Does the Dog Die? A Brief Review of A Royal Affair, by Stella Tillyard

Here in the U.S., we tend to think of George III as the king who dug in his heels at the time of the Revolutionary War. And yet it turns out that he was the steadiest member of his sometimes manic, sometimes tragic family. The subtitle of Stella Tillyard’s excellent book says it all: George III and His Scandalous Siblings.

Most prominent in the book, and presenting the most complex story, was the youngest sister, Caroline Mathilde. At a time when princesses were bartered for political gain, Caroline was married off to King Christian VII of Denmark, who comes across as autistic. He had some sort of problem, and wanted to be left alone, which allowed unscrupulous sorts to manipulate him. Caroline and her lover, the king’s physician Johann Struensee, were probably not as bad as those who followed. Indeed, it seemed at times as if Christian liked being with them, because they catered to some of his whims and otherwise left him alone, while also taking on some of the kingly tasks he found odious (which appeared to be all of them). And after Caroline and Johann were charged with the crime of cuckolding Christian, he seemed bereft. 

By the way, I suspect Tillyard would have liked to have done an entire book on Caroline, but there might not have been enough material, or her publisher might have told her to write more broadly. Regardless, Caroline’s story is compelling and sad, but the account of how the neglected young woman gained power is intriguing.

There were other siblings, of course. A cranky older sister, also married off for the good of the country, lived a long and probably unhappy life in some little nation that was eventually absorbed by Germany. The charismatic brother who was best suited to be king died young, and a couple of other brothers couldn’t keep their pants up, thereby providing ample material to the scandal-mongers of the day.

Tillyard writes extremely well and is an excellent storyteller, even though she hops around a tad more than I like. That’s a quibble; I strongly recommend this book.

As for animals, there’s nothing here to put off even the most squeamish animal lover. So I am declaring this book SAFE for animal lovers.

Does the Dog Die? A Brief Review of Assassination Vacation, by Sarah Vowell

Third cranky book review, and least cranky of the three:  I read this for my book group with no previous knowledge of Sarah Vowell. I don’t listen to public radio because I don’t listen to talk radio of any kind, so even though she’s a contributor to This American Life, she was completely new to me.

 And as she narrated this nonfiction tour of presidential assassination sites, I began viewing her as two people: Good Sarah and Bad Sarah. I’d say she had an evil twin, but she has a real-life twin who shows up occasionally. Anyway, Bad Sarah was a self-absorbed flake who took advantage of her friends because she was cute! And adorable! And isn’t it cute! and adorable! how Bad Sarah expects them to do all sorts of unreasonable “favors” for her just because she is who she is? Well, no. I didn’t buy Bad Sarah’s act. She was massively annoying and had no endearing traits at all. Unfortunately, she also narrated the first part of the book, in which Bad Sarah grates on my every last nerve as she expects her friends to drive her hither and yon so that she can gaze at Lincoln assassination memorabilia that are at about the fourth degree of obscurity.

 In the book group, this observation led to a lively debate on friendship. One person said that you just hang out with your friends and go along with what they want to do, like they do for you. I believe if you want to spend time with a friend, you do activities that are agreed upon, negotiated, or made optional. Like, if you want to see a movie I don’t want to see, I’ll meet you afterwards for dinner or something, but not see the movie with you. This also explained something about the person who made the comment about hanging out. A few years ago, she about hanging out with a friend of hers who spent half the day chasing down discounted chicken wings for a party he’d planned. And she went along with him and was bored out of her skull. But I would not take a friend along on my Odious Chores, nor would I go with them on theirs. It gets down to what another member of the group calls “the Unwilling Accomplice.” Bad Sarah always has to have an Unwilling Accomplice in her stories; it’s part of her shtick. I think all accomplices should be willing, but my stories are different from hers. I’m very independent and don’t always need an accomplice. And that is something I like about myself. In fact, it’s something l like about myself A LOT.

 Anyway, enough about all that. Good Sarah knows her history and writes more about it than herself. Good Sarah yanked the Lincoln story away from Bad Sarah, and kept the Garfield and McKinley stories to herself. Good Sarah has her playful side, especially when explaining how Robert Todd Lincoln was a sort of jinx. She tells about what happened with Ford’s Theater after Lincoln’s assassination, gives us some insight into the evolution of the Republican Party, and touches on everything from American cults to totem poles to statues.

I’ll recommend this book to American history buffs who think they can bear with Bad Sarah’s narcissism for a while. It doesn’t last that long, certainly less than one-third of the book.

 As for animals, there are a couple of unpleasant images, but they are fleeting. So I will declare this book SAFE for animal lovers.

Does the Dog Die? A Brief Review of Lucia, by Andrea De Robilant

I think it would be fun to discover a scandalous — or even interesting — ancestor and then write a book about that person. Andrea di Robilant has done just that by telling the story of Lucia Mocenigo, his great-great-great-great-grandmother. By virtue of being married to Alvise Mocenigo, of a powerful Venetian family, Lucia traveled across Europe and witnessed such events as Napoleon’s conquest of Venice, as well as his defeat in 1814.

Lucia herself had some compelling traits: she was determined at her core, her devotion to her sister and her son drove many of her actions, and she certainly didn’t lack opinions. She was also insecure and a bit of a nag in my opinion, which didn’t help her marriage to the perpetually philandering Alvise. It was clearly a marriage of convenience, but that was a message she seemed to have missed. Still, she showed elements of being a strong, independent woman when not fretting about her family. For example, after Alvise ordered her to take charge of one of his rural properties, Lucia raised pigs and sheep, which I found remarkable for a woman who had previously spent her entire life in the city. In fact, she and Alvise quarreled when she decided to raise cattle as well. Later, while hovering over her adult son and his disturbingly controlling tutor in Paris, she took up the study of biology, chemistry, and other sciences at de Jardin des Plantes, working with esteemed professors to achieve a certificate in botany. Lucia had an intense affair with Austrian military officer, rented much of her home to Lord Byron in a tempestuous landlord/tenant relationship, and generally showed a knack for being wherever history was made. Despite her missteps with Alvise, I found her shoulder a lively perch from which to view the fall of Venice and other Napoleonic era events. If you read history books at all, I recommend this one.

As for the treatment of animals in the book, I will toss out my usual caveat that as times change, so do attitudes towards animals — and we treat them better than our predecessors, as a rule. Horses, being a mode of transportation first and foremost, were viewed as somewhat expendable, for example. They also died on the battlefield along with the men who rode them. However, these situations are merely mentioned, not portrayed, so I am going to declare this book SAFE for animal lovers.

Does the Dog Die? A Brief Review of Gertrude Bell: Queen of the Desert, Shaper of Nations, by Georgina Howell

I finished this book over a week ago and have delayed reviewing it for one reason: Gertrude Bell was such a complex and accomplished person that it’s hard to know what to say in a short review. In fact, my only complaint about Howell’s well-written and exciting biography of this astonishing woman is that she sped through some parts of Bell’s life that, for most people, would warrant a book in and of itself. Then again, would I have read a 700-page biography? Probably not. Howell did an admirable job of keeping the text down to 419 pages.

Let’s get one of the unpleasant aspects out of the way right now: Bell opposed women’s suffrage. With her stepmother, she had been active in lobbying for the rights of the working poor and saw firsthand the burdens many working class women suffered. Her clearly flawed rationale for opposing suffrage stemmed from two related issues. First, she thought there were more pressing problems related to women’s rights, and second, only a quarter of British men were eligible to vote and universal suffrage would swamp the system. As history has shown us, we can’t set priorities like that, and fortunately, Bell’s beliefs did not carry the day.

On to her extraordinary life! Bell was extremely close to her father, who encouraged her in everything she aspired to do. And Bell wanted to do a lot. For example, instead of following the usual course for a wealthy young woman and becoming a debutante, Bell read history at Oxford. However, with career options for educated women being close to non-existent back in the late 1800s, she returned home after acquiring her degree. As Howell makes clear, Bell had to chart her own course.

For a while, she helped her stepmother in working with the poor. She also traveled, as the rich did in those days, to visit family friends. It was during one of these trips that she took up mountain climbing in the Alps – more uncommon among her generation’s women than attending Oxford. During another trip, she discovered her first love, the Middle East. (Note that she also did fall in love with two men during her life, one unavailable to her due to class, the other due to the fact that he was already married.)

Bell had a facility for languages and became fluent in Arabic and several other languages with relatively little effort. She took up archaeology, learned the etiquette of dealing with tribal chiefs, and made some amazing journeys into territory that was unexplored by Europeans. As a result, when post-WWI international treaties led to the need to set political boundaries, Bell was included. She had to be — no one else knew as much, not even T. E. Lawrence, aka Lawrence of Arabia, who also participated in the discussions.

This doesn’t even touch the surface. If you like history at all, or if you enjoy a good biography, you must read this book. It is exceptional.

As for animal lovers, I don’t think there is anything in this book that would put off someone who can’t stand to read incidents of animal abuse and neglect. Lawrence shoves a camel to make it behave, and that was about it. Bell loved dogs and seemed to calm her camels — in fact, in two photos of the 1921 Cairo Conference participants, her camel was the only one that wasn’t waving its head and blurring the picture. So this book is SAFE for animal lovers.

Does the Dog Die? A Brief Review of The Worst Hard Time, by Timothy Egan

This well-told, engrossing history of the Dust Bowl years won the National Book Award, and rightly so. Author Timothy Egan gives us vivid characters, fast pacing, and intriguing plots and subplots — not easy to do when history is so often full of dull minutiae that must be conveyed for the story to make sense. But Egan even makes the struggles within the Federal bureaucracy sound exciting.

He starts by describing what the southern Great Plains were like before settlement. These vast grasslands sustained buffalo and the native peoples who hunted them for purpose, not sport. Then the bison were killed off by the white settlers, who moved in cattle and, eventually, wheat farms. What we had here was a fragile environment disrupted in the worst possible way, leading to Egan’s “worst hard time” with the dust storms. The needs of cattle differ from those of bison, and wheat doesn’t grow in the same way as prairie grass. Just as the Great Depression hit and wheat cultivation became a financial liability, a sustained drought began. The winds stirred up dust so bad that it engulfed entire towns for days, seeping into even the most meticulously sealed windows and doors. People died of “dust pneumonia” and suffered other ailments caused by the fine dirt particles that surrounded them. Meanwhile, tons of top soil disappeared every day. Despite new agricultural practices introduced to hold down the soil and conserve the land, the region is still less populated than it was almost 80 years ago.

All of this is seen through the eyes of those who lived it. White-gloved schoolteacher Hazel Lucas Shaw tried to make the best of it despite the dust creating tragedy in her life, former ranch-hand Bam White struggled to keep his head up while self-medicating with grain alchohol, bloviating hypocrite John McCarty used his media outlet to deny that government help was even needed (there’s one like him in every crisis, I guess), and innovative soil conservationist Hugh Bennett timed a Senate hearing to the arrival of an enormous dust cloud in Washington DC, hundreds of miles from its origin. These and other individuals make Egan’s history come alive.

Unfortunately, as the people suffered, so did the animals. Therefore, I have to declare this book UNSAFE for animal lovers who don’t want to read about animal suffering. There was a lot of it, from chickens to rabbits to cattle. No species was safe from the dust that permeated every aspect of life in the Dust Bowl on an almost daily basis for years on end.

Nonetheless, if you can handle that, I strongly recommend this book.

Does the Dog Die? A Brief Review of Katherine, by Anya Seton

Anya Seton was the Philippa Gregory of her day, and vice versa. We know Gregory as the author of The Other Boleyn Girl and similar historical fiction told from the female point of view. In acknowledgement of her predecessor, Gregory has used her success as an author to promote Seton’s books, written in the 1940s and 1950s. As a result, some of Seton’s works have been reissued, with forewords by Gregory.

While there is a dated quality about Katherine, I think Gregory has done the right thing in trying to get it and other Seton books back into circulation. Aside from some relatively chaste bodice-ripping, along with a bit of overwrought yearning, Seton has written a well-crafted history of Medieval England. In Katherine, she tells the story of Katherine Swynford, third wife of John of Gaunt, the Duke of Lancaster during the reigns of Edward III and Richard II. Although they married late in life, Katherine and Lancaster became lovers shortly after the death of his first wife, Blanche, to whom Katherine was also devoted. (Why didn’t they marry sooner? This was the 14th century, when royal marriages were based on political alliances.)

Seton takes us through wars, rebellions, and the plague, deftly using her characters to show us life at all levels, from the poorest serfs up to the most self-centered kings. I finished this book feeling as if I knew more about what it was to be alive then, regarding the customs, the clothing, the values, etc.

I know of John of Gaunt primarily through Shakespeare plays and the odd bit of history. Seton’s portrayal of him as politically astute and mostly benign — except for one vengeful period following a questioning of his legitimacy — is echoed in Wikipedia which, while not being the ultimate authority, backs up Seton’s take on the man. His vengeance, however, led to the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 and the destruction of his luxurious Savoy Palace. In one of her most harrowing and strongest chapters, Seton shows Katherine and a daughter trapped in the palace at the time of the attack.

So I definitely recommend this book, if you will keep in mind that it’s long, and writing styles have changed over the decades. Neither of those facts should put you off, however.

As for animal lovers, this book is set in the Middle Ages. They did things differently back then. Bull-baiting was considered fun, and other activities we wouldn’t tolerate were routine. But really, this book is MOSTLY SAFE for animal lovers. There’s the occasional beast of burden that needs more rest than it’s had; Katherine feels affection for her horse, Doucette; a dog is kicked; royalty fuss over their falcons; and children play with kittens. I didn’t come across any especially gruesome or sad scenes that couldn’t be ignored.

Does the Dog Die? A Brief Review of Dreamers of the Day, by Mary Doria Russell

Born in the 1880s, Agnes Shanklin thought she was going to be a pale shadow of a person, living with constant nagging from her mother, having no chance of realizing her dreams, envying her younger sister’s freedom and, for a time, that of her brother. Then the Spanish flu hit, leaving Agnes as the only surviving member of her family — a survivor with an unexpected fortune. Following an uplifting visit to a fancy department store, Agnes decides to visit Egypt. Accompanied by Rosie, the long-haired daschund she’d saved as a puppy, Agnes arrives just as T.E. Lawrence (aka Lawrence of Arabia), Winston Churchill, and Gertrude Bell have completed the task of drawing the boundaries of the modern Middle East.

Lawrence, Bell, and Churchill aren’t minor characters in Russell’s thoughtful and sometimes amusing exploration of self-definition and self-discovery. Agnes has quite a lot of interaction with Lawrence, for example. I would have thought it difficult to use historical figures as significant characters to this extent, but Russell pulls it off.

Overall, I thought the book was excellent — Agnes is an endearing narrator, the pacing is good, and the characters are well-drawn. Sometimes it seemed a bit too much like a travelogue, and Churchill came across as a self-absorbed buffoon: possibly true, possibly not, but I’d not seen him presented like that before. These are quibbles, however. I loved this book, I’ll recommend it to my book group, and I recommend it to anyone else looking for a well-written, well-told story.

In terms of animals, this book is most definitely SAFE for animal lovers. Rosie is one of the main characters, and Agnes might not have met Lawrence and the others without her. As authors often do with animal characters, Russell uses Rosie to amp up the tension a few times, but ultimately the dog comes to no harm. There are a few cranky camels, and Lawrence shoves one to get it to behave, but this is a very animal-friendly book, and Rosie is one of the most vividly drawn animal characters I’ve seen in a long time.

Does the Dog Die? A Brief Review of People of the Book, by Geraldine Brooks

I was so happy and excited when this book came out in paperback! I couldn’t wait to get to the bookstore and buy it. Brooks’ Year of Wonders, which I reviewed a few months ago, is one of the best books I’ve ever read, and People of the Book had received great reviews.

You know where this is going, don’t you? Disappointed reviewer finds herself skimming sections, keeps waiting for the magic to appear, ends up deciding to give book a mediocre review? Yeah, that’s what happened.

Somewhere along the line, said reviewer has to tell what the book is actually about before trashing it. Okay, then: Hanna, a book conservationist from Australia, gets called in to work with a rare Jewish text called a “haggadah” that’s been found in Bosnia after surviving hundreds of years in the hands of different people. Hanna’s mother is surrealistically awful, but Hanna herself is a nice, normal person. As Hanna researches the debris and stains she finds in the book, we are given the stories of the people responsible for all this detritus. And there’s a plot twist involving Hanna, and another involving Momzilla, and then it ends.

As you might have gathered, I don’t like one-dimensional villains. (The attempt at giving the momster a second dimension didn’t work.) I also thought the short stories of the people who’d had the book previously didn’t always work. Sometimes I wanted more and was left hanging, sometimes I was appalled at the violence and had to skim. Yes, if you’re going to write accurately about the Spanish Inquisition, you need some ugliness, but I don’t want to read about it in gory detail. And it wasn’t just that section. Furthermore, Brooks’ research was showing a lot when she wrote about the book conservation; it just didn’t blend in well. Then there’s Hanna herself, who seems both too normal for having had the terrible mother, and too flat to be the protagonist. Bottom line: this book just didn’t work for me, and I’m not recommending it.

As for animals, there were Persian cats that came to no harm, a dutiful donkey that served some rebels in WWII, and a few odds and ends. So the book is SAFE from an animal lover’s perspective, although the violence will likely be off-putting to those for whom that matters. Read Year of Wonders instead.

Happy Link Day

Okay, so we’re supposed to support the economy by spending, but we’re also supposed to save more, and we’re supposed to do this when we’re all in danger of losing income. David Leonhardt of The New York Times kindly explains how. I am now the proud owner of a brand new seltzer maker.

Speaking of New York, these old photographs of the city are amazing.

And it’s flu season. So, from Flu Wiki (because there’s a Wiki for everything these days), we have an instructive and slightly amusing video on how to prevent its spread.

Does the Dog Die? A Brief Review of Sisterhood of Spies, by Elizabeth McIntosh

Here’s a helpful hint: If you and your lover are at a foreign embassy trying to break into a vault, take your clothes off and work naked. That way, any guard who barges in on you will leave quickly without being able to see what you are really up to. Of course, there’s no guarantee of success, but it did work once, as Elizabeth McIntosh notes in her book, Sisterhood of Spies.

Although sometimes reading like a catalogue of who did what, McIntosh loaded this book about the Office of Strategic Services — predecessor to the CIA — with many intriguing anecdotes similar to the one above. Despite the unfortunate tendency of the men in charge to treat many of the highly educated and multi-lingual OSS women as if they were inherently incapable of doing the work given to less intelligent, less gifted men, a fair number of women worked as researchers, agents, station managers, and propagandists. Along with McIntosh herself were Marlene Dietrich and the seemingly unflappable Julia Child, then still Julia McWilliams. More lethal to the enemy was “the limping lady,” a one-legged agent who disguised herself as a French peasant while organizing air drops, training agents, and sending radio dispatches to London. A woman fluent in Czech developed a strategy that led to hundreds of Czech soldiers defecting to the Allies. And on and on, in an amazing chronicle of the contributions made by OSS women during the Second World War. This is definitely on my “recommend” list.

Animal lovers have little to worry about when reading this book. There is the occasional sedative slipped to a guard dog and numerous pets, and the Limping Lady actually milked cows and herded goats as part of her cover. Because the events of this book occurred during a war, there are also dead and hungy livestock noted. But the latter are fleeting, and this book is therefore SAFE for animal lovers.