RUTHFULLY YOURS

Millard’s book is wonderful reading about the Spekes/Burton search for the source of the Nile. Burton is described as a swashbuckling, romantic hero, but he had a vicious side not documented in Millard’s book…..rsk

https://www.haaretz.com/2008-12-11/ty-article/musings-the-other-richard-burton/0000017f-dc0b-df9c-a17f-fe1bf0cd0000

“However, the manuscript with the most inflammatory content, a brand which, as it were, was a brand plucked from the flame, has been preserved to this day. It is entitled “Human Sacrifice among the Sephardine (sic) or Eastern Jews.” In it, Burton, one of the most educated men of his time, had given credence to that most ignorant of medieval prejudices: the blood libel. How he came to this is a story on its own. The Damascus Affair, about which he wrote, occurred in 1840. A Capuchin friar disappeared with his servant, never to be seen again. With the help of the fiercely anti-Semitic French consul, 13 Jews were arrested and confessed under torture to sacrificing the friar for religious purposes. The cause of the Jewish victims was taken up by the great and the good, and they were released and vindicated. By the time Burton wrote his inflammatory pamphlet, the Damascus Affair was history.”

Sir Richard Francis Burton (1821-1890) was one of the most intriguing of all Victorian adventurers. A truly extraordinary character, he was a spy, scholar, linguist, explorer, religious fanatic and pornographer. He was said to have learned 25 languages and 40 dialects. Burton spent much of his life as a soldier in India. With his excellent Hindustani, Persian, Gujarati, Urdu and Arabic, it was natural that he should be an active player in what became known as the “Great Game” – the espionage activity on the northwestern frontier of India popularized by Kipling in his novel “Kim.” To misquote the title of the old BBC adventure serial, he could well be described as “Dick Burton, special agent.”

https://spectatorworld.com/book-and-art/faulty-towers-education-will-bunch/

One of the few issues about which the American left and right agree is that higher education is, as Orwell would say, in a bad way. But even in that source of agreement lurk countless points of dispute, regarding the sources of dysfunction (corporate greed, grade inflation, libezoomers?) and possible solutions (ending tenure, forgiving debt, creating safe spaces?).

In After the Ivory Tower Falls: How College Broke the American Dream and Blew Up Our Politics — and How to Fix It, Will Bunch, a columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirer, argues that the cause of the higher-education crisis is conceptual: we see higher education as a personal privilege rather than a public good, something to be earned rather than a right that is owed. Bunch sees a straight line connecting the increase in college tuition and student debt to America’s growing social, cultural and political divisions.

To make his case, Bunch interviews people from various demographics (almost all from his home state of Pennsylvania) as illustrations of the different ways higher education — or its lack — affects everyday Americans. He also provides a history of American higher education from the end of World War Two to the present day. This history begins with the idealism of the G.I. Bill and President Truman’s Commission on Higher Education in the 1940s, both of which expressed optimism about the role of college in strengthening American democracy. But in the 1960s, students realized the flaws in this democracy — the ways that America fell short of its ideals — and pro- tested accordingly.

World War I  began on 28 July 1914 and ended on 11 November 1918. One of the best books about this epic event was written by Barbara Tuchman. I am reading it again and her narrative, her elegant prose and her stirring depictions stand the rigorous tests of time…..rsk

PULITZER PRIZE WINNER • “A brilliant piece of military history which proves up to the hilt the force of Winston Churchill’s statement that the first month of World War I was ‘a drama never surpassed.’”—Newsweek
 
Selected by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best nonfiction books of all time

In this landmark account, renowned historian Barbara W. Tuchman re-creates the first month of World War I: thirty days in the summer of 1914 that determined the course of the conflict, the century, and ultimately our present world. Beginning with the funeral of Edward VII, Tuchman traces each step that led to the inevitable clash. And inevitable it was, with all sides plotting their war for a generation. Dizzyingly comprehensive and spectacularly portrayed with her famous talent for evoking the characters of the war’s key players, Tuchman’s magnum opus is a classic for the ages.

https://www.manhattan-institute.org/mangual-criminal-injustice

In his impassioned-yet-measured first book, Rafael A. Mangual offers an incisive critique of America’s increasingly radical criminal justice reform movement, and makes a convincing case against the pursuit of “justice” through mass-decarceration and depolicing.

After a summer of violent protests in 2020—sparked by the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Rayshard Brooks—a dangerously false narrative gained mainstream acceptance: Criminal justice in the United States is overly punitive and racially oppressive. But, the harshest and loudest condemnations of incarceration, policing, and prosecution are often shallow and at odds with the available data. And the significant harms caused by this false narrative are borne by those who can least afford them: black and brown people who are disproportionally the victims of serious crimes.

In Criminal (In)Justice, Rafael A. Mangual offers a more balanced understanding of American criminal justice, and cautions against discarding traditional crime control measures. A powerful combination of research, data-driven policy journalism, and the author’s lived experiences, this book explains what many reform advocates get wrong, and illustrates how the misguided commitment to leniency places America’s most vulnerable communities at risk.

The stakes of this moment are incredibly high. Ongoing debates over criminal justice reform have the potential to transform our society for a generation—for better or for worse. Grappling with the data—and the sometimes harsh realities they reflect—is the surest way to minimize the all-too-common injustices plaguing neighborhoods that can least afford them.

https://www.persuasion.community/p/coleman-hughes-on-how-america-racializes#details

Coleman Hughes is the host of Conversations with Coleman. Racialized, his first book, is forthcoming from Penguin Random House.

EXCERPT:

Hughes: I think we should foolproof our systems against bigotry as much as possible. So I gave the example of cameras on traffic lights handing out tickets instead of cops. If racist cops are the problem, take the cop out of the equation, have it be automated. If you’re a teacher, grade your students blind, so that racial bias could never possibly be a problem. There was a news organization that did a careful sting operation on the housing market, where they sent trained actors of different races into a real estate office and saw how they were treated differently. We should fund and do more things like that. Make society more and more like a blind audition in order to take racial bias out of the equation.

Education is one of the only ways in which the state gets to intervene in a person’s odds of success at a very early age. One of my critiques of those I would call elite woke writers and thinkers is that many of their policies and solutions take people from the age of 18 and rig their life racially after that, in the name of helping them—things like affirmative action and diversity inclusion initiatives for adults. But you actually have far more influence over a person’s life trajectory from the ages of zero to 15. Those are the most crucial years of intervention, as a person’s brain is forming. Of the $23 million in New York that was earmarked for putting teachers through “anti bias” training, every cent of that wasted money should have been put towards early childhood initiatives, cognitively rich universal pre-K programs, and experiments in schooling like charter schools, towards making the environment for poor kids from ages zero to 15 and 18 as safe and as cognitively rich as possible. That word “safety” is another crucial one. Nothing in life matters if you feel unsafe, if you live in a neighborhood with lots of crime, and everything else is secondary and tertiary. It is one of the biggest disparities between the poor and the wealthy. In fact, what the wealthy use a lot of their money to buy a premium for is to live in safe neighborhoods. 

https://dianebederman.com/bullies-of-woke-and-their-assault-on-mental-health/

New English review is pleased to announce the publication of our forty-fourth title: Bullies of Woke and Their Assault on Mental Health by Diane Weber Bederman.

Bullies of Woke and Their Assault on Mental Health is a ground-breaking work documenting the serious harm the ”Progressive Left” is doing to the mental health of our innocent children who are subject to the unrelenting pressure to conform to woke ideology as never before. Bederman is unsparing in her critique of the absurdity, anti-Americanism and anti-Western cultural ideas emanating from the Woke brigade. Our children are literally being bullied to death—committing suicide rather than endure the viscous and aggressive bullying to which they are routinely subject these days. Critical Race Theory, Transgenderism and the heavy-handed efforts to silence dissent are deadly foes of what was once broadly considered to be classical liberalism. Bederman’s book is simultaneously a guidebook to the modern woke movement and a call to action for the common-sense, silent majority to rise-up in opposition and restore our Judeo-Christian bedrock values in our homes, our schools, and our nations.

Advance Praise for Bullies of Woke:

The Bullies of Woke is Diane Weber Bederman’s most passionate defense yet of the West’s embattled, Judeo-Christian values in the face of the religious fanatics of “wokeness.” In this short but wide-ranging book, she empowers us to resist the Progressive bullying of Cancel Culture, Critical Race Theory, the abuse of language, the war on the traditional family, and more. For anyone beginning to despair that our civilization is lost, Diane Bederman points the way forward, with wisdom, compassion, and a fighting spirit.

—Mark Tapson, the Shillman Fellow on Popular Culture for the David Horowitz Freedom Center

https://www.wsj.com/articles/citizen-chronicler-of-the-american-story-11660170030?mod=opinion_lead_pos11

What would we do without experts? The era of Covid has seen immense damage inflicted on Americans by some of the most highly credentialed people in our society. So let’s remember a remarkable man who didn’t leave something as important as U.S. history to the professoriate.

Bill Eville reported this week for the Vineyard Gazette:

David McCullough, a towering force in American literature and biography, winner of the President’s Medal of Freedom, two Pulitzer Prizes and two National Book Awards, died on August 7. He was 89 years old.
He died of natural causes at home in Hingham, the family confirmed, where he had lived for the past few years, with all five children by his side.

Candice Millard remembers in the Atlantic:

The first book I read by McCullough was John Adams, one of his many masterworks that begins with men on the move. “In the cold, nearly colorless light of a New England winter,” he wrote, “two men on horseback traveled the coast road below Boston, heading north.” For me, that was all it took. I wanted to know who these men were, where they were going, what was going to happen next. I did not care that the book was nearly 800 pages long. I was hooked.

So were countless others. McCullough didn’t spend a career on campus, and readers may have been better for it. In 2003 Librarian of Congress James Billington wrote:

David McCullough is the citizen chronicler of the American story for our time… As an independent scholar, he is not beholden to any of the ideological causes or methodological fads that often take possession of otherwise good historians in bureaucratized academia–and cause them to end up writing more for each other than for a general audience. Unlike many revisionist historians, McCullough basically likes what he is writing about; yet he seeks to clear away myths for which he can find no factual basis.

https://www.city-journal.org/rafael-mangual-discusses-new-book-criminal-in-justice

My new book, Criminal (In)Justice: What the Push for Decarceration and Depolicing Gets Wrong and Who It Hurts Most, is not about me. It’s first and foremost about the far too many victims of the sorts of injustices that inspired the title—injustices like the 2019 murder of a young, unarmed Chicago mother allegedly shot by a parolee with nine prior felony convictions (including for second-degree murder); like the little boy forced to run for his life in that same city this summer, backpack in tow, as he dodged bullets meant for the group of young men he just happened to be walking past at the time; like the young woman who police say was stabbed to death in her Lower East Side apartment earlier this year by a homeless career criminal with not one, not two, but three open cases; and like the incredibly strong young woman robbed of a husband (Detective Jason Rivera) many of us watched her eulogize after he and his partner, Wilbert Mora, were murdered by a repeat offender out on probation. I wrote this book largely because I was tired of reading stories about heinous crimes carried out by offenders who had no business being out on the street—stories the data make clear are not outliers—and I wanted to do something about it.