Books

Like those of his wartime ally Joseph Goebbels, the diaries of the Italian fascist foreign minister Count Galeazzo Ciano (1903-44) have proved a mainstay of academic research into the frequently banal inner workings of the Axis dictatorships. Both men were entirely aware of their journals’ historical and commercial value. In 1937, Goebbels struck a lucrative deal with Max Amman, the Nazi Party publisher, for the release of his warped musings on race and politics twenty years after his death, which in the event came sooner than he might have imagined. Ciano in turn used his diaries to barter unsuccessfully for his life when arrested on charges of treason.

In 2011, a terminally ill Christopher Hitchens faced death with droll stoicism: “To the dumb question ‘Why me?’ the cosmos barely bothers to return the reply: ‘Why not?’” he wrote. As his health declined and the end drew nearer, the skeptical Hitchens stuck to his atheist guns, clear-eyed in his confidence that death was final. Hitchens died in 2011, but his work and reputation live on. No paradox there, of course, but just how large Hitchens looms twelve years after his death would surely have surprised even this immodest author. It’s certainly a surprise to me, a reformed Hitchens fanboy. The face of twenty-first-century atheism is having quite the afterlife.

It is one of those cosmic ironies that the author Martin Amis, who has died at the age of seventy-three of esophageal cancer, might have appreciated that his death was announced the day after Jonathan Glazer’s adaptation of his novel The Zone of Interest premiered to a rapturous reception at this year’s Cannes film festival.

Until a few weeks ago, Judy Blume’s reputation as one of the world’s most admired and respected novelists seemed assured. She has sold over 82 million copies of her twenty-five books, has won countless awards and was named one of TIME’s most influential people earlier this year. But those whom the gods wish to destroy are asked for their views on J.K. Rowling — and so when Blume was asked as much in an interview, she replied, “I love her... I am behind her 100 percent as I watch from afar... I haven’t been in touch with her during this tough time. Probably I should.” This went badly, as might be imagined — “Fuck Judy Blume!

Donald Trump is set to publish a letter from then-Prince Charles, without the British monarch's permission. The letter from the now-King will form part of a book coming out Tuesday called Letters to Trump, which features celebrities and other people who have written to the former president during his life. The correspondence is said to range from President Richard Nixon to Alec Baldwin. Perhaps they bonded over lawsuits? Charles purportedly wrote to Trump in 1995 to thank him for offering an honorary membership to his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida. A nice gesture, but King Charles isn’t a golfer. Maybe it’s something to do with those hands.

Jonathan Eig’s new King: A Life (KAL) is the first comprehensive biography of the black civil rights hero to appear in more than thirty years, and it will succeed my own Bearing the Cross (BTC), published in 1986, as the standard account. One normally does not review a book one’s blurbed — I’ve called it “a great leap forward in our biographical understanding” — nor where one’s actively aided the author’s research and read his manuscript multiple times. But comparisons between KAL and BTC will be legion, so highlighting the three most significant ways in which the two biographies differ will be a service both to the thousands of readers whom Eig’s volume should attract and to students of King’s life more generally.

Alexander Larman’s The Crown in Crisis ended with the former Edward VIII, "now exiled to Europe, traveling away in the night." In his engrossing The Windsors at War, Larman relates what happened next. In some respects, the tale he tells can be read as a pitch-black comedy, something signaled by the dramatis personae that begins it. A "disgraced Yugoslavian prince" makes it into "Society — high" joining, among other grandees, a millionaire murder victim, and no fewer than three "playboys," one of whom was the millionaire’s suspected murderer. A "would-be royal assassin" fares less well, banished to "Society— low," along with the likes of a journalist (naturally) and an American engineer "unimpressed by the Duke and Duchess of Windsor.

The heroic age of polar exploration gave birth to epics as grand and as harsh as the landscapes in which they unfolded. And, as in all the best epics, their protagonists are often of interest not only for what they do, but also for who they are, or, in the case of the Arctic adventurer — “explorer” is too confining a word — Vilhjalmur Stefansson (1879-1962), who they pretend to be. Stefansson is the “villain” of Buddy Levy’s Empire of Ice and Stone: The Disastrous and Heroic Voyage of the Karluk, a tale that reads like an unusually grim, remarkably gripping Edwardian imperial yarn.