Firro is Done! Hallelujah!

The event is not as exciting as if it were, say, raining men, but with due apologies to the Weather Girls, hallelujah, nonetheless!

That last chapter was brutal. Firro’s fatal weakness is that he really isn’t capable of writing the thesis statements and plans of attack that good writing needs to have if a reader is to keep up with a complex argument. Coupled with his assumption that his reader basically knows the history and he can spend most of his time interpreting it, the text is very difficult to follow. As Zamir’s Quest book runs out just before the fall of France, 1940-1946 on my existing timeline pretty much relied solely on Zisser. Zisser, while fairly comprehensible, is not a detailed chronologist. So unlike the other chapters I’ve timelined out of Firro, I didn’t really have a good chronology onto which I could graft Firro’s material in this last chapter. It was quite painful. I may have to go back to Firro after reading the Gaunson book, just to see if I missed anything useful.

But first, I need to read the first Zamir book. I have large parts of it already in the timeline, but because I wanted to “just bang the paper out” back in 2004, I did triage reading and timelining to fill in the blanks. But Zamir shows himself to be the most reliable chronologist in the bunch. I figure I should use him as a foundation. So to Zamir I go. I’d show you the picture of the cover, but the library copy doesn’t come with the cover and I can’t find a picture on the internet. It is mercifully slimmer than the second Zamir book. Sadly, though, as I explained earlier, it has Firro’s irritating habit of not translating French quotations. Yippee.