White Eagle, Red Star

White Eagle, Red Star: The Polish-Soviet War 1919-20 by Norman Davies, 278 pages

In the aftermath of the First World War, the Russian Empire fractured.  While the Bolsheviks consolidated their hold over the core territories, the Baltic States asserted their independence, and Poland became a sovereign nation again after a century of foreign domination.  As Norman Davies relates, this was not a simple, clean, or peaceful process.  With the Bolsheviks preoccupied with the Russian civil war, the Poles rushed forward to establish their eastern border near Minsk.  The Soviet response was conditioned not only by the border question, but by their dialectical fantasies of a general European revolution, which envisioned Poland as a stepping stone to Germany and the West.  In the end, the superior Soviet forces overextended themselves and were routed by a counterattack at the gates of Warsaw, and the whole episode concluded with a hasty peace which pleased neither government.

Writing in the early 1970s, Davies laments that the war is little known and poorly understood.  The Soviets were badly embarrassed by their defeat, and soothed their wounded pride by casting the bourgeois Allies as the actual belligerents.  However, as Davies chronicles, the British particularly gave the Poles little support, with David Lloyd George far more interested in building bridges with the Soviets than guaranteeing the future of the Polish state.  After the victory was won, the Western powers were glad to share in this view, with much of the credit accruing to the French general Maxime Weygand who was sent to Poland as an advisor and was credited as the architect of the Polish victory.  Yet Davies demonstrates that Weygand was treated with indifference and even contempt by the Poles and contributed little of value.  For the Poles those most responsible were Commander-in-Chief Pilsudski and God Almighty, and having dismissed the latter Davies gives the credit to the former.

As Davies demonstrates, despite the brief duration of the war and the compromise peace that ended it, the Polish-Soviet War had far-reaching consequences, especially in the area of Soviet foreign policy and the growing rivalry between Trotsky and Stalin.  For the Poles, of course, the war merely bought them a couple of decades before Nazi and Communist occupation.  For Davies, from his position in the early '70s, this seemed a small enough thing, but from a later perspective it is undoubtedly significant that Karol Wojtyla spent the first 19 years of his life in a free, Catholic Poland.

Brunelleschi's Dome

Brunelleschi's Dome: How a Renaissance Genius Reinvented Architecture by Ross King, 167 pages

At the end of the 13th century, the Florentines decided that they required a new cathedral, as much to celebrate the city's growing prosperity as to replace the crumbling Santa Reparata.  An ambitious plan was approved, but progress was slow, and it was not until the beginning of the 15th century that preparations began for the construction of what would be the largest masonry dome ever constructed.  Filippo Brunelleschi's innovative proposal for the dome construction was ultimately selected over several more conventional plans, including one by Lorenzo Ghiberti.  The dome was completed sixteen years later and remains an iconic symbol of one of the most beautiful cities in the world.

The story of this construction, through two decades of war, plague, and civil strife, is the subject of Ross King's book.  It is a promising subject indeed - a great construction project during one of the most colorful and fertile periods in human history, a contest of human ingenuity and the feuding wills of great artists and their patrons.  Unfortunately, King's book is deadly dull.  Working with incomplete historical and biographical records, he constructs his own account of events, asserting that a figure "must have" done this, or "seems to have" done that.  He plays equally fast and loose with history (at one point he flatly declares that the technique of perspective was "lost", then shortly thereafter says it was abandoned as "dishonest") and even basic facts (he asserts that other than Brunelleschi, the "only other person interred inside the cathedral was St Zenobius", which seems to be simply untrue).  Worse than all this, he seems to regard only the technical challenges of construction to be worth writing about, resulting in a book that contains nothing of beauty, nothing of poetry, and precious little of mind or spirit.

Fascism in Spain

Fascism in Spain: 1923-1977 by Stanley G Payne, 479 pages

The rise of fascism in Europe in the 1920s and '30s had their impact on the political landscape of Spain.  Far-right activists, seeking a way forward in the crisis of the interwar years, naturally found attractive the path shown to them by Mussolini in Italy, a nation with a history and culture so intimately connected with that of Spain.  Various leaders alternately embraced and rejected the fascist label, incorporated elements of fascist ideology into their own thinking, sought assistance from the fascist powers, or adapted fascist symbols and slogans to a Spanish context.

However, as Stanley Payne demonstrates in his landmark history of Spanish fascism, fascism was never comprehensively adopted by the Spanish far right.  Even Jose Antonio Primo de Rivera, the founder of the Falange, was ambivalent about many aspects of fascism as it was practiced in Italy and especially in Germany.  Certainly Franco resisted identification with fascism, even in 1940-1 when the Axis seemed on the verge of total victory, effectively neutering the Falange by incorporating it into his new uniparty.  Efforts to strengthen the syndicalist movement within the Franco dictatorship were systematically thwarted.  Payne suggests a number of reasons for this, including the historical regionalism of the Spanish right and the strength of Catholic traditionalism as an alternative to fascism.  

The most important element of Payne's masterful study is not its thoroughness, but its fundamental refusal to treat the study of fascism as something akin to demonology.  Not that Payne is blind to the violent, revolutionary component that is essential to the ideology, but his goal is understanding rather than judgement, and he doesn't feel any need to restate every few pages that comprehension does not mean approval.  The result is a work that allows the reader to see the meaning that fascism had for mass man in the first half of the twentieth century, and therefore its appeal, growth, and failure.

Real Presence

The Real Presence of the Body and Blood of Our Lord Jesus Christ in the Blessed Eucharist Proved From Scripture in Eight Lectures Delivered in the English College, Rome by Nicholas Cardinal Wiseman, 328 pages

As the full title explains, this is a printed collection of eight lectures which the future Cardinal delivered at the English College in Rome in 1836.  As might be expected by the audience, the lectures are academic in tone and content.  They are also straightforward defenses on Scriptural and philosophical grounds of the Catholic belief in the Real Presence, and there is no devotional spirit to them, nor do they reveal much about their author, who would soon become the first Archbishop of Westminster.  This does not mean that they have no value, but that there is little reason to prefer them to other texts on the same subject.