The History Guy: History Deserves to Be Remembered
Published 14 Aug 2019The life of the youngest-ever winner of the Nobel Prize for literature, Rudyard Kipling, was filled with tragedy. He survived a difficult childhood to go on to become one of the most celebrated authors of his day, penning such classics as The Jungle Book and Just So Stories. But only one of his children would survive him and his legacy has been tied to some of his out-dated political beliefs. The History Guy remembers the tragic life of Rudyard Kipling.
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September 5, 2022
The Tragic Life of Rudyard Kipling
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September 4, 2022
Who was reading during Plague Year Two, and what format did they prefer?
In the latest edition of the SHuSH newsletter, Kenneth Whyte summarizes some of the findings of the most recent Booknet survey:
H/T to Marc Adkins who shared this meme at the perfect moment for me to steal it, file off the serial number and repost it here.
A few months ago, BookNet Canada, which does a lot of valuable research into the book market, released the 2021 edition of its annual survey of Canadian leisure and reading habits. It’s always an interesting study. I was slow getting to it this year because there’s been so much else going on. Here are the ten most interesting findings.
- Canadians have had plenty of time on their hands: 81 per cent report having enough or more than enough leisure. Pre-COVID, about 25 per cent of respondents said they had more-than-enough; during COVID, that jumped to about 35 per cent. The pandemic wasn’t all bad.
- Canadians read books more than they listen to radio or play video games but less than they shop or cook; 42 per cent of us (led by 58 per cent of the 65-plus crowd) read books daily; 35 per cent of the 18-29 age group read daily and 57 per cent of that cohort read at least once a week. Young people are no more likely to read books less than once a month than any other under-65 segment, which bodes well for the future of the industry.
- The statement “books are for enjoyment, entertainment, or leisure” received a ‘yes’ from 62 per cent of respondents, and a ‘sometimes’ from 34 per cent; the statement “books are for learning or education” received a ‘yes’ from 41 per cent of respondents and a ‘sometimes’ from 50 per cent.
- The top reasons for selecting a book to read are the author (40 per cent), the book’s description (30 per cent), recommendations (25 per cent), the main character or the series (20 per cent), its bestselling status (14 per cent), and reference needs (13 per cent). “Recommendations and the impact of bestseller lists have trended down from 2019 to 2021.”
- The love affair with print continues with 68 per cent of readers citing hard copies as their preferred format. Ebooks came in at 16 per cent and audiobooks at 10 per cent Interestingly, readers had a marked preference for paperbacks over hardcovers. Format preferences differ from age group to age group, with some evidence that the kids might not be keen on physical books:
I was interested in that apparent rejection of physical books by the 18-29 cohort so I looked back at the last two years of the survey […] The results are quite different, suggesting a methodological shortcoming (the survey sample is 1,282 adults so the margin of error will be large when you eliminate those who don’t read a given format, those without format preferences, and break the remainder down into five age groups).
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August 31, 2022
QotD: John Keegan’s The Face of Battle
The Face of Battle (1976) is in some ways an oddly titled book. The title implies there is a singular face to battle that the author, John Keegan, is going to discover (and indeed, to take his forward, that is certainly the question he looked to answer). But that plan doesn’t survive contact with the table of contents, which makes it quite clear that Keegan is going to present not one face of battle, but the faces of three different battles and they will look rather different. Rather than reinventing the wheel, I am going to follow Keegan’s examples to make my point here (although I should note that of course The Face of Battle is a book not without its flaws, as is true with any work of history).
Keegan’s first battle is Agincourt (1415). While famous for the place of the English longbow in it, at Agincourt the French advance (both mounted and dismounted) did reach the English lines; of this the sources for the battle are quite clear. And so the terror we are discussing is the terror of shock; not shock in the sense of a sudden shock or in the sense of a jolt of electricity, rather shock as the opposite of fire. Shock combat is the combat when two bodies of soldiers press into each other in mass hand-to-hand combat (which is, contrary to Hollywood, not so much a disorganized melee as a series of combats along the line of contact where the two formations meet). The advancing French had to will themselves forward into a terrifying shock encounter, while the English had to (like our hoplites above) hold themselves in place while watching the terrifying prospect of a shock engagement walk steadily towards them.
There is actually quite a bit of evidence that the terror of a shock engagement is something different from the other terrors of war (to be clear, not “better” or “worse”, merely different in important ways). There are numerous examples of units which could stand for extend periods under fire but which collapsed almost immediately at the potential of a shock engagement. To draw a much more recent example, at Bai Beche in 2001, a force of Taliban withstood two days of heavy bombing and had repulsed an infantry assault besides, but collapsed almost immediately when successfully surprised by a cavalry charge (yes, in 2001) in their rear (an incident noted in S. Biddle, “Afghanistan and the Future of Warfare”, Foreign Affairs 82.2 (2003)).
And so our sources for state-on-state pre-gunpowder warfare (which is where you tend to find more fully “shock” oriented combat systems) stress similar sequences of fear: the dread inspired by the sight of the enemy army drawing up before you (Greek literature is particularly replete with descriptions of teeth-chattering and trembling in those moments and it is not hard to imagine why), followed by the steady dread-anticipation as the armies advanced, each step bringing that moment of collision closer. Often in such engagements one side might break before contact as the fear not of what was happening, but what was about to happen built up. And only then the long anticipated not-so-sudden shock of the formations coming together – rarely for long given the overpowering human urge not to be near an enemy trying to stab you with a sharp stick. There is something, I think, quite fundamental in the human psyche that understands another human with a sharp point, or a huge horse rapidly closing on a deeper level than it understands bullets or arrows.
Which brings us to Keegan’s second battle, Waterloo (1815), defined in part by the ability of the British to manage to hold firm under extended fire from artillery and infantry. The French artillery in an 80-gun grand battery opened fire at 11:50am and kept it up for hours until the French cavalry advanced (hoping that the British troops were suitably “softened” by the guns to be dislodged) at 4pm. In contrast to Agincourt (or a hoplite battle) which may have ended in just a couple of hours and consisted mostly of grim anticipation, soldiers (on both sides) at Waterloo were forced to experience a rather different sort of terror: forced to stand in active harm for hours on end, as bullets and cannon shot whizzed overhead.
The difference of this is perhaps most clearly extreme if we move still forward to the Somme (1916) and bombardment. The British had prepared for their assault with a week long artillery barrage, in which British guns fired 1.5 million shells (that is about 148 shells fired a minute, every minute for a week). At the first sound of guns, soldiers (in this case, the Germans, but it had been the French’s turn just that February to be on the receiving end of a bombardment at Verdun) rushed into their dug-out bomb shelters at the base of their trench and then waited. Unlike the British at Waterloo, who might content themselves that, one way or another, the terror of fire would not last a day, the soldier of WWI had no way of knowing when the barrage would cease and the battle proper begin. Indeed, they could not see the battlefield at all, only sit under the ground as it shook around them and try to be ready, at any moment when the barrage stopped to rush back up to the lip of the trench to set up the machine guns – because if they were late to do it, they’d arrive to find British grenades and bayonets instead.
We will get into wounds, both physical and mental, next week, but it is striking to me that repeatedly there are reports after such barrages of soldiers so mentally broken by the strain of it that they wandered as if dazed or mindless, apparently driven mad by the bombardment. Reports of such immediate combat trauma are vanishingly rare in the pre-modern corpus (Hdt. 6.117 being the rare example). And it is not hard to see why the constant threat of sudden, unavoidable death hanging over you, day and night, for days or in some cases weeks on end produces a wholly different kind of terror.
And yet, to extend beyond Keegan’s three studies, in talking to contemporary veterans, it seems to me this terror of fire – being forced to stand (or hide) under long continuous fire – is not always quite the same as the terror of the modern battlefield. Of course I can only speak to this second hand (but what else can a historian generally do?), but there seems to be something different about a battlefield where everything might seem peaceful and fine and even a bit boring until suddenly the mortar siren sounds or a roadside IED goes off and the peril is immediate. The experience of such fear sometimes expresses itself in a sort of hypervigilance which seems entirely unknown to Greek or Roman writers (who in most cases could hardly have needed such vigilance; true surprise attacks were quite rare as it is extremely hard to sneak one entire army up on another) and doesn’t seem particularly prominent in the descriptions of “shell-shock” (which today we’d call PTSD) from the First World War, compared to the prominence of intense fatigue, the thousand-yard-stare and raw emotional exhaustion. I do wonder though if we might find something quite analogous looking into the trauma of having a village raided by surprise under the first system of war.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: The Universal Warrior, Part IIa: The Many Faces of Battle”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2021-02-05.
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August 29, 2022
“What did you do in the Covid War, Daddy?”
Janice Fiamengo hopes that the future isn’t female, for the sake of all of us:
If Covid was a war, as it was frequently depicted as being, it was one in which none of the typical masculine virtues required by war were in evidence. Gone was the valorization of stoicism, courage, forgetfulness of self, rational risk assessment, and the curtailment of emotionalism. In their place came generalized anxiety, self-righteous vindictiveness, and the longing for (an unattainable) safety at all costs.
In his book United States of Fear: How America Fell Victim to a Mass Delusional Psychosis, American psychiatrist Mark McDonald noted the disappearance of men from the Covid state as a key factor in our descent into social psychosis. Of course men remained in existence, but their roles were reduced to enthusiastic compliance with even the most trivial of health rules.
As a psychiatrist with extensive clinical experience, McDonald was uniquely positioned to diagnose some of the underlying causes of Covid panic. He notes in the book that women, evolved to be hyper-attentive to the needs of infants and simultaneously aware of their own vulnerability as maternal caregivers, tend to be far more susceptible to anxiety disorders than men. Women evolved over millennia to look to men for protection of themselves and their children (p. 30-31), and men evolved to provide it.
Yet as Covid experts encouraged us all to worry about the safety of our families, with daily case counts and endless updates on (de-contextualized) death numbers, “men failed […] dismally in their duty to provide a sense of safety and security for the women in their lives” (p. 41). When some women insisted fearfully on rules to protect themselves and their loved ones — even irrational rules such as outdoor masking and limitations on how children played together — men, whose traditional role has been to “calm and ground women’s fears” (p. 39), either did nothing or went along. Some men, of course, led the charge.
The emasculation of men had been prepared for a long time, and under Covid it came to fruition. Men could not reassure the women in their lives or stand up to the infantilizing Mother State. They could not speak out to put the Covid threat in perspective. Most of them couldn’t even decide independently whether to go to work in the morning. McDonald is well aware of the social forces that have contributed to the feminization of men — he notes especially how “healthy expressions of masculinity […] have all been redefined as universally unhealthy” (p. 52) — but even he does not fully understand the depth of the anti-male attack that prepared the ground for Covid-enforced male passivity.
For decades now, with the advent of no-fault divorce, mother-favoring custody laws, the determination to stamp out (subjectively defined) alleged sexual harassment, and the mandate to “Believe Women”, it has been made clear to men that their lives and careers remain intact entirely at the pleasure of feminist ideologues or potentially vengeful ex-wives. One wrong move, an inappropriate comment, a gaze that is too intense, a tone-deaf request for a date, a sexual encounter where the woman is left unhappy, or merely having married the wrong woman, can lead — and too often does lead — to the ruination of a man’s reputation, a forced psychiatric evaluation, the garnisheeing of his wages, imprisonment on false charges, and the judicial kidnapping of his children. Scholar Stephen Baskerville has extensively documented the injustices in his devastatingly compendious Taken Into Custody: The War Against Fathers, Marriage, and the Family and his more recent The New Politics of Sex: The Sexual Revolution, Civil Liberties, and the Growth of Governmental Power. For a heartbreaking and fully researched personal account, see Greg Ellis’s The Respondent: Exposing the Cartel of Family Law.
For well over 20 years, it has been made more and more difficult for men to respond as men once did, firmly and unplacatingly, because many men now know that everything they have built in their lives — and their ability to continue to build, to contribute their gifts, to live a normal life, to be a father to their children — now hinges on their avoiding the fury of a state-supported complaining woman. It is this bedrock vulnerability, the reality that even guiltless men can be imprisoned on a woman’s word and can lose their life savings and children, that more than anything else has silenced and paralyzed many decent and brave men.
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August 28, 2022
Church and state, British-style
In The Critic, David Scullion reviews Catherine Pepinster’s book Defenders of the Faith: The British Monarchy, Religion, and the Next Coronation:
The longevity of Elizabeth II has (mostly) allowed us to avert our attention from the question of the relationship between church and state for a very long time. Given that her 70 years on the throne have seen the relentless rise of the forces of philistine secularism and constitutional vandalism, one cannot help but feel grateful for the benign obscurity that her reign has cast over such issues. Alas, this cannot be the case for much longer.
During her coronation in 1953, the Queen made solemn oaths to maintain the “true profession of the Gospel”, “the Protestant Reformed Religion established by law” and the Church of England. She was anointed with holy oil as the chosen ruler of God in a ceremony that owes its ultimate origins to the monarchy of Israel, and which can be traced back in England to at least the coronation of Edgar in 973 AD.
In 1953 this solemn ceremony was received with little in the way of controversy, except in terms of the debate over whether it should be televised. In the end it was, but with the most holy part of the rite — the coming of the Holy Spirit and God’s blessings in the sacred moment of anointing — kept away from the nation’s prying eyes.
If the next coronation is similar, one can only imagine the chorus of outraged, irreverent squawking that will sound from the amassed ranks of secular-liberal opinion-formers. Despite this unappetising prospect, it seems reasonable to discuss what form it should take now, given that 70 years have elapsed since the last one — a task that Catherine Pepinster’s new book purports to undertake.
I say “purports to undertake”, because in fact the vast majority of it is taken up with a rather pedestrian rehearsal of British religious and monarchical history since the Reformation, followed by long and dull accounts of what little we know about the spiritual lives of HM the Queen, Prince Philip and Prince Charles.
These central six chapters of the book are overwhelmingly preoccupied with a topic which clearly concerns the author more than any other: the nature of the relationship between Roman Catholicism and the monarchy, which seems like a rather odd focus given that the British monarchy has not been in communion with the Church of Rome since the 16th century.
She spends a large proportion of the book bewailing the historical inequities perpetrated against Ms Pepinster’s co-religionists by the British establishment, and demonstrating how recent decades have seen a real — albeit cautious — rapprochement between the monarchy and Roman Catholics. She goes on to make a series of commonplace observations about the country’s growing secularism, the rise of religious and cultural diversity, and the decline of Anglican congregations since 1953.
If one wants to know what the equivocating Ms Pepinster thinks the implications of all these trends are for the next coronation and relations between church and state, then one will have to read between the lines. Although her account of the various possibilities is a useful summary, working out what she actually favours is like trying to staple a jellyfish to wet soap.
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August 25, 2022
Louise Perry – “It’s precisely because I’m a feminist that I’ve changed my mind on sexual liberalism”
Guest-posting at Bari Weiss’s Substack, Louise Perry explains what drove her to write her new book, The Case Against the Sexual Revolution: A New Guide to Sex in the 21st Century:
I used to believe the liberal narrative on the sexual revolution. As a younger woman, I held the same opinions as most other millennial urban graduates in the West. I conformed to the beliefs of my class.
Of course freedom is the goal, I thought. What women need is the freedom to behave as men have always behaved, enjoying all the pleasures of casual sex, porn, BDSM, and indeed any other sexual delight that the human mind can dream up. As long as everyone is consenting, what’s the problem?
I no longer believe any of this.
[…]
The problem is the differences aren’t trivial. Sexual asymmetry is profoundly important: One half of the population is smaller and weaker than the other half, making it much more vulnerable to violence. This half of the population also carries all of the risks associated with pregnancy. It is also much less interested in enjoying all of the delights now on offer in the post-sexual revolution era.
The research is clear. Men are (on average) far more interested than women are in casual sex, buying sex, watching porn, and experimenting with unusual fetishes. It’s not that women never enjoy such things. But, on average, they enjoy them much less than men do.
Remove the progressive goggles, and the history of the last 60 years looks different. The sexual revolution isn’t only a story of women freed from the burdens of chastity and motherhood. It is also a story about the triumph of the playboy.
It would have been impossible to imagine a self-described feminist offering advice like this to other young women even a few years ago:
This is the advice I would offer my own daughter:
• Distrust any person or ideology that pressures you to ignore your moral intuition.
• Chivalry is actually a good thing. We all have to control our sexual desires, and men particularly so, given their greater physical strength and average higher sex drives.
• Sometimes (though not always) you can readily spot sexually aggressive men. There are a handful of personality traits that are common to them: impulsivity, promiscuity, hyper-masculinity and disagreeableness. These traits in combination should put you on your guard.
• A man who is aroused by violence is a man to steer well clear of, whether or not he uses the vocabulary of BDSM to excuse his behavior. If he can maintain an erection while beating a woman, he isn’t safe to be alone with.
• Consent workshops are mostly useless. The best way of reducing the incidence of rape is by reducing the opportunities for would-be rapists to offend. This can be done either by keeping convicted rapists in prison or by limiting their access to potential victims.
• The category of people most likely to become victims of these men are young women between the ages of 13 and 25. All girls and women, but particularly those in this age category, should avoid being alone with men they don’t know or men who give them the creeps. Gut instinct is not to be ignored: It’s usually triggered by a red flag that’s well worth noticing.
• Get drunk or high in private and with female friends, rather than in public or in mixed company.
• Don’t use dating apps. They offer a large pool of options, but at a severe cost. It is far better to meet a partner through mutual friends, since they can vet histories and punish bad behavior. Dating apps can’t.
• Holding off on having sex with a new boyfriend for at least a few months is a good way of discovering whether or not he’s serious about you or just looking for a hook-up.
• Only have sex with a man if you think he would make a good father to your children — not because you necessarily intend to have children with him, but because this is a good rule of thumb in deciding whether he’s worthy of your trust.
• Monogamous marriage is by far the most stable and reliable foundation on which to build a family.
None of this advice is groundbreaking. It’s all informed by peer-reviewed research, but it shouldn’t have to be, since this is what pretty much most mothers would tell their daughters, if only they were willing to listen.
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August 21, 2022
David McCullough, RIP
In the latest SHuSH newsletter, Kenneth Whyte remembers the late David McCullough:
David McCullough speaking at Emory University, 25 April, 2007.
Photo by Brett Weinstein via Wikimedia Commons.
David McCullough died August 7 at the age of 89. He won Pulitzer Prizes for his biographies of John Adams and Harry Truman, National Book Awards for The Path Between the Seas, about the building of the Panama Canal, and Mornings on Horseback, a biography of young Theodore Roosevelt, as well as two Francis Parkman prizes (The Path, Truman) and the Presidential Medal of Freedom. He also enjoyed a prominent career as a broadcaster and several of his books were transformed into important television events, most notably HBO’s John Adams.
I read him closely over the years. Studied him, even. After finishing his major biographies — books that can’t fail to impress for their prodigious research and literary grace — I went back to his early work to trace how long it took him to develop into a master of narrative historical writing. I started at the beginning, The Johnstown Flood (1968), and was stunned to find that he was all there from page one. He had total command of his material and his story at the outset.
I wouldn’t call him a favorite writer. McCullough tended to play safe. He had a somewhat rosy view of American history: “I want to bring to life the best that can be found in the story of why we are the way we are and how we got to where we are.” He was so busy bringing the best to life that he seldom challenged his readers with the worst: truly repellant individuals or unredeemed national failure.
His subjects tended to be public-spirited men of noble character and hard-earned wisdom. He felt comfortable in their company. “It’s like picking a roommate,” he once said, explaining why he dropped the idea of a biography of Pablo Picasso. “After all, you’re going to be with that person every day, maybe for years, and why subject yourself to someone you have no respect for or outright don’t like?”
When the abhorrent forced its way into his stories, he tended to rationalize it. His formulation that Harry Truman’s decision to drop atomic bombs on Japan, killing hundreds of thousands of civilians, was a lesser evil necessary to prevent a greater evil (heavy American troop losses) may have got it exactly backward.
His paeans to American greatness even wore on American audiences in his later years. Reviews of The Pioneers, his 2019 account of the Euro-American settlement of the Ohio River valley, accused him of “romanticizing white settlement and downplaying the pain inflicted on Native Americans.”
I raise these issues not to speak ill of the dead but to say that McCullough is worth reading, and reading again, even if, like me, you’re part of the minority who can find him hard to take at times. (The majority love him: I’m not sure any historian has sold more books.)
I had the pleasure of meeting David McCullough in Toronto at an intimate lunch arranged by his publisher, Simon & Schuster. I interviewed him later for Macleans. He was a complete gentleman and an enjoyable companion, notwithstanding his many twice- and thrice-told stories (an occupational hazard for touring writers).
I was able to draw him out on various aspects of non-fiction craft, which he spoke well on. What follows are some of my favorite quotes from the interview along with several other things McCullough said about writing and one comment by another author, the great Candace Millard, about his work.
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August 19, 2022
“This is her advice: Get Married and Make Sure You Stay Married”
Elizabeth Nickson was a feminist entrepreneur (although I’m sure she would not have used that word to describe herself) in her early 20s, earning money to support herself by pushing feminist ideology through theatrical performance and running consciousness raising sessions. It was, as she says, “fashionable”. She now realizes that the changes to sexual belief and behaviour led directly to the modern “hook-up” culture young people now have to navigate to find relationships:
A new book, the Case Against Sexual Revolution, A New Guide to Sex in the 21st Century, written by Louise Perry, a young writer for the New Statesman is published at the end of this month. Perry volunteers in rape centers, and works for the campaign group We Can’t Consent To This, which documents cases in which UK women have been killed and defendants have claimed in court that they died as a result of ‘rough sex’.
This is her advice: Get Married and Make Sure You Stay Married.
Dramatically well-argued and sourced, Perry goes through every “innovation” in the sexual space and demonstrates without flinching, that all of it, all of it, privileges a particular subset of male, the sociosexual male – the kind that preferences quantity over quality – and not only that the worst kind of sociosexual male. The kind who like choking women, the rapists, abusers, serial womanizers, the pedophiles, the pimps, and the traffickers.
Decades later, says Perry, the mothers and grandmothers of 2nd and 3rd stage feminism have created hook-up culture as the near exclusive method of finding a mate. She details the unassailable fact that women, by their very nature, by their evolutionary history, and their specific biology are victimized in every move of hook-up culture, which ruthlessly uses their femininity, their gentleness, kindness, and agreeableness against them. It coarsens men, inflames their worst natures and has turned the netherworld of the sexual marketplace into a vicious free-for-all, a Darwinian thrash-hunt of the most vulnerable.
Everyone is hurt by it. Without exception.
I live in a place socially advanced, jokingly known as the end of the hippie trail. It is prosperous because it is one of the most beautiful places in the world. But, because it is environmentally advanced, our population is aging. The young and busy cannot start businesses or families here, because the environmental regulation is so strict, they cannot afford it. The human wreckage of the sexual revolution, therefore, is on full display. The streets and markets are littered with broken older men and women, long divorced or separated, the women especially living on crumbs, alone and destined to die alone, many without family. Hey, but their 20s and 30s were free. They got to have sex with dozens, if not hundreds of gorgeous men or women. And they used all the drugs.
If you look hard enough, you will see the same people drifting along the margins of every city and town. Break sexual norms, you break the family, and then you break the culture. What is left is pitiable.
Perry makes the point that I have tried to make hundreds of times in the past 20 years. So many of the political aims of upper-middle-class work for them, but for no one else. They are luxury beliefs. Upper-middle-class mothers do not send their gorgeous teens away to college now without very stern warnings about what might happen to them. Without a full delineating of the horrors that attend hooking up. But the less advantaged, those who swallow the propaganda of the culture do not.
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August 16, 2022
“Penguin Random House is a vampire corporation”
Belatedly, as I was away for the weekend, here’s something from the latest SHuSH newsletter on the Random Penguin court case:
At the beginning of the millennium, Random House (pre-Penguin) had revenues of $2.3 billion (all US figures) and a profit margin of 9 per cent. At the end of the aughts, it had revenues of 2.3 billion and a profit margin of 9 per cent. It was the biggest publishing company on the planet but it had ceased to grow.
Growth matters, especially to Random House’s parent company, Bertelsmann SE, a public company. People buy shares in publicly listed companies because they believe the entity will grow and produce larger profits in the future, making the share price rise and the investor happy. That is the whole game for public companies.
When an asset at a public company does not contribute to growth it is dead weight. It needs to be fixed or jettisoned.
Bertelsmann decided to fix Random House. In 2012, it struck the richest deal in book publishing history, acquiring 53 per cent of Penguin Books, which it then merged with Random House to make the biggest publisher even bigger.
It was said at the time that the two publishers, with combined revenues of $3.9 billion, would be able to share costs, attract better talent, take more risks, offer new products, develop new markets, and otherwise innovate. Together they would have the scale to stand up to bookselling chains like Barnes & Noble and the massive digital players, Amazon and Apple.
It was a lot of hype, of course. Random House had its pick of talent, all the size it needed to negotiate with Barnes & Noble, and it would never be in the same league as Amazon. Markus Dohle, CEO of Penguin Random House, is lucky to get a mid-level account manager on the phone at Amazon.
But the deal went ahead and expectations for the new Penguin Random House were sky high. They had to be. Bertelsmann’s purchase price valued Penguin at $3.5 billion, or more than twenty times its annual profits of $171 million. Penguin Random House would have to be far more than the sum of its parts to justify that price.
Over the next several years, Bertelsmann doubled down on its bet, scooping up the remaining 47 per cent of Penguin in two separate transactions to eventually own it outright.
Did any of the anticipated magic happen?
The first full year of a combined Penguin Random House was 2014. Revenues were about $4 billion, and that’s where they’ve been ever since (leaving aside a nice bump in 2019, the year of Michelle Obama). Profits are up, which might be considered a good sign. But they didn’t grow as a result of the combined firm’s increased scale, new competitive muscle, better talent, new markets, new products, or innovations. As far as I can tell, the improved profitability was achieved the old-fashioned way: the payroll shrunk from a high of 12,800 to 10,800. Also, e-books and audiobooks improved the profitability of all publishers. And the Obamas each knocked one out of the park.
The point is that seven years down the road, Penguin Random House remained exactly the sum of its parts, minus 2000 workers. The acquisition was a big-time bust. Most of the $3.5 billion purchase price was wasted.
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August 14, 2022
Book Review: FN Mauser Rifles by Anthony Vanderlinden
Forgotten Weapons
Published 2 Jan 2017Buy the book here: http://www.fnbrowning.com/fn-mauser-r…
When I was waiting for my copy of Anthony Vanderlinden’s new book FN Mauser Rifles to arrive, I was expecting a typical sort of dry reference work. You know, the sort of thing that is essential for looking up details like the serial number range for a specific contract, or the sling swivel location on some specific nation’s version of a rifle. When the book arrived and I cracked it open, I found something quite different.
What I found was an authentically engrossing history of Belgium, the Fabrique Nationale company, and the rifles it produced. It would have been a savvy move to deliberately expound on the context of FN’s Mausers to make them more interesting (let’s be honest; Mauser contract variations are not the most riveting subject in arms history), but I think the book took this path because of the author’s genuine passion for the subject and a desire to share that passion with others. Good grief, the man owns a 1926 FN car! If that’s not devotion to a subject, I don’t know what is (and it’s really cool!).
Anyway, the first half of the book is a tale of Belgian history and arms production. The trials that led to the adoption of the 18
9189 Mauser and the subsequent formation of the FN conglomerate by the preeminent armsmakers of Liege in order to secure a contract to make those 189189s. The production leading up to WWI, and the Belgian response to that war, including production in the United States and England. The company’s recovery after the war, including its efforts in the automotive industry. The buildup to WWII, and the response to yet another German occupation. Sabotage of German production. Recovery after that war as well, and FN’s role in post-war Europe as Mauser production came to an end. And throughout this tale, the simultaneous story of the Congo Free Sate as it became the Belgian Congo and took part in Belgium’s trials and tribulations.In the more technical sections of the book, Vanderlinder presents information that has heretofore been pretty hazy, like the actual differences between FN Mauser model designations, and exactly who ordered what and when. He also provides excellent detail on the manufacture, repair, and later conversions of the Model 18
9189 rifles for the Belgian military as well as the Congolese armed forces.As you have probably realized by this point, I found the book an excellent and compelling read … not the sort of thing one would normally expect from this subject matter. You don’t need to be an avid enthusiast of FN or Belgian history to appreciate it. Quite the opposite, in fact — if you (like most people) have only the most cursory knowledge of the subject, it is an excellent way for you to really find an appreciation for the company and country. Just be warned that the cover price doesn’t include the rifles you will want to buy once you’ve started reading!
FN Mauser Rifles is available directly from the publisher (who is also the author, but this is not a self-published work) at www.FNBrowning.com. Ordering there instead of from other dealers will get you an autographed copy, which is a nice bonus.
(more…)
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August 13, 2022
QotD: Erich von Manstein
In the Britain of the Sixties, a certain mystique still attached to the generals of the Third Reich. In their stylish uniforms and their gleaming jackboots, they had swaggered. Only two, Keitel and Jodl, were executed at Nuremberg; the rest got away with murder.
Even some of those who were convicted of war crimes had friends in high places. One of the most prominent was Erich von Manstein, the architect of many German victories both in the Battle of France and on the Eastern front. He was also complicit in the genocide of more than a million Jews and others by the Nazi Einsatzgruppen in Ukraine.
Yet Churchill was among those who successfully campaigned to have Manstein’s 18-year sentence reduced to 12, of which he served only four.
Manstein’s memoir Verlorene Siege (translated as Lost Victories) appeared in 1958, a key text in the mythology that depicted the Wehrmacht as “clean” and laid the blame for war crimes on Hitler. Konrad Adenauer, the first chancellor of the postwar Federal Republic, also played his part in the rehabilitation of Manstein, on the grounds that West German rearmament required a sharp distinction between the Nazis and an untainted military tradition as the basis for the new Bundeswehr.
Daniel Johnson, “The moral blindness of Putin’s generals”, The Critic, 2022-05-10.
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August 12, 2022
Apple, afterwards
In Quillette, Jonathan Kay looks at Apple after the death of Steve Jobs:
In 2004, Apple co-founder Steve Jobs asked famed author Walter Isaacson to write his biography. It’s a mark of Jobs’s hallowed place in the pantheon of American corporate titans that Isaacson, whose other subjects included Henry Kissinger, Benjamin Franklin, and Albert Einstein, would eventually say yes. While best-selling books about successful business leaders represent a popular niche, most specimens are fawning airport reads that combine hagiography with self-help advice for aspiring entrepreneurs. Isaacson’s Steve Jobs (2011), by contrast, was a serious work of literary non-fiction that exalted its subject as a once-in-a-generation technological savant, while also showing him to be a callous parent and scathing boss, not to mention a proponent of loopy “fruitarian” medical theories. (Much has been made of Jobs’s use of fringe therapies to treat the pancreatic cancer that killed him in 2011, but he also entertained the bizarre belief that his vegan diet allowed him to avoid bathing for days on end without developing body odour, a proposition vigorously disputed by co-workers.)
Tripp Mickle, a Wall Street Journal technology journalist who covered the Apple beat for five years, isn’t Walter Isaacson (few of us are); and, to his credit, doesn’t try to be. Nor does he seek to present his primary subjects — former lead Apple designer Jony Ive and incumbent chief executive Tim Cook — as world-changing visionaries on par with their departed boss. Indeed, the very title of his book — After Steve: How Apple Became a Trillion-Dollar Company and Lost Its Soul — presents Apple as existing in a state of creative denouement since Jobs’s death — a bloated (if massively profitable) corporate bureaucracy that increasingly feeds shareholders’ demands for quarterly earnings by milking subscription services such as Apple Music and iCloud instead of developing new products.
The first five chapters of After Steve are structured as a twinned biography, following the lives of Ive and Cook from their precocious childhoods (in England and Alabama, respectively), and on through the 2010s, when the pair jointly ran Apple (in function, if not in title) following Jobs’s death.
Timothy Donald Cook grew up in Robertsdale, a farming community located roughly halfway between Mobile, Alabama and Pensacola, Florida, the middle child of a Korean War veteran and a pharmacist’s assistant. In high school, Cook was named “most studious”, and served as the business manager for the school yearbook. “In three years of math, he had never missed a homework assignment”, reports Mickle, also noting that one teacher remembers him as “efficient and dependable”. Cook also happens to be gay, a subject that caused some awkwardness for his Methodist parents, even though Cook wouldn’t come out publicly till later in life. As a means to deflect questions, Mickle reports, Cook’s mother told drug-store coworkers that her son was dating a girl in Foley, a nearby town.
Following high-school graduation, Cook went on to study industrial engineering at Auburn University and business administration at Duke. He then gravitated to the then-burgeoning field of personal computing, quickly carving out a niche within its production and supply-management back office. At IBM and Compaq, Cook turned himself into a sort of human abacus, ruthlessly bringing reduced costs, increased efficiencies, and smaller inventories to every assembly line he set eyes on. By the time he’d arrived at Apple in 1998, Mickle reports, Cook was completely neurotic about keeping any stocked materials off the books, calling inventory, “fundamentally evil”. In time, he pioneered a process by which yellow lines were painted down the floor of Apple’s production plants, with materials on the storage side of the line remaining on suppliers’ books until the very moment they were brought to the other side for assembly.
Like Ive, Cook declined to be interviewed for After Steve. And so it is entirely possible that the man has a rich inner life that remains opaque to Mickle and the outside world more generally. But the portrait that emerges in this book is one of a fanatically dedicated workaholic who rises before 4am to begin examining spreadsheets, and thinks about little else except the fortunes of Apple Inc. during the waking hours that follow. Mickle reports a sad scene in which Cook is spotted by sympathetic strangers at a fancy Utah resort, dining alone during what appears to be a solitary vacation. We also learn that Cook’s Friday-night meetings with Apple’s operations and finance staff were sometimes called “date night with Tim” by attendees, “because it would stretch for hours into the evening, when Cook seemed to have nowhere else to be.”
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August 11, 2022
Nostalgia seen as harmful
In The Critic, Michael Ledger-Lomas reviews a new book that is critical of Britain’s chronic case of nostalgia for “the good old days”:
Indulging in pained regret for lost times might seem a harmless pleasure, but Hannah Rose Woods is here to warn it has become a pathological “fixation”. The Right, she argues, has “weaponised” nostalgia, tapping “inchoate yearnings about fading pride and glory” to fuel hatred against historians who are simply “putting the facts back in” to the national “storybook”.
Apparently, the first cure for this “peculiarly English affliction” involves refuting errors and egregious simplifications in Tory talk about the national past. Woods is an inveterate Tweeter and her Rule, Nostalgia often works like a book-length version of the “Hi, historian here” threads that infest that medium.
The Government exhorted people to get through Covid by showing the Blitz spirit, but historians know German bombing caused as much fear and resentment as pride and resolve. Britons were supposed to Keep Calm and Carry On, “but this was a fantasy”, Woods writes, because the 1940s poster with that motto never entered circulation. The tea towels lied to us.
Woods is more productive when she probes nostalgia as a cluster of emotions, rather than condemning it as a set of errors. For like all emotions, it can be usefully historicised. This insight shapes the basic structure and approach of the book, which is more ironic than irate. Our times seem to be gripped by nostalgia for the days before yesterday, but the sixties, seventies and eighties abounded with yearning for the simplicities of the Second World War.
The thirties and forties were, in turn, full of voices lamenting what one of Orwell’s heroes called the “newness of everything”, pining for the sun-dappled afternoons of Edwardian England. The Edwardians themselves lamented the lost certainties of the high Victorian age and fretted that rural tranquillity was on the wane. And so on. Woods turns the periods of our history into Russian dolls of nostalgia, each nested within the other.
It is an engaging literary device which palls as succeeding chapters ask readers to re-enact their surprise that apparently stable times were consumed with anxiety about losing touch with tradition. Woods says the “calmly elegant Georgian heyday” fretted about whether Britain should go global or remain a tight little island, while it would be a “hard sell” to claim that the age of the Reformation and the Civil War was an “age of contentment and stability”. Well, quite.
The further Woods progresses away from the “rancid Englishness” of the present, the more forgiving she becomes of nostalgia — or at least of wistful absorption in the past, which is not quite the same thing. She rightly sees that nostalgia has generally not been an obstacle to rapid social change — what bolder Victorians would have called “progress” — but has offered psychological compensation for them.
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August 9, 2022
When asking a simple, factual question is treated as a direct personal attack
Chris Bray explains why just asking for [certain] facts is enough to trigger people who think you’re somehow saying that they’re not “good people”:
Come back to the cultural sewer with me, just for a moment, because here’s the last time I’ll lay a quote on you from Klaus Schwab’s COVID-19: The Great Reset, from a discussion about public health measures to contain the pandemic:
This is ultimately a moral choice about whether to prioritize the qualities of individualism or those that favour the destiny of the community. It is an individual as well as a collective choice (that can be expressed through elections), but the example of the pandemic shows that highly individualistic societies are not very good at expressing solidarity.
Now: Pharmaceutical products sometimes fail, and sometimes cause serious harm, and it frequently takes a while for reality to get out of the dugout and take the field, so keep taking your FDA-approved Vioxx. It’s safe and effective! I rarely give up on books, but I gave up on Ben Goldacre’s 2012 book Bad Pharma about halfway through — for the same reason you’d stop eating a skillfully prepared shit sandwich. I felt like, yes, I get the point: Sometimes a drug is ineffective, sometimes a drug is outright harmful, and the manipulation of science and of regulatory agencies is more common than you would ever have wanted to know.
But it’s different this time, even while “this time” fits a very long pattern. As much as Big Pharma course corrections are always hard, this one will be infinitely harder. We’re not currently debating the efficacy of a pharmaceutical product, or of a class of pharmaceutical products; instead, we’re debating self-conception, social status, and cultural position. The claim “I don’t think these mRNA injections are as safe as they’ve been made out to be” is a character attack that threatens to take people out at the core like dynamite under a bridge: Are you saying I’m not a good person?
Bad Cattitude has been on fire lately on the topic of elite self-hypnosis and the descent into an “entirely hallucinatory landscape”. Consistent with this shrewd feline analysis, look again at what Klaus Schwab said about lockdowns and the suppression of economic activity in the name of public health: He said that shutting down our open societies was a “moral choice” about “expressing solidarity”. (My mask is for you, your mask is for me!) The discussion isn’t about what works, and has never been about what works. It has never been a discussion about the efficacy of anything; it’s a posture about social character, and always has been. Are you a bad, selfish person, or are you a good person who believes in kindness? The subtext about social class strikes me as too obvious to explicate, because mean people belong in their trailer parks in flyover country, and kind people are high-status. Review the lawn signs if you doubt this.
So when you question the little vial of fluid that goes into a syringe to be injected into your body, you’re not asking questions about the way a medical product works — or at least, you’re not asking questions that are perceived, by advocates of the injections (or the lockdowns, or the masks), as a discussion about safety and efficacy. You say, “Does it work? Is it safe?” — but they process it as an attack on their moral choice to express solidarity:
Are you saying we should have stood up for selfishness? Which means, if we bring the subtext to the surface, Are you saying we should have engaged in low-status behavior?
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QotD: Fusty old literary archaism
In fairy tales, this “once upon a time” has always delighted children. Novelists, and especially historical novelists, need archaic means to apprise readers of location, in their passage-making through time. Archaisms may paradoxically subvert anachronism, by constantly yet subtly reminding the reader that he is a long way from home.
Get over this adolescent prejudice against archaism, and an ocean of literary experience opens to you. Among other things, you will learn to distinguish one kind of archaism from another, as one kind of sea from another should be recognized by a yachtsman.
But more: a particular style of language is among the means by which an accomplished novelist breaks the reader in. There are many other ways: for instance by showering us with proper nouns through the opening pages, to slow us down, and make us work on the family trees, or mentally squint over local geography. I would almost say that the first thirty pages of any good novel will be devoted to shaking off unwanted readers; or if they continue, beating them into shape. We are on a voyage, and the sooner the passengers get their sea legs, the better life will be all round.
David Warren, “Kristin Lavransdatter”, Essays in Idleness, 2019-03-21.
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