict last year, historians would have woven narratives to show the signs we missed (I was preparing my own version).

The inevitability of the first world war is usually traced in a similar way, back through events of 1913 and before, and several excellent books have looked at how the world went to war, notably Christopher Clark's excellent The Sleepwalkers. Emmerson's 1913 tries hard to ignore what follows and mostly it succeeds.

This is not an attempt to explain how the war started but more to show what was lost, what it felt like to be alive in that unlucky-number year. If you were European, particularly British, it felt very good indeed. The British empire was not what it was, damaged as much close to home by suffragettes and Irish nationalists as it was threatened by the growing challenges from the US, China and restless colonies. Emmerson presents this world through portraits of its great cities, which seems appropriate as many of them were linked up in a way we would recognise as global: the modernity of some aspects of city life a century ago is striking, with the startup of global brands such as Gucci and Ford, although there were still sheep cropping Hyde Park.

Many of the choices of cities are obvious, divided into groups such as Europe's imperial capitals, some key American cities, a scattering of others – Algiers, Bombay, Tehran – and a handful of cities belonging to "twilight powers", although in the absence of a compelling argument, some choices can seem random. To capture a year of the world in a single snapshot is, of course, impossible, but Emmerson provides a real sense of 1913 by combining details of individual lives with sweeping international trends: one of the great pleasures of this book is to see parallels between then and now.

Yet he clings to the view that the world in 1913 was one of innocence, security and mutual understanding, epitomised, perhaps, by the ball in Berlin in May 1913, attended by the British king-emperor, the German kaiser and the Russian tsar. Not unlike the after party of the G20 summit in St Petersburg last year, and therefore hardly a reliable measure of international relations.

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THE GREAT DEFORMATION: The Corruption of Capitalism in America

Mar 29, 2013

David A. Stockman
PublicAffairs
ISBN 978-1586489120
743 pages
$35

Reviewed by Marcus Brauchli

David Stockman occupies a rare place in this nation's public pantheon - the serial apostate.

While heading the Office of Management and Budget under Ronald Reagan, he called out his fellow Republicans for fiscal recklessness and repudiated policies that his boss was promoting. He soon left Washington for a place of presumably sounder financial thinking: Wall Street.

But once again, he encountered mankind's shortcomings. A financier who built elaborate deals on foundations of debt, Stockman proclaimed the folly of such ways. He ran afoul of a prosecutor who accused him of not complying with accounting standards that Stockman later concluded didn't make sense anyway.

Now, he has cast his acid eye on the country's entire economic edifice. What the former divinity student sees doesn't merely dismay, it outrages him morally, page after page, chapter after chapter. Stockman's new tract, "The Great Deformation," is a kaleidoscopic rant against people, institutions and practices he knows well. He attacks, upends, eviscerates, mocks and denigrates them all, usually with some justification, always in the brutalist prose of a manifesto.

The New Deal was a "political gong show," and Franklin D. Roosevelt and Richard M. Nixon were "peas in a statist pod." Morgan Stanley's former chief executive, John Mack, is a "ruthless gambler and bully who never hesitated to exploit any avenue to make a buck." Reagan's defense secretary, Caspar Weinberger, was "obdurate and imperious on everything within his brief." Alan Greenspan and Milton Friedman get entire chapters dedicated to their free-market heresies.

But here's the thing: Even as he indulges his spleen, Stockman produces a persuasive and deeply relevant indictment of a system dangerously akilter.

Over the past 40 years, the United States has become a strange fantasy land where many politicians think deficits don't matter, regulators are closely entwined with their charges, and the Federal Reserve manages the economy through high-stakes, high-risk experimentation. The financial turmoil of the past few years is just a glimpse of what lies at the end of the road we're on, Stockman warns.

In showing us where it leads, he takes the long way, ambling past the wreckage of fiscal and market calamities dating back a century, pausing to praise the gleaming fiscal conservatism of President Dwight D. Eisenhower, before arriving at the ever-more-dire failures of the last generation.

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THE DRUNKEN BOTANTIST: The Plants that Create the World's Great Drinks

Mar 29, 2013

Amy Stewart
Algonquin
ISBN 978-1616200466
381 pages
$19.95

Reviewed by Rick Nichols

My wife and I biked home from work one humid spring evening to find an icy Mason jar sweating by the doormat. It was a gift from our neighbor, the widow of a Swedenborgian minister, an intrepid gardener known for her climbing roses. The jar was stuffed with a tangle of greens - a frilly ground cover she snipped each late April and early May called sweet woodruff. It gave off the warm scent of cardamom or maybe shavings of cedar. And steeped in white jug wine with sliced strawberries, it was the signature of the fragrant, spring-time chiller that Germans call maiwein, or May wine.

We'd had it before. But this time around, hot and parched from our ride, we guzzled it down on the porch, rocking on the swing, until the fireflies came out. And until, well, our heads were spinning. We barely made it in the door. Was there something different in the wine this time? we asked our neighbor after we'd sobered up. She looked puzzled, then brightened: "Oh, I added a cup of vodka. For pep!"

Oy, we'd imbibed far more than our minimum daily requirement of alcoholized fruits and grains and leaves. But what did we know? In the spirit world - and in the wine, craft beer and brave, new, artisan cocktail worlds, for that matter - what you see is not always quite what you think you're getting. Is there angostora bark in Angostora Bitters? Maybe, maybe not. (A trademark fight led to obscure labeling.) Why does Maker's Mark bourbon seem gentler? It adds wheat, instead of the usual rye, to its mix, removing rye's spicy bite. Does innocent-looking sweet woodruff have toxic levels of coumarin? At times, yes. But not if it's picked in the early spring.

In fact, most of us don't have a clue about the botanical mysteries that lurk - luxuriate? - in our bottles of Bluecoat gin and bowls of punch, in the rattling shakers and sparkling stemware we engage to sand the rough edges off.

But there are, indeed, back stories behind every sip, starring the exotic and prosaic plants that perfume our booze, give rise to our vodka - tap-lines of maple sap are run straight into one small-batch distillery in Vermont's Northeast Kingdom - and turn water (at Dogfish Head's brewery in Milton, Del.) into a cacao-inflected beer. Those curious stories and asides are the stuff of nature-writer Amy Stewart's latest amble through the garden, "The Drunken Botanist."

Spoiler alert: No actual botanists get drunk in these pages. In fact, they come off as heroic stiffs, a diligent, self-sacrificing lot, one of them (David Douglas of fir tree fame) killed on a volcano in Hawaii, another (USDA plant explorer Frank Meyer, who brought the sweet Meyer lemon back from China) swept to his death down the Yangtze River in 1918. And most poignant of all, the academician Nikolai Vavilov, a tireless, globe-trotting geneticist who ran afoul of Stalin's pseudo-science and was tossed into a Soviet jail where he died in 1943 after a career trying to boost Russia's famously erratic crop yields. Stewart dedicates one of her featured cocktail recipes to him, the Vavilov Affair, a twist on the Old Fashioned with equal parts applejack and bourbon.

She is something of a Queen of the Jungle these days, with three New York Times best-sellers under her belt: "Wicked Bugs," "Wicked Plants," and "Flower Confidential." But like ultra-hoppy beer, this latest effort may tickle the initiated while leaving newcomers wondering on occasion if there can be too much of a good thing.

"The Drunken Botanist" is a strange brew - part Ripley's Believe it or Not, part compendium on the order of "Schott's Original Miscellany," and part botanical garden tour, albeit with a curated cocktail party at the end. It is meant, one supposes, as a companionable reference and whimsical recitation of historical-botanical trivia, with a little tart debunking. Tequila? Like a fine Scotch, the good stuff requires only a splash of water, she suggests. No lime and salt, which originated as cover-ups for rough flavors in low-end stuff.

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'Charlotte's Web' and 99 more 'great' kids books

Charlotte's Web, E.B. White's 60-year-old novel about how a determined farm girl and a noble, vocabulary-building spider save a naïve runt of a pig, is No. 1 on a new list of the "100 Greatest Books for Kids."

'Scholastic Parent & Child' magazine ranks 'Charlotte's Web' as the No. 1 book for kids ever written.

'Scholastic Parent & Child' magazine ranks 'Charlotte's Web' as the No. 1 book for kids ever written.

The rankings, released today by Scholastic Parent & Child magazine, are aimed at "generating controversy and conversation," says Nick Friedman, the magazine's editor in chief.

In that spirit, why is J.K. Rowling's groundbreaking debut, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, only No. 6, chosen to represent the entire series?

It's "undoubtedly one of the greatest in history," Friedman says, but "it is only 15 years old and hasn't had time to be as firmly established."

Beyond literary merit and popularity, he says, the list was chosen to include a variety of genres for different ages — from infants to middle schoolers — and to be "culturally representative."

A team of literacy experts and "mom bloggers" nominated nearly 500 titles. Friedman and four other editors at the magazine made the final decisions.

Their toughest choice, he says, was between Charlotte's Web and Goodnight Moon, the 1947 picture book by Margaret Wise Brown, with illustrations by Clement Hurd, as No. 1. Charlotte's Web emerged as "a bit more sophisticated."

Friedman welcomes "comments and complaints." The list includes Dr. Seuss' Green Eggs and Ham (No. 7), but not The Cat in the Hat. It omits classics such as Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House series and J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit. Stephenie Meyer's best-selling Twilight series was considered "too mature."

Scholastic, which publishes books as well as the magazine, has 14 titles on the list, including No. 33, Suzanne Collins' best seller The Hunger Games. Friedman says the judges looked at the books, not their publishers.

Also named are 10 "superlative award" winners, including (overall rankings in the top 100 in parentheses):

• Best Read-Aloud: Mo Willems' Don't Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus! (28).

• Most Beautifully Illustrated: Jerry Pinkney's The Lion and the Mouse (61).

• Most Relatable Character: Jeff Kinney's Diary of a Wimpy Kid (38).

• Most Side-Splitting Hilarious: Dav Pilkey's The Adventures of Captain Underpants (97).

For more information about reprints & permissions, visit our FAQ's. To report corrections and clarifications, contact Standards Editor Brent Jones. For publication consideration in the newspaper, send comments to letters@usatoday.com. Include name, phone number, city and state for verification. To view our corrections, go to corrections.usatoday.com.

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Find the great outdoors inside these kids' books

The outdoors, from baby blue jays to baseball, figure in four new books for young readers, from preschool to high school. USA TODAY takes a look.

Like a tamer 'Wild Things'

The Woods, written and illustrated by Paul Hoppe (Chronicle, 36 pp., $16.99, for ages 4-8, * * * out of four): In a gentle variation on Maurice Sendak's classic adventure/nightmare Where the Wild Things Are, the young unnamed narrator of The Woods can't find his favorite stuffed bunny at bedtime. That leads him into the woods, which seem to sprout right in his bedroom. The brave narrator encounters bears, dragons and monsters, although none, it turns out, should scare even the youngest readers. Paul Hoppe's text and watercolors make for comforting bedtime reading.

Finding nature in the city

My Baby Blue Jays, by John Berendt (Viking, 32 pp., $16.99, ages 5-8, * * *): Wildlife adventures can be found anywhere, even in Manhattan. Best-selling author John Berendt (Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil) spent a spring photographing one of nature's miracles on his 86th Street balcony, where two blue jays were building a nest. It was soon home to three baby blue jays, which learn to fly the hard way and seem to be unperturbed by their personal photographer. Nature (and Disney movies) can be cruel, but Berendt's blue jays find nothing but blue skies in the big city.

Covering historical bases

First Pitch: How Baseball Began, by John Thorn (Beach Ball Books, 40 pp., $19.99 hardcover, 14.99 paperback, ages 9 and up, * * *): Young baseball fans ready for revisionist history can learn much from John Thorn, the official historian of Major League Baseball, who writes, "Saying Abner Doubleday invented baseball is as ridiculous as saying the moon is made of green cheese." In an illustrated, kid-friendly episodic history, Thorn traces the evolution (rather than creation) of baseball and celebrates unsung pioneers such as Doc Adams, who, in about 1850, invented the idea of shortstops, and Octavius V. Catto, a 19th-century combination of Jackie Robinson and Martin Luther King Jr.

Rough seas for this teen

Sharks & Boys, by Kristen Tracy (Hyperion, 264 pp., $16.99, ages 12-18, * * 1/2): At 16, Enid thinks she has problems: Her mom and philandering dad are in couples therapy, and her boyfriend wants a "break," which, she hopes, doesn't mean a "breakup." Driven by suspicion and jealousy, Enid ends up as a stowaway on what was supposed to be an all-boy sailing adventure. A storm turns it into a high school version of Survivor, without the cameras but with a lot more reality. The sitcom-like dialogue becomes deadly serious as Enid learns, "Life is not fair. This world will swallow anyone. Even if you know how to swim."

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THE DEAL FROM HELL: How Moguls and Wall Street Plundered Great American Newspapers

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Washington Post book reviewers

Jun 24, 2011 ARCHIVES  |  Entertainment  |  COLUMNS

James O'Shea
PublicAffairs
ISBN 978-1586487911
395 pages
$28.99

Reviewed by Jack Shafer

Eyewitnesses can't be expected to produce the best dispatches from a calamity. They're usually too bound in bandages and cross-stitched with sutures to understand anybody's pain but their own. That's what sort of witness James O'Shea was to the disastrous purchase of the Los Angeles Times media empire in 2000 by the larger media empire that owned the Chicago Tribune.

From vantage points first in the Tribune newsroom, where he supervised coverage of the deal, then later in the Times newsroom, where Tribune Co. executives installed him as the paper's top editor, O'Shea files a comprehensive report about the genesis of the deal, its rapid unwinding into a novel buyout by real estate wizard Sam Zell, and the final descent into bankruptcy where the combined company languishes today. But his book "The Deal From Hell" appears to make the reportorial mistake of coming to conclusions first and not letting the evidence, no matter how strong, shake him loose from them.

In O'Shea's view, the cause of the undoing of the newspapers owned by the Tribune Co. and Times Mirror, as well as other newspapers in the country, has not been the Internet, or declining circulation, or long stories and "skimpy attention spans, or arrogant journalists." It's been the reaction of newspaper executives to those forces. He writes: "The lack of investment, the greed, the incompetence, corruption, hypocrisy, and downright arrogance of people who put their interests ahead of the public's are responsible for the state of the newspaper industry today."

The problem with O'Shea's analysis is that important newspapers whose executives and owners weren't stingy, greedy, incompetent, corrupt, hypocritical or arrogant have also been forced to reduce news pages, cut whole sections, close bureaus and decimate newsrooms. Both The Washington Post and the New York Times, long controlled by families that have taken immense pride in providing the public service of great journalism, have bent before recent market forces and made the cuts that O'Shea deplores. (Candor demands that I disclose that I work for Slate.com, which is owned by The Washington Post Company.)

When the Hearst Corp. paid $660 million for the San Francisco Chronicle and paid another publisher $66 million to take its San Francisco Examiner off its hands in 2000, it had no idea that its losses would be so great by the end of the decade that it would threaten to close the newspaper if employees didn't make big concessions. Likewise, when McClatchy Newspapers, one of the best-run quality chains in the country, bought the larger Knight Ridder chain in 2006 for $4.5 billion (spinning off four newspapers it didn't want for $1 billion), the owners were guided not by greed and corruption when they later dramatically cut staff and features at all of its titles. They were guided by an instinct to survive.

You don't have to like the Tribune Co. number crunchers who put the deal together with Times Mirror -- or their demand that profits come before Pulitzer prizes -- to see that they thought their deal was going to make the combined company a lot of money. One of the lead Tribune dealmakers, John Madigan, predicted an additional $225 million in cash flow for the new enterprise.

O'Shea is not so blind that he doesn't correctly identify a few greedheads undermining quality journalism. There would have been no deal if the estimated 170 descendants of the Chandler family, which controlled Times Mirror, hadn't been so eager to sluice profits and capital out of the company. O'Shea reports that Times Mirror paid out $2.1 billion in dividends and distributions to investors and the Chandler heirs between 1995 and 1997, compared to $417 million the three previous years. The cash cravings of the Chandler heirs, practically none of them Times Mirror employees, made the deal happen. Readers of the Los Angeles Times, the Baltimore Sun, Newsday, the Chicago Tribune, the Orlando Sentinel and the other newspapers that suffered after the deal can hate the Chandlers all they want, but it was their cow to milk, bleed or slaughter.

As late as 2007, Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. moved in with a $5.6-billion offer for Dow Jones, owner of the Wall Street Journal, when heirs to that company showed a similar desire to cash out. Despite Murdoch's substantial investment in all aspects of the Journal, changes in newspaper economics forced News Corp. to take a $3 billion write-off in his newspaper division 14 months after the purchase.

Not to get overly counterfactual about this "deal from hell," but let's say the Chandlers had stood up for journalism -- as have the Grahams, who control The Post, the Sulzbergers, who control the New York Times (and the very much diminished Boston Globe), and even Murdoch, who has spent deeply to improve the Journal. Let's say the deal never happened just before the 40-year financial heyday of newspapers came to a close. Wouldn't the Tribune and Times Mirror newspapers still have had to cut employee perks, staff, bureaus, circulation and quality to prevail? The answer is obvious.

O'Shea's pocket histories of both Times Mirror and Tribune are succinct, and his reporting on the circulation scandals at Newsday and other newspapers in the last decade is superb. But, alas, he is not much of a writer. When he pokes former Los Angeles Times publisher Mark Willes for expressing himself with cliches like "think outside the box," O'Shea invites readers to catalog his own literary laziness. He writes of "gritty neighborhoods," "finishing touches," a "seasoned veteran," "a bear of a man," a "sympathetic ear," "a taste of their own medicine," a "crown jewel" and more. When he writes that somebody's eyes "twinkle," I found myself wanting to poke mine out.

O'Shea, an experienced reporter and editor, misses the story and writes poorly. If only we could send his terrific assignment back to the rewrite desk for fixing.

Jack Shafer writes about the media for Slate.

Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
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THE GREAT NIGHT

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Washington Post book reviewers

May 18, 2011 ARCHIVES  |  Entertainment  |  COLUMNS

Chris Adrian
Farrar Straus Giroux
ISBN 978-0374166410
292 pages
$26

Reviewed by Keith Donohue, who wrote about changelings in his novel "The Stolen Child." His new novel, "Centuries of June," will be published in June.

Stealing from Shakespeare, as the Bard himself would admit, is no crime. In his new novel, "The Great Night," Chris Adrian takes characters and broad structural plotlines from "A Midsummer Night's Dream" to write a kind of sequel to the play, giving a twist to all its familiar elements.

The scene is shifted from the court and forest around Athens to Buena Vista Park in contemporary San Francisco. Taking the part of the four star-crossed lovers are three people, each suffering from heartbreak, lost in the woods. Instead of the rough countrymen putting on a production of "The Tragedy of Pyramus and Thisbe," a group of homeless men and women is mounting a musical comedy version of "Soylent Green."

And 400 years after they first appeared as the faerie queen and king, Titania and Oberon have been relocated to an underground hideaway, attended by Puck and a new cast of faeries. The novel's action begins, as does the play, with Titania and Oberon fighting over a changeling boy.

In Shakespeare's comedy, the changeling is but a plot device, a means to incite Oberon's jealousy over the attention paid to the boy by Titania. But in Adrian's version, the changeling becomes much more of a central figure. Titania falls in love with the mortal child, especially after the boy is stricken with leukemia. In the most moving part of the book, Titania and Oberon watch over the toddler as he undergoes months of treatment in a cancer ward.

Adrian's remarkable talent for capturing telling moments is on display in this poignant chapter. Frustrated by his wife's spoiling of the boy, Oberon instructs him to pick up his blocks and put them in a bucket, but the changeling instead takes the handle in his mouth and pretends he is a puppy. Titania walks in on the two of them, playing on the floor, her husband with a plastic shovel in his mouth. "Titania laughed, and it seemed to her in that moment that she had two hearts in her, each pouring out an equivalent feeling toward the prancing figures, and she thought, My men."

Grief-stricken by the child's death, Titania drives her husband away, but on the midsummer night in question, she summons Puck to go search for Oberon. For those who remember the play, with its comedy of mistaken lovers brought to harmony, this novel's heartbreak and loss are jarring, but more startling still is the characterization of Puck. In "A Midsummer Night's Dream," he is the trickster who powers the antic mischief and mistaken identity that make the play one of Shakespeare's most beloved comedies. But Adrian has other plans for Puck, making him a figure of true mayhem and destruction.

That dissonance with the original undermines Adrian's considerable powers. Moments of comedy -- from slapstick to farce -- exist in the novel, but they are mixed with graphic violence and anonymous sex. Rather than ending upon a dream, "The Great Night" aches with lost love and the torturous ordeal of childhood caught between innocence and awakening.

For a novel based upon a classic comedy, it's devastating. The intertwined stories of the three young San Franciscans are at the heart of the sadness. There is Will, the tree surgeon whose wife has left him; Molly, raised a Christian fundamentalist, who is coping with the loss of her boyfriend; and most prominently, Henry, a pediatrician, recently rejected by his boyfriend. The mood darkens as the night unfolds, and it becomes increasingly difficult to reconcile the adaptation with the spirit of the original. One's appreciation for the rustics' musical "Soylent Green" depends upon how you react to lyrics such as "People who eat people are the loneliest people in the world!"

Adrian takes great imaginative risks in his writing. His novels "Gob's Grief" and "The Children's Hospital" and his collection of short stories, "A Better Angel," (which also features a story called "The Changeling") have been widely praised for their courage and linguistic dexterity. Last summer, he was included on the New Yorker's 20 Under 40 list of exciting new writers. A graduate student at the Harvard Divinity School and a fellow in pediatric hematology-oncology at the University of California San Francisco, he clearly knows the sorrow of the human comedy and what fools we mortals be. Brush aside your Shakespeare, and you will find the same in "The Great Night."

Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
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