history

The book is always better than the movie, right? It seems that way to me, even with movies as good as the Lord of the Rings series. The movies were amazing, but the books were still better. It seems inevitable that Unbroken will appear on the silver screen before long (and, if the rumors are to be believed, it will star Nicholas Cage). Before it does, make sure you read the book. Unbroken is, in a word, amazing—easily one of the best books I read in 2010. It’s written by Laura Hillenbrand who also penned Seabiscuit. This new book has shot straight to #2 on the New York Times list of bestsellers just days after its release.

Unbroken tells the tale of Louie Zamperini, a character who is so much larger than life that I can’t believe I hadn’t encountered him before. Zamperini grew up in California in the 1930’s, a troublesome kid who was constantly stealing, constantly fighting, constantly getting into trouble. He was that kid, the kid who was known by the police, the kid who was every teacher’s nightmare. He was also lightning fast, eventually becoming a member of the 1936 U.S. Olympic team where he ran the 5,000 meter race and even had the opportunity to meet Adolf Hitler.

War came in 1941 and, like so many men his age, Zamperini joined up, enlisting in the United States Army Air Force. He was made bombardier in a B-24 bomber and posted to Hawaii. He took advantage of all the world had to offer, drinking and carousing with the best (or worst) of them. On May 27, 1943, while searching the ocean for a crashed plane, his own plane suffered mechanical failure and plunged into the ocean. Zamperini survived the crash along with two other members of the crew. They were adrift in the Pacific for 47 days, living off whatever rain fell from the sky and whatever food they could somehow pluck from the ocean. Though one of the men eventually succumbed to starvation, the two who remained were eventually “rescued” by the Japanese Navy, some 2,000 miles from where the plane had crashed.

Zamperini’s war was about to get far worse.

While I was on vacation I did a lot of reading about Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson, a man I’ve long admired but one I had barely gotten to know. Having returned home, I turned to a biography of his contemporary, Robert E. Lee.

In the foreword to this particular biography, author Emory Thomas has some very useful things to say about writing biography. Though it applies to Lee in particular, I think we can extend it to any historical figure. He warns against the tendency to deify subjects and shows, rightly I think, that heroism tells as much about the society that admires as it tells about the figure himself.

Here is what Thomas says:

Lee, the enigma, seldom if ever revealed himself while he lived. To understand him, it is necessary to look beyond his words and see, for example, the true nature of the lighthouse keeper Lee encountered during his surveying mission in 1835. It is also important to peer beyond Lee’s words and recall what he did as well as what he said. Sometimes the existential Lee contradicted the verbal Lee.

There is a third caveat to understanding Lee. In addition to looking behind and beyond his words, it is well to remember that Lee was once possessed of flesh and blood. This is important because so many have made so much of Lee during the years since he lived that legend, image and myth have supplanted reality. Lee has become a hero essentially smaller than life.

People usually venerate as a hero someone who exemplifies (or who they think exemplifies) virtues which they admire or to which they aspire. Heroism thus reveals more about the society that admires than about the hero. Lee has been several sorts of American hero, and within the American South he has attained the status of demigod. Over time Lee has been a Christ figure, a symbol of national reconciliation, an exalted expression of bourgeois values, and much, much more. In life Lee was both more and less than his legend.

The time has come—indeed, the time is long overdue—to review and rethink Lee alive. History needs Robert E. Lee whole.

Reading these few paragraphs gave me a lot to chew on (to the point that I put the book down for a day and just thought about it). I think Thomas is essentially correct. Looking at this from the perspective of a Christian, I can see that at any time Christians have certain character traits, certain virtues that they value above all. What we tend to do, I think, is to find heroes who displayed these characteristics, and we then describe our heroes as if they were only these characteristics. When we do this, we make our heroes both more and less than what they truly were—we make much of those few strengths and ignore other strengths and inevitable weaknesses. And in this way we miss out on many of the lessons we ought to learn from them. Along the way, we tell a lot about ourselves but not nearly so much about these old heroes.

What do you think? Is Thomas on to something here? Do we, as Christians, tend to fall into this trap, where we create and even desire one-dimension heroes?

I have been waiting a long time for this book. Published last year by Intervarsity Press, The Unquenchable Flame was initially released only in Europe. It has taken until now for it to make its way to North America, courtesy of Broadman & Holman who secured the rights for this side of the ocean. The book is, quite simply, an introduction to the Reformation. That puts it in the company of plenty of similar titles, but this one is unique in its accessibility and its liveliness. Michael Reeves tells the story of the Reformation and he does so in a way that is really and truly enjoyable.

So what is there to say about the book’s content? It is, after all, a 180-page account of a well-known period of history. There are no great surprises here—no new theories, no new facts that have been recently uncovered. It is just a straightforward telling of the Reformation. Reeves begins by setting the stage in the medieval era, telling of the state of the medieval church and introducing the pre-Reformers Wycliffe and Hus. He also introduces Erasmus and discusses that man’s unique contribution to all that would follow.

This little reflection, which I wrote yesterday while researching my book, seemed appropriate to post this morning, one day after the 199th anniversary of the birth of Luddism and the very day that the next great technology, the iPad, goes on sale.

*****

Luddites have gotten a bad rap. Synonymous with irrational suspicion toward technology, Luddites were, in reality, not nearly as concerned with technology as we might think. History has not been entirely fair to them.

Early in 1811, the owners of Nottinghamshire weaving mills began to receive angry and threatening letters from General Ned Ludd and his Army of Redressers. It’s unlikely that there ever was a Ned Ludd; historians believe that the name was a fictitious name fabricated by workers in the textile industry. And these workers, artisans mainly, had much to concern them. As the nation became increasingly industrialized, machines began to do the jobs previously done by men. The work of skilled craftsmen soon became the work of an apprentice or an unskilled woman operating a machine. Wages plummeted as did quality and even the demand for quality. The craftsmen were quickly becoming obsolete and impoverished. The new machines did inferior work, sure, but it was both fast and cheap—a trade-off most people were willing to make.

Under the banner of Ned Ludd, the old artisans plotted to thwart the factories that appeared bent on destroying them. They first wrote letters threatening harm to factories if they did not rid themselves of the machines. Not surprisingly, the factory owners refused to comply with the demands. And so the Luddites attacked. Within weeks factor raids were a nightly occurrence and hundreds of knitting machines had been destroyed.

A short time ago I made the decision to read through all of David McCullough’s books. He is a renown historian and a gifted author and I realized that reading his books would be both educational and enjoyable—not just to learn history from a master but to learn from his style of writing. Few men can write history with the lucidity and character of David McCullough. This is why, I’m sure, all of his books remain in print, even forty and fifty years after publication, and why he has twice received the Pulitzer Prize (not to mention multitudes of other accolades).

Intimidated by the sheer size of his biography of Truman, and having already made my way through 1776 and John Adams, I turned recently to The Johnstown Flood, one of his lesser-known works. This book, which weighs in at a “mere” 300 pages (quite short for McCullough’s standards) deals with one of the most devastating disasters in American history. On May 31, 1889, a dam burst near Johnstown, Pennsylvania, sending a massive wall of water hurtling towards the thriving town. It smashed into Johnstown, killing more than 2,000 people. But it was more than a tragedy—it was also a scandal, for the dam was privately owned and had been built to make a private lake on a summer resort property patronized by such tycoons as Andrew Mellon, Andrew Carnegie and Henry Clay Frick. Americans were outraged.

Though the event has been largely forgotten, at the time it was a national scandal and riveted the attention of Americans much the way Hurricane Katrina did when it devastated New Orleans a few years ago. For weeks and months it was front page news across the nation. Johnstown would never fully recover and, once a bustling town with a great future, it quickly faded in favor of other nearby towns.

While The Johnstown Flood may not be a book carrying lessons of great importance for our day (“Don’t neglect dams?”), neither does it need to be. It is a fascinating read and an interesting little slice of history. Through the pen of David McCullough the events come to life and the reader is transported a century into the past. Like all of the works of McCullough I’ve read to this point, this one is well worth the read.

I think we all remember where we were and what we were doing when, on September 11, 2001, we first heard that a plane had slammed into the World Trade Center. It is one of those moments we will undoubtedly always remember, just as so many people have never forgotten where they were when they heard about the assassination of J.F.K.. They are seared forever into our memories. They are utterly unique moments in history. How could we ever forget?

While the story of what happened on that day has already been told in many books and in several movies, none of the accounts has told it from the perspective of the pilots of the 5000 planes that were in the skies that day or from the perspective of those on the ground who were responsible for the air-control and air-defense systems that controlled the skies over America. In Touching History Lynn Spencer tackles the story from this new perspective and in so doing writes a book that is both fascinating and riveting. A commercial pilot herself, she is well acquainted with the decisions and the responsibilities faced by pilots and controllers across the nation.

In an interesting literary decision, Spencer opted to write the book in the present tense rather than the more obvious past tense. This makes the book read less like history and more like current events. It transports the reader to the day itself, giving a moment-by-moment breakdown of the actions and decisions of the day. The book effectively takes the reader back to that day, stirring memories and evoking emotion perhaps long forgotten. Though the reader knows how the story ends, it makes the journey no less interesting.

Meticulously researched, the book actually makes some important corrections to the official 9/11 Commission Report and introduces some interesting new details to the account. Even those who have read other books on the subject will find new information here as the author deliberately covers some of the lesser-known drama. For example, she writes quite extensively about Delta flight 1989, an aircraft officials became convinced had also been hijacked. The plane was refused landing on the East Coast and was eventually forced to land in Cleveland where it sat for hours on the tarmac before a SWAT team finally approached and cleared the plane. She tells such stories from the perspective of those involved, not as abstract history but as personal narrative. She writes also of fighter pilots who, flying unarmed planes, were ready and willing to sacrifice their lives by crashing into hijacked airliners to save lives on the ground; she writes about air traffic controllers who were faced with almost unimaginable stress and the nearly-impossible task of, for the first time in history, grounding every plane in the country. Spencer has a knack for detail and for finding and describing interesting stories.

Touching History is a book that drew me in and wouldn’t let me go until I had finished the last page. In fact, I took concerted effort for me not to destroy a whole work day reading it. It is that good. Anyone who wants to have a better understanding of what transpired on September 11 will want to read this account.