RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.jns.org/opinion/soldiering-on-for-the-jews-and-israel/
A new biography reveals the lifelong battles of Australian-Israeli warrior Isi Leibler.

(February 9, 2021 / JNS) Reading a biography about a friend is a mixed experience. On the one hand, the protagonist is familiar. On the other, he’s a complete stranger, whose story unfolds like that of a fictional character being introduced in a novel.

This is the sense of duality that I had while curled up with Lone Voice: The Wars of Isi Leibler, a tome by renowned Australian-Jewish historian Suzanne D. Rutland.

Before meeting Leibler in person 20 years ago, I knew about the human-rights activist from Australia and his long-standing fight on behalf of Soviet Jewry, his tireless battle against global anti-Semitism and his connection to the World Jewish Congress—an organization from which he subsequently resigned as vice president and whose financial corruption he would launch a campaign to expose.

I was also aware that he possessed one of the world’s largest private libraries of Jewish books, certainly the most extensive in Israel. Visions of a dimly lit room covered floor-to-ceiling in volumes of bibles bound in leather and gold, alongside works of the sages and interpretations of the Talmud, came to mind.
Judging by his aptly named “Candidly Speaking” columns in The Jerusalem Post—all brutally honest and hard-hitting—I imagined the man himself to be a daunting, scholarly figure around whom I would do well to watch my intellectual step.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/02/07/the-baby-boomers-dismal-legacy/

There is no generation about which so much has been said, written, filmed, and sung as the Baby Boomers; most of it by the Boomers themselves who have, from their youth, been absolutely enthralled with . . . themselves. 

Helen Andrews’ new book, Boomers, is a welcome corrective to the steady stream of hagiographic literature produced since the first Boomers picked up a pencil, a camera, and a guitar. It is at once beautifully written, incisive, entertaining, maddening, and flabbergasting. As she writes in the book’s introduction: “they tried to liberate us, and instead they left behind chaos.” I would add that Janis Joplin (of the Silent Generation) predicted this when she sang that freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose. But the Boomers weren’t listening.

If you want to understand the Baby Boom generation you might start with this epigram: Extremism in the defense of vice is our liberty. I don’t think anyone ever put it quite that way, but it could be a Boomer slogan. And it’s part of unlocking the secrets to their generation and to many of the problems they have inflicted on America. Never has any generation in this country—or perhaps any other—so monopolized every aspect of society, for so long, and for such selfish ends while congratulating each other on their selfless righteousness.

Tear apart the family, the churches, the charities, the schools, and everything else in your path; encourage mass drug use, promiscuous sex, and spend, spend, spend-materialism; even saddle your kids and grandkids with tens of trillions of dollars of debt to make sure you can keep the party going “Big Chill”-style, until the very last Boomers depart for the Strawberry fields where it’s always 1967. 

“‘There are endless nightmares of uncertainty,’ explained one. ‘The tensions,the nerve strain and fatigue, the all-demanding alertness of living a lie, these are [the agent’s]to meet, accept and control. They are never really conquered.’”

Quote from a former member of the SOE in war-torn France Sonia Purnell                                                                                             

Besides being a gripping tale of the Resistance in France during the Second World War, this is the story of Virginia Hall, an American woman, with an artificial leg, who operated behind enemy lines at a time when being a female in a combat zone was unusual, let alone one who was disabled. “If caught,” Ms. Purnell writes, “women were…subjected to the worst forms of torture the depraved Nazi mind-set could devise.”

Virginia Hall was the daughter of a wealthy Baltimore banker and a social-climbing mother. She was born in 1906 and like her mother was ambitious but directed her ambition “toward a career and exploring the world rather than bagging a feckless husband.” At age twenty, after one year at Radcliffe and one at Barnard, she moved to Paris and enrolled in the École Libre des Sciences Politiques. She spent three years in Europe, becoming fluent in French, German, Spanish and Italian. She came home and joined the State Department as a clerk. In 1931, she returned to Europe, working for State in Poland and Turkey. An accident in the fall of 1933, while on a hunting trip near the Aegean Sea, caused her to shoot herself in her left foot. Fearful of gangrene, doctors in Turkey amputated the leg below the knee.

In the spring of 1934, she was back in Maryland. Two years later, she rejoined the State Department and returned to Europe. With the Continent spinning toward war, she worked in Vienna. “Pigeonholed as a disabled woman of no importance, she resigned from the State Department in March 1939.” In February 1940, she joined the French 9th Artillery Regiment as an ambulance driver. In June 1941, when France was overrun, she returned to London and enlisted in the newly formed SOE (Special Operations Executive). By early September 1941 she was a spy in Lyon, France. She had found her métier.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/matt-margolis/2021/02/04/seriously-hunter-biden-memoir-called-beautiful-things-to-be-published-in-april-n1423082

The controversial scandal-plagued son of Joe Biden has a memoir coming out in April, and I can’t even.

A primary subject of his memoir,  titled Beautiful Things, will be his well-known issues with substance abuse. The book is being published by Gallery Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster. Last month, Simon & Schuster canceled Senator Josh Hawley’s book, in the aftermath of the Capitol riot.

Hunter Biden is currently under investigation by the Justice Department for tax issues, he refused to pay child support to a stripper he had a son with out of wedlock, and there were reports that Hunter Biden’s laptop (which he infamously left at a Delaware repair shop) allegedly contained inappropriate images of underage girls. In September, a Senate report linked him to a human trafficking ring, but Simon & Schuster did not cancel Biden’s memoir from publication.

The most interesting thing about this memoir is the fact that it was acquired in the fall of 2019, but was kept under wraps as Hunter Biden’s business dealings became a significant liability for Joe Biden’s presidential campaign.

Several left-wing authors were given advance copies of the memoir and provided predictably smarmy blurbs for it. Stephen King called it a “harrowing and compulsively readable memoir,” and credits Hunter Biden with proving that even the son of a president “can take a ride on the pink horse down nightmare alley.”

The book description, available via Amazon on an inconspicuous product page, reads as follows:

“I come from a family forged by tragedies and bound by a remarkable, unbreakable love,” Hunter Biden writes in this deeply moving memoir of addiction, loss, and survival.

https://thefederalist.com/2021/02/04/hunter-biden-clinches-deal-with-simon-schuster-after-it-nuked-sen-josh-hawleys-book/

President Joe Biden’s son Hunter, who previously worked on the board of Burisma under the Obama administration for reasons still unclear, is set to release a tell-all memoir titled “Beautiful Things” on April 6 through Simon & Schuster.

This comes on the heels of the same publisher previously dropping Missouri Republican Sen. Josh Hawley’s “The Tyranny of Big Tech” book deal after the Capitol breach in early January. “As a publisher … we cannot support Senator Hawley after his role in what became a dangerous threat to our democracy and freedom,” the publisher said. Today, what evidently earns someone a platform to share their story is quite an arbitrary process, based on wild partisanship.

Hunter Biden’s book was acquired by Gallery Books in the fall of 2019 and will reportedly detail the paternity suit from 28-year-old Arkansas woman Lunden Alexis Roberts, who petitioned in court for Hunter to provide health care and financial support for his alleged son. The book will primarily discuss Hunter’s drug abuse problems through the years, however.

Hunter entered rehab in 2003 and headed to Tijuana, Mexico, in 2014 for treatment using psychoactive alkaloid drugs illegal in the United States. The Biden son was notably discharged from the Navy Reserve in June 2013, after testing positive for cocaine in a routine drug test. His struggles with addiction continued for several years, and he was found with a crack pipe in a rental car in 2016.

“In his harrowing and compulsively readable memoir, Hunter Biden proves again that anybody — even the son of a United States President — can take a ride on the pink horse down nightmare alley,” acclaimed author Stephen King wrote in a blurb on the cover.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/victoria-taft/2021/02/02/andy-ngo-unmasks-antifa-in-new-book-and-warns-antifa-lives-and-thrives-only-if-america-dies-n1422325

Antifa is the muscle, the Southern Poverty Law Center and other non-profits help pick the targets, and anyone who points out their totalitarian intolerance is called a fascist, promptly canceled, or burned in effigy. That’s the crazy Leftist triangulation playing out these days on the streets of Portland and in many other riot-prone American cities. Journalist Andy Ngo knows this all too well.

The angry red communist comrades of antifa and BLM have tried to cancel the Portland-based journalist but Ngo told PJ Media that it obviously hasn’t worked out too well for them. Antifa “protesters” beat him senseless and sent him to the hospital with brain damage in 2019, engaged in a sustained smear campaign against him due to his coverage of the group, and basically put out a hit on him, but Andy Ngo’s still standing. And thriving.

Instead of being canceled, Ngo wrote a book about antifa and BLM. Unmasked: Antifa’s Radical Plan to Destroy Democracy has just hit bookstores.

Though I’ve watched the Portland protest scene go from the chill Friday-at-4 drum circles to shrieking animal rights protesters, Occupy encampments, May Day melees, and antifa trying to burn down my hometown, Ngo’s book is a valuable resource and well told.