|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
my rating |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0297852655
| 9780297852650
| 0297852655
| 4.07
| 11,720
| 2011
| Jan 27, 2011
|
really liked it
|
There is no time for dawdling as this history gallops from the time of King David, around 3000 years ago, up to 1967. I read all these vastly impressi
There is no time for dawdling as this history gallops from the time of King David, around 3000 years ago, up to 1967. I read all these vastly impressive 500 pages ten years ago and I wanted to reread the 20th century part now, as the latest tragedy unfolds in Gaza. All history is painful – as Gibbon rightly said “History is indeed little more than the register of crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind”- but the history of Israel and Palestine is still an open wound. A history of Jerusalem can’t avoid spilling over into a history of Israel, a history of the Jewish people and a history of the Palestinian people; they are all intertwined. And the historian knows his words will be fiercely scrutinised for distortion, exaggeration, selective reporting and axe grinding. This history is as contentious as it gets, so I was surprised at the very few 1 or 2 star reviews here. He uses a method of overlapping biographies in many parts – I see why, each life adds to the rich tapestry and all that, but it can overwhelm the poor innocent reader. So in the early 20th century part we have the life stories of Herzl, Ben Gurion, Captain Monty Parker, Jemal Pasha, T E Lawrence, Arthur Balfour, Chaim Weitzmann… and so on. SOME RANDOM THINGS I LEARNED 1) IT DIDN’T HAVE TO BE PALESTINE Theodor Herzl, founder of Zionism, was by no means fixated on the Holy Land as the place Jews should have their nation state. He suggested Cyprus or El Arish in Sinai (then part of British Egypt). When he talked with British politicians David Lloyd George and Arthur Balfour they suggested Uganda. Herzl tried to sell Uganda to the Jews at the Sixth Zionist Congress in 1905 but there weren’t many takers. An Austrian plutocrat was simultaneously financing Jewish colonies in Argentina. , then there was something called the Galveston Plan, an idea for Russian Jews to settle in Texas. Everyone had their own ideas. Before he hit on the idea of murdering them all, Hitler thought Madagascar would be just the place. Churchill was all for Libya. 2 ) A SAD QUOTE P 383 : “Ben-Gurion believed, like most of his fellow Zionists at this time (1910) that a socialist Jewish state would be created without violence and without dominating or displacing the Palestinian Arabs… he was sure they would cooperate.” Can people really have thought that? 3) TWO REASONS FOR THE BALFOUR DECLARATION The British government believed that the Americans might be encouraged to join the Great War if they knew that part of British war aims was to establish a Jewish homeland in Palestine. Montefiore points out that they had discovered the Germans were considering a Zionist declaration of their own – “after all, Zionism was a German-Austrian idea, and until 1914 the Zionists had been based in Berlin”. Also, check this out : The Declaration was designed to detach Russian Jews from Bolshevism but the very night before it was published, Lenin seized power in St Petersburg. Had Lenin moved a few days earlier, the Balfour Declaration may never have been issued. 4) THE ZIONISTS DIDN’T WANT JERUSALEM FOR THEMSELVES When those two rascals Sykes and Picot were drawing borders of future countries on the maps of the Middle East they specified that Jerusalem should be an “international city” and the Zionists agreed . Weitzmann wrote : “We wanted the Holy Places internationalised”. 5) THE TWO STATE SOLUTION, 1937 STYLE AND THE ONE STATE SOLUTION, 1939 STYLE The British government (they were the colonial overlords following the end of World War One) proposed a partition of Palestine into an Arab area (70% of the land) to be joined to the Kingdom of Transjordan and a Jewish area (20% of the land). Jerusalem to remain under British control. The Zionists accepted. King Abdullah of Transjordan accepted. All other Arab Palestinians rejected it. Two years later, with the next world war looming, the British came up with another proposal : Jewish land purchases limited; Jewish immigration capped at 15,000 per year for 5 years after which the Arabs would get a veto; Palestinian independence within 10 years; no Jewish state. This was the best offer the Palestinians were to receive from the British or anyone else during the entire twentieth century, but the mufti, displaying spectacular political incompetence, rejected it from his Lebanese exile All of this is very interesting, and there is of course so much more, but it is only tangentially to do with Jerusalem itself, and this is the nature of this massive beast, forever shapeshifting into a general history of the state of Israel and an account of all the bitter wars. I give it 4 fairly over-ambitious stars [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
Nov 06, 2023
|
Nov 09, 2023
|
Nov 06, 2023
|
Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 1324051191
| 9781324051190
| 1324051191
| 4.31
| 1,387
| May 09, 2023
| May 16, 2023
|
liked it
|
This book is in two halves, before 22 February 2022 and after. I needed the first part (but not the second) because after all the millions of words sp
This book is in two halves, before 22 February 2022 and after. I needed the first part (but not the second) because after all the millions of words spouted forth by the journalists and professors, still my brain could not quite grasp exactly why Putin decided to roll his tanks. There was a belief in Tsarist times and Soviet times that there were three Russian peoples, the Great Russians, the Little Russians (Ukraine) and the White Russians (Belarus). During the Empire and then the USSR the borders were really quite notional, it was kind of a case of what’s yours is mine, what’s mine is yours, one big happy family. But gradually there arose a belief that there was such a thing as a separate Ukrainian nation. Putin has written about this – he blames Polish intellectuals in the 19th century. And this was done deliberately by “the west”, according to Putin’s view, in order to erect “a barrier between Europe and Russia, a springboard against Russia”. Well a barrier is one thing, but a springboard is a whole other thing. Putin might not mind a barrier but when the Ukrainian constitution was changed on 7 February 2019 to include the strategic objectives of joining the EU and NATO, then for Putin the barrier was now very clearly becoming a springboard. But I still don’t quite get it – does Putin think that if Ukraine was part of NATO there would be suddenly a military threat to Russia that wasn’t there before? Existing NATO states Latvia and Estonia already border Russia since 2004. And we all know that NATO cannot get into any direct confrontation with Russia without provoking WWIII. (Whilst at the same time noting that this is now a proxy war.) There is a psychological/cultural/historical component to this conflict – it’s personal. And this must be why some essential thing about this terrible situation still eludes me. One thing this book told me is that Ukrainians and their politicians themselves have been dreadfully conflicted about the orientation of their own country – towards Russia or towards the West. And there have been two revolutions (Orange 2005, Maidan 2014), leading to the question when is a revolution a coup? I may say this book is a grand one for finding problems of definition – what is an annexation? What is a valid referendum? What is an independent republic? What is democracy? I appreciated Professor Plokhy’s carefully colourless account of a dreadfully tangled, complex history. But Putin’s war still seems - to put it mildly – a gross, reckless, weird miscalculation. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
May 26, 2023
|
Jun 03, 2023
|
May 26, 2023
|
Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 0140133631
| 9780140133639
| 0140133631
| 4.15
| 6,468
| 1998
| Oct 30, 2001
|
it was amazing
|
The whole story is astonishing. You read 600 dense pages about how an obscure nonentity born in Austria became the absolute dictator of Germany and wa
The whole story is astonishing. You read 600 dense pages about how an obscure nonentity born in Austria became the absolute dictator of Germany and was worshipped as a demigod and after Ian Kershaw has explained in detail how it all happened you still want to know how did that happen??? Part of the explanation of this bizarre totally incredible story is that, according to the author, and he says this time and time again, the German people wanted it to happen. They were looking for, they were yearning for a Hitler. Maybe not Hitler, maybe not Adolf Hitler, but someone Hitlerish. Another part is that Hitler was lucky – for instance 13 years before he was born his father changed his name to Hitler from Schicklgruber. As the author says, can you imagine “Heil Schicklgruber!”? And another part is that Hitler was brilliant at one thing, he was a born rabblerouser, yelling and ranting about his vulgar extreme prejudices for two hours at a time, in public. And the people loved it. So, born in 1889, dropped out of school aged 16 and never went back, refused to get a job, said he was going to be a great artist, age 18 went to Vienna to sit exams and go to the top art school, they rejected him out of hand, he dossed around Vienna, tried again, failed again, ran out of money and sometimes slept rough in the streets. Hitler had now reached rock bottom. Some time in the weeks before Christmas 1909, thin and bedraggled, in filthy, lice-ridden clothes, his feet sore from walking around, Hitler joined the human flotsam and jetsam finding their way to the large, recently established doss-house for the homeless…the 20 year old would-be artistic genius had joined the tramps, winos and down and outs in society’s basement. A little later he left the dosshouse, having found he could do small paintings of street scenes and buildings and sell them and scrape a bare living. For years he lived in nasty cheap flats, had almost no friends, certainly no girlfriends. This was his miserable lifestyle for seven years until at the age of 25 he was rescued by the First World War. No one in their right mind would have guessed this poor broke-down failure would cause the Second World War. [image] (Hitler almost unrecognisable on the right) In the war he was a dispatch runner (if you saw the movie 1917 you know what they did, it was extremely dangerous, most of them died.) He was decorated twice for bravery and he was very lucky to survive the war. You probably know that towards the end he was gassed and was pretty much blind for two weeks. But what about when the war ended? Approaching thirty years of age, without education, career or prospects, his only plans were to stay in the army as long as possible. Someone described him at the time : “he was like a stray dog looking for a master”. That was in 1920. By 1933 he was the supreme leader of the Third Reich and was about to annihilate millions. **** This is part one of a great biography. Here are a few quotes to give you a flavour : Critical observers could remain uncomprehending at a melange of half-truths, distortions, over-simplifications, and vague, pseudo-religious redemptionist promises. But the 16,000 people jammed into the Sportpalast had not turned up to hear an intellectual discourse. They had heard what they had come to hear. 14 September 1930 : the Nazis advanced at one stroke from the 12 seats and mere 2.6% of the vote in 1928 to 107 seats and 18.3%, making it the second largest party in the Reichstag. 1932 : …travelling the length and breadth of Germany, and addressing huge crowds in twelve cities during the eleven day campaign. In Breslau he arrived four hours late, in Stuttgart two hours behind schedule. The crowds still waited. Hitler’s own actions were of only secondary importance in bringing him to power. …standing with outstretched arm for seven hours while the Hitler Youth paraded past him [What did the middle-class think of the Nazis?] The communists were revolutionaries, they would take away private property, impose a class dictatorship, and rule in the interests of Moscow. The National Socialists were vulgar and distasteful, but they stood for German interests, they would uphold German values, and they would not take away private property. Hitler’s party, with a third of the voters behind it, went further and advocated compulsory sterilization of the hereditarily sick. Some of Papen’s conservative friends also expressed their deep concern at the prospect of a Hitler cabinet. To one who warned him that he was placing himself in Hitler’s hands, Papen replied: “You are mistaken. We’ve hired him.” There was no inevitability about Hitler’s accession to power. Democracy was surrendered without a fight. Within a month [of Hitler becoming chancellor] civil liberties had been extinguished. …Within four months the once powerful trade unions were dissolved. In less than six months, all opposition parties had been suppressed or gone into voluntary liquidation, leaving the Nazis as the only party. Without any orders from above, and without any coordination, assaults on Jewish businesses and the beating up of Jews by Nazi thugs became commonplace. The reordering of German cultural life along Nazi lines was far reaching indeed. But the most striking feature was the alacrity and eagerness with which intellectuals, writers, artists, performers and publicists actively collaborated in moves which not only impoverished and straight-jacketed German culture for the next 12 years but banned and outlawed some of its most glittering exponents. The symbolic moment of capitulation of German intellectuals to the “new spirit” of 1933 came with the burning of 10 May of the books of authors unacceptable to the regime…the burning of books which took place at all German universities that night of shame had not been initiated by Goebbels but prompted by the leadership of the German Students Association….Local authorities and police had voluntarily assisted in clearing out the books to be burned from public libraries. The levels of hero-worship had never been witnessed before in Germany…Hitler’s forty-fourth birthday on 20 April 1933 saw an extraordinary outpouring of adulation as the entire country glutted itself with festivities in honour of “the Leader of the new Germany”. However well orchestrated the propaganda, it was able to tap popular sentiments and quasi-religious levels of devotion that could not simply be manufactured. Cardinal Faulhaber, Catholic leader of Bavaria, in a handwritten letter : “What the old parliament and parties did not accomplish in sixty years, your statesmanlike foresight has achieved in six months… May God preserve the Reich Chancellor for our people.” This review kind of defeated me... to do it justice I would have to write a thirty page essay - and no one wants that! But this book is RECOMMENDED ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
Mar 30, 2023
|
Apr 12, 2023
|
Mar 30, 2023
|
Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 0521197201
| 9780521197205
| 0521197201
| 3.93
| 217
| Jul 31, 2010
| Jul 05, 2010
|
it was amazing
|
One of the best narrative histories I ever read, this massive book begins in the 5th century with St Patrick and ends in 2007 with the Chuckle Brother
One of the best narrative histories I ever read, this massive book begins in the 5th century with St Patrick and ends in 2007 with the Chuckle Brothers (Ian Paisley and Martin McGuinness in their extraordinary power-sharing executive). Thomas Bartlett drives his book through all its 580 large pages with a wonderfully assured style that never falls into professional historian-speak (so very ghastly) and makes as complex and, it has to be admitted, at times repetitive story as this one as clear as a mountain stream in County Kerry. He even finds space to give a mention to Van Morrison! Readers who want a less exhausting version of Irish history are advised to try elsewhere, this is the full-sail galleon cruise through 15 centuries. It will take its time and there will be magnificent sights. I might also mention that the final section dealing with the Troubles (as sinister a euphemism as you could wish for) is just not long enough (they probably said “no it can’t be 900 pages long”) so you would be better skipping that and reading something like Making Sense of the Troubles by David McKittrick – that one was excellent, I’m sure there are other good ones too. One note on the strange world of comparative death statistics : I found out that in the Irish Civil War (1919-23) there were less than half the number people killed than in the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Centre. Or to put it another way, the total number of deaths in that four year civil war had happened every day for five months during the Battle of the Somme in 1914. It’s useless information but there it is. [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
Nov 28, 2022
|
Jan 28, 2023
|
Nov 28, 2022
|
Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 1862072906
| 9781862072909
| 1862072906
| 3.74
| 27
| Jan 01, 1963
| Sep 09, 2001
|
it was ok
|
This was totally the wrong book on the Congo under King Leopold – I now realise should have read King Leopold’s Ghost by Adam Hochschild, published in
This was totally the wrong book on the Congo under King Leopold – I now realise should have read King Leopold’s Ghost by Adam Hochschild, published in 1998, 36 years after The King Incorporated, when a ton more research had been done. Only a single chapter covers the story of the awful atrocities that were perpetrated in the 1890s and 1900s to enforce the extraction of rubber. (You will all know that the horrors of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and therefore Coppola’s Apocalypse Now were based on reports from the Congo.) The rest of the book is excruciatingly detailed accounts of the financial & political wheelings, dealings and outright swindlings perpetrated by this gruesome Leopold (one of history's most disgusting villains) who was able to throw dust in everybody’s face and rake in untold fortunes over the bodies of millions of Africans (minimum 3 million) for years. The author turns a horror story into a technical plod. But it’s my fault, readers should find the right book not the one they happen to stumble over. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
Jul 22, 2023
|
Aug 04, 2023
|
Sep 01, 2022
|
Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 0140277447
| 9780140277449
| 0140277447
| 4.23
| 44,356
| Oct 14, 1997
| Nov 01, 1998
|
really liked it
|
I thought I wouldn’t review this one, it’s such a grim and grisly subject. But then I read The Death of Truth by Michiko Kakutani and realised each bo
I thought I wouldn’t review this one, it’s such a grim and grisly subject. But then I read The Death of Truth by Michiko Kakutani and realised each book lit up the other one with a bright lurid light. The Death of Truth discusses (despairs over) our current dilemma : that between contending political believers there is now no common ground, no agreed-upon facts, no objectivity to be had anywhere, leading to the grotesque spectacle of bereaved parents being told they are “crisis actors” hired to pretend a school shooter killed their kid because the school shooting was a “false flag” operation designed by the government to whip up gun control support, and never actually happened. During and after wars bigger events than a school shooting can be suppressed. The Nazis built Belzec extermination camp in November 1941, killed between 400,000 and 600,0000 people there, then demolished the whole camp in June 1943, ploughed over the ground and planted trees. They built a farmhouse and moved some locals in and told them to tell anyone who asked that they’d been farming there for generations. Well, they nearly got away with it. The killing of around 200,000 Chinese people during a six week period December 1937 to January 1938 in the city of Nanking by the Japanese Army was one of those events which were almost obliterated from history, even though witnesses survived and Western reporters were present. It took this book published in 1997 to put this event into many people’s minds. In Japan this book was and is very controversial. I read on Wiki that Associate Professor David Askew of Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University said that Chang's book ignited an interest in Japan about the massacre, increasing the amount of publications about the massacre in Japan. He opined that a unified Japanese view of the massacre doesn't exist because of the internal debates and contentions surrounding the massacre, and that the different views can be categorized into mutually exclusive thought groups. I bet Michiko Kakutani would have loved to have come up with that phrase : mutually exclusive thought groups. So I am suggesting, and it can’t be any kind of original idea, that the establishment of agreed-upon historical and political facts can be almost impossible. Is a fact a fact if 90% agree about it and 10% disagree? What about 55/45%? All the polls say that around 60% of Americans think Oswald didn’t shoot Kennedy by himself. Does that make it true? I think truth dies and is reborn and dies again in multiple locations simultaneously, dying and resurrecting, as the obfuscators and delusional, the paranoid and the wishful thinkers win then lose the raging arguments that billow continually through all the long centuries. One other chilling moment from this chilling book : The entire Japanese education system suffers from selective amnesia, for not until 1994 were Japanese schoolchildren taught that Hirohito’s army was responsible for the deaths of at least 20 million Allied soldiers and Asian civilians during World War Two. In the early 1990s a newspaper article quoted a Japanese high school teacher who claimed that his students were surprised to learn that Japan had been at war with the USA. The first thing they wanted to know was who won. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
Aug 03, 2022
|
Aug 21, 2022
|
Jul 25, 2022
|
Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 178590731X
| 9781785907319
| 178590731X
| 2.82
| 11
| Feb 22, 2022
| Feb 22, 2022
|
it was ok
|
THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE KIND OF OBVIOUS OR I’D DO ANYTHING FOR DEMOCRACY (BUT I WON’T DO THAT) Here we have 21 essays by various expert persons musing THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE KIND OF OBVIOUS OR I’D DO ANYTHING FOR DEMOCRACY (BUT I WON’T DO THAT) Here we have 21 essays by various expert persons musing on what the hell happened last August – how come nobody saw THAT coming? And was it all for nothing? I have to report that a lot of these essay writers should be rounded up and sent to Afghanistan where they would succeed where the military failed by blathering the Taliban to death. On every other page we encounter such ringing phrases as “multiple governance models”, “a clear centre of strategic gravity”, “a new paradigm of engagement” and suchlike. The last essay is called “The Post-Afghan Reset And The Case For Rebuilding EU-UK Security Co-Operation”. Then again, there are five Afghan “witness statements”, the last one of which is called “A Mother Turns to Sex Work”. No obfuscation there. All due respect, I don’t think you are going to come away from this book with much you didn’t already know. For example - in spite of its global dominance, the collective brains of the West persistently fail to understand non-Western countries – ex-USSR countries, Iraq, Afghanistan…. In 2001 there was an assumption that Afghans were sick of the Taliban and would therefore welcome its opposite. The first part was probably true, the second was hopelessly naïve. There’s a very obvious point to be made right away : British and NATO officials never spoke Afghan languages or knew any Afghan history or anything about clan and tribal structures. Also, there was a fast turnover of diplomatic staff because nobody wanted to stay there longer than 18 months. We did not work with the grain of Afghanistan because we did not know what the grain was and did not make the time or space to find out. One big problem was the drugs trade. I am informed that 95% of Western heroin was supplied by Afghanistan. What an opportunity for Western forces to eradicate a great social evil. But “many key powerbrokers themselves profited from the trade” and blocked any attempt to destroy the poppies. Well, pardon me, not so surprising. Another big BIG maybe the BIGGEST problem was corruption. This bad word is sprinkled around on every other page, but most annoyingly, all the writers assume we know exactly what they mean. I mean, yes, we have a rough idea, but I would have liked some light shone on this murkiest aspect to the whole Afghan catastrophe. Do the Western authorities shrug and turn a blind eye when all the aid is stolen over and over? A CASE OF REAL BAD TIMING Lord Purvis of Tweed, the Liberal Democrat Party’s bigshot in the House of Lords, writes in his essay : The world is – contrary to what the daily news may make us think – more stable, democratic, free and tolerant than in any time in recent history. As I read that Mr Putin’s tanks were about to start rolling into eastern Ukraine. SERIOUSLY??????? WTF?????? One time I was told something that shocked me – on page 243 : Bagram Airbase…had been abandoned by the US in early July, leaving behind some $85 billion worth of military equipment. $85 billion? Do you think that's a misprint? UPDATE on this : Venus (below) pointed me to articles on fee and politifact which seriously dispute this crazy figure. Undoubtedly there was a whole lotta hardware left behind but not quite that much. Google "No proof Biden left Taliban $80B" for details. A CONTROVERSIAL OPINION The best, most forthright essay for me was by Professor Paul Dixon. He sticks it to the military elite, and I think about time too …Senior British military officers, like their US counterparts, have resented and evaded democratic control. Their growing power represents a threat to democracy but…. criticism of the military elite, whether from the left or the right, is considered largely beyond the bounds of legitimate debate… Scrutiny and criticism are portrayed not only as an insult to those who have served and sacrificed but also as potentially treacherous for undermining the propaganda required to defeat the enemy. Strong words indeed. There are many other aspects to the whole thing which I would love to discuss but I have tried your patience enough I think. 2.5 stars. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
Feb 22, 2022
|
Feb 23, 2022
|
Feb 20, 2022
|
Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 1473562252
| 9781473562257
| 1473562252
| 4.23
| 3,976
| Feb 27, 2020
| Feb 27, 2020
|
really liked it
| Girls just wanna have fun damental human rights - Slogan on a banner WHAT THIS BOOK ISN’T I was after a history of feminism and in my male brain that woul Girls just wanna have fun damental human rights - Slogan on a banner WHAT THIS BOOK ISN’T I was after a history of feminism and in my male brain that would be a cool judicious account of all the great names, you know, Mary Shelley, Betty Friedan, Simone de Beauvoir, Germaine Greer, but nope, not at all, they only get some glancing references. This book is all about practical women, the feminists who did something to make women’s lives better, not the feminists who analysed why things were so terrible. You have to have both, but this book is about the doers. ANOTHER GREAT QUOTE FROM ANDREA DWORKIN Her definition of feminism: A political practice of fighting male supremacy on behalf of women as a class, including all the women you don’t like, including all the women you don’t want to be around, including all the women who used to be your best friends whom you don’t want anything to do with anymore. WHAT IS DIFFICULT ABOUT DIFFICULT? It kind of seems as if everybody eventually finds every single other person difficult these days, it’s been an irritable decade. I see that mostly this book gets 4 & 5 stars but very occasionally 1 or 2 because predictably it has been judged to be transphobic due (it appears) to using the term “male bodied” in one chapter. I can see that for some Helen Lewis herself is a difficult woman to be writing the history of feminism as she’s too white, too posh and too rich and too often on the television. (I realised half way through I’d seen her many times – ah, THAT Helen Lewis!) NAMING NAMES The issues and the difficult women are : Divorce : Caroline Norton The vote : Annie Kenney Sex : Marie Stopes Play : Lily Parr Work : Jayaben Desai Safety : Erin Pizzey Love : Maureen Colquhoun Education : Sophia Jex-Blake Time : Selma James Abortion : Diana King, Colette Devlin and Kitty O'Kane Aside from Marie Stopes and Erin Pizzey, these were obscure names to me. Maureen Colquhoun, for instance, was the first out lesbian Member of Parliament in the 1970s and has been completely airbrushed from political history since then. I had never heard of her. (She died aged 92 in February this year.) HOW DIFFICULT IS DIFFICULT ANYWAY? ANSWER : VERY Erin Pizzey is the embodiment of the difficult woman. She is famous for establishing the first women’s refuge in Britain. She didn’t wait for any kind of official approval, she just went ahead and did it in 1971. Two years later a male MP got up in the House of Commons and opened a discussion on domestic violence, praising her Chiswick Aid Centre. She was watching from the public gallery. The chamber of the House of Commons was nearly empty. The MP said that if the debate had been about cruelty to dogs it would have been packed. Women’s refuges – couldn’t be more feminist, right? Right. But when Erin Pizzey met up with other feminists she took an instant dislike and refused to have anything to do with them. It seems they were ultraleft Maoist feminists, but you might have thought she would meet some non-Maoists later. By 2009 she was writing for the Daily Mail an article called Why I loathe feminism... and believe it will ultimately destroy the family describing feminism as “a lie” and writing that “we must stop demonising men and start healing the rift that feminism has created between men and women”. And now she is “an advocate for the Men’s Rights Movement, serving as editor-at-large of the anti-feminist website "A Voice for Men”. The boss of that site, Paul Elam, has called feminists "human garbage” and says that he would never vote guilty in a rape trial if he was a juror no matter what the evidence was. (For more information about these vermin see the excellent book Men who Hate Women by Laura Bates*). So as Helen Lewis says “How does a woman go from founding England’s first refuge for domestic violence victims to hanging out with MRMs?” The answer to that deserves a book in itself. HL mentions her own experience of what she calls “purity politics” and also “The Intersectionality War” which broke out on the internet in 2011 after the publication of How to be a Woman by Caitlin Moran : The next few years were bloody : feminism’s equivalent of a civil war. Fair and unfair criticisms blended into one giant screaming mass, fuelled by Twitter, and left everyone hurt and angry…. Online feminism became obsessed with language. A kind of priesthood had sprung up to adjudicate what terms could be used You can tell HL is still reeling from all this : Outrage had become prized for its own sake and online feminists had lost the ability to distinguish between genuine anger and mere spite. …My own trashing was a traumatic experience. I was accused of endangering lives because my rhetoric was so hate-filled that people reading it would surely kill themselves. I was a racist, I was a transphobe So there is a parallel between Erin Pizzey and the Maoists of 1972 and Helen Lewis and the trans rights movement of 2011, I guess. I think HL or someone else probably needs to write a whole book about how contemporary feminism became such a minefield.** SWIRLING, SURGING, EXHILARATING, DEPRESSING, UPLIFTING, LIKE FLOWING WATER, NEVER STILL FOR ONE MOMENT I liked this a lot. Not the book I thought I was going to read, and like being locked in a washing machine of ideas with the setting on FULL SPIN. [image] *https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4... **Has anyone tried to do this? ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
Dec 14, 2021
|
Dec 21, 2021
|
Dec 14, 2021
|
Kindle Edition
| ||||||||||||||
| 0743282035
| 9780743282031
| 0743282035
| 3.93
| 1,011
| 1976
| May 01, 2005
|
it was amazing
|
Review of Pages 1 to 264 is here https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... Here is now the review of pages 265 to 517 or to put it another way from 1511 Review of Pages 1 to 264 is here https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... Here is now the review of pages 265 to 517 or to put it another way from 1511 to 1975 During these 200 years four things happened to Christianity : 1) The Reformation in which the Protestants said rude things about the Pope & stopped sending him Christmas cards 2) The invention of actual science which kind of blasted huge holes in the Bible 3) The First World War 4) Communism and Fascism All these things demonstrated the impotence of Christianity – the Church could not stop itself splitting; it could not resist the deluge of new information which entirely capsized what every Christian had previously believed; and it could not prevent Christians from murdering each other on a vast scale. During World War One, it was painfully clear that in every country patriotism overwhelmed Christianity : On one side were ranged Protestant Germany, Catholic Austria, Orthodox Bulgaria and Muslim Turkey. On the other were Protestant Britain, Catholic France and Italy, and Orthodox Russia. … Christian soldiers of all denominations were exhorted to kill each other in the name of their Saviour. Well, twenty years later, Hitler arrived with his evil gang, and as is well known, the Churches bent over backwards to make nice with him, yes, the same Hitler who said Do you really believe the masses will ever be Christian again? Nonsense. Never again. The tale is finished… but we can hasten matters. The parsons will be made to dig their own graves. They will betray their God to us. They will betray anything for the same of their miserable little jobs and incomes. PJ’s section about the Nazi period is great : The churches continued to greet Nazi victories by ringing their bells, until they were taken away to be melted down Oh hold on – maybe they weren’t all sleazy supine jackboot kissers : check out this speech by the Pope. He said Nazism was A satanic spectre… the arrogant apostasy from Jesus Christ, the denial of his doctrine and of his work of redemption, the cult of violence, the idolatry of race and blood, the overthrow of human liberty and dignity Hey, pretty strong stuff from the Pope…but he waited until June 1945 to say it, when Hitler was dead. **** Paul Johnson manages in this excellent book to cram the history of this enormously complex religion into a mere 500 pages, mostly without losing the ordinary reader in a welter of theology and weird sect names. He is a great companion, throwing out summaries and judgements boldly and crisply. Here for instance is PJ on the witch craze : There is no reason to suppose that such a phenomenon as witchcraft ever existed. The myth was on a level with the supposed ritual murders of Christian children, of which the Jews were accused in the 12th century. Witches simply replaced Jews as objects of fear and hatred, and torture supplied “proof” of their existence and malevolence. Witch-hunting could not survive without torture. I could quote many favourite passages. But enough. Even if I think a one volume history of Christianity is an impossible thing PJ here pretty much does the impossible. I probably shouldn’t like him so much since he’s a “conservative Catholic” according to Wiki. But he never shrinks from putting the boot in where it’s deserved. And he is such good company. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
Sep 09, 2021
|
Oct 14, 2021
|
Sep 09, 2021
|
Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 0674985834
| 9780674985834
| B07FVKQQKM
| 4.30
| 121
| Oct 09, 2014
| Apr 02, 2018
|
it was amazing
|
REVIEW OF PAGES 121-415 This study was based on the conviction that it is necessary to take seriously the texts, the images and the words of the Nazis. REVIEW OF PAGES 121-415 This study was based on the conviction that it is necessary to take seriously the texts, the images and the words of the Nazis. This is not easy to do. While reading them, it may be difficult to believe that these authors could seriously have believed or subscribed to the things that they wrote, that their texts could ever have been read without unease, mockery or indignation. In Part One of this review we found out how profoundly anti-Christian the Nazis were (Jesus was an Aryan but Saul was a Jew and perverted the whole thing); [image] and we found that they sketched out a theology for themselves that – interestingly – was not a revival of some Wotan worship at all, but something quite different. Before I sketch in the rest of this very dense book I might say that potential readers might think of first reading Black Earth by Timothy Snyder. [image] This is another very dense book (sorry!) but it brilliantly describes the world-view set forth in Mein Kampf and of course Nazi thinking sprang forth from that. So, moving from the theological to more practical matters, we now deal with What Went Wrong and How to Fix It. The blood of a people flows from the soil of its farms like a bubbling, lively stream, while it drains away and runs dry in the cities. (Darre) The French Revolution threw out a set of pernicious ideas like democracy and civil liberty, and then the Industrial Revolution destroyed the purity of rural life by syphoning away all its workers. The Nazis were going to reverse all that. Their intention was to establish an agrarian utopia*, using all the rich land to the East which had been stolen away from them by a cabal of enemies who most cruelly crammed the great German people into the stifling cramped space in which they now eke out a living. To fulfil this dream of millions of Germans farming peacefully their vast Eastern lands, the Nazis needed to fix the German people itself, and then enslave the millions who were currently squatting on German eastern territories. [image] The German people were the greatest in the world but they had weaknesses. There were too many useless mouths, meaning, disabled people. So a law was passed on 14 July 1933 which said that “anyone with a hereditary illness may be rendered sterile by means of surgical intervention”. Which would be “carried out against the patient’s will when required”. Well, “what good was a pity that produced more objects of pity”? 400,000 people were sterilized over the 12 year Nazi period. They used the same argument over and over, when they talked about this issue or the Final Solution – yes, these look like harsh, brutal measures, but really, they are kindly – to the immediate families of the disabled people, to the Germans as a whole, and to humanity as a whole. Mistaken morality focuses on the individual. Superior Nazi morality focuses on the nation. Whatever is good for the German people is good. Eugenics was the name of the game here, and although it was taken to its logical extreme by the Nazis, it wasn’t original to them. The USA, Switzerland and Scandinavian countries has passed laws for “racial improvement”. But they didn’t go as far as to physically liquidate disabled people, as the Nazis did, beginning in October 1939. (That operation was called T4.) * In the final chapter Johann Chapoutot reaches the subject of the Nazis’ apocalyptic antisemitism and finally I had a feeling that I had read all that stuff before. And there is an undeniable feeling that some of the (penetrating) points he is making and some of the (hair-raising) examples he uses are being repeated. Some pruning might have made this less exhausting. I say this in the spirit of a mouse looking at the King and thinking his crown looks slightly crooked during the last couple of chapters, maybe. In conclusion: For anyone seriously interested in the Nazi period this is a must read. *We know another guy who wanted to do that : Pol Pot. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
Sep 02, 2021
|
Sep 07, 2021
|
Sep 02, 2021
|
Kindle Edition
| ||||||||||||||
| 1529312140
| 9781529312140
| 1529312140
| 3.92
| 480
| Nov 12, 2020
| Nov 12, 2020
|
really liked it
|
There are some funny examples of the Peter Principle at work here – this is where a person is very good at their various jobs in an organisation but i
There are some funny examples of the Peter Principle at work here – this is where a person is very good at their various jobs in an organisation but is finally promoted to the job they can’t do. We just lived through the three gruesome years of Theresa May, Queen Midas in Reverse, and you had to ask yourself, as she was continually presented with betrayals and treacheries and calamities and situations she could not rise to why on earth did she want that job in the first place? For her it was a vale of suffering and tears. In British history there are so many famous names that I know almost nothing about so this was a great one stop shop for some of them. Who was William Pitt The Younger? Well, he became prime minister at the age of 24 – imagine that! And he was good at it too. Some PMs were there for the best part of a decade like John Major but were thought of as continually failing the entire time. Some were immediately crushed by events beyond their control (Gordon Brown with the 2008 financial meltdown, Neville Chamberlain with Hitler). Some began as universally beloved and made a single disastrous decision and became universally detested (Tony Blair). Some were cosy and reassuring (Harold Macmillan) and some were screechy and turbulent (David Lloyd George). Some were modesty itelf and some were flat-out egomaniacs, such as the only novelist to have become prime minister, Benjamin Disraeli (“I am one of those to whom a moderate reputation can give no pleasure.”) Most people I think will pick Churchill as the GOAT but I rather think William Gladstone was the GOAT : Yes, it’s true he would encounter prostitutes in the London streets and take them back to Downing Street to convert them to Christianity and the respectable life, and yes it’s true that when he felt he was tempted by their voluptuous charms he flagellated himself on occasion, but let’s put that to one side. He set up employment exchanges for dock workers to stop the gross exploitation by the shipping companies; he organised the new railway network ensuring cheap fares for all and making the new technology of the telegraph run alongside the train tracks; he scrapped ancient laws which kept basic foodstuffs artificially expensive, and this turbocharged the whole economy; he campaigned to extend the vote to the working class; all of this was before he became PM; then, he provided free education for all children up to the age of 12; he abolished the sale of army commissions, replacing patronage with meritocracy; he introduced the secret ballot in all elections; he supported the London dock strike of 1889 when he was back in opposition (aged 77); he began a campaign for state funded old age pensions; he fought the 1892 election at age 83 and won (take that Joe Biden) and so had a 4th time as prime minister). He was an old man in a hurry. Although it feels not a little uncomfortable to endorse a volume with a foreword written by Boris Johnson, I must say this is a lot of historical nerdy fun. [image] My unlikely hero ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
Apr 09, 2021
|
Apr 19, 2021
|
Apr 14, 2021
|
Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 1910695114
| 9781910695111
| 1910695114
| 4.46
| 18,411
| Aug 15, 2013
| May 23, 2016
|
really liked it
|
This is an excellent and essential book but there was simply too much of it, it’s nearly 700 pages long. Transcriptions of dozens of interviews with d
This is an excellent and essential book but there was simply too much of it, it’s nearly 700 pages long. Transcriptions of dozens of interviews with dozens of Russians, all ex-Soviet citizens, about what it was like to live through the collapse of the USSR, the defeat of communism and the rise of the gangster oligarchy. There are many sincere communists in these pages who wring their hands in different ways, some denouncing that perfect idiot Gorbachev, some that ridiculous stooge Yeltsin, there were enemies of the unique Soviet way of life every way you looked. Yes, they say, it was all true about the empty shelves and the shortages and the cramped lives, but in those days they were doing something unique, they had this dream, it badly needed to be reformed, but instead the crazy hotheads threw the whole project in the bin and prostrated themselves before the mighty capitalists. Over and over again. Let’s take a core sample. Page 50: Today, they accuse us of fighting for capitalism…that’s not true! I was defending socialism, but some other kind, not the Soviet kind Page 100 One of my girlfriends got into such a big fight about Lenin with her son and daughter-in-law, she kicked them out. Page 150 There was a mountain of red flags and pennants. Party and Komsomol membership cards. And Soviet war medals! Orders of Lenin and the Red Banner. Medals! For Valor!...being sold for dollars…”These are relics from the era of totalitarianism” Those were his words…Like these were just refuse, but the foreigners liked them. Page 200 I read an essay by a so-called democrat who said that the war generation… which is to say, us…was in power too long. We won the war, rebuilt the country, and after that we should have left because we had no conception of how to live in peacetime. Page 250 There were kilometer-long queues outside of the first McDonald’s, stories about it on the news. Educated, intelligent adults saved boxes and napkins from there and would proudly show them off to their guests. You can see how it is. So for me there were a couple of big problems. First is that this huge book seemed like raw material gathered for another book. And it was the other book I was wanting to read. For me, there was simply too much of the same kind of woeful sorrowful tale of bitter regret. But I can’t fault a book for doing what it set out to do and not what I think it should have wanted to do. But I wanted to find out how the gangsters actually took over (the “pirate privatisation” as one guy calls it), whether they had been there in the background all along, how the transformation from 1989 to (say) 2000 happened, piece by piece. Although I quite see that Svetlana Alexievich is not going to be able to get some despicable billionaire to sit down and say “well, this is how we stole the natural gas industry…” Finally a note on the crazy cover policy of the publisher Fitzcarraldo Editions. They have uniform covers for all their books and they are the world's dullest. [image] [image] [image] Wow, okay, we get you're really a Serious company, but give us readers a break, please. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
Jan 24, 2021
|
Mar 07, 2021
|
Jan 24, 2021
|
Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 0195140737
| 9780195140736
| 0195140737
| 4.23
| 1,042
| Jan 01, 2006
| Apr 01, 2006
|
really liked it
|
[image] What people like to do is justify their terrible atrocities and try to sleep at night, and they can be quite successful at this. European Chris [image] What people like to do is justify their terrible atrocities and try to sleep at night, and they can be quite successful at this. European Christians busily enslaving Africans liked to quote the Curse of Ham from Genesis 9:18-27. This is a weird story about Noah and his sons after the flood. Noah got drunk “and uncovered himself within his tent. Ham, the father of Canaan, saw his father’s nakedness and told his two brothers outside”. Shem and Japheth took up a cloth and walked backwards (!) into the tent and covered up Noah’s nakedness without looking at him. Now, for this crime Noah issued the following statement : Cursed be Canaan, the lowest of slaves shall he be to his brothers Over the centuries there was a blurring of meanings and Ham and his son were mysteriously associated with blackness (no mention of that in the Bible) and the story was cited a million times to give Biblical authority for the slave trade. Likewise when the idea of abolition of slavery was raised in the USA the slavers never tired of saying what great lives the slaves had down on the plantation and how they would have a terrible time if they were free, nowhere to go and no one to look after them. (No one to whip them and sell their children either, but they didn’t mention that.) (Before that Southern slave owners used to like to say that slave owning was a great burden inherited from Britain and entirely not their fault.) [image] Interesting fact : Slaveholding Southern presidents governed the nation for roughly fifty of the seventy-two years between George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. In this sorry story of slavery in America there are a few inspiring moments, and one of them is the unlikely story of the British abolition of the slave trade. After being the principal organisers and profiteers from African slavery for a couple of centuries, within a few decades (1780 to 1820) the British made a complete U turn and abolished the whole thing and spent a considerable amount of money and resources making sure nobody else could carry on slave trading. Many cynical historians then wrote that it wasn’t anything to do with a sudden onrush of altruism but just a way of ensuring existing West Indian economies were protected, but DBD carefully dismantles these arguments and says no, it was entirely altruistic, and you can see how the West Indian colonies suffered as a direct result. And plus, the British freed all their slaves too. One excellent section in this jam-packed book deals with the way racism and slavery has been remembered in the USA since the Civil War. Or should we say, how it’s been airbrushed away. Few if any other wars have created among the public such a strange fascination with the concrete details of military tactics and strategy, and this pride in knowing where and when general Daniel Sickles lost his leg at Gettysburg, but not knowing when slaves were freed in the District of Columbia. As the early 20th century progressed, the Civil War came to resemble in many minds the nation’s greatest athletic contest, a kind of mid-nineteenth century Super Bowl between all-American heroes. Professor Davis takes on a huge subject here, and deals with its dizzying complications and entanglements as well as anyone could, I think. There is a lot of detail here, at times a bit too much for my poor brain. But still, highly recommended. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sfbps... [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
Sep 28, 2020
|
Oct 15, 2020
|
Sep 16, 2020
|
Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 046502307X
| 9780465023073
| 046502307X
| 4.16
| 4,220
| Mar 10, 2015
| Mar 10, 2015
|
liked it
|
This year I have been fascinated by all things Turkish including baklava which if you need to know what your next heart attack looks like it looks lik
This year I have been fascinated by all things Turkish including baklava which if you need to know what your next heart attack looks like it looks like this [image] So I thought I’d read how one of the biggest and longest lived empires came to an end. Really what I knew about the Ottoman Empire could be written on the back of a postage stamp & you would still have room for a recipe for Hunkar Begendi. It’s sad that almost all history is sad. Mr Gibbon said History is indeed little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind. And this book confirms his gloomy conclusion. The Ottoman Empire lasted in total from 1300 to 1922. 622 years, not bad as empires go. It beat the British Empire (1556-1960) by 200 years. The beginnings were kind of mixed up. Way back when, the World’s Longest Lasting Empire which of course was the Roman, got the western bit chopped off by vandals and morphed into the Eastern or Byzantine Empire which was Greek, they tell me, but mostly located in Turkey before the Turks. Yes, there were many centuries when there were no Turks in Turkey. They arrived from The East, as almost everyone did in those days and they were called Seljuks. They squashed the Greek Romans bit by bit and set up various little kingdoms, one, amusingly, called Rum meaning Rome, just to confuse the historians. Eventually one little band of Seljuks ate up all the others and became the Ottoman empire. TWO VERY GLOOMY CHAPTERS I have to say half of this book is dull, stuffed with meticulous descriptions of the battles of World War One that took place in the Middle East. Yes, exactly what the subtitle of this book says, so I can’t say I wasn’t warned. But battles are samey so I kind of skipped those bits. There was one unskippable battle, though, something I always heard about but never understood before, the Gallipoli Campaign. This is the part that really struck me : The diversity of the invasion force further complicated planning. No battlefield in the Great War would prove more global than Gallipoli. The Mediterranean Expeditionary Force numbered some 75,000 men from around the world. In addition to British troops there were volunteers from the Dominion of Newfoundland, Australians and New Zealanders (with both Pakeha and Maori units), Gurkhas and Sikhs, Frenchmen, Foreign Legionnaires hailing from around the world, and colonial troops from across Africa – Senegal, Guinea, Sudan and the Maghrib. Soldiers were mutually reliant on men with whom they could barely communicate. Is it reasonable to ask why all these Africans and Indians and Maoris would have any desire whatsoever to traverse the globe and put their lives at risk and lose their lives to further the interests of white imperialists fighting against a country they had probably never heard of? Was it that they didn’t get any choice in the matter, or maybe it was simply that they all loved the British Empire so very much ? The other gloomy issue is of course THE ANNIHILATION OF THE ARMENIANS That is the title of chapter seven. And this is a very contentious issue. No one is disputing that thousands of people died but they bitterly dispute how and why to the present day. Wikipedia had a map showing the countries in the world which recognise these massacres as a genocide and those who don’t. I’m not sure this is a very useful dispute. Wiki says things like On 4 March 2010, a U.S. congressional panel narrowly voted that the incident was indeed genocide This is really disgusting, a bunch of comfortable politicians thinking hmmm, yes, I think we should call this a genocide, or hmm, no I don’t think it was, merely a series of massacres. Either way, approx 1.5 million people died. As to how, this book states that there were undoubtedly death squads sent out to murder adult male Armenians, and the women, old people and children were then sent on long death marches into the Syrian desert, which were called deportation. A HAPPY END Well, the carving up of one empire by another empire is not a pretty sight, but that’s what happened after 1918. This did provoke the Turkish people to throw out the last Sultan Mehmed VI. The very remarkable Mustafa Kemal Ataturk became the new Republic’s first president, and I need to read a biography of him next. [image] [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
Aug 21, 2020
|
Sep 14, 2020
|
Aug 21, 2020
|
Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 0674660439
| 9780674660434
| 0674660439
| 4.30
| 121
| Oct 09, 2014
| Apr 02, 2018
|
it was amazing
|
There are some books that are almost impossible to review because they are so crammed with large ideas on every other page, so many that by the end of
There are some books that are almost impossible to review because they are so crammed with large ideas on every other page, so many that by the end of the book you could only do it justice by writing a 30 page essay with footnotes; and this is not a Goodreads-friendly thing to do. The Law of Blood is one of these. (I’ve added a list of some other books in this category below.) As a way round this, I thought, what you could do is review the said problem books bit by bit. I never really thought of that before. But why not ? So…. THE LAW OF BLOOD : PAGES 1-120 Everyone knows what the Nazis did. And we have had a number of books which try to explain how they got people to do all this horrendous stuff (Ordinary Men by Christopher Browning, the enormously controversial Hitler’s Willing Executioners by Daniel Goldhagen, and so on). But I haven’t before come across a book that tries to explain the totality of Nazi thought, their worldview, their belief system. It’s a truly unpleasant subject, like trying to reconstruct Ted Bundy’s attitude to women in forensic detail. But it’s well worth doing. We need to be able to recognise this world view wherever it raises its head (and it’s never far away) so we need to look the beast right in the eyes without flinching. Professor Johann Chapoutot does a fantastic job here, and he deserves whatever medals there are going for history books. THE THEOLOGY OF THE NAZIS This book opens with an investigation of what you have to call the Nazi religion. To call it a philosophy would be an insult to philosophy but yes, Nazis, bit by bit, did try to assemble a coherent theoretical framework, a setting out of their stall. In so doing, they had a problem, because they were operating within a fundamentally Christian country, and they were radically anti-Christian. So they had to proceed with caution – I know, Nazis proceeding with caution sounds oxymoronic, but in this area that’s what they did. They explained the various anti-Christian concepts to the SS but they didn’t let on how much they hated Christianity to the rest of the German population. The people, alas, would not have understood. The Nazis knew it would take some time. Their religion went like this : the monotheistic God conceptualised in Judaism and then Christianity was out there, above everything, creator and judge. But in the pre-Christian past, the German and Nordic races were pantheists, animists, revering Nature as the perfect expression of the divine. They were holistic, they lived with nature and didn’t exploit it. The Bible, in contradistinction, says that God condemned man and Nature as fallen, sinful. But this was a wicked lie. In truth there was a grand unity of all living things, man was an animal, part of and in no way superior to the natural world. It follows, therefore, that Nazis were strong on animal rights. Their Reich Animal Protection Act of 24.11.1933 was left on the statute books until 1972. So the Christian religion had alienated the Nordic races from their original nature. Shame of the physical, of the body, was intrinsic to this distortion. The Nazis were not ashamed of the human body, and they had no problem with art depicting nudes, and it’s well-known that they promoted nudism. [image] Christianity’s essential idea is salvation – the rescue of the individual from a sinful condition, and the passage of the individual soul into the next, infinitely superior world. In the Nazi theology, the individual, firstly, is not essentially sinful, and secondly, is wholly unimportant. The individual is fused with the race in its place in Nature and there is no requirement for any kind of priesthood. Relations with the divine should be companionable and confident, as opposed to the terror-stricken grovellings of the Bible, that monstrous slave/master relationship. Prof Chapoutot summarises : The youth of Germany had been subjected to the brainwashing of Judeo-Christian alienation, trussed and tied and handed over to priests who were nothing but rabbis in disguise. [image] A SLIGHT PROBLEM WITH JESUS But it was always going to be difficult to throw Jesus out, alas, the people seemed to hold him very dear, so the Nazi thinkers tried the next best thing. They founded the Institute for the Exploration and Elimination of the Jewish Influence in German Religious Life and they proclaimed that Jesus wasn’t a Jew. One of these Nazi theologians wrote We, the racists, are the only ones who revere Christ as he deserves They said that Jesus’ original preaching was perfectly Aryan, but the rabbi Saul (St Paul) had rewritten it and Judaised the whole project, turning it from a socially revolutionary religion into a mystical-conservative one venerating death and rejecting nature. All this in the first 120 pages. I’m taking a break from this fascinating but wearing book, reading the whole thing through might give a person some psychological issues. But this is what great history looks like. BOOKS TO MAKE YOUR BRAIN EXPLODE In the Freud Archives by Janet Malcolm Stamped from the Beginning by Ibram X Kendi Malcolm X by Manning Marable Destiny Disrupted by Tamim Ansary The Good Soldiers by David Finkel The Honor Code by Anthony Appiah The Novel : a Biography by Michael Schmidt Shrinks by Jeffrey Lieberman A Terrible Beauty by Peter Watson Prisoners of Geography by Tim Marshall Explaining Hitler by Ron Rosenbaum Black Earth by Timothy Snyder ...more |
Notes are private!
|
2
|
Jul 15, 2020
not set
|
Aug 07, 2020
not set
|
Dec 08, 2019
|
Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 0374282455
| 9780374282455
| 0374282455
| 4.17
| 1,596
| Nov 15, 2016
| Nov 15, 2016
|
liked it
|
This book is way too short to contain the vast and furious events it tries to explain. In 1917-18 four empires collapsed (German, Russian, Habsburg, O
This book is way too short to contain the vast and furious events it tries to explain. In 1917-18 four empires collapsed (German, Russian, Habsburg, Ottoman) and dozens of new countries were born or imposed from above; the Bolshevik revolution in Russia drove everyone completely crazy with the notion that either you were a Red and you wanted to exterminate all the capitalist exploiters who had just caused the misery of four years of war, or you wanted to kill all the dangerous Reds before they hung you and your children from a lamp post; so that great paranoid battle was raging across all of Europe at the precise time that everyone was trying to create these newfangled nation states. Because after you have lived in a huge multicultural empire like Austro-Hungary, and then you are allowed to inaugurate your new nation state, what is it that you will be thinking about? Making your new state ethnically pure, of course! Expelling from your ancestral lands the scurvy foreigners you have had to put up with for so many generations, that’s what. So here was a rich recipe for chaos indeed – left-right civil wars mixed with land seizures by freebooting militias with a taste for ethnic cleansing. All done under the benign gaze of Woodrow Wilson, president of the USA, who believed that liberal democracy could replace despotic empire as easily as a man could swap a top hat for a bowler. A FEW FLAVOURSOME QUOTES Munich, 1919 As the army and Freikorps troops moved into the city more than 600 people were killed during the fighting, many of them civilian bystanders. Summary executions of prisoners continued…53 Russians who had served in the Red Army were tortured and shot in Pasing, an outskirt of Munich. Hungary, 1919 A Red News article said : “Before they stifle the revolution, suffocate them in their own blood!”… Political violence in the second half of 1919 and the early 1920s took the lives of up to 5000 people. Ruhr Valley, Germany, 1920 The army leadership had no reservation about opening fire on striking workers. In the event, some 1000 “Red Army” insurgents were killed before the March Rising was finally put down by government troops Sofia, 1925 An underground group of communist activists detonated a bomb on 16 April 1925 in the roof of Sveta Nedelya Cathdral during a public funeral service for General Konstantin Georgiev, who had been assassinated by communists a few days earlier. The explosion led to the collapse of the cathedral’s roof, killing over 130 mourner, including many senior army officer and politicians **** Now you can see that this book is 446 pages long in paperback, so that seems adequate, surely? But no – a whole 178 pages are taken up with end notes and the index, so this book is a mere 267 pages long, and that’s why I say it is too short. So many revolutions, counter-revolutions, coups, purges, riots, strikes, assassinations – they all begin to blur together. Professor Gerwarth brings the gruesome whirligig to a halt in the year 1923 and tells us that relative peace descended upon Europe, finally. It lasted for a whole six years! In 1929 the effects of the Wall Street crash swept over Europe bringing massive economic destabilisation, leading to another round of extreme politics, the abandonment of democracy and the coming of the jackboot, with World War Two and the Holocaust a few years down the line. This history, I think, explains why many Europeans of today hold so dearly to the idea of the European Union. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
Sep 25, 2019
|
Oct 14, 2019
|
Sep 25, 2019
|
Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 0813343917
| 9780813343914
| 0813343917
| 3.75
| 8
| 2009
| Aug 25, 2009
|
it was amazing
|
Realpolitik Politics based on practical objectives rather than on ideals…a pragmatic, no-nonsense view and a disregard for ethical considerations. In d Realpolitik Politics based on practical objectives rather than on ideals…a pragmatic, no-nonsense view and a disregard for ethical considerations. In diplomacy it is often associated with relentless, though realistic, pursuit of the national interest. (Encyclopedia Britannica) The invasion of Iraq in March 2003 was realpolitik. To justify the invasion, at first, the US government wondered out loud if Iraq was connected to the 9/11 attacks on the USA. James DeFronzo puts it like this : Suspicion that Saddam was involved in 9/11 was also used to justify attacking Iraq. Some asserted that the 9/11 operation was too well co-ordinated to be carried out by Al-Qaeda alone, that Iraq’s intelligence service must have been involved, and that no one had a stronger motive that the Iraqis to launch such a vicious attack on the United States. But the main reason given by Bush was all about the WMD (weapons of mass destruction, meaning chemical weapons) – Iraq was supposed to have stockpiled tons of the stuff. They therefore had to be disarmed, and Saddam wasn’t playing ball. As the invasion became the occupation, both these reasons turned out to be entirely wrong. The Bush regime shrugged and said oh well, mistakes can happen, nobody’s perfect. They then made a sharp right-turn in their speechifying and said well, look, we removed a real bad dictator and we are bringing the glories of democracy to Iraq, what’s not to like. And yes, Saddam was a terrible dictator, but so were about twenty others in various countries in 2003. The real reason for the invasion was never admitted. It was to remove a hostile government and replace it with a friendly government, because Iraq has the 5th largest oil reserves in the world. This was the Western world making sure that the oil continued to flow. The Western lifestyle wouldn’t last five minutes without a steady flow of oil. And unfortunately, most of the oil is in the very politically unstable region of the Middle East. (So, if you live in the West, you should really be grateful that the USA, at least, has your best interests at heart, and will make sure of the oil at whatever cost to anyone who stands in the way.) DID THEY LIE? NOT REALLY But does this mean that politicians like Bush and Blair straightfacedly lied on camera to their voters? At this point I diverge from a lot of opinion by saying no, they didn’t. They were given the ostensible reasons and they found them sufficiently plausible. They really believed in the phantom WMD. Behind them, the Pentagon and MI6 advisors may or may not have believed in the WMD, but they knew the Bushes and Blairs would, and they knew Bush and his political friends wanted to have believable reasons to do something they wanted to do anyway. So that’s where the duplicity lay. And they would say, well, we were just doing our job. If I put a gun into your hand, it's your decision whether to shoot it. And where to point it. This process of removing Saddam’s regime and setting a friendly regime in place was a complete catastrophe, entirely due to a fundamental lack of American understanding of the country or planning for its immediate future, due, I suppose, to massive incompetence and arrogance on the part of the CIA and the Pentagon. They were sort of kind of shocked when the Iraqi people did not strew flowers before the soldiers in grateful appreciation for getting rid of Saddam. So before the Americans’ eyes invasion turned to occupation which turned into a war. EVENTUALLY LEADING TO TRUMP Some Americans, outraged by this horrible turn of events, saw a conspiracy at the immediate point of origin of the war, that is, 9/11. That enormous event now seemed to be too convenient, providing a perfect reason to go to war (first in Afghanistan, then Iraq, the “real target”). They thought of 9/11 as a Reichstag Fire (the event in 1933 that Hitler used to assume dictatorial powers). Either the Bush administration had perpetrated the attacks themselves, or had allowed them to proceed. This was total nonsense, but this radical distrust in the American government by its own citizens has not gone away, and in 2016 turned into the unexpected (by the political classes) surge of support for Trump. BUT ACTUALLY, THERE REALLY WAS A CONNECTION BETWEEN IRAQ AND 9/11 A TANGLED TALE PART ONE : KUWAIT During World War One, the British promised the Arab people that if they helped them fight the Ottoman Empire the British would help them create an independent unified Arab nation after the war. This was all total lies. The British ended up with a mandate over Jordan, Palestine and Mesopotamia. The latter became Iraq but not before the British decided to snap off the southern oil rich part of Basra which became Kuwait. They did this because they needed a tame oil rich state on the Persian Gulf. As well as oil it would provide a useful base for any further invasions of Iraq which may be required in future. You may easily believe the British had no especially strong feelings about the ancient independent rights of the royal family of Kuwait. It was just convenient for Kuwait to exist. If it hadn’t been judged to be convenient, it wouldn’t exist now. During the Iran/Iraq war of 1980-88 Arab nations gave Saddam billions of petrodollars to help him win. When he didn’t, Kuwait, one of the donors, wanted their money back. There were some other beefs too; and anyway from Saddam’s point of view Kuwait was the 19th province of Iraq. So after the ghastly stalemate of the war with Iran he thought he could get a quick popular victory knocking out and reclaiming the little sheikhdom in the south. He thought that if the United Nations objected they wouldn’t do anything about it – look at what happened when the USA invaded Panama and replaced their government in 1989 – nothing happened, that’s what. In this he made a serious miscalculation. A TANGLED TALE PART TWO : ENTER OSAMA So, finally, the connection between Iraq and 9/11 went like this. When Iraq attacked and occupied Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, afraid it would be next (and maybe it would have been too), allowed the USA to set up a military base in the Kingdom. Osama Bin Laden, the Saudi billionaire, back from his part in the victorious jihadi war against the Soviets in Afghanistan (a victory that started the process of the unravelling of the entire USSR, but that’s a whole other story), (this is now sounding like an insane soap opera) was appalled – he saw another Islamic country (his own) being occupied by another imperialist Western power. He protested loudly about it, got kicked out of Saudi, went back to Afghanistan and revitalized & reorientated al-Qaeda. It would now attack America, which it did in 1993 (truck bombing of the World Trade Center), in 1998 (bombings of US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania) and in 2000 (bombing of the US ship Cole). After those attacks came 9/11. This was not the connection the Bush administration had in mind. But everything is connected together. The laws of cause and effect work day and night. Just not in the ways we might expect. THIS BOOK An excellent no-nonsense clear account of a very complex story. I try to make sense of the events I have lived through – it’s difficult at times, I’m sure you’d agree. Books like this really help. James DeFronzo joins together British imperial chessboard moves from the 1920s with the hijacked planes of September 11, with Saddam’s reckless attempts to hold an impossible country together and with Western voters’ increasing dismay at their own out of control governments; and along the way, he notes how easily we on every side can be whipped up to support the insupportable. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
Jul 25, 2018
|
Aug 12, 2018
|
Jul 25, 2018
|
Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 0099555646
| 9780099555643
| 0099555646
| 4.07
| 25,906
| Jan 13, 2010
| Jan 03, 2013
|
really liked it
|
REVIEW : SHORT VERSION This is a hell of a story, told very engagingly. The last 50 pages are agonizing and heroic and you won’t forget them. Recommend REVIEW : SHORT VERSION This is a hell of a story, told very engagingly. The last 50 pages are agonizing and heroic and you won’t forget them. Recommended. REVIEW : LONG VERSION : A QUESTION OF DEFINITION If I waddled around in an elaborate penguin costume loudly proclaiming that I was a penguin while swallowing fish whole, it wouldn’t make me a penguin. Even if I got all my friends to violently nod their heads and point at me and say yes, he’s a great old penguin, that one, sure he is. Even if I took a plane to Antarctica and joined one of the vast throngs of penguins there, and you filmed me David Attenborough-style, creeping up on me real close while I was looking after my egg which I got a friend to make for me before I came, looks pretty realistic, I still wouldn’t be a penguin. Whatever everybody – the author, all the critics, and every last review says, this is not a novel. But Mr Binet persuaded the entire universe to go along with his penguin impersonation. And before him, other books have done this too : Bartleby & Co – a long biographical essay about writers – not a novel Problems, The Wallcreeper, Love Me Back, What is the What and a zillion others – memoirs, not novels The Pale King - a random collection of experimental writings, not a novel None of HHhH is fictitious, it’s either the precise historical information about the events leading to the assassination of one of the all time hall of fame Nazi bastards Reinhard Heydrich – presented in a refreshing casual conversational style (“anyway, let’s talk about something else” he says at one point) but still accurate (getting the details right is one of the main things LB agonises over) or it’s LB’s personal commentary about how he got this book written and the research he did and the problems he found, including such hilarious stuff as telling us that he should have bought a particular book online from Amazon since it was Heydrich’s widow’s memoir (pretty relevant) but he didn’t because it was too pricey and in the wrong language. Several pages later he tells us he finally did get it. This whole kind of jokey (but really, about such a grisly no-joke subject) self-dramatising angst-ridden approach is exactly the same as a brilliant book by Geoff Dyer called Out of Sheer Rage , an account of how he didn’t write a book about DH Lawrence. Geoff could have called his book a novel, but for some reason he didn’t. Oh wait, that would be because it wasn’t a novel. What about historical novels like Schindler’s Ark, I Claudius, Wolf Hall, etc? Well in those you can see all the novelistic art, the dialogues, the plotting, the inhabiting of the famous person’s brain and so forth so yes, they are novels. SOME QUOTES Unbelievable – I’ve just found another book about the assassination! It’s called Like a Man and it’s by a certain David Chacko. The book is extremely well researched. I get the impression the author has utilized everything currently known about Heydrich and the attack … [LB discusses this novel for a page, pointing out some stuff Chacko made up completely e.g. some sexual scenes]…He’s a skillful cheat. A trickster. Well…a novelist, basically. [as opposed to LB himself!] If this were a novel I would have absolutely no need for Valcik. He is more of an encumbrance than anything else [so, it’s not a novel] I don’t even know how they reacted when they heard about Heydrich’s death, although that ought to make one of the best bits of my book. My story has as many holes in it as a novel. But in an ordinary novel, it is the novelist who decides where these holes should occur. Because I am a slave to my scruples, I’m incapable of making that decision. [so, it’s not….] LAST MINUTE UPRUSH OF STARS Around two thirds the way through I was getting a little tired of Mr Binet’s posturings (“look at me having problems writing my book, let me tell you all about them”) and frankly this is way too horrible a subject to be parading like a loud peacock with a tail of woe – just shut up and get on with it – but the last third gets a mighty grip as the assassination plan springs into life and all of what followed makes this – almost – a must read, & swerved the rating from a huffy 2.5 stars to a confident 4 stars. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
Aug 13, 2018
|
Aug 20, 2018
|
Jun 18, 2018
|
Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 0006532462
| 9780006532460
| 0006532462
| 3.96
| 4,998
| Sep 15, 2003
| 2004
|
really liked it
|
It all started with breadfruit. [image] A guy called Joseph Banks spotted it when he was with Captain Cook on Tahiti. Joseph Banks later became a major It all started with breadfruit. [image] A guy called Joseph Banks spotted it when he was with Captain Cook on Tahiti. Joseph Banks later became a major ideas man and fixer for the British Empire ™ which was at that point in Phase One (steal anything that’s not nailed down in which case steal the nails and then steal it). There was a problem in the West Indian colonies – the poor slaves needed better food. As Wikipedia elegantly expresses it The late-18th-century quest for cheap, high-energy food sources for slaves in British colonies prompted colonial administrators and plantation owners to call for the breadfruit plant to be brought to the Caribbean. So Banks commissioned an expedition. A ship was to go to Tahiti and grab up lots of breadfruit plants and ship them over to Jamaica. Sounded fairly straightforward. What could possibly go wrong? I am young in years but old in what the world calls Adversity. It has made me acquainted with three Things, which are little known, First, the Villainy & Censoriousness of Mankind – second, the Futility of all Human Hopes - & third, the Enjoyment of being content in whatever station it pleases Providence to place me in Lieutenant William Bligh got the job and his little ship was called The Bounty. You may have heard of it. Captain Bligh was later played by Charles Laughton, Leo McKern, Anthony Hopkins and Trevor Howard. Off they went on 15 October 1787 with 46 men and they had a hell of a time of it, let me tell you. After 27,000 miles (they didn’t go in a straight line) on 26 October 1788 they arrived at Tahiti. They were knackered. They spent 5 months recuperating and canoodling with the local females who from all accounts were most beautiful and also most accommodating. One must therefore deduce that the Tahitian men were pretty broadminded too, but this is not mentioned anywhere. Several of the men had undergone traditional Tahitian tattooing over large parts of their body, particularly on their buttocks. All good things must come to an end so they eventually packed up their breadfruits and waved goodbye to their new wives and sailed off. At this point the mutiny happened. A very odd thing too. From all accounts Captain Bligh was the very opposite of the tyrannical naval captain handing out a hundred lashes at the drop of a hat. He really couldn’t do that anyway, because he didn’t think he could rely on his officers if push came to shove. So after three weeks sailing back to England the 23 year old more-or-less second-in-command Fletcher Christian, later to be played by Clark Gable, Errol Flynn, Marlon Brando and Mel Gibson, burst into Captain Bligh’s bedroom, grabbed him up in his nightshirt and thrust him and 19 others into a small launch and bade them go to the devil. Millward, your piece is cocked, you had better uncock it as you may shoot some Person. The mutineers were sure they had seen the last of that lot. A small boat in the middle of the Pacific? They were going to drown. Why did they do it? The only reason which makes sense to me is that they had just had 5 months of all-sex-all-the-time paradise, and all that Captain Bligh was promising them was a tough voyage back to Blighty and look sharp about it. It was more dignified to complain that Bligh was an intolerable bully, though. Okay, he did have a very sharp tongue. But these were tough sailors. When men are cooped up for a long Time in the Interior of a Ship, there oft prevails such jarring Discordancy of Tempers and Conduct that it is enough on many Occasions by repeated Acts of Irritation and Offence to change the Disposition of a Lamb into that of an Animal Fierce and Resentful By one of the major miraculous feats of navigation, the castaways didn’t drown. Bligh by his genius and fanatical management of food and water guided the tiny boat to a Dutch colony on Timor, 4000 miles away. It took from 28 April to 14 June, 1789 during which time only one man died. Bligh then got himself back to England , arriving 14 March 1790. Two sharks were caught and in the belly of one was found a prayer book, “quite fresh… not a leaf of it defaced” In November 1790 the British government sent a ship called the Pandora to catch the scurvy mutineers and bring them back alive. (In the crew of the Pandora was one of the loyal sailors from the Bounty.) It arrived on 23 March 1791 after a serene voyage and quickly rounded up the 14 mutineers they could find on Tahiti. Unfortunately, on the way back to England, the Pandora was wrecked on the Great Barrier Reef, where Sarli, the Barrier Reef turtle lived. 31 of the crew and 4 of the imprisoned mutineers drowned. The others took to the sea on four little boats and – yes, very ironically – they more or less had to duplicate Captain Bligh’s voyage of two years previously. Later in 1791 Captain Bligh was given a second chance to bring breadfruit from Tahiti to Jamaica. This voyage was successful. But alas, as Wikipedia laconically reports its immediate objective, which was to provide a cheap and nutritious food for West Indian slaves was not made, as most slaves refused to eat the new food The court martial of the mutineers, and the story of the second lot who made their way to Pitcairn Island and were discovered 15 years later is a tale too tangled to take up your time. Caroline Alexander’s long book is like this : Fascinating, wonderful dull dull dull page turning very interesting boring boring boring boring great stuff can’t put it down yawn bore bore bore interesting end She includes way too much detail about the hundreds of participants in this tortuous history, I think I could snip out a good 80 or 90 pages. She was clearly besotted with all of the details. But the tiresome stuff is easily skippable, so for the rest of it I am tattooing a fierce four stars onto its buttocks. [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
Oct 25, 2017
|
Nov 09, 2017
|
Oct 25, 2017
|
Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 1910702374
| 9781910702376
| 1910702374
| 3.91
| 7,670
| Jun 01, 2017
| Aug 22, 2017
|
liked it
|
Revived review as a public service during the current Coronavirus outbreak. The Spanish Flu epidemic of 1918 is the gold standard of modern epidemics a Revived review as a public service during the current Coronavirus outbreak. The Spanish Flu epidemic of 1918 is the gold standard of modern epidemics and this book is a solid account of what happened. It was really bad and it happened before medical science understood what was causing it. So should you be wondering what a REAL epidemic looks like, this was the big one. Original review follows. ******************** This wasn’t the jolliest read, but heck, my friendly GR poppets, life is not all ha-ha-ha, hee-hee-hee. When she was around 11 or 12 I used to play a game with my daughter called WHO WOULD WIN? I’ll give you an example – the first player says something like “who would win in a fight between a lion and a polar bear?” Each player then tries to find the best reason why one or the other would win. But of course our imaginary fights swiftly became more outlandish – “who would win in a fight between Brenda (who is Georgia’s grandmother, an elderly lady) and The Queen?” In this case it was : The Queen would win because although she is very old and frail, Brenda would be too scared to clobber her, because she’s The Queen. If she wasn’t The Queen Brenda would win easily. Bam! One punch. Over and out. We had a million imaginary fights between strange opponents (who would win in a fight between President Obama and the cast of Glee?) but we never thought of this one : Who would win in a fight between the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918-19 and World War One? The answer is : Spanish flu. It wasn’t Spanish (it might have been Chinese or – how about this – from Kansas!) but it killed more people. WWI killed around 38 million. Spanish flu killed between 50 and 100 million. Actually World War One gave Spanish flu a great boost : It would be hard to think of a more effective dissemination mechanism than the demobilization of large numbers of troops … who then travelled to the four corners of the globe where they were greeted by ecstatic homecoming parties. Human life is grotesque. The differences between one time and another, one place and another, are so vast it makes your head hurt. The huge meaning some human deaths acquire - here's three examples - In 1972 British troops killed 13 Irish people in Derry in an event known as Bloody Sunday. The official inquiry into that event lasted 12 years and cost £195 million. In 1993 a black teenager was murdered by racists in London There was an official inquiry into that, at a cost of £4.2 million. In 2007 Madeleine McCann, aged 3, disappeared whilst on holiday with her parents in Portugal. The police investigation into that has so far cost over £5.5 million. So, the 50 million (minimum) who died during 1918-19 - Who spent millions on an official inquiry about that disaster? Nobody. Ever. Well, they had other things on their mind, it’s true. But I think this pandemic gives a conclusive answer to the Buddhist question: if a tree falls in a forest where there are no ears to hear, does it make a sound? Answer: no. The pandemic broke out when people were just getting used to the germ theory of contagion, so they figured the flu was caused by bacteria, but it was actually caused by a virus, and this was only discovered decades later. No one had heard of viruses in 1918. It wouldn’t have mattered anyway because there was NO TREATMENT for the flu. The ONLY thing a doctor could do for you, according to this book, was ENSURE YOU DID NOT BECOME DEHYDRATED. Laura brings us good news - when you study how people acted during this disaster it’s most heart-warming, because mostly people acted with humanity towards each other . But alas, that didn’t do them much good because the more people helped the sick and dying, the more people caught the flu. Your best chance of survival was to be utterly selfish. Assuming that you had a place you could call home the optimal strategy was to stay there… not answer the door (especially to doctors), jealously guard your hoard of food and water, and ignore all pleas for help. Western medicine found itself equally as useless as all other types of medicine. Doctors prescribed aspirin, but sometimes in such large quantities that one researcher has suggested “aspirin poisoning might have contributed to the deaths of a sizeable proportion of the flu’s victims”. It seems they were ignorant of the poisonous effects of overdosing with aspirin. My God, they were ignorant of so much! Quinine was overprescribed in Brazil and one historian later wrote To the symptoms of the disease now had to be added those caused by the panacea : buzzing in the ear, vertigo, hearing loss, bloody urine and vomiting The great majority of medicine taken by the millions of flu victims had only a placebo effect. Laura Spinney explains that placebos can, as we know, be very beneficial – but only if the patient believes in them (this is how homeopathy works, when it does work, for instance). And she adds According to some estimates, 35-40 percent of all medical prescriptions today are not much more than placebos. Controversial!! But then – if the patient loses faith in the medicine then the placebo can become a NOCEBO – which was a new word to me. A nocebo aggravates your symptoms because you believe it will. She does not explain why anyone would continue taking a medicine they thought was rubbish. So : one in three human beings on the planet caught the flu in 1918 and one in ten – maybe as many as one in five – died. One of the deceased was a German immigrant to America. As a prudent husband and father he had taken out life insurance so the company paid up to the widow and son. The son prospered and the son’s son is Donald Trump. This is a very solid account of a huge and hard-to-comprehend subject. Laura devotes chapters to aspects of it which I had no interest in (did it come from birds? Where did it actually begin?) and so I can only dish out three stars for me as a reading experience but if you’re a fan of pandemic historiography this might be a five star read for you. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
Jun 26, 2017
|
Jun 29, 2017
|
Jun 10, 2017
|
Hardcover
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
my rating |
|
|
||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
|
| 4.07
|
really liked it
|
Nov 09, 2023
|
Nov 06, 2023
|
|||||
|
| 4.31
|
liked it
|
Jun 03, 2023
|
May 26, 2023
|
|||||
|
| 4.15
|
it was amazing
|
Apr 12, 2023
|
Mar 30, 2023
|
|||||
|
| 3.93
|
it was amazing
|
Jan 28, 2023
|
Nov 28, 2022
|
|||||
|
| 3.74
|
it was ok
|
Aug 04, 2023
|
Sep 01, 2022
|
|||||
|
| 4.23
|
really liked it
|
Aug 21, 2022
|
Jul 25, 2022
|
|||||
|
| 2.82
|
it was ok
|
Feb 23, 2022
|
Feb 20, 2022
|
|||||
|
| 4.23
|
really liked it
|
Dec 21, 2021
|
Dec 14, 2021
|
|||||
|
| 3.93
|
it was amazing
|
Oct 14, 2021
|
Sep 09, 2021
|
|||||
|
| 4.30
|
it was amazing
|
Sep 07, 2021
|
Sep 02, 2021
|
|||||
|
| 3.92
|
really liked it
|
Apr 19, 2021
|
Apr 14, 2021
|
|||||
|
| 4.46
|
really liked it
|
Mar 07, 2021
|
Jan 24, 2021
|
|||||
|
| 4.23
|
really liked it
|
Oct 15, 2020
|
Sep 16, 2020
|
|||||
|
| 4.16
|
liked it
|
Sep 14, 2020
|
Aug 21, 2020
|
|||||
|
| 4.30
|
it was amazing
|
Aug 07, 2020
not set
|
Dec 08, 2019
|
|||||
|
| 4.17
|
liked it
|
Oct 14, 2019
|
Sep 25, 2019
|
|||||
|
| 3.75
|
it was amazing
|
Aug 12, 2018
|
Jul 25, 2018
|
|||||
|
| 4.07
|
really liked it
|
Aug 20, 2018
|
Jun 18, 2018
|
|||||
|
| 3.96
|
really liked it
|
Nov 09, 2017
|
Oct 25, 2017
|
|||||
|
| 3.91
|
liked it
|
Jun 29, 2017
|
Jun 10, 2017
|
Loading...
