"The Silk Roads" by Peter Frankopan (2015)

"There is more going on, then, than the clumsy interventions of the west in Iraq and Afghanistan and the use of pressure in Ukraine, Iran and elsewhere.  From east to west, the silk roads are rising up once more."

Peter Frankopan is a Professor of Global History at Oxford University.  At the time of writing he's written one other book: The First Crusade: The Call from the East.

The Wikipedia entry for this book is, by the way, awful.  The criticisms expressed there are valid, but someone needs to add a better synopsis and revise the Reception section.  I'd do it, but hey, I'm doing this!

So what's The Silk Roads about?  Put in simple terms, it claims to be "a new history of the world" in which the middle east is repositioned at the center of world history and politics.  This of course makes a certain amount of sense if you venture far enough back into Antiquity, into the time when Greece and Rome contended with the might of the Persian Empire.  It even makes a certain amount of sense if you move forward from Antiquity to the Middle Ages, and from there to the years just after the First World War, when countries were scrambling to secure supplies of oil.  But I'm not sure if it works for every time period, especially considering how various empires and caliphates in the region inevitably crumbled over time.

I'm also not sure that it works for the modern era, given the state that some middle eastern countries are in today.  Then there's the fact that the author adds and subtracts China from his equations in the most arbitrary manner.  He's very positive in how he views China's role on the world stage (when it suits his arguments), but the picture he paints of that country is extremely selective.  The closing chapter of this book is also, to put it charitably, wildly optimistic in how it views what seemed like a middle eastern resurgence in 2015.  Things in China aren't looking so rosy now, Israel's bombing the hell out of Palestine, and Russia's still mired in its invasion of the Ukraine, so... what were we talking about again?

It's a decent survey of the region's history, but it's funny how even the author can't seem to stick to his own topic.  At certain moments he can't help but jump into the history of Europe and North America, a fact which undermines his argument that what was happening in the middle east, during the same time period, was what was most important.

There's not much in The Silk Roads that you won't remember from any survey of World History class, but I did learn a few interesting tidbits.  I doubt I'll read the author's other book, but this book, given its size, was fairly easy to get through.

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"The Winter Fortress" by Neal Bascomb (2016)

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"The Winter Fortress" by Neal Bascomb (2016)

"Wallis Jackson, Bill Bray, and the twenty-eight other Royal Engineers were well primed for their operation.  They ate sandwiches and smoked cigarettes outside the Nissen huts on the barren seaside Scottish moor that made up Skitten airfield.  There was some banter, the false bravado of men about to head into action.  Others handled their nerves in silence.  There would be a final briefing, but they already knew what they needed to know: they were heading to Norway to blow up a power station and hydrogen plant."

Neal Bascomb is a former journalist who's written several nonfiction books on World War II.

In The Winter Fortress several Norwegians escape their country during the German occupation of Norway.  They flee to the United Kingdom, where they're trained as commandos at a camp in Scotland.  Their mission?  To destroy or disable an electrical plant producing heavy water, a material used in German nuclear research.

In relation to the historical record, this book introduces one of the more interesting chapters in World War II history.  Norway isn't often discussed in the context of the war, and the German effort to develop a uranium-fueled nuclear reaction is also left outside of most discussions of the time period.  The commandos sent back into Norway are also interesting in their own right, being men of great personal fortitude tasked with a near-impossible feat.

In dramatic terms, however, I'm not sure whether or not the author really "found the story" in the events which constitute The Winter Fortress.  For one thing, the Germans really weren't that far along in their nuclear research, and framing this tale as a "race against time" doesn't really work.  So what if the Nazis secured a supply of heavy water?  Didn't they have bigger problems on their eastern front?  And weren't they somewhat incapacitated by an internal focus on a rocket program and squabbling between ambitious scientists?  It's hard to imagine the German scientists, laboring as they were in increasingly primitive conditions, developing a fission bomb with the resources at their disposal.  The German nuclear program was at best a pale shadow of the Manhattan Project, so aside from the usual Nazi thuggery it's hard to view the Nazi's nuclear ambitions as much of a threat.

And then there's the fact that many of the best minds in Germany had already left that country during the early years of Hitler's rise to power.  During the events related in The Winter Fortress, they were, in fact, on the other side of the Atlantic, working on the Manhattan Project.  The German atomic program, by contrast, couldn't even get the complete cooperation of companies within Germany.

Lastly, considered from the point of view of style, The Winter Fortress reads at times like a lower grade spy novel.  The author often attempts, somewhat clumsily, to end chapters on cliffhangers, a strategy that sometimes mediates against the book's more serious tone.

Were I to give it a score, I'd say 7 stars out of 10.  It presents some interesting episodes from the Second World War, and also some riveting stories of survival, but I feel that The Winter Fortress is very rough around the edges.  Focusing on a single commando might have improved it, or if not that then restricting the narrative to a shorter time frame.  But as it is The Winter Fortress doesn't achieve the epic sweep its author was obviously aiming for, seeming instead like something rushed into print before he was ready to provide the fullest account of this overlooked series of events.

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