Book: A Small Death in Lisbon by Robert Wilson

Lisbon, Portugal

The intense drama of A Small Death in Lisbon zigzags between the 1940′s and 1990′s and between a Nazi thriller and a police procedural, but the focus is always Portugal, and mostly Lisbon.  While we read about a Portuguese cop, Zé Coelho, trying to unravel the murder of a teenage druggie in modern day Portugal, author Robert Wilson brings us another story centered on a German officer assigned to the technically neutral country during World War II. It served the dictator’s purpose, despite Salazar’s Facist tendencies, for the country to be able to do business with both Britain and Germany.

Portugal Country House

The two stories, both with plenty of complications, kept me guessing. The main guessing game for the reader is–when and how are these two threads going to connect?  The present day detective story is spiced up with the detective fighting alcoholism (a common failing among mystery novel policemen) and puzzling over his teenage daughter.  He also has a new partner whose odd ways have alienated most of the department. They criss-cross Lisbon and its suburbs and we get a good picture of the city and the life of the country today.

Meanwhile, back in World War II days, the German officer with an insatiable appetite for prostitutes bonds with a rural, illiterate Portuguese wheeler-dealer with enough smarts to make him a Godfather of corruption in his rural province.  An illigitimate son of the German inherits his sexual appetites and as the story moves through the years to the present day, several strands of narrative tangle in a final knot to be straightened–or maybe not–by Zé Coelho.

Lisbon Cafe, Portugal

Real historic events not only add interest to the stories, they are essentially part of the stories.  I was particularly interested in an extremely artful scene where Wilson introduces the day of the peaceful coup against Salazar in April, 1974.  A husband and wife are bickering because he wants her to  turn off the radio. As she fiddles with the dial, the song Grôndola, vila moreno comes on.  The two people go on arguing and the husband tries to make phone calls to some of his important friends in the Salazar regime.  We learn that the song triggered the uprising of the army, and the VIPS he was trying to reach on the phone, were busy trying to save the government. From reading The Portuguese: A Modern History, I learned that the scene is completely accurate. The song is still sung with emotion in Portugal as a symbol of freedom.

Here the stories begin to merge, as we see Zé as an eighteen-year-old, seeing the only deaths that happened that day. The art of Wilson’s writing is his ability to pull all that historical research seamlessly into the story. There is never a moment when the story stops for exposition, we just live the characters lives as they live through historic events.

The other endearing thing about Wilson is that he started as a travel writer.  (Just like African writer Binyavanga Wainaina, remember?) Robert Wilson wanted to tell about his experiences in Africa, but a friend suggested there would be more money in setting a mystery there instead.  He studied the genre, and wrote four African mysteries, before A Small Death in Lisbon the first of two books set in Portugal, this one became his break-out novel, winning awards and readers. Next he moved on to four spy novels set in Seville, Spain, the latest, The Ignorance of Blood in 2009. (Wilson, by the way, would prefer that we read these four books in order, so I’ll start with The Blind Man of Seville.)

Based on his own description of the pace of his writing , his next book is overdue.  In a 2009 interview, he said that his next book would be set in London.  I cannot wait.  But meanwhile, you can bet I will get copies of those four set in Seville.  I have a fondness for Seville that sounds very like Wilson’s own description of the magic of that city. Like him, I arrived there during Easter week and stayed up all night watching the processions, streets packed with people and cheering their favorite image of the Virgin like football fans. (Here are some pictures that capture the magic of Semana Santa (Holy Week)–although they are taken in other parts of Spain) The city is gorgeous, alluring, and somewhat mysterious…a perfect setting for a travel writer turned mystery/thriller novelist.

The book title is linked to Amazon for your convenience. If you click through to Amazon and purchase anything at all, I get a few cents which helps support A Traveler’s Library. Thanks.

Wilson admits that as a reader he is not fond of books with parallel stories. Do you have an opinion about that form? And which of his books would you start with? Portugal, Africa or Seville?

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©2012 A Traveler's Library. All Rights Reserved.

Destination: Albania

Book: Chronicle in Stone (org. 1971, NEW paperback edition)  by Ismail Kadare

This amazing novel by a former Man Booker Prize winner brings to life Gjirokastër, a city on the southern edge of Albania, near the Greek border. The events during World War II in this city provide a microcosm of the shifting bands of conquerors that have moved through Albania over the ages. Chronicle in Stone stops just before the paranoid rule of Communist dictators in the twentieth century, but the constant turmoil that is the history of this country explains a great deal about why it seems rivaled only by Romania in seeming inability to join the modern world.

Ismail Kadare is hailed as “Albanians best known poet and novelist,” and the fact that there are  not a lot of competitors for the title does not take away from his power as a story teller. He is a master artist with words. His style is easy and simple on the surface, but full of symbol and metaphor and originality of thought.

As in our recently reviewed In the Country of Men,  a young boy narrates tragic events.  I felt even more appalled by the deprivation of life in Albania because the wartime tale came from the mouth of an innocent in Chronicle in Stone.

Gjirokaster, Albania

Andrzej Stasiuk (On the Road to Babadag, reviewed here two days ago) described the city Gjirokastër, using many of the same details used by Kadare.  Stasiuk says: ”Gjirokastër is a town of white stone.  The roofs of the houses are covered with black tiles that once were white, too.” Both authors talk about the minaret, about the Turkish fortress on the hill, but mostly about the fact that this is a vertical town–so steep that drunks often fall off the street and onto the roof of a house.

The book is chronological, but there are hints at the randomness and disorganization of life in the insertion between chapters of fragments from a Chronicle, and random thoughts of the boy.  The boy barely understands much of what he is seeing, but then, neither do the adults.  The adults may understand the human sexual pornography around them, but they cannot comprehend the pornography of war and factions that randomly kill townspeople.

I realize I am making it all sound rather grim, but there are laugh-out-loud funny moments and characters that make you giggle with recognition. Small towns everywhere breed such characters. Like the woman Kako Pino whose job it is to apply make up to the bride when there is a wedding. For anything that is related to her, her predictable reply is “It is the end of the world.” Like the man who changes his name each time a different nationality marches across the border.

And there are plenty of opportunities to change one’s name.  The Italians invade. Eventually the Greeks drive out the Italians, but only for a couple of days. Then the Italians come back. Then the Greeks. The populace loses track of how many times the conquerors’ uniforms change. Finally the Italians surrender and the Germans, who have by then taken over Greece, march in. But this is nothing new. Kadare says:

At dusk, the city, which through the centuries had appeared on maps as a possession of the Romans, the Normans, the Byzantines, the Turks, the Greeks and the Italians, now watched darkness fall as a part of the German empire.  Utterly exhausted, dazed by the battle, it showed no signs of life.

Gjirokaster

In this paragraph, the city becomes a person.  That is a common manner of expression throughout the book, as the boy ascribes human qualities to clouds, airplanes, the very stones of the city. When the Germans invade, the boy says, “The road that would lead them there (as it had led so many armies) now writhed at the city’s feet, begging forgiveness.”
The boy sees everyday life around him and makes everyday observations even as unusual events are occurring. The English planes bomb so regularly that “people seemed to get used to the bombings as a disagreeable part of a daily routine. ‘See you tomorrow at the coffee house, right after the bombing.’ ‘I’ll be up at dawn tomorrow; that way I think I’ll have the house cleaned before the bombing.’”

Life becomes one big jumble. During the shifting of armies, there are times when “The city had been left without a government. In quick succession it had lost planes, the anti-aircraft guns, the siren, the brothel, the searchlight and the nuns.”

The Turkish Fort at Gjirokaster

Chronicle in Stone opened my eyes to Albanian history, to a city that sounds quite worthy of a visit just because of its unique architecture, and mostly, to a masterful weaver of words, Ismail Kadare.

Some day I may tell you about my personal experience with an Albanian in Greece, which did nothing to erase the prejudice that the Greeks hold against the Albanians. A good deal of the animosity between the two countries is based in their religious differences, but also, a dirt poor country next door to a wealthier one makes for friction. As bad off as Greece is these days, Albanian is still worse.

Global Giving has an economic development  project in Gjirokastër, teaching locals preservation skills. You can see photos of the Gjirokastër, and learn about the Albania project.

The book title is linked to Amazon for your convenience. If you click through to Amazon and purchase anything at all, I get a few cents which helps support A Traveler’s Library. Thanks.

Have you been to Albania? I would like to hear first person accounts. What do you think is the most pathetic country in Europe?

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©2012 A Traveler's Library. All Rights Reserved.

Lampost on Pont Neuf, Paris

Destination: Paris

Book: The Last Time I Saw Paris by Lynn Sheene (NEW May 2011)

The sad period of the occupation in France during World War II intrigues me.  I wonder about the ability of ordinary people to survive the gigantic disruption of their lives. I wonder about the choices people made–some to risk their lives resisting, some to risk their reputation by becoming collaborators.

We took a look at the story of Irène Némerovsky in Suite Francaise   and saw glimpses of the resistance in other stories about France. The movie, Charlotte Gray, tells of an Englishwoman who joins the resistance movement. Now a first novel, The Last Time I Saw Paris, traces a fictional American who becomes a reluctant heroine.

Storm clouds over Place de Concord

Despite an awkward start, Lynne Sheene recreates life in Paris under the Germans with details about scarce food, difficult transportation, distrust between neighbors and raw fear.  Her heroine, Claire, a woman who has invented a life for herself and climbed the social ladder in New York using other people’s weaknesses, is perfectly suited to work undercover for the resistance.

I had trouble caring about Claire and did not think I would want to spend a whole novel with her. I came to grudgingly respect her gritty determination and street smarts.  She may fool a lot of people, particularly men, but she never deceives herself.  She knows exactly who she is and what she is willing to do even when it is distasteful.

The author overburdens the story with sex scenes to the point wher I wanted to say, “Okay, I get it! Claire uses her sexual attraction to get what she wants.”  Unfortunately, Claire’s willingness to pounce (naked) on any man weakens the believeability of her one true romance. The object of her affection is a too-perfect Englishman who is a true hero of the resistance.

The French characters, no matter how interesting, play supporting roles, no more important than the scorned Germans.

After the first hundred pages, I was finally drawn into a story which excaltes from minor difficulties to chase scenes and cold-blooded murder.  But those first hundred pages were murder to read.

I could pause here for a rant about how little editing publishing houses seem to do these days, and the book provides a good example of how helpful some rewriting could have been.  Nobody ever said that exposition is easy, but it seems particularly awkward here, simply because of word choices.

For instance, the strained, “their gliding shoes whispered against the balcony floor” and so many extraneous adjectives in other sentences. “The glittery cream folds of her dress swept around her legs like a curtain of stars poured onto the white marble.” Huh?

Once the action starts, the author seems to get too busy for the over-writing.

It’s a tough call whether to recommend this book for the traveler’s library.  Obviously well researched, it does add to the reader’s understanding of Paris during the occupation. The heroine traverses Paris, giving us a tour of some familiar, and some unfamiliar streets. But there are so many better-crafted books, like Suite Francaise. As usual with books that I’m not terrribly fond of, I have to warn you that your mileage may vary.  We all have different tastes, thank goodness. So decide for yourself. (And let me know, would you?)

The book title is linked to Amazon for your convenience. If you click through to Amazon and purchase anything at all, I get a few cents which helps support A Traveler’s Library. Thanks.

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©2012 A Traveler's Library. All Rights Reserved.

Those of you whose hands are not up—you’re showing your age.

Memorial Day poster, showing graves at Arlington National Cemetery

In the small town in Ohio where I grew up, the cemetery was up on the hill behind the Church of Christ. It was called Schoolhouse Hill, because the school stood beside the cemetery.  And every Memorial Day in my childhood, the VFW (Veterans of Foreign Wars) put down their beer bottles, donned as much of their old uniforms as they could still get in to, and held a ceremony up on the hill, distributing flags to all the graves of old soldiers.

Red poppy "In Flanders' Fields, the poppies blew..."

Every house flew a flag, and most people pinned on red artificial poppies that they bought from the VFW–the funds going to veterans in need.

Fallen warriors were not the only ones honored, though. It became a day to honor one’s ancestors as well.  That was the day that people cleaned up the area around family plots, put flowers in pots, or planted them in the ground and stood and thought a minute or two about each ancestor.  People still do that in small town America. So in the spirit of a Memorial Day that used to mean something more than “Sale”, here are some past posts about America and patriotism in travel and books to add to your travel library. So plan a trip, read a book, remember.

WW II Re-enactment

A ceremony in Fredericksburg Texas and a magnificent World War II museum. The book: Fortress Rabaul:  The Battle for the Southwest Pacific, January 1942-April 1943.

Memorial at Normandy World War II American Cemetery

Visiting a cemetery in Normandy, France, and the battlefields of D-Day. The book: The Steel Wave by Jeff Schaara.

Independence Hall, Philadelphia

A visit to the cradle of America, Philadelphia. The book: Miracle at Philadelphia

Ohio Grave of Civil War Veteran, Henry Allen Butts

A salute to veterans in my own family, and books about war. The books: Several by Michael Schaara and Jeff Schaara

George Washington

Revolutionary War and early American sites to visit. The book: 1776 by David McCullough.

Here’s a touching post from Vacation Gals about a visit to the Pearl Harbor WWII site in Hawaii.

Remember, you now are able to rate posts (even old ones). Let me know which ones you like and you’ll get more of the same.

For your convenience, I put several links to Amazon in this article. If you buy anything at all at Amazon, please click through one of my links or the Amazon search box. You’ll be showing your support of A Traveler’s Library, and helping me pay the rent on my Internet address. Thanks so much!

Thanks, as usual to those photographers at Flickr who took some of these photos. I took the Normandy, the Civil war grave and George Washington photos. If you are interested in using a photo, be sure to ask the photographer for permission.

Happy Memorial Day weekend. What are your plans?

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©2012 A Traveler's Library. All Rights Reserved.

Book Cover

Destination: Jersey Island, the Channel Islands, Great Britain

Book: War on the Margins (2009, PB August 2010) by Libby Cone

I read War on the Margins as I sat at my dining room table eating a sandwich made of leftover Thanksgiving turkey and cranberry sauce. Marlene and Peter sat in a farm shed on a piece of canvas and contemplated killing a rat for food.

I read War on the Margins as I sat propped up with pillows on my sofa, drinking a cup of tea. Lucy and Suzanne had long run out of real tea, and made a drink of parsnips.

Hunger pervades the story of precarious survival on the Island of Jersey in the English Channel during World War II.  But there are other horrors as well, which the Libby Cone has made clear in War on the Margins not only with poetic descriptions but also by reprinting actual documents from the Germans–orders regarding Jews, mostly. As a researcher, I am always fascinated when I see original documents, but in the midst of this novel, they sometimes seemed unnecessary and intrusive.

As readers, we sit with the British citizens of Jersey as they try to learn something from their crystal sets and wonder why no one is coming to the aid of the Channel Islands. We are with them when the BBC broadcasts a poem, by Verlaine (probably chosen because his name starts with “V” the symbol of the resistance.

“The long sobbing of the violins of Autumn,

Molasses tomorrow will spurt froth cognac,

Sabine…”

Several years ago, I visited the Spy Museum in Washington, D.C.  They have fascinating displays of espionage and deceit dating back to ancient times, but nothing was more moving than to hear a recording of the actual radio broadcast from the BBC on the day preceding the D-Day invasion of the Normandy beaches. Following the opening notes of Beethoven’s Fifth (which spell V in Morse Code–dot-dot-dot-dash), the announcer started the news, but then read the poem before going back to mundane weather reports.

I could only imagine what joy must have welled up in the hearts of the people on the continent as they heard the hidden message. The invasion is on.

The horror felt by the citizens of Jersey when they were abandoned by their country, are now transferred to the German soldiers stranded inside British territory as a defeated army. I admire that Libby Cone does not take the easy way out and paint a sharp line between the good guys and the bad guys. Everyone faces moral dilemmas. Everyone in war is a victim.  People make decisions under stress that violate principles they thought were inviolable. Sometimes they are forced to take actions that they don’t approve of and cannot forgive themselves for.

This year, when we were in France, we heard about the hundreds of acts of resistance and thousands of communiques of intelligence to the Alliest helped make D-Day a success. According to a British history site, organized resistance to the Allies in France in 1944 included 100,000 people. Between January and September there were more than 500 successful acts of resistance.

War on the Margins, based on scholarly research done for a dissertation, focuses on the plight of Jews, or people defined by the Nazis as Jews, but clearly all the people living in the Channel Islands faced devastating circumstances.  While the best seller, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society, serves up a witty tale of survival, War on the Margins presents a nearly unmittingly grim picture of life on the island. The reader spirals downward along with the characters, and begans to lose hope even though she know the real outcome of the war.

Claude and Lucille (Suzanne and Lucy), surrealist artists active in the resistance, befriend Marlene, a shy misfit who thinks of herself as an old maid.  It would be hard to imagine more interesting characters than the lesbian surrealist artists, Lucy and Suzanne– proving once again that fact is stranger than fiction. Libby Cone uses actual correspondence between the two when they were imprisoned by the Germans.

The non-German characters in the novel seemed never to doubt what the outcome would be–Britain would triumph–anything else was untinkable. However, the question is, which of them will be able to hang on until the end?

You can learn more about the occupation of Jersey at this Jersey Heritage web site , wherel you can see photographs of Jersey during occupation.

Yes, between The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society and War on the Margins, I definitely want to visit the Channel Islands. How about you?

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©2012 A Traveler's Library. All Rights Reserved.

Suite Francaise Cover

Destination: France

Book: Suite Française by Irène Némirovsky (Published in French, 2004/English 2006.)

Traveling in France, it was impossible to imagine the life of French people during the German occupation of World War II. And then I read Suite Française. Irène Némirovsky brings to vivid life the actions and reactions of ordinary, and not-so-ordinary people as they reluctantly accept that their troops have NOT defeated the Germans, and they WILL have to evacuate Paris. Then she follows their lives as they adapt to a new world.

What could be an unrelentingly grim story of hardship, is leavened with touches of humor. We follow several individuals and families through two books of a planned work of four or five. These people are not all heroes. Perhaps because she was a Russian emigré, Némirovsky is able to stand apart and describe not just the people who rise to the situation, but those who petulantly insist on retaining their privileges, or find ways to cheat and steal from others for their own benefit.

The Suite certainly stands on its own, but what happened to the other two books and why these two– written while she was living in the midst of the chaos that she describes–disappeared and reappeared makes another gripping story. The paperback edition of Suite Française that I read– published by Vintage Books–has appendices with author’s notes and letters from and to her publisher, her husband and friends that explain  Némirovsky’s own story.

Irene Nemirovksy at 25

Already a successful author in the 1930′s, Némirovsky had long abandoned her Jewish roots, as had her husband, Michel Epstein.  They thought of themselves as French Catholics. Thus, although there may be echoes of Anne Frank’s tragic story, Suite Française does not set out to tell a Jewish story, but rather a French story.

The German government had a different opinion. Because Epstein and Némirovsky had Jewish grandparents, they had to wear the yellow star, were limited in the way they could work,  and eventually paid the price that so many people of Jewish lineage paid. While Suite Française stands alone as a masterpiece of presenting the human reaction to great catastrophe, the appendices make this moving novel even more poignant.

Describing one of her characters, a self-centered collector of decorative arts, she writes in her book:

Important events–whether serious, happy or unfortunate–do not change a man’s soul, they merely bring it into relief, just as a strong gust of wind reveals the true shape of a tree when it blows off all its leaves.  Such events highlight what is hidden in the shadows; they nudge the spirit towards a place where it can flourish.

Because she is writing events as they happen, she doesn’t know how it is going to turn out. She plans Storm (in June), the first section–retreat from Paris– and Dolce–life under occupation– then Captivity (which would talk about the concentration camps) and others–perhaps Battles and Peace. In her journal she says “It’s really in the lap of the gods since it depends on what happens.”

Of the section called Captivity, she says “Keep it simple. Tell what happens to people and that’s all.”  But in the great irony of her life, when she was taken captive, her husband struggled for a year to find out what had happened to her, and did not learn that she ultimately had been killed at Auschwitz. Then he was taken captive, too. She never had a chance to finish her story.

The rough draft survived with one of her daughters, who was only a child in 1942 when her parents were taken away. As an adult, when she finally was able emotionally to read her mother’s words, she realized the value of what she had and began the long process of converting hand written notes to a manuscript. It was published in France in 2004.  Sixty-four years after Irène Némirovsky’s death, we can read her book in English.

Read this book. If you want to know more about France. If you are interested in the writer’s process. Or if you want to read a masterpiece on the level of Irène Némirovsky’s literary hero, Tolstoy. Read it. It is that good.

Have you read other war-time novels about France during the occupation? I would like to hear about them.

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©2012 A Traveler's Library. All Rights Reserved.

St. Peter Port bus station, Guernsey

DESTINATION: Guernsey, the Channel Islands, Great Britain

BOOK: The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society (2008) by Mary Anne Shaeffer and Annie Barrows

A GUEST POST by Anne-Sophie Redisch

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society is a lovely book, written entirely in the form of letters, mostly between the main character Juliet Ashton, a young author in 1940s Britain – and numerous pen friends.

One day, Juliet receives a letter from Dawsey Adams, a Guernsey farmer, who owns a book with Juliet’s name and address written in it, that once belonged to her. And thus begins an engaging correspondence between the two.

Through his letters, Dawsey paints a lively picture of everyday life in German-occupied Guernsey (the Channel Islands were the only part of the British Isles occupied during World War II).

Guernsey War Time Street in the German Occupation Museum

Things To Do

He relates stories of meetings in the Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, a club originally set up as a front by a group of islanders needing to hide a pig from the Nazi occupiers. Oddly, the Germans seemed to tolerate intellectually oriented gatherings. During their meetings, the colourful members of the Society talked and ate – and for a few hours each week, forgot the horrors of the war.

Our protagonist, Juliet, finds herself increasingly drawn in by Dawsey’s depictions of Guernsey life and all its wonderful characters. And one day, to the outspoken dismay of her rich, self-satisfied businessman boyfriend, she sets off for Guernsey. Naturally, her relationship with the smug millionaire is doomed.

The book was written by Mary Anne Shaffer, who after being stranded in Guernsey in 1980, was inspired to write a story set here. During the book’s final phases, she became ill and she left it to her niece to finish work with the editors. Sadly, she died and so, this is her only book. I would have liked to read more by this author. She depicts characters, village life, the atmosphere so brilliantly and I was immediately drawn to Guernsey. (Ed. note: and she writes about her visit in her blog).

Guernsey, St. Peter Port

My daughters and I arrived by sea – and, like Juliet, we first spotted the island, as “the sun broke beneath the clouds and set the cliffs shimmering into silver”. I would have liked to travel in time as well, but a visit to 1946 Guernsey was out of the question. To get an idea of how it might have been, though, we visited the German Occupation Museum, showcasing among other WWII relics and memorabilia, a war-time street in St Peter Port.

Luckily, the quaintly named Guernsey capital hasn’t completely changed. Many of the buildings still stand. The narrow passages, stairways and the cobbled streets are the same. Charming, individual little shops remain. My only gripe with Guernsey turned out to be the traffic. The narrow country lanes aren’t built for the sheer number of cars, too many of them large SUVs. But even so, it wasn’t difficult to shut out the noise and stress of the present-day traffic and picture horse drawn carts and a few 1940s cars rambling across the streets of St Peter Port.

For an even better sense of history, we hopped on a ferry to the neighbouring little island Herm. With gravel roads, it’s completely car free. And completely adorable. In fact, I wonder if Juliet ever went to Herm. She was curious, an explorer. I like to think she did.

Sophie and Cat

Anne-Sophie Redisch is a bilingual writer who loves hopping off a train in a new city. Her two daughters often come along, enlivening the travel experience. She has lived in the USA, New Zealand and Norway, and her work appears regularly in in-flight magazines and various Scandinavian and English media. She blogs at Sophie’s World and tweets as SophieR.

Anne-Sophie not only wrote this terrific review–which makes ME want to go to Guernsey–how about you?  But she also supplied the photographs that accompany the review. Be sure to visit her lovely blog, particularly the article linked above about her trip to the Channel Islands. Thanks Sophie!! To show your appreciation for introducing us to the Channel Islands, how about hitting one of those sharing buttons below??

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WW II Re-enactment

On Memorial Day, a museum on Main Street in Fredericksburg, Texas, draws a big crowd as lives lost in war are commemorated. Dignitaries lay 50 wreaths, each honoring a unit or ship that served in World War II.

IT STARTS WITH ADMIRAL NIMITZ

The only national museum dedicated solely to the WWII war in the Pacific, The National Museum of the Pacific War stands on Main Street of the lovely small town of Fredericksburg Texas. If at first it seems to be an odd place for a world-class museum, take a look at their website. You can learn there how it evolved, starting when 5-Star Admiral Chester Nimitz, who grew up in that Texas town, said he would only agree to a museum if it honored EVERYONE who served—not just him.

The first time I visited, the George H. W. Bush Gallery was not yet complete, but I visited the Admiral Nimitz Museum, in the restored Nimitz Hotel on Main Street. It takes about 30 minutes to see the displays of Nimitz’ life from his childhood in Fredericksburg, to his stirring role in the Pacific during World War II.

THE COURTYARD AND GARDENS

Between the Nimitz and the Bush Galleries, you can wander through a Memorial Courtyard (where the Memorial Day wreaths will lie), a Japanese Garden of Peace, and a Plaza of Presidents, that honors all the Presidents involved in some way in World War II.

George H.W. Bush Gallery

A PRESIDENT WAR HERO IN WW II

The second time I visited, the enormous and impressive George H.W. Bush Gallery had been completed, and I shuffled into the entry hall that explains the history of enmity between Japan and the West. An enormous crowd packed the entry hall. As I walked further, the space opened up, the crowd thinned, and it was possible to have private moments to ponder the events and players that interested me most.

I’ll date myself here, but as a very small child, I remember people pouring into the street to celebrate the victory over Japan. I also have some ration books to remind me of the civilian sacrifice during the war. Finally, as I wrote last year on Veteran’s Day, I had three relatives who were Navy Seabees in the Pacific.

I was moved by the letters from sailors, and the photographs and mother’s voice of a family of brothers all killed in the Pacific. I was terrified by the re-enactment of standing on a boat in the harbor when the Japanese attacked Hawaii. But I came close to tears when I came upon a couple looking at a display and remembering how it related to their own life. A woman wheeling her husband in a wheelchair. A couple recalling her veteran father’s stories. People the war had touched.

My feet, my back, and my brain all became overwhelmed after a couple of hours, and I had not seen everything. That is why they sell 48 hour tickets, so people can come back the next day and start fresh. Great idea.

COMBAT ZONE

A major part of the museum that I did not get to visit, The Pacific Combat Zone, occupies about three acres two blocks east of the main campus.  It definitely gives me a good reason to go back to Fredericksburg (besides wonderful art galleries, shopping, restaurants and vineyards, that is).

Tom Vortman, Marketing Director, tells me, “We offer guided one-hour tours (of the Combat Zone) daily.  Some of the major artifacts to see are the PBM Avenger, the last WWII combat PT boat (PT-309), and a MASH-style field hospital in a Quonset hut.  All three of these artifacts are indoors.  Outdoors we have two tanks, a landing craft, several guns and a mock battle field.  We use this in the World War II re-enactments presented seven weekends a year (six 75-minute shows each weekend).” Visitors feel the vibrations as a tank rumbles by, hear the sounds of actual weapons from WW II, and if they get too close, may feel the heat of the only operational flame-thrower in Texas.

A BOOK FOR THE TIME TRAVELER

I particularly like the closing event at today’s Memorial Day Service at the National Museum of the Pacific War. An Author’s Forum on in the afternoon features Bruce Gamble, author of Fortress Rabaul:  The Battle for the Southwest Pacific, January 1942-April 1943.  This is the story of Japan invading the Southwest Pacific island of New Britain the beginning of 1942.  Rabaul, on the northern tip of New Britain Island became a major military complex, the mightiest Japanese base in the Southwest Pacific.

So I leave you with a book and a reminder that A Traveler’s Library has remembered war veterans in previous articles. Naples in World War II, Apocalypse Now and Good Morning Vietnam in Vietnam,the resistance in France.

Just so you know, my second trip to Fredericksburg was hosted by the Fredericksburg Convention and Visitor’s Bureau. The pictures for this article are used with the permission of the National Pacific War Museum.

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©2012 A Traveler's Library. All Rights Reserved.

Ohio Grave of Civil War Veteran, Henry Allen Butts

I have been thinking for quite a while about what I wanted to write about to commemorate Veteran’s Day. My brother, a veteran of Vietnam,  thinks I should write about the Civil War. He, my sister-in-law and two nephews (one of whom served in the Marines in Iraq)  participate in Civil War Renenactments in California.  So obviously, HE is the one who should be writing about books about the Civil War.

I will digress from my usual pattern here and tell a little story of my own, and then list a few books that seem to be worth looking at if  you need travel literature to help plan re-enactments of your own.

My Story

My grandfather, William Henry Butts, an Ohio farmer, served on the Union side of the Civil War. We still have some of the letters he wrote home to his wife, unhampered by standardized spelling and punctuation. (In the excerpt below I have seen fit to add periods, just to make it easier on the reader.)

He was discharged for disability after 8 months. Being let go in Nashville, Tennesee, he presumably had to make his way home to Ohio on his own. By October 1864 he had re-enlisted, and he served until July the following year. “Dear Wif” he writes on December 18, 1864 from “Near Savanah, GA”

It is a pleasure to me that i am permited to seat myself to anser your ever welcom letter which came to hand yesterday. i was glad that you and dear little Allen was well. your letters found me well and enjoying myself as well as I can enjoy my self. better since i herd from you for it has bin a long time to me. i must tell you the reason i did not hear from you sooner we started on this march the 15 of november and landed hear on the 10 of this month we had no communication all that time but its all right now. we have had a hard march over three hundred miles. some nights we did not get time to lay down and hardly time to eat but we are through and i em glad this is Sunday. my dear last Sunday i did not think that i wold write to you this day for we laid under the rebels fire boath Saturday and Sunday and the shells and balls flew thick and fast. thear was one shell bursted about ten feet from me and broke three of our guns so i begin to think that was coming rather close.

Henry Butts as an old man

One of the rare lucky ones, he was able to return to his wife and lived a long life, and was buried in the church cemetery outside his small town. We went in search of great-grandfather’s grave, and noticed that in the older section of the church cemetery, Civil War Veteran’s graves spout brass star that indicates service in The War. One star stood beside a grave of a boy who lived to the age of fourteen.

While you think about that, you might also think about taking a road trip to one or more of the many, many battlefields of the Civil War scattered from Pennsylvania down to Georgia. You can drive. You do not have to march.

Books

• Gods and Generals by Michael Shaara. Best book on the Civil War, hands down. When Michael Shaara died before the book found fame and became a movie, his son Jeff took over and completed a trilogy with Killer Angels and The Last Full Measure. Jeff Shaara went on to specialize in novels of war.
• Rise to Rebellion and The Glorious Cause relate the American Revolution.
• The Last Full Measure , covers the gruesome and grueling World War I
• No Less Than Victory,  a novel of World War II

I will no doubt be talking in the future about WWI and WWII sites to visit, but here are previous posts about a movie in France, a memoir in Naples,and the underground in Crete all set in WWII. Travel to American revolutionary places were covered in Philadelphia, and Reading for July 4; a guest poster talked about Vietnam during the war.

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©2012 A Traveler's Library. All Rights Reserved.

Naples, photographed by Ginaluca Ruggiero from Flickr

Destination: Naples, Italy

Book: Naples ’44: An Intelligence Officer in the Italian Labyrinth by Norman Lewis

Have you discovered the British travel writer Norman Lewis? Between 1938 and 2003, he published 23 travel books and 15 novels that can serve as travel books. I owe my discovery of Lewis to the manager of an inn on St. Lucia. Being British, he was quite astounded that I, a travel writer, did not know Norman Lewis’ work. He was quite right.

As a young soldier, Lewis was dispatched to (practically abandoned in) Naples after the Allies had driven out the German forces, but before the German army had left Rome.  A fact that complicated communications greatly, and gave a job to Lucky Luciano, who later became a Mafia chief in America.

The high command scarcely knew what to do with this situation.  One example of the idiocy that the occupation forces had to deal with. The people were starving. One of their mainstays before the war had been fishing.  But the army declared that no small boats could venture into the bay. So the fishermen lashed together doors to make a raft. The land was bare for several miles around the town, as the people walked out each day to harvest every blade of grass and stalk of weed to eat, sometimes having to walk ten miles for a couple of handsful. Much of the book deals with the lack of food.

Italian culture has enough inexplicable quirks on its own, as was pointed out ably in Italy Out of Hand. Pile on top of that decisions by military brass miles, if not continents away, and the friction between American and British forces and you have a situation both tragic and comic.  Sometimes I thought of Naples ’44 as the true forerunner of Joseph Heller’s Catch 22 or M.A.S.H, except that Naples ’44 is not fiction.  Lewis lived through this. The people of Naples lived through it, amazingly.

I did not visit Naples when I was in Italy, but this books makes me want to go back, wander the streets and wonder at the resiliency of people.  A reader’s comment on Amazon caught my eye.  The reader, from Naples, wrote “The way people live then and now has not changed. Minus having sex in the cemetery.”  The book, from page to page, is filled with moments that catch your attention like that second sentence.

One paragraph, particularly, made me pause and think about the aftermath of war.

Learn more about the life of Norman Lewis in the Guardian’s obituary.

Have you been to Naples? What else should we read before going to Naples? And what are the not-to-be-missed sights?

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Photograph by Ginaluca Ruggiero, Rome. Book titles that are linked to Amazon allow you to purchase directly and benefit  A Traveler’s Library without costing you extra money. Magic!

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