Anna Faktorovich
This Fall 2023 set of book reviews includes four types of books: printed books that were shipped to me by publishers, Cambridge University Press’ Google Books review copies, NetGalley electronic review copies that I read on an app on my phone, and Libby audiobooks that I requested through the Houston Library and that took a few weeks on-hold to arrive in my account. The Libby audiobooks were especially helpful this season because I listened to them on extensive cross-country drives. The longest drive was from Quanah, TX to Atlanta, TX, or around 18 hours on the road with some rest-stops in the middle. I have also had some very long dentist appointments this season, and audiobooks and downloaded Spotify non-fiction podcasts were essential for getting through these without really noticing the time dragging on. I even started listening to these types of shows with headphones while shopping. I have over-requested review copies for this issue because I have received fewer books in the past few issues. Given the 36 books I have gathered for review in this set, and the looming end-of-December deadline to finish the issue, these reviews might be briefer than usual. There is also a greater variety of book-types in this set, as it even includes a few popular novels, as well as some edited classics, and traditional scholarly books. The sections in quotes can be assumed to be blurbs from the publishers, as usual.
An Imagined Collaboration with “Shakespeare”
Will Sharpe, Shakespeare & Collaborative Writing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, September 30, 2023). Softcover: $65. 240pp. Index, 8×5.3. ISBN: 978-0-19-881964-6.
*****
An “account of Shakespeare’s artistic development in, against, and beyond collaboration… An author shaped by others in a collaborative network of intellectual influence and dynamic interchange, and, the book argues, one that he helped substantially to create… Chapters exploring collaboration via theatre history, book history, and attribution debates complement the central three chapters detailing the different phases of Shakespeare’s collaborative work… Reconstructing the circumstances and outcomes of his pairings with other dramatists, and scrutinizing more closely their artistic contributions…”
This seems to be a related supplement to The New Oxford Shakespeare: Authorship Companion (2017), which was edited by Gary Taylor and Gabriel Egan, and had introduced several new co-authors, including “Fletcher” and “Marlowe”, to previously solely “Shakespeare”-bylined plays. This book is a stand-alone, but it continues the idea the earlier companion established, or that “Shakespeare” collaborated with a known set of co-authors. My own British Renaissance Re-Attribution and Modernization (BRRAM) series explains that most of the bylines suggested in these re-attributed collaborations are pseudonyms or ghostwriting-contractors, including “Shakespeare” (a pseudonym taken from the biblical phrase “shake spear”), “Marlowe” (the first text was attributed to this byline in print after his death), and “John Fletcher” (a debaucher, whose “academic” and clerical family habitually hired the Workshop as its ghostwriters). Because Oxford’s writers have been misattributing these texts, their interpretation of this history and biographies is clouded by these misconceptions.
I brought this book with me to the SAMLA conference, hoping I would learn something new from reading it while exhibiting books from my BRRAM series and explaining it to visitors. Sadly, it proved impossible to read this book casually because I found myself disagreeing with most sentences. For example, chapter “17: Determining Collaboration” begins with a long digressive paragraph that ends with this sentence: “It is no use emending Fletcher on the basis of Shakespeare’s characteristic usage” (160). As I explain in BRRAM, 2 main ghostwriters created most of the “Shakespeare”-bylined dramas: Jonson created most of the comedies, while Percy created most of the tragedies. Jonson’s linguistic-signature also appeared in the tested “Fletch”-bylined dramas. Thus, around half of “Shakespeare” has the same “characteristic usage”, or Jonson’s usage, that appears in “Fletcher”. On the next page, he points to Fresdson Bowers’ conclusion that “both writers” share rare “spellings”, which have been erroneously assigned to “scribal” intervention (161), when this simply accurately identified a single linguistic hand between these two bylines. It is possible that Verstegan or a copyist was inserting corrections, but not if these spellings are specifically shared across only Jonson’s output.
Then, there is a casual mention of the “Shakespeare”-assigned “Hand D” in Sir Thomas More, with the note that it only matches Q1 2 Henry IV in its reuse of the misspelling “scilens” (“silence”), and Q2 Hamlet in the misspelling of “deale” for “devle”. “Hand D” is not the only instance of this handwriting’s appearance, as I explain in BRRAM, as it also appears in several play plots, some other texts, and most importantly in the Northumberland MS, or a manuscript found in the Percys’ family estate, which included exercises in variant spellings of not only “Shakespeare’s” name, but also other bylines the Workshop utilized, such as “Bacon”. One helpful observation here is that “Hand D is almost entirely unpunctuated” (162). Percy had to have had a strong reason to almost always collaborate with Jonson in at least a portion of his plays. One such reason is if he preferred to leave out punctuation, and to have Jonson insert it for him. Percy might have also typically dictated plays to Jonson, who would have been more familiar with punctuation rules as part of taking down this dictation and preparing it for the stage and print. Percy is likely to have transitioned to using punctuation himself later in his career, especially since he published some of Jonson’s posthumous plays by finishing them himself. The type of punctuation that Percy uses in his self-attributed handwritten closeted plays should solve this mystery. This is an important point, as I use punctuation as around a third of my stylometric tests for authorship attribution. The 5 Percy plays that I translated into Modern English in BRRAM had a significant quantity of punctuation in them in their original manuscripts, and Percy did a final edit on these after Jonson’s death, and their punctuation matched Percy’s “Shakespeare”-bylined plays.
One of the reasons why Sharpe’s note about “D’s” lack of punctuation is surprising is because of a gap in cross-byline forensic analysis of these texts. As Sharpe writes: “no major commercial single-edition Shakespeare series has modelled co-authorship into its approach to a range of issues like emendation, lineation, stage directions, spelling, or forms of contractions” (164). A system analysis of cross-byline elements in these categories should confirm my own re-attributions that point to the presence of only 6 ghostwriters across the Renaissance. Finding echoes between so many different bylines is contrary to the traditional narrative of the history of British literature, so these topics are usually avoided.
A section on stylometry explains that there have been studies that have added other texts to “Shakespeare’s” hand with this method, including Edmond Ironside, Thomas of Woodstock, and The Birth of Merlin, but they “have failed to achieve any scholarly traction, despite lengthy studies” (167). Edmond Ironside survives only as a manuscript, whose handwriting appears to match Harvey’s; but it has been found to use many rare words that only appear in “Shakespeare”; it is dated 1587, and Percy started writing plays by around 1584, so it could have been one of Percy’s early plays. Thomas of Woodstock is more likely to have been one of Percy’s closeted experiments because it was found in his lawyer’s, William Cartwright’s, collection, to which Percy refers to in one of his final 1647 letters. And The Birth of Merlin was published posthumously in 1662 under the “Shakespeare” and “William Rowley” bylines. Other tested late “Rowley”-bylined plays proved to be Percy’s, so it is also likely that linguistic tests of this play assigned it to Percy’s hand. The latter play has as strong of a “Shakespeare” assignment credit as the other posthumous plays or half of the First Folio that were published in 1623. Obviously, the failure to establish “traction” is because of the desire of publishers to preserve the illusion of grandeur of the “Shakespeare” byline, which would be deluded by association with lesser plays. However, in reality, professional writers have a lot of bad plays before and after they manage hits. Stylometry should be allowed to reach true attributions, instead of using it to reach the attributions that make the most profit for publishers.
A similar discussion can be derived from most pages out of this book, but it would be too digressive. One of the major problems with this book is that it is too digressive, as it frequently digresses into theoretical questions of the nature of authorship, and collaboration. A typical paragraph begins with a broad claim, such as, “Shakespeare was a sharer…” This is followed by commonly accepted theories on how he was paid for shared labor (without proof). Digressions follow. Then the paragraph concludes with a quote from “Henslowe’s” letter that simply refers to the plural “their book” to conclude that this means it was indeed collaboratively created by those who “Henslowe” describes in an associated issued loan, or “Robert Wilson and collaborator(s)” (13). As I explain in BRRAM, “Wilson” and others simply sponsored or invested in the creation of these plays or took out high-interest loans against their potential success; these loans then paid ghostwriters like Percy and Jonson to in fact write these plays. This book is better than most I have reviewed previously in this field because it does make a strong effort to provide at least some documentation for its claims, even if it does so after extensive digressions on other subjects.
Anthology of Foundational Texts of Modern Jewish Theology
Samuel J. Kessler and George Y. Kohler, Modern Jewish Theology: The First One Hundred Years, 1835-1935: JPS Anthologies of Jewish Thought (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society: University of Nebraska Press, October 15, 2023). Softcover: $40.00. 384pp. Index. ISBN: 978-0-8276-1513-7.
*****
“The first comprehensive collection of Jewish theological ideas from the pathbreaking nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, featuring selections from more than thirty of the most influential Jewish thinkers of the era as well as explorations of Judaism’s identity, uniqueness, and relevance; the origin of ethical monotheism; and the possibility of Jewish existentialism. These works—most translated for the first time into English by top scholars in modern Jewish history and philosophy—reveal how modern Jewish theology developed in concert with broader trends in Jewish intellectual and social modernization, especially scholarship (Wissenschaft des Judentums), politics (liberalism and Zionism), and religious practice (movement Judaism and the struggles to transcend denominational boundaries).” A collection of “source material from the formative years of modern Jewish thought… A general introduction and chapter introductions… and extensive annotations…”
As I have been working on my re-attribution studies across the past few years, I have come to be increasingly more skeptical regarding the history of the world, and especially the history of the world’s theologies. I have realized that pre-print history is largely a fiction that has been imagined many generations after the events being imagined are supposed to have taken place. Given that Judeo-Christian-Islamic mythological narrative takes place pre-print, it is easy to imagine that these stories were imagined much later than when they are supposed to have been first written down, and certainly after the dates when they are described to have happened. Previous scholars have also observed that these theologies borrow content from previous Indian religious texts. Given these uncertainties, it is indeed necessary to review how the Jewish theology took shape to arrive at its modern relatively solid narrative in the post-print century that led up to the outbreak of WWII. This collection achieves this goal by introducing first translations of previously inaccessible texts that trace these roots. I wish this collection went further back to the Renaissance, but I will search for another book for this purpose.
Though, as usual, my hope for this book is greater than what any such book could achieve. The included essays do not explain topics I imagine are of greatest interest, such as why Hassidic Jews retained antique garment choices, why women are still asked to wear wigs after marriage, or how the establish prayer-cycle was selected. Instead, these are essays on general principles, such as, Gotthold Salomon’s “Thirteen Basic Teachings of Religion” (1829). And these also include commentary on biblical sources, such as Ludwig Philippson’s “Introduction to the Five Books of Moses” (1844). Considering that I am an atheist, ethnic Jew, I guess there is a logic for including a section on “The Relevance of Judaism”, though it is extremely preachy for David Einhorn to lecture on “The Benefits of the Jewish Doctrine of God” (1852). It is a strong negative that this is really a set of pro-religious or pro-Jewish propaganda pieces. Though it would be more troubling if there had been an entire sect of the population employed in the Judaic clergy, and none of them described the foundations of their theological beliefs. Since I perceive “God” as a fictional character, this book is not for me. I am interested in the roots of dogma, rather than in its restatement.
The introduction explains that most of these texts originated in Germany’s birth of the humanities in universities, where Doktor-Rabbiner in the Wissenschaft des Judentums movement were able to gain a foothold, as they published about theology to succeed in academia, as opposed to publishing in a hard-science, or publishing non-critical repetitions of theological propaganda that praised divinity without questioning or exploration of the nature of belief (xvii-xviii). The movement is known after its first journal, which translated into English is Journal for the Study of Judaism (1822-3).
The introductions to individual book sections are very helpful, as they explain concepts that average readers should be unfamiliar with. The introduction to the first section explains that one of the main debates in this section is over “ethical monotheism”: “the idea that the belief in one God solved the problem of competing systems of morality: if there is only one God, who is truly moral, then all humanity can likewise be united under (and then governed by) a single moral system” (3). This explanation clarifies that this book is concerned with double-speak theoretical questions that circle around theological fiction without really exploring the types of questions that skeptics like me have about theological beliefs.
This book is intended for those who are Judaic scholars, and those who are interested in understanding the foundations of modern Judaic scholarship. Sadly for me, it is not suited for atheists searching for the truth about who wrote the fiction that is the Jewish Torah. It is good to have this book around in case my research stumbles into these subjects.
A Great Anthology of the Earliest Science Fiction
Michael Newton, The Origins of Science Fiction: Oxford World’s Classics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, December 14, 2023). Softcover: $11.95. 392pp, 7.7×5.1. ISBN: 978-0-19-889194-9.
*****
“This anthology gathers seventeen tales from the nineteenth and early twentieth century that make up the foundations of science fiction. It moves from Mary Shelley to H. G. Wells, from Edgar Allan Poe to W. E. B. Du Bois, and from George Eliot to Jack London. Before the term ‘science fiction’ was established, writers pursued a new and strange subject matter, to be written about in a startlingly new way. The selected stories in this collection reflect the many diverse paths that led towards science fiction, including scientific Gothic, dystopian fantasies, psychological hoaxes, feminist parables, fictions of time-travel, adventure stories, uncanny tales, and stories of alien encounters. The anthology unveils the power of the literature of the period and exposes our fascination with scientific discovery and the allure (and threat) of the imagined future.” This and some other books in this set are part of the Oxford World’s Classics series, which includes “expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study”.
I had to request this book because it is the first time that I have seen an anthology of this type available for review. The topic is of special interest because I previously wrote and published with McFarland a book called The Formulas of Popular Fiction, which briefly covered the science fiction genre, and its founding, amidst a discussion of fantasy and other speculative genres. Given the popularity of science fiction above some of these rival genres today it is puzzling why there have been few previous anthologies I have noticed for the origins of this genre. It is typically much easier to explore the structure, motivations, and other elements of a fictional formula in short stories than in novels. The standard curriculum tends to cover novels, like “H. G. Wells’” Time Machine (1895) or “Mary Shelley’s” Frankenstein (1818). These novels are too digressive, whereas short stories compress scientific or other types of ideas to allow readers to understand more clearly what the author was attempting to highlight and why. My current attribution research on 18th and 19th century British texts includes texts by “Shelley” and “Wells”, concluding that these were ghostwritten by small workshops, who also founded many other genres across these centuries. More than one ghostwriter worked in sub-genres, such as the vampire novel. I hope this book will help to further my research into this subject; I will return to it afterwards for this purpose.
The “Introduction” offers a philosophical perspective on the mangled origin story of this genre. It also tellingly observes in the “late nineteenth century” there was a “formation of a myriad new genres… where a writer must position themselves in the marketplace as the purveyor of a certain kind of fiction: Kipling’s Indian tales, Arthur Conan Doyle’s Holmes stories…” (xi). My research into this period has explained that these bylines were as fictitious as the subgenres that they were assigned to. Publishers were purchasing content from only 11 ghostwriters across the 19th century, and they were repackaging it as the creation of puffed or marketed personalities of the “Authors”. Thus, Arthur Conan Doyle came to be seen as if he was Sherlock Holmes, with equivalent fame without deserved achievements. The science fiction genre was developed in tandem with the development of the “Wells” canonical “Author” status. As this “Introduction” explains, “Wells” was positioned as the leader of this genre because he was credited as the editor of a collection of these stories, Thirty Strange Stories (1898), and then of The Country of the Blind and Other Stories, which was described by a reviewer as a story type that “first made Mr. Wells famous”. Michael Newton concludes that “Wells” set the canon for this genre because before these collections “no-one put together an anthology of short stories that might all, or might predominantly, be described now as ‘science fiction’” (xii). “Wells” was puffing his own status as a leader of this movement by crediting himself as the editor and arbiter of what was in or outside of this genre. While my perspective on this period in British literature is very different from Newton’s, as usual, Oxford has provided thorough front-matter that invites researchers to step into this new field with some guidance. For example, there is a chronology of the creation of the relevant works and surrounding events.
The collection opens with “Shelley’s” story about “The Mortal Immortal”. It reminds me of Anne Rice’s vampire novels, which is one of the only fantasy series that I read in near its entirety. It is very tempting to set aside my deadlines and just read this whole book cover-to-cover. Those with sufficient time will surely enjoy just reading this anthology for pleasure. It is rare to find modern speculative fiction that is as thought-provoking as these 19th century experiments. And short stories tend to be a more intense read in science fiction than extensive novels, as the pay-rate per-word might be higher in magazines, or the competition stiffer. Though a reader really must be willing to be hypnotized to enter this world. From my current pessimistic perspective, I find the descriptions to be dragging and digressive. The language is describing a trance as it is attempting to induce it: “I often called to mind that period of trance-like inebriation with wonder. The drink of Cornelius had not fulfilled the task for which he affirmed that it had been prepared, but its effects were more potent and blissful than words can express…” (6).
There is enough stylistic similarity in the stories in this collection that I can guess that the British-credited ones were created mostly by my 19th century corpus’ ghostwriter-A, who matched “Wells’” Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), “Rudyard Kipling’s” Captain Courageous and Jungle Book, and “Doyle’s” Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. Though others in this collection were probably created by ghostwriter-G, who matched “George Eliot’s” Felix Holt and Middlemarch, as well as “Mary Shelley’s” Frankenstein. There is little byline fidelity to any single ghostwriter. But it is likely that the above-mentioned “Shelley” story was written by the same ghostwriter as the “George Eliot”-bylined “The Lifted Veil”, as both depict a similar theme of the dread of death and the fantasy of immortality. Both of these stories are told in the first person, and both open with a line like: “I wish to use my last hours of ease and strength in telling the strange story of my experience.” The latter is a bit more detailed in its description of the narrator’s childhood before the commencement of digressive death-ponderings. Another distinction is the sexual tension with Bertha in the latter; this seems to have been added to account for the length of this narrative, which couldn’t have been sustained if it was all about solitude as the first of these stories was. Though this tendency returns mid-story: “Things were in this state near the end of the seventh year. I had become entirely free from insight, from my abnormal cognizance of any other consciousness than my own, and instead of intruding involuntarily into the world of other minds, was living continually in my own solitary future” (109). It is pretty clear that a single hand created these stories at different times along this genre’s progression.
It follows that “Wells”, “Kipling” and “Doyle”-bylined stories in this collection should have a distinctly different A-ghostwriter style, unlike the G-ghostwriter melodramatic digressiveness. “Wells’” “The Cystal Egg” does indeed begin and progress in a very different manner. It opens with the description of a specific shop and the trinkets in it. And tension is created with elements such as, “Mr. Cave glanced nervously towards the door”, or with a fear of a specific threat, whereas the other stories described a greater fear of the internal threat (162). And instead of a loving obsession between characters, dialogue is used to build up anger or a nervous tension. However, both use hallucinatory visions as their “strange” centers, rather than introducing legible scientific facts that are altered with fiction. “Mr. Cave was so startled and so impressed by the absolute reality of these eyes that he drew his head back from the crystal to look behind it…” (171).
“Kipling’s” “Wireless” begins similarly with a dialogue in a shop. Though there is more direct dialogue across this story than in “Wells’”. Again, there is a hallucinogenic climax: “For an instant, that was half an eternity, the shop spun before me in a rainbow-tinted whirl, in and through which my own soul most dispassionately considered my own soul as that fought with an overmastering fear” (189).
Finally, the “Doyle”-bylined “The Terror of Blue John Gap” begins with specific details of a credit of authorship being assigned to a specific person who died at a specific time and place. The structure of this story is unique, as it begins with this third-person introduction and then includes events described by-date as in a diary. Though aside for these unique structural elements, most of the narrative appears to have the typical A-ghostwriter narrative style in its digressiveness and melodramatic self-reflection. “I should have been incapable of such feelings in the days of my strength, but one grows more nervous and fanciful when one’s health is shaken” (267). The third-person self-reference and the growing self-doubt and self-loathing echoes the “Shelley” and “Eliot” stories.
These are some of my initial impressions on this useful collection. Those who do not see it from my re-attribution perspective will probably just find these stories to be great examples of classical science fiction. I am probably also going to return to it when I finally begin editing my own science fiction space-travel story for publication, as I can benefit from the lessons these stories have in proper narratology. It is a great mystery just what captivates readers in a story and these ghostwriters have certainly achieved the pinnacle of this craft.
Proust: “Me, Me, Me, Sleepy Me!”
Marcel Proust, The Swann Way: Oxford World’s Classics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, December 14, 2023). Softcover: $12.95. 440pp, 7.7×5.1”. ISBN: 978-0-19-887152-1.
*****
“The Swann Way is the first volume of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time (1913-27), one of the most important novels of the twentieth century. The work is a portal to Proust’s novel and an introduction to its unforgettable first-person narrator-protagonist. Immersed in themes of time, memory, identity, art, sensation, love, and jealousy, the narrator embarks on the story of his life and the paths he takes towards fulfilling his vocation as a writer. Principally focused on the narrator’s childhood, this volume lays the foundation of Proust’s extraordinary literary edifice. The first volume in a major new translation of In Search of Lost Time, co-edited by Brian Nelson and Adam Watt.”
It would be impossible for somebody to complete even a high school honors English education without hearing puffery of this novel of the French novelist, Marcel Proust (1871-1922). The traditional biography is that he published a few short pieces in his youth, began and gave up on a preceding novel, and then spent most of his final years writing the seven volumes of this novel (one of the longest in human history). The novel has been assumed to be autobiographical, and as a description of Parisian high-society from one of its members. I have not researched attributions of French literature, but it is more likely that Proust died after a short life of partying or debauchery, rather than the traditional narrative that writing too much exhausted him so much that it killed him. Given the puffery this work has received from academia as one of the best examples of a novel ever-written, and given that its author did not write any other novels, this is a book that I had to request when I saw it on the list of new releases.
The “General Editors’ Preface” explains that this work is adjacent to James Joyce’s nonsensical Ulysses novel: “Instead of a conventional linear story with a clearly identifiable plot, the Search uses a kaleidoscope of memories to create a startlingly new form of narrative.” Then, the “Introduction” elaborates: “A brief event or a fleeting impression may be dwelt on for pages, while months, even years, can pass in a brief parenthetical remark” (xxiv).
The next itself opens as if it intends to repel readers from its contents, or by describing the first-person author-narrator falling asleep (7). The sentences are digressive and lengthy, but the novel is not a single non-stop sentence as in Ulysses. The leaps in time include the narrator lying in bed and at first it being dawn just before the servants wake up, and the next sentence it is midnight and “the last servant has gone to bed” (8). This is basically a novel about a wealthy man wasting time in self-pity, while not doing any labor, and even writing about nothing just because everybody must listen to his complaints no matter how tedious they are. Perhaps, this novel has been over-puffed because of its occasional references to sexist theology: “just as Eve was created from one of Adam’s ribs, a woman would come into being as a result of an unusual position of my thigh” (8). He goes on to describe real or imagined intercourse with this woman that is very lazy. He is distressed by “the weight of hers” (8). This narrator just keeps hammering home that he is unbelievably lazy, even in this attempt at the laziest sort of hacked cyclical philosophy: “Perhaps the immobility of the things around us is imposed on them by our certainty that they are themselves and not anything else, by the immobility of our mental conceptions of them” (9). This novel’s every page is designed for it to be impossible to read cover-to-cover. It is likely that professors like assigning this novel to students because it is impossible for any of them to remain awake or to recall the nonsensical no-content digressions of this spoiled-brat’s ramblings about how miserable it is to be extremely wealthy, to have everything, and also to be forced to do a bit of scribbling.
In the middle of the book there are cyclical conversations about nothing. For example, there’s a discussion of an invitation to go to a lunch: “…There’s no need to ask, she’ll be here for the holidays. But in that case we’ll soon see Madame Sazerat come and ring at her sister’s, for lunch…” And this is one of the more eventful sentences, as most keep repeating this same idea, “all her folk going in to have lunch…” With an exclamation that they just must not rise too early to make this lunch too strenuous: “Yes, but not before twelve!” (55) This melodramatic pining about unimportant things are the sort of thing only a sadist would want to listen to, when it comes from any other human than themselves. One fragment suggests this interpretation: “It was true that in Mademoiselle Vinteuil’s behavior the appearance of evil was so absolute that it would have been hard to find it so perfectly embodied in anyone other than a sadist; it’s behind the footlights of a Paris boulevard theatre rather than in the lamplight of a country house that you might see a girl encouraging her friend to spit on the photograph of a father who lived only for her; and sadism is almost the only thing in real life that provides a basis for the aesthetics of melodrama” (152). Some young readers might have the strength to bear with this narrator’s ponderings. At points in my own education, I managed to read the entirety of Tolstoy’s War and Peace for fun, and the entirety of Ulysses for a class dedicated to this one book. However, after achieving these triumphs of self-masochism, it would be impossible for me to sit through this novel even if somebody paid me to edit it.
One thing is clear when one reads one of these “classics”, humanity has not yet written any great novels. Modern writers who look back and imagine that all the great literature has already been created, and now only pop-fiction fills the void are mistaken. There is a giant gap on academia’s shelf where great novels should go, and there is a great need for current writers to first try reading a bit of Proust, and to learn from this work what to avoid doing in their own writing. After reading The Swann Way, it might be impossible for a writer to repeat the mistakes of Proust’s self-involved babbling. It would not be possible for me to understand this work so briskly without the succinct introductory and editorial materials provided in this Oxford edition. Thus, if you must read this book, this is a great updated English translation to acquire.
“Thoreau” and “Emerson”: Two Bylines from a Single Ghostwriter
Lawrence Buell, Henry David Thoreau: Thinking Disobediently (Oxford: Oxford University Press, October 3, 2023). Hardcover: $19.95. 152pp, 10 b/w illustrations, 5.5×8.25”. Index. ISBN: 978-0-197684269.
***
“Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) was a leading figure in the American Transcendentalist movement and the era of U. S. literary emergence, an intellectual with worldwide influence as essayist, social thinker, naturalist-environmentalist, and sage. Thoreau’s Walden, an autobiographical narrative of his two-year sojourn in a self-built lakeside cabin, is one of the most widely studied works of American literature. It has generated scores of literary imitations and thousands of neo-Walden experiments in back-to-basics living, both rural and urban. Thoreau’s great essay, ‘Civil Disobedience,’ is a classic of American political activism and a model for nonviolent reform movements around the world. Thoreau also stands as an icon of modern American environmentalism, the father of American nature writing, a forerunner of modern ecology, and a harbinger of freelance spirituality combining the wisdom of west and east. Thoreau is also a controversial figure. From his day to ours, he has provoked sharply opposite reactions ranging from reverence to dismissal. Scholars have regularly offered conflicting assessments of the significance of his work, the evolution of his thought, even the facts of his life. Some disagreements are in the eye of the beholder, but many follow from challenges posed by his own cross-grained idiosyncrasies. He was an advocate for individual self-sufficiency who never broke away from home, a self-professed mystic now also acclaimed as a pioneer natural and applied scientist, and a seminal theorist of nonviolent protest who defended the most notorious guerrilla fighter of his day. All told, he remains a rather enigmatic figure both despite and because we know so much about him, beginning with the two-million-word journal he kept throughout his adult life. The esteemed Thoreau scholar Lawrence Buell gives due consideration to all these aspects of Thoreau’s art and thought, framing key issues and complexities in historical and literary context.”
Walden remains one of the most enjoyable books I read across my schooling. It inspired me to believe that it was possible for an author to become entirely self-sufficient and to spend a lifetime in the writerly labor. However, as part of my re-attribution studies, I recently compared “Thoreau’s” Walden to “Emerson’s” writings and they matched linguistically, so that it is clear there is only a single linguistic hand behind these two bylines. This de-attribution of an essay on self-reliance away from the hand of the guy credited with it explains the biographical incongruities between the ideology expressed in texts assigned to “Thoreau” and the reality of who the guy called Thoreau in fact was. Thoreau was just a guy who did not want to pay his taxes, and who lived on his mother’s land. In contrast, the author of Walden was a professional writer who survived by making a self-sustained living from this writerly craft.
Given this underlying significance, this is a rare book that takes a critical perspective on this work. This must be largely because this is a critical study of it, instead of a new edition of the work itself. Most editions of it that I have read have focus on puffing it and “Thoreau’s” biography unquestioningly. It is a negative that this book does not include Walden itself, as having this “classic” in my collection was one of the motivations for requesting it. It seems the author has used the “classics’” title deliberately to mislead potential buyers, just as I was confused. This book also stands out in having a very modern cover design that uses shades of blue, instead of using a classic impressionist or the like painting to romanticize the content.
The book is also misleading in its blurb because “Chapter 1” proves that the stated point of this study is not what the discussion is actually about. The second paragraph reframes this as a philosophical study that addresses existential questions, such as, “How can personal integrity be reconciled with the demands of society and the state?” (1) This is a very irrelevant question for answering the actual mystery of why a pacifist would have puffed a revolutionary, as the blurb promised to explore. The following pages digress into ponderings in Walden and from other classic authors such as Woolf, even as the narrative is supposed to be addressing facts about Thoreau’s childhood. The author also makes the error of imagining what happened in Thoreau’s life, instead of finding documents to support the reality of what happened. For example: “the bond to family reinforced his feeling of embeddedness at the center of the universe that in turn reinforced his proclivity for measuring Concord, for better or worse, against any and all exotic places and times” (7). How can this author know what family bonds did inside of Thoreau’s mind? This is pure biographical fiction. Later in the book when facts are introduced it is mostly about what Emerson did in his “lay sermons” (38). The author is also imagining what Thoreau’s life was like at Harvard in the Transcendental Club meetings: “Brownson became, briefly, his first intellectual mentor, when Thoreau boarded with him as a resident-tutee on leave from Harvard” (39). There are no citations in this paragraph, but it seems the only known fact is that Thoreau boarded with this guy; the idea that Brownson also mentored Thoreau during this rooming seems to be again entirely an imagined fiction. Then, instead of quoting extensively from “Thoreau’s” journal to mine it for biographical evidence, the author discusses it theoretically, while drawing a structural parallel back to “Emerson”: “At first Thoreau treated his journal rather as Emerson did, as a miscellaneous repository for thoughts and experiences, self-assessments, reading notes, and observations on history and current events. Then it seems to have become chiefly a workbook for drafts, large chunks of which were discarded” (66). The similarity between these journals further supports my conclusion of a single ghostwriter operating behind these two bylines. And then discussions of “Thoreau’s” later essays are phrased in a critical perspective that compares works abstractly: “Next to his more overtly political writings, it sounds crotchety rather than impassioned…” (98). Such digressive impressions are not useful for scholars who are mining this book for useful insights on either Thoreau’s biography or his writings.
This book would not have been this disappointing if it just refrained from making extraordinary promises in its blurb. This book is neither suitable for scholars (who will be frustrated in finding succinct or clearly documented evidence to support their own research) or for casual readers who are searching for light transcendentalist reading. It is thus best to avoid stepping inside these pages all together.
Primary Sources on the Atomic Bomb (with Some Propaganda)
D. M. Giangreco, Truman and the Bomb: The Untold Story (Lincoln: Potomac Books: University of Nebraska Press, August, 2023). Hardcover: $34.95. 252pp. 14 photographs, 1 map, 1 table, 18 appendixes, index. ISBN: 978-1-64012-073-0
****
“Many myths have grown up around President Harry S. Truman’s decision to use nuclear weapons against Imperial Japan. In destroying these myths, Truman and the Bomb will discomfort both Truman’s critics and his supporters, and force historians to reexamine what they think they know about the end of the Pacific War. Myth: Truman didn’t know of the atomic bomb’s development before he became president. Fact: Truman’s knowledge of the bomb is revealed in his own carefully worded letters to a Senate colleague and specifically discussed in the correspondence between the army officers assigned to his Senate investigating committee. Myth: The huge casualty estimates cited by Truman and Secretary of War Henry Stimson were a postwar creation devised to hide their guilt for killing thousands of defenseless civilians. Fact: The flagrantly misrepresented ‘low’ numbers are based on narrow slices of highly qualified—and limited—U.S. Army projections printed in a variety of briefing documents and are not from the actual invasion planning against Japan. Myth: Truman wanted to defeat Japan without any assistance from the Soviet Union and to freeze the USSR out of the postwar settlements. Fact: President Franklin D. Roosevelt and President Truman desperately wanted Stalin’s involvement in the bloody endgame of World War II and worked diligently—and successfully—toward that end. Using previously unpublished material, D. M. Giangreco busts these myths and more…”
The best portion of this book are the appendixes that include photocopies and transcripts of the actual documents that mention the Atomic Bomb. For example, “Air-Raid Casualties and Property Damage in Japan” describe casualties from U.S. bombing campaign prior to the decision. The next appendix is the “Memorandum on Ending the Japanese War”; the unnamed author of this work appears to be making a propagandistic pitch for extreme measures by threatening that a prolonged ending can cost up to a million American lives. Another useful appendix is a chronology of the Manhattan Project, which begins in June 28, 1942, when Roosevelt established the Office of Scientific Research and Development, which was tasked broadly with using science to help the war effort, with only one of their ideas including nuclear fission. Most of the letters and documents are typed, so most of them could have been ghostwritten by a propagandist who was working behind the scenes towards making sure the Atomic Bomb was employed out of some self-interest, such as if they had been indirectly sponsored by those who were being paid to manufacture this weapon. Seemingly only one of the letters is handwritten, and it is addressed from Major General Frank Lowe to Truman and Brigadier General Harry Vaughn indicates that the trio had been casually chatting about the Bomb as early as in ’42 and ’43. Anybody who has any interest in understanding warmongering from the perspective of those who engage in such efforts will find an unparallelled collection of digested primary sources here. It is very rare for scholarly books to manage to provide this type of a useful and polished presentation of documents. The commentary before each appendix is sufficient for readers to understand the contents even without reading the interior of this study. Researchers on any related topic can turn directly to these sources to profit from them. It is typically extremely difficult to find such sources in the archives remotely. Most of the documents of greatest historical interest are not digitized, and those that are digitized tend to be buried amidst irrelevant materials, or can be presented in an unreadable format, such as in scribbled handwritings. Giangreco is thus to be commended for understanding how these sensitive materials needed to be digested, while also being preserved with their precise original content.
The body of the book describes the history of the Manhattan Project chronologically. However, the “Prologue” introduces the author’s bias: the author is heavily leaning towards the propagandistic argument that was expressed in the letter that threatened that a million Americans could have died if the Bomb was not dropped. This same propaganda is described as having appeared in the New York Times, which “printed the warning of General Marshall and chief of naval operations Admiral Ernest J. King that armed services needed to induct nine hundred thousand men over the next six months to meet the needs of the coming one-front war against Japan.” Instead of stepping back and seeing this as rephrased propaganda, Giangreco is convinced by this argument, as he dramatizes the threat (3). If there was no real threat of continuing warfare (an argument a different interpretation of the same documents supports); then, Truman and others in this administration committed extreme genocide to benefit something other than the interests of self-preservation. There is no discussion here of Japan’s pending surrender that would have nullified the need for extreme measures; a counter to this idea is not introduced. When there are mentions of Japan attempting to end the war, this section is oddly full of abstractions, without the facts that fill the descriptions of America’s propagandistic position. For example: “Some civilian elements within Japan’s ruling circle were determined to try to find a way to end the war before the U.S. invasion was launched. Unfortunately, the militarists were in firm control of the government, and Japanese ‘moderates’ had to tread gingerly for fear of arrest or assassination. American officials reading the secretly intercepted messages between Japan’s ambassador to the Soviet Union in Moscow and its foreign minister in Tokyo could clearly see that the ‘defeatist’ ideas of the ambassador received northing more than stinging rebukes from his superior” (15). The source cited at the back of the book for this paragraph is a June 18, 1945 meeting in Joint Chiefs of Staff, as well as earlier 1942-3 meetings, and discussions of these events in one of Giangreco’s previous articles (217). This means that the Japanese might have made direct requests to make peace to American officials, and they simply ignored these appeals and presented in propaganda and official meetings that Japan was determined to fight forever. Giangreco’s passage is really a restatement of the propaganda that was mitched at the Joint Chiefs meeting, instead of being a balanced analysis of what Japan’s leaders were in fact communicating in official or unofficial correspondences. It is strange that these are absent from the appendixes, as this argument clearly needs this perspective. It is anti-Japanese propaganda to imagine that “moderates” were threatened with assassination; especially when in fact America saw a bit later the Red Scare and had been jailing Japanese people in camps across WWII, and so it was engaged in threatening its citizens with threats of “assassination” and “arrest”.
Only by accepting fault in past genocides and mass-murders can modern politicians begin to imagine a world without ongoing continuing atrocities that are covered by propagandistic explanations for the righteousness of these attacks. There are warmongers who make billions from artificially creating motives to continue warfare endlessly, including by launching offensive attacks just as the other side is attempting to surrender. To end our current wars in Ukraine and Gaza, we must acknowledge that there is no righteous war. There are no good sides in a war that takes numerous lives. This is a very useful book for those who want to understand the science of propagandistic warfare. It is just best to focus on the second half where the documents are presented as facts, and to avoid reading most of the first half where they are interpreted with a slant that is pro-American or pro-Truman.
Primary Accounts of Montana’s Native Chiefs’ Perspective on Conflicts with Whites
Robert Bigart and Joseph McDonald, eds., Salish and Kootenai Indian Chiefs Speaks for Their People and Land, 1865-1909 (Pablo: Salish Kootenai College Press: University of Nebraska Press, June, 2023). Softcover: $34.95. 238pp. Map, 11 illustrations, index. ISBN: 978-1-934594-34-6.
*****
“This collection includes talks or petitions by Salish and Kootenai chiefs found in the surviving historical record. The Salish and Kootenai Indians of the Flathead Indian Reservation confronted many crises in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The physical and cultural survival of the tribes was challenged by epidemics, intertribal warfare with larger enemy tribes, and an invasion of white settlers. The tribes had to fight to have their voices heard and to get the United States government to keep its promises. Fortunately, the tribes had capable leaders who spoke up for their interests and negotiated with visiting government officials. The chiefs were able to get sympathetic white men to write letters supporting their efforts to keep a reservation in the Bitterroot Valley of western Montana and pressure the government to honor other promises made in the 1855 Hellgate Treaty. In later negotiations their white neighbors coveted tribal land and assets. Many of the chiefs’ statements were preserved in English by newspaper reporters and government clerks. The interpreters in the meetings had to struggle to explain white American cultural concepts of property and right and wrong. They were also challenged in trying to explain Salish and Kootenai values to the white officials.”
American history books include plenty of descriptions of what was done to Native Americans, including how they were forced out of their lands through forced migrations such as the Trail of Tears. What is missing from these histories is extensive textual evidence of what these Native Americans intellectually did to defend their lands. These narratives instead tend to describe Native chiefs fighting in wars, or signing onto treaties created by whites, instead of giving them intellectual agency. Thus, this is a great step towards inserting this missing piece of American history. The speeches, letters and documents that Native leaders intellectually created are essential to establishing their agency. They did not lose land because they did not understand white laws, but rather because the whites had corrupted the system so that it was impossible for the Native leaders to win through legal means. This collection focuses on a small geographic region in western Montana, so it explores the problems of this area in detail.
One of the obstacles that the editors notice is that verbatim recordings of dialogue during negotiations appear to be marked by deep “confusion” on all sides. It seems likely that whites used the Natives relative lack of knowledge of English and American law to manipulate these negotiations. It is also likely that these negotiations were transcribed and depicted in papers in a light that was propagandistically flattering towards the whites’ perspective in newspapers (one of the only sources for these documents). It is troubling that the introduction suggests that Natives did not have concepts for private land ownership, and this was one of the reasons they lost out in some of these negotiations. If the Natives did not understand land ownership; it was illegal to force them into signing documents they did not understand, as nobody can enter into a contract without understanding the terms. The introduction acknowledges this and other problems, such as that there were no capable enough translators who could have understood both sides of these negotiations, and thus court transcriptions of what Native leaders said in court might have been largely fictional (if the clerks did not understand what was in fact said, but rather imagined what might have been intended) (2). This proves that if whites had invested in training capable translators; they probably would have settled disputes with Native tribes by legal means and without warfare.
“Document 1” presents Bitterroot Salish Chief’s petition to the Governor of Montana on April 25, 1865 about the theft of animals, and a request for the whites not to sell whiskey to the Natives. The second document is a far more linguistically sophisticating 1868 appeal because it was created by W. J. Cullen, Special Indian Agent to the Montana Territory, which describes Salish Chiefs Ambrose and Adolph perspective regarding a lack of compliance from the whites to the Hellgate Treaty. This document includes some useful information about the lives of the Native people, but it is also blatantly biased: “Most of these Indians have embraced the Catholic religion, and are in some degree civilized” (11). In another section, the Commissioner appears to use theological fiction to convince Chief Arlee that the Christian God or the “Great Father” possesses the “country” and has granted “whites… a right to go there”. He is attempting to use this theological character to disenfranchise the Native people of their land in an official court proceeding. The second chief in this discussion, Chief Eneas, then acknowledges this false reasoning by bringing the matter back to facts: “the government did not give half if agreed about annuities; and I think I don’t wish the road to pass through this reservation” (75). He goes on to make a factual argument, but the Commissioner again returns to imaging what the “Great Father believes”, including his knowledge that whites keep selling whiskey to Natives despite chiefs’ continuing objections to this practice (76).
This is a great text that should allow historians to insert some of these direct quotes from Native leaders into textbooks that have previously been imagining what they were thinking and saying without such citations. I hope other publishers will introduce similar primary collections for Native peoples from across America. This is an essential book for those who are interested in the topic of interactions between whites and Natives, including casual readers as well as scholars who specialize in this field.
Can Espionage Ever Be Intelligent?
Norman Polmar and Lee J. Mathers, Spy Ships: One Hundred Years of Intelligence Collection by Ships and Submarines (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, July, 2023). Hardcover: $34.95. 306pp. 41 photographs, 4 illustrations, 7 tables, 3 appendixes, 2 indexes. ISBN: 978-1-64012-478-2.
*****
“Almost from the first days of seafaring, men have used ships for ‘spying’ and intelligence collection. Since early in the twentieth century, with the technological advancements of radio and radar, the U.S. Navy and other government agencies and many other navies have used increasingly specialized ships and submarines to ferret out the secrets of other nations. The United States and the Soviet Union/Russia have been the leaders in those efforts, especially during the forty-five years of the Cold War. But, as Norman Polmar and Lee J. Mathers reveal, so has China, which has become a major maritime power in the twenty-first century, with special interests in the South China Sea and with increasing hostility toward the United States. Through extensive, meticulous research and through the lens of such notorious spy ship events as the Israeli attack on the USS Liberty, the North Korean capture of the USS Pueblo, and the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency’s success in clandestinely salvaging part of a Soviet submarine with the Hughes Glomar Explorer, Spy Ships is a… resource for understanding maritime intelligence collection and what we have learned from it.”
The “Foreword” explains that “most countries have never openly admitted to operating spy ships”, which is the reason this is a unique book as knowledge of this subject is “classified” (x). The “Perspective” gives as an early example of modern naval espionage the interception by the British of a 1904 wireless signal sent by the Russian navy that assisted the other side in intervening to block a maneuver with wireless jamming at Port Author (xii). Since such radio interception and jamming should only require sending a little jamming device into the region, this does not really explain why giant, cumbersome submarines can be necessary for anything other than making warmongers who profit from these contraptions money. By WWII, High-Frequency/Direction-Finding was in place that allowed Germans to locate ships (xv), so giant subs became identifiable and bombable. It is far more likely that all lives on board of a sub would be lost when it is located, as opposed to a ship, from which some crew might escape if it is bombed. Since such detection equipment on both sides should mean that both know exactly where the other’s “spy” ships or subs are; then, the point of placing these in waters near an enemy seems to be to intimidate and threaten a rival, as opposed to achieving any rational intelligence collection. Michael A. Palmer is quoted as saying that “the Soviet and American navies stalked each other on, above, and under the surface of the world’s seas in preparation for a conflict that never came” (xvi). The Cold War was the ideal conflict for weapons manufacturers: it allowed for the build-up of enormous piles of weapons at extreme cost to both sides and to the profit of a few weapon-manufacturers on both sides. Since the threat was nuclear winter: there was no way either side could actually do anything (if its espionage managed to detect a forthcoming attack) but start the nuclear winter first. Propaganda about espionage appears to be used by sides in such conflicts to point to a present threat of intelligence-invasion even when there is no hot war present to frighten the public into wanting to over-spend on defense or offense. Setting up signal intercept locations in the 1930s might have been useful then, but today such signal-interference can be conducted remotely, or by intercepting satellites and the like. In the concluding “Some Bottom Lines”, Polmar and Mathers acknowledge that submarines have “limited antenna array…, need to remain submerged to avoid detection, and other factors have limited their effectiveness” in espionage. The few notable exceptions where subs have been useful in modern times is in photographing the “wreckage of the Soviet submarine K-129” and stealing “a towed acoustic array from a Polish trawler.” The authors contemplate that unmanned ships might be more suitable (and cheaper) for these roles (208-9). However, these are not mainstream because the point in submarine mechanics is to maximize the cost, and to minimize what such espionage can actually achieve, as when they do achieve things then they tend to cause international incidents via theft, communication disruptions and the like, which might only be semi-legal if done during active warfare.
This book is well illustrated with black and white photographs of reconnaissance aircraft (194), intelligence ships (180), a U.S. Navy’s environmental research ship (used additionally for espionage) (154), a Soviet submarine Victor III that was entangled in acoustic array of a U.S. ship in 1985 (a bit embarrassing) (87), the Dupuy de Lome sailed through the Taiwan Strait just to show China that it did not respect its claim to the waters of that region (251), and just general decrepit ships with all on board so bored that they were “watching the watcher” or the ship that took a given photo (64).
This is the first book in this set that gave me a good laugh. It is just hilarious. If humanity had invested the money it has spent on “spy ships” and on people who watch-the-watchers across this past century, it could have ended poverty, hunger, and especially war. Around 1% of Americans use cocaine regularly, consuming around 3,196 tons of it annually. Marijuana has around 12% of regular users, and other drugs are consumed regularly by another 1%. 41 million American regular marijuana users consume around 1.35 grams daily each, or 22,140 tons annually. According to the Justice Department, in 2009, 27 tons of all drug seizures were made by maritime, and 1,751 tons by land. Thus, for around 28,532 tons of illegal drugs that Americans consume annually, only around 6% is seized prior to this consumption. This is like having 19 out of 20 drug-laden subs sneaking past our guards, and only 1 being spotted. It has been over a century since the first ship-detecting methods were invented, and yet they might be more ineffective today than they were at the dawn of this science. There has been an open War on Drugs since June 18, 1971, and China has been fighting its Opium wars since 1839… Humanity is just incapable of winning its wars or of inventing technology that is practically useful in solving any real or imagined problem. The recent implosion of the sub that submerged to spy on the Titanic is one of the least disastrous adventures in underwater travel. There is a lot to think about in this book, so it has achieved the main goal of an original scholarly endeavor.
Enlightening Drawing Experiments of Liotard
Christopher Baker, Liotard: A Portrait of Eighteenth-Century Europe (Ringmer: Unicorn Publishing Group, November, 2023). Hardcover: £30.00. 176pp. Color photographs, index. ISBN: 978-1-911397595.
*****
“Jean Etienne Liotard (1702-1789) was one of the most accomplished, idiosyncratic and witty artists of 18th-century Europe. Born in Geneva, he pursued a remarkable career, travelling across the continent and the Near East, portraying a riveting cross-section of society. Liotard worked in Paris, London, Amsterdam, Venice, Constantinople and Vienna and excelled as a specialist in the delicate art of pastel. He became renowned for the uncanny realism of his portraits as well as the beauty of his drawings, while also experimenting with watercolour, oil painting, printmaking and enamels. In Britain he enjoyed notoriety because of his exotic persona, and received commissions from royalty, aristocrats, grand tourists and celebrities.” It describes “fashion history, orientalism and the promotion and display of portraits in the public and private spheres of Enlightenment Europe.”
The “Introduction” opens with a description of Figure 1, the self-portrait of Liotard, wherein “he depicts himself with remarkable candor”, or as a “grinning man in his late sixties”. His teeth are browned, his hair is white and thin, and he is wearing a simple blue coat (8-9). It is indeed refreshing that this artist did not feel a need to puff his “Creator” personality by making himself look better and more powerful than he was. In contrast, the other color paintings in this collection are exclusively of grand people who paid Liotard to make them appear better than they actually were. It is rare to find an authentic creator in the history of culture. Too many “greats” seem to be consumed with the status of greatness, instead of with the labor involved in the life-long road to attempt to reach a maximum possible height in a craft. A professional marketer surely would not want to market when he is drawing himself for his own personal pleasure. And yet this self-portrait is one of several that Liotard made as part of is “campaign of self-promotion and self-scrutiny”, as he used them at major exhibits, such as at the Academie de Saint-Luc in 1752. Baker points out that most of Liotard’s portraits are unique in their use of pastels to achieve the type of precision of depiction that has traditionally been achieved with oil. Pastels are basically “pigments” bound with “filler” that are “shaped into small sticks or crayons” (11). How can crayons be sufficient to achieve some of the best portraits ever completed? “As you placed the crayon or stick on the paper or vellum and gently applied pressure some of the pastel was directly transferred. The resulting marks could be made in a linear manner, or different colors might be layered and rubbed and mixed on the surface of the work. Gentle rubbing of the pastels could create very subtle variations of tone and hue, in order to evoke, for example, the sheen on silk or the bloom of skin.” While it was extremely difficult to apply these notes to depict exact features, pastels were extremely portable and thus a preferred medium for a traveling artist (13).
It is delightful to read this book, as all of its text is dense with heavily researched practical information about how Liotard achieved artistic mastery. It is even curious that when Liotard visited England to paint its wealthy clients, the English Workshop had a hostile reaction to him. Joshua Reynolds, the future President of the Royal Academy, called him “something of the Quack”, with a manner that was the “very essence of Imposture”, adding in a sexist bite that “his pictures are just what ladies do when they paint for amusement” (81). It is also curious that one of the rumors the British press spread about Liotard is that he once refused to paint a woman because she was wearing heavy makeup; Lord Chesterfield in 1755 had Liotard comment that “he never copied anybody’s works but his own and God Almighty’s” (82). One of the more amazing achievements is the picture used on the back-flap, and inside in Figure 29: The Lavergne Family Breakfast (1754); it is a canvas of 80 X 106 cm (over 3 feet in length) that now hangs in the National Gallery in London. The woman’s dress seems to rustle with texture, the girl has seashells or paper wrapping her hair, and the teacups are intricately realistic and pretty. This “highest finishing” was commented on in the Public Advertiser’s description of this portrait (95-100).
It is very tempting to set aside these reviews, take out some color pencils or buy some pastels and attempt to replicate this artistic style. There is no higher achievement for an art book than to make somebody want to stop reading it, and to do some art of their own. Thus, it is highly recommend for both those who practice art-making, and those who enjoy art-criticizing.
The Dimensions of Real Artists’ Studios
Caroline Chaptman, A Place Apart: The Artist’s Studio, 1400 to 1900 (Ringmer: Unicorn Publishing Group, November 6, 2023). Hardcover: £25.00. 170pp. Color paintings. ISBN: 978-1-911397687.
*****
“Exotic lair, freezing garret or convivial rendezvous, artists’ studios reflect their personalities, the way they work, their dreams and obsessions. Some are battlegrounds where hopes are dashed and original concepts fail dismally in their execution. A few artists became celebrities and flaunted their success by furnishing huge studios with exotic objects, while others lived in a haze of opium in squalid tenements in Montmartre. Spanning 500 years of Western art history from 1400 to 1900, and accompanied by glorious images, Caroline Chapman describes the skillful techniques employed in a Renaissance workshop; Michelangelo’s agony and ecstasy while painting the Sistine Chapel; the murky world of the artist’s model; the looting by Napoleon of Veronese’s masterpiece; Van Gogh’s wretched first studio; how Géricault painted his Raft of the Medusa; the way Rodin worked in his plaster-spattered environment and the ateliers of the Impressionists in Paris.”
The practical side of artistic composition is a neglected field of scholarship. Thus, it is refreshing to see the physical space of an artist’s studio take the center in this book. The concepts mentioned in this blurb are enticing. Most starting artists should be excited to read about these details to avert stumbling into similar mistakes, or to adjust their own spaces to be more inviting to greatness. The idea of a “studio” has always puzzled me, as in modern times it tends to mean that only those who can afford to rent a giant empty space are qualified to be employed as artists, whereas those who only have their houses or apartment’s rooms to work in are unworthy of a professional status. The “Introduction” clarifies that in the Renaissance, before the “studio” gained the modern meaning, it was just a room with enough space for an easel or desk and with books around for inspiration and enrichment. In particular, Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640) in Antwerp “used the ground floor of the building to paint his great canvases while the floor above contained a vast studio for his army of assistants”. Indeed, a studio, in the modern sense, is only necessary when there are employees or workshop artists helping to create art; whereas, a single artist should find sufficient space for artistry in any private residential space. Modern studios also came to be necessary when London artists such as Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723-92) had enough money to live in a mansion, and used their studio as a space where wealthy sitters could feel that they had paid for a deserving luxury (10). And in the 19th century, the space of studios was expanded to accommodate enormous canvas sizes for paintings that might be displayed in giant museums or halls (11).
The chapter on how studios were run in the Renaissance introduces numerous curious revelations. For example, Taddeo Zuccaro (1529-66) was mostly employed to grind colors, make beds, bring water and wood, light fires, and otherwise do common labors while he apprenticed to Giovanni Calabrese (15). My attribution research only found 6 original linguistic-signatures in the British Renaissance. There were many more printers and booksellers credited in books, as well as “authors” in bylines. Most of the printers were probably employed in similar manual tasks of preparing ink, printing and the like, whereas only the few actual masters created the literature. And the “masters” who put their bylines on either art or literature were not necessarily authentic creators, as a single master might have signed several different bylines to give buyers the illusion of choice between product creators. Extremely few masters were likely to have been made because most must have dropped out during the arduous master-making process: “a year learning to draw, followed by six more years learning to prepare panels, apply gold and grind pigments”. In Leonardo’s workshop, “pupils were not allowed to touch a paintbrush under the age of twenty” (16). Who could have reached these extreme standards. Somebody had to have had some family money to manage to remain as an apprentice into the mid-20s, and yet somebody had to have had the grit to keep laboring without any rewards across this period when they had the money to do nothing instead. 20 years of study from early childhood to become a professional artist or writer is an obstacle that apparently very few humans have managed to survive.
This is a great instructional book about and for artists. There is plenty of inspiration here for those who want to be hit with the realities of artistic toil. While there are also sections that describe wealthy socialites doing artistry, these sections should be disregarded by most practicing artists as nonsense that describes people who probably paid other artists to do their labor for them. Art is not a craft that pays well or is done in a pleasant setting. Only crooks and swindlers manage to profit from art, while those who are seeking to evolve it or to innovate in it are going to spend a lifetime as apprentices to the thankless Master of Perfection.
The Establishment of British Propagandistic Publishing in the Colonies
Stuart D. McKee, Indigenous Enlightenment Printing and Education in Evangelical Colonialism, 1790-1850 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, December 1, 2023). Hardcover: $80.00. 586pp. 6×9”. Index, 32 illustrations. ISBN: 978-1-4962-3730-9.
*****
“The methodologies, tools, and processes that British and American educators developed to inculcate Indigenous cultures of reading. Protestant expatriates who opened schools within British and U.S. colonial territories between 1790 and 1850 shared the conviction that a beneficent government should promote the enlightenment of its colonial subjects. It was the aim of evangelical enlightenment to improve Indigenous peoples’ welfare through the processes of Christianization and civilization and to transform accepting individuals into virtuous citizens of the settler-colonial community. Many educators quickly discovered that their teaching efforts languished without the means to publish books in the Indigenous languages of their subject populations. While they could publish primers in English by shipping manuscripts to printers in London or Boston, books for Indigenous readers gained greater accuracy and influence when they stationed a printer within the colony. With a global perspective traversing Western colonial territories in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, the South Pacific, Madagascar, India, and China,” it “illuminates the challenges that British and American educators faced while trying to coerce Indigenous children and adults to learn to read. Indigenous laborers commonly supported the tasks of editing, printing, and dissemination and, in fact, dominated the workforce at most colonial presses from the time printing began. Yet even in places where schools and presses were in synchronous operation, missionaries found that Indigenous peoples had their own intellectual systems, and most did not learn best with Western methods.”
My research into the British Renaissance determined that there were basically 6 literature people in Britain across this period. The pool of literature people was expanded by the onset of a wider availability of books by the 18th century, but widespread true literacy did not set in on the continent until around 1900. Given the continuing illiteracy back in Britain, it was absurd or a deliberately futile act for the British to insist on selling their English-language propaganda (including both the morally erroneous lessons of political-monarchy and theological monotheism) to the indigenous people around the world they were attempting to colonize. The British were basically selling the literary output small propagandistic workshops in their capital created as the beneficial output that was sufficient for foreign nations to surrender their power. They used legal contracts in languages that foreigners did not speak to argue that they were legally purchasing lands and businesses for tiny sums. They also used their fictional theology to argue that those who did not believe in their fictions could legally and morally be exterminated. The consistency of the message through complete control of the British press and its offshoots in English propaganda being printed in the colonies is what created in their subjects a fictitious belief in the existence of the concept of the British Empire. In my Introduction to Stylometry for Attribution’s 19th century corpus there are several books that were ghostwritten by the 11-ghostwriter British Workshop, but that were credited in bylines to Indian hands, such as Rammohun Roy’s Ishopanishad (Culcutta, India: 1816), or “Toru Dutt’s” Ancient Ballads and Legends of Hindustan (London: 1882). McKee’s book describes how the British industrial propaganda-selling complex forced people around the world to purchase and “believe” in their printed words.
Given my previous research into printing of British ghostwritten books in Culcutta, India, the most interesting section in this book from my perspective is “Part 3: An Uneasy Conflation of Cultures: Printing in Bengal, 1775-1835”, which begins with chapter “8: Learning to Print”. It explains that after Britain’s Regulating Act of 1773, and the monopoly over India being granted to the British East India Company, Warren Hastings, the first governor-general of the Company, “invited eleven Brahmin pandits (from the Sanskrit word pandita, to signify a person of wisdom) from distant regions of Bengal to gather at the company’s base in Calcutta.” In reality, one of the 10 ghostwriters who were working in Britain probably traveled temporarily to Culcutta to research local culture, which could be adopted, plagiarized, and re-written to fit British propaganda in a manner that would be digestible to the Indian masses. “Hastings paid each pandit 1 rupee per day to piece together a collection of tenets from the dispersed body of Hindu manuscripts that they called the Vivadarnavaseta (Bridge over a Sea of Controversies).” This number of wise scholars is blatantly fictitious, as in reality “Hastings commissioned” only a single “Muslim writer to produce an intermediary translation in Persian” from Sanskrit (211). The British ghostwriter was credited under the “Nathaniel Brassey Halhed’s” (1751-1830) byline, “a young language scholar from Oxford” (he never finished this degree), who was granted a writership by the Company. The resulting work was a translation of the Hindu legal code titled A Code of Gentoo Laws (1776). “Halhed” was only credited with one other text, A Grammar of the Bengal Language (1778), and then he spent a career as a member of Parliament. The latter publication came with a “monetary award of 15,000 rupees” that sponsored the printing of 500 copies by a private press; this press was initially anonymous, just as the 1776 printing, but then in 1859 it was credited as belonging to an unidentifiable “Mr. Andrews” in the specified “Hooghly”, a Portuguese settlement; this publishing history is absurd, as blatantly one of the Workshop’s regular printers in London ran this print run and the ghostwriter pocketed most of this enormous award for creating propaganda (213). Given this background and Halhed’s years of birth and death, it is impossible that he was one of the ghostwriters. His main task might have been in transporting documents or making transcriptions that might have made it possible for the actual ghostwriter to perform the translation from Persian without leaving England. McKee notes that “Halhed” managed to learn Sanskrit “from a hospitable Brahmin whom he did not publicly identify” (212). In reality, there was no need to learn Sanskrit if there was a translator in England who was familiar with the intermediary Persian language. In fact, these early books were not even printed in India, due to a lack of a printing press there, so they had to be shipped to and printed in London (or they could have just been created in London). These profitable initial printings then allowed for the creation by the East India Company of their “first printing office and typefoundry, the Honorable Company’s Press”, where the English-language Indian-credited texts I tested in my 19th century corpus were later created (215). I am going to return to this book when I begin researching the Indian section of the second volume of my mini series on the re-attribution of 18th and 19th century British texts.
This is a very helpful book, as I only found useful information in this brief review of a few pages from it. McKee has compressed heavily researched relevant information into these pages, without digressions, and only addressing the topics that future researchers are likely to profit from. Undergraduate students should find some enriching details to add to their papers, while those who specialize in this field will also find a wealth of information and perspectives that they might not have seen elsewhere before. Thus, I recommend this book as a great resource for all sorts of libraries. It might even be a good supplementary textbook in a course on Colonialism, as I have not seen this type of information elsewhere, and the subject is explained succinctly and thoroughly.
A “New” Classic of Norwegian Literary Realistic Absurdity
Knut Hamsun, Pan: New Translation by Terence Cave: Oxford World’s Classics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, June 14, 2023). Softcover: £6.99. 120pp. ISBN: 978-0-19-289345-1.
*****
“One of Knut Hamsun’s” (1859-1952) “most famous works, it tells the story of” Lieutenant “Thomas Glahn, a lone hunter accompanied only by his faithful dog, Aesop,” in Norway. “Living out of a rudimentary hut on the edge of the forest, he pursues a solitary existence, hunting, fishing, and engaging intermittently with the inhabitants of the nearby coastal village. Among these is Edvarda, daughter of the wealthy local trader Herr Mack. Their mutual attraction rapidly develops into an erotic fascination shot through with suspicions and jealousies; a series of fraught encounters culminates in violent actions with unforeseen consequences… A new translation… originally published in 1894. Up-to-date bibliography and chronology of the author.”
The “Introduction” offers a brief biography of Knut Hamsun, a Norwegian writer, who only had “252 days of schooling” (ix), as he worked across his youth on his family’s farm, before he suddenly bloomed into a writer, and a couple decades later managed to create this book in Paris. This is not the first English translation of this work into English, but it is a relative rarity, as I believe this is the first time, I have seen this title on a classics list. Norwegian literature is not typically in the center of the literary canon, so it is delightful that Oxford chose to showcase this book in this series.
Sadly, this work begins in tandem with Proust, as the narrator spends a great deal of time pondering about wasting time: “Time stretches out, I can’t make it pass as quickly as I would like although I have nothing to worry about and I lead the jolliest of lives” (3). And the setting of living alone in a hut echoes “Thoreau”. Proust’s novel was published after this work, so Proust would have had to be influenced by Hamsun (a possibility since Hamsun wrote this work in Paris). The second page finally introduces some specific description: “a maze of islands and rocks and skerries, a little of the sea, a few blue-tinged mountain peaks, and behind the hut lay the forest, a tremendous forest…” This paragraph concludes by additionally foreshadowing that he will fall in love with a woman called Cora, and that he will later violently shoot his “companion” dog, Aesop. These details are antithetical to the remainder of this introduction that appears to be designed to repel readers, similarly to Proust’s deliberately rambling style. Proust might have even adopted the sleepiness troupe from these pages: “And many times I fell asleep where I lay, fully dressed, just as I was, and didn’t wake again before the sea-birds had begun to shriek” (4).
In contrast with Proust, this is a very short novella. There are also far more surprises in this narrative, or details that draw readers inwards instead of sending them away from repetition. One example of a strange waking surprising element: “She was no doubt thinking about he shoe that I had thrown out over the water, about the cups and glasses I had been unfortunate enough to break, about all my other injuries to good tone; all that was undoubtedly coming to life again in her memory.” While he previously had assumed she looks as if she is in love with him, these ponderings about what else she might be thinking about sends him away from her “without farewell, without thanks” (77).
Some of the comments in this novel are deliberately provoking, such as the discussion about women who are “too fat”. The narrator elaborates: “Anyway, not all the women were ugly, although their faces were fat and blown out; I had met a girl in the town, a half-Tamil with long hair and snow-white teeth, she was the prettiest of the lot.” While this seems to be offensive, the continuing details make up for this miss, as they digress about him meeting this girl in “a rice-field, she was lying on her stomach in the grass and waving her legs in the air” (94). It is rare to find novels that introduce these types of ordinary details, and where the narrator is allowed to comment honestly about finding most girls to be ugly, if it is just the way he feels. Great literature mostly must be surprising while describing many tiny truths that jointly introduce insightful realities of existence, no matter if the larger narrative is a fantasy, or hard-realism.
The conclusion is abstract, violent, and surprising despite the foreshadowing in the opening pages that deliberately appeared to reveal the plot to deflate suspense.
This would be a more enjoyable novel to read in a class assignment than Swann or Ulysses, but it I less dense than Lolita, and less realistic than “Dickens”. Given the rarity of non-British/American novels in the main canon, it is a good idea for this work to be assigned in a world literature class. And a copy of it should also be available in all types of libraries to make it accessible to the different types of readers and scholars who might be interested in accessing it.
French Renaissance Workshop’s Classical Imitative Poetry
Du Bellay and Ronsard, Selected Poems: New Translation by Anthony Mortimer: Oxford World’s Classics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, November 10, 2023). Softcover: $11.95. 250pp, 7.7×5.1”. Glossary. ISBN: 978-0-19-284799-7.
*****
Joachim du Bellay (1522-1560) and Pierre de Ronsard (1524-1585) “are two of the major sixteenth-century French poets and leaders of the extraordinary group known as ‘La Pléiade’.” This described a literary Workshop or a group of professional writers, which modeled itself on the seven poets of 3rd century BC Alexandria; in other words, this was a self-professed ghostwriting workshop. “Determined to create a national vernacular literature, the Pléiade poets profited from an intense study of Greek and Roman models and from a creative use of classical mythology to produce a body of verse that reflects the vigour and variety of European Renaissance culture. Du Bellay broke new ground with the gritty realism and resentment of the Regrets and with his meditation in the Antiquities on the rise and fall of the Roman Empire. In a series of sonnet sequences (Cassandre, Marie, Astrée, Hélène) Ronsard developed the Petrarchan tradition of love poetry with a wider range of situations, a richer imagery, and more robust sensuality.” The Petrarchan sonnet is named after one of its originating practitioners, Francesco Petrarca (1304-1374), who wrote in Italy; the British Renaissance Workshop also imitated and innovated from this sonnet’s formula, which Byrd turned into some familiar British poetic formulas, such as the English or the “Shakespearean” sonnet; one of the reasons Byrd focused on the Petrarchan sonnet as a starting point was because of its popularity with this French poetic Workshop; this movement began in French in around 1539 when Marot translated six sonnets from Petrarch’s Canzoniere, and then Maurice experimented in this genre, but this workshop made this structure their central signature. Ronsard’s “reputation as France’s greatest love-poet should not, however, obscure his excellence in an astonishing variety of forms and genres such as elegies, odes, philosophical hymns, and religious controversy. Anthony Mortimer’s verse translations cover this many-faceted achievement in a version that functions as English poetry in its own right without departing from the letter and spirit of the original. The French text is given on facing pages and a useful appendix contains extracts from seminal manifestos by the two poets. A critical introduction, a glossary of names and places, and abundant notes encourage the reader to place the poems in their social and cultural context.”
The “Introduction” opens by explaining that, just as with the output of the British Workshop, the authorship of many of the works created by this French Workshop has been contested. For example, the author of the Deffence et Illustation de la Langue Francoyse (1548) is “announced as Du Bellay, but” it “is generally assumed to represent the views of a number of young poets” of this Workshop. The three “nucleus” members of this Workshop, Ronsard, Du Bellay and Antoine de Baif appear to have been grouped together because they all studied “in Paris at the College Coqueret under the inspiring direction of Jean Dorat”, while non-central members studied elsewhere (ix). This puffery of wealthy aristocrats and the expensive university they are associated with is typical for what literary workshops advertised during this period. What is strange is why this collection only includes Du Bellay and Ronsard’s poetry, leaving out the third corner of this trio: Baif… Then, Mortimer explains that one of the positives of this reprinted poetry collection is that its central theme is Empire, or monarchy. The puffery of monarchical power has continued to be a favorite subject in academic and literary publishing from the Renaissance through the presence (despite claims of decolonialization and anti-imperial tides) (x).
I had to request this collection because the British Workshop’s ghostwriters regularly translated, adopted, and re-wrote, with and without credits these poems from the Pléiade. There is so much borrowing between Latin classics, Petrarchan Italian versions, these French attempts and the latest British variants that most lines sound familiar, including the allusion to Cupid in the first poem, “The Olive”: “…And strike my heart, transfixed with that great beauty./ I truly thought the archer would take aim/ At both of us, and that the very same/ Sharp wound he makes would bind us close together;/ But that blind boy, careless as children are,/ Left you untouched, alas, although you were/ The greater prey, and chose to shoot the lesser” (5). I could cite extensive similar passages in the other variants for this and probably for all of the poems in this collection.
While these poems have great historical significance as precursors and as echoes of the past, many are not particularly dense in original meaning. For example, stanza 26 of Du Bellay’s The Regrets puffs the Vatican, with its “rich” adornments, while reflecting on Rome’s mythological past (25). The collection seems to be a labor of a poet or two who were paid by-the-line to rhyme about something propagandistic in favor of Catholicism, Empire, heterosexual marriage and love, and respect for Latin classics. This sense of a laborious assignment being executed is apparent in repetitive lines that express dire sadness, as in these lines from Ronsard’s Les Amours (Marie): “Likewise my head at every blow/ Is bent with sadness to the ground”. The narrator is not describing corporal punishment, but rather, as a preceding stanza explains: “…like the rose a lover hides/ Between the breasts of some young maid,/ Who keeps it safe and guarded by/ Those ripening apples, undisplayed/ Until the night when she’ll enlace/ And find it withered in its place…” (109). Then again, I believe I have overdosed on Renaissance poetry. It would take something extreme for me to feel as if I have not heard these types of lines before after publishing BRRAM’s 20 volumes. For any normal reader who has not been dampened to it, these romantic poems should be delightful and insightful exercises in poetic structure.
This is an essential poetry collection for all humans’ home libraries, as well as public and university libraries. This collection is also a great choice for French or world literature classes. It might be difficult for students to find distinct points of interest in some of these poems, so professors who place this collection on the syllabus should find the poems here that have specific narratives that are memorable and invite specific research and points for discussion. Though I could not find any extensive narratives at a glance, as even longer poems, like Ronsard’s Sonnets for Helen, “47 Elegy” is presented as a lament for a specific character, but it includes few biographical details that might have been memorable (129-31). On second thought, it would be best to only assign this book to graduate poetry students, who could write their own research papers related to this collection. Giving a quiz on its contents to an undergraduate class would probably result in mostly fails, as these poems blend, without clear elements to memorize or narrative plots to grasp.
The Second Volume of Henry James’ Letters
Henry James; Michael Anesko, Greg W. Zacharias, and Katie Sommer, eds., The Complete Letters of Henry James: 1887-1888, Volume 2 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, December 1, 2023). Hardcover: $95.00. 480pp, 6.25X10”. ISBN: 978-1-4962-3832-0.
*****
“This second volume of The Complete Letters of Henry James, 1887-1888 contains 182 letters, of which 120 are published for the first time, written from late December 1887 to November 19, 1888. These letters continue to mark Henry James’s ongoing efforts to care for his sister, develop his work, strengthen his professional status, build friendships, engage timely political and economic issues, and maximize his income. James details work on The Aspern Papers, The Reverberator, Partial Portraits, and The Tragic Muse. This volume opens with some of James’s social visits, includes the death of longtime friend Lizzie Boott, and concludes with James on the Continent.”
Since I reviewed the first volume of this collection of letters, I tested two of “James’” novels in my 19th century corpus and the fit into the G-group, of which “James” could not have been the underlying ghostwriter. This suggests it is likely that “James” also did not write these copious letters himself, but rather a ghostwriter created these for him. Thus, one question is if there are any evidence in support of this hypothesis in this volume. Many of these letters are addressed to other tested bylines that matched one of the Workshop’s ghostwriters. “Edmund Gosse” was tested and his rhetorical Questions at Issue (1893) fit into the K-group. The first letter addressed to “Gosse” is undated and addressed to him at the Leeds University. I wish this and other letters from the different bylines included handwritten original copies. Only transcriptions, without any photocopies are included in these volumes. I will search for handwritten samples from as many as possible bylines in my corpus in the next stage of my project to check if handwriting analysis agrees with my stylometric findings. Returning to the first letter, it is a Christmas wishes note, which does not have enough details, so that it could have been written by anybody. Gosse’s life is mentioned but so generally that it merely required the author knew the addressee was married (5-6). The second letter in this set to “Gosse” again mentions his wife, as an obstacle who took up James’ time when he visited hoping to speak with Gosse. There is some cryptic references here: “You are right in supposing that my talk with you the other night made me feel better. It quite set me up, and made me, as if I had received a cheque for £1,000.” This is followed by a reference to pending interview with Mr. Watt, so that it seems that James has been paid for this looming interview (16). No letter to Alexander Pollock Watt follows. James mentions Watt again several letters later: “I have lately put my literary affairs (so far as they are connected with magazines) largely into the hands of an agent, one Mr. A. P. Watt, who places and arranges for all the production of Walter Besant, Rider Haggard, William Black, Bret Harte, James Payn and Wilkie Collins. He appeared eager to undertake me, and I am promised remarkably good results from it. He is to make one’s bargain and take charge of one’s productions generally – but especially over here. He takes 10 percent of what he gets for me, but I am advised that his favorable action one one’s market and business generally more that makes up for this – and that even if it didn’t the relief and comfort of having him take all the mercenary arranging and selling side off one’s mind is well worth the cost…” (74). Given the previous reference to a large payment just prior to the mention of this meeting with Watt, it seems likely that Watt gave him the stated sum at the preceding meeting after “James” already performed some service. An agent would have been essential for a professional ghostwriter to avoid having the ghostwriter soliciting ghostwriting contractors himself, and thus possibly incriminating either the ghostwriter or the contractors. Given the fiscal implications of this relationship it is odd that “James” does not mention Watt otherwise in this volume. Though the cryptic first reference suggests that there was something about this partnership that was secretive. The reference to Watt also representing Collins and Haggard is likely to also be significant, as all of “Collins’” tested texts matched the A-group, while “Haggard” matched the A and G groups. With “James” texts also in the G-group, it is likely that if the other bylines on this list were tested, they would also match the K, A and G groups, as the agent is likely to have been selling a few ghostwriters’ creations to a roster of ghostwriting contractors. Discussions regarding agents and the business of writing would have only been relevant if those communicating were aware of the realities of professional writing. This suggests that whoever was writing these letters for “James” was writing these with a practical business purpose, as opposed to merely using them to establish James as an intellectual to a social circle. James could not have ghostwritten the G-group that his novels fit into because he was born extremely late for it, in 1843, when the earliest texts in this group were published by 1811 at the earliest or 1832 at the latest. Nearly half of this group was already published by the time James was 16. These uncertainties are one of the reasons it is important to review the handwriting samples across this corpus. These types of giant collections of letters have been published for most canonical puffed bylines from the 19th century. Thus, it should be obvious if the handwriting from one byline matches another in such tomes of hundreds of letters.
It is extremely important for scholars who cannot travel to the archives where original letters are stored to have access to these in books such as this one. There are treasures of evidence on every page I have reviewed, and most scholars should find relevant information to their own research. Since everybody cannot be sent review copies, it is important for libraries to have a copy of this series of letters.
A Linguistically Corrected Translation of the Old Testament
The JPS Tanakh: Gender-Sensitive Edition: Torah Nevi’im Kethuvim (Lincoln: Jewish Publication Society: University of Nebraska Press, October 15, 2023). Hardcover: $39.95. 1718pp. ISBN: 978-0-8276-1559-5.
*****
“The first Jewish gender-sensitive translation of the full Hebrew Bible, THE JPS TANAKH: Gender-Sensitive Edition renews and revises the iconic Jewish Publication Society Bible translation from 1985 to reflect advances in scholarship and changes in English while maintaining utmost fidelity to the original Hebrew. This edition offers gender-inclusive renderings where appropriate and gendered renderings when called for historically and linguistically, incorporating the best of contemporary research into Israelite history and religion, literary studies, philology, linguistics, and the social sciences to offer a faithful and accurate translation. References to persons are gender sensitive yet consistent with ancient gender norms, and the translation strives for inclusive language when referring broadly to people, ancestors, and humankind. References to God are typically gender neutral and generally avoid grammatically masculine pronouns and labels, with careful examination of each context yielding the most appropriate rendering. To enable the tetragrammaton (God’s four-letter name) to be encountered as a name and without masculine connotations, the edition typically translates it as ‘God’ (in small capitals) rather than ‘the Lord.’ Revising the venerable JPS translation, the gender-sensitive edition—RJPS (Revised Jewish Publication Society edition)—empowers readers to experience Scripture with all the power of the original Hebrew.” It is designed for “readers who embrace biblical scholarship with reverence for tradition, and for communities and individuals who adopt an inclusive, egalitarian perspective in today’s world.”
It is amazing that this single volume manages to fit the entire Old Testament by using ultra-thin pages to squeeze together 1718 pages. This is the first time I have the entirety of the Old Testament in my library, so I am delighted that this book was available for review. I have read significant portions of it during my Hassidic schooling, and recently when I translated a verse version of the Book of Job. But I have not previously imagined paying money to purchase the Bible… It seems like a very strange purchase for an atheist. Then again, atheists need a copy of the Bible on their shelf more than believers, since atheists are likely to spend more time explaining their disbelief. When I was performing my own translation of Job, I realized just how important it was to have an updated translation of the Bible because the King James version was done briskly by the Workshop and most English-speakers still use that slightly modernized version today. Even I noticed some mistakes between the Hebrew and the King James English translation, so it is very likely that this entirely new translation should fix many of the misunderstandings that remain unfixed in those reading King James.
This translation presents the gender-neutrality of God as accurate to the original Hebrew intention. The British ghostwriting Workshop in the Renaissance was composed only of men, and their had a monarchical perspective on a male Lord God. In contrast, there is a female analogy for God in Genesis, and God is described as a mother in Deuteronomy, Isaiah, Psalms, Matthew and Luke. And the Hebrew name of God, Yahweh, combines a feminine first part and a masculine second part. This is not a version that applies neutrality to God in all instances. “It offers gender-inclusive renderings when appropriate and gendered ones when called for historically and linguistically.” The goal is to restore “how gender functioned in the ancient world” (ix). This ancient society was clearly far less sexist than society during the Renaissance. For example, in the conclusion of Job, all of Job’s new daughters are referred to by name and are celebrated, whereas none of his new sons are named. There are many words with multiple meanings that have previously been interpreted as male, but also have neutral meanings, such as the distinction between “son” and “offspring”, or “fathers” and “ancestors” (x).
Anybody who reads a few passages from this version will notice that many or most of the words differ from the habituation King James version. For example, the King James version makes a mistake of referring to plants as meat: “I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in the which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat.” In contrast, this new translation states correctly: “I give you every seed-bearing plant that is upon all the earth, and every tree that has seed-bearing fruit; they shall be yours for food” (4). This translation just generally seems to be more poetic, less archaic, more specific, and more readable than earlier versions. The insertions of terms such as “Lord” before “God” were not in the original text, and they interrupt the flow of ideas. For example, in Genesis’ “Chapter 2”, in the King James version the 4th sentence reads digressively as: “These are the generations of the heavens and of the earth when they were created, in the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens”. In contrast, the new version is simple direct and states the same meaning: “Such is the story of heaven and earth when they were created” (4). The Bible is long enough when it is translated precisely, it does not need any repetitive phraseology to make it even longer.
This is a wonderful translation of the Old Testament. Perhaps, if the Bible is this approachable going forward those who claim to be religious will in fact begin reading it. Given that the Bible is the world’s top best-selling book, and most of the world’s population claim to believe in its fictional narrative as their theological truth; it is of great importance for there to be such accessible translations of this text so that humanity can refer to its actual content when debating about topics that it might comment on very differently than how most zealots imagine it would without checking. The more convoluted the Bible is the easier it is for people to manipulate its message, knowing the public will not be capable to check their accuracy in this original source. Thus, this is another rare book that most members of the public should probably have in their library or in their local library.
CIA’s Fight for the Growth of International Stupidity
Jack Devine, Spymaster’s Prism: The Fight Against Russian Aggression (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, November 1, 2023). Softcover: $26.95. 304pp, 6X9”, 13 photographs, 1 appendix, index. ISBN: 978-1-64012-601-5.
*
“A prescient study of our unending struggle with Russia and its intelligence agencies’ relentless effort to undermine our national security. Replete with the most salient spy stories, covert actions, and counterintelligence investigations from the beginning of the Cold War up until the eve of Putin’s misguided march on Kiev, legendary spymaster Jack Devine builds a vivid and complex mosaic that illustrates how Russia has employed intelligence activities to undermine our democracy throughout modern history and lay the groundwork for this invasion. Devine tells this story through the gimlet-eyed perspective of a seasoned CIA professional who served his country for more than three decades, some at the highest levels of the agency, offering objective and candid analysis that will bring new insight into Russia’s invasion…”
This book opens as a direct opposite to the factual spy-ship book I reviewed earlier in this set. It’s “Preamble” and opening focuses on the “I” of the author and puffs his career in espionage, even though it had ended over 2 decades ago, and since he has been working in private security (xv). From there he digresses into a description of the architecture of the CIA building (xvi). And after digressing to chat about the furniture or what-not, he reaches the abrupt conclusion that the proposed “victory in the Cold War” did not end “our struggle with Russian intelligence” (xvi). Is the struggle with Russian intellectuals, or is there some specific goal of this broad espionage knowledge-seeking? Why the pessimism that “Russian covert… espionage” is continuing “unabated” (xvii)? Didn’t he and most of the CIA spend the past century abating it? Pages later, he is lecturing with “lessons” about Russian schemes, without mentioning concrete details that could explain what specific spying maneuvers he is so concerned about (xxi). Then, he expresses concern that after the Berlin Wall fell, the US has been wasting its time by pivoting to analysis of “narcotics, nuclear proliferation, terrorism, and digital/cyber security”, instead of “refocusing” on the “soul” of “our mission”, or the pursuit of intelligence to use against Russia (23). Why would this vendetta be more important than all those other history-shifting concerns? Then, there are threats that what Russia did to “Ukraine is a cautionary” tale “for the Baltic states,” Europe, and the US (53). How can Russia seriously attack any country after Ukraine when it would be impossible for any country to “win” a territorial modern war with a country as large as Ukraine. America has not “won” any wars since WWII. There is no victory when there is no clear goal in warfare when territorial conquest is illegal according to international law. No country can permanently occupy another country, or install an entire foreign government of puppets to rule over it, especially not if it wants to present itself as a benevolent actor. And if Russia wants to conquer as a malevolent aggressor, a first step might have been to at least call the attack a war aimed to conquer Ukraine, and not a military operation it was fighting to liberate Ukraine from a Nazi threat, as a liberated Ukraine cannot also be a territorially conquered Ukraine. How can this nonsensical no-ending-possible scenario be threatening to anybody but the human rights of the Ukrainian people? Why shift the debate away from these true victims onto an unrelated third party like the US, and to the still relevant CIA spies who wish they had executed some missed illegal-spying maneuver. In the second half of the book, the text is still digressive, general, and horridly lacking in specific research. For example, there is a brief mention of the CIA in the 1980s using a Russian spy to use data from US tech companies to plant some kind of a trojan horse in “Soviet military equipment, pipelines, chemical plants, and even their space program” to “compromise two hundred Soviet intelligence officers working across Europe and North America and send them packing” (158). What? Imagine this story in the reverse. Hundreds of spies’ identities were disclosed? Were they all killed? Were they all arrested? Why would they “pack”; did they migrate somewhere after being exposed? What nonsense is trying to be communicated here? The paragraph concludes with the grand statement: “Some sovietologists consider this operation an important factor in impeding the Soviet Union’s technical progress” (158). The goal of the CIA is to impede the progress of technical intellectual progress of Russia? In other words, the CIA’s goal is the growth of international stupidity?
This is the worst book in this set, and one of the worst books I have reviewed. Perhaps, it stands out as horrid because most of the books in this set are pretty good. This is just some kind of double-speak nonsense anti-Russian propaganda that only manages to make the CIA seem to be an absurd villain as well.
Multi-Ethnic True Crime Murder Mystery Set in Manchuria
Scott D. Seligman, Murder in Manchuria: The True Story of a Jewish Virtuoso, Russian Fascists, a French Diplomat, and a Japanese Spy in Occupied China (Lincoln: Potomac Books: University of Nebraska Press, October 15, 2023). Hardcover: $36.95. 218pp. 20 photographs, 4 maps, 1 chronology, 1 glossary, index. ISBN: 978-1-64012-584-1.
*****
“Explores an unsolved murder set amid the chaos that reigned in China in the run-up to World War II. The story unfolds against the backdrop of a three-country struggle for control of Manchuria—an area some called China’s ‘Wild East’—and an explosive mixture of nationalities, religions, and ideologies. Semyon Kaspé, a young Jewish musician, is kidnapped, tortured, and ultimately murdered by disaffected, antisemitic White Russians, secretly acting on the orders of Japanese military overlords who covet his father’s wealth. When local authorities deliberately slow-walk the search for the kidnappers, a young French diplomat takes over and launches his own investigation. Part cold-case thriller and part social history, the true, tragic saga of Kaspé is told in the context of the larger, improbable story of the lives of the twenty thousand Jews who called Harbin home at the beginning of the twentieth century.” It “recounts the events that led to their arrival and their hasty exodus—and solves a crime that has puzzled historians for decades.”
This is a strange book, so that I kept glancing though its opening pages without being certain what suitable comments to make. The introductory remarks are a mix of first-person reflections, and light history. The latter wins over by the start of the first chapter “Tug of War”, which describes the wars that touched Manchuria from the Renaissance through the central events that took place on August 24, 1933, when a young man called Semyon escorted a young lady called Lydia home, but ended up being the one in danger and murdered. One of the reasons these chapters are disorienting is because they introduce the cross-migration between China and Russia at the turn of the 20th century. It explains that the military turmoil in Russia from the final decade of the 19th century through the Revolution, and the buildup to and the execution of WWI that drove migration not only to the west, but also to the east (3-10). One of the main tensions in this mystery is the conflict between Jewish-Russian and White-Russian antisemites who both migrated to the same region in Manchuria. Though this book also pitches several other sides and historical intricacies. And it dives into the second chapter “Harbin – Cosmopolis in the North” by reviewing other bits of seemingly unrelated histories that have not yet attempted to be explained as relevant to the murder mystery the blurb promised to solve. For example, there is an extensive description of the architecture of a plaza, and then a paragraph about recreations like swimming available in the region, as if this is an advertisement for travelers to come to this region (11-4). Finally, the point of this digression is explained: “In legalizing Jewish residence in Manchuria, the czar offered Jews willing to settle there freedom from these restrictions, as well as from worsening economic conditions in Russia itself” (15). Jews and the native Chinese lived peacefully for a couple of decades before Chinese antisemitism began to emerge, as legal demands for “limiting the rights of the Jews” were raised in the Chinese Chamber of Commerce in Harbin (18). Then, this region was also invaded by Japan, and this brought yet another antisemitic sect. These troubles were overlaid with a multi-ethnic criminal element, as well as police and spies who were profiting from pursuing the criminals. These conflicting interests led to “five Chinese and two Russians” being “shot by Japanese police for attempting to deliver appeals to the commissioners”, and several other violent suppressions of civil disobedience (55). The specific murder is addressed in later chapters, with most of the details of the case being digested during the descriptions of trial proceedings. The front-matter includes a useful summary of the main characters in this narrative, and there is a timeline of events in the backmatter. These components are necessary due to the confusing nature of this saga.
Readers of this book should be prepared to be overwhelmed with a lot of new and unusual information, and to prepare to be served this information gradually over several chapters, instead of having a summary up-front. The presented materials are heavily researched, but the language is casually phrased to invite general readers, and not only historians specializing in this region. Those who enjoy historical true crime mysteries should enjoy reading this book cover-to-cover. So this is really a book meant as vacation personal reading, which is probably a larger market than libraries. Though libraries would probably also benefit from having a copy.
Somniferous Babbling About 100 Years of Non-Romantic Romance
Patrick Vincent, Ed., The Cambridge History of European Romantic Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, October 31, 2023). 786pp. ISBN: 9781108750301.
**
“This wide-ranging new history of European Romantic Literature presents a pan-European phenomenon which transcended national borders and contributed to a new sense of European cultural identity across the continent. Conceived in the same spirit as Madame de Staël’s cultural and political agenda at a time when her ‘generous idea’ of Europe is being challenged on all sides, the volume pays close attention to the period’s circulation of people, ideas, and texts. It proposes to rethink the period comparatively, focusing on various forms of cultural mediation and transfer, and on productive tensions, synchronicities, and interactions within and across borders. Organized chronologically, its twenty chapters address over five hundred works, proposing a coherent historical narrative without completely erasing individual nations’ specificities. By showcasing in particular the place of Britain within continental culture, the volume hopes to reactivate critical examinations of Romanticism from a historicised European perspective.”
The Contents explain that this book covers a century between 1750 and 1850, which is labeled as the “Romantic” period. The blurb is problematic as it suggests this book is mostly digressive and nonsensical. The Contents page supports this initial guess, as each of the chapters is written by a different critic. This type of multi-author collection on any topic tends to be digressive, repetitive, and nonsensical unless an editor reins in the writers to keep them from veering into nonsense, and not repeating each other or themselves. It is also problematic that the book is divided into 3 sections chronologically, with the two last sections being “Revolution to Restoration (1790-1815)” and “Restoration to Revolution (1815-1850)”; this organization means the editor opted for the easy chronological organization when the essays all addressed distinct themes. To orient myself I looked first at the “Introduction”, hoping it could answer how a broad century of different types of literature can all be called “Romantic”. What does Revolution have to do with the degree of Romanticism in fiction? This chapter claims that this 100 years is known as “Romanticism” because of how Madame Germaine de Stael described it, as supportive to “the development of all generous ideas”. The general “urgency” and hopefulness for achievement in literature is apparently sufficient to label produced texts as part of this Romanticism movement. Stael specifically published a “prospectus for a future Romanticism”, which “called for a socially and politically transformative literature that might develop virtue and regulate public opinion in a republic.” The description becomes a puffery as it repeats that Stael’s primary criteria for this type of literature was that it propagated for “national cultures”, but also nonsensically “translational”. By including both sides of a theoretical concept like nationhood one is clearly attempting to avoid giving any actual definition, as one is just referring to pretty much everything. This non-definition must be one of the reasons this book can label 100 years broadly as a part of “Romanticism”. This is a broad problem with the field of literary criticism, rather than the fault of this particular collection’s editor. The editor does point out that Stael appears to have plagiarized or borrowed her ideas’ in On Germany with its focus on the glory of “Northern literature” from German propagandists, such as Friedrich Wilhelm von Schelling (his had a theory on aesthetics, and his brother Friedrich first used the term “romantic” in 1798). This introduction also claims that Romanticism was a separation from admiration for classical structural forms in poetry and drama, but one of the chapters is called “Shakespeare and Romantic Drama” (by Frederick Burwick).
The most interesting or relevant to my research chapter seems to be Angela Wright’s “5: Gothic Circulations”. It opens with digressive paragraphs that stress an intention to avoid defining just what the “Gothic” genre is. Then, it claims that its roots in Britain were oddly “inspired by eighteenth-century travelogues”. Supposedly these travelogues inspired settings for cross-European Gothic romances. It is extremely difficult to read these repetitions of scholarly monologue that circles back in on itself. But there are a few rational ideas expressed. Such as that the highbrow elements of the Gothic include: “Stylistically… the Gothic excavates and forces its readership to examine the structuration of hierarchy through its use of highly stylized devices. Paratexts in the form of editors, translations feigned and authentic, discovered manuscripts, or displacement in a not-so-remote past…” Instead of spending the rest of this paragraph in giving specific examples of these different devices, Wright digresses into discussing the “paranoid” perspective on “provenance” she imagines in readers, and other unreadable topics.
It would be a horrid Gothic nightmare if I had been assigned this book in a literary theory class in graduate school (I was assigned many similar books). These essays do not say anything truly original, nor do they clearly state even the standard definitions of terms for genres and related concepts. They are instead exercises in babbling about as little as possible for as long as possible in the hope all readers will fall into permanent slumber.
Grammar Textbooks Should Never Use etc.
Andrew Radford, Analysing English Sentence Structure: An Intermediate Course in Syntax (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, August 31, 2023). 584pp. ISBN: 9781009322966.
**
An “intermediate course in English syntax and contemporary syntactic theory. Chapters are split into core modules, each focusing on a specific topic, and the reader is supported throughout with learning aids such as summaries, lists of key hypotheses and principles, extensive references, exercises with handy hints, and a glossary of terminology.” Includes “free online resources, which comprise an open-access Students’ Answerbook, and a password-protected Teachers’ Answerbook, each containing comprehensive answers to exercises, with detailed tree diagrams.”
Syntax is “the arrangement of words and phrases to create well-formed sentences in a language.” I look a PhD-level grammar class that covered this linguistic science. It is typically only covered when students make common mistakes in syntax and teachers grade them down for it in classes prior to this level. One of these common problems is with “Agreement”, which is covered in intricate detail in a section of its own in this book. The simple definition of “agreement” is the grammatical rule that related words (especially nouns and verbs) should agree in their number and gender. In contrast, the technical definition given in the “Overview” of this section for “agreement” is its involvement of “a relation between a probe and a goal”. The next section 3.1.1 offers a variant standard definition: “finite auxiliaries are said to agree with their subjects in person and number”. After this point, the discussion uses so many complex concepts in combination and in abbreviation that it is more like a foreign language than a textbook that could be picked up by opening it to a random page. Knowledge of the preceding chapters is certainly assumed in references such as the parenthetic citation: “(in the classic CP+TP+VP model outlined in Chapter 1)”. Then there are numerous examples of agreement without a clear enough explanation of what aspects of agreement are being highlighted. Another problem is that this section does not review elemental or even intermediary concepts related to agreement before leaping to a discussion of abstract advanced concepts such as the “postverbal subject”; “postverbal” means anything “occurring after a verb”. This is mentioned in reference to a very narrow problem of “a spec-head account of agreement” failing to address cases where “the subject is postverbal”, so the “relation” to the “specifier” is “Potentially problematic” (138-9). This is a very unreadable and un-appliable textbook. And instead of spending the introduction on explaining any of these later abbreviations and references, the frontmatter “Background” chapter casually digresses into a discussion about the difference between prescriptive and descriptive grammar that is of no practical use when later complexities overwhelm readers. There is a brief definition of the abbreviations, such as “N for noun” in the middle of a discussion of “functional categories”, or “words with a grammatical function” Perhaps, the use of “etc.” at the end of this definition that uses as examples of “properties… definiteness, tense, mood, aspects, clause type etc.” The author of this book seems to be rushing somewhere without stopping to weigh if what he is communicating is cohesive or addresses the term the beginning of the sentence set out to define.
Students who are assigned this book will problem have a horrific semester ahead of them, full of confusion, dread, and checking a myriad of other grammar textbooks to find some rational explanations for what this textbook was trying to communicate. So I hope professors won’t assign this book to students, and researchers of syntax should also stay away to avoid being deeply perplexed.
Another Puffed Canonical Stories Collection
Thomas Hardy, Life’s Little Ironies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, September 30, 2023). 539 pp. ISBN: 9781108871082.
*****
“Life’s Little Ironies (a phrase coined by Hardy) was Thomas Hardy’s third collection of short stories. The volume’s eight stories and one sequence of shorter tales (presented in a Canterbury Tales-type framework) had all appeared first in magazines before being gathered together in 1894. Not only do they reflect the strengths and themes of his great novels—they are also themselves powerful works, encompassing tragedy and humour. Part of the Cambridge Edition of the Novels and Short Stories of Thomas Hardy, this volume presents an authoritative text which aims to reflect Hardy’s original artistic intentions. A full scholarly apparatus includes every authorial revision, from manuscript (where extant) onwards, enabling readers to trace Hardy’s creative process. An introductory essay gives details of the stories’ composition, publishing history and critical reception; there are comprehensive explanatory notes and a glossary, and the illustrations that accompanied the stories’ magazine publication also provide valuable context.”
When I tested “Hardy” in my 19th century corpus, 2 of his social novels matched the G-group. I requested this collection so that I could reference it as I begin researching the biographies and textual outputs of the authors that I am re-attributing in the second volume of my 18th and 19th century re-attribution mini-series. Because one of the items that I anticipate will be especially difficult to gather is handwriting samples from the hundreds of bylines in these corpuses, I first turned to “Appendix D: Galley Proofs for First Edition”, hoping that it would include handwritten corrections, so that I could save these as examples of handwriting of “Hardy” and perhaps also his editor. But this appendix only includes transcribed corrections; these can also be useful in evaluating the attribution of the editor’s hand, as a strange linguistic usage difference between the original and edited versions can help to pinpoint this element. The introductory comment to this appendix notes that these pages are “stamped and dated by the printer” as: “R & R Clark, Printers” and “Brandon St Edinburgh”; they conclude that “the proofs have been marked by Hardy in black ink with a thin nib”. It is still a bit unclear if the original text only is in “Hardy’s” handwriting, or the original and the corrected version, or if the text is printed and “Hardy’s” edits are in his handwriting; the latter is likely to be the intended meaning. This is a useful appendix, even if it does not meet my hope of finding handwriting samples. There is also a section of explanatory notes, which clarifies items such as that “Exonbury” in “For Conscience’ Sake” is a reference to “Exeter”. Most editions do not include these types of primary materials, so this is a superior edition designed for researchers at all levels of “Hardy’s” fiction.
However, the “General Editor’s Preface” begins by over-puffing “Hardy” and his famous novel, Far from the Madding Crowd, which “Hardy” himself described more rationally as an example of “a good hand at a serial”. This preface goes on to offer the publishing history of “Hardy’s” texts, including the 20-volume Wessex Edition that was released by Macmillan in 1912-4. This Wessex Edition was significantly different from the versions of these works when they were first-published decades earlier. This Cambridge Edition “follows an early text model”, with annotations on what edits were made later on.
Then, the “Introduction” explains that the stories in this collection were published in periodicals in 1882, 1891 and 1893. They were initially collected as a book in 1894. Textual, bibliographic and editorial histories are offered for each of the stories. This would be very useful to scholars who are researching specific textual elements, such as that “Sophie’s native village is moved from ‘Upper Wessex’ to ‘North Wessex forty miles from London’” in fo. 3., can learn about it here, without needing to travel to England to find this specific manuscript in an archive.
The body of the stories is heavily annotated with abbreviations for what manuscripts specific variants appeared in. The lines of the text are numbered, and the annotations reference these line numbers. This style of annotation is one I dislike, as it requires readers to do math as they count the lines to figure out to what line a reference is referring to. One also must search each of these lines for the specific term being annotated, such as the substitution of “eye” for “eyes” on line 4 of the first story, “The Son’s Veto”. This is the standard Cambridge annotation style. It really should be changed to an automatically formatted footnote model where a number is placed next to the word being annotated, and this number repeats in a footnote to minimize time consumed in figuring out what is being referred, which can instead be spent on understanding of the meaning of the reference (3). This first story is an example of “Hardy’s” characteristic social topics as it is about “a young invalid lady”, who was managing to take care of herself without a “maid”, despite sitting in a “wheeled chair”. Similarly to Knut Hamsun noting the ugliness of a love-interest, “Hardy” stresses that “she was not so handsome as the people behind her had supposed” (4). Such avoidance of the stereotypical descriptions of beautiful eyes and the like is common to “social” or “literary” fiction, which must be frank and shocking, to counter the low-brow predictability and repetitiveness. The next paragraph adds that “she was less young than they had fancied her to be” (4). Then in a dialogue a boy makes a “correction” to his mother: “Surely you know that by this time!” (5) These sexist remarks begin to be very burdensome for a female reader. Especially when the invalid is compared with some “pretty woman”. The invalid echoes this sentiment as she falls “into reverie”. The point of these depressing perspectives is to depict the depression of this character, while imparting a depressed feeling on the sensitive reader (6). However, just what aside for the sexism is the “tragedy” they are sad about is not explained as the dialogue and the narrative avoid simply explaining the underlying points. The “tragedy” seems to be explained as the invalid’s lack of a “maid” when the author describes a wealthy visitor’s “household” being staffed with “the cook, the housemaid, the parlor-maid, and the man out-of-doors” (8). This advertisement of extreme and middle-wealth, and ridicule of miserable and less-than-pretty people is indeed depressing.
Why are these stories classics? What about this style of narrative is worthy of being taught in schools over a century after these stories’ publication? The more I research the attribution of the British canon, the more I realize that humanity needs to acknowledge that these ghostwritten propagandistic and salesmanship-oriented creations are not pinnacles of creative achievement, but rather very ordinary outputs. Modern writers must do better. There is more to be explored through the literary art than these little sketches that the British 19th century workshop has cemented into our collective curriculums. Though it is not this particular collection’s editors fault, but rather the fault of the literary studies academia for failing to acknowledge that some classics should be downgraded, and truly great yet undiscovered works should take their place.
Pufferies of a Puffer Who Puffed
Charles Martindale, Elizabeth Prettejohn, and Lene Østermark-Johansen, Walter Pater and the Beginnings of English Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, November 9, 2023). 300pp. ISBN: 9781108835893.
***
“Walter Pater’s significance for the institutionalization of English studies at British universities in the nineteenth century is often overlooked. Addressing the importance of his volume Appreciations (1889) in placing English literature in both a national and an international context, this book demonstrates the indebtedness of the English essay to the French tradition and brings together the classic, the Romantic, the English and the European. With essays on drama, prose, and poetry, from Shakespeare and Browne, to Lamb, Coleridge, Wordsworth and Pater’s contemporaries Rossetti and Morris, Appreciations exemplifies ideals of aesthetic criticism formulated in Pater’s first book, Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873). Subjectivity pervades Pater’s essays on the English authors, while bringing out their exceptional qualities in a manner reaching far into twentieth-century criticism.”
In other words, Pater established the standard puffing position in the English literature department with an entire book of pufferies, or Appreciations (1889). Thus, these essays are the opposite of “subjective”, as they are highly biased towards advertising English literature as superior to that of other nations. I requested this book hoping it will be a coherent explanation for how the over-puffery or the dominance of English canon commenced across the world. However, this is not the goal this book actually attempts, as it is a collection of essays loosely about Pater from different scholars. The “Preface” adds that these editors had previously put together at least one other collection that puffs Pater the Classicist. They stress that one of the ways they chose essays for inclusion is that they had to express that “Pater has novel, interesting and important things to say about English authors”. Thus, critics who might have presented logical objections to problems with this puffery of a puffer who puffed were not allowed to redirect this field in a more rational direction.
The “Introduction” explains Pater’s significance in bringing about a shift that raised English literature above others in world-wide curriculums. “In nineteenth-century Britain, Classics was the premier university humanistic discipline dealing with matters literary. In the twentieth century, as everyone knows, it was replaced in that position by English” (1). Given my findings regarding ghostwriting across the British canon, this was not a positive change. This change began with John Churton Collins’ campaign to “establish a School of English at the University of Oxford”, and “leading intellectuals”, including Pater, as well as Matthew Arnold, William Morris and Max Muller were solicited in support of this development (2). As part of my 19th century corpus, I tested “Pater’s” Marius the Epicurean: His Sensations and Ideas (1885), which fit into the K-group; I also tested “Arnold” who also matched the K-group, and “Morris”, whose novels fit into the C-group, but his untested nonfiction might have also fit into the K-group. In other words, Oxford is likely to have employed the K-ghostwriter to create “scholarly” pufferies of its Workshop’s literary output for a newly planned English Department. At least there are some critical points raised in this otherwise puffing introduction, such as the note that “Pater’s detractors, who include T. S. Eliot and Eliot’s admirer Christopher Ricks, typically accuse him of two failings: a tendency to subjectivism amounting at times to solipsism; and an espousal of belletrism, vagueness, and lack of critical rigour” (7). These are post-19th century critics, so it is likely that ghostwriter-K puffed his own “Pater”-bylined criticism as great during the 19th century under other bylines, but the next generation of scholars realized that, in reality, these critical observations fell far short of the high bar that should be set in top university departments. An example of the types of self-pufferies under other bylines “Pater” appears to have published are mentioned in Charles W. Mahoney’s “Chapter 11: Pater on Coleridge and Wordsworth”, which includes the following positive reviews of “Pater”: “Arthur Symons” describes him as an “aesthetic critic” with “virtue” and a special “appreciation”; similarly, “C. L. Graves” describes his critical collection as: “excellent, and full of acute remarks”; and even “Oscar Wilde’s” byline was utilized in a review that described it as “the finest” book that “appeals, not to the ordinary Wordsworthian with his uncritical temper, and his gross confusion of ethical with aesthetical problems, but rather to those who desire to separate the gold from the dross” (216). “Wilde’s” dramas and fiction fit the A-group, while the others are more obscure and were not tested. Meanwhile, “Coleridge’s” scholarly writing fit into the K-group, and Wordsworth’s poetry into the D-group. “Coleridge’s” fit for the K-group further reinforces that this cluster of British-literature-puffing scholarship was probably all ghostwritten by the K-ghostwriter, who probably wrote scholarly under the “Wilde” byline, as well as under “Pater’s”. It is easy to be the “best” if one can call one’s self the “best” under a multitude of ghost bylines.
The essays in this collection contrast it with other English literature scholars, and review the reception of Pater’s essays. These are useful from my perspective because they allow for these types of revelations. But I doubt this book would be as practical for anybody who is reading it without these hidden meanings. On the surface this is a puffery of pufferies that mostly ignores the problems with this style of criticism because it is actively embracing and repeating these errors in its own critical style.
A Collection of Echoing Essays About Gulliver’s Travels
Daniel Cook and Nicholas Seager, The Cambridge Companion to Gulliver’s Travels (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, October 19, 2023). 228pp. ISBN: 9781108830195.
***
“Jonathan Swift’s satirical masterpiece, Gulliver’s Travels, has shocked and delighted readers worldwide since its publication in 1726. At turns a humorous and harrowing indictment of human behaviour, it has been endlessly reinterpreted by critics and adapted across media by other artists.” It “comprises 17 original chapters by… scholars… As well as providing detailed close readings of each part of the narrative, this Companion relates Gulliver’s Travels to the political, religious, scientific, colonial, and intellectual debates in which Swift was engaged, and it assesses the form of the book as a novel, travel book, philosophical treatise, and satire. Finally, it explores the Travels’ rich and varied afterlives: the controversies it has fuelled, the films and artworks it has inspired, and the enduring need authors have felt to ‘write back’ to Swift’s original, disturbing, and challenging story.”
Yet again I have made the mistake of requesting a collection of essays by different literary scholars, when I was hoping to acquire for my collection a copy of this classic novel with some contextual essays, such as early reviews. This collection is divided into sections on: Context, Genres, Reading Gulliver’s Travels and its Afterlives. The Contexts section includes the standard division between: Politics, Religion, Bodies and Gender, and Science, Empire, and Observation. While I enjoyed reading such sections when I was in graduate school because I could easily write essays of my own that agreed or disagreed with interpretations of a novel’s politics or culture; now these sections seem extremely formulaic and repetitive. In instances where they are not restating typical commentary in all such sub-genre essays, they frequently veer into offensive areas. For example, Ian Higgins’ essay on “Religion” includes this sentence: “The Yahoos are not solely identified with any one particular human group, whether English, Irish, ‘Scots Irish’, Jews, natives of Africa, Australia, the Americas, or the helots of ancient Sparta, though they have some resemblances with each of them, as well as with voyage literature accounts of monkeys and apes” (32). Then, the following essays by Liz Bellamy on “Bodies and Gender” takes the strange position of defending this novel as not being sexist, after spending the opening section on summarizing Gulliver displaying his enormous private parts to the Lilliput and urinating in front of them to their “astonishment”. The conclusion drawn from this summary is: “Critics have frequently characterized the narrative as misogynistic and stressed its negative representation of female physicality, but this reading will highlight the importance of both male and female forms in the construction of gender relationships.” The basic idea is that in comparison with dramas of that period, this was a relatively mildly sexist portrayal (34-5). How is this a useful critical explanation? It is taking gender studies back to 18th century standards.
I might return to this collection when I am writing about this novel to search it for specific relevant ideas, but there is nothing useful to be gained from a further general review of this project. Similarly, scholars who are preparing essays for undergraduate or graduate classes, or for publication on this novel are compelled to cite relevant essays in this or other collections like it to show that they are aware of recent scholarship. But since this scholarship does not really offer anything new, other than asks to take us back to the old, it would be better if such reviews of past scholarship were not required in literary essays.
A Censored, Puffing and Imagined Theory of 18th Century Theatre Censorship
David O’Shaughnessy, The Censorship of Eighteenth-Century Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, August 17, 2023). 280pp. ISBN: 9781108496254.
***
“This collection reveals the wide-ranging impact of the Stage Licensing Act of 1737 on literary and theatrical culture in Georgian Britain. Demonstrating the differing motivations of the state in censoring public performances of plays after the Stage Licensing Act of 1737 and until the Theatres Act 1843, chapters cover a wide variety of theatrical genres across a century and show how the mechanisms of formal censorship operated under the Lord Chamberlain’s Examiner of Plays. They also explore the effects of informal censorship, whereby playwrights, audiences and managers internalized the censorship regime…”
And here again I have mistaken this for a history book that should have clearly explained censorship in this period, when it is actually a collection from multiple scholars who address the theory digressively, instead of explaining the facts. The problem that I was hoping this book would clarify is my finding that there was basically only one dramatic ghostwriter across the 18th century corpus, who must have been hired by a theatrical monopolist who had complete control over every word that was uttered on the stage. The censorship was not only excluding unwanted content, but was preventing anybody from that 1 exclusive ghostwriter from saying a word on the British stage that was designed to communicate a propagandistic message to the public. And this ghostwriter appears to have been so bored with the task of restating the same types of plays that he plagiarized some Renaissance plays, re-writing them sufficiently to present them as new plays. Instead, the “Introduction” puts a middle-ground spin on censorship as both “constitutive and destructive”, suggesting censorship is necessary for the betterment of the canon. The degree of censorship in this period is so extreme that such contradictory remarks are entirely contrary to the entirely destructive impact censorship had on the British cultural output; and the propagation of this output as the superior literature around the world has imparted its low standards on all the other countries where these texts are taught as the canon. The Stage Licensing Act 1737 and the later 1843 Theatres Act kept in place a monopoly or duopoly of theaters who were the only licensed theaters in London; and yet these problems are not even mentioned in this “Introduction”. Instead, it makes puffing statements of these acts such as: “the Examiner’s pen could be a delicate scalpel or a forceful bludgeon as required” (5). There is this note: “After an initial small flurry of prohibitions of anti-Walpole plays in the late 1730s, it was quite unusual for a play to be prohibited as the culture of censorship became internalized by authors and managers” (7). This lack of rejections is explained when one realizes that theater managers were only hiring a single ghostwriter who was writing precisely the types of plays that he was hired to write, and thus there was no reason to reject his output. The inability of any other writers to submit their rival plays for staging shows an absolute chasm of total censorship that was hidden by the application of multiple bylines in the authorial credits of this single ghostwriter. There were only 2 ghostwriters (A and C) operating in the dramatic genre in the 19th century, and C was the one that was dominant in the first half of that century. Only 1 of these tested 19th century plays was credited to a female byline; in contrast, a significant portion of the far more numerous new 18th century dramas were credited to female bylines. Katherine Newey’s “Chapter 3: Women Writers and Censorship in the Early Nineteenth Century” explains one of the reasons for the relative lack of female bylines in the 19th century, as it describes the banning in 1824 of “Mary Russell Mitford’s” Charles the First, before it was later bombed by critics when it was finally allowed on the stage in 1834. The lack of “access” for “Mitford” to the stage is explained as due to her being a “provincial ‘lady’”, whose “powerful friends” advocated “for her”. In other words, she had contracted an agent who hired a ghostwriter, who executed the writing and had the exclusive contract to stage plays in London. Without realizing that this is what her correspondences are actually indicating, the author of this essay imagines what “Mitford” was likely to have thought, and why some specific political themes might have been undesirable. Then, the discussion digresses into other plays that puffed British monarchs and goes further downhill from there (73-5).
This is a very unhelpful collection that digresses and fails to have clear introductions, conclusions, or lines of reasoning. Paragraphs leap between ideas. Imaginings or what writers theorize is preferred over the evidence of what in fact happened in this history of the covered events. I do not recommend this book for scholars in this field unless they are searching for some specific bit of evidence, or want to find something in a critical essay to disagree with.
NetGalley EBooks
A New Science Fiction Novel About an A.I. Stumbling into a War
Edward Ashton, Mal Goes to War (New York: St. Martin’s Press, April 9, 2024).
*****
“The humans are fighting again. Go figure. As a free A.I., Mal finds the war between the modded and augmented Federals and the puritanical Humanists about as interesting as a battle between rival anthills. He’s not above scouting the battlefield for salvage, though, and when the Humanists abruptly cut off access to infospace he finds himself trapped in the body of a cyborg mercenary, and responsible for the safety of the modded girl she died protecting. A dark comedy wrapped in a techno thriller’s skin,” it “provides a satirical take on war, artificial intelligence, and what it really means to be human.”
I requested some books in random genres in this set just to do a brief review of what other types of books are being currently published outside of my standard interest in academic publishing. Classical British science fiction has been one of my favorite subjects, and I enjoy watching modern science fiction films and shows, so this seemed like a curious segway as the blurb introduces a funny concept of an unbound A.I. who un-formulaically seems to be on a curious journey of discovery.
After the classical literature I have been reviewing in this set, the opening page of this novel is refreshing in its relative originality. Ashton sets up some suspense at the onset by describing a battle, and yet the conflict is seen from an absurd perspective, as the artificial intelligence has no emotional response to deaths that this nonsensical conflict implies. Enough details are given for the reader to visualize what is taking place and where. On the other hand, many of the references are convoluted and confusing. For example, when !HelpDesk describes “heavily armed monkeys on both sides” it seems the reference is to humans, but it is unclear if it might instead be to mechanical monkeys; and if it is a reference to humans, it is unclear if this is meant to be a racist reference. A later passage from “Mal (not a robot)” seems to clarify that “monkeys” is being used as a synonym for “humans”. After this brief chat, readers learn that Mal is armed with a “twenty-millimeter cannon” in the drone his intelligence is operating. While the general lack of empathy for Mal is amusing, it is troubling that Mal then goes to the extreme of describing this warfare as the “Humanitsts” having “fun” mutilating bodies. Though several other strange developments follow, such as the A.I. invading the computerized part of a dead human girl called Mika, and being discovered in this invasion by a girl who is familiar with this deceased human. The conversation is more philosophical and interest-catching than some of the classics. For example: “He things to explain that he did not mean to disparage the quality of her mod package, but only to express sympathy with the fact that now that her guardian is no longer functional, she is highly likely to die in the very near future, probably in an extremely painful manner.”
This is a fun read for somebody with some free time who is interested in catching up on new science fiction releases. The contents of this book are exactly as-advertised, so they can be ranked as fully meeting the bar the blurb has set for it. Some of the conversation and details are not as imaginative as it could have been, but the author might be constrained by lowbrow requirements of keeping the vocabulary simple and the details at a semi-low level.
The Fractured Narrative of the Mismanagement of Disaster Relief After the Haitian Earthquakes
Jake Johnston, Aid State: Elite Panic, Disaster Capitalism, and the Battle to Control Haiti (New York: St. Martin’s Press, January 30, 2024).
****
“Haiti’s state is near-collapse: armed groups have overrun the country, many government officials have fled after the 2021 assassination of President Moise and not a single elected leader holds office, refugees desperately set out on boats to reach the US and Latin America, and the economy reels from the after-effects of disasters, both man-made and natural, that destroyed much of Haiti’s infrastructure and institutions. How did a nation founded on liberation—a people that successfully revolted against their colonizers and enslavers—come to such a precipice?” Jake Johnston is “a researcher and writer at the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, DC,” who “reveals how long-standing US and European capitalist goals ensnared and re-enslaved Haiti under the guise of helping it. To the global West, Haiti has always been a place where labor is cheap, politicians are compliant, and profits are to be made. Over the course of nearly 100 years, the US has sought to control Haiti and its people with occupying police, military, and euphemistically-called peacekeeping forces, as well as hand-picked leaders meant to quell uprisings and protect corporate interests. Earthquakes and hurricanes only further devastated a state already decimated by the aid industrial complex. Based on years of on-the-ground reporting in Haiti and interviews with politicians in the US and Haiti, independent aid contractors, UN officials, and Haitians who struggle for their lives, homes, and families…”
This blurb does not really directly specify what the “Prologue” opens with: “On August 14, 2021, about one hundred miles to the west of Port-au-Prince, the capital of Haiti, the tectonic plates lurking beneath the earth’s surface slipped, producing a 7.2 magnitude earthquake – twice as powerful as the one that had hit in 2010…” This event was at the top of minds a couple of years ago, but as the years go by, it is necessary to specify that this is the disaster that this book explains the aftermath of.
After Hurricane Katrina, I was so shocked by this event that a few weeks later I drove from South Carolina there to look at the destruction to see if I could help with the reconstruction. I had imagined was taking place. However, to my surprise, there was nobody around that was actually reconstructing anything. When I offered to clean up a debris-littered yard, or questioned a homeless man if I could help, the men responded with requests of an inappropriate nature. I could not find any aids organizations to assist. And when I ate in a restaurant, the waitress and visitors seemed upset that I was eating up their food. I then visited a decade later, and found that shops had been redone with extreme luxury, but there were still remains of broken up buildings along highways and still people living in trailers that could not rebuild their homes. This book’s premise is that there is something unusual about the disfunction of Haiti’s inability to respond to 2 major earthquakes 10 years apart. But American cities are equally as incapable of responding to natural disasters. This perspective might help this author to gain a deeper understanding of these problems. Corruption eats up most of the relief funds both in New Orleans and in Haiti. Johnston does compare the “failed state” response to the Haiti earthquake with the failed withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan. American businessmen and politicians did corrupt both of these disasters. “In Afghanistan, the US spent billions in an effort to prop up unpopular presidents, from Hamid Karzai to Ashraf Ghani. As in Haiti, the only thing keeping these leaders in power had been foreign support.” The money sent in “foreign aid” to these countries were corruptly eaten up by the white-collar criminals at these “aid” organizations who take most of the money, while merely doing the minimum required to sell to the media the idea that they should receive continued funding. And the benevolent propaganda of America as a savior is so successful that, as this intro explains, many Haitians have traveled to Mexico and walk into Rio Grande only to be “charged” at by the border patrol agents there to block their attempt to enter the US.
The first chapter on “The ‘Compassionate Invasion’” begins with a description of Haitian President Rene Preval’s luxurious Palace. The tour he makes of the region after the earthquake is then presented. This is followed by perspectives of others across Haiti. “From the hillside perch, the city below appeared gone, hidden by a rapidly expanding cloud of dust. They could hear screams coming from the city’s densely packed neighborhoods in the distance and the collapsed Hotel Montana nearby…”
This book is a series of newspaper articles about different perspectives and times in the history between a couple of these earthquakes in Haiti. It could be improved if the author connected ideas more clearly, and spent fewer words on imagining what different actors were thinking. But it is a very useful account of these disasters and how the aid was mismanaged for historians, economists and others who are in the business of understanding the implications of such narratives.
Digressive Ponderings About Aliens
Dr. Lisa Kaltenegger, Alien Earths: The New Science of Planet Hunting in the Cosmos (New York: St. Martin’s Press, April 16, 2024).
**
“A look at the research that is transforming our understanding of the cosmos in the quest to discover whether we are alone… For the first time, we have the technology to investigate… How do you find it over cosmic distances? What actually is life? As founding director of Cornell University’s Carl Sagan Institute, astrophysicist Lisa Kaltenegger has built a team of tenacious scientists from many disciplines to create a specialized toolkit to find life on faraway worlds… She demonstrates how we can use our homeworld as a Rosetta Stone, creatively analyzing Earth’s history and its astonishing biosphere to inform this search. With infectious enthusiasm, she takes us on an eye-opening journey to the most unusual exoplanets that have shaken our worldview—planets covered in oceans of lava, lonely wanderers lost in space, and others with more than one sun in their sky! We also see the imagined worlds of science fiction and how close they come to reality…”
I have reviewed several books in the sub-genre of the search for life on other planets. This is not a good example of this mostly scientific genre. The frontmatter is digressive as it turns over the same ponderings and repetitive philosophies regarding life elsewhere. The above blurb is half the size of the original because the original keeps repeating some of the same ideas with slight rephrasing. Even the first chapter “At the Brink of Finding Life in the Cosmos” opens with first-person ponderings about starting at “my computer screen” and watching NASA launch the James Webb Space Telescope, instead of opening with some clear history of who has been searching for these exoplanets, when and the like. A couple of paragraphs later she is still “glued to NASA TV”. Then, there is a brief moment of clarity as she explains: “The JWST is the first telescope capable of capturing just enough light with its 21.3 foot (6.5 meter) mirror to explore the chemical composition of the atmosphere of other rocky worlds.” But the next paragraph again digresses at the meaningless “cheering of the crew in the control room”. The next section leaps to ponderings on “UFO sightings”. Many paragraphs follow that explore alien theories. Then, suddenly there is another scientifically sound paragraph that describes the speed of light, and offers the distance to the nearest star.
It is as if there are two writers making this book, one is a scientist who provided a brief essay about searching in practice for life on other planets, and the second is a generalist who has a TV-watcher’s curiosity about aliens who has composed the babblings between these scientific sparks. This combination makes this book entirely unreadable both to scientists and to those who just like science fiction. Thus, I do not recommend for anybody to read this project.
Learn the Tarot to Understand Why Theology Is Also a Fiction
Leanna Greenaway, The Magic of Tarot: A Modern Guide to the Classic Art of the Cards (New York: St. Martin’s Press, March 19, 2024).
**
“This card-reading handbook is a one stop shop for anyone interested in the ancient art of Tarot. Tarot experts Leanna and Beleta Greenaway tackle romance, marriage, health, careers, safety, children, and much more, as well as situational knowledge for those interested in taking on Tarot as a profession.” Includes: “the history and origins of the Tarot, how Tarot is moving with the times, tips on unleashing the power of the cards, housing and cleansing your decks, various card layouts for different situations, as well as full descriptions and explanations of each of the 22 Major Arcana cards, and 56 Minor Arcana cards… Also adds illustrations of each card (right way and reversed) from two powerful Tarot decks – the modern One World deck and the traditional Rider Waite deck. Thoughtfully guiding readers through each card, the Greenaways compare the modern and traditional decks… With a section dedicated to magic, readers also learn how to enhance the magic of Tarot through the use of crystals, pendulums, affirmations, and spirit guide communication.”
Back in high school, I was temporarily interested in researching and performing Tarot readings. However, most on whom I performed readings seemed to be mostly frightened by them as some kind of a demonic practice. And once I tried to ask for a job as a Tarot reader in Los Angeles, and was met with a chuckle by a girl who assumed I had come into her shop to pay for a reading. These experiences generally convinced me that this was a silly pursuit and that I had learned all there was to understand about it. Such mystical interests were more mainstream back in Russia, where in one camp one of my roommates openly described being abducted and probed by aliens, while we looked at strange lights in the night sky that she said were the spaceship that had previously abducted her. I realize in retrospect that she was spinning a fiction, and that Tarot cards and other New Age items are just scams that profit from the ignorance of the young and hopeful. But these subjects remain more popular than hard sciences, so it is important to review new releases in this field on occasion.
Unlike myself, the authors of this work have apparently succeeded in finding employment in Tarot reading to have “amassed over seventy years of Tarot knowledge”. One new thing I learned in “1: A Brief History” is that Tarot card reading is called “cartomancy”. It is curious that they note that the “history of Tarot is sketchy, but we know it has Italian roots”. Whenever such histories are sketchy, it is likely its roots are in fact relatively modern and were artificially created by profit-minded marketers. They note that the claim is that the first Tarot deck was created in Italy in 1392, but no archival evidence of this survives. Then supposedly the full deck was drawn and grew in popularity, but no actual “history” is offered for the archival surviving decks and for how they are related to the design of modern decks. Instead, this chapter dives into “psychic” tactics, such as: “Sit quietly, holding” the cards “for at least five minutes.” What I wish this section included is the psychology for how the narratives Tarot readings inspire tend to be accepted as true because of how general they are and applicable to most people. It would also be helpful if there was an explanation of what tricks Tarot readers use to convince people to pay so much money for telling them a little fiction. And the instructions here are very theological, as I recall the books that I read in high school being less preachy. These instructions ask for users to chant: “Magical Tarot, I bless thee, unite with me, predict for me.” It is unclear why this chant does not end with an exclamation point. It is also curious how reliant these instructions are on superstitions and stereotypical meanings, such as the belief in specific magical powers of colors: “Green is more nature-based, so witches might like to wrap their cards in this color to channel their psychic flow and tune into the meridian levels of the planet.”
It is troubling to consider why I was so interested in studying this stuff in my youth. This background has helped me to become a rational atheist in adulthood due to the general philosophy of not being fooled more than once. If I had not researched this and other mystical subjects I might also have been more easily fooled by propaganda or by marketing sales-pitches. The tricks used to manipulate minds towards believing in the supernatural are psychologically similar to those used in other fields. Thus, it is a good idea for youths to explore books about magic in parallel with explorations of theological books as both are selling fictions, but the first time is just not qualified for tax exemptions.
The Suspicious Finances of the International Food Bank Monopoly
Daniel N. Warshawsky, Food Waste, Food Insecurity, and the Globalization of Food Banks (University of Iowa Press, January 2, 2024).
****
“Food banks—warehouses that collect and systematize surplus food—have expanded into one of the largest mechanisms to redistribute food waste. From their origins in North America in the 1960s, food banks provide food to communities in approximately one hundred countries on six continents. This book analyzes the development of food banks across the world and the limits of food charity as a means to reduce food insecurity and food waste. Based on fifteen years of in-depth fieldwork on four continents, Daniel Warshawsky illustrates how and why food banks proliferate across the globe even though their impacts may be limited. He suggests that we need to reformulate the role of food banks. The mission of food banks needs to be more realistic, as food surpluses cannot reduce food insecurity on a significant scale. Food banks need to regain their institutional independence from the state and corporations, and incorporate the knowledge and experiences of the food insecure in the daily operations of the food system.”
The “Preface” describes that the author received a PhD in geography before traveling around doing some sort of personal research into Third World food bank systems. It is unclear if he was employed in a job in this system that might have biased his perspective. His CV at the Wright State University where he is a Professor of Social Sciences or Geography clarifies that he has been employed in academia since finishing his PhD in 2011, without any significant positions abroad.
Most of the “Introduction” is cyclical as it repeats general-knowledge ideas, such as: “In cities, food access is strongly associated with income and the capacity to buy food in the cash economy.” One has to read many paragraphs to arrive at a statistic such as: “statistics from 2018 state that food banks may reduce as little as 1 to 3 percent of food waste across the world’s regions.” Then, a long digression about the theory of what impact Covid had on this system follows, with few concreate statistics. “Chapter 1” eventually introduces some history, or that the “first food bank was founded in Arizona in 1967, when a retired Phoenix businessman named John van Hengel stored food in a warehouse to give to the hungry.” Apparently, he was inspired with this idea when a woman who ate from dumpsters told him about her approach, and he decided that instead of putting expired/spoiled food in dumpsters he could store it in a warehouse. This is an absurd idea as it would make more sense for grocery stores and restaurants that have food that is about to go bad to immediately give it away to the poor, as opposed to spending money to ship it somewhere so that it can sit on a shelf and continue rotting. This system makes some sense when one realizes that it has been used to subsidize American food producers (or to give welfare to food businesses, with any feeding of the hungry being a side effect of this goal). “In the 1970s, the U.S. Department of Agriculture launched its Emergency Food Assistance Program to stabilize agricultural markets, which led to an excess in food commodities and set the stage for food banks to manage that excess.” The profitability of this business is apparent since Feeding America’s revenue in 2022 was “$4.2 billion”, supposedly from “serving 6.6 billion meals per year.” It would take feeding 20 meals annually to every American to reach this number. And if this organization actually served this many meals, the cost for collecting, storing and distributing this volume of food would be equivalent to the budgets of all American restaurants combined; McDonald’s made $23 billion in revenue on around 2.36 billion burgers (alongside other foods) in the US in 2022, with the fast food industry making $367 billion. It is logical that McDonald’s makes around $10 per meal sold, but how does Feeding America make $.64 per meal? The poor probably aren’t paying them for these meals, or it wouldn’t be charity. Thus, the government is paying them this sum? What percentage is going to the food producers who are contributing this food to these banks? The few other statistics offered by Warshawsky only confuse this subject, rather than answer these questions. For example, he notes that Feeding American is “reaching more than 53 million people annually”. This would mean that these 53 million people are on average eating 125 meals per year at Feeding. Why only 125 and not every meal? Instead of solving this statistical puzzle, he digresses into their mission statement. The next section puffs the “Globalization of Food Banking”, as it describes this monopoly has branched out internationally as the Global FoodBanking Network. Thus, the same monopoly that has been dominating the feeding of the poor across America is now attempting to profiteer from the funds governments are investing in food insecurity internationally. This section adds that this international branch is sponsored by 88.3 percent “from corporations and foundations”, and 11% by individuals. Seemingly governments are not giving these organizations money. This contradicts previous statements where this system was founded in the government propping up the agricultural sector. The monopoly power of this giant Feeding corporation is not apparent because it delivers its food to thousands of different charitable organizations who then food this food-waste to the poor… There are so many spoiled produce at the grocery stories where I shop that I wish they would donate it to the poor instead of leaving spoiled items for customers, but is that seriously the charitable thing to do?
This book seems to be an advertisement for these food-banks instead of being an honest assessment of this system as the blurb promises. And there is insufficient specific investigative information in these pages to help researchers reading this book figure out what is happening within this system that there are still 12.8% or 44 million Americans in food insecure households. If food banks were solving this problem shouldn’t the billions of meals that they provide be feeding these 12.8% and thus eliminating the problem? On the other hand, if it’s a corrupt system that stores and throws out food waste, while collecting billions from businesses for this disposal… It’s disturbing to think about these problems without a book with sufficient information to really understand them.
A Fictitious Propaganda About Demonic Women
Marion Gibson, Witchcraft: A History in Thirteen Trials (New York: Scribner, January 16, 2024).
**
“A… global history of witch trials across Europe, Africa, and the Americas, told through thirteen distinct trials that illuminate the pattern of demonization and conspiratorial thinking that has profoundly shaped human history… Some famous—like the Salem witch trials—and some lesser-known: on Vardø island, Norway, in the 1620s, where an indigenous Sami woman was accused of murder; in France in 1731, during the country’s last witch trial, where a young woman was pitted against her confessor and cult leader; in Pennsylvania in 1929 where a magical healer was labelled a ‘witch’; in Lesotho in 1948, where British colonial authorities executed local leaders. Exploring how witchcraft became feared, decriminalized, reimagined, and eventually reframed as gendered persecution,” it “takes on the intersections between gender and power, indigenous spirituality and colonial rule, and political conspiracy and individual resistance.”
The author, Gibson, is a Professor of Renaissance and Magical Literatures at the University of Exeter in the UK. The “Introduction: What Is a Witch” misunderstands the problem by arguing that it stemmed in the split of the British Protestants from the Catholic church. My re-attribution research into the Renaissance found that most of this “debate” was fabricated by a single ghostwriter who wrote on both sides of the Protestant versus Catholic arguments, and also on both the pro- and anti-witchcraft sides. Verstegan sold these texts to politicians, theologians and others who profited from these debates becoming popular to gain powerful positions. For example, after Verstegan ghostwrote “James I’s” Daemonology (1597), James I managed to win the English crown while being far from next in line for that throne. Verstegan also condemned Papists to death in his “Anthony Monday”-bylined English Roman Life (1582), while seemingly being exiled from England for publishing pro-Catholic propaganda (and then being paid pensions by the Pope and Spain for continued espionage and Catholic publishing). Verstegan made up, forged and backdated much of the “demonology” theology that has been credited to multiple bylines. Gibson does not cite sources as she presents a version of the witch-trials that are typically pitched in history classes. “Just as Eve had been corrupted by Satan, so fifteenth-century women were also seen as open to his suggestions.” There are no citations from texts for this perspective, as most of the texts Verstegan ghostwrote actually accuse male practitioners of demonic aspects, including simply of being Papists. The shift towards seeing women as the main victims of these trials might come from cherry-picking interest in the isolated cases where women were tried, which as they summary states happened not in Renaissance Britain, Germany and Italy, but rather mostly later in other parts of the world with other theological or political motives. The lack of citations in Gibson’s general summary of this background is troubling because she is clearly misunderstanding and ignoring historical evidence. For example, she notes that “in many jurisdictions, women made up 75 to 90 percent of the accused”, without specifying to what jurisdiction this if referring and why there is such a wide gap in this estimate.
The narrative does become slightly more grounded in actual research by “Chapter One: The Trial of Helena Scheuberin: A Demonologist Hammers Witches”, as a description is offered of an Austrian household of a Catholic prince in the 1480s. Though it is problematic that this chapter begins without any citation for what is the primary source for this narrative? When was it written? Who wrote it? Were they biased? I turned to the “Notes” section to figure this out. The notes for the “Introduction” refer to recent books that were published between the 1970s and 2010, without any citations from the Renaissance period covered. And “Chapter One” also repeats citations from these later history books. The first earliest text mentioned is the German book from 1890 about the 1485 trial. In fact, there are no other citations for any books in this chapter that were published before 1970. It is extremely inappropriate for a researcher to write about the Renaissance without checking any sources from the period in question. A book that was written 400 years after an event can be entirely fictitious. One must check if ideas presented centuries later are in fact supported by documented facts. I cannot continue reading a book with these types of flimsy citations.
A Dramatic History of Performance-Enhancing Drugs in Thoroughbred Racing
Milton C. Toby, Unnatural Ability: The History of Performance-Enhancing Drugs in Thoroughbred Racing (Louisville: University Press of Kentucky, August 8, 2023).
*****
“In a mere twelve months, between May 2020 and May 2021, horse racing’s most recognizable face—Hall of Fame trainer Bob Baffert—had five horses that failed postrace drug tests. Among those was the 2021 Kentucky Derby winner, Medina Spirit. While the incident was a major scandal in the Thoroughbred racing world, it was only the latest in a series of drug-related infractions among elite athletes. Stories about systemic rule-breaking and ‘doping culture’—both human and equine—have put world-class athletes and their trainers under intense scrutiny. Each newly discovered instance of abuse forces fans to question the participants’ integrity, and in the case of horse racing, their humanity… While early attempts at boosting racehorses’ performance were admittedly crude, widespread legal access to narcotics and stimulants has changed the landscape of horse racing, along with athletic governing bodies’ ability to regulate it… Paying special attention to Thoroughbred racing’s purse structure and its reliance on wagering to supplement a horse’s winnings, Toby discusses how horse doping poses a unique challenge for gambling sports and what the industry and its players must do to survive the pressure to get ahead.”
This book is refreshingly full of facts after the last few reviews in this set. The “Introduction” summarizes the history of prosecution, research, investigations and the like into the use of substances in horse racing. For example, it notes that the “license of prominent trainer ‘Silent’ Tom Smith, of Seabiscuit fame, was revoked for using the stimulant ephedrine in the 1940s.” There are many specific facts offered here to introduce readers to the breadth of this problem across over a century. There is also a brief summary of how betting was legalized in the US. This legalization increased attendance at racing events, and with it corruption of this sport via use of substances to enhance performance. The statistics and history is supplemented with quotes from those involved such as a retired professional bicycle racer, Jorg Jaksche who comments: “they slaughter a scapegoat, not a black sheep, and no one ever looks at the shepherd’s responsibility. I’m talking about those in the higher levels, those who govern the sports and, most importantly those who provide the money that fuels everything” (6).
“Part I: The Man Who Made Them Run” begins with chapter “1: The Death of Dr. Riddle” that opens with a description of this horse laying “dead in his stall, the apparent victim of a massive dose of cocaine, heroin, arsenic, strychnine, or some combination of drugs and patent medicines intended to make a horse run faster.” This graphic description is followed by the note that this overdose happened back in 1903. This is a great combination of dramatic narrative with factual, well-researched details that combine to make a story that both grabs the casual reader’s attention, and also offers sufficient useful information for highbrow researchers who are gathering information for books on related topics, or journalists who want to understand this field before writing articles of their own in it.
This is just a great, well-written book that addresses an important current issue, which needs a thorough book like this one to inform the public on the intricacies of what headline news tend to simplify into the workings of a few villains. It is recommended for private shelves of those with some extra time to read dramatic non-fiction, as well as for public libraries that are looking for books that will actually be read by their patrons.
A Multisided History of the Growth of Warner Brothers
Chris Yogerst, The Warner Brothers (Louisville: University Press of Kentucky, September 5, 2023).
*****
“One of the oldest and most recognizable studios in Hollywood, Warner Bros. is considered a juggernaut of the entertainment industry. Since its formation in the early twentieth century, the studio has been a constant presence in cinema history, responsible for the creation of acclaimed films, blockbuster brands, and iconic superstars. These days, the studio is best known as a media conglomerate with a broad range of intellectual property, spanning movies, TV shows, and streaming content. Despite popular interest in the origins of this empire, the core of the Warner Bros. saga cannot be found in its commercial successes. It is the story of four brothers—Harry, Albert, Sam, and Jack—whose vision for Hollywood helped shape the world of entertainment as we know it. In The Warner Brothers, Chris Yogerst follows the siblings from their family’s humble origins in Poland, through their young adulthood in the American Midwest, to the height of fame and fortune in Hollywood. With unwavering resolve, the brothers soldiered on against the backdrop of an America reeling from the aftereffects of domestic and global conflict. The Great Depression would not sink the brothers, who churned out competitive films that engaged audiences and kept their operations afloat—and even expanding. During World War II, they used their platform to push beyond the limits of the Production Code and create important films about real-world issues, openly criticizing radicalism and the evils of the Nazi regime. At every major cultural turning point in their lifetime, the Warners held a front-row seat.”
Pufferies of mainstream corporations are typically not the sort of book that interests me, as I tend to assume that most of what is published about these founders is a fiction that marketers released to puff the standing of the brand. Despite these reservations, it is useful for academia to study the origins of the monopolies that dominate our modern world, as these examinations are necessary for our culture to be aware of what it is buying into.
This specific book is well-executed in its delivery of researched facts, instead of theoretical or imagined narratives. The “Prologue” opens with a meeting of the Anti-Nazi League that led to the Warner Bros.’ production of the first film about the Nazis. Then, the dynamics between and characteristics of the three Warner brothers are summarized. It is also honest in presenting both positive and negative aspects of Warner’s founding, such as that this company switched to making “anticommunist films” after it was blacklisted in 1947 for making “communist” films (2). This type of wavering or working for both sides of “issues” is a common tactic of most corporations that put profits ahead of ideology; it is refreshing that this reality is presented, instead of focusing on one extreme or another in a cherry-picked study. It is also good that this book acknowledges that the three Warner brothers were not the only creators who build this company, but that “others… helped the Warners along the way.” The standard narrative of the exceptionalism of a few corporate CEOs above all others has led to the current extreme pay-disparity between the top and the workers, when most of the actual labor that gets a company extreme success might be performed by the common workers who are entirely uncredited in typical books of this type.
The first chapter “Manifest Destiny: Origins to 1923” notes that the Warner surname is an invented name that was changed from “either Wonsal or Wonkskolaser”. Such uncertainties in the naming of Jews due to their persecution is an important reality in any history that addresses the Jewish heritage. There is more certainty that “Hirsch became Harry and Abraham became Albert”. It is also good that the brothers’ early jobs are listed, such as “Sam’s summer job working at Idora Park with Hales Tours and Scenes of the World amusement company”. This simple beginning makes them more sympathetic and truly self-made, which makes this into a socially beneficial story, unlike biographies of rich people who simply preserved their family-wealth.
This is a well-written book that presents plenty of quotes from various knowledgeable parties, biographies of businessmen, and a history of the development of an entertainment company. Those who are interested in starting an entertainment company of their own, or those researching early Hollywood should find much to appreciate in this book.
Now a Bad Plagiarized Translation Was Turned into Nostradamus’ Prophecies
Rolfe Boswell, Nostradamus Speaks: The Classic Guide to His Most Shocking Prophecies and Predictions (New York: St. Martin’s Press, April 2, 2024).
****
“The classic translation and interpretation of Nostradamus’ most shocking prophecies, both those fulfilled and those still to come true. People have been transfixed by French astrologer and physician Nostradamus for five hundred years, since he began making prophecies in the sixteenth century. In his 1941 book, Nostradamus Speaks, Rolfe Boswell translated and interpreted Nostradamus’ most shocking prophecies. Many of these predictions would come true within the five years following that original publication. Many of those prophecies, however, have yet to be fulfilled. Could modern events be the fulfillment of these centuries-old predictions?” This is an updated modern edition.
Nostradamus popularized the prophesizing guru, a sect that makes billions in our modern world by selling all sorts of fictitious ideas as if they are truths that are of beneficial use. Anybody who reads the original text Nostradamus created would not be impressed, as it would just read as theological propaganda that repeats standard ideas that were common at that time but are not as unappealing as most other antique ideas. Boswell profited from Nostradamus’ existing fame by spinning his own fiction that claimed to find patterns and true predictions among the original nonsense. And this is a puffery of Boswell’s fiction that attempts to profit from new readers who can still buy into this hype.
The first chapter explains that “Michel de Notredame… was born at Saint-Remy, in Provence, France, in 1503, of Jewish ancestry, but Catholic parentage.” In other words, Jews were outlawed in Europe starting in 1492 or so (when Spain outlawed them), so during this period Jews who remained in Europe were forced to convert to Catholicism, even if they secretly retained their Jewish heritage. Nostradamus became a medical professor and practiced medicine during the pestilence of 1524-9. The main book credited as being prophetic is structured as if it was blatantly intended to be a fictional poem called Centuries, the first section of which was published in Lyons in 1555. One of the only mentioned documented prophesies that he made was to Queen Catherine de Medici’s sons, for whom he made horoscopes, before he died in 1566. The poetry collection began to gain fame when it was condemned by Pope Pius VI in 1781, who imagined that this poem was prophetic. One of the reasons these poems are especially difficult to understand so that some have begun to see prophesies in them is because they are written in “crabbed French,” as well as “in the Provencal dialect, all reading as if they had been translated from earlier Latin versions”. In other words, this collection was probably plagiarized from an older Latin poetry collection by a very bad translator, who was so bad that it is not easy to figure out what the original source is supposed to have been. When this author is describing “stanzas” as “the most lucid”, giving the example of the “beheading of Britain’s King Charles I”, the actual “lucid” passages are not given (because there are no lucid predictions in the original; for example, there are no names of “Charles I” or any of the other details assigned to them by later puffers). Here is an example of one of the only quotes from the original book in these pages (remember this is a polished translation, whereas the original is in broken French): “From Lake Geneva sermons will bore, first by day, then brought to weeks, then months, then years; then they all will fail.” The following interpretation from a “commentator” argues that this passage is referring to 3 antipopes during the WWII period. This is obviously nonsensical and unrelated. The original translator might have just misunderstood the specific timing in Latin, so he might have just digressed into referring to random spans of time.
Those who are intent on referring to Nostradamus and his “prophesies” in casual conversations should at least read this book or others like it. Though it would be best to just read the best available translation of Centuries with minimum commentary in the margins to see for yourself if you would interpret any of these poems as prophetic without overlaid suggestions. It is important for scholars to reflect on the history of notorious personages such as Nostradamus, so this is a productive investment of scholarly effort.
The Doom of Language and Meaning
Scott Oden, The Doom of Odin: A Novel (New York: St. Martin’s Press, December 19, 2023).
**
“As the Black Death rampages across Europe, two creatures of the Elder World clash over the rotting corpse of Christendom in Scott Oden’s third book in the Grimnir Series. For over a century, he has tracked the dragon, Níðhöggr—the Malice-Striker—from the shores of Lake Vänern, across the Baltic Sea, through Russia, and down into the Mediterranean; he has hounded the wyrm from Old Muscovy to Messina. And finally, to the Eternal City—to Rome, itself. And in Rome, on a cold November night in 1347 AD, on the ruined steps of Old St. Peter’s basilica, Grimnir’s saga comes crashing to an end. A crossbow bolt, loosed in terror, slays him out of hand. It is a mundane finale to a life spent hip-deep in bloodshed and slaughter, surrounded by steel and savagery and the sorcery of the Elder World. Now, on the grim and misty isle of Nástrond, under the shadows of Yggðrasil, Grimnir is plunged headlong into the twisted Valhalla that is the afterlife of his people. Here, bloody in-fighting, schemes and betrayals are the order of the day. Grimnir is forced to contend with a cabal of witches, with giants and trolls who have never felt the light of Miðgarðr’s moon, and with his own rapacious kin as he journeys beyond the shores of Nástrond to find answers. And with every death, Grimnir unravels another thread of a monstrous secret woven at the dawn of time—one that will turn him from the pawn of unknown gods into the most powerful being in the Nine Worlds. And the most hunted. For he, alone, holds the key to Ragnarök and the Doom of Odin.”
The first element that stands out from this summary and from the opening pages is the usage of Old English or Old Norse letters. They are not used particularly properly; for example, Miðgarðr places a ð between two consonant r’s; ð is a consonant as well that has a th sound, so this name is Mithgarthr. Before looking this up, I looked up Scott Oden (1967-), hoping that he lived in Norway, Sweeden or Finland, and perhaps these books were translated from native languages of these countries… No. Oden is an American, who only attended a community college before starting a career as a fiction writer. Oy vey. In summary, he is just using fancy Old English letters because they make him sound cool… He uses several Old Norse words in rapid succession, including: sjovaettir (a variant for spirits), Angrboda (mother of monsters in Norse mythology), skraelingr (Norse Greenlanders), Gjoll (river), Balegyr, Svadilfari (eight-legged horse), nar (corpse), and kaunr (kind). I am providing these translations; there are no notes to explain what these words mean in Old Norse in this novel. Thus, readers are likely to be extremely lost and confused by these strange references. Such confusion tends to push reviewers to just say something nice to avoid looking up what all this actually means.
The narrative seems to be designed to put the reader into a deep slumber. A memory is evoked of an “ancient ruin” and “forgotten nymphs”. There are cries and screams and shadows, and it’s all as confusing as can be. Ellipses are used to cut off thoughts and leave things unexplained. Something violent is happening as there is spitting, retching, and burning in the “killing field”. There are some good descriptions that weave together many adjectives, as in: “discs of bone, beads of scrimshaw, silver, and amber, and still-bright cylinders of gold, heavy and ancient”. But when one stops to figure out what all this description is attempting to say, or what the connecting narrative is: these questions are left unanswered.
This is just not a good novel because a good novel must invite readers into the story and has to connect ideas in adjacent sentences and paragraphs into a story. Without these connections, it does not matter how dense or meaningful individual words or phrases are as the do not cling together to make coherent meaning.
The Short Histories of the Multiple Thefts of the Mona Lisa
Noah Charney, The Thefts of the Mona Lisa: The Complete Story of the World’s Most Famous Artwork (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, February 6, 2024).
*****
“From the artwork to its theft and role in popular culture… Leonardo da Vinci’s portrait, called the Mona Lisa, is without doubt the world’s most famous painting. It achieved its fame not only because it is a remarkable example of Renaissance portraiture, created by an acclaimed artistic and scientific genius, but because of its criminal history. The Mona Lisa (also called La Gioconda or La Joconde) was stolen on 21 August 1911 by an Italian, Vincenzo Peruggia. Peruggia was under the mistaken impression that the Mona Lisa had been stolen from Italy during the Napoleonic era, and he wished to take back for Italy one of his country’s greatest treasures. His successful theft of the painting from the Louvre, the farcical manhunt that followed, and Peruggia’s subsequent trial in Florence were highly publicized, sparking the attention of the international media, and catapulting an already admired painting into stratospheric heights of fame… First, it examines the so-called “affaire des statuettes,” in which Pablo Picasso and Guillaume Apollinaire were arrested under suspicion of involvement in the theft of the Mona Lisa. Second, there has long been a question as to whether the Nazis stole the Mona Lisa during the Second World War—a question that this book seeks to resolve…
Charney is now a professor at University of Ljubljana in Slovenia.”
The chapter that attracts initial interest is “When Picasso Stole the Mona Lisa”. This chapter starts oddly with Picasso’s meandering visit to the Louvre in 1904. The first few paragraphs make it seem that this chapter will discuss Picasso’s borrowing of classical figure ideas in his “prostitutes” paintings, such as the Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907). But then the narrative arrives at some curious history: “in 1911 Pablo Picasso and his close friend, the Polish-born poet Guillaume Apollinaire, were brought in for questioning by the Paris police on suspicion of having stolen the Mona Lisa.” The next sentence claims it is a fact that they were “innocent” of the theft of that painting, but they had indeed stolen “a pair of ancient Iberian statue heads”. He explained this theft as being driven by a nationalist sympathy for his native Iberian heritage. An explanation is offered that during this early period “to remove objects from the Louvre Museum was not particularly difficult to do.” This is followed by a specific description of the simplicity of the security system. And apparently Gery Pieret admitted he began stealing items from the Louvre in 1907. An extensive first-person account of some of these thefts is quoted. Pieret’s confessions “implicated two celebrity artists in the theft of the Mona Lisa: Picasso and Apollinaire.” This was not a random accusation as “Pieret knew Picasso” (60), and “Pieret lived in Apollinaire’s apartment at the time” (64). So that Charney even asks: “might Picasso have commissioned the theft?” Picasso manipulated this scandal to gain greater fame, while Apollinaire became infamous and shortly died in obscurity. Pieret was imprisoned and then lived the rest of his life in poverty (64-5). One of the best ways to afford a great publicity campaign is if one has profited from a criminal thievery enterprise, so this evidence collectively points to Picasso as the most likely underlying theft puppeteer, who maneuvered his way into getting away with these crimes, while underlings suffered. The sale of Picasso as a “Great” painter, despite extreme simplicity of most of his creations, and the divergent styles (which suggest multiple different painters in fact created different “periods), is in itself a great heist of artistic “merit”.
This is a very approachable book that is designed as a non-fiction mystery that draws readers into the web of its rapidly-moving short-stories. It is thus recommended for anybody interested in true crime, art, history, or mysteries.
Reading This Book Will Guarantee a Loss of Interest in Book Design
Debbie Berne, The Design of Books: An Explainer for Authors, Editors, Agents, and Other Curious Readers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, March 12, 2024).
**
“Design is central to the appeal, messaging, and usefulness of books, but to most readers, it’s mysterious or even invisible. Through interiors as well as covers, designers provide structure and information that shape the meaning and experience of books.” It describes “the conventions and processes of her profession, revealing both the aesthetic and market-driven decisions designers consider to make books readable and beautiful. In clear, unstuffy language, Berne reveals how books are put together, with discussions of production considerations, typography and fonts, page layouts, use of images and color, special issues for ebooks, and the very face of each book: the cover… Berne lays out the practical steps at each stage of the design process, providing insight into who does what when and offering advice for authors on how to be effective advocates for their ideas while also letting go and trusting their manuscripts with teams of professionals. She includes guidance as well for self-publishing authors, including where to find a designer, what to expect from that relationship, and how to art direct your own book.”
This book is divided into chapters on the dimensions of books, type, cover, interior, illustrated books, ebooks and the design process. There are some great illustrations throughout that glamorize the artistic book design process. However, the front-matter and the opening of “Chapter 1” are digressive, as the author rambles on about what design is, or if design will go extinct in the digital age. The section on the “Kinds of Books” also provides too much non-information without specifics. The first piece of relevant information seems to appear on page 12 in an illustration of “The Anatomy of a Hardcover” that provides the terminology for the book’s elements that are necessary to communicate about these parts. But then there is a very long and winding description of what a “case” is with details that should not be practically useful either for advanced or starting book designers or authors seeking a designer. Then there is a curious illustration of “A Sixteen-Page Signature” (17), but this style of folded book-printing was last used in the Renaissance… and is not at all relevant in the modern world where books are printed digitally and not on a manual printing-press. The second chapter begins by claiming readers “can’t understand the basics of book design without knowing a little about type” (32). The following paragraphs babble on without just giving the practical elements about type that starting designers would need to just go ahead and design their book. There are moments of useful knowledge, such as a section on “Font Categories”, but outside of the illustrations, the verbal explanations are almost entirely rambling and unhelpful. Here is an example: “The font marketplace forces you to understand something about how they’re made and packaged – for instance, you can buy just the bold face of a typeface, just the italic, just the bold italic…” (38) I have never purchased any type, as it is included in programs like InDesign, Corel Painter and Word, and additional fonts can be acquired for free from Google. Sending designers to purchase only italic font or the like is not at all helpful.
Do not purchase this book if you just want to figure out how to design books without previous experience, or if you are a professional in this industry and want to learn more about it. I cannot imagine what type of a buyer could benefit from this book.
Libby Audiobooks
Sanders’ Anti-Socialist Propaganda Clothed in the Disguise of Socialism
Senator Bernie Sanders, It’s OK to Be Angry About Capitalism (New York: Crown, February 21, 2023). $28.00. 320pp. 6X9”. ISBN: 9780593238714.
**
“Sanders argues that unfettered capitalism is to blame for an unprecedented level of income and wealth inequality, is undermining our democracy, and is destroying our planet.” It is not the capitalist system, but rather the corruption of the capitalist exchange that is “undermining democracy” by bribing politicians, and is destroying the planet once again because politicians are bribed, as well as because incompetent people are in charge of corporations due to nepotism and other corrupting influences. If rational or the smartest people rose to the top of capitalist companies, they would not be choosing to destroy the planet that profits all life. Sanders is one of the more corrupt politicians in this field because his irrational arguments are deliberately making those who criticize capitalist corruption sound irrational. “How can we accept an economic order that allows three billionaires to control more wealth than the bottom half of our society? How can we accept a political system that allows the super rich to buy politicians and swing elections? How can we accept an energy system that rewards the fossil fuel corporations causing the climate crisis?” This book does not offer any practical solutions. This lack of applicable action-points offers the subliminal meaning that Sanders is indeed asking his readers to “accept” these realities as unchangeable. “Sanders believes that, in the face of these overwhelming challenges, the American people must ask tough questions about the systems that have failed us and demand fundamental economic and political change…” Sanders is described in the third-person here because this book was ghostwritten or co-written by somebody other than him, though some parts are written from Sanders’ first-person. Demanding that Americans ask questions is generally immoral because it is Sanders’ literal job as a Senator to stand up and “ask questions” whenever issues are raised connected with these problems. He does not complain every time such issues are raised, and when he does complain he just repeats talking-points, instead of bringing up statistics, reports, or any other elements that could sway other politicians or the public. “Extends beyond the promises of past campaigns to reveal what would be possible if the political revolution took place…” The hyperbolic use of the term “revolution” here, while Sanders and others are criticizing Trump for starting a coup to stay in power is absurd. “…If we would finally recognize that economic rights are human rights…” This is cyclical double-speak that does not actually say anything, which is what Sanders does across most of this book. “…And if we would work to create a society that provides a decent standard of living for all.” It is not “society” that is supposed to spontaneously provide “a decent standard of living”, but rather the laws that the Senate and politicians put in place. Sanders should not be complaining that his readers have failed to change their own lives, but rather should ask himself why he, as an elected representative of their voice, has failed to change the system to make it fair for all. “This isn’t some utopian fantasy; this is democracy as we should know it.” Indeed this book is a “utopian fantasy” that digresses into the common phraseology of the political “socialist” elite, which fails to come back down to earth to actually address the steps that need to be taken down here for the good of all.
“The Dumbest Sketches on Television”
Colin Jost, A Very Punchable Face: A Memoir (New York: Crown, July 13, 2021). Paperback: $18.00. 336pp. ISBN: 9781101906347.
***
“If there’s one trait that makes someone well suited to comedy, it’s being able to take a punch—metaphorically and, occasionally, physically. From growing up in a family of firefighters on Staten Island to commuting three hours a day to high school and ‘seeing the sights’ (like watching a Russian woman throw a stroller off the back of a ferry), to attending Harvard while Facebook was created, Jost shares how he has navigated the world like a slightly smarter Forrest Gump. You’ll also discover things about Jost that will surprise and confuse you, like how Jimmy Buffett saved his life, how Czech teenagers attacked him with potato salad, how an insect laid eggs inside his legs, and how he competed in a twenty-five-man match at WrestleMania (and almost won). You’ll go behind the scenes at SNL and Weekend Update (where he’s written some of the most memorable sketches and jokes of the past fifteen years). And you’ll experience the life of a touring stand-up comedian—from performing in rural college cafeterias at noon to opening for Dave Chappelle at Radio City Music Hall. For every accomplishment (hosting the Emmys), there is a setback (hosting the Emmys). And for every absurd moment (watching paramedics give CPR to a raccoon), there is an honest, emotional one (recounting his mother’s experience on the scene of the Twin Towers’ collapse on 9/11). Told with a healthy dose of self-deprecation,” it “reveals the brilliant mind behind some of the dumbest sketches on television, and lays bare the heart and humor of a hardworking guy—with a face you can’t help but want to punch.”
This book is pretty easy to listen to, but as one listens one is likely to be inspired to punch somebody in the face for the first time. This desire is likely to arise out of a writer who attempts to make himself sound like a victim or like a sympathetic character when he has every imaginable privilege that has led to his sudden rise to the most coveted position in comedy-TV, and from which he still hasn’t fallen. It is extremely annoying to read somebody state about himself in the third-person that “he’s written some of the most memorable… jokes of the past fifteen years”. I cannot remember a single joke from SNL, and I’ve listened to it rather regularly in the last few years. Perhaps, the most memorable thing that comes to mind is when the African American co-host must read jokes that are so racist that they might be legally actionable if the white Jost read them himself. If he is writing these racist jokes… The part about this audiobook that’s memorable is Jost’s description of becoming a writer with an exclusive Harvard joke-paper. He complains it is difficult to have been invited, but never explains why exactly he was eventually chosen. What exactly did he do that got him all those top jobs, and got him into Harvard, while so many others were rejected? There’s nothing special about these jokes, nothing intellectual that would deserve an Ivy League credential… It’s just all very depressing. Especially, when he spends a large part of the opening building sympathy for himself by describing his mother’s sacrifices while working with firefighters during the Towers’ collapse. It is as if one is listening to George Santos, but Jost’s mother at least was there. Why would a truly great comedian need to puff his mother’s achievements? The blurb is certainly honest when it notes that the author is responsible for the “dumbest sketches on television”.
A Dramatic Historical Shipwreck Adventure
David Grann, The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder (New York: Doubleday, April 18, 2023). Hardcover: $30.00. 352pp. 6X9”. ISBN: 9780385534260.
*****
“On January 28, 1742, a ramshackle vessel of patched-together wood and cloth washed up on the coast of Brazil. Inside were thirty emaciated men, barely alive, and they had an extraordinary tale to tell. They were survivors of His Majesty’s Ship the Wager, a British vessel that had left England in 1740 on a secret mission during an imperial war with Spain. While the Wager had been chasing a Spanish treasure-filled galleon known as ‘the prize of all the oceans,’ it had wrecked on a desolate island off the coast of Patagonia. The men, after being marooned for months and facing starvation, built the flimsy craft and sailed for more than a hundred days, traversing nearly 3,000 miles of storm-wracked seas. They were greeted as heroes. But then… six months later, another, even more decrepit craft landed on the coast of Chile. This boat contained just three castaways, and they told a very different story. The thirty sailors who landed in Brazil were not heroes—they were mutineers. The first group responded with countercharges of their own, of a tyrannical and murderous senior officer and his henchmen. It became clear that while stranded on the island the crew had fallen into anarchy, with warring factions fighting for dominion over the barren wilderness. As accusations of treachery and murder flew, the Admiralty convened a court martial to determine who was telling the truth. The stakes were life-and-death—for whomever the court found guilty could hang.”
Not much needs to be added to this description to explain why this is a great book to listen to on a long drive. This is a dramatic account that captures the intricacies of this historic adventure, without being so technical that a listener would miss the intended meaning. The realities of life at sea during the 18th century are rarely captured in its strange foreignness and excitement. There are no equivalent modern experiences to living in a space without plumbing, with little fresh food, sleeping in hammocks, and otherwise suffering through the miseries of early capitalist exploitation of the working poor to make extraordinary profits from colonialism. I have always admired stories about pirates and sea voyages, hoping to find just this sort of fidelity to the real experience, while the author is also actively striving to bring in all the dramatic actions that captivate a reader seeking to go on an adventure through a writer’s yarn.
Self-Important Ramblings of an Actor
Alan Rickman, Madly, Deeply: The Diaries of Alan Rickman (New York: Henry Holt and Co., October 18, 2022). Hardcover: $32.00. 480pp. ISBN: 9781250847959.
**
“From his breakout role in Die Hard to his outstanding, multifaceted performances in the Harry Potter films, Galaxy Quest, Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, and more, Alan Rickman cemented his legacy as a world-class actor. His air of dignity, his sonorous voice, and the knowing wit he brought to each role continue to captivate audiences today… Rickman’s diaries detail the extraordinary and the ordinary, flitting between worldly and witty and gossipy, while remaining utterly candid throughout. He takes us inside his home, on trips with friends across the globe, and on the sets of films and plays ranging from Sense and Sensibility, to Noël Coward’s Private Lives, to the final film he directed, A Little Chaos. Running from 1993 to his death in 2016, the diaries provide singular insight into Rickman’s public and private life. Reading them is like listening to Rickman chatting to a close companion. Meet Rickman the consummate professional actor, but also the friend, the traveler, the fan, the director, the enthusiast…”
Why do all these actors (dead or alive) get millions for contracting ghostwriters or putting whatever comes into their minds on paper? And Alan Rickman is one of the most powerful actors I have seen in films. If I did not have a fond admiration for Rickman, I would not have requested this book. Listening to this book is indeed like listening to a guy babble on about random stuff he did. But I avoid traveling with other people because I really hate listening to other people talk about nothing. I have never read a book by somebody equally self-consumed with his own importance. He appears to admire every word he utters, as he almost chats in code regarding stuff he did with famous people. These activities typically simply include eating fancy food, or finding the actions of a fellow star on the set to be improper or annoying. If you admire Rickman’s performances, do not listen to this book as your admiration for him will rapidly fade.
True White Crime Drama About the Sacklers
Patrick Radden Keefe, Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty (New York: Anchor, October 18, 2022). Paperback: $18.00. 640pp. 5X8”. ISBN: 9781984899019.
*****
“The history of the Sackler dynasty is rife with drama—baroque personal lives; bitter disputes over estates; fistfights in boardrooms; glittering art collections; Machiavellian courtroom maneuvers; and the calculated use of money to burnish reputations and crush the less powerful. The Sackler name has adorned the walls of many storied institutions—Harvard, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Oxford, the Louvre. They are one of the richest families in the world, but the source of the family fortune was vague—until it emerged that the Sacklers were responsible for making and marketing a blockbuster painkiller that was the catalyst for the opioid crisis.” It “moves from the bustling streets of early twentieth-century Brooklyn to the seaside palaces of Greenwich, Connecticut, and Cap d’Antibes to the corridors of power in Washington, D.C. It follows the family’s early success with Valium to the much more potent OxyContin, marketed with a ruthless technique of co-opting doctors, influencing the FDA, downplaying the drug’s addictiveness… Chronicles the multiple investigations of the Sacklers and their company, and the scorched-earth legal tactics that the family has used to evade accountability.”
I recommend this audiobook for listening while on-the-go. The Sacklers are frequently in the recent news or commentary, but their story tends to be very lightly handled with general ridicule. In contrast, Keefe has performed thorough research into this family’s business and personal history. The blurb is honest in describing this book as a dramatic true white crime account. Many of the details or turns in this narrative are surprising, as they help to explain how this family got to the present moment. For example, one of their founders ran a mental hospital, where he experimented on the mentally ill, and married a woman who worked for him there. I had not heard this origin-story before, and knowing that experimentation on the mentally ill generated the initial pile of wealth helps to explain why later generations built on further psychotic experiments on the mentally vulnerable. Their corruption of the FDA, of marketing organizations to publish self-pufferies and the like help to explain just how the medical marketplace is typically corrupted in the US. Investigators who are researching all types of medical maleficence (corporate or at the doctor-level) will learn a great deal from listening to this extensive report. And those generally interested in true crime will just enjoy the drama.
Stories About American Racism and Slavery
Caitlin Roper, Ilena Silverman, Jake Silverstein, The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story (New York: One World: The New York Times Magazine, November 16, 2021). Hardcover: $29.99. 624pp. ISBN: 978-0593230572.
****
“In late August 1619, a ship arrived in the British colony of Virginia bearing a cargo of twenty to thirty enslaved people from Africa. Their arrival led to the barbaric and unprecedented system of American chattel slavery that would last for the next 250 years. This is sometimes referred to as the country’s original sin, but it is more than that: It is the source of so much that still defines the United States.” A previous book “reframed our understanding of American history by placing slavery and its continuing legacy at the center of our national narrative. This book substantially expands on that work, weaving together eighteen essays that explore the legacy of slavery in present-day America with thirty-six poems and works of fiction that illuminate key moments of oppression, struggle, and resistance.” Touches on “contemporary American society, from politics, music, diet, traffic, and citizenship to capitalism, religion, and our democracy itself… contextualizing the systems of race and caste within which we operate today.”
This book has been featured in media accounts as a revolutionary tool that has been oppressed and suppressed by the Republicans. It is absolutely absurd that Republicans have been using this particular book to start campaigns against “critical race theory”. The Republicans are saying that books like this one prove that textbooks include propaganda that teaches that white children today should be ashamed of historical actions of their ancestors who engaged in slavery. The problem is that this book is very unapproachable because of its horridly-written preface. Readers who want to benefit from it should just skip the preface and start on the first story.
This preface opens with a first-person account of a girl reading about 1619. Instead of explaining the history, she digresses into chatting about her schooling, or that she generally learned “history” there. She notes that “Black people… were largely absent from the histories I read.” But she is repeating this mistake by not mentioning any specifics about what black people achieved in history. The only way to correct gaps in black history is to fill these gaps. But this collection merely complains about the existence of gaps. The following pages mention George Floyd, but it also quotes Jefferson.
The first piece in the collection opens by finally giving a few more details about the 1619 arrival, noting that this ship was called the White Lion to introduce a poem by this name. The poem itself is rather dense with meaning and with specifics about the enslaved peoples’ experience. However, the preface was so digressive and meaning lacking that I stopped listening to this audiobook before I got this part. Now, looking inside the printed book, I can see its internal benefits. The second story is also interesting as it describes the experiences of Black residents on a “white plantation”, under threat of a “county” that “lynched more Black residents than those in any other county in Mississippi, for such ‘crimes’ as entering a room occupied by white women bumping into a white girl, or trying to start a sharecroppers union.” This reminds me of Langston Hughes’ stories, and that is high-praise.
The Killer of Wakefulness
David Grann, Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI (New York: Vintage, April 18, 2017). Hardcover: $35.00. 416pp. ISBN: 978-0274810567.
**
“In the 1920s, the richest people per capita in the world were members of the Osage Nation in Oklahoma. After oil was discovered beneath their land, the Osage rode in chauffeured automobiles, built mansions, and sent their children to study in Europe. Then, one by one, the Osage began to be killed off. The family of an Osage woman, Mollie Burkhart, became a prime target. One of her relatives was shot. Another was poisoned. And it was just the beginning, as more and more Osage were dying under mysterious circumstances, and many of those who dared to investigate the killings were themselves murdered. As the death toll rose, the newly created FBI took up the case, and the young director, J. Edgar Hoover, turned to a former Texas Ranger named Tom White to try to unravel the mystery. White put together an undercover team, including a Native American agent who infiltrated the region, and together with the Osage began to expose one of the most chilling conspiracies in American history.”
This is one of the most annoying books to listen to. It is difficult to describe why it is unbearable, but anybody who tries to tune in should also be overwhelmed with a sense of dread, depression, and sleepiness. On the surface the description suggests that this should be an engaging, dramatic narrative about a topic of social interest. However, the author manages to butcher this story. The main problem is that the narrative is extremely slow in describing the feelings, the beauty and other unresearched elements about the Native American women who are at the center of the investigation. The investigation itself goes nowhere, as investigators just stumble around senselessly, don’t do anything, or just pretend to be doing something while doing nothing. Suspicion is cast at the women, as suggestions are made that they were sexually adventurous. Characters walking or otherwise getting to places, or just doing mostly nothing take up many, many words, as if the author is striving to put all readers into a deep slumber by saying as little of meaning as possible. If the FBI is founded at the end of this story, it must have been founded because investigators got bored to death. Just do not listen to this book. Save your time, and patience.
What It Took for a Nepotism-Lawyer Like Murdaugh to Be Investigated
John Glatt, Tangled Vines: Power, Privilege, and the Murdaugh Family Murders (New York: St. Martin’s Press, August 8, 2023). Hardcover: $30.00. 320pp. ISBN: 9781250283481.
*****
“Reconstructs the rise of the prestigious Murdaugh family and the shocking double murder that led to the downfall of its patriarch, Alex Murdaugh. Among the lush, tree-lined waterways of South Carolina low country, the Murdaugh name means power. A century-old, multimillion-dollar law practice has catapulted the family into incredible wealth and local celebrity—but it was an unimaginable tragedy that would thrust them into the national spotlight. On June 7th, 2021, prominent attorney Alex Murdaugh discovered the bodies of his wife, Maggie, and son, Paul, on the grounds of their thousand-acre hunting lodge. The mystery deepened only months later when Alex himself was discovered shot in the head on a local roadside. But as authorities scrambled for clues and the community reeled from the loss and media attention, dark secrets about this Southern legal dynasty came to light. The Murdaughs, it turned out, were feared as much as they were loved. And they wouldn’t hesitate to wield their influence to protect one of their own; two years before he was killed, a highly intoxicated Paul Murdaugh was at the helm of a boat when it crashed and killed a teenage girl, and his light treatment by police led to speculation that privilege had come into play. As bombshells of financial fraud were revealed and more suspicious deaths were linked to the Murdaughs, a new portrait of Alex Murdaugh emerged: a desperate man on the brink of ruin who would do anything, even plan his own death, to save his family’s reputation.”
This is one of the rare audiobooks that I listened to from-start-to-finish. It is just an interesting account of how privileged Americans cheat their way into top schools, cheat to pass the bar, and then manipulate the criminal justice system in their favor to corruptly win even when logic and fairness is not on their side. The fatal flaw is not that Alex Murdaugh failed to follow these typical profit-seeking steps, but rather that he and his family forgot that to get away with these corruptions they had to create the illusion of incorruptibility. It is part of the norm to drink and do drugs excessively, as such abuses convince crooks that they are “one of them” and are likely to act corruptly in their interest. It is also normal to cheat clients out of money after bribing a jury, a judge, or others to win cases. And it is normal to plagiarize and cheat through college, and then to just inherit a position in a firm through nepotism. Shifting the justice system in favor of crooks apparently even excuses children committing vehicular homicide while intoxicated. The American justice system is corrupt enough for law enforcers to have turned blind to such actions because they were probably all implicated in earlier corrupt acts that were overseen by the Murdaughs. Even killing his wife and son might have been excusable. But when Murdaugh tried to commit suicide with help from a friend he threatened the financial interests of an insurance company, and that is when he was finally caught by the Law. This is just a hilarious dark comedy about the true corrupt nature of the American legal system. It is hard to imagine how any biography could have been franker and exposing of truths that rarely make it into the mass-media’s broadcasting.
Great Study of Strange Sensory Characteristics of Animals
Ed Yong, An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us (New York: Random House Trade Paperbacks, August 29, 2023). Paperback: $20.00. 480pp. 5X8”. ISBN: 9780593133255.
*****
“The Earth teems with sights and textures, sounds and vibrations, smells and tastes, electric and magnetic fields. But every kind of animal, including humans, is enclosed within its own unique sensory bubble, perceiving but a tiny sliver of our immense world…. Allowing us to perceive the skeins of scent, waves of electromagnetism, and pulses of pressure that surround us. We encounter beetles that are drawn to fires, turtles that can track the Earth’s magnetic fields, fish that fill rivers with electrical messages, and even humans who wield sonar like bats. We discover that a crocodile’s scaly face is as sensitive as a lover’s fingertips, that the eyes of a giant squid evolved to see sparkling whales, that plants thrum with the inaudible songs of courting bugs, and that even simple scallops have complex vision. We learn what bees see in flowers, what songbirds hear in their tunes, and what dogs smell on the street.”
This is such an interesting book that it is the only audiobook that I requested a second time when the days I had taken it out for expired. It is one of the most interesting subjects because each of its short sensory accounts presents ideas that I had not read about previously, and yet are essential knowledge that all humans need to understand how other types of life on earth perceive this world. For example, understanding that a dog is reading copious information as it is intently sniffing the street explains a perspective that otherwise would be entirely misunderstood. A domestic animal cannot be satisfied with watching TV because it might experience sensory deprivation without a wealth of outdoor smells. And that crocodile that swam away from me when I once encountered it as I swam across a river-lake might have been concerned I was about to collapse into his sensitive face. I had read about plants moving and communicating with other plants through their root systems before, but it is entirely a different idea to realize they are making music to attract bugs.
The Evolution and Environmental Threats to the Complex Lives of Insects
Steve Nicholls, Alien Worlds: How Insects Conquered the Earth, and Why Their Fate Will Determine Our Future (Princeton: Princeton University Press, August 1, 2023). Hardcover: $39.95. 496 pp. 6X9”, 179 color photos. ISBN: 9780691253589.
*****
“Life on Earth depends on the busy activities of insects, but global populations of these teeming creatures are currently under threat, with grave consequences for us all.” It “presents insects and other arthropods as you have never seen them before, explaining how they conquered the planet and why there are so many of them, and shedding light on the evolutionary marvels that enabled them to thrive. Blending glorious imagery with entertaining and informative science writing…” Includes: “Spectacular photos… Sheds light on the origins and wondrous diversity of insects. Discusses how insects first took to the air and colonised the far corners of our planet. Explores the extraordinary sensory world of insects. Explains the remarkable success of social insects, from termites and ants to bees and wasps.”
This is an enjoyable audiobook to listen to on a long drive, as it offers a combination of dramatic narrative in the curious interactions or social lives of insects, while also informing listeners of biological and environmental facts. I had not realized just how many ants exist on most pieces of land on the planet. The evolutionary narrative regarding how insects began to fly captures the imagination as well as if I had been listening to fantasy fiction. The social interactions between even common insects like bees are revealed to be far more complex than one might expect, as young female bees can be pushed out to start their own colonies, or can wait for a queen to die. Some of the details have faded over the past few months, but this is a sign that this was just an enjoyable listen, without the strain of reading a scholarly book on this subject that might have been retained better, but I probably could not have listened to it while paying attention on the road.
Anaphora Literary Press 
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