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This Week in Private Papers
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Front
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Allies, Friends, Neutrals, or Enemies? by Victor Davis Hanson Ayatollah
of Anti-Americanism |
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Culture
Gibson's "Passion" by Honora Howell Chapman Troy's Literary Offenses Power to do Good Wars New and Old "The ancient Greeks: Were they like us at all?" |
| Education This page is under construction |
| Collection of Curiosities Homepage |
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July
10, 2004 For all the mayhem in the Sunni Triangle, and for all our mishaps at trying to reconstruct a pathological society reeling from 30 years of mass murder, we are beginning now to see the emergence of new civilized beginning in Iraq. Sadly our allies are mostly neutral, if not hostile to this radically new world, mostly out of spite, narrow self-interest, and deductive anger and envy of the United States. In the process, they have done the near impossible: lost the good will of the American people, a development that will have radical repercussions in the years ahead. |
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July
10, 2004 The Anti-Chomsky Reader, ed.
by Peter Collier and David Horowitz (Encounter Books) More "Ayatollah" |
July
9, 2004 Nor was the destroyer of Iraqi dissidents hitched — Saudi-style — to a Humvee and dragged to pieces through the streets of Baghdad. The pillager of Kuwait did not lose a limb on the precepts of a sharia-inspired fatwa. A young Saddam-like Baathist assassin did not break in and shoot the desecrator of the Mesopotamian marshlands in the back of the head. And a West Bank-like mob did not lynch the torturer of dissidents in the public square. Even al Jazeera, an enthusiast of the usual barbarity, was wondering what the heck was going on in its own neck of the medieval woods. |
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July
6, 2004 Almost
daily we are assured that another attack on the homeland,
commensurate with 9/11, is inevitable. What a scary
mood of fatalism we are in! Where will it happen?
The Olympics? The party conventions this summer? A
week before the election? Chicago? L.A.? |
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July
4, 2004 The next half-year will see some of the most critical months in American history. The issues at stake involve not just the prosecution of the war on terror, but also problems larger and deeper in our culture and its place in the world, problems that terrorism is one particularly destructive manifestation of. Simply put, the question is this: Can the values of the West---liberal democracy, individualism, and free market capitalism, along with the freedom and prosperity they create---survive? Or do such values promote a materialist hedonism that reduces all goods to appetite and pleasure and thus corrupts all values, ultimately leading to weakness, decline, and finally extinction? |
| July
2, 2004 We live in an upside-down civilization of hit Michael Moore conspiracy films, of novels about how to kill a sitting President of the United States, of elite American newsmen ridiculing brave Iraq democrats, and of allied peoples abroad who tell pollsters that they prefer beheaders and fascists to win in Iraq. Perhaps we should take a hard look at this current mythic world. |
| July 11, 2004
Response to Readership I am very interested in the ways other writers do their research. When you are reading a book do you highlight salient points, make notes in the margin, etc? Also, do you have a certain system for capturing the most important points? Hanson: I have an eccentric way of doing things. I start by reading solidly on the topic for about 6 months, take no notes, no marginal comments, nothing really but read and try to think about the main issues at hand. Then for about 3 months I just write out the book by memory in one long draft. Then for the next year or two..... |
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Recent Works by Victor Davis Hanson Review of Rural Greece under the Democracy, by Nicholas F. Jones, in Times Literary Supplement, June 25, 2004 "The Power to Do Good" : a review of Niall Ferguson's "Colossus" in the New York Post, April 25, 2004 Review of John Gaddis's Surprise, Security, and the American Experience Introduction to the Modern Library's Plutarch's The Life of Alexander the Great |
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| July 11, 2004 Response to Readership Victor will post a response to readers' questions daily. If you have questions that Victor can answer, email them to author@victorhanson.com. |
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| Current Affairs and Classics
I am very interested in the ways other writers do their research. When you are reading a book do you highlight salient points, make notes in the margin, etc? Also, do you have a certain system for capturing the most important points? Hanson: I have an eccentric way of doing things. I start by reading solidly on the topic for about 6 months, take no notes, no marginal comments, nothing really but read and try to think about the main issues at hand. Then for about 3 months I just write out the book by memory in one long draft. Then for the next year or two I go back carefully through hundreds of books and articles, and add, clarify, erase, support, reject, etc. all the points in the original draft, doing footnotes or citations in the text in the process. Then I redo the entire text for points of style, general interest, and length. So it is a layering process. I think it fatal in research to adopt the idea that you just take endless notes or make note cards before writing a word. Some of the best paragraphs I have left in were hunches that I wrote in the early draft, and some of the worst were tortured “it seems,” “one could argue,” pages that were a result of reading everything written on a particular point. I’ve always advised my students to start writing at least something every early in the process. I usually count on about 3,500 hours of work for a normal book. And I have learned after a lot of them, that there is no way around that general figure, sometimes 5,000 hrs., sometimes 2,500 but on average about 3,000-4,000 hours—or a little under two years of pretty much 40 hrs every week. As one ages, disturbing questions arise like “Do I wish to give up 3,000 hours of otherwise normal activity to do this book?” So one really must enjoy writing and reading and be devoted to the project, or it is simply not worth it. Far too many books are written for tenure, academic promotion, self-indulgence, or polemics, rather than love of the subject. |
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