Over the years, one of my favorite authors has become Erik Larson. He has written historical non-fiction about such topics as devastating hurricanes, serial killers at the World's Fair, an American ambassador to Hitler's Germany, the sinking of the Lusitania, and Winston Churchill in his first year as Prime Minister of England. All of his books are thoroughly researched, well written, and are both extremely informative and entertaining to read.
His newest, The Demon of Unrest is no exception. In this one, Larson writes of the time period between Abraham Lincoln's election to the Presidency in 1860 and the attack on Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor in South Carolina that signaled the beginning of the Civil War. The last quarter or so of the book covers the period of March 29 through April 14, that day of the attack on Sumter, and throughout, Larson Jumps back and forth between Charleston, Washington DC, and Montgomery, Alabama, the then capitol of the Confederacy, to write about events that were taking place simultaneously during those perilous two weeks. It was pretty gripping reading.
The subtitle of the book describes it best, I think: "A Saga of Hubris, Heartbreak, and Heroism at the Dawn of the Civil War."
One thing that is somewhat terrifying about this book is the parallels that can be drawn to what took place back in 1860-61 to events that we are seeing in our country today. In his introduction to the book, Larson states that he was deep into the research for this book when the events of January 6, 2021 took place. He writes:
"As I watched the Capitol assault unfold on camera, I had the eerie feeling that the present and the past had merged. It is unsettling that in 1861 two of the greatest moments of national dread centered on the certification of the Electoral College vote and the presidential inauguration." Larson concludes his introduction by stating that as you read this book "I suspect your sense of dread will be all the more pronounced in light of today's political discord, which, incredibly, has led some benighted Americans to whisper once again secession and civil war."
So true and the idea, frankly, scares the shit out of me.
I have yet to read a book by Erik Larson that, if it wasn't GREAT, it was at least VERY, VERY GOOD. His newest one, "The Demon of Unrest" is proving to be in that same category. It covers events leading up to the attack of Fort Sumpter in Charleston Harbor that was the beginning of the American Civil War. In his introduction to the book, Larson tells us that he was well into the research of this book when the events of January 6, 2021 unfolded, and that he couldn't help but see the parallels to what took place in 1860. I am only 100 pages into the book, and I can say that he is exactly correct. The unrest stirred up in the American South prior to the Civil War is exactly what we are seeing being fomented in America today by the Convicted Felon-in-Chief and his minions, and it scares the shit out of me.
I always wait until I finish a book or movie before giving it a rating, but this one is well on it's way to Four Grandstander Stars.
This movie was released in mid-May and within two weeks was available on streaming, so it seems to have bombed at the box office. It was still playing in our local multiplex, so we took it on last weekend, and enjoyed it a lot.
Ryan Gosling plays a professional movie stuntman, and Emily Blunt plays his ex-lover who is an aspiring movie director, there is a plot to this one that I won't go into, since these are all "Kwickie Kommentaries" today, but it's a fun movie to see. Gosling is charming as the put upon lead, and has Blunt ever been bad in anything?
Three Stars from The Grandstander, and be sure and stay for all of the closing credits.
I sought out this 1946 British mystery movie based upon a write-up on a classic movie Facebook Group to which I belong called My Reel Life. It was said to be the type of movie that Hitchcock would have made back in Britain at the time. It takes place in a London hospital that was set up to care for those injured and wounded during the Blitz of Great Britain by German V-1 rockets (called "doodlebugs" by the Brits; I had to google it when I heard it in the film) during WW II. A death takes place. Was it a murder? Then another death takes place that most certainly was a murder. There are five possible suspects, and a Scotland Yard detective played by Alistair Sim has to unravel the whole bloody mess. Sim, who is best known as being the best ever film version of Ebenezer Scrooge, can be classified as a distant antecedent to America's Lt. Columbo, in his portrayal of the detective in this one.
I found this one on Amazon Prime, and give it Two Grandstander Stars.
Now let's talk about Uniforms, and I'll be brief.
MLB's City Connect Uniforms are an abomination. I have yet to see one that I like. At PNC Park on Wednesday night, I saw a guy coming out of the Pirates Clubhouse Store putting on his newly purchased Pirates City Connect uni with the Number 21 and the name CLEMENTE on it. It made me want to gag.
On May 10, 1940, Winston Churchill became Prime Minister of England. During that same week, Nazi Germany had invaded and taken over Belgium and the Netherlands, and within a few weeks, France would also surrender to the forces of Adolf Hitler. Within a month the Luftwaffe would begin an almost nightly series of bombing attacks on Great Britain, most specifically on London itself, that was intended to weaken the British Isles in preparation of a Nazi invasion that was sure to come.
Welcome to 10 Downing Street, Mr. Prime Minister.
Erik Larson's latest book (currently #1 on all significant Non-Fiction Best Sellers lists) follows the first year of Churchill's tenure as PM. It is surely the stuff of history, but it is more than that. Making use of historical documents, as well as letters and diaries, not only of the British officials that surrounded Churchill, but of family members, and ordinary English citizens of the time, Larson gives the reader a look at a period in our history that is almost impossible for one who didn't live through it to grasp. It also gives a view of what leadership - true leadership - in the person of Winston Churchill meant to the British people when all hope appeared to be lost. (It also gives a reader today a startling contrast to what passes for "leadership" in 2020, but I digress.)
Larson also gives a glimpse of what life was like, not only in the high reaches of government, but for ordinary English citizens at the time. Among the "characters" in this book are daughter Mary Churchill, who turned 18 during that year, daughter-in-law Pamela Churchill, 21 year old wife of ne'er-do-well son Randolph, John Collville, one of the PM's private secretaries, Lord Beaverbrook (don't you just love British names like this?), a trusted advisor of Churchill's who had a Machiavellian streak in him, Averill Harriman, an emissary sent from FDR to oversee the American Lend-Lease Program, and scores of others, including King George VI. He also gives us glimpses of what was going on in Germany through the diaries and papers of Hitler, Josef Goebbels, and Herman Goring.
In 1939, a British government project called Mass-Observation recruited hundreds of ordinary British citizens and asked them to make daily observations of their life. The goal was to help sociologists of the time and of the future to get a true glimpse of ordinary, daily British life. These Mass-Observation diaries were also a key source of information used by Larson, and the stuff of those diaries were and are marvelous.
For example: When the bombing commenced, and it seemed that the world was going to fall apart, one diarist, Joan Wyndham, decided that the time had come for her to cease being a virgin. After carefully planning and executing the seduction of her boyfriend Rupert to carry out the deed, she reflected "Well, that's done, and I'm glad it's over. If that's really all there is to it I'd rather have a good smoke or go to the pictures."
Yes, life went on. People went to work, went to dances, fell in love, and had children while living in the midst of unbelievable terror and desperation. Larson's description of calm days shattered by night after night of bombing, of devastation rained upon London and other cites are absolutely mind boggling. From September 1940 through May 1941, nearly 29,000 Londoners were killed and over 28,000 were seriously wounded during The Blitz. Throughout the United Kingdom, the totals were 44,652 dead and 52,370 injured. 5,626 were children. But life DID go on, largely because of the leadership and inspiration of Winston Churchill. In January of 1941, King George wrote in his diary that "I could not have a better Prime Minister."
Well after the fact, one of the military assistants to the British War Cabinet wrote of Churchill:
"It is possible that the people would have risen to the occasion no matter who had been there to lead them, but that is speculation. What we know is that the Prime Minister provided leadership of such outstanding quality that people almost reveled in the dangers of the situations and gloried in standing alone."
Another minister wrote "Only he had the power to make the nation believe that it could win."
"The Splendid ad the Vile" is a terrific book about one of the greatest, if not THE greatest, persons of the twentieth century. It gets the full Four Stars from The Grandstander.
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I thought that I would include in this post some photos that I had taken of statures that we saw in Paris in 2018....
And in Parliament Square in London in 2019....
Also, when Googling "statues of Winston Churchill", one finds that there are statues of Churchill everywhere, literally all over the world. My guess is that probably Jesus Christ is the only person for whom there are more statues than there are of Churchill.
Nobody asked, but I thought I'd tell you about a couple of books that I have just finished reading.
Erik Larson is a terrific writer of non-fiction, and I have written of him and his books (In The Garden of Beasts, Devil in the White City, Dead Wake) in this space in the past. "Isaac's Storm" is one of his older books, published in 2000, and it tells the story of a devastating hurricane that struck the coastal city of Galveston, Texas in 1900. He centers his narrative around Dr. Isaac Monroe Cline, the man who headed up what today we would call the "Weather Bureau" in Galveston. It is a story of hubris and bureaucracy that existed at the time that allowed the human results of such a calamitous event to become far more devastating than they needed to be. (Not-so-Fun Fact: More people died in the Galveston hurricane than died in the Johnstown Flood and the San Francisco Earthquake combined.)
As it was in his other books, Larson's descriptions of the events as the storm enveloped Galveston are remarkable and totally compelling. On the down side, he spends a lot of time writing about the science of meteorology (isobars, barometric readings, low and high pressure pockets). It got to the point where I kind of began to skim over those parts. It was raining a lot and it was really, really windy. That would have sufficed.
Not the best of Larson's books, in my opinion, but a worthwhile read, nonetheless. Three stars from The Grandstander.
By the way, a search on the Google Machine tells you that Larson's next book will be coming out this Fall. It is called "The Splendid and the Vile" and it covers the first year of Winston Churchill's first term as Prime Minister of Great Britain. Some have termed it a sort of a "Downton on Downing" look at this darkest hour in Britain's history. Here is how one pre-publication write-up describes it:
"The Splendid and the Vile promises to take readers out of today’s political dysfunction and back to a time of true leadership, when Churchill’s eloquence, strategic brilliance, and perseverance bound a country together in the face of unrelenting horror."
Knowing what Larson has done with such historical events, I can't wait to read it.
This book has spent time on the New York Times best seller list this year, and was a selection for Mrs. Grandstander's book club. It looked intriguing to me, so I read it. It is a novelization of the story of actress Hedy Lamarr - her rise as a young actress in her native Austria, her marriage at age 19 to Fritz Mandl, an Austrian arms manufacturer fifteen years her senior and one of the wealthiest men in Austria, how Mandl sided with both Mussolini and Hitler, Lamarr's escape - and that's what it was, an escape - from this abusive marriage, and her arrival in Hollywood where she became a prominent movie star.
More importantly, it tells of how Lamarr teamed up with Hollywood composer George Antheil in 1942 to invent a radio guidance system to be used for more accurate guidance systems in torpedoes and other weapons. Their invention was approved by the US Patent Office, but rejected for actual use and development by the War Department for various bureaucratic reasons (even in wartime!).
Eventually, Lamarr was recognized for her scientific accomplishment. The technology that she developed is a major component of the wireless technology that enables us today to have WiFi technology. Yes, the fact that each of us are attached to our cell phones 24/7 can be traced, in part, to technology that was developed by the beautiful Hedy Lamarr! Both Antheil and she were posthumously inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2014. She was indeed more than just another pretty face.
Three stars from The Grandstander.
Reading this book prompted me to do a little research on Miss Lamarr. She was indeed beautiful, as these photos will attest:
She was, in fact, married to the so-called "Austrian Merchant of Death" Fritz Mandl, and he was certainly not a good guy. I do not know how many of the details of the marriage spelled out by author Marie Benedict, a Pittsburgh area resident, by the way, are real or inflated for dramatic purposes, but it is a novel, so one must, I suppose, keep that in mind.
In 1974, she filed a $10 million invasion of privacy lawsuit against Warner Bros. over the parody of her name ("Hedley Lamarr") used in Mel Brooks' "Blazing Saddles." The suit was settled out of court for a nominal sum and both Brooks and the studio apologized for "almost using her name."
Google will also give you a trove of great quotations from Miss Lamarr if you just type in "Hedy Lamarr quotes." Here are some good ones:
Any girl can be glamorous. All you have to do is stand still and look stupid.
American men, as a group, seem to be interested in only two things, money and breasts. It seems a very narrow outlook.
I advise everybody not to save: spend your money. Most people save all their lives and leave it to somebody else. Money is to be enjoyed.
She was, it turns out, a most interesting woman.
Oh, and I can't end a post about Hedy Lamarr without including this clip of perhaps her most famous single line of dialog from her Hollywood career. From the 1942 movie, "White Cargo".....
May 7 of this year will mark the 100th Anniversary of the sinking of the British passenger liner Lusitania by a German U-boat off the coast of Ireland. Erik Larson has written this book to tie in with that century anniversary. I saw this book reviewed in the Post-Gazette last week, and it also popped up on my daily email from Amazon. I had read three other of Larson's books (The Devil in the White City, Thunderstruck, and In the Garden of Beasts). His books are all well researched, and he is a terrific writer when he tells his stories, so I was all over this one. I finished reading it in two days. I confess to having known very little of the story of the sinking of the Lusitania. I knew it happened. I knew it had something to do with drawing the United States into World War I, but I knew very little of the event itself. Larson tells the story almost cinematic fashion (if done right, this would make one terrific movie). Alternating chapters take place aboard the Lusitania as it leaves New York and crosses the Atlantic, headed for Liverpool, aboard the German Unterseeboot-20, or U-20, as it leaves it's base in Germany to patrol the North Atlantic and the Irish Sea, and it also intersperses chapters in London's Admiralty office, and Washington DC, where the widowed President Woodrow Wilson was juggling to keep the USA neutral while the rest of the world was at war and was also falling madly in love while courting Washington widow Edith Galt. The central characters of the story are Lusitania Captain William Turner and U-20 Captain Walther Schwieger. Throw in the passengers aboard the Lusitania, and the research that Larson had to have done to tell their stories is staggering to imagine, Woodrow Wilson, Winston Churchill, several British Intelligence operatives, and you've got one fascinating book. One torpedo hit the Lusitania that May 7 morning 100 years ago, and eighteen minutes later, the ship was gone. Twelve hundred people died, seven hundred survived. Of course, there are questions that still exist as to why the Lusitania was struck. Where were the Royal Navel escort ships that were supposed to escort passenger ships? British navel intelligence was well aware of the presence of U-20 in those waters at that time, why wasn't the Lusitania better warned and protected? And why did officials the British government, led by no less than Lord of the Admiralty Churchill himself, so zealously seeking to affix blame on Captain Turner? It's a great story, a very sad story, and a terrific book.
