Book Reviews: Spring 2023

Anna Faktorovich

Puffery of the Antique “Shakespeare” Craze Disguised in Book History Scholarship

Emma Smith, Shakespeare’s First Folio: Four Centuries of an Iconic Book (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016, 2023). Hardcover. 380pp, 6X9”. Index. ISBN: 978-0-19-288664-4.

*****

The publisher’s summary of this book states: “This is a biography of a book: the first collected edition of Shakespeare’s plays printed in 1623 and known as the First Folio. It begins with the story of its first purchaser in London in December 1623, and goes on to explore the ways people have interacted with this iconic book over the four hundred years of its history. Throughout the stress is on what we can learn from individual copies now spread around the world about their eventful lives. From ink blots to pet paws, from annotations to wineglass rings, First Folios teem with evidence of their place in different contexts with different priorities. This study offers new ways to understand Shakespeare’s reception and the history of the book. Unlike previous scholarly investigations of the First Folio, it is not concerned with the discussions of how the book came into being, the provenance of its texts, or the technicalities of its production. Instead, it reanimates, in narrative style, the histories of this book, paying close attention to the details of individual copies now located around the world—their bindings, marginalia, general condition, sales history, and location—to discuss five major themes: owning, reading, decoding, performing, and perfecting. This is a history of the book that consolidated Shakespeare’s posthumous reputation: a reception history and a study of interactions between owners, readers, forgers, collectors, actors, scholars, booksellers, and the book through which we understand and recognize Shakespeare.”

This is not the book I expected when I requested it for review. I was interested in the history of the creation of the First Folio, a subject this book avoids. And indeed I have read several articles on how the First Folio was created, and have already mentioned these findings in the BRRAM series. The history of how this folio was read and forged after the Renaissance is not of direct interest to my research, but there are surely some points here that are of general scholarly interest. For example, the new “Preface to the Second Edition” that was written in 2023 (the First Edition had been published in 2016: Oxford also mailed a copy of the softcover First Edition for some reason for my review, which is just lacking this new “Preface” as far as I can see; the page numbers for the main chapters in the table of contents and the illustration page numbers have not changed) notes that Claire M. L. Bourne and Jason Scott-Warren “have studied the hundreds of manuscript annotations in the copy given by the Wideneer family to the Philadelphia Free Library at the end of the Second World War, alongside manuscript witnesses in Cambridge and elsewhere. Their work has convincingly identified John Milton as the volume’s annotator” (ix). My linguistic studies did not test Milton’s works, but I assume that a broad handwriting analysis probably identified one of the Workshop’s widely-used handwriting styles with “Milton” erroneously. More importantly, it is curious how handwriting analysis is accepted automatically from some scholars such as these, while a similar type of analysis in studies like mine is rejected because it does not fit the desired attributions that benefit antique owners (who now can claim their works are worth more because they are annotated by a famous Author like Milton). Smith points to this as she describes in the following pages how Oxford and other institutions “have sought to release the funds stored in this valuable book, and super-wealthy and usually anonymous private buyers pay ever-larger sums” (x). For example, the Mills College in California sold a copy for “just under” $10 million in October 2020 (x). Thus, this book is part of this scholarly puffery that is designed to maximize the resale value of this specific book that Oxford, Cambridge and other English schools have in their archives in large numbers. BRRAM would decrease the relative value of all “Shakespeare” books, in favor of the rare (frequently only single-copy) books Percy (the lead “Shakespeare” tragedian) wrote under other bylines like “John Lyly”, some of which currently cost as little as under $1,000. As Smith suggests, her scholarly study of the Folio back in 2016 helped with this hype that has generated such $10 million-hitting price spike.

Even if this is a profiteering project, there is a benefit to studying the history of bookmaking and book-reading, as without such studies this field would not advance or be understood. A good example of the reverence offered to this field is an illustration “Fig. 5.1. Roger Payne”, of a Folger library copy of “the famous binder Roger Payne” that was included as an “engraved picture of him in his workshop” in one of the facsimile copies of the Folio he created in 1807 (292-3). But some other illustrations show the absurdity of some preservation efforts or extreme reverence shown towards “Shakespeare” (the Author), as “Fig. 4.2. Edwin’s Forrest’s First Folio” is of the “burnt remains” that are “kept in a glass sarcophagus”. The pieces are tossed into the container like an art-piece, instead of being arranged to maximize their preservation (257). Another absurdity is an illustration of the drawings made on a copy by a child in “Fig. 2.6. Elizabeth Okell her book” (167). Of more interest is “Fig. 2.3. William Johnstoune: The annotation to Hamlet by William Johnstoune, a Scottish reader of the first half of the seventeenth century, in a copy now in Meisei” (133). According to my comparative visual of the Workshop’s handwriting styles, https://github.com/faktorovich/Attribution/blob/master/Illustrations%20of%20the%206%20Ghostwriters’%20Handwriting%20Styles%20-%205-25-2023.docx, the handwriting actually appears to be Ben Jonson’s, who was a co-ghostwriter with William Percy, whose familial Northumberland estate bordered with Scotland, so this copy appears to have been misidentified or pseudonymously labeled with a mutilated spelling of Jonson’s last name and William Percy’s first name. This is significant because Percy’s closeted six plays show signs that in his final years he was analyzing and reconsidering the tragic formula of his and Jonson’s “Shakespeare” texts, so these notes were probably some of his ponderings that led to the anti-tragic farces in works such as Forest Tragedy, which might have been started decades earlier, but were probably re-written with these anti-tragic features in the 1630-40s. One of these annotations notes: “most friendly offer offers of court favor entreaty to forget his father’s death / unfeigned and deep sorrow for a father’s death / reasons against excessive sorrow for a father’s death” (132). These notes are summarizing the formulaic stages of this tragedy, probably in an effort to imitate them or to satirize them in new projects. The handwriting is closer to Percy’s wiggly hand in the annotations in “Fig. 2.2. Glasgow commonplacing”, which is assigned as “Lucius Cary’s” copy from the 1630s (130-1). Percy’s handwriting also appears in “Fig. 1.6. Epitaphs” where it is credited as an annotation “in a Folio flyleaf reproduce the lines of Shakespeare’s tomb and monument in Stratford, and an unknown additional epitaph”. In other words, this is likely to have been Percy’s draft of the epitaph before it was placed on “Shakespeare’s” tomb, together with an additional stanza that he considered including that did not fit on the monument (114). This type of evidence is why it is indeed an important endeavor to study antique archival materials, as they can provide proof that even the researcher looking at them might not be aware of. Another section of this book mentions that the “famous forger, William Henry Ireland, boasted that he had reproduced in another volume Ben Jonson’s signature” from an edition of the First Folio. Jonson’s signature on the Folio would prove that Jonson edited or reviewed at least one or two of the First Folio copies, explaining his annotations in “Fig. 2.3”, but instead Smith observes that Ireland’s “syntax obscures the likely fact that Ireland either forged the inscription or made up the existence of the copy” (282).

The book is divided into chapters on “Owning”, “Reading”, “Decoding”, “Performing” and “Perfecting”. The “Decoding” chapter opens by addressing the fact that the first biographical introduction and a separate editorial byline was given in the 1709 edition assigned to Nicholas Rowe (1674-1718) (183-4). The “Life” of “Shakespeare” Row created was mostly fictitious or derived from the texts assigned to the “Shakespeare” byline. And this biography has been growing due to fictional additions since, despite little new evidence of this “Life” being uncovered.

There are many curious pieces of evidence across this book, but many of them appear to have escaped its author. The parts that are written by Smith are thoroughly researched, and well-organized. This is a good that is designed for antique collectors and for “Shakespeare” fans. It should also be of interest to generalist Renaissance scholars. It is not likely to be accessible to the general public, as it leaps between very complex subjects that are beyond an average reader’s grasp.

Questioning the Authenticity of the “Shakespeare” Biographies

Margreta de Grazia, Shakespeare without a Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023). Hardcover. 170pp. BW illustrations, index. ISBN: 978-0-19-881254-8.

*****

“A fascinating account of how Shakespeare’s works were understood and valued by readers and writers from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century, before Shakespeare’s biography came to dominate readings of his plays and poetry.” As Smith noted, the first brief biography of “Shakespeare” appeared in 1709, so there were only a few decades when “Shakespeare” was consumed without biographical supplements; so, the following statement in this blurb is incorrect. Grazia mentions the 1709 biography in her “Introduction”, but she dismisses it as insufficiently lengthy to deserve the “biographical” terminology. “For almost two centuries after his death, Shakespeare had no biography. The makings of one were not available.” Actually, the First Folio’s introductory poems and some other notes had begun fictionalizing “Shakespeare’s” biography during the Renaissance, and the fiction grew steadily with each new editor. “No chronology had been devised by which to coordinate the events in his life with the writing of his works. Nor was there an archive of primary materials on which to base a life.” Aside for his will, some legal documents and some other bits, there still aren’t much documentary evidence to substantiated that a person of this name even existed, as it was more likely to have been a business and authorial pseudonym, as for example this surname is spelled in six different ways in each of the six surviving handwritings. “And the only work by Shakespeare written in the first person, the Sonnets, had yet to be critically edited and incorporated into the canon.” The Sonnets matched Byrd as their primary, with second poems from other ghostwriters, whereas the tragedies were mostly Percy’s and the comedies were mostly Jonson’s, so basing “Shakespeare’s” biography on the first-person poems in the Sonnets collection is an absurd exercise, as they really should be taken as words of fiction addressed from fictional narrators. “Without a biography, how could Shakespeare have been valued and understood?” Why would a biography be necessary to evaluate a work of fiction. Judging the author by their biographical actions can only lead to a mis-valued conclusion of the literary quality of the work(s). “In Shakespeare without a Life, Margreta de Grazia looks at aspects of Shakespeare’s reception between 1600 and 1800 that have been all but lost to the now still prevailing biographical impulse. It recovers the anecdote as a form of literary criticism, retrieves the ancient category of genre as the canon’s organizing rubric, demonstrates how the quest for authentic documents invalidated other forms of literary record, and reveals how the desire to forge connections between Shakespeare’s life and the Sonnets occluded his self-presentation as the ‘deceasèd I’ of a posthumous poet.” This study is based on the Oxford Shakespeare Wells Lectures series, which is a series of lectures (2008-2021) that honor the memory of Professor Stanley Wells with publications from different contributors, among whom Grazia presented on this topic in the 2018 lecture.

It is certainly necessary to rethink “the role of biography in Shakespeare studies”, but the rest of the blurb appears to do the opposite, as it does not specify what might be of value among the “Shakespeare” canon without the dramatic biography of this “Author”. The bulk of the book examines how “Shakespeare’s” biography was crafted by Malone and others. For example, there is a brief review of Malone’s work on establishing a “numbered chronological table of the plays… followed by an entry for each play of up to five pages explaining how each date had been determined (44). Most of these explanations are intuitive or a are based on mentions in the text that suggest events in given years. This dating for when the plays were first “written”, as opposed to the documented date when they were first registered and published, is still repeated in most books on “Shakespeare’s” plays. Since Malone’s and other early dating for their writing is mostly intuitive, these dates should really not be used to make chronological conclusions about this corpus because they are mostly fictious. In truth, around half of the First Folio plays were first-printed in the First Folio in 1623, or 7 years after Shakespeare’s death; this alone proves that Shakespeare could not have written “Shakespeare”, as he was dead before “Shakespeare” finished writing. 

In the “Introduction”, Grazia notes that English biographers had a tendency to “give only the year of death or burial”, without the year of birth, or only occasionally noting the age at the time of death (8). As my findings indicate, this is because England was a mostly illiterate population, with only the handwritings of the six ghostwriters appearing across pretty much all of the documents from across the Renaissance period or through 1648. Most of the records that survive of birth dates appear to have been forged for economic reasons or to direct government funds to different districts, or for other schemes. These records might have also been forged because, as Grazia notes, “Thomas Cromwell’s edict of 1538” made “recording of both baptismal and burial dates in parish registers… mandatory” (8). Grazia also ignores the likely forgery when a “surveyor” invents “Shakespeare’s” “birth place on Henley Street” a century after his death in 1759 (9). If this date was not known during his lifetime, how could a surveyor have guessed it a century afterwards?

Overall, this is a thorough study that questions the authenticity of “Shakespeare” biographies, even though it does its best to repeat pufferies of these biographies’ grandeur. The research is detailed and extensive for a pretty short book by Oxford standards. This is a book designed for “Shakespeare” scholars who are already closely familiar with this corpus, and who are interested in digging beyond the common surface readings.

Polished Edition of a Mystery-Genre Forming Novel: Fanu’s Uncle Silas

Sheridan Le Fanu, Uncle Silas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023). $13.95: Softcover. 442pp. ISBN: 978-0-19-886435-6.

*****

“‘The old woman opened the door, and the next moment I was in the presence of Uncle Silas.’ In Victorian Derbyshire, 17 year old orphan and heiress Maud Ruthyn is sent to live at the claustrophobic Bartram-Haugh house with her mysterious Uncle Silas. Silas has a reputation for gambling debts and past accusations of murder, but now lives as a reformed Christian. Sinister schemes and preternatural events unfold as Silas, his son, and a malevolent governess plot against Maud and her fortune.” A genre-defining work “of sensation fiction. With elements of tragic romance, horror, and psychological thriller, Uncle Silas shows Le Fanu at the height of his powers. With an introduction from Claire Connolly, this edition places the novel in its broadest context and unpicks the layers of Celtic, Christian, and mystic influence behind Le Fanu’s best known work.”

Sheridan Le Fanu (1814-73) is an Irish canonical writer who helped establish the mystery and horror genres. Aside for Uncle Silas (1864), he is also known for a lesbian vampire novella, Carmilla (1872). Fanu began publishing in a literary magazine founded by a group of Trinity College students (when he was a student there). He had started being credited with historical novels in his youth. This novel is introduced by an “Introduction” and concluding “Notes” by Claire Connolly. Connolly’s “Introduction” summarizes the novel, and puffs its greatness. There are also narrative theories proposed on the voice of the lead female character. A biography of Le Fanu follows. And there then is an obligatory section on the “publication of” the novel. This section explains that this novel’s horror is partially explained by Fanu having suffered the death of his wife Susanna a few years earlier, in 1858. There was also the “Great Famine” that caused destruction and death across Ireland. The next section about the text of the novel points out that this work avoids Fanu’s characteristic Irish setting in favor of an English setting, seemingly to escape the reality of the Irish Famine. But since its subject is horrific, its readers could hardly have been interested in escaping the dark parts of life. Then, there is an introduction to how this work’s mysteries or searches for clues have framed it as a “precursor to the detective and spy novel”, as well as other related genres, as Allan Hepburn has argued. The other related genres reviewed are the gothic and the supernatural formulas (xvii-xviii). And there is an explanation of the texts this novel imitates, such as Griffin’s Holland-Tide and Tales (1827) that uses “a Celtic calendar” (xix). There are also other helpful traditional sections like a “Chronology” of Fanu’s life. And Fanu explains his own intentions in “A preliminary Word” that was written in 1864 (3-4). There are only a few pages of “Explanatory Notes” at the end, but they provide useful biographical, linguistic and historic information that explains the text of the novel. Overall, these are all standard great components of an Oxford World’s Classics edition of a canonical text. I always enjoyed reading these editions when I was going through my schooling. But since struggling to sell my contrary opinions in my 20-volume BRRAM series, I have recently realized that Oxford, Cambridge, Norton, Penguin and a few other big publishers have a monopoly over the publication of canonical texts that are required reading in K-12 and in college through graduate classes. They tend to echo each other in the type of introductory content offered in each of these volumes, and they tend to repeat the same preset text of authorial biography and generic standards. If the echo-chamber is echoing any points that are not actually true, there are no competing publishers who are powerful enough to question their conclusions, or to publish entirely contrasting presentations of these classics, which really have a lot more to them than what these surface introductions prefer to present to sell more books.

Reading through the first few pages of this novel, one is transported into this concrete place and time not only with vivid descriptive elements, but also with philosophical insights into the characters like the father’s “supernatural pretensions” of talking “with angels”. And there is only a light use of dialogue to communicate meaningful points, like the anticipated arrival of a Doctor Bryerly, the “great conjurer” (9). Dialogue is overused in moder-fiction, where it tends to repeat common phrases of introduction and parting, and other nonsensical chit-chat. Then again, when there is longer dialogue in this work it also tends to be too airy. For example, there’s a traditional discussion about the narrator’s unfortunate female gender: “Pity she’s a girl, and so young—ay, a girl, and so young—no sense—giddy…” (12). This line does explain how others see this character, but similar downplays of female power in novels with female narrators across the nineteenth century because nauseating when consumed in large numbers. The dramatic change that opens “Chapter II” is the father’s desire to hire a governess to educate the girl. “Chapter III” opens with a mystical and beautifully detailed description of a girl sitting at her window and watching the scene outside, followed by a turn into the deeper past, onto the death of her mother. The work switches between intensely literal descriptions, and parts that might be natural in modern popular fiction. For example, “Chapter XX” ends with a paragraph that asks characteristically for the horror genre, “What was that dreadful sound? Who had entered my father’s chamber?” However, unlike typical modern mysteries, these questions are immediately answered with a unique turn: “It was the visitor whom we had so long expected, with whom he was to make the unknown journey, leaving me alone. The intruder was Death!” (114)

If I was still in school, and I had been assigned to read this edition of this novel in a class, I would have spent many days closely reading this book, and I probably would have written a great original essay on some neglected aspect of this composition that other scholars have not observed before. Thus, I would recommend for professors of British literature to assign this work in undergraduate and graduate classes without hesitation. It will not be an easy read, but each of them will come away with unique things to write about. This also means that this book is suitable for libraries of all types and sizes, so that some of the poorer students can access some free copies.

Extensive Study of the Artificially Propagated Divide Between Sunnis and Shia

Toby Matthiesen, The Caliph and the Imam: The Making of Sunnism and Shiism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023). Hardcover. 926pp. Color illustrations, index. ISBN: 978-0-19-068946-9.

*****

“The authoritative account of the sectarian division that for centuries has shaped events in the Middle East and the Islamic world. In 632, soon after the prophet Muhammad died, a struggle broke out among his followers as to who would succeed him. The majority argued that the new leader of Islam should be elected by the community’s elite. Others believed only members of Muhammad’s family could lead. This dispute over who should guide Muslims, the appointed Caliph or the bloodline Imam, marks the origin of the Sunni-Shii split in Islam.”

Crown Prince Al Hussein bin Abdullah II of Jordan is the latest or 42^nd direct descendant of Muhammad (Shii). His father, King of Jordan, Abdullah II, is the 41^st descendant. They are part of the Hashemites dynasty that was founded in 1916 in Hejaz before it spread to Syria in 1920 and Iraq and Jordan in 1921. The family line suddenly became monarchs after centuries of powerlessness when Muhammad Abd al-Mu’in ibn ‘Awn was appointed to the Emirate in 1827 by the ruler of Egypt; he was the Sharif and Emir of Mecca. It would be interesting to examine the genealogical truth of this family’s claims of lineage, as forging supporting evidence appears to have granted them a generations-long monopoly over monarchical power across the Middle East. The preceding date when a claim of Muhammad’s lineage was used to seize monarchic power in the region was when Ismail I established the Safavid dynasty in Persia (later renamed as Iran) in 1501, and thus made Shiism (or the belief in the monarchal rights of Muhammad’s descendants) the state religion. Sunnis have been rebelling against these assertions, but they have claimed monarchal power as well, as happened in Iraq in 1932, when King Faisal declared Iraq to be an independent nation under his rule. Saddam Hussein appears to have started out by trying to bring modern democratic rule by calling himself the president of Iraq in 1979, but by remaining in power without fair elections he shifted back towards monarchy without giving himself the “king” title. America has been siding with the Shiites (pro-Muhammad-lineage monarchy) in Iraq in their successful attempts to rebel against Saddam, and also in Afghanistan. This dispute dominates power in the Middle East because this region has the highest density of monarchies in the world, including the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Kuwait, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Oman. Continuing this militant struggle for power is in the interest of the monarchs who inherit these countries as long as their claims to Muhammad’s lineage are accepted as sufficient to grant them absolute or limited power. Thus, a study of what historical evidence says about the roots of this dispute is of extreme political importance to the modern people of the Middle East and the rest of the world.

“Toby Matthiesen explores this hugely significant division from its origins to the present day. Moving chronologically, his book sheds light on the many ways that it has shaped the Islamic world, outlining how over the centuries Sunnism and Shiism became Islam’s two main branches, particularly after the Muslim Empires embraced sectarian identity. It reveals how colonial rule institutionalised divisions between Sunnism and Shiism both on the Indian subcontinent and in the greater Middle East, giving rise to pan-Islamic resistance and Sunni and Shii revivalism. It then focuses on the fall-out from the 1979 revolution in Iran and the US-led military intervention in Iraq. As Matthiesen shows, however, though Sunnism and Shiism have had a long and antagonistic history, most Muslims have led lives characterised by confessional ambiguity and peaceful co-existence. Tensions arise when sectarian identity becomes linked to politics. Based on a synthesis of decades of scholarship in numerous languages”, explaining “contemporary sectarian conflict and its historical roots.”

The book is logically organized into the stages that shaped this divide: “Part I. The Formation of Sunnism and Shiism, 632-1500”, “Part II. The Shaping of Muslim Empires, 1500-1800”, “Part III. Empire and the State, 1800-1979” and “Part IV. Revolution and Rivalry, 1979-”. The “Prologue” explains that the divisions between Sufis, Shiism and Sunnism are blurred across the enormous geographic territories where the Islam religion is worshipped. For example, some Sunnis also revere descendants of Muhammad, rather than viewing them as doing something contrary to their faith when they hold monarchical power. Matthiesen notes that he noticed that the two sides have prejudices against each other that appear to be common superstitions. For example, Shia believe they are a “chosen group of Muslims” (5-6). And the Sunni are not anti-monarchal, as they also have ruling families that pass on power within their clans. “Sunni-Shia tensions stem from” Bahrain’s “history as a province of Iran and then its conquest by a Sunni ruling family in the eighteenth century and the disenfranchisement of its Shii population”. In other words, to convince the population that specific monarchical clans are “chosen” to rule all other people in a given country, the propagandists in these regions have argued that all members of the side that does not support their “chosen” ruler can be disenfranchised. The solution to this problem is a separation between church and state, and democratic rule that elects the most intelligent possible leaders with pro-humanist policies. But as the book on idiotic American presidents in this set of reviews proves, there are no intelligent leaders anywhere in the world. Matthiesen also points out that the British Empire directly intensified or initiated a political divide between these sects when it “organized separate Muharram processions for Sunnis and Shia”, and the “Sunni and Shii became legal categories that were reinforced in interactions with the state”, in which the Brits primarily “engaged with Sunnism”, so they started seeing Shiism from the Sunnis’ prejudiced perspective on them (8). The “historical narrative” has been manipulated in textbooks from both sides to create an artificial campaign of hatred that imagined a divide beyond the basic theological disagreement between these groups. Matthiesen also explains that Sunni and Shii are two parts of Islam, and that neither of them are a “sect” or a minority group that is revolting against the majority (9). Also of note is that the Sunnis believe the rulership should have passed from Muhammad to the top Caliph (Deputy of God) or the top religious administrator, who was also given political power. This is why caliphs or clergy have taken control of many Middle Eastern Islamic states, where Islam is enforced as the required state religion. The Sunnis first created a monarchal dynasty with the “first of the Sunni Caliphate” in Damascus between 661-750 (11-2). Thus, the line between clergy and monarchs was blurred, so that both sides were fighting for totalitarian political rule, as opposed to one side standing for the promotion of intellectual biblical scholars to the top positions of theological and governmental leadership.   

I will return to this book if I am ever asked to explain Middle Eastern theology. It is a dense history that fairly considers the various sides of this dispute, and attempts to sift out the propaganda from facts. There are extensive notes on all chapters that support the narrative with specific sources that it is based on. This is especially necessary for scholars in this complex field that want to research sub-topics further and need to follow the evidence to still deeper roots. Some parts of the book do generalize or imagine what has happened a bit too much. An example of this is this sentence: “Despite Iraq’s social sectarianism and history as battle-ground for rivalries between Sunni and Shii powers… the level of sectarian polarization, and the organization of the political system along sectarian lines, was new” (365). There was some division previously, and there continued to be division later, so it is unclear what specifically was “new”. The surrounding history surely explains the reasoning behind this claim, but there are some other broad conclusions throughout that do not necessarily match the facts presented, or might be disputed with facts that are omitted. The general public is likely to be very lost if they dive into this book, as I had to do some preliminary research in mainstream sources before returning to this text, so that I could grasp what it was saying. The author could have benefited from including a chapter that had an easy to follow summary of the history, instead of the preface that dived too much into what the author was feeling about the conflict from living in the region. I think that if he had tried summarizing it all and looking at documentary evidence first for what claims either modern Califs or Imams had to their positions of power, he would have come to much more solid and useful explanations for what (if anything) has gone awry, and why the West has been shifting blames on this divide for regional non-stop warfare. Scholars of this topic will certainly benefit from reading this book cover-to-cover to benefit from Matthiesen’s scholarly thoroughness.  

Biography of a Designer-Artist and a History of Arts and Crafts

Gregory Jones, William Harry Rogers: Victorian Book Designer and Star of the Great Exhibition (Lewes: Unicorn Publishing Group, March 2023). £50: Hardcover. 312pp. Color and BW illustrations, index. ISBN: 978-1-911397-17-5.

*****

“The year 2023 sees the 150th anniversary of the death of William Harry Rogers. Rogers was one of the finest artist-designers of the Victorian period in Britain, to be considered in the same company as Pugin, William Burges, Owen Jones and Christopher Dresser. His designs won several prize medals at the Great Exhibition of 1851, the event which provides a ubiquitous reference point for cultural histories of the nineteenth century. He subsequently specialised in designing the appearances of books and his work in this field in the 1850s and 1860s was unrivalled, with many of his designs appearing also in the USA. William Harry Rogers is the definitive account of his work and his life in Soho and the village of Wimbledon; it includes many new discoveries and hundreds of colour illustrations.”

This is a delightful book to glance through as it is full of illustrations in various types of design that Rogers drew, as well as the resulting products his designs created, such as spoons and architecture. The cover of this hardcover book is gilded with the type of design that Rogers was popular for. And the book includes a cloth yellow bookmark. The “Acknowledgements” explain that Jones decided to work on this book because he realized that most of Rogers’ designs were “largely unrecognized and uncatalogued” (7).

“Chapter Two: Life of the Artist-Designer” begins with a family history. WHR’s father was William Gibbs, who was born in 1792, and at fourteen apprenticed to a “leading carver and gilder, David McLauchlan, of Printing House Square in the City of London” near St Paul’s Cathedral. Then he turned to woodcarving under the training of Richard Birbeck. William was freed from these apprenticeships in 1814, and then began more independent sculptural carvings of wood, which was rewarded with a “Commission from the Duke of Sussex… to adorn several rooms in Kensington Palace with his carvings” (20). William had other children that were successful in different fields: Mary Eliza was a travel writer and artist, Edward Thomas was a diplomat in the Ottoman region, and George Alfred also became an artistic carver. WHR attended a boarding school, Academy, Morden Hall in Merton. WHR then began working for his father as an artist-designer. This book focuses more on WHR’s trip abroad, his marriage and other personal relationships as opposed to explaining exactly what type of work he was doing, for whom and how he was advancing in his career. The narrative only begins to focus on design with a summary of what the 1851 Great Exhibition was about. Though even at this point, there is more emphasis on a grandfather’s death than on how he prepared for this enormous artistic display. There is a mention of a Savage Club that pulled together “free-wheeling artistic and literary” people in London (27-8). This suggests that WHR was a member of a Workshop that ghost-created jointly or had a member who was ghost-creating for them some of their projects, but not enough information is given to explain why this club managed to include some of the most puffed creators of this period. Only the 1860-70s or the last productive decades of WHR’s short life are there more mentions of the type of work he was actually doing in the arts. For example, there is an explanation of the parts of a design for Quarles’ Emblems that WHR was responsible for in contrast with the contribution made by the second artist credited of drawing other elements; and there is a mention that his collaborator, Charles Bennett gained a cartoonist position with Punch (29-30). WHR’s father winded down his business by around 1864 (31). The scarcity of this biography on artistic topics is partially due to the fact that the art is instead discussed in other chapters of this book. Jones admits the gaps in the documentary evidence regarding what specifically WHR was doing across his career. “It is not known how WHR ‘made some few francs a week out of commissions from the booksellers’. Perhaps he drew illustrations for engraving or ‘illuminated individual customers’ purchases for presentation. Nor do we know if the occasional five-pound note from England was payment for drawings or simply an allowance from his father. We do know that some drawings which he made in Paris at this time were published in The Builder several years later” (39).

This book pulls readers in by revealing a few curious details gradually in tightly organized sections. It will be of interest to modern designers and artists who want to make a career in these challenging fields, as they would benefit from understanding a predecessor’s path that led to success. This is thus a book that is of interest to all sorts of libraries, so that the public and academics can access it when it is needed. Private collectors of beautiful books would also enjoy putting it on their shelves, as it would be an intricately-designed addition to a decorative bookshelf.

The Faults of Modern Fiction: Setting Dogs on Fire

Terese Svoboda, Dog on Fire (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, March 1, 2023). $19.95: Softcover. 204pp, 5.5X8.5”. ISBN: 978-1-4962-3516-9.

***

“Out of a Shakespearean-wild Midwest dust storm, a man rises. ‘Just a glimpse of him,’ says his sister; ‘every inch of him,’ says his guilt-filled lover. ‘Close your eyes,’ says his nephew. ‘What about it?’ asks his father. The cupboard is filled with lime Jell-O, and there are aliens, deadly kissing, and a restless, alcoholic mother who carries a gun. ‘Every family is this normal,’ insists the narrator. ‘Whoever noticed my brother, with a family as normal as this?’ the beleaguered sister asks. Against the smoky prairie horizon and despite his seizures, a brother builds a life. Imbued with melancholy cheer, Dog on Fire unfolds around a family’s turmoil, past loves, and a mysterious death.”

University of Nebraska Press is determined to send novels for my review, while not sending most of the non-fiction scholarly books I have been requesting. I do not like reviewing modern fiction, as it is mostly complete, unreadable dribble. But since scholarly presses attempt to classify the fiction that they publish as high-brow, I have to consider these books when they are sent to me. And they previously sent a novel for review that started with a dead animal, on which I commented as a repelling note, so this time they’ve sent a book whose title announces in advance there will be a Dog on Fire.

There are some similarities between the opening page of this novel and Fanu’s Uncle. Both attempt to use specific descriptive details to put readers into a place, both create mystery by revealing some details and introducing questions about others, and both use literary devices to interrupt and elaborate the flow of the text. Both also generalize about humanity’s types and habits. Svoboda notes: “Men who shovel look alike. They all face where the wood joins the metal or at least their glance grazes there on its way to the shovel tip, so all you see is head or hat…” (3). Both works also focus on familial ties, as they repeat the tropes of familial connections and distances. One paragraph mention’s the narrator’s brother, and then the father, and the next mentions a cousin. And both use dramatic death-threatening language. Svoboda’s is just less dramatic and more direct, as she describes a cousin who “caught outside her parked vehicle, holding up her unwrapped baby to a tornado…” (3). One major difference is that while the tropes achieved in this page are similar, Fanu delivers a united message that drives the plot towards a known point on the formulaic horizon. In contrast, Svoboda leaps between the tropes without connecting them to each other, or aiming them towards any particular larger thesis for the novel as a whole. Why is the tornado threat mentioned, right after a dust storm description? Is this novel about natural disasters, and if not why are these death-threats needed in the opening page, instead of whatever central personal conflict is actually at the center of the plot, as related by the book’s blurb?

On the next page, there is a comparison to a “boat lost in a fog” when describing the difficulty to see in a dust storm. The comparison is unnecessary, as it would be better to just explain how the dust storm limits visibility, instead of bringing in a simile to a different element.

One positive in comparison with other Nebraska novels I have reviewed is that there is minimum dialogue, which tends to be repetitive and tends to not move the plot forwards. However, these repetitions are kind of still there, just without the proper punctuation required for dialogue in standard writing. Chapter 31 starts with the italicized paragraph: “That woman is back, says Mom.” It is not immediately clear why this entire page-long chapter is italicized. The first line suggests, the italicization is identifying dialogue, but most of the other lines are not dialogue between characters, but rather a continuation of the thoughts of the main narrator (111). And there really is dialogue throughout. Here’s one example: “You have to come, she says. She tells me all about this idea of hers—that if I’m there”, at an autopsy, “while she does it, then it’s not an attempt to defile the body, its’ fine it’s a relative, it’s okay.” Later on the same page there’s an explanation of the title: “She lets me out, and instead of fleeing, I get the shovel out of the back. His, I’m thinking, from the time when the dog was on fire…” (138).

This novel is congested or made unreadable by its lack of quotation marks around dialogue, and the jumping narrative that describes a bunch of unrelated events and thoughts while somewhat getting to some kind of a unifying narrative storyline or point. This deliberate tendency to create bumps for readers that prevent smooth reading seems to be an intentional goal of modern fiction. The deletion of quotation marks and the like is presented as an innovation, when it really subtracts the few good elements 19^th century fiction managed to achieve in its standardization without taking any new steps to improve the density, coherence, or meaning of the related stories. There are some good elements in this novel, whereas some other modern fiction I’ve read has no redeeming qualities. Occasional descriptions are visually precise, and the tension of the unraveling events does invite a level of attention. But I would not recommend that the general public attempt reading this work. It is an experiment, and one that has not been written up by an inviting commentator.

The Orphan as a “Feral Creature” and Other Anti-Humanist Observations

Pamela Carter Joern, Toby’s Last Resort (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, March 1, 2023). $21.95: Softcover. 232pp, 5.5X8.5”. ISBN: 978-1-4962-3269-4.

**

“Toby Jenkins, the oldest surviving member of her family, has opened a summer residence program in the Nebraska Sandhills for the wounded and broken, misfits and dreamers. Besides her guests—a minister on sabbatical and a woman recovering from cancer treatment—Toby is joined by Anita and Luís, her hired help; Anita’s brother Gabe; and someone Toby least expected, her nearly estranged daughter, Nola Jean. Mother-daughter tensions, age-old prejudices, and generational divides challenge the members of this disparate community as they bump up against each other. Parallel conflicts occur against the backdrop of a changing rural landscape where history clashes with evolving mores… Pamela Carter Joern probes the complications of family relationships, identity, belonging, and the impact of long-held secrets.”

The last note in this blurb regarding “secrets” is curious as it explains that modern fiction’s lack of details, narrative direction or density of content tends to be explained as the elements left out to keep readers guessing what “secrets” might lie behind the vast amount of things that go unsaid or unrelated. This device helps writers avoid having to relate vividly what happened, in favor of saying as little as possible to make readers guess or imagine what the solutions to the mysteries or the unsaid gaps should have been.

Most reviewers tend to puff this absence, as if it is a positive; this is the case in the blurb from the Library Journal that proclaims: “She packs a lot of story into 250 pages.” To check the density of the story, I opened to a random page, and here’s a section with the densest content on this page:

If they were wrong about Nola Jean, they weren’t wrong about themselves. Sure, Walter knew what to do with a motherless calf. Toby had coaxed countless calves and foals to thrive on a makeshift bottle. Both exhibited patience and basic kindness with critters whose needs they understood, but with a willful, unhappy human child, they were lost. Exhausted and without resources, they didn’t know what to do, except to give her what they would have wanted. Time and space. Plenty of space.

This is followed by airy dialogue (with quotation marks) that basically notes the narrator wasn’t listening to what a woman had been saying as he was semi-thinking this paragraph. And the preceding paragraph claims that the parents had realized that they had hoped for a good child, but got a disruptive “feral creature” (35). To summarize parents adopted a child, and discovered that this “creature” had been traumatized previously, so the child rebelled by refusing to eat and recoiling from their touch during bathing and other intimate activities. This section is full of truisms, but they contradict the reality of what is being described, as if the author has never experienced anything like it, and is attempting to fill the lines with as many common sayings as possible. If a child is recoiling from touch, then “kindness”, such as fondling and patting would be the worst imaginable solution. And if “space” is the solution, then giving the child the silent treatment and staying away from it to let it starve itself into being forced to return to the family table is the opposite of a “kind” approach to parenting. This section is mysterious because the words cluttered into it do not make any congruent sense. It’s a text that wants to appear sympathetic, while actually being extremely anti-social or deeply harassing towards orphans and those in need. The absence of density in this section is apparent by the lack of details about what the orphan was doing, in favor of broad philosophizing about caring for orphaned dehumanized “creatures”.

The book appears to begin with a dense paragraph, as it is long, and has a few multisyllabic words like “cottonwoods”, but its actually empty of grounding specifics and instead uses trigger-words like “Civil War” and various familial relationships (father, brother, husband etc.). There’s an attempt to build sympathy for the characters by describing various relatives buried in a cemetery (1-2). The problem might be the author is struggling with a dilemma that echoes a comment from a character: “She held a mug of coffee, hankering for a splash of whiskey she was trying to avoid” (3). Then, the folksy description of a country cemetery is interrupted by the upper-class idea of hiring a decorator to design the décor of the Last Resort, or a motel-resort the narrator is describing starting. “She asked Dorothy Kincaid, a local watercolor artist, to help her furnish the cabins: a good bed with a nightstand, dresser…” (3). This is followed by a description of an ad campaign with the design and contents of the ad for this establishment (4). All is geared towards consumerism, as if the author is selling her own hotel rooms to the readers. When I searched for Pamela’s biography, I found this note, in addition to the fiction she has written and awards she won: “Pam lives in Minneapolis. She is a graduate of United Theological Seminary and holds an MFA from Hamline University.” It is unclear if she might have businesses aside from her writing, but this does explain her anti-moody-orphan depiction, as modern theologists tend to have anti-humanist views.

I hope this will be the last novel Nebraska will send my way, but it looks like they are determined to keep them coming. Readers should avoid this book. And generally it is a good idea to read at least a chapter out of a modern book before deciding on buying it or not.

Introduction to Nakoda Linguistics and the Full Breadth of Its Vocabulary

Vincent Collette with Wilma Kennedy, A Concise Dictionary of Nakoda (Assiniboine) (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, April 1, 2023). $85: Hardcover. 378pp, 7X10”. 8 illustrations, 1 map, 8 tables. ISBN: 978-1-4962-2972-4.

*****

“Brings to life the hopes and dreams of Nakoda (Assiniboine) elders. The Nakoda language—also known as Assiniboine, an Ojibwe ethnonym meaning ‘Stone Enemy’—is an endangered Siouan language of the Mississippi Valley branch spoken in southern Saskatchewan and northern Montana. Nakoda belongs to the Dakotan dialectal continuum, which includes Dakota, Lakota, and Stoney. The fieldwork for this project was done between 2018 and 2020 with Elder Wilma Kennedy, one of the last fluent speakers living in Carry The Kettle, Saskatchewan. The volume brings together many valuable stories and colorful expressions as well as archaic words that do not appear in any known sources of the language. Particular care was taken to obtain the derivatives of many verbal stems, along with sentences for many of the verbs, adverbs, and other function words. More than a list of words, this volume contains definitions and standard spellings along with a wealth of grammatical information. The dictionary contains more than 6,000 Nakoda-to-English translations, more than 3,000 English-to-Nakoda translations, and more than 1,500 sentences that will be extremely helpful for those interested in mastering the different usages of words and the various sentence patterns of the language. This dictionary of Nakoda can be used by anyone interested in learning or would like to refresh their knowledge of the language.”

This is one of a few similar vocabulary and grammatical dictionaries and reference guides to Native American languages that have been published in the last few years, as there seems to be a revival happening in this field. Since, as the blurb notes, there are some “last fluent speakers” surviving today, who might die in the near future, and leave no fluent speakers behind in some of these languages, it is certainly the right moment to capture this linguistic evidence to preserve it for future generations. The study of forensic linguistics of rare languages is one that gains value the further we move from a language’s common usage. Evidence in a language’s vocabulary and grammar can help future researchers understand the true history, geography, culture and other aspects of the lives of groups of people that otherwise might have preserved very little about the facts of their past. While historians tend to make history sound solid and known, there is really too much in the world’s history that is firmly established. For example, the relationship between Old German and Old English might explain more about population flow across Europe than history books about this migration that were motivated by propagandistic drives.

This book includes extensive front-matter introductions, which are essential both for scholars in this field and for casual learners who will want this content to orient themselves in the subject. The “Introduction” covers “A Short History of the Nakoda People”, explaining that they lived in icy parts of Canada (Saskatchewan) and US (Montana), and were hunter-gatherers. There are some shocking bits that need more explanation, such as that the Nakoda’s Sundance included “the piercing of the young men’s chests with skewers” (xiii). Contact with Europeans began in 1640-78. By the 1690s, the Nakoda became “trade middlemen… between the Hudson Bay Company and western tribes who were in search of European goods”, such as firearms (xiv). They were affected by smallpox epidemics and a decline in the bison population across the 18-19^th centuries that led to widespread poverty. The Nakoda now live in a few reservations in Canada and the US (xvi-xvii).

The next section is “Dialectal Situation of Nakoda”, which notes that Nakoda is a member of the Siouan language family, which is descended from the Proto-Siouan language of 3,000 years ago. A useful tree diagram of the relationship between this group of languages is available on the North American Languages website under the title “Siouan language family tree”. Nakoda or Assiniboine is at an end-branch, under the Dakotan category. Collette provides a table that shows “Dialectal differences”, where, for example, “friend” in Nakhota is “khona”, while it’s “khola” in Lakhota” and “khoda” in West and East Dakhota (xvii). Collette then goes into more complex linguistic distinctions of this language. “In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries Nakoda was still largely spoken in Canadian reservations, but it started losing ground in favor of Plains Cree or English… Nakoda is now a moribund language spoken by a handful of elderly people of the great-grandparent generation… Nineteenth-century material concerning the Nakoda language is scarce since it was considered a dialect of Yanktonai Dakota” (xx-xxi).

I did not find a section of extensive common phrases that would be necessary for a new language learner who wanted to begin studying with some conversational bits and pieces they could use in active attempts to communicate. Thus, I doubt somebody could learn the Nakoda language based only on this book if they are starting without any grounding. This book is instead designed for the Nakoda themselves, who might want to learn the intricacies of their language beyond what they might know from occasional common interactions. I believe this dictionary would be sufficient for me or other linguists to translate a text written in this language, but it would be insufficient to translate from English into Nakoda because this would require a good deal of basic examples of how this language works or looks in common usage. There are some phrases within the dictionary, such as “Oceti nataga!” meaning, “Turn the stove off!” The language is written with diacritics, accents and other glyphs that indicate differing sounds than plain English letters. It also uses some upper-case A’s, as in: “sonyA” for “he smokes smth (such as meat)” (144). It is puzzling what “smth” means in this context. Some of the other definitions are also a bit sparce, as some elements are missing, like specifying much beyond the abbreviated part of speech about given words. The lack of periods after all definitions is also contributing to some of my confusion as I look through this dictionary. Given the interrelationships between the languages in this family, it would have also helped if there were some notes on variants of words in related languages, or other etymological information, or citations on how specific meanings were derived. Since this dictionary was derived from field research, some notes on who suggested what words, and if there is corroboration for these definitions would have been of interest.

This book is part of a much needed linguistic effort, and it densely achieves the main ambitious goals it promises. If I was a member of this population, I would have really enjoyed having access to this book, so I could occasionally use Nakoda terms to bring the community closer through shared linguistic history. Academic libraries should add this book to their collections, as all of them are likely to be teaching sections of classes on Native Americans, and this book provides more insightful information on Native culture than many mainstream textbooks on this subject.

A Digressive Puffery of Collaborative Writing

Heather Bozant Witcher, Collaborative Writing in the Long Nineteenth Century: Sympathetic Partnerships and Artistic Creation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, March 2022). EBook. 270pp, 6X9”. Index. ISBN: 978-1-009075-50-3.

****

My British Renaissance Re-Attribution and Modernization (BRRAM) series re-attributes the texts of this period to a collaborative Workshop of only six ghostwriters. I have also just completed the computational-linguistic testing of 304 texts from the 18^th century, and will shortly begin a study of 19^th century British texts. In all these periods, I have found texts that have mixed linguistic signatures that indicate that two or more authors collaborated in writing these texts. Thus, understanding the various aspects of collaborative writing is important to my own attribution projects, as new ideas might help explain unique situations that are otherwise puzzling. However, on closer examination I realized that the author of this scholarly book was less interested in the practical aspects of the collaborative process, and more interested in theory and ideology.

“Bringing the collaborative process to life through an array of examples, Heather Witcher shows that sympathetic co-creation is far more than the mere act of writing together. While foregrounding the material aspects of collaboration—hands uniting on the page, blank space left for fellow contributors, the writing and exchanging of drafts—this study also illuminates its social aspects and its reliance on Victorian liberalism: dialogue, the circulation of correspondence, the lived experience of collaboration, and, on a less material plane, transhistorical collaborations with figures of the past. Witcher takes a broad approach to these partnerships and, in doing so, challenges traditional expectations surrounding the nature of authorship itself, not least its typical classification as a solitary activity. Within this new framework, collaboration enables the titles of ‘coauthor,’ ‘influencer,’ ‘editor,’ ‘critic,’ and ‘inspiration’ to coexist. This book celebrates the plurality of collaboration and underscores the truly social nature of nineteenth-century writing.” This puffery of the collaborative process appears to be a propagandistic argument for a process that really favors plagiarism, and the reliance on paid editors to take on the bulk of the task of authorship. Earlier today I was listening to the Robert Oppenheimer audiobook and it mentioned that Oppenheimer forced his graduate students to collaboratively write (some transcribing, some editing, some researching) an entire thesis for another student, who supposedly came up with an idea but could not write it up, in exchange for treating them to fancy dinners and illegal (at the time) alcohol and trips on the ferry. Oppenheimer is also described having affairs with some of his female graduate students, while constantly intimately socializing with this group. The student for whom a thesis was composed by a Workshop of others then graduated and probably obtained a top academic tenured teaching position for life, where he might not have had to do any more original research, aside for publishing the thesis others wrote for him. Thus, this student created an academic dead-end, where no new research or insight came out of. If this group had not written this work for a student who was incapable of writing for himself, the job he occupied might have gone to one of the actual writers, who might have made great scientific progress that might have improved the world across the following decades. I do not recall reviewing a scholarly book that did not have dozens of names of people being thanked in the preface for helping the author write the book. For example, the “Acknowledgements” of Plagiarizing the Victorian Novel notes: “At Cambridge University Press, this book began life under the auspices of one editor, Linda Bree, and it came to fruition under another, Bethany Thomas, who championed the manuscript when it was something of an orphan. I am grateful to both and to Carrie Parkinson, for guiding me through the process. I also want to thank the series editor, Gillian Beer, for approving the project. Rose Bell provided careful copy-editing, and Anna Claire McGrath created the index. The two anonymous readers for the press offered potent suggestions; the chapters that follow are better because of their efforts” (ix); and this is only one paragraph out of many other people thanked for helping edit and create this one book. Collaboration is thus a required part of the current scholarly publishing process. Perhaps this book will convince me in its usefulness, but based on my own research into the publishing industry, I think it is very destructive to scientific progress.

The negative impression of this book only deepens in “Chapter 1: Adam Smith’s Liberal Sympathy”. I opened it because my tests of “Adam Smith’s” texts indicated that they were parts of linguistic clusters that cross bylines, indicative of the presence of an underlying collaborative ghostwriter working under multiple bylines. I was hoping this chapter would jump into explaining with whom Smith might have collaborated, so I could work out the attribution mysteries I am working on. Instead, the chapter begins with an irrelevant philosophical question about the “self”, and then quotes from random digressive sources to answer it. This question is about the definition of a “lyric”, which is answered by claiming that lyric poetry is more of an individualistic pursuit, in contrast with collaborative writing. Smith’s theory on “sympathy” is questioned, instead of any evidence of how Smith might have written his works collaboratively. The chapter eventually winds up discussing “nineteenth-century sociability” or networks in “salon culture”. The first practical mention about the writing or publishing process is that The Theory of Moral Sentiments sold its initial 1,000 copies print run in a “brisk” manner. Aside for this mention, there are repetitive rephrasing about “feelings”, “emotions” and “sympathy” between people to explain the general intuitive tendency to collaborate, instead of the practical aspects of this process (i.e., why it was profitable, and how it worked).

“Chapter 2: The collaborative Process of Mary Shelley and Percy Bysshe Shelley” enters the 19^th century, which I have not yet fully linguistically tested. Instead of the warm reflections about “feelings” in the previous chapter, this chapter starts with a first concrete description of the “legend” of how Percy died at sea, only parts of his body survived, which were burned, except for his heart that did not get burned, and so Mary kept it in a box until it was found by her child after her death. This scene seems to be designed to shock, and does indeed grasp the reader’s attention. Then, finally, there is a first description of the collaborative process by looking at the two handwriting styles found in Mary and Percy’s journal, where Mary appears to finish Percy’s sentence by turning an abbreviated “w” into “with me”. It would have been useful if this was followed by more studies of this journal, with quotes of collaborative lines and paragraphs. Instead, the author digresses back into the general theory of sympathy and “kinship”. There is a mention of Mary Wollstonecraft’s and William Godwin’s “1790 circle”, before the discussion digresses elsewhere. On a positive note, reading that both of them were collaborative writers made me realize that I had not yet included Godwin in my 18^th century study, so I added his Memoirs of Wollstonecraft into my corpus as the 305^th text. This is why I benefit from writing these reviews, even if most of the actual text of these books is not helpful. Following this thread of connected collaborative poets led me to add 6 more texts to the study (for a total of 310), which took me the rest of the day.

Chapter 3 covers the collaboration between writers and their illustrators. The next chapter discusses William Morris press, and his work as a “jack of all trades”: “poet, artist, designer, visionary, socialist, rebel, revolutionary, genius…” This begins to suggest that Morris ghostwrote for those he published later in his career, but instead of getting to this, the narrative digresses into pufferies of Morris’ knowledge of publishing. The next section even digresses into the “paradox” between Morris’ capitalist profiteering publishing efforts and his membership in socialist organizations. Then, there is a section of Morris’ editing and collaboration on creating an edition of Chaucer.

While some of the opening chapters are frustratingly flighty and too theoretical for my taste, the bulk of this book does provide evidence and analysis of how different types of publishing creators have collaborated across the 19^th century and beyond it. Thus, those with enough time to read more deeply into this book will find information to benefit their own related research. I recommend it for graduate and professorial scholars who are familiar with this field, and are looking for some specific information on the subject. 

A Survey into Perspectives on Teaching and Doing Publishing and Editing

Jocelyn Hargrave; Samantha Rayner, Leah Tether, eds., Teaching Publishing and Editorial Practice: The Transition from University to Industry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023). EBook. 172pp. ISBN: 978-1-108856-73-7.

*****

“Investigates how effectively editing and publishing programmes prepare graduates for industry and how well these graduates translate this instruction to the workplace. Taking a global perspective to gauge the state of the discipline, the mixed-methods approach used for this Element comprised two online surveys for educators and graduates, three semi-structured interviews with industry practitioners (scholarly, education and trade) and ethnographic practice (author as educator and practitioner). Three key concepts also framed this Element’s enquiry: being, learning and doing. The Element demonstrates how these transitioning but interdependent concepts have the potential to form a holistic practice-led pedagogy for students of editing and publishing programmes.”

The subject of teaching and practicing publishing is one that is of central importance to all publishers and English professors. This book is broken down into three central chapters that cover the “Perspectives” of the Educator, Graduate and Industry. And there are appendixes with the questions that were asked in the central study that was performed to arrive at these conclusions on perception. This would have been a more useful book if it addressed a point mentioned in its own Introduction: “the need for more distinct nomenclature to define editors and editorial practice”. Haugen is cited as describing that the editing field has been changing in what it is asked to do for writers into “recasting, reseeing, reconceiving”. In other words, editors have been asked to re-write or restructure texts, instead of merely proofreading or polishing them. Further exploration notes that “editor” is derived from the term “edition”, meaning a compiler. And a line is drawn between editors who find works worthy of publication, and copyeditors who perform line-edits. The modern publishing process involves breaking down the parts of the editing process into separate industrial-style mini-steps performed by different employees, such as typesetters and indexers. The author walks through the different types of editing, and how it can be evaluated, taught and otherwise dissected. The introducer notes that the busy work of meetings and collaboration between these different editor types has meant that the “percentage of the workday spent on [editing] has greatly decreased”, according to Albers and Flanagan. And the gig-economy means that contractors are hired to “limit project costs”. These are indeed curious subjects that all editors ponder, so there is need to explore them in such studies. The section on the history of publishing education offers a dense summary of how the first publishing programs started, and what led to the current standard programs. However, when this chapter actually approaches the subject of how to improve these programs or what they should be teaching, many sources are cited but little is communicated among the chaos of conflicting opinions. The text keeps returning to the different skills that need to be taught for different types of editors: “the editorial skills of commissioning editors in the magazine or journal publishing sectors are distinct from those editors developing content for online spaces”. While there are obviously differences between editing textbooks versus blogs, the essentials that need to be taught are really the same, if the goal for both is creating outstanding content.

Chapter 2 on the perspective of the educators also returns to the subject of the technology of editing: “Editorially, this movement applies not just to editing manuscripts on-screen, typically using Microsoft Word and the track changes function to ensure transparency between the author and editor (though the use of track changes is more a policy issue as part of editorial procedures) but also undertaking proof-correction of typeset pages on-screen using Adobe Acrobat Reader”.

While some of the information across this book is of interest to publishers, academics and students in this field, most of it is repetitive and unreadable. The book could have benefited from being broken down into more sub-sections on the different parts of the survey, and on the conclusions drawn from it. Also, a single set of surveys is insufficient to reach conclusions about this field, as the respondents can only answer to questions being asked, when the problem of teaching editing has far more complex problems. For example, the use of ghost-editors or sub-contracting of editorial labor to poorer countries or to contractors might be helping the rich gain top editorial positions, while those who are actually skilled in this craft are forced to work at extremely low wages because they do not have the social power to win the lucrative, high-paying positions. And it is too easy to cheat on tests, thus rewarding those who know the answers through cheating, while making tests impossible to pass for those who are taking them honestly.

Those who are scholars in the field of book publishing will certainly benefit from reading the details of these surveys’ findings. But those who are students of the editing process are likely to take away the wrong lessons from all this information.

Illustrating and Puffing Public Domain Texts to Create “Classics”

Rosalind Parry, The Art of the Reprint: Nineteenth-Century Novels in Twentieth-Century Editions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023). EBook. 215pp. ISBN: 978-1-009272-04-9.

*****

“A genuinely original work, The Art of the Reprint establishes the reprint as a vital area of study. In tightly curated encounters between extraordinary twentieth-century artists and beloved nineteenth-century novels, Clare Leighton travels to Dorset to minutely observe Thomas Hardy’s landscape for a 1929 The Return of the Native (1878); Rockwell Kent channels his many sea journeys into a 1930 Moby Dick (1851); Fritz Eichenberg transposes the churn and isolation of fleeing Nazi Germany onto Expressionistic engravings for Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847); and Joan Hassall elucidates a bright social world at miniature scale for a 1975 set of The Complete Novels of Jane Austen (1787-1817). Mediators between text and book and author and reader, these artists interpreted these novels and then illustrated their interpretations, stunningly and strangely, in wood, ink, and paper, for everyday readers.”

After translating and editing the BRRAM series that includes 18 volumes of translations of Renaissance texts, it is particularly interesting to me how other editors go about the task of revitalizing and adding content that makes reprints worthy of a new edition. The introduction opens with a helpful history of the boon in reprints at the turn of the 20^th century, or when “the greats of the mid-nineteenth century ceased to be copyrighted”. Parry lists the different publishers who entered the business of reprints, like Collins’ Pocket Classics. Most of these previously independent publishers have since been acquired by giant publishers. The inaccessibility of entering this market today is most telling by the fact that Smashwords does not allow reprints or new editions of public domain work, i.e., reprints at all; and Smashwords even forbids translation of foreign public domain classics for the first time into English. Amazon similarly refuses to put such titles into Extended Distribution. Thus, the Big Five publishers have gained an oligopoly control over the classics that are required in international K-12 and college classes reading. Classics from the mid-19^th century are now entering the public domain, but small publishers who would have flourished by publishing reprints of such works a century earlier are now barred by various obstacles from entering this socially-beneficial market. As Parry explains: “sometimes they helped nudge books onto lists of classics that might not have been there in their own century, as in the case of Austen’s juvenilia and incomplete works, published in Hassall’s set as Shorter Works, and Melville’s Moby Dick, which Kent’s editions helped popularize at a moment when interest in the novel was growing”. Reprints have the power to create widely read classics, so if small publishers who might see such revivalist work as a way to profits are unable to break into the mainstream because of oligopolist control of the mainstream reviewers etc. by the Big Five publishers; then, a century of great literature might crumble into the forgotten. Instead of addressing these problems, Parry puffs the artistry of these 20^th century editions. Parry explains that Penguin Books was founded during this burst as a reprint publisher of very cheap classics, but he does not dive into how Penguin now is one of the Big Five who is instrumental in monopolizing the field and preventing new small publishers like itself from competing for readers.

“Chapter 1” begins with the artistic work performed by Clare Leighton to illustrate Thomas Hardy’s Return of the Native (1878): “she dropped her teaching duties in London almost immediately in order to relocate to Dorset, Hardy’s home county and the inspiration for the novel”. There is information on how Clare executed these designs, and on her education in art. There is also an explanation of how the 1,500 print run was autographed by Clare on each copy, unlike the much larger print runs of other classics. This is all interesting information for a book historian, and draws readers into this subject.

“Chapter 2” is about Rockwell Kent’s illustration of Moby Dick. This finally clarifies that this book’s subject is not the economics and editorial content of reprints, but rather specifically the “art” or the illustrations that accompany them. Again there is an introduction to the visual elements of the novel, a biography of the artistic development of the illustrator, and a history of the illustration process. There is also a summary of how the pufferies in the preceding decades of Melville as a great “Author” helped to finally turn Moby Dick into a classic when it was published in this more accessible illustrated edition, which could be enjoyed for its visuals, even if the text remained inaccessible to the common readers. This clarifies how classics are made more by their puffers or advertisers than by the actual tastes of the reading public, as classics become required reading, so readers are forced to either acknowledge they haven’t done their homework or to lie that they enjoyed reading even the most unreadable texts. Puffers are likely to be paid by publishers for their pufferies, thus the works that are actually “best” but do not have as big of a budget are likely to be ignored, while horrid books can be puffed into extraordinary fame. Classics also tend to be tied to nationalist propaganda. As Parry notes about Lakeside Press: “Authored, illustrated, and made in America, the editions were meant to represent the best of the country’s literature, art, and craftsmanship” (60). The canon of “American” or “British” literature is taught in individual classes or sections of classes that are designed to raise propagandistic beliefs in the greatness of these countries’ cultural value. National literatures have been used in this culture war since the dawn of print in the 15^th century, when fictitious histories of colonialization and the greatness of the colonizers propagated the interests of the colonizers to their fiscal and political profits.

Overall, this book has a lot of revealing information about the art and business of reprints, but most of it is hidden under the cloak of pufferies that attempt to revive interest in these reprints’ buyers. A keen reader should work to plunge beyond this surface to the underlying truths regarding the corruptions of this business. Beautiful pictures do not necessarily mean the process of crafting them was beautiful or ethical. Either way, every new book in this field helps me to understand its implications, so I would recommend for all scholars and practitioners to look inside this book to fish around for information useful for them.

Densely Researched and Entertaining Study of Various Types of Plagiarism Between Victorian Novels

Adam Abraham, Plagiarizing the Victorian Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023). EBook. 282pp. ISBN: 978-1-108493-07-9.

*****

“How can we tell plagiarism from an allusion? How does imitation differ from parody? Where is the line between copyright infringement and homage? Questions of intellectual property have been vexed long before our own age of online piracy. In Victorian Britain, enterprising authors tested the limits of literary ownership by generating plagiaristic publications based on leading writers of the day. Adam Abraham illuminates these issues by examining imitations of three novelists: Charles Dickens, Edward Bulwer Lytton, and George Eliot. Readers of Oliver Twist may be surprised to learn about Oliver Twiss, a penny serial that usurped Dickens’s characters. Such imitative publications capture the essence of their sources; the caricature, although crude, is necessarily clear. By reading works that emulate three nineteenth-century writers, this innovative study enlarges our sense of what literary knowledge looks like: to know a particular author means to know the sometimes bad imitations that the author inspired.”

I just completed the initial stage of a new computational-linguistic study of 18^th century British texts, and I am going to test the 19^th century next; I already published the BRRAM series on my re-attribution of all Renaissance texts to only 6 ghostwriters. The 18^th century study initially suggests there are 21 different ghostwriters, but overlaps between these signatures hint that the number was smaller. Some of these 18^th century findings indicate that satires or imitations of earlier texts were ghostwritten by the same authors as the originals, as is the case with Bickerstaff Esq., who is supposed to have been imitated or satirized in the “Bickerstaff” pseudonym, but these texts match the same linguistic signature. Similarly, during the Renaissance, Verstegan ghostwrote the Marprelate texts, as well as the political critiques that ridiculed these publications. And “Richardson’s” Pamela is in the same linguistic style as “Haywood’s” Anti-Pamela, when the latter is supposed to be a satirical re-writing of the former from a different, feminine perspective. With this information, I believe cases of imitation and plagiarism in the 19^th century reviewed in this study are likely to betray far more than what they appear to be on the surface. Underpaid ghostwriters are likely to have used self-plagiarism to resell the same works to multiple buyers for profit, or self-imitation to puff their earlier creations (when their profits were tied to the number of copies sold). I took some notes on the texts in this study to possibly add them to my 19^th century study to test this theory. I will probably return to this book when I begin the writeup for the 18^th and 19^th century studies to gather evidence for my own conclusions.

The “Prologue” begins with a review of the history of plagiarism and other forms of unoriginality. The first paragraph mentions Pamela and cites Lowe’s note “the Labours of the press in Piracies, in Criticisms, in Cavils, in Panegyrics, in Supplements, in Imitations, in Transformations, in Translations, &c.” Lowe was probably especially thinking of Anti-Pamela, since this is the satire most frequently mentioned together with Richardson’s novel. Abraham later mentions “Fielding’s” more direct satire in Shamela; I was tempted to add this text to my 18^th century study, but since I had already tested 3 texts by “Fielding” and one of them (Tom Jones) had the same signature as Pamela and Anti-Pamela, it is obvious that tests would prove that this cluster of imitative texts were all by the same ghostwriter. Abraham points out that the imitative works tend to be ignored (with perhaps rare exceptions like Anti-Pamela), while the seemingly original texts are puffed and studied in literature classes. This lack of research does indeed make these texts an interesting unexplored area for research. Researchers also need to be original, and it is more original to research works previously ignored in scholarship, as opposed to classics that have been over-studied. However, Abraham does not see the same thing in this evidence as I do. Abraham writes in the “Thackeray” chapter: “With his writings for Fraser’s and later for Punch, Thackeray parodies Edward Bulwer and shapes his own authorial identity. The Yellowplush Correspondence appeared in Fraser’s, with some irregularity, from November 1837 to January 1840” (117). Abraham and most other critics do note suspect that a single ghostwriter is behind texts that have this type of parodied “authorial identity”. In contrast, my linguistic data tends to indicate that where there is a cloned “authorial identity” (satirically or seriously), there is likely to be a ghostwriter who failed to alter his style enough to be non-identifiable behind multiple bylines. And the “war” between Thackeray and Bulwer in Thackeray’s satirical critiques of Bulwer in magazines like Punch was obviously part of the publishers’ or ghostwriter’s marketing campaign to promote both bylines, as opposed to a serious rivalry between competing “authors”. Such negative authorial warfare is rare today, when pufferies are the preferred method of promoting books, but I think this type of mud-slinging could help the modern literary climate to improve its output, and to sell more copies. There are a few sections that match my own questions about cross-byline ghostwriting, like a paragraph on page 146 that introduces a few 1857-8 speculations in magazines that “Liggins wrote Scenes of Clerical Life”. These speculations were probably deliberately designed to threaten publishers or byline holders with outing ghostwriting contracting, while also puffing the different bylines involved.

I am stopping this review here, after reading a good part of the book until page 149. I am sure I will read this book in its entirety when I begin my 19^th century study at the end of this week or so. This is an enjoyable book due to the volume of evidence that has been packed into it. It is also fun to read as the evidence uncovers little-discussed mysteries of the literary world. Thus, I recommend this book for all types of readers from high school, college to professors in this field. Libraries of all types would benefit from purchasing this book for their shelves.

First Translation of an “Antique” Artificially-Created British Classic

Scott C. Lucas, A Mirror for Magistrates: A Modernized and Annotated Edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023). EBook. 484pp. ISBN: 978-1-316998-02-1.

*****

“Over the six decades it remained in print in Tudor and Stuart England, William Baldwin’s collection of tragic verse narratives A Mirror for Magistrates captivated readers and led numerous poets and playwrights to create their own Mirror-inspired works on the fallen figures of England’s past. This modernized and annotated edition of Baldwin’s collection—the first such edition ever published—provides modern readers with a clear and easily accessible text of the work. It also provides much-needed scholarly elucidations of its contents and glosses of its most difficult lines and unfamiliar words. The volume permits students of early modern literature and history to view Baldwin’s work in a new light, allowing them to re-assess its contents and its poems’ appeal to several generations of early modern readers and authors, including William Shakespeare, Michael Drayton and Samuel Daniel.”

The subtitle of this book is something that might have been required by the distributor, as Amazon requested that I add these types of stipulations to the title of the books in my BRRAM series that also modernizes and annotates texts from the Renaissance. There are surprisingly many central texts from the Renaissance that have never been translated into Modern English before. I even received a comment from somebody who noted that Hamlet (the first quarto had not been translated before my translation) was already in “English”; to which I had to explain that it’s in a combination of Early Modern, Middle, and Old English with sprinkles of French, Latin and other languages; thus, even if a reader reads all of the annotations that explain rare vocabulary or foreign words, they might not understand the meaning of the text because even minor words that are not annotated could have had a different meaning during that period. Mirror of Magistrates (1559-1610) is mentioned a couple of times in BRRAM. In one of Percy’s earliest plays, Fedele and Fortunio (1585), Pedant (the tutor) uses a line that is similar to a variant of the “Justice is blind” proverb in “Robert Tresilian’s” poem in this multi-authored collection. And the rare spelling “nipt” has been used by scholars, such as Boas, to attribute both Cornelia (1595) and Spanish Tragedy to “Thomas Kyd” (it was ghostwritten by Percy); this same “nipt” also appeared in mostly Byrd-ghostwritten texts including “Michael Drayton’s” Idea: The Shepherd’s Garland (1593) and in “Davison’s” Poetical Rhapsody (1602); and it also appeared in the untested Last Part of the Mirror for Magistrates (1578). Given this evidence, it is reasonably likely that Mirror was mostly ghostwritten by Byrd (he helped Percy with measuring and rhyming and writing some poetic segments in Percy’s plays). The philosophical introduction is likely to have been ghostwritten by Verstegan or Harvey.

The “Introduction” opens by describing how Mirror “inspired” authors like “Shakespeare”, “Spenser” and “Drayton” to write “tragic verse narratives in the Mirror tradition” or to borrow bits from this text. Byrd ghostwrote “Shakespeare’s” sonnets and some of “Drayton’s” poetry, so this “inspiration” is likely to have been primarily the result of self-repetition by the same ghostwriter. Though the Workshop’s collaborative authorship meant that they re-wrote or finished each other’s texts, so other members of the Workshop might have become as familiar with this work as Byrd, and probably added to it as this text was expanded between the first edition in 1559 and the last expansion (at around the time Byrd retired from ghostwriting) in 1610.

The next section discusses the creation of Mirror before its stated initial publication date. Joseph Lupo migrated to England from Italy and Antwerp just before 1563; and all evidence suggests that all of the tested texts that are believed to have been first-published before 1563 were likely to have been backdated forgeries that were actually first-printed in 1563 or later. There were obviously some texts that were written in England prior to 1563, but there might not have actually been any printing presses in England before this point. The earliest text that this introduction notes that included parts of Mirror is the “suppressed” A Memorial of Such Princes, which is claimed to have been first-printed in 1554, but no year of publication is included in the title-page that is included in this introduction. The 1559 edition did have the firm “1559” date on it. Both of these editions use the “i” to “y” substitution (Since the Tyme and Myrroure) that Byrd (i.e., a substitution for Bird) used for many backdated texts he claimed had been written decades earlier than when they were actually written or between 1510-1563. Lucas’ introduction reports details about the publication process as if they are facts, but the key elements are unsubstantiated. For example, the author notes there was a Workshop of seven “poets” who started working on this text back in 1554, but does not explain what documentary evidence confirms this dating. “After arranging the collection into a form suitable for printing, Baldwin took the Memorial to Wayland’s shop and had it printed at the end of the new Fall of Princes edition. Unfortunately, someone in Wayland’s shop (most likely Wayland himself) detected controversial matter in the Memorial poems and brought the newly printed work to Mary I’s lord chancellor, Stephen Gardiner, for review. Gardiner found enough of the contents of the Memorial objectionable to order the entire work sup pressed before publication. The Memorial was never allowed to appear in Mary’s reign, and most of its pages were simply scrapped. As a result, copies of only a single leaf of text and two title pages relating to the 1554” (xvii). The fact that Lucas does not know who “found” this work “objectionable” in the printshop proves that there is no document where this person actually made this claim. Instead, it is more likely based on the evidence I have gathered that there was no printed edition back in 1554, but only a title-page that was designed as a backdated edition to increase the value of Mirror as an antique or uniquely old text that was worthy of special hype in the bookstores. The firm documentations appear to begin with the 1559 license granted for the printing of Mirror by Elizabeth, but since some of Elizabeth I’s speeches and letters from this period were ghostwritten and backdated, it would not have been difficult to backdate and forge a license with a 1559 date. My guess is that the earliest edition of Mirror to be printed was actually the 1563 edition, when the 1559 and 1554 backdated materials were also created to support its antiquity. Baldwin happened to have died in 1563, so after the death of this person forgeries could have been backdated to his name without implicating him in the fraud. There are several attribution problems and typographical glitches within the versions of this text. As Lucas notes, there are 20 poems in the table of contents, but only 19 poems in the text. “Of those nineteen, eight are credited to three particular authors, while a single surviving leaf of the suppressed 1554 edition identifies Sir Thomas Chaloner as the author of the poem ‘Richard II’. Ten tragedies in the 1559 Mirror are anonymous, though evidence points to Henry, tenth Baron Stafford, as the author of one of them.” The “evidence” is not explained here, but in most such scholarly re-attributions the editor’s intuitive feeling that an aristocrat did it is sufficient for such claims. “By contrast, the 1563 edition clearly identifies by last name each of the authors of the eight poems added to it, though more than one hand evidently took part in at least one of the tragedies, namely Tragedy 27, ‘The Blacksmith’” (xxiv). The latter claim of “more than one hand” is also unsupported by anything other than the editor’s intuition. What would have been more useful here is for a clear explanation regarding which of the poems had which initial bylines. Biographies of all of the claimed “authors” are included; this is very helpful, as some such books do not include biographies for minor contributors to antique anthologies. All of the credited “authors” were basically significant players in early government, so granting them bylines was a propagandistic move to promote British governance. The last author in the initial set is significant because “John Skelton’s” poetry matched Byrd’s signature in my study; characteristically for Byrd he reprinted the elsewhere “Skelton”-bylined poem “Of the Death of the Noble Prince King Edward IV” anonymously in Mirror. Byrd frequently self-plagiarized or reprinted works under multiple bylines and anonymously as part of his general tendency to profiteer from reprints, over crafting new poems.

There is a section on “The Verse of the Mirror” that notes that critics have ridiculed it for not being in “regular iambic rhythms of later English poetry”; Lucas corrects this idea by noting that the iambic pentameter gained popularity decades later. Byrd experimented with different poetic formulas, and perhaps his first poetic work in English was obviously not as metrically complex as his later attempts. The following explanation for the translation rules is helpful and thorough for those who might want to check the difference between the original and the modernized texts.

The body of the text is accessible, as the translation is made to the entirety of the text, without simplifying the meaning. The annotations use a similar style to my own, by using bold for the words that were in the original text, before defining or explaining them. However, instead of placing annotation numbers next to the words being translated, the confusing system of line numbers is used to give the line where a word/phrase being explained is located, forcing readers to search the line for the relevant fragment. There are also separate annotations within the text, so the reason for this could not have been to avoid placing interrupting numbers in the middle of the text. The annotations themselves are also rather confusing, as they refer readers to other sources without explaining what to look for; or more commonly they only specify other wordings that appeared in variant editions (especially the 1563 edition). Some words in the text are not translated that have firm intended meanings, such as using “commonweals” instead of “commonwealth”, and “hath” instead of “has”, and “alway” is used instead of “always”, etc. These antique spellings push readers out of being able to smoothly read the content without pausing to question the meaning. And the source for most of the introduction that explained how Mirror’s early editions were created seems to be “Baldwin’s” dedication to these early editions, which mentions the migration of the Jews (Lupo/Byrd was Jewish and moved to England because of the persecution of Jews in Spain/Italy), and then describes the origin of “Lydgate’s” translation of Bochas’ The Fall of Princes, and mentions how Queen Mary “hindered by the lord chancellor” had overseen the printing of the earlier (backdated) editions. This preface was clearly designed to give this book antique and subversive value in bookshops.

The poetry is uniquely dense with political meaning starting with the first tragedy of “The Fall of Robert Tresilian”. This suggests it is likely that Verstegan and Byrd collaborated on writing this book, as Verstegan was more prolific in political research. These poems satirize or puff many mythical events in British history, so it is indeed of great interest to scholars of British history and literature.

Only a very curious book could have solicited this much commentary from me, so it is clearly a significant step in offering insights into the true history of the start of British publishing. This history needs to be revised (as I recommend), but it is useful to read thorough history to understand what is wrong with it. I would recommend this book for libraries of all types and for all researchers of British literature and history. Though I recommend my own BRRAM translations as superior in accessibility and insight.

A Puffery of False Imaginings in Ancient History Re-Writing

K. Scarlett Kingsley, Giustina Monti, Tim Rood, The Authoritative Historian: Tradition and Innovation in Ancient Historiography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, December 2022). EBook. Hardcover: $135. 493pp. ISBN: 978-1-009179-78-2.

***

“In this volume an international group of scholars revisits the themes of John Marincola’s ground-breaking Authority and Tradition in Ancient Historiography. The nineteen chapters offer a series of case studies that explore how ancient historians’ approaches to their projects were informed both by the pull of tradition and by the ambition to innovate. The key themes explored are the relation of historiography to myth and poetry; the narrative authority exemplified by Herodotus, the ‘father’ of history; the use of ‘fictional’ literary devices in historiography; narratorial self-presentation; and self-conscious attempts to shape the historiographical tradition in new and bold ways. The volume presents a holistic vision of the development of Greco-Roman historiography and the historian’s dynamic position within this practice.”

In other words, this is a book that excuses fictional or mythological history writing, by focusing on the “beauty” of the flowing words and images, instead of critiquing that untruths are being imagined by historians that are then repeated as if they are truth by later historians. There are a few similar books out there that puff fictional imaginings of “historians” as a worthwhile effort, so the editor of this volume does not stop to question this notion. As a result of this tendency to fight for fictitious history as if it is “reality”, many reviewers have rejected my finding that only six ghostwriters created all of the texts of the British Renaissance simply because it does not match the “reality” past British myth-writing historians (the ghostwriters themselves) have propagated. Instead of addressing these problems, the introduction begins with theories about the “relation between the text and its readership” among German and English 1970-80s scholars. “From T. P. Wiseman’s Clio’s Cosmetics in 1979 to A. J. Woodman’s Rhetoric in Classical Historiography in 1988, ancient historiography witnessed a seismic shift away from the hunt for ‘what actually happened’ and toward its representation in narrative.” This is obviously problematic, as “what actually happened” is what can teach humanity lessons from its factual past, whereas the “narrative” quality is something that should only be of equivalent consideration in works of acknowledged fiction. For example, if there were no major wars in antiquity, and warfare only really started after humans created “history” books that claimed there was always warfare in antiquity; then, these “historians” put all humans into a state of perpetual warfare, which is normalized by claims made in ancient “histories”.

In Chapter 1, “Seven Types of Fiction in the Greek Historians”, Michael A. Flower claims that falsehoods used by historians are just artistic plot devices needed to create a better reading experience; things that he notes historians have been guilty of includes: “invention of speeches, exaggeration of methodological rigour, imaginative elaboration of gaps in the record, omissions, manipulation of chronology, attribution of motivation on the basis of likelihood”. In other words, historians have been ghostwriting speeches they have been assigning to propagandized historical figures to grow the myths of their greatness, as well as adding various other types of content to create a version of history that suits a given propaganda campaign. For example, adding that a conquering army helped rebuild local villages, or fed the masses, when nothing of the sort actually happened creates a false sense of the glory of military conquest, when in reality it is likely to have been the opposite of these grand notions. Military profiteers have made enormous sums from such propaganda, using past “glory” of warfare to apply it to their own sale of arms, or other military goods and services. As I explain in my Restitution for Decayed Intelligence in Antiquities volume of the BRRAM series, Verstegan invented or imagined most the mythology of an “Anglo-Saxon” origin (together with its pagan theology) for Britain in this book, which used a few disagreeing and mythological words in earlier sources to write an entire detailed history, which has mostly been repeated by later historians without acknowledging that Verstegan made it up. Too many other histories of ancient civilizations were written centuries after the events in question happened, and later generations of “historians” have only added fictional details, instead of digging for the truth. Now that humanity has access to carbon-dating, DNA-dating and various other technologies designed to establish concrete historical dating and the archeology to dig up the past, this should be the age when historians finally question all of these mythological histories, and replace them with factual accounts. Instead of facing these truths, Flower absurdly digresses into pondering if ancients had the same definition for “truth” as we do. The general thesis for Flower is: “This is because real life does not usually conform to an artificially crafted and constructed narrative arc—the kind of arc that makes a story interesting and meaningful.” It is absolutely not true that stories have to use the same formulaic plotlines for them to be of interest to readers. The “chaos” of “real life” is why people need to read history, as it instructs us on past chaotic results of historical fact, so that we can respond in a way that avoids problems that were created in the past when erroneous choices were made. If either the calamitous events, or responses to them, or the outcomes of these responses are altered by fiction-writers; then, we learn the wrong lessons, or we are taught to make errors that are likely to lead to the worst possible outcomes, instead of choosing options that would benefit all parties. It is bad enough that modern fiction writers are limited to a few formulaic popular plot types, it is absolutely a crime-against-humanity to argue that historians should plagiarize plotlines about past wars to create fictional accounts of what happened in the wars they are fictionalizing.

This is a horrid book that should be avoided by all except those who are researching how we can put an end to fiction in history books.

Libby Audio Books

A Puffery of the Man Who Stumbled onto the Atomic Bomb

Kai Bird, American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer (New York: Blackstone Publishing, December 31, 2005). Audiobook.

****

“The… biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer… a… physicist who led the effort to build the atomic bomb for his country in a time of war, and who later found himself confronting the moral consequences of scientific progress. In this… biography twenty-five years in the making, Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin capture Oppenheimer’s life and times, from his early career to his central role in the Cold War. Pulitzer Prize Winner.”

The puffing phrases have been deleted from the above blurb, leaving very few details. The deleted parts of this book’s advertisement focus on this being the best book of its kind about the best scientist in the world, etc. Such pufferies are neither accurate nor helpful. Having listened to around a third of this book, the recurring thought I had was that Oppenheimer appears to have used ghostwriters and various inducements to get ahead. These corruptions stand out in the notes about Oppenheimer pulling strings to get his brother, Frank Oppenheimer, into a physics graduate program without him having started an undergraduate one; and later, Robert pulled strings (perhaps bribed) administrators to secure an academic position for Frank. There is also a note about Robert poisoning an apple that belonged to one of his laboratory physics professors in Cambridge; Robert’s father came to Cambridge and pulled strings (also a bribe seemingly) to avoid criminal charges, but Robert did switch schools, as he moved to Gottingen. There are repeated notes on how Robert hated laboratory work so much that he turned to similar homicidal or psychotic behaviors in other instances. This hatred of laboratory work could have been a sign that Robert was purchasing ghostwriting services for his theoretical physics papers, but could not hire somebody to physically be in the lab to do experiments for him. There are direct confessions in the biography that the original drafts of Robert’s papers were always only 3-4 pages long, as other collaborating researchers were expected to expand these into dozens of pages. And when Robert was studying for his undergraduate degree at Harvard, he would just roll on the floor without doing anything for a significant portion of the time. The bulk of the first third of the biographical narrative, though, focuses on the luxury trips Robert took to ride on horses, or to feed his graduate students at restaurants. There are notes that Robert’s lectures were incomprehensible (as he was probably misreading or misremembering texts that were ghostwritten for him by others). In contrast with this nonsensical nature of the lectures, the biographers insist that Robert’s students liked him and chose Berkeley to be taught by him, perhaps because he forced some to ghostwrite for others in a Workshop (as mentioned in another review in this set), or because he wined and dined them and perhaps graded them based on the social friendships they formed, instead of on the quality of their work. None of this suggests the presence of a “great” man or physicist, and this was all before he became the “father of the atomic bomb”. This biography does explain how destructive ghostwriting can be in the scientific and other non-fiction fields. The person who ghostwrote “Hitler’s” My Life helped launch Hitler’s political career with a text that reflects socialist concern for the lower classes; then, in contrast to these notions the man who gained power was more concerned with anti-intellectualism and racism, leading to the massacre of millions. Similarly, if a ghostwriter created “Oppenheimer’s” theoretical physics papers about atomic weapons, this same ghostwriter was probably not given the choice of putting these theories into practice that the man called Oppenheimer faced without the necessary awareness of the actual likely destructiveness of such weapons.

With billions of people on this planet, the world can be benefiting from billions of annual scientific discoveries, if people had equal access to the press and funding. Instead, string-pulling or insider benefit granting is driving funding, employment and publication decisions, and leading to an increasingly anti-intellectual and de-intellectualizing society. The same facts about Oppenheimer’s biography that are presented here as quirks of a creative personality, should instead be weighed with the gravity of what they are saying about the state of ghostwritten research that led to WWII, and that is leading to our current brainless predicaments. Do not buy this book, but if you have access to it via Libby, it is an interesting listen if you listen between the pufferies.

Biography of the Last Puffed Female Mystery Writer: Agatha Christie

Lucy Worsley, Agatha Christie: An Elusive Woman (New York: Tantor Media, September 7, 2022). Audiobook.

****

“Account of the life of Agatha Christie… ‘Nobody in the world was more inadequate to act the heroine than I was.’ Why did Agatha Christie spend her career pretending that she was ‘just’ an ordinary housewife, when clearly she wasn’t?” Having listened to this entire audiobook from start to finish, I did not find evidence to support anything other than that Agatha was precisely “an ordinary housewife”, and not something other than this. Just as with the Oppenheimer biography, across this narrative, I kept returning to the ghostwriting findings in my Renaissance (BRRAM) and 18-19^th centuries findings on British literature, or that an overwhelming percentage of it was ghostwritten by small Workshops with a few ghostwriters that worked under multiple bylines. One piece of evidence that supports this conclusion for Agatha is that the handwriting “Agatha” uses changed dramatically in the middle of her life, or at around the time when she switched secretaries or transcribers (who were hired by Agatha’s publisher). This strongly suggests that there were at least two ghostwriters who crafted both handwritten and typed texts attributed to “Agatha”. There is plenty of evidence across this book of Agatha spending most of her life shopping for houses and things to furnish them, and very little factual evidence of Agatha spending time writing. Another bit of curious evidence is that “Agatha” would read chapters out of her books to her family only after they were completed, and did not make any edits from any comments they might have made afterwards. Mark Twain similarly read chapters to his family, but the goal was typically to find things to edit in the text from the relations’ comments. Reading chapters absentmindedly without even taking notes suggests complete detachment between the reader and the creative writing process. Another major problem with this book is that, as the author confesses, most of it repeats what was said in “Agatha’s” posthumous biography, or in the letters assigned to “Agatha” and members of her family. If these manuscripts were ghostwritten by a profit-seeking ghostwriter employed by the publisher, they are really puff or propagandistic versions of what Agatha was meant to appear to be to the public to maximize the sales of her books. Worsley goes to significant effort to gloss over or to repeatedly interpret events in a positive light, or to make them appear mysterious when they are clearcut. For example, the narrative frequently returns to Agatha’s “disappearance”, or when Agatha got drunk (seemingly), crashed her car, and got another car to take her to a hotel to drink and dance to celebrate the ending of her first marriage (after her husband cheated). Worsley keeps insisting that this “disappearance” was not a staged publicity stunt, even though the papers jointly dramatized the event, the local police organized extremely expensive search-parties, and nobody actually bothered to investigate if Agatha might simply be taking a holiday. This trip to a neighboring town in England is one of the only events in Agatha’s life that is supported by documentary evidence. The other major bit of evidence is the trips she took abroad on archeological expeditions. She met her second (younger) husband on these trips, and there are notes that she sponsored some of these expeditions, and definitely sponsored his salary as an archeology professor at a college. These trips are puffed as a scientific endeavor, but really Agatha served as a secretary during raids that robbed the Middle East of its archeological treasures, and profited from reselling these items to European museums. Underhanded profits from these exploits might have covered Agatha’s ghostwriting fees. It is tempting to research these ideas further, but this surface interpretation is all that’s allowed by the biography as-is.

The blurb continues: “Her life is fascinating for its mysteries and its passions and, as Lucy Worsley says, ‘She was thrillingly, scintillatingly modern.’ She went surfing in Hawaii, she loved fast cars, and she was intrigued by the new science of psychology, which helped her through devastating mental illness.” To clarify, Agatha was a spendthrift who went on international luxurious vacations and purchased the most expensive cars, while avoiding paying taxes before she was haunted down for these due tax fees; and who at one point owned at least eight different houses. The “devastating mental illness” is the brief alcohol-induced sadness that led to a car crash and a week-long vacation.

“So why—despite all the evidence to the contrary—did Agatha present herself as a retiring Edwardian lady of leisure? She was born in 1890 into a world that had its own rules about what women could and couldn’t do.” Most of this biography is taken up with repeating philosophizing about what women cannot do. Most of these comments are anti-feminist. For example, Agatha became a nurse during WWI by cleaning a hospital, without any education in nursing; and the section that covers this is critical of the high-ranking nurses who were educated in this field, while puffing Agatha for managing to help the sick without any knowledge of medicine.

“Lucy Worsley’s biography is not just of a massively, internationally successful writer. It’s also the story of a person who, despite the obstacles of class and gender, became an astonishingly successful working woman. With access to personal letters and papers that have rarely been seen, Lucy Worsley’s biography is both authoritative and entertaining and makes us realize what an extraordinary pioneer Agatha Christie was—truly a woman who wrote the twentieth century.” The British Renaissance Workshop credited women like “Mary Sidney” and “Elizabeth I” with authorship 350 years before Agatha started writing or hiring ghostwriters. Yes, women in England, Wales and Scotland were given the right to vote in 1928, and WWI and WWII opened new employment opportunities for women, but Agatha’s brief stints in employment are hardly exemplary or groundbreaking. If Agatha was a ghostwriter who labored for other writers, she might have indeed have set records in writerly output for a female ghostwriter. But if she was hiring ghostwriters, this achievement was already covered during the Renaissance. The fact that female writers form a minority of mystery writers today (as the genre is dominated by men, as I explain in my Gender Bias book) indicates that whatever Agatha did with the novels she wrote, she repelled readers from female mystery writers, instead of proving that women are better at writing this genre of fiction.

Those who read mystery books, or are interested in Agatha Christie would certainly benefit from listening to this book in the background as they are running through chores. And those who listen a bit more closely might find much in this narrative that is disturbing and shocking, but this is spun as if these details are pufferies of a “great” Author.

Shifting Blame on Lehman Execs, While Puffing One’s Own Financial “Hero’s Journey”

Lawrence G. McDonald, Patrick Robinson, Erik Davies, A Colossal Failure of Common Sense (New York: Random House Audio, July 20, 2009). Audiobook.

****

“One of the biggest questions of the financial crisis has not been answered until now: What happened at Lehman Brothers and why was it allowed to fail, with aftershocks that rocked the global economy? In this news-making, often astonishing book, a former Lehman Brothers Vice President gives us the straight answers—right from the belly of the beast. Larry McDonald, a Wall Street insider, reveals, the culture and unspoken rules of the game like no book has ever done. The book is couched in the very human story of Larry McDonald’s Horatio Alger-like rise from a Massachusetts ‘gateway to nowhere’ housing project to the New York headquarters of Lehman Brothers, home of one of the world’s toughest trading floors.” In other words, Larry confesses that he lied and cheated his way to the top. He admits he lied on his resume and invited himself into financial offices, without scheduled interviews. He was told during one of these meetings that he had to get experience being a top-seller of financial products or anything else to become a trader (since he did not have an Ivy League education, which would have been a suitable alternative qualification). He goes out and gets a boring sales job and manages to become a best-seller with tricks such as going to golf courses, where he is not a member, and other high-class establishments and talking people out of their money. Later he gets a job in a dodgy business that sells questionable financial products, and manages to become a best-seller there. Obviously, he was selling mostly scams, or products that probably lost customers money, or were otherwise disadvantageous to most parties involved. These types of sale scams is what Lehman took to the extreme, so Larry was clearly a creative originator of some of these schemes, as opposed to somebody who was later fighting against executives perpetrating them at Lehman (as he makes himself sound). To finally win the job at Lehman he describes starting a financial data company with a computer-programming partner. Larry’s part in this enterprise was gathering and analyzing financial data to post on their website. So, Larry was a financial scheme specialist, who certain would have created Lehman’s risky fiscal strategies, or at least would have understood the data behind them, as opposed to being a witness of others’ mistakes (as he makes it sound). Lehman basically hired Larry only because he sold this independent business to them in exchange for the job; it’s unclear what happened to his programming partner, who might have been pushed out of the deal. Larry’s dream was to win the prestige of a Lehman job, but it seems he might have made less money working within this corporation than he did while running his own business. He describes extreme pressure on the sales team to oversell not only on bad housing loans, but everything else, as they were only paid a small percentage of the profits their sales generated. The Lehman corporation ate up the bulk of these ill-gotten gains, and used it to pay executives to cook the books to make it seem the company was not dancing on the edges of bankruptcy as its extremely risky bets failed (as there was a preference for bestsellers, instead of on the most intelligent people who could figure out the types of products that were best both for the company and investors in the long-term).

The summary continues: “We get a close-up view of the participants in the Lehman collapse, especially those who saw it coming with a helpless, angry certainty. We meet the Brahmins at the top, whose reckless, pedal-to-the-floor addiction to growth finally demolished the nation’s oldest investment bank. The Wall Street we encounter here is a ruthless place, where brilliance, arrogance, ambition, greed, capacity for relentless toil, and other human traits combine in a potent mix that sometimes fuels prosperity but occasionally destroys it. The full significance of the dissolution of Lehman Brothers remains to be measured. But this much is certain: it was a devastating blow to America’s—and the world’s—financial system. And it need not have happened. This is the story of why it did.”

A year ago, in May, I invested money for the first time ever. I invested it in series-I Treasury bonds. I invested in this option because there was a 9.62% annual rate, due to the high inflation rate in the previous year. However, this rate has fallen to 4.3%. Having just reached the year-mark, it is now finally possible for me to withdraw the funds. I heard about Apple and high interest savings accounts that hit around 4%. I am generally resistant to changing strategy, but the threat of a US government default is approaching on June 1. So, I withdrew the series-I bonds on May 25^th. I then learned, when I searched for the top high-interest savings accounts, that PNC (my main bank) has raised its interest rate from near-zero just months earlier to 4.41% now, so it looks like I will just keep the funds in my standard savings accounts for now. Since similar impasses in US politics usually lead to non-action (as with government shutdowns), it seemed likely that the US could simply refuse to pay back its outstanding bonds, which would have disappeared my very first investment into $0. By May 28^th it seemed they would reach a deal that included democrats surrendering to making cuts to social welfare programs, like making work a requirement to receiving food-stamps. This is an absurd requirement, since it creates a Catch-22 where those who cannot find work need food-stamps, but to get food-stamps they have to first find work. The have long been similar laws in place that bar Americans from receiving help when they need it, but now apparently these will be stricter. There are economics and financial specialists, like Larry, who are running the US financial system, and they have been supervising the escalation of the debt to its current obscenely high level, and they are cheering for the default. I initially obtained an Economics degree because I anticipated doing financial research in the banking industry, echoing Larry’s dream. However, during my internships for Bank Boston, Bank of America and Fleet Bank and then a brief employment as a financial analyst for an insurance adjuster, I faced so many corrupt, mismanaging and generally customer-hostile practices that I decided to start my graduate studies in literature instead. Apparently, the people who stayed and kept fighting to get to the top of this barbaric ladder are the people who are continuing to lead us all into fiscal default, while puffing their actions as heroic narratives of personal success.

Pandemics as Lab-Created Engines of Biological Warfare

David Quammen, Breathless: The Scientific Race to Defeat a Deadly Virus (New York: Simon & Schuster Audio, October 3, 2022). Audiobook.

****

“Tells the story of the worldwide scientific race to decipher the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, trace its source, and make possible the vaccines to fight the Covid-19 pandemic… Analysis of SARs-CoV-2 and its fierce journey through the human population, as seen by the scientists who study its origin, its ever-changing nature, and its capacity to kill us. David Quammen expertly shows how strange new viruses emerge from animals into humans as we disrupt wild ecosystems and how those viruses adapt to their human hosts, sometimes causing global catastrophe. He explains why this coronavirus will probably be a ‘forever virus,’ destined to circulate among humans and bedevil us endlessly, in one variant form or another. As scientists labor to catch it, comprehend it, and control it, with their high-tech tools and methods, the virus finds ways of escape. Based on interviews with nearly one hundred scientists, including leading virologists in China and around the world, Quammen explains that: ▪Infectious disease experts saw this pandemic coming. ▪Some scientists, for more than two decades, warned that ‘the next big one’ would be caused by a changeable new virus—very possibly a coronavirus—but such warnings were ignored for political or economic reasons. ▪The precise origins of this virus may not be known for years, but some clues are compelling, and some suppositions can be dismissed.”

This was a disturbing history to listen to at-length, as the narrative focused on puffing the biographies of the scientists involved, instead of on explaining the details of the science, which is shrouded in mystery, despite this book promising to explain the facts. The premise behind this book itself is problematic, as it aims to prove that scientists anticipated the approach of a pandemic (of some unknown type). This is a problem since the history of human kind goes hand-in-hand with the histories of pandemics, so anybody in this field who does not anticipate a new pandemic at some point in the future is absurdly naïve. History.com has posted a timeline of “Pandemics That Changed History”, which begins soon after the dawn of the written-word in 430 BC Athens, where the “earliest recorded pandemic happened during the Peloponnesian War”. Since this unnamed disease started during a war, it seems likely that one of the sides used this disease as a weapon against the enemy; it killed “two-thirds of the population” across the Middle East. The next Antonine Plague (perhaps of smallpox) of 165 AD was also the outcome of warfare, this time between the Huns and the Roman Empire. All of these early plagues have not yet been identified. Given the capabilities of modern science, isn’t it of top importance to human progress for researchers to dig up people who were killed by these plagues and to test them forensically to determine what specific diseases they had, how they were started and how they spread? I recall reading a book that questioned if the origin of syphilis was in the Americas or among Christians in the Old World, and after scientific exploration they did not reach a solid conclusion. The timeline is finally specific in naming leprosy, noting it was “around for ages”, but became a pandemic in Europe in the Middle Ages. And bubonic plagues started at some point in the Middle Ages as well, with a major outbreak starting in Sicily in 1347, supposedly from the arrival of immigrants, but this is likely to have been anti-immigrant propaganda. It is clear that when Europeans arrived in the New World they infected for the first time the locals with smallpox, measles and the bubonic plague. This suggests there might have been artificial origin stories for these plagues, as otherwise humans in the New World would have had some of the same natural diseases after being geographically separated for only a few hundred or thousand years. Europeans began enslaving the populations of Africa and the Americas in part because their disease-warfare might have led to the extermination of so much of their population that they could not feed themselves with their own labor. And it seems humans have invented some new diseases as science progressed, as seems to be the case with the “First Cholera Pandemic” in 1817, to which a vaccine was only created in 1885. The 1875 Fiji Measles Pandemic literally had the Fiji people being invited to Britain by Queen Victoria after their secession from the monarchy and being poisoned there with measles and bringing this disease back to Fiji, where it killed a third of their population. While the flu has been around for at least 1,500 years, the first flu pandemic happened in Russia in 1889, followed by a few other strands of the flu across the following decades in other places. There have really only been three entirely new diseases that humanity faced since the beginning of recorded human history and all of them happened within my lifetime: 1. 1981: HIV/AIDS, 2. 2003: SARS, and 3. 2019: Covid-19. Though there were a few other disease inventions during the past century that were less deadly, like H1N1 (2009), Ebola (1976) and Zika (1947). The lab-creation theory for Covid-19 is dismissed by Quammen and most other scientists as a likely hoax, but it is far more likely that laboratories created all three of these diseases than that monkeys, bats and other wild animals have suddenly begun interacting with humans in some strange new ways, and this caused a mutation that created these diseases. If new diseases naturally evolve; then, there should have been the same rate of new diseases and pandemics being discovered in the preceding centuries as there were in the past 50 years. Instead, most of the previous pandemics were returns of old knew diseases, whereas these new diseases are entirely new or scientifically discovered killers. If modern scientists fail to investigate what labs or scientists actually started these “new diseases”; then, humanity is going to continue to be hit by terrorist waves of outbreaks that threaten to kill millions with an unseen poison. It seems that the post-atomic-bomb age has robbed some scientists of their sense of human sympathy. How any of us can help with injecting humanity back into such callous humans is a mystery that I wish this book had explored.  

A Tragic Farce About Idiotic American Presidents

Andy Borowitz, Profiles in Ignorance: How America’s Politicians Got Dumb and Dumber (New York: Simon & Schuster Audio, September 12, 2022). Audiobook.

*****

This book is advertised as a New York Times Bestseller; the legitimacy of these bestseller rankings is something I have questioned in my previous books on the publishing industry; in general, measuring the worth of a book by the success of its marketing effort leaves gaps in a society’s intellectual development.

The blurb notes this book describes “American politics, from Ronald Reagan to Dan Quayle, from George W. Bush to Sarah Palin, to its apotheosis in Donald J. Trump. Andy Borowitz writes a satirical column in the New Yorker called “The Borowitz Report.” Borowitz argues that “over the past fifty years, American politicians have grown increasingly allergic to knowledge, and mass media have encouraged the election of ignoramuses by elevating candidates who are better at performing than thinking. Starting with Ronald Reagan’s first campaign for governor of California in 1966 and culminating with the election of Donald J. Trump to the White House, Borowitz shows how, during the age of twenty-four-hour news and social media, the US has elected politicians to positions of great power whose lack of the most basic information is terrifying. In addition to Reagan, Quayle, Bush, Palin, and Trump, Borowitz covers a host of congresspersons, senators, and governors who have helped lower the bar over the past five decades.” It “aims to make us both laugh and cry: laugh at the idiotic antics of these public figures, and cry at the cataclysms these icons of ignorance have caused. But most importantly, the book delivers a call to action and a cause for optimism: History doesn’t move in a straight line, and we can change course if we act now.”

It was enjoyable to listen to this audiobook, as it presented densely researched and entertaining histories. Given my current interest in ghostwriters, I again focused on this element of the narrative. Borowitz appears to have paid attention to this problem as well, as he explains that some of the most ignorant politicians, like Reagan were initially hiring ghostwriters and speech-preppers, who attempted to teach them in a few months the basics of human history and political theory, while also crafting their speeches and other content that were being published on these politicians behalf. The problem that Borowitz fails to notice is that before the last 50 years or so, politicians could be extremely ignorant, and they could pay for ghostwriters to create propaganda, or speeches and the like with their byline on them. But in the modern radio and television age, politicians would appear absurd if they only delivered the written speeches, and never said anything outside of these scripts. Thus, a politician can be caught speaking nonsense to members of their cabinet, and this speech might be recorded on-tape, and this idiocy can be shared with the world, whereas before a transcription of such nonsense might not have been believed as actually having come from a president’s mouth. Since BRRAM has explained that “Elizabeth I’s” speeches and letters and “James I’s” books were ghostwritten for them by the Workshop, it has been a historical tradition that rich people have been purchasing propagandists or ghostwriters’ services to push them into politically powerful positions. The change in modern times is how accessible these politicians are to the ever-watching eye of recording devices, which make it impossible for extremely stupid people to escape having this stupidity noticed and reported on by some people who cannot compete for these top governmental positions because of their relative poverty. As far as I know, the world has never really had a major intellectually capable leader because the people who struggle to obtain a truly superior education cannot compete with those who grab power and money through corrupt means. There are also so few people who are intellectually superior through their efforts (instead of through cheating on their SATs) and they have such a difficult time breaking into jobs that offer an intellectual challenge that it would be extraordinary if anybody good and smart managed to climb into a position with political power (unless they are ghostwriting for the rich idiot).

These are the types of thoughts that this book might inspire. If you enjoy pondering questions regarding why you (probably an intelligent person) are struggling to advance, while idiots are flourishing, it will feed your curiosity. This book is designed for the general public, but it would also be helpful for researchers of the US presidency, as the information is typically precise and thoroughly cited.

Ransomware Hunters Are Unpaid and Tasked with Solving Millions of Problems

Renee Dudley, Daniel Golden, BD Wong, The Ransomware Hunting Team (New York: MacMillan Audio, October 24, 2022). Audiobook.

****

“A real-life technological thriller about a band of eccentric misfits taking on the biggest cybersecurity threats of our time. Scattered across the world, an elite team of code-cracking techies is working tirelessly on your behalf to thwart the most notorious cyber scourge of our time. You’ve probably never heard of them. But if you work for a school, a business, a hospital, or a municipal government, especially if its cybersecurity is imperfect, chances are that you’re painfully familiar with the group’s sworn enemy: ransomware. Again and again, these ordinary people, mostly self-taught and often struggling to make ends meet, have outwitted the shadowy networks of hackers and criminal gangs that lock computer networks and extort huge payments in return for the key…” This “is the incredible true story of a band of misfits who have used their extraordinary skills to save millions of ransomware victims from paying billions of dollars to criminals. Working in their free time from bedrooms and back offices, they offer their services pro bono to those whom the FBI, other government agencies, and the private sector are unwilling or unable to help. This book follows the teammates as they respond to dire calls for help—and tracks the ups and downs of their work as they race to rescue precious files and communicate directly with their adversaries… A real-life technological thriller set in a dangerous new era of cybercrime.”

This book was very frustrating to listen to because it focused on puffing the careers of the “code-cracking techies”, as if it is designed to pad their resumes. It keeps digressing into origin-stories of the techs, while failing to give the necessary information regarding how these cases are solved, or regarding specific technical methods for solving them. While the blurb makes it sound as if this team has solved all such crimes, the truth is much more negative. According to Statist’s graphic, “Annual number of ransomware attacks worldwide from 2017 to 2022”, the number of worldwide attacks leaped up to 623.25 million detected ransomware attacks in 2021 (an all-time record). Another graph demonstrates, “Percentage of organizations victimized by ransomware attacks worldwide from 2018 to 2022”, indicating that 2022 was a record year when 71% of organizations were victimized; in other words, ¾ of all companies are threatened by this problem. The problem only seems smaller because, as Security Info Watch notes, there were only “335 publicly reported attacks in 2022”, and “676 attacks” reported in 2021. These major corporate and governmental breaches are the ones that make the news because the average ransomware “demand” rose to a high of “$13.2 million in 2022”. If there were techs in the world capable of solving these problems, there would not be any need to pay these enormous ransoms, and so there would be no reported attacks (as all would be screened out or blocked by anti-virus/malware programs, or techs). And while the number of these major attacks seems small, these are the attacks of mega companies that tend to involve the exposure of on average “117,000 records” per a single attack and 115 million records across the attacks in 2022; so, millions of people can suffer identity fraud and various other types of damage from having their data exposed in the aftermath of these breaches.  

Returning to the blurb for this book, it is mystifying why these ransomware techs are “working in their free time from bedrooms and back offices, they offer their services pro bono to those whom the FBI, other government agencies, and the private sector are unwilling or unable to help”. Government agencies do not pay for the technical knowledge of programmers who are the only people capable of fixing one of these breaches that otherwise threatens the wealth, health and lives of most of the world’s population? On the books, both businesses and government agencies all have IT departments whose primary job is blocking hackers, ransomware attacks and other similar criminal intrusions. Are all of these people just pretty much turning on Norton anti-virus software and calling it “a day”? How can a cyber-security industry generate billions in profits, and yet be so clueless that techs have to volunteer their time to actually solve any problems in this sphere? The parts regarding these techs’ communications directly with the anonymous or pseudonymous criminals are also troubling, as they suggest to me that it is very likely that these techs are both the heroes and the villains of these stories. Perhaps, because these intellectuals cannot find work to solve hacking problems, they are forced to profit from creating the ransomware? It is more likely that somebody who is running a ransomware attack would volunteer their time to “solve” (or prevent from being solved) one of these cases, as opposed to a person who has no interest in a given case volunteering their time in such an effort.

If this book had more information regarding the technology of how such crimes are solved, I would have had less time to speculate about the possible conspiracies that can be involved in this “shadowy” undertaking. I do recommend that those interested in this field take a listen, but they should be ready to abort listening if the content becomes too frustrating, as it did for me.

A Rare Investigative Book on a Consulting Firm that Manipulates World Markets

Walt Bogdanich, Michael Forsythe, When McKinsey Comes to Town (New York: Random House Audio, October 4, 2022). Audiobook.

*****

This book was also a New York Times bestseller. “McKinsey & Company, the international consulting firm that advises corporations and governments, that highlights the often drastic impact of its work on employees and citizens around the world. McKinsey & Company is the most prestigious consulting company in the world, earning billions of dollars in fees from major corporations and governments who turn to it to maximize their profits and enhance efficiency.” This book offers precise case studies of what McKinsey does, and the facts are unimpressive. There are many references to McKinsey creating PowerPoints that are given to the companies who are their clients, which teach sales teams or other groups how they can maximize profits with strategies like selling opioids at higher dozes to create addicts. There are also notes on how McKinsey has templates for recommendations they give to similar types of business or government agencies, which advise basically firing employees and otherwise cutting costs, or other similar self-explanatory measures. It seems that all these strategies could be designed by a single ghostwriter or administrator in this company, while the rest of the workforce appears to be paid in exchange for bringing high-paying clients who are their relatives or other types of associates in their social circles. There is also an explanation that those who are profitable to McKinsey during their time there then enter an insider network that helps them win top jobs in other places; whereas being critical of this system gets employees blacklisted across the sector.

“McKinsey’s vaunted statement of values asserts that its role is to make the world a better place, and its reputation for excellence and discretion attracts top talent from universities around the world. But what does it actually do?” This question is answered in the book by pointing out that McKinsey has advised companies on how to avoid repercussions of selling products of cancer-causing tobacco, or environment-destroying gases. It is shown as the villain that is behind most of the nightmarish news items that seem unexplainable without a puppeteer like McKinsey corrupting these outcomes.

It is a “company sharply at odds with its public image. Often McKinsey’s advice boils down to major cost-cutting, including layoffs and maintenance reductions,” (such as not fixing breaks on trains, or rollercoaster screws, or other maintenance issues that can cause loss of lives when unfixed) “to drive up short-term profits, thereby boosting a company’s stock price and the wealth of its executives who hire it, at the expense of workers and safety measures. McKinsey collects millions of dollars advising government agencies that also regulate McKinsey’s corporate clients.” In other words, it corruptly bribes politicians into siding with the anti-human policies their corporate clients pay them to promote. “And the firm frequently advises competitors in the same industries, but denies that this presents any conflict of interest.” By advising competitors with a streamline strategy, McKinsey achieves price-fixing, market monopolization and various other market-controlling goals that are either illegal or simply go against the interests of the public. “In one telling example, McKinsey advised a Chinese engineering company allied with the communist government which constructed artificial islands, now used as staging grounds for the Chinese Navy—while at the same time taking tens of millions of dollars from the Pentagon, whose chief aim is to counter Chinese aggression.” In BRRAM, I found a similar strategy that was used by Richard Verstegan during the Renaissance, as he ghostwrote for all sides (England as well as Spain and the Pope, Catholics and Protestants, anti-government rebels and the government fighting these rebellions) and deliberately attacked all sides to give a motive for the others to hire him to retaliate. While Verstegan’s double-dealing was unknown, McKinsey’s is openly on display, and yet no actions are taken to stop it because all sides are too reliant on it to do their work for them. “Shielded by NDAs, McKinsey has escaped public scrutiny despite its role in advising tobacco and vaping companies, purveyors of opioids, repressive governments, and oil companies. McKinsey helped insurance companies’ boost their profits by making it incredibly difficult for accident victims to get payments; worked its U.S. government contacts to let Wall Street firms evade scrutiny; enabled corruption in developing countries such as South Africa; undermined health-care programs in states across the country. And much more. Bogdanich and Forsythe have penetrated the veil of secrecy surrounding McKinsey by conducting hundreds of interviews, obtaining tens of thousands of revelatory documents, and following rule #1 of investigative reporting: Follow the money… A… work of investigative reporting that amounts to a devastating portrait of a firm whose work has often made the world more unequal, more corrupt, and more dangerous.”

This is one of the better audiobooks as it delivers a great deal of information about the corruption of the company under investigation, while also not becoming so academic that it would be a better read in print. It is recommended-reading for anybody who wants to be informed about world politics and economics, so it is suitable for all types of libraries. And it should be helpful for researchers on the subject of corporate and governmental corruption.

How Oil Companies Manipulate Environmental Policy

Geoff Dembicki, The Petroleum Papers (New York: Kalorama, September 19, 2022). Audiobook.

****

A Washington Post Best Book of the Year. “Burning fossil fuels will cause catastrophic global warming: this is what top American oil executives were told by scientists in 1959. But they ignored that warning. Instead, they developed one of the biggest, most polluting oil sources in the world―the oil sands in Alberta, Canada. As investigative journalist Geoff Dembicki reveals in this explosive book, the decades-long conspiracy to keep the oil sands flowing into the U.S. would turn out to be one of the biggest reasons for the world’s failure to stop the climate crisis… Dembicki draws from confidential oil industry documents to uncover for the first time how companies like Exxon, Koch Industries, and Shell built a global right-wing echo chamber to protect oil sands profits—a misinformation campaign that continues to this day. He also tells the high-stakes stories of people fighting back: a Seattle lawyer who brought down Big Tobacco and is now going after Big Oil, a Filipina activist whose family drowned in a climate disaster, and a former Exxon engineer pushed out for asking hard questions. With experts now warning we have less than a decade to get global emissions under control,” it “provides a step-by-step account of how we got to this precipice—and the politicians and companies who deserve our blame. Published in Partnership with the David Suzuki Institute.”

Perhaps because I have consumed a great deal of films and books on this subject, this book did not stand out among those I listened to in this set. As with the hacker book, it focused too much on the biographies of the environmental fighters. Instead, it should have focused more on delivering the promised evidence of what is in the “confidential oil industry documents”. Their contents is mentioned lightly, but without saying much I had not heard before in other sources. It is possible that this book is the main uncited source for the evidence I have heard from other sources. The hyperbole that “a Seattle lawyer” has already “brought down Big Tobacco” is also counter to the goal of making positive changes because it makes it sound as if this problem has already been solved, when 11.5% of Americans still smoke. One of the reasons I might not have gotten further into this book is the extensive narrative description of the Filipina family drowning in a hurricane. It is certainly important to report the damage natural disasters cause in detail, but the description focused on what the family members were feeling or thinking, instead of on the details of the wind-speed, water-levels, or what natural features or unnatural land manipulations were causing the flooding to be particularly rapid. Readers who might live in a similarly environmentally-threatened area might not understand that they might suffer a similar fate with the statistical, geographical and otherwise specific explanations for the causes or who else across the world is under threat. Sympathizing with the victims in a horror movie leaves a viewer in a state of helpless shock, whereas what is needed is for readers to understand why solving these problems might be of direct financial and health benefit to them via avoiding these dangers.

This book would have benefited from a thorough edit to cut out parts that distract readers from the substance of the case onto contrived emotive scenes. Thus, I do not think the general public would enjoy listening to it. It would probably be easier to skim to the dense sections in a printed or ebook version, as opposed to in this audiobook. Enter this book if you have the stamina to dig through it, despite these hurdles.