Books

One of many fascinating things to be learned from Morning After the Revolution: Dispatches from the Wrong Side of History, by former New York Times correspondent Nellie Bowles, is the process by which someone gets canceled. I was of course familiar with the concept of cancel culture and figured it meant blackballing the wicked, but I’d never gotten a clear idea of how the thing was actually done. On the evidence of Bowles’s book, it means going on Twitter (OK, X) and posting derogatory tweets (X-pressions, whatever) about the offending party contemporaneously with others doing the same thing.

Call it a prejudice if you like. Living in Japan in the 1970s, I had a slight aversion to a particular type of westerner. He — for it was mostly a he — usually lived in Kyoto, sometimes wore a kimono and liked to sit in ancient temples chasing after that presumably blissful moment of enlightenment, awakening, satori, or whatever one wishes to call it. These seekers were less interested in Japan as a society of human beings. They wanted to float in higher spheres. As Christopher Harding explains in The Light of Asia, the Zen adepts, the Buddhist chanters, the rock-garden worshippers, the kimonoed fools (in my no doubt blinkered eyes) were part of a long western tradition.

In Salman Rushdie’s new memoir Knife, there is a powerful and moving moment — amid the many other powerful and moving moments — in which Rushdie visits his ailing friend Paul Auster at the latter’s house in Brooklyn and describes his sorrow at seeing him so reduced by illness. It may have been that the extent of the cancer that killed Auster had not been made public knowledge, although a statement was released about his condition, until Rushdie’s description of his encounter — and some might accuse him of indiscretion or indelicacy. Yet the news of Auster’s death, anticipated though it undoubtedly was, has meant that such questions recede almost immediately — and instead a consideration of his legacy as a writer, rather than an invalid, can begin.

A good place to start with The Blues Brothers, Daniel de Visé’s engaging account of the John Belushi-Dan Aykroyd comedy classic, is in the spring preceding the movie’s summer 1980 release. By this stage, the production was mired in controversy and a martyr to industry scuttlebutt. Press reports put the expenditure at anywhere between $35 million and $40 million (in fact it sailed home at a mere $27.5 million) — and this at a time when over-subsidized box office calamities such as Steven Spielberg’s 1941 and Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate had prompted many a lament about Hollywood hubris. The rough cut came in at a mammoth three hours, at a time when two were reckoned excessive.

When Ohio senator J.D. Vance arrived at the Munich Security Conference in February, he had a clear message meant for the world: the Republican Party was no longer the party of Ronald Reagan. Standing outside the Hotel Bayerischer Hof, he informed reporters that he did not believe American support for combat against authoritarian regimes should extend to Ukraine — and that he would continue to oppose efforts to “increase the supply of weapons in Ukraine because we’ve already expended so many of our munitions and resources” to achieve a victory that he does not foresee. Vance’s bootstrap story is well-known — he’s a Marine veteran turned Yale Law grad turned venture capitalist made prominent by his bestselling Appalachia memoir Hillbilly Elegy.

If you’re one of the many people worried that US foreign policy is in the hands of a visibly declining eighty-one year-old president, Alexander Ward’s account of the Biden administration’s first two years in office may — or may not — make you feel better, for he leaves readers with little doubt as to who is actually the executive branch’s most influential decision-maker: forty-seven year-old national security advisor Jake Sullivan. Ward might deny any such authorial intent, but time and again he shows his hand, as when he invokes “Sullivan’s first two years at the helm alongside Biden.