WHAT YOU NEED NOW - CONTENT UPDATED THROUGH THE DAY
Dec. 27, 2005
BOOK REVIEWS: ‘Our Oldest Enemy’ Revises Stereotypes about the French;
‘Cruel World’ Reminds Us of World War II’s Impact on Children; ‘Live Fast,
Die Young’ Tells Story of Iconic Film ‘Rebel Without a Cause’
Reviewed By David M. Kinchen
Huntington News Network Book Critic
Hinton, WV (HNN) – The end of the year always finds me with books read but
not reviewed. Here are three significant books to end my hectic reviewing
year.
* * * *
I love revisionist history because it sets me to thinking about all the
misinformation I absorbed by paying attention in class and reading our
infallible (!!!) history books. The paperback edition of the book that was
praised and attacked, “Our Oldest Enemy: A History of America’s Disastrous
Relationship with France” (Broadway Books, 304 pages, $14.95) is out and
should bring the controversial book to an even bigger audience than the 2004
Doubleday hardcover edition.
John J. Miller (“A Gift of Freedom,” just reviewed on this site) and Mark
Molesky remind us – or tell us, since we’ve been brought up on a diet of
“French equals Good” – that going all the way back to the beginning of the
18th Century, the French in North America did what they thought was good for
La Belle France. If that included alliances with various Indian tribes and
massacres of frontier settlements like the one at Deerfield, MA In 1704, so
be it. The French were able to call the 22-year-old George Washington a war
criminal who started the French and Indian War in 1754 with an alleged
atrocity against a French officer at Fort Necessity, while a little over two
decades they sent Lafayette and troops and ships to help the colonists throw
off the British yoke – and praise the same George Washington to the skies
for fighting the Brits.
Miller, a writer for National Review, and Molesky, a Harvard-educated
assistant professor of history at Seton Hall University, may be a bit over
the top in their reassessment, but it’s true that the French forces fought
harder against American soldiers that were aboard two British ships in Oran,
French Morocco in 1942 than they did against the Germans only two and a half
years before. Hundreds of Americans died on Nov. 8, 1942, as the Vichy
French forces – a puppet government at the beck and call of the Germans –
shelled the H.M.S. Walney and the H.M.S. Hartland. The Americans were making
preparations for Operation Torch, the American invasion in North Africa. The
authors opine that had the French invaded western Germany in September 1939
during so-called “Sitzkrieg” and fought as fiercely against Germany while
the Nazis were Blitzkriegging Poland, the war might have ended much sooner.
The French – later stigmatized as “cheese-eating surrender monkeys” – had
more than 100 divisions against only 25 German divisions in the Rhineland.
If they had fought as they had under their WWI leaders, including Charles de
Gaulle, the outcome might have been different. And then again, it might not
have mattered!
Those making a case against the authors might say Miller and Molesky are
selective for choosing episodes like the French invasion of Mexico in 1862
(the Mexican holiday Cinco de Mayo celebrates a Mexican victory over the
invading French at Puebla on May 5, 1862) – while the U.S. was engaged in
its Civil War – that reflect badly on particular French regimes. In this
case the Mexican adventure was orchestrated by the wretched Napoleon III,
nephew of the terror of early 19th Century Europe, Napoleon Bonaparte. Or
the XYZ Affair during our “Quasi-War” with the French from 1798-1800 during
the John Adams presidency, when French privateers preyed on shipping in
American waters. But that’s what history is: One damned thing after another!
I personally think the authors are too easy on Woodrow Wilson at the
Versailles Peace Conference in 1919, blaming the vindictive French – who had
lost millions of men to the hated Boche – for a harsh treaty that was sure
to produce another war. My view is that by bringing the “avoid entangling
alliances” Americans into the Great War in 1917 (his slogan in the 1916
campaign was “He Kept Us Out of War”), Wilson naturally produced a Germany
bent on avenging real or imagined wrongs. This is also the view of historian
Jim Powell in “Wilson’s War,” reviewed on this site earlier this year.
It’s no secret that the French have always looked down on American culture,
except perhaps for the comedy of Jerry Lewis. Our culture owes no apologies
– producing great writers like Emerson, Poe, Emily Dickinson, Longfellow,
Whitman, Twain, Melville, Henry James, Faulkner, Hemingway, Fitzgerald,
etc., etc. I can be as much of a chauvinist as the Frenchman – Nicolas
Chauvin – who gave his name to the concept!
In spite of all our faults, we never had a Dreyfus Affair, attacking and
falsely imprisoning a loyal army officer because he was a Jew. We’ve never
had the pogroms and the Holocausts perpetrated by the supposedly superior
Europeans – inhabiting what the distinguished British historian Mark Mazower
calls the “Dark Continent.”
On Page 198, Miller and Molesky single out thoughtful French writers like
Raymond Aron, born in 1905, the same year as communist-loving,
America-bashing Jean-Paul Sartre. Aron, like another European writer born in
1905, Arthur Koestler, excoriated intellectuals for falling for the false
god of Marxism. The authors also cite another pro-American writer,
Jean-Francois Revel, author of “The Totalitarian Temptation,” and many other
works attacking communism. Other French writers who didn’t fall for the
totalitarian trap include Alain Besancon and Stephane Courtois. I was
familiar with Aron, but the others were new to me. There’s a long section in
the book about the flawed critical theories of Jacques Derrida and Paul De
Man, one a Jew, the other an anti-Semite, but both wrong, wrong, wrong!
If “Our Oldest Enemy” is a polemic, it’s a well-reasoned, thoughtful one
that should be read by every history buff. This isn’t what you learned in
school: that’s for sure!
Publisher’s web site: www.broadwaybooks.com
Also: www.oldestenemy.com
* * * *
Lynn H. Nicholas (“The Rape of Europa”) told the story of the looting of
European art by the Germans during World War II. With “Cruel World: The
Children of Europe in the Nazi Web” (Knopf, 656 pages, 39 photos, 3 maps,
annotated, indexed, $35.00) she brings her writing and researching skills to
the task of telling the story of Europe’s children from the Nazi takeover in
1933 to the beginning of the Cold War and the recovery of Europe from the
devastation wrought by Hitler, his henchmen and the ordinary Germans and
their partners in murder throughout Europe. I would say to any European
after reading this book that because of your history of hatred “you have
permanently relinquished the power to judge others.” Just one example – the
aftermath of the breakup of Yugoslavia – backs me up. Europeans for the most
part did nothing to stop the horrors of Bosnia, Serbia and Croatia, once
again relying on Americans to come to their rescue.
One picture in “Cruel World,” on page 300, brought tears to my eyes: It
shows a German soldier in a regular Wehrmacht (German Army) uniform – not
the deadly black battle dress of the SS murderers – aiming his rifle at a
young woman holding onto her child. The caption: “A German soldier prepares
to execute a Jewish mother and child in the USSR.” What a commentary on the
wretched human species! No animal is capable of the crimes humans do as a
matter of course --as a matter of “just following orders.”
Nicholas deals with children of all religions and nationalities in her
breathtaking book. Thanks to the German-Soviet pact in August 1939, Baltic
Germans were forced to leave their homes in Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania,
to make way for the Soviet conquerors after the fall of Poland that
September. Russians like to alter history, but they were allied with the
Nazis for almost two years, until June 22, 1941 when the Germans invaded the
Soviet Union – surprising Stalin and leading to the destruction of millions
of men, women and children in Eastern Europe. Europe will never be able to
live down Babi Yar.
Nicholas relies on interviews of survivors, as well as members of Nazi youth
organizations who found themselves the hunted as the war turned against the
Germans and their allies. Under the Nazis, the Germans took pseudoscientific
ideas of eugenics—many of which were developed by Americans like birth
control advocate Margaret Sanger (1879-1966) in the so-called “Progressive”
era in the early 1900s – and proclaimed the concept of an “Aryan” “race,” an
idea that is totally ridiculous, especially for Germans who’ve been
impregnated by invaders from all directions for centuries. The British and
American eugenicists – the old saying about economists applies to them: “God
created eugenicists to make astrologers look good” – developed all the
concepts, including sterilization, that the Nazis later used in their “Cruel
World.”
The book was so painful to read that I put it aside for long periods of
time. I finally finished it and recommend it to anyone who thinks the
species is basically good. Nicholas is careful to include tales of rescue
performed at great risk to the rescuers, in places like Poland, Russia, the
Netherlands, Norway, Denmark and France, where the Vichy French
collaborators were as virulent anti-Semites as their German overlords. I was
surprised that Nicholas didn’t include in her bibliography Daniel J.
Goldhagen’s “Hitler’s Willing Executioners,” a controversial book published
in 1996 that covers much of the same ground. She does draw on Mark Mazower’s
1993 book about the Nazi occupation of Greece, which recounts horrific
crimes against Greeks of all religious backgrounds by the Germans. Mazower
is also the author of one of my favorite books on Europe during World War
II, “Dark Continent.”
The anti-Semitism of the U.S. in the 1920s, ‘30s and ‘40s, which closed off
a refuge for children and others is recounted. To their credit, the British
took in thousands more refugee children – almost all Jewish – than did the
U.S. In point of fact, few nations – with the exception of Denmark which
managed to ship its entire Jewish population across the straits to neutral
Sweden – come across well in “Cruel World.”
Publisher’s web site: www.aaknopf.com
* * * *
The year 2005 marks the 50th anniversary of one of the most important movies
ever made, Nicholas Ray’s “Rebel Without a Cause,” starring James Dean,
Natalie Wood and Sal Mineo. All three would die tragically, with Dean dying
in a California car crash on Sept. 30, 1955, just about a month before
“Rebel” was theatrically released.
Lawrence Frascella and Al Weisel tell the story about the making of the
movie in “Live Fast, Die Young: The Wild Ride of Making ‘Rebel Without a
Cause’” (Touchstone/Simon & Schuster, $24.95, 384 pages, illustrated,
annotated, indexed). In so doing, the authors portray the America of the mid
1950s, when I was a high school kid in Illinois, almost exactly the same age
as Natalie Wood (we were both born in 1938). In January 1955, when filming
of “Rebel” began, I received my Illinois drivers license, a license that
gave the proud owner of a 1941 Studebaker rescued from a junkyard unlimited
mobility.
Nicholas Ray, a Wisconsin-born director of such noir classics as “In a
Lonely Place,” “Knock on Any Door” and “They Live by Night”, was following
a trend when he decided to make a movie about disturbed teens; Richard
Brooks directed “The Blackboard Jungle” starring Glenn Ford and Sydney
Poitier from a wonderful novel by Evan Hunter – who died this year – and it
was released while “Rebel” was filming on location in and around Los
Angeles, including the final scene at the Griffith Observatory in Hollywood.
Ray was inspired to make a teen angst movie partly by the kind of experience
that sounds like it’s from a movie. He arrived at his Malibu home one day in
June 1951 to find Tony Ray, his 13-year-old son from his first marriage, in
bed with Ray’s wife, actress Gloria Grahame. He exploded in anger, throwing
Tony out and leaving Grahame, who starred in “In a Lonely Place.”
During the filming of “Rebel” Ray had an affair with the 16-year-old San
Francisco-born child star Natalie Wood. Having sex with a minor could have
cost the director his career, but he managed to dodge that bullet, just as
he avoided being blacklisted during the McCarthy era, when many directors
and screenwriters, as well as actors ended up working in Europe, if they
worked at all.
The authors interviewed everyone they could find who was involved with the
production of the movie, which was named one of the 100 top films of all
time by the American Film Institute. They describe in detail how the movie
was made, including the famous “Chickie Run.” It’s a perfect book for any
movie buff. It’s filled with anecdotes about Ray and his stars, as well as
others in the cast, including Dennis Hopper, Steffi Sidney and Corey Allen.
Publisher’s web site: www.simonsays.com
