Book Review: The Revenant

By Michael Punke

The Revenant is a thrilling tale of hardship, betrayal and survival against all odds, set in a ruggedly unforgiving milieu. Last fall saw the premier of a film adaptation featuring Leonardo DiCaprio and Tom Hardy. 

The plot centers on veteran trapper Hugh Glass, who is savagely mauled by a grizzly bear when undertaking an expedition with the Rocky Mountain Fur Company. His comrades do their best to patch him up, but his situation looks dire. The financial underpinnings of their company are rather shaky, and with winter rapidly approaching they are desperate to get on with the business of depopulating the wildlife. Otherwise bankruptcy await. Glass is left behind, abandoned by the men he thought he could trust. Against the odds he manages to cling on to life, and he soon sets out on a quest for revenge. If the story had been set today, the sympathy garnered from their predicament would no doubt have secured the crowdsourced funding required to keep the company afloat, but no such option existed in 1821.

Michael Punke is a member of a fairly exclusive club. He is currently serving as the US ambassador to the World Trade Organization and has previously worked on the White House National Security Council staff. Like Winston Churchill and Boris Johnson, the mayor of London, he manages to combine his day job with a spot of writing on the side. A quick peek through his bibliography reveals that the great American outdoors of the nineteenth century seems to be his great passion.   

The story in The Revenant is partly based on real events, although Punke has made some changes in order to make the narrative more suitable for a novel, as most writers of historical fiction are wont to do. I must say I was slightly surprised when I learned that Hugh Glass and his survival story was real, it seemed too unbelievable to be true. As so often is the case, history is full of riveting stories that are way more unbelievable than what any screen writer could come up with.

The story of Hugh Glass seems to perfectly embody that most cherished and hallowed of heroes in the American psyche. The hardy Yankee, born in a log cabin he built himself, who traverses the Wild West with a Kentucky rifle slung over his shoulder and his steely eyed gaze fixed on the horizon. Everywhere he looks there is a new oil well to drill, new southern belles to rescue from distress, and a pouch full of chewing tobacco to spit into the fire while talking like Jeff Bridges in True Grit. Jeremy Clarkson once remarked while testing a Dodge pickup truck that all Americans secretly dream of being rugged outdoorsmen, and that understanding is key to grasping their appeal. I am starting to think that for once in his life, he was right.

It is fair to say that the Mid West of the early nineteenth century was a pretty rough place, where the strong did what they could and the weak suffered what they must. For my own part, I am fascinated by the allure of the Wild West and the open frontier, but I would have preferred to have spent the early nineteenth century in London, eating a seven course lunch at a gentlemen´s club before taking a cab to the opera house. Despite my distinct lack of longing for sodden underwear and grizzly bears, The Revenant is a riveting read. Punke delights in picturing the savage hardship of the frontier, and I keep turning the pages at a breakneck pace, wanting to see how it will all turn out.

Punke skillfully brings an epic real life tale from this period to life, and even if the steam runs out a little towards the end, I would strongly recommend The Revenant. I haven’t yet seen the film, but it will certainly be interesting to see how it compares to the novel.    

   

Book Review: SPQR, A History of Ancient Rome

By Mary Beard

More than 1500 years have passed since Alaric and his horde of rampaging Visigoths sacked Rome in 410 CE, yet the Roman Empire lives on in the public conscience. So much of our language and our culture stems from the ancient Romans, and everyone ranging from artists to Fortune 500 CEOs are influenced by their words and deeds. From the popular French cartoon Asterix to the ubiquitous “Even you, my Brutus”, that someone might say when he or she is betrayed by a close friend and about to be stabbed in the back, ancient Rome lives on in our modern era. SPQR is an ambitious work that attempts to get to the bottom of what it was that made Rome so special, how it came to pass that the republic was replaced by a dictatorship and how the Romans thought of themselves and their empire.

Mary Beard is a professor of classics at Newnham College, Cambridge, who has spent more than five decades researching ancient Rome with great fascination. Her passion and great interest in the subject is clear from the very first page and the book is a splendid love letter to her field of academic excellence. Beard is a thoroughly modern historian. What I mean by that might not be obvious, so allow me to explain. Since I am utterly devoted to my readers, I have spent some time leafing through a couple of musty old history books about Rome written during the middle of the last century. Generally, historians of yore were rather boring, with the possible exception of Edward Gibbon. They treated history very seriously indeed, and never thought to sprinkle their pages with a bit of dry humor. What´s more, they made sweeping and more or less untrue declarations that ran something like “Compared to Greek, the Roman language is straightforward and simple, reflecting the Latin people´s hard work ethic, discipline and stoic demeanor.” I improvised that last sentence myself, but it´s what an old-timey historian would have said with a straight face. Beard writes about such well known characters as Julius Caesar and Marcus Tullius Cicero, but she also writes about the common men and women who lived their lives cheek by jowl in Cicero´s ramshackle housing. One of the old tomes called Cicero “the greatest orator of ancient Rome”, which he certainly was. But he was also a rapacious slumlord who built such shoddy tenement flats that they frequently collapsed and killed scores of hapless tenants. Beard will also remark on the hilarity of a half-mad Commodus clutching a severed ostrich head while berating his long suffering colleagues in the senate.

The origins of Rome are shrouded in mystery, but Beard reasonably points out that Aeneas fleeing the sack of Troy to seduce a Carthaginian queen and then proceeding to be the bottom most root of Romulus and Remus´s family tree might not be entirely true. What we do know, however, is that Rome started out as a fairly unremarkable city state in central Italy. Rome waged several wars against neighboring states, and eventually went on to be the master of the Italian peninsula. Beard points to Rome´s political system, where conquered cities and peoples were allowed to keep their local deities and go on with their lives as long as they payed taxes to Rome and supported her when she needed able bodied men to wage war. It is impossible for us to know exactly how Roman these people felt, but the Social War of BCE 90-88, when numerous Italian cities, including Pompeii, rose in revolt against Roman rule, shows us that people did not become Roman simply because they lived on the red bits on the map.

Contrary to what many may think, there probably wasn´t any manifest Roman destiny from the beginning, nor was Rome always the bloodthirsty aggressor attacking peaceful neighbors in opportunistic land grabs. Sometimes neighboring states asked for Roman assistance when confronted with dangerous rivals, sometimes Rome was threatened by bloodthirsty enemies at the gate, and sometimes, obviously, an insecure emperor needed to add a bit of martial glory to his name and went off to conquer and plunder. Before they knew it, the Romans had themselves an empire, and empires, as the late Gore Vidal warned, are dangerous things, and very hard to get rid of.   

Roman institutions during the late republic never adapted to these vastly changed circumstances. The soldiers of the legions were loyal to their commanders first and foremost, since they were the ones who fixed them up with a plot of land upon their retirement. A couple of senile old men in the senate telling their beloved commander to stand down and hand over his commission was hardly something they cared about. First Sulla, and then Caesar, defied the senate and marched their soldiers into the city. The century before the birth of Christ saw violent civil wars that nearly tore the Roman world asunder, until Caesar´s adopted son, Octavian, emerged as the ultimate winner and came to rule over a vast empire as the first among equals. Octavian assumed the mantle of Augustus, this came as a surprise since no one really knew what the word meant, and the template that he laid down for autocratic governance lasted the following two centuries.

There were a couple of bumps in the road during these heady days of the Pax Romana, such as the occasional mad emperor clutching severed ostrich heads and the infamous year of the four emperors in CE 69, but the Roman Empire effectively became a hereditary monarchy. The most dangerous part of this process, Beard argues, was when the old Caesar lay on his deathbed. As long as there was someone nearby who was not mad and either related to or adopted by the incumbent emperor, everything was good and well. However, barbarian incursions, inequality, infighting among the roman elites and ambitious commanders with a couple of loyal legions at their back and a lot of charisma eventually took their toll. There is no single explanation for the downfall of the Roman Empire, the subject would require a book in itself, and Beard even goes so far as to suggest that the Empire may not even have declined, it just morphed into something else. SPQR covers so many interesting topics that I am quite unable to dive into every one of them, but it would suffice to say that Beard has hardly been dragging her feet.   

I would heartily recommend SPQR to anyone who is interested in ancient history and probably also to those who aren´t but are feeling adventurous. The book may be several hundred pages thick, but as someone who wasn´t Roman once said “a good book always ends too soon”. Beard sheds new light on fascinating topics that scholars have long discussed, and does this with plenty of humor, passion and accessibility.   

Trilogy Review, The Karla Trilogy: Tinker, Tailor, Soldier Spy, The Honorable Schoolboy and Smiley´s People

By John le Carré

I thought it would be fun to shake things up a bit and try something new, that´s why I intend to not just review one book, but a whole trilogy in one fell swoop. I’ll write a little bit about the author and the individual parts of the trilogy before I move on to explaining why I think that the trilogy in question deserves to be on your reading list. There will probably be some minor spoilers but I’ll try my best to make sure that readers whose interests are piqued can still pick up Tinker, Tailor and enjoy it like le Carré intended.

John le Carré (that´s his pen name, his real name is David Cornwell) was born in Dorset, England in 1931. After graduating from Oxford he started working for British intelligence, at a time when the Cold War was threatening to become hot. He wrote his first novel, The spy who came in from the cold, in 1963 while still working for MI6, hence the need for a pen name. After the successful publication of his first novel he left the service and became a full time writer.

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier Spy

The first installment in the Smiley trilogy went up on the silver screen in 2011, Directed by the brilliant Tomas Alfredson, and featured an all-star cast of Gary Oldman and Benedict Cumberbatch among others. Many people complained that the film was too slow paced, yours truly remains adamant that they should have slowed down a bit and made it at least an hour longer. The film is one of my favorites, and the book it´s based on was an instant classic that turned the espionage genre on its head.

The plot is set in the rain soaked London of the early seventies. Master spy George Smiley has been let go from the “Circus”, Le Carré´s synonym for British intelligence, after his long time mentor, a man known as Control, has passed away. Smiley is soon called back from retirement, however, when a British agent is contacted by a soviet defector with a shocking revelation. A soviet mole has penetrated the highest levels of British intelligence, it´s someone who has been there for years and it´s likely that Smiley knows the mole personally. This devious double agent has been planted there by Smiley´s nemesis, the mysterious Karla, head of Soviet intelligence´s Thirteenth Directorate. Working under the radar with a small but dedicated cadre, it falls to Smiley to uncover the identity of the mole and redeem his old mentor.  

Tinker, Tailor is in my opinion an absolute literary delight. It´s possibly one of the most riveting spy stories ever written, even though you have to stay on your toes to be able to follow all the twists and turns in the plot.  

The Honorable Schoolboy

After having exposed the mole within the British Secret Service, George Smiley is placed in charge of a gravely compromised Circus. Due to spending cuts they can barely afford to keep the kettle turned on. Yet when Moscow is planning something big in war torn Southeast Asia, Smiley dispatches the failed spy and man perennially looking for his big break, Gerald Westerby, to pose as a journalist and expose whatever devilry Karla is up too. While Westerby is dodging shells in the jungle, Smiley grapples with his colleagues in U.S intelligence and plans a joint operation together with his overseas colleagues.

The Honorable Schoolboy is a compelling novel of daunting scope and complexity. True to his tradition, le Carré doesn´t lend the reader a helping hand, which might have been useful for understanding all the nuances of the plot. Alfredson and the film team intends to skip this one and proceed directly to Smiley’s People. Even though it´s a great novel, the narrative may be a bit sprawling at times and it´s certainly the leased focused of the three.          

Smiley´s People

When a washed up old spy is found dead in the middle of London, George Smiley is once more called out of retirement. A seemingly million to one shot, uncovered by an old war hero written off by the Circus ages ago, might just be the ticket to a final showdown with Carla. Like Michael Bloomberg pondering a 2016 presidential bid, the lure is irresistible for Smiley to throw all the chips onto the table in the autumn of his life and battle it out one last time with his old nemesis.

The conclusion of the Smiley trilogy is riveting and spellbinding. It might just be the best book of the three, if only because you can always feel how high the stakes are personally for Smiley as he draws ever nearer to a final reckoning with Karla. Gathering his old colleagues for an espionage operation that everyone knows beforehand will go down in Circus lore, Smiley embarks on the last and greatest undertaking of his life.      

Le Carré´s words and world

Ian Fleming served in British intelligence during world war two, perhaps the last time in modern history when there was such a thing as a “good” war. John le Carré joined the service during the Cold War, when the line between friend and foe was blurred and everyone looked anxiously over their shoulders. The former lived in a time of heroes and villains, the latter in a brown and beige postwar England where there was still rationing well into the nineteen fifties. I previously reviewed Trigger Mortis on this blog, and the difference between Le Carré and Fleming is so vast as to be almost laughable. They both manage (or managed in regards to Fleming) to bring great suspense and memorable characters to life, but they do so in starkly different ways. James bond is the suave, good looking ladies’ man who shoots Russians in the face and drives exotic sports cars. George Smiley is none of the above. A balding and diminutive old man who polishes his spectacles on the fat end of his tie and never raises his voice above a whisper, his enemies are of a different breed entirely than a megalomaniacal villain living in a volcano. One of the central tenets of Le Carré´s stories is that the spy trade is a morally ambiguous one. Just because someone was born on the wrong side of the iron curtain doesn´t mean that they are bad people, and vice versa. Smiley even muses privately that, had he not been born in England, he might have become something very similar to Karla. 

The pipe smoke, the wallpaper, the corduroy trousers, everything in George Smileys world is either brown or grey. There is a palpable yet hard to define sense of danger and unease that permeates every page. Set during a time when the British Empire was dissolving and her Majesty´s government no longer wielded the power in once did, the embattled Circus is always short on funds and the golden days during the war when everything was black and white are long gone. The decline of the west is in full swing and for Smiley, his own home is just as threatening an environment as the world of international intrigue. His wife Ann only features sporadically, and her incessant philandering is always there in the back of Smiley´s head, as is the knowledge that he will never be able to work up the courage to leave her. In the end he might not even want to, despite all they have been through. Smiley is the last of a dying breed, and his colleagues as well as himself knows this.

Le Carré is a master in the art of delivering great suspense through small means. The reader is fed tales of international intrigue one tiny teaspoon at a time, and will have to read between the lines to fully understand what is going on. Even though I have just praised the Smiley trilogy, I would paradoxically recommend you to not start reading Tinker, Tailor just yet. Le Carré´s debut, The spy who came in from the cold, is much more accessible and straight forward, as well as a classic in its own right. Start with his first novel and you can´t go far wrong. If you find it to your liking you will definitely love the rest of his works. His most recent novel however, A delicate truth, is unfortunately not that great, and represents a sad blip on his otherwise impressive resumé.

Book Review, World Order: Reflections on the character of nations and the course of history

By Henry Kissinger

World Order is a lengthy tome on the subject of our prevailing global structure and state of affairs, written by a veteran statesman who has definitely “been there, done that”.

Henry Kissinger, winner of the 1973 Nobel peace prize and a prolific writer deep into his autumnal years, remains a controversial figure. Several human rights organizations have long accused him of war crimes and his brand of realpolitik is certainly not rosy tinted or angelic, even if he believes that principles need to be a vital component of statesmanship. Whatever one happens to think of the man, it was certainly exciting to get to grips with Kissinger´s latest publication, which mixes a rich dose of history with his own personal reflections. 

Heinz Alfred Kissinger was born to a family of German Jews in Fürth, Bavaria, in 1923. When his family fled Nazi persecution they sought refuge in the United States, where the first stage of the young Heinrich´s acclimatization to his newfound home was to adopt the more Anglo-Saxon Henry. He studied accounting at university before he was drafted into the army during World War II, where he eventually did a stint in military intelligence, and even saw combat during the Battle of the Bulge. After the war he studied political science at Harvard and swiftly rose through the ranks, serving as secretary of state during both the Nixon and Ford administrations. It was during this time that his career was at its zenith, when he engineered the concept of détente with the Soviet Union and initiated diplomatic relations with the People’s Republic of China, although naturally the specter of the Vietnam War still hovers over the rest of his accomplishments.         

The book starts with an introductionary chapter on the concept of global order, before subsequent chapters delve into the unique characteristics and views of world order prevalent in of Europe, The Middle East, Asia and The United States. One of the cornerstones of the book is the Westphalian concept of the nation state, which originated in Kissinger’s native Germany. After Europe was ravaged by the Thirty Year´s War, its shell shocked participants drew up a peace accord as well as a framework for preventing anything like it from happening in the future. The role of the Papacy was now symbolic, and Europe was structured around the concept of sovereign nation states. To shield them against the horrors of total war, the anxious populace needed a wise sovereign (appointed by God or otherwise) who protected their nation’s borders and exercised a monopoly on the use of force. There was no one Caesar to rule all of Europe, although Bonaparte gave it his best shot, which gave rise to the concept of a balance of power, where all nations sought to use diplomacy and warfare to further their own national interests and made alliances as it suited them at the time. When one nation grew too powerful to be contained Britain intervened on the continent on behalf of the weaker party. This most commonly meant France, as Germany was only unified in 1871, the worst possible thing that could happen from a French viewpoint, the principal goal of their foreign policy for the best part of two hundred years having been to keep the fractured German states and fiefdoms from uniting under one banner. Too powerful yet too weak at the same time, Kissinger argues that a united Germany was always going to be serious threat to the balance of power in Europe. On its own Germany couldn´t defeat the rest of Europe, yet they were way too powerful for their smaller neighbors comfort. Belgium, matter of fact, came into being since no major continental power could be allowed to hold the vital port city of Antwerp. This sounds a lot like drab realpolitik, but at least this geopolitical necessity has given Duuvel beer as well as moule frites. Naturally, the outbreak of World War I represented a massive failure and miscalculation on the part of the European nations to maintain the balance of power and control the destructive forces harnessed by industrialization. Europe never fully recovered from two devastating world wars, and has since chosen the path of mutual cooperation, in the form of the EU, to settle their differences.

Asia, as Kissinger wryly notes, is a vast landmass that the majority of humanity calls home, yet its inhabitants have never seen themselves as being part of the same continent or felt any natural solidarity with each other. In Asia we find large and influential countries such as Russia, China, and Japan, which are incredibly diverse and different from each other. Russia has long played a role on the continent of Europe, intervening decisively to check the ambitions of monarchs and dictators whose hubris got the best of them, and is a unique mix of east and west. China deserves a book all on its own (as does more or less every country covered I the book to be fair), and if you are interested I suggest you read Kissinger´s On China.

The Middle East, as Kissinger reasonably notes, is a region undergoing turmoil, without any Asian style tiger economies to provide a stable foundation for peaceful growth. This region displays the problem of the concept of world order when some actors do not find the nation state the most legitimate vessel for achieving this goal, and instead turn to religion as the sole source of legitimacy. If the right of sovereign nation state is not accepted, this can cause volatility and friction. Some of the current woes besetting the region are due to imperialism, when the British and the French divided the Middle East into areas of influence with the 1916 Sykes-Picot agreement. The borders between Iraq and Syria, for instance, wasn´t a natural creation, but rather the product of smoking room diplomacy. Drawing national borders on a map without showing any regards for the different cultures and ethnicities in the region could only spell trouble down the road.

After gazing down upon the world from on high, like an all knowing observer atop a floating palanquin, Kissinger at last arrives at the subject that I am fairly confident he is most concerned with, namely The United States of America and its concept of world order. Unlike all the other countries and regions of the world, America, and to a large extant Europe as well, believes in certain universal principles that transcend the concept of the Westphalian state. America (this is all Kissinger but I trust that he knows what he is talking about) regards itself as a shining city on a hill, and like Ronald Reagan in his farewell address, believes that freedom and democracy are universal human values. The goal of any statesman, Kissinger argues, is to balance geopolitical necessities with morals and principle. Where other countries are solely motivated by their own gain, the “Western” statesman cannot simply make a cold calculation about lines on a map or figures in a ledger. Although to be fair Mr. Kissinger has done his fair share of cold calculation during his long career. This concept would, I believe, be called American exceptionalism, and Kissinger is definitely a believer, even though I suspect China might not be.   

Even though I might not agree with everything Kissinger says, World Order is a thoroughly fascinating read. He concludes the book by offering his thoughts about what challenges a budding statesman might be confronted with in the future. For someone who didn´t use the internet until he was in his seventies, Kissinger is very farsighted and thoughtful about the ramifications of today´s connected information society, and offers a warning about mistaking data and information for insight and wisdom. Young millennial layabouts like me who panic when the internet is down for 15 minutes might be well served by pondering what all the information we are bombarded with 24/7 actually means, and what insights are worth having. Even though we are surrounded by a wealth of information unheard of for almost all of human history, every problem does not have a definite answer or a solution that you can look up online. Information needs to be tempered with history and experience to yield actual, useful knowledge. For that insight alone, World Order is worth your time.

Book Review: The Crash of 2016

By Thom Hartmann

The year 2016 I still so young I catch myself saying it´s 2015 out of familiarity. Yet the global economy is already looking decidedly shaky, with disappointing growth numbers from China and whispers about a possible emerging market crisis. Given this grim economic climate, what could be more suitable than starting off this year with a book that predicts it will end in such dramatic fashion? If the crisis doesn´t happen, however, I expect you will be able to find The Crash of 2016 in the bargain bin come next year. That would be a shame, since it´s a highly thought provoking read that deserves attention.

Thom Hartmann is an internationally syndicated progressive radio and talk show host who is never afraid to debate his ideological adversaries on air, whether they are a former grand master of the KKK or conservative intellectual Dinesh D´Souza. He has previously written many books about a wide range of topics and narrates The 11^th Hour, an upcoming documentary about climate change, together with Leonardo DiCaprio. In The Crash of 2016 he lays out his case for what´s wrong with America and why an economy built on an unsound foundation might find itself in dire straits during the coming year.

The child of a middle class household who grew into adulthood during the golden years of postwar prosperity, Thom´s view on politics and economics is invariably linked with his upbringing. His father served in World War II and went to college thanks to the GI Bill, a part of Franklin Delano Roosevelt´s domestic program known as the New Deal. After his wife got pregnant with their first child (Mr. Hartmann, that is), he was forced to abandoned his studies but found a good paying union job at a metal machining company. This enabled him to support a family of four children, buy a home through a government guaranteed mortgage and go on vacation for two weeks every year. His father´s generation, Hartmann says, benefited immensely from the New Deal and its policies that helped build a middle class. Today, however, it is no longer possible for a working family, even with the wife working as well, to afford anything near the same lifestyle. Why is it, Hartmann asks, that this is the new normal?

One of the main themes of the book is that major economic crises occur about every eighty years or so. That timespan is long enough time for those who lived through the previous crisis to die off and for everyone else to forget the lessons they should have learned. This “great forgetting” is advantageous for the powerful and unscrupulous, fittingly referred to by FDR as the economic royalists, since it enables them to enrich themselves while acquiring even greater influence and privilege. The so called “progressive era” in the US ended when Warren G Harding was elected in 1915. He promised “less government in business and more business in government”, and delivered handsomely on that promise. Deregulation and massive tax cuts for the well to do fueled a speculative binge on Wall Street that culminated in the Great Depression when the stock market collapsed in 1929. After FDR and his New Deal bailed out the economy and America had enjoyed a quarter century of solid economic growth, the stage was set for another coup by the economic royalists when the seventies was running to a close. With Ronald Reagan in the White House and new-fangled conservative think tanks influencing hearts and minds, the policies that led to the Great Depression were exhumed from their dusty crypt and implemented once more. Things got even worse this time around, however, when blue collar jobs started to be exported to low wage countries like China. This was done under the guise of “free trade”, and served to further enrich the economic royalists while thousands of manufacturing plants closed every year (and still do) in the US. When he appeared on Hartmann’s show, Dinesh D´Souza chided him for his resistance to free trade and exclaimed regretfully “So this is the face of modern progressivism”, before praising international trade as the world´s most effective anti-poverty program.

The policies of Reagan and his cohorts, especially pertaining to trade and deregulation, were carried on during the democratic administration of Bill Clinton, whom Hartmann argues was a democrat in name only, until the economy eventually collapsed like a house of cards in 2008.

Since the fundamental problems that caused the crash were never properly addressed by the Obama administration, he argues that we should get ready for part two of that same crash. The narrative is a familiar one from my perspective, since I reviewed Robert Reich’s Inequality for All on the blog last year, which raised very similar concerns and came to more or less the same conclusions as Hartmann does.   

To remedy this situation Hartmann suggests that the recipe for having a prosperous middle class consist of four simple points, all of which have been under assault in America during the past four decades: progressive taxation, a social safety net, protections for working people and rules in the marketplace. Getting money out of politics and getting more Americans to show up at the polling booth would also help, he reasonably points out. We disagree, however, when he raises the topic of Greece. According to him, the economic royalists are getting away with murder while they fleece the country out of every single olive farm. Herbert Hoover and Ronald Reagan´s policies are sneakily infiltrating the birthplace of democracy and the booze cruise. As a European, and a northern one at that, I quite naturally have a somewhat different perspective. It wasn´t Goldman Sachs who tricked Greece into cooking their books and hiding the mountainous extent of their debt from their European comrades. The Greek government asked the infamous investment bank to do it for them, so that they could ditch the drachma and join the Eurozone. Austerity might not be a magical remedy for financial crises, far from it, but Greece must bear a share of the blame for the predicament they find themselves in. 

The Greek matter aside, I find Hartmann to be more or less correct and to the point. You certainly won´t find anyone in the so called mainstream media raising any of these concerns. Whether we actually get to see a crash in 2016 or not, and I certainly hope we don´t, The Crash of 2016 lays out a credible blueprint for restoring broadly based prosperity. 

Book Review: Trigger Mortis

By Anthony Horowitz

This fall Daniel Craig returned to the silver screen to star in Spectre, the 24^th installment of the James Bond franchise originally created by Ian Fleming. While Spectre was a bit hit at the box office, the venerable franchise also returned in print, with Anthony Horowitz taking up the pen were Fleming left off, in order to bring back the James Bond that Ian Fleming originally envisioned. The story nestles in between the events in Goldfinger and For Your Eyes Only, and is partly based on Ian Fleming´s original notes.

Daniel Craig´s modern Bond is fair haired, handles technology with ease and shows off his ripped torso to a lady with an accent astride a white horse every time he saunters onto a beach. The secret service agent that Ian Fleming envisioned through the generous cigarette smoke at his Goldeneye estate in Jamaica was literally none of the above. Bond, in his own words, was supposed to be a plain looking and rather boring man, devoted to king and country. He only went to exotic places and did interesting things because Her Majesty’s Exchequer paid his salary. When I read the first Bond novel, Casino Royale, our favorite secret agent drank so much and smoked so copiously that I was amazed he could even climb the stairs to his hotel room. Besting Le Chiffre at baccarat and bringing down his soviet spy ring seemed like a very tall order indeed. In the sequel, Live and Let Die, Bond limits himself to ten cigarettes a day and takes a sprightly jog down the beach as a concession to reality in order to toughen himself up before he can take down the devious Mr. Big. Horowitz continues, with barely concealed delight, in this same vein. The Moorlands cigarettes from Grosvenor Street, the V8-Bentley, an M played by Bernard Lee and Don Draper´s view of women in the workplace are all duly ticked off. Horowitz´s narrative is focused and believable enough that the fifties touch doesn´t feel overly out of place.

After having foiled Auric Goldfinger´s heist of the century in Ian Flemings original novel, the story in Trigger Mortis starts off with Bond having returned to London. He is accompanied by the charismatic Pussy Galore, the lesbian leader of a criminal gang composed entirely of women, whom Bond seduced while battling Mr. Goldfinger. He barely has time to show her the sights before Old Blighty is once more presented with an urgent threat to its national security. The Soviet intelligence agency SMERSH plans to sabotage a race at the infamous Nürburgring race track in Germany. Their intention is to show off the superiority of Soviet technology by ensuring that their 16-cylinder behemoth of a race car wins. This places the tally ho British race car driver Lancy Smith in mortal danger and Bond is dispatched to ensure his survival. The vintage racing around the Nürburgring is a period montage of dashing brylcreemed drivers jammed into primitive cars so life threatening that Lancy Smith´s own motor would probably have been just as dangerous as any SMERSH assassin.

However, when Bond spots SMERSH´s driver together with reclusive Korean billionaire Jason Sin, he realizes that there´s more on the line than simply the life of a British race car driver. The mysterious death of a rocket scientist from former Nazi Germany and the development of a new high-tech ballistic missile raises the stakes considerably. Being a double certainly O is certainly not easy, but luckily the mysterious and alluring Jeopardy Lane also has a bone to pick with Mr. Sin.

Ian Fleming´s works of fiction were never part of the respectable literary scene, they were accessible adventure stories aimed at the wider market, yet written with a distinctively suave flair. Horowitz has done a splendid job of resurrecting the historical Bond, and Trigger Mortis does feel like a novel that Fleming himself could have written. He has great attention to detail and presents the reader with a fast paced narrative that is reminiscent of what Sean Connery got up to during the sixties. The race at the Nürburgring is the part that is based on Fleming own notes, but Horowitz manages to craft a compelling story with the help of that tasty morsel. The novel could have been a little bit longer, but then Fleming´s originals were rather short as well, so I guess that´s to be expected. In summary, Trigger Mortis doesn´t disappoint would certainly be a splendid read for the holidays. 

       

Book Review: The Greatest Comeback, How Richard Nixon Rose from Defeat to Create the New Majority

By Patrick J. Buchanan

“Just think how much you´re going to be missing. You don´t have Nixon to kick around anymore, because, gentlemen, this is my last press conference.” 

A pale and dejected Richard Nixon greeted the press after having lost the 1962 California gubernatorial race to the incumbent democrat, Pat Brown. Two years earlier he had lost the presidential election to John F Kennedy. A once promising political career had now seen the final nail been hammered into its coffin when Nixon indulged in his public display of self-pity. The former congressman and Vice-President under Eisenhower had now been expelled to the political wilderness. Yet, against all the odds, a great many factors and upheavals would, only seven years later, see Richard Nixon become the 37^th president of the United States. Although the popular opinion seem to be that Nixon´s life and presidency was about as interesting as watching paint dry and as bland as a speech by Mitt Romney, The Greatest Comeback is at times written like a fast paced thriller with plenty of drama.  

Patrick J. Buchanan was born in Washington D.C in 1938, and the quintessential component of that state, politics, seems to have been imprinted into his bone marrow from day one. As a young man he became a part of a conservative movement that was on the ascendant in the Republican Party and threatened the liberal East Cost Establishment. He briefly worked as an editorial writer for the Saint Louis Globe-Democrat. Having seen which way the wind was going to blow before even the meteorologists had, Buchanan joined Richard Nixon´s presidential campaign in January 1966. His delight at having landed the job is obvious to any reader, and Buchanan quickly distinguished himself through his hard work and keen political mind. Having aligned himself with Nixon when his stock was still not quite what it had once been, Buchanan became part of his inner circle from that day one until the Watergate scandal forced Nixon to resign in 1974. His journalistic roots are still evident however, as his writing is effortlessly readable, entertaining and insightful.

The Sixties was an era of major social and cultural upheaval in the United States. The battles being waged at the time would come to shape the country, and indeed the world as we know it today. When Buchanan joined the Nixon campaign in its very early stages, the war in Vietnam was raging in parallel with the Culture war. Lyndon B. Johnson, having stepped in after JFK was shot, was challenged in the 1964 presidential election by Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater. Buchanan, being a pragmatist as well as a devout conservative, wasn´t surprised by how badly Goldwater was thrashed by LBJ in the national election. A more extreme version of Ron Paul, Goldwater once said that “extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice”. He was the kind of guy who would never compromise about anything, and barely succeeded in uniting his own party. The ensuing democratic landslide ushered in a program of domestic legislation known as The Great Society, under which the number of people living under the poverty line was reduced from 22.2 percent in 1963 to 12.6 percent in 1970. True to his conservative roots, Buchanan writes at length about his dislike of government programs in general and the Great Society in particular, and didn´t quote the abovementioned statistic. But I digress. After Goldwater’s humiliating defeat, hardline conservatives such as Buchanan were left reeling. The only way for the Republican Party to regain the White House, was to nominate a candidate who could speak to Middle America without sounding like a lunatic and who could forge a new majority coalition of voters.

After LBJ signed the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act, the pro segregationists in the South, who had been solidly democratic for a great many years, were suddenly left disillusioned with the party of their fathers and grandfathers. Today we think of Texas and Alabama as red states, but at the time they were solidly blue. During the sixties, the old political map of the United States was re-drawn, old certainties were turned upside down and what emerged was the political map and the political climate that we know today. When Buchanan joined the Nixon campaign, however, these events were still unfolding, or waiting to unfold, and everything looked uncertain.

Opposing Nixon´s nomination were three formidable rivals from within his own party, the Liberal Republican Nelson Rockefeller, Mitt Romney´s father Gorge Romney, and the Gipper himself, Ronald Reagan. Emerging victorious from a melee with such formidable opponents, who straddled the full spectrum within the party, from the ultra-conservative Reagan to the liberal Rockefeller, would clearly require a formidable politician. Luckily for Buchanan, Richard Nixon was a consummate politician married to a robust work ethic. Perhaps equally important were Nixon´s own political convictions. I was going to write about them, but that might be hard as, and I hope Mr. Buchanan can forgive me, but I´m not sure what they were or if they ever existed. Richard Nixon´s heartfelt beliefs seems to have been dependent upon what polled well and what people wanted to hear. He styled himself as a “progressive conservative”, whatever that means.  Had Nixon made a campaign stop at an ice cream parlor and someone asked him what his favorite flavor was, I´m sure he would have replied that it was strawberry. But also that he loved chocolate chip ice cream in equal measure. And let´s not forget butterscotch, which he has always cared for. And pistachio is gaining popularity, so Nixon likes pistachio just as much as he likes strawberry and chocolate, although he has not forgotten butterscotch, which he loves as much as strawberry.       

The glue that held together the diverse and diaphanous views of Nixon were his foreign policy clout. At a time when the Vietnam War was the number one issue of the day, that was highly fortunate for his campaign. Buchanan accompanied Nixon on lengthy trips abroad, ranging from Africa to Europe and the Middle East, where they met with many prominent world leaders. Nixon thereby managed to establish himself as the grown-up in the Republican Party. He played it carefully in regards to Vietnam, not wanting to be seen as an opportunist criticizing the Johnson Administration at every turn, yet he carefully articulated a willingness to pursue every option in order to bring US involvement in the war to a close. When a wide swath of white-middle class America tired of riots breaking out in the major cities on a regular basis, he promised this emerging “silent majority” law and order.

The term “silent majority” has since been accused of having had a subtle racist undertone, where the subsequent war on drugs has predominantly targeted the poor and minorities. On the issue of Nixon and race Buchanan ducks and dodges and weaves about like he is a bull in a china shop. He steadfastly denies that Nixon was racist in any way and lambasts the Democrats for having cynically relied on the Dixiecrat vote in the past. After doing that he promptly assists Nixon in scooping up that very same demographic, which might be considered a tad cynical.

The Nixon team, with Buchanan on board, were like a crack brigade of paratroopers moving into the Republican primary, while the three R: s: Romney, Rockefeller and Reagan, were always on the back foot. Nixon managed to outmaneuver his opponents with the skill of a master tactician and bring large parts of the south into his fold while all factions of the Republican Party could stomach his candidacy. Well, maybe except for the odd holdout clique of Goldwater loyalists, but nobody cared what they thought. This is when The Greatest Comeback is at its best. When Buchanan and the Nixon team battle it out against their opponents, reacting to new Gallup polls as they come in and with Buchanan rushing off to write new speeches for Nixon with his typewriter rattling like a machine gun. The pace is almost too breakneck, but I loved every minute of the unfolding drama, with all its twists and turns and colorful characters.

If Nixon managed to unite his party, the Democrats, on the other hand, were in dire straits. After LBJ decided not to run for a third term, the New Left was in disarray. Robert Kennedy could have been their savior, but he was assassinated just moments after winning the California primary. The 1968 Democratic convention was held in Chicago, during which the police violently clashed with protesters in what was to become known as the Battle of Chicago. Depending on who you ask the police were either defending themselves against the massed onslaught of marijuana crazed hippies (according to Buchanan) or the police dealt with the largely peaceful protesters with excessive force (according to everyone else). During the Battle of Chicago, Buchanan occupied a suite downtown and gleefully invited reporters and press to join him while he knocked back a scotch and watched the city burn. The New Deal, The Great Society, you could say that it all ended there, among the flames and smashed windows at that Chicago convention. The Left may have won the culture wars, but the Right have more or less dictated the economic agenda, the occasional democratic who have been in office since then a far cry from the party´s progressive roots. The Democratic nominee who emerged from that shell shocked convention, Hubert Humphrey, sounds like someone Winnie the Pooh runs into while playing in the forest. He never stood a chance against Nixon´s keen political calculations and second to none campaign staff. On January 20^th 1969, Nixon assumed office, after having pulled of perhaps the greatest comeback in political history. 

The chapter that remains unwritten, Buchanan concludes, is that of the Nixon presidency. He is no longer the young man he was back in 1968, but if his health remains he promises to finish the story. The next time I hold a drink in my hand I will toast to Mr. Buchanan’s continued wellbeing, for I sure enjoyed reading The Greatest Comeback and look forward to the sequel.