Tag Archives: Book review

Arts, Books

Book Review: ‘Daughters of War’

LITERARY REVIEW

Intro: The first in an epic new series from the number one international bestselling author, Daughters of War is a stunning tale of sisters, secrets and bravery in the darkness of war-torn France

LIVING in an old stone cottage on the edge of a beautiful French village, three sisters yearn for the end of the war.

Set in 1944 in the Dordogne area of France, near the village of Sainte-Cécile, we encounter a series of perilous events during the Nazi occupation of the country.

When their father Charles passed away, their mother Claudette took the girls to the family’s cottage in France and returned alone to England. In her absence, Hélène, the eldest, takes the motherly role and tries her hardest to steer her family to safety – even as the Nazi occupation becomes more threatening. She longs to be an artist, but she is a nurse who is employed by Hugo Marchant, the local doctor at the surgery in Sainte-Cécile. She puts her own hopes and dreams on hold. Due to the war the sisters are unable to return to England and they hope no one in the village will tell the Germans they are only half-French. Like everyone in France, they resent the Germans presence, and can’t wait for the allies to arrive and the war to end.

The middle sister, Elise, is a rebel and is covertly aiding the Resistance at the side of her lover Victor. She does so when not working at her own café, but it becomes a place and central focus where information is collected.

The youngest of the sisters, Florence, dreams for a world where France is free. She looks after the home, cooks for her siblings and tends to the garden.

One night the Allies visit their cottage requesting assistance, and from here the Baudin sisters are drawn closer to the violence. Tensions are high and as events unfold family secrets from their mysterious past begin to emerge. They threaten to unravel everything they hold most dear. But these young women are doing everything they can to hang on and by surviving the war.

Daughters of War is a stunning tale which is a rich tapestry of courage, love, and sacrifice. It is also chilling and taut in its vivid portrayal of the horrors of war. Dinah Jefferies deftly brings to life the resilience of the human spirit through the dark shadows of war. There are scenes of a horrific sexual assault described in such detail that the reader will likely be brought to tears. The cascading effects of the violence of war and how it is described in such fine detail is a testament to the challenges of living in an occupied country under tyranny: hardship, danger and loss.

Hélène’s emotional state deteriorates and is heartbreaking as she worries about her sisters, friends and patients. On that dark night the Allies came knocking at the cottage door, she fell for Jack, one of the special operations soldiers, who needed their help. Hélène constantly hoped he would feel the same way and she desperately wants to be loved. The novel unfolds in such a way that the reader is taken on an emotional rollercoaster. There is naturally some mystery surrounding Jack given his character role, but this certainly adds to the excitement in the first of which is to be a trilogy series.

Secondary characters are also constructed particularly well. Other than Jack, there is Victor, Dr Hugo and his wife Maria, and a German officer, Captain Meyer, who was kind and helped protect some of the villagers from Nazi reprisals. The strength of love, family and community oozes in a tale that depicts the horrors of war and the passions that arise from it.  

The characters are well-drawn and the author uses vivid details to help us feel like we’re in the midst of the action and facing similar circumstances. The beautiful French countryside, the village life, their daily routines and interactions, and the realities of war are richly described.

We should wait to see with eager anticipation what else happens after France is liberated, and especially to the Baudin sisters, once the next book in the series is released.

– Daughters of War is published by HarperCollins, 520 pp

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Arts, Books, History

Book Review: ‘A Village in the Third Reich’

LITERARY REVIEW

Intro: A forensic history of a Bavarian village vividly illustrates how ordinary Germans were ruthlessly bullied into accepting the new, brutal Nazi order. The village of Oberstdorf is the focus of attention

UNDERSTANDING micro-history is invaluable when analysing how a whole country can be swept up in a tidal wave of dictatorial evil and madness, as happened with Germany and the Third Reich.

Readers of this historical account will learn more about the psychological workings of Nazism than by reading a shelf of wider-canvas volumes on the rise of Nazism in general. It’s a superbly researched chronicle of one small village in the Bavarian Alps called Oberstdorf.

For instance, many will know of Hitler’s T4 euthanasia programme, so-called because decisions on whether mentally or physically ill citizens should live or die were made at the Berlin headquarters, Tiergarten 4.

This narrative, however, introduces us to a young resident of Oberstdorf, Theodor Weissenberger, a sensitive, curly-haired blind boy (probably blinded by a nurse who gave him the wrong eye-drops just after birth), adored by his mother and sisters.

Aged 19 in 1940, Theodor was “collected”, taken to a psychiatric hospital, put inside a “charity ambulance” and gassed. German doctors chose meningitis from a list of convincing diseases to put on his death certificate. This young man was one of 70,272 people with so-called disabilities to be murdered at six killing centres across Germany.

How could this happen in a civilised country? As it turns out, there are quite a few doctors in this book. Some are benign; others are clearly a revolting inversion of what a medical doctor should be. One kind village doctor diagnosed a young villager, 16-year-old Franz Noichl, with flu in February 1945, prescribing “bed-rest”, thus exempting him from joining the Volkssturm, Hitler’s army of teenaged cannon fodder about to be mown down in a crazed, last-ditch attempt to win the war, as Franz’s best friend was.

Another doctor in the village refused to exempt a young Jewish villager, Eva Noack-Mosse, from being sent to the murderous place of Theresienstadt.

INDOCTRINATED PROPAGANDA

One villager with the august name of Lieutenant Heinz Schubert – a descendant of the composer – supervised the shooting of some 800 gypsies in the Crimea in 1941. The whole country was indoctrinated into racist propaganda which led to bestiality on the Eastern Front.

Later, at the Nuremberg Trials, Schubert would defend himself by saying: “We did not set out to kill, but to defend Western civilisation.” What perverted version of “civilisation” did he think he was living in, and how did he get there?

Oberstdorf was such a peaceful, agricultural and devoutly Catholic village – a picture-postcard of a place –that when, after World War I, the locals started a small militia to guard against possible looting caused by the deteriorating economic situation, that their main concern was to make sure its meetings didn’t clash with Mass or milking.

The village was a favoured tourist destination for mountain walkers and many of its regular patrons were Jews.

In 1920, just after the Nazi party was born amid the unrest and misery of a country defeated in the Great War, its renowned newspaper the Volkischer Beobachter published a piece railing against Jews holidaying in Oberstdorf. The rhetoric used in the article was inhumane and unspeakably disgusting, but, the next day the local Oberstdorf newspaper responded robustly with the words: “No one can deny Jews the right to holiday where they want.”

Through the 1920s and 1930s, however, we see how, one by one, villagers went over to the dark side. In 1923, in the days of hyperinflation caused by the mass-printing of cash, the wedding of two locals cost an astronomical 380 billion marks.

That married couple would be typical of those ripe for conversion to Nazism – the Wall Street Crash meant their pay was cut in half. They sensed and believed that Hitler would bring a new dawn and help Germany to believe in itself again.

One female Oberstdorf journalist wrote, “We need a dictator like Mussolini . . . blessed with his ruthlessness, energy and recklessness”.

The Versailles Treaty imposed on Germany was economically crippling. The locals were all ears when a Nazi politician, Theo Benesch, spoke in the village tavern, promising “beauty, freedom and dignity” if the audience put their trust and faith in the Fuhrer.

A farmer who’d been sceptical hung a swastika from a tree in front of his farmhouse.

THE ENABLING ACT

Within the space of just three months of Hitler being voted to power in 1933, the Enabling Act allowed all state and local authorities, associations and societies to be dissolved and re-formed in the Nazi image. That was how Nazism extended its tentacles into every tiny area of German society.

The chairman of the Oberstdorf Fishing Society resigned the moment a motion was passed banning Jewish members, and there was a lot of muttered loathing of local Nazis who were suddenly strutting about in positions of power.

As the Third Reich took hold, though, small gestures of defiance would be acts of great rashness.

Eavesdroppers were ubiquitous. The school bully, Margot, the daughter of a prominent Nazi, was on the lookout. Woe betide you if you so much as grumbled about the regime.

One mother became acutely anxious in the village square when her young son started singing a jingle he’d heard on French radio; you could be sent to prison for listening to a foreign radio station.

Keeping your head down by trying not to be noticed had become common practise, for fear of the knock on the door in the night.

Getting children on board was a propaganda masterstroke. The authors depict a vivid picture of summer youth camps and Nazi songs round the camp fire.

“My father was utterly disgusted that his children had to join the Hitler Youth,” recalled Franz Noichl, “but any protest would have been useless and dangerous.”

Franz had to give up being an altar boy: you had to make it clear that in the battle between God and Hitler, you chose Hitler.

Meanwhile, at school, the science syllabus included racial theory. One girl, a committed Nazi, took her own life on discovering that her mother was half-Jewish. So it was a toxic mixture of indoctrination and the sheer terror that kept the show on the road. Then, as Germany started losing the war, the regime became even more hysterical. You could be imprisoned for merely voicing pessimism about the Russian campaign.

The heroes of this fascinating and historical book are the ones in positions of power, torn between what they were expected to do and what they knew was morally right.

Werner Fink, for example, the fundamentally decent mayor, continued to offer residents’ permits to Jews, and did not enforce putting the obligatory generic Jewish identifiers “Sara” and “Israel” on their identity cards – at great personal risk to himself.

When the village was liberated by the French in 1945, the reckoning began. Civilian tribunals were set up, grading public officials’ involvement in Nazism. It was amazing how many of them denied all involvement, or somehow vanished into thin air.

Schubert was sentenced to ten years for his evil and wicked acts, released after just six, and lived happily ever after. It leaves you feeling quite sick.

– A Village in the Third Reich by Julia Boyd and Angelika Patel is published by Elliott & Thompson, 456 pp

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Arts, Books, Environment, History, Science

Book Review: Otherlands

LITERARY REVIEW

Intro: A history of Earth suggests humanity will eventually perish – but new life forms will rapidly evolve to take our place

IF you were to dig deep below contemporary London gravel you would find among the clay astonishing fossilised remains of crocodiles, sea turtles and early relatives of horses.

They lived and frequented the earth in an era when London was “forests of mangrove palm and pawpaw, and waters rich in seagrass and giant lily pads, a warm, tropical paradise”.

More recently there was a time when, instead of carved stone lions built on plinths looking at people, real lions lived in what is now Trafalgar Square, gazing down on herds of elephants and hippos grazing beside a wide and meandering river.

This somewhat mind-boggling scene introduces us to the concept of “deep time”, explains Thomas Halliday, as he leads the reader on a mesmerising journey into those vast stretches of Earth’s pre-history that lie behind us. He does so on such a scale that you experience a kind of temporal vertigo just thinking about it.

Halliday is a Fellow in Earth Sciences at Birmingham University, but he is also a brilliant writer. His lyrical style vividly conjures a myriad of lost worlds from the patchy but sometimes startling fossil records. Each chapter takes us further back in time, to an older and more alien earth with every passing epoch.

It begins a mere 20,000 years ago, in the heart of the last Ice Age, and on the dry plains of Alaska: the eastern end of the awesome Mammoth Steppe, an unspoilt grassland that stretched all the way from the Americas across Russia to Ireland (sea levels being much lower then).

Over those plains roamed vast herds of herbivores: camels, bison, horses and mammoths. Camels were originally American which later migrated to the Old World over the Bering Strait.

The last mammoths survived until just 4,500 years ago, contemporaries of the Pyramids and Stonehenge, a small and increasingly inbred group on Wrangel Island near Russia.

Top predator of the Steppe was unquestionably the short-faced bear, which on its hind legs towered a metre above the three-metre-high shoulder of a mammoth.

But there were also humans around. We know this from “the footprints of a gleeful group of children, running through the ditchgrass into the mud of a chalky lakeshore, 22,500 years before the present,” and still visible “in the white sands of New Mexico”.

Imagine, then, what stories they must have told each other by the evening fire, sharing their landscape and territory with creatures including mammoths and short-faced bears.

APOCALYPTIC

By chapter three, we have dived back 5.33 million years to a truly apocalyptic moment. Then, the Mediterranean was sealed off from the Atlantic by a land bridge at Gibraltar, joining Africa to Europe.

The inland sea had evaporated, so where the Med now sparkles there was only a huge dried-out salt lake, in some places 4 kilometres below sea level, with temperatures down there reaching 80C – some 25C warmer than anything ever recorded even in the hotspots of California.

This burning saline desert was dotted with cooler volcanic island plateaus covered in cedar trees, and “a shrubland of pistachio, box, stooping carobs and gnarled olives”.

One day, a trickle of Atlantic sea-water began to seep over the top of the Gibraltar land-bridge, eroding the dry earth as it went, until the trickle became a stream, then a river – then an unstoppable cascade.

A mile high and several miles wide, the torrent roared over and dropped at 100 miles per hour, throwing up a “tumultuous cloud mist”, with the eastern Mediterranean becoming a sea once more in just one astonishing year.

Sicily and Malta became islands in that sea, populated by hippos, dwarf elephants and the Terrible Moon-Rat.

There are so many wonders here: a rock wall in modern Bolivia where dinosaur footprints climb gecko-like up a sheer vertical cliff, because the surface of the earth has tilted 90 degrees over 32 million years; beavers and hedgehogs, Asian arrivals, wiping out native European primates; the incredible fact that it was on huge rafts of vegetation riding the ocean currents that many animals, including monkeys and guinea pigs, travelled accidentally from Africa to South America, surviving an ocean voyage of at least six weeks on their uncertain craft.

Going back 550 million years ago, our world seems like another planet altogether.

Then there were animals so strange that scientists have named them Hallucigenia, and there was no North Star in the sky, nor a single star of the seven in Orion, nor brilliant Sirius. None of these familiar stars had even been born yet.

Journeying into the abysses of deep time in Otherlands will certainly make the reader feel very small and transient – a feeling both humbling and comforting – and surely reminds us that we pay too much attention to many of our own minor daily troubles.

Barring some miraculous and unprecedented effort of global cooperation, which seems rather unlikely at present, the world will rapidly head back soon to something like the swampy Eocene epoch of 50 million years ago, bringing a mass extinction of today’s flora and fauna (including us, unfortunately), and then, after a few more million years, a huge explosion of unimaginable new biological species better suited to this hothouse earth.

As the book’s subtitle aptly reminds us, this planet is still “a world in the making”.

Otherlands is a carefully and skilful choreograph of the earth’s evolution and has a very good chance of being shortlisted for Book of the Year. It is a stunning and exquisite narrative and the author deserves huge acclaim for it.

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