The nation that brought the world Lada and Zhiguli cars–which asked of their owners to spend nearly every weekend under their jacked-up chassis salving their ever-irritated metal bowels–produced submarines during WWII that would never quite pass muster in an American or German shipyard. This run-down state of submersible machinery can be fully appreciated by reading Victor Korzh’s memoir, Red Star Under the Baltic: A Soviet Submariner in WWII.

As the chief engineer aboard these subs, Korzh knew every nut and bolt and describes their mechanical failures with the technical detail befitting a master. But the inability of Soviet designers and shipyards to perfect submarine design is no stain on the reputation of the Russian sailor. On the contrary, the Russian submariners’ ability to not only survive but also sink many German merchantmen in the unforgiving seas of the Baltic is a testament to their boldness and technical ingenuity.

In one story among many, Korzh describes how a shoddy repair job in a Finnish dry dock left his submarine, L-21, with broken stern hydroplanes (which help control the diving and surfacing of the boat) after a nasty storm. To fix this, Korzh kept L-21 resting on the seabed for two days as teams of sailors pounded away with four sledgehammers at the mounting of the stern hydroplanes in an effort to remove enough steel from it to fit in there the still-working control mechanism from the bow hydroplanes (which weighed hundreds of pounds and had to be lugged from the very front of the ship to the back). The ricocheting of the sledgehammers drew inquisitive German submarines like sharks to the scene, but they were powerless to attack L-21 while she lay submerged.

I’ve read more in the past about American fleet boats and German U-boats than about Russian submarines. There are some interesting differences between the conditions and doctrines of these naval services.

Korzh’s memoir begins during the Siege of Leningrad, where the Baltic Fleet’s submarines were relocated after their forward bases in the Baltic countries were captured by the Germans. The dire shortage of almost everything in that city meant that the submarines had to make do with substandard repair work, and the sailors themselves had to scrounge around Leningrad for raw materials to repair their boats. Korzh admits, “we were showing the old ships no mercy; we were repairing their machinery just enough for them to stagger on to the end of the war, creaking and groaning.”

Operating in the Gulf of Finland and Baltic Sea also meant that the subs had to slither through shallow water in enemy territory, which usually spells death for the submarine. Luckily, the German crews weren’t as skillful or equipped for anti-submarine warfare as the British were against the U-boats. There is only one story in Korzh’s account of the Germans ever using active sonar (the ping one hears in sub movies which means another ship is locating the sub). If the British and American hunter-killer groups were chasing these Soviet subs in the Baltic, I think the latter would never stand a chance.

Another amazing difference is how the Russian subs navigated German minefields, which they couldn’t avoid in the Gulf of Finland. These mines would be floating on the surface and have a cable attached to them descending to the seafloor. The procedure for going through a minefield was for the sub to submerge, all of the sailors to be quiet, and everyone to listen for the scraping of a mine cable against the ship’s hull. When they would hear the cable sliding across their hull, the captain would order an emergency turn to avoid snagging it and triggering the mine. Considering that this is the crudest method imaginable for dodging mines, it’s amazing Korzh survived these ordeals.

Korzh was lucky. On his second patrol, his boat S-12 triggered two antenna mines, and the explosions sent waterfalls into the ship. On that same patrol, they also got caught in an anti-submarine net ringed with canisters of explosives (which went off), but they managed to escape. Dozens of situations presented themselves to Korzh over the course of his patrols that would have resulted in capture by the enemy or death if an ingenious technical fix wasn’t found for a critical malfunction. That Korzh survived all of these trials is really amazing and speaks highly of his resourcefulness.

The steel boats hunting alone in ice-rimmed Baltic waters. The men inside shivering from condensation endlessly dripping off pipes onto their damp clothing. The scramble of activity to fix broken machinery, heads and hands submerged in greasy engines and chloric batteries. It’s a story best read while sitting inside of a warm house.

Inside, there is a scramble of activity. A general checkout line stretches from the cashier stands far back into the dairy products aisle. Lines are everywhere—to the seafood stand, the deli, the aisle with the cooking oils—but they are all rapidly moving forward.

Men in suits coming back from work squeeze through the narrow space between shelves to get around other shoppers: young women with strollers, older ladies in puffy black coats with fur collars, hipsters sampling different flavors of olive oil, a gray-browed man pounding an air piano with one hand as he listens to an iPod.

Two employees hidden in a nook are busy servicing a separate line of customers wanting to get coffee. They take orders, scoop pungent black beans from barrels, sprinkle them into grinding machines, pack the resulting powder into paper packets, and give it to the customers. The nook is heavy with the sweaty scent of crushed beans. Ahead of them is an even larger nook whose three walls are resplendent with fine cheeses.

Two men—one on a ladder—empty a wooden cart onto an unreachably tall pyramid of oranges. It has a sculpted shape formed by perfect layers—like bricks—of fruit, but I notice that the men aren’t forming the newly-plumped oranges into the pyramid themselves. Does this mass of fruit just take on its own shape?

…

I FLY INTO New York City yesterday morning, the plane’s landing pattern taking it into a swooping turn over the center of Manhattan on its way to land at LaGuardia Airport. The sun rises over a clear atmosphere. Bridges from the other boroughs stretch over waters—pink-lit—and onto Manhattan Island like ropes over Gulliver.

Flying over Brooklyn toward LaGuardia, I see an enormous patch of elevated dull green ground amid a landscape of brownstones and projects. It is a group of cemeteries, and their yellowed grass seems to be sprinkled, like salt on a wound, with tiny white specks—tombstones. Two busy highways run through the cemeteries like arteries coursing through a dry heart.

What is there? A whole swarm of New Yorkers—dead. Citizens, civic leaders, strong-hearted men and women, contemporaries of Whitman and the Roosevelts, some once rich and some once poor are now all dry bones collected in durable boxes. The dramas and struggles of their lives continue in the city all around them, passed on to more animated hands and hearts.

…

TODAY, I WALK down the streets of Manhattan to a café near my brother-in-law’s apartment. There are people everywhere. They abound in the shop-lined avenues that intersect streets with multi-storied ancient townhouses. They run and walk their dogs in Central Park, that enormous sculpture of stone, hill, grass, tree, and lake loved by wildlife.

At the bottom of a hill, an old white woman in gray coat and a young black man in a varsity jacket are talking. Their dogs, leashed, play tag in a circle around their legs.

Even on a snowless winter day, Central Park is beautiful. The park benches have dedicatory inscriptions. I read them and think about the New Yorkers—now gone—that they commemorate. Who were they, these citizens that looked upon these same trees and boulders as I do? The inscriptions on the benches are a narcotic: I lose myself in these thoughts.

Halfway down a ridge overlooking a vista of forested hills furrowed by walkways, there is a bench and an inscription that I stop for. It reads, “Dear Leonard, / Meet me here. / I love you.” Two whole lives and a wish for immortality are summed up in those three lines of poetry.

…

I WALK ON Columbus Avenue. Window cleaners slop soapy water onto a tall shop window and squeegee it down with a long-handled mop to reveal an invisible surface. A sturdy man in a coarse blue-gray jacket prepares to unload boxes from a parked white truck in the salty mid-winter morning air. A fragile old woman sits with her head buried in a fur coat. She has jade-colored jewellery flowers in her faded blonde hair. As I pass her hunched alone in the outdoor seating area of a corner café, her leashed puppy lunges at a nearby pigeon. The bird flies away.

A man emerges from the metal door-flaps of a basement cellar carrying a large uncovered basket of freshly-quartered onions. He walks into a door below a maroon awning on which is written in white letters, “Indian Bistro”. There are many such cellars in New York City. They are twenty-foot traps gaping in the sidewalk with descending iron ladders. Their doors are flung open for much of the day. If you don’t look when you walk—and if you are really unlucky—you could actually fall in.

This first of a series of posts, called “In the Abstract”, are ideas for topics for new history books. Sometimes historians, I think, shoot themselves in the foot by framing their research projects in an uninteresting way. Others, though, do this masterfully and create history books that are engaging, relevant, insightful, and bring the characters and world of another age to life not only for the academic community but for the general public too. Often the path of success or failure begins in the choice of topic. In an effort to sharpen my skills in framing historical topics, I welcome your criticism and comments of my imaginary abstract.

…

ART is frequently seen as flourish to life for those that can afford leisurely activities. Love of art is something that supposedly dies in people when other, more basic, human needs are not being met. But to a select group of Russian writers, poets, artists, and musicians that lived in Leningrad during the siege of 1941-44 by the German army, the drive to produce new creative work did not vanish. Amid the base struggle for survival in that city under blockade, with starvation, violence, death, cannibalism, terror, and inhumanity permeating their existence, many artists in Leningrad later wrote that they experienced the strongest artistic drive of their lives. There has not been a book in English devoted to their stories. A book about the individuals, meeting places, and creative works that these artists produced (among them Dmitri Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 7–the “Leningrad Symphony”) under the most unpromising circumstances would be a testament to the basic importance of creativity in human life.

Below is a survey of books that were published in the past month or so and look to me like interesting reads (note: I have not actually read these books, and these are previews not reviews).

…

Africa

I’m currently reading William L. Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, and one of among many striking things about Nazi Germany is how easily a multitude of religious leaders in that country kowtowed to Hitler’s religious decrees (which needless to say were staggering in their impiety—replacing the Bible in pulpits with Mein Kampf, for instance). Religions like Christianity derive their power from writing and oratory. But if those mesmerizing words are not backed by deeds when the going gets rough (i.e. when the Gestapo will kill you if you continue practicing authentic Christianity) then such sermonizing appears in hindsight like idle chatter.

That’s why I can’t help but admire a guy like Sam Childers. After he converted to Christianity, he traded a life of drugs, motorcycle gangs, and chasing women in America to become a machine-gun armed protector of orphans and other destitute children in violence-ravaged Sudan. That’s some tough, in-your-face Christianity and not of the “Have you heard the Good Word? Here, take a pamphlet” variety. Childers has published a memoir of his experiences.

Fr. John Kaiser, a priest raised in Minnesota who was killed in Africa while standing up to government authorities on behalf of the poor, had a similar mission as Childers. Journalist and author Christopher Goffard has just published an account of Fr. John’s life in Africa called You Will See Fire: A Search for Justice in Kenya. These life stories of hard-bitten Christians exhibiting physical courage while helping others are just the thing to read for suburban Christians experiencing ennui in the faith.

Life Upon These Shores: Looking at African American History, 1513-2008. Henry Louis Gates Jr. A prominent scholar musters the latest research to chronicle the varied experiences of blacks in America.

…

Russia

Seven years ago, I read memoirs of Russians who lived through World War I in the city of Petrograd. I realized how hard it was to pick apart the truth from varied and contradictory accounts of the past. The Russian history professor who was supervising my project was scathingly critical of Tsar Nicholas II’s leadership. The autobiography that I read of a commander in the tsarist White Army, though, praised the deposed monarch to no end. A historian needs to form his own opinions by looking at the facts, which is the most challenging and also the most ennobling part of the profession. And one of the most confounding mysteries in recent history–one that requires the historian to marshal her utmost skills–is the cause and culprit of World War I.

Recent research in this area of Russian history has focused on the political climate of the capital of Tsarist Russia: Petrograd. Professor Mark D. Steinberg of the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign has just published a book examining the works of writers in that fateful city between the two revolutions of 1905 and 1917.

But the most stunning contribution to the subject is the salvo delivered by Sean McMeekin across the bow of the academic history community with his publication on November 30th of The Russian Origins of the First World War. His thesis that Russian politicians’ aggressive drive toward annexing territories from the Ottoman empire was the primary cause of World War I flies in the face of the accepted wisdom (championed by 20th century historian Fritz Fischer) that Germany was the culprit of 1914. This book is sure to ruffle some feathers and unnerve some minds, but I think McMeekin’s work is worth reading to understand the complexities of the diplomatic fiascoes that precipitated worldwide catastrophe.

The Jewish Dark Continent: Life and Death in the Russian Pale of Settlement. Nathaniel Deutsch. An expedition before WWI documented the life of Jews living in shtetls in the Tsar’s empire before those communities vanished.

It Was a Long Time Ago, and It Never Happened Anyway: Russia and the Communist Past. David Satter. Satter examines Russia’s Communist past—a rare project today—because authoritarianism rears its ugly head there again.

…

Natural resources

If you’re really into some natural object, there’s probably a history book out there about it. Coffee, fruit, cod, salt, spices, tobacco, chocolate, and many other resources have been featured in cultural histories over the past couple of decades. Other well-known contemporary works, such as Guns, Germs, and Steel and 1493, focus on the effects of biology on history and vice versa. My hunch is that this trend in historical writing may be inspired by the environmentalist and foodie movements.

The most recent addition to the collection of books glorifying the fruits of the earth is Tom Mueller’s Extra Virginity: The Sublime and Scandalous World of Olive Oil. Anyone who has read about or travelled to that cradle of Western civilization—the nations around the Mediterranean Sea—knows the symbolic importance of the olive and its juice. From cleaning the naked torsos of the Greek Olympic heroes to anointing the bodies of the Jewish and Christian faithful, this oil of the craggy trees that lend the Mediterranean landscape its senescent and unruly forms has become a fixture in Western culture. Mueller’s new book not only explores the history of the oil but also the current state of the olive oil industry, which apparently is filled with deception and corruption.

Stone of Kings: In Search of the Lost Jade of the Maya. Gerard Helferich. The story of how two prospectors searched for the source of the Mayans’ elaborate jade stone carvings and reignited a lost art in Central America.

…

Notable mentions

Pricing the Future: Finance, Physics, and the 300-year Journey to the Black-Scholes Equation. George G. Szpiro. A book about the origin of the mathematical financial model that transformed finance from an art into a science.

Saladin. Anne-Marie Eddé. A lengthy biography—translated from the French—takes a hard look at existing sources to peel back the centuries of effusive mythology about the Arab warrior and sketch a balanced portrait of the man.

American Nietzsche: A History of an Icon and His Ideas. Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen. A virulent critic of modern society, Nietzsche lived a tragic life. His pronouncements live on, and this book is about their influence in America.

A Convenient Hatred: The History of Antisemitism. Phyllis Goldstein. The Nazis would never have risen to power if the culture of Weimar Germany wasn’t first poisoned by centuries of hatred. This is the story of a sentiment.

Paul on Homosexuality. Michael Wood. This book marshals historical context to help Christians baffled by the Apostle Paul’s seemingly brazen homophobia understand what exactly he was criticizing in his letter to the Romans.

Because of songs like his and the Russian culture of my upbringing, the symbolism of World War II (or, as the Russians call it, The Great Patriotic War) has stayed with me as a kind of arch-metaphor for the human condition.

I was listening today to one of my favorite songs by Vysotsky called Pesnya lyotchika-istrebitelya: “Song of a Fighter Pilot”. It is one of the greatest poems about friendship that I have ever read, and I decided to translate it into English. My translations skills are limited, but though my version inevitably may have errors, I have done my best to convey both the meaning and the flow of the song. The original, like most Russian poems and songs, has a rhyme scheme.

The song is about two Russian fighter pilots in World War II that find themselves embroiled in a losing battle with a larger German fighter formation. You can listen to the original song on YouTube and read the lyrics in Russian here.

…

Song of a Fighter Pilot

By Vladimir Vysotsky
(Translated by Alex L.) 

Eight of them and two of us. Our prospects before battle
Aren’t bright, but we’ve committed to the fight.
Seryozha!* Hold on, it’s looking dim,
But we we have to get an edge in the game.

I promise to not run away from this airspace.
The numbers don’t matter to me now,–
Today my friend guards my back,
Which means we have evened the odds.

A “Messer”† perches on my tail, puffing smoke,
His propellers whining and hacking the air.
They don’t even need crosses on their graves,
The ones on their wings will suit them.‡

I say, “Number One! Number One! They’re right under you,
I’m turning to cut them off.
Put out your fire! Hide in the clouds! I’ll cover you!”
In battle, there are no miracles.

Sergey! You’re on fire! Put your hope, man,
In the strength of your parachute chords.
No! Too late–a “Messer” too has sets his sights on me.
Farewell! I’ll meet him head on.

I know that others will deal them justice.
But sliding along the clouds,
Our souls now rise, like two airplanes,
That can never fly alone.

The Archangel will tell us: “There’s not much room in Heaven.”
Coming before the gates, they close.
We’ll ask God, “Write my friend and I
Into some celestial regiment’s rolls.”

And I’ll ask the Father, Spirit, and Son,
To fulfill this, my will:
May my friend guard my back in Heaven
Like he did in this, our last, battle.

We’ll ask of God wings and arrows,
For the angels need aces too.
But if they have many fighters already,
Let us be guardians then.

To protect–that too is an honorable mission,
Carrying good luck on one’s wings,
To those like we were–Seryozha and I–in life,
Up in the air and once walking on earth.

…

Notes

* “Seryozha” is the informal version of the Russian name Sergey

† Messerschmitt Bf 109 fighter planes

‡ German planes had black crosses painted on their wings

My lovely girlfriend, a Canadian citizen, challenged me to write something about the more northerly part of North America. Since I’ve also wanted to write a post dealing with economics, badabing badaboom: here’s an article about the Canadian economy. I’m not a professional economist but this entry (and future ones like it) are my way of engaging with economic facts and data on my own so I don’t have to rely solely on the opinions of commentators. That’s why I’m counting these entries as part of my “Economics Sandbox”. Please feel free to correct, comment, question, and enlighten.

I was recently surprised to read that Canada was weathering the economic downturn much better than the United States. What does that mean exactly? I looked at some data to get a better idea.

Just looking at GDP growth, it looks like Canada’s economic output was affected in almost exactly the same way as the U.S. economy.

Source: World Bank

But GDP growth is not the only (or even the best) measure of a country’s economic health.When I looked at unemployment rates, it’s clear that America’s labor market has been in worse straits than Canada’s since the recession started in 2008.

Source: BLS via FRED

Employers hire less when they don’t see a positive outlook for the short-term future of the economy. Another indicator of business confidence is gross capital formation, which is a partial measure of how much money businesses and governments are willing to invest  on machinery, buildings, services, and other capital. If they are hopeful about the future, these organization are more likely to invest in these new projects.

The chart below shows that gross capital formation has declined less in Canada than in the U.S. during the recession, which suggests that Canadian organizations are investing more in the future relative to the U.S.

Source: World Bank

So why has GDP growth in the two North American countries remained the same while employment and business confidence have been higher in Canada than in the United States? The standard answer seems to be because the Canadian banking system acted much more sensibly during the past decade than its counterpart in the U.S. Canada’s system of lending is more tightly regulated and more insulated against risky investment practices, according to the New York Times.

In other words, Canada’s government didn’t have to bail its banks out of their own mess to the same extent that the U.S. did (although Canada did allow banks to trade mortgages for cash through the Insured Mortgage Purchase Program). The government deficits incurred by the U.S. as a result of the emergency measures to restore the economy have increased the U.S. debt by a staggering amount (my data set for the chart below did not include the most recent statistics: the U.S. debt-to-GDP ratio is actually much higher as of Q2 2011—about 100% of GDP).

Source: WEF Global Competitiveness Report

There are some recent indications that the Canadian labor market may be slowing down, but Canada’s economy is not nearly as precarious as that of the EU, Japan, and the U.S. President Bill Clinton, in his new book, Back to Work: Why We Need Smart Government for a Strong Economy, makes an example of countries like Canada because they are less hamstrung by ideological hangups when dealing with the economy (unlike most conservative politicians in America).

Although we Americans are often dismissive of our northern neighbor and other “socialistic” economies—some of which, like Germany, have been more resilient than ours in the recession—it would be the greater part of wisdom to learn what has worked well for others and try it ourselves.

Below is a survey of books that were published in the past month or so and look to me like interesting reads (note: I have not actually read these books, and these are previews not reviews).

…

Russia

My parents’ generation grew up in the Soviet Union reading and owning volumes of classical literature. Despite my parents’ polemics, my friends and I somehow found playing “Sonic the Hedgehog” on the SEGA Genesis video game console when we were younger more compelling than reading James Fenimore Cooper. Where did this cultural gap come from? A new book by Katerina Clark examines how the Soviet fascination with world literature began in the 1930s as Soviet leaders and intellectuals tried to cast Moscow as a cosmopolitan beacon of secular culture for the world. This mindset during the Stalinist era must have, it seems to me, influenced my parents’ generation to become voracious readers.

Soviet life is still a rich field for contemporary historical study and literature. But the Western imagination is more captivated by an earlier time in Russian history: the dynasty of the Romanovs. Robert K. Massie has just published a book titled Catherine the Great: Portrait of a Woman. His previous biography of a Romanov monarch, Peter the Great, won a Pulitzer Prize in 1981. Catherine continued the project begun by Peter of making Russia one of the preeminent nations of Europe and was friends with the likes of Voltaire, Frederick the Great, and even John Paul Jones. Massie’s new work about the most influential female ruler in all of Russian history will likely remain the definitive biography on Catherine for many years.

Soviet Baby Boomers: An Oral History of Russia’s Cold War Generation. Donald J. Raleigh. Relying on interviews of my parents’ peers, this book describes customs of education and political cynicism peculiar to that generation.

Know Your Enemy: The Rise and Fall of America’s Soviet Experts. David C. Engerman. What happens to an industry of experts—such as Islamic Studies today—when the threat that they were trained to analyze evaporates?

…

Italy

When I think of Italy, I imagine the creativity of Florence during the Renaissance, the unrelenting power of imperial Rome, the jaw-aching eloquence of Ferrari automobiles, and the sexual fiascoes of ex-Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi. That is, I have a surface understanding of the nation. Fortunately, there are resources to enrich my knowledge of Italian history and culture. David Gilmour, for instance, has just published a work that presents a sensible observation. He describes that the unification of the regions of Italy into a single nation during the 19th Century masks the regions’ vast diversity. They can almost (and have for most of Italian history) constitute entirely different nations.

It was during those creative centuries of Italian city-states that the legendary Medici family held power in Florence. But before Cosimo de’ Medici founded the family dynasty in the 15th Century, his grandmother, an impressively strong woman in a man’s world, was making a name for herself in Italy. There have been few books written about Caterina Riario in English, but her devotion to strength and art are equal to that of her progeny. Elizabeth Lev’s new biography of Caterina, titled The Tigress of Forli: Renaissance Italy’s Most Courageous and Notorious Countess, Caterina Riario Sforza de’ Medici, would make an enlightening introduction to the society of Renaissance Italy.

The Swerve: How the World Became Modern. Stephen Greenblatt. During the Renaissance, a man rescued the last manuscript of a 2,000-year old poem that went on to influence many modern thinkers.

Rome: A Cultural, Visual, and Personal History. Robert Hughes. This work is unique because the author mixes his own personal experiences of being in Rome with historical facts to create an inviting narrative.

…

Material culture

I naturally gravitate toward abstract ideas when thinking about history. But reading Matthew B. Crawford’s excellent book, Shop Class as Soulcraft, and watching Pawn Stars on the History Channel has made me think more about artifacts, how we use them, and how we think about them. Crawford rightly says that humans often think more clearly and honestly when they are interacting with the physical world (compare repairing a motorcycle to managing office politics).

Paul Koudounaris’ new book, The Empire of Death: A Cultural History of Ossuaries and Charnel Houses, uses artifacts from the past to explore a subject that most of us are loathe to remember: death. The publication is peppered with stunning photographs of churches decorated with hundreds of human skulls, an uncomfortable reminder of former generations in Europe that were intimately familiar with the constant visitation of death in their communities. A cool book to contemplate an idea we’d all like to forget.

A History of the World in 100 Objects. Neil MacGregor. Written by the director of the British Museum, this gorgeously-printed book may help one realize just how many stories exist within mere artifacts.

Pilgrimmage. Annie Leibovitz. Leibovitz, an accomplished photographer, roamed to places that were symbolic for her—such as E. Dickinson’s home—and took pictures. “It taught me to see again,” she said.

…

Current events

I didn’t know you could ‘polish a turd’ until I read President George W. Bush’s autobiography, Decision Points. The former leader actually makes an administration that my peers and I had grown to hate sound fair and sympathetic. He reminds the reader that, though he may have been hated at home and in the Middle East, he was revered in Africa for his massive initiative to combat the AIDS epidemic. The book elicited complex emotions, and I realized that the decisions he was faced with (Bush was, after all, The Decider) were not as simple as I had thought of them in college.

So now I am interested in learning more about the context of the tumultuous Bush administration. Condoleezza Rice, Bush’s National Security Advisor and Secretary of State, has just published an autobiography, titled No Higher Honor: A Memoir of My Years in Washington. It’s a hefty 784 pages. By comparison, George W. Bush’s memoirs were 512 pages (half the length of Bill Clinton’s), and Rice appears to give the blow-by-blow decision-making details that I was futilely looking for in her boss’s book.

Awakening Victory: How Iraqi Tribes and American Troops Reclaimed Al Anbar and Defeated Al Qaeda in Iraq. Michael Silverman. A participant recounts the (seemingly unlikely) turning point of the Iraq War.

The Shadow World: Inside the Global Arms Trade. Andrew Feinstein. It doesn’t take a wild imagination to fathom the scale of corruption in this shadowy industry. Feinstein exposes the world of arms dealers.

…

United States before 1900

In one of my college classes, a student once delivered a passionate presentation of why he thought James Joyce’s novel, Ulysses, was a masterpiece. He handed out a piece of paper describing the plot and symbols of each chapter of this notorious slog of a book. My classmate’s heartfelt and skillful defense of Joyce’s greatness made me want to actually attempt to read Joyce. A writer who does this—enliven something old—well is Tony Horwitz, author of the acclaimed Confederates in the Attic. Horwitz has just published a second book about the Civil War whose subject is John Brown’s band’s ambitious raid on the Harper’s Ferry federal armory in 1859.

Like hearing about Joyce, reading Nathaniel Philbrick’s new book, Why Read Moby-Dick?, would possibly reduce my initial repulsion toward another great classic (I’ve unsuccessfully tried to read Melville on numerous occasions). Philbrick’s book, unlike Moby Dick itself, is immediately interesting from the first page. Melville, I find out, references himself as the author writing the novel (“fifteen and a quarter minutes past one o’clock P.M. of this sixteenth day of December, A.D. 1850”) in the middle of his whale story. Intriguing.

Conquered into Liberty: Two Centuries of Battles along the Great Warpath that Made the American Way of War. Eliot A. Cohen. Colonial wars around Canada shaped the U.S. military’s tactics and traditions.

Founding Rivals: Madison vs. Monroe, The Bill of Rights, and The Election that Saved a Nation. Chris DeRose. In a forgotten election, Madison barely won a congressional seat that allowed him to champion civil rights.

An American Betrayal: Cherokee Patriots and the Trail of Tears. Daniel B. Smith. After Pres. Jackson force-marched the Cherokee Indians off their land, many of them tried to assimilate into white society. This is their story.

…

Exploration

Ever since reading Paul Fussell’s excellent work, The Great War and Modern Memory, I’ve felt an affinity for the generation that participated in World War I. Soldiers in the trenches, the “poor bloody infantry”, had to stare raw-eyed every sunrise and sunset to the other side of earth-churned no man’s land for signs of enemy movement. The dramatic colors of the horizon-hugging sun came to symbolize dread rather than beauty. The war destroyed centuries of Europe’s best ideas and aspirations. In a new book, Peter Englund, the permanent secretary of the academy that awards the Nobel Prize in Literature, retells the experience of twenty people from multiple backgrounds who lived and wrote during that war.

The flattening to the earth of Europe’s optimism preceded wildly experimental art forms like jazz and abstract art. The shattered soul sought redemption for years of suffering. One such hopeful enterprise was the race to be the first person to climb to the highest point on earth—the top of Mount Everest. In a new book, Into the Silence: The Great War, Mallory, and the Conquest of Everest, Wade Davis describes one expedition—comprised of an expert mountaineer and a novice 22-year old Oxford scholar—that left in June of 1924 and was never heard from again. Davis argues that such quests had their origins in European imperialism but also gave a nation shattered by the experience of World War I a new symbol of hope and achievement.

Explorers of the Nile: The Triumph and Tragedy of a Great Victorian Adventure. Tim Jeal. No one ever knew from where the Nile flowed until a stouthearted group travelled through Africa to find “the source”.

The Unconquered: In Search of the Amazon’s Last Uncontacted Tribes. Scott Wallace. We’re still living among explorers. The book begins in the author’s Manhattan apartment and takes him to the frontier.

…

Notable mentions

Socrates: A Man for Our Times. Paul Johnson. Socrates is the protagonist in the writings of my all-time favorite author: Plato. This book tries to resuscitate yet again the memory of Europe’s greatest ancestor.

Guerrilla Leader: T. E. Lawrence and the Arab Revolt. James Schneider. Lawrence was tasked with inciting a foreign uprising. His story is a study in shrewdness and entrepreneurship (and also PTSD).

Inferno: The World at War, 1939-1945. Max Hastings. This one-volume history of World War II is great because it incorporates epic conflicts often forgotten in the West: the wars in the Soviet Union and China.

Lisbon: War in the Shadows of the City of Light, 1939-1945. Neill Lochery. Neutral Portugal during WWII was host to a bizarre drama of Nazi and Allied spies living alongside exiled royalty and refugees.

George F. Kennan. John Lewis Gaddis. This is an intimate biography of the complex man who outlined the “containment doctrine” that led to American wars in Korea and Vietnam, both of which he opposed.

Swords to plowshares

President Obama recently announced that the United States will recall all of its armed forces personnel from Iraq by the end of 2011. This is a strange outcome for those of us who remember the seemingly insurmountable setbacks created by the insurgency before the 2007 surge of American troops unraveled the extremists’ grip on the country. It was hard to see back then that the situation in Iraq could improve. But it did. The following books explore in a unique way the nature of organized violence in the contemporary world.

…

Although we may not realize it from all of the news dispatches dripping with depressing forebodings of disaster either due to economic or glacial meltdown, there are reasons to be optimistic about the current state of the world. Joshua S. Goldstein, in a new book called Winning the War on War: The Decline of Armed Conflict Worldwide, makes the case that the human race is freer from war now than it has ever been. The facts tell a counterintuitive but inspiring story: there are currently no nations at war in the world (only civil wars are going on) and last year had one of the lowest death rates from armed conflict in history.

Along similar lines, Steven Pinker has just published a similar work. Pinker makes the same observation – “we may be living in the most peaceful time in our species’s existence” – but approaches the subject from the perspective of psychology, his field of study, rather than international affairs. Both of these perspectives are worth keeping in mind the next time you hear a pundit on cable news or a sensationalistic author prophesying apocalypse for Western civilization just to get your attention.

…

Amazon.com’s Best Book of September 2011 is Karl Marlantes’s What It Is Like to Go to War. Marlantes is the author of the popular novel recently published about the Vietnam War titled Matterhorn, but his more recent book is candid non-fiction. There, he uses his own experiences in Vietnam to describe the psychological pressures soldiers endure, such as killing strangers in foreign nations, watching your friends being killed by them, and returning home to a country of civilians who can not understand what that feels like.

What is now called post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) was once called shell shock and sometimes mistaken for cowardice. But there are many soldiers who escaped a war without any destruction of their body but whose mental functioning became as gnarled as amputated limbs. I internalized this fact after having seen a short YouTube clip of footage from World War I of soldiers overcome by “shell shock” after the Battle of Verdun (you can see it here, but be warned: it’s very graphic). I think it’s useful for civilians to read honest accounts of war such as Marlantes’s because soldiers of all wars that are not fought on home soil often feel isolated from their own countrymen for lack of being understood.

…

I don’t think Ken Ballen’s new book, Terrorists in Love: Real Lives of Islamic Radicals, would have been published ten years ago. A former federal prosecutor of terrorists, Ballen founded a non-profit organization called Terror Free Tomorrow devoted to understanding the minds and hearts of extremists and suicide bombers. Our current two wars are slowly nearing resolution, but it is essential that we understand the circumstances that drive people to extremism.

President Obama suggested last Thursday that the military focus of the United States has moved away from fighting the war on terror to asserting U.S. influence in East Asia. If Jeremi Suri, who was a history professor at my alma mater when I was an undergraduate, is correct in claiming in his new book that nation-building is an American specialty, then we should consider the realities of the common people in all of the places where we intervene.

…

Booms, busts and revolutions

In the past several years, economics has come to the forefront of national concern. When the stock market crashed in September and October of 2008, it practically sidelined John McCain’s hopes of being elected president (his bungling of the issue during the campaign didn’t help either) as the American public looked toward Barack Obama and a new Democratic administration to restore fiscal order. The complexities of the recent crash have been analyzed and retold, compared to the Great Depression, and set off the current Occupy movement against socioeconomic inequality. The following are some interesting new narratives related to economics.

…

Menzie Chinn was my favorite economics professor in college. He would begin each class by reviewing the latest economic indicators that were posted on Bloomberg.com and explain to us what they said about the state of the economy. Over a year before the market crashed, he laid out for us the dangerous state of the housing market. Professor Chinn’s economics blog, which he frequently updates, is one of the best on the internet.

Given this praise, is it a wonder that I would feature here his latest book about the current recession? In Lost Decades: The Making of America’s Debt Crisis and Long Recovery, Chinn compares the current financial crisis to previous ones here and abroad and highlights the crippling effect of America’s debt on the economy. The title is a reference to Argentina during the 1980s, which became known as the “lost decade” for that country because of the problems caused by unrestrained borrowing from foreigners in the 1970s. Browsing through the book, I can tell it’s written in the engaging and approachable style that I enjoyed as a student in Professor Chinn’s class.

…

Markets take occasional dives in the natural course of financial life, but what frequently turns economic downturns into complete disasters is public fear. Widespread loss of confidence in the financial system is detrimental to banks, governments, and citizens because, among other things, it can increase inflation and diminish investments in new enterprises. A new work by Ron Suskind examines the recent crash from the perspective of confidence in government: how it was lost under the presidency of George W. Bush and regained during the election of Barack Obama.

What didn’t help to ease public worries over the economy during 2008-09 were the repeated comparisons of those years’ market crash to the Great Depression. How accurate and insightful is such a comparison? To answer this, we have to understand what the economy of the 1930s was like. A new book by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Michael Hiltzik, titled The New Deal: A Modern History, reevaluates the momentous government programs launched by Franklin D. Roosevelt to address the economic impact of the Great Depression. It’s worth a read to put current events in perspective.

…

Economics can be an obtuse subject for the uninitiated (myself included; I took the non-math intensive option in my major). Luckily, there are people out there who are both versed in econometrics and in prose writing. They help in the essential task of revealing economic issues to the public. A classic in this field is Robert L. Heilbroner’s The Worldly Philosophers, which recounts the lives and ideas of important economic thinkers. Another work, written by Sylvia Nasar and published in September, focuses on the 19th and 20th Century economists who helped to improve the material circumstances of the poor worldwide.

Such histories vivify the very personal lives of now-dead economists. With this goal in mind, Mary Gabriel has just published a book called Love and Capital: Karl and Jenny Marx and the Birth of a Revolution. Looking at photographs of the long-bearded men and hoop-skirted women of the 19th Century, it’s hard to imagine them as real. Their death and disappearance from the world suggests their fragility and insignificance. But knowing that we are all fated to this vanishing act, we can empathize with the stories of their lives. Karl Marx lived an interesting and influential one. What sights, circumstances, and experiences caused him to create his ideas? There are always human-interest stories behind the histories.

…

Notable mentions

Memorial. Alice Oswald. I love it when old stories or events from the past are given a new breath of life by casting them with vivid modern language. Oswald retells Homer’s epic, The Iliad, with contemporary forms and similies.

Reprobates: The Cavaliers of the English Civil War. John Stubbs. This seems like an interesting book to introduce oneself to the English Civil War written by an author who has a sense of reality and humor about people of the past.

Ostkrieg: Hitler’s War of Extermination in the East. Stephen G. Fritz. Despite its significance, books about the Eastern Front in WWII are rare. This one is unique in examining both German military and terror operations.

Death in the City of Light: The Serial Killer of Nazi-Occupied Paris. David King. A grim spin on (what seems to me) the recent popularity of French history in America, this book recounts a disturbing but fascinating true crime story.

Grant’s Final Victory: Ulysses S. Grant’s Heroic Last Year. General and President Grant died penniless but finished his brilliant memoirs just days before his death, saving his family from financial ruin. A really cool idea for a book.

I know next to nothing about vintage car restoration, but I can appreciate a sleek-looking and rumble-producing automobile. When I came across Jay Leno’s video of his 1915 Hispano-Suiza Aero Engine Car restoration (see part 1, part 2 and part 3), though, I almost started drooling. The reason is because the restored car combines in an engaging package some things that, well, just make me salivate like a dog sensing dinner: aviation, World War I history, craftsmanship, and speed.

The 1915 machine is no ordinary automobile. It’s fitted with an engine taken from a World War I fighter airplane. As Wikipedia informed me, after the First World War ended, surplus airplane engines were relatively cheap and vastly more powerful than what cars were then using. Some auto engineers decided not to let this opportunity pass and created cars with automobile chassis and airplane engines. Such aero-engined cars were a brief trend in auto racing during the inter-war period.

The Hispano-Suiza engine is the motor that was used to power the S.E.5, a British fighter plane during World War I. This was the primary aircraft of No. 56 Squadron RFC (Royal Flying Corps), the famous unit of expert flyers and warriors—such as James McCudden, Albert Ball, and Cecil Lewis (the last of whom wrote a now-rare but fascinating and honest memoir of his war years, titled Sagittarius Rising)—who helped defeat the imperial German air force.

Although I wrote earlier about my admiration for a company in New Zealand that restores historic biplane aircraft such as the S.E.5, aero-engined cars are something else. The engine blazes loudly with life like those historic airplanes once did. To operate the car requires more hands-on work and engine mechanics comprehension than today’s automobiles. As you can hear in Leno’s video, starting the car requires magneto firings, oil pressure regulation, mixture monitoring, and other concepts about which I know nothing.

Leno’s start-up procedure reminded me of a story in Sagittarius Rising when Cecil Lewis’s aircraft was chased over the front by a German scout plane down to just above the trenches. Lewis then realized that his oil pressure level had dropped critically low. As he ducked and weaved to avoid both the ground and the German flyer’s bullets, Lewis also had to pump more pressure into the engine by hand. Harassed by both his enemy and his motor, Lewis somehow managed to fly back to safety.

I can hardly think of a better way to really get a visceral connection to those events in the past than to be blasting down the highway in that metal tube car with a monstrous V8. And so Leno may not tickle my funny bone, but he’s one lucky guy to have in his garage for his driving pleasure a car with such a sweet and storied engine.

Leno driving in his vintage car with an Hispano-Suiza aircraft engine. Notice how the exhaust pipe looks identical to that on the S.E.5 (bottom image)

Below the fluorescent lights of an auditorium, a professor lectures to students about current historical ideas gleamed from countless of hours of collective research and collegiate debates. A journalist, after decades of reporting on current events in a foreign land, publishes a book about a historical subject she deems particularly important to understanding what is happening there today. A popular film gets released about the past that lights up the public imagination to a certain era of history.

Public recollection of the past happens in many ways. To follow every one of these events, which occur daily, is almost impossible. But patterns emerge from observation, though understanding why they occur is sometimes difficult. In the following previews of new books, I hope to draw attention to trends in the public discourse about history. A more detailed look at the context and causes of these dialogues, though, requires further research.

Fighting to the last

Ever since I first heard the lyrics of Alexander Gorodnitsky’s song “Atlases”, the Siege of Leningrad has become elevated in my mind as an eternal symbol of people’s remarkable ability to endure suffering and emerge victorious. The symbols and metaphors of the song are ingenious. In the famous Hermitage Museum of St. Petersburg, there are sculptures of Atlas from Greek mythology that act as structural columns for a portico . The Soviet men and women who died to stymie the advance of Nazi warriors before Leningrad are, to Gorodnitsky, like the Atlases of the Hermitage, “up-holding the sky / with arms of stone”.

I have been surprised to learn that the Siege of Leningrad has also become part of the American (not just the Russian or Russian-American) imagination. Bestselling novels published in English within the past decade such as Paullina Simons’s The Bronze Horseman (which is being adapted into a movie to be released next year) and David Benioff’s City of Thieves (he is the author of 25th Hour, which too was adapted into a phenomenal film starring Ed Norton) take place in Leningrad during the siege. The Decembrists, an indie folk rock band, released a song in 2006 called “When the War Came” that itself was based on another recent novel about the siege called Hunger by Elise Blackwell.

I first read about the heroic exploits of the people trapped in that unfortunate city in Harrison Salisbury’s book, The 900 Days: The Siege of Leningrad. Published in 1969, this nonfiction work, written by an American journalist who witnessed parts of the siege firsthand, remains the classic English-language account of the event. But the book was published long ago and during the Cold War. A fresh perspective on the siege that takes advantage of the plethora of historical documents released to the public since the fall of the Soviet Union is overdue.

This is just what Anna Reid hopes to achieve in her newly published book, Leningrad: The Epic Siege of World War II, 1941-1944. The questions Reid seeks to answer deal with both how it came to be that the circumstances in Leningrad under siege were so terrible and also why they didn’t get worse (i.e. how the city managed to prevent invasion and internal chaos).

While the novels recently published about the siege are a welcome contribution to American literature, the siege of Leningrad was one of those events in history where the true stories of people that took part in it are as extraordinary (if not more so) as any fiction. I look forward to reading Reid’s account.

By the time the siege of Leningrad ended in 1944, the pendulum of the offensive swung in the other direction as the Soviets beat back the German armies and marched westward. Like the citizens and soldiers who defended Leningrad, Germans living on native soil now found themselves  scrambling to survive amid scarcity, hunger, and violence. Although their homeland eventually succumbed to Allied armed forces strangling it from all sides, Germans also fought on longer than most people thought was humanly possible.

Examining the reasons why the German people were willing to fight to near annihilation under the putrefying Nazi banner is the purpose of Ian Kershaw’s new book, The End: The Defiance and Destruction of Hitler’s Germany, 1944-1945. The key motivator seems to have been terror: both the totalitarian lashings the Nazi apparatus inflicted on its own population and also the possibility of unimaginable Soviet retributions on the German people if they surrendered.

But Kershaw also seems to make the case that Hitler’s rise to power had created such an inseparable bond between him and the German public (one is reminded of the absolute monarch Louis XIV’s dictum, “I am the state”) that any organized opposition to Hitler’s maniacal urging of defense unto suicide was unthinkable.

There are stories of genuine courage and patriotism exhibited by the civilians and soldiers of Germany and the Soviet Union during the war. But these exist alongside a painful chronicle of apocalyptic violence concocted by iron-fisted governments and carried out by complicit individuals. Sorting the human from the inhumane is part of the job of historians such as Reid and Kershaw.

Grooves with swagger

Without concerted effort, my wardrobe reverts back to the Soviet era. It has been like this ever since primary school for me. As an immigrant growing up in suburban Chicago, I rarely understood the tastes in music and fashion espoused by my fellow classmates. In other words, I was never cool.

Phenomena such as wearing baggy clothing and enjoying angst-sopped music seemed like directives from an alien planet. I had to (and did) follow them just because everybody else was doing so, though I rarely had any life experiences that fostered an emotional connection to such trends.

But I know that behind the mists of marketing and media, many elements of popular culture grew out of real experiences had by real people… somewhere. Baggy clothes, for instance, were first worn by hustlers in the inner city to conceal packets of drugs. By the time these expressions of culture trickled down to my suburban isle, they looked like improbable oddities.

One such cultural movement was grunge music. I’ve grown to appreciate rap, but I still have a hard time understanding certain offshoots of rock ‘n’ roll like emo and heavy metal. And grunge.

The whiny tone and outlandish sarcasm of Nirvana. The slacker aesthetic. The sophisticated musical tastes of hipsters. I’m still a bit intimidated.

But grunge music has a specific context from which it emerged: Seattle in the 1980s and 90s. The snark, the choreographed laziness, the cool detachment from mainstream culture: these elements of grunge undoubtedly had a logic that made sense to those musicians of the Pacific Northwest.

The story of the early grunge musicians is the topic of Mark Yarm’s new book, Everybody Loves Our Town: An Oral History of Grunge. The book is organized as a continuous series of quotes from band members from the early Seattle scene. This makes it harder to follow than a more formal narrative. Jay-Z’s excellent book published this year, Decoded, for instance, spells out for the clueless the genius behind rap songs. With Yarm, one may have to read between the lines.

But reading books about subjects outside of one’s comfort zone is like having those life experiences (though in miniature form) that open one’s mind to new possibilities. Maybe I won’t find myself as uncomfortable around hipsters. Perhaps I’ll start liking Nirvana. The possibilities are endless.

Like grunge, hip hop music culture was born and reared in a specific place before sending envoys worldwide: New York City in the 1960s and 70s. Hip hop culture developed as an alternative to gang life for many poor blacks in the city. Through offshoots such as gangsta rap and white rappers like Eminem, hip hop music spearheaded into safe little neighborhoods like mine when I was growing up.

Now many of the founding fathers of mainstream hip hop are reaching middle age. Through their books and advocacy, they are offering a fresh perspective on the meaning of the hip hop movement. In addition to Jay-Z’s Decoded, the Chicago rapper Common has published a memoir last month called One Day It’ll All Make Sense.

Another veteran of the hip hop scene is Steve Stoute, who is an advertising and record executive that produced albums by the likes of U2 and Eminem. His first book has just been published and is called The Tanning of America: How Hip-Hop Created a Culture That Rewrote the Rules of the New Economy. Although not a history book in the strict sense, it aims to do what good history should do: illuminate the present by casting light on the (in this case, recent) past.

Stoute argues that hip hop has become a disruptive trend that has continued to erode calcified mental categories of social divisions based on skin color. The old ways of thinking have increasingly less relevance today. His lofty goal in writing the book is, as he writes, “to put an end, once and for all, to the boxing of individuals based on color.”

Tanning is not so much a blending of “white” and “black” cultures in America as an entirely new paradigm. “Tan really has no age. And cool really is a state of mind.” For a bookworm like me, the idea that the brain is the key to being cool gives me hope.

Sailing to Jerusalem

Judging by the quantity of books published on the subject in the last several years, historians have yet again been interested in rewriting the story of New World colonization by the Europeans. Like planets orbiting some star, the debates gravitate around the legacy of Christopher Columbus.

In August, Charles C. Mann published a book titled 1493, a sequel to the enormously popular 1491. While the older publication examines what America was like before Columbus arrived, the new book looks at the ecological impact of European migration on the native societies and environment of America.

Another author, Daniel Richter, has ambitiously tried to describe the successive waves of colonization by the Europeans in a new thematic way. Richter’s book, published earlier this year, is called Before the Revolution. He divides the book into sections describing the types of vocations that brought Europeans to the New World: Progenitors, Conquistadors, Traders, Planters, Imperialists, and Atlanteans.

In lieu of describing the story of all the European colonies, historian Hugh Thomas has focused on the Spanish empire. A scholar with an accomplished career, Thomas has just released a book that describes Spanish activities in the Americas several decades after Columbus’ first voyage. This work, titled The Golden Empire, is a sequel to a previous book, Rivers of Gold, about the Spanish empire during the time of Columbus.

Many of the new books don’t specifically focus on the journey of Columbus and others like him. Other scholars have made the European explorers, who have been studied extensively before, the main topic of their reexaminations. But what more can be said about Columbus?

Carol Delaney, for one, thinks there’s more to Columbus than we currently acknowledge. In her new book, Columbus and the Quest for Jerusalem, she argues that the explorer was “neither a greedy imperialist nor a quixotic adventurer, as he has lately been depicted, but a man driven by an abiding religious passion.” In seeking a route to India by sailing west, Columbus was less concerned with wealth than with helping Europeans recapture Jerusalem from Muslim warriors.

This interpretation surprised me. Seeing in paintings the red crosses on the sails of the European ships, I thought they represented the explorers’ desires to convert native Americans to Christianity. Obviously this doesn’t make sense for Columbus’ first voyage: no European even knew about the American continents. The idea that Columbus was primarily trying to open a new gate to the Holy Land for Europeans (the capture of Constantinople by the Ottomans had closed a favored route for pilgrimage and crusading) is new to me.

Along similar lines, Nigel Cliff has written a new book, Holy War: How Vasco da Gama’s Epic Voyages Turned the Tide in a Centuries-Old Clash of Civilizations, that also examines the motivations of a European explorer from the perspective of the Crusades. Vasco da Gama, sailing several years after Columbus’ first voyage, navigated around Africa to find a new route to the Middle East and India. This was never done before by a European, and opened the door for European colonization of the “East Indies” (modern-day South and Southeast Asia).

Cliff makes an even stronger claim than Delaney. He writes that both Christopher Columbus and Vasco da Gama were hoping to launch a new Crusade. The opening by Vasco da Gama of a new waterway for Europeans to Asia “drew a dividing line between the Muslim and Christian eras of history—what we in the West call the medieval and the modern ages.” I wonder how strong the evidence is for both Delaney and  Cliff’s interpretations.

So why the recent scholarly and popular interest in the earliest origins of America? Perhaps the meteoric rise of China as a global power has prompted the United States to consider yet again what its cultural influence means to the world. Maybe studying the conflict between Christians and Muslims in earlier centuries will help contextualize the West’s wars against Muslim extremists today.

Another possibility is that, in the spirit of Stoute’s book, The Tanning of America, historians today are seeking to destroy obsolete mental boundaries between cultures. I hope so. Though in all honesty, I don’t really know.