Not quite Wednesday reading
Just finished
Peter Hales' Atomic Spaces is a really fascinating social history of the Manhattan Project: how it was administered, policed, regulated, even how landscapes were shaped by it. There are not nearly enough sociocultural histories of wartime and this one felt very unique: when I discovered that the author is an art/architectural historian, it made a lot of sense. I would not call this an objective book but it is wonderfully and insightfully scathing about the roots of the military/industrial complex. The Apollo program still lacks a comparable volume, sadly...
Currently reading
Alan Allport's Demobbed: Coming Home After World War Two. Just a little too late for my last fic, where the end of WWII is a key theme, but at least I can reassure myself that I haven't got anything hideously wrong?
S.P. Mackenzie's The Colditz Myth. Initially I was a little disappointed with this one, as indeed I was with Angus Calder's The Myth of the Blitz. It's only the first chapter that offers a sustained deconstruction of the mythology and its roots. (If you're looking for that sort of thing in a wartime context, Martin Francis did it much better, if with occasional heteronormativity, in The Flyer: British Culture and the Royal Air Force 1939-1945) After that, most of the book is actually about German POW camps generally, serving as a basis for comparison, so if you're looking for a detailed history of Colditz this is not the volume for you.
Having said that, there is still some food for thought. I was interested to learn about the generally bad relations of the Colditz prisoners with their "other ranks" orderlies: "Colditz was by no means the only camp for officers where friction occurred, but it was one of the few places to experience an irreparable breakdown in relations." Apparently the prisoners had a distinctly Tory bent and it was one of the more socially exclusive camps? One thinks there could have been a whole chapter on class.
As for another topic which I know is of interest to some, "the extent of active homosexuality among British POWs is open to debate." Mostly the author comes down on the side of "uncommon." Though this after quoting a diarist from Marlag M, the Navy ratings' camp, who says that: "a hell of a lot of men seem to be affected here-some of them quite obvious. It's all more or less beyond me and quite out of control!" (Must... not... make... obvious... Navy... joke.)
To read
A whole stack of exciting university library books, but I can't be bothered going upstairs in order to list them. You'll just have to wait for next week!
This entry was originally posted at http://naraht.dreamwidth.org/527462.html. Please comment there using OpenID.
Peter Hales' Atomic Spaces is a really fascinating social history of the Manhattan Project: how it was administered, policed, regulated, even how landscapes were shaped by it. There are not nearly enough sociocultural histories of wartime and this one felt very unique: when I discovered that the author is an art/architectural historian, it made a lot of sense. I would not call this an objective book but it is wonderfully and insightfully scathing about the roots of the military/industrial complex. The Apollo program still lacks a comparable volume, sadly...
Currently reading
Alan Allport's Demobbed: Coming Home After World War Two. Just a little too late for my last fic, where the end of WWII is a key theme, but at least I can reassure myself that I haven't got anything hideously wrong?
S.P. Mackenzie's The Colditz Myth. Initially I was a little disappointed with this one, as indeed I was with Angus Calder's The Myth of the Blitz. It's only the first chapter that offers a sustained deconstruction of the mythology and its roots. (If you're looking for that sort of thing in a wartime context, Martin Francis did it much better, if with occasional heteronormativity, in The Flyer: British Culture and the Royal Air Force 1939-1945) After that, most of the book is actually about German POW camps generally, serving as a basis for comparison, so if you're looking for a detailed history of Colditz this is not the volume for you.
Having said that, there is still some food for thought. I was interested to learn about the generally bad relations of the Colditz prisoners with their "other ranks" orderlies: "Colditz was by no means the only camp for officers where friction occurred, but it was one of the few places to experience an irreparable breakdown in relations." Apparently the prisoners had a distinctly Tory bent and it was one of the more socially exclusive camps? One thinks there could have been a whole chapter on class.
As for another topic which I know is of interest to some, "the extent of active homosexuality among British POWs is open to debate." Mostly the author comes down on the side of "uncommon." Though this after quoting a diarist from Marlag M, the Navy ratings' camp, who says that: "a hell of a lot of men seem to be affected here-some of them quite obvious. It's all more or less beyond me and quite out of control!" (Must... not... make... obvious... Navy... joke.)
To read
A whole stack of exciting university library books, but I can't be bothered going upstairs in order to list them. You'll just have to wait for next week!
This entry was originally posted at http://naraht.dreamwidth.org/527462.html. Please comment there using OpenID.