Bear Flag Blog

I've been reading quality books again recently. For no substantive reason I picked up The Agony and the Ecstasy, Irving Stone's biography of Michelangelo. Most folks who recognize the title are probably familiar with the movie starring Charleton Heston, which I have not seen.

At any rate, it was excellent. It managed to be emotionally imbued without being maudlin, and really captured the sense of Michelangelo as a man and an artist. Admittedly, this is Irving Stone's conception of Michelangelo, who might be very different from the real Michelangelo, but nonetheless a very compelling figure. A very good book; my only complaint is that it really sped up towards the end, covering the last half of his life in less time than it took to cover until age eighteen, and I know he did some interesting things towards the end of his life. I wonder whether this is because Michelangelo (who has left copious records and diaries and autobiographical writings) gave up on writing memoirs and thus Stone's source material became scant, or if Stone grew tired of writing and wanted to bring the book in at under a thousand pages.

When looking for a follow-up I noticed that the sequel to the fantastic (and Pulitzer Prize winning) WWII book An Army at Dawn had come out in paperback, so I picked it up. The Day of Battle is also excellent, really top-rate military history. Rick Atkinson can write and has his research down, giving us another really well done work on WWII, this time the campaigns in Sicily and Italy.

I wish more people would read (voluntarily or no) these sorts of books; policymakers and the average American voter just don't seem to understand the truth of the maxim "war is hell". We engage in it too lightly, as recently evidenced, and view it too shallowly. I also had a day to myself recently, when the wife and the boy were off at the Renaissance Faire, so I spent all afternoon watching Band of Brothers, possibly my favorite television program. Anyone who would say "well, let's just invade/bomb them" or promote it as policy or endorse someone who promotes it as policy, without a sense of what a terrible thing it is, is a person willfully letting ignorance cloud their humanity.

Which is not to say that war is never worth the cost, but that far too many people indulge in deliberate ignorance about that cost.

Anyhow, a great book. Looking forward to the third.

Summary:
The Agony and the Ecstasy: A Biographical Novel of Michelangelo by Irving Stone, 8.5/10
The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943-1944 by Rick Atkinson, 9/10