Flash For Freedom!

by George MacDonald Fraser

Accused (falsely, amazingly enough) of cheating in a friendly game of cards, Flashy injures the accuser in a rage. His reputation damaged, Flash joins a ship’s crew until the scandal cools down – only to realize to his horror (his own neck being on the line, of course) that it’s a slave ship. Here begin Flashy's adventures on the high seas and America, where at various times he is dragooned and bluffs his way into nearly every role concerning the slave trade: buyer, trader, seller, driver on a plantation, underground railroad smuggler, anti-slavery double agent, almost even a slave himself at one point.

It’s all tremendous stuff, full of the usual (on Fraser's part) erudition and wit and (on Flashy's part) lechery, as well as, of course, the historical tweaking: Flashman meets a young Disraeli, a young Lincoln, and even serves as the inspiration for Harriet Beecher Stowe’s famous book. Superb historical parody, historical fiction, and pure entertainment all in one. Oh, a final thought: Flashy's definitely gotten a lot braver since the first book. Scared or not, it takes guts to pull a gun on a killer, or even keep one's wits enough to play-act in the face of danger. That's most likely a good thing, of course; as a reader, one can take only so much helpless, quivering terror from the narrator.  

five stars

The Myths Of Greece And Rome

by Hélène A. Guerber

1907 

Revised by Dorothy Margaret Stuart. 

 

 

A formidable tome, retelling a great many of the myths, from creation and the twelve main gods to Bellerophon to the Trojan War to the Aeneid. The language is rich and literate, representative of the time the book was written. Guerber also adorns her retellings with excerpts from Milton, Shakespeare, Keats and other poets whose work was drenched in mythological allusion. She finishes the book with some interesting comments on interpretation of myth.

Her style is on the whole pleasingly arch, as for example when she mentions that Cronus must have been “not of a very inquiring turn of mind” when he swallows a rock instead of Zeus. On the negative side, Guerber often robs the tales of their drama: she skims over such incredible feats as Bellerophon’s destruction of the invincible Solymi, and fails to tell how exactly the sons of Boreas destroyed the harpies, or where King Admetus managed to find and ride a chariot drawn by boars. I also found the tales gutted in places; I’m not speaking of obvious bowdlerization such as references to homosexuality, but surprising omissions such as how Heracles ripped Theseus’ hips when he rescued him from Hades, or why Echo was punished by Hera (it wasn’t just for talking too much). Guerber doesn’t even make it explicit that Achilles refuses to fight in the Iliad! These odd gaps aren’t too distracting, however, as Guerber is usually thorough, and as noted before, her style is entertaining.

three stars

King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa

by Adam Hochschild

The rarely told, indeed deliberately forgotten, tale of the greed of King Leopold II, who through hypocrisy, false promises, obfuscations and outright lies, took possession of the Congo.  Under his rule, which he tried to depict as beneficial to the natives (bringing the savages the ennobling light of civilization, the typical Victorian delusions), a sadistic form of slavery was the order of the day.  Leopold’s reign, officially endorsing mutilation, whipping, massacre and kidnapping, oversaw the killing of fully half the Congo’s population, a figure Hochschild estimates at ten million deaths.

This is a chilling book, written as an indictment without a single false step.  The pacing is deliberate, the charges made plain, the research thorough.  It’s a harrowing tale, and Hochschild peoples it with villains and heroes (the great pioneers of the human rights movements that challenged Leopold’s self-serving catalog of lies).  Hochschild never manages to secure absolute evidence that Leopold knew of the atrocities, but given the detail-obsessed, controlling personality that emerges from the book, it seems that the king had to know at least most of what went on.  An indispensable work of history.

five stars