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14695. (N. A. M. Rodger) The Safe­guard of the Sea ― A Naval His­to­ry of Britain, Vol.1, 660‑1649
14696. (John Dille –ed.) Time Cap­sule 1925, A His­to­ry of the Year Con­densed From the Pages
. . . . . of Time
14697. (Jon George) Faces of Mist and Time
14698. (Ray­mond W. Bak­er) Capitalism’s Achilles Heel: Dirty Mon­ey and How to Renew the
. . . . . Free-Mar­ket Sys­tem
14699. (Jared Dia­mond) The Third Chim­panzee
14700. (Mervyn Peake) Gor­meng­hast
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Swindells runs two sto­ries in par­al­lel. One is set in 19th cen­tury Lon­don, and tells of an orphan boy who encoun­ters Dr. John Snow, the founder of mod­ern epi­demi­ol­ogy, and dis­cov­erer of the cause of cholera. The sec­ond sto­ry is set in mod­ern times, and fol­lows a young girl who flees sex­ual abuse from her mother’s boyfriend, and lives in a Lon­don “squat”. Inter­spersed through these episodes are news­pa­per let­ters from a con­ser­v­a­tive crank, and the diaries of a nasty Vic­to­rian mag­is­trate. The boy’s nar­ra­tive is writ­ten in pho­netic tran­scrip­tion of his dialect, which may cause trou­ble for a Cana­dian or Amer­i­can read­er. Jug­gling these dis­parate ele­ments is a dif­fi­cult task, and the author pulls it off beau­ti­fully. The nov­el has an obvi­ous mes­sage: the strug­gle against igno­rance nev­er ceas­es. I was delight­ed that a youth nov­el like this draws atten­tion to Snow, who is one of my per­sonal heroes. The more atten­tion is paid to real­ly impor­tant his­tor­i­cal per­son­ages like Snow, the more peo­ple will under­stand the dif­fer­ence between them and the assort­ment of gang­sters, thugs, and con-men who are con­ven­tionally rep­re­sented as “great”.

Bernard DeVo­to was was one of the lead­ing Mark Twain schol­ars, as well as being a his­to­rian of the Amer­i­can far west, a pas­sion­ate advo­cate of nature con­ser­va­tion, and a lead­ing advo­cate of civ­il lib­er­ties. In this curi­ous book, writ­ten in 1932, he devotes most of his ener­gy to crit­i­ciz­ing oth­er Mark Twain Schol­ars. The book is clever, acer­bic, and some­times down­right nasty, but enter­tains pre­cisely for those rea­sons. DeVo­to detest­ed the scholas­tic habits of reify­ing abstrac­tions (The Fron­tier, Puri­tanism, The Artist, Mate­ri­al­ism) and bas­ing grand explana­tory the­o­ries on triv­ial or dubi­ous evi­dence, or no evi­dence at all. Some­times his sar­casm grates on the read­er, but often it is just so good (that is to say, cru­el, like Scot­tish humour) that it brings up a smile from that lit­tle reser­voir of mal­ice that hides some­where in even the kind­est read­er. Here is his treat­ment of one well-known pun­dit: “He exhibits the amateur’s rev­er­ence for the prin­ci­ple of ambiva­lence. This, in his lay psy­cho-analy­sis, is a device for the rec­on­cil­i­a­tion of con­tra­dic­tory evi­dence. It explains that a fact can be both its lit­eral self and a sym­bol of its oppo­site, that one fact can prove a giv­en asser­tion on one page and a con­tra­dic­tory asser­tion on anoth­er, that the two facts which seem to indi­cate irrec­on­cil­able con­clu­sions real­ly mean one thing — the pre­ferred thing.” Boy, I wish I could write sar­casm of that dis­ti­lla­tion. DeVo­to could prob­a­bly take on six coral snakes and a griz­zlie before break­fast, then move on to seri­ous sar­casm after cof­fee. Psy­cho­an­a­lyt­ic crit­i­cism was the bab­ble of that time, but I’m sure he would make mince­meat of today’s equiv­a­lents (“post-mod­ernism”, for example).

There’s a com­mon belief, fos­tered in gen­tle soci­eties, where peo­ple expect their chil­dren to grow up, and famine nev­er stalks the land, that there is no such thing as absolute evil, and that dic­ta­tors are con­fused ide­al­ists who took a wrong turn. This, the first seri­ously researched and accu­rate biog­ra­phy of Mao Zedong, should dis­abuse any­one of such naiv­ité. I have spent most of my life­time study­ing the motives, ide­olo­gies, mech­a­nisms, and agents of slav­ery, but I was still not pre­pared for the con­tents of this book, which is one of the most impor­tant biogra­phies of mod­ern times. It is absolute­ly essen­tial that this book be in every library and school in the world, for Holo­caust Denial is the endem­ic sick­ness of our age, and the wor­ship of mass mur­der­ers the endem­ic sick­ness of all ages.

I remem­ber when col­lege cam­puses were adorned with posters of Mao, when Jean-Paul Sartre was pro­claim­ing that Mao’s “rev­o­lu­tion­ary vio­lence” was “pro­foundly moral”, when uni­ver­sity pro­fes­sors prat­tled the moron­ic, mega­lo­ma­niac slo­gans of Mao’s Lit­tle Red Book[“Pow­er comes from the muz­zle of a gun”] as if they were pro­found phi­los­o­phy, and a lawyer and fem­i­nist activist tried to slap me in the face when I told her that Mao was a geno­ci­dal crim­i­nal. I remem­ber when anoth­er stu­dent activist glee­fully showed me a pho­to­graph of one of Mao’s “projects” — thou­sands of ragged, starved, bru­tal­ized slaves dig­ging up earth with their bare hands while machine-gun-tot­ing Com­mu­nist Par­ty cadrés watched over them, smok­ing cig­a­rettes, barbed wire and wood­en watch­tow­ers clear­ly vis­i­ble in the back­ground. This, he explained, was the ide­al soci­ety, Utopia being con­structed for the com­mon good. This was not even the death camps or the lao­gai, mind you, of which no pic­tures where per­mit­ted to exist, but of one of the projects the Par­ty liked to pub­li­cize. And their cal­cu­la­tions were cor­rect. To the cam­pus intel­lec­tu­als in Paris, Berke­ley, or Toron­to, such pic­tures were appeal­ing. To any actu­al human being, they could not be any­thing but hor­ri­fy­ing and dis­gust­ing. Read more »