107 Days

107 Days by Kamala Harris, 300 pages

On July 21st, 2024, Vice President Kamala Harris got a call from her running mate, President Joe Biden.  He had decided, after weeks of pressure, to drop out of the campaign and back her as the Democratic nominee for the 2024 election.  It was up to Harris to step into the breach and save the Democrats from defeat by the deplorable Donald Trump.  She only had 107 days to do it, and 107 Days is her own day-by-day account of that momentous campaign and its immediate aftermath.

Of course, Harris failed, but the hidden comedy of 107 Days is that she still does not seem to have realized this.  The book is filled with stories about how her campaign succeeded and Trump's failed, most directly when discussing the Joe Rogan podcast, which she somehow manages to present as something that she was cheated out of and simultaneously something that hurt Trump.  Again and again, the former vice president is caught believing too many impossible things, that Biden was perfectly fit for a second term but should have quit the race sooner, that she was an inspiring success as vice president but unknown to the American people, that it was impossible to mount a successful campaign in 107 days but that on election night she believed there was no way she could lose.

Throughout, it is not entirely clear whether Harris is consciously trying to deceive or whether she is herself badly out of touch with reality, a distressing but by no means unusual trait in an American politician in the early 21st century.  Pointless agreements about combating climate change are touted as great foreign policy successes while wars rage around the globe.  The importance of job programs and affordable housing for American workers are touted as major priorities but legal and illegal immigration are treated as a minor concern.  She repeats Bernie Sanders' advice on the day Biden stepped aside not to concentrate on abortion as her defining issue, yet again and again that is what she does, secure in her complacency that no one who matters could possibly disagree with her.

This is the punchline of a very funny 300 page joke.  Harris claims to represent the future of democracy in the United States, but she repeatedly demonstrates that she neither understands nor particularly cares for the actual people of that country.  The comedy of her comeuppance is that much greater for not being hers alone, but shared by every institution that mocks the concerns of ordinary Americans because they do not conform to progressive ideological orthodoxy.

Fascism in Spain

Fascism in Spain: 1923-1977 by Stanley G Payne, 479 pages

The rise of fascism in Europe in the 1920s and '30s had their impact on the political landscape of Spain.  Far-right activists, seeking a way forward in the crisis of the interwar years, naturally found attractive the path shown to them by Mussolini in Italy, a nation with a history and culture so intimately connected with that of Spain.  Various leaders alternately embraced and rejected the fascist label, incorporated elements of fascist ideology into their own thinking, sought assistance from the fascist powers, or adapted fascist symbols and slogans to a Spanish context.

However, as Stanley Payne demonstrates in his landmark history of Spanish fascism, fascism was never comprehensively adopted by the Spanish far right.  Even Jose Antonio Primo de Rivera, the founder of the Falange, was ambivalent about many aspects of fascism as it was practiced in Italy and especially in Germany.  Certainly Franco resisted identification with fascism, even in 1940-1 when the Axis seemed on the verge of total victory, effectively neutering the Falange by incorporating it into his new uniparty.  Efforts to strengthen the syndicalist movement within the Franco dictatorship were systematically thwarted.  Payne suggests a number of reasons for this, including the historical regionalism of the Spanish right and the strength of Catholic traditionalism as an alternative to fascism.  

The most important element of Payne's masterful study is not its thoroughness, but its fundamental refusal to treat the study of fascism as something akin to demonology.  Not that Payne is blind to the violent, revolutionary component that is essential to the ideology, but his goal is understanding rather than judgement, and he doesn't feel any need to restate every few pages that comprehension does not mean approval.  The result is a work that allows the reader to see the meaning that fascism had for mass man in the first half of the twentieth century, and therefore its appeal, growth, and failure.

Broadway Butterfly

Broadway Butterfly by Sara Divello 432 pages

 

And here’s yet another book that I picked up because of its cover. It is set in Manhattan from 1923-29 and is based on a true cold case that still lingers in the NYC police’s files. Author Divello does not solve the crime, but she brings its sordidness to the page.

 

Divello wastes no time in getting to the murder; it’s the first thing we learn in this juicy tale. Twenty-three-year-old Dot King enjoys life. Although it was never clear if she was a Broadway star, it was clear that she did enjoy the attention of several, shall we say, gentlemen (in the voice of the book.). She also made the papers so often that she became known throughout the city as “The Broadway Butterfly.” One morning when her housekeeper reported for duty, she found Dot dead on her bed with an exceptionally large bottle of chloroform next to her rapidly stiffening body.

 

The cops were called in and the list of possible suspects is rather large but is quickly whittled down to four:  A “volatile a politically connected Philadelphia socialite, Atlantic City bootlegger, Dot’s dicey gigolo lover, a sultry Broadway dancer, and a cagey sugar daddy guarding secrets of his own.” Sometimes it was hard to keep them all straight.

 

In an interesting use of character and structure, Divello uses a girl reporter, Julia Harpman of the Daily News, to cover the case and help keep the reader on what’s happening with the investigation. Julia is the lone woman in an otherwise male-dominated industry, but she is ambitious, strong, and follows the trail…and her suspicions…in the search for justice for Dot King.

 

As I mentioned sometimes it was hard to keep the cast of suspects and Dot’s friends straight, but it makes an interesting read. Also, Divello takes readers behind the scenes of the murder investigation and the world of news reporting that keeps readers glued to the story.

Broadway Butterfly gets 4 out of 5 stars in Julie’s world.

Disraeli

Disraeli by Robert Blake, 766 pages

Benjamin Disraeli was born into a Jewish literary family, baptized into the Church of England at an early age, and educated at a second-rate school (or one he evidently felt was second-rate).  He was in turns a failure as a journalist, a middling success as an author, a greater success as a dandy, and then a brilliant success as a politician, twice serving as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom and dominating the Conservative party during its first half century.  He was a romantic both by upbringing and inclination, undeniably an adventurer, disliked by the British establishment and yet an icon of Victorian Conservatism.

The definitive biography of Disraeli, begun by WF Monypenny in 1910 and finished by GE Buckle in 1920, runs to six volumes.  Robert Blake begins his biography by apologizing for its length, but pointing out that it isn't as long as Monypenny and Buckle.  Fortunately, his light touch makes even the intricacies of parliamentary politics amusing, if not always interesting.  This complements his subject, for as Blake demonstrates, throughout his career Disraeli approached politics as something of a game.  This playfulness has its attractive aspects, but also raises questions as to what, if any, principles he actually held, especially as the ideas he expounded in his political novels seem to bear little relation to the practical politics he pursued.  Yet Blake insists that despite - and, indeed, through - his flexibility, Disraeli consistently upheld the traditional, "irrational" divisions and institutions of England against the spectre of "centralizing Benthamite bureaucracy, however 'democratic'."  In this view, the central element of his playfulness was his rejection of the cant and cliche of "a society which has mistaken comfort for civilization."

The Only Plane in the Sky: An Oral History of 9/11

 The Only Plane in the Sky: An Oral History of 9/11 by Garrett M. Graff 560 pages

 

In some ways, when I think of it, 9/11 could have happened a few months ago, the images are still that crystal clear in my mind. However, there is a whole generation, or more, to whom 9/11 is just another historical event, like Pearl Harbor is to most of us. But author Garrett M. Graff spent years compiling the one book that, I believe, should be required reading (or listening as the audiobook is approximately 16 hours) for all Americans.

 

The book tells the story of that day’s events from hundreds of people, in their own words—from air traffic controllers to people on the street to President George W. Bush. These are the people who witnessed the event, who were part of it, who were left behind. Readers are able to get a much fuller look at what was happening that the news teams were able to depict. The story of that day is told in snippets from many individuals, coalescing into one heartbreaking narrative.

 

It has been at least a month since I finished The Only Plane in the Sky, and there are several images that have not left me, much like the images of those planes hitting the Towers. Images like:

 

·       As a firefighter was exiting one of the Towers, he was startled by the number of women’s shoes that were lying on the ground. Hundreds of pairs in every shape and size. After commenting on how it looked like the floor of Macy’s after a big sale, the firefighter was told was had happened:  As women exited the buildings, the kicked off their shoes and ran.

 

·       After the buildings fell, a group of people were trapped in a pocket in a stairwell. They heard a ping, then another, then another. One of the firefighters who was with them told them that that meant that a firefighter and down and movement was undetected (much like a Life Alert necklace). Suddenly all they could hear was ping, ping ping ping ping ping ping ping ping ping ping ping ping ping ping ping ping ping ping ping ping ping ping ping ping ping ping ping ping ping ping ping ping ping ping ping ping ping ping ping ping ping ping ping ping ping ping ping ping ping ping ping ping ping ping ping ping ping ping ping ping ping ping ping ping ping. 

    ·       I knew people had jumped from the Towers to avoid the flames. I had no idea how many there really were. Graff does an amazing job of making the reader hear every one of those bodies hitting the ground. 

·       The thickness of the ash and how survivors had to scrap it form their eyes and mouths.

The Only Plane in the Sky receives at least three thousand stars in Julie’s world, but I’m only allowed to give five.

The Davenports

The Davenports by Krystal Marquis 384 pages

Debut novelist Krystal Marquis has written an historical romance worthy of a Harlequin, a name synonymous with romance novels. She has written a work loosely based on the “real-life story of the C. R. Patterson family.”  Patterson was the first Black owner of first a carriage company, then a car company, based in Ohio.

Marquis shifts her story to Chicago in 1910 and gives readers a look into the lives of wealthy African Americans. The Davenports own a carriage company,  and they live in a luxurious home, complete with servants.

There are three teenagers in the house. All three of the children are expected to make good, wealthy marriages. The oldest daughter, Olivia, thinks she is in love with Jacob Lawrence. Her parent eagerly await news of their engagement. But once she meets Washington DeWight, a political activist, it’s love at first sight.

The middle child, John, is being groomed to take over the carriage company. He has dreams and desires to fade out the carriage company and replace it was a car company. He is not currently attached, but many of the young ladies in their societal sphere seek his attentions, including the maid, Amy-Rose, and Ruby, Olivia’s best friend.

Younger daughter, Helen, is a tomboy. She scoffs at romantic relationships, preferring be a mechanic and spend her days under the hoods of the latest horseless machines. And she’s good at it, really good at it. At her parents’ anniversary party, Cupid darts her with his arrow. The man she wants is strictly forbidden.

The book is told from three points of view: Olivia, Helen and Amy-Rose. The chapters are short, and, sometimes I was confused about whom was chasing, or wanted to chase, whom.

According to the back cover, this is “the first in a frothy, page-turning YA series set in turn of the last century Chicago and featuring an all-Black main cast.”  I don’t know if this means that Marquis will be writing sequels to “The Davenports” or if other authors will have books set during this time. 

I enjoyed reading “The Davenports,” even though romance novels are not my preferred genre. I loved the history and the escapades that the characters found themselves embroiled in. “The Davenports” receives 4 out of 5 stars in Julie’s world.

 

Hotel Portofino

Hotel Portofino by J. P. O’Connell 376 pages

I don’t remember where I first saw the cover of this novel, but I was intrigued. On learning that it was not only to be made into a six-part PBS series (which is airing now), it also checked all the boxes on why I pickup a book---FABULOUS cover, historical fiction (set in the 1920s) and takes place in Italy (the Italian Riviera to be precise). It’s gotta be great, right?

Wrong! For me, this book was utterly disappointing. I’m enjoy character-driven stories, but each of these characters lacked depth or they were caricatures of what a such-and-such person should be like.

Bella Ainsworth opened the luxurious Hotel Portofino a few weeks ago, and the visitors are beginning to arrive. From their first glances, the guests look down their noses at what is described as a state-of-the-art, modern as possible, hotel.

Besides the hard-to-please guests, Bella is juggling a lot of other physically and emotionally draining events. Her marriage to Cecil is on the rocks. He comes across as slimy and supports Danionin, an equally slimy politician who thinks Mussolini is a rock star.

Their son, Lucian, is recovering from the Great War; I’m surmising that is suffers from PTSD, or shell shock as they would have called it. Bella has a potential bride coming to make his acquaintance.

Their daughter, Alice, is a nervous wreck and a people pleaser. Not sure about her at all.

I had a lot of trouble differentiating between each of the guest; they are interchangeable.

Plus, I would have never truly figured out the time setting as it is never mentioned, except on the back cover

The descriptions of the setting, the Italian Riviera were gorgeous though, which is why “Hotel Portofino” receives 2 out of 5 stars in Julie’s world instead of one. I’ve been recording the PBS series, and now I’m sacred to watch it, but this might be the one time that a movie is better than the book. 

 

Last Samurai

The Last Samurai: The Life and Battles of Saigo Takamori by Mark Ravina, 214 pages

In 1877, Saigo Takamori died in battle against the army of the Emperor of Japan, an army he had once commanded and an emperor to whom he had pledged his life in service.  Even before his end, he was already popularly portrayed as a semi-divine figure transcending mere politics, and after his death he would continue to be celebrated by generations of Japanese romantics and reactionaries dissatisfied with the march of modernity.

Yet in Mark Ravina's telling Saigo had a crucial role in that march.  Not only was Saigo a key player in the overthrow of the shogunate after Progress was brought to Japan in the mouths of American cannons, he was central in the subsequent disempowerment of the daimyo, including his own liege lord, who had backed the ousting of the shogun.  Although it is impossible, at least from the material Ravina provides, to know exactly what Saigo believed would follow, it is difficult in hindsight to imagine anything other than a bourgeois democracy filling the resulting vacuum.  This is consistent with a view of Saigo's character that sees him as addicted to the grand gesture, the type of man who could sway the fortunes of a nation with a dramatic action at a pivotal moment, but who is uninterested in the minutiae of actually governing a modern state.  It is possible to judge this as foolishness or even indiscipline, or imagine it to be the disinterested pursuit of virtue and the selfless leadership of a true hero.  Whether deliberately or by accident, Ravina leaves that decision to the reader.

Disraeli's Reminiscences

Disraeli's Reminiscences by Benjamin Disraeli, 148 pages

During the 1860s, Benjamin Disraeli, with the best part of his career still ahead of him, began jotting down notes towards a future autobiography that, as things turned out, was never actually written.  The notes survive, however, in this loosely arranged series of brief anecdotes and scraps of narrative.  

Some of the bits and pieces are amusing, and the personality of Disraeli shines through clearly.  Those hoping for insight into his life or the political and social world he inhabited are likely to be somewhat disappointed, however, especially since, as the editors take care to note, the author was hardly above embroidery and invention.

Unsettling of America

The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture by Wendell Berry, 223 pages

In this early work, Wendell Berry decries what he sees as the continuing colonization of the North American continent, concentrating on the colonization of the rural by the urban.  This colonization is carried out by technocratic elites who reduce everything to economics, ignoring the human, social, and environmental costs of their policies.  Although Berry's subject is agriculture, his theme is over-specialization and fragmentation, a feature of modern life that of itself tends to transform all human interaction - even "charity" - into forms of money-exchange.  The alternative, he insists, must be the invention (or recovery) of an economics, a politics, a philosophy, and even a theology of limits.

This was always intended as an argumentative work, a new salvo in an ongoing debate.  Now it is a mostly forgotten volley in a debate that has moved on, but its echoes can, perhaps, still be heard in the hills.  While it is explicitly tied to the particular time and place in which it was composed and published, with considerable space taken up by criticism of academic and political figures in power or in fashion in the late '70s, the underlying principles are hardly outdated, and what it has lost in ripped-from-the-headlines relevance is compensated for by what it has gained in historical value.

Essays

Essays on Catholicism, Liberalism, and Socialism Considered in Their Fundamental Principles by Juan Donoso Cortes, translated by Rev William McDonald, 347 pages

In his celebrated 1988 Gifford lectures, Alisdair MacIntyre exposed the failure of both the modernist "encyclopedic" and postmodernist "genealogical" approaches to ethics, a failure rooted in their incommensurability, their inability to meaningfully dialogue with and assimilate alien systems.  Now we stand in the ruins of those towers of human pride, with leaders who, whether from knavery or imbecility or some mixture of the two, leap uncomprehendingly from one to the other, asserting at one moment that "my truth" is something manufactured, and at the next that it issues from the Delphic prophetess Science, once her mad ravings have been suitably interpreted by her labcoated priests.  If reason is the slave rather than the master of the passions, every subjectivity is at war with every other, convenient lies contending with convenient lies, and so the heathen rage.

This was all warned against by Juan Donoso Cortes in the early nineteenth century.  The liberal superstition that truth will triumph in a free marketplace of ideas is belied by the fact that men do not seek the truth, to the contrary, even when the Truth appeared to them they mocked Him, spit on Him, and ultimately crucified Him.  The entire liberal project is founded on the mistaken belief that human freedom consists of the power to choose between good and evil rather than the ability to will the good.  The result is moral chaos, the war of all against all by other means, and sin, Cortes reminds us, is nothing more or less than disorder, the confusion of lesser goods for higher, ending in the disunion of soul and body which is death.  Life, then, is order, true order, the harmony which exists in the presence of the supreme mysteries in the light of which all apparent contradictions are resolved.   

Culture and Anarchy

Culture and Anarchy by Matthew Arnold, 212 pages

In the seminal essays that make up Culture and Anarchy, originally published serially in 1869, Matthew Arnold attempted to convince his hardheaded English countrymen, who prided themselves on practicality and efficiency, of the value of culture.  For Arnold, the cult of efficiency amounts to an idolatry of machinery, a confusion of ends and means, and a worldview closed to the "sweetness and light" that make life worth living.  In the process, Arnold famously distinguishes two rival tendencies in Western civilization, which he dubs the Hebraic and the Hellenic - the former demanding faithful action, the latter rational thought.  Both pursue the same goal of human perfection, but that goal is unattainable by either alone.

It is easy to criticize Arnold's scheme as overly simplistic and reductive, although the notion of a rivalry between Athens and Jerusalem can be traced back at least as far as Tertullian.  It is equally easy to point out its weaknesses - to ask, for example, whether Hellenism is not just as likely to lead to the kind of radical individualism Arnold deplores as Hebraism, or whether other forms of Hebraism beyond Puritanism might not admit sweetness and light as readily as Hellenism.  To do so, however, would be to fundamentally misunderstand what Arnold means by Hebraism and Hellenism, to imagine the former as simply religious and the latter as purely secular.  Arnold wants contemplative philosophers, not scientific administrators, true intellectuals, not chattering policy wonks.  Indeed, the latter are the vanguard of the mechanical anti-culture he abominates.

True and Only Heaven

The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics by Christopher Lasch, 532 pages

Christopher Lasch's story of progress and its critics is, as the subtitle suggests, really two stories.  The first, counterintuitively, is the tale of the nineteenth century critics of industrialization and enlightenment and their warnings about atomisation, alienation, and decadence.  The second is that of twentieth century American progressives as they came to increasingly view the masses as the object rather than the protagonist of historical processes.   Uniting these narratives is Lasch's apocalyptic understanding that the end of progress is not a realized utopia, but an insatiable demand for more of everything, resulting in a fundamental rejection of all boundaries and limitations.

The True and Only Heaven is not merely a book that should be read by anyone seeking to understand the current century and the two which preceded it.  It is a book that no one can plausibly claim to understand the world in its present moment without having read.  Lasch even profoundly explicates matters only peripheral to his central concern - the transformation of the civil rights movement from moral suasion to black power, for instance.  Indeed his analysis is so brilliant that it illuminates even areas he does not directly touch - his treatment of syndicalism, for example, reveals a previously unexpected foundation beneath Nolte's theory of fascism.  Yet another mark of Lasch's genius are the uses to which his thoughts can be put that he did not foresee and would not have sympathised with.  This is entirely fitting for a narrative the great theme of which is hope, for hope, Lasch tells us, depends upon faith in an "underlying order of things [that] cannot be flouted with impunity."

Revolt of the Public

The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium by Martin Gurri, 425 pages

In The Revolt of the Public, analyst Martin Gurri considers the possibilities and dangers that the information age presents to established institutions and ways of life.  The technological changes of the last few decades, he observes, have greatly facilitated the emergence of informal networks, energized by a passionate involvement with specific issues, out of a generally disinterested mass populace.  These have collided with technocratic institutions which have inherited their organization from the industrial age, their size and complexity justified by modernist utopian promises which are no longer rationally believed but are still emotionally expected.  It is precisely in this gap - between what we know to be the limits of expertise and what we believe we are owed - that the aroused public finds its angry home.  The negativity of postmodern protest, then - the inability of activist networks to advance positive solutions to the systemic problems they identify - is not just the result of their own lack of hierarchy, but an inescapable feature of the crisis of late modernity.  The danger, Gurri believes, is that the accelerating erosion of institutional authority is transforming the gap into a chasm, making the prospect of a wholesale rejection of democratic pluralism correspondingly more attractive to dissidents on both the left and the right.

Beyond Gurri's method and presentation, there is little here that would surprise anyone who has read, for example, MacIntyre, Postman, or Lasch.  That Gurri, deliberately or not, seems unaware of this is, on the whole, more a blessing than a defect, allowing him to approach the current crisis along his own path and therefore providing all that much more support when his conclusions overlap with those of deeper thinkers. It also gives him space to suggest his own solutions, as nebulous as those might be.  It helps, too, that his presentation is excellent, and will doubtless appeal to many reluctant to try older, more substantive works.

Fiery Angel

The Fiery Angel: Art, Culture, Sex, Politics, and the Struggle for the Soul of the West by Michael Walsh, 224 pages

On one level, The Fiery Angel is Michael Walsh's celebration of the power of art and storytelling, of how they shape us and our future.  On another, it is an argument for the heroic ideal he believes is central to Western culture and civilization.  Walsh is well aware that the heroic tends to shade into the luciferian, indeed he sees this as a positive - Western man is never comfortable with the status quo and acknowledges no limits except those which he places on himself.  This is a vision that Walsh believes is threatened by the rising forces of leftism and Islam, each of which finds the concept of the heroic threatening for ideological and theological reasons.

Walsh leaps quickly from topic to topic and idea to idea in a way that is equal parts thrilling and disorienting.  It isn't clear whether this is deliberate - a little reflection reveals how thin is his distinction between the idea of progress he advances and the progressive definition he deplores, as well as how consistently his archetypal superman served as a cautionary tale rather than a model to be imitated in the premodern West, and especially how it is precisely the rejection of limits that has led us to our present crisis.  If his overall vision seems lacking, however, the passages where he discusses music are notable for their depth of thought and feeling.

Liberalism

Liberalism: A Critique of Its Basic Principles and Various Forms by Louis Cardinal Billot, SJ, translated by Msgr George Barry O'Toole and Thomas Storck, 67 pages

Written in the last years before the First World War, Liberalism is a masterful critique of the political ideology of the so-called Enlightenment.  Cutting right to the heart of the matter, Cardinal Billot exposes the core dogma of liberalism as the enthronement of liberty as the supreme good, and demonstrates how this is corrosive of every human institution and relationship.  Prophetically, he foresees the paradoxical condition of the thoroughly dehumanized mass man who will tolerate no power above or beside him save that of the omnipotent state.  In closing, he distinguishes three types of liberals - the consistent, revolutionary, luciferian liberal, the supposedly moderate liberal who imagines that he can command the revolutionary forces of destruction to only go so far and no further, and the Catholic liberal who, in attempting to separate his politics from his faith, inevitably betrays both.

As incisive as they are short, Cardinal Billot's essays are, if anything, more powerful today than they were when they were written, since history has only added to the evidence for his claims.

Integralism

Integralism: A Manual of Political Philosophy by Thomas Crean and Alan Fimister, 279 pages

A spectre is haunting what was the West - it is the spectre of Integralism.  All the powers of the old liberalism have entered into an unholy alliance to exorcise this spectre: Democrat and Republican, libertarian and socialist, German and Brit, Dorsey and Zuckerberg, Bezos and Gates.  

This may seem a trifle overblown.  It is true, however, that as the liberal consensus crumbles, engaged Catholics, and especially younger Catholics, have begun looking for traditional alternatives to the naked emperor of modernity.  One of the most trenchant criticisms of the movement has been the lack of agreement as to what, precisely, is meant by "Integralism", particularly in a country founded on the rejection of throne and altar.  Is Integralism equivalent to Falangism, or is it a particular flavor of common-good conservatism, or is it a fundamentally unserious social-media phenomenon with no meaningful content whatsoever?

Although disagreements will no doubt continue, with the publication of Crean and Fimister's manual at least the last is no longer an entirely plausible answer.  Without being argumentative, they carefully build their argument for a rational society and a politics which respects the entire human person.  Although their conclusions are unlikely to convince anyone who does not agree with their premises, their political philosophy is at least coherent, which is more than can be said for any of the post-modern alternatives.  The result is a challenge to many, and an invitation to a few.

The Day Is Now Far Spent

The Day Is Now Far Spent by Robert Cardinal Sarah and Nicolas Diat, translated by Michael J Miller, 343 pages

The hour is late indeed, says Cardinal Sarah in this book-length interview with his favorite interlocutor, Nicolas Diat.  The Church, he tells us, is riven by dissension, compromised by unbelief, and stained with sin.  Meanwhile, the decadent ruins of Christendom are in the grip of a "fundamentalist liberalism" that pursues wealth and power (often under the guise of "justice" and "liberation") while treating the sacred with indifference and contempt.  The irony is that, by attempting to place himself at the center of the world, modern man has created a world in which he is increasingly superfluous.  Not content in its iconoclasm with the destruction of its own past, the neo-colonialist West actively works to erase the cultures of Africa and Asia even as it plunders their lands of their natural resources.  

It is necessary, then, for faithful Catholics to resist the temptations of compromise and despair.  This demands the cultivation of virtue and excellence - "The Church does not have the right to be mediocre."  Fittingly for the author of The Power of Silence, while Sarah's message is urgent, it is not primarily a "call to action", but a call to prayer and contemplation.  "Your mission is not to save a dying world... Your mission is to live out with fidelity and without compromise the faith you received from Christ."

John Ruskin

 John Ruskin: The Argument of the Eye by Robert Hewison, 212 pages

Midway through his life's journey, Ruskin wrote, "Once I could write joyfully about beautiful things, thinking to be understood; - now I cannot any more; for it seems to me that no one regards them."  Ruskin was, in fact, one of the most famous public intellectuals in the Anglophone world, but it was not fame he sought but understanding, and he had failed to gain many adherents for his more radical ideas, as he complained in another place: "I can get no soul to believe that the beginning of art is in getting our country clean, and our people beautiful."  Instead, Victorian England remained the prisoner of its own "greed for money, lust for food, pride of dress, and the prurient itch of momentary curiosity for the politics last announced by the newsmonger, and the religion last rolled by the chemist..."

Robert Hewison's task, then, is to facilitate a real understanding of the totality of Ruskin's thought, not as it stood at any one time as a complete, coherent doctrine, but as it changed and developed through what Ruskin himself admitted were a series of contradictions.  In Hewison's view, such understanding begins with the recognition that Ruskin was a visual thinker whose lifelong mission was to teach others how to see what he saw.  As such, his ideas are allusive and derive their power from analogy rather than logic.

Road to Somewhere

The Road to Somewhere: The Populist Revolt and the Future of Politics by David Goodhart, 233 pages

In 2016, when despite the opposition of every major political party and the media establishment, the British people voted to leave the European Union, a commonly heard reaction from those who had smugly assumed Remain would win was that they didn't recognize the country anymore.  Several months later, on the other side of the Atlantic, after Donald Trump overcame the establishments of both parties to win the US presidential election, the same chorus was heard.  As David Goodhart reveals, however, both of these electoral earthquakes were the consequence of even more people feeling that their country had already been deformed beyond recognition.  For Goodhart, the major division of the early twenty-first century is between "Anywheres" and "Somewheres", the latter group finding their identity in their local community and culture, the former inventing identities out of their own will and desires.  While the Anywheres have been ascendant for the last few decades, the Somewheres have not disappeared nor even, according to polling, appreciably diminished in numbers.  Indeed, Goodhart maintains, the fundamental divide between a small Anywhere group and a somewhat larger Somewhere contingent is an enduring reality of modern societies, a reality made invisible and therefore dangerous by the Anywhere bubble of the elites.

It is worth noting that, if Goodhart is writing to call attention to the existence of the Somewheres, he is himself an Anywhere, and to some extent a prisoner of Anywhere cant and prejudice.  Thus, he uses "reason" as shorthand for the efficient pursuit of a purely material self-interest, so that the prioritization of family or faith over material gain is "irrational" even if it actually makes people happier, and when he struggles to come up with something the British people can be proud of having in common, the best he can offer is the welfare state.  Underlying it all is the belief that the meritocratic arrangements of liberal regimes function largely as advertised, efficiently filling positions with the people best suited for them, a naive faith that does not seem as if it could survive an encounter with the history of the past two decades.  Given that Anywheres are the target audience for the book, this may all be for the best.