Gone Fishing
I’m up to my knees in the rushing waters of history right now. Once I climb out, dry off, and have a reviving shot of whiskey or three, I’ll be back in here in the Margins with new stories. I promise.
Leave the light on for me.
Fighting Words
(This cover is much more impressive in real life.)
Books about foreign correspondents in the first half of the twentieth century are popular at the moment, which is a good thing as far as I’m concerned.* I am happily reading them as part of my deep background reading for the current book. (It's nice to have a reason to choose one book from the ever-growing to-be-read stacks over another.)
In Fighting Words: The Bold American Journalists Who Brought the World Home Between the Wars, historian Nancy Cott follows the career of four American journalists—John Gunther, Rayna Raphaelson, Vincent Sheean, and Dorothy Thompson—who built careers for themselves as foreign correspondents in the years between the two world wars. Cott looks at her journalists as part of the stream of young Americans who poured to Europe after World War I, with little knowledge of its politics, or even its languages. In the process, she gives us a larger, richer vision of the “Lost Generation”.
Her journalists—like all the Lost Generation expats—spent time in Paris, but they were more itinerant than the writers we generally associate with that label. They traveled through China and Russia as well as more accessible European capitals, and were driven in part by the desire to understand the cultures in which they found themselves. They wanted to help their readers back home understand those cultures as well.
They may have started as innocents abroad, but they didn’t stay innocent. In their writing they moved beyond reporting the news to struggling with the big issues of the day. By the early 1930s, Gunther, Sheean, and Thompson were actively engaged in warning Americans about the dangers of fascism, in Europe and at home.**
Fighting Words is a bigger book than the story of four fascinating figures and the way their lives intertwined. It is at heart the story of the birth of modern journalism.
Good stuff.
*So far, as best I can tell, no one is writing about my own foreign correspondent. Also a good thing.
**One of these things is not like the others. Raphaelson died in Moscow in 1927. Her relationship to the others is important but her story doesn't carry the same weight in the book.
Champion’s Day: The End of Old Shanghai
I will admit that I approached historian James Carter’s book Champion’s Day: The End of Old Shanghai with seriously mixed feelings.
On the one hand, I spent some time last year reading about the International Settlement in Shanghai in the 1930s while I was working on a piece on self-styled “girl reporter” Peggy Hull I was eager to learn more. I have always been interested in the times and places where two cultures meet and change each other. Shanghai was definitely such a place. The fact that the book is World War II adjacent was a plus.
On the other hand, horse racing does not spark my imagination. And I knew going in that horse racing and horse-racing people would play a big role in the book.
Champion's Day met my expectations on all counts.
In November 1941, the International Settlement in Shanghai had stood as a "Lone Island" within Japanese-controlled China for four years—surrounded by Japanese forces yet protected from invasion by Japan's relationships with the countries whose nationals controlled it. With the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Shanghai's protected status crumbled. In Champion's Day, Carter explores the history of the city through the lenses of a single cultural institution, the Shanghai Race Club, and the events of a single day, November 12, 1941, when the club held its last Champion's Day races.
Taking the position that the Shanghai Race Club was the social heart of the International Settlement, Carter introduces readers to the world of Chinese pony racing in Shanghai: the breed, the owners, the horses, the jockeys, the gambling and the races themselves. He uses the rules for membership in the club and for attendance at its races as tools for understanding Shanghai's history and cosmopolitan culture. He explores the complexities of racism and wealth in Shanghai, looking at the European population of the International Settlement (and its flexible definition of Europe), the role of interracial elites in constructing Shanghai's international culture, and the attempts of the city's Westernized Chinese elites to integrate themselves into that culture.
The result is a nuanced history of a complex, multicultural city, which was created as a compromise between European imperialism and Chinese isolationism, and developed into something that was both and neither.
I was fascinated by Carter’s depiction of the city as a cultural jumble,* including the role horse-racing played in providing a shaky link between disparate populations. However, I reached the point where I was skimping over the descriptions of horse races. They were well written and I just didn’t care. I suspect the failing is mine and not Mr. Carter’s
*I don’t think you can call it a melting pot when the different components obdurately resist melting into each other.
The guts of this review appeared previously in Shelf Awareness for Readers