RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2020/05/18/the-contradiction-at-the-heart-of-hilary-mantels-the-mirror-and-the-light/

The Mirror and the Light, by Hilary Mantel (Henry Holt, 784 pp., $30)

Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall was a high-cultural phenomenon. The novel, published in 2009, retold the story of the downfall of Sir (Saint) Thomas More and the rise of Thomas Cromwell: A Man for All Seasons, but with the good guy and bad guy reversed. In Mantel’s telling, More was a religious fanatic, an embodiment of the deliberate, persecuting medieval darkness, while Cromwell was the new man, an omni-talented, self-made son of a blacksmith whose virtues were above all else moderation and practicality. Written with a brilliant combination of arresting detail and swift movement, the novel won the Man Booker Prize (the “British Pulitzer”), as did its 2012 sequel Bring Up the Bodies. The books spawned a Royal Shakespeare Company play and a BBC miniseries and became a worldwide sensation among the serious set.

Then — nothing. The third book in what was announced as a trilogy was supposed to come out in 2018. Then, 2017 brought rumors of delay . . . 2018 . . . 2019 . . . The literati thought they knew why. While the Wolf Hall novels are fiction, their characters are, of course, historical figures. And Thomas Cromwell, after triumphing over More and Anne Boleyn, overseeing the dissolution of the monasteries, procuring Henry VIII’s marriages to his third and fourth wives, and significantly advancing the cause of Protestantism in England, was executed by orders of that monarch on July 28, 1540. If Mantel finished her trilogy, in other words, she was going to have to kill her hero.

Now the third book, The Mirror and the Light, is here. Read page by page — that is to say, taking the measure of the book by the quality of the prose — it is another masterpiece, a worthy successor to its forebears. There are some reasons, however, to think that the rumors were right — that the death of Cromwell presented a challenge for Mantel. Of the novel’s 754 pages, there is not a hint of trouble for Cromwell until around the 600th, and the crisis leading to his death does not break until about the 700th. This would not be a problem were there some other narrative arc Mantel was intent on tracing. But there isn’t, really. The Mirror and the Light, unlike Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies, does not have a central conflict. In Wolf Hall, the clash with More and the struggle to secure Henry’s divorce and remarriage gave a narrative coherence to the work. In Bring Up the Bodies, Cromwell squared off in a zero-sum contest — death or absolute power — with Anne Boleyn. The Mirror and the Light begins where Bring Up the Bodies left off, just after the execution of Boleyn and her supposed lovers. Henry VIII, now a widower, is free to marry Jane Seymour, and does. Cromwell, having brought this state of affairs to pass, is master secretary (and soon lord privy seal), in fact if not in title the most powerful man in England.

https://quillette.com/2020/04/11/the-fate-of-rome-climate-disease-and-the-end-of-an-empire-a-review/

A review of The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease and the End of an Empire by Kyle Harper, Princeton University Press, 417 pages (October 2017)

Why did the Roman Empire fall? The classic answer is given by Edward Gibbon (1737 — 1794), in chapter 38 of the third volume of The History of the Fall and Decline of the Roman Empire (1776 — 1789):

The decline of Rome was the natural and inevitable effect of immoderate greatness. Prosperity ripened the principle of decay; the causes of destruction multiplied with the extent of conquest; and as soon as time or accident had removed the artificial supports, the stupendous fabric yielded to the pressure of its own weight.

Kyle Harper, Senior Vice President and Provost of the University of Oklahoma, seeks to complement Gibbon’s account by emphasising the role of nature, and specifically climate change and infectious disease, in the fall of Rome in his provocative, exceptionally well-written book The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease and the End of an Empire. Is Harper correct? Were plagues and climate events fatal for Rome?

Harper accepts the conventional view that Rome’s civilizational collapse began in the later second century AD, accelerated amidst chaos and bloodshed during the third century, and culminated in the humiliations of the fifth century, when Rome was famously sacked by barbarians, and the last, weak, insignificant Roman Emperor was pushed off the throne in AD 476.

The Fate of Rome does not neglect literary and archival sources, or archaeological evidence related to the fall of Rome; but Harper thinks historians have neglected “natural archives,” which is how he describes genome evidence from DNA, biological data (as found in bones and teeth of excavated ancient skeletons), tree rings, glaciers, marine sediments, and all other materials studied by environmental historians, geochemists, and other scientific researchers:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/well-worth-saving-review-displaced-academics-11586905987?mod=opinion_reviews_pos1

Five of the eight Ivy League universities are now led by self-identifying Jews: Harvard’s president is an observant Jew, sometimes Hillel, sometimes Chabad; Yale’s, a descendant of possibly the most learned rabbinical dynasty; Penn’s, the daughter of a German Orthodox Jew who escaped to America before the carnage; Brown’s, a Quaker convert to Judaism; Princeton’s, a former Catholic who learned as an adult of his German refugee mother’s Jewishness. The overtness, even the ubiquity, of these varied Jewish identities reflects a dramatic 75-year evolution in the status of Jews in American academia. And this shift intertwines with and reflects something broader still: a sea change in the texture of American academic life, a change that has brought with it new challenges to the academy’s current relevance.

Laurel Leff has written a sober and fair—but devastating—volume documenting the story’s start, without which its arc is difficult to grasp: the tragedy of hundreds of Jewish scholars and their kin who perished in Hitler’s death camps, in the ghettoes and in the streets, for want of a piece of paper inviting them to an American campus. The book’s title, “Well Worth Saving,” is an unfortunate phrase of the period that was often used to describe these scholars—even by the American philosopher and humanitarian activist Horace Kallen (1882-1974), a Prussian-Polish Jewish émigré who, among other like-minded academics in the 1930s and ’40s, helped to save some of them. In 1919, Kallen had been a founder of the New School for Social Research. He had also, five years earlier, helped to found the New Republic, a magazine of opinion that started life championing Louis Brandeis’s Supreme Court nomination against old-line Protestant opposition. As his history suggests, Kallen found no theoretical obstacle to a deep national character with particularistic threads enriching it.

Mikhal Dekel is author of a column on Jewish refugees in Iran posted on April 10,2020

When Iran Welcomed Jewish Refugees In the middle of World War II, Tehran became a haven for both Jewish and Catholic Polish refugees who were welcomed as they arrived from Soviet Central Asia. Mikhal Dekel

http://www.ruthfullyyours.com/2020/04/10/when-iran-welcomed-jewish-refugees-in-the-middle-of-world-war-ii-tehran-became-a-haven-for-both-jewish-and-catholic-polish-refugees-who-were-welcomed-as-they-arrived-from-soviet-central-asia-mikh/

https://www.jpost.com/Israel-News/Sami-Rohr-Prize-announces-finalists-for-2020-lite

The Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature, the largest book prize in the Jewish literary world, announced on Friday the four finalists for its 2020 prize for non-fiction writing.

The four finalists are Jerusalem Post Editor-in-Chief Yaakov Katz for his book “Shadow Strike” (St. Martin’s Press), Mikhal Dekel, a professor at City University of New York, for her book “Tehran Children” (W.W. Norton), Sarah Hurwitz, a former speechwriter for President Barack Obama for her book “Here All Along” (Spiegel & Grau) and Benjamin Balint, a research fellow at the Van Leer Institute for his book “Kafka’s Last Trial” (W.W.Norton).

https://www.amazon.com/s?k=The+Book+of+Humanitarian+Hoaxes%3A+Killing+America+with+%27Kindness%27+by+Linda+Goudsmit&ref=nb_sb_noss 
B&N:
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-book-of-humanitarian-hoaxes-linda-goudsmit/1136800447?ean=9780983542544

The Book of Humanitarian Hoaxes: Killing America with ‘Kindness’, exposes fifty of the most sinister leftist, Islamist, globalist interconnecting attacks on America deceitfully disguised as altruism.

Goudsmit’s warning is designed to ensure an informed American electorate in advance of the pivotal 2020 presidential election. 

The Book is a powerful éxpose of the deceptive policies and practices of the Leftist/Islamist/Globalist axis attempting to destroy America from within. Goudsmit’s unique talent is deciphering the many political hoaxes being played on us by those who present themselves as our advocates but who are, in fact, America’s enemies. This remarkable book tells us the many ways in which we’ve been had–but don’t know it. The Book of Humanitarian Hoaxes: Killing America with ‘Kindness’, describes the corrupt underbelly of the Leftist/Islamist/Globalist axis attacking America, American democracy, and America-first President Donald J. Trump. Written in her signature conversational style, each hoax chapter unmasks a distinct and destructive axis policy deceitfully presented to an unsuspecting public as humanitarian. Americans do not like being duped. Linda Goudsmit is the consummate truth-teller in an era of profound political deceit. The Book of Humanitarian Hoaxes: Killing America with ‘Kindness’ should be compulsory reading in advance of the crucial 2020 U.S. presidential election.

From Author Donald Allen:   Stay Safe!

To learn more about how to do that be sure to read my upcoming short book with the working title “Chuck Brook’s TOP10 Cybersecurity Secrets:”

https://dacybersecurity.com/blog/chuck-brooks-book/

Chuck Brooks is a thought leader, cybersecurity and technology evangelist, Forbes contributor, and just a nice person who is always willing to help the cybersecurity community. Also, he received Presidential Appointments for Executive Service by two U.S. Presidents and helped “stand up” Office of Legislative at The Department of Homeland Security.

You can join the waiting list today to get a huge discount and special bonuses during the official launch of the book:

https://dacybersecurity.com/blog/chuck-brooks-book/

Securelicious,
Donald Allen
dacybersecurity.com

https://pjmedia.com/spengler/steve-bryens-new-book-on-technology-security-and-strategy-is-must-reading/

Book Review: Essays in Technology, Security and Strategy, Vol. III, by Stephen D. Bryen with Shoshana Bryen. 537 pages. $19.95 paperback/$9.95 Kindle.

Steve Bryen is a brilliant and high-qualified defense analyst who cuts through the baloney and tells you exactly what is going on. His lead article today in Asia Times on coronavirus problem on the USS Theodore Roosevelt argues that the carrier never should have been sent to Vietnam, where the crew mingled with locals in the middle of an epidemic. The State Department had already advised U.S. citizens not to travel overseas, yet the Navy put the crew at risk by exposing them to the locals in what boiled down to a public relations exercise. As so many times in the past, Bryen writes about key issues that no-one else talks about.

His latest volume of essays, many published originally in Asia Times, is required reading for anyone who wants to understand how technology shapes national security. His range of expertise is as broad as his background. He was an engineer, fighter pilot, senior staff director of the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee, the executive director of a grassroots political organization, the head of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, the Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Trade Security Policy, and the founder and first director of the Defense Technology Security Administration during the Reagan years. His brilliant wife Shoshana Bryen is senior director of the Jewish Policy Center.