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BOOKS

The Contradiction at the Heart of Hilary Mantel’s The Mirror and the Light By Nicholas M. Gallagher

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2020/05/18/the-contradiction-at-the-heart-of-hilary-mantels-the-mirror-and-the-light/

The Mirror and the Light, by Hilary Mantel (Henry Holt, 784 pp., $30)

Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall was a high-cultural phenomenon. The novel, published in 2009, retold the story of the downfall of Sir (Saint) Thomas More and the rise of Thomas Cromwell: A Man for All Seasons, but with the good guy and bad guy reversed. In Mantel’s telling, More was a religious fanatic, an embodiment of the deliberate, persecuting medieval darkness, while Cromwell was the new man, an omni-talented, self-made son of a blacksmith whose virtues were above all else moderation and practicality. Written with a brilliant combination of arresting detail and swift movement, the novel won the Man Booker Prize (the “British Pulitzer”), as did its 2012 sequel Bring Up the Bodies. The books spawned a Royal Shakespeare Company play and a BBC miniseries and became a worldwide sensation among the serious set.

Then — nothing. The third book in what was announced as a trilogy was supposed to come out in 2018. Then, 2017 brought rumors of delay . . . 2018 . . . 2019 . . . The literati thought they knew why. While the Wolf Hall novels are fiction, their characters are, of course, historical figures. And Thomas Cromwell, after triumphing over More and Anne Boleyn, overseeing the dissolution of the monasteries, procuring Henry VIII’s marriages to his third and fourth wives, and significantly advancing the cause of Protestantism in England, was executed by orders of that monarch on July 28, 1540. If Mantel finished her trilogy, in other words, she was going to have to kill her hero.

Now the third book, The Mirror and the Light, is here. Read page by page — that is to say, taking the measure of the book by the quality of the prose — it is another masterpiece, a worthy successor to its forebears. There are some reasons, however, to think that the rumors were right — that the death of Cromwell presented a challenge for Mantel. Of the novel’s 754 pages, there is not a hint of trouble for Cromwell until around the 600th, and the crisis leading to his death does not break until about the 700th. This would not be a problem were there some other narrative arc Mantel was intent on tracing. But there isn’t, really. The Mirror and the Light, unlike Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies, does not have a central conflict. In Wolf Hall, the clash with More and the struggle to secure Henry’s divorce and remarriage gave a narrative coherence to the work. In Bring Up the Bodies, Cromwell squared off in a zero-sum contest — death or absolute power — with Anne Boleyn. The Mirror and the Light begins where Bring Up the Bodies left off, just after the execution of Boleyn and her supposed lovers. Henry VIII, now a widower, is free to marry Jane Seymour, and does. Cromwell, having brought this state of affairs to pass, is master secretary (and soon lord privy seal), in fact if not in title the most powerful man in England.

Howard Zinn’s Tendentious Mendacity William D. Rubinstein

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2020/04/tendentious-mendacity/

In recent decades Howard Zinn (1922–2010) became probably the best-known radical historian of American history, almost exclusively through the book he published in 1980, A People’s History of the United States, 1492–Present. This gained for Zinn what Mary Grabar describes in her introduction as “Icon, Rock Star” status, making him nationally known outside narrow academic confines. He is also one of the few historians who has generated a comprehensive refutation of his errors and biases, which Mary Grabar ably sets out at length in Debunking Howard Zinn.

Debunking Howard Zinn: Exposing the Fake History That Turned a Generation Against America
by Mary Grabar

Since Zinn’s work is unlikely to be known to most Australian readers, something must be said about his background and historical methodology. He was born in New York in 1922 to Eastern European Jewish parents who were (literally) dirt poor, his father working as a ditch digger and window cleaner during the Depression, and later as a waiter. In his teens, Zinn attended a Communist Party rally in New York, where he was knocked unconscious by charging police, apparently a traumatic event for him. In 1940 he worked as an apprentice in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, where he and others lost no time in organising an Apprentice Association, already demonstrating his outsider’s propensity for radical activism. After the war (in which he was an Army Air Force bombardier, an experience which made him into a lifelong near-pacifist), Zinn attended New York University and Columbia University. He has been widely accused of being an active member of the American Communist Party (which he denied), the FBI taking him seriously enough to compile a 423-page dossier on his activities.

In 1956 Zinn landed a teaching job at Spelman College in Atlanta, Georgia, an institution established in the late nineteenth century for black women. Unsurprisingly, Zinn fails to discuss the college’s background in his autobiography You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train (2002), since the college is named for its chief benefactor, Laura Spelman Rockefeller, whose husband was John D. Rockefeller, in real terms the richest capitalist in American history.

MISUNDERESTIMATING CHINA: DAVID GOLDMAN

https://lawliberty.org/book-review/misunderestimating-china/

Toward the end of his new book, The Return of Great Power Rivalry, Matthew Kroenig offers sensible if tentative advice for responding to China’s ambitions for technological leadership:

U.S. government investments in basic science and R&D have been critical in past technological breakthroughs, including nuclear power and the Internet. . . and the United States could do more to invest in the technologies of the future. Democracies are often slow to build consensus for a problem, and that helps them to avoid mistakes. But when a national consensus is achieved, they can mass resources toward a problem just as well as any autocracy. And Washington is beginning to awake to this new Sputnik moment. When it does, it will be well positioned to compete.

During the preceding 200 pages, though, Kroenig does little to elicit a sense of urgency with respect to China’s challenge. Instead, he presents a set-piece argument that autocracies in general and China in particular will inevitably fail to compete against democracies. Prof. Kroenig, who teaches at Georgetown University and directs a strategic studies program at the Atlantic Council, offers a complacent reading of China’s position today—hardly the makings of a Sputnik moment. He seems to be searching for something like the Spanish expression “mañana,” but without a connotation of urgency.

The first half of the book surveys the history of conflicts between democratic and authoritarian regimes with a disconcertingly selective choice of facts. The second half discusses China and, more briefly, Russia as today’s authoritarian challengers. The two parts of the book fit together poorly. The reader has the feeling that the author originally set out to write yet another comparison of democracy and autocracy, and later decided that a Chinese angle would elicit more interest.

Democracy and Autocracy

The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, and the End of an Empire—A Review written by Jaspreet Singh Boparai

https://quillette.com/2020/04/11/the-fate-of-rome-climate-disease-and-the-end-of-an-empire-a-review/

A review of The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease and the End of an Empire by Kyle Harper, Princeton University Press, 417 pages (October 2017)

Why did the Roman Empire fall? The classic answer is given by Edward Gibbon (1737 — 1794), in chapter 38 of the third volume of The History of the Fall and Decline of the Roman Empire (1776 — 1789):

The decline of Rome was the natural and inevitable effect of immoderate greatness. Prosperity ripened the principle of decay; the causes of destruction multiplied with the extent of conquest; and as soon as time or accident had removed the artificial supports, the stupendous fabric yielded to the pressure of its own weight.

Kyle Harper, Senior Vice President and Provost of the University of Oklahoma, seeks to complement Gibbon’s account by emphasising the role of nature, and specifically climate change and infectious disease, in the fall of Rome in his provocative, exceptionally well-written book The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease and the End of an Empire. Is Harper correct? Were plagues and climate events fatal for Rome?

Harper accepts the conventional view that Rome’s civilizational collapse began in the later second century AD, accelerated amidst chaos and bloodshed during the third century, and culminated in the humiliations of the fifth century, when Rome was famously sacked by barbarians, and the last, weak, insignificant Roman Emperor was pushed off the throne in AD 476.

The Fate of Rome does not neglect literary and archival sources, or archaeological evidence related to the fall of Rome; but Harper thinks historians have neglected “natural archives,” which is how he describes genome evidence from DNA, biological data (as found in bones and teeth of excavated ancient skeletons), tree rings, glaciers, marine sediments, and all other materials studied by environmental historians, geochemists, and other scientific researchers:

‘Well Worth Saving’ Review: Displaced Academics In the 1930s and ’40s, American universities made life-and-death decisions about which European Jews to give faculty appointments. By Martin Peretz

https://www.wsj.com/articles/well-worth-saving-review-displaced-academics-11586905987?mod=opinion_reviews_pos1

Five of the eight Ivy League universities are now led by self-identifying Jews: Harvard’s president is an observant Jew, sometimes Hillel, sometimes Chabad; Yale’s, a descendant of possibly the most learned rabbinical dynasty; Penn’s, the daughter of a German Orthodox Jew who escaped to America before the carnage; Brown’s, a Quaker convert to Judaism; Princeton’s, a former Catholic who learned as an adult of his German refugee mother’s Jewishness. The overtness, even the ubiquity, of these varied Jewish identities reflects a dramatic 75-year evolution in the status of Jews in American academia. And this shift intertwines with and reflects something broader still: a sea change in the texture of American academic life, a change that has brought with it new challenges to the academy’s current relevance.

Laurel Leff has written a sober and fair—but devastating—volume documenting the story’s start, without which its arc is difficult to grasp: the tragedy of hundreds of Jewish scholars and their kin who perished in Hitler’s death camps, in the ghettoes and in the streets, for want of a piece of paper inviting them to an American campus. The book’s title, “Well Worth Saving,” is an unfortunate phrase of the period that was often used to describe these scholars—even by the American philosopher and humanitarian activist Horace Kallen (1882-1974), a Prussian-Polish Jewish émigré who, among other like-minded academics in the 1930s and ’40s, helped to save some of them. In 1919, Kallen had been a founder of the New School for Social Research. He had also, five years earlier, helped to found the New Republic, a magazine of opinion that started life championing Louis Brandeis’s Supreme Court nomination against old-line Protestant opposition. As his history suggests, Kallen found no theoretical obstacle to a deep national character with particularistic threads enriching it.

Mikhal Dekel, for ‘Tehran Children Is a Finalist in the major Jewish literary Prize see note please

Mikhal Dekel is author of a column on Jewish refugees in Iran posted on April 10,2020

When Iran Welcomed Jewish Refugees In the middle of World War II, Tehran became a haven for both Jewish and Catholic Polish refugees who were welcomed as they arrived from Soviet Central Asia. Mikhal Dekel

http://www.ruthfullyyours.com/2020/04/10/when-iran-welcomed-jewish-refugees-in-the-middle-of-world-war-ii-tehran-became-a-haven-for-both-jewish-and-catholic-polish-refugees-who-were-welcomed-as-they-arrived-from-soviet-central-asia-mikh/

https://www.jpost.com/Israel-News/Sami-Rohr-Prize-announces-finalists-for-2020-lite

The Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature, the largest book prize in the Jewish literary world, announced on Friday the four finalists for its 2020 prize for non-fiction writing.

The four finalists are Jerusalem Post Editor-in-Chief Yaakov Katz for his book “Shadow Strike” (St. Martin’s Press), Mikhal Dekel, a professor at City University of New York, for her book “Tehran Children” (W.W. Norton), Sarah Hurwitz, a former speechwriter for President Barack Obama for her book “Here All Along” (Spiegel & Grau) and Benjamin Balint, a research fellow at the Van Leer Institute for his book “Kafka’s Last Trial” (W.W.Norton).

The Book of Humanitarian Hoaxes: Killing America with ‘Kindness’ by Linda Goudsmit

https://www.amazon.com/s?k=The+Book+of+Humanitarian+Hoaxes%3A+Killing+America+with+%27Kindness%27+by+Linda+Goudsmit&ref=nb_sb_noss 
B&N:
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-book-of-humanitarian-hoaxes-linda-goudsmit/1136800447?ean=9780983542544

The Book of Humanitarian Hoaxes: Killing America with ‘Kindness’, exposes fifty of the most sinister leftist, Islamist, globalist interconnecting attacks on America deceitfully disguised as altruism.

Goudsmit’s warning is designed to ensure an informed American electorate in advance of the pivotal 2020 presidential election. 

The Book is a powerful éxpose of the deceptive policies and practices of the Leftist/Islamist/Globalist axis attempting to destroy America from within. Goudsmit’s unique talent is deciphering the many political hoaxes being played on us by those who present themselves as our advocates but who are, in fact, America’s enemies. This remarkable book tells us the many ways in which we’ve been had–but don’t know it. The Book of Humanitarian Hoaxes: Killing America with ‘Kindness’, describes the corrupt underbelly of the Leftist/Islamist/Globalist axis attacking America, American democracy, and America-first President Donald J. Trump. Written in her signature conversational style, each hoax chapter unmasks a distinct and destructive axis policy deceitfully presented to an unsuspecting public as humanitarian. Americans do not like being duped. Linda Goudsmit is the consummate truth-teller in an era of profound political deceit. The Book of Humanitarian Hoaxes: Killing America with ‘Kindness’ should be compulsory reading in advance of the crucial 2020 U.S. presidential election.

How Low Can Higher Education Go? By John Ellis

https://www.mindingthecampus.org/2020/03/29/how-low-can-higher-education-go/

A new book from author John Ellis examines the real reasons why most college graduates are woefully undereducated when they leave college after four or more years. Below is an eye-opening excerpt from The Breakdown of Higher Education: How it Happened, The Damage It Does, and What Can be Done.

Everyone knows that complaints about the quality of higher education are now heard with great frequency. What is less well known is that a large number of careful studies have already investigated what college graduates have learned by the time they get their degrees. These studies have been done by all kinds of people and agencies with quite different attitudes and interests. They include employer organizations, think tanks, educational theorists, and academic researchers. But though the people who have performed these studies come at the question from different directions with differing social and political attitudes and with differing methodologies, there is very little difference in their conclusions. They all find that recent graduates seem to have been very poorly educated. One study after another has found that they write badly, can’t reason, can’t read any reasonably complex material, have alarming gaps in their knowledge of the history and institutions of the society in which they live, and are in general poorly prepared for the workplace.

The most interesting—and devastating—of these studies is that by Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa, whose book documenting their study, Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses, appeared in 2011. Arum and Roksa found that higher education in America today “is characterized by limited or no learning for a large proportion of students.” More specifically, “An astounding proportion of students are progressing through higher education today without measurable gains in general skills as assessed by the CLA [Collegiate Learning Assessment].” The authors also find “at least some evidence that college students improved their critical thinking skills much more in the past than they do today.”

Chuck Brook’s :TOP 10 Cybersecurity Secrets”

From Author Donald Allen:   Stay Safe!

To learn more about how to do that be sure to read my upcoming short book with the working title “Chuck Brook’s TOP10 Cybersecurity Secrets:”

https://dacybersecurity.com/blog/chuck-brooks-book/

Chuck Brooks is a thought leader, cybersecurity and technology evangelist, Forbes contributor, and just a nice person who is always willing to help the cybersecurity community. Also, he received Presidential Appointments for Executive Service by two U.S. Presidents and helped “stand up” Office of Legislative at The Department of Homeland Security.

You can join the waiting list today to get a huge discount and special bonuses during the official launch of the book:

https://dacybersecurity.com/blog/chuck-brooks-book/

Securelicious,
Donald Allen
dacybersecurity.com

Steve Bryen’s New Book on Technology, Security and Strategy Is Must Reading By David P. Goldman

https://pjmedia.com/spengler/steve-bryens-new-book-on-technology-security-and-strategy-is-must-reading/

Book Review: Essays in Technology, Security and Strategy, Vol. III, by Stephen D. Bryen with Shoshana Bryen. 537 pages. $19.95 paperback/$9.95 Kindle.

Steve Bryen is a brilliant and high-qualified defense analyst who cuts through the baloney and tells you exactly what is going on. His lead article today in Asia Times on coronavirus problem on the USS Theodore Roosevelt argues that the carrier never should have been sent to Vietnam, where the crew mingled with locals in the middle of an epidemic. The State Department had already advised U.S. citizens not to travel overseas, yet the Navy put the crew at risk by exposing them to the locals in what boiled down to a public relations exercise. As so many times in the past, Bryen writes about key issues that no-one else talks about.

His latest volume of essays, many published originally in Asia Times, is required reading for anyone who wants to understand how technology shapes national security. His range of expertise is as broad as his background. He was an engineer, fighter pilot, senior staff director of the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee, the executive director of a grassroots political organization, the head of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, the Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Trade Security Policy, and the founder and first director of the Defense Technology Security Administration during the Reagan years. His brilliant wife Shoshana Bryen is senior director of the Jewish Policy Center.