RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.city-journal.org/vs-and-shiva-naipaul

In the 1970s, when the ideas of Third Worldism had reached their apex, I became enamored of the work of two gifted writers: V. S. Naipaul and his brother, Shiva Naipaul. V. S., who died last year at 85, won the 2000 Nobel Prize for literature; his comparably talented brother, Shiva, 13 years younger, died at 40 from a sudden heart attack in 1985. Both were born in Port of Spain, Trinidad, and went on to study at Oxford and then make lives for themselves in England. They were the grandchildren of Hindu indentured servants brought from India to replace the slaves who had once worked the colony’s sugar plantations. Their father, Seepersad Naipaul, was a journalist and an aspiring novelist.

Intellectually and emotionally, the Naipaul brothers were caught up in the experience of the Indian diaspora in Africa and South America as a direct result of the circumstances of their birth, which gave them a different perspective on the so-called Third World from what was conventionally offered by Western devotees of dictators in Castro’s Cuba, Forbes Burnham’s Guyana, Ben Bella’s Algeria, or Nasser’s Egypt. American and European leftists looked to those charismatic leaders as charting an alternative path to independent development, apart from the West or the Soviet Union. Their thinking, unlike that of the Naipauls, did not hold up well.

From an award-winning historian and regular Fox contributor, the true story of how Donald Trump has become one of the most successful presidents in history — and why America needs him now more than ever.

In The Case for Trump, award-winning historian and political commentator Victor Davis Hanson explains how a celebrity businessman with no political or military experience triumphed over sixteen well-qualified Republican rivals, a Democrat with a quarter-billion-dollar war chest, and a hostile media and Washington establishment to become president of the United States — and an extremely successful president.

Trump alone saw a political opportunity in defending the working people of America’s interior whom the coastal elite of both parties had come to scorn, Hanson argues. And Trump alone had the instincts and energy to pursue this opening to victory, dismantle a corrupt old order, and bring long-overdue policy changes at home and abroad. We could not survive a series of presidencies as volatile as Trump’s. But after decades of drift, America needs the outsider Trump to do what normal politicians would not and could not do.

Posted: November 6, 2018https://www.claremont.org/crb/article/lust-for-destruction/

Journalist Victor Sebestyen’s Lenin: The Man, the Dictator, and the Master of Terror is a fast-paced, absorbing new biography of one of history’s greatest revolutionaries—or, if you share my perspective, political mass murderers. Scrupulously researched and vividly written, it is the first major new biography of Vladimir Lenin in 20 years and makes extensive use of the archival materials that have become available in that time. It will be an invaluable contribution to our understanding of the founder of the Soviet Union.

Much of the interest in the book has been over its revelations about Lenin’s personal life, hitherto largely unknown. Although his wife, Nadya Krupskaya, has often been portrayed as a dour helpmate in a loveless marriage who cooked and cleaned for the Iron Man, Sebestyen reveals real depth of feeling and complexity in their private lives. At the same time, Lenin carried on a passionate love affair for a decade with a beautiful French émigré, Inessa Armand, “by far the most glamorous of all the Russian émigrés in the radical circles of Paris.” His “ménage à trois” with Inessa and Nadya (who condoned the affair) was “central to Lenin’s emotional life.” According to Sebestyen, the Soviet leader was “not a monster” but, in personal relationships, “invariably kind.” He could even laugh at himself, “occasionally.” What’s more, he didn’t revel in “the details of his victims’ deaths” as did Hitler or Mao, because, for Lenin, “the deaths were theoretical, mere numbers.” I’m afraid Sebestyen may have succumbed to the temptation every biographer faces of getting too attached to his subject.

After he led the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 against the crumbling Czarist autocracy, Lenin’s socialist state quickly became a totalitarian hell of mass executions, forced collectivization, and slave labor. Newly revealed details about his personal life furnish no further insight into this vast project of institutionalized terrorism. Countless men display traits of loyalty in marriage as well as lapses from that loyalty; very few emerge as political murderers on such a grand scale. The most that these details can establish is the sickening contrast between someone capable of tenderness and affection in private life and capable at the same time of mobilizing the deaths of millions.

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/

Prince Harry and Meghan Markle? Nothing new there really. Just catnip.

The daughters of the American rich who invaded London in quest of titled mates tended to be spirited and good company, not milksops like the general run of British debutantes. Whatever their other attractions, the ‘buccaneer belles’ have inspired a social history par excellence.

There I was, in an airport bookshop, seeking some entertainment for another long-haul flight, clutching a paperback that had looked promising on the shelf, and so it proved to be. The cover picture was enticing, a coloured-up photograph of an 1890s belle, displaying in pastels the porcelain skin, long straight nose, fine clear eyes and the pile of preferably auburn hair that was all the go at the time, the whole a cultural ensemble for feminine pulchritude, topped off with a bunch of pink peony roses dramatising her blue straw hat. Her neck swathed in a high fichu of fine white lace, the hint of an elegantly generous leg-of-mutton sleeve on her gown and her discreet stud-pearl earrings all said “lady”, but her vaguely eager expression suggested she might be fun nevertheless.

https://www.momentmag.com/book-review

Ben Hecht: Fighting Words, Moving Pictures
by Adina Hoffman

The great French film director Jean-Luc Godard called Ben Hecht a “genius” who “invented 80 percent of what is used in Hollywood today.” Israeli leader Menachem Begin, speaking at Hecht’s packed funeral in Manhattan in 1964, said Hecht not only “wrote stories…he made history.” Yet most modern American Jews have likely never heard of Hecht, despite his eminence as a playwright, best-selling novelist and screenwriter of a host of Hollywood film classics, including Scarface, Twentieth Century, The Front Page, Gunga Din and Notorious.

Hecht was also a pivotal figure in American Jewish history—in bringing the Holocaust to the attention of the American public in real time during the height of World War II, and in aiding one of the most extreme of Zionist underground groups in its violent campaign against British forces in Palestine, thus helping create the conditions for the birth of Israel.

Adina Hoffman’s richly informative new biography is part of the Yale University Press’s acclaimed Jewish Lives series of short interpretative biographies covering a wide range of Jewish figures, from authors to philosophers to politicians to entertainers. Her book is a fine introduction to a seminal figure in American Jewish culture and Hollywood’s first century. But like a large and powerful man crammed into a suit three sizes too small, Ben Hecht’s life is simply too robust and complicated to be shoehorned into 220 pages of text. It’s not Hoffman’s fault: She was commissioned to write, in effect, a one-act play about a life that merits a four-hour opera and a six-part HBO series.

Hecht grew up in Racine, Wisconsin, where his parents, who had arrived from Belarus as teenagers, moved from the sweatshops of New York. After graduating from high school and lasting just three days at the University of Wisconsin, he escaped to Chicago, where he worked as a police reporter for the Chicago Daily News, wrote short stories and novels and hobnobbed with literary figures such as Carl Sandburg, Sherwood Anderson and Theodore Dreiser. He acquired the sandpaper lingo, flexible ethics and hard-liquor habits of the city newsrooms, learned how to write fast and facile prose, spent six months reporting on the toxic chaos of post-World War I Berlin and dumped his young, well-off, non-Jewish first wife for Rose Caylor, a novelist who stuck with him for the rest of his life despite his self-confessed tendency to sleep with every attractive woman he met.