Black Vomit and Racist Ideas of Purity: 2 Mini Book Reviews.
I began this year firmly intending to do better at the "read 50 books in a year" thing than I did last year, but now, at a little over the halfway point, I have to ruefully admit that I will in all likelihood fall short -- again. Yeah, I joined up with that 50bookchallenge group, but the mad influx of new blood ever since it was featured on LJ Spotlight this past January -- the group now has just under 7,000 members -- ultimately chased me away.
This year I've been inordinately fascinated with the old comic books I've splashed out on, re-reading stuff from my collection, keeping up on my various magazine subscriptions (six) and my brand new (as of May) Netflix subscription; which means that I've scant time or energy left for reading actual books. I've even lost count of the number of books I've read, when I've started and/or finished a book, etc., etc. Waah, waah, waaaaahhh.
In any event, I thought I'd try slapping up a couple of (brief) reviews of books that I've read in the last few months, in the hopes that I'll inspire myself to actually read a book again, and maybe populate this LJ with more book reviews and less middle-aged whingeing. Time to try to class this joint up a bit, methinks.
The Strong Brown God: The Story of the Niger River by Sanche de Gramont (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company; 1975)
A popular history of the European (largely English and French) exploration and exploitation of the Niger River written by a veteran of the Algerian War (who has since changed his name to Ted Morgan), The Strong Brown God is an entertaining read generously seasoned with amusing, distressing, or disgusting anecdotes (viz. one ship's surgeon drinking off at a draught a glass of black vomit -- which is a symptom of and an old name for yellow fever -- collected from a fatally ill crew member in the name of improving the ship's morale; p. 212) and afflicted with a too-liberal use of the adjective "Victorian" as shorthand for certain traits of the Englishmen who ventured to West Africa (particularly before and immediately after Victoria even ascended the throne...) and too-pat conclusions (such as de Gramont's contention that the "Victorian" belief "in the obligation of a superior society to help inferior peoples...was in fact necessary to justify the expansion required by the industrial revolution in its search for new markets;" p. 193). Despite these flaws, and despite certain other shortcomings (Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton is mentioned only twice, despite the fact that he served as the British consul to Fernando Po and spent much of his assignment exploring West Africa, obtaining enough material for four books), this is a book that anyone at all interested in the region or in 19th century English and French history will want to read. (It's also helpful for sketching in some of the backstory to Chinua Achebe's classic novel Things Fall Apart.) De Gramont's conclusions that the English stumbled into their West African empire in the search for trade, and that the French stumbled into theirs thanks to several French officers' dreams of Napoleonism, seem more sound than some of his other, more facile ones.
As a further note of interest to Burtonophiles, the armchair geographer James McQueen (variously styled "M'Queen" and "MacQueen") gets a brief mention here as having deduced the correct source of the Niger (p. 176); McQueen of course helped stoke the fires of the origin of the Nile controversy in which Burton and John Hanning Speke played their dramatic -- even melodramatic -- part.
Hitler's Priestess: Savitri Devi, the Hindu-Aryan Myth and Neo-Nazism by Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke (NY: New York University Press; 1998)
Second in Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke's trilogy of books examining the roots and fruits of Nazism (the others being The Occult Roots of Nazism: Secret Aryan Cults and Their Influence on Nazi Ideology [1985, 1992] and Black Sun: Aryan Cults, Esoteric Nazism and the Politics of Identity [2002]), Hitler's Priestess: Savitri Devi, the Hindu-Aryan Myth and Neo-Nazism is a pithy, compelling and disturbing book that elucidates how a Cornish-Italo-Hellene with French citizenship, Savitri Devi (born as Maximiani Portas), managed to blend certain aspects of Hinduism with Nazism to such effect that some Indian nationalists were given ready-made excuses, beyond mutual hatred of the British, to align themselves with the Nazis and view Hitler as a Hindu prophet, if not an out-and-out avatar of Vishnu (as did, for example, Srimat Swami Satyananda; although, to be fair, Savitri Devi's Aryo-Nazi theodicy was contemporary with many high-caste Hindus' veneration of Hitler as "an incarnation of God" and "the Saviour of the world").
If the idea of Hitler as an avatar of Vishnu the Preserver is suggestive of a wildly subversive sci-fi satire along the lines of Norman Spinrad's The Iron Dream, brace yourself for the distressing links that Goodricke-Clarke makes with Savitri Devi's eulogies for Hitler and "racial purity" and modern-day animal rights and radical ecology movements. The real value of Hitler's Priestess lies in the way it demonstrates how far the tentacles of Nazi thought did and have spread, and how this should force one to rethink one's misanthropy, given that one may find oneself agreeing (or at least sympathizing) with certain parts of the neo-Nazi weltanschauung.
There! I feel better already...
This year I've been inordinately fascinated with the old comic books I've splashed out on, re-reading stuff from my collection, keeping up on my various magazine subscriptions (six) and my brand new (as of May) Netflix subscription; which means that I've scant time or energy left for reading actual books. I've even lost count of the number of books I've read, when I've started and/or finished a book, etc., etc. Waah, waah, waaaaahhh.
In any event, I thought I'd try slapping up a couple of (brief) reviews of books that I've read in the last few months, in the hopes that I'll inspire myself to actually read a book again, and maybe populate this LJ with more book reviews and less middle-aged whingeing. Time to try to class this joint up a bit, methinks.
The Strong Brown God: The Story of the Niger River by Sanche de Gramont (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company; 1975)
A popular history of the European (largely English and French) exploration and exploitation of the Niger River written by a veteran of the Algerian War (who has since changed his name to Ted Morgan), The Strong Brown God is an entertaining read generously seasoned with amusing, distressing, or disgusting anecdotes (viz. one ship's surgeon drinking off at a draught a glass of black vomit -- which is a symptom of and an old name for yellow fever -- collected from a fatally ill crew member in the name of improving the ship's morale; p. 212) and afflicted with a too-liberal use of the adjective "Victorian" as shorthand for certain traits of the Englishmen who ventured to West Africa (particularly before and immediately after Victoria even ascended the throne...) and too-pat conclusions (such as de Gramont's contention that the "Victorian" belief "in the obligation of a superior society to help inferior peoples...was in fact necessary to justify the expansion required by the industrial revolution in its search for new markets;" p. 193). Despite these flaws, and despite certain other shortcomings (Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton is mentioned only twice, despite the fact that he served as the British consul to Fernando Po and spent much of his assignment exploring West Africa, obtaining enough material for four books), this is a book that anyone at all interested in the region or in 19th century English and French history will want to read. (It's also helpful for sketching in some of the backstory to Chinua Achebe's classic novel Things Fall Apart.) De Gramont's conclusions that the English stumbled into their West African empire in the search for trade, and that the French stumbled into theirs thanks to several French officers' dreams of Napoleonism, seem more sound than some of his other, more facile ones.
As a further note of interest to Burtonophiles, the armchair geographer James McQueen (variously styled "M'Queen" and "MacQueen") gets a brief mention here as having deduced the correct source of the Niger (p. 176); McQueen of course helped stoke the fires of the origin of the Nile controversy in which Burton and John Hanning Speke played their dramatic -- even melodramatic -- part.
Hitler's Priestess: Savitri Devi, the Hindu-Aryan Myth and Neo-Nazism by Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke (NY: New York University Press; 1998)
Second in Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke's trilogy of books examining the roots and fruits of Nazism (the others being The Occult Roots of Nazism: Secret Aryan Cults and Their Influence on Nazi Ideology [1985, 1992] and Black Sun: Aryan Cults, Esoteric Nazism and the Politics of Identity [2002]), Hitler's Priestess: Savitri Devi, the Hindu-Aryan Myth and Neo-Nazism is a pithy, compelling and disturbing book that elucidates how a Cornish-Italo-Hellene with French citizenship, Savitri Devi (born as Maximiani Portas), managed to blend certain aspects of Hinduism with Nazism to such effect that some Indian nationalists were given ready-made excuses, beyond mutual hatred of the British, to align themselves with the Nazis and view Hitler as a Hindu prophet, if not an out-and-out avatar of Vishnu (as did, for example, Srimat Swami Satyananda; although, to be fair, Savitri Devi's Aryo-Nazi theodicy was contemporary with many high-caste Hindus' veneration of Hitler as "an incarnation of God" and "the Saviour of the world").
If the idea of Hitler as an avatar of Vishnu the Preserver is suggestive of a wildly subversive sci-fi satire along the lines of Norman Spinrad's The Iron Dream, brace yourself for the distressing links that Goodricke-Clarke makes with Savitri Devi's eulogies for Hitler and "racial purity" and modern-day animal rights and radical ecology movements. The real value of Hitler's Priestess lies in the way it demonstrates how far the tentacles of Nazi thought did and have spread, and how this should force one to rethink one's misanthropy, given that one may find oneself agreeing (or at least sympathizing) with certain parts of the neo-Nazi weltanschauung.
There! I feel better already...