Books

Christopher C. Miller, acting secretary of defense during the last few months of the Trump presidency, will reveal the entirety of his role in protecting the Capitol on January 6, 2021 riots in his new book, Soldier Secretary: Warnings from the Battlefield & the Pentagon about America’s Most Dangerous Enemies. Miller previously testified about how the Pentagon sought to quell the riots to the January 6 Committee; pieces of his testimony have been released to the press to raise questions about President Donald Trump's claims that he personally ordered 10,000 troops to be on standby during his speech on the Ellipse. Miller does not expound on this debate in the introduction to his book, which has been provided exclusively to The Spectator World.

After a fair-to-middling 2022, it’s not unreasonable to hope that 2023 will see several stars burn brightly in the literary firmament. Whether what promises to be the most talked-about book of the year, Prince Harry’s Spare (Random House, January), is included in this number remains to be seen. On the plus side, the prince has the estimable J.R. Moehringer as his ghostwriter; on the negative side is the fact that his every public appearance over the past few years has been so combative that we might expect little more than a 416-page exercise in score-settling. More reliable pleasures await. Pamela Anderson’s memoir Love, Pamela (HarperCollins, January) should be a revelatory and fascinating dive beyond the usual bimbo clichés.

One of the great, pesky questions of human history has finally been answered. For thousands of years , as we all know, most great accomplishments were the works of men. But now and then there was an outlier, a woman doing great things. Esther in the Bible, Joan of Arc or Elizabeth I of England. It made no sense — but today, thanks to the tireless work of gender studies departments we know the truth: those weren’t women at all. They were actually men. This weekend we had further confirmation of this revelation from the New York Times which ran a piece revealing that Louisa May Alcott, author of Little Women, was a trans man. We know this because sometimes Alcott went by “Lou” and mentioned having a “boys' spirit.” I’m sold.

If you sit down and talk to an author for any length of time, you will hear gripes. (Writers will never be confused with the sunniest of people on this planet.) About the visibility of their books; about the size of their advances; about their sales, relative to their other titles and to their peers; about publicity campaigns; about cover designs. There will be a lot of gripes, and if you are cornered by an author in a bar, or at a party, you might be advised to make your excuses and flee. But if you have some sympathy for this much-maligned breed, it may occur to you that the basis of their complaints ultimately comes down to a simple lack of appreciation by their publishers: those all-powerful entities that have the power to make or break careers at the touch of a button.

The times, they are a-changing. For the past six decades, Bob Dylan has been one of the most enigmatic artists in American music, whose every public utterance has been pored over by his admirers and detractors alike. But one thing that Dylan has never been is a man who threw it all away: reputationally speaking, at any rate. Yet things at last have changed. In a simple twist of fate that Dylan surely never could have predicted, he has become embroiled in — of all things — a controversy over signed books. Dylan's most recent publication, The Philosophy of Modern Song, was released in a deluxe limited edition, retailing at $599 apiece.

The period of the First World War was a golden age for the spy novel. There’s nothing like a really cataclysmic global conflict to stir any halfway attentive author. And perhaps the pick of the literary crop was 1903’s The Riddle of the Sands, by the Anglo-Irish writer, soldier, and politician Erskine Childers. The novel mixes some gentle satire about the graded snobberies of the Edwardian class system with a seafaring adventure involving a couple of topping British chaps going after German spies in the Baltic. It’s not only a riveting tale in itself, but so cogent in its account of the state of Britain’s maritime defenses that it prompted the Admiralty to hurriedly install a series of new coastal gun batteries.

William Boyd Writing effective comedy is very difficult. True comic genius, the ability to create a unique tone of voice — deadpan, perfectly timed, self-deprecating, abjuring all whimsy (the British disease) and grandstanding — is extremely rare. One thinks of S.J. Perelman, Peter de Vries, the Grossmiths and P.G. Wodehouse amongst very few others. One name that can be added to this tiny and exclusive club is Theo Fennell who has published, this year, his memoir I Fear For This Boy: Some Chapters of Accidents (Bloomsbury, $35). It relates incidents in Fennell’s life where everything that could go wronnd Catholic Churches as he veered between them.

On December 23, 2021, I left the Hollywood Roosevelt and walked down North Orange Drive to turn right and face Sunset Boulevard. It was dark when I passed the entrance to the Chateau Marmont. When I finally crossed the street to arrive at Book Soup, the “Bookseller To The Great & Infamous,” I turned to the cashier and asked if they had copies of Play It As It Lays by Joan Didion. He huffed, “Uh, yeah, we’re sold out.” Joan Didion had died earlier that day in Manhattan due to complications of Parkinson’s Disease.

There is a famous (and, I fear, apocryphal) story about Bono at his most messianic at a U2 gig in the early part of this century. Pausing between songs, he clicked his fingers meaningfully. After doing this a few times, he said, with utmost gravity, “Every time I do this, a child in Africa dies of starvation.” Most of the audience nodded in sympathy, but one man in the front row had a better response. “Well stop fucking doing it then!” Bono’s response was not recorded, but the finger-clicking soon disappeared from his repertoire of stadium show gimmicks. It is reasonably easy to see why Bono — and, by extension, U2 — are so reviled.

Cockburn would like to issue a preemptive apology to those who thought being extraordinarily accomplished was enough to justify a lucrative book deal. Apparently an author's manuscript should be sent to the shredder if he or she holds an unorthodox opinion on hot-button political issues. That's the case made by the coffee-fetchers and typo-catchers in the publishing industry who signed an open letter denouncing Supreme Court Justice Amy Barrett's upcoming book with Penguin Random House. The group of "concerned publishing professionals" claim that paying Coney Barrett a $2 million advance to outline her judicial philosophy constitutes an international human rights violation. No, seriously.

In April 1930, the nineteen-year-old Edda Mussolini married Count Galeazzo Ciano, aged twenty-seven, after a brief courtship in which love appears to have played little part. Her father, Il Duce, wanted the magnificent occasion to be not merely the wedding of the century but a grand, almost royal, demonstration of fascist might and a celebration of fecundity. Edda, his beloved firstborn, was to stand for everything that was best about fascist womanhood, while the groom was to carve out the path of “the new Italian man.” These were the glory years, and thousands of schoolchildren sent poems and cards with angels in advance of the occasion, which the Papal Nuncio attended with a present from the Pope.