"Too Busy Saving the World"

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To label Kati Marton’s biography of Angela Merkel a hagiography would not be fair—not entirely. That said, when she writes of the chancellor being “too busy saving the world” to have much time for strolling in the woods, the expression may be less of a rhetorical flourish than it should. “The Chancellor” is an impressively researched but, in many respects, devotional work—the reflection of a worshipful establishment consensus that will eventually seem absurd.

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Slanted but Essential

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Shutdown, historian Adam Tooze’s new book—which carries the somewhat premature subtitle How Covid Shook the World’s Economy—is billed by its publishers as “a deft synthesis of global finance, politics and business . . . a tour-de-force account of the year that changed everything.” Whether the coronavirus will, when all’s done, have “changed everything” remains to be seen, but Shutdown is well worth reading as an intriguing, thought-provoking study of a period made unique not by a disease—our species has weathered many—but by how we dealt with it.

“Never before,” writes Tooze, “had there been a collective decision, however haphazard and uneven, to shut large parts of the world’s economy down.” He could have taken a more rigorously questioning look at the rights and wrongs of that decision, one of several missteps in the book that range from his cursory examination of the different course adopted by Sweden to his failure to consider whether prolonged shutdowns would have been justifiable had vaccines not been developed so quickly. The vaccine breakthrough casts the draconian measures taken by authorities in a more favorable light than they may deserve. For how much longer would we have had to shelter at home? Years?

But then Shutdown’s author makes no secret of his preference for strong state action…

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From Pillaging to Prosperity

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The Viking Heart, the latest work by the historian Arthur Herman, is engaging, informative, and highly readable. As Herman deals with four separate topics each of which deserves a book of its own, it is also an extremely ambitious undertaking. His reach may some­times exceed his grasp, but even when that is the case the results are likely to leave readers wanting more — in a good way.

The first topic, taking up a third or so of The Viking Heart’s text, is a history of the “classic” Viking era. The second is a discussion of what happened next — the Vikings did not just vanish into nothingness when the longships ceased setting sail. The third touches on the Scandinavian experience in America. The fourth, which is more of a thread running through the book, is an examination of what Herman dubs “the Viking heart,” character traits (mercifully somewhat evolved since that heart began beating) that, in his view, contributed so much to the development of these northern peoples and the impact they have had far beyond the fjords, forests, and lakes of their homelands.

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The Sound of Silence

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The Middle Ages,” wrote Carl Jung in a 1958 book about UFOs, “have not died out. . . . Mythology and magic flourish as ever in our midst.” I doubt if Monica Black, a professor of history at the University of Tennessee and the author of A Demon-Haunted Land,an intriguing, subtle, and occasionally startling examination of a wave of superstitious belief that swept across Germany in the immediate post-war years, would disagree. Certainly, Black recognizes the fascination that supernatural ideas and practices, from astrology to the occult, held for millions of Germans “across the modern period” as well as the persistence of a long-standing tradition of folk and magical healing.

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Afterwards

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Writing a few years after the armistice that, at 11 o’clock on November 11, 1918, brought a halt to the fighting on the Western Front, John Buchan related how:

“At two minutes to eleven, opposite the South African Brigade, which represented the easternmost point reached by the British armies, a German machine gunner, after firing off a belt without pause, was seen to stand up beside his weapon, take off his helmet, bow, and then walk slowly to the rear. Suddenly, as the watch-hands touched eleven, there came a second of expectant silence, and then a curious rippling sound, which observers far behind the front likened to the noise of a light wind. It was the sound of men cheering from the Vosges to the sea.

After that, peace descended on the long battlefield. A new era had come and the old world had passed away.”

But cataclysms rarely end so elegantly. More of the old world lingers on into the new than is often presumed.

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Cold War Cosmonaut

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Readers of Stephen Walker’s fine new account of how Yuri Gagarin, a 27-year-old Soviet air-force major (he was promoted from lieutenant while circling the Earth), became the first man in space will discover quite a bit about Gagarin the man, but a great deal more about the program that put him into orbit 60 years ago, on April 12, 1961.

Vasco da Gama, Gagarin was not. For all his skill, toughness, unflappability and courage, he was no explorer. In a way, he was merely the most important of all the fauna that the Soviets shot into space. The first astronauts had relatively little control over their capsules; the first cosmonauts had far less.

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The Truth is out There

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In the age of QAnon, it is of little comfort to learn in Michael Butter’s “The Nature of Conspiracy Theories” that such malevolent fables have been around for some time. Cicero devised one. Winston Churchill, at least once, passed along another. What’s different now, claims Mr. Butter, is who believes them, who spreads them and how they are disseminated. Once common among the elites, conspiracy theories were stigmatized, in the West anyway, during the postwar years. “We used to be afraid of conspiracies,” the author relates. “We are now more afraid of conspiracy theories,” a fear that helps account for the attention they attract.

But only partly: Ideas that might once have been confined to a pamphlet are now easily available on the internet, a space where anyone can be an expert and where conspiracy theories can provide a splendid living for those who peddle them. The internet has “largely nullified” the media’s “traditional watchdog role,” a change that Mr. Butter, who writes from a leftish-establishment point of view, mourns more than is entirely healthy.

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Still Free and Alive

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Never judge a book by its cover. And never, probably, begin a review by quoting that line. But I think it’s appropriate here. For as I gazed at the cover of Francesco Boldizzoni’s “Foretelling the End of Capitalism: Intellectual Misadventures Since Karl Marx ” and noticed the presence of the Grim Reaper, I prepared myself for a detailed discussion of the millenarianism that has characterized leftist thinking, not only since Marx but indeed long before him.

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The Slow & the Dead & Other Authors

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There’s something suitable, in this year gone awry, that the best novel I have read in 2020 purports to be an autobiography written from beyond the grave (“I am not exactly an author recently deceased, but a deceased man recently an author”) and that it was first published in 1881 (after appearing in installments in the Revista Brazileira). With 2020 being 2020, The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas (Memórias Póstumas de Brás Cubas) has been rendered from Portuguese into English not once, but twice, even if it has been read by me not twice, but once.1The New Criterion arranged for me to be sent a copy of the Penguin Classics version, which has been translated by Flora Thomson-DeVeaux and boasts a perceptive foreword by Dave Eggers. That this is a paperback, and a rival (translated by Margaret Jull Costa and Robin Patterson) was only available in hardback was, I am sure, merely a coincidence.

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The Point of No Return

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Barely two months before the opening of the Nuremberg trials, British prime minister Clement Attlee wrote to President Truman about the “displaced persons”—the DPs—of numerous nationalities stranded in the fallen Reich. Attlee explained that British forces would continue to “avoid treating [the Jewish DPs] on a racial basis. . . . One must remember that within these camps were people from almost every race in Europe and there appears to have been very little difference in the amount of torture and treatment they had to undergo.”

As David Nasaw devastatingly illustrates in “The Last Million,” there was widespread reluctance among the victorious Allies to confront the true nature of the Holocaust, so it’s just possible that Attlee (no anti-Semite but no Zionist either) believed what he wrote. Whatever his motive, he undoubtedly didn’t want to see “the Jews [placed] in a special racial category at the head of the queue.” Much of the reason was Palestine, then under British control: “We have the Arabs to consider as well.” Attlee’s worry, evident in the letter if never explicitly spelled out, was that defining the Jewish DPs as a distinct group, unable to return “home,” would bolster the argument that they be permitted to immigrate to Palestine, in which, and about which, tensions were running dangerously high. Attlee warned that “the whole Middle East” could be “set aflame.”

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