Hell or Connaught!

Hell or Connaught!: The Cromwellian Colonisation of Ireland 1652-1660 by Peter Berresford Ellis, 252 pages

Catholic Ireland revolted against the Protestant rule of Charles I in 1641.  By 1644 the Irish were supporting the King against Parliament, and after the execution of the King in 1649 the Roundhead army arrived in Ireland to end resistance by fire and sword and, most deadly of all, starvation.  Hundreds of thousands of Irish, perhaps as much as a quarter of the population, perished and thousands more were enslaved and transported to the New World.  In Ireland itself, the decision was made to isolate the native Catholic population in the province of Connaught, the northwestern quarter of the island, with the lands thus depopulated to be given as pay for the Commonwealth soldiery and the London investors who backed the campaign.

The story of this decision, the effort made trying to put it into effect, and the pain it engendered are the primary themes of Ellis' history of the period.  There are other important narratives here, too, including the impact of land speculation, the religious sectarian divides among the colonists, the internal politics of the Commonwealth, ultimately resulting in its end, and the disappointments of the Restoration.  Ellis tells these stories, and more, including the long running personal feud over the survey of Ireland, in a straightforward manner that nevertheless manages to incorporate primary sources and contemporary poetry to provide a complete picture of a crucial moment in Irish history.

Who Fears Death

Who Fears Death  by Nnedi Okorafor   419 pages

I would never have read this book were it not a book club choice as I am not drawn to science fiction or magical bildungsroman tales. It is clear that Okorafor is transitioning from YA to adult; her protagonists are young but the themes and events of the story are undeniably, brutally adult, and Okorafor certainly deserves a great deal of respect for her willingness to unflinchingly examine rape, genocide, and female genital mutilation. The novel is set in a post-apocalyptic Africa, where two clearly distinguishable ethnic groups are in conflict. At its heart, this is a standard coming-of-age story: a young person gaining a teacher, learning they are the subject of a prophecy, and going to defeat an evil lord. There was a lot more to the conclusion than the heroine realizing that she needed to upend the systemic problems that created her opponent, rather than just defeat him; the ending felt hurried and odd, like I overlooked or misinterpreted details through the story. To fully appreciate the story, I should probably go through it again, but I didn’t enjoy it enough to invest any more time doing so.

Posted by:   Regina C.  

Machete Season

Machete Season: The Killers in Rwanda Speak by Jean Hatzfeld, 253 pages

"The first day, a messenger from the municipal judge went house to house summoning us to a meeting right away.  There the judge announced that the reason for the meeting was the killing of every Tutsi without exception.  It was simply said, and it was simple to understand."

Simply said, simply understood, and simple to carry out.  For the next few weeks, Pancrace Hakizamungli and his Hutu friends and neighbors from the Nyamata district of Rwanda, sometimes assisted and encouraged by troops sent by the government but often on their own, methodically hunted down and slaughtered thousands of Tutsi men, women, and children who had, until recently, also been their neighbors.  Most of the killings were carried out by machete, the tool that the killers were most comfortable with, the one they used in their everyday work, clearing land and butchering animals, proving equally handy for butchering people.

Machete Season is Jean Hatzfeld's second oral history of the Rwandan genocide - the first, Life Laid Bare, presented the experiences of the victims.  The former is, as might be expected, even more horrific than the latter, both due to the inclusion of atrocities no victim survived to speak of and the insight into the minds of the genocidaires.  For the perpetrators, the killing season, in retrospect, acquires the character of a holiday.  Ordinary work and even church services were suspended - the men spent their days killing, the women looting, the children helping both, all living off the property of the victims.  Indeed, as the Tutsis controlled most of the Rwandan cattle, the plundering Hutus feasted on a previously undreamt-of quantity of meat.  Mass murder was not a distasteful task, but something they took pleasure in.

Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler

Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler: The Age of Social Catastrophe by Robert Gellately, 594 pages

The closing years of the First World War saw an unprecedented wave of human liberation sweep across Europe.  The repressive tyrannies that had shackled the human spirit for so many centuries, particularly the traditional regimes of the Russian, German, Habsburg, and Ottoman empires, were at long last swept away.  Idealists were finally free to pursue lofty visions of a better world without superstitious nonsense about human limitations, and they found their visionaries in such men as Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler.  The screams of their tens of millions of victims echo still today, even if many, now as then, seem deaf to them.

Although he certainly identifies the many similarities his subjects shared, Gellately also highlights differences, notably the contrast between Hitler's "consensus dictatorship" as against the Soviet Bolshevik dictatorship, resulting in revolutionary Communism as opposed to evolutionary Nazism, expressed in differences between the "arbitrary and sweeping terror" under Lenin and Stalin and the "aimed terror" of Hitler.  While providing surprises and insights even for those familiar with the period, Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler manages to be an accessible introduction to the darkest chapter in human history so far, from the conditions which encouraged so many to commit themselves to the inhuman ideologies of Leninism, Stalinism, and Hitlerism, through the clash of those ideologies in a social catastrophe "so utterly unprecedented in all its many horrific faces, that it raised questions about the very meaning and future of Western civilization."

The Vanquished

The Vanquished: Why the First World War Failed to End by Robert Gerwath, 267 pages

After the guns fell silent across the western front on the 11th of November, 1918, the Western Allies entered a peaceful reverie that lasted, with brief disturbances, until September of 1939.  The result is a clear division between the world wars.  But, as Robert Gerwath relates in The Vanquished, the experience of those decades was very different for those in the empires - German, Austrian, Russian, Ottoman - whose defeat in the War resulted in their dissolution.  In the East, the War continued for years after peace was formally declared, as the lines drawn on a map at Versailles were rewritten in blood across the landscape, and the conventional rationales of the First World War were gradually replaced by a new, genocidal logic.

Gerwath briskly and readably relates the bloody chaos and anarchy, and even bloodier order, that attended the revolutions and counter-revolutions, civil wars and territorial wars, of the early twenties,  The remainder of the inter-war period is only briefly summarized.  There are some oddities of organization - the rise of Mussolini is described several chapters before the saga of D'Annunzio's seizure of Fiume, for example - but these do not prevent The Vanquished from being a compelling and informative account of a much-neglected but vitally important chapter in the history of the twentieth century.

Half of a Yellow Sun

Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, 433 pages

Half of a Yellow Sun is a historical fiction novel that takes place during Biafra’s attempt at independence from Nigeria in the 1960’s. We are guided through the winding narrative by the main characters, Ugwu the houseboy, Odenigbo his master and a local professor, and Olanna the professor’s mistress, also to a lesser extent Richard a write and Kainene, Olanna’s sister.

Half of a Yellow Sun is another book I read for a book group, but unlike the previous blogged about book, this one was up my alley, or at least near my ally. While it had little in common with the historic fiction by Turtledove that I do read, I found it to be at worst bearable, and at times even enjoyable.

But what I truly liked about this book was how Chimamanda choose to end the book. It is sadly too rare for a book end in such a fashion, and for that I instantly thought better of this book.

Note: This is not the cover my edition had, but this seems to be an accepted version.

History of the Armenian Genocide

"They Can Live in the Desert but Nowhere Else": A History of the Armenian Genocide by Ronald Grigor Suny, 374 pages

2015 marks the hundredth anniversary of the height of the mass slaughter of Armenians by the Ottoman government, a horror which resulted in the first use of the term "crimes against humanity".  Not surprisingly, a number of books have been released to coincide with the anniversary, and Suny's is surely one of the best.  He relates in careful detail how modernity and its attendant ethnic nationalist factionalism turned Armenians from the best trusted and most loyal subjects of the Sultan into an oppressed, marginalized ethnic group.  The eventual genocide is revealed as the culmination of an escalating series of massacres and persecutions carried out despite, not because of, military necessity.

The book takes a middle course, concentrating on the narrative of how the genocide developed, rather than on extensive statistical analyses of the populations involved or the visceral personal experiences of victims and killers.  Perhaps no book could do all three well, and by making the choice he did, Suny is able to not only illuminate what happened in Anatolia a hundred years ago, but also to sketch the general process by which genocides are born.

Dancing in the Glory of Monsters

Dancing in the Glory of Monsters: The Collapse of the Congo and the Great War of Africa by Jason K Stearns, 337 pages

The wars that have raged in and around the Congo since the mid-'90s have sometimes been described as the African equivalent of a World War, but Stearns finds a closer parallel in the Thirty Years War.  Like their seventeenth century European cousin, the First and Second Congo Wars featured a disunited giant nation being fought over by its smaller neighbors, with shifting alliances and a galaxy of minor players, each with its own agenda, all of which seemed to be fighting to mutual exhaustion.  This helps explain why the Congo has received so little media attention as compared to Rwanda or Darfur, where the situation was much clearer, although the casualties were an order of magnitude smaller.

Stearns navigates the confused tangle of factions and personalities with ease.  Even better is his rare gift for personalization - the journalistic human interest angles flow organically into the historical narrative, and shed actual light on events, whether making concrete the reality of the human tragedy or exploring the psychology of genocidaires.  The ending seems shockingly abrupt, but this is no doubt true to life, still, more material on the ongoing post-war conflicts would not have been out of place.

Sub-Saharan Africa has, for a long time, been an easy place to ignore.  That time may be ending.  That time should be ending.  Stearns' book is a good place to start paying attention.