Books

Vicky Osterweil, a trans woman who describes herself as a ‘writer, editor, and agitator’ and whose Twitter handle is ‘Vicky_ACAB’ (all cops are bastards), must have been overcome with joy when rioting and looting broke out in the wake of George Floyd’s death. This is partly because she is a radical leftist and partly because she had just finished writing a book called In Defense of Looting. What a stroke of luck! It's as if I had written a book called Beware of Pandemics in late 2019. I have to salute her timing.Osterweil is the classic sort of leftist who attempts to wrap enough pretty language around violence and destruction as to ennoble it. The riots, arsons and looting of 2020 needed such a character.

The facts are stark, if little known. Before World War Two, the Jewish community of Thessaloniki, Greece (Salonica, in its old Ottoman name) numbered over 50,000. Jews were this Mediterranean port city’s most numerous ethnic minority and had shared in many of its past glories. When the war was over, only 5,000, less than 10 percent, of the Salonica Jews survived. Between March 15 and August 10, 1943, the local Greek police, supervised by the SS, arranged the deportation of 45,000 men, women and children in 19 convoys, most of them bound for death at Auschwitz-Birkenau. My grandmother’s family was among them. Talking Until Nightfall is a grim and gripping family saga. It compiles the testimonies of three generations of the Matarasso family.

Don’t skip over the dedications in books. They can be as illuminating as the stories they precede and shine an intriguing light on the author’s private life and loves: Jane Austen and Edmund Spenser [caption id="attachment_9876775" align="alignnone" width="739"] Family portrait of Jane Austen[/caption] The dedication to Jane Austen’s Emma reads: ‘To His Royal Highness The Prince Regent, This Work Is By His Royal Highness’s Permission, Most Respectfully Dedicated, By His Royal Highness’s Dutiful And Obedient Humble Servant, The Author.’ The Prince Regent was George Augustus Frederick, uncle of Queen Victoria and the eldest of George III’s children. He was self-indulgent and excessive.

Perhaps contemporary ‘cancel culture’ officially began in 1989, when Khomeini issued his fatwa against Salman Rushdie for having ‘defamed’ Islam in The Satanic Verses. Rushdie was ushered into hiding and the Islamist assault on truth-speech in the West was on. But here’s what I also think. The day after Israel won its 1967 war of self-defense, the propaganda began in deadly earnest against both Israel and the West. Within two decades, perhaps less, Western universities were intellectually and politically ‘occupied’ by Stalinist and Islamist narratives. Balkanized social identities and victimology ruled.

Sitting beneath the pergola of the historic Roycroft Inn, J.R. Seeger looks the part of a successful thriller writer. He is wearing an immaculate white shirt, blue jeans and boat shoes, his blue-green eyes peering over a camouflage-style face mask. The western New York hotel, some 20 miles from the city of Buffalo and the Peace Bridge crossing into Canada, was a centerpiece of the American Arts and Crafts movement when it opened in 1905. It is also the setting for one of the most gripping scenes in Seeger’s debut novel, Mike 4, in which a Russian double agent tries to lure an American protégé into a life of treason. The rendezvous involves a splintered oak door, a Colt Python .

Kapka Kassabova’s previous travel book, Border, was rightly acclaimed and won several prizes. The author traveled to the edge of Europe, between Greece, Bulgaria and Turkey, and teased out ‘where something like Europe begins and something else ends, which isn’t quite Asia’. This is a sequel of sorts. She now travels to another border, that between Macedonia, Albania and Greece, where the vast and beautiful Lake Ohrid remains one of the Balkans’ surviving religious melting pots, despite considerable nationalist pressure. It is where her mother was originally from, so her journey is partly a rediscovery of her own roots.

Edmund Burke wrote the authoritative Western defense of cultural traditionalism in modernity, Reflections on the Revolution in France. How could he also compose a tract called Thoughts and Details on Scarcity, in which the same writer provided steadfast support for Enlightenment, market-based principles that were perceived by contemporaries as a threat to settled social conventions?Burke’s opposition to state intervention in the domestic agricultural economy bursts through in his very first statement in Thoughts and Details. ‘Of all things, an indiscreet tampering with the trade of provisions is the most dangerous,’ he writes, ‘and it is always worst in the time when men are most disposed to it: that is, in the time of scarcity.

Cormac McCarthy of all living American novelists has realized most fully the potential grandeur of his métier by revealing the spiritual condition of our time in the old epic language. In this sense, he is the most serious American novelist of the post-war era. McCarthy’s work is magnificently oblivious to modern industrial and technological society and to the post-urban and suburban culture of consumerism, triviality and superficiality that are its fruits: the penalty a decadent civilization pays for its self-alienation from nature, humanity and metaphysical reality, and its embrace of an artificial world in which what is real and human withers and dries up, and art becomes well-nigh impossible.

Whenever Cockburn has watched Diamond and Silk, whether they’re getting a heroes’ welcome at CPAC or sassing a left-wing celebrity in one of their viral videos, the same thought has always crossed his mind: when will this dynamic duo claim their rightful mantle in the literary pantheon? When can he sit down and peruse 256 pages of their incisive political commentary, as they follow in the footsteps of William F. Buckley Jr. and Ayn Rand and advance American conservative thought? Mercifully, the wait is over. The African American Trump-loving duo, real names Lynnette Hardaway and Rochelle Richardson, who sailed to notoriety throughout the 2016 campaign, release their debut book Uprising: Who the Hell Said You Can't Ditch and Switch?

We have reached a point in history where the ideas that sustain the liberalism and modernity at the heart of western civilization are at great risk. The precise nature of this threat is complicated. It arises from at least two overwhelming pressures, one revolutionary and the other reactionary, that are at war over which illiberal direction our societies should be dragged. Far-right populist movements claim to make a last desperate stand for liberalism and democracy against a rising tide of progressivism and globalism. They are increasingly turning toward leadership in dictators and strongmen who can maintain and preserve ‘western’ sovereignty and values.

I thought I could never feel fond of Charing Cross Road, London. In 1988, when I was 23, I spent a miserable three months there doing a typing course on the bleak first floor of a building next to the Garrick Theatre. Secretarial instruction was delivered over headphones to classrooms full of women and as I tried to follow the disembodied tutorials my fingers kept slipping and jamming between the keys of a hefty, black manual typewriter.Fortunately for me, just as the course was finishing, a job as subeditor at Harpers & Queen fell into my lap.

Maggie O’Farrell is much possessed by death. Her first novel, After You’d Gone (2000), chronicled the inner life of a young woman who finds herself comatose following a near-fatal car accident. And a recent piece of non-fiction, I Am, I Am, I Am (2017), gave an account of O’Farrell’s own numerous brushes with mortality. Her latest novel returns to this preoccupation with the ‘undiscovered country. from whose bourn/ No traveler returns’. In it she sets out to tell the imagined story of the life and death of Shakespeare’s only son, Hamnet, who perished at the age of 11, four years before his father wrote the play that would share his dead son’s name — in Elizabethan England, the spellings Hamnet and Hamlet were interchangeable.

In this week's Book Club, my guest is the historian Tom Holland, author of the new book Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World. The book, though as Tom remarks, you might not know it from the cover, is essentially a history of Christianity — and an account of the myriad ways, many of them invisible to us, that it has shaped and continues to shape Western culture. It's a book and an argument that takes us from Ancient Babylon to Harvey Weinstein's hotel room, draws in the Beatles and the Nazis, and orbits around two giant figures: St Paul and Nietzsche. Is there a single discernible, distinctive Christian way of thinking? Is secularism Christianity by other means?

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’.