RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/273631/thomas-sowells-discrimination-and-disparities-walter-williams

My longtime friend and colleague Dr. Thomas Sowell has just published a revised and enlarged edition of “Discrimination and Disparities.” It lays waste to myth after myth about the causes of human differences not only in the United States but around the globe. Throughout the book, Sowell shows that socioeconomic outcomes differ vastly among individuals, groups and nations in ways that cannot be easily explained by any one factor, whether it’s genetics, sex or race discrimination or a history of gross mistreatment that includes expulsion and genocide.

In his book “The Philadelphia Negro” (1899), W.E.B. Du Bois posed the question as to what would happen if white people lost their prejudices overnight. He said that it would make little difference to most blacks. He said: “Some few would be promoted, some few would get new places — the mass would remain as they are” until the younger generation began to “try harder” and the race “lost the omnipresent excuse for failure: prejudice.”

Sowell points out that if historical injustices and persecution were useful explanations of group disadvantage, Jews would be some of the poorest and least-educated people in the world today. Few groups have been victimized down through history as have the Jews. Despite being historical targets of hostility and lethal violence, no one can argue that as a result Jews are the most disadvantaged people.

https://www.city-journal.org/robert-caro

Working, by Robert Caro (Knopf, 207 pp., $25)

In Working, Robert Caro tells us how, exactly, it is done. “Truth takes time,” Caro writes. He began his epic study of Lyndon Johnson in 1976, and now, 43 years later, having published four volumes, he is at work on the fifth, which tells of LBJ’s presidency and the disaster of Vietnam. He has interrupted that labor to offer Working.

If I were teaching journalism or nonfiction writing, especially the writing of history and biography, I would build a course around Caro, with Working as my primary text and scenes from his Johnson books as case studies. I would tell my students: “In a given situation, ask yourself, ‘How would Caro handle this?’” The course would teach Caro’s instincts and methods. It’s possible that he is all the education that a writer in this line of work requires.

First, choose the right subject, he advises. Read all available books on the subject. Then read all magazine and journal articles. After that, all national newspaper coverage of the subject—then local coverage. Plunge now into the documents: “turn every page,” as a newspaper editor advised the young Caro long ago. You never know what you might stumble upon. Luck emerges from diligence. In the LBJ Library in Austin, pages from 32 million documents awaited turning. Caro and his wife Ina, his research partner, spent years there, turning pages—panning for gold.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/17/books/review/adina-hoffman-julien-gorbach-ben-hecht-biography.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share

BEN HECHT
Fighting Words, Moving Pictures
By Adina Hoffman

THE NOTORIOUS BEN HECHT
Iconoclastic Writer and Militant Zionist
By Julien Gorbach

For understandable reasons, biographies about Ben Hecht have focused
almost exclusively on his screenwriting career in Hollywood. And why
wouldn’t they? Consider a few of his credits: “Underworld,” directed
by Josef von Sternberg, for which Hecht won the first Academy Award.
(Not his first Academy Award, the first Academy Award ever given for
best story. The year was 1927.) “Scarface,” “The Front Page,”
“Twentieth Century,” “Design for Living,” “Wuthering Heights,” “His
Girl Friday,” “Spellbound,” “Notorious.” And that’s just films with
his name on them. Uncredited, he script-doctored countless others,
including “Stagecoach,” “Gone With the Wind,” “A Star Is Born” (1937)
and “Roman Holiday.”

Across four decades, Hecht worked on about 200 movies. He helped
establish the ground rules for entire genres, including the gangster
film, the newspaper picture, the screwball comedy and postwar film
noir. Jean-Luc Godard said “he invented 80 percent of what is used in
Hollywood movies today.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2019/05/06/socialisms-rise-and-fall-heaven-on-earth-book-review/

The volume here reviewed is the second edition of a book first published in 2002. I reviewed it favorably (with some reservations) in 2003. A good case can be made for the new edition, given the survival of socialist ideals and the persisting disagreements about their nature and realizability. It remains of interest why people in different parts of the world are still attracted to these ideals and why the same ideals have been so difficult to implement. Of special interest is what Joshua Muravchik calls the “afterlife” of socialism — what happened to these ideals and political aspirations after the political systems supposedly dedicated to their realization, such as the Soviet Union, ceased to exist.

As the reader is informed in the preface, the new edition is largely unchanged, except for the addition of an epilogue, some updating of the chapter on the kibbutzim (collective farms of modern Israel), and the correction of small errors.

The difficulty of coming to grips with the subject — that is, the proper understanding of the nature of socialist ideals and their realizability — has not diminished since the book was first published. The problem begins with the widely held, undifferentiated views of socialism shared by most Americans. They are unaware of the fundamental differences between authoritarian (or totalitarian) state socialism embedded in one-party systems, such as the former Soviet one or the Chinese one under Mao, and social-democratic societies, such as those in Scandinavia.

https://quillette.com/2019/04/19/george-faludy-hungarian-poet-and-hero-for-our-times/

Had the poet George Faludy not written in his native Hungarian—arguably the most impenetrable of European languages—he would, as many have argued, be world famous. He died aged 95 in 2006, his life spanning the First and Second World Wars, the Russian revolution, and the Nazi and communist takeovers of his country.

Having achieved literary fame at 20, he would be imprisoned by both regimes and spend much of his life as an exile in France, Morocco, America (where he was a tail-gunner for the U.S. Airforce), and Canada, where he fled communism, only to find his lectures picketed and disrupted by campus leftists to whom his experience was an inconvenient truth. A ladies’ man all his life, he surprised the world by suddenly entering a gay relationship with Eric, a Russian ballet dancer, who’d fallen in love with Faludy in print and then rushed across the globe to find him.

In his 90s, after communism fell and Faludy, returning to Budapest, achieved living legend status, he married a poetess 70 years his junior with whom he produced his verses right up to his death. Faludy ignored the rulebook, spurred on by the knowledge that a man like himself would never exist again. He was right.