Fascism in America - the View from 1930s Vermont: Review of "It Can'y Happen Here"

It Can't Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

In the 1930s, the world was becoming increasingly dominated by totalitarian states, and these were not just the banana republics that we have grown accustomed to seeing in Africa, Latin America or the Middle East. Totalitarianism, whether in the form of fascism or communism, seemed to have a monopoly on new thinking and revolution. It was far from unthinkable that this was the new way of the world.

It was into this world thatSinclair Lewis injected It Can't Happen Here. The fictional rise of Berzelius "Buzz" Windrip is rapid and shocking, showing just how fragile America's constitutional balance of power is. I found that rise to be a bit precipitous (vs. similar fictional American fascist movements laid out in The Plot Against America or The Center Cannot Hold and [The Victorious Opposition]. Sinclair is a better author than either Roth or Turtledove, but the later books take things slower. Those feel more plausible, but Sinclair's history is amazingly possible.

Another place where Sinclair seems to skip a cylinder is in the brutality of the Windrip Corpo regime. The repression is brutal and torture is always awful, but Sinclair did not have a conception of the mechanized murder and evil that was to come in the Holocaust. Turtledove does not flinch from a proposed Confederate Holocaust and the threat of the Holocaust is ever-present in Roth's book. But I can in no way blame Lewis for failing to foresee the twists that the mind of Adolf Hitler would take (even if Japanese behavior in Nanking and other Chinese cities had given a taste of what was to come).

And don't rest on your laurels America, thinking that the age of totalitarianism is past and so is the threat that Lewis wrote of. I worry about the claims made by an imperial presidency, regardless of party. Always question those who have all the answers.

View all my reviews

What If It Happened Here - Review of "The Plot Against America"

The Plot Against America by Philip Roth


My rating: 3 of 5 stars
I went into this book expecting to dislike it. I'm not certain why. Maybe it was the fact that I remember gushing reviews talking about how Roth had created a 'whole new literary genre'.

The genre exists. It's called alternate history. It sells millions of books.

As alt-history goes, this isn't too bad. The memoir aspect is a little different, but does fit well with the focus on day-to-day life of ordinary people instead of movers-and-shakers. As for alt-history tropes, we h=get the seemingly ever-present Jews (nothing against Judaism, it just that Jews are way over-represented in nearly all alt-history series for reasons that I have yet to ascertain), we have a roughly defined point-of-departure (why did Lindy suddenly decide to run for president?), but a real failing on what Terry Pratchett has termed the 'trousers of time' problem. Basically, Roth gives us two years of alternate history, but then has the world snap back into the same basic shape as before (victory in Europe a little late, RFK still assassinated in the 60's). I don't buy it. Once history comes off the rails of what we have been taught, it cannot be forced back on. Would RFK have run for president if JFK hadn't been killed? Would JFK have been president if his big brother Joe Jr. hadn't died in a B-25 bomber/drone accident? Would the US Air Corps have used the same plan to take out V1 sites if they had 2 extra years of aviation development under Lindy before entering the war? Everything goes all quantum on you.

Outside of the discussion of alt-history tropes, well, I'm not sure if I see what makes Roth so admired. Some scenes were very effective. Many others felt like bad filler. The main character, Philip Roth at age 9 or so, comes off as a self-absorbed little snot.

Maybe I'm not cultured enough to understand.

View all my reviews >>

Japan Didn't Know When to Quit - Review of 1945: A Novel

1945:_A_Novel by Robert Conroy

My review rating: 2 of 5 stars

*Sigh*

My wife mocks my reading of Harry Turtledove because it's so far from literature. To her, the flat characters and forced plots pull her out of the story to often to enjoy the ideas or just the ride. Conroy shows me much more of what that must feel like for her.

In a lot of ways, I don't blame the othor for most of the problems in this book - I blame the editor. It's the editor's job to point out when the author swaps point-of-view in the middle of a conversation. It's the editor's job to put in this extra line breaks between shifts of focus and to try and balance the chapters to some form of consistency. It's the editor's job to cut unneccassary referrence to future events (a bomber called "the Polish Pope"?). I really feel like the editor said "It's alt-history, who cares if it's badly edited, these morons will read anything."

So am I a moron for reading it?

The idea that Japan would fail to surrender after the triple-blow of two nuclear bombs and a declaration of war from the Soviet Union seemed like a stretch to me when I first picked up this book. I was not aware of the Kyujo Incident, an attempted coup to prevent Emperor Hirohito's surrender to the Allies. With a successful Kyujo Incident as his point of departure, Conroy spins a believeable history right up until his characters become a bit too involved. Then we get a deus ex-machina (or emperor ex-helicopter, as the case may be) ending that leaves reader scrathing their heads feeling a bit as if they've been robbed.

Nope, Conroy is not my new Turtledove. More's the pity.

Absurd Super-weapons of WWII -- Review of "My Tank Is Fight!"

From Goodreads:
"My Tank is Fight! is a humorous look at more than 20 unusual or insane inventions of the Second World War. Each chapter features a detailed examination of the real history and technology behind each invention. All 19 chapters are linked by a fictional narrative that explores what might have happened had the inventions been put to use during the War. The book is also lavishly illustrated, with 18 full-color illustrations and more than two dozen detailed black and white illustrations. My Tank is Fight! is not a dry analysis of the forgotten weapons of war, it brings those weapons to life."

30 foot high super-tanks.
U-boats that crawl out of the water on treads.
Backpack helicopters.
Aircraft carriers made out of ice.
Spaceplane bombers
Flying tanks

They actually built 2 of those in at least prototype form.

Funny stuff, well-organized, and aimed at the fan of WWII as a pulp-adventure. I wish the author had kept going. Yes, I know the Germans had a real knack for the absurd weapons, but he couldn't find anything in the Pacific Theatre? Weren't the Japanese going to bomb the Panama Canal with submarine-launched bombers? Where are they?

I need a sequel.

End of a Fascist Confederate States -- Review of "In At the Death"

Settling Accounts: In at the Death by Harry Turtledove

review rating: 2 of 5 stars
Not bad...not the best in the series. I spent the second half of the book wondering what Turtledove was waiting for to end the book. As it turns out, not much...it just kind of ends.

Maybe someone else can confirm, but I'm pretty sure that this is the end of the rather massive Timeline-191 series. From "How Few Remain" we've had eleven volumes in total.

The whole series was rather good I thought, but things become more and more forced once Turtledove had committed himself to a Second World War. The parrallels became too forced, a common problem with the alt-history genre in general. Sometimes I get the feeling the author just wanted this series to go away.

View all my reviews.

Tales From the Recently Read Stack...

I've been on a run of WWII-themed reading material of late. I'm going to have to take a break soon to fit in"The No-Cry Sleep Solution" so that my wife and I can sleep for longer than 2-3 hours at one time without having our toddler go ballistic on us. But in the meantime, here's some of the recent reading material that has been cluttering up our apartment.

Harry Turtledove continues on with his Great War or Southern Victory series. I can't bring myself to pay hardback prices for this series, so I've just finished The Grapple while In at the Death hits the bookstore shelves. These two represent books eleven and twelve in Turtledove's alternate timeline the separates from ours shortly before the battle of Antietam. Some eighty years later, North America is embroiled in a Second World War between the USA and CSA.

The many different point of view characters and lack of traditional narrative arcs makes epic alternative history books like these hard to follow at times. Turtledove fans have even spawned their own wiki to keep track of his works, timelines, and characters. I will never argue that Turtledove creates great literature, but I think it is good sometimes for Americans to imagine what life would have been like if the ravages of war had visited our shores as well as those of Europe.

The Foreign Correspondent by Alan Furst does aspire to be great literature. The story follows the life of an Italian emigre in Paris in 1939. Carlo Weisz splits his time between reporting on a Europe lurching towards war for Reuters and serving as editor for a clandestine Italian resistance newspaper. There is, of course, a romantic plot line thrown in as well. I really felt that the strongest portions of the book centered on Weisz serving as a witness to history, from the end of the Spanish Civil War to the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia. These scenes of 'neutral' reporters rushing with and ahead of armies to get the scoop and the story were more compelling and tension-filled than the shadowing and counter-shadowing of Italian emigres by Mussolini's secret police.

Finally, I'm still working my way through a non-fiction entry, a biography of John Whitesides Parsons. Strange Angel covers Parsons' work as one of the pioneers of rocketry during the 30's and 40's in America. Parson's was central to the creation of modern solid-fueled rockets and the use of JATOs by the US Army Air Corps and US Navy. He was also a priest in Aleister Crowley's cultish Church of Thelema. Parson's was a renaissance man and all-around geek at a time in which membership in the American Communist Party, the Ordo Templi Orientis, the American Interplanetary Society, and the Los Angeles Science Fiction League were all technically legal, but looked down upon with equal disdain. All of these groups sought to change the world and open up new frontiers through learning, and Parsons moved in the circles of them all until his death in an explosion in 1952.

What I'm Reading

Life may be hectic, but I have always felt that having something that you are reading is important. I thought I'd take a moment to cover two books, one I just finished and a second I've started to dig into.

First is The Utility of Force by General Rupert Smith. I was inspired to order this book after seeing Smith, a retired British general and former D-SACEUR in NATO, give history lessons to Jon Stewart on the Daily Show.

Although the book was only 400+ pages, it was amazingly dense with analysis of war and military power from the reforms of Napoleon to our current mess in Iraq. The main thrust was to show how the militaries of the West in particular are still wed to the idea of 'industrial war' that was created by revolutionary France and 'perfected,' for lack of a better term, in the two World Wars. The advent of the atomic bomb made that sort of war unwinnable. Instead, almost all wars since 1945 have grown out of the guerrilla tradition. Now we face what Smith inelegantly calls "war among the people." Instead of using strength and force to break the will of your enemy, we must capture the will of the people to break the strength of the enemy.

I'm really not doing justice to the book here. Smith is calling for a fundamental re-assessment of the purpose and organization of the military in a way that has not been seen since Clausewitz. It is not an easy read, but it does put all of the political and military fumblings in Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon, Palestine, Kosovo, Bosnia, and Chechnya in a stark,but now understandable framework. I wish it were required reading for any of our presidential candidates.

So, after a scholarly work of military theory, I decided to slip into my guilty reading pleasure, the sometimes pulpy alternate-histories of Harry Turtledove. In this case "The End of the Beginning," the second book in his "Days of Infamy" series. The point of departure is the decision by the Japanese to not only bomb Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, but to follow-up with an immediate invasion of the islands.

Folks can debate all they'd like whether the Japanese had the logistical ability to handle such a long-range operation, but I think Turtledove handles these questions pretty well. The interesting challenge with this series versus other alt-histories is that the invasion isn't likely to irrevocably change the world. In the World War series, alien invasion changes the world eventually beyond recognition. Turtledove's Great War series, has a much smaller point of departure (a dropped set of orders wrapped around some cigars), but has led to a version of WWII being fought in Ohio and Pennsylvania. Here, the Japanese hold the Hawaiian islands, but the most I can see that doing for them is to delay the inevitable for a year or so.

Turtledove is clearly aware that he is not playing with the fate of worlds in this series and instead limits his point-of-view characters to the island of Oahu and a few Americans training stateside for the inevitable US invasion. The trick works rather well; the reader finds themselves hanging on every rumor of the war in the wider world. The limited geography also helps to create more of a feeling of oppression and claustrophobia inherent in the occupied territory. In the end, it isn't great literature, but for a WWII geek like myself, it's an enjoyable read.