Not long after September 11, 2001, the conservative US historian Bernard Lewis wrote a book by the title What Went Wrong?: The Clash between Modernity and Islam in the Middle East. Lewis examined historical, political and cultural developments in the Muslim world, and arrived at the conclusion that the 9/11 attacks had been born from a profound sense of frustration amid Muslims that somehow–from the pinnacle of Ottoman expansion in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries–they had fallen behind the rest of the world in economic and technological development. Germany and Japan—countries obliterated by World War Two—had quickly stood up, dusted themselves off, rejoined the world order and enjoyed thriving economies, while the nations of the Middle East continued to lag behind. According to Lewis, this sense of frustration mounted over time, especially with Western military incursions into the Middle East, and may well have motivated those who perpetrated the September 11, 2001 hijackings of US passenger planes. 

Some twenty years on, we have Îsrael: What Went Wrong? by Omer Bartov. Bartov is Jewish, was raised in kibbutz, served his time in the Israeli military, and is a pronounced skeptic of recent Israeli military and economic policy. His criticism of Israel’s behavior stems from the departure of its behavior, which he considers to be borderline genocidal toward the Palestinians, and the lofty rhetoric of its 1948 Declaration of Independence, which mirrors that of Thomas Jefferson.  For various reasons, Israel has never passed a constitution. According to Bartov, a formal constitution may have lent weight to these words. “It will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex.”

The most potent charge that Bartov levels against Israel is that its leadership, led by Benyamin Netanyahu,  has been conducting a campaign of genocide in Gaza in the name of defending a state whose own creation was the product of genocide. In Bartov’s view, two wrongs, however horrific,  don’t make a right. He draws parallels between the terms that Nazis had for Jews and those that Israelis express toward Palestinians. A former Israeli Prime Minister, referring to Palestinians,  is quoted thusly: “I don’t call them human animals because that would be insulting to animals.” Tough rhetoric, indeed. Bartov might have achieved better balance by quoting someone form the Palestinian side. 

The situation in Palestine has endured for generations. I grew up with it in the news, and it will most likely remain in the news after my time.  Countless books have been written on supporting either side. Bartov  to an extent sympathizes with the Palestinian side, though Hamas comes in for heavy criticism for the October 7 attack. His final chapter surveys novel propositions to resolve the conflict. Perhaps he’s simply tired and looking for a resolution—any resolution—to the seemingly endless mutual hostility. Wouldn’t all of us welcome such a development?

N.B. I was turned on to this book by Jack Beatty’s podcast The Jackpod, which I recommend. The podcast is part of NPR’s On Point series with Meghna Chakrabarti (https://www.npr.org/podcasts/510053/on-point.)

The year is 1940, and Charles Lindburgh, the handsome, charismatic aviator and noted antisemite, has just defeated Franklin Delano Roosevelt in a landslide presidential election.  Lindburgh has become president largely on the strength of his campaign promise to keep the United States out of World War Two. FDR, he asserted, by providing military and economic assistance to Britain and France, had been moving the US closer to direct involvement in the distant struggle. In line with this, the new president shuns his erstwhile allies. He signs the Iceland Understanding with the Nazi government, promising Hitler that the US will not intervene in German expansion in Europe. He reaches an agreement with the Japanese government which allows Japan a free hand in Asia.

The Plot Against America is not solely about high-level politics, however. It is told chiefly from the perspective Phil Roth, a nine-year-old Jewish boy who lives in a working-class neighborhood along with his parents and older brother. The Roth family is wracked with divisiveness as the new political environment settles over them. Phil’s older brother Sandy is enticed to join a government program whereby teenage boys are sent to work on farms in distant states and unlearn Jewishness (Sandy eats bacon and sausage for breakfast every morning during his summer working on a Kentucky farm). His aunt marries a prominent assimilationist rabbi and dines at the White House. A cousin who has lived with them crosses the Canadian border to join that country’s military and take the fight to the Germans. Bad things happen to him. Hermann, the father, sees their old world crumbling further by the day. In large part, his attempts to hold the family together form the centerpiece of the story.

While reading this book, I was reminded of I Shall Bear Witness, the World War Two diary of Viktor Klemperer, a German Jew from Dresden. Klemperer noted that restrictions placed on Jews did not happen all at once; they were piecemeal, sort of like the frog sitting in the pot of water that gradually heats to the boiling point.  The Roth family endures subtle encroachments: the cancellation of a hotel booking, strangers voicing antisemitic insults, visits by the FBI to investigate the father’s anti-Lindburgh opinions, Hermann loses his job. Jewish families are relocated against their will. Parents and children are separated. Further afield, a prominent and outspoken Jewish radio commentator is silenced.  Protests are instigated when convenient to the government and violently suppressed when they aren’t. There is a noticeable increase in police presence on the streets. The border with Canada is closed, as the US slouches towards authoritarianism.

Sound familiar?

The day after the shooting of Renee Good in Minneapolis, US Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem addressed an audience from behind a podium on which was emblazoned the following message, “One of Ours. All of Yours.”  The passage is eerily reminiscent of the Nazi destruction of the Czech village of Lidice in 1942 in retribution for the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, second in command in the SS after Heinrich Himmler.  Coincidence? Perhaps.

Recently, the US Department of Labor posted on X the slogan, “One Homeland, One People, One Heritage.” The phrase’s resemblance to the Nazi slogan, “Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Fuehrer” seems uncanny to me. Coincidence? Hmmm…

What would being a slave in the nineteenth century feel like? And how about being a runaway slave? How secure would you feel?

This book is not a conventional autobiography; to convey his message, Bourdain takes you into the restaurant kitchens of his experience.  Who cooks your food, you might ask?  Well, I’ll let Bourdain respond: “You might get the impression from my less than stellar career that all line cooks are wacked-out moral degenerates, dope fiends, refugees, a thuggish assortment of drunks, sneak thieves, sluts, and psychopaths. You wouldn’t be too far off base.” These guys have their own language and appear to possess a moral code quite a remove from yours or mine. Bourdain writes from hard experience, especially as he readily admits that his behavior was no better than most of his colleagues. The sections where he recounts tales of aberrant staff behavior, whether good or bad (mostly bad), are where the big laughs come in. I won’t divulge any of his stories in this review; I leave it to the reader to discover them.

Most restauranteurs are fools.  By way of example, Bourdain tells of dentists who got into the restaurant industry because they assumed they would make an easy buck. They were mistaken.  Ignorance, hubris, bad luck, run-ins with organized crime—just about anything—will torpedo a fledgling restaurant.

Caveats abound for the diner, and this is the part where you grimace. For example, one should never order seafood in a restaurant on Monday, since fish is delivered on Thursday, and by Monday, the fish is five days old. Never eat hollandaise sauce in a restaurant, as it is never stored at a temperature necessary to prevent the proliferation of bacteria. Avoid specials and buffets like the plague. I’m touching the mere tip of the iceberg here.

It’s not all doom and gloom, however. In the final section of Kitchen Confidential Bourdain takes a trip to Japan and then, back in the States, visits a high-end restaurant where operations flow by the book, and the food is to die for. Stark contrast with Bourdain’s barely controlled kitchen chaos.

But who would want to read a book about a quiet, smoothly-functioning restaurant, when Kitchen Confidential is available?

He has to root himself in movie theatres to establish a sense of place, and indeed, of himself. Movie theatres represent the anchors that Binx cannot locate in real life.

This is what it must feel like to be completely jaded.  Jack “Binx” Bolling is 29 years old, single, a Korean War veteran, and a stockbroker. He is indifferent toward his family, save for an aunt who offers unsolicited advice free and freely. At one point, Binx confesses “For years now I have had no friends. I spend my entire time making money, going to movies and seeking the company of women.” But he doesn’t seem to derive a great of pleasure from any of it.

But the reader does, for Walker Percy is a splendid writer whose portrayal of New Orleans—the old New Orleans—is spot on.  Percy loved the place and depicts the city in colorful detail—music, the architecture, but especially the food. It comes as no surpise when Binx, whose uncle pressures him into taking a position in Chicago, muses “Oh son of all bitches and great beast of Chicago lying in wait. There goes my life in Gentilly, my Little Way, my secret existence among the happy shades in Elysian Fields.”

Indeed, at one point Binx laments the hopeless tedium of existence—“Everydayness is the enemy”—and remarks that the only moment he felt relieved from ennui was when he lay wounded in a ditch in the Korean War. Yet, he finds solace in a road trip with Kate, a mentally disturbed cousin whose happiest moment in life occurred when her fiancé died.

The novel concludes, fittingly, in New Orleans at Mardi Gras, where Binx makes a life-changing decision. Maybe there is hope after all.

Nota bene. You may know Walker Percy for his role in the publication of John Kennedy Toole’s Confederacy of Dunces, about which more in a later post.

A great read.

What would being a slave in the nineteenth century feel like? And how about being a runaway slave? How secure would you feel?

James is an effective, if not brilliant, reimagining of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, narrated this time by James, a.k.a. Jim, the runaway slave I alluded to above. Years have passed since I read Twain’s book, and I
recall the story as told more from Huck’s perspective. In The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Jim comes across as a loyal and trustworthy companion to Huck, and a good friend, but a bit simple. In James, Jim is still a loyal friend, but he possesses a more calculating edge. He needs to do what he can to survive in a game with the odds stacked against him. Although he can read, write and speak better than another character in the story, he must conceal this fact or risk his neck. Some of the most riveting scenes pivot around the necessity of concealing this fact. A slip in diction, and he might hang. There are scenes in this story whose tension rival anything that Quentin Tarantino has come up with.

James contains ironic humor, a lot of it. At one point, a minstrel band leader overhears his singing and buys him from his owner (who actually isn’t his owner, but never mind. It’s a long story.) and wants him to be the tenor in his
band. But Jim, who is fair-skinned, must pass as a minstrel musician, so they apply blackface to a black man so that he can pass as a white man pretending to be a black man.

I won’t reveal more, but I should let you know that the Huck and Jim story assumes a new angle with a magnificent twist in the novel’s final leg.

A great read.

N.B. I was turned on to this book by Jack Beatty’s podcast The Jackpod, which I recommend. The podcast is part of NPR’s On Point series with Meghna Chakrabarti (https://www.npr.org/podcasts/510053/on-point.)

The year is 1940, and Charles Lindburgh, the handsome, charismatic aviator and noted antisemite, has just defeated Franklin Delano Roosevelt in a landslide presidential election.  Lindburgh has become president largely on the strength of his campaign promise to keep the United States out of World War Two. FDR, he asserted, by providing military and economic assistance to Britain and France, had been moving the US closer to direct involvement in the distant struggle. In line with this, the new president shuns his erstwhile allies. He signs the Iceland Understanding with the Nazi government, promising Hitler that the US will not intervene in German expansion in Europe. He reaches an agreement with the Japanese government which allows Japan a free hand in Asia.

The Plot Against America is not solely about high-level politics, however. It is told chiefly from the perspective Phil Roth, a nine-year-old Jewish boy who lives in a working-class neighborhood along with his parents and older brother. The Roth family is wracked with divisiveness as the new political environment settles over them. Phil’s older brother Sandy is enticed to join a government program whereby teenage boys are sent to work on farms in distant states and unlearn Jewishness (Sandy eats bacon and sausage for breakfast every morning during his summer working on a Kentucky farm). His aunt marries a prominent assimilationist rabbi and dines at the White House. A cousin who has lived with them crosses the Canadian border to join that country’s military and take the fight to the Germans. Bad things happen to him. Hermann, the father, sees their old world crumbling further by the day. In large part, his attempts to hold the family together form the centerpiece of the story.

While reading this book, I was reminded of I Shall Bear Witness, the World War Two diary of Viktor Klemperer, a German Jew from Dresden. Klemperer noted that restrictions placed on Jews did not happen all at once; they were piecemeal, sort of like the frog sitting in the pot of water that gradually heats to the boiling point.  The Roth family endures subtle encroachments: the cancellation of a hotel booking, strangers voicing antisemitic insults, visits by the FBI to investigate the father’s anti-Lindburgh opinions, Hermann loses his job. Jewish families are relocated against their will. Parents and children are separated. Further afield, a prominent and outspoken Jewish radio commentator is silenced.  Protests are instigated when convenient to the government and violently suppressed when they aren’t. There is a noticeable increase in police presence on the streets. The border with Canada is closed, as the US slouches towards authoritarianism.

Sound familiar?

The day after the shooting of Renee Good in Minneapolis, US Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem addressed an audience from behind a podium on which was emblazoned the following message, “One of Ours. All of Yours.”  The passage is eerily reminiscent of the Nazi destruction of the Czech village of Lidice in 1942 in retribution for the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, second in command in the SS after Heinrich Himmler.  Coincidence? Perhaps.

Recently, the US Department of Labor posted on X the slogan, “One Homeland, One People, One Heritage.” The phrase’s resemblance to the Nazi slogan, “Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Fuehrer” seems uncanny to me. Coincidence? Hmmm…

The man was weary, an old soul. I’ve read a fair number of biographies, but I’ve never felt a person’s burden as closely as I did while reading this one. King is not only a splendid study of a great person’s life, but it at the same time a study in human nature.  Important people—President Lyndon Johnson, Malcom X– turned their backs on him when he was down and full of doubt, and there were more than a few such moments. Such disappointments did not kill him, but they wore on him. And you feel it with him.  Others–Coretta Scott King, Ralph David Abernathy—were steadfast, and you feel that, too.

 This is no hagiography. Martin Luther King is a real person here—he equivocates at crucial moments, cheats on his wife, spends significant amounts of time away from his family, plagiarizes segments of his dissertation. You get it all, from the civil rights leader who had Lyndon Johnson’s ear to the guy who stopped by his aunt’s house for a slice of peach pie and a glass of iced tea on his way to a protest march.

There are parts of this book, in particular sequential chapters surrounding King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, so movingly composed that they chilled me. I’d heard it all before, or so I had believed, and there I sat in my chair not knowing what to make of what I had just read.

King was a reluctant hero who struggled with doubt throughout his adult life.  He wanted to be a preacher like his old man, but he ended up embroiled in the struggle for Civil Rights. He was uncomfortable with violence, and this stance led to partings of ways with LBJ over the conflict in Vietnam and Malcolm X over the measures necessary to achieve racial equality. King’s convictions led him down a path. Was it worth it?  I suppose it was, though I think we can draw haunting parallels with the United States of 2026. Maybe the US is incurable, but if that’s the case, at least MLK can rest in peace in the realization that he was on the right side of justice, back in the the day when justice was conceivable.

John F Kennedy seemed to be surrounded by death. Nearly killed when a Japanese destroyer rammed his PT boat in The Solomon Islands in 1943, he and most of his shipmates survived largely through Kennedy’s leadership and sheer determination (he swam four miles, towing a wounded fellow soldier behind him). A few years later, he nearly died from infection after spinal surgery. His older brother Joe, a navy pilot, was killed in a suicide mission before his plane left British skies in 1944. His sister Kathleen was killed in a plane crash, along with her husband in 1948. JFK himself often said that he would be lucky to see age forty-five (he was off by one year). We meet his younger brother Bobby, and knowing what awaits him makes this story all the more poignant.

JFK wrote a lot of letters and had a lot of siblings, professional colleagues, and friends, all of which he had many. From these documents and the recollections of those who knew him, one cannot help but feel that one is getting to know him well while reading this book. That isn’t the case with a lot of biographies. Though he came from money and privilege, time and again those who knew him and/or worked alongside him expressed surprise at his humility.

This book situates the Kennedy family within the context of history. One learns of the Irish potato famine and large-scale immigration to the US, the Gilded Age, American involvement in the First World War, the Great Depression, the Second World War, and beginnings of the Cold War. And there was always a Kennedy or two involved in the mix.  What set JFK apart from his father and older brother was that his viewpoint on world issues evolved as he gained experience overseas, and he moved on from his father’s pacifism to endorse a strategy of confrontation against militant fascism and the Communist threat.  Here, in my view, is the kernel of this book’s argument: JFK might have followed unabashedly in the footsteps of his father and aligned nicely with the Kennedy family’s expectations of him and have enjoyed a fine career in whatever field. But he didn’t do so. He was his own person, and his family respected and supported him for it.

I find this book tantalizing because it is not hagiographical in the least. Kennedy had warts; he clearly cheated on Jackie Kennedy, for starters. He was oftentimes dismissive of those who had been loyal to him for years.  But I forgive him.  I know about what is to come, and yet I want to walk alongside JFK through his remaining years.

Perhaps I’m a sucker for a tragic tale, but I still admire the guy, and it would have been a pleasure to know him.

Deep Rivers is a novel of nature and magic. These two elements overlap. I feel like I have entered a young boy’s realm—he is a teenager without a close family, save for his father who deposits him unceremoniously at a boarding school and never re-appears. Ernesto is a mestizo who speaks both Quechua and Spanish, and he never quite fits into either world.

Ernesto indeed inhabits a magical world. That may sound trite and overstated, so I will backtrack a bit.  Ernesto inhabits a half-magical world. As an adolescent mestizo in 1920s Peru, he has one foot in the Quechua world where an appreciation of nature and the possibilities of magic hold sway, and the other in the counterpart world of the Spanish-speakers, which comes across as distant in this story.  This is a coming-of-age tale—Ernesto’s father, an itinerant lawyer who appears to be on the run from the authorities for reasons never made clear, drops him off at a boarding school in the village of Abancay. There Ernesto witnesses, and receives, the bullying that one comes to expect among teenagers, but also grows aware of unseemly behavior of certain faculty members and students at the expense of a mentally disabled woman. This is what people are capable of, he learns. Note Arguedas’s invocation of nature in his description of the boys after they have their way with her:

… I knew that the whole place concealed by the board fence was under a curse. Its stench oppressed us, seeping into our dreams, and we smaller boys struggled with that evil burden, trembling before it. We tried vainly to save ourselves, as river fish do when they are swept into waters muddied by an avalanche. The morning illuminated us and liberated us; the great sun shed its radiance even on the yellow weeds that grew in the dense atmosphere of the latrines. But the evening, with its wind, would awaken that horrible bird that flapped its wings in the inner courtyard. We never went there alone, in spite of being wracked by a desire to do so. Some of us, a few, would go, following the biggest boys. And they’d return in shame, as if they had bathed in a polluted stream; they looked at us fearfully, overcome with remorse. And when they thought we were asleep, they would pray, almost aloud, in their beds.

To be sure, issues of race and cultural tension have their place in the novel. The indigenous population, who speak Quechua as a first language, and the dominant Spanish-speaking element co-exist uneasily side by side, and Arguedas includes elements of the native culture, such as the singing of huaynos—folk songs and dances of Inca origin.  At one point, Ernesto remains outside a chicha bar listening to musicians performing a huayno:

“I stayed outside of their circle, watching them, like one who watches the rising waters of those Andean rivers of unpredictable schedule—so dry, so stony, so humble and empty for years, and then, some overcast summer when the clouds burst, swelling with foaming water and growing deeper, halting travelers and awakening unfamiliar thoughts and fears in their hearts and minds.”

Meanwhile, the hypocrisy of the faculty, including the Rector, who he describes as “a fish with a luxurious, waving tail,” of a faith-based institution does not escape Ernesto’s notice. Nor does the behavior of the Spanish-speaking authorities who confiscate much-needed salt from the townsfolk. He finds himself swept up in a march staged by indigenous women to protest this measure and then witnesses the occupation of the town by government troops. This train of events confirms his appreciation for the Quechua community and the injustice meted out to them by those in control.  After all, the lively quarter where the Indian community live and work is referred to as Huanupata, which means “dungheap.”

Bullying? Check. Hypocrisy? Check. Racism? Check. Bald assertions of power by the dominant element? Check. Abancay prepares Ernesto well for the adult world.

Early in the novel, Ernesto and his father stand outside an ancient fortress in Cuzco. Conversing with his father before his father departs Ernesto notices the eagles that soar over the old Incan fortress:

“Then I asked about the birds that soared over the fortress.

“They’re always there,” he told me. “Don’t you remember that huaman means ‘eagle’? Sacsay huaman means ‘satiated eagle.’ “

“Satiated? They must fill themselves with air.”

“No, Son.  They don’t eat. They’re the fortress eagles. They don’t need to eat, just soar over the fortress. They never die.  They’ll be at the Final Judgment.”

One wonders how the final judgment will play out.

The two cultures collide and contrast, which plays out in several scenes, and you can easily tell when Ernesto’s Quechua roots come to the fore.  In school, Ernesto befriends a Quechua boy named Markask’a, who presents him with a gift of a zumballyu—a spinning top, which, to Ernesto possesses a magical ability to connect with nature and indigenous culture.  Ernesto’s affection for Markask’a is clear in the following passage:

Markask’a was better than I; he had explored a river, an awesome river, and not just as a traveler explores it. Pachachaca! “Bridge over the world” is the meaning of this name. I could not have said which it was that I loved more—the real river, or the author of my thoughts.

Some of the images border on the fantastical, as in the description of K’arwarasu, the Apu, or mountain god, of Ernesto’s village. During Lent,  K’arwarasu emerges from the highest peak in the form of a firebird, pursues the condors, breaking their backs, and humiliating them.

Deep Rivers contains two central episodes: the insurrection against the salt confiscation and another which involves the crossing of the great river to seek expiation.  Meanwhile, glimpses of Quechua culture populate the story, and rich depictions of or allusions to nature fill almost every page.

I’m from the United States, so I have read and reviewed Deep Rivers through a gringo lens. I read it in 2017 before a trip to Peru and then again a few weeks ago.  There’s quite a bit to it, on a subtle plane. If there were a Peruvian Faulkner Prize, it would be a fine candidate, for its nuanced observations.

Can you draw a line from the methods of torture of ancient Persia to the Woke movement, via Martin Luther and The Beatles? I could attempt it, but I would most certainly fail. Tom Holland surely has succeeded.

First, a bit about Tom Holland. He’s an intelligent guy who wins points from me for eschewing a career in formal academia after veering down that path; Holland started but did not complete his dissertation—his, on Lord Bryon, my own on, well, never mind. Holland has come under some criticism for his flamboyant style, and I suspect that such misgivings come from professional academics, whose opaqueness and lack of clarity can only be described as flamboyant. Nevertheless, and perhaps for that reason, I highly recommend Holland’s podcast “The Rest is History”, which you can find on Spotify. I likewise recommend Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind.

An abundance of books seeking to thread a narrative through history have appeared in recent years. I’m thinking of the work of Noval Harari and Hanno Sauer. As its title suggests, Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind is a work of high ambition, grand sweep. But Dominion is no worse off for its scope, and Holland is neither pompous nor high-handed. He is a fine, accessible writer of popular history, who can tell a tale in gripping detail. Witness his description of the Greek god Apollo early on in the book:

When a king’s daughter named Niobe boasted of how many more children she had than Leto, the mother of Apollo and Artemis, who had only ever had the two, the twin gods exacted a terrible vengeance. A firestorm of golden arrows felled her sons and daughters. For nine days their corpses lay unburied in their mother’s hall, caked with blood. The princess herself, worn to the bone with weeping, took to the hills. ‘There, stuck into stone, Niobe still broods on the spate of griefs the gods poured out to her.’

Vindictive, indeed.

But unlike many recent historians of the history of Christianity, which is Holland’s goal, he places the splintering of Christianity well back in the Middle Ages, all the way back to Pope Gregory the Great. If you count yourself among the crowd that knows little about Gregory the Great, well, you ought to fear for little. Tom Holland will hold your hand.

However, we should not dismiss Holland as a mere flourish with a pen. He situates evidence in context, and thereby tells a convincing and entertaining story of how the notion of deities went from a multitude who were intimately involved in the affairs of humankind (think Iliad) down to one that establishes an inarguable standard of behavior through the Ten Commandments (Yahweh) to one, devotion to whom depends on a feeling in the heart—All You Need Is Love (The New Testament).  Expectations of charity, asceticism, and proper behavior that might lead to salvation followed.  And all the conceptions of a god ultimately point into a snow cone.

But wait! The wave of Muslim armies that swept across the Middle East and North Africa in the seventh and eight centuries replaced the message of books written by humans (The Torah and the Bible) with one conveying the direct language of a god (The Quran). While the human element in the Jewish and Christian books allowed for multiple interpretations of God’s message, Islam brooked no such discussion.

And Holland pulls no punches in laying bare what awaited the fragmented Roman Empire as the Muslim armies approached:

“What it (the Muslim invasion) certainly portended was an upheaval in the affairs of the Near East on a scale not witnessed since the time of Alexander. Palestine, although the initial target f the invaders, was not the last. Provinces of the battle-wearied Roman and Persian empires, like over-cooked meat slipping off the bone, melted into the grasp of Arab warbands. From Mesopotamia to central Asia, the lands ruled by the King of Kings were swallowed whole by the conquerors; those rules by Caesar reduced to a bloody trunk. Heraclius, so lately triumphant, had barely been able to hold the line in the mountains of his native Cappadocia. The fate of Gaul and Spain—rule by barbarian overlords—was now visited upon Syria and Egypt.”

That split the western world. So how, then, could the Church regain lost turf and spread a universal message?  By the sword, naturally. Having asserted its independence from secular authority in the 12^th century, the Church now sought to recapture the Holy Land. The Crusades ultimately failed, but the Church lost little time in extirpating internal heresies through the inquisition. Forward Holland takes us, through the Reformation, Galileo, selecting precise settings as the focus of each chapter: Wittenberg, 1520 or Leiden, 1620. They are, in Holland’s view, the fulcra of history.

Through it all, those creating new religions erected them on existing scaffolds. Ultimately, however, the centre would not hold, and the Reformation begot more reformations in its train.  Many, like Martin Luther, sought a return to the original church by eschewing the tradition established by the popes. But to rebuke tradition was in itself a Christian tradition, so little had changed. When critics such as Spinoza equated Christ’s teachings with the universal laws of nature, which applied everywhere, he was doing little more echoing the catholic theme of universality.  Even Voltaire remarked, “If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him.”

Holland traces developments throughout the history of the West, and points at every turn how Christianity suffused events. All sides in the French Revolution could point to biblical passages in support of their ideas. Even Africans themselves, who had long suffered under European colonization, which the Europeans used as a justification for the colonial enterprise, turned to Christianity after liberation.

Christianity even survived the challenges of Darwin and those who applied his ideas, at times nefariously, toward human societies. How could a God who sent his son to die a slave’s death on the cross—strength through weakness—square this result with what many had long observed in the natural (and human) world?  The survival of the fittest.  To be weak was to lose the battle.

When bigots, racists and chauvinists dismissed people of color, gays, and women as inferior, they ignored the biblical message that all are created the same in the eyes of God.  The West imposed constitutions drawn from Christian values on Muslim countries and then expressed surprise when frustrated Muslims rejected these Christian intrusions, which had no place in Islamic society. Such conceits had deep roots in Christianity and led westerners to assume a universality of human experience that simply does not exist. And this leads us to Woke, where the only thing we have in common is the realization that we have little in common.

Homer Simpson once said, “Aaah, alcohol. The cause of—and solution to– all life’s problems.” Replace “alcohol” with “Christianity” and you have a fair observation about Christianity itself.

In my younger and more vulnerable years I worked in a bookstore alongside a guy named Thad. Like many of us in the place, Thad was of a type to spend what little extra money the bookstore gig allowed him on classes at the university. Literature classes. So one afternoon he came into work his shift all aglow about John Fante.  Who the hell is John Fante?

Well, it turned out that John Fante was a bit overlooked in his day, but for no good reason. Much in the same way that John Kennedy Toole was overlooked, but for different reasons. Thad held in his hands a copy of 1933 Was a Bad Year.  He asked me to borrow it from him—the title itself might have warned me away–but I took it home and devoured it in an evening.

Back to my question above: who the hell was John Fante?  Sometimes brevity is for the best. He grew up in Colorado before the Depression, and moved to California smack dab in the middle of it. He was a west coast novelist, and deserves a place in the neighborhood of John Steinbeck. The people he writes about are poor;  if the title 1933 Was a Bad Year didn’t hint enough at it , it should. Think of that as a backdrop.

1933 Was a Bad Year captures the essence of Depression-era Colorado. I base this impression on stories my own father told me about that time and place—no running water, outhouse around back, father deserting the family leaving the mother to tend to the household while the eldest son managed the land, the bank run that left the family next to penniless.

It was a shit hand.

The protagonist of the 1933 Was a Bad Year is Dominic Molise, and he, like my father, spends his youth in Colorado. Tough, 1930s Colorado:

I was the son of a bricklayer who had not worked in five months. I didn’t own an overcoat, I wore three sweaters, and my mother had already begun a series of novenas for the new suit I needed to graduate in June.

Dominic is confused. He thinks he fancies that he might have a decent career as a baseball pitcher, a southpaw at that, in front of him, and like any eighteen-year-old, places great faith in any possibility.  We know it won’t happen. What does happen is life playing out before a frightened eighteen-year-old who, like anyone at that age, begins to regard the world around him with a jaundiced eye and begins to call the world on its bullshit.  His father disappears for days on end, supposedly getting hustled at billiards. But Dominic sees through the charade, and one can’t but bury his face in his hands at what follows:

“…she suspected my father of playing around. It seemed such a corny notion—old Papa, the father of four children, a bricklayer out of work and trying to hustle a buck with a cue stick, taking on the added trouble of another woman. The plain truth was, my father didn’t like women very much. Not even his own mother, and certainly not his wife.”

When a teenager recognizes the flaws and shortcomings of their parents, it’s an early setback. They might not be the superheroes you thought they were, and you realize that you have to fend for yourself. But during The Great Depression, those blows must have felt more like hammerblows.

One hopes this kid’s overdeveloped cynicism will see him through the 1930s. We hope he does, as we know what awaits him there. He’ll probably end up in the infantry in 1943.

My own father turned nine in 1933, which makes him a bit younger than Dominic. Eligible for the draft, he enlisted in 1943. He ended up in the Pacific theatre and was sitting in a tent in Okinawa when news came of the Hiroshima bombing.  My old man was lucky, as was I.

I developed affection toward Dominic when reading this novel. I only hope he didn’t end up face down on the beach at Iwo Jima, with the waves rolling up behind him.

I wrote this review of a novel about a Latin American dictatorship on the very day of the anti-King protests in the US. This was pure serendipity; when I picked up Mario Vargas Llosa’s Conversation in the Cathedral a few weeks earlier, I was not aware of the anti-Trump protests in the offing.

In Conversation in the Cathedral Llosa uses the dictatorship of Manuel Odria in Peru in the 1940s and 1950s to comment on the effects of oppression on everyday people. Odria was just that, a dictator, but the novel centers around figures somewhat lower in the Peruvian hierarchy of the time: newspapermen, prostitutes, low-level flunkies, along with political fixers and kingmakers. A lot of time is spent drinking in dive bars, visiting whorehouses, and answering questions in police stations. There are mass arrests, torture, exile, suppression of protests. Sound familiar?

Two men, Ambrosio and Santiago, meet in a bar and talk. About themselves and others. Santiago is an embittered newspaper reporter who, defying the wishes of his wealthy father, flirted with communism and became estranged from his family. His counterpart Ambrosio was born poor but has climbed the ladder of influence, serving as a lackey/driver for figures of political influence, which provides him with insight into the rampant corruption and insider games of dictatorial politics. Both are disgusted as they reflect, over beers, on the recent past.

What follows is a story of brinksmanship and double-dealing that calls to mind movies such as The Departed or The Death of Stalin. Political maneuverers rise and fall, and their decisions trickle down into the everyday lives of the students, the madams, the reporters, to bad effect. People disappear, die.

To wit, at one point a high-level operator named Cayo Bermudez discusses the rooting out of an anti-government cell in Lima with Ambrosio, but Llosa intersperses their dialogue with observations of gritty realism: the plight of a buzzard that has been stoned to death in a courtyard, plucked and cooked. 

 He was diligently chewing up the piece of meat he had won with his fists and his arms and hands were burning and he had purple scratches on his dark skin and the fire where he had roasted his booty was still smoking. He was squatting down in the corner shaded by zinc, his eyes half closed because of the bright sun or better to enjoy the pleasure that was growing in his jaws and was reaching the hollow of his palate and his tongue and his throat where the remains of feathers clinging to the singed meat scratched delightfully as they passed.

To convey the mood, Llosa employs a style perhaps unique to the late 1960s, but more commonplace in the 2020s. Some reviewers have pointed to Llosa’s juxtaposition of conversations occurring at different times and locations as jarring. For instance, two different conversations might be interwoven on the same page. This technique can be a bit confusing at first—like following a Robert Altman movie—but patience is rewarded. Reading chapters in single sittings made everything clearer for me.

Llosa can create episodes of touching heartbreak, for example, when a chief character endures a stillbirth, or the conversation between Santiago and his father as they attempt a somewhat belated reconciliation, or the rapid descent of the once successful madame who once exhibited a zeal for living well and helping others. The relationship between Ambrosio and his on-again, off-again girlfriend Amelia warmed my heart, and it, to me, is the centerpiece of the story.

Any novel that begins with the bludgeoning of a dog can be off-putting. But I think I understand Llosa’s intention behind the inclusion of that scene. Moral rot under a dictatorship. He makes his point well. There are scenes where I put my little sticky tab so that I might return to them when I’m sixty-four.

King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa, by Adam Hochschild.

When in 1903 Roger Casement issued a report from the Belgian colony of Congo indicating a large number of people missing their right hands, the Belgian business mouthpiece Le Tribune Congolaise commented that the amputees “were unfortunate individuals, suffering from cancer in the hands, whose hands had to be cut off as a simple surgical procedure.”

But why was it then necessary to assign the role of “keeper of the hands” to a colonial administrator, who kept the severed hands in bags?

 Such a measure was necessary because in King Leopold’s Congo, which was a personal possession rather than a formal government colony per se, if a forced laborer returned from his shift with an inadequate supply of rubber, they would cut off his hand, presumably for holding back on his quota. This begged the question: what use would an early 20^th-century Congolese have for raw, unprocessed rubber in a pre-industrial economy?

King Leopold’s Ghost is a gripping tell-all of Belgian King Leopold II’s brutal administration of his personal possession, the Congo, a place he never visited.

Leopold II ruled the small county of Belgium in the late nineteenth century and, driven by envy of other European colonial powers, pored over a world map in search of a colony of his own. Asia? Not a candidate. The Americas? More or less independent. Africa? Ah, yes! The Scramble for Africa was already underway, but Congo had only recently been charted, by none other than Henry Morton Stanley of “Dr. Livingstone, I presume?” fame. Stanley, it turned out, possessed a far less endearing persona than the one attributed to him in the romance novels of the time, as he had blood on his hands as well.

By way of context, British ships had long patrolled the Atlantic Ocean in a humanitarian effort to stop the trans-Atlantic slave trade, which officially ended in 1806.  But the Indian Ocean slave trade still thrived under Arab oversight, and it was in the language of faux humanitarian concern of stopping that trade in human cargo that Leopold II couched his forays into his newly-acquired Congo. And the world bought into his story. Leopold was nothing if not a master manipulator of opinion. Leopold turned the Congo, which he arranged as his own personal possession,  into a slave empire right under the noses of those European powers (read: Great Britain) who thought they had pretty much put an end to the entire sordid business.

A colony was expected to turn a profit, and Leopold’s Congo did well in the ivory trade, considering the newfound demand for ivory—think of all those billiard balls, piano keys, and staircase bannisters that marked the gilded age. But with the invention of the automobile, the worldwide demand for rubber tires skyrocketed. The Congo had a lot of rubber trees. And a lot of people to be forced into hard labor (i.e., slavery redux). And if a forced laborer returned at the end of the day with less than his quota, well, he should learn to use his left hand.

Alongside Edward E. Baptist’s The Half Has Never Been Told and Douglas A. Blackmon’s Slavery by Another Name, King Leopold’s Ghost depicts what develops when moralists look the other way. But Leopold’s companies could only send so many representatives and the churches so many missionaries into the rainforests, before some of them returned to Europe to report the atrocities they had witnessed. In particular, two travelers into the interior —the Irishman Roger Casement and the Brit Edmund Morel– form the moral anchor to this story. It was they who called the world’s attention to the atrocities playing out in the Congo, and it is their efforts to put an end to it, along with their personal stories, that riveted my own attention.

But such reports mattered little to Leopold—witness the “cancer in the hands” remark at the beginning of this review. No, what Leopold desired above all was to use the wealth appropriated from the Congo to leave testaments to his personal glory scattered all over Belgium—over-wrought architectural landmarks dedicated to his memory.  He nearly ran Belgium into the ground erecting these testaments of stone and draining the public coffers to placate the whims of his wife, some fifty years his junior. In the end, he pocketed millions by selling the Congo to Belgium.

Yet, after Leopold’s death, little changed. Business is business, after all. And other colonial powers were little better. Occasionally, Africans fled the Belgian Congo into French and German colonies, only, remarkably,  to return to the Congo to escape brutal conditions they encountered in those places.  Life in central Africa went on much the same after Leopold’s death. Even when Patrice Lumamba was elected prime minister of Congo and began denouncing the western economic stranglehold over the Congo, the US had him assassinated. The CIA chief at the time, later said, “The President (Dwight Eisenhower) would have preferred to have him taken care of in some other way than by assassination, but he regarded Lumamba as I did and a lot of other people did: as a mad dog…and he wanted the problem dealt with.” After Lumamba’s assassination, his US-backed successor Joseph Désiré Mobuto treated the Congo as his personal fiefdom: running up debts, acquiring palatial homes, embezzling money left and right, until his overthrow in 1997. Mutatis Mutandis, indeed.

King Leopold’s Ghost is a dark take on a dreadful topic, yet still pertinent today. Congo remains fraught with corruption and strife. Governments around the world still masquerade as forces for good as they pursue stark economic agendas—witness Trump’s aggression toward Venezuela and its supposed drug empires (Oh, incidentally, Venezuela has a lot of oil). Grim reading, perhaps, but the well-described efforts of Casement, Morel, among many others in this story, give rise to hope, nonetheless.