Joshua Kronengold

These books are both amusing, and fun to read, although they take their topics seriously.

Germania: In Wayward Pursuit of the Germans and Their History, by Simon Winder (Farrar Straus & Giroux, 2010)

I reviewed here Unruly by David Mitchell, a history of England's rulers up to Elizabeth I, dealing entirely seriously with its topic but doing so in an entirely witty and amusing style. In an acknowledgments note, Mitchell points to this book as the one whose approach he was trying to emulate with that distinctive combination, so I went to read it as well.

It does indeed have the same distinctive combination of wit and seriousness. The one thing Winder has that Mitchell doesn't is a desperate need for an editor. The beginning of the book contains enormous digressions in the form of apologias for Winder's interest in German history; and the earlier part of the book, mostly on the medieval period, wanders around chronologically a lot and concentrates just as much on later Germans' reaction to and framings of their history as on the history itself. To be fair, Winder had alerted the reader that he was going to do that.

Somewhere around the Thirty Years' War, the narrative settles down and becomes more chronological, though there are lots of marked digressions into specific points of interest, for instance a section on the Jews, in which Winder seems to be arguing that the Holocaust was an aberration and not a uniquely German perversion, and proves it by pointing to earlier German pogroms. Huh? Anyway, the main narrative ends with the Weimar Republic, and that's one of the few references to what happens afterwards.

Though there's plenty of political history in here, this is mostly a cultural history, a lot from the perspective of what historical patterns and customs survive today, especially in surviving townscapes. Though many rulers are mentioned, if you want to keep track of the list of Holy Roman Emperors, for instance, you'll need another book. (Mitchell, by contrast, is clear and complete in his accounts of rulers, but that's his topic.)

To give a sample of the prose, after a long discussion of the marriages of the British royal family to princesses from obscure German states, Winder writes,

I go on about this, partly because it is funny and curious (both the facts and the names), but also because these little territories had potentially very considerable power and prestige and the most bashful beginnings could end in glory. In a sort of asteroid belt of low-grade German princesses and narrow, petty, moustachioed princes, there was enough room for something really surprising to happen. Most absolutely alarming in this respect was pretty little Sophie Augusta Frederica of the laughable territory of Anhalt-Zerbst, a place so small it could hardly breathe. Her father was a Prussian field marshal and as a helpless pawn in plans to boost Prussian-Russian relations in the 1740s Sophie was shunted off to Russia where, after several ups and downs, she married the Grand Duke Peter, learned Russian, became Russian Orthodox, had Peter killed and wound up as Catherine the Great, devastating the Ottomans, the Swedes and the Poles and carving out immense new territories from Latvia to the Crimea. Indeed, a case could be made for her being the single most successful German ruler of all time, albeit not one ruling Germany.

Class Clown: The Memoirs of a Professional Wiseass, by Dave Barry (Simon & Schuster, 2025)

These are actual memoirs, not the 'personal tales of my everyday life' stories we're used to from the famous humor columnist. They are, however, professional memoirs. After opening chapters on his childhood and schooling, it discusses purely his career until he settles down at the Miami Herald, at which point it broadens out into a topic-oriented survey of work he did there, then narrowing back to a final chapter on his decision to retire 20 years ago, at which point it stops. It's also oriented towards his newspaper career; there's almost nothing about his books. Barry gives full descriptions in his typical amusing style, emphasizing eccentricities, of his parents - both now deceased - but all he says of his adult family is that he's been married three times, and there's a cameo appearance by his son.

But on that professional life he is clear and lucid. How he stumbled into a job as a reporter for a small-town paper and wrote his first professional humor columns there; a discussion of his seven years as a business-writing consultant, which he handles in some specific detail because of the training it provided him for his later career; how he sidled back into becoming a full-time humor columnist; why he took the job in Miami; and so on. He's a little reluctant to show his early work, which he doesn't think is very good; but once he becomes a professional he shows more of it, and the Miami chapters are tales about various feature stories and other items he wrote, much of which I hadn't known about. I'd forgotten, for instance, that Barry is the person who popularized Talk Like a Pirate Day. His greatest delight, though, is when he discovers that a celebrity he interviews has a good sense of humor.

As with Mitchell and Winder, Barry strikes a balance between serious and straightforward content and a witty and amusing way of writing about it. In his chapter on schooling (one of his classmates was Glenn Close, interestingly enough), he comes up with one sentence that perfectly encapsulates its topic - as I know, having suffered through the same thing in junior high:

At certain points of the week we boys would troop off to the shop, where we would learn, over the course of several months, how to use tools to turn pieces of wood into slightly smaller pieces of wood stained brown.