First Boredom, Then Fear

First Boredom, Then Fear: The Life of Philip Larkin by Richard Bradford, 263 pages

Philip Larkin is generally accepted as one of the greatest English poets of the latter half of the 20th century.  The publication of his collected letters in 1992, unfortunately, led to a chorus of denunciations due to his outspoken heretical views on matters of race and gender.  First Boredom, Then Fear is Richard Bradford's attempt to correct the record, casting Larkin's racism and xenophobia as consciously exaggerated in his letters and incidental to his poetry.

Certainly, Bradford treats his subject with respect.  His book is a literary biography in the best sense, illuminating the poetry through the life of the poet.  This is somewhat difficult with Larkin, who was, as Bradford notes, uncomfortable with anything that revealed too much of himself.  In Bradford's telling, even Larkin's closest friend could only say, "He didn't keep half his life in compartments."  And yet, paradoxically, this was the same poet who "spoke so candidly to his readers." 

Some readers, exposed to the candid Larkin, are likely to agree with those who saw in him the embodiment of "an undergraduate attitude perpetuated into adult life."  Like all artists, Larkin was a man of his time and place, and for him that was England in a particularly silly season.  Seen from this perspective, his commitment to an accessible, popular poetry and his lifelong fascination with the permanent things take on a value diminished but not extinguished by his chronic inability to commit himself.

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.

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.

Stoner

Stoner by John Williams, 278 pages

When William Stoner left his parents' small farm to attend the University of Missouri, he never expected that he would be spending the rest of his life there.  By chance he discovers in Archer Sloane's English course a love of literature and poetry he had never known he possessed.  It is a love that remains with him all his life, through disappointments in his career, his romances, his marriage, and his fatherhood.  It is, in the end, the pattern of all his loves, and the one love to which he remains most true.

John Williams, who taught at the same university for a time, is clearly at ease describing familiar places and personalities.  This gives his writing a powerful realism, so that the novel is genuinely moving without being sentimental.  The flap of the first edition describes Stoner as "a man who is clearly out of keeping with his times," and if the lackluster sales of the book upon its publication bear this out, its subsequent rediscovery suggests that Stoner, like Sloane before him, is of a type that exists in all times.

Short Timers

The Short-Timers by Gustav Hasford, 180 pages

"The Marines are looking for a few good men."  So the young man we know only as Joker enlists.  He soon learns more.  "The Marine Corps does not want robots.  The Marine Corps wants killers.  The Marine Corps wants to build indestructible men, men without fear."  If he never quite reaches that ideal, he pursues it, never alone, but always in the company of his fellow Marines, through the narrow hell of boot camp on Parris Island and the wider hell of war on the banks of the Perfume River.  "I understood that my own weapon could do this dark magic thing to any human being.  With my automatic rifle I could knock the life out of any enemy with just the slightest pressure of one finger.  And, knowing that, I was less afraid."

The Short Timers is no doubt best known as one of the two semi-autobiographical novels on which the film Full Metal Jacket is based (the other being Dispatches by Michael Herr).  The book is significantly different from the film - more brutal, more repetitive, and also more obvious.  Questions of credibility arise at certain points - how many Stars and Stripes photojournalists dabbled in cannibalism?  Perhaps more than one might think, but at times the reader will be very conscious that this is a novel and not a direct factual account, a problem that is compounded by some surreal sequences and others which are ambiguously unreal.  If the writing is uneven, however, there are certainly more than enough unforgettably visceral passages to justify the trouble.

Chiang Kai-Shek

Chiang Kai-Shek: China's Generalissimo and the Nation He Lost by Jonathon Fenby, 505 pages

Chiang Kai-Shek rose from humble beginnings to rule over the most populous nation in the world.  In his time he fought Chinese warlords, Communists, and the army of Imperial Japan.  He was a general who throughout his career lost more battles than he won, but only in his war with Mao Tse-Tung was he irrevocably defeated.  For the remainder of his life he plotted his return, and even in death his body remains unburied, awaiting a final rest in a restored Kuomintang China.

In his biography, Jonathan Fenby has attempted to tell the story of Chiang's rise and fall, ending with the retreat to Taiwan.  He does so passably, providing a broad, readable biography without much depth or special insight.  The real matter is implied in the second half of the subtitle.  In Fenby's estimation, it was Chiang Kai-Shek who lost China, and no one else, certainly not the American and British allies who demanded Chiang support their goals and worldview.  How he could have saved it is another matter, and here Fenby only offers some weak gestures in the direction of a Western-style liberalism that he acknowledges would have likely accelerated the disintegration of the Kuomintang government.  For some readers, the dogmatic insistence that China had to Westernize, with the only choice being between liberal "reforms" and Marxist revolution, will only sharpen the poignancy of the tale.

Storm of Steel

Storm of Steel: from the Diary of a German Storm-troop Officer on the Western Front by Ernst Junger, translated by Basil Creighton, 284 pages

Ernst Junger served in the German army, first as an enlisted man and later as an officer, throughout the First World War.  After the war, he published his diaries in book form, although he would revise the collection many times over the course of the following decades.  This is the first English translation, published in the fateful year of 1929.  Remarkably literary for a diary - even allowing for editing and revision by both author and translator - it is an open window to the legendary horrors - and lesser known heroics - of the Western Front.

The inevitable comparison is to All Quiet on the Western Front, but while that more famous work is a novel based on experience, this is an immediate, literal account.  Unlike Remarque, Junger does not end in despair but moves through it, or, as he says of one veteran early on, "One could see that the man had been through horror to the limit of despair and there had learned to despise it."  Like Remarque (and Henry Adams), Junger is brought face to face with the indifferent power of the inanimate world, but he casts the confrontation as a call to heroism, "It is in such moments that the human spirit triumphs over the mightiest demonstrations of material force."  The war leads him, not to nihilism, but to a renewed sense of collective purpose, "We stand in the memory of the dead who are holy to us, and we believe ourselves intrusted with the true and spiritual welfare of our people." 

Stalin's War

Stalin's War: A New History of World War II by Sean McMeekin, 666 pages

Sean McMeekin's provocative thesis in Stalin's War is that it is Stalin, not Hitler, who should be regarded as the central figure of World War II.  In proposing it, he is defying decades of Western historiography which has centered the war on Hitler's showdown with the French and British empires, as well as the Russian perspective in which the USSR is portrayed as the victim of Western perfidy and German aggression.  In McMeekin's persuasive retelling, neither the European nor the Pacific wars would have happened absent Stalin's active encouragement, and even Barbarossa was just as much a consequence of Stalin's ambitions in Central Europe as Hitler's.  Even more importantly, Stalin received from the war more than he could ever have hoped for, not only a mostly free hand in Central Europe and East Asia, but immense subsidies from US taxpayers to help build the Soviet military-industrial base.

The book is necessarily long and repetitive, yet McMeekin writes in a way that saves it from becoming ponderous.  Some may find the seemingly endless catalogues of lend-lease material supplied to an ungrateful mass murderer tiresome, but this is more than compensated for by the foregrounding of information which will be new even to those generally well-informed about the Second World War.

The Last Garden in England

The Last Garden in England by Julia Kelly 368 pages

Author Kelly employs one of my favorite plot devices, in this, her third novel: dueling timelines. Most writers use only tow, but Kelly has stretched her writing skills by having three timelines: present day, 1944 and 1907. She does a wonderful job in keeping the characters individualized with the descriptions, but I had a hard time with their voices---all three sounded similar. This caused an occasional problem for me as I sometimes forgot whose story was being told. However, the descriptions of the times and other characters involved held ground me.

The first plotline/character we meet is Emma. Her firm has been hired to restore the garden to Scotland’s Highbury House to its original grandeur. The garden hasn’t been maintained and is grossly overgrown.

The second character is Venetia Smith in 1907. She was hired by the original owners to design the garden in the formal English style. She lays it out in a series of “rooms,” different areas for different emotions…like the Children’s Garden, The Poet’s Corner, the Winter Garden, etc. Interesting enough, Venetia is based on a real-life designer, one that Emma holds in the highest esteem.

The third plotline is 1944. Actually there are three women in this section: Highbury House’s mistress and its cook plus a “land girl,” come to work the land since all the men were off to war.

Three generations of women plan and care for the garden, each with her own story. I found Venetia’s story the most compelling. In the early 20^th century there were not many women who owned a business. Second, I found the discovery of Venetia’s original plans in the present day the highlight of the novel. It had the most tension and the most excitement.

The Last Garden in England is touted as for fans of Kate Morton’s novel, The Lake House, but I don’t feel it even comes close. The tension was sporadic, and I still don’t understand the title. Therefore, The Last Garden in England receives 3 out of 5 stars in Julie’s world. 

 

The Forgotten Home Child

The Forgotten Home Child by Genevieve Graham  384pages

Fans of Christina Baker Kline’s Orphan Train will love this latest novel from Genevieve Graham.  This story is also about the relocation of children, much like what happened here in in America between 1854 and 1929.  This story, however, is how the British relocated destitute children to Canada between 1869 and 1948. During that time it is estimated that more than 120,000 children between the ages of three and eighteen were taken from England’s streets and orphanages, or given up by their parents, and sent to Canada to be taken in by whoever would give them a home. Many were abused and neglected as there was no checks and balances systems to ensure they were well cared for. Graham based this novel on those children.

This story is framed by ninety-seven-year-old Winny, who was once one of those children. In 2018, her granddaughter drops the box when she is helping Winny move and a lifetime of memories tumble out.

Then the story goes back to 1936, which is the setting for the majority of the story. It follows Winny, Jack, his sister Mary, and two brothers, Edward and Cecil. The little band of five is all they have in the world to call their family.

Upon their arrival in Canada, they are split up---Jack, Edward and Cecil going to one farm while Mary and Winny are also split up.  Life is hard on the farms, the people entrusted with the youngsters treat them less than they do their animals. The live for the day when they can all be together again and make a home of their choosing.

At Winny’s new home, if she doesn’t finish her chores before the supper scraps are thrown out, the dogs get to eat while she goes to bed hungry. She is forced to sleep in the barn, but thank heavens for the sheep or she would freeze to death in the deep cold of a Canadian winter. At the farm where Mary has been sent, she is repeatedly raped by her “master.”  The boys are worked like mules and are often beat for the tiniest of infractions.

Much like Baker Kline’s Orphan Train, readers will get to know all five of the children intimately, but Winny takes the lead. This is a tale of loss, turbulence, resilience, second chances, adaptability, and courage. Be prepared to not get anything else accomplished once you start this wonderfully woven tale.

The Forgotten Home Child receives 6 out of 5 stars in Julie’s world.

 

From the Terrace

From the Terrace by John O'Hara, 897 pages

Born to an alcoholic mother and a father who had spent all his love on a son who died too young, Raymond Alfred Eaton grew up in a cold home with a cold future - one day he would inherit the family steel mill and live out his days as the biggest fish in the small pond of Port Johnson, Pennsylvania.  The larger world beckoned, however, and after a spell at Princeton he chose instead to seek his fortune on Wall Street and to serve his country in Washington, DC.  Along the way he struggles to maintain his integrity and reputation in the boardroom, the war room, and the bedroom.  His failure is an American tragedy.

John O'Hara, once considered to be a major American writer - even a potential Nobel Prize winner - is mostly forgotten today.  A mere two years after its publication, From the Terrace was made into a "major motion picture" starring Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, but it is no better remembered than the novel.  If this is unjust, it is hardly surprising, as From the Terrace is today as redolent of its own moment in time as its descriptions of life in the first half of the twentieth century are reflective of those eras, particularly its prurient obsession with sex.  On the other hand, it is a remarkably complex page-turner.

British in India

The British in India: A Social History of the Raj by David Gilmour, 525 pages

For better than three hundred years, the British were in, and increasingly over, India, first in the form of the East India Company, later as direct representatives of the Empire.  Who they were, why they came, and how they lived are the subjects of David Gilmour's sweeping social history, a pointillist study which sketches the human face of the British presence on the subcontinent.

As a social history, this is not to be confused with a more conventional political or military history, and a basic knowledge of British and Indian history is required to make much sense out of it.  Gilmour admirably resists the natural temptation to put the more interesting oddities in the foreground while leaving the boring commonplaces in the background.  Even more remarkably, he largely abstains from value judgments, allowing the lives of his subjects to speak for themselves without authorial editorializing.  Unfortunately, this does nothing to moderate the at-times overwhelming amount of information Gilmour presents, but so many of the anecdotes he has uncovered are entertaining or enlightening that the reader is likely to find being lost amongst them a delight rather than a chore.

Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity

Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity by Ven Fulton J Sheen, 170 pages

Written in 1938, as fascists and communists in Europe and America gathered their forces for their pending assault against the liberal order, Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity diagnoses the troubles of the time in terms of the internal contradictions of the slogans of the bloody revolution which established that order.  The liberals exalt freedom above all, the totalitarians demand equality, and as the values each proposes are seemingly incommensurable, their differences cannot be peacefully resolved absent a higher unifying principle.  Sheen finds this principle in fraternity, the principle which animates Catholic social teaching, which he advances as a cure for the world's ills.

Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity was written early in Sheen's public career, and suffers from a lack of focus.  After ably establishing his argument, Sheen proceeds to ramble on at length about the threat of communist subversion in the US - a timely warning, but one not directly connected to the main theme of the book or of much interest to a reader eighty years later.  Sheen's analysis of both liberalism and totalitarianism as sharing the same dehumanizing character despite their irreconcilable differences, however, remains powerful.

Three Faces of Fascism

Three Faces of Fascism: Action Francaise, Italian Fascism, National Socialism by Ernst Nolte, translated by Leila Vennewitz, 462 pages

Almost as soon as Mussolini coined the term in 1919, "fascism" began to be used as a slur, and the widely divergent views of those who have claimed the label have generated almost as much confusion as those who have stuck the label on others.  This has led some to question whether a coherent ideology that can be called "fascism" exists beyond whatever happens to be necessary to justify the leader's will to power, a view grounded in Mussolini's famous exaltation of action over thought and bolstered by the tendency since 1945 of considering fascism primarily as a subset of totalitarianism.  Nonetheless, as Ernst Nolte carefully explicates in this seminal study, twentieth century fascism has unique characteristics which definitively separate it from both more traditional forms of reaction and Marxism.

As Nolte understands it, fascism is identifiable by its denial of the possibility of a future world free from sin and injustice, a denial he alternately describes as "resistance to transcendence" and "hostility to history".  This not only places fascism in direct opposition both to traditional religion and various forms of socialism, it contributes to a worldview which imagines history as a ceaseless struggle without end or ultimate meaning.  Yet the salvific promises of fascism become progressively evident throughout his study - embryonically in Maurras' secularized Catholicism, haltingly in Mussolini's braggadaccio, fully in Hitler's megalomania.  His argument is further undercut by a certain amount of special pleading, as when he dismisses the lack of terror in fascist Italy with the claim that the black shirt terrorism accompanying Mussolini's rise sufficed for the duration of his reign.  If these flaws diminish the value of Nolte's conclusions, however, they do not affect the depth and thoroughness of his examination of the intellectual roots and branches of fascist politics.

Suspect

The Suspect: An Olympic Bombing, the FBI, the Media, and Richard Jewell, the Man Caught in the Middle by Kent Alexander and Kevin Salwen, 334 pages

On July 27th, 1996, Richard Jewell, a former sheriff's deputy doing security work during the Olympic Games, noticed a suspicious package under a bench in Atlanta's Centennial Park.  The bomb squad was summoned and Jewell joined his coworkers in attempting to clear people from the area.  Less than half an hour later, the bomb inside the package exploded, killing two people and injuring dozens more.  Within days, the press was reporting, based on leaks from within the FBI, that investigators had determined that Jewell had planted the bomb himself.  Tom Brokaw told millions of Americans that there was "probably" already sufficient evidence to arrest and prosecute Jewell.  Three months later, the FBI officially announced that it had, in fact, never had any real evidence to tie Jewell to the bombing, its focus on him having been driven by their belief that he fit the "profile" of a lone bomber, this despite the fact that the FBI knew early on that he couldn't have carried out the bombing alone.  As Kent Alexander and Kevin Salwen report, Richard Jewell's guilt had been a "convenient myth" - it had given the FBI a suspect, the media a story, and the Olympics a chance to move on.  That it had almost destroyed Jewell was a small price to pay.

If their book is a cautionary tale, it is not, however, a polemic.  Alexander and Salwen write in a way that is factual, compelling, and deeply personal, not surprising in that both were tangentially involved in the story and knew many of the players, Alexander as a US Attorney and Salwen as an editor for the Wall Street Journal.  It would be a hard heart indeed which is not moved by their account of the later years of Kathy Scruggs, the reporter who broke the Jewell story, and it is even possible to feel a grudging admiration for Eric Rudolph, the actual bomber, who spent over five years as a fugitive in the Carolina mountains, sleeping in caves and surviving only on what he could catch or scavenge.  Perhaps the greatest insight the book can give is into the direction of the massive power of the federal government and public opinion by ordinary, imperfect people just trying to do their jobs.

Shining Path

The Shining Path: Love, Madness, and Revolution in the Andes by Orin Starn and Miguel La Serna, 355 pages

On Christmas Eve, 1980, a group of rebels invaded the home of a well-off sugar farmer in a remote canyon in the Peruvian Andes.  The guerrillas dragged the landowner to a nearby chapel where they tortured him to death, leaving "Long Live the People's War" spray-painted on a farmhouse wall.  He was the first to die in that war, launched a few months earlier by a sect of Maoist revolutionaries calling themselves the Peruvian Communist Party but invariably referred to in the foreign press by the more romantic name Shining Path.  Their barbaric struggle would drag on for over a decade and leave over 70000 dead, roughly half killed by the Shining Path themselves, the other half split between the regular army and village militias.  

It is difficult to write a history of a guerrilla insurgency, which by its very nature is fluid and avoids decisive battles.  It is even more difficult without reliable sources from within the movement.  Starn and La Serna attempt to overcome these difficulties, and paint a broader picture of Peru in the last decades of the twentieth century, by concentrating on the personal stories of those touched by the conflict, from slum activist Maria Elena Moyano to novelist and presidential candidate Mario Vargas Llosa to policeman Marco Miyashiro to peasant militiaman Narciso Sulca.  As a result, those who expect either a thorough history or an exploration of the inner workings of the insurrection are likely to be disappointed.  They are unlikely to be bored, or to soon forget some of the unexpected people and places introduced.

Father Coughlin

Father Coughlin: The Tumultuous Life of the Priest of the Little Flower by Sheldon Marcus, 232 pages

For his supporters, he was one of the few men with the courage to defy the Establishment and take a stand against the vested interests responsible for the Great Depression, steering America between the Scylla of Fascism and the Charybdis of Communism.  To his enemies, he was a demagogue exploiting the desperate masses, an ignorant loudmouthed bigot, a Catiline in a Roman collar.  In his own account, he was a simple priest preaching the social doctrine of his Church.  For over a decade Father Charles Coughlin held forth to an audience of millions, both on the radio and in his journal Social Justice, providing critical support to FDR in the 1932 election, when he coined the slogan "Roosevelt or Ruin", but turning against him when the New Deal proved insufficiently radical.  Hatred of bankers and financiers segued easily into anti-Semitism, Anglophobia into Teutonophilia, horror at Communism into sympathy for fascism.  In 1942, he narrowly escaped treason charges for his vocal opposition to the same president he had helped put in power ten years earlier.

Those years of feverish activity are the only reason anyone is interested in a biography of Coughlin, and they are the subject of the overwhelming majority of this book.  Unfortunately, Sheldon Marcus' biography is a confused jumble of news reports and personal reminiscences, without narrative flow or structure.  Marcus seems singularly uninterested - or perhaps assumes his audience will be - in the substance of Coughlin's political positions, but also provides only the barest glimpses of the personalities involved.  The author might be praised for his willingness to present multiple conflicting accounts of the same events and let the reader judge which is the most plausible, but the result is an undifferentiated mass of information more likely to confuse than edify.

Auden and Christianity

Auden and Christianity by Arthur Kirsch, 179 pages

In Auden and Christianity Arthur Kirsch explores the impact of the faith of WH Auden primarily through an analysis of For the Time Being and the "Horae Canonicae".  In the process Kirsch reveals the extent to which Christianity served as a unifying principle in Auden's life and work, bringing together matter and spirit, the present and the past, the individual and society.

This is the kind of literary criticism that is expansive rather than reductive, illuminating one facet of an author's work without denying the existence or value of others.  Although Kirsch's remarkable combination of sensitivity and candor is unlikely to inspire readers to a greater love of God, it is very likely to lead to a greater love of Auden.

Lenten Lands

Lenten Lands: My Life with Joy Davidman and CS Lewis by Douglas H Gresham, 213 pages

Douglas Gresham is the younger son of the authors WL Gresham and Joy Davidman.  After his parents' divorce, his mother took him to England, where she had become close friends with the brothers CS (Jack to his friends) and WH (Warnie) Lewis.  In time, Jack and Joy would wed, and Lewis legally adopted the Gresham boys.  Lenten Lands is Gresham's memoir of his time at the Kilns, as the Lewis' home was called, from the earliest days when it seemed an enchanted place, to later years when it became for him an emblem of loss and grief.

This is a personal book.  Lewis' writings are barely mentioned, and anyone seeking insight into them (other than A Grief Observed) is sure to be disappointed.  It is also Gresham's book, giving his perspective and not anyone else's, and it is focused on his life rather than being "CS Lewis As I Knew Him."  It has to be said that it is all the more charming for that, and it would be an enjoyable read even if Lewis had never written a word.

Judgment in Moscow

Judgment in Moscow: Soviet Crimes and Western Complicity by Vladimir Bukovsky. translated by Alyona Kojevnikov, 626 pages

Usually, when a criminal regime is removed from power, there is a reckoning, whether in the form of war crimes trials or truth and reconciliation commissions.  When the USSR collapsed, however, there was no judgment passed upon the men and women who had brutally tyrannized millions for generations.  In the opinion of dissident Vladimir Bukovsky, there could be only one reason for this lapse - the criminals had not really been defeated.  To the contrary, they remained at the levers of power, fully prepared to reassert themselves in time.  And so it happened.

Judgment in Moscow was originally published, in Russian, in 1996.  It was soon translated into a number of languages, but English was not one of them - until now.  In Bukovsky's account, this was due to the unwillingness of his publishers at Random House to market a book documenting  how Western elites fundamentally misunderstood the Soviet nightmare, deliberately or accidentally supported its continuation, and finally helped its engineers escape justice.  This unwillingness was itself a demonstration of the urgent need for an honest accounting for the history of Soviet tyranny and the struggle against it, a need which has tragically continued to be unmet.  The long-delayed publication of Bukovsky's book is at least a small step in that direction.