Writer of fiction, poetry and essays.

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I’ve never been a huge fan of John Wayne. It always seemed to me he played the same character in every movie he was in. And yet, all the same, there’s no denying he was a symbol of an era

In The Shootist, he plays J.B. Books, an aging gunfighter who rides into Carson City, Nevada to see an old friend, a Dr. Hostetler, to get a second opinion on what another medical man has told him.

Hostetler confirms the bad news: Books has an inoperable cancer. There’s nothing the doctor can do except prescribe laudanum, and give Books a reference to a boarding house down the road, operated by a widow named Bond Rogers and her son, Gillom.

Books takes a room, hoping only to die in peace, but word of the famous gunman soon spreads around town, and everyone, from the sheriff to the local newspaperman, is looking to make hay off of the dying celebrity.

Meanwhile, Books finds himself in a tumultuous relationship with Mrs. Rogers. There is immediate chemistry between them, but Books’s rough, gruff personality clashes with her prim religiosity. Gillom, for his part, is delighted to have Books staying in their house, but starts to resent him when he sees the stress it puts on his mother.

After a few days, Books realizes he isn’t going to be allowed to die peacefully, despite what Doc Hostetler recommends.  Various low-lifes keep trying to make names for themselves by ambushing Books, and a number of local criminals express their interest in becoming “The Man to Kill J.B. Books” in no uncertain terms. And so, Books realizes that in the end, his best bet at finding dignity is to die as he lived.

What makes the movie particularly noteworthy is twofold: first of all are how many quiet, understated scenes there are, especially between Books and Mrs. Rogers. They can communicate whole conversations worth of information with just a look between them. As is so often the case, what makes the scenes powerful are the things they don’t say.

And second is that there’s a certain “meta” element to the movie. The Shootist was John Wayne’s last film, and he would die of cancer only a few years after it was filmed. But that’s only the beginning of the parallels between the film’s plot and its behind-the-scenes reality. It’s about the end of the era of the Wild West, with Books as its last representative. As the sheriff tells him:

“The old days are gone, and you don’t know it. We’ve got waterworks, telephones, lights. We’ll have our streetcar electrified next year, and we’ve started to pave the streets. We’ve still got some weeding to do, but once we’re rid of people like you, we’ll have a goddamn Garden of Eden here. To put it in a nutshell, you’ve plain, plumb outlived your time.”

And the film itself is likewise the end of an era for Hollywood. Besides Wayne, you’ve got Lauren Bacall and Jimmy Stewart playing Mrs. Rogers and Doc Hostetler, two more stars of the Golden Age of Hollywood who grew gray in its service. Everything about the movie really does convey that, as Jim Morrison would say, “this is The End, beautiful friend.”

It’s really this element that elevates the film from just another “aging cowboy comes back for one more fight” story into something more sweeping and powerful. Some of the lines about sorrow and death seem more powerful coming from an actor delivering his last performance, and an actress who witnessed her own husband succumb to cancer.

In other words, I recommend this movie, even if you don’t particularly like John Wayne’s brand of Western. It’s surprisingly subtle and it packs an emotional punch, especially in the raw and poignant final scene, in which nary a word is spoken, but the actors’ faces and movements convey their tremendous anguish and turmoil.

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Book cover of 'Engines of Liberty: Rebel Heart' featuring a young man in a leather jacket holding a mechanical device, with an eagle in the background and a dramatic sunset.

What if I told you there was a YA adventure book about a boy fighting evil wizards? You’d probably say, “meh, sounds like a Harry Potter clone.”

I see why you’d think that. But what if I told you it’s set in America? Or rather, an alternate retro-futuristic America, in which the revolution was defeated, and the rebel colonists remain under the thumb of the cruel mages, who keep the non-magical people in a state of constant poverty by restricting their technology.

This is the world in which Calvin Adler, the protagonist, has grown up, and against which he rages impotently, lashing out at the mages who oppress his family. This act of rebellion earns them all a harsh punishment, and also earns Calvin a place in the underground resistance forming to fight the magic-wielding oppressors. A group of “technomancers”, who have vowed to succeed where George Washington failed.

The story is fast-paced and fun. It has all the usual beats of a coming-of-age YA novel: evil villains, school where hero takes some hits and learns to get back up, arrogant bullies, budding romance, and all the other elements we expect are here. Also, some interesting retrofuturistic technology, especially the guns. That’s right, unlike the Potterverse, wands aren’t the only weapons folks have at their disposal!

Is it the most original, innovative, or inventive story I ever read? No, it’s not. But I had fun reading it, and I think that’s all that really matters. If you’re in the mood for a fun fantasy adventure for quick reading, then this is a good choice. 

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Theodore Roosevelt was a man of many talents. He was, as Ben Stiller summarizes in that great masterpiece of 21st-century cinema, Night at the Museum 2: “26th President of the United States, Roughrider, Founder of the National Parks, and a whole bunch of other stuff.”

Among that “whole bunch of other stuff”, he was a writer, and one of his works is this biography of Oliver Cromwell: “Lord Protector of England, Puritan, born in 1599 and died in 1658, September.”🎶  (Once you hear the Monty Python song about him, you can never un-hear it.)

I love reading one famous historical figure writing about another. The gold standard for this is, of course, Napoleon’s commentaries on the wars of Julius Caesar, but this one is right up there. T.R.’s writing is efficient, to the point, and very opinionated. He’s making no attempt at neutrality, but arguing strenuously that Oliver Cromwell was awesome, and that the Stuart monarchy he temporarily deposed were, basically, a bunch of mindless jerks who were the first against the wall when the revolution came.

But Teddy had a problem, in that Cromwell’s reign was, by basically any measure, just a tyrannous as was that of Charles I, if not more so. To his credit, he doesn’t deny this. He admits that Cromwell did some nasty stuff. He even puts together a tiered ranking of “guys who took over their countries after a revolution.” Top tier: George Washington. Next tier: Cromwell. Bottom tier: Napoleon. (Too bad he didn’t write this after 1917.)

He makes a lot of excuses for Cromwell, basically all of which amount to, “he meant well.” Yeah, yeah, Ted; that’s what they all say.

Nevertheless, the biographical sketch is quite interesting, and it’s kind of nice to read a politician who is unafraid to take an unequivocal stance on a relatively controversial topic. Not to mention that the idea of a politician taking the trouble to learn something about a distant period of history is rather amazing by modern standards.

Is it the best book ever written on Cromwell? Probably not. Is it objective? Definitely not. But is it the best book we’re ever likely to get about Cromwell written by an American politician? For at least the foreseeable future, yes.

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I am not generally in favor of content warnings. It’s not that I have any problem with them per se; it’s just that if you start doing them, you have to list everything that could possibly upset anyone. Which could really be anything. My mother knows a woman who is afraid of kittens. Kittens!

But this book should come with a warning. It is incredibly depressing. So depressing that, as I was reading it, the thought occurred to me that it could actually be in some sense dangerous. I am not prone to depression or melancholy, and yet even I was filled with a profound sense of gloom after reading this. I would say if you do read it, you should be sure you have someone you can talk to about it, because otherwise it might get just too damn bleak. For myself, I re-read a Zachary Shatzer book after finishing it, as a sort of satyr play.

What, you ask, is Stoner about? Not a drug enthusiast or the famous firearm designer, as you might have thought, but a man named William Stoner born on a small Missouri farm, back when the West was young… oh, wait, no; that’s Frank and Jesse James. Stoner is born on a small Missouri farm in 1891. Farm life is bleak and hard and miserable, and so, in 1910, Stoner’s father suggests he take classes at the University of Missouri, an institution set up to educate rural youths such as himself and mold them into productive citizens. (Their motto is salus populi suprema lex esto: “the health of the people shall be the supreme law.”)

Stoner enrolls at Mizzou, but finds the agricultural science classes boring. English literature catches his fancy, and he seeks a graduate degree in it, much to his parents’ disappointment. From there, he goes on to a career teaching at the same university. He meets a woman named Edith, whom he marries for no particular reason, and their marriage quickly proves to be an unhappy one. Despite this, they have a daughter, whom they name Grace. Stoner bonds with Grace when she is young and Edith is frequently absent, but then Edith begins manipulating her to keep her away from her father.

Meanwhile, Stoner’s professional life is the dreary, repetitive drudgery of teaching the same classes over and over, intermixed with the petty factional squabbles common to academia. Anyone who has ever been connected with a university for an extended period will recognize familiar types: the scheming faculty members with their intradepartmental political jockeying, and the malingering, dishonest students who put more effort into gaming the system than into studying their assignments.

All of it makes Stoner miserable, but only in a very detached sort of way. Frequently, we are told he views his problems as if he is watching them happening to somebody else. Some might call this stoicism or perseverance. But to me, it called to mind a line from a Monty Python skit: “He doesn’t know when he’s beaten, this boy! He doesn’t know when he’s winning either. He has no sort of sensory apparatus!”

Stoner is just a non-entity. A vaguely sad non-entity, but when it seems as if he himself can’t be bothered to care that his life sucks, well, why should I?

Stoner was more or less ignored when it was published in 1965, and only recently rediscovered in the age of the internet. This book has over 18,000 reviews on Amazon, most of them positive. It’s also tagged with something called “Best of #BookTok”, which means it’s popular on social media. Which amazes me, because it seems like exactly the sort of book that wouldn’t interest the TikTok crowd, what with its slow pace, historical setting, and lack of sparkling vampires. In a way, I view it as a good sign that a book like this can still find an audience today.

But not that good of a sign, because it’s still an unbelievably grim slog. A lot of reviews say that, basically, that’s the point. Stoner’s entire life is drab and uninteresting, like so many people’s lives, and yet the author was able to weave a narrative out of a completely dull non-story.

I have my own theory as to why the book is more popular now than it was upon its original publication. I suspect Stoner is most interesting to people who are familiar with the inner-workings of academia. In the 1960s, this was a smaller share of the population. But as access to college has increased, and especially as more students have sought post-graduate degrees, the percentage of people who can relate to Stoner has grown as well.

Which is a rather ominous message, given that the theme of the book seems to be that academic life is gloomy and wretched. Then again, it doesn’t suggest that Stoner’s agrarian parents were living the Life of Reilly, either. Basically, there are no happy endings here. All that was missing was a Barry Lyndon-esque epilogue in case we hadn’t gotten the point already: “It was in the reign of Franklin Roosevelt that the aforesaid personages lived and quarreled…”

So, the big question: should you read the damn thing? Well… it’s hard to say. It’s well-written, and given the aggressively tedious subject matter, I have to give the author credit for making it fairly readable. I kept going after all, with morbid curiosity, wanting to know what awful thing Stoner would have to deal with next, and what his new excuse would be for not making his own life better.

Probably any young person just going off to college should read this. Then they can decide for themselves if they want to risk ending up like Stoner. But I don’t think many college-age kids read this blog. So for my typical readers: if you love well-written and crushingly depressing literary fiction, sure, give it a shot. Otherwise, steer clear.

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Cover of the book 'Wit and Assurance' by Zachary Shatzer, featuring the subtitle 'Reviewing the Jests of 18th Century Humorist Joe Miller.' The design has a dark background with white text.

Whenever I’m on the lookout for books to read, and a new title by Zachary Shatzer comes to my notice, I pause, stroke my mustache, and say in the voice of an English bobby, “‘ere now, wot’s all this then?”

In this case, “all this” is an annotated review of an 18th century joke book allegedly by an actor named Joe Miller, although actually it seems to have been compiled by a man named John Mottley, writing under the pseudonym of Elijah Jenkins. Are you confused yet? Just wait.

18th century humor is not always like modern humor. Sometimes, of course, it is. There are patterns in the human experience which are universal, and some of the jests do indeed strike chords of hilarity which echo down all the ages.

But other times, it’s hard, to be quite blunt, to know what the hell Miller (or Mottley or Jenkins or whoever) is talking about. Sometimes, Mr. Shatzer’s commentary is able to shed light on the matter. Other times, he is as baffled as the rest of us.

Fortunately, Shatzer is one of the funniest writers currently going, and so his commentary on each of the 247 jests is enjoyable in its own right, even when the joke he is commenting on is incomprehensible. Maybe especially when the joke he is commenting on is incomprehensible.

And every now and again, one of the jests is actually relatable and funny, and suddenly, the gulf between us and the 18th century is bridged, and we understand the people of the past were people, not merely names in history books, and that they laughed at absurdities just as we do. There’s nothing like shared laughter for helping to relate to someone else.

If nothing else, this book is a good window into Shatzer’s process. When his future biographers are trying to describe what made this great 21st-century humorist tick, they will no doubt turn to this volume for insight into Shatzer’s philosophy of comedy. To paraphrase a film review I once read, “Joe Miller’s wit is almost enough, because Zachary Shatzer’s wit is more than enough.”

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I had never heard of Nelson DeMille until recently, but apparently he was quite popular in his time. His time, alas, is over, but his books live on, including this short story, which is about a bookstore owner crushed to death by a fallen bookcase. An accident? The protagonist of the story, detective John Corey, is not so sure, and sets about unraveling the tangled web of events surrounding the bookstore owner’s demise, complete with a running sarcastic commentary on the cast of characters who seem to be involved, from the youthful shop clerk to the bookstore owner’s wife.

It’s an amusing story, though fairly predictable, which, when you consider the length and limited number of characters, might be inevitable. There’s only so much of a mystery you can have when the possibilities are so limited. Still, that’s not a bad thing. It would be worse if he had dragged it out to full novel length by throwing in extraneous material. Nobody wants that.

At the same time… it’s also not ground-breaking. Not that it needs to be. It’s just that, I can think of plenty of indie authors who have written things that are just as good or better. Yet, DeMille could get traditionally published and they could not. It’s not DeMille’s fault. Nil nisi bonum, after all. It’s just one of those frustrating mysteries in the world of publishing. These are the kinds of mysteries that just can’t be resolved with snappy, sarcastic one-liners. Believe me, I’ve tried.

Forgive me if this all seems a bit negative. Perhaps it’s my own failing, as I ponder the future of writing and feel a sense of looming disaster. But all in all, it’s a decent story if you want a quick diversion and some funny lines.

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AI is inescapable. At least as a topic of discussion. Which, if you believe in the idea of AI super-intelligence as a memetic mind virus from the future, means it has already won. But I digress. The subject of today’s review is a short story by my friend and fellow author, Richard Pastore, which you can read for free in its entirety on his blog.

Of course, one of the difficulties of reviewing short stories is that it’s too easy to accidentally give away the whole thing by describing it. I find it’s best to instead give a general “flavor” of it rather than to describe specific plot points. For this one, that’s a pretty easy task: it’s like a modern-day Twilight Zone episode on the theme of AI. As I said to Richard in the comments, I heard the closing paragraph in the voice of Rod Serling.

The story balances Swiftian satirical humor and science-fiction quite well, and serves as a good cautionary tale for where society seems to be going. Of course, there have been no shortage of cautionary tales over the years, some of them by Mr. Serling himself. So far, they haven’t worked. It’s a classic Torment Nexus situation. Or a “Berlin Cabaret” situation, for the old-timers.

And yet, all the same, fiction is one of the ways we process the world we live in. If the world becomes dystopian, can we really help it if our fiction does as well? Which way does the causality run?

All these are interesting questions to ponder, and that’s exactly what this sort of experimental sci-fi story is designed to do. Set the gears turning, as they say. So, what are you waiting for? Go read it. No, don’t have AI summarize it for you; just read it.

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Movie poster for 'Sweet Liberty' featuring Alan Alda in a historical outfit, playfully holding a hat, beside a motorcycle, with Michelle Pfeiffer and Michael Caine's names also displayed.

Let me begin with one of my trademark non-sequitur intros: my mother recently complained to me that she made the mistake of clicking a news article on her MSN homepage about Meghan Markle. And as a result, she sees multiple articles every day about Meghan Markle, because the algorithm thinks she’s interested in the activities and opinions of the Duchess of Sussex, which is not the case. (Yes, I know I could tell her to clear the cache, but frankly it’s fun to hear her rant about it.)

I bring this up because here at Ruined Chapel, we follow the opposite logic of the internet algorithm. Here, we believe in delivering our readers the offbeat and the esoteric; things that they had not expressed an interest in, because they did not know they existed. So when I threw the floor open to my audience to ask whether I should review Sweet Liberty or another, more famous picture, and I received replies to the effect that no one had heard of this film, the choice was easy for me. 

Sweet Liberty is a comedy about a history professor named Michael Burgess (Alan Alda) who has written a book called… Sweet Liberty, set during the American Revolution. And he’s achieved what so many authors dream of: Hollywood is making a movie of it! Even more improbably, they’re making it in the town where he lives, so he gets a front row seat to watching his book evolve from page to screen.

Unfortunately, this evolution means it changes from the carefully-researched, historically-grounded story he wrote to a slapstick sex comedy set during the Revolutionary War. Being a good student of history, Burgess is appalled to see the liberties the film takes, including a thorough revision of the character of Banastre Tarleton, transforming “Bloody Ban” into a romantic rogue, played by a charming English actor, Elliott James. (Himself played by a charming English actor, Michael Caine.)

Meanwhile, Dr. Burgess’s personal life is also on the rocks. After an argument, he and his girlfriend (Lise Hilboldt) decide to “take a break” from one another, and his aging mother (Lillian Gish) keeps pestering him to reunite her with an old friend of hers, even though such a reunion is for, multiple reasons, quite problematic.

The one good thing to come out of it all is when Dr. Burgess meets the lead actress in the film, Faith Healy. (Michelle Pfeiffer) She is the very image of the heroine of his book, as if the woman he has carefully studied from the 18th-century has stepped into his world. Naturally, he is attracted to her—but is he attracted to the actress, or the character she is playing?

The movie juggles Burgess’s outrage at the historical inaccuracy, his relationship turmoil, and the antics of the film’s cast and crew—particularly Elliott, whom Caine plays with an infectiously devil-may-care attitude—with only moderate success. All of the story elements are funny, but none of them get enough screen time to fully develop. As it is, it feels more like a loose series of sketches built around a concept.

The most interesting part is the subplot with Burgess’s mother, which at first felt like it was part of a different movie altogether, but ultimately proves to contain the core theme of the film. Burgess is faced with a choice of whether to tell his ailing parent the truth, as is his natural inclination, or to tell her something that will make her happy, as his girlfriend urges.

Which is better: the hard reality, or a comforting fairy-tale? This is a choice everyone, but perhaps especially a historian such as Burgess, must grapple with. As the filming of his book carries on, Burgess becomes increasingly desperate to have something historically accurate happen, finally leading the re-enactors performing the Battle of Cowpens, and insisting that the battle be depicted in accordance with historical accounts in a climactic and fittingly rebellious act of defiance to the show-biz crowd. 

The film is funny, but could have been much funnier. It has an interesting theme, but it could have explored it better. It feels overall like a really good idea, with so-so execution.

Still, the cast seems like they’re having a good time. Michael Caine’s scenes in particular are an absolute hoot, even one involving a trip to an amusement park that has nothing to do with the plot, but which seems like an excuse to act silly, which Caine does with relish. Also, it’s a rare thing to hear anybody reference Banastre Tarleton nowadays, so I applaud the movie for making him the focus of Burgess’s book, instead of the low-hanging fruit like Washington or somebody.

It’s a fun, feel-good movie, and anyone who loves history, particularly the American Revolution, is likely to enjoy it. I certainly know what it’s like to watch a historical movie and find myself slack-jawed with horror at the inaccuracies, so I could relate to Burgess on that level. It would be a good movie to watch while cooking the hot dogs and waiting for the fireworks to begin.

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No book review this week. Instead, please read this recent post by Chuck Litka in its entirety. Chuck is a wise and insightful writer who has lots of experience in the indie publishing game, so you would be well-advised to heed his words.

I can’t claim to be “wise” or “insightful”, and I certainly have not achieved anything like Chuck’s success in indie publishing. Perhaps the most I can aspire to is the role of the Shakespearean Fool in this drama. But like Jack Point, “winnow all my folly and you’ll find / a grain or two of truth among the chaff.”

Obviously, Chuck is quite right when he says that “AI is going to eliminate jobs that produce art, which is sad, but that doesn’t mean AI is eliminating art. It’s just eliminating jobs.” We can still make art, at a financial loss, on our own time. Which, as Chuck observes, is what most indie authors have been doing already anyway.

Of course, we all hope our books will be read by someone. And by that I mean someone human, not merely an LLM incorporating our words into its training data. And as AI-generated works proliferate, it will become harder for human readers to find human authors, even if they want to. AI is capable of generating content exponentially faster than humans. Which means it will be much easier to find books by AI than not. Which means game over for human writers and artists. Sorry, guys; go home. Gotta hand it to those neural networks, they just wanted it more.

Ah, but wait a moment… go back. A key word just struck me in that conclusion: “easier.” We automatically assume that doing what is easier is the logical choice. This seems intuitively correct. However, imagine if you told a bodybuilder or a marathon runner that there is an “easier” alternative to their activities. Obviously, it’s easier to sit on the couch eating chips than to go to the gym. Yet, some people choose the gym anyway.

Economists speak of individual preferences as a way of predicting people’s decisions. It’s normal to assume the easier choice will be preferred for any given individual.

But what if it’s not? What if we adjust our preferences so that we prefer the harder thing to the easier one? Suddenly, AI’s ability to make access to books “easier” is no longer a competitive advantage. If we prefer difficulty to ease, a whole lot of things get scrambled. For instance, it also becomes clear that using AI to write books is a non-starter as well, since part of the fun is the challenge of writing.

Sticking with thinking like an economist for now, we might next ask, “what is our incentive to change our preferences?” Well, what’s our incentive to go to the gym? Short-term pain for long-term gain. (Just ignore that one economist who famously said, “in the long run we are all dead.”)

Being an indie author means actively choosing something harder over something easier. I think most of us know this instinctively, but seeing it written down helps you incorporate it into a whole system of action. Because once you tell yourself that you prefer something harder, it no longer feels so much harder. And once you make a habit of exercise, it feels worse not to exercise.

But there is still the question of how to monetize this. This is the central problem of being subject to market forces. You and I may prefer human-written books all we like. The majority of the market is indifferent, and will still choose the easier option. So if it’s just you and me selling our books to each other, we can never hope to expand the total income of our two person market.

One possible answer to this is prestige: if human-authored books are seen as more impressive than AI-ones, it could be that a viable market for them will still exist. This is possible, but not likely. Another possibility is the return of patronage systems, where wealthy benefactors sponsor promising artists and intellectuals. Mass-market capitalism gradually replaced this system, but to the extent that AI content-generation is essentially the automation of capitalism, it may be that we will return to more human-based networks of creation, like the one that gave us the Renaissance.

These are just ideas, half-formed theories; nothing more. As of now, that’s Berthold’s Plan A for ensuring AI doesn’t completely eradicate humanity. There is no Plan B. Well, actually, there is, but no one wants that.

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A spectre is haunting Europe. Actually, it’s probably a lot of spectres. Turns out, a ton of people have died there over the years, especially in wars. Here in the United States, we think of our Civil War as a horribly bloody struggle that rent the national fabric in ways that have yet to be mended. In Europe, it would hardly register as a blip on the radar. They had one of those every few decades

So when you hear the word “Prussia,” it’s natural you think of warfare. In our caricatured version of history, Prussians are basically coded as proto-Nazis.

As this book makes clear, that’s not entirely a fair view of the famous German state. Sure, they had a strong military tradition. But they also had a strong tradition of learning, enlightenment, and civic organization. Frederick the Great would probably get called “Frederick the Woke” today for as much as he talked about values like equality and justice.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Clark starts at the beginning, when “Prussia” was just a bunch of warring groups. In a process Clark analogizes to the English Civil War and Thomas Hobbes, the violence of the Thirty Years War made a philosopher named Samuel von Pufendorf realize the need for a strong sovereign to maintain peace.

Thus was born the conception of The State. And, in stereotypical German fashion, the Prussian project became an obsessive need to build this new civic instrument into the most powerful and efficient version of itself that anybody could imagine.

The famous quip, often attributed to Voltaire, that “where some states have an army, the Prussian Army has a state,” is, like so many Voltaire quotes, very funny but also misleading; the Prussians believed in having a good army simply because without one, the edicts of the state would be meaningless.

However, to some extent, the very mythology of le epic Prussian Army is just that; mythology. I think at least some of this is attributable to none other than good old Napoleon Bonaparte, who, having defeated the Prussians decisively, thought it would burnish his image to tell everyone how incredibly tough they were.

Not that they weren’t good, because they were. And indeed, in reaction to their defeat at Boney’s hands, the Prussians turned the Prussianism up to 11. They would be the Prussianest Prussians who ever Prussed. This is why the Germany vs. France series became so lopsided after 1813; you could argue that the entire Prussian philosophy was “always have a plan to beat France.”

This worked great in the Franco-Prussian War. It worked less great in World War I, when the plan to immediately invade France in response to a crisis sort of blew up in their faces. And the world’s face.

None of which is to suggest that the Prussian administrative class was unduly warlike or bloodthirsty. Indeed, part of their problem was their bureaucratic emphasis on rules, regulations and strict parliamentary procedures. A mode of operation which persisted into the Weimar Republic period, and which in turn could be exploited by non-Prussians entirely uninterested in rule-following.

Clark doesn’t appear to subscribe the “Great Man Theory,” but nevertheless, throughout the book there do emerge interesting pictures of some of the more vivid characters of Prussian history. The only thing that makes it a bit hard to follow is that almost all their rulers are named Wilhelm, Frederick, or Frederick-Wilhelm.

And then there’s Otto von Bismarck, the comically mis-nicknamed “Iron Chancellor”. “The Rubber Chancellor” would be more apt, because of his ability to bend as needed. Bismarck was the pragmatist to end all pragmatists. Whenever he would pretend to stand on principle, it was only as a ruse to get some practical goal advanced. Naturally, he is considered one of the greatest political figures of his era. (I watched the show Fall of Eagles concurrently with reading this book; and Curt Jürgens’ performance as Bismarck is one of the highlights.)

I picked up this book on a friend’s recommendation, mostly because I was interested in expanding my knowledge of the other players in the Napoleonic Wars. It delivers on that front. Clark’s treatment of the Battle of Leipzig alone is worth the read. And in addition to that, I got a meticulous analysis of 400 years’ worth of history, told in a very readable narrative.

But what’s the upshot, you may ask? What ultimately is to be learned from the rise and fall of the Prussian state? What, in short, is the moral of the story?

Naturally, always-online Gen Y-er that I am, my mind goes to a line from The Simpsons:

Lisa: Perhaps there is no moral to this story.

Homer: Exactly! It’s just a bunch of stuff that happened.