‘Ordinary Heroes’
by Scott Turow
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 384 pp., $25
Scott Turow, best known for his courtroom thrillers, takes a sharp detour in his new novel, “Ordinary Heroes.” Rather than the typical murder potboiler, Turow offers a complex World War II novel, loosely based on his own father’s wartime experiences.
Famous for his fast-paced murder mysteries with shocking last-minute plot twists and thoughtful narratives, Turow instead offers a sentimental and ill-conceived war novel.
“Ordinary Heroes” traces the efforts of Stewart Dubinsky, a lawyer featured in Turow’s earlier works, as he tries to reconstruct his deceased father’s wartime activities.
Like many a baby boomer sorting through the long-forgotten letters and records of his parents, Turow uncovers secrets from the past, in this case a collection of love letters that reveal his father’s previously unknown court martial and imprisonment.
Dubinsky tracks down the JAG corps lawyer who defended his father, Barrington Leach, now ailing in a nursing home. Improbably, however, Leach still possesses a copy of the records from the court martial.
This alone is enough to make the reader scratch his or her head and wonder what Turow was thinking. Most nursing-home occupants are lucky to keep their own toilet kit, much less obscure legal records from 50 years ago.
In any event, the records contain a handwritten account, by Dubinsky’s father, in which he describes for his lawyer’s benefit the events leading up to his court martial. The account begins as Leach is given the assignment to travel the front lines during the Battle of the Bulge in northern France in search of an OSS officer named Robert Martin.
Martin operated behind the lines, working closely with the French Resistance, but was resented and suspected of treasonous cooperation with the Soviets by General Teedle – a cartoonish and, frankly, clich
Year: 2005
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Ordinary, yes, and far from heroic
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‘La Belle France’: Modern France shaped by historic loss
‘La Belle France: A Short History’
by Alistair Horne
Knopf, 485 pp., $30
There are few countries with a more fascinating history than France. In “La Belle France: A Short History,” Oxford historian Alistair Horne provides a breathtaking tour of French history, from its earliest kings through the Mitterand government of the 1980s.
Starting from Julius Caesar’s division of Gaul, Horne surveys the Crusades; the Dark Ages; the Plague; and endless royal succession, mendacity and extramarital sexual liaisons. Horne, no stranger to his subject, has authored nine prior volumes of French history.
Horne deals with the French Revolution in a single chapter, but then sweeps on. Napoleon Bonaparte rose to power amidst the anarchy of the Revolution. But he fatally invaded Russia in 1812, was forced back, and ultimately surrendered. He was banished to Elba, escaped, returned to power and was defeated at Waterloo, all within the so-called “Hundred Days.” From the Revolution to Waterloo took 25 years – a span of time comparable to that from the election of Ronald Reagan to today.
Internally, the restoration of the monarchy lead to repeated popular uprisings. Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, nephew of Napoleon I, seized control and declared himself “Emperor” but ultimately was defeated by Prussia, which forced a humiliating capitulation by the French at Versailles in 1871.
From there, it was a straight line to World War I, an utter calamity for France, during which she lost 1.3 million men. The United States, by contrast, lost 53,513 men in the entire conflict. Indeed, France lost more men in World War I – by a large margin – than the United States has lost in every war it has ever fought, from the Revolutionary War through the last soldier to die in Iraq, combined.
That’s no criticism of unquestionably brave American soldiers, but for much of the brutal slaughter of the Great War, they were home in Nebraska. How do you measure bravery? By sacrifice? By the willingness to stand and fight against all odds? By the war’s end, France was bereft of an entire generation of young men. That loss – 20 years later – resulted in a shocking disparity in birthrates. By the eve of World War II, four times as many militarily-capable young men were reaching maturity in Germany as in France.
Conventional wisdom would have it that the brutal peace terms dictated by France and her Allies led directly to World War II. But for France, humiliated at Versailles in 1871, this was a settling of debts. Unfortunately, not the last.
Like slow-motion footage, the book slows as it approaches the cataclysm of World War II. The devastated French sought desperately to avoid another war but devoted their attention to eastern fortifications and social unrest, rather than military preparations. The Germans, by contrast, quietly built a powerful war machine and lulled the West to sleep. When ready, Hitler sidestepped the French Maginot line and punched a 60-mile-wide hole through the French defenses, moving with astonishing speed. It was over before it began, with the French losing more than 300,000 men in the first six weeks alone.
The Germans were strictly instructed to be extremely courteous in occupied Paris, and it was only after they consolidated control that neighbors living near 74 Avenue Foch, where the Gestapo settled, were kept awake at night by the screaming from the interrogation rooms.
Some things are understood best from a great distance. French resistance to more recent calls to arms must be seen through the prism of its bloody history, and particularly its staggering losses of the last 100 years. As Santayana famously remarked, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. -
‘Restless Sleep’: Detectives on trail of murders gone cold
‘The Restless Sleep: Inside New York City’s Cold Case Squad’
by Stacy Horn
Viking, 320 pp., $24.95
Murder is different from all other crimes. The crime of murder is so abhorrent that there is no time limitation on murder prosecution. Even 50 years after a killing, a murderer – if he or she is caught – can still be tried, sentenced and convicted. But, unfortunately, the catching is often the hard part. There are thousands of murder cases in New York City that go cold, remain unsolved and are pushed into the far corners of dusty evidence rooms.
The problem is that if a murder is not solved within the first few days, the chances are good that it never will be solved. As time passes on, memory fades, evidence disappears and the trail, if one existed, evaporates. As new cases pile up, demanding attention, the older unsolved cases get pushed aside and, eventually, forgotten.
New York City tackled this problem by creating a elite team of detectives with the responsibility for chasing such “cold cases.” In “The Restless Sleep: Inside New York City’s Cold Case Squad,” Stacy Horn tells the story of the Cold Case and Apprehension Squad, its formation and a handful of its successes.
In New York, since 1985 alone, there are 8,894 unsolved murders. That’s 444 murders a year; 37 a month; more than one every day. These are awful, brutal crimes for which the perpetrators remain entirely free.
Horn tells the story of four of these cases, from the crime to its resolution, years later. These are not delicate stories. Linda Leon and Esteban Martinez, for example, were murdered just 10 days before Christmas in 1996. They had been brutally tortured and then murdered while their three young children huddled in another room, distracted by an accomplice.
Police officer Ronald Stapleton died in early 1978 after he stumbled onto the scene of a robbery in progress while off duty. Beaten so badly he could hardly move, he was shot with his own gun and then his eye was torn from its socket with a meat hook. Christine Diefenbach died early the morning of Feb. 7, 1988, just 14 years old at the time. She was fetching milk for her family but was found hours later, dead, at the top of a small hill near railroad tracks.
Some of these cases are even older. Jean Sanseverino was 26 years old on March 8, 1951, when she was found strangled. When the cold case squad tackled the case, the file had not been opened for 20 years.
In every case, the original homicide detectives ran into a wall during the original investigation. Leads failed to pan out. Witnesses dispersed or failed to remember key facts. For a million reasons, or none at all, the crime simply couldn’t be solved.
But then the cold case squad, a curious group of part-historian detectives, began poring through the notes, re-examining the evidence and re-interviewing witnesses, searching for what all of the detectives before had missed. And surprisingly, in at least these four cases, they resolved the murders, found the murderers and – decades after the bad guys thought that they had gotten away with it – slapped the cuffs on them.
It’s satisfying, but of course only scratches the surface. For all of its success, the squad has barely dented the backlog. And for each of these success stories, there are hundreds of other cases that remain cold and unsolved.
“The Restless Sleep” tells an interesting story but is unfortunately flawed by Horn’s tough-guy approach to her writing style. At times thoughtful and lively, the book is too often marred by breathless first-person narratives or the grunting vernacular of street cops.
Horn provides a short statistical summary of homicide rates and case resolution, but provides precious little comment on the very phenomenon she describes. Why so many unsolved murders? Why such limited success? These are compelling, even stunning, success stories, but how can we capitalize on this success? Like the murders themselves, those mysteries are left cold and unsolved by this otherwise entertaining true crime expos -
‘Franklin, France, and the Birth of America’: Revolutionary ideas, charm
‘A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America’
by Stacy Schiff
Henry Holt, 489 pp., $30
In December 1776, a decidedly seasick 70-year-old Benjamin Franklin arrived in France, seeking financial and military support for his embattled new country. During the seven years he served as the American representative in Paris, Franklin proved a masterful diplomat, manipulating the tangled European political scene to achieve what, from a distance, appears an improbable outcome: the massive support for a republic founded on democratic principles from one of the strongest monarchies in Europe.
In “A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America,” Stacy Schiff recounts the story of Franklin’s time in Paris. A Pulitzer Prize winner (for “Véra,” a biography of Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov), Schiff poured through diplomatic archives, family papers and even spy reports to reveal insights into this little-known chapter in Franklin’s life.
At the time of Franklin’s arrival in Paris, the newly declared American republic was recognized by no other countries, had few financial resources and no military allies, and was attempting to win its independence from one of the most formidable, well-armed and well-financed military powers in existence. Its citizen army was poorly equipped, on the run and suffering one defeat after another, retreating even from major metropolitan centers. To say that the colonial revolutionaries faced an uphill battle is an understatement.
Franklin’s purpose was to secure French military and economic support for the revolution. France sought to undermine England’s hegemony over North America and to support its own designs on that continent. England sought to crush the revolution and keep the French from meddling in what it considered “internal” disputes within the British empire.
Franklin deftly played one side off the other — holding out the possibility of a negotiated settlement to the British on the one hand, while cajoling a series of enormous loans, grants and military support from the French on the other. And he was spectacularly successful: During the first year of the revolution, 90 percent of the gunpowder came from France. Millions of dollars in economic aid, military uniforms and French volunteers poured across the Atlantic to support the cause. The battle of Yorktown was not only fought by brave American patriots, but also by the combined American and French armies, where the victory cry was equally “God and Liberty!” and “Vive le Roi!” The French population became passionately pro-American in what, in retrospect, plainly presaged the French Revolution itself.
When he arrived, Franklin was already well known and widely respected by the French. His unannounced arrival caused an uproar of well-wishers trodding the path to his door, and he quickly won over the Parisian population with his charm.
But even from the outset, the French-American relationship was strained in ways that continue to this day. First, cultural differences between the two countries were stark. As Schiff notes, in American society, a young lady could properly flirt until marriage, but never thereafter. The roles were almost precisely reversed in pre-Revolutionary France, where flirtation among married women was elevated to a near art form. Franklin excelled at the art and had numerous relationships (in his 70s) with a variety of French women. Moreover, class standing played a central role in defining one’s role in pre-Revolutionary France, and many French were puzzled by Franklin, a mere printer by trade, who rose to prominence on the strength of his scientific and diplomatic accomplishments.
But for all the power of the story, the biography suffers from stilted, awkward writing, almost as if written in French, or perhaps German, and then poorly translated to English. More than once, a reader is forced to reread a sentence two or three times before comprehending what Schiff was attempting to communicate. The editor here was plainly missing in action and the book suffers as a result.
Still, the story rises above even this flaw, and has special relevance today, in an era of “Freedom Fries” and blatant anti-French sentiment. Franklin, who embraced — and was embraced by — the French, recognized that, without French support, the American Republic would have quickly vanished without a trace under the bootheels of the British regular troops. Perhaps it is a timely reminder that, despite passing political trends, the bonds between America and France were forged from the outset of the Republic and can withstand even today’s unfortunate political posturing and sloganeering. For, indeed, without France, there would have been no America at all.