Category: Bio – Subject Was Originally From Western Europe

Lewis Carroll – BONUS POST

The Bonus Book of the Week is “Lewis Carroll, A Biography” by Morton N. Cohen, published in 1995.

Born into a family whose children eventually numbered eleven, in January 1832 in Cheshire (England), Carroll was given the name Charles Lutwidge Dodge. His father was curate of the local parish.

The headmaster of “Rugby”– the boarding school Carroll attended (which gave rise to the eponymous sports game), couldn’t “… rid the school of drunkenness. The boys were served beer with their meals– water was unsafe– and from beer to strong libations is not a long leap.” Rugby was considered England’s best public school (in America this means an elitist private school) at the time.

Carroll endured the usual abusive hierarchy (frat boy behavior) that occurred at such a place for nearly four years. Later, he was accepted to Christ Church, at Oxford University. Students from wealthy families brought their hunting dogs to school, and continued their shooting and riding, as they had at home. Academics were way overrated.

Carroll, however, majored in and got high grades in mathematics. After graduating, he became a math tutor and lecturer. But he got upset when he saw freshmen who were ignorant of material he thought they should have already learned.

In an attempt to cover up this embarrassing truth, in April 1864, the school administration proposed lowering its standards, and finally succeeded in doing so in February 1865. In protest, Carroll resigned as Mathematics Examiner.

On another topic, of course, Carroll became best known for Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. It started in July 1862, as an extemporaneous story he made up about Alice Liddell, one of the middle daughters (about twenty years his junior) in a large family full of them. He became quite close with the girls socially, accompanying them on walks, picnics, boating outings, in playing croquet, etc.

Nearly a year later, he rode a train alone with the girls– who were without their usual adult supervision. Shortly thereafter, their mother forbid Carroll to see them. Wild rumors swirled around the mysterious incident; the page on which Carroll wrote about this in his diary was removed– lost to history– by his niece.

As an amateur photographer, Carroll had been taking photos of his aforementioned unnaturally close friends, as well as daughters of other families in his community. In spring 1867, he began taking photos of girls in the nude.

Read the book to learn of all of the details about the above, other highlights of his life, and how the “Alice” stories evolved into an enduring piece of work.

ENDNOTE: Curiously, the author of Peter Pan, J.M. Barrie, befriended a family of sons. He took an especial liking to a middle son, Peter, about which he made up stories at the dawn of the twentieth century. Both Alice and Peter Pan have been enjoyed in various incarnations internationally for decades and decades. Parallels can be drawn between their authors. The stories must therefore delve into the deepest, truest universal aspects of human nature. That must be why they are still classics.

Von Braun

The Book of the Week is “Von Braun, Dreamer of Space, Engineer of War” by Michael J. Neufeld, published in 2007.

Born in Prussia in March 1912, Wernher von Braun grew up in a wealthy, cultured, intellectual family who encouraged his interest in science. He played the cello and piano. At thirteen years old, he was sent to boarding school. Although he failed math and physics, he learned these subjects to the extent he needed to in pursuing his passion for rocketry and astronomy.

In 1932, von Braun’s father snagged a plum civil service position. As a result, the German army funded von Braun’s research into rocket-based weaponry. In summer 1933, he took flying lessons. He later completed his PhD at one of the most prestigious universities in Germany.

After Hitler’s purge of political dissidents in spring 1934, the German army and air force had a duopoly on top-secret ballistic missile research directed and supervised by von Braun.

In November 1937, von Braun was compelled to join the Nazi party, or be fired. Although ample evidence has emerged that he was aware of the evil purposes to which his projects were applied, he appeared to suppress his moral revulsion in connection therewith. His first love and loyalty was working toward his goal of creating vehicles that could explore outer space. But he was ordered to make weaponry first.

“After 1938, corporate and university researchers were also integrated in increasing numbers, further propelling funding in breakthroughs in liquid fuel propulsion, supersonic aerodynamics, and guidance control.” In spring 1940, von Braun was compelled to join the SS or be fired. He reluctantly did so.

Von Braun’s was a serious moral dilemma. It is unclear what the consequences would have been had he refused to willingly participate in operations involving slave labor (Resistance fighters, Communists, criminals, concentration camp internees) subjected to inhumane conditions (disease, torture, starvation) in making the instruments of war, and to willingly participate in the making itself.

The first successful ballistic missile (launched via a rocket), occurred in October 1942, after various trial-and-error failures (balls-of-fire explosions). This kind of experimentation at that time was, and still is, agonizingly slow and astronomically expensive. At the start of WWII, the weapons program had about twelve hundred employees. Wartime meant von Braun’s experimental resources of nitric acid, diesel oil and aluminum alloys were diverted to Hitler’s actual military usage, causing serious production problems.

In spring 1945, von Braun and his immediate boss were able to carry out their plan at war’s end of turning themselves over to the Americans, with whom they would share their rocketry expertise.

According to the author, in June 1945, the Americans liberating Germany persuaded about 350 skilled rocket-workers, and their relatives, numbering a few thousand, to emigrate to Alabama and New Mexico in the United States. The Soviets grabbed a few “brains” who traveled to East Germany, and then the Soviet Union. The author didn’t explicitly state which superpower acquired more talent.

In the 1950’s in the United States, von Braun published his writings, lectured, and literally broadcasted his opinion that the United States should engage in space exploration for the purpose of launching a satellite that would indicate weapons installations of surveilled regions on earth, among other purposes.

Read the book to learn of the political power struggles and trials and tribulations that von Braun and the German and U.S. governments underwent in aerospace research as matters of national pride and security; of why some historians might describe von Braun as an overrated attention whore; and how times have changed (hint– in the 1960’s, “…only nation-states had the resources to finance and direct huge guided-missile and space programs.”).

Ian Fleming – BONUS POST

The Bonus Book of the Week is “Ian Fleming, the Man Behind James Bond” by Andrew Lycett, published in 1995.

Born in May 1908 in Mayfair in England, Ian Fleming had a childhood befitting his place in an elitist, wealthy family. However, his older brother Peter was the favorite. Fleming was sent to boarding school at six years old. Then it was off to Eton and Sandhurst. His father was killed in WWI when he was nine.

Fleming’s strong suit was sport, not academia.  He failed both to become a military officer while in training, and the diplomatic-service entrance exam. This, after this wild child was sent to a language school in Switzerland and a finishing school in Munich. Then a school in Geneva.

In the early 1930’s, at wit’s end, his mother helped him go to work for Reuters. But she prevented him from getting married by telling his employer to deny him permission to marry– something it had the authority to do in those days.

In 1934, when he followed in his father’s footsteps by entering the lucrative banking field, he began to lead a charmed life. He took up gambling, golf, tennis, skiing, carousing, and sowing his wild oats. He played well with others and made lots of valuable contacts. Even so, banking was really not his thing either.

Although lacking the bent of a student, Fleming’s thing was bibliophilia. He developed the concept of amassing a library which was responsible for worldwide technological or intellectual progress since the year 1800– “books that made things happen.” The collection, spanning more than four hundred volumes from more than twelve nations, published from the 1820’s through the 1920’s, improved humanity and changed the world.

Through centuries, people have done so, too. They have been muckrakers, whistleblowers, dissidents and activists, and have been called heroes and martyrs. Most of them, even the famous ones, who risked their lives to counter political ideology that was oppressing a large number of people, are deserving of high praise.

The most recent examples of countless such individuals who saved countless lives include those who acted courageously during the Holocaust; two who come to mind are Raoul Wallenberg and Oskar Schindler. However, they need not have directly saved lives to have made an impact, though they made serious sacrifices for their causes: Mahatma Gandhi, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Andrei Sakharov, Daniel Ellsberg, Vaclav Havel, Aung San Suu Kyi, Nelson Mandela, Edward Snowden, etc., etc., etc.

Ralph Nader is exceptional in this regard– he saved lives but did not risk his own life. In medicine too, there have been plenty of such individuals, like Alexander Fleming (no relation to Ian). However, politics is a more widespread subject of discussion and there are no barriers to entry. Therefore, more individuals’ names in politics enjoy longer historical recognition. Also– medicine is governed by politics because it’s a matter of life and death. Politics is all about tribal unity and public relations. Image management is all it takes to acquire a political footnote in the history books. Some individuals have been too power-hungry to care about their do-good legacies.

That’s the flip side of the coin– evil. Individuals’ evil can be quantified– by the number of deaths for which they are directly responsible. Comparing politicians who have made unfortunate remarks or have engaged in unfortunate actions or behaviors, to Hitler– is usually an invalid comparison. He was a genocidal maniac. The true comparisons to Hitler and others are displayed below in alphabetical order by last name (footnotes 1-3 are at the bottom of the fourth page).

Anyway, Ian Fleming played bridge with a literary social set. Yet, at 28, when he finally moved out of his mother’s home, he was still a megalomanaical, hedonistic schoolboy, a smoker and drinker.

The year 1939 saw him begin to engage in his true passion– intelligence gathering (and collecting weaponry), for the British government. He found subversion, sabotage and clandestine warfare so exciting.

After the war, he bought a vacation house which he called Goldeneye in Jamaica in the Caribbean, and became a journalism manager for the Sunday Times in London. He supervised spies who posed as journalists. They cranked out propaganda his way. “First drinks of the day were served at eleven in the morning.”

By 1950, Fleming’s mother had moved to Cannes for the purpose of tax evasion. Less than two years later, Fleming had written his first novel, Casino Royale.  The main character was a Renaissance man called James Bond who engaged in gambling, espionage and economic sabotage. He was all that men wished they were.

Nonetheless, his publisher in America requested that he tone down the sexual-sadism-and-masochism language for the good of book sales there. His stories tended to contain sicko characters who were improbably good at escaping from impossibly bad situations– designed to shock the reader and offend his sensibilities with their extreme goings-on.

Fleming made frequent visits to the United States over the years. He astutely concluded that Walter Winchell, Joe McCarthy, and J. Edgar Hoover were evil. Fleming had a large, diverse social set that included Noel Coward and Jacques Cousteau. They gave him ideas for his novels.

Read the book to learn about: the intellectual-property legal disputes among the various entities handling Fleming’s career; his family life; about the extensive research (including personal travel to experience various subcultures) he did when writing; and why reviews on his books suggested that he had various psychological issues such as a low level of maturity, sociopathic tendencies and sexual deviance.

Francis Bacon

The Book of the Week is “Francis Bacon, The Temper of A Man” by Catherine Drinker Bowen, published in 1963. This biography describes the life and times of an English aristocrat born in 1561.

When Bacon was in his late teens, his father died. His older brother got the lion’s share of the estate. Bacon was an arrogant debtor, always blaming others for his debt. Nevertheless, he continued to maintain the standard of living to which he was accustomed, thanks in part to his uncle– who was immensely wealthy with a global network of contacts and a collection of mansions with hundreds of rooms.

England in the 1570’s was a nation of four million fronted by Queen Elizabeth. It was still seen as a primitive backwater, “…her native tongue rude, her food and wines execrable… No less than eight hundred men, women and children were hanged each year… maybe for picking a pocket or stealing a sheep.” Deaths from disease were rampant.

The church elders at Trinity College, Cambridge– where Bacon started his higher education at thirteen years of age (not uncommon for his generation)– thought more truth could be found in faith than in knowledge.  Bacon, an extremely intellectually curious lad, a budding grand thinker and passionate, prolific writer, disagreed. “Beyond the first row of the House of Commons were men unlike Bacon, nonintellectuals who knew more of hounds, horses and crops than of Latin and philosophy.”

During Queen Elizabeth’s reign, the custom was to arrange a marriage between next door neighbors so as to enlarge the families’ estates and wealth. Bacon finally wed in 1606 to a fourteen year old girl. He was 45.

In 1620, Bacon published a fictional story whose plot mentioned many of the advances in humanity he anticipated, such as the existence of institutions of higher learning that would perform empirical research in the “hard” sicences. It was written in Latin so that all of Europe could read it.

Read the book to learn about the ups and downs of Bacon’s legal career, and how he became one of the first victims of the beginning of reform for England’s political system in the 1620’s.

Extreme Measures

The Book of the Week is “Extreme Measures” by Martin Brookes. This is a biography of Francis Galton.

Galton was born in Birmingham in 1822, the youngest of seven children of a wealthy, prominent family in the Victorian Era. During his third year at Cambridge University, Galton had a mental breakdown. Ironically, he wrote, “…life seemed a game, played for the benefit of a select few, and from which he had been excluded…”

Galton had two major passions in his life:  a) exploring Africa, specifically Namibia– where he reported on navigation, land formations, climate, flora, fauna and its tribes– at the time, territory uncharted by Europeans; and b) collecting data on humans and what made them tick. He coined the expression “nature” or “nurture” to describe the roles played by genetics or the environment on people’s behavior and circumstances. He also labeled the statistical concepts of “regression” and “correlation.”

“Eugenics, his socio-scientific philosophy of the future would be built, according to Galton, on a solid foundation of knowledge, and exercised through a ruthless system of competitive examinations.”

Through the decades, other science projects of Galton’s included but were not limited to tea brewing, and a fingerprints database for law enforcement. Read the book to learn of the contents of the resulting publications, and how Galton seized upon the intellectual ideas of his generation, in a way that allowed him to achieve a minor footnote in the history books.

Louis Renault, A Biography

The Book of the Week is “Louis Renault, A Biography” by Anthony Rhodes, published in 1969.

Renault, an automobile entrepreneur, was born in February 1877. When he began his career, there were only two classes of any real importance in France– the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie. Renault sold vehicles initially for commercial purposes like taxis, public buses and milk delivery trucks.

By 1905, there were 22 intensely competing European automakers. The year 1908 saw six-cylinder engines made by eight French, ten American, three Belgian and one German manufacturer. In 1909, Renault sold his cars in New York. The goal was to sell 1,200 to 1,500 of them.

In the 1920’s, Citroen, Renault’s chief rival, employed many women in his factories. He conducted an ongoing direct-marketing campaign, mailing letters to potential first-time and new car buyers who had visited the local showroom and expressed interest in a purchase. He also made toy models of his cars for kids. Renault and Citroen competed in starting bus lines between cities in France. Citroen was taken over by Michelin after going bankrupt in 1935.

Read the book to learn of Renault’s accumulation of wealth, his company’s corporate culture and labor troubles, what transpired among automakers during the World Wars and through the decades, and how history dealt Renault a serious blow toward the end of his life.