In the Daily Beat’s list of favorite books of 2011, Liesl Schillinger writes, “I read with fascination Conscience, Louisa Thomas’s thoughtful, elegant début.” She also gives attention where attention is due: to the bits about the womenfolk!

I was also totally honored to be among some great books on the Quarterly Journal of Military History’s best Books of 2011. As Geoff Dyer says, “The next stage along that path is that you only read military history.” I’m not sure what the first stage is.

Speaking of Geoff Dyer–and the Daily Beast–I had a wonderful time writing this piece about Dyer’s own World War I book, The Missing of the Somme.

In announcing its picks for best books of 2011, the San Francisco Chronicle noted that one of the pleasures of compiling such lists were in noting the surprises–for example, what a good year it was for books about World War I, highlighting Conscience along with a few others (including Dyer’s). Conscience also made its recommended list.

A new year in a few days–and new projects ahead.

The last of Jen Saura’s series.

Jennifer Saura’s second installment of her World War I cartoon series of Man and Dog.

This week, the New Yorker publishes its annual Cartoon Issue. The cartoon editor at the New York is Bob Mankoff, otherwise known as king of the jump shot. But it turns out that the brains, not to mention the humours, of the operation is Bob’s assistant, Jennifer Saura.

I learned a few things during my years at the New Yorker, and one of them is that a great deal of thought goes into dog cartoons. David Remnick really knows a lot about talking dogs. So I was honored when Jen did a series of World War I cartoons for Miscellany of a soldier and his dog. And gas masks! (You’ll have noticed that I have a peculiar fascination with gas masks.) I’ll be posting one a day for the rest of the week.

When I saw that Adam Hochschild had a new book out the month before mine, I was thrilled. When I saw that it was called To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918, I was thrilled and suddenly nervous, ever the neurotic author. And then I read it, and I was really thrilled–because it’s a terrific story, deftly and movingly told, and also because, although the book is focuses on British COs, it intersects in surprising ways with the story of the Thomas brothers. I read about the Socialist Keir Hardie and thought of Norman Thomas listening to him speak on his swing through New York, skeptically but curiously… I read about Bertrand Russell and the Hobhouses and pictured Evan Thomas and Harold Gray reading I Appeal Unto Caesar aloud to each other in their small room in London and deciding to return to the US and become conscientious objectors…

So I was very happy to be reviewed (and nicely!) with Hochschild’s book in the San Francisco Chronicle this week.

The book also received a wonderfully written and perceptive review from Joanna Scutts in Open Letters Monthly, which calls Conscience “a gripping hybrid of the personal and the political.”

Another model of gas mask–more beaver than praying mantis, don’t you think?

In a typically terrific post, the New Yorker’s Amy Davidson calls attention to a discrepancy between the book “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows” and the movie (Part 2, which I loved): in the movie, in the scene in the main hall at Hogwarts, just before the battle begins, the kids who don’t want to fight are sent to the dungeon. In the book, they’re giving the choice. “It’s not said exactly why the children who left in the book did so; given the situation, some may have hated Harry, and more hated the idea of being hurt or dying, or thought that there might be a better plan,” writes Davidson. “But without at least the possibility of conscientious objectors, it becomes harder to credit conscience.” And then she kindly refers the reader to my book. So yes, I’m biased in thinking Amy’s right–but I think she’s right.

It would seem strange that abstaining from what is so clearly presented as a justified and righteous fight could possibly be considered an act of “conscience,” which is probably why the director sent the kids who wouldn’t figh’t to the jail. (Directors are the ultimate superego.) But one of reasons conscientious objection is meaningful is that it calls attention to the fact that fighting, not only resistance, is a choice.

And, anyway, as Harry himself shows, there is another way–first, when he goes out to meet Voldermort alone in the woods, and then at the end when he holds the all-powerful elderwand on the bridge. Ron asks, excitedly, what they’ll do with it. Harry might have answered that they’ll stop hunger, or give Ginny’s love a little nudge, or whatever. But instead he breaks the wand and tosses the pieces away.

(Okay, now I’m a little embarrassed.)

Things I’ve just learned: the Marquis de Sade played an important role in Bastille Day. Also, it’s not Bastille Day.

But, first, the Marquis. Apparently, the Marquis de Sade was one of eight prisoners in the Bastille in early July of 1789. (He had been imprisoned several times before but was currently behind bars due to his mother-in-law, who was furious that he had seduced his sister-in-law.) From the Writer’s Almanac:

The Marquis was annoyed because the threat of revolution meant  that he was not allowed to walk freely along the ramparts of the Bastille. So  he converted his urine funnel into a megaphone and shouted provoking statements  through the windows of his cell — he claimed that his fellow  prisoners were being brutally massacred, and called on the people to come  rescue them. He made it all up, but he riled up the crowd and made the guards  nervous, so on July 4th they had him transferred to an insane  asylum. Ten days later, hundreds of revolutionaries stormed the Bastille. The  seven remaining prisoners were freed, and Governor de Launy, who was in charge  of the prison, was murdered and his head was paraded around Paris on a pike.

In fairness, I go a little insane when I’m deprived of my daily constitutional too.

Anyway, just when I was delighting over the absurdity of France’s national holiday, when I read (via Reihan) that France’s holiday is not actually that absurd. According to the Business Insider (Europe), “The National Holiday celebrates the Fête de la Fédération, which occured on July 14th 1790.” The article’s author sounded pretty irritated by the common error. “It’s like if we French people referred to your Independence Day as “Constitution Day” or “Football Day.” It’s not! It’s Independence Day!” Fair enough. But Independence Day is also the fourth of July.

(Miscellany’s first hint of color! Exciting.) A couple of years ago, I wrote about my friend David Mahfouda’s giant flag, and about his civic project. Maybe it’s not on point–but I think it is. (One of the casualties of the Newsweek/Daily Beast merge was the photographs–a real loss! They’re wonderful. One is above.) I end the piece by talking about carrying the flag from my grandfather’s landing craft at D Day. I seem to be writing about my grandfather a lot lately.

Bastille Day–I mean the Fête de la Fédération–was also my grandfather’s birthday.

For Violet and Norman and their kids, during the 1910′s summer meant Ridgefield. I wrote a piece about their love of the Connecticut town in the Ridgefield Press (whose editor, Jack Sanders, was a great help in running down–and finding–photos while I was researching the book). Soon after Tommy (pictured below) died, at the age of 9, they stopped going. Instead they went to Cold Spring Harbor, in Long Island, where the civil rights-activist Norman liked to take a dip at the Cold Spring Harbor Beach Club, which was not exactly a hotspot for Reds. (Members included John Foster Dulles, Col. Henry Stimson, Arthur Ballantine, etc.) It’s troubling that the civil rights activist liked to retire to his then-segregated club–but I’ll have to say here how much I loved going there every summer when I was growing up. It was a rinky-dink place–no beach, actually, just a concrete fenced in changing area and a pool, a few tennis courts, a clubhouse with a ping pong and a deck where we ate cheeseburgers and mint chocolate chip ice cream in between swim team practice, tennis, and bombing around in our little optimists. But I thought it was pretty much the most perfect place in the world. I miss it.

Tommy in Ridgefield

I was thrilled that the good people at the New York Times Book Review chose to use the picture of Norman and Billy to accompany Alan Riding’s review of Conscience in the July 3 issue. It’s one of my favorite pictures. In fact, I keep it on my desk, along with a little reproduction of Alice Neel’s painting “Hartley” torn out of the London Review of Books; a postcard of William Adolphe Bouguereau’s A Young Girl Defending Herself against Eros; and a picture of a road disappearing into the woods in Wicklow, Ireland (the tiny figure of the girl striding into the dark is my friend Colby Hall. The image gives me courage!). But back to the picture of Norman and Billy. It was taken at their house in Ridgefield, Connecticut, which was a haven to them. From the angle of the shot–and the way Billy reaches toward the photographer–it seems likely that Violet, Norman’s wife, took the picture. This was before the war broke out in Europe. Norman called it a time of bliss. From his smile, it seems it was.

- Gay Talese ate–I mean read–Conscience as part of his Media Diet on the Atlantic Wire. He thought it was “excellent”! We here at louisathomas.com think Gay Talese is excellent. Most heartily we recommend his Silent Season of a Hero and, of course, Frank Sinatra Has a Cold, along with many others.

- The New Yorker takes note of Conscience this week. “Louisa Thomas examines how the question of conscience guided America’s thinking about war and dissent in the first decades of the twentieth century, in an intimate history of her great-grandfather the Socialist leader and pacifist Norman Thomas and of his three brothers (of whom two were soldiers and one a conscientious objector).” (I should here disclose that years ago I worked at the New Yorker.)

- And the tennis goes on! In Grantland, my new piece on Wimbledon (and Woodrow Wilson, while we’re at it):

- Barnes and Noble, which already named Conscience as a Best Book of the Month, has put it on the Long List in the Barnes and Noble Review.

In honor of The Championships, I give you Rafa and Roger, being silly. (Also, our first motion picture here on Miscellany!) Notice that Nadal still has his fingers taped.