Epiphany It was a relief to come to Pisa, though the train trip was enlivened by a pair of Africans vendors, returning to Cascina, shouting their native language into their cellphones. I politely signaled to one of them by putting by finger to my lips. He turned his shouting to me and informed me...
Year: 2014
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A Few Days in Florence
January 4, 2014 The trip to Florence took a long and unpleasant day. It was cold the day we left, and there was so much snow it required a bit of nerve just to drive to my office to pick up a few things I had forgotten. We caught the bus to O’Hare an...
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Turkey and Trannies
I don’t blame you for not being up on the very latest from Broadway, that gayest of entertainment venues. And I’ll admit that I’m not about to enrich your cultural life by bringing you up to speed. Unfortunately, however, this has broader implications. I write of Kinky Boots, the current Tony-winning Broadway smash about a...
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Updike’s Grandfather
“Our Union rests upon public opinion, and can never be cemented by the blood of its citizens shed in civil war. If it cannot live in the affections of the people, it must one day perish.” —President James Buchanan, 1860 A poll of American historians, not long ago, chose James Buchanan as “the worst”...
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You Shall Be as Gods
“It’s awesome”: A young relative of mine loves the word and uses it profusely. Since she applies it to a restaurant or a vacuum cleaner she finds extraordinary, I doubt she realizes its real meaning. This is a typical instance of the degeneracy of a word caused by the search for quick superlatives, and mainly...
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Paid Hypocrites
Most “NGOs” fomenting regime-changes and color-coded revolutions, promoting “pride marches” and similar “human rights issues,” are in reality Western (mostly U.S.) funded conspiracies pursuing the agenda of their paymasters. That much has been known for years, but in recent days we have witnessed a particularly egregious example of their politically-motivated duplicity. On December 17...
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The Pathology of Postmodernity
“[W]e may expect,” Sigmund Freud wrote in Civilization and Its Discontents, first published in 1930, “that one day someone will venture upon . . . research into the pathology of civilized communities.” This statement directly follows Freud’s suggestion that, if it is true that the evolution of a civilization proceeds similarly to that of an...
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A Certain Knack
Even at first dip, this book gives the impression of being unreadable to any but the tweediest Anglophile. There are still such people in the world, you know, and some of them have even been born in Britain. For them, hearing the names “Lady Diana Cooper” or “St. Pancras” is like a drop of lime...
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In the Ultra-West
Drowned drumlins swarmed in the brilliant bay, and ravens like those that plagued Saint Patrick croaked from the chasm below my feet as they rolled lazily half a mile above County Mayo. The ravens’ harsh call was an onomatopoeic reminder of my present eminence, Croagh Patrick, the 2,510-foot cone that dominates the great inlet of...
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Reckless Regard
All Is Lost Produced by Before The Door Picture Written and Directed by J.C. Chandor Distributed by Lionsgate Robert Redford and Bruce Dern are proving that we needn’t retire to our rocking chairs at 77—not if we have star power, that is. Each costar of 1974’s The Great Gatsby has his own leading role in...
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France in Asia, and at Home
These books on postwar French history are meritorious and complementary. Professor Logevall’s effort is a careful military and political history of the French Indo-Chinese war, including three chapters on its aftermath. Mr. Fenby’s readable biography discusses the major events in De Gaulle’s life and supplies a good introduction to it for the uninitiated. Both books...
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I’ll Take My Sit
Because it’s reasonable to assume that Gerald Russello (“The Agrarian Burden,” Reviews, October) is highly knowledgeable of his chosen subject, the Southern Agrarians, I must conclude that his avoidance of their intellectual hypocrisy (or worse) is by choice and not by accident. I’ll Take My Stand was written by a dozen academics, most comfortably ensconced...
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Obama: Our American Idol
“Hell,” as Thomas Hobbes astutely noted several centuries ago, “is truth glimpsed too late.” As in the case of Barack H. Obama, self-anointed messiah? I should certainly imagine so. By the end of the first year of Obama’s second term, a majority of Americans had pretty much caught on to their President’s unmatched gift for...
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The Con Man
“The more identities a man has, the more they express the person they conceal.” —John le Carré, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy Fifty years ago, The Spy Who Came in From the Cold completed the most successful transformation of David Cornwell’s shape-shifting life. The son of a war profiteer and con man became John le...
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Wiseguys
The American home-mortgage crisis, though it is only a little less urgent than it was a year ago, has taken second place, in the ambulance-chasing media, to ObamaCare, same-sex “marriage,” and even the wars in Syria and Afghanistan. We have all been informed that the Great Recession was caused in large part by high rates...
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Global Security Challenges in 2014
The year ahead is likely to bring unforeseen foreign-policy challenges. Two years ago nobody anticipated the “Arab Spring,” and that phenomenon’s causes, significance, and future developments are still a matter of dispute. The North Korean regime is fundamentally less stable than at any time since the 1950-53 war, and its sudden unraveling could cause a...
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The End of (a) History
“There is significance in the end of things,” a young man, hinting at a wisdom beyond his years, once told me. For that reason alone, A Short History of the Twentieth Century, the latest book by John Lukacs, would be significant. For this is not just his most recent book but, as he announced in...
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Breaking Up Is Hard to Do
“Allies fear a U.S. Pullback in Mideast,” shouted a headline splashed on the front page of the Wall Street Journal, reflecting a sense of hysteria in Israel and Saudi Arabia that the diplomatic rapprochement between Washington and Tehran was “just the latest evidence that a war-weary U.S. is slowly seeking to close the books on...
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No Peeking
I promised mysel I’d stay out of local politics once I moved up here to Sonoma County, California, but this story is too good to pass up. It was 3 a.m., and the beautiful lady heard a rustling at her window. Maybe it was the wind. Had she left the window open? She lay motionless...
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Cold War Leftovers
“And the next speaker is . . . ,” the chairman pauses as she runs her eyes down a long handwritten list, “the Anti-Defamation League for Yoga and Spiritual Movements followed by ‘Istiqbolli Avlod’ Youth Information-Enlightening Center, Tashkent Branch.” Sitting around a vast table, representatives of 57 states listen to a lady with bottle-blonde hair...
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Deadly” “Kiss Me
My title is not the title the film is known by, but it is, with familiar strangeness, the title that we see, as the credits crawl “the wrong way” (in this film, the right way), imitating the unwinding of the road as seen from a speeding vehicle. In other words, the plane of the screen...
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A Farewell to Balls
I recently sat down with a friend of more than 50 years, Reinaldo Herrera, and was filmed by Graydon Carter, the editor of Vanity Fair, also an old friend, while lunching and discussing the past. The Herrera house is a grand one, on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, and Graydon’s idea was to film...