Review: How to Lose a Battle by Bill Fawcett

How to Lose a Battle
by Bill Fawcett
2 stars

There is a hierarchy of history books. There are the upper tier books, which grab you and present you with fascinating new worlds to explore. Books like The Devil in the White City, and The Evolution of Useful Things fall in to this category. They’re as gripping as a novel and bring events to life (as dead as that cliche is).

Then there’s the second tier down, full of interesting history, but not written well enough to spur you to action.

Below those books are the dreadfully dull historical novels and textbooks, which curbstomp history and leave it for dead. We’ll ignore those.

How To Lose A Battle , edited and mostly written by Bill Fawcett, falls decidedly in the second tier. This book showed promise – I picked it up on the basis of its title alone. Yet I was certainly not interested in much of the book. This is just a collection of stories of various military blunders.

Some of the essays are very good. I was particularly interested in the essay on the Six-Day War by Edward E Kramer (although why he was chosen as a good person to write this essay I have no idea – he’s better known for founding DragonCon and writing other sci-fi books – assuming I found the correct Kramer.)

Other essays aren’t so great. I hate to name names, but I was really unimpressed by Bill Fawcett’s writing style. All he writes is a narrative. If you’re looking for an analysis of these events, or even a particularly critical examination of them, look elsewhere. It’s hard for the stories to stand on their own – can you really derive entertainment from events that, because of poor leadership led to the deaths of thousands of people? OK, yes, if you’re a horrible person like me, who calls the Darwin Awards a joke book, you can.

This isn’t a funny book though. It’s just stories, depressingly real stories about stupid people and stupid deaths, and the author doesn’t even take the time to give a full picture of the disasters. Either make it interesting by teaching me something, or make it interesting by glazing over it to humor.

• It’s also somewhat annoying to read endings like this.
• It’s the lazy way out of writing a good conclusion, and almost every essay by Bill Fawcett (and there are a hell of a lot of them for your anthology, Mr. Editor!) ends in bullet points.
• Seriously, it’s like reading through a textbook and getting to the Chapter Summary at the end. Snooze.

Challenges: 325 pages, A to Z

Review: The Bridge at Andau by James Michener

4 stars

 ”At one camp near Andau, a Catholic priest visited a group of refugee students and asked, ‘Now that you are free, would you like me to conduct religious services here next Sunday?’
The boys were embarrassed, but finally one said, ‘Father, we thought we’d just sit around and talk.’
The priest understood and laughed: ‘Yes…after so much silence.’”

If the last book I read (Cat’s Cradle) was about the futility of man, this book is about the survival of man. Although much has changed (and much has stayed the same) in the 50 years since this book was written, it remains a powerful work and argument against communism.

Andau's coat of arms. Thank you, Wikipedia!

The bridge at Andau is small – just a few cheap boards over a not-too-big river. Yet it is also a marker of the boundary between Hungary and Austria, and at the height of the Soviet occupation of Hungary, it also became the site of a mass migration of refugees fleeing the Communist regime. Their powerful story is told by Michener, who was an American journalist helping the refugees escape.

This is more than just the refugees story, however. Michener is very careful to place it within its times, explaining the Soviet takeover that led to the Hungarian Revolution. This revolution was a spontaneous resistance to the Soviet occupation by many students and laborers, and culminated in the indiscriminate murder of protestors and civilians by Russian military. In the midst of this, a significant number of people escaped to Austria.

I can honestly say when I started this book I was not anticipating being so moved. This is a powerful, thought-provoking book. Although this occurred over half a century ago, the same issues are alive today. I am so grateful for my intellectual freedom, for the ability to live without fear.

Just a couple parts that stood out to me – and I could go for so much longer! The only reason I chose these quotes above the others are that they are a reasonable size for a short review.

“Most of the names in this book are fictitious for the reason that the people involved are still terrified that the AVO will track down their friends and relatives and torture them endlessly … But when I finished talking with this particular woman she said boldly, “Go ahead and use my name. It’s Mrs. Maria Marothy. I suffered so much at the hands of these beasts that this can be my only revenge. Let them know that in freedom I hold them in contempt.”

If anything, the only critique I could offer to this book is that so much is written filled with emotion – not the best way of presenting an unbiased perspective on history. But when you read this and learn of the things that happened, suddenly it seems a bit impossible to avoid being angry at the terror and injustices that were pushed upon these people.

Challenges: 271 pages for Paging All Bookworms, A to Z for M author, and Mixing it Up, History category

Review: The Double Agent by H T Teilhet

2 stars

Probably it was because she was an excellent swimmer and had the trim construction that seems to help excellent swimmers with short curly hair get their pictures in newspapers more often than girls who are ordinary swimmers and somehow look it.

Hoo boy. When that is on the front page, you know you’re in for a treat. The entire book is written like that. It is awkward to the point where I was having trouble figuring out just what was going on.

Teilhet had a good thing going here. You’ve got spies, Nazis, a chase through the French countryside. You would think it’d be hard to mess this up, but baby, you’d be wrong. How do you do that?

Step one is to write in such a horridly stilted fashion. Awkward parsing, far too much attention on unimportant details (I cite a paragraph-long description of the fact that a man was adjusting his rear-view mirror) and ignoring important details (the characters could teleport, apparently, if the connecting sentences were any indication). I tried to keep a list of poorly written sections but honestly, just open the book anywhere.

Step two is to make the main character so aggravatingly sexist. I will grant you this book was written in 1945. But Hoot (the double agent) ditched his wife, Cally, after three days of marriage. He shows up five years later and whines that “she abandoned him” because she tried to move on with her life. Not the most sympathetic of characters. Couple that with the wife – who has a doctorate – only being referred to as “girl” or “little one”.

Step 3, and I feel silly bothering with a spoiler because you’re not going to read the book but anyway SPOILER ALERT the reason Hoot and Cally are chased through France, being shot at, mobbed, and generally terrorized, is because their dear ol’ government thought it’d be a good way to flush out who were Nazis and who weren’t…somehow? It’s explained in this way: “He’d brought Hoot and Cally up to date.” There’s no real conclusion, and certainly no logical explanation for the charade. END SPOILER

Why isn’t this a 1-star review? Because that makes me feel like a mean person. At least this book gave me the pleasure of having something to rip into. Okay, maybe I am a meaner person than I thought. 1 star for you, Mrs Teilhet!

Challenges: 220 pp for Paging All Bookworms