Books

In 1990, Jeffrey Epstein spent $2.5 million on a Palm Beach mansion less than a mile and a half from Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort. Epstein had money and all the luxuries of wealth: multiple homes, private jets and beautiful women. Yet Epstein had a difficult time fitting in with elite society circles. Friends described him as crass. Epstein might have lived among the elites, but he was not one of them. That is, not until he met Ghislaine Maxwell. She introduced him to class, was his match in every way, and would eventually become his partner in one of the darkest schemes one could ever imagine. In the early 1990s, Ghislaine Maxwell was young, popular, and broke.

This extraordinary summer of protest and upheaval has sparked the most pervasive and sustained interest in the question of what it means to be black in the United States that I have witnessed. The American people, it can be said in all earnestness, are finally having that proverbial ‘national conversation’ on racism. And yet, one of the more fascinating consequences thus far has been the emergence of White Fragility, a text written by the Italian-American academic and corporate consultant Robin DiAngelo, and How to Be an Antiracist, by the historian Ibram X. Kendi, as the two most sought after (by a wide margin) explanatory aids for understanding our moment. Both books posit race — and racial difference — as something real and practically essential.

Man’s refusal to accept reality can take entertainingly paradoxical form. One of the more enjoyable is the New Atheists’ crusade (I use the term advisedly) against God — a battle with human nature which, like most battles with human nature, can never be won. God may never have appeared in a burning bush, but, he, she or they came to life in the brains of some ancient hominids, probably as a bug in a new pattern-recognition app. It was a bug with benefits, and as evolution is an opportunist, God has never gone away since. Tara Isabella Burton, who has a doctorate in theology, does not deal with the sources of religious belief in Strange Rites, Instead, she focuses ‘primarily on what a religion does’.

On June 3, the New York Times published a very bad op-ed. By itself, this is not breaking news. The Times opinion page has long been a kind of stagnant water cooler for conventional center-left opinion, a hospice care ward for America’s remaining pleats-panted, open-collar Blairites. Sure, they’ll occasionally publish something interesting — an essay by the deputy leader of the Taliban, for example, or an admission by David Brooks that he once tried the ganja. But generally the Gray Lady’s opiners tend to be tucked in bed by nine, dreaming of the things globalization might accomplish the next day.This piece was not that. It was, first of all, written by a Republican, Sen.

Nerds everywhere are frantically googling tattoo removal services this week, as the author who inspired their ink failed to STFU about the most cancelable offense of our time. In other words, she told the truth. I'm talking about J.K. Rowling, of Harry Potter fame, who has dared to suggest that women are adult human females and therefore not men. She did not specifically say 'men are not women,' thereby saving herself from Twitter expulsion. She did question the accepted trend among progressives and media outlets everywhere of replacing the dreadful word, ‘woman’, with the much more pleasant, ‘people who menstruate’, or, if you prefer brevity, ‘menstruators’.

Universal genius is a law unto itself, but the personalities presented in Signatures at least deserve to be remembered by generations yet unborn. Ernst JüngerJournals, 1951 Researching for my book Paris in the Third Reich, I was just in time to catch some German officials or soldiers who had played a part in the occupation. Understandably, they tried to put themselves in the best possible light. Ernst Jünger was different. A staff officer, exceptionally intelligent and exceptionally observant, he kept a day-by-day record of his life in Paris. Much more than a timely self-portrait, these diaries fix for posterity the historic moment when the long-drawn contest for power in continental Europe appeared to have ended conclusively in German victory and French defeat.

Oh, to hell with the Olympian book review, that distanced and disinterested critique pronounced from on high. Our muses may dwell on a mountaintop, but we writers live on the molehill of our trade. An ant heap, actually, where every trifling insect in the little colony is kin. We’re constantly caressing each other with our feelers, trading morsels of wit with our mandibles and pushing each other under the passing shoes of the reading public. There’s no such thing as a book review without an agenda, any more than there’s such a thing as an ant that will leave your picnic lunch alone. My agenda here is to lavishly praise Rake’s Progress by Rachel Johnson. I like her, and she’s my friend. I freely admit to my affection for Rachel.

Political autobiographies are written to conceal, not to reveal. They come in two eminently pulpable forms. One is the twilight apologia of the retired or defeated politician, the other the resumé-polishing pitch of the rising star. Which category Ilhan Omar’s autobiography falls into depends on whether you, like her, think she’s a cruelly traduced beacon of hope in a land of benighted bigotry; or whether, as one investigative journalist concluded, she has committed the ‘worst spree of felonies by a congressperson in history’.‘I’m not here to undo or rewrite history,’ Omar tells us. But the truth slips away from her like a greased pig.

Just over 500 years ago, in June 1519, the castle hall of the German city of Leipzig was expecting a throng of spectators. The room had been specially decorated: two pulpits stood dramatically facing each other. Under the eyes of the Duke of Saxony, Martin Luther was challenged to defend some of his writings by which he attacked abuses in the Church. The scene was set for an intellectual battle — a rebellious friar, Luther, taking on the Catholic establishment. Physical threats made the atmosphere all the more tense. Two hundred axe-wielding students accompanied Luther. His opponent, the Catholic theologian Johann Eck, protected himself with 76 armed guards. Their ensuing debate dealt to a large degree with history.

No one likes to watch television with me, because I am that sick pedant who delights in pointing out anomalies and plot-line errors, never more so than when the show in question is connected in some way to a cherished book. That’s when my pedantry enters an almost superhuman phase, as I educate the room about literally every single deviation from the original literary source. HBO’s Game of Thrones series was an absolute gold mine in this respect, because it came out just after I’d finished devouring the books in George R.R. Martin’s epic series. If you haven’t read those books, you should do so now — as you may never again have this much spare time on your hands.

Probably most of the world is bilingual, or more than bilingual. It is common in many countries to speak a national language alongside an international lingua franca such as Arabic, Spanish or English. On top of that, there may be a mother tongue that is not the same as a national language. A Nigerian, for instance, may be at once one of the million speakers of Berom, one of the 64 million speakers of Hausa and one of the 1.13 billion speakers of English. The same pattern is repeated across the globe.

Dave Rubin loves to talk about ideas. In his new book, Don't Burn This Book, he tells the reader:‘I want you to walk into a bar and order yourselves a full-bodied opinion. I want you to get absolutely wasted on facts until 3:00 a.m., and then, when you’re just about ready to pass out, I want you to get another large glass of reality and chug it.’It's telling that Rubin suggests that we order the opinion before the facts. Would it not make more sense to suggest, say, blending a cocktail of facts into an opinion? Rubin’s advice seems backwards to me.But it would be wrong to take this suggestion seriously. Don't Burn This Book is not a serious work. It is, in fact, extremely lazy, bearing all the hallmarks of a project that was knocked together over a few wet weekends.

When John F. Kennedy was dating Jacqueline Bouvier, he gave her two books. One was Pilgrim’s Way (1940) a memoir by the British spy and author John Buchan. The other was The Young Melbourne (1939) by Lord David Cecil, which describes the raffish exploits and political intrigues of a Whig aristocrat, and later prime minister, in the early 19th century. Quite what Jackie thought of this is unrecorded. Later President Kennedy told Life magazine what his favorite books were. Both of the titles above were in this proto-listicle, along with works about Byron, John C. Calhoun, Talleyrand and Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of The Roman Empire.

The convention is that if you happen to meet authors and have just bought or acquired a book of theirs, you ask them to sign it. Particularly stuffy authors might refuse, but in most cases they feel flattered and duly inscribe your name and theirs on the title page or the flyleaf of the book in question. If the mood is right, they may add ‘with best wishes’ or something of the sort. At a superficial level, of course, such signatures are only the equivalent of an autograph album. There’s more to it than that, however. Added value perhaps, but association certainly. The human race lives by the stories we tell ourselves about our identity and our purposes, and that signature helps to make the author’s story part of the reader’s story.

‘Things that would have seemed utterly improbable now happen on a daily basis,’ Sir Salman Rushdie tells me. ‘The implausible has now become everyday.’ Isn’t this a problem for a writer whose books derive from the fantastical traditions of magic realism and science fiction, where crazy stuff happening is what sets them apart? ‘It is.’ The active threat to Rushdie’s life from radical Islam is two decades behind him. His novels have a way of dealing in sour, sometimes apocalyptic ironies. His latest, the Booker-shortlisted Quichotte, is set in what it describes as ‘the Age of Anything-Can-Happen’.

‘Buy pink baby clothes,’ Kim Jiyoung, the protagonist of this best-selling South Korean novel is told at the obstetrician’s office. Jiyoung’s mother responds: ‘It’s OK, the next one will be a boy.’ There are numerous births in this book. Births of girls are met with disappointment. The births of sons are celebrated. When Jiyoung is born in 1982, ‘abortion for medical problems had been legal for 10 years...aborting females was common practice as if “daughter” was a medical problem’. Her younger sister is ‘erased’.