How Did the Axis Powers Get Their Name?
I recently struggled to explain the Allies and the Axis Powers in War II in a sidebar for a book aimed at 8 to 12 year olds.* It was harder than you might think. Even just listing who belonged in each group was tricky, because in some ways World War II was a collection of smaller wars mashed together into one big war. Who was on what side when changed. (The Soviet Union being the most astonishing example of this.) I think I succeeded. I hope my editor agrees.
In the process, I stumbled across the answer to a question I’ve had for a long time: why do we call German, Italy and Japan the Axis powers?** (This may not be news to anyone but me.)
In October, 1936, Germany and Italy signed the first of several treaties that would create the alliance between the three powers. On November 1, Benito Mussolini declared that from now on, Europe would revolve around the axis between Rome and Berlin.
And for at least a while it was true.
* One of the challenges of writing history for the general intelligent audience (that would be you, right?) is that occasionally you are required to explain something very complicated in very few words. Why uranium is radioactive, for example.
** A related question from an earlier blog post: How did Germany become the Hun?
Chasing Chopin
I am a Chopin fan. I’ve spent a lot of time hanging out in Paris in the 1830s. I even wrote about the heroine of the Polish Revolution of 1830 in Women Warriors.* Those subjects (and so many more) come together in one delightful package in Chasing Chopin: A Musical Journey Across Three Centuries, Four Countries, and a Half-Dozen Revolutions by Annik LaFarge
Chasing Chopin opens in a jazz club in Chicago where LaFarge heard a quartet riffing on the funeral march from Chopin’s Opus 35 Sonata.** She had a decades-long relationship with the sonata and was fascinated by its transformation into a jazz vernacular. A quick Google search revealed not only that musicians have been appropriating the funeral march for more than a hundred years, but that Chopin is the subject of video games, a popular manga series, and a Netflix animated series based on the same.*** Intrigued, LaFarge set out to understand the work, the world from which it came, and the power it continues to have.
The result is a charming and deeply personal account of both her subject and her search. LaFarge literally follows Chopin’s footsteps for the three years in which Chopin wrote his sonata, between 1837 and 1840, visiting the sites in Majorca and Paris where he lived and worked. In the process, she looks at the larger world in which he functioned, including a close look at his relationship with the gender-bending author George Sand. She places him firmly in the context of literal revolutions in Poland and France and the artistic revolution of European Romanticism. She explores the difference between the modern piano and the pianos of Chopin’s time. She looks at Chopin’s role as a revered Polish hero and as a broader cultural icon.
Chasing Chopin is part biography, part memoir, part musical appreciation, and one hundred percent fascinating.
So fascinating that it inspired me to pull out all my Chopin recordings looking for the Opus 35 Sonata, which I apparently don’t own. So I listened to all the others instead. For the record, Chopin is good music to write to.
*Emilia Plater. Just in case you’re curious.
**Whether you realize it or not, you know the opening phrase of Chopin’s funeral march. Its dum dum da dum is the sound of something bad about to happen on screen, whether in a Loony Tunes episode or a movie thriller.
***Forest of Piano. Just in case you’re curious. I found it delightful.
The guts of this review first appeared in Shelf Awareness for Readers.
The Invention of News
These days I’m spending a lot of time thinking about the news: how it is shaped, who controls the story, how we receive it.* These questions are not only an important part of the political dialogue today, but an important part of the book I’m working on. In search of a dimly remembered idea, I recently pulled a book off my shelf that is at least in part about the growth of newspapers. I didn’t find what I was looking for, but I was sucked into a fascinating account of how the news as we know it came to be.
At a time when digital media is transforming the way news is delivered–and by whom– Andrew Pettegree offers a reminder that newspapers too were once a revolutionary form of delivering information. In The Invention of News: How The World Came To Know About Itself, Pettegree looks at the changing definition, use, control, and distribution of the news from the medieval world to the age of revolution.
Building on his previous work in the ground-breaking The Book in the Renaissance,** Pettegree demonstrates how access to news became increasingly widespread, moving from private information networks run by medieval elites, through sixteenth century news pamphlets and news singers, to the newspapers of the eighteenth century. He looks at the development of postal systems, private couriers and the printing press. He considers the importance of the introduction of paper, the rise of coffee shops and the growth of a literate middle class. He discusses the roles played by news pamphlets in the Reformation and by newspapers in the American and French Revolutions.
Some of the most interesting sections of The Invention of News deal not with the development of new media, but the creation of new audiences. Technology often outpaced demand. Early printers, finding the traditional market for large books would not keep them solvent, created new markets for more ephemeral products. The leap from broadsheets to newspapers presented a similar challenge: the first newspapers were bewildering to audiences accustomed to news pamphlets that told a single story from beginning to end. Perhaps, at some level, the medium is the message.
*I must admit that I am more plugged in than I was in the past thanks to Twitter. Embarrassing, but true.
**Also well worth reading. Printing and the Protestant Reformation are more closely linked than you might think.
A version of this review appeared in Shelf Awareness for Readers a million years ago.