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BOOKS

The Golden Gate: A Novel by Amy Chua

Her last book was Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother in 2011 

Her novel is a great read….rsk

Amy Chua’s debut novel, The Golden Gate, is a sweeping, evocative, and compelling historical thriller that paints a vibrant portrait of a California buffeted by the turbulent crosswinds of a world at war and a society about to undergo massive change.

In Berkeley, California, in 1944, Homicide Detective Al Sullivan has just left the swanky Claremont Hotel after a drink in the bar when a presidential candidate is assassinated in one of the rooms upstairs. A rich industrialist with enemies among the anarchist factions on the far left, Walter Wilkinson could have been targeted by any number of groups. But strangely, Sullivan’s investigation brings up the specter of another tragedy at the Claremont, ten years earlier: the death of seven-year-old Iris Stafford, a member of the Bainbridge family, one of the wealthiest in all of San Francisco. Some say she haunts the Claremont still.

The many threads of the case keep leading Sullivan back to the three remaining Bainbridge heiresses, now adults: Iris’s sister, Isabella, and her cousins Cassie and Nicole. Determined not to let anything distract him from the truth—not the powerful influence of Bainbridges’ grandmother, or the political aspirations of Berkeley’s district attorney, or the interest of China’s First Lady Madame Chiang Kai-Shek in his findings—Sullivan follows his investigation to its devastating conclusion.

The New Defenders of the Faith Authors need to stop relying on victim narratives to sell books—not only because it tokenizes minorities, but also because it makes one dependent on the whims of liberal elites who are quick to adopt new pets e quick to adopt new pets by Sheluyang Peng

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/new-faith-defenders

This past year’s National Book Awards gala presented an ironic, yet at this point increasingly familiar scene: Held in the glittering halls of Cipriani’s on Wall Street, the attendees—dressed in their finest, dining at one of New York’s famed upscale spots—spent the evening showering prizes on a very specific subset of writing: for young people’s literature, a graphic memoir of an awkward Asian American teen coming of age during a class trip in Europe; for translated literature, a novel about an old gay man who reflects on his clandestine teenage romance with his best friend; for poetry, a collection about the history and culture of the Chamoru people native to Guam; for nonfiction, a Howard Zinn-style history of the United States from a Native American perspective; and finally, for fiction, an experimental novel about two queer Puerto Rican men that wax on about the work of a pioneering sexuality researcher. Other finalists for the fiction award included a novel about Black prisoners being forced to fight to the death for the amusement of racist white viewers, a novel about three generations of Native Americans forced to attend boarding schools set up by racist white government officials, and not one, but two novels about racist white Christian missionaries that try to convert BIPOC souls.

The message was clear: In the book business, at least, it literally pays to be a victim.

Of course, the authors of trauma narratives are simply playing their part in a symbiotic dance with the trauma-hungry gatekeepers of elite spaces. Readers of this magazine are no doubt familiar with the “woke meritocracy” of American academia and letters, according to which the only entrance to the upper echelons of American society is gatekept by those who seek to “check their privilege” and feel absolved through the consumption of victim narratives. Every college student who dreams of ascending the ivory tower knows that the people at the top reward those that can claim their rise was prickled with thorns, just as every struggling product of elite overproduction desperately tries to think of how many victim identities they can check off in an ever-shrinking pool of positions in academia and the workplace.

There is, of course, a paradox in the demand for “diverse voices”: Rather than seeking an actual diversity of viewpoints, our DEI commissars instead seek a racially diverse group whose members will hold the same viewpoint. This one off-the-shelf sob story is now the only viable route to elite advancement.

CHAPTER 13: Fomenting Race Wars Begins in Kindergarten Space Is No Longer the Final Frontier—Reality Is [forthcoming release May 2024] by Linda Goudsmit

https://goudsmit.pundicity.com/27686/chapter-13-fomenting-race-wars-begins-in

goudsmit.pundicity.com  and website: lindagoudsmit.com 

National sovereignty is to a country what individual sovereignty is to a human being. In The Collapsing American Family: From Bonding to Bondage,[i] I describe the globalist strategy of using reformulated Marxism in American schools in order to replace American individualism with collectivism. The goal is to persuade the individual to stop being an individual:

The Left had a new marketing, lobbying, and advertising strategy that targeted first American universities and then K–12. American education was chosen as the vulnerable soft target for revolution—no bullets required. The long-term strategy was that two generations of leftist educational indoctrination would transform America from a capitalist constitutional republic into the socialist state required for internationalized one-world government.

The radical leftists on campus in the ’60s did not go quietly into the night after Woodstock. They graduated and became the teachers, professors, textbook writers, psychologists, sociologists, politicians, doctors, lawyers, and decision makers in charge of public education, including curriculum content, that reflected their anti-American bias and globalist views. Gradually the individualism and critical-thinking skills that had created the vibrant, independent, upwardly mobile middle class and supported the American dream were deliberately dumbed down to encourage dependence, collectivism, groupthink, and a victim mentality.

In a sweeping effort that eventually transformed public education, collectivism was repackaged, marketed, lobbied, advertised, and sold to an unsuspecting American public. The former pro-American curricula that proudly promoted individualism, meritocracy, capitalism, and the middle class was replaced. The revised curricula teach American students to be anti-American, self-loathing, dependent, fragile collectivists, unapologetically preaching global citizenship in a New World Order. (The Collapsing American Family: From Bonding to Bondage, pp. 123–124)

Collectivism is the core of John Dewey’s infamous progressive education, discussed in Chapter 8. Progressivist instructional methods focus on group work and group projects, and promote the experience-centered focus of the progressive philosophy. Progressivism defines itself as a contrast to Perennialism. Perennialism,[ii] the foundation of American education established in Colonial America, emphasizes objective reality, universal truths, and an educational curriculum that cultivates students’ individual intellectual skills with the “three R’s”—reading, writing, and arithmetic.

John Ketcham Ready for Freedom? A new book proposes reestablishing responsible and accountable authority.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/ready-for-freedom

Everyday Freedom: Designing the Framework for a Flourishing Society, by Philip K. Howard (Rodin Books, 128 pp., $15.83)

“Everyday Freedom calls on individuals, families, and communities to exercise newfound authority in the pursuit of flourishing lives. By the last page, the book acts as a mirror, staring back at readers with a challenging question: Are we ready to live up to the responsibilities of such freedom?”

In a now-obscure 1960s BBC interview, Malcolm Muggeridge, the English satirist, journalist, and convert to anti-Communism (and later Christianity) declared: “I hate government. I hate power. I think that man’s existence, insofar as he achieves anything, is to resist power, to minimize power, to devise systems of society in which power is the least exerted.”

That sentiment of Muggeridge’s—the anti-authoritarian spirit of the 1960s—is the starting point of Everyday Freedom, the latest book by attorney and good-government advocate Philip Howard. Reformers of that era felt that biased individuals couldn’t be trusted with discretion. Those in power had given American society racial segregation and other forms of discrimination, destructive urban-renewal projects, and environmental costs that would be paid by future generations. The reformers believed that the way to prevent unfair and unjust outcomes was to limit and check authority.

But the worthy goal of limiting institutional power ran aground with the reformers’ emphasis on grievance and resolution. Howard chronicles how the discretion that had characterized an earlier mode of governance gave way to a new system of individual rights and impersonal rules. Dense rulebooks came to dictate the “one correct way” for workers to do every task. Formal processes constrained executives from disciplining employees and planning for new development. Expansive civil rights, and a bureaucracy designed to enforce them, added arrows of state power to the quiver of every student and individual suffering personal disappointment. The prospect of massive jury verdicts turned these rights into a “weapon for selfishness,” leading to absurdities like a $54 million case against a Washington D.C. dry cleaner for losing a customer’s pair of pants.

Marxism: the Next Generation A new book traces the genealogy of wokeness. by Bruce Bawer

https://www.frontpagemag.com/marxism-the-next-generation/

If more Americans had been familiar a couple of decades ago with the history recounted in the pages of Next Gen Marxism – a cogent, comprehensive new book by Mike Gonzalez, a former Wall Street Journal reporter, and Katharine Gorka, an expert on the terrorist threat (and Sebastian Gorka’s better half) – a lot would be different. For one thing, Barack Obama would almost certainly never have been elected president. Fewer people would’ve been suckered into the George Floyd hysteria. Parents would’ve been warned a lot sooner about the existential danger of sending their kids off to study in the Ivy League. And that’s just for starters.

For the history told in Next Gen Marxism is the history of what we now know as wokeness – the leftist sociocultural ascendancy manifested in (among much else) cancel culture, the Antifa and BLM riots, DEI, “judicial reform,” “squatter’s rights,” the near-ubiquitous promotion of transgender ideology, and (not least) the conspiracy of Hollywood, the media, the D.C. swamp, and Big Tech to destroy Donald Trump’s first term and deny him a second.

It can feel as if the woke madness slithered out of nowhere, like some poisonous snake, just a few years ago, only to be coiling itself tightly around our throats very soon afterward. But in fact, this toxic creature has a long lineage that leads back to Rousseau and the French Revolution in the 18th century, Marx and Engels in the 19th, and the Russian Revolution in the 20th. Then there’s Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937), whose revolutionary writings – notably his theory of hegemony – have made him, in the authors’ words, “the unrivaled Marxist political theorist of the past half century.” (And guess who, of all people, is America’s “top Gramsci scholar”? None other than Pete Buttigieg’s father, Joseph. It’s one of a number of surprises here – surprises that, perhaps, shouldn’t be quite so surprising.)

A Stalin-Era Story, Roiling Russia Jay Nordlinger

https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/04/a-stalin-era-story-roiling-russia/

The Master and Margarita, Bulgakov’s classic, becomes a movie

It’s a miracle,” everyone says. It’s a miracle that Michael Lockshin’s adaptation of The Master and Margarita made it to Russian screens. It’s a further miracle that the adaptation, this movie, has stayed there (so far). Among those who use the word “miracle” is Lockshin himself.

He is the director, and The Master and Margarita? That’s the classic novel by Mikhail Bulgakov, the Russian writer who lived from 1891 to 1940. He worked on the novel from 1928 until his death. In 1930, he burned his manuscript. Then he started again. The novel could not be published during his lifetime. Stalin would not have liked it. It was published decades after Bulgakov’s death, with the first complete version appearing in 1973.

Maybe the most famous line of the book is “Manuscripts don’t burn.” Bulgakov may have picked this up from Christopher Marlowe, whose Doctor Faustus cries, “I’ll burn my books!” (but it is not so simple). There is a lot of the Faust legend in The Master and Margarita: Goethe, certainly. There is even a character named “Berlioz.” (Hector Berlioz composed a kind of oratorio — which can also be staged as an opera — called “The Damnation of Faust.”)

So, that’s what The Master and Margarita is about? A pact with the devil? What the novel is about is a complicated, not really answerable question. Michael Lockshin puts it amusingly, in a conversation with me: “Ask ten Bulgakov scholars what the novel is about, and you’ll get ten different answers. Ask a hundred, and you’ll get a hundred.”

The book has a devil character, yes. (His name is “Woland” and he pays a visit to Moscow, entourage in tow.) The book deals with religion and irreligion. There is a love story. There are various stories, interweaving.

Regardless, everyone can agree on this: The novel depicts the condition of the artist under dictatorship — the life that Bulgakov was living. The life that many were living. Lockshin’s film adaptation depicts the same.

A to Z Insanity: Kids’ Alphabet Book Has a Gender for Every Letter Catherine Salgado

https://pjmedia.com/catherinesalgado/2024/04/01/a-to-z-insanity-kids-alphabet-book-has-a-gender-for-every-letter-n4927819

Since today is April Fools’, it seems appropriate to discuss an entirely inappropriate alphabet book being pushed to young kids (including by tech giant Amazon), which has a fake “gender” for all the letters of the alphabet.

The book is called “ABC of Gender Identity,” by Devika Dalal, available on Amazon and Barnes and Noble. This is how the wacky authoress describes her childhood propaganda text: “Children begin exploring their gender from as young as three years old. But many are taught that there are only two to choose from. In an effort to introduce a wider lens and promote greater diversity, inclusion and acceptance, I developed ABC of Gender Identity – an A to Z alphabet book designed to normalize nonbinary genders.” In other words, it’s a fantasy book masquerading as non-fiction, and proportionately dangerous to innocent young kids who don’t know any better.

The book is now “distributed globally and available at all major retailers and libraries,” the authoress declared. Libs of TikTok shared a video in which a young woman explained that “ABC of Gender Identity” was given to a kid in a British Columbia school. The video showed the child’s mother flipping through the book, which shows a different invented “gender” for each letter of the alphabet. The complete list of inanity was “Agender, bigender, cisgender, demigender, endogender, femme, gender fluid, horogender, intersex, juxera, kynigender, libragender, man (or boy), nonbinary, offgender, pangender, gender (questioning), (gender) reassigned, subgender, transgender, ungender, venngender, woman (or girl), xirl/xay, yinyang ren, ze/zir.”

CHAPTER 12: Seeding Race Wars Space Is No Longer the Final Frontier—Reality Is [forthcoming release May 2024]

https://goudsmit.pundicity.com/27668/chapter-12-seeding-race-wars

 lindagoudsmit.com goudsmit.pundicity.com 

James Lindsay’s analysis of Woke Marxism (Chapter 11) is supported by the extraordinary Testimony of Dr. Bella Dodd to HUAC in 1953.[i] The U.S. House of Representatives formed the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) in 1938 to look into subversive activity by private citizens. Bella Dodd (1904–1969) was a New York teacher, lawyer, labor union activist, and high-ranking member of the Communist Party USA in the 1930s and 1940s. She speaks candidly about her idealism; her seduction into the Communist Party as a young woman; and her growing disillusionment, disaffection, and final ardent anti-communist stance.

Bella Dodd testifies with an experienced insider’s voice, exposing the fundamental deceit of communism in her very personal and powerful sworn statement. She explains how millions of Americans, herself included, were sucked into communism with slogans and generalizations—seduced by feelings, not facts. Excerpts from her testimony are particularly relevant today:

Take, for instance, the whole question of antifascism. The Communist Party in this country set itself up as the one organization that was fighting fascism. Very few other organizations gave them a battle for that, and so the Americans got to feeling, “These are the anti-Fascists.”

We only learn now, after reading documents captured by the American soldiers in Germany, that throughout the time the Communists were calling themselves “anti-Fascists,” they were working with the German high brass while Hitler was in power…. Well, they took the anti-Fascist slogan and made themselves the protagonists of antifascism.

They did the same thing with the word “democracy.” It became very difficult to oppose them because they posed everything in terms of the word “democracy.” … (pp. 1746–1747)

They divide your loyalty to the “country” from loyalty to the “people.” They say, “We are the greatest Americans there are. We believe in supporting the people.”

Who are the people? They are for the class society—for the proletariat. They say, “The working class makes up 98 percent of the people. Therefore, we, in our desire to protect the people, are the greatest democrats that there are.” But they forget to tell you that as far as they are concerned, before they are through taking power, they will kill off large sections of the working class if it doesn’t go along with their program…. (p. 1748)

In War Against the Jews: How to End Hamas Barbarism, Alan Dershowitz

—#1 New York Times bestselling author and one of America’s most respected legal scholars—explains why the horrific attack of Oct 7 and Israel’s just response changes everything. 

It has changed the relationship between Israel and the United States, especially with regard to the possibility of direct American intervention. 
It has required Israel to consider its nuclear option as a last resort to assure its survival. 
It has revealed dangerous attitudes among America’s future leaders on today’s college campuses toward Israel’s possible destruction.
It has exposed media biases that have been exacerbated with Israel’s vulnerabilities. 
It has united Israelis and Jews around the world as never before, despite the deep divisions among them politically, religiously, and ideologically.  Nothing will ever be the same. 
It has clouded the future of peace between Israel and its Arab and Muslim neighbors and has diminished the proposals for a peaceful resolution of the Israel-Palestinian conflict.
It has made predictions about the future of the region nearly impossible, except that imposing instability is inevitable.

In this short book, Dershowitz analyzes these transforming events and suggests how to move forward.

Steeped in Fragility Jonathan Haidt describes how a smartphone-based childhood works against making children resilient.Carolyn D. Gorman

https://www.city-journal.org/article/how-smartphone-based-childhood-works-against-making-children-resilient

The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness, by Jonathan Haidt (Penguin Random House, 400 pp., $30)

In 2018’s The Coddling of The American Mind, Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt contended that kids are inherently “antifragile”—that is, they benefit from adversity. But instead of “preparing the child for the road, not the road for the child,” parents have surrendered to bad ideas and practices that foster a culture of emotional fragility, with its calls for safe spaces, trigger warnings, and censorship.

Haidt’s new book, The Anxious Generation, is a thematic extension of this argument. It describes how Gen Z—those born after 1995, the first “to go through puberty with a portal in their pockets”—has been made fragile by the transition from a play-based to a smartphone-based childhood. The virtual environment of social media, Haidt contends, amplifies extreme ideas and worsens cognitive distortions, swelling this cohort’s rates of depression, anxiety, suicide, and self-harm.

Haidt chronicles how the shift to a phone-based childhood affects learning. It deprives children of experiences that make them productive participants in a democratic society. One reason that kids play is to practice adult skills like independently resolving conflicts. Virtual environments don’t offer this practice—kids can just log off or leave a chat to avoid disputes—while crowding out time spent on real-world activities that do. Unsupervised physical play, with opportunity for low-cost mistakes and even some criticism and teasing, are crucial for learning interpersonal skills and building resilience.

Ironically, while we overemphasize protecting children from the slightest physical or emotional harm in the real world, the virtual world has greater potential for danger. In this realm, parents can’t reward kids with increasing levels of responsibility and independence as they get older. Age does not exist online; little more is needed than, say, checking a box without verification to access a webpage meant for those over 18.

Social media exploits our natural sensitivity to others’ opinions and actions. Haidt describes how evolutionary pressures have rewarded those who learn to conform and who pick the right people to copy. Millions of followers or likes on a post tell young people what they should do to fit in. Social media’s architecture is designed to make the most extreme content go viral. It’s easy to see how constant exposure to the pseudo-norms of a virtual environment, whether radical political ideas or unattainable standards of wealth, beauty, and success, can lead to sustained negative feelings.

The virality of social media presents other dangers. A social miscalculation among a few kids on the playground can help children calibrate their behavior; the same mistake on the Internet can result in thousands—or even millions—of harassing comments and will live online forever.