Norman Geras - Marx & Human Nature: Refutation of a Legend

It is fascinating to read a book whose author I know mostly for being one of those socialists who'd moved so far from their politics that they ended up supporting Tony Blair's war on Iraq. Yet in the past Geras had been linked to the International Marxist Group. His earlier politics led him to write several useful books including this short essay on Marx's views on human nature. The "legend" that the subtitle refers to is the idea, common on the left in the past, that Marx rejected the idea of human nature. If the reader can penetrate the extremely specific approach to the subject, Geras offers some very useful insights. He begins by arguing that

Marx - like everyone else - did reject certain ideas of human nature; but je also regarded some as being true. It is important to discriminate the sort that he rejected from the sort he did not. More important still is to try to discriminate such of these ideas as are indeed true from such of them as are false. Neither purpose is served by talk of the dismissal of all conceptions of human nature. 

The author's style, as exemplified in the quote here, gives the reader some sense of what to expect. This is not a book that begins from the real world, but from the pages of Marx's writings, in particular a very specific paragraph, the sixth of Marx's theses on Feuerbach. Let's remind ourselves of what Marx said.

Feuerbach resolves the religious essence into the human essence. But the human essence is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In its reality it is the ensemble of the social relations. Feuerbach, who does not enter upon a criticism of this real essence, is consequently compelled:

1. To abstract from the historical process and to fix the religious sentiment as something by itself and to presuppose an abstract – isolated – human individual.
2. Essence, therefore, can be comprehended only as “genus”, as an internal, dumb generality which naturally unites the many individuals.

It is then a very specific exploration of what Marx meant here. Geras says, for instance, writing about the final sentence of the above that, for Marx "Feuerbach is mistaken not because he views man in terms of 'inner', 'general', 'species' (or 'natural') characteristic but because he views him exclusively in those terms. He is wrong for a one-sidedness of perspective rather than wrong tout court... Feuerbach, Marx wrote, 'refers too much to nature and too little to politics.'"

Geras argues that Marx had a more dynamic approach. He say human nature as a thing that was shaped by circumstances.

If diversity in the character of human beings is in large measure set down by Marx to historical variation in their social relations of production, the very fact that they entertain this sort of relations, the fact that they produce and that they have a history, he explains in turn by some of their general and constant, intrinsic, constitutional characteristics; in short by their human nature. This concept is therefore indispensable to his historical theory.

So what is human nature? This is a harder question to answer from Geras book, because Geras is more concerned with proving (as he writes in his final sentence) that the sixth theses "does not show that Marx rejected the idea of human nature... He was right not to do so." This exercise in logic might be useful academically, particularly in the context of a general academic debate around the issue. But it doesn't help the reader who is trying to get to grips with Marx in order to change the world.

In fact, as the earlier quote suggests, Marx's concept of human nature, arises out of his understanding of how all human societies rest upon the natural world. We, in a myriad of different ways, have always laboured to change nature in order to satisfy our needs - most important of all, food, water and shelter. The societies we have created to do that in turn shape us, transforming our nature and relationships. We might think that human nature is to be greedy, violent or competitive. But those traits arise from the type of society we live in today. Time and again, even under capitalism, we have seen situations where what is supposed to be "human nature" is broken down as the nature of society is challenged collectively.

Unfortunately, Geras' defence of Marx's approach is lost in a jumble of self-referential arguments. There is nothing here (in fact Geras explicitly rejects this approach) that looks at anthropological studies or attempts to expand on Marx's historical materialist approach with examples from real human history. The argument is proved theoretically by Geras, but few are any wiser.

Related Reviews

Burkett - Marx and Nature: A Red and Green Perspective
Marx & Engels - The German Ideology
Molyneux - The Point is to Change it: An Introduction to Marxist Philosophy

Margot Lee Shetterly - Hidden Figures

By coincidence I started reading Hidden Figures as the recent Black Lives Matter protests erupted in the United States and rapidly spread globally. Those demonstrations quickly went from anger at the murder of George Floyd to generalising about contemporary racism and the history of colonialism, imperialism, slavery and many other injustices. I decided to read Hidden Figures after seeing the  2016 film of the same name. I'm glad I decided to as while the film is inspiring and entertaining, out of necessity, misses much detail and compresses a longer timescale and the experience of many women into a short story.

Margot Lee Shetterly is the daughter of a black NASA engineer. She grew up knowing the stories of the women who played a crucial role in the early NASA space programme. The women cranked out calculations, checked equations, researched solutions and helped run simulations of aerodynamics, trajectories and much else. They were known as "computers" and they were all women, and most of them were black at a time when few women of any colour were employed in workplaces. Their names and crucial roles were almost forgotten until Shetterly's book was published and they started to gain limited recognition - though Katherine Johnson who is one of the focuses of this book eventually got a Presidential Medal. But there were many more. Shetterly writes that she "can put the names to almost fifty black women who worked as computers, mathematicians, engineers, or scientists at the Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory from 1943 through 1980, and my intuition is that twenty more names can be shaken loose from the archives with more research".

The movie implies that the story begins with the US space programme, but actually the story of the black women "computers"  begins during World War Two when a desperate need for labour meant the US government reached out to employ women.

Interestingly the film portrays the success of the women as being solely down to their personal force of will. But Shetterly's book makes it clear that they were able to do this in the context of wider social movements. In particularly the famous occasion when black trade unionist, socialist and civil rights activist A. Philip Randolph threatened to march on Washington with 100,000s of black activists if the government did not employ black workers in war industries. The opening that was won allowed the computers to be employed at Langley for the NACA initially on aircraft and later space vehicles.

This is not to decry the struggle by the women as individuals. They challenged racism and sexism, as well as the limitations that resulted from their own backgrounds. Women in general and black women in particular were not expected to have jobs like these. At best some one like Katherine Johnson who went on to play a particularly important role at NASA might be teachers. Johnson, for instance, went to do Mathematics at university, having to hide her marriage and quitting when she got pregnant. The War, then the Space Race however sucked her and thousands of others into the machine. While there were hundreds of women like Johnson, Shetterly builds her book around Johnson and two other key figures, Dorothy Vaughan (the first black woman to manage staff at the NACA) and Mary Jackson who was the first engineer. Other women's stories are told, with similar tales of overcoming racism, poverty and inequality, but it is these three key figures who tell the story of the women computers and the roles they play at NASA.

The book is inspiring, and it demonstrates that collective and individual struggles often go hand in hand. It also showed the way that racism and sexism reduces everyone - one of the women fights to be allowed to study at a white only college. On arrival she is dismayed to see that the school is as dilapidated as the black schools she already knows. The white women at NACA and NASA have to fight sexism, even as some of them are expressing racism to their black colleagues who are fighting a double burden. Shetterly points out that many people had no idea that women worked at NASA, never mind black women in such crucial roles. That said Hidden Figures also shows that many people didn't accept racism, and that black and white people worked and often relaxed together in NASA's social events. However mixing outside work was less common. Housing was segregated and black families in particularly found it hard to get places to live.

The hopeful conclusion, which rightly shows that the lives of individuals like Johnson, Vaughan and Jackson, laid the ground for other black women to play their role in the space programme, seems inadequate when we look at the death of George Floyd, or the way that racism means that black people are more likely to be unemployed or die from Covid-19. I also found the book difficult to read in places, as it skipped back and forth in time, or between the different viewpoints of characters. That said this is a must read for people interested in the struggle against racism and inequality, the space race and science in general.

Related Reviews

Scott & Leonov - Two Sides of the Moon
Brzezinski - Red Moon Rising
Winterburn - The Quiet Revolution of Caroline Herschel: The Lost Heroine of Astronomy

John Williams - Butcher's Crossing

The myth of the West, a place of adventure and endless empty space, held a grip on the imagination in the 19th century as much as it does today. John William's Butcher's Crossing is the story of what happens to a wealthy young East Coast man who leave leaves Harvard and travels to the eponymous town to find adventure and himself. Using his own wealth to outfit a buffalo expedition, despite warnings against the hazardous nature of the trip, Will Andrews leaves behind his comfort zone and heads out into the wilderness. His companions are relics from a different era. His mentor Miller is a grizzled buffalo hunter who remembers the herds so big that they looked like smoke. He claims to know of a secret valley where buffalo still roam in vast numbers. His companions, other than Will, are sceptical, but they're being paid so they tag along.

The story is quite simple. The plains are in a process of change. Miller can't find the way because landmarks have come and gone. The roads are well travelled and there's the occasional building. The travellers come across rotting piles of bones from previous hunts. It begins to look like its a wasted quest. But the party does eventually reach the valley and there begins a mass hunt - on a scale that sickens Will, but rapidly teaches him new work. He has to learn to skin an animal that moments earlier had been standing proud in the grass. Now its reduced to skin, bone, guts and pieces of meat. The men eat the livers raw to ward off disease. Will learns fast.

Williams excels in telling the details of the hunt. The skinning, the shooting, the cooking, the hard, hard labour. I don't know if the author ever went buffallo hunting, but he certainly gives the impression he knows what its like. Its unlikely that he nearly died of dehydration in the desert, or froze through a long winter in the wilderness but again the reader feels like he did.

Its a western, but of a different calibre to those about gunfights and wars against the Native Americans. This is about the plains as a space were men and women eek out a living, but were the vicissitudes of the market matter even hundreds of miles from a spot on the map called Butcher's Crossing. Its a raw and powerful story that will stay with me a long time.

Related Reads

Williams - Stoner

Ian Kershaw - Hitler, 1936-1945: Nemesis

If the first volume of Ian Kershaw's biography of Adolf Hitler teaches us how he could have been stopped, then the second tells us the consequences of failing to do that. The book begins in 1936 as Hitler is consolidating his own position and that of the Nazi regime. But the majority of the book deals with Hitler's obsessive preparations for war and the history of Hitler's roll in World War Two. Here one thing is clear. For Hitler wanted war. His adjutant Fritz Wiedemann recalled Hitler saying in 1938, "every generation must at one time have experienced war". As food shortages, hard work, low wages and, in particular, labour shortages began to take their toll in the late 1930s Hitler saw "war as panacea. Whatever the difficulties, they would be - and could only be - resolved by war." When finally made to comment on the anger among German farmers about the shortage of labour, he answered that their complaints would be dealt with after the war.

This obsession with war arose directly out of Hitler's worldview. The German people needed to be strengthened through the experience of conflict at the same time as restoring the country to its proper position in Europe. War eventually came in 1939. Hitler was surprised that Britain and France stood by Poland, as he'd been convinced by their actions of Czechoslovakia that they would back down. His disappointment that Germany hadn't been able to seize Czechoslovakia by force was now matched by excitement at the potential victories.

The machinations over the Ruhr, Austria and Czechoslovakia need not detain us her, but it is worth noting that Kerhsaw makes it very clear that, through their inaction, the British and French governments had allowed Hitler to strengthen his power base by proving he was able to regain national pride and territory as he had promised. Among most ordinary Germans, even including sections of the left who had bitterly opposed the fascists, Hitler's star was rising. This was taking place against the backdrop of intensifying repression of Jews and other minorities, but Hitler's successes in the international field helped his regime get away with increasing violence internally.

In war Nazism came into its own. It's worth quoting Kershaw on this:

The war now brought the circumstances and opportunities for the dramatic radicalisation of Nazism's ideological crusade. Long-term goals seemed almost overnight to become attainable policy objectives. Persecution which had targeted usually disliked social minorities was now directed at an entire conquered and subjugated people. The Jews, a tiny proportion of the German population, were not only far more numerous in Poland, but were despised by many within their native land and were now the lowest of the low in the eyes of the brutal occupiers of the country.

As before the war, Hitler set the tone for the escalating barbarism, approved of it, and sanctioned it. But his own actions provide an inadequate explanation of such escalation. The accelerated disintegration of any semblance of collective government, the undermining of legality by an ever encroaching and ever-expanding police executive, and the power ambitions of an increasingly autonomous SS leadership all played important parts. These processes had developed between 1933 and 1939 in the Reich itself. They were now, once the occupation of Poland opened up new vistas, to acquire a new momentum altogether. 

He continues:

The key area was Poland. The ideological radicalisation which took place there in the eighteen months following the German invasion was an essential precursor to the plans which unfolded in spring 1941 as preparation for the war which Hitler knew at some time he would fight: the war against Bolshevik Russia.

In volume one Kershaw introduced the concept of "working towards Hitler" as an explanation for how diverse parts of the Nazi state (in Germany and occupied areas) made the Holocaust and other aspects of Nazi ideology real. But Kershaw doesn't intend this to mean that Hitler was somehow unaware of what was transpiring. Some readers might hope that Kershaw has found some lost document detailing Hitler's thoughts or instructions about, say, Auschwitz. This is to misunderstand what the Nazi regime was and how Hitler operated.

Hitler provided a "general license for barbarianism" but others acted on it. In the case of the euthanasia of disabled people in Germany before the war started, Kershaw points out that Hitler "hand-picked" trusted Nazi "old-fighters" - "They knew what was expected of them. Regular and precise directives were not necessary".

Lack of evidence of Hitler's direct knowledge of the Holocaust arises in part because of his keenness "to conceal the traces of his involvement in the murder of the Jews". That said,

compared with the first years of the war when he had neither in public nor - to go from Goebbels's diary accounts - in private made much mention of the Jews, Hitler did now, in the months when their fate was being determined, refer to them on numerous occasions. Invariably, whether in public speeches or during comments in his late-night monologues in his East Prussian HQ, his remarks were confined to generalities - but with the occasion menacing allusion to what was happening. 

In fact, Kershaw has  assembled lots of comments, fragments and texts which make it clear that Hitler was aware of plenty of details of what was happening. Eg, in October 1941 Hitler said of the Jews "Don't anyone tell me we can't send them into the marshes". This reference refers to attempts to "drown Jewish women by driving them into the Pripet marshes". Goebbels, in his diary, referred to "the most brutal means" being used against the Jews. Later he wrote "A judgement is being carried out on the Jews which is barbaric, but fully deserved" and continued "the Fuhrer is the unswerving champion and spokesman of a radical solution".

While Hitler created the framework for Nazi followers to drive forward the Holocaust in horrific ways, he was very much culpable in what happened. As Kershaw concludes:

Hitler's role had been decisive and indispensable in the road to the 'Final Solution'. Had he not come to power in 1933 and a national-conservative government, perhaps a military dictatorship, had gained power instead. Discriminatory legislation against Jews would in all probability still have been introduced in Germany. But without Hitler, and the unique regime he headed, the creation of a programme to bring about the physical extermination of the Jews of Europe would have been unthinkable.

Hitler was, by the start of World War Two, convinced of his own infallibility. He never lost this belief, even as the tide turned and military forces advanced over Germany's territorial gains and then the country itself. Everyone else, the Jews, his generals, the German people, became objects for Hitler's scapegoating. Kershaw details the inability of Hitler to accept criticism, to trust generals and to understand the need to tactical decisions such as strategic retreats. It is notable here that Hitler's actions are very much linked into his world view. This is not simply about his inability to trust others, but a world view that saw the German people as being superior to everyone else. His paranoia arises out of his belief that defeat in World War One was not military, but the consequence of others.

But the Nazi state Hitler created was also culpable. It's breathtaking that as Germany's defeat becomes inevitable and as their power is reduced to almost zero, Hitler's various underlings remain dedicated to strengthening their own positions, however ludicrous it might be. The figure of Hitler within this remains constant and unbelievably powerful right to the end.

The book finishes with the defeat and suicide of Hitler. Amid the shattered ruins of Berlin, with the deaths of tens of millions of people arising out of the war and Holocaust, the conclusion has to be "never again". That said, how do the books stand up?

The first volume dealt with the rise of Hitler to power and the second with the war and Holocaust. But it strikes me that while these work as biography they don't entirely match up to Hitler's life. In his own review, Alex Callinicos writes:

[German historian Joachim] Fest argues that Hitler's political career can be divided into three phases. In the first, which lasted till the late 1920s, he was simply a fascist demagogue, in rebellion against a society that offered him no place, and in pursuit of the barbarous utopia of a racially pure German empire. Then, as power beckoned, Hitler developed a more realistic side--first carefully courting the German economic and military elites, and then, once in power, manoeuvring with great success to win control of most of Europe by diplomatic and military means. The final phase began as failure became plain--after the German defeat at Stalingrad in 1942-43. Hitler then relapsed into the racist fantasist of his youth, progressively ignoring the realities of power.

I think this fits well with what Kershaw describes. Hitler's obsession in the bunker with models of how Germany could be rebuilt and his obsessive return to stories about the early days of the Nazi party illustrate the point. It explains why Hitler put himself into supreme command of the army and why he refused to allow tactical retreat, or entertain the idea of negotiations with the Allies. At the end Hitler feels abandoned by everyone, including the German people. He had placed himself at the centre of the Nazi state, and when that collapsed, he blamed everyone else. Retreating into personal fantasy, he abandons the people themselves - it is striking (even to Goebbels) that as the fortunes of war turn Hitler, the arch-propagandist, refuses to speak in person, or by radio, to the German people. 

So while the two volume approach works as books, it doesn't quite work in terms of Hitler's life. I also felt the subtitles of the books, Hubris and Nemesis, imply an inevitability to the fall of Hitler. But Kershaw's whole story shows that there was no inevitability to anything that took place. Had things been slightly different Hitler might never have achieved power, but had other things been slightly different he might well have defeated the Soviet Union. The strength of Kershaw's books is that he places events in their historical context and there were many factors that shaped what took place.

But these criticisms are minor compared to the brilliance of Ian Kerhsaw's work. They are not easy reads - because of their scope and the material covered. But they are important works. As we struggle today against fascism and racism in all its forms, the lessons from history remain crucial. Ian Kershaw's work remains essential in our understanding of the past, in order to shape the future.

Related Reviews

Kershaw - Hitler, 1936-1945: Hubris

Kershaw - To Hell and Back: Europe 1914-1949

Kershaw - The End

Mazower - Hitler's Empire

Sereny - Albert Speer: His Battle with the Truth

Browning - The Origins of the Final Solution

Paxton - The Anatomy of Fascism

Ian Kershaw - Hitler, 1889-1936: Hubris

Why read a two volume, nearly two thousand page biography of one of the 20th century's most appalling dictators? The answer lies in who Adolf Hitler was. He was a dictator, but he was also, as Ian Kershaw's biography ably shows, a shrewd organiser who was able to build a movement that could take power and install a fascist leader. Thus, understanding Hitler is in no small part of importance for trying to stop this reoccurring.

The two volume format works well for two clear phases in Hitler's life. Whether these are the only two phases I will return to in my discussion of volume two. But certainly the first half consisting of Hitler's youth, army service followed by the route to power neatly fits a first book. The longer second book focuses almost entirely on World War Two. But the two books cannot really be separated. This is not simply because they tell the story of a single life. But because the ideas that Hitler developed early were at the core of his thought and action for his whole life. These included but weren't limited to extreme antisemitism, nationalism, a pathological hatred of the left, belief in a "stab in the back" of Germany following World War One, and the desire for a strong, dictatorial leadership for Germany. To his dying day he clung to this fascist "worldview". In fact, key, flawed, decisions made between 1939 and 1945 arose directly from the Nazi ideas that Hitler developed in his 20s and 30s.

But I get ahead of myself. Readers picking up Kerhsaw's book for information on Hitler's personal life will find them sorely missing. But this is not the fault of the biographer. Hitler had very little personal life. Even in his early life he comes across as lazy, quick to blame others for his own failings, unable to make friends and obsessed with his own intelligence. It's easy to draw parallels between this characteristics and Hitler's later behaviour. To do so would be massively over simplifying things. Instead Kershaw shows how Hitler's world-view and the fascist movements he helped create arose out of two key things. Firstly the long tradition of far-right, nationalistic and antisemitic organisation that existed in Austria and German. Hitler's early engagement with these ideas and the organisations that preceded him, gave him a quick entry to fascist organisation. Of most important though was World War One. As Kershaw says:

On the eve of the First World War, Germany was certainly a state with some unattractive features - among them those of the unbalanced character sitting on the Imperial throne. But nothing in its development predetermined the path to the Third Reich. What happened under Hitler was not presaged in Imperial Germany. It is unimaginable without the experience of the First World War and what followed it.

What followed was economic crisis and revolution. In a hospital in 1918 Hitler watched the revolutionary events with horror. Kershaw says that his "entire political activist was driven by the trauma of 1918- aimed at expunging the defeat and revolution which betrayed all that he had believed in, and eliminating those he helped responsible."

While we know Hitler as the beer-hall agitator, he (and others on the right) discovered Hitler's speaking talents working for the Reichswehr (the German counter-revolutionary defence force) that organised against the left in the aftermath of World War One. It was this that "turned Hitler into a propagandist". Here he developed the ideas that would crystallise into the Nazi worldview. Kerhsaw:

At first Hitler's antisemitic tirades were invariable linked to anti-capitalism and attacks on 'Jewish' war profiteers and racketeers, whom he blamed for exploiting the German people and causing the loss of the war and the German war dead... There was no link with Marxism or Bolshevism at this stage. Contrary to what is sometimes claimed Hitler's antisemitism was not prompted by his anti-Bolshevism; it long predated it.

This combination of antisemitism and anti-capitalism allowed Hitler to appeal to layers of the masses who had been left devastated by the economic crisis following World War One. Rather than blaming the capitalist system itself though, Hitler's antisemitism played on the racist conspiratorial view that it was the Jews who had caused economic crisis and allowed Germany's defeat. But for Hitler ideology was not an abstract question. It mattered little that his ideas held little internal coherence, they were important because they were tools to mobilise people. The people could be shaped into a movement that would lead to the fascist seizure of power.

It is worth noting Kershaw's point that the iddea of Hitler as Fuhrer of Germany (and indeed the Nazi party) did not originate fully formed in his head in 1918. It arose out of the experience of the struggle to build Nazi organisation and Hitler's increasing obsession with his own self importance.

Much of Kerhsaw's book charts the rise to power of the Nazis. Here the book is full of detail. From small details about the organisation of the early Nazi party, including Hitler's seizure of the leadership to the Beerhall Putsch that temporarily set his movement back. The final section details the machinations of Hitler in the last years of the Weimar Republic, the massive election campaigns, the innovative use of propaganda and the hard nosed negotiations that eventually got him chosen as Chancellor.

In part Hitler was able to achieve this because of the close links he began to increasingly make between Jews and Marxism. Kershaw explains that in court for his role in the Putsch, Hitler used the platform to declare that [Kershaw's words] "The Nazi movement knew only one enemy... the mortal enemy of the whole of mankind: Marxism. There was no mention of the Jews." As Kershaw explains "Marxism and the Jew were synonymous in Hitler's mind". It is this that is key to understanding why many in the German ruling class were prepared to give Hitler power.

But on the eve of success Hitler nearly failed. What Kershaw does brilliantly is to place the story of the rise of the Nazis into wider contexts. Hitler was lucky as well as being a shrewd organiser of the mass fascist party. In the late 1920s and early 1930s the Nazis increased their vote share extraordinarily rapidly rising on the back of economic and political crisis, using antisemitism and anticommunist hysteria to attract large sections of the population. But the party was, on occasion, internally divided and crisis prone. In the last election before his victory, the Nazi vote was declining and Hitler faced a crisis in the organisation that nearly split it. Had this happened, Kershaw argues, Hitler would not have come to power.

The point, though I don't think that Kershaw makes enough of it, is that Hitler could have been stopped right up until the last moment. The near splitting of the Nazi party during the Strasser crisis, was a sign that had united organisation existed that was prepared to challenge the Nazis on the streets, on the ballot and in the workplace existed, it could have broken Hitler. Certainly the experience since 1945 has been that were mass anti-fascist movements been able to pressure emerging fascist movements through counter-protest and propaganda, the splits that follow often set the Nazis back many years.

Kershaw concludes:

Democracy surrendered without a fight.... In the final drama, the agrarians and the army were more influential than big business in engineering Hitler's takeover. But big business, also, politically myopic and self-serving, had significantly contributed tot he undermining of democracy which was the necessary prelude to Hitler's success. The masses, too, had played their part in democracy's downfall... Democracy was in a far from healthy state when the Depression struck Germany. And in the course of the Depression, the masses deserted democracy in their droves... The working class was cowed and broken by the Depression, its organisations enfeebled and powerless. But the ruling groups did not have the mass support to maximise their ascendancy and destroy once and for all the power of organised labour. Hitler was brought in to do the job for them. That he might do more than this, that he might outlast all predictions and expand his own power immensely and at their own expense, either did not occur to them, or was regarded as an exceedingly unlikely outcome.

The working class was broken. But its political parties still retained the loyalty of millions of voters. Had the Communists and Social Democrats united to stop Hitler, the story might have been very different. The ruling class certainly didn't think Hitler would last long. But they were, in many cases sympathetic to his ideas. It was a frightening combination.

The great strength of this volume is that Ian Kershaw places the rise of Hitler in the context of the historical moments. Those readers expecting to learn that the origin of the Holocaust and World War Two lay in some combination of Hitler's personality or the nature of German people will be disappointing. But understanding Hitler as both a product of his times and someone who shaped the situation through the mass Nazi party is much more useful.

Hitler could have been stopped. That's the conclusion that should be drawn from this book. The story doesn't end in volume one though in 1933. It shows the consolidation of power through his destruction of his own enemies (real and perceived) in the Night of the Long Knives, the defeat of the left and the trade unions, and the emergence of the Nazi state. It also show how the steps towards the Holocaust began. Here the development of trhe Fuhrer state on the back of a network of millions of members of the Nazi party allowed for a myriad of small bureacrats and activists to "work towards the Fuhrer". These individuals had no specific instructions, but they too lived inside Hitler's worldview and worked towards the implementation of those ideas. In volume two we see precisely what that meant for millions of Jews, disabled people, gays and lesbians and leftists, as well as the populations of Europe.

Related Reviews

Kershaw - Hitler, 1936-1945: Nemesis
Kershaw - To Hell and Back: Europe 1914-1949
Kershaw - The End
Mazower - Hitler's Empire
Sereny - Albert Speer: His Battle with the Truth
Browning - The Origins of the Final Solution
Paxton - The Anatomy of Fascism

J.L.Carr - How Steeple Sinderby Wanderers Won the FA Cup

This is possibly the funniest novel from the 1970s that you have never heard of. Steeple Sinderby is a tiny village, a "tiny grey-walled settlement, forgotten in the western wolds". It is populated by exactly the sort of people you imagine populate tiny forgotten villages and its amateur football team won the FA Cup. Or at least they won a slightly alternative FA Cup where Scottish teams participate and in which Manchester United might be persuaded to play in an uneven, uphill field in the middle of nowhere for the semi-final ("we make it an all-ticket game... but...  decided that it would be immoral to raise the charge for admission from the 5p with which we'd begun the season").

Sinderby Wanderers are doubly lucky. There is at least two former first division player in their village and the local school headmaster is a exiled Hungarian genius whose fresh eyes on football allow him to devise fiendish strategies to defeat all the higher placed players. From the polygamous landowner who chairs the football board simply because he chairs everything else in the village, to the vicar who plays on the wing (except when there's a funeral to organise) these beautifully drawn, hilarious, characters give an odd sense of realism to the unlikely tale. There are spectator brawls, improbably goals, and a hilarious TV interview with the chairman who channels Enoch Powell in his vision for Britain, nearly bringing down the government.

The book is not the official history of Wanderers' victory. Rather its the private memoirs of Joe Gidner who usually takes the ticket money from the derisory number of fans who normally watch Wanderers play, and makes a living writing poems for greeting cards. Told through flashback, newspaper reports and committee minutes, this is an absolutely hilarious and deeply poignant story.

JL Carr was himself delightfully eccentric. His most famous book is probably A Month in the Country. Readers of that beautiful and sad novel will be unprepared for the humour of this one. I'd recommend both if only to see the true genius of this forgotten writer. Perhaps the funniest book I've ever read, this is certainly in the top ten. Buy it as soon as you've finished reading this review, you don't even need to like football.

Related Reviews

Carr - A Month in the Country

Lev Grossman - The Magician's Land

***Spoilers***

There is no denying the consistent high quality and ongoing inventiveness of Lev Grossman's Magicians trilogy. Three volume fantasy novels are hardly new, but few maintain their quality (whatever level that might be) through the whole series. Grossman's books however are excellent and this conclusion is both satisfying and different enough to the early volumes to hold the reader till the end.

The first two books dealt with the adventures of Quentin Coldwater who having been accepted into a hidden magical college in the first volume, then expelled from the alternative magical realm Fillory that he came to jointly rule in part two, spends much volume three trying to re-enter  Fillory. The final part is a battle to save Fillory from complete destruction.

Such a summary only superficially explains the story. Quentin, as in the rest of the series, is an annoyingly self-obsessed figure, a loner who is convinced of his talent and genius who is prepared to knock over everyone else on the way to success. He has never quite got over the guilt of the death of his partner earlier in the tales, and thus broods his way through much of this book as he tries to bring her back from the dead. The beginning of the book is focused around an entertaining magical burglary but quickly the reader learns that this is nothing more than an entree to the larger story.

But the book neatly brings the story full circle. By the end, we know much more about Fillory, but we also understand more about how children from Earth first found their way there. These tales are much more dark than we might have first believed and Grossman ties all the lose ends together very neatly.

All in all a very satisfying, dark and entertaining conclusion to an excellent fantasy series.

Related Reviews

Grossman - The Magicians
Grossman - The Magician King

Colin Tudge - The Secret Life of Birds

This is a fantastic book to introduce you to its subject. Tudge's easy going, but informed, style is that of a genuine enthusiast whose desire is to develop all his readers to the same level of knowledge. Tudge begins with a couple of seemingly easy questions - what is a bird, and how should they be classified. From these he takes the reader through the complexities of groups and species, through to grappling with more esoteric questions like what is it to be a bird. What we quickly learn with is that birds are infinitely more complex than they seem at first. These are more than just flying animals that eat and lay eggs, these are creatures with complex social lives, the ability to learn and comprehend their surroundings and a huge variety of ways of living. For instance, birds are able to learn about their surroundings and make decisions based on how their environment changes. For instance, take the Collared Flycatcher:

In one field experiment, scientists, being scientists, added more eggs to Collared Flycatcher nests in one area, and in a neighbouring area they reduced the number of eggs in the various nests, and the next year mos males turned up in the territory that had been given more eggs. Once more we see that birds can be aware of their environments; they know what they are doing and build their knowledge season by season throughout their lives.

Key to understanding the enormous variety of bird life on our planet is how these animals evolved. Tudge takes us from the time of the dinosaurs onward, showing how different aspects of bird life - feathers, song, brain and so on - would have evolved. One of the most amazing examples of this is the parasitic behaviour of the European Cuckoo which has evolved in a way that is, surprisingly, often of use to the other species that are lose their eggs when the Cuckoo lays its eggs in their nests.

Once the parasitism of one species on another becomes habitual, an arms race would develop between parasite and host. As the centuries pass the parasites mimic the eggs of their hosts more and more accurately, while the hosts become more and more adept at detecting the minute differences o that the parasites need to be more and more accurate. Eventually we reach the fine-tuned versatility of the European Cuckoo - to which its hosts have yet to mount a convincing defence.... But the relationship... in which the hosts can apparently discriminate foreign eggs pretty well, but sometimes choose not to- adds yet another layer of subtlety.

One final point which I found fascinating. Birds superficially seem to offer a classic example in nature of the family unit consisting of two adults and babies. Yet there seems an infinite array of different ways of bringing up baby birds in nature. From the parasitism of the European cuckoo to the sharing of eggs, to the species that move eggs into different nests and have multiple partners (both female and male birds breeding with others). All human life, so to speak, is here.

Tudge's final chapter ruminates on the threats to bird biodiversity. He shows how bird life is intrinsically part of wider networks, relying on other animals, plants and birds. Destruction of individual species can undermine wider eco-systems. Sadly, if anything, the trends he outlines are far worse now then when the book was published in 2009.

My only criticism of the book is that the detailed "cast list" of birds, dividing them into different orders was overlong, though Tudge skilfully keeps the reader attentive by giving them morsals of fascinating and sometimes hilarious titbits about different examples. For the reader with a passing interest in birds, or the more serious watcher, this book has a lot. Read it with an internet connection so that you can look up each amazing creature and marvel at the wonder of evolution, and, then go outside. You'll see birds with new eyes.

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