Book Review Time Again

In case your New Year's resolutions involve a commitment to read more history, here are a couple of books you might consider putting in the pile.

The first, by Madhusree Mukerjee is subtitled The British Empire and the Ravaging of India during World War II. It made me think about the way in which we select our heroes and the way in which that is reflected in our recorded histories. In a very real sense, World War II made Churchill. If he hadn't become the hero that we know today, he would justly be remembered as the architect of the horrendous WWI campaign at Gallipoli, where 43,000 Allied troops and 60,000 Turks died (not casualties, deaths)!!

But all of that is overlooked and we don't even think twice when we read that Churchill was the greatest statesman of the twentieth century. We accept without question the first sentence in Paul Johnson's biography: “Of all the towering figures of the twentieth century, both good and evil, Winston Churchill was the most valuable to humanity, and also the most likable. It is a joy to write his life, and to read about it.”

No one who reads Mukerjee's book will ever think of Churchill in quite the same way. What is sad is that many people still resist looking at our heroes, warts and all, as if that diminishes their other accomplishments.

This book starts by giving an overview of the British Raj and the Indian resistance to it. It then details Churchill's complicity in the Indian famine of 1943-44 that killed at a minimum 1.5 million people and realistically more like 3 million Bengalis. Interwoven in that story are the efforts Churchill's government made to play the Muslims against the Hindus in an attempt to defuse Indian nationalism. One of the results of those efforts (games, really) is the fact that the end of British rule brought about two countries instead of one. For more on that, see the second book, about Pakistan.

What this book made me realize, over and above the hitherto unknown historic details, is that Churchill was a dinosaur, a relic, a representative of an epoch that was already dead, even if that wasn't fully apparent at the time. He was history, in the slang sense, even as he was making it.

The second book, subtitled Pakistan, the United States and an Epic History of Misunderstanding, was written by a former Pakistani ambassador to the U.S and current professor at Boston University. It details sixty-five years of two countries deluding themselves about each other. In its simplest form it comes down to sixty-five years of Pakistani deceit and outright lying and U.S. gullibility. Needless to say, the author isn't going to be going back to Pakistan anytime soon.

Although the description I just gave doesn't seem compelling enough to make one dive into a longish book, the details and insights in the book are actually fascinating.

Even if you didn't resolve to read more history, Happy 2014.