The Headboard Reviews

2009
2010

 

The Tudors: The Complete Story of England's Most Notorious Dynasty
G. J. Meyer

The Tudors, long-reigning drama queens and kings of English history, heroes of stage, page and screen (big and small), sit for an unflattering family portrait in this lively general history. The emphasis is, predictably, on Henry VIII and Elizabeth I - founding father Henry VII gets short shrift indeed - and the series of religious reformations the period was wracked by. Though not wildly revisionist, Meyer does have a bit of an axe to grind. His judgment of the Tudor dynasty is harshly critical, seeing Henry and Elizabeth in particular as cruel, intolerant, selfish monsters who generally made life miserable for their subjects. Even "Bloody" Mary gets off lightly in comparison.

How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read
Pierre Bayard

Not reading classic works of literature is a matter of special concern for the French, as it has a very specific meaning: Whether or not you've read all of Proust. Pierre Bayard, a professor of French literature who has only skimmed Proust, takes this anxiety (he is also a psychoanalyst) and seeks to assuage it by asserting that not reading is not only inevitable, but a form of creative activity in its own right. By turns tongue-in-cheek, provocative, liberating, and depressing, the thesis of Bayard's little book (which I did read all of, by the way) finally dissolves in light of how much reading one has to do to qualify as truly unread. That so little remains with us, "no more than a few fragments afloat, like so many islands on an ocean of oblivion," was, consciously, one of the reasons I had for starting this site.

Nikolski
Nicolas Dickner

The conceit of a novel constructed out of seemingly unrelated parts that in some metaphysical way connect is now a familiar one, in tune with a cultural zeitgeist that includes David Mitchell's Ghostwritten (Mitchell provides a blurb for Nikolski), the movie Babel, most conspiracy theories, and even the pop bromide about everything happening for a reason. Nikolski is a work informed by this same spirit, tracking the lives of three modern nomads who all relocate to Montreal for a while and whose paths cross without really touching. A very clever, fresh, and lean entertainment buoyed by some terrific writing (ably translated by Lazer Lederhendler). 

Vienna, 1814: How the Conquerors of Napoleon Made Love, War, and Peace at the Congress of Vienna
David King

In 1814, after what seemed to be the end of the Napoleonic Wars, all of Europe went to Vienna to party. The occasion was a peace conference, the Congress of Vienna, where royalty and diplomats came together to draw a new political map of Europe. As David King's subtitle indicates, his emphasis is as much on the Congress's extravagant social scene, the intrigues in the ballrooms and bedrooms, as on the actual diplomacy. But the two were closely connected. The "greatest and most lavish party in history" was eventually crashed by Napoleon's escape from Elba, but after nine-months a lasting peace had been brought forth. A better record than Paris, 1919, and almost as interesting as MacMillan's book (which was reviewed here).

This Land Is Their Land
Barbara Ehrenreich

While I'm a fan of Barbara Ehrenreich's adventures in immersive journalism (Nickel and Dimed, Bait and Switch), this collection of short op-ed pieces did not impress. The book's theme, that America is a country divided by class, with all of the meanness, exploitation, and hypocrisy that entails, is a simple one that these various field reports don't do enough to flesh out. Only a few of Ehrenreich's observations combine her rhetorical flair with compelling insight ("we are reaching the point . . . where the largest public housing program in America will be our penitentiary system"), or involve any real newsy reporting (like the way Target handles security problems with its employees). But it's a breezy read and makes an important moral and political statement all the same.

Cultural Amnesia
Clive James

"Notes in the margin of my time," runs the subtitle of this collection of fascinating character sketches and highly quotable marginalia. The "my time," however, is a bit of a stretch, since James (born 1939) is mainly interested in the collapse of the cosmopolitan intellectual culture of pre-First World War Europe (Vienna is the touchstone) and the rise of twentieth-century totalitarianism (Hitler, Stalin, et al.). But while passionately defending individualism against the forces of ideology and closed systems of thought, some of the essays veer into their own judgmental closed-mindedness, a slamming of round pegs into square holes. This is, however, the way cultural memory works. We use it (for our own purposes, of course) or lose it. In the process it is necessarily transformed.

The Death of Conservatism
Sam Tanenhaus

The simple thesis of this short, disposable book (the outgrowth of a magazine article) is that in the cycles of American political thought conservatism is currently on the outs after having become too rigidly ideological. In recent years the classical conservatism of the great tradition has been usurped by the "movement conservatism" of the neocons and subsequently cast into the eclipse by the pragmatic, "compromise" politics of Barack Obama. That Obama is "temperamentally conservative" himself, and his policies - both foreign and domestic - not that clearly distinguishable from those of the preceding Bush administration, suggests the death of liberalism, too. A closely related subject that I think we will be reading more about before too long.

Lord Beaverbrook
David Adams Richards

As part of a series of brief biographies of "Extraordinary Canadians," novelist David Adams Richards tells the story of fellow Miramichi (then Newcastle) native Max Aitken, a kid from the "backward province" of New Brunswick who became the press baron Lord Beaverbrook and, during the Second World War, an important British cabinet minister. Richards feels an obvious kinship, identifying with Aitken's status as the "consummate outsider" and his lifelong struggle against spineless, condescending toffs. But while providing some local insight, filtered through Richards's tirelessly paraded moral and political biases, the book includes no original research and in the end only offers a quick character sketch of its subject.

Favorite Father Brown Stories
G. K. Chesterton

Oh, the insufferable Father Brown! Better the exuberant arrogance of Holmes and Poirot than the cringing, blinking, mock humility of this clerical Uriah Heep, the little village priest with a "face as round and dull as a Norfolk dumpling." Since Chesterton doesn't give the reader sufficient clues to play along, Father Brown comes to seem an agent of God, his over-ballyhooed powers of "reason" a mystical ability to share in the divine mind. There is something almost insulting in the attitude of these stories, a nasty bit of ear-pulling meant to show us not only that we shouldn't look down on the dumpling Brown, but that we should in fact look up to him - while he remains justifiably indifferent to what any of us might think of him or his God-like powers. Pure humbug.

Penny Dreadful
Shannon Stewart

The tabloid world of urban legends and junk science, with roots going back to the penny dreadfuls of the nineteenth century, provides the background for Shannon Stewart's poetic conjuring of real-life bogeyman, pig farmer, and serial killer Robert Pickton. It is Pickton's victims, however, the ghosts of Vancouver's missing women and Jane Does, who are rescued from anonymity to be placed among the stars. An effective concept book that blends high and low, threading together themes of myth and metamorphosis with hysterical headlines and horoscopes, Penny Dreadful is a work in the Modernist mode that does the "news" of the day in different voices. 

The Closing of the Western Mind
Charles Freeman

The bold claim made in this book's title - that the establishment and imposition of official (orthodox) Church doctrine led to the suppression of a great tradition of philosophical inquiry, science, and rational thought - pretty much takes a back seat to a general history of early Christianity. Along the way a sharp eye is cast on such interesting subjects as the politics behind the early ecumenical councils and the Church Fathers' perverse attitude toward sexuality. One of the best introductions available to a subject that Freeman convincingly argues is deserving of more attention.