Critics' choices for Christmas
Allitt, Patrick
Patrick Allitt Patrick Allitt is professor of history at Emory University. His most recent book is Religion in America since 1945: A History (Columbia University Press). One of the hazards of...
...and that the Allies made a catastrophic error at Versailles by demanding that Germany accept guilt for the war...
...His effortless wit and erudition make you feel, while you're turning the pages, more intelligent than you really are...
...Overy, also a London academic, takes the same kind of revisionist approach to World War II, contradicting standard interpretations and prompting you to think again about what really happened, and why...
...He admits that early British attacks, such as the Battle of the Somme (July 1916), were futile blood-baths, but he goes on to emphasize that the British commanders like Douglas Haig, far from being wooden-headed, learned quickly from their mistakes...
...This year I had a wonderful time with a string of Richard Russo's novels, culminating in Empire Falls (Vintage, $14, 496 pp...
...One of the hazards of being a professor is the temptation to read only in my professional field, because even in that little area there are more new books to read than there are days in the year...
...I spent the summer in England, at a summer school in Oxford, where I often teach a course on Britain and the two world wars...
...I also guzzled down David Lodge's Thinks (Viking Penguin, $14,352 pp...
...They knew they were fighting for a good cause and fought all the better because of it while their enemies had to rely ever more on repression and terror to keep the war effort going at all...
...In 1917 and 1918 they developed the offensive tactics and cooperation that enabled them to forestall the German offensive of 1918, reverse it, and win a decisive battlefield victory later that year...
...As bad as casualties were among British and American aviators, they were incomparably smaller than those suffered by the Russian infantry...
...I prepare for it each time by reading at least a few of the latest war books, of which the supply seems still to be growing rather than receding with the passage of time...
...The best two I found this time around were Gary Sheffield's Forgotten Victory (Review Books, $12,365 pp...
...What does everyone think about World War I? That it was a tragic and unnecessary war, fought unimaginatively by blunderingly insensitive generals who bled entire nations by launching hideous frontal assaults of men against machine guns...
...They all have the same plot: small-town America has been left behind by the big modern world, and is populated by sensitive, underachieving men with hopeless but lovable fathers...
...Most striking to me was his demonstration that the Allies' massive bombing campaign (which many historians have dismissed as wasteful and ineffective) really did play a vital role in shattering German resolve, organization, and productivity...
...In quick succession in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, after all, they had abandoned red uniforms, abandoned tight formations, transformed their armaments, revolutionized logistics and field medicine, and adapted to a world of aircraft, big-gun ships, and industrial mechanization...
...I resist the temptation with fiction binges, such as the delicious weeks I spent a few years ago reading fifteen of Patrick O'Brian's brilliant novels about life in the Napoleonic-era Royal Navy, or the queasy month I devoted to Martin Amis's sordid masterpieces Money, London Fields, and The Information...
...He had undertaken these studies in preparation for writing a novel about the romance between an AI expert and a novelist, in the setting of a provincial English campus...
...Each of them has distinct ideas about what thinking is and about its connection to the emotions, but Thinks is much more than a formulaic confrontation between science and the humanities, and Lodge knows just how to make the best of each point of view while subtly exposing his characters' weaknesses, contradictions, and logical lapses...
...This well-written and persuasive book reminded me that the brilliant poets and novelists of World War I (Owen, Sas-soon, Graves, Hemingway, and Remarque), superb as they are, ought not to have the last word on the political and military questions...
...Russo rings the changes on this premise in so many ways that each new book is simultaneously familiar and wonderfully strange...
...Movie sequels are usually duller than the original but each Russo sequel is richer and fuller than the one before...
...on the Second, both of which overturn conventional interpretations...
...Wrong on all counts, says Sheffield, a professor at King's College, London...
...In Empire Falls the main character's pride in, and fears for, his teenage daughter echoed those I feel for Frances, my own fifteen-year-old, with uncanny exactness...
...I have been one of his devoted fans ever since, as a twenty-one-year-old, I laughed my way through Changing Places, which is the funniest academic novel ever written...
...Overy includes a shrewd account of morale, morality, and religion as factors contributing to the Allies' victory...
...on the Great War, and Richard Overy's Why the Allies Won (Norton, $17, 428 pp...
...Last year Lodge gave a series of lectures at Emory, about recent developments in artificial intelligence and the attempt to make computers think...
...He argues that we should be more impressed by the military leaders' skills as innovators rather than their alleged dogged traditionalism...
...For example, he shows that it was entirely reasonable to expect that Germany would win the war, at least until mid-1942, and that the Battle of Britain in the summer of 1940 was more a holding action than a decisive victory...
...Among his gifts is a phenomenal ability to convey parental anxieties...
Vol. 130 • December 2003 • No. 21
