Safe Water

by Conroy

Gathering unsafe water in India

I’m fond of saying that the modern world started when indoor plumbing, fresh water and modern sanitation, became widely available. Not only did these innovations make conditions far more sanitary but it also promoted better hygiene [1]. For the United States, this happened in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries [2], and by the decade after World War II most urban and rural areas of westernized nations had modern plumbing; clean water was delivered to the house and dirty water carried away.

This development had a profound effect on public health. Cholera, dysentery, and typhoid fever were among the common epidemics suffered in London, New York, and other major western cities before what I’ll term the safe water infrastructure was in place. Now those diseases are largely unknown in the west. I’m guessing that for most readers of this blog, safe water is taken largely for granted, as it was by our parents and even our grandparents. In fact, a resident of New York or London probably thinks that the word cholera is quaint and foreign, when as little as 100 years ago it would have caused mortal dread.

Unsafe Water
This isn’t the case everywhere though. Cholera still afflicts millions of people worldwide each year, and a major outbreak occurred in Haiti after the massive, crippling 2010 earthquake. This is because even now, in 2012, billions of people across the globe still lack access to clean drinking water and modern sanitation. Here are a few eye-opening statistics from the World Health Organization (WHO):

• 900 million people lack access to drinking-water from improved water sources (13% of the world population);
• 2.6 billion people lack access to improved sanitation facilities (37% of the world population);
• 2.2 million children die worldwide each year from unsafe water.
• Unsafe water is a major risk factor for diarrheal disease, which is the second leading contributor to the global disease burden.

Here are a couple of maps, taken directly from the U.N.’s 2010 Global Annual Assessment of Sanitation and Drinking-Water (GLAAS) report that illustrate the current safe water crisis (click on them to enlarge):

The top map shows the state of improved sanitation. The pink colored countries are where less than 50% of the population has access to improved sanitation; the light green colored countries are where less than 75% of the population has access to improved sanitation. The first category includes the great majority of sub-Saharan Africa as well as south Asia. The second category includes China, the world’s most populous nation. Less than 90% of the populations of Brazil, Russia, Argentina, and Mexico have access to improved sanitation.

The bottom map shows the state of improved drinking water. The pink colored countries are where less than 50% of the population has access to improved drinking-water; the light blue colored countries are where less than 75% have access; and the medium blue colored countries are where less than 90% have access. The first and second categories include the great majority of sub-Saharan Africa. The third category includes India and China, the world’s two most populous nations. Not surprisingly, all of these nations, including India and China, fare very poorly in the U.N.’s Human Development Index, which attempts to quantify overall quality of life by country [3]. This is hardly surprising; it’s difficult to imagine human development being high where safe water is a luxury.

Prometheus and the Alien Saga

by Conroy

This past weekend there was quite a bit of buzz emanating from the WonderCon [1] convention in Anaheim as revered director Ridley Scott revealed more details about his upcoming movie Prometheus. There have been rumors for years that Scott was working on a “prequel” to his landmark 1979 movie Alien, a much-loved, critically-hailed, and very influential film. But Scott and his creative partners have been rather coy about their plans to revisit the Alien “universe”, and so fans were left to wonder whether Prometheus would be a true prequel or only tangentially related to the original. The jury, even after WonderCon, is still out. Scott indicated that Prometheus is definitely related to Alien (“in the same universe”) but it asks different questions and focuses on new themes. At the same time he debuted the film’s trailer [2], which allowed audiences their first glimpse at the actual film. I’ll leave it to others to dissect what can be learned from the two-minute trailer, but suffice it to say it does appear to be both related to and different from the original movie.

I’m a huge fan of both Alien and its first sequel Aliens (more on this below), so Prometheus fills me both with excitement and hesitation. On the one hand, we have an accomplished director revisiting a universe he shaped with the promise of answering questions that have been asked by fans for the past 33 years, along with adding to the mythology of a celebrated movie franchise. This has been done successfully, consider how Francis Ford Coppola expertly fleshed-out the rise of Vito Corleone in The Godfather, Part II. On the other hand, we may get a movie that tacks on a backstory that detracts from the original. Just look at the execrable Star Wars prequels to see how wrong revisiting earlier movies can go.

Still, Prometheus can’t help but kindle anticipation because even a generation later, the first two Alien movies remain deeply compelling. Not only have they been influential, but they stand out for their intelligence and fundamentally as excellent examples of filmmaking craft. They’re great movies.

The Alien Saga
I’ll assume that if you’ve read this far you’re at least somewhat familiar with the Alien movie franchise. But here’s an overview. As noted, Alien was released in 1979, the sequel Aliens, directed by James Cameron, was released in 1986. Alien 3 [3] came out in 1992, and was followed by Alien Resurrection in 1997. There are also two crossover movies, Alien vs. Predator (2004) and Alien vs. Predator: Requiem (2007). These last two don’t exist in the same movie universe as the first four. [4]

Alien is set sometime in the future in deep space. The crew of the commercial spacecraft Nostromo is awakened prematurely from suspended animation during their return voyage to Earth to investigate a signal from a nearby moon. There they find a derelict spacecraft and a cargo hold full of live pods, or eggs. One crew member is attacked and incapacitated by an alien parasite. Later, back on their return voyage and after the parasite dies, the crew member, Kane, appears to have recovered. However, he is soon violently killed as an organism bursts from his chest. The creature escapes, grows rapidly, and kills other members of the crew. Finally, as the survivors become more desperate it is revealed that Ash, the science officer, is in fact an android and has been ordered to ensure the survival of the alien for the profit of “the company” (the ship’s owners), Ripley (Weaver) leads the remaining crew in abandoning the ship. However she’s the only one who makes it off the ship alive, and is forced to confront the alien a final time as it has taken surreptitious refuge in the escape shuttle.

This is a horror movie with sci-fi trappings; a monster movie on a spaceship. But it’s executed masterfully: from its measured pacing; setting in space on a large ship full of dark corridors and cavernous mechanical spaces, a murky planet, and a mysterious alien craft; the juxtaposition of light and shadow; a great cast [5] and the let’s-just-get-the-job-done-so-we-can-go-home attitude of their characters; and its hostile and half-seen alien whose lifecycle is truly terrifying. It is without doubt one of the best horror movies ever made.

Aliens is set 57 years after the first movie. By fortune Ripley is rescued after having having passed the decades in suspended animation. She learns that LV-426, the moon from the first film, is now in the process of being terra-formed. Not long after her awakening, contact with the terra-forming colony is lost and a rescue mission, led by colonial marines and including Ripley is dispatched. Once on the moon they find the colony abandoned. The marines are routed by a horde of aliens. Eventually Ripley, again left nearly alone, confronts an alien “queen”. This is an action movie with sci-fi and horror trappings. The sequel uses the first movies visual style and measured pacing. The cast is again superb [6] (Sigourney Weaver was nominated for Best Actress for her role). The change from one hidden alien to many quick-moving, visceral aliens is a great contrast to the first movie, as is altering the basic structure from horror to action. Indeed, Aliens is one of the best action movies ever made.

Here are some details that illustrate why these movies are so good:

"Bus Good, Train Bad"

by Conroy

Rendering of a "future" high-speed rail train in California

Sometimes exciting ideas are bad. Take the title quote, which I read in a recent Bloomberg article by Edward Glaeser the accomplished Harvard economist [1]. These four words, according to Glaeser, sum up the accepted wisdom gleaned from 40 years of transportation economics at Harvard. And they are directly at odds with one of the long-held – and long out-of-reach – goals of many American transportation planners: true high-speed rail (HSR in planning and transit lingo).

High Speed Rail in America
For many decades (if not longer) there has been a desire among transit advocates to connect America’s cities with a web of efficient, clean, fast trains. This transit mode would act as an environmentally friendly alternative to the automobiles that crowd urban highways and dirty the air, and to expensive, polluting planes. Advocates point to the successful HSR systems in Western Europe and Japan [2] and models for a future American system. Indeed, HSR does offer advantages over other transportation modes, but only under the right conditions. Those conditions include densely populated areas along the train route, relatively underdeveloped highway infrastructure, high gas prices, existing heavy passenger rail use, and relatively short distances. These conditions are needed because HSR becomes economically feasible when ridership is high. And ridership will only be high if it’s more cost effective for people to use HSR than it is to use other modes, or borrowing terms from economics, if the combination of cost (the price of a ticket) and duration (the time the trip takes) are lower than competing modes (road and air).

In Japan, where there are 65 million people living tightly along the 250 mile corridor between Tokyo and Osaka, HSR is an ideal solution. Similarly, the densely packed corridor in France between Paris and Lyon is a prime location. In Japan and France gas prices and population densities are high, intercity freeways are less extensive, and major urban areas are closely spaced. And even in these locations, HSR like other transit modes isn’t self-supporting. It requires government investment to fund the capital expense and support the high operating costs [3]. This investment is justified because of the high value of time saved by moving so many riders.

If you look at the United States, the conditions for HSR are far less favorable. Gas is cheap [4], the interstate highway system is vast, and excepting the Northeast Corridor between Washington and Boston [5], population centers are widely spaced across the continent. Today, on a national level, only about one half of one percent of passenger trips are made by train of any sort and just one tenth of one percent are taken on intercity rail. The Northeast Corridor is the most heavily used intercity passenger train route, but Amtrak’s semi-high-speed Acela train [6] deployed on that route only accounts for about three million trips annually. A number dwarfed by automobile trips on Interstate 95, the parallel freeway.

Despite these realities, the political support for HSR has grown in recent years. In 2009, as part of the much-touted, mid-recession American Reinvestment and Recovery Act, Congress included, at the President’s urging, $8 billion for intercity rail, with an emphasis on HSR. Since then the Federal Railroad Administration and many state-level transportation agencies have been studying potential routes all over the country. The furthest down the track in these efforts is California, which rather fancifully expects to start the building an HSR line later this year. Unfortunately for HSR advocates, numerous studies (prominent examples here and here) have demonstrated the massive flaws in California’s plan. Given the huge costs and time to develop HSR, and that funding and grass roots support is largely absent, HSR is likely to go nowhere in California or anywhere else (with the lone potential exception of the Northeast Corridor).

Baltimore on Screen

by Conroy

This week Grantland.com, ESPN’s self-styled “sports and pop-culture” offshoot, is hosting Smacketology [1] an interactive March-madness-style tournament where readers vote on matchups of 32 of the most memorable characters from the acclaimed HBO series The Wire. This tournament exists, I suppose, as a pop-culture anticipation of the upcoming NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament [2], but also because so many of the Grantland senior staff are semi-obsessed with the show, which to be fair, does boast an undeniably impressive roster of realistic, interesting characters. Why else invent this completely meaningless tournament based on a show that’s been off the air for several years?

Of course, just because it’s meaningless doesn’t mean people don’t have strong opinions. From who will prevail (the odds-on favorite [3] is Omar, the homosexual street vigilante), to who was “snubbed” (no Ellis Carver or Rhonda Pearlman?!), to how each character was seeded (Jimmy McNulty is just a “3” seed?). For me, this tournament is nothing more than a curiosity, but I do have one beef. It seems that the tournament committee (or whoever at Grantland put this thing together) made one massive, unforgivable omission, the biggest character of all, the show’s beating heart, the city of Baltimore.

Place as Character
And that leads me to two separate but related thoughts. First, the idea of place, of setting, as a principal character. The Baltimore shown in The Wire is as inseparable from the show as the main criminals and cops. We see the decaying underbelly of the city. The characters inhabit it; they create and are the products of its devitalized social milieu. Dirty streets, boarded-up houses, depressed stores, corners surrendered to thugs and drug dealers. We see the violence that rots the city’s poor (and largely black) neighborhoods. We see the effects of the corruption and bureaucratic malaise, the numbing inertia of large institutions that are incapable of arresting the long social and economic decline of huge parts of the city. This may all seem rather bleak, but the show is vibrant because of its universe of characters and because all those characters lived in a “real” place. A great deal of the show takes place outside, on the city streets, at the port, on rooftops, at neighborhood bars and parks. If the city plays a central role it’s because the show was almost entirely shot on location [4]. David Simon, a former Baltimore Sun writer and the show’s creator, knows Baltimore and its criminal street scene intimately. That realism is transferred to the screen. This is only one view of Baltimore, the saddest parts of the city, but what’s seen on the screen is more or less true.

Joyce immortalized in his Dublin

This reminds me of the way other places have been used to emphasize and enliven great art. A prime example is the Dublin of James Joyce’s stories and novels; Dublin is as much a character in Ulysses as Leopold Bloom or Stephan Dedalus. Joyce famously said, and I’m paraphrasing, that if Dublin were to vanish from the Earth he hoped it could be reconstructed brick-by-brick from the pages of his book. Just note the intricacy of how the Dubliners traverse and inhabit the city in the novel. Even if you’ve never seen Dublin, as I hadn’t when I first read the book, Joyce’s prose renders powerful images and especially powerful impressions in the mind; in the end, the story is inseparable from the place. Joyce’s stories and characters are universal, they convey the human condition, but they’re grounded in a time and place. They’re intertwined with the Dublin of the author’s youth. There are countless authors who, like Joyce, create character from setting, Faulkner’s Mississippi and Dickens’ London are a couple of prominent examples.

Jumping to a different medium, think of Martin Scorsese’s best films, they take place in New York, from Taxi Driver, to Raging Bull, and Goodfellas. And it’s not the glamorous high-rises of Wall Street or midtown Manhattan or the wealthy neighborhoods of the Upper West Side, but working-class sections of the Bronx and Queens; the rough, lonely night streets. His characters are New Yorkers. It’s hard to imagine Travis Bickle, the anonymous taxi driver, prowling the streets of any other city, and of any other city being as hostile and hard on him as 1970s New York. And as Henry Hill says in Goodfellas, “We grew up near the airport [5], it belonged to us.” Indeed the mid-level crimes and heists of Hill and his gangster friends never rise above or beyond the streets of their neighborhood.

Baltimore on Screen
But this leads me to my second thought. As effective as The Wire is in incorporating Baltimore into the story, it shows a pretty grim side of the city. My hometown appears simultaneously dysfunctional, dangerous, and genuinely soul-crushing. Realistic or not, it’s not really how I want the image of the city conveyed to the rest of the world. I admit to a certain possessiveness and defensiveness in how Baltimore is depicted in the media. I suspect this is true of a great many people who take pride in their cities but who live in places that are only sporadically shown in the mass media. Some cities are used so commonly as settings for shows, movies, novels, any fiction, that you can gain a fair appreciation for the nuances of the place: New York and Los Angeles most obviously. Other common settings include Chicago, Washington, Miami, Boston, and San Francisco. London and Paris are popular international locales.  But for cities like Baltimore, such exposure is intermittent and shows like The Wire cast an incomplete perspective.

Shifting Americans

by Conroy

Bright big Dallas

Locals say everything is bigger in Texas, and maybe no place exemplifies this boast more than Dallas – “Big D” – a booming metropolis of well over six million people spread over the flat north Texas grasslands [1]. Examples of bigness: the city is home to the world’s largest domed stadium, along with one of the biggest and busiest airports, and many of the nation’s “mega-churches”. Fulfilling its reputation, metro Dallas has grown to become America’s fourth most populous urban area [2] and the nation’s sixth largest economy. An evening drive south along I-75 towards the city (inside an air-conditioned car which repels the smothering summer heat and humidity), reveals Dallas in all its vibrancy and excess. Starting around Allen, 25 miles or so from downtown, you enter into Dallas’ suburban sprawl: shopping malls, box stores, business parks, mid-rise towers, tract housing developments, and fast food restaurants flanking both sides of the freeway; your eyes dazzled by the sea of house lights, glowing colorful business signs, the pale orange twinge of sodium-streetlights, the alternating white-red of countless vehicle head-and tail-lights. Miles and miles later you can glimpse downtown, tall chromatically lit glass towers glinting in the fading twilight. It’s all new, pretty-ugly, dynamic-gaudy, impressive-bland, a 21^st century American city.

What a contrast to the Dallas of my parents’ youth, then a quiet mid-size southern city made infamous by an assassination. Contrast the blandness of Dealey Plaza (which looks much the same as it did in 1963 [3]) with the glitzy modern hustle of the nearby downtown. Dallas is emblematic of what seems to be a continuing fact of America; it’s ever shifting, moving, resettling population. It’s a source of some amazement to me how fluid and dynamic the American people remain, after nearly two-and-a-half centuries of nationhood, in where they choose to live. I think this can be demonstrated by two graphics.

Where Americans Lived in 1950
First, a map showing the largest urban areas in 1950:

In 1950 the U.S. population was 151 million, 6 percent of the world total. Well over a third of the population (36%) lived in rural areas, and as the map above shows, big cities were few and outside of the Northeast and Midwest, widely scattered.  Just one city, New York, had more than 10 million people. Chicago, then still America’s “Second City”, was the only other city with more than 5 million people. Just five other places had more than 2 million: Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Detroit, Boston, and San Francisco. Only five others cities, St. Louis, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Washington, and Baltimore had more than 1 million. The above map shows whole swathes of the country from the South, to the Mountain West, the Pacific Northwest, and desert Southwest bereft of large cities. Miami, Atlanta, Phoenix, Seattle, Denver, and San Diego didn’t even rank. Dallas and Houston were mid-size.

Largest Urban Areas in 1950
Rank	City	Metro Population	Rank	City	Metro Population
1	New York	12,600,000	11	Washington, D.C.	1,287,000
2	Chicago	5,208,000	12	Baltimore	1,162,000
3	Los Angeles	4,250,000	13	Minneapolis	987,000
4	Philadelphia	3,297,000	14	Buffalo	895,000
5	Detroit	2,884,000	15	Dallas	855,000
6	Boston	2,301,000	16	Milwaukee	829,000
7	San Francisco	2,131,000	17	Cincinnati	813,000
8	St. Louis	1,541,000	18	Houston	701,000
9	Cleveland	1,425,000	19	Kansas City	698,000
10	Pittsburgh	1,400,000	20	New Orleans	660,000

Source: Peakbagger.com

In 1950 the most populous state was New York with a little less than 15 million people (10 percent of the nation’s total); more than double the population of Texas and five times more than Florida. Over half the American population lived in a contiguous band of 15 Midwest and Northeast states [4], which together comprise just 15 percent of the total national land area. These are the states that were (1) well-settled, they all were admitted to the Union before the Civil War, (2) were home to America’s largest industrial centers, which in 1950 accounted for nearly 30 percent of the American economy (e.g., Detroit and Pittsburgh), and (3) were not hampered by the segregationist and discriminatory policies that caused the American South to languish for more than a century after the Civil War [5].

The least populous state was Nevada with just 160,000 people, and less than 50,000 of those lived in and around the new city of Las Vegas. Keep in mind an alternative statistic, baseball in 1950, still then very much America’s most popular sport, didn’t field a Major League team west of St. Louis or south of Washington [6].

Where Americans Lived in 2010
Now, a map showing the largest urban areas in 2010 (just sixty years – less than a lifetime – later):

The first thing that strikes you about this map is the impressive proliferation in the number of large cities. In 1950 there were 12 cities with metropolitan populations of 1 million or more, in 2010 there were 51. This is the result of two trends. First, by 2010 the U.S. population had more than doubled since 1950 to 308 million (5 percent of the world total) [7]. Second, the shift from rural areas to urban areas continued and in 2010, 82% of Americans lived in urban areas. So by 2010 there were more and bigger cities.

Geographic Oddities: The Exclave

by Conroy

The Kentucky Bend

The Mississippi River flows in a meandering path across its wide, flat floodplain; appearing on the map like a slack garden hose, twisting and turning and practically looping back upon itself for the whole of its long and broad lower course below St. Louis. One the most notable bends occurs not too far south of where the Ohio River enters the main channel, and the south flow abruptly reverses and the river turns north and bends omega-like [1] in a counter-clockwise semicircle before returning to its southern course. In this location the river practically surrounds a little spread of land called the Kentucky Bend. What’s notable about this barely populated patch of fallow cotton fields is that is lies totally disconnected from the rest of the Bluegrass State. From here, a look across the Mississippi in any direction (east, north, and west) is of Missouri, and the only land access is from the south through Tennessee. The Kentucky Bend is an example of one of those geo-political oddities: the exclave [2].

There are examples of exclaves all over the world, and they tend to exist in locations where geography, history, and politics have combined to leave a portion of a state or nation where you wouldn’t expect it to be. The stories behind these exclaves are often interesting, and common sense may suggest that they not exist. Why isn’t the Kentucky Bend part of Tennessee, or even Missouri [3]?

First, what am I calling an exclave?  Definitions vary, but to me exclaves are geographic areas of one state or country that are physically separated from the bulk of their home state/country, requiring transit through (or over) another state/country, unless the separated place can be accessed via the open sea. If you can’t drive or walk or ride or fly or sail there without going through another place, it's an exclave. By this definition, Alaska isn’t an exclave of the United States. Sure it’s physically separated from the rest of the country, but planes and ships can transit between the “lower 48” and Alaska without going through Canadian territory. In the same vein, Hawaii, or any other island distant from the mainland, isn’t an exclave. 

Consider a few prominent examples (of dozens) of true exclaves from around the globe:

Straight Lines
A ninth-grade biology or Earth sciences student could tell you that nature doesn’t use straight lines; however, mankind loves them. Just compare man’s architecture to nature’s landscapes. As a consequence, our un-straight Earth, where even the flat horizon of a dead calm sea creates a circle, is divided into political units by straight lines drawn on flat maps. When this happens sometimes you end up with unexpected results. The U.S./Canadian border provides a great illustration of this point.

Point Roberts, Washington

Today it might seem strange that the rather tranquil boundary between the United States and Canada – the longest “unguarded” border in the world – was a place of longstanding and bitter dispute during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. A new and growing America vied with Britain for control of the Great Lakes, St. Lawrence River, and the vast interior west of the North American continent. These disputes were settled, peacefully for the most part, resulting in what is today the longest international land border in the world [4]. All of the disputes and agreements, treaties and tribunals decided matters on a macro scale, which produced no less than seven exclaves along the border:

• Point Roberts, Washington on the Strait of Georgia and connected by land only to British Columbia.
• Elm Point and Northwest Angle, Minnesota in the Northwest Angle of Minnesota but connected by land only to Manitoba.
• Province Point and Alburg, Vermont on Lake Champlain but connected by land only to Quebec.
• Saint Regis, Quebec on the St. Lawrence River but connected by land only to New York.
• Campobello Island, New Brunswick which is only connected to land, via a bridge, to Maine.

A glance at the map shows that these places would more logically be part of the nations that they are physically attached to. But politics and history means that will never come to pass.

Straight lines similarly separate most U.S. states and Canadian provinces, creating exclaves in both countries. A few of note:

• Knott’s Island, North Carolina which is actually connected by land to Virginia.
• Eastern Shore of Virginia which is separated from the rest of the state by the lower Chesapeake Bay and connected by land to Maryland. However, its exclave status was largely eliminated when the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel was completed in 1964, which now connects the eastern shore across the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay to Virginia Beach.
• Lost Peninsula of Michigan, which is actually connected by land only to Ohio.
• Cold Lake, Alberta where a spit of land near the town is actually connected by land only to Saskatchewan.

The March of History

Colorful West Berlin

There is more than orderly (if arbitrary) lines that create exclaves, unexpected historical developments are often a cause. Take Berlin after World War II. The city like the rest of Germany was partitioned between the Western Allies and the Soviet Union. Eventually the western controlled areas, West Berlin, emerged as a capitalist, democratic exclave surrounded by East Germany (and East Berlin). The vulnerability of this exclave was revealed when the Soviet Union, in one of the first overt acts of the Cold War, closed the land link between the city and West Germany in 1948. The city was then supported by a massive American-British airlift that lasted nine months until the Soviets reopened the ground links to the city. Later, West Berlin became a focal point for Germans fleeing the communist East. The exclave vanished in a good way when the two German nations reunified in 1990.

The Inferno of World War II

by Conroy

“War is prodigiously wasteful, because much of the effort made by rival combatants proves futile, and the price is paid in lives.”

“Among citizens of modern democracies to whom serious hardship and collective peril are unknown, the tribulations that hundreds of millions endured between 1939 and 1945 are almost beyond comprehension.”

“An average of 27,000 perished each day between September 1939 and August 1945 as a consequence of the global conflict.”

- Max Hastings, Inferno: The World at War,   1939-1945

It seems that seventy years after the events of World War II – the greatest calamity in human history – historians have gained a better understanding of the facts and effects of the conflict than anyone, be they leaders, generals, soldiers, civilians, or victims, had during the war or in the immediate post war period. Max Hastings is one of these historians and his many works on World War II stand out among the best histories of the conflict. To this list can be added his latest work, Inferno:The World at War, 1939-1945, an ambitious single-volume overview of the war.

Readers of this blog may remember an earlier post where I praised Hastings’ previous two books, Armageddon and Retribution, which respectively covered the final year of the war in Europe and the Pacific. As with those works, Hastings focus in Inferno is not on the Allied and Axis leadership, notable generals, or even the broad goals and war strategy. Instead, he provides a “bottom-up” approach that conveys the experience of war, what it was like to be a rifleman in battle, a civilian under aerial bombardment, or victim of pillage and rape (a ubiquitous civilian experience in many theaters of the war), to provide a few examples.

As Hastings notes it is impossible to present a blow-by-blow account of World War II, an immensely large and far-reaching subject, in 800-odd pages. In fact, a work ten times as long would be insufficient. Instead, he set out to provide an impression of events as they unfolded starting with the German invasion of Poland in September 1939 and ending with the Japanese surrender in Tokyo Bay six years later. He has succeeded. The quotations provided at the top of this post give a sense of the massive horror of the war, and indeed for a modern reader it’s very difficult to understand how such a large proportion of the world’s people could have endured under the stress of war for so long. No book can fully capture this reality, but Inferno does it as well as any. And it does this through largely new or never before used first-hand accounts, diaries, letters, etc. These sources add a gratifying freshness to the book.

Hastings also manages to provide some new insights that have been revealed through decades of studying World War II. There are no sacred cows in Hastings’ telling of the war and he expertly separates fact from myth and legend. This is useful and appropriate. Wars gather their own momentum and this was especially true for World War II. History (with a capital H) has largely identified the correct decisions from the terrible blunders, the necessary sacrifices from the useless wastes, the effective leaders from the incompetent, and the victims and criminals. But Hastings goes one step further, correctly assigning evil to those to which it belonged and separating it from the terrible logic of war, where horrible things happen to many people by all sides. There no moral equivocation with Hastings, only clarity.

I recommend this work highly, it presents the war as well as any single-volume history is likely to. Hastings book is both concise and comprehensive, but to better present Hastings’ mastery of the subject, I’ve provided a series of quotations and passages below that demonstrate two aspects of the book: the actual experience of the war – the bottom-up view, and the many blunders made by the Germany – the broad evolution of the War.

For me, the only real counter-factual worth pondering about World War II is this: Could Germany have won the war? That’s an important question mostly because such an outcome would have been catastrophic for most of Europe’s population and would have set subsequent history in a radically different direction (and thinking from a modern perspective, a very loathsome and bizarre direction). There is much debate about this issue, the forces arrayed against the Axis were enormously powerful, but surely the many and massive mistakes made by Germany (and Japan) contributed substantially to the Axis defeat.

Warrior Tennis

by Conroy

Djokovic and Nadal weary after nearly six hours of play

Have we seen the limit of tennis? I mean, really, can the sport get any better? Much has already been written, deservedly, about the remarkable Australian Open final, won this past Sunday [1] by Novak Djokovic over Rafael Nadal; a nearly six hour match – six hours! – of energy-sapping intensity and dramatic competitive swings. This is just the latest, perhaps the ultimate culmination, in what is surely one of the glory times for the sport. We fans must count ourselves lucky that we get to watch three of the greatest players of all time – and yes, Djokovic has now entered that discussion – battle in so many riveting matches on tennis’ biggest stages.

One startling statistic communicates the hegemony that Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal, and now Novak Djokovic have established over tennis: Since the 2005 French Open – the last seven years – they have won 27 of 28 grand slam tournaments [2]. These three have and continue to demonstrate how far the bounds of excellence can be pushed. But along with the brilliance and athleticism come the compelling narratives that leave commentators (including this writer) searching for appropriate descriptions.

Tennis is often compared to other sports. Boxing is a favorite of the TV analyst types as players are described as landing “body blows” or going for the “knockout”, or engaged in a “heavyweight struggle.” This analogy seems fitting given the lonely one-on-one nature of tennis and more so as the sport has gotten more physical. Tennis is also compared to a mental struggle, a kind of hyper-kinetic chess, or as an ultimate test of men, a gladiator’s duel. Loftier still are comparisons of today’s top players to Greek mythical heroes, meeting in dramatic epical battles [3]. The fact that tennis matches are commonly compared to wars and battles [4] is a further expression of this perception. There may be hints of truth in these comparisons, but I think they miss something essential, something that can only be understood by examining the dominance and defeat of each man.

The Rise of Roger Federer

There will never be a perfect player, but by the end of 2003 the 22-year-old Roger Federer had become what many believed to be the next closest thing. Watching Federer in his prime, as David Foster Wallace famously wrote [5], was a religious experience. He was at once fast, graceful, and powerful. But these words don’t do him justice. He was more like the full embodiment of speed and grace and power. His shot-making was beautiful and brutally effective. His intelligence was obvious from how he constructed points, to the shots he chose to play, to his uncanny ability to anticipate and read opponents. He was a virtuoso; he owned every shot in the book and used them in ways no one had seen before. I’ll give you one of my favorite examples from the middle of the tense fifth set of the 2007 Wimbledon Final against Nadal.

Federer leads three games to two and is ahead in Nadal’s service game 0-15. Nadal, a lefty, hits a serve to Federer’s backhand, like he almost always does in the ad (left side) court, and Federer slices a short return into the middle of the court, forcing Nadal to come into the net. Nadal hits a forehand with heavy topspin deep into Federer’s backhand corner and follows this shot even closer to the net. Federer flicks a backhand to Nadal’s backhand side but above the Spaniard’s head. Nadal hits the only real shot available, a backhand crosscourt volley, and it’s good, bouncing low. But Federer has anticipated the shot and sprints along his baseline picking up the low ball and beating Nadal with a perfectly measured forehand pass. Now it’s 0-30 and Nadal again hits a serve to Federer’s backhand, up the “T” (middle) in the deuce (right side) court. Federer hits a neutral backhand return back down the center of the court to Nadal, who then hits a hard forehand to Federer’s forehand side. Nadal is anticipating a crosscourt forehand and has moved a couple of steps to his right. But instead Federer drills a deep, heavily top-spinned forehand into Nadal’s forehand corner. The ball is so well struck and such a surprise that even at a full gallop and stretch Nadal can’t reach it and it goes past him for another winner. Two points later and it’s 15-40. Nadal hits a body serve that Federer fights off with a floating forehand to Nadal’s backhand side. Nadal backs-up and hits a hard forehand deep the Federer’s backhand. Federer hits a hard backhand right back to Nadal who hits a backhand down the left (his right) sideline. Federer quickly scampers to the ball and hits a lofted backhand back toward Nadal but deep, just inside Nadal’s baseline. Nadal is forced to retreat and hits a neutral forehand to Federer’s forehand, where Federer, still on his backhand side of the court, hits a hard forehand near the left (Nadal’s right) sideline. This shot foreces Nadal to hit a crosscourt backhand which Federer anticipates and moves quickly to his right across to the deuce side of the court, easily tracking it down and responding with a crosscourt forehand. Nadal hits a hard backhand into the center of the court that Federer counters with a hard low slice backhand that barely clears the net and forces Nadal to scramble just to get to the ball. He’s forced to hit a short crosscourt forehand. Federer literally skips to his left and near his left sideline strikes a gorgeous forehand smack onto the left sideline past Nadal for a winner and the decisive break. These few critical points show Federer’s variety, intelligence, and wicked shot-making.

I can go on and on lauding his, well, magnificence, but seeing the real thing is better than reading about it, so check out these highlights. His game had (and still has) a genius, an originality and style and potency that can make you shout out loud in amazement while watching alone from your living room. I’ve noted his feats in previous posts, but from the end of 2003 through the end of 2007 he won 11 grand slams (of 16 played), won over 93% of his matches, and beat the other top players not named Nadal like a drum going 69-2 against Top 10 opponents – all feats unparalleled in tennis history. But if Federer was a tennis Superman there was definitely a kryptonite.

The Rise of Rafael Nadal
Federer made an interesting comment during the on-court interview following his 2007 Wimbledon win, stating that he was glad he won this match before Nadal won them all. In the moment it was probably intended as a compliment and as admittance that the match was a close-run thing. Indeed it was, and Federer’s remarks proved prescient, he hasn’t beaten Nadal in a grand slam match since (0-5).

Not long after Federer began dominating tennis there came the meteoric rise of Rafael Nadal, a tennis phenom. Here was the rare player who rose to the upper echelon of the game as a teenager, winning his first grand slam, the 2005 French Open, just after his 19^th birthday; the first teen to do so since a 19-year-old Pete Sampras won the 1990 U.S. Open. His game was distinguished by its pure physicality. Nadal was blurry fast, he could run forever without tiring, his forehand was hit with tremendous power and an unprecedented amount of topspin. He was also metronomic-ally consistent hitting that forehand, and his strong two-handed backhand, shot after shot until, seemingly inevitably, his opponents made an error or grew impatient and forced (and missed) a risky shot. Add to that an unmatched competitive focus and determination – Nadal never takes a point off and never puts less than full effort into every exchange. This combination of skills and focus made him virtually unbeatable on clay where he set a never-to-be-beaten record of 81 consecutive match wins between 2005 and 2007. He beat Roger Federer in the French Open each year from 2005 through 2008, the last three in the final. The 2006 and 2007 final loses were Federer’s only defeats at a grand slam in those years. Why did Nadal give Federer, the perfect player, such trouble?