Apr 19 2012

King John by William Shakespeare

This play is surprisingly good for one of Shakespeare’s lesser known works. It is a story of shifting alliances and treachery in a world that is constantly uncertain. Surprisingly, a character known simply as “the Bastard,” who is surely fictional, is the central and most sympathetic character in the story, proving himself a pole of constancy and unbroken loyalty in an ever-changing and faithless world. King John himself is hardly sympathetic, but his enemies are hardly any more noble. This is a very short drama, but it packs a punch, and it seems to me unjustly overlooked among Shakespeare’s admittedly massive canon.

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Apr 15 2012

The Myth of Mental Illness by Thomas Szasz

Dr. Szasz seems to regard mental illness as a moral failure rather than a genuine illness, and he seems to think the mentally ill deserve judgment rather than treatment. Most mentally ill patients, he believes, are merely social misfits and malingerers rather than people suffering from a disease. His arguments are philosophical rather than scientific, but they are nevertheless somewhat cogent. Unfortunately, the mental illness he chiefly focuses is on is “hysteria,” which, as anyone who has looked at the DSM-IV knows, is merely one of hundreds of mental illnesses that afflict modern man. Moreover, his arguments seem to be chiefly a reaction against Freudian psychoanalysis, which mainstream modern psychiatry has already mostly discredited. Dr. Szasz’s case is not entirely without merit, but anyone who has been around someone with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, or severe depression can tell that something is seriously wrong and that the illness is not imaginary. Wrong, Dr. Szasz.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2012/04/15/the-myth-of-mental-illness-by-thomas-szasz/

Apr 06 2012

Hollywood by Charles Bukowski

Before I discuss the book, a word about Bukowski. Bukowski has a way of making it seem that a life of sin is good for your soul and that people who live virtuous lives are dull people with dead souls. I am rather skeptical of this philosophy, but every time I read about his adventures with booze and women I tend to feel that I am missing something in life. Bukowski represents the realization of the fantasy most men have of saying fuck you to the system and the routine and getting away with it. This book is a memoir of the making of the movie Barfly, which he wrote the screenplay for and which is based on his early life. Bukowski has a well known contempt for Hollywood types, whom he considers phonies, hacks, hustlers, and hucksters, and his rendering of his immersion in this world is funny and memorable. And by the way, I have seen the movie: the book is better.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2012/04/06/hollywood-by-charles-bukowski/

Mar 06 2012

‘Salem’s Lot by Stephen King

It is refreshing to read a novel about vampires in which vampires are scary monsters and not romantic sex symbols. This book is a good creepy read, and even though it is only the second novel King wrote, it is clearly one of his finest. The only flaw is that it goes on for a hundred pages after it logically should have ended. But it is a good, suspenseful page turner…and SCARY. Not a book for bienpensants or pollyanna sensibilities.

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Feb 20 2012

Napoleon by Frank McLynn

This is the best and most balanced biography of Napoleon I have read so far. It contains much excellent scholarship and critical commentary; however, it also contains a lot of amateur Freudian analysis that is pure rubbish. While I am neither a warmonger nor an imperialist, I find it hard to read a biography of Napoleon without rooting for him. For all his faults–and this book discusses them in detail–he remains the outstanding military leader of the gunpowder age.

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Feb 15 2012

Christianity and Culture by T.S. Eliot

This collection of essays was written on the eve of World War II, but the question it poses is highly relevant for our time, particularly for people like me: what role, if any, should Christianity play in a modern democracy? In what way is Christianity connected to contemporary culture, and in what ways should it influence that culture? There is far more discussion of culture than Christianity in this book; culture and not Christ is obviously what is dearest to the heart of a poet and literary scholar like Eliot; not once does he ever make reference to Jesus or any of His doctrines. According to Eliot, there are strong cultures and weak cultures. Again, as a poet and scholar, he has rather peculiar notions of what makes a culture strong, as if there is an obvious connection between Shakespeare and nuclear physics. Eliot’s thesis of culture as social capital is basically Matthew Arnold revisited, but it is a thesis worth revisiting, even if history has rather unevenly shown its merit.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2012/02/15/christianity-and-culture-by-t-s-eliot/

Feb 02 2012

A Brief History of the Cold War by Colonel John Hughes-Wilson

The author argues that the Cold War’s beginning was not in 1945 but in 1917. Some of his other judgments are even more controversial. He reveals that the Cuban missile crisis was not the only time during the Cold War when the United States went on DEFCON 3 alert, he believes Diem’s assassination in Vietnam was a CIA operation fully authorized by Kennedy, and he even believes the JFK assassination was carried out by the Mafia and that Oswald was indeed a patsy. Other judgments are more conventional but equally memorable: Reagan was a brilliant Cold Warrior who deserves to be remembered for that if nothing else, Bush was an incompetent bungler who hummed and hawed indecisively as the Soviet Union unraveled before his eyes, and Gorbachev… “Gorbachev stands as an almost heroic figure, who did more to end the Cold War than any other individual, although perhaps not in the way he had envisaged.” This is the best book to date I have read on the Cold War, and the author is not an American.

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Jan 09 2012

A History of Warfare by John Keegan

This is Keegan’s best work. In most of his works he analyzes the science of warfare; in this book he also analyzes the psychology and culture of warfare. He takes exception from the beginning with Clausewitz’s dictum that war is politics by other means, and shows with ample evidence from history that war often is destructive of the political orders that it is supposed to preserve. The scope of his survey of warfare is impressive, ranging from prehistoric primitive warfare to the nuclear age. He is clearly an admirer of the warrior class and the warrior ethic, but he is no idealist or romantic when it comes to war, and he ends the book with the hope that man’s warmaking days will soon be over. Alas, I do not share his optimism, but I do share his love of good historical writing, of which this book is a shining example.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2012/01/09/a-history-of-warfare-by-john-keegan/

Jan 07 2012

The Spanish Inquisition by Joseph Perez

The author is obviously a committed Catholic. In this book he soft-pedals the Spanish Inquisition, arguing that it was bad, but really not as bad as all that. He argues that originally the aim of the Inquisition was not to eliminate Jews but merely to eliminate Judaism…a distinction that Jews will probably not appreciate. He observes that Grand Inquisitor Torquemada was a man of the utmost integrity. He helpfully points out that in the sixteenth century the Inquisition did not burn witches but only Protestants. And he is dismissive of the argument that the Inquisition thwarted scientific and intellectual progress in Spain, although he acknowledges that it discouraged critical scholarship and even reading of any kind altogether. Moreover, throughout the book he seems more interested in the bureaucratic machinery of the Inquisition than in the suffering it inflicted on innocent people. He is not exactly an apologist for the Inquisition…who can be one?…but he comes close.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2012/01/07/the-spanish-inquisition-by-joseph-perez/

Jan 05 2012

The Reformation by Diarmaid McCulloch

The first time I read this book I didn’t think much of it, but on rereading it I found it a rich source of information, analysis, and commentary. If there is a single theme throughout this history, it is the way in which a passion for God usually leads to a ferocious hatred of anyone who has different ideas about God. The story of the Reformation is not an altogether inspiring story, with Luther, Calvin, and Zwingli all exposed as rather less than saintly men, and it flies in the face of the New Testament doctrine that the church of Christ is supposed to be a unified body. But I believe that the Reformation overall was a positive development in Western civilization, although, as the author notes, its effect on Europe has largely evaporated as European religious faith has increasingly waned. The United States, I would argue, is largely a product of Protestant faith and continues to be so today. But in my opinion the Reformation is not finished and still has a long way to go.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2012/01/05/the-reformation-by-diarmaid-mcculloch/