The Men Who Lost America by Andrew O`Shaughnessy:Book Review

LeftCentral Book Reviews

Image © Mr d`Aprix

When it comes to the American War of Independence, the UK and the USA are two nations divided by a common history, although a general consensus has emerged regarding British incompetence.   Professor Andrew O`Shaughnessy has attempted to address this and in doing so has written a beautifully balanced book.  It contains ten biographical subjects, George III, Lord North, Sir William Howe, Admiral Lord Richard Howe, John Burgoyne, Lord George Germain, Sir Henry Clinton, Lord Cornwallis, Admiral George Rodney and John Montague.  There is significant interplay but remarkably no repetition of detail, in a well crafted and riveting book.  

Review of Simon Schama – The Story of the Jews Episode 5: Return

LeftCentral Review

This final episode deals with the creation of the state of Israel, it begins on Yom HaShoah. We hear a siren wail; symbolically life comes to a stop, busy traffic, hospitals, colleges all the bustle of daily life grinds to a halt. People desist from chatter, as they are filmed standing in complete silence, attempting to remember an event which as Simon Schama says, is beyond words. He then explains that the state of Israel contains 50% of the world’s Jewish population, six million people, each survivor representing a defeat for the Nazi programme of total extermination. The Holocaust, argues Schama, finally made the moral case for the creation of Israel. Not only because of what the Nazis did but what everyone else failed to do.

Review of Simon Schama – The Story of the Jews 2: Among Believers

Lincoln Green

Image © Michael D Beckwith

Holidaymakers towing caravans towards the Lincolnshire coast via the A46 will notice Lincoln Cathedral at a high point to their right.  The image, in bright sunlight or possibly glowing in the dark, will mean different things to different people.  Simon Schama’s account of the Jews in medieval times under Christian and Islamic rule, first broadcast on BBC Two on 8 Sep 2013, will change perceptions of that building and its art in a manner suggested by Schama’s Landscape and Memory (1995).  In this earlier work he discusses the interrelationships between culture and landscape, how the one informs and is a reinterpretation of the other. The TV programme, which is still available on BBC iPlayer, promotes reinterpretation through Schama’s identification of the less emphasised and indeed misrepresented impact of Jews on life in medieval Lincoln.

BIG BROTHER’S PASSION FOR HISTORY AND WHAT IT REVEALS ABOUT US

Katherine Edwards

Image © Simon Harriyott

The 25^th of June this year is the 110^th anniversary of the birth of the creator of that most darkly compelling and well known of all dystopias, Nineteen Eighty-Four.  Like all such speculative fiction Orwell’s dystopia holds up a distorting mirror to reality.  It subjects some of its distinguishing features to extremes of enlargement and extrapolation, to explore them and warn of their implications.  Such flights of imagination stand or fall by their plausibility, their emotional power and what they reveal about reality by recasting it in a different and distorted form. Orwell would not engage his readers if his dystopia didn’t communicate something significant about the human condition. One aspect of his message, I will argue, has particular current significance.