K. Amis, The Riverside Villas murder
J. Littell, The Kindly Ones
M. Wickstead, Aid and Development
It took me two months to read Jonathan Littell's work on the Holocaust. Last month, I said it was brilliant, but harrowing. Having finally finished it, I'd qualify that. The end (and especially the bit before the end) is very weak. However, the book as whole is also deeply flawed. In some ways it is brilliant, and it's one of the best treatments of the bureaucratic workings of the Nazi state and the Holocaust I've read. It really drives home the nature of how the task sucked in so many otherwise decent enough people; and in the first section, which is the best, it outlines what it did to them. But in the end, the book is hamstrung by the main character. He is sympathetic - given he is a murderer and a mass murderer, this is impressive - but he's also psychologically damaged before the action even begins. This means not only does the book fail to address the question that Littell posed himself - what would someone like me have done in Nazi Germany - but it also bloats the book with a fantastical subplot that adds little. A better book would have excised that entire element, which would have made it better and happily shorter.
So I've given, not without reservations, book of the month to Frankopan's on Central Asia and the Near East. I've issues with this too. It's a worthwhile book and is jam-packed with gems, but it suffers from two major issues. Firstly, I don't think it holds focus well enough in the middle, where we flit too rapidly from the ostensible subject of the book to the West. In a work seeking to correct western centric views of history, there's just too much on the European age of discovery rather than its impact on the aforementioned Silk Roads and this leads to real compression; Timur gets a single page. Secondly, and surprisingly given Peter's background (he taught me middle Byzantine history briefly), it has what might be termed 'Ferguson syndrome' where the lure of modern politics gets in the way of the historical analysis. That means that it's got too much modern in - we get to 1900 with 40% of the book to go. And some of it is too obviously the author's political view without enough backup: for example, he's keen to emphasise the Taleban's insistence in the 1990s that they wouldn't shelter Bin Laden if he committed terrorist acts, but no comment on their volte-face in the aftermath of 2001 two pages later. This is a shame ass the historical perspective he brings to the twentieth century is actually fascinating, just a) overlong and b) too partisan.
I'd read both of these, but with caution.
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