Weekend Beacon 8/31/25

August 30 - 31, 2025

This Tuesday marks the 80th anniversary of Japan's formal surrender to the Allies aboard the USS Missouri, officially bringing to an end the world's bloodiest conflict. The Weekend Beacon commemorates this occasion with two reviews by the historian Paul Kennedy: Scorched Earth: A Global History of World War II by Paul Thomas Chamberlin and Victory '45: The End of the War in Eight Surrenders by James Holland and Al Murray.

"Is there a single volume that could possibly encompass all that the Second World War was, and meant? Surely not. And yet, from one generation to the next, scholars have striven to produce such a work, although even the best of them inevitably falls short in one regard or the other, revealing as they do the historiographical approaches of their era. For example, when (almost 60 years ago) this reviewer was assisting the great military historian Sir Basil Liddell Hart in the completion of his History of the Second World War (1970), the approach of that work and so many like it was usually rather narrow, concerned with military operations and campaigns. ... There were few studies in it upon the social history of the war; labor and the war; wartime economics and technology; propaganda and morale; the war and Western imperialism—all of that was to come.

"There were also very few comparative histories, if any at all. And while there were 15 volumes on the U.S. Navy in World War II, there was hardly anything on the greatest and bloodiest fighting of all—that between Nazi Germany and the USSR along the gigantic Eastern Front. If much had already been written, it was overwhelmingly an Anglo-American operational account of the war, and there was a great deal that was missing."

"It is rather wonderful to report, therefore, how well the Columbia University historian Paul Chamberlin has stepped up to the task. Scorched Earth is a heavyweight book in all regards, with over 570 pages of densely packed text plus 60 pages of detailed endnotes, and in consequence it really does live up to its claim to be 'A Global History of World War II.' ... It is admirable that he begins the story of these Great-Power struggles in East Asia, and in 1937—that is, with the Japanese aggressions against China following the obscure Marco Polo Bridge incident. Thus, his account of the onset of the war in Europe, with the German Army's attack upon Poland in September 1939, does not start until page 101. Chamberlin's endpiece, a summary of what the war meant for a vastly altered world, is a lot briefer, but the various parts of it are clear; Europe's place at the center of affairs is gone, the two very egoistic superpowers are jostling for advantage, and even the victorious British Empire is in fast decline. Stalin had once claimed that victory in war (and everything else) went to the powers with the big battalions. Here, in 1945, was the ocular proof."

"Victory '45 is a nice and rather breezy text of the sort favored in particular by American popular military history writers (e.g., 'It was a stunning May afternoon when [U.S. Army lieutenant] Pratt and his men wound their way up the road from Berchtesgaden towards the Obersalzburg. "We rounded a bend," noted Pratt, "and there before us in a broad opening lay the ruins of what had once been Hitler's house and the SS barracks."'). The book uses a great deal of memoir literature, which in this case works very well, ... History buffs will surely find Victory '45 a pleasant, easy-going contribution to their late-summer reading. In Scorched Earth they will find something else: an important and massive work (in word size it's almost three times as big) that is much, much more than a military history. Chamberlin's book joins an already considerable list of attempts at producing a single-volume study of the Second World War. In this reviewer's opinion, it lays claim to being among the very best."

From global strife to civil strife, David J. Garrow returns to the Weekend Beacon with a review of Summer of Our Discontent: The Age of Certainty and the Demise of Discourse by Thomas Chatterton Williams.

"Summer of Our Discontent is, in different passages, both deeply optimistic and despairingly pessimistic about the near-term American future. Williams notes that 2024 'was the least racially polarized election since 1972' and writes that an 'authentically color-blind society is the final destination every Western society must assiduously direct itself toward.' He believes that 'free speech is the bedrock for all subsequent rights and assurances' and calls for us to 'honor and engage with people as individuals.'

"Williams mourns how 'the short-lived color blind vision of the civil rights movement has … given way to an identity politics of irreconcilable group differences' that 'obliterates every marker of individuality.' Summer ponders at some length how the gleaming promise so readily visible in the winter of 2008–09 dissipated first so quickly and then so totally. 'How difficult it is even to recall,' Williams writes, 'that more innocent and in retrospective frightfully naïve moment in American … culture, when the ascent and election of Barack Hussein Obama to the U.S. presidency momentarily seemed to herald … the dawn of a whole new so-called post-racial, genuinely progressive epoch of multiethnic social harmony.'"

"Williams is dismayed and puzzled by why in more recent years 'discontent has exploded even as life in the United States in real terms has never been better—or fairer—for black people.' Today's United States, he writes, is 'a society that is frankly more democratic, multiethnic, and egalitarian than any other in recorded history.' The answer, Williams rightly recognizes, lies in the tradition of what we might best call 'Afro-pessimism,' which in its modern garb reaches back to the latter-life writings of law professor Derrick Bell, who insisted in a 1992 book that 'racism is not a passing phase' but instead is a permanent and ineradicable feature of American life. That's 'a worldview devoid of belief in the possibility of meaningful or transformative progress,' Williams writes, but in recent years it's been widely publicized by a small coterie of authors both white and black."

It wouldn't be a Labor Day Weekend Beacon without a book on hard-working Americans: Kevin Kosar reviews Mailman: My Wild Ride Delivering the Mail in Appalachia and Finally Finding Home by Stephen Starring Grant.

"Being a rural letter carrier was a far cry from cranking out PowerPoints and pitches for a bleeding-edge advertising agency and equity holding company.

"His first day of work was at the Roanoke Processing and Distribution Center, a windowless hulk of a building where smokers huddled outside the front door. The entryway had a formica floor, and a sign read, 'Why come to work? Numerous studies have shown personal and financial benefits to those who show up to work.' It might as well have read, 'Abandon hope all ye who enter.'

"Grant was shown a cheesy film that discouraged him and other newbie letter carriers from becoming mules for drug dealers. USPS instructors relentlessly warned him that the postal police will be watching him to ensure he does not steal anyone’s mail."

"Grant spent hours learning to case the mail—sort it by address into trays to enable prompt delivery as he rolled by mailboxes. But the training and skills-testing little prepared him for the realities of the job: driving on the right-hand side in a left-hand drive vehicle, enduring 100 degree heat, getting a mail truck out of an icy ditch, driving across a flooded creek bed, discerning whether a mailbox contained a black widow spider or hornets, or averting dog attacks.

"Nor was Grant well prepared for dealing with the people whose mail he delivered. Grant inevitably was the new guy on a mail route, a substitute for the regular letter carrier. Residents of remote areas could be armed and suspicious. Other individuals were just nuts, like the plump woman who hollered, 'YOU AREN’T A REAL MAILMAN! I CAN SEE YOU!' before chasing his truck."

Hollywood has been chasing after teenage audiences longer than you think. Sonny Bunch explains in his review of Bruce Handy's Hollywood High: A Totally Epic, Way Opinionated History of Teen Movies.

"In his new book, Hollywood High: A Totally Epic, Way Opinionated History of Teen Movies, Bruce Handy highlights Pauline Kael’s pan of American Graffiti, one of the few critical voices to stand athwart the tide of teen movies yelling, 'Grow up, dinguses!'

"'I think she diagnosed something real,' Handy allows. 'But my hunch is that what she found so rankling was less the picture itself than the naïve seriousness of teenagers themselves, the narcissism of adolescence, the mythologizing that goes on inside the closed circuits of modern high schools.' Born in 1919, Kael had missed the rise of the teenager as a cultural force in America—the Boomer cohort of which comprised a consumer class nonpareil—and was forced to watch with bafflement from the outside as we were all supposed to take seriously folks whose biggest problems were cars and girls.

"Handy’s book is a capable pop history, guiding us from early iterations of the teen movies brought to life by Mickey Rooney as Andy Hardy in the late 1930s, to the modern action heroine embodied by Katniss Everdeen in The Hunger Games and its sequels, and the modern symbol of chaste sexuality represented by Edward Cullen and Bella Swan in the Twilight series. In between, there would be movies both silly (like the beach pictures of Frankie and Annette) and self-serious (best represented by Rebel Without a Cause), but they all represented something real: the cohort’s power of the purse."

Happy Labor Day!
Vic Matus
Arts & Culture Editor
Washington Free Beacon