THE BOOK CORNER: DEBUT POST
“The Last King of America”, Andrew Roberts. Viking, 2021.
God save the King, and Andrew Roberts will take care of his reputation. Andrew Robert, previously the author of biographies of Napoleon and Churchill, here takes on a lesser-known leader: George III.
The relative obscurity of this monarch is Roberts’ point of departure, and he makes clear from the outset that the pompous tyrant of the Hamilton stage production is an unjust myth. The main thrust of this 676-page volume is the rehabilitation of a legacy that Roberts sees as unfairly negative. To that end, Roberts traces the story of George, Prince of Wales, as a child, portraying a lively and intelligent boy, a precocious student, and a devout and pious Anglican. These early accounts are the most entertaining portions of the book, owing not a little to the gossipy, chambermaid-and-courtier drama of “Downton Abbey”. The human drama here is genuinely engaging: George was a sickly child who was nevertheless doted upon by his father and mother, and the correspondence that remains between child and parents is surprisingly touching, indeed, surprising for the reason that it is touching.
Equally engaging is Roberts’ survey of contemporary English politics, which is sometimes neglected in treatments of the American Revolution. Before the first shot of the Boston Massacre was ever fired, England itself was undergoing radical changes in its own political system. Having recently rewatched Nicholas Hytner’s “The Madness of King George”, I was especially interested to see this book recount the political upheaval that was taking place in England. The groundbreaking of reform, Roberts makes clear, was tilling the soil out of which American independence would eventually grow.
George was a recalcitrant conservative, and his country suffered for some of his political myopia. England in the mid-1760s was plagued with social unrest and riots, for which George had little tolerance. The George that emerges here, even from Roberts’ sympathetic perspective, is a stubborn and obstinate man, who refused to accede to any fundamental change in the world order if it threatened his sacred conception of tradition, even if those changes would have squared with George’s personal piety (namely, the abolition of slavery and civil rights for Catholics). The flip side is that George could also be amazingly liberal, especially when it came to penal reform and commuting sentences.
Of course, Roberts deserves credit for at least attempting to show both sides of a complicated man. Never was he more complicated in his life than when he struggled with his infamous madness, which is often classified as “porphyria”, but which Roberts diagnoses as bipolar disorder. Again, this is where the narrative shines, acutely portraying the sufferings, not only of the King, who takes on a Learian nobility and pathos, but of his devoted family. Like Lear, George had often to deal with the troubles caused by a wayward child, and Roberts spares no detail of Prince George’s spending and irresponsible behavior.
Nor can the bulk of Roberts’ admiring narrative be simply gainsaid. Except, perhaps, for his treatment of the slavery issue, none of George III’s vices were any worse than those of his contemporaries. It is true that none of George’s restrictions of the American colonies were wholly his own devices, and both Parliament and George’s appointed ministers were at least as responsible for the imperial overreaches that sparked the Revolution (Pitt and Grenville in particular). As Roberts points out, several times, if we are to judge George III as a tyrant, we must also judge the rest of the British monarchy as such, especially up to that time. Indeed, as Roberts writes in one of his more enlightening passages, the genius of the American Founding Fathers lay in their ability to foment the overthrow of a perfectly legitimate government and then replace it with an equally legitimate one, but wholly different in aims and character. Ultimately, Roberts posits, the creation of the American nation owes more to the mere desire of the colonies for independence rather than to a colonizer that they needed independence from.
If Roberts has a fault, it is that of one-sidedness. Biography is one thing; agenda is another. Given the array of history written from the other side however (both by American and non-American historians), perhaps the belaboring of a lesser-known point is forgivable. A lack of counterpoint does not necessarily imply the falsity of a narrative. It does, at least, raise a few questions, if not eyebrows. The amen corner has its say in “The Last King of America”. We must look elsewhere for the opposition.
“The Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War”, Andrew Roberts. Harper Perennial, 2011.
With his characteristic verve and vigor, Andrew Roberts zips through the Second World War at blitzkrieg speed. Beginning with the Deutschland Pact, whereby the German Army would support Hitler’s regime upon the death of President Paul von Hindenburg. This death pact would be the overarching unifying principle that would drive Germany and the world into a conflagration that would see between fifty and eighty-five million dead and millions more wounded and displaced.
Roberts, the earlier biographer of Napoleon and Churchill, here achieves a difficult trick: he condenses and synthesizes a vast historiography into a lithe and limber 600 pages.
As usual, Roberts is charmingly partial to his fellow Brits, with a special fondness for Montgomery. The narrative is broadly chronological, with little flashback or foreshadowing appended to the main plot. Shorn of sidebars or graphs, “The Storm of War” reads like a straight history, inflected here and there by Roberts’ personal touch, which includes a keen eye for colorful characters, telling anecdotes and a deep-seated desire to rescue the great-men view of history from its place of opprobrium.
Another recurring theme is Hitler’s incompetence as a military strategist. Again and again, Roberts gives us snapshots of Hitler’s usual method of military engineering: slapping together a plan based on instinct and an unwavering trust in his own supposed genius, and then berating his underlings when the half-baked scheme inevitably failed.
If there’s a weakness here, it is Roberts’ slightly scattered approach. Had he changed the subtitle to “Britain in the Second World War” and then honed even further in on that subject, the book would have gained a cohesivity now lacking in the present volume. “The Storm of War” doesn’t always read like “a new history of the Second World War”; it reads, at times, like an erudite overview of the British campaign.
Of course, anyone passingly familiar with Roberts expects a bit of Anglophilia. That’s not a fault in and of itself. His personality and outspokenness make Roberts one of my favorite active historians. But I spent the first 200 pages trying to piece together a cohesive overview of the war, and kept getting lost in anecdotes of Monty and Patton and Churchill. Roberts has picked the choicest quips and quotes from these colorful characters, which entertain even as they sometimes distract from the bigger picture.
Roberts, it would appear from the many interviews, reviews and articles, rather relishes his newfound role as modern narrative history’s enfant terrible. That may give many, including the present reviewer, pause. Thankfully, that impish impulse has been restrained here. “The Storm of War” is a crackingly-paced thrust through the heart of the last 100 years’ greatest conflict.
“King: A Life”, Jonathan Eig. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023.
If Martin Luther King were alive today, he’d be the same age as Bob Newhart; he was born the same year as Anne Frank.
Both those contemporaries seem to pin him in place, belonging both to past and present. A new book by Jonathan Eig, previous biographer of Lou Gehrig and Muhammad Ali, does much to preserve his legacy, not just in some nebulous “present”, but in the here and now.
Drawing on a wealth of newly released telephone transcripts, FBI documents and interviews with member of the King family, “King: A Life” is the first major biography of the civil rights leader in over a decade.
The King that emerges from Eig’s analysis is profoundly human, yet transcendently vital. Hero or flawed figure? Both, Eig insists. Deeply religious, yet with a penchant for the affections of women. Brilliant, yet sometimes unfeeling. Driven, but sometimes inconsiderate.
If King himself was a complicated figure, so too was the nascent civil rights movement, and consensus among figures like Malcolm X, Thurgood Marshall and the men and women of the fledgling NAACP was not easily nor often reached. King was too conservative for some, too radical for others, and the struggle of the movement to find the right balance is one of the book’s most fascinating pieces. One is left with the sense, and Eig seems to believe, that King’s “moderate radicalism” was exactly the right tack for the times.
Eig pays special attention to King as an orator: influenced deeply by the Bible, by the Black church, by the social gospel of Harry Emerson Fosdick. But there are the moments behind the pulpit that reveal a deeply human man: King, tired and exhausted, relaxing with a drink and a cigarette; King in his younger days, screwing up the courage to ask a pretty girl out on a date. King was partial to southern food, collards and chicken and cornbread, and tended to eat with his hands.
Make it stand out
It is this very normalcy of King that throws the prejudices of his time into such disheartening relief. King was not calling for a complete societal overthrow; he was calling for Black Americans’ right to participate in that society. Hardly as radical as Lyndon Johnson and the FBI seemed to believe, and this is often overlooked in modern studies, where a friendlier, defanged King with nothing to say about socioeconomic injustices prevails. King was both more radical and more flawed: he moved beyond race to economic inequality, yet he can credibly be accused of multiple infidelities and may have stood by during a sexual assault.
These issues are still up in the air; pertinent documents are still sealed and will be until the middle of the decade. Would Eig have been better served had he waited five years? I don’t think so. He has synthesized, condensed and distilled the more complex and lengthy accounts into the best one-volume treatment available. I prefer Taylor Branch’s trilogy for breadth and depth, but relying solely on that work would require ignoring the new material that Eig accesses.
