wahistorian's Reviews (506)

Fiona Hill has written an eclectic book that combines her own story as the Northern England daughter of a coal miner and a nurse, then Harvard graduate, then advisor to presidents with a keenly observed analysis of the decline of economic and educational opportunity since the 1980s in the UK, the U.S., and Russian. Extremism, she argues, comes out of frustration at dead-end jobs (or no jobs), poor schools, poor health, and a wealthy class that sequesters all the opportunities for itself; people without horizons tend to gravitate toward their “tribes,” and everybody becomes more tribal, less civil, and polarized in their beliefs. Some of her own experiences with the challenges of coming from poverty to the highest echelons of power are horrifying: as an NSC Director, she was referred to as “darlin’” by a president who couldn’t be bothered to learn her name and a room full of white men refused to speak up for her when that President asked her to retype a speech. These indignities wear at people’s souls, Hill suggests, and they are assumed by a privileged class that expects the right to hold others back so they can get ahead. Hill doesn’t spend much time on the ultimate results in these societies if more opportunities are not opened for more people—she is solutions-oriented—but she does predict more populism, extremism, and authoritarianism. She has more hope for locally based micro-initiatives to lift people out of poverty, get them invested in national success, and then the tools to successful human beings. We each can play a role in staving off more Know-Nothing populism of the Donald Trump brand: by mentoring young people, insisting on stronger transit systems and more equitable schools, sharing and being kinder. These are not platitudes; they are the keys to a livable society.

A rich reinterpretation of Edmond Rostand’s play, with an emphasis on the power of poetry more so than love. So moving onstage, as moving as on the page.

I was just never sure where this book was going, and despite the breadcrumbs Darnielle dropped along the way, I lost patience with it. He clearly knows how to get inside the heads of adolescent boys, but other characters were one-dimensional foils for the story he really wanted to tell about alienated youth. Well-written, but there just wasn’t enough there for me.

I had to read this book in a hurry because I needed the information in it. Bill Eddy wrote this book from years of experience as a licensed clinical social worker dealing with what he calls High Conflict Persons (HCPs), highly emotionally driven people who often inflict damage on the lives and reputations of Targets of Blame, innocent people who get in their way somehow. These HCPs are often suffering from one or more of 5 personality disorders, as outlined in the DSM-5 (paranoid personality, antisocial, etc.). Eddy has useful tips for how to spot these HCPs and how to stay out of their way; he also has recommendations about how to deal with them and their allies if you can’t stay away. What he doesn’t help you with is how to overcome the humiliation or anger or stress that comes with dealing with an HCP enough to rationally implement his methods. Maybe that’s the next book. Still, an incredibly useful book if you find yourself in this situation.

A chance encounter with a scholarly friend lands Adam Dalgleish in the Dupayne Museum, the star attraction of which is the “Murder Room” with its collection of photos and objects relating to famous killings of the interwar period. The real murders at the Dupayne follow his brief visit—not a spoiler, because the section heading announce each crime. I picked up this book because of its museum theme, and P. D. James has some funny and insightful things to say about museums, their boards, and what people think about them. “A museum is about life,” insists cleaner Talluljah Hutton. “It’s about the corporate life of the times, men and women organizing their societies…. No one with any human curiosity can dislike a museum” (61). But when it came to the crimes I did feel that all the evidence was not really shared with the reader, especially since the second crime, discovered halfway through, was against someone we had never even heard of, and her details had to be quickly filled in. Despite the unusual and interesting setting, this was not one of my favorites, but it was still enhanced by James’s eye detail and descriptive talent.

Emerging from the debacle that was the Trump Administration, Marie Yovanovitch had one chance in ‘Lessons from the Edge’ to go on the record about what kind of diplomat she is, so if there’s one flaw in her story, it’s a tendency to go into a bit too much detail about her various posts. Yovanovitch served in some of the most difficult American embassies on Earth: Somalia, Kyrgyzstan, Armenia, and finally Ukraine during her 33-year career. She documents her learning curve in the Foreign Service, her many adventures, and the misogyny she had to cope with (looking at you, Rex Tillerson). The daughter of Russian immigrants, “Masha” never loses her patriotism and her absolute admiration for the American system, especially as compared to some of the corrupt and chaotic places she served. Which made Donald Trump’s style of governance even more impossible for her to understand. She outlines in excruciating detail the dawning realization that not only was she being targeted by “Trump world,” but that her own State Department—in the person of Secretary of State Mike Pompeo—had no intention of protecting her. The last part of the book narrates her attempts to navigate her way through the conspiracy theory she was caught up in, as Trump tried to lay the groundwork for discrediting Joe Biden and the 2020 election in advance. And here we are, almost two years later, coping with the fall-out from his willingness to win by any means necessary. Yovanovitch’s example stands as a heroic profile in courage and integrity for us to remember in the dark days to come.

How is one thin book so chockful of lessons from history about where tyranny comes from and how to combat it? Because it’s distilled from Timothy Snyder’s extensive scholarship on nationalism, fascism, and communism. Every American should read this now, before things get much worse. And if you think it can’t happen here, that’s the first sign we’re in danger.

C. is an East German writer in 1989; having overstayed his visa in the West, he cannot decide where he belongs and so he is living “in the interim.” He rides on trains to see his girlfriends or his mother or to give readings, and in each city he is simultaneously fascinated and repulsed by the trappings of freedom: his ability to buy books (mostly on the Holocaust or the Gulag, books he will never read) or clothes or to frequent red-light districts where even women’s bodies are part of consumer culture. His liminality pushes him to drink; he is between ideologies, between occupations (is he a writer or a worker?), between God and psychoanalysis. “He was one of the human stopgaps from whom the GDR was assembled, the very precondition for its existence,” Hilbig writes, creating the impression of millions of people suffering in this state of uncertainty and unbelief (243). Hilbig’s writing is beautifully painful in places—he writes that “C.’s inner unrest was so powerful that each glass of alcohol seemed to sizzle in it like a drop of water in a forge” (276). Some of this is hard to read, yet the author so convincingly ties C.’s individual condition to his moment in history, you cannot help but sympathize.

Timothy Snyder’s ‘Our Malady’ uses his experience with the hospital system during a life-threatening illness as a case study of themes explored in his book ‘On Tyranny.’ The profit motive and inequality of the American medical system undermine our claim to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” since without good health—and that is not what our current system delivers—we cannot be contributing members of a healthy society. A country in which the rich have access to better care “turns our human concern about health into a silent yet profound inequality that undermines democracy…. If health care is a privilege rather than a right, it demoralized those who get it and kills those who do not” (34-35). Snyder also spends some time analyzing Donald Trump’s deplorable response to the COVID pandemic and the implications of his politicization for public health. Uncharacteristically, however, this slim book doesn’t include much of a call to action, beyond demanding better, more sensitive care in our day-to-day interactions with medical professionals.

This is an odd book, brimming with musings and insight that you can’t be sure are going anywhere. At first I thought the book’s elliptical quality might be due to the author’s inartfulness, but I came to see that it was a way of making sense of a phenomenon that seems to be beyond understanding. In the mid-1960s British psychiatrist John Barker became obsessed with the notion of putting people’s premonitions to the test, collecting and cataloging them, then comparing them with the real world to see just how predictive they were, with the help of the ‘Evening Standard’ newspaper and its science writer, Peter Fairley. But because most premonitions involve death and disaster, the book becomes more than a history of this Premonitions Bureau; it is also about death and our beliefs and attitudes around it, whether we can bring on our own deaths or whether death is predetermined, out there lying in wait for us. Knight also explores the nature of time, the brain and how it works, British asylums, and other topics, which don’t always connect neatly but are interesting as a collection of ideas. I still wish he’d finished the thought about angel poop, however.