The Dream of Reason: A History of Western Philosophy from the Greeks to the Renaissance. Anthony Gottlieb. 2000
Child’s Play. Robert Morasco. 1970
Unholy Orders: Tragedy at Mount Cashel. Michael Harris.1990
Ghosts of the Orphanage. Christine Keneally. 2023.
Sons of the Mountains; Vol. 1. Ian Macpherson McCullough. 2006
1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare. James Shapiro. 2005
The Zone of Interest. Martin Amis. 2014
No Man Knows My History: The Life of Joseph Smith. Fawn M. Brodie. 1945/1995
The Longest Con: How Grifters, Swindlers, and Frauds Hijacked American Conservatism. Joe Conason. 2024
Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine. Robert Conquest. 1986
Things Fall Apart. Chinua Achebe. 1958
The Dream of Reason: A History of Western Philosophy from the Greeks to the Renaissance. Anthony Gottlieb. 2000
Having set myself a new goal of reading deeply into the “Age of Enlightenment” as background for three different topics (one of which I hope will become a book) I purchased a copy of Anthony Gottlieb’s The Dream of Enlightenment only to discover that it was a sequel to his The Dream of Reason. So, of course, I had to read that book first. And I am glad I did.
There are a large number of “Histories of Philosophy” – starting with Bertrand Russell’s A History of Western Philosophy (1946). They seem to satisfy an innate need to understand a complex and difficult (but important) subject, without putting in the enormous time and effort to master any one part of it – only to discover that it’s the wrong part for you and you need to start over on a new one. The third alternative is, of course, to you-tube or self-help-book yourself to a potted (and potty) version of, say, Stoicism or Epicureanism and learn a few useful catch phrases to post on Facebook.
So, I will stick to the histories since the only philosopher that I have deeply studied (Socrates/Plato) has proved largely unrewarding. And as a whole, the histories (like The Cave and the Light: see my review in 2024) are not a bad lot – if a little, well, dry.
But The Dream of Reason has a little bit extra to offer, to me and to everyone. To me, it is the first book to truly shed a little light on the Sophists and their actual beliefs and activities. The Sophists have, since the time of Aristophanes, been the victim of a bad reputation – hence the negativity of the modern term sheer sophistry. They have been portrayed as a bunch of foreign (non-Athenian) con men who took money to teach young men how to argue that false was truth and bad was good. In fact, at least in part, they taught people how to speak intelligibly and with a clarity of thought.
Just a small example. Athens had, by the time the Sophists arrived, become a direct democracy where all the large decisions were taken by the citizens in public meetings. But very few of those citizens spoke at the large assemblies. Why? Because they were largely unsure of their ability to do so without embarrassing themselves. They had no confidence in themselves as a public speakers. The few who did (mostly from wealthy families who had hired private tutors) ran the show: eg. Pericles. This is the kind of teaching gap that the Sophists filled. Similarly in law courts, where there were no lawyers and everyone had to speak for themselves. You can understand why people from wealthy and powerful families (like Plato) would have a problem with Sophists.
To everyone else, who has no particular interest in Sophists (they certainly would be helpful in today’s largely inarticulate world), Gottlieb has something else to offer that is most rare in a history of philosophy – a rather wicked sense of humour. This appears throughout the book but is particularly helpful when he has to navigate the co-habitation of philosophy and religion in the C.E. years; particularly in mediaeval thinking. Enjoy.
Having finished this book I get to write some words that I never thought I would get to write: On to Enlightenment!
Child’s Play. Robert Morasco. 1970
There are three events, three books and one over-all conclusion that I want to deal with here. They all involve, at some level, books or publications and follow the internal logic of memory and evade the external vice of time. Patience is, therefore, required.
In 1975-6 I was the technical director of the Centennial Theatre at Bishop’s University and was in the process completing my Master’s degree there as well. The regular season of student productions was nothing particularly memorable but two outside shows did touring gigs there that fall. One was the first tour of Toronto Workshop Productions /TWP Ten Lost Years which was a singular event in Canadian theatre (the show, not the tour) in that it brought “collective creation” to mainstream Canadian theatre audiences. I was so impressed by the show that I have since directed three different productions of the play. The second show was Child’s Play by R. Morasco, performed by the faculty and students of Bishops’ College School. Such a night and day contrast on the very same stage is a great rarity – an amateur production by an all-male boarding school cast of actors vs. one of the best professional companies in Canada; and yet . . .
A little setting of the scene is required here. The same religio-cultural impetus that established Bishop’s University outside Lennoxville as an Anglican Seminary created its cousin BCS just across the St. Francis River. Bishop’s College School was, in the 1970’s, an all-male boarding school for the Anglo-elite. Among its graduates it boasted Sir Montagu Allan, Conrad Black, Michael Ondaatje, Hartland Molson, Stuart McLean and some guy who invented Trivial Pursuit. It was expensive, exclusive and elite – and it was very Anglican. It also had a strong drama program (just like Bishop’s). At this same time, Bishop’s U. was just coming down from an extraordinary decade-long run as one of the most powerful drama programs in the country culminating in the creation of Festival Lennoxville. It was not that there was a host of exceptional acting classes – there were no acting classes at all – but that there was a dynamic theatre faculty led by David Rittenhouse and featuring William Davis and Tom Lyttle. The volunteer program of actors (and technicians)turned out some very fine artists who went on to careers in Canadian Theatre. And it drew from every aspect of the Bishop’s community – even the football team. So, although the reputation for drama at BCS was also strong, there was a kind of smug, “let’s see what the juniors can do” attitude among the audience at curtain rise. That changed within three minutes.
The play is set in a private Catholic (the word Jesuit not spoken) boy’s school. All the students were played by the BCS students and most of the faculty were played by – the faculty. The set was enormous and the opening scene featured a huge staircase leading down into the main hall of the school; picture class change time at Hogwarts. BCS had pulled out all the stops and the stage was covered with students in school uniforms (BCS, but very effective). It looked like 50 or 60 students, moving in and out going, up and down the stairs – almost like a well choreographed “Met” chorus scene, with a couple of teachers weaving their way through the crowd, against the current, to the focal point of the scene: the foot of the stairs. It was the kind of crowd blocking that is almost never seen on the professional stage because of the numbers required. The only thing that I ever saw that came close was the exorcism scene in John Hirsch ‘s production of The Dybbuk.
And then, almost out of nowhere, one teacher comes face to face with one student leading a small group of his peers and then, in an instant, the teacher lays a resounding slap – and it was a real one and very loud – on the face of the lead student in the group. And suddenly time, and every one on stage and everyone in the audience, was frozen in stillness and silence. It was one of the most profoundly shocking theatrical moments I have ever seen. The rest of the play is the unravelling of the mystery of that slap.
Now, Child’s Play (a new play then, produced on Broadway in 1970), is no great shakes as a play. It has its gruesome gothic moments and a great reversal of expectations but ends up very unsatisfying in its refusal to decide between being a psychological thriller or a supernatural one. What made it successful for our audience was the eeriness of a boy’s school playing a boy’s school gone bad. It did NOT predict the revelations to come about private and residential schools run by various Churches – in fact the bad guys are the non-religious teachers and the worst that can be said about the priests is that one of them has issues with alcohol. What was the most eery part of it is that probably every single person in the production, and probably no-one in the audience, knew that BCS had a well-kept secret about real-life abuses at their own school that went back to the early 1950’s and were only being partially resolved at the time of the production. It is possible that that secret knowledge provided the energy that drove and electrified that terrific performance.
Skip forward in time to May 2010 and an article appeared in the Gazette written by a feature writer of great talent, Hubert Bauch. The headline reads “A Place That Destroyed Children”. I will quote, in part:
Former students - plaintiffs in a class action lawsuit - describe the elite private school in the 1950s and '60s as a house of horrors and dirty secrets, where a culture of abuse reigned unchecked
Students and alumni of Bishop's College School are generally regarded as members of a privileged class. For some, however, the privilege of a BCS education came at a terrible price. Not in fees, but in shocking, soul-eroding, life-wrecking abuse visited on them there. Long buried, their memories of Bishop's school days of yore have lately risen to haunt the esteemed institution. . . .
It has been the prep school for the scions of some of Montreal's finest old families. . . .For others, their BCS "education" put them on a downward life path, to alcoholism, drug abuse, psychological disorder, failed relationships and career instability. Their lately rendered accounts of sexual abuse at the hands of an ordained faculty member and rampant corporal punishment - routine floggings on bared backsides with canes, steel-edged rulers and hockey sticks - echo recent tales of abuse in Catholic parishes and Indian Residential Schools, as well as other upper-crust schools, including Montreal's Selwyn House and Toronto's Upper Canada College.
Both David and Peter are among those who say they were sexually molested by the only alleged culprit named in the suit, Rev. Harold Forster, who served at the school from 1953 to '62 as a teacher, chaplain, choirmaster and house master, whose predatory routine, it is said, was to call miscreant students to his quarters, have them strip and bend over his knees, then alternately spank and fondle their buttocks and sometimes their genitals.
Peter typically recounts how he got the treatment from Forster who ordered him into his bedroom early one morning, Peter naked and Forster clad in a dressing gown.
"He took a dark brown coloured hairbrush from a nearby chair and started hitting my buttocks violently with the hairbrush. He was breathing hard and making funny noises with his mouth. After four or five blows he massaged my buttocks with his hand in a circular motion. Then he resumed with the brush for another four or five hard strokes, then again the circular massage. It went on for at least 20 minutes, all the time making weird sounds with his mouth."
Richard recalls him doing it right in the open to him with a ruler that he called Excalibur, after King Arthur's mythical sword.
"At least once a week he used it on me in front of the class. It was how he used it that was degrading. He used to smooth out my pants and feel down between my legs and squeeze me a little. All this in front of the class."
The article also revealedthat the school had been using the old English private school routine of“fagging” – that is making younger boys the servants of the senior boys andallowing the seniors to administer corporal punishment – that is, 17 and 18year-old boys were allowed to hit 12 year old boys with canes. Fagging was madefamous in Tom Brown’s Schooldays by Thomas Hughes (written in 1857) andits dangerous abuses were pointed out even then. The offending teacher at BCS,the Reverend Harold Foster (also choirmaster and Chaplain) had been fired in1962 and then went on to teach at Harrow, in England. The school began theprocess of going co-ed in the 1970’s and settled a lawsuit out of court for 1.5million CAD in September of 2010. Bauch’s article makes it very clear that anumber of the students remained psychologically scarred for decades afterwards.
So, this was the true backstory for the famous slap that we began with.
Now school abuse, particularly of the violent nature, is not new to the printed page. Dickens makes it the central issue in a number of books, particularly Nicholas Nickleby. But somehow with Dickens it seems all very Victorian and – well – Dickensian. He can never hold himself back from a humorous imagining even in the darkest of places, like Bleak House. The true stories of abuse – and they are legion – have only made themselves known in History books that few read any more. The children of 19th century Great Britain (and not just the children) who were sold as indentured servants to masters and mistresses in the New World who could abuse them any way that they wanted without fear of British law courts. All of this is a matter of (little recounted)history.
So, when the revelations of what was going on and had been going on in schools and orphanages in Canada and the US and Australia and all around the world began to filter out there was a wave of shock that this was going on for REAL and not just in dusty old books.
Unholy Orders: Tragedy at Mount Cashel. Michael Harris. 1990
Starting in 1988,Newfoundland was rocked by a series of revelations that devastated the island community and the status of the Catholic Church there. On Jan 12, 1988 Father James Hickey (Father Jim) was charged with thirty-two counts of criminal sexual behaviour. He had been shielded and protected by the Catholic Church for years. The same could not be said for the altar and former altar boys he victimized. After having told his archbishop that the charges against him were scurrilous, Hickey pleaded guilty in provincial court to twenty counts of sexual assault, indecent assault and gross indecency (twelve other charges were dropped). Three weeks later he appeared for sentencing (at which he expressed his “remorse”). Judge Reginald Reid said: ““Your conduct appears to be without tenderness or affection. … The boys were exploited in their naïveté simply for the gratification of your basal sexual urges. … The only thing the boys have learned from you is that they shouldn’t have trusted you.” 12 He sentenced Hickey to five years in prison. After a year in prison the priest made clear to Sister Nuala Kenny, during a prison visit, that he felt no remorse only a “bitter conviction that he had been wronged by the system”. 12
Two moths after “Father Jim” was incarcerated another well-known Newfoundland Priest – Father John Corrigan– pleaded guilty to seven sex-related charges involving boys between the ages of ten and thirteen.
This (it must be remembered) took place in a society (Irish/Catholic Newfoundland) that was so devout that it was common belief that if a child was born with a deformity, it was because the parents had said something bad about their priest. Things would change.
Among the many other scandals that began to break at this time in Newfoundland was the Mount Cashel Orphanage affair that led to the Hughes Commission 1989 and multiple convictions in 1991. The Christian Brothers of Ireland is a Catholic organization that could be best characterized as modern-day teaching monks. The Brothers are not ordained priests but they do receive considerable training and have to take a number of oaths which include celibacy. Their specialty is teaching and they were invited (begged) to come to Newfoundland to run Mount Cashel.
In 1975 a boy named Shane Earle ran away from the orphanage after a savage beating by Brother Joseph Burke which led to a Police investigation which led in turn to the interviewing of a large number of boys who told their stories of physical and sexual abuse by more than four of the Brothers but principally Brothers English and Ralph. It was not the first (or the last) story of this nature that would come out of the Orphanage. But this time a Police Officer, Robert Hillier, actually did interviews and wrote a damning report. He was told by his superiors to re-write it twice and then he was removed from the case and the report was buried in the files. The orphanage director, Brother Kenney (whose name had also turned up in the interviews of the boys) was informed by someone in the police and the two Brothers (English and Ralph) were whisked by the Church out of Newfoundland and sent for “psychiatric treatment” to places that had no expertise in pedophilia whatsoever. Or that’s what everyone was told; including, probably, the police –but it was a Christian Brothers lie (see below). The affair slept uneasily for fourteen years.
Again, context is important. In the 1970’s the Newfoundland Constabulary was unofficially organized on religious lines. Equal numbers of Protestant and Catholic graduates from the police academy would be hired. If the Police Chief was Protestant the Assistant Chief would be Catholic (and vice versa – no pun on vice intended). It was vaguely reminiscent of the constitution of the state of Lebanon and large swathes of Newfoundland society was similarly distributed. In 1975 the Chief of the Constabulary was a Catholic named John Lawlor.
It would be hard to find a man better attuned to the denominational realities of St. John’s or more potentially compromised by them in the circumstances than Chief John Lawlor. A staunch Roman Catholic, he attended daily mass at the Basilica, a short walk from Fort Townshend down Bonaventure Avenue to Military Road, where the huge cathedral looked out over the harbour. His brother was Father Eric Lawlor, later a Monsignor in the Archdiocese of St. John’s. His spinster sister, Elizabeth, devoted her life to her cleric brother, keeping house for him and travelling with him on his church duties. Chief Lawlor’s daughter, Maureen, was a nun, a Sister of Mercy stationed in St. Lawrence on the island’s rugged south coast. His son Edward was a Christian Brother, while another son, John, had been a Christian Brother before leaving the order to get married. Lawlor himself was a member of the Patricians, a club whose members were former students of St. Patrick’s Hall, a St. John’s school run by the Christian Brothers. 73-4
These kinds of associations ran up and down through Social Services and all the involved ministries (like Child Welfare). They all believed that the Church’s tactics of bait and switch, hide and treat were the best way to deal with the problem. At least the problem of the offenders. The problem of the abused did not seem to trouble them much. Perhaps it never occurred to any of them that any of the offenders would offend again. And if they did, well, they would not offend in Newfoundland again (the fact is they did offend again – see below.) So, the case was hidden until the victims, by this point adults, decided it was payback time and they went public. When the authorities put them off they went to the Press – mostly to our author Michael Harris – and the story went Front Page across Canada.
The government of Newfoundland quickly established a Commission – the Hughes Commission – but responsibility and guilt within the Constabulary and Child Welfare was never established. A large number of officials involved in the issue had disappeared, or died. And the rest seemed to have lost their memories and, no exaggeration, that was exactly their defence: “I don’t remember”. Still, The Hughes Commission was not a total failure. The Christian Brothers were totally discredited, the orphanage was closed and the Church lost its aura of perfection in Newfoundland. Brothers English and Ralph (and others) received jail sentences and that was that. Except it wasn’t.
First and foremost: the victims have never recovered. The then boys, now men, have needed psychological assistance ever since the incidents took place. Even the survivors of BCS. This is what one of them said recently: "For years I buried it," said Sam. "I never had any idea that it ever affected me. I just thought I was crazy. Why I couldn't hold a job or get along with people, why I had an explosive, crazy temper when I was drunk. I know now." (CTV News Sept. 9,2010) No financial settlement will ever give them back their lives.
Second, the abusers. Briefly, as its not part of the book, this is the toll: Brother Doug Kenney got 7 years, served 23 months never admitted his guilt and claimed it was all a conspiracy against him. Brother Allan Ralph was sentenced to 6 years but only served 26 months. Brother Edward English got 10 years and served 8 of them. Brothers Thorn, Short, Burton and Rooney all got lesser sentences.
Third, consider the prosecuting attorneys at the Hughes Commission who had to interview all the victims and read all the evidence. David Days had to seek long-time psychological support and Clay Powell quit law, was for a time suicidal and became a psychiatric out-patient.
Fourth, and once again, the abusers. Brother Edward, in 1975 when the first investigation that was buried took place, was sent by Brother Kenny and the Christian Brothers “out of Newfoundland for treatment” – not true. In fact, he was sent to B.C. to teach at Vancouver College – a private Catholic boy’s school – where he continued to abuse. Further charges from this teaching assignment were laid against him in 2023 as were charges from the time he spent teaching at another Catholic school, St. Thomas More Collegiate, where he was hired to teach after serving his time for the Mount Cashel crimes. In other words, the Church continued to employ him at private boy’s schools with the full knowledge that he was a child molester. In fact, itis alleged, in a B.C. lawsuit, that six abusive Brothers from Mount Cashel were sent in 1975 to teach at schools in Vancouver and Burnaby, B.C. by the Christian Brothers organization. I have a copy of the class action lawsuit form concerning St. Thomas More Collegiate and it names “teachers alleged to have abused students: Edward English, Joseph Burke and Douglas Kenny” as well as “Vancouver College Limited; St. Thomas More Collegiate Ltd.; Gerard Gabriel McHugh; The Roman Catholic Episcopal Corporation of St. John’s; and the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Vancouver.”
This is the pattern that the Catholic Church has used over and over, everywhere that abuse charges have been laid. Protect, hide and enable the abusers. Follow the story that unfolded in Boston or Louisiana and you will see it played out in the same way.
Fifth, at least the Orphanage was torn down and is now a Sobey’s
Ghosts of the Orphanage. Christine Keneally. 2023.
This is a story about St. Joseph’s Orphanage in Vermont. Itis not a particularly well written story, complicated by the fact that the author uses a disjunctive style of delivery, moving from place to place and era to era without really the skill to do it well. But it is an important story because it broadens the spectrum of our knowledge of what can happen in Church run institutions. She also mentions a number of other Catholic orphanages where similar abuses have taken place (St. Augustine’s in Australia, Smyllum Park in Scotland (they estimate hundred of hidden graves there), Bon Secours and Tuam in Ireland and Mount Providence in Montreal). She is very frank from the beginning about her agenda:
I began to focus on the Catholic orphanage system, partly because I was raised Catholic and partly because the Catholic Church is remarkable – ironically - for its record-keeping as well as its criminality. It still took years to glimpse the full outline of that dark underworld. Over time, I became overwhelmed by the sense that those of us lucky enough not to know it were in a fraught position. We had unwittingly been party to a great mystery, a huge heist, a secret murder, many murders probably. I lost count of the stories I heard - too many to fully grasp. Some I could document, some I couldn’t. But each was uniquely harrowing. The more that happened, the more I was struck by the immensity of the under world and the monster that stood astride it. 15
She also states exactly what it is that makes these loci – orphanages, residential schools – so dangerous:
Take a group of people at their most vulnerable, make them subject to an organization with almost zero transparency to the outside world, build weak to nonexistent systems of oversight, and give the organization social status or exemption from taxes then what does the abuse look like? It is profuse, complicated, and category-busting. It is the act, and it is the denial of the act. It causes emotional, physical, social, and economic harm and increased risk across the span of lifetimes and down generations. The organizations that ran orphanages still deny the full reality of what happened inside them, still refuse to take true responsibility for the consequences, and still sit on the records. They will rewrite history, if they are allowed to. They will rewrite reality, too. 16
Eventually, as she goes on, there were enquiries in various countries – Canada, Ireland, Austria, New Zealand, Scotland – and what is extraordinary is that they all sound pretty similar. The 2002 Boston Globe story (“Spotlight”) was shocking about abuses and even more shocking about the cover-up. But then came Tuam and Louisiana and all the other stories.
But what makes this story a little more surprising is that it’s about nuns, not priests. But then we, in Canada, should be less surprised. The Children of Duplessis were raised by nuns and many residential schools were run by them. And clearly the Church had little grasp on what was taking place. As one survivor put it:
A woman who had suggested contacting the bishop at one of the survivor meetings went ahead and visited him herself. She said he told her that if modern-day laws had been in place when he was a child, his own father would have been charged with child abuse; Yet he was able to get over what had happened to him. He didn’t understand why other people couldn’t do the same. “They were just kids,” the woman later testified that she told him. “Well, these nuns were just frustrated ladies,” he replied, according to her testimony. “They didn’t know how to handle children. They hadn’t any children of their own. 138
Which begs the question, “Then why put them in charge of a girl’s orphanage or a Residential School?”
A large part of the book deals with the children of Duplessis (so-called) and how they were recategorized from illegitimate orphans of single mothers to mental deficients in order (it was said) to get more funding for them. Then they were put in the care of untrained nuns elevated to the status of psychiatric nurses “armed not just with wooden paddles but with all the tools for treating mental illness in the 1950s, including restraints and intravenous sedatives. Here, the nuns, who the author surmised were mostly French-Canadian farm girls, managed wards instead of dormitories.” 240 Indeed,
the range of sedatives that the sisters of Saint-Julien administered by injection included chlorpromazine, an antipsychotic marketed under the brand names Largactil and Thorazine. It was most familiar to Americans Widman’s age for its excessive use as depicted in the film One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Quinton was given Largactil and other sedative injections by the nuns starting at the age of fifteen. Sister Ste. Thérèse du Crucifix was one of the nuns she remembered injecting it. When she was twenty-one, she was punished for laughing in chapel when one of the other girls passed gas. She was placed in a cell for a week, receiving Largactil and sedative shots from Sister Marie Julie. 243
The abuses at St. Joseph’s did not seem to include medications of this nature but they followed the usual pattern. Children who wet the bed had the wet sheet draped over their heads. Children who threw up their meals were forced to eat their vomit. Children were kicked in the head. And like everywhere else there were the stories of children who died, or disappeared without a trace, that were always difficult to prove.
One story struck me as very bizarre. One survivor insisted that she had suffered a mock execution in an electric chair kept in the attic. The story was confirmed by another survivor a few years later. 290 What is interesting is that a similar story emerged from a western residential school, also run by Catholic nuns – as if the “electric chair” was part of a nun’s standard repertoire.
I was planning to include Tanya Talaga’s new book here (reviewed in 2024) to incorporate the Residential School System into the story but I realized almost immediately that that was a foolish error. First, it’s a totally different kind of book and second, no-one has yet written a history of the Residential School System and its impact on First Nations. There are the (devastating) personal stories – and more will be told. There is the question of the unmarked graves to be answered. There is also an excellent history of the Residential Schools as a failed Institution that is well worth reading: A National Crime by John S. Milloy. I would consider that book required reading for every Canadian. There is the Truth and Reconciliation Committee Report available free on line. But I suspect that a true history may take awhile yet as there is still much that has not been fully revealed.
One other little, personal anecdote. When I was a student at McGill in the late 1960’s I had a summer job as a camp worker at a place called Trail’s End Camp, near Rawdon. It was run by the Federation of Catholic Charities (later they changed their name to the Federation of Catholic Community Services.) I was the real outsider there – raised Presbyterian and everyone else Catholic – and I had a lot to learn. The Camp Director was a priest called Father Dick (I kid you not). He was down to earth, very friendly, and extremely popular with everyone and he lived in a small house at the camp at the top of the hill. And he lived there with a boy who was maybe 15 or 16 and who ran all his errands and delivered messages for him. And no-one thought that a little odd.
So what conclusion is to be drawn from all of this – and the on-going revelations in the press from Boston and Louisiana and Ireland and. . . everywhere. Simply put, the Church (es) cannot handle the on-going contact with, and control over, children, in schools, in orphanages, even in boy’s clubs and dioceses. And equally they cannot handle their own staff. The priests (and brothers and nuns) are protected rather than punished. And no-one is protecting the children – until the police are called. And even then . . .
Sons of the Mountains; Vol. 1. Ian Macpherson McCullough. 2006
I hesitated before including this book as it is both a specialist’s book as well as being rather difficult to get a copy of, but it has some interesting features and so I will give it a brief mention. If you have an interest in the fate of the Scottish clans after the ’45, or the history of the seven years war, then this book is a must read. It is the story of that war but told from the point of view of those who fought it. As a result, you will discover (for instance) that there were two battles fought for Quebec on the Plains of Abraham. The first – the one every knows about – was won by the English. Wolfe and Montcalm both died (very picturesquely posing for painters) and the last ever, broadswords out, charge of the clans took place – not at Culloden. The second battle, on almost the same ground, was fought the next spring. No generals died, the French won and Quebec almost fell back into their hands. In fact (and this has been corroborated elsewhere) the only reason that Canada fell, militarily to the British was that when the spring opened up the St. Lawrence River it was a British fleet that arrived with reinforcements first.
1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare.James Shapiro. 2005
This is my third read at this book and it never gets old. In fact, I think the James Shapiro is probably on of the most interesting writers on Shakespeare living today. There are several reasons for this. One is that he does not fall into the trap (in fact, he cautions against it) of taking the writings of Shakespeare as being largely biographical. I know a number of very clever people who think that think, for example, that Hamlet was written because Shakespeare’s son of that name died around the time the play was written. But it is quite clear – and Shapiro goes into this at interesting length – that Shakespeare’s play was a re-write of an earlier drama (possibly more than one) and what makes it great and significant is HOW it is done not why?
Another reason is that Shapiro has an extraordinary grasp of the historical context of the plays and how they reflect and fit into that context – which is why we can get a large and thorough book about one year (an important one) in Shakespeare’s life.
A third reason is that Shapiro never forgets that writing for the stage was Shakespeare’s profession, not a creative urge (although it may have been that as well) and that the theatrical art of the Elizabethan world was also a profession and that making a living (and lots of money, if possible) was what drove the machine – not some Tudor form of amateur dramatics. Keeping these facts constantly before us does a great deal to clarify the plays dealt with. It also helps us deal with the fact that while we may believe that Will was the great soul of the dramatic form, he was also (apparently) a rather pitiless moneylender and a hoarder of malt who bought and owned the second biggest house in Stratford because he did make lots of money.
So, enjoy this book as Shapiro enlightens you as to the background (and foreground) of Henry V, Julius Caesar and Hamlet; and also regales you with true tales about Essex and Elizabeth and the revolting Irish and much, much more. Highly recommended.
The Zone of Interest. Martin Amis. 2014
I will start by confessing that I have not seen the film – although now I would like to.
This is a very fine novel, expertly constructed and richly deserving of the appellation: ‘historical novel’. As such, it makes certain demands on the reader – most of which are easily met. To succeed, Amis tries to stay (as much as possible) away from the greater facts of the Zone – the horrific gassings, the mass starvation and abuse, the disposal procedures . . . the unrelieved looting. They are mentioned in passing, like scenery on a car ride, but do not subsume the plot of the novel. This is as it should be in a work of historical fiction; we need to focus on the characters and what happens to them in the wider context. Amis, here, is brilliant.
At the same time, he manages to show us, with stark clarity, the barren and more than banal soul of the (fictional) Commandant Doll of Auschwitz (what a perfect choice of name), who commands the suffering and death of millions and is beaten up by his (good Aryan) wife. Amis also manages to show us the outer and inner workings and feelings of a sonder commando in are markable view of a historical figure often brutally condemned for what they consented to do to stay alive. Even the lesser characters shine, if only for brief moments.
For me, the only potential difficulty to the novel is the fact that that a true appreciation of many of its delicious ironies lies in the need for some historical knowledge of the period. For example, to truly follow the plot and understand the balance of power between the characters one has to know some details about Uncle Martin (Martin Bormann) and his place in the Nazi Hierarchy. It also helps with our understanding of the end of the novel proper (a bit less with the “Aftermath”) where things go very rapidly down the tube. The Americans (for instance) are hardly mentioned, but we know exactly what is coming from the Russians. The solution to the mystery (spoiler alert) of the Reichstag fire is an extra bonus.
I have never been a huge fan of Martin Amis (and even less of his father Kingsley) but this book is a winner.
No Man Knows My History: The Life of Joseph Smith. Fawn M. Brodie. 1945/1995
And the reason for that is that you kept it as well hidden as you could – and that’s much of the story.
Joseph Smith was an extremely clever farmer’s son from the Green Mountains of Vermont. A great deal of what happened to him and was caused by him was a result of the times that he grew up in. The first half of the 19thcentury in New England (but elsewhere in America as well) was a time of revivalism, religious fervour and the proliferation of cults that we are seeing again in the last 50 years. (think Waco, Texas). Near Seneca Lake, New York State, Jemima Wilkinson led her flock to the lake to demonstrate her ability to walk on water, but as her toes broke the surface, she led them away saying that their faith was so strong they needed no proof. Isaac Bullard founded a commune in Woodstock, Vermont. William Miller announced that Jesus would return in 1843 and gathered multitudes; John Humphrey Noyes proclaimed that the millennium had already arrived and created a communist community; Joseph C. Dylkes proclaimed himself, in church, to be a celestial creature and the messiah. He was arrested but argued that it was not against the law to be a god. The less godly ran him out of town on a rail. The list is nearly endless in the first era of the great American con. Mark Twain wrote about it in Huck Finn. Herman Melville wrestled with it in The Confidence Man.
Joseph Smith began his career trying to capitalize on another New England fad of the time: finding gold. The settlers of New England had driven out and stolen the land of the aboriginal peoples of the area much earlier. Now they began to discover “Indian Mounds”, burial places that they – being good Americans – thought might be stuffed with gold. And so arose a group of men who used “magic” like “seer stones” to discover this hidden gold. Not for themselves of course, they sold their services as gold finders to the locals. Joe Smith became one of these finders – it beat doing farm work. But it was a con that didn’t actually pay well, so Joe upped the stakes: he used his seer stone to find gold plates on which were written a hitherto unknown biblical story about the lost tribes of Israel and their adventures in North America with the “Indians”. The books and how to translate them were explained to him by an angel named Mormon and he kept them hidden from everyone else. This was followed by a series of visions, “revelations” and miracles and the sect was so firmly established that it endured fire, sword, arrest, assassination and persecution over its polygamy and continues to exist in mighty numbers today. Joseph Smith was himself assassinated and the leadership passed to Brigham Young who brought ‘em west to Salt Lake.
It is quite a story and if baldly told is patently ridiculous. But at the time it had enough plausibility to seize many minds. And most important of all, is what has been left out of this story: the power of Joseph Smith’s persuasiveness. Smith had many bad qualities; he was greedy and he was a terrible manager of money. He was most prone to covet his neighbour’s wife (multiple neighbours) and so he had a “revelation” that polygamy was good; which was not a good move in the realm of publicity for the Mormons. But Smith was an absolute charmer, people believed him; he was the perfect man for the job – a born con man. And the con is endemic to American life. It seems to be a recent phenomenon but it isn’t. Trump is part of a long line.
The book is meticulous and detailed, perhaps too detailed. The wonder of the book is that you never know exactly what the author is actually thinking. I suspect her tongue was firmly in her cheek. She gives an example of Smith’s power of imagination and being believed on the spur of the moment:
Stopping near an Indian mound on the Illinois River, he excavated a skeleton from near its surface and said to his companions: “This man in mortal life was a white Lamanite, a large, thick-set man, and a man of God. His name was Zelf. He was a warrior and chieftain under the great prophet Orandagus, who was known from the eastern sea to the Rocky Mountains. The curse of the red skin was taken from him, or, at least in part.” Lifting the thigh bone, which had been broken, and pointing to an arrowhead still lodged between two ribs, he described in vivid detail the great battle in which Zelf had been killed. Brigham Young eagerly seized the arrowhead, and others carried off the leg and thigh bones for souvenirs.” P.149
How’s that for improv. And they believed it, too.
The Longest Con: How Grifters, Swindlers, and Frauds Hijacked American Conservatism. Joe Conason. 2024
The Longest Con is a history of the grift and corruption that has destroyed the post WW2 Republican party and is highly effective in its analysis and entertaining in its story. It begins with Roy Cohn, who Conason refers to as The Role Model. Cohn began his career of malice, evil and corruption as a Chief Counselor for Eugene McCarthy’s witch hunt for communists in the American army during the 1950’s. While McCarthy's performance was an alcohol fueled pursuit of power at everyone else’s expense, Cohn added pure malice and considerable personal greed to the process. McCarthy was self-destructed but Cohn escaped to a hugely lucrative career defending the scum of New York:
Unscrupulous and belligerent as well as skillful, Cohn became prominent in New York society as a “legal executioner” who would stop at nothing to win. He had big clients -George Steinbrenner, owner of the New York Yankees, Cardinal Spellman and the Catholic Archdiocese, and later, the press lord Rupert Murdoch. His specialty was in representing Mafia bosses, mobbed-up real estate moguls, and the aggrieved wives of very wealthy men. 15
And that leads us to where the book is actually heading, nearly 200 pages later:
Cohn also represented several of the leading landlords. By far, his favorite was a flashy and ambitious developer from Queens named Donald J. Trump, for whom Cohn was not just counsel and friend but also the single most influential mentor. What the awestruck Younger Trump saw in Cohn was an all-powerful public figure who had lived, until then at least, a life of lying, bribing, cheating, stealing, swindling— and never apologizing - without any lasting consequences. The lesson Trump learned was that he could get away with anything. 16
Cohn connects Trump to a series of sleazy criminals (Roger Stone, Paul Manafort, Richard Viguerie et al) who connected him with the central grift of the Republican party and the Christian preachers of the Prosperity Doctrine – one of the truly great American cons.
The book takes us “entertainingly” through the story of the John Birch Society founded in 1959 (“Much of the conspiracy blather that pollutes the internet today is brazenly ripped off from Birch Society tropes. When Donald Trump’s aides and followers rant against globalists” and “elitists,” or smear their opponents as “communists,” they’re recycling Birch Society rhetoric that went stale more than a half century ago.” 40). I say “entertainingly” because there are parts of this story that make me want to repeatedly wash my hands.
We find out the immense financial value of compiled mailing lists of victims (rubes is the term most often used) that were used by political operatives under Wallace and Reagan and Nixon to fund raise money that went into the bank accounts of the fund-raisers rather than into any political campaigns. For example:
The aggrieved white working-class George Wallace donors never realized that instead of “standing up for America,” as the campaign slogan promised, their dollars were propping up Richard Viguerie’s business. Few if any of them had ever heard of Viguerie, even as they enriched him. A mark was simply a mark, whether the con was “political” or “charitable.” Viguerie’s methods gained traction, so, too, did his political style. After the Nixon presidency collapsed in the Watergate scandal, Republicans and conservatives felt more cheated than chastened. They responded to the slash-and-burn political style popularized by Viguerie, which in turn became the animating spirit of a new wave of right-wing activism. Featuring a cast of characters who would become notorious, from Jerry Falwell and Jim Bakker to Lee Atwater and Roger Stone, this crowd billed itself as the New Right -and would find new ways to sucker the ever-credulous base that Viguerie had mapped. The populist rage of the Right, which seemed to expand in every election cycle, was pure gold. 69
Nixon brought the technique to the white house and raised $20 million just from executives who wanted access to the President. 71 Paul Manafort took a $10million dollar bribe for Reagan from President Marcos of the Philippines and put it into his own offshore bank account. 94
Then Conason turns to the (sometimes mysterious) connection between the Republican party (Trump) and organized religion in the United States:
Of all the rhetorical strategies deployed by Republican politicians in recent decades, none has proved more durable than their insistence that God wants them to rule America-and that their opponents are impious, atheistic, materialistic, or even worse, inspired by Satan. Defying the customs of normal political debate and conflating religious faith with ideological conviction, it is an assertion impervious to factual contradiction or logical argument. It can be persuasive to the unwary and unsophisticated, as generations of faith-based con artists have demonstrated on these shores since long before the founding of the American republic. The intense attraction between purportedly Christian swindlers and right-wing demagogues is not accidental. They are often working the same kind of grift. And they both resent any government interference in their dubious operations. 126
And so, the Pentecostals turned their support to Trump, “a twice-divorced philanderer, former gambling magnate, and infrequent churchgoer who boasted of molesting women and paid off a porn star to silence her about a sexual encounter. Trump was an unlikely successor to the mandate of heaven. Never burdened by intellectual consistency, however, the evangelical leaders who had endorsed Bush because he was so earnestly and ostentatiously religious found a way to argue the opposite case for Trump. The unexpected rise to power of this irreligious reprobate demonstrated, they said, that God indeed works in mysterious ways.” 132 The major point of contact was Prosperity Gospel religion, which is a magnificent grift all on its own:
Congregants could free themselves from debt if they burned their bills and tithed their meager savings to [the pastor]. He promised they could escape financial stress -as well as any health problems, no matter how grave - if only they purchased the miraculous objects he hawked on his website and TV broadcasts, such cheap kitsch items as “prayer cloths” and “covenant swords.” He pressured congregants to tithe 10 percent of their income to World Harvest, with the constant reminder that “the Bible says to withhold the tithe is to rob God.” 135
This is the world in which Donald J Trump moves and prospers, with his golden bibles and playing cards and endless fund-raising. And why is he so successful? Because, as Conason points out:
Modern con artists launch a scam, they know that the most easily and profitably swindled marks are quite likely to identify themselves as “very conservative. ”Cocooned within the hermetic media system that validates their prejudices and insulates them from inconvenient truths, right-wing Republicans are a vulnerable cohort often elderly; isolated, and insecure, with at least some disposable income.
. . .
In recent years, the explosive growth of the QAnon cult - premised on the notion that dozens of prominent Democrats and Hollywood stars consume the blood of infants to remain young - has demonstrated that many of them will believe quite literally anything.163
Once Conason gets to Trump we get a mini biography that is literally shocking (unless you hadn’t heard it before). High points are “his” famous book.
In a 2016 interview with The New Yorker, Schwartz described his authorship of Trump’s book, an exercise in mendacity that had earned him millions of dollars, as “the definition of selling out.” Undoubtedly, he confessed, abandoning his career as a legitimate journalist was the greatest regret of his life. Having created the spurious “Trump,” he foresaw terrible consequences almost thirty years on from that seemingly harmless hoax. The guilt-ridden and apprehensive Schwartz blurted out his recollections of the real Trump as a remorseless liar, a “blackhole” of egomaniacal compulsion - and an imposter who in no way resembled the “self-made man” that Random House had foisted on a gullible public. 198
Authors who produced factual biographies of Trump in later years, including Gwenda Blair, Wayne Barrett, and Tim O’Brien, came to agree that the “Trump” created by Schwartz - what Blair once called “the founding myth” - had never existed.(Schwartz himself has confessed that the book “should be recategorized as fiction” and retitled The Sociopath.) 199
Then the television show gave Trump stature – and believability to those who believe in television. In the end we know exactly what we have in power in the White House: “his political triumph completed the transmogrification of the American Right into a shameless hustle, devoid of principle and fully devoted to exploitation.” 218
In the end I have only one quibble with Conason. The con as an American landmark goes far back before even the Republican Party. It was there in the first Federalist administration and it was absolutely overwhelming under Andrew Jackson. It destroyed the reputation of Ulysses S. Grant and really never went away under either democrats or republicans. When you have a nation whose perfect life (American Dream) is centered around riches and which also consistently demonstrates a significant contempt for education (even today they are dismantling the Dept. of Education) is bound to be a nation full of gullible rubes. Trump is just the worst example yet.
Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine. Robert Conquest. 1986
It loves blood
The Russian earth
Akhmatova
Given the history of the last quarter century and even more so the last five years, this book could use a title alteration. It has become abundantly clear that one of the prime Russian goals of the last 3 to 4 hundred years has been the obliteration of (the) Ukraine as a nation and as a culture. And we are watching that play out in real time today. If you ever wondered why Russia is so aggressive towards the Kiev people, this book goes a long way towards explaining it.
At it’s time (1986) Conquest’s study was the first comprehensive and successful attempt to break through the Soviet governments Orwellian obfuscation of the truth about what happened in 1930-33 in Ukraine and the singular fact that it was a deliberately induced famine, on Stalin’s orders, in order to break the back of Ukrainian nationalism and peasant resistance to the Russian revolution. The book was a monumental success and remains unchallenged today – although greatly nuanced by the recent work of Applebaum and Kotkin.
I will give you a sample from one page only to show the kind of havoc that the Party wreaked on the peasants of Ukraine:
In both town and village officially encouraged, or ideologized, brutality flourished. One observer of the Kharkov Tractor Works saw an old applicant for a job being turned away: ‘Go away, old man… go to the field and die’
A woman seven months pregnant in Kharsyn village, Poltava Province, was caught plucking spring wheat, and beaten with aboard, dying soon afterwards. In Bilske (in the same Province), Nastia Slipenko, a mother with three young children whose husband had been arrested was shot by an armed guard while digging up potatoes by night. The three children then starved to death.
In Mala Berezhanka, Kiev Province, the head of the village Soviet shot seven people in the act of plucking grain, three of them children of fourteen and fifteen (two boys and a girl).
There are a number of reports of brutal brigadiers who insisted on carrying the dying as well as the dead to the cemetery, to avoid the extra trip, and of children and old people lying in the mass graves still alive for several days. 231
The book is not all horror stories. A great deal of time is spent in connecting the (long hidden) dots that show that this famine was a deliberate act of ideological warfare and not a freak event of nature. Crops were allowed to rot in the field and in warehouses while people dropped dead in the streets. Literally – many photos exist. Those in the party who refused to enforce the confiscation of food were shot. Those who did not refuse were rewarded with more food. One said:
With the rest of my generation I firmly believed that the ends justified the means. Our great goal was the universal triumph of Communism, and for the sake of that goal everything was permissible-- to lie, to steal, to destroy hundreds of thousands and even millions of people, all those who were hindering our work or could hinder it, everyone who stood in the way. And to hesitate or doubt about all this was to give in to ‘intellectual squeamishness’ and ‘stupid liberalism, the attribute of people who ‘could not see the forest for the trees. 233
And so in from 1930 to 1933 about 11 million people were starved to death, most of them Ukrainian peasants. Another 4.5 million were sent to the camps where they were often worked to death. This what Akhmatova means in the quote above.
But Conquest has one more offering that is, almost, equally troubling:
We have quoted Bukharin’s view that the worst result of the events of 1930-33 was not so much the sufferings of the peasantry, frightful though these were: it was the ‘deep changes in the psychological outlook of those Communists who participated in this campaign and, instead of going mad, became professional bureaucrats for whom terror was henceforth a normal method of administration and obedience to any order from above a high virtue’, diagnosing ‘a real dehumanization of the people working in the Soviet apparatus’ 343
In a sense, the commission of these acts destroyed forever the humanity of those who committed them and that is something that is very hard for a society to come back from – even over several generations. And in 1936-37 came Stalin's Great Terror.
One of the most ominous phrases that people can use in this world, is “I believe”. It can be used to defy fact, science, empathy and humanity. As Hume said: “There is no such thing as a rational belief.”
Things Fall Apart. Chinua Achebe. 1958
A very long delayed pleasure, and greatly enjoyed. This is a powerful and disturbing novel at many levels – probably in some ways that the novelist had never anticipated. At it’s root it is a story about a rich and wonderful society destroyed by a colonialism that is oblivious of its own impact – like a steam roller in a field of flowers. But Achebe does not make the mistake of making his society or his hero perfect. The society kills twins and commits other inexplicable acts as well. The “hero,” Okonkwo is a brave and fierce warrior but he is a man filled with violence. He is a beater of wives and children and has his own fears and demons. His desperate desire to rise to the top of his clan coincides with the destruction of that clan. And yet we regret his pointless destruction at the hands of a cult based on a rhetoric of love and mercy.
More universal is the theme of the destruction of cultures by other cultures that claim superiority but have none. The missionary who feels himself to be an anthropologist and hasn’t a clue what he is witnessing and destroying at one and the same moment.
Any one who has lived long enough to feel that the world that they knew is disappearing all around them will appreciate the depth of this novel.
