"The Plains of Abraham" by Brian Connell

 The story of the events leading up to Wolfe's attack on Montcalm in Quebec which led to French Canada becoming British ... and eventually to the American War of Independence.

This book is well written and well-illustrated with maps. I was very much in the dark about this period of history: the Seven Year's War, the premiership of Pitt the Elder, and the last years of George II. 

There were some interesting points and, of course, characters of whom I had heard made starring or sometimes walk-on appearances.

• George Washington learned his soldiering fighting for the British against the French and their Indian allies. 
• One of Montcalm's more impoortant subordinates was Bougainville, later to become a famous explorer and to have Bougainvillea named after him.
• On Wolfe's side, with the ships in the Royal Navy force, was a young man called James Cook, later to become an even more important explorer than Bougainville.
• Both Wolfe and Braddock, a British general killed early in the Seven Year's War, fought at Culloden; one of the French leaders at Quebec also fought there, but for the Highlanders.
• Midshipman John Robison, in Wolfe's boat as they rowed under cover of darkness to climb the cliffs leading the the battleground, later became a "professor of natural philosophy at the University of Edinburgh" (Ch 10).
• I hadn't realised how useless the American colonists were at mounting their own defence. Then, as perhaps now, they repeatedly refused to volunteer men or raise taxes to help the British put sufficient armies into the field. "The American campaigns alone had cost £60 million ... The colonies themselves had not provided a tithe of this huge sum, although their population was nearly a quarter of the mother country." (Ch 13)
• They would have been easily defeated had it not been for the monstrous corruption of French Canada in which a few men cornered the market in everything and made vast profits while the majority of the Canadian farmers, poor peasants, starved. "Every functionary pilfered, plundered and extorted ... The only reproach from seniors to juniors was of stealing too much for their position." (Ch 5) This was the sort of behaviour which led to the French revolution and which we can see today in British politics.
• Had it not been for the French Canadian collapse, the US would have been restricted to the Eastern seaboard, since the French possessions didn't just flow down the St Laurence and through the Great Lakes but hopped over to what is now Pittsburgh and thence down the Ohio to the Mississippi and down to New Orleans in a great crescent shaped belt which bisected the continent.
• There was the surrender of Fort William Henry to Montcalm and the subsequent massacre by Montcalm's Indian allies of the surrendering men, women and children as they marched away from the fort; a key even in the fictional Last of the Mohicans by James Fennimore Cooper.

Other great moments:

• "The English aristocracy had re-established itself after the Roundhead upheaval of the previous century. Its scions ran the country entirely in their own interest." (Ch 7)
• "There never was a people collected together so unfit for the business they were sent upon - dilatory, ignorant, irresolute ... and very unsoldierlike or unsailorlike." (Ch 7)
• "We have cheval a la mode, escalope de cheval, filet de cheval, saddle of horse au gratin and horse pate." (Ch 8)
• "He asked the most extraordinary questions, rather like a blind man who has suddenly been given his sight." (Ch 9)

A very interesting read. October 2020; 243 pages

"Wizard: The Life and Times of Nikola Tesla" by Marc J Seifer

Tesla was, to say the least, eccentric. Perhaps he was "the quintessential mad scientist" (C 45). Perhaps he was a misunderstood genius; perhaps he was a charlatan. In this odd biography Seifer attempts to write  "the biography of a genius."

Born a Serb in Croatia, Tesla studied in Serbia and Paris before making his way to New York to work for Edison. He was fascinated by electricity, in particular by electromagnetic induction in which a changing magnetic field induces electric current to run through a wire. This is the fundamental principle used in generating electricity, it is used to transform voltages up and down, and it is used in creating electromagnetic waves which enable you to send electrical signals from transmitter to receiver by electromagnetic waves, including radio waves.

When he arrived in New York he was a pivotal player in the 'battle of the currents': Edison championed direct current (dc) electricity; Westinghouse was in favour of alternating current (ac); the great advantage of ac is that it can be easily transformed to very high voltages which can be transmitted with negligible loss of power over great distances and then transformed down to safe usable voltages; it is the basis for most modern grid systems. Tesla had realised as a young student that ac had an advantage over dc in that an ac  generator doesn't need a component called a commutator as a dc generator does. Tesla was therefore an ac convert and his invention of three-phase ac, after leaving Edison and setting up as an independent inventor,  was the key component of the Westinghouse victory.

One of the grisly side-issues in the battle of the currents was Edison's attempt to brand ac as more dangerous than dc by having it employed to execute prisoners. An Edison associate called Brown manufactured electric chairs and experiment on electrocuting animals and sought employment as a prison executioner. The first prisoner to be capitally punished by electrocution was subjected to a drawn-out, much bungled affair. (C 6)

This led to fame and fortune for Tesla who began a lifetime habit of living in hotels, hobnobbing with rich and famous (John Jacob Astor III (as well as being one of the richest men in the world at the time he was a bit of an inventor including "a bicycle brake ... a storage battery, an internal-combustion engine, and a flying machine"; C 17), John Pierpoint Morgan and many luminaries of the science world), working all hours to come up with even more exciting inventions and writing patents, and fighting patent litigation battles against other inventors he claimed were pirating his patents (or those who claimed they had priority over him). The intricacies of the patent battles, fully described in the book, are a bit of a yawn.

As a very young man Tesla invented the Tesla coil, a coil of wire used to produce high-voltage high-frequency ac electricity and a key component in the early wirelesses. Thus, he claimed priority over Marconi, who used a Tesla coil in his early wirelesses. Tesla also claimed to have invented the ability to transmit much further using ground waves. Marconi's triumph in their endless battles over patents and priorities embittered Tesla and, perhaps, turned him from eccentric to madman. As a succession of investors discovered before pulling out, Tesla's Leonardo-like inability to focus on a single project to completion and his inability to produce something merely good, led to a succession of never-actually abandoned projects. His work degenerated into showmanship and endless promises of revolutionary new designs and world-beating systems which were incomparably better than anything yet seen but never actually materialised. This was the polar opposite of the Edison system of 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration (Tesla criticised Edison by saying "If he had a needle to find in a haystack he would not stop to reason where it was most likely to be, but would proceed at once with the feverish diligence of a bee, to examine straw after straw"; C 4) and Tesla, for all his genius, for all his spent his mature years dodging from hotel to hotel, his bills unpaid, sponging off friends, pleading for funds, and feeding pigeons.

The biography embodies the restless energy of Tesla, his chaotic lifestyle and his eccentric approach to life. I was surprised when, about half-way through, it moved from a conventional approach to quoting conversations verbatim; some of these are clearly 'reconstructed'; it is as if it has become a novel based on the life of Tesla at these points. For me the biography failed to make sense of the chaos of Tesla's life and it certainly failed to explain in a way I could understand and appreciate the physics behind Tesla's inventions (and I taught Physics for 33 years so I have some idea of electromagnetism). The moments it came alive were in the sympathetic portrayal of the character of the man, especially in old age, his triumphs forgotten, still working hard to pay his debts, still working hard to persuade investors of the value of his latest scheme.

In the end, Tesla was a bit of a loony. These tendencies started early when he seemed to be claiming that some of his nearly perpetual-motion systems used energy very similar to 'vril' the mysterious force invented by Lord Lytton in a work of fiction called 'The Coming Race' which became a favourite of occultists and led to a drink called Bo-Vril. When studying Hertzian electromagnetic waves he decided the Hertz was wrong and that radio waves were longitudinal. (C 11)His pursuit of perpetual motion disregarded the laws of thermodynamics; later he claimed to have invented particles and waves that travelled faster then light in defiance of Einstein's relativity: "the various discoveries and suggestions inherent in Tesla's theory violate not only accepted theories such as relativity and quantum physics but also, on the surface, common sense." (C 44)

This looniness went a bit sour when he became a devotee of eugenics: "Tesla supported the idea of 'sterilizing the unfit and deliberately guiding the mating instinct'." (C 46) He himself was. probably, celibate. "Tesla denied himself certain pleasures as a way to supposedly establish total control over himself. And yet Tesla was a complete slave to his idiosyncrasies and to a cauldron of phobias." (C 46)

There are also plenty of other weirdos, such as Abraham Spanel, an Odessan Jew who fled Russian pogroms in 1905 and ended up as president of the International Latex Corporation in Delaware, now Playtex.

Some brilliant bits:

• "Other bogus inventors of the day included Gaston Bulmar who tried to sell General Electric (GE) special pills that turned water into gasoline." (C 7)
• "Michael Pupin ... wanted to go to Cambridge to learn under James Clerk Maxwell, but he found upon his arrival that Maxwell had been dead for four years." (C 8)
• "For exercise, the inventor would walk '8 - 10 miles per day' ... Later, Tesla would add to his repertoire the squishing and unsquishing of his toes one hundred times for each foot each night." (C 43)
• Tesla said: "I'll never be rich unless the money comes in the door faster than I can shovel it out the window." (C 44)

June 2020; 470 pages

"In the Heart of the Sea" by Nathaniel Philbrick

This book recounts the story of the whaleship Essex, from Nantucket, which was sunk by a whale in 1820. The crew subsequently travelled in three whaleboats across the Pacific, many died, some being eaten by their starving shipmates; there was one case in which one of the crews drew lots and one lad was killed by his friend for food (this latter story is adapted for the novel Jamrach's Menagerie by Carol Birch). The account of the voyage by first mate Owen Chase (who possibly unknowingly incited the whale attack: “On the morning of November 20, 1820, sperm whales were not the only creatures filling the ocean with clicking sounds; there was also Owen Chase, busily nailing a piece of canvas to the bottom of an upturned whaleboat.”; C 5) was written in 1821; Herman Melville read it and was inspired to write Moby-Dick. Philbrick speculates in chapter 14 that the theme of Ahab's revenge came via a story told by Ralph Waldo Emerson who in 1834 was told of a white whale, famed for attacking whaling ships with its jaw, which had been hunted and killed by a boat called the Winslow or Essex; Owen Chase, first mate of the Essex, became captain of the Winslow.

This account is based on the account written in 1876 by the cabin boy (he also happened to be at the helm of the Essex when it was rammed by the whale) Thomas Nickerson which was lost until 1960 and only published in 1984.  

It is a tremendous story and beautifully written. Whilst written at a distance and thus able to reflect on the economic and social circumstances surrounding the Nantucket whale industry and the lives of the whalers (which, for example, enables understanding of the fact that those seamen who died first were predominantly African American), at the same time it transports you to the deck of the Essex and into the small whaleboats which attacked the whale. There were times when I was in those whaleboats and I felt hungry. At the end one is left with admiration for the indomitability and the ingenuity of the survivors, as well as deep sadness for those who died.

The story goes on to look at the consequences. Amazingly both Captain Pollard and Owen Chase returned to the sea, although only temporarily. Even more amazingly, when the captain of the Essex took his next command two of the Essex crew served under him again, one being Thomas Nickerson and the other Charles Ramsdell “the boy who had spent ninety-four days in a whaleboat with him” and who had been the one to propose drawing lots to see who should be sacrificed and who would actually kill the victim. (C 13)

Other consequences include, of course, Moby-Dick but also The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket by Edgar Allan Poe in the early part of which the ship-wrecked hero survives an open boat voyage through cannibalism, the victim being chosen by the drawing of lots.

Selected quotes:

• “Unfortunately, the anger which [the Quakers] are forbidden to express by outward actions, finding no vent, stagnates the heart.” (C1, quoting William Comstock)
• “A sharp-sighted man was a jewel in the estimation of the genuine whaling captain.” (C 1)
• A treatment for seasickness: “The sufferer was made to swallow a piece of pork fat tied to a string, which was then pulled back up again. If the symptoms returned, the process was repeated.” This remedy also appears in Peter Duck by Arthur Ransome. (C 2)
• “Salt beef and salt pork ... was so salty that when the cook placed it in a barrel of saltwater for a day (to render it soft enough to chew), the meat’s salt content was actually lowered.” (C 3)
• “The strong winds and unpredictable currents that boiled in and around these volcanic outcroppings sometimes created the illusion that the [Galapagos] islands were actually moving.” (C 4)
• In both Sperm Whale society and Nantucket Society the males spent most of their lives alone only returning to the female pod to breed. “In their dedication to killing sperm whales the Nantucketers had developed a system of social relationships that mimicked those of their prey.” (C 4)
• “Nantucketers recognized that the positions of captain and first mate required contrasting personalities.” Captains needed to be authoritarians, first mates needed to be more personal. (C 6)
• “The human body, which is 70 percent water, requires a bare minimum of a pint a day to remove its waste products.” (C 7)
• “The act of self-expression - through writing a journal or letters - often enables a survivor to distance himself from his fears.” (C 7)
• “The biological anthropologist Stephen McGarvey has speculated that the people who survived these voyages [the original voyages of the Polynesians to colonise remote Pacific islands] tended to have a higher percentage of body fat before the voyage began and/or more efficient metabolisms, allowing them to live longer on less food than their thinner companions. (McGarvey theorizes that this is why modern day Polynesians suffer from a high incidence of obesity.)” (C 9)
• “Many of the so-called American characteristics ... abounding energy, generosity, optimism - become intelligible as the expected behaviour response of a well-fed people.” (C 10)
• “Anthropologists and archaeologists studying the phenomenon of cannibalism have estimated that the average human adult will provide about sixty-six pounds of edible meat.” (C 11)

A fascinating and most interesting book which has been made into a film.

June 2019; 238 pages

"Homegoing" by Yaa Gyasi

A woman gives birth to two daughters in an African village an a land that will become Ghana. The sisters do not know of one another. Both are very beautiful. One is captured and sold to America as a slave. One becomes the 'wife' of the English slave trader. As the African proverb says: “separated sisters ... are like a woman and her reflection, doomed to stay on opposite sides of the pond.” (p 39)

This story alternates between the descendants of these two women. Each generation is given a chapter of about twenty pages. Thus the book is essentially made up of short stories, linked by the ancestry of the protagonists. This story is then intended to encapsulate the society in which they grow. Thus, on the American side of the 'pond', we have a slave, followed by a runaway in Baltimore whose wife is kidnapped under runaway slave legislation and reenslaved, followed by a convict working on a chain gang, followed by a gospel singer, followed by an angry young man who works for the NAACP and becomes a drug addict, followed by a failing PhD student. This makes the people become representative; they are icons. But it is extraordinarily difficult, in twenty pages, to introduce a character and give them a potted biography and link them to their parents and show how they reflect the history of their time and at the same time turn them into a meaningful character. At the start I was prepared to invest in the characters; they felt real. Towards the end the characters seemed just another shell rolling off the production line. They felt superficial and contrived. 

The story heads towards a resolution which, despite the little twist, one knows from almost the start that it will reach.

It is important to tell the history of colonialism, slavery and racism. Wicked things were done by ordinary men and women; terrible things were suffered by ordinary men and women. Somehow people survived. The problem with this book as fiction is that it became didactic. It was a little like watching a Brecht play. I wanted to become involved in the emotional life of the characters, I wanted to suffer with them, rage with them, triumph with them, love with them. But the instruction always kept me at arms length.

Some great moments:

• “Weakness is treating someone as though they belong to you. Strength is knowing that everyone belongs to themselves.” (p 38)
• “They would just trade one type of shackles for another, trade physical ones that are wrapped around the wrists and ankles for the invisible ones that wrapped around the mind.” (p 93)
• “Anna said ‘there won't be no violence in this house’. Five minutes later, Daly kicked Eurias in the shins, and Anna spanked him so hard he winced every time he sat down that day.” (p 121) A rare moment of humour. There aren't many laughs in this book.
• “Who ever heard of sweeping dust from dust?” (p 179) 
• “Maybe the Christian God was a question, a great and swirling circle of whys.” (p 186)

A drama documentary in book form. January 2018; 300 pages

A review of the audiobook by the Book Chatter blog points out the two-part structure of the book in which "The first half reads like a fable. It is vibrant with the culture of the African people. The story-telling is itself true to the culture of these people, full of their belief systems. ... The second half becomes more straight forward in its manner of relating the stories of the characters, as we get closer to modern day."

But Book Chatter seems to love the book for its informative aspect: "Gyasi depicts a beautifully functioning African culture that becomes fractured by the slave trade. The horrors of slavery and it’s aftermath are put in perspective with this broadly sweeping novel. We are still dealing with the aftermath today, and Gyasi bravely posits the question of where will it end." Well, yes. As an academic work, as the PhD that Marcus is trying to write at the end of the book. But as a novel?

I discussed this book in my reading group. We identified the themes of fire (very explicit, although there were some mentions to its that some of us had overlooked) and scarring. There were a lot of characters with physical scars. There were clearly a lot of issues that could be discussed. But my reading group is made up of aspiring writers and what the book is about are of less interest to us than how it was written. We were intrigued how the prose changed from village rustic in the early chapters to more modern in the later chapters though we were uncertain whether we could distinguish individual voices. Despite the Book Chatter review mentioned above, we failed to appreciate why the book is divided into two halves except in so far as the American Civil War and the emancipation proclamation took place between the two halves. We agreed that there were passages which demonstrated that this young writer really could write. But our verdict was that she had set herself too large a challenge with the structure of this book. There were so many characters who were started but for whom there was insufficient opportunity to develop to their full potential. We wanted more depth.