Review 2320: The Haunting of Alma Fielding

The two previous books I’ve read by Kate Summerscale were Victorian true crime stories. In The Haunting of Alma Fielding she changes genres (slightly) and periods to write about the spate of supernatural cases, and one in particular, that hit England when World War II was threatening in 1938.

The principal figure in the book is Nandor Fodor, a Hungarian emigré who studied the supernatural but also had an interest in Freudian psychology. When the Fielding case cropped up, he was in a difficult position, because although his mission was to prove whether there were legitimate supernatural occurrences, when he tried to use somewhat scientific methods of observation, he was accused of being unfriendly to mediums. His role at the Society for Psychical Research was contradictory at best and his notion of the scientific not very well developed.

The Fielding case began with a frightened family haunted by a poltergeist that hurled dishes and toppled furniture. Fairly quickly, it became clear that the activity centered around Alma, who lived in the house with her husband and lodger, and the spirits began to branch out by producing objects from her clothes at séances.

Fodor seemed so happy to have found what looked like legitimate supernatural activity that he believed everything he was told and actually encouraged the “spirits.” When later he found evidence that Alma deceived him, he still believed that some of the events were real and continued his investigation.

I found this book less interesting than the true crime books because I became so impatient with the gullibility of the investigators. And the medium tricks! After all, even if a spirit could produce small objects (called apports) from a person’s body, why would it want to? Obviously, because it’s an effect that can be faked.

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Review 2290: The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny, and Murder

In 1740, a small fleet of ships set out from Portsmouth on a mission to try to capture Spanish ships laden with treasure in the Pacific Ocean. This poorly conceived and executed mission was part of the War of Jenkin’s Ear, essentially an excuse to try to gain wealth by pillaging Spanish ships.

Because of delays in refurbishing and equipping the ships, they left late. They were trying to round Cape Horn during the southern hemisphere’s summer, which they thought was the calmest time to venture through those dangerous waters. By the time they got to the Horn, the Wager, the smallest ship, had already experienced a bout of typhus and another of scurvy. The loss of officers to illness had given them a new leader, newly promoted Captain David Cheap. They made it around the Horn but lost contact with the other ships and then were shipwrecked.

Nearly a year after they were last sighted at the tip of South America, a few of the sailors made it back to England. Six months after that, a few more appeared, including Captain Cheap, accusing the first group of mutiny and other crimes. Two more appeared even later, accusing the first group of abandoning them on the coast of Patagonia.

Using the widely varying accounts in the journals and memoirs of some of the survivors, David Grann has attempted to reconstruct a fair account of what happened. One of these survivors was the sixteen-year-old midshipman, John Byron, who became the grandfather of the poet, Lord Byron. It’s a fascinating account, with some of the thrills of fictional naval adventure. Yet its all true.

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Review 2218: Romney Marsh

I’m not quite sure what possessed me to look for this little book. I guess it looked interesting on someone ‘s review blog, although I’m not sure whose. It is a short, descriptive book about Romney Marsh as it appeared in 1950 with a little history and some drawings.

After a descriptive section about the marsh and the towns on the coast, it has a section of drawings with short descriptions of the churches on the marsh. Finally, there are a few drawings of marsh features, towns, and more churches. I would have liked the drawings from the final section to have been placed near the appropriate text, but I understand that placement of all the drawings at the back allowed them to be printed on finer paper. It seemed as if the church section might be useful on a tour of churches of the area.

Although I have never been to Romney Marsh, if I ever went there, I would be sure to take this little book along, if only to see how much it has changed in 70 years.

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Review 2100: Mistress of the Monarchy: The Life of Katherine Swynford, Duchess of Lancaster

I looked for a biography of Katherine Swynford after reading Anya Seton’s Katherine, a novel about her life. I had a suspicion that the story was greatly romanticized, and acclaimed biographer Alison Weir agrees with me.

The bare bones of Katherine Swynford’s story are dramatic. Of undistinguished foreign parentage, Swynford was married to a low-ranking knight in the army of John of Gaunt, the Duke of Lancaster and son of Edward III. John was the most wealthy and powerful noble of his time except for the King. Katherine was attached to the Duke’s household as sort of a governess for his children with his duchess, Blanche of Lancaster, to whom he was devoted. Katherine’s husband served overseas. (Weir has him dying of illness rather than being murdered by a servant faithful to the Duke.)

After Blanche’s death, John married Constance, titular Queen of Castile and tried for years to take back her country from usurpers. This marriage was not successful, and soon the Duke began an affair with Katherine that lasted for years. The couple parted then reunited, but Lancaster astounded everyone by marrying her after Constance’s death. Amazingly, Katherine was the ancestress of every king of England since 1399 and of six American presidents.

Although Katherine’s story is an intriguing one, there is so little historical information available about her that the biography is mostly about her husband and sons, with information derived from records of grants and budgets. This is the kind of research that is probably fascinating to the writer but not so interesting to the reader.

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Review 2085: The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher

Last summer, my husband and I watched a set of programs on BritBox—not a series but separate movies each with the title “The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher” and a different subtitle. When I looked at the credits, the name Kate Summerscale rang a bell, and I realized I had read her book The Wicked Boy about a Victorian true crime. The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher is also nonfiction, about a famous Victorian murder and the detective whose career was nearly destroyed by the case.

In June 1860, the Kent family awakened to find three-year-old Saville Kent missing. Searches of the property eventually located him under the seat of an outside privy with his throat cut. A window of the dining room was ajar.

The initial investigation was botched, with local police assuming the crime was committed by a servant or outsider, and even hiding some potential evidence. John Whicher, a top detective in the newly formed detective department, was assigned to the case after two weeks, as a result of reported bungling.

Mr. Whicher was thorough in his investigation despite lack of cooperation and even obstruction by the local officials. He concluded that Saville was murdered by his 16-year-old sister, Constance (this is not a spoiler because this information comes out fairly early in the book), but felt he didn’t have enough proof to make an arrest. However, the local magistrates pushed him into it.

It is the national reaction to the crime and Mr. Whicher’s suspicions that Summerscale concentrates on, as well as telling what happened to the principals later. This is a really interesting book, relating how Mr. Whicher was a model for early fictional detectives and how this case affected early crime fiction.

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Review 1856: Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth

First, let me say that I am not a religious person, furthermore, that I have a big problem with how many people practice their religion, especially if it involves war. I believe one of my brothers feels the same, so I was surprised when he recommended Zealot to me.

Reza Aslan is not so much interested in Jesus Christ as in Jesus of Nazareth, that is, not in the ministry of Jesus or the beliefs about him, but the actual man—what can be found about him from the earliest and most reliable sources. This examination involves placing utterances and events in their proper context, not as we understand them today.

The result is eye-opening, starting with the story of his birth, for example. For Aslan reveals this story as a construct by the writers of the gospels—all written well after his death—to support messianic claims. The messiah was supposed to be a descendant of David, which meant he had to be born in Bethlehem. There was indeed a tax levied, but on Judea, and it would never have required the populace to travel to pay it, as taxes were levied in the place of residence. Jesus’s parents lived in Galilee and so were not subject to that tax. Jesus was known as Jesus of Nazareth all his life, as he was born in Nazareth.

One by one Aslan knocks down the myths that have risen around the life of Jesus and explains why these myths were created. Instead of the gentle soul that emerges from the gospels, we get a fighter for the poor and a strong supporter of the laws of Moses who never intended his teachings for anyone but Jews.

One of the myths is that Jews killed Jesus, not the Romans. Aslan explains that after his death, the new religion shifted from being a sect that was always meant to be a form of Judaism to one that began to recruit gentiles. As Rome was the base of many of these activities, the writers of the gospels had to find a way to appease Rome. They couldn’t come out and say Jesus was killed by Rome. So, to quote Aslan, “Thus, a story concocted by Mark strictly for evangelistic purposes to shift the blame for Jesus’s death away from Rome is stretched with the passage of time to the point of absurdity, becoming in the process the basis for two thousand years of Christian anti-Semitism.” And wait until you read what this book says about Paul.

This book is an eye-opener, written by an acclaimed scholar of religion.

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Review 1720: Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream

As a young adult in the late 60’s and 70’s, I did not have a high opinion of Lyndon Johnson. Although I was not political, like many people, I was against the Vietnam War. It wasn’t until I lived in Texas that I saw another side to Johnson, who was revered for, among other things, bringing electricity to rural Texas to ease the work of women.

Doris Kearns Goodwin worked in the White House in the late 60’s, and when Johnson asked her to help him write his memoirs, she declined because she also was against the war. However, Johnson was a master of persuasion, and she finally agreed. The memoir never got written, but Goodwin had unprecedented access to Johnson because of it and eventually used her notes to write this biography.

Goodwin is obviously interested in the pursuit and use of power, and Johnson is a perfect subject for that interest. She depicts a man who did not pursue power for itself but for the good he could do with it. I failed to mark them in the text, but many of his comments about the presidency and the use of power contrast starkly with the thinking of our last regime, which was fizzling out as I read this book.

Goodwin paints a picture of a complex man, brilliant but at times crude, organized, manipulative, a consummate negotiator, but a man with good intentions. It’s a pity that the war overshadowed and overwhelmed the other accomplishments of his presidency. Because of it, we forget that he put into process programs to help the needy and people of color. Medicare and the Voting Rights Act are down to him as well as other programs that were not handled as well because of his preoccupation with the war or that were gutted by Richard Nixon.

I did get a little bogged down in the chapter about the war, and it being a different time, today’s readers may have problems with how Johnson and others refer to minority groups. Still, I found this book really insightful and interesting, as it explores the reasons for some of his controversial decisions.

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Review 1667: JFK: Coming of Age in the American Century, 1917-1956

JFK is a biography that makes you feel you really understand John F. Kennedy despite it being the type of biography not necessarily aimed at mass consumption. Although it is eloquently and clearly written, it contains about 150 pages of notes and sources. It examines the first 39 years of Kennedy’s life in a balanced fashion, showing both strengths and faults, and is absorbingly interesting. It also tries to dispel some of the myths about Kennedy’s political career, showing, for example, that his interest in politics began long before his older brother’s death, in answer to the belief that he entered politics at his father’s urging as a replacement for his dead brother.

Although a lot of people are fascinated by the Kennedys, I knew only the basic facts and found the home life of his family growing up to be a very strange one. First was their emphasis on competition and winning, one that was extreme and probably explains the tendency toward alcoholism in a few of its members (not JFK, who was not a drinker). A few details stood out—one that family members didn’t seem to have permanent bedrooms in Hyannis Port but treated the house more like a hotel. Very odd.

I was less interested in his development as a politician than I was in the earlier material, but still, even though I knew, for example, that Kennedy was not the vice presidential nomineee in 1956, Logevall was able to make the Democratic convention truly exciting.

Logevall is a Harvard historican whose last book won the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for history. This is a serious, well-researched biography that nevertheless offers much interest to the more casual reader.

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Review 1658: Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire

My curiosity about this subject was piqued by seeing the movie starring Kiera Knightly. Predictably, the movie exaggerated the story of Georgiana’s home life and left out her role as a serious political negotiator. (Those scenes of her on the podium don’t really count.) For the Duchess of Devonshire was a complicated person, intelligent but too trusting, generous but also profligate, adored by most but not by her own husband, a savvy politician, a serious amateur scientist, an author who never published under her own name, and an important figure in 18th century social and political life whose legacy was either purposefully erased by rivals or too-proper Victorian descendants or overlooked by historians.

Georgiana’s home life was exciting enough to provoke the prim, for, married at 16 to a husband who was cold and unloving, she was full of insecurities that eventually led her to live most of her married life in a ménage with her husband and Lady Elizabeth Foster, her husband’s mistress. Although Bess Foster seldom missed an opportunity to undercut her even after her death because she envied her position, Georgiana always considered Bess her best friend despite her mother’s and children’s detestation of the woman (with good reason).

Aside from Georgiana’s loyal support of the Whig Party and Mr. Fox, who may have been her lover, an overarching concern of her life was debt. Georgiana and her family all shared the trait of an inability to live within their means, despite having fortunes at their disposal. Georgiana missed several opportunities for the Duke to settle her debts by being too ashamed to admit them all, so all her life she was constantly juggling money, borrowing from one person to pay another or gambling away money meant to pay her debts.

Georgiana was a flawed but fascinating woman, and this biography reveals not only her life but her times to the reader.

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Review 1652: The Silk Roads: A New History of the World

In the opening of The Silk Roads, Peter Frankopan talks about his uneasiness with the narrow focus of his historical studies in school, to Europe and the countries affecting Europe. This struck a chord with me, because I remember discussing this with my father when I was in high school. “Why don’t we learn about China or Japan?” I remember asking, and I didn’t even think of Central Asia or the Middle East. So, The Silk Roads seemed as if it would be very interesting to me.

Frankopan shows that while Europe was a backwater, the countries of Central Asia and the Middle East were vibrant with trade, of goods, culture, and ideas. His thesis is that this area of the world has long been its heart and is becoming so again.

The subject matter of this book is interesting, in a way that changes one’s preconceptions. Frankopan’s writing style, though, is clear but very matter of fact, with no attempt to be stylistically interesting or eloquent.

Although I’m sure this is a simplistic statement, it seems as if there are two ways of approaching historical content. One is to relate it more as a series of stories. The other is to throw in every fact that supports your thesis. Unfortunately, at least the later chapters use the second approach, making the last few chapters sort of a slog for me. For example, most of the last chapter is just lists to show the ways Central Asia has become wealthy. I believe that Frankopan’s ideas are important, but I sometimes found this book putting me to sleep.

The irony is that Frankopan’s book is, after all, westerncentric, especially the last half, which focuses on the mistakes England and then the U. S. made in the Middle East.

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