The Books I Read In September

Fiction
'Unseen Academicals' by Terry Pratchett
This is probably the most British of Pratchett's books, focusing on the topic of football (or soccer if you are an American).  In Ankh-Morpork the violent medieval style game, i.e. between districts with teams of any size, is transformed into something resembling what we know.  The first new team is run by the Unseen University, hence the name ('academicals' are not only the name of a real team as in Hamilton Academicals, but also what the robes and hats academics wear are called).  There are some university jokes, especially around 'new' universities and their relation to established ones and apparently about strange rituals at All Souls College, Oxford.  There are also tropes around football commentary and the Discworld's equivalent of Latin American footballing.  As is typical with late Pratchett novels, this one also explores themes such as prejudice against a 'goblin' character, inter-racial relationships, fashion, celebrity and being shut off from opportunities by the assumptions you were brought up with.  In this you can see a kind of parody of David and Victoria Beckham, or indeed a range of footballers and their girlfriends.  However, unlike some of the other Pratchett novels from the 2000s, I felt that the messages were not laid on as heavily and this allowed more room for humour.  This was the first Pratchett book I had laughed out loud to for some while.  Overall I enjoyed it and it is a shame there was never a follow-up to this one with the team going on tour and the development of Glenda's relationship.

'The Bloody Ground' by Bernard Cornwell
Despite Cornwell's declaration at the end of the book, published in 1996 this actually proved to be the fourth and final book in the Starbuck series.  I think this is because Cornwell realised that the series was not up to the standard of his others.  As I noted before, the constant switching of characters across the lines between the Union and the Confederacy and the fact that so many characters were unlikeable made the books hard going and they felt under-developed.  They improved as they progressed as Cornwell narrowed the focus, simply leaving out some characters from previous books and killing off others.  This book focuses on the Battles of Harper's Ferry and of Antietam.  The sort-of hero, Nathaniel Starbuck is sent to a punishment battalion which is being used to scam the Confederate government of resources to profit its commander.  He trains the unit up to a reasonable level and most of the book is about these battles.  Recounting conflict is Cornwell's strength.  However, usually, as for example in the Sharpe books, he is able to set it well in action off the battlefield well.  Overall this is not a bad book, but Cornwell could not really dig himself out from the weak situation he got into the first two books of this series.  I have a number of his medieval-set books on my shelf so I will see if he overcame his problems with those in the coming months.

Non-Fiction
'Warfare and the Third Reich' ed. by Christopher Chant
This is a mess of a book.  It is made up of three individual books, the authors of which are not indicated.  The first is a general survey of the development of the German armed forces from the end of the First World War to the end of the Second World War, though there is less on the Luftwaffe.  It is interesting on showing the foundations laid by the men who preceded Hitler's rise to power and particularly on the German navy, the Kriegsmarine. 

The second section is about Hitler's generals.  There are some reasonable over-arching points but also some oddities such a tiny chapter on the generals' uniforms.  The rest of the section looks at leading individual generals, focusing on particular campaigns.  This is interesting on the lesser-known generals, but given that we have already read about the German armed forces in action in the first section and the careers of many of the generals overlapped, it begins to become repetitive.  The author is particularly an enthusiast for Kesselring and in contrast dismisses Rommel as over-rated. 

The third section is on the Luftwaffe, the German airforce.  Again it is good in the pre-war section.  However, we have now read about the course of the war and campaigns within it repeatedly by this stage of the book, so only sections on, for example, the air campaigns against Allied shipping or organisation of air defence of Germany add new incidences.  Furthermore, this author, had numerous strings of acronyms for different units listed at length as parts of larger units.  Increasingly your eyes are having to get to grips with just these codings about units being moved around, with little narrative.  In addition, the tables that are referred to on a number of occasions, have not been included in this version of the book.

There are odd typographical errors throughout the book and as with the John Gardner's book last month you do wonder why companies do not take the opportunity of producing a new edition of a book to correct these.  This book does have some interesting insights and aspects which you may not have seen in books on Nazi Germany.  However, the fragmented and repetitive structure adopted means it is a challenge to pick these out from the text as a whole.