I bought this book at one of those library discount sales that I frequent, based on the author's name alone. Barbara Tuchman is best known for her study of World War I, The Guns of August. I read Guns in high school and loved it. About a decade ago I picked up a used paperback copy for my bookshelf. I've occasionally tried reading it again, but somehow I can't get interested in it now. At one point in the course if reading A Distant Mirror, I happened to be reading in a semi-public place while waiting. The guy next to me was a Tuchman fan, and we chatted a bit about her works. He recommended a book she wrote about George Washington, which sounded very interesting to me. (Now that I think of it again, I'll have to bump it up on my list.)

This is the last of the books I finished prior to the big hiatus this summer. As with the Peter biography, I'd have a lot more to say if it weren't so damn long ago. Glancing at my notes, I see that in my list of page-referenced items all but one fall within pages 417-598, a sure sign that another list of notes got lost somewhere along the way.

One of my intended themes found its way into a discussion on RMO. You could find it with a Google search of the newsgroups, but I'll save you the trouble by cut-and-pasting it right here. REG happened to mention that he was reading the Alexiad. That has very little to do with this book, but it must have been on my mind since it prompted me to respond:

This prompted a response from one of my longtime RMO pals (the one there whose knowledge of history I most respect) here writing under the pseudonym of Hans Lick:

Now me again:

Among those tangents is an enormous one at the start of the book which distracts Tuchman for several chapters before the "interesting individual", one Enguerrand de Coucy, is even introduced. Before reading this book I had never heard of Coucy, and I don't think one is expected to. He was definitely a prominent individual of the time, and his life is sufficiently well-documented for Tuchman to build a large story from it, but not in the sort of way that makes it into popular history. He was the sort of guy who was always near at hand to the big names and the big events, but never quite at the center of attention himself. He was frequently nominated to great posts, but he always dodged the central spotlight. In an age where we read about kings but also read that those kings had to contend with a slew of unnamed but important nobles with large estates, Coucy was France's most important noble with the largest estate.

Possibly it was a coincidence of name ― Coucy's estates were in the area of northern France called Picardy ― but at some point in the course of my reading it occurred to me that, with respect to his place in history, Coucy reminds me of the fictional captain of the Enterprise in Star Trek: The Next Generation, Jean-Luc Picard. Like Picard, Coucy was renowned both as a warrior and as a diplomat, with wide and varied experience for each; he seemed to be magically be nearby at all the interesting episodes of history; he had an improbable close relationship with the leaders of the other side (the Klingon emperor for Picard, the English royal family for Coucy); promotions were often offered to him, but just as often declined; and he commanded respect that crossed the usual barriers of political inclination.

Tuchman seems to favor him as a transitional character who bridged the "old school" and "new school" in the transition out of the age of chivalry which I perceived as a main theme (as described above). As the story is told, Coucy stands out as uncommonly competent and uncommonly well-liked. I don't know Tuchman well enough to separate her historical study from her narrative embellishment. It may well be that she chose Coucy as a subject for precisely these qualities, but it also may be that he is simply the most convenient hook upon which to hang the story that she wants to tell.

For the rest of this review, I turn to my notes. Unlike usual, these are not about vocabulary words. Rather they point to interesting little ideas to explore or felicitous phrases that tickled my fancy, instances of both of which abound in this book. Starting with the latter:

Coucy met his end in a crusade to the east. His company is captured and held prisoner in Gallipoli, giving Tuchman an excuse to rhapsodize on the Trojan War. Coucy, older and wiser than his compatriots, but bound by honor to join them, is Odysseus:

Providing background for this Crusade, Tuchman gives a brief review of Byzantine politics. We're back in 1341 now. With the unexpected death of Andronicus III, his nine-year-old son succeeds as emperor John V Paleologus. By Andronicus's will, the regent is to be his good friend John Cantacuzenus. The latter was a wealthy landowner, much disliked by others at court. At the earliest opportunity, when Cantacuzenus was away waging war, they deposed him and established a new regency. When he came back to re-depose them in turn, he declared himself John VI, co-emperor, but in fact he held all the power.

Years later, fortune's wheel turned yet again, and Cantacuzenus was turned out. "Upon Cantacuzene's abdication," Tuchman writes, "his former ward, John Paleologus, regained the throne (which accounts for the alarming succession of John VI by John V).

Elsewhere, Tuchman's attention is in the Kingdom of Naples, which for centuries occupied the southern half of the Italian peninsula. Nearby was the Kingdom of Sicily, on the island of the same name. For a while the two kingdoms were united under a single king, and then later they weren't again. In a footnote, Tuchman observes: "The name Sicily remained attached to the Kingdom of Naples, causing confusion which should be resolutely ignored."

Discussing one of Coucy's diplomatic ventures, Tuchman describes the political situation:

And now the rest.

One of my notes provides no passage to refer to, only reminding me that somewhere along the way this book gave me a better understanding of Boccaccio, a favorite author of mine who lived and wrote during the 14th century. Boccaccio's writings, satirical and mostly light, are bitterly anticlerical. Something in this book about the 14th century clergy illuminated that for me somehow. I'm sure it had something to do with the rampant corruption in the clerical class of the time, which Tuchman exposes thoroughly and at length. Alas, I don't recall any more than that.

Boccaccio's Decameron is one of my favorite classics. We tend to think of culture as being stricter and more conservative the further back one goes in history. The pattern holds reasonably well going back to about the 16th century, so it's a bit of a surprise to find that when you continue back just a little more you find women of the 14th century to be surprisingly liberal and liberated. Still less so than today, of course, but considerably more so than in, say, Shakespeare's time.

Tuchman observes Europe's attitude toward divorce in the 14th century:

The specific divorce that brings on this discussion was that of the Earl of Oxford and his wife Philippa. Philippa's mother was Isabella, the eldest of England's King Edward III's numerous daughters, and her father was none other than Enguerrand de Coucy. Their marriage was an effort by the English king to pursue his rivalry with the king of France by gaining an ally in one of the more powerful landowners of Picardy. Coucy skillfully played his difficult position and managed to enjoy the best of both connections before his wife died and he gradually became estranged from his daughter.

The Earl of Oxford was Richard de Vere, a minor noble until his marriage to Philippa brought him into the royal court where by force of personality he became the favorite friend of the boy king, Richard II ― not the Lion-Hearted one, nor Shakespeare's hunchback, but the one in between. In this position Oxford attained such influence that when he tired of his wife, he could easily dispose of her and collect a new one. This insult to Philippa's family was a key event in driving a political wedge between Richard and the Lancastrian wing of the royal family, a divide which would soon lead to Richard being deposed by his cousin Henry IV Bolingbroke, and would eventually become the Wars of the Roses.

Is it true that this same Richard II invented the handkerchief? I had never heard such a thing, but Tuchman reports it. (After googling, I see that Wikipedia reports the same story, albeit with no commitment on whether it's true.)

Discussing the Ottoman sultan who held Coucy and his compatriots hostage ― Bayezid I, who came to the throne upon the murder of his father at Kosovo, and who met his own end 13 years later in Ankara, where Timur (aka Tamerlane) destroyed his forces so utterly that the empire fell into civil war for a decade ― Tuchman catalogues the extravagant luxuries that, according to contemporary accounts, he demanded as ransom gifts. Among these are "tapestries of Arras depicting the history of Alexander the Great, from whom he claimed to be directly descended". This is a nice little reminder that Alexander is no less Muslim than he is Christian. In fact, he was neither ― not just because neither religion had been invented yet, but also because Alexander was notoriously irreligious. Still the Muslims claim him as one of their own ― Saladin also idolized Alexander ― with no less reason than we do.

Most of my notes are from near the end of the book (which is why we're so much in the near East). The one from earlier mentions Amedeo of Savoy. I think it's my own note, not Tuchman's, that observes that as of the 1860, when they assumed the crown of the new united Italy, the house of Savoy was the longest ruling royal family in Europe by far.

Amedeo VI was known as "the Green Count", Tuchman tells us,

I also recall a mention ― I'll never find it now ― of another knight who led an entire army outfitted in one color. White, I think it was.

Amedeo, by the way, is the tradition Savoyard spelling of the name which corresponds to standard Italian "Amadeo" or Latin "Amadeus". With a rudimentary knowledge of Latin roots, one can easily see that it breaks down to "love" and "God", though one can only guess at the grammatical relationship of the two particles. Peter Shaffer renders it as "beloved of God", which suits the theme of his play (later a movie) about Mozart. The name is synonymous with Greco-Latin "Theophilus" and German "Gottlieb", each of which is documented somewhere as Mozart's true middle name. (One on a birth certificate and the other on a baptismal record, I think.)

Among Tuchman's documentary discoveries is the frequency with which wealthy men of the 14th century complete their wills on or shortly before the day of death. After regarding one such (Louis of Anjou), she remarks:

Another explanation that occurs to me is that perhaps the wills are fraudulent, but perhaps she has reason to know otherwise.

Tuchman is the sort of author who loves to scour the archives. I'm inclined to think of her as more novelist than historian, but she is one with an insatiable appetite for documentary evidence. One of her goals with this book, I think, is to dispel some of the romantic glamor that surrounds the age of chivalry. Exposing its cruelty and ugliness is nothing new, and that too is romantic in a way. More deflating to the romanticists is the materialism and utter banality. A great deal of the documentary evidence, one gathers, is simply accounting and record-keeping. Tuchman likes to give us a taste of this from time to time, reporting lists and catalogues of various events. Summing up a certain truce in which Coucy is involved, she concludes:

4:57:14 PM  [permalink]  comment []  

November 2006
Prelude to Foundation, Isaac Asimov (1988)
Foundation's Edge, Isaac Asimov (1982)
Foundation and Earth, Isaac Asimov (1986)

Back when I used to watch television more often, it was my standard practice to rarely watch my favorite shows live. Instead, I'd always record them on the VCR to watch later. It freed me from being tied to the broadcaster's schedule, both in the larger (what day to watch) and smaller (when to pause for breaks) context. This was my ingrained habit for years before TiVo was invented, and I never felt a need for any new technology. One could often tell how busy my life was by counting how many unwatched tapes had piled up.

For some shows, and especially for sporting events, it was important not to talk to anyone who might reveal what happens before I had a chance to watch. I quickly discovered that it was necessary to be sure not to discuss the show at all, lest some person who doesn't get it can't resist saying something foolish like, "I won't tell you how it ends, but I can't wait to hear your reaction to what happens in the 8th inning," which spoils the game nearly as much as blurting the end result.

This review is sort of like that. Asimov's Foundation stories rely on surprise endings. I've avoided giving away any of the big surprises, so if you ever do read the books they won't be completely spoiled, but I'll be dancing all around various points, so if you definitely plan to read the books and you want the experience to be pure, you'd better stop reading this blog right now.

In our last episode, I had reread the original trilogy, and I inquired whether it made a difference if I read the first prequel before I read the two sequels, which were written first. I see now that perhaps the more relevant question would have been whether I should have read some of Asimov's robot stories first ― but for someone to even have suggested that might have changed the experience.

Both the prequel and the sequels have as a central theme an attempt to discover the early history of the Foundation universe. In the course of this discovery, robots get mentioned from time to time. I was aware that Asimov had written several books about robots, but I've never read any of them. It didn't take long to realize that by putting robots in Foundation's distant past, Asimov was connecting his fictional universes into one. In some places it was clear enough to me that there were direct references, even though I didn't know the antecedent, and I suppose there were probably other subtler references that I missed.

I liked the prequel (Prelude to Foundation) better than I liked the sequels. That's not really saying much, since the latter I didn't much like at all. Asimov's plots ― well in these stories anyway ― follow a basic pattern: a question is posed, the protagonists wander around a bit looking for the answer, and then it ends with a clever twist. In a short story that's good enough. As it increases to novel length the middle part gets stretched out into a bunch of little episodes many of which have little real connection to the main quest except as diversions from it. Enough of that and you start to wonder how much of the book is just junk filler. Or at least I did.

The two sequels run end to end, with Foundation and Earth (which I will hitherfrom refer to as "book 4") picking up at the very moment that Foundation's Edge ("book 5") left off. This only makes them seem even longer, since it feels more like one double-size story split in two ― particularly since the resolution of the book 4 is only half a resolution.

Book 4 has some interesting episodes near the beginning, when it's still more Foundation-like. The closer it gets to resolution, the less I like it. The main gimmick ― the revelation at the end and the retrospective explanation of everything that has preceded ― I find pretty unconvincing and somewhat dumb. If this were just some run-of-the-mill junk sci-fi I wouldn't be so critical, but it baffles me that this book won a Hugo Award. I can only suppose it's one of those awards that rewards an author's past performance and has little to do with the book itself.

Book 5 has the opposite problem: Here the ending is a bit more satisfying, but all the rigamarole along the way centers around the lame theme of book 4. Since book 5 is meant to be readable by on its own, it is often reminiscent of a weekly TV series where they have artificial conversations to remind you what happened last time ... when I'd really rather not be reminded.

It doesn't help that none of the main characters are likable. In the first half of book 4, the story follows a couple of different individuals in various parts of the galaxy, some of whom are OK, but after a while it centers on one pair of guys. These two guys, plus a passenger they pick up at the end of book 4, then dominate book 5, which is entirely about them. The sidekick guy is a pleasant fellow, but he's a total dweeb; worse, he's not written very well, and frequently when he talks ― he says "old chap", frequently ― you can't help asking yourself, "Is this guy for real? or is he just the author's fantasy of a benevolent nerd who stumbles upon profound and rewarding adventure?"

The main protagonist is more believable, but he's a dick. He's not even evil in a delightfully villainous way. In fact, he's not the villain at all; he's supposedly the hero, but he's still a dick. It's hard to follow a guy through space for a book and a half when you don't feel any sympathy for him at all. Are we supposed to identify with this guy? I sure didn't. And the supposed explanation for why he is unique in all the universe and therefore destined to determine the fate of all civilization is pretty lame, too.

As for the passenger who joins them for most of the trip, I have no objection to her character per se. But her role in the enterprise is completely entwined in the lame theme of book 4, and her relationship with the sidekick guy is a big part of what makes his character stick in my craw. Granted, she's not a normal human being, and her alienness gives a gravitas that belies her years, but ultimately she's a fresh and sexy 20-something who just happens to fall completely in love with the 50-something academic loser dork. I think I'd like it better if she were just a sex object that he was lucky enough to collect. It's the way the relationship is spiritually dressed up that comes across to me as phony. (Oh, and her name is "Bliss.")

You can barely see it on the book cover displayed here, where the illustration is reduced to a smaller window. On the copy I read, the same illustration filled most of the cover. You can see the full picture here. When Ericka saw that we laughed at how the artist managed to make a phallic symbol out of the open door on the spaceship. (My Scrabble dictionary doesn't accept "yonic", but that's how I'd describe the ship itself.)

The hot-and-bothered woman in the foreground I assumed was just trope for the genre, along with the lush alien vegetation ... until I got to the scene in the book which this picture really does illustrate pretty accurately. Yes, that's Bliss there. Asimov helps the artist by introducing her properly:

Sadly, this passage is not atypical. Asimov apparently can't resist this sort of physical description any time any female character is introduced, regardless of age or appearance. If she's old and plain, then it goes something like this:

It's not that Asimov requires all females to be sexy; it's that he can't go on without stopping to pass judgment on whether they are or aren't.

If you're feminist-minded, you're tempted ― as I was ― to ask, "Would he ever describe a male character that way?" Perhaps someone posed that very challenge to Asimov, and the result is regrettable. On a couple of occasions, the hero of book 4 and book 5 (yes, the jerk) has encounters with female characters. In what seems to be Asimov's effort to give equal time to the other sex, he allows the female character to regard the hero with the same lecherous eye, and the resulting prose is even more nauseating.

The prequel tells the early life of Hari Seldon, the legendary figure of the past in the original trilogy, so that already makes it more interesting. I wouldn't say that Seldon's character is fascinating, but he's basically likable and believable. His mysterious sponsor who intermittently reappears in the book really is quite intriguing, and is easily my favorite character in any of the three books.

In my review of the other Foundation books, I meant (but forgot) to complain that Asimov doesn't write female characters convincingly. Two of the original stories have female protagonists, one twenty-something and the other fourteen, and neither ring true. (I have friends who will insist that no male author can really write good female characters. I don't believe that. Tom Robbins immediately comes to mind as someone I feel is a counter-example. Several of the great male classical authors also wrote great female characters, though come to think of it at least one of the greatest character writers of all time (Shakespeare) did not.)

In this book, Hari Seldon's sidekick is a woman, and her character isn't so bad. She's a bit bland, but not unlikable nor unbelievable. My main complaint is that she and Seldon obviously had chemistry throughout the story and by the time I was halfway through the book I wanted to shout at them, "Just sleep together already!" ... but then at the end when something finally does happen, it's so hokey that I almost wish they didn't.

Unlike book 4 and book 5, Prelude ("book zero"?) lives up the standard set by the original trilogy, with the interesting plot twist at the end. If you've read it, you may remember that there are not one but two big surprises at the end, presented in rapid succession. Both are great, and both were completely unexpected by me. I only wish there was a little more space between them so that I could recover from the first enough to better appreciate the second. After that is a third surprise, which I did suspect by then, but I think it's supposed to be that way. After the first big surprise he starts hinting at it for a while, and when it's finally revealed he kind of dances around it like he wants you to draw your own conclusion.

I know this review makes it seem like I hated these books. I really didn't, but I don't expect them to read them again either. There's one more Foundation book left, the last Asimov wrote, but I'm now inclined to set that aside and read the robot books first. I assume the best reading order would be the order in which they were written, but if anyone has different advice I'm open to suggestion.

All three of the books were written in the 1980s, and there were times when it really showed. Just about any pre-1990 sci-fi book that mentions computers is going to get in trouble. Asimov seems to get into more trouble than most, since he's willing to go into a little more detail describing his imaginary computers of the future. Many authors had a knack for imagining what powerful computers might do, but pretty much everyone missed the boat on the miniaturization. The spaceship in books 4 and 5 has an extra special computer with a state-of-the-art interface that involves some sort of mind-meld technique, which is still ahead of the curve compared to us today (and at 20,000 years into the future they damn well ought to be) but too many of the others are still stuck on 1980s technology like clunky disks for storage and special training needed to operate them.

The influence of Asimov's era struck me even more on one cultural matter. Among the various alien cultures visited in Prelude, the protagonists encounter a reclusive and anti-technological society vaguely reminiscent of our Amish. One of this group's strange customs is that they abhor any hair on one's head. They all are shaved completely bald, and visitors are obliged to wear special bald wigs so as not to offend the natives.

OK so far. Cultural standards are varied and strange and it's good to make up strange quirks for your fictional cultures. What is really odd to me, though, is what a big freaking deal Asimov makes out of this. The protagonists comment to each other how very very alien this is and how shocking it is that people would voluntarily ― gasp! horror! ― give up their precious hair. When I read it, I just thought, "Geez, why not just shave your heads already? What's the big deal?" but in the book they treat it as if they were cutting off their fingers or something.

That makes me reflect on the symbolic importance of hair in the 1970s and 1980s. I remember one time when I was a kid ― that would be in the mid 1970s ― I read in a book somewhere that the ancient Egyptians would, when in mourning, shave their eyebrows. "Ancient Egyptians" spans several cultures, and I couldn't tell you which one did this, or for that matter if this factoid is even accurate. I do remember, though, that I was absolutely horrified at the idea of shaving my eyebrows and thinking that I would never never agree to such a thing. (Come to think of it, in those days I think I would have been pretty traumatized if obliged to get a crew cut, too.)

Today that wouldn't faze me at all. I don't particularly want to shave my eyebrows, but if there were some good reason to do it ― like maybe if I were in some sort of show where it was relevant to the character ― it would be no big deal. They'd grow back soon enough.

For Brux, a couple of words I happened to make note of, none wholly new, all from near the end of book 4 (which apparently is the only part where I was keeping vocabulary notes):

I know serried from a line in Nanki-Poo's song at the beginning of Gilbert & Sullivan's Mikado:

Both quotes suggest being in a line, which is part of the word's meaning; but the more direct connotation is that of being pressed together. Merriam Webster also acknowledges serried as a synonym for "serrated". This definition is labeled as "by alteration", which is an etymologist's way of saying enough people got it wrong for long enough that it stuck.

From a parenthetic description of Bliss,

I know this word from translations from French. I think I first encountered it in context with Murger's Bohème, but it's all over Hugo's Les Misérables, too. In French it's originally a word for boy (gamin) or girl (gamine), but in practice has come to be used specifically to refer to urban street urchins.

The English language lets me down here: I wanted to say "young boy" or "young girl", but that's hopelessly ambiguous. If "girl" is synonymous with "young woman", as it undeniably is for many speakers (mostly men), then a "young girl" would perhaps be a woman of 18 or 19 years, which is indeed exactly what many mean when they say "young girl". If, on the other hand, "girl" refers only to female children, as feminists would like it to be, then surely a "young girl" would be one who is six years old at the most; by that definition, a 12-year-old would have to be an old girl, though it's hard to imagine that anyone would call her that. Anyway, in imagining gamines and gamins, I'm thinking of kids in the general vicinity of 11 or 12.

In English usage, I've seen the adjective gamine used with a faintly erotic sense, which I really don't get at all. What is erotic about a street urchin?

Demurity is the quality of being demure, obviously enough, but I don't think I'd ever seen the noun before. That's Bliss again. Our hero "had been casting glances at Bliss, who sat with mocking demurity".

Celerity is a delightful word that I know but don't see often enough to really know well. It refers to quickness of motion. I tend to confuse it with alacrity, which is cheerful and prompt responsiveness. Possibly the most memorable thing I ever read in the New Republic was in Stanley Kaufman's review of Michael J Fox in Secret of My Success in which he referred to Fox's character's "chipmunk alacrity".

My one and only note from Prelude refers me to this discussion of a certain planet where indoor lighting imitates nature:

Surely that should be latitudes, not altitudes. Maybe it's just a typo that nobody caught.

Looking up this passage reminds me of the peculiar typography in this book. This is the edition matching two of the three covers pictured here, but of the three books it's the only one I read in that edition. The typeface for the main book is a standard Garamond ― I couldn't tell you exactly which one, but it has a pretty wide set. I'm not a big fan of Garamond for book type, but it's reasonable. Most of the display type ― page numbers and page heads, section heads, first line of each chapter, etc. ― is set in all caps in a really ugly boxy type vaguely reminiscent of Star Trek: The Next Generation.

I guess there was some unfortunate time near the end of the 1980s when that sort of typeface communicated high-tech futurism. And just in case the typeface itself isn't ugly enough, in the largest heads it is underlined with a line right on the baseline. Yes, that's right. The line actually overlaps with the bottoms of every letter. Who designs this shit? It's atrocious.

Also, the promo blurbs in the front have the same Garamond but now semibold and condensed, probably in order to better fit a certain amount of text in a certain number of pages while still almost-matching the design of the main text. One of the intro pages has a single word ("by" in "Bantam Spectra Books by Isaac Asimov") set in some simple sans-serif that bears no relation to anything else in the book. Was it intentional? an unfortunate font accident? Who knows. (The cover itself and the advertising pages in the back have a completely separate design from the main book, which is commonplace for second editions.)

2:56:30 PM  [permalink]  comment []