Take two: Argo: How the CIA and Hollywood Pulled Off the Most Audacious Rescue in History, Antonio Mendez and Matt Baglio (2012)

This was bought at a bookstore in Leichhardt, a suburb of Sydney. It was bought new but I’ve had it in my collection for a decade without reading it. The confusing publication data says the book was published first in 1862 but a website contains more reliable information. I can’t account for the neglect of this excellent book other than by saying that the Oscar it won for the movie probably put me off: I like to browse in the shadows.

For the background I chose a flag in my collection. I’ve actually got two flags, one of which at the time of reading the book was at the framers’ waiting to be mounted. For a full review, read my Patreon. 

Take two: Boxing with Shadows: Travels in China, Brian Johnston (1996)

I bought this book at Vinnies for three dollars. It’s a Melbourne University Press publication and was originally sold for $22.95. This is an edition that came out in 2006, by which time China’d changed remarkably compared to how it features in Johnston’s narrative.

I took this photo in front of a linocut I made after my trip to Japan in 1982. The structure in the print resembles the building on the cover of the book, especially the twisted roofs. Full review on Patreon. 

Take two: Rupert Murdoch: An Investigation of Political Power, David McKnight (2012)

I bought this book a long time ago – almost ten years! – but for some reason never got around to reading it until now. It was probably bought at Books of Buderim. It’s from Allen & Unwin and cost $33 – the recommended retail price (I assume) – which is a fact because there’s a sticker on the back cover. At the time of reading I hadn’t bought a new hardcopy book for a period of months.

I chose for this photo to take the picture in front of a painting by Darren Munce bought from a little gallery in Thirroul. I like the abstract tendency of the work of art and the black it uses to convey meaning chimes with the same colour on the book’s cover. Red and black two colours that, for me, have special significance. If you want to read the full review, you’ll have to subscribe with Patreon. If you do, you’ll be able to understand why I gave this book a rating other than “positive”. 

Take two: Worm: The First Digital World War, Mark Bowden (2011)

I bought this book at QBD (Queensland Book Depository) in or after February 2013. At the time I was living in the Sunshine Coast and there was a QBD store down at Sunshine Plaza where I’d drop by to pick up things from their sale tables when I had a few minutes free and when I was down that way. The book cost me $7.99.

In the background in this photo are two engineers in my life. On the bottom is my father, Peter. On the top is my brother Peter. Brother Peter is a computer programmer and dad was a sales engineer for Honeywell. I’m not sure what brother Peter would make of this book (I’ll have to ask him next time was talk) but dad would’ve enjoyed it as it’s quite easy of access, and includes a short history of the origins of the Internet (yes, it’s capitalised in the book). Full review on Patreon. 

Take two: The Way of the Knife: The CIA, A Secret Army, and A War at the Ends of the Earth, Mark Mazzetti (2013)

This was bought new – probably at Books of Buderim – and cost $27.95. The picture it’s taken with is a painting in oils of African violets by Zuza Zochowski. Back in 2013, when the book was purchased, I wasn’t really interested in America’s seemingly endless wars and this probably accounts for the fact that the book was only first read to about page 95. The second time I’ve persisted. 

A full review is on my Patreon. I know I keep plugging away with these links, but you’ll have to bear with me because I love literature but I’d gotten sick of doing all of this work with no reward. Even now I get no financial reward because the subscriptions collected so far only go toward servicing the publishing platform, and nothing gets sent through to my PayPal account. Keep in mind that even if a dollar a month gets through to PayPal it’ll probably be sucked up by service charges on that end anyway. So even though I’ve been asking for money for reviews since February I’ve actually seen not a cent of the money people have so far pledged. The choice is yours. 

Take two: The Mansions of Bedlam, Gerard Windsor (2000)

For a full review, see my Patreon. I keep plugging away at this appeal having convinced myself of the value of what I write. If nobody values my reviews apart from myself I’d grow down instead of up, and I dream of the sun sometimes. If you can spare a few coins each month to support my writing, all the better. If you cannot, then that’s sad too. 

I took this photo in front of a sketch mum made of some of the participants in a sort of hybrid vacation and study tour of Oxford that she and dad did in the 90s, a time when I was struggling with work commitments and with the demands of a young family. On the day I started reading this book I met a man – who I know to be Catholic because he told me his uncle was a papal knight – on account of some coins I wanted to sell that had come to me as part of my patrimony. I was paid in cash, the last time I ever got anything from dad being when, in payment for some painting work I did on the interior of an apartment he owned in Elizabeth Bay, I was gifted mum’s green Toyota Corolla station wagon. I was very young and thought it generous but with the years I came to understand how miserly my father was, so keeping coins in a bank’s safety deposit box summed up the man.

Take two: With Love and Fury: The Selected Letters of Judith Wright, ed Patricia Clarke and Meredith McKinney

For a full review, see my Patreon. 

A charming publication and another of my rambling purchases from the Co-Op Bookshop, Sydney University (like Wright I worked in admin for a tertiary education institution). It set me back the princely sum of $3.59: a steal at a tenth of the original retail price. Because the poet was from New England I chose a bucolic 1979 painting by Michael Taylor (bought via Facebook Marketplace for about this book’s recommended retail price) to go with my prize – for this National Library of Australia book is more than a gift despite its modest cost.

Take two: The Diaries of Miles Franklin, ed Paul Brunton

For a full review, see my Patreon. 

This book came from mum and dad as one or the other of them bought it at Dymocks for $39.95. I presume it was the branch in Brisbane. The book contains, pressed in the front before the first page, a clipping from the 30 July 2005 edition of the Sydney Morning Herald. The article is a “Take two” feature about Barbara Blackman and Rebecca Gambirra Illume, who were friends when the author (the painter’s wife) was still alive. It was significant that I took this book off a shelf where it had been sitting since my move from Queensland because Barbara’s youngest son Barnaby, who was a pal of mine when I was at school, had just died. I learned about this event on Facebook. 

Either mum or dad had evidently cut the article from the newspaper and placed it there to keep. I’m not sure why it was done like this but it might’ve been that they just wanted both to keep the article for future reference and to have a bookmark to use in the present.

Take two: Where Shall Wisdom Be Found?, Harold Bloom

For a full review, see my Patreon. 

I bought this on sale for $14.95 at the Co-Op Bookshop in or just after April 2007. The book has since gone with me (unread) to southeast Queensland, and back to Sydney, accompanying me mutely in my travels around the east coast of the continent. The sketch in the background is by me and shows Henry Miller, with whose novels I was frequently enamoured as a youth.

Take two: The New Silk Roads, Peter Frankopan

For a full review, see my Patreon. 

I borrowed this book from a Chinese-Australian friend because I was visiting her house and had to wait for her to get ready to go, so picked it up off her shelf to read while I was otherwise unoccupied. Evidently I’m not very patient. I had been recommended this book by the same friend but had shrugged it off. Now, she reminded me of that event and because I felt sheepish I dedicate the linked Patreon review to her.

Take two: Homo Irrealis, Andre Aciman

For full review, see my Patreon. 

I bought this in Newtown where I’d travelled by bus, walking from Redfern along Abercrombie Street – a street fabled in my memory due to associations with people and times past – and stopping on the way to the bookstore at Campos Coffee to get supplies. The trip was made on 22 May. I caught the train back to Redfern then got on the 309 bus toward my home. I read the book on the platform and at the busstop, immersing myself in the writer’s thoughts about remembrance of things past. The book also talks about how reading works in other ways, furnishing material for the imagination to dream up alternative futures but I felt at times, while reading, as though Aciman – a man made popular by his novels, not on account of his nonfiction – were trying to find new words for old things.

Book review: The Ring of Truth: The Wisdom of Wagner’s ‘Ring of the Nibelung’, Roger Scruton (2016)

I bought this at Abbey’s bookshop in November. I wasn’t acquainted with the store layout and the staff were helpful and found this on the shelves for me.

Early on, the philosophical foundations of the Ring are outlined. This is rare for the reason that most artists don’t have specific works of philosophy in mind when they sit down to write, paint, or carve. But Wagner did, drawing on German tradition, especially the ideas of Hegel. Doing so puts him in the same category of creative as Marx, who was working at the same time and who, in developing his ideas, also drew heavily on a writers such as Kant and Hegel. Then, on the political front, there was revolution in the air during the 19th century; I felt glad to’ve read about the European uprisings of the 1820s. I’d started to read books about the 19th century with an eye to better understanding the Ring. 

With respect to popular culture, the big topics of the middle of the 19th century were the links between European and Indian cultures and languages, as well as the burgeoning German nationalist project (which produced the works of the Grimm brothers). In order to write his magnum opus, Wagner also drew on Viking culture, especially Icelandic and Norse mythological narratives, which were available at the time. These artefacts offered a counterpoint to the usual Greek and Roman stories – obviously, Greek and Roman stories were very much discussed and plundered by artists working in the 1850s and 1860s – but in a way that privileged northern Europe. 

This was Wagner’s goal, anyway. I’ve not read much philosophy and am still researching the period in question, but it’s safe to say that a nationalist enterprise was central to the identities of people living at the time in the area now known as Germany. Many people today dislike nationalism – for obvious reasons, not the least being the way German nationalism spiked into militarism in the 20th century – but it cannot be argued against an assertion that it is an engine of change, since it mobilises people to achieve (what they see as) shared goals.

I won’t go into the evidence of anti-Semitism here as it doesn’t seem very relevant beyond the necessity of mentioning it in order to acknowledge such ideas as present in Wagner’s mind at the same time as he was writing his lyrics and scoring his music. Early on in his book, Scruton mentions this aspect of Wagner’s mind (or education), but more broadly this author is intent on something else, and he demonstrates this “something else” using plain evidence. There’ve been books lambasting Wagner on account of unpleasant expressed views and no doubt I will get around, at some later point, to reading them.

For the moment, having given my introduction, I want to say something about the music – which is the thing that first drew me to the Abbey’s Bookshop in Sydney’s CBD. 

Wagner represents for me a culmination of generations of a certain type of music, music I do not possess the cognitive tools required to eloquently classify, so I will use proxies in an effort to be specific and to help to orient the reader around my ideas. The 150 years leading up to 1900 were a time of amazing economic and political change and Scruton makes it plain that such changes functioned to motivate Wagner to create the ‘Ring of the Nibelung’ tetralogy. Notable influences were the revolutionary movements I mention above. Advances in scholarship, in science, and in politics were matched by shifts in emphasis in the arts. So Beethoven – who belonged to one of the two generations that came immediately before Wagner’s – was more different from Mozart than Wagner was different from Beethoven. Wagner and Beethoven both plumb emotional depths of the human psyche and, in using related auditory vocabularies, outline in their work the lineaments of humanity in a way that we recognise today as being, somehow, true.

We talk about progress and assume that, gradually, each artform moves inexorably toward a steady state of perfection. I won’t go into this in detail other than to say that such an idea is an oversimplification, and add as well that art is made by individuals working in communities. So while the values and ideas of the community condition the individual’s responses to the past, the individual is also able to act independently. While a man or woman is an echo time whelped, he or she struggles naturally against the constraints of his or her destiny. Singly or in concert with their peers, they rebel. Wagner addresses this dynamic in the work and, while by his day the apogee of the Church had well and truly passed and Enlightenment figures had repeatedly concluded that God was a relic, he takes a different tack and places religion at the centre of his work. What happens, he seems to be asking, if the gods really are dead.

Scruton’s study contains a detailed description, in chapter three, of the entire opera, punctuated by a welcome pause at the end of ‘Siegfried’ act two, at which point Wagner took a decade off from this labour and went away to work on other things. The composer came back again, in the end, to finish his work, and Scruton takes you through it in a blow-by-blow fashion, recording musical elements at their appropriate places (there’s a notated appendix that lists these motifs and themes, useful for those who can read music), and relaying the story in a way that allows you to gauge the influences he’d included in the previous chapter. 

The effect is challenging but engrossing, helping the neophyte to understand the scheme of the drama and to assess the significance of Wagner’s vision relative to other works of art – for example other long poems that had appeared in other eras – as well as to the history of the times. Having earlier fallen in love with the music, I was happy to find that Scruton – though he gives a full description of the intricacies of the narrative used to make the opera’s libretto – always comes back to it. 

Chapter four leaves the writing aside and here Scruton turns to the music itself, then in chapter five he loops back to the story again. This opera is so complex, and it has been interpreted in so many ways (its inherent complexity and innovativeness attracting both valuable and tendentious interpretation) that Scruton’s analysis is however not always easy. He proceeds in vertical categories (“Character and symbol” is chapter six) and then changes to horizontal ones (“Love and power” is chapter seven). Just as I noted in my mind this switch, it was because I was writing about the book’s density, and it was as though Scruton had anticipated my objection, and had decided, while writing (at a moment in time prior to my realisation), to facilitate my job (the reader does work, just as the writer does). Chapters five and six are so thick with references – both internal, within the work, and within the volume under discussion here – that at times you struggle to keep up. I hesitate to say that this is a weakness, but it seemed to me that taking individual themes as the jumping-off point – for example, the depiction of Albericht, the dwarf, and his role as nemesis and locus of power relative to Siegfried and Wotan; or the role of the Rhine-daughters and the redeeming power of nature, which is linked to the symbol of the Ring – might’ve made the messages Scruton is trying to convey more accessible. Often, I felt overwhelmed but, loving the music as much as I do, and conscious, reading the book, of the artwork’s power and reach, I persevered.

There’s no doubt Tolkien borrowed heavily from Wagner. The figures of Golem and Albericht are so similar as almost to make you cry foul. But the way the book ends compared to the opera is radically different, and while ‘The Lord of the Rings’ is a brilliant work of art, ‘Ring of the Nibelung’ is most certainly more enigmatic and profound. While Tolkien gives the reader a typical quest story – an unlikely hero is given an apparently impossible task and sets out on a journey of discovery during which he meets obstacles and overcomes each of them to, finally, reach his goal – Wagner offers a different scenario. This is what I set out (on my quest, as a reader) to uncover, since originally (like Bilbo Baggins in the Shire) I had only become aware incidentally of the significance of what happens. With the tetralogy, you face – not dragons, orcs, or treacherous subhuman trolls – an historical conundrum since, despite its speculative (or mythological) elements, Wagner roots his work firmly in the context of the 19th century. As mentioned earlier, the work is a conscious attempt to come to terms with intellectual and political, technological and economic changes altering the face of Europe at the time he was alive.

Just a note about the cover: the design is fresh and mysterious. In it, four sections drawn by gold lines can be taken to represent the four parts of the Ring, and the sensuous and enigmatic lines (the colour representing the gold of the Ring, and the fluidity of the lines reflecting in the fact that it is the Rhine-daughters who give the Ring to Albericht) seem to point to the motive quality of music: something that is always in motion, but where assonance and dissonance alternate for the listener’s pleasure – the gold on the cover here shimmers, twists, and coheres but seems never to find a steady state. The lines are alternately parallel, then diverge, only to coalesce in coherent strands. 

Something about Wagner’s narrative and the transcendental beauty of his music is matched by this elegant cover. I found the book challenging and enlightening, and was so struck by a passage in chapter eight (titled ‘Siegfreid and Other problems’) that it was almost as though I was reading something I had written myself. At least it was something I had long been searching for in print – or so it seemed to me as soon as I had consumed this deathless passage, which I quote below:

The true artist stands back from his work so that it speaks to us directly. The artist who steps forward to moralize does an injustice, not to us only, but also to his characters, who are, by this gesture, deprived of the right to speak for themselves. In giving an interpretation of a true dramatic work we are exploring the characters, and what they symbolize. We are also clarifying the underlying ideas and assumptions that set the context for the drama, so as to show just why these people in this situation deserve our interest and sympathy and just why they have something to tell us. But we are not, or not usually, in the business of extracting a message that can be formulated as a maxim or a recipe for life.

In bad art, the author or composer stands over the reader or listener like a parent standing over a child who refuses to tidy his or her room, demanding that a certain understanding be taken away from a work of fiction (it even applies to nonfiction). Scruton’s strong ethical stance – in relaying the above snippet of wisdom (for it is a wise thing to write) – is evident in his qualification; that “usually” added in the final sentence in order not to offend the artist who writes allegories or aphorisms – or  other types of fiction that are designed to serve a didactic purpose. You can see Scruton summing up something that he strongly believes and that he offers to the reader as a corrective to the types of abuse that some creative people perpetrate by making their vision too rigid and not adequately true to life. 

His exegesis is in parts very dense and apparently neat in its progress toward achieving the epistemological goals he had set himself at the outset. For this reason the reader will not immediately grasp the meaning of every utterance the book’s nine chapters contain – you wonder sometimes if Scruton is going too fast or, alternately, whether what he is saying about the Ring is perhaps not, in the music, quite the way as he describes (for you cannot – or, at least not easily – simultaneously listen to a piece of music and read about it) – the reward to be gleaned from reading this book is that it excites responses within you that other types of writing cannot. This is the great benefit of criticism: that it allows you to revisit, as though seeing it through a differently-coloured lens, a familiar scene. As a result you are transported, as if by magic, to a strange kingdom where there are things you recognise but others that you had never seen before. If a work of art is like a landscape or a city, then the critic is like Virgil for Dante: a guide, with his or her own map, a document that resembles that of another person only in its general outline – the streets have the same names but the shops marked to visit do not. 

Scruton touches on the idea of verisimilitude and in broad terms he is congratulatory with respect to the Ring, although at the end of the book, through the lens of other commentators, he details some misgivings. The Ring is enigmatic to a degree that individuals apply their own thinking in talking about it, so it functions as a tabula rasa upon which generations of commentators have overlaid their views. Scruton isn’t shy of giving his own, and for the main I understood him. It helped me to read this as, now, when I go back to the music I’ll have a framework upon which to hang other images, other ideas, other was of imagining the meaning Wagner imbued the world with through his creativity. The edifice of the Ring will get higher still when I publish this review, an event that will, in its own small way, change the world.

Book review: Veritas, Ariel Sabar (2020)

I bought this book at Gleebooks while I was out looking for a book on Liszt. (I’d called the bookstore earlier and they’d told me to look up a title and ask them to order it, but my online researches weren’t fruitful. It took the woman behind the counter in the store less than a minute to find what I needed, and she ordered it for me. While I was standing at the back of the shop, waiting, I picked up ‘Veritas’ in order to buy it.)

Subtitled 'A Harvard Professor, a Con Man, and the Gospel of Jesus's Wife', the book is sometimes a fascinating work of journalism – and sometimes dull – chronicling the participation of an esteemed academic in the unearthing for public scrutiny of a document a man who contacted her purported was an ancient manuscript. If that sounds elaborate, wait until you get to the section on the history of Harvard. I sometimes wondered if Sabar had just taken the technique of writing a magazine article and stretched it out (seemingly) indefinitely. I wouldn’t say that the book has structural problems, but I think that some people will find this overly-complex.

Starting in 2012, the story unfolds carefully in a way that allows you to understand the personalities of the people involved and the gravity of the outcomes of the case, which began when a professor at Harvard University named Karen King received an unsolicited email.

It’s salutary that her name is “Karen”, and the book makes frequent nods toward the online public sphere, where extreme views get all the attention. It’s a timely reminder of how abuse of trust can undermine a whole class of individuals and upset a fragile balance. Sabar began researching the case while writing a story for a well-known US magazine. 

The book is the result of a broader search for answers. It illustrates much about society generally, especially about our beliefs as a collective and about our unwillingness to listen to dissenting voices. In this way it’s a kind of parable about conformity and the mob, something that has, because of social media, become more obvious in recent years. Academics are complicit in perpetuating this dynamic and, as Sabar suggests, the poor conduct of one can damage the reputation of an entire class of individuals. 

The conflict between left and right is alive in these pages, and though Sabar goes a bit fast at times he is thorough and conscientious – both qualities that are essential a journalist.

I wasn’t impressed by all his assumptions, especially where he slates conservative voters’ objections to abortion to the issue of sex, and the church’s disapproval in relation to it. Personally, I think the idea that abortion is bad has more to do with concerns about the sanctity of life – something that religious people have, in all ages, valued higher than their secular counterparts (you can see the truth of this assertion for example in the fact that it was the religious who first advocated for the abolition of the slave trade in the 18th century). 

But this is a minor – though important – point to make and in doing so I don’t want to detract from the relevance of Sabar’s achievement, which is larger than what I have outlined here as in its second half the book veers off into truly strange territory. 

To explain how this happens would risk revealing the plot, so I’ll keep silent. Suffice it to say that Sabar’s story goes to the heart of the nature of the status of institutions of higher learning, which have come to signify so much about our civilisation: what, if anything, is wrong with the way that they portray themselves, and the way that we see them? If you are employed in a professional capacity by such an organisation, how should that fact work on your personal conduct? What is the ultimate responsibility of the academic, vis a vis the public and vis-à-vis herself? To the truth? Whose truth? And what, in a Postmodern age, is truth?

The image on the cover is of Harvard University and Sabar attempts to wound his subject but I think misses out on more productive leads though the narrative longueurs near the end suggest an appetite for detail. Sabar might’ve spent more time thinking about the nature of truth itself, rather than just allocating blame for certain actions to certain individuals.

The process that all of his major players are involved in should be the main subject of the book. 

No-one comes out of the wash looking particularly radiant, but it’s not clear what the ritual cleansing is in aid of. 

My guess is that each reader will take away different lessons, depending on their experience in life. I just wish Sabar had had more fun with his material.

Book review: Samsung Rising, Geoffrey Cain (2020)

I bought this volume at Gleebooks for the recommended retail price.

Cain had been writing stories about Samsung, the diversified manufacturer, for many years before he decided to write this book, though signally the company wouldn’t cooperate with him in the latter endeavour. Cain yet found many people willing to talk with him, some on the record and some not.

The company had nothing to fear in my case as apart from the Ellen De Generes selfie that made such a splash when it was taken in the Oscars about six years ago, I wasn’t aware of most of the events that form the core of this book of journalism. The TV personality’s stunt however wasn’t spontaneous but was, rather, the result of a sustained effort by a group of American employees who subsequently left the company on account of its culture.

Excellence isn’t prized very highly at Samsung but conformity is. Belonging to the herd is the most important characteristic of successful employees of a company that, to succeed, relies on the support of the Korean government, the country’s judiciary, as well as business luminaries. The collective is paramount.

As is the case also in Japanese companies. Hard to imagine I’d be able to stoke into existence a desire to buy a Samsung phone after reading this engrossing book, which begins its account in the early years pre-WWII and continues up to the present. Luckily there are plenty of alternatives available in the market.

Book review: Rupert’s Adventures in China, Bruce Dover (2008)

I bought this book at an op shop in Fairy Meadow while out of town. My apartment was on the market and I wanted to avoid mussing up the place and making more work for myself in advance of buyer inspections.

I’m having trouble working out why the cover was made the way it was but it’s not a fatal flaw: the book is informative and entertaining, having been written by an executive in Rupert Murdoch’s employ during years when Murdoch was trying to gain entry to the Chinese pay-TV market. Dover was therefore, for much of the time in question, close to the source of the events that allowed him to produce material for his story.

It’s interesting for two reasons. On the one hand it provides an indication for the curious spectator of how Murdoch runs his businesses. On the other hand – and just as importantly – the book shows how the Chinese Communist Party worked with overseas businesses in the later part of last century and the first years of this one. Before the Great Firewall and the emergence of native social media sites. The situation has changed dramatically since the time covered by Dover, but reading the book at least you get some idea of how the mechanisms of governance in the Middle Kingdom work.

I won’t disclose the reason why Rupert Murdoch decided to pull out of the Chinese market other than to say it was about access. Murdoch is famous for his love of the media business, and he’s been successful in many global markets because of his ability to make the system work in his favour and by delivering a kind of content for which there was a market that wasn’t being filled. But in China he came up against a different set of principles, and this eventually did it for him.

Because the book is full of dramatic vignettes – bits of stories inserted into the larger narrative to illustrate salient points – you are able to get a feel for Murdoch’s business in a way that a report in a newspaper or on the home page of a stock exchange could not deliver. The different threads of the narrative – involving such issues as political freedom, China’s emergence as a major economy, the role of the media in a pluralistic democracy, and Murdoch’s own character – come together to form a rich tapestry full of primary and secondary significations. Dover’s book is more than just a documentary account of a business failure, it’s a mine of information about the Middle Kingdom.

While at times the writing can be a bit long-winded and continuity might have been improved – as if it were a feature article being written, rather than a book – it’s a lot of fun to read, and it’s informative on all counts mentioned earlier in this review. Highly recommended, though a bit more attention paid to proofs might’ve improved the final product.

Book Review: Inheritance, Sharon Moalem (2014)

I’ve had this book in my collection since buying it soon after its publication, probably at Books of Buderim on the Sunshine Coast. Until recently it sat unread on one or another of my bookshelves.

Subtitled ‘How Our Genes Change Our Lives, and Our Lives Change Our Genes’, it’s a fun read, and for someone, like me, who knows little about genetics and epigenetics (the second word meaning how genes are affected by environment) there’s plenty in the book to wonder at – in fact “wonder” is like a talisman that kept repeating in my mind as I was reading, this branch of science so new and so complex that it seems to embody something about the future itself. Though it reads a little, at times, like an invitation to get your genome sequenced.

It’s becoming clear to specialists that inheritance works in subtle ways, and that, for example, trauma suffered by a person in one generation can be passed down to his or her children. All of the ideas we thought we possessed about inheritance are set to be thrown out the window. And because genetics and the health practices that are allied to it are so new, the laws that define how information contained in your genome can be used is often either new or non-existent.

Some of what Moalem writes – at least what he says about the law and the economics of healthcare – will be irrelevant to many readers because the US health system is so different from what applies in most developed nations.

And each country will be in the process of coming to terms with the new reality as it reflects advances in genetics and epigenetics. How health insurance companies access such patient information might, for all I know, be completely different in the US from how it happens in Australia. In fact, it’s almost guaranteed to be the case. For readers of this blog located in Helsinki or Agadir, I cannot offer much advice, but rest assured that change is on the way.

While you don’t need any background information to engage with this book as most terms are explained, it might help to be acquainted with a few key concepts, such as “allele”. Wikipedia might help those who lose track of things when unfamiliar words are used, but in the book there is usually enough secondary detail to enable you to orient yourself so that you can follow the narrative. “Allele” is a specific term that is used to talk about inheritance, as this passage from a web page demonstrates.

Although an individual gene may code for a specific physical trait, that gene can exist in different forms, or alleles. One allele for every gene in an organism is inherited from each of that organism's parents. In some cases, both parents provide the same allele of a given gene, and the offspring is referred to as homozygous ("homo" meaning "same") for that allele. In other cases, each parent provides a different allele of a given gene, and the offspring is referred to as heterozygous ("hetero" meaning "different") for that allele. Alleles produce phenotypes (or physical versions of a trait) that are either dominant or recessive. 

Genes are found on long strings (chromosomes) of chemicals (nucleotides) in each of your somatic cells – the cells that make you up apart from reproductive cells (I told you this would be complex). The four chemicals – so few! – are used to construct your code, the code which is duplicated each time a cell is made. During the production of your originary cells, which will become the embryo from which your body will be formed, if one of the chemicals is copied incorrectly, either put in the wrong order or exchanged for another of the four – one marker out of the billions that make up your individual code – then you can have a disease that can lead to death, or that can lead to a change that will dramatically impact your life. And just because your parents didn’t show a trait, doesn’t mean that you will be exempt:

Somatic cells contain two alleles for every gene, with one allele provided by each parent of an organism. Often, it is impossible to determine which two alleles of a gene are present within an organism's chromosomes based solely on the outward appearance of that organism. However, an allele that is hidden, or not expressed by an organism, can still be passed on to that organism's offspring and expressed in a later generation.

What is of interest perhaps to most people is how invisible traits can suddenly express themselves in the children of two individuals, neither of whom shows any sign that they have a disease. It is not, however, possible for such a trait to express itself when it is recessive. Moalem talks about such things and provides examples, but because of the nature of the material I am pretty sure I won’t be able to meaningfully talk about the even more complex subject of epigenetics – though it is such an interesting field of enquiry – for a long time to come.

It’s clear to specialists like Moalem, but it’s probably news to you, that life experiences can affect the genetic makeup of your children. So just as characteristics that in an earlier age might have been slated down to morality are now understood to be part of “just the way you are made”, the way we understand our responsibilities to the children we are destined to love so much, is changing. Random acts can have consequences not just for your own future but, indeed, in the lives of people yet to be born. Do you really need to have that second drink?

Family is something we hide from most people; you only get to know such things about a person after meeting with them under the right circumstances a number of times. But family is at least something that we are willing to discuss with friends. We should be talking about inheritance more, as it is to become more prevalent as part of our lives. We all want to be healthy and we all want our children – if we are lucky enough to be able to conceive – to be happy and well.

Recommendations for similar books to read are welcome. The author had help writing ‘Inheritance’, and though his prose is flexible and accurate the book contains some errors (“free reign” …?) and awkward expressions, all of which might’ve been eliminated by better editing.

Book review: Love: A History, Simon May (2011)

I’ve had this book in my collection for a good number of years, and I must’ve bought it when I was living in southeast Queensland, going by the publication date (though I have no recollection of where I bought it). The book was on one of the shelves in my library when I discovered it a few weeks ago and remembered that a relative of a friend had, once upon a time, suggested reading it. I don’t remember if the two events – the suggestion and the purchase – were causally linked.

One thing I am sure I will never forget is the quality of May’s work, though many details will, in time, evade memory’s reach, there are so many things to learn by reading his book. He tries to come to grips with the idea of love after examining the writings of generations of people, beginning his discursus with the Old Testament, then going on to discuss the writings of Plato and his pupil, Aristotle, among others.

But while this book is in fact, in some sense a “history” it is also a part of a broader debate about what it means to live a good life. During his divagations – centred, say, on the period of Greek hegemony in the third century BC – he won’t restrict himself to anaylsing the way that classical authors thought about love, friendship, religion, and marriage (among other things) but takes matters further and tries to identify the traces of contemporary (i.e. 21st century) notions within the thinking of people alive at the time the texts he consults were written and read. He also recaps in short summaries in each chapter, so while talking about Schopenhauer he will take us back to Plato to find links to the past.

So, this is not precisely just a “history”: it is, in fact, a philosophical treatise. Not being in the habit of reading philosophy, I have to guess that, in future, I shall do so with greater frequency – going by the pleasure available to me from reading this book.

May says that the search for love – common to all humans at all times, even though the way that it is pursued and its objects might change over time – is due to a human need to be ontologically grounded.

To find a home. Of course, the caveats included in the preceding paragraph are broad. In fact – and May is at pains to highlight this – we think rather differently about love today compared to, say, a third century BC Athenian or a 1000 BC Hebrew speaker. For this reason, what we mean by the word “love” might, to our eyes, look a lot different to what a person – we can only know by consulting texts – living in those eras might have meant when using it. But because of writing we have texts, and it’s May’s job to communicate to us ideas they contain.

Who, though, is “we”? A person living in a developed, pluralistic democracy might think differently about God than, say, a person living in rural India or a person living in metropolitan Argentina. Because May delves into the details of the texts he consults, and because he tries to enable us to understand them using language that we can easily comprehend, we are given the opportunity to engage with the text fluidly – via the medium of ideas – but the focus is exclusively on the Western tradition. And though book deals with notions that are probably, at least in part, alien to people alive in the 21st century, a person living in Buenos Aires might see things in the words of Aristotle that evade me, and likewise for a person living in a small town in Kerala, in southern India. In a sense each person reads a different book, though the text remains unaltered regardless of whose hands hold the volume.

The notion of a deity God seems, to me, to be a consequence of the human tendency toward subjectivity. The “I am” of the Jewish monotheistic deity an outgrowth of humanity’s ability to see itself in opposition to its environment, and possibly also of economic changed economic circumstances, which saw people living in larger agglomerations of dwellings (towns) supported by farmers living nearby in the countryside.

Greek mythology had mankind existing as offspring of beings that a god (or gods) had, at one point in time, sundered the one from the other – with love being an endless search for “one’s other half” (an expression that continues to be used today). When I was reading this part of the book I was reminded of a prehistoric statue (see photo below) I saw in Jordan. I wrote for a post published on this blog on 5 July last year:

The Ain Ghazal statue in the Jordan Museum … has not been properly understood to this point in time. It is dated to 7500BC, so it is Neolithic, and it was discovered in Amman in the 1980s along with 31 other plaster statues. The label in the museum goes on to say: “We don’t know its meaning, but we know that the people who made it were skilled craftspeople living in a thriving village.” 

But May by no means restricts himself to prehistory or the classical era, and takes us through the centuries roping in authors of the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and the Enlightenment and regions beyond. Always with one eye on the past and one on the future (our present moment in the 21st century). In this way his book is, like a man in love, ontologically grounded although to experience the past in the present is something that religious literalists, to use another example of a type of person very different from myself, try to do. 

I was less enthusiastic about May’s use of Proust – it is difficult, I think, to view the narrator of ‘In Search of Lost Time’ as a stand-in for its author, or even as some sort of paragon; he seems to me to be a flawed individual, as different from you or me as the next person – but May’s analysis filled in, for me, gaps in my understanding of antiquity. A difference separating the Greeks and the Romans – separating east and west, the spiritual and the logical – is implied in his reading of texts from that era.

Love is an idea, as much as a biological imperative, and different people at different times have defined it in different ways. The very diversity of approaches catalogued, the different ways of solving the problem of existing in the world, is the book’s strength. ‘Love: A History’ is a lot of fun to read, raising spectres and phantoms of the past – like a haunted house in an amusement park – in a way that makes you think they might still be alive, and giving you ways to compare your own mind to the minds of dead men and women. It’s a kind of “best of” compilation that samples and layers strands of thinking or threads in a crazy quilt you might throw over your legs on a winter’s day as you sit on the couch, reading.

Book review: Hooking Up, Tom Wolfe (2000)

A sticker on the front of my copy shows that I bought it second-hand for $3. The recommended retail price ($21) is printed on the back, visible under a torn sticker, the significance of which I can never know.

Here lie traces of the past. Another is evident in the photo on the front cover, which cannot have been taken close to publication day – Wolfe was born in 1930 but in this photo he looks to be aged no more than 50 – so it was at least 20 years out of date when the publisher and author decided to use it. The dog jumping gaily between the author’s legs in a blur of asymmetrical abandon hints at another relic: the screaming jets heading, down the tunnel of history, toward the Twin Towers.

The candy colours used for the cover remind you of Wolfe’s pedigree (more reminders of the past; after WWII Wolfe was a front man in the literary journalists’ push to reshape the way reporting was done) but, like the essays in the book, the myth of the dandy, the man-about-town now appears dated, like another book from 2000 – a history of magazine the New Yorker by American journalist Ben Yagoda – that I tried to read on the same day I took up ‘Hooking Up’.

As a stylist Yagoda doesn’t entertain and Wolfe falls short of his goal. He riffs like a jazz player but needs a score to guide him. Improvisation overburdens the facts he marshals to his cause, making you wonder if he’s really being objective in his assessments in each case. Like Icarus, Wolfe aimed high. And his higher purpose in writing the book – a piece of American exceptionalism – fails because the heyday that such works sought to herald, like ice on a summer pavement, quickly evaporated.

The first piece is about hook-up culture, but the book’s broad remit suggests other readings for the book’s title, which rhymes with “looking up”. Who looking up to whom? Or, were things finally, on the eve of the new millennium, looking up? Perhaps the phrase should be understood literally: since the Cold War had ended America’s curve was trending up after a hook-shaped reverse.

I wished Wolfe had spent 300 pages writing about Intel’s founder Robert Noyce alone, or entomologist Edward O. Wilson alone. In his essays there’s not enough time to adequately elaborate his ideas or, even, to outline the achievements of his subjects. He is content to do a sketch based on a modicum of research and then, while celebrating Trump’s America, try to predict the future.

There’s no doubt the country continues – as it has always done – to innovate and to throw out new inventions and technologies and ways of thinking. It is a vast, kaleidoscopic community containing – like the microprocessor (which Noyce’s company, Intel, invented) – an array of elements. This diversity is its strength and when planning his book Wolfe displays a preference for stories where the subject was born outside the major cultural centres. Wolfe himself was born in Virginia. Noyce was born in Iowa and Wilson was born in Alabama. A kind of oblique or erratic shape made Wolfe happy, as did poking a stick in the eye of what he thought of as the staid elites of the country’s north-eastern quadrant. In the article that lends its title to the book’s front page, Wolfe points to the demotic fashion trends of the 90s – low-slung jeans, T-shirts, garish sneakers, baseball caps – which were first made popular on the West Coast, so his choice of garb also strikes me as an index of a certain ingrained contrariness. (“They might change to suit the times, but I’m not going to.”)

With ‘In the Land of the Rococo Marxists’, a kind of Trumpian libel of intellectuals of all stripes, he celebrates the multicultural nature of America, its ability to attract people from all over the world through migration, though new arrivals tend to gravitate to the major urban centres, such as LA and New York, and not to the places where Trump would reap his rewards 16 years later.

The impetus behind the book reflects an overt and hard-nosed triumphalism and is intended as a rebuke to Europe, so it is an artefact belonging to a time when the cultural cringe still pressed upon the minds of American intellectuals. I wonder if those days are, now, in the past or if they returned after 2016.

Book review: Outlaws Inc, Matt Potter (2011)

I bought the book for $19.99 sometime in or soon after April 2012; I see the bookseller’s sticker on the back cover. Ever since then it has sat, unread, in one or more of my bookcases. In the meantime, Australian journalist Anthony Loewenstein published (in 2016, though I’ve not read it) a book titled ‘Disaster Capitalism: Making a Killing out of Catastrophe’.

Potter charts the same space. His work of journalism has a cover that makes it look like pulp fiction, a spy thriller. The title is equally impressive. Then there’re the stock images used for the cover illustration and the quote from someone named Andy Ross – about whom, online, I could find no mention (nor, for that matter, could I find much about “America Now” where, presumably, Ross worked at one time). “It’s Jason Bourne meets James Bond, only it’s really happening, and it’s happening now.”

The hints, sleight-of-hand, and suggestions combine to form an introduction, both misleading and accurate, to what turns out to be a shadowy world. To draw you in, the book uses spicy syntax and pungent style, but it is always credible in terms of sourcing and referencing and reads much more like investigative journalism than an action novel. It represents serious work and the packaging was, presumably, chosen on the basis that, rather than to be educated, people want the thrill of dodgy personal contacts, clandestine meetings, aliases, fake passports, and cash payments. (Everything they don’t have in their own lives.) At the beginning of each new section, the narrative is anchored in an anecdote illustrating Potter’s life in the sky or in one or another of the world’s trouble-spots, where he has gone, following the money.

But ‘Outlaws Inc’ offers a better way to spend your time than a fiction because – while there is plenty of speculation as Potter tries to pin down what, where, when, why, and how – he retails in facts. Potter’s (or the publisher’s) choice of packaging is mirrored by slightly breathless prose that is by turns jaunty and complex, as this sample from chapter 21 (on page 339) demonstrates:

The breeze is picking up, carrying whirls of sand and grass-husks on its warm jets. And on the foggy, overgrown hook-end of this disused upcountry air base, deep in the West African bush, among rusting helicopters and a cement-mixer graveyard, the vast iron bird is popping and blinking as it cools down. Night sounds drift in through the plane’s metal skin: motorbikes, wire-mesh gates being clanked, a rifle firing, dogs. Somewhere further off, a televised football match and the unsettling human-voice-in-distress cries of the night birds wander in and out with the direction of the wind. A fuel truck backs up in the distance, and once or twice another plane crosses the sky.

Compare the poetry of the above passage with the more functional tone of the following extract, from page 337, in the previous chapter:

Mark Galeotti believes this ability to slip seamlessly off the radar and into different roles and identities, goes deeper for Mickey, Tatyana, even Bout, than a calculated wish to deceive. 

‘It’s not actually a situational thing,’ he says. ‘It’s a reflex. You’ve got to remember that this is one of the glories of the old Soviet system. On paper, it was hierarchical, ordered, rational and everything had its place. In practice, it was everything but. And if Russians have a genius, it’s to screw over those people who try to rule them, and at every occasion.’

The following extract is from page 340, and demonstrates a preference for impressionism as the author granulates characteristics to form portraits of those whose exploits he chronicles, in this case a Russian flyboy he names “Mickey”:

They say nothing’s certain in life but death and taxes. And with his cash business at least, Mickey’s got tax pretty well licked. But the older he gets, the more I fear for him. The planes are ageing, the loads creeping up and beyond even the physics-defying abilities of men like him. Still, spectacular escapes and close shaves always stick in the mind longer than the bodies by the road, and like all of them, Mickey is convinced he’s lucky. Part of him has started to believe the myth, I think. That larger-than-life creation, the schizoid comic-book caricature that jumps from the pages of the trafficking reports and the mouths of other bush-jockey pilots is so dazzling – a sort of Bond villain-Scarlet Pimpernel combo – it’s pretty much all that I saw at first, back in Belgrade, and wherever else I looked. Until I met Mickey. Then, when you peel away layers, you’re left with a bunch of blue-collar guys and the muggy, canvas-packed shadows inside an Ilyushin-76 at night, and things look different. Less glamorous.

How you view these stories might depend on your politics, or on where you live, but Potter does actually evince the kind of gravitas needed to achieve his aim of informing and entertaining his readers. He worked at different times for a London magazine that published articles about the defence industry, and also as a freelance journalist in the ex-Yugoslavia during the time of the civil war. Due to these experiences he developed contacts giving him access to the airborne smugglers whose exploits he covers. Fifteen years were needed to gather material for the book. The Berlin Wall coming down in 1989 set off a cascading sequence of events, including the dissolution of the USSR, resulting in a huge number of Russian, Ukrainian, and Belorussian defence personnel becoming unemployed. Keen to support themselves and their families, they took advantage of an official dispensation allowing for the sale of equipment from the country’s arsenal. Many also quickly took to flying old Ilyushin and Antonov aircraft on commission, carrying freight from one place to another.

The book makes you work and challenges you to keep track of people and places as your focus shifts from one object to another. There’s a primary set of characters – some names have been changed to protect reputations – but on the other hand a wide range of settings – from Eastern Europe and Russia to the Middle East and Central Asia, from Africa to South America – softens the impact of any one story.

As well as challenging it’s fun, and while there is concrete evidence for the kind of racketeering suggested by the title and apportioned by the author to key players, a lot of what is described happens in a grey zone. You are never quite sure how you should be judging these people. Are they entrepreneurs or criminals? Whose side do you want to be on? That of the authorities or that of the operatives who fly the planes on often dangerous missions from one place to another? What about the middlemen, or indeed the governments who receive or sell equipment, drugs, or other types of contraband?

After 9/11 when the world’s attention turned to Afghanistan, the pilots headed to the Middle East. In one chapter, Potter likens them to Han Solo and Chewbacca, and the planes they flew (are still flying) to the Millennium Falcon. I was also reminded of Ignacio Serricchio’s ship mechanic Don West, who flirts with Judy Robinson, a doctor, on Netflix’s ‘Lost in Space’. West smuggles liquor in his ship, and Judy lambastes him but, when you are on the frontier, lines easily blur and it’s hard to make up your mind who wears the white hat and who the black. And if you make the rules so tight that you take out the outlaws, Potter says, then you also cripple the legitimate operators who are helping you to achieve your political goals.

Does the book describe the normal process of supplying a market, or is it about profiting off human misery? Was the chaos always going to happen once the ball was set rolling? Is disaster capitalism just normal functioning in a market where the people involved come from backgrounds that are unlike people found in the cities and towns of a country like the USA?

While Potter tries to answer such questions, there’s another message in this book full of evocative prose. It’s that you cannot predict the future. Once something large is in motion it can crush smaller things that it comes across in its path. But it can also come crashing down to the earth. Flying these Ilyushins and Antonovs is dangerous due to the age of the craft, their state of repair, and the temptation, at all times, to get that extra ton of goods onboard. While people caught up in the fighting that happened (and is still happening) in such countries as the Democratic Republic of Congo led (leads) to innocent civilians suffering violence, the casualties stemming from the trade of contraband included people who were shipping it across borders.

But a market has its own logic, and always tends to command supply. “You like grey?” Potter seems to be saying, “Check out Mickey’s flight suit!” Here’s a different take on Capital, one for the records.

Book review: Trail Fever, Michael Lewis (1997)

I read a few chapters of this book and put it aside, but came back to it after reflecting, at leisure, upon how entertained I had been by some of the early chapters. So, I happily finished this fascinating though ancient work of literary journalism. Its subtitle is also ludicrous (‘Spin doctors, rented strangers, thumb wrestlers, toe suckers, grizzly bears, and other creatures on the road to the White House’), evoking within the reader’s mind – and adding a poignant dash of camp that reinforces the notion that Lewis was more a part of the mainstream than his predecessor was – Hunter Thompson’s chaotic 1973 work: ‘Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail '72.’

Thompson was, unlike Lewis, self-educated. But both journalists display a politically progressive approach to the world, and both are also enormously funny, though in different ways. Lewis grew up in Louisiana and Thompson grew up in Kentucky, but the differences separating the two books come down to matters of style rather than substance. In the intervening years, Thompson suicided (2005) while Lewis wrote and published a number of books on money and sport. The younger man also edited other books.

In ‘Trail Fever’ Lewis chronicles, in sometimes absurd and often hilariously funny ways, the 1996 presidential race, starting with the Republican primaries at the beginning of the year. What is so striking about it is how it shows how the seeds that bore fruit with the election, in 2016, of Donald Trump existed well before Bill Clinton (in the year 2000) opened the way for China to sell its goods in the US market by granting it “most-favoured nation” status.  In the failed ‘96 Republican presidential candidates Pat Buchanan (who supported protectionism) and Morry Taylor (who wanted to reduce taxes) you see the seeds that would grow and, 20 years later, flower in the Midwest.

Buchanan and Taylor also anticipate with their ideas Trump’s dictum “drain the swamp” and had libertarian ideas that reflected a distrust of insiders and what Lewis terms “rented strangers”: the faceless men and women who gravitate toward politics in the hope of securing a well-paid job providing advice or some other form of service to a candidate or member of Congress. Lewis writes:

The Outsiders – the agitators, the troublemakers, the champions of lost causes – are temperamentally unsuited to treating politics as if it were a rigged fight. The Outsider is by nature indiscreet, unstable, and risk loving and as a result will rarely land himself a seat in power Alley. (Pat Buchanan’s drift from Insider to Outsider mirrors the drift in American politics away from large-bore crisis management and toward small-bore career management.) Occasionally the Outsider may call himself a Democrat or a Republican, but he can’t be contained by either party, because his enemy is not the other party but the entire system. He has a taste for the structural issues: campaign finance reform, global trade. The current crop of Outsiders – Buchanan on the right, Perot in the center, Jesse Jackson on the left – stood together against the North American Free Trade Agreement, for instance, and for campaign finance reform. Each in his own way speaks to the dissatisfaction with politics that 70 percent of Americans claim to feel. Each in his own way is guided by some mythic view of the past. And each in his own way addresses the central problem of politics: that an awful lot lies beyond its reach. To succeed, an Outsider must grab for what he knows he cannot have. He’ll probably never get it, but he might knock it loose so that someone else will, one day.

Now we know who that someone is. Tyre manufacturer Morry Taylor produced a manuscript – which remained unpublished at the time Lewis’ book went to print – titled ‘Kill All the Lawyers and Other Ways to Fix Washington’. Lewis spent a lot of time with Taylor, even after Taylor was eliminated from the race to secure the Republican nomination. On Taylor’s relations with most of the media:

Morry can be persuasive when he wants to be. For instance, he is normally withering on the subject of journalism; asked to define “journalist” he will say, “People who can’t add.” Now he tells me that I’m different from other journalists because “unlike those other guys you’re not inserting your private opinion. You just listen and tell people the truth.” I nod to myself: How true. 

The smile behind that last sentence is wide, however, because Lewis is just as acerbic and opinionated when writing about Taylor as he is when writing about, say, Buchanan. The book has 25 chapters (including a prelude and an epilogue) and at the end there is a humorous vignette where Lewis gets caught up in the conspiracies surrounding Clinton that, as the days ticked away toward the beginning of November and became colder and colder, took on a life of their own and accelerated. But it’s a storm in a teacup. These passages are especially funny because, in this case, it’s Lewis’ own reputation that is at stake, rather than a politician’s. He has spent the better part of 300 pages beaming a spotlight on the personalities, the characters, and the words of a set of men and women involved in politics, and now when he becomes a central player he has to be as honest as he was then. It’s truly hilarious. 

This book is a gem not just because it is funny but also because of the insights it contains about America’s democratic deficit. For example, on Jesse Jackson:

The Jacksons and the Buchanans have been folded into their respective tents. You can see that Jackson is struggling: because their concerns are not explicitly addressed, the poor don’t vote; because they don’t vote, their concerns are even less likely to be explicitly addressed. How this resolves itself, God only knows.

The thing to keep in mind if you are a progressive in the US, however, is that Buchanan’s and Taylor’s ideas remained current in the hearts and minds of a significant slice of the demographic, emerging finally in 2016 in Trump’s campaign speeches. (For the book, Lewis made a visit to the border and interviewed a Mexican who was trying to get over the fence into the US.) Bernie Sanders lost the Democratic nomination but, in the future, Lewis’ book suggests, someone with similar ideas is going to come along and successfully steal his thunder. 

In a sense this book was waiting for me (it had, of course, sat unread in my library for years, but that’s not what I mean here). A couple of years ago I wrote a post about the future of US politics, musing on the likelihood of something worse than Trump emerging on the Right. This book buttresses that notion. Just as the Democratic primaries held today will probably presage the emergence of a candidate with similar views a generation hence, the same thing can happen on the conservative side of the political spectrum. We’ll have to see what form such a persona might take.