Will o'the Glen on Books

The author of The Boston Massacre: A Family History presents an interesting thesis, that the amount of social interaction between the occupying British troops and American colonists turned the so-called “Boston Massacre” and the later Revolutionary War into “family conflicts”. According to the descriptive blurb, “… the Massacre arose from conflicts that were as personal as they were political. […] When soldiers shot unarmed citizens in the street, it was these intensely human, now broken bonds that fueled what quickly became a bitterly fought American Revolution. Serena Zabin’s The Boston Massacre delivers an indelible new slant on iconic American Revolutionary history.” In my view, this book fails to live up to its billing, as it never effectively identifies a causal relationship between the personal, social interactions which she describes in great detail, and the actual event – let alone the greater events that followed, and which eventually led to American independence. Ms Zabi...

The Yalta conference, in February 1945, comprised what is probably the most important eight-day period in modern history. The leaders of the three principal nations of the Allied alliance opposing the Axis powers – Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Joseph Stalin – met in the Black Sea resort city of Yalta to confer on subjects ranging from the conduct of the final campaigns against Nazi Germany to the configuration of Poland post-World War II; they also wrangled over the settlement of many other issues which would arise in the aftermath of the war, effectively shaping the world of the second half of the 20th century, and beyond, in the process. Diana Preston’s account of the conference, and its aftermath, is thoroughly researched and extremely well-written. The book includes vivid descriptions of the environs – the war-ravaged Black Sea resort of Yalta – and the personalities: FDR, ravaged by a multitude of physical ailments and increasingly unwell; Churchill, voluble, ...

Henry Hemming’s Agents of Influence was a real revelation to me, recounting as it does a British effort to bring the United States into World War II that went far beyond anything that I was aware of before reading this book. In addition to documenting the activities of British diplomats and the British intelligence service, MI6; not to mention the Prime Minister, Winston Churchill – to sway the U.S. government and U.S. public opinion in favor of entering the conflict in support of Great Britain, Hemming details the efforts of both the Nazi regime and the American isolationist movement, spearheaded by the “America First” organization and their spokesman, Charles Lindbergh, to keep the United States out of the war. Some might characterize the activities of the U.S.-based office of MI6, led by Canadian William Stephenson, as underhanded, and even duplicitous, but they were fighting a desperate battle to combat misinformation (while spreading a bit themselves, in a good cause) and turn ...