Multivolume History: My Least Favorite Among My Favorites

Today’s book review will be a little different as I won’t be talking about a single book, but rather a single type of book. Readers of this blog know that I have a soft spot for the biography and history genre, as well as other types of non-fiction. I had teachers who treated history like it was the world’s greatest story (which by the way it is). For another thing, today’s media and technological environment make it easy to trick yourself into believing you live in an era with no precedent. I don’t buy this narrative because history books constantly show the many ways in which life was similar and way worse back in the day.

That being said, just because I’m a loud advocate for history books doesn’t mean I don’t have some reservations about the genre. In my opinion, being a good cheerleader for something also means knowing when to not cheer for it.

So when do I not put on a skimpy skirt to wave pompoms for history books?

The answer is when I’m reading a very particular genre of history book: multi-volume works to be exact.

The Farcical Tragedy of William Manchester: Why Multi-Volume (Usually) Does Not Work

Multi-volume history books offend me across the board, but the wellspring of offense always goes back to the same tap root: the multi-volume books are not worth my time, the writer’s time or the talent expended to produce them. The most egregious example of a multi-volume book committing all three sins—wasting the reader’s time, wasting the writer’s time, and depriving the world of artistic talent— is William Manchester’s trilogy about Winston Churchill.

William Manchester and I aren’t on good terms because I felt he did a bad job with his single volume biography of Douglas MacArthur, but his Churchill trilogy is dubiously special.

For those unfamiliar, William Manchester was a writer who served on Okinawa in 1945 and became an acclaimed journalist and author after the war. In the early 1980s, he embarked on what ultimately became his swan song, The Last Lion. Three whole volumes of Winston Churchill’s life would be painstakingly covered by a writer with immense experience in the field. The Last Lion volume 1 covered the years 1874-1932, ran well over 900 pages, and was published in 1983. The Last Lion volume 2, covering 1932-1940 and running 760 pages, was published in 1988.

But volume 3, which would have covered the rest of Churchill’s life (including the all-important wartime premiership years of 1940-1945), never materialized. Sometime in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Manchester developed writer’s block and froze up. By the late ‘90s and early 2000s, his publisher suggested bringing on a second writer to help finish the project. This was not mere mental prodding; Manchester suffered a series of strokes in 1998 which crippled his health. A second writer was absolutely necessary, but according to a New York Times Magazine article about the publication of the third volume, “Many historians volunteered, but Manchester was adamantly opposed to hiring a professional historian. He wanted ‘a writer.’“

The ‘writer’ Manchester brought on was Paul Reid, a friend and features columnist for a local Florida newspaper. There was just one problem: Paul Reid had never written a book before, never mind a biography of the 20th century’s most important statesman. Manchester died in 2004, and Paul Reid found himself way in over his head. One revealing paragraph from the aforementioned article tells the whole story:

“Manchester’s ‘clumps’ [research notes] were, in fact, so idiosyncratic that Reid found them more confusing than edifying. Had Manchester been able to work as he did on the first volume, Reid says, ‘he could have finished the book in a couple of years, but I couldn’t use a lot of what would have worked for him.’ It would take Reid two years before he could fully decipher Manchester’s coding system. Frustrated, Reid began his own studies of Churchill and the war.“

To actually finish the work, Reid’s editor threw him into what amounted to a biography writing bootcamp. So ‘Volume 3’ of Manchester’s trilogy, finally released in 2012 and running an unbelievable 1200+ pages, is essentially another writer’s Churchill biography with Manchester’s name glued on at the end.

And do you know what the ultimate tragedy is? Over the course of the 30+ years of the project, none of The Last Lion was worth it.

Wasting The Reader’s Time.

Manchester’s trilogy is problematic for all sorts of reasons, and we’ll get into them, but the first and most obvious sin is how these three books waste the reader’s time. At the end of the day, a writer’s only client is the reader and the reader is paying the writer with their time and most likely their money. Manchester breached his side of the bargain on two fronts.

Even if you were in the market for a multi-volume biography of Winston Churchill, William Manchester was not offering an authorized biography or a new history. That honor belongs to Churchill’s son Randolph and eventually Sir Martin Gilbert, who wrote the official eight-volume biography in the 1970s and 1980s (which means it was being published alongside Manchester’s work and thus robbed Manchester of any advantage he might have had when trying his hand at a new history). For those needing specialist research, Gilbert’s companion volumes, completed after Gilbert’s death by his research assistant Larry Arnn, run no fewer than 23 volumes. Manchester’s books come nowhere close to that and were still unfinished by the time he died.

Gilbert’s work is unquestionably the biography of record and a necessary publication, but not something I would recommend to most readers because two later one-volume books on Winston Churchill also exist.

In 2001, author and British parliamentarian Roy Jenkins published his single-volume biography of Churchill. Unlike the undisciplined Manchester, Jenkins knew how to write about Churchill because he had nearly all of Churchill’s parliamentary jobs in his long career as a British politician. Then in 2019, the military historian and unofficial friend of the blog Andrew Roberts, who’d been writing about Churchill on and off for more than twenty years, produced Churchill: Walking With Destiny. This newest book not only covered all of Churchill’s life, but it did so by incorporating new materials even Jenkins, never mind Manchester, did not have access to. It is easily the best book on Winston Churchill for general readers, with Jenkins coming in second.

Remarkably, Manchester’s multi-volume biography did not just violate the reader’s side of the unspoken agreement, but also the obligations the writer had to make sure his project was being produced efficiently.

Wasting The Writer’s Time.

Timeframes are, fittingly, key to understanding why multi-volume history books are often such wastes of time. As mentioned, volume 1 of Manchester’s book covered Churchill’s life from his birth in 1874 up until 1932 and runs 973 pages. That is a period of 58 years, and so easily explains the length of the book. In those years, Churchill was a student, a solider in the Boer War and a prominent cabinet minister during World War I. There is undoubtably 973 page of work in such a time period.

Where Manchester went off the rails is with volume 2. That book only covered period of nine years, from 1932-1940, at 765 pages when Churchill was out of power and thus not doing very much. Gilbert’s official volume for the same period covers the years 1922-1939 and runs 1100+ pages. But because Churchill was still in government and thus actively making policy, Gilbert’s length still makes sense. Manchester’s timeframe is utterly wrongheaded. Those eight years of political exile did not yield 765 pages worth of literary material.

By contrast, Gilbert’s next volume in the official work runs 1500+ pages covering a period of just two years, from 1939-1941. At first glance, that seems excessive. However, those two covered the period when Winston Churchill was running a literal world war more or less without allies. Every day—hell, even every hour—of what Churchill did in 1939-1941 mattered, Gilbert devoting 1500 pages to only two years of Churchill’s life.

By the time Manchester reached the same time period, he got writer’s block and frittered the rest of his life away.

Which reminds me…

The Books That Don’t Exist

Between 1988 and his death in 2004, The Last Lion volume 3 languished unwritten, sucking down Manchester’s remaining talents and then proceeding to shave off nine years of another writer’s life. The tragedy is the number of books by William Manchester—and by extension, Paul Reid—that do NOT exist because they tried to finish this cursed trilogy.

This sad reality is by no means confined to William Manchester. Another book I’ve complained about is Niall Ferguson’s first volume of the life of Henry Kissinger. As I indicated at length in that post, the central problem with that book is that there is not 800 pages worth of material for just the first half of Henry Kissinger’s life. Worse still, volume 2 is still unfinished. At least Ferguson wrote and produced other projects in the (as of this writing) ten years since volume 1’s publication. But if the official Kissinger biography were a single volume, Niall Ferguson’s desk would be free to use his considerable talents for other projects.

I’m equally unsympathetic to Robert Caro’s (still unfinished) five-volume biography of Lyndon Johnson because the four existing volumes already run more than 3000 pages and Caro hasn’t finished it since starting almost fifty years ago. The unfinished volume five is supposed to include all of Johnson’s involvement in Vietnam (volume four ended in 1964) and his post-presidential years. Yeah, right. I’d bet that there is at least a four-in-ten chance that volume five will not be published in Caro’s lifetime. No offense to presidential historians, but Lyndon Johnson’s biography is nowhere near significant enough to warrant a general history book of this length. A book record like Gilbert’s Churchill biography, maybe, but as a book for ‘general readers’, absolutely not. After all, Ron Chernow got away with an acclaimed single-volume biography of George Washington, and all Washington did was beat the world’s largest empire with a rag-tag army and establish the most consistent presidential republic in world history.

And of course, think about what we don’t have. Robert Caro’s biography of Robert Moses, The Power Broker, is justly a masterpiece, but how many masterpiece Caro biographies of other people DO NOT EXIST because this Lyndon Johnson book has been Caro’s sole focus for nearly fifty years?

The Only Real Case for Multi-Volume History Books

As you can tell, my patience for multi-volume history books is quite thin. But surely there is an exception to this exception? When would I endorse a multi-volume work because it is the only clear-cut way to adequately cover a subject?

The sole instance where such a move makes sense would be an utterly complicated event where a mere single volume would reduce the subject to simplistic platitudes. In general, this format is appropriate only for authors chronicling the full history of a war or an event with no obvious human agents, like the Industrial Revolution. And, crucially, my endorsement for such any multi-volume history is conditioned on the author actually finishing the project in a reasonable timeframe and moving on to other works.

Sir Martin Gilbert not only completed Winston Churchill’s official biography and many of the companion volumes, but many more for a total 88(!) books. I can accept him needing eight books to straighten out Winston Churchill’s complicated legacy.

In more recent years, Rick Atkinson has produced ‘The Liberation Trilogy’, about the US Army in World War II which is sufficiently complicated for a multi-volume work. Atkinson is currently in the middle of writing a trilogy about the American Revolution, with two volumes coming out over a period of seven years. Unsurprisingly, both subjects are about wars (always complicated) with many participants playing many roles (also complicated). Atkinson shows no sign of slowing down, so I’ll give him the thumbs up as well.

Conclusion

Multi-volume histories are the one genre of history book I dislike nine times out of ten. They’re too slow because they too often fail to take into account the actual scope of the subject at hand. As a result, the amount of information within even a single volume of a multi-volume can overwhelm even the most patient and enthusiastic reader, never mind the reluctant readers who need to read history books the most.

I will not write off multi-volume history books entirely, but my god do they strikeout a lot.