RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://quillette.com/2019/01/26/

In 1955, when a flushing toilet was still considered too offensive for the eyes of the movie-going public, it’s no surprise that a blackly comic novel about sex with children would cause a stir. Enter Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, the effusively written story of a 37-year-old literature professor who marries a widow in order to gain access to Lolita, her 12-year-old daughter. The star of Lolita is not Lolita herself, but Humbert Humbert, who hides his obsession with adolescent girls under a mask of tweedy old-world erudition. Humbert uses his position as narrator to lecture the reader on the many noble aspects of adult-on-child romance, and to extol his love for his adopted daughter/concubine. To many, Nabokov remains “the guy who wrote that book about pedophilia.”

Following its publication, Lolita was ignored, and then banned. Britain led the way, confiscating all copies of the novel entering the country, and France followed suit. Only months after its release did Lolita receive its first positive review from a respectable paper, the Sunday Times.

Responding to the Sunday Times, John Gordon, editor of the Sunday Express, spoke for Lolita’s moral critics: “Without doubt it is the filthiest book I have ever read. Sheer unrestrained pornography… Anyone who published it or sold it here would certainly go to prison. I am sure the Sunday Times would approve, even though it abhors censorship as much as I do.”

The first edition of Lolita was printed by Olympia Press, a publishing house where the pornographic bumped elbows with the merely provocative. Nabokov was not the first serious writer to take refuge with the seedy publisher: William S. Burroughs’s Naked Lunch, Samuel Beckett’s Molloy and Robert Kaufman’s exposé Inside Scientology all had their first editions at Olympia. The Olympia imprint, however, did little to improve Lolita’s credibility.

In the 2010s, as hand-wringing over the moral effects of art has grown fashionable once more, Lolita has been subjected to fresh scrutiny. In Russia, an ascendant religious Right has sought to discredit Nabokov as an un-Russian cosmopolitan and purveyor of deviance. The Nabokov Museum in St. Petersburg has suffered particular abuse, ranging from graffiti accusing Nabokov of pedophilia to having vodka bottles containing Bible verses thrown through its windows.

http://thefederalist.com/2019/01/25/rediscovering-the-virtues-of-andrew-jackson/

Few Americans in the country’s history have received the polarized interpretations that President Andrew Jackson has. Once revered as the quintessential frontier hero, a statesman who saved rugged individualism from the corrupt forces of corporatists and government centralizers, Jackson has more recently been maligned as a brutal white supremacist who epitomized white, capitalist, and Southern bigotry in the 19th century.

On this point, there is an unlikely alliance between some conservatives and Marxists. Dinesh D’Souza attacks Jackson as an early “progressive Democrat” who ushered in the Democratic Party’s legacy of genocide. The neo-Marxist Howard Zinn, similarly, scorns him as a “slave owner,” a “killer of Indians,” and “the architect of the Trail of Tears.” Adding to the confusion, Jackson has been appropriated by rather unlikely allies, such as the government centralizers of the New Deal era, who argued that Jackson anticipated the New Deal’s concentration of power in the hands of the presidency for the purpose of fulfilling the will of the majority.

Against the facile misinterpretations and half-truths touted both by friends and foes of President Jackson, Bradley Birzer’s In Defense of Andrew Jackson offers a thoughtful, refreshing, and timely analysis of our hopelessly misunderstood seventh president. Birzer, a historian at Hillsdale College, paints a vivid portrait of Jackson as both a man and as a statesman.

He should be perceived, Birzer demonstrates, not as the ancestor of majoritarian New Deal democracy but as a principled defender of traditional American republicanism. Eloquently written and amply supported by historical evidence, In Defense of Andrew Jackson serves as a sorely needed reminder of the republican principles that inspired so many Americans in the 19th century—principles that Americans need desperately.

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2019/02/11/churchill-walking-with-destiny-book-review/

Churchill: Walking with Destiny, by Andrew Roberts (Viking, 1,152 pp., $40)

We might ask ourselves which is worse — disdain for Winston Churchill or simple ignorance of this colossal figure and his place in history. Ignorance may be unsurprising in a period when, as a recent poll shows, many young people think Churchill a character from fiction. But the disdain can come only from minds corrupted by propaganda and laced with ingratitude for Western civilization and, just as much, for those who have sacrificed for its defense in those darker days before our own brilliantly flabby, righteous age arrived. The fact that astronaut Scott Kelly can be slapped down for tweeting a quote by Churchill (“In victory, magnanimity”) on grounds that the great man was so clearly a “racist” is regrettable enough. That the ill-schooled Kelly so quickly apologized to trolls tells us much about the desperately low tone of our culture these days.

So perhaps yet another biography of Churchill, one of the most written-up men of the last century — this is the 1,010th biography, Roberts notes — doesn’t need to justify itself after all. This is true most especially when the British historian Andrew Roberts writes it. Churchill’s world and its environs have been so richly and perspicaciously documented by Roberts for decades that the real oddity would be his reaching the end of a fruitful career as a historian of vast events and great men with no such tome to his credit.

And a tome any proper biography of Churchill must be. Little else can do justice to a man whose stupendous political journey lasted over 60 years and who died just past his 90th birthday. With nearly a thousand pages of chiseled prose, Roberts allows himself the room to lay out all the highlights and not a few sidelights of his subject’s long and varied life, following him from a benighted childhood and on to Harrow and Sandhurst, through military and journalistic triumphs and misadventures from Cuba to Sudan, India, and South Africa, and then by the age of 25 to Parliament, from which point the rest would be history. The result is a tour de force of scrupulous selection and astute appraisal, perhaps the best full-scale biography to date in a field where the competition has been crowded and stiff.

Support for Nazism in a post-World War I-weary America was far more extensive than previously realized. In his new book, Hitler’s American Friends: The Third Reich’s Supporters in the United States, Bradley W. Hart reveals the sizable network of Nazi sympathizers, spies and supporters in the US during the 1930s and early 1940s.

Using newly available archives, Hart, an assistant professor at California State University, Fresno, reveals how key figures in US government, business, academia and the priesthood – along with German Americans – aspired to bring Nazi ideology to the US and keep the country out of World War II. Hart pores through unsealed archives and personal papers to tell the story of Hitler’s domestic advocates. Prominent isolationist groups – the German American Bund, the Friends of the New Germany, the Silver Legion and the America First Committee – politicians, corporations and universities, plus leaders such as industrialist Henry Ford, famed aviator Charles Lindbergh and celebrity priest Father Charles Coughlin, endeavored to advance Nazi ideology and cultivate support for the Third Reich in America. These individuals and entities not only pushed for isolationism and neutrality, they also distributed German propaganda, some with assistance from the German Embassy in Washington and German agents within the US.

Between 1933 and 1935, the Friends of New Germany – with an armed wing that engaged in brawls and painted swastikas on Manhattan synagogues – recruited 5,000 members, established two newspapers, and founded branches in five cities. After US authorities targeted the group’s leader for deportation, the group’s prominence was replaced by the German American Bund, with members largely drawn from recent German immigrants.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/01/book-review-leaders-myth-and-reality-stanley-mcchrystal/

In the new Leaders: Myth and Reality, history outshines theory despite the best efforts of McChrystal and his co-authors.

Leadership is the religion of America’s ambitious. Middle managers, hedge-fund executives, and Silicon Valley entrepreneurs alike make pilgrimage to conferences and peruse the bestselling breviaries on the subject. This month, high-school seniors who submitted college applications await judgment from admissions committees evaluating their “leadership experience.”

This societal obsession is not new. During the 19th century, sales of Plutarch’s Lives — the classic second-century study of great men — trailed only those of the Bible. And for all its misuse as a concept, leadership remains a desirable skill today, especially in wartime, for reasons Plutarch understood well. Describing the life of the Greek general Eumenes, he wrote: “As soon as the soldiers saw him they saluted him in their Macedonian dialect, and took up their shields, and striking them with their pikes, gave a great shout; inviting the enemy to come on, for now they had a leader.”

Few Americans today have led troops into battle. Fewer still have fought in multiple wars. During his 35-year career, U.S. Army general Stanley McChrystal led multinational forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, earning multiple times three medals — the Defense Distinguished Service Medal (twice), the Defense Superior Service Medal (twice), and the Legion of Merit (thrice) — that most soldiers never once receive. Four decades after he began fighting America’s wars, he remains active in American public life. He runs a leadership-advisory firm, frequents cable talk shows, teaches at Yale, and publishes books. In his latest, Leaders: Myth and Reality, he and coauthors Jason Mangone and Jeff Eggers turn to the study of leadership.

With Mangone and Eggers, themselves veterans (of the Marine Corps and Navy, respectively), McChrystal takes up the study of 13 deceased leaders. Adopting Plutarch’s style, they pair leaders for comparison: Maximilien Robespierre and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi are the Zealots, Martin Luther and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. are the Reformers, and so on.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/code-name-lise-review-the-wars-most-decorated-woman-11547245771

In October 1942, Odette Sansom, a housewife turned British spy, was holed up on Gibraltar waiting for passage to Nazi-occupied France to begin her mission. She had left her three daughters at a convent school in England, a decision so painful, she later said, that it paled in comparison to Nazi torture. She had endured training, learning to shoot, detonate explosives, encode messages and navigate by compass at night. She had tried and failed four times to get to France. At last she was just a boat ride away, but the Polish seaman charged with taking her refused.

She was a woman, he said. France was no place for her. Would she like to go dancing with him in Gibraltar instead?
Code Name: Lise

By Larry Loftis
Gallery, 360 pages, $27

Sansom was relentless. She would get there even if she had to swim, she told him. He commented that she would look good in a bathing suit. In the end, she did the only thing she could—she got him so drunk that he gave in.

Odette Sansom, née Brailly, would go on to become the most decorated woman of World War II—a member of the Order of the British Empire, a Chevalier de la Légion d’honneur, and the first woman awarded the George Cross, an award for “acts of the greatest heroism.” Her story was first told in print in 1949, followed by a film re-enactment the next year that made her a national heroine. It has been retold many times since. In “Code Name: Lise,” Larry Loftis tells it again for a new generation, reweaving the usual account of her wartime activities into a kind of nonfiction thriller.

It is a story that is inherently thrilling. “Shortly after ten the mist began to dissipate,” Mr. Loftis begins, “leaving them partially exposed.” He then flashes back to give a glimpse of Sansom’s childhood. Born in Amiens, France, she grew up visiting her father’s grave every Sunday with her brother and grandparents. A war hero, he had been killed in action when she was 6. When war returns, her grandfather said, it will be your duty to do as well as your father did.

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2019/01-02/whos-afraid-of-the-big-bad-trump/

While some folks talk a big game about principles, what they really prefer is someone socking it to their enemies. Donald Trump won in 2016 because he could be relied on to punch every conceited political moraliser and mediocre pseudo-intellectual who attempted to stand in his way.

Fear: Trump in the White House
by Bob Woodward
Simon & Schuster, 2018, 448 pages, $45
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Bob Woodward’s account of the Trump White House, provocatively titled Fear, is not a very interesting book. For one thing, the title is grandiose, and is predicated on the fallacious assumption that the best way to understand Donald Trump is to take him at his word. The back of the dust-jacket provides the quotation from which the title is drawn, a remark Trump made (one of a whirlwind of contradictory and context-pandering remarks) during the 2016 campaign: “Real power is—I don’t even want to use the word—fear.”

Naturally, the book’s marketers were probably trying to play up the image of Trump the authoritarian strongman, possibly even a fascist, a recurrent fantasy that those with little political acumen relish in peddling. As others have pointed out, such tough-guy talk from Trump actually springs from an adolescent desire to play the tough guy (his favourite film is reputedly The Godfather), and so he places a premium on words like respect and fear and—my favourite of his rare terms of adulation—tough cookie.

This review appears in the current edition of Quadrant.
Click here to subscribe and avoid the paywall

Michael Wolff’s book Fire and Fury had the first-in-best-dressed quality of confirming our worst fears about Trump—his inherent ridiculousness, his abnormal inattentiveness, and his propensity to take as most valuable the advice he received most recently. So Woodward has nothing new to offer here.

Woodward’s prose is clear but leaden. He’s less a writer than a conduit for information (which isn’t the worst thing in the world: boring and clear writing is often necessary, but it hardly makes for engrossing reading).

Fundamentally, there’s nothing I read in Fear that I felt I didn’t already know—with the exception of the information regarding Trump’s inability to grasp the linkage between trade policy and foreign policy. The book opens with a terrifying account of Trump’s near foreign-policy debacle in demanding to withdraw from the KORUS free-trade agreement between the United States and South Korea. As is so often the case in foreign affairs, economic relationships are part of the quid pro quo that goes into securing a profitable strategic military position in a country. Abandon KORUS and you risk compromising a key strategic foothold in the Korean peninsula—a foothold essential to the United States’ early detection of nuclear operations by the North.

But even here, my assumption before and throughout the Trump presidency is that his worst behaviour will be circumscribed by the often eminently sensible team of advisers he has around him, chiefly Jim Mattis (thankfully, Trump is more than usually deferential when it comes to men in uniform) but many others, too.

Trump’s chief economic adviser, Gary Cohn, is an amusing character in the book, stealing documents off Trump’s desk when he thought it better that The Donald didn’t see them, as in the KORUS case, where Trump had a draft letter on his desk signalling withdrawal from the agreement:

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/01/john-cleese-of-monty-python-book-review/

A new book by Monty Python’s John Cleese revisits the wide variety of topics he delved into in the course of his two decades as a Cornell professor. Monty Python’s John Cleese, for many years a Cornell professor, weighs in brilliantly on a wide assortment of topics.

In 1986, John Cleese saw an ad in a Los Angeles magazine that claimed the following: “Buddhism gives you the competitive edge!” The oblivious machismo proved inspiring when he created the character of Otto, the dimwit thug in A Fish Called Wanda, whom Kevin Kline won an Academy Award for playing.

That ad captured Cleese’s attention because he has done a lot of thinking about religion and the sometimes curious gap between the lessons taught by religious leaders and the lessons learned by some followers. Cleese has done a lot of thinking about a lot of things, and he revisits his various fields of study with an engaging curiosity and able wit. Everything from the science of facial recognition to the art of screenwriting turns up in his slender but brilliant new book Professor at Large: The Cornell Years.

Cleese studied science when he entered the University of Cambridge, switched to law while he was there, graduated, did some other things, and in 1999 became a professor-at-large at Cornell University, where he lectured intermittently on a variety of subjects for nearly 20 years. The book collects transcripts of seven of those appearances, four of which are actually conversations between Cleese and someone else.

https://quillette.com/2019/01/05/how-the-self-esteem-

Will Storr is an award-winning journalist and novelist. His work has appeared in outlets such as the Guardian, the Sunday Times, the New Yorker, and Esquire. His latest book is Selfie: How We Became so Self-Obsessed and What it’s Doing to Us. As a psychologist who studies the self and related topics, I was excited to read the book and was not disappointed. I highly recommend it. Below is an interview I conducted with Mr. Storr about Selfie.

Clay Routledge: What made you interested in researching and writing a book focused on the self?

Will Storr: My previous book, The Unpersaudables, was an investigation into how intelligent people come to believe crazy things. It focused on the ways we become intellectually stuck. I concluded that we don’t really choose the things we believe—at least not those things that are core to our worldview. What we believe is just part of the accident of who we are. In an important way, our core beliefs and our self are indivisible.

But this was also a slightly unsatisfying answer, because clearly people do change. I became curious about how this happens and began focusing, in my journalism, on people who’d changed their minds. One of these people was the eminent psychologist Professor Roy Baumeister who used to be a believer in the self-esteem myth. Not only did he change his mind, he was an important figure in proving to the world that the idea, which was dominant at the time, was wrong.

CR: What is the self-esteem movement and how did it come about?

WS: Its proponents believed self-esteem was a “social vaccine” that could cure us of a vast array of problems, and to make us more successful and competitive in our working lives. At its simplest, it said that in order to become amazing we must believe we’re amazing. It helped change the way we raised and taught our children.

At the heart of Selfie is a deep investigation into one of its main proponents, a politician named John Vasconcellos, and his government mandated task force to look into self-esteem. He told the world that the scientific part of his investigation confirmed that high self-esteem was, indeed, a social vaccine. I tracked down former members and spent weeks pouring through their archives and found that he’d deliberately lied and attempted to cover up about what the science really showed—which was no causative link between self-esteem and good outcomes.

Unfortunately, Vasconcellos’s lie went around the world. Journalists bought it, powerful influencers such as Oprah Winfrey embraced it and the idea took over. It was hugely consequential. It was in this era of self-esteem parenting and teaching that we began to see the rise of narcissism in young people, that leads right into this “selfie” era. I believe that Vasconcellos and his task force played a part in that story.