Grift away

Jake Tapper' and Alex Thompson's Original Sin is not a pleasant read, or listen. It is the intersection of politics and gerontology. Some readers who have experienced the decline of aging loved ones will relate to the Democratic politicians who, alarmed at President Biden's noticeable decline, implored him not to seek re-election, because he reminded them of their own aging parents. They, and the author, would have done well to have spoken up earlier, and more boldly. Goodness knows why they failed to do so. 

Let the sunshine in

As a dispassionate observer of American politics, I just finished listening to the audiobook edition of The Courage to Be Free: Florida's Blueprint for America's Revival, by Florida Governor, and as yet undeclared 2024 Presidential candidate, Ron DeSantis.

It certainly reads like a campaign biography, recounting his life story, his taking on cultural elites, woke corporations and the news media, and managing to keep his state out of lockdown when the Covid 19 pandemic was at its height. Some of this record may resonate with potential voters. While he seems to be a solid conservative, and a staunch family man, unlike his likely main rival in the primaries, it will fall to other biographers and commentators to assess his character. 

It was a good decision to have a professional voiceover artist narrate most of the book. DeSantis sounded flat and monotone in the dedication, epigraph, and closing credits. He will need to develop his speaking skills if he wants to lift his poll numbers and be competitive in what will probably be a tough campaign, perhaps as bitterly fought as the 2016 campaign. 

According to the most recent RealClearPolitics polling data for the 2024 Republican nomination, he is placed a distant second behind former President Donald Trump. 

https://www.harpercollins.com/products/the-courage-to-be-free-ron-desantis?variant=40977857544226

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2024/president/us/2024_republican_presidential_nomination-7548.html

Staying apart keeps us together

Whilst it's unusual to write a review of a book that you haven't finished reading, this is an example of a history book that speaks to the present day, and the current world situation. Richard J Evans is a prolific historian, specializing in Nazi Germany. Published in 2020, his latest work, The Hitler Conspiracies: The Third Reich and the Paranoid Imagination, deconstructs and debunks conspiracy theories involving Hitler and the Nazis: that the Jews had a secret plot to undermine civilization, as outlined in the Protocols of Zion, that Germany lost the First World War because it was "stabbed in the back" by socialists and Jews in 1918, that the Nazis burned down the Reichstag in February 1933 in order to seize power, Rudolf Hess's 1941 flight to the UK to offer the British a peace deal was sanctioned by Hitler, and that Hitler escaped the bunker in 1945 and fled to South America. 

One way to counter conspiracy theories is with sober, factual analysis. The author offers this book for "our own troubled times." It was published before the start of the Covid pandemic, but plenty of conspiracy theories have arisen surrounding it, circulated rapidly by alternative news outlets and social media, perhaps adding to the general sense of fear and uncertainty that presently pervades the world. For this reason, this type of book is needed more than ever.  

https://www.penguin.com.au/books/the-hitler-conspiracies-9780241413463

https://www.richardjevans.com

Vitamin D deficiency

I felt compelled to read this book after hearing the author, Steve McNeil, a self-proclaimed video gaming comedian,  interviewed on a retro gaming podcast that I listen to. This is clearly a labour of love for McNeil. I find his writing style entertaining, and he does a good job of chronicling the history of the video game industry. While I enjoyed reading this book, I noticed an error on page 193. The author writes that the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and The Simpsons arcade games were published by Taito. They were actually published by Konami. The pedant in me was also distracted by formatting errors, such as not italicizing the titles of games. Hopefully these will be rectified in a future edition.

https://www.stevemcneil.co.uk/my-book

The sceptical Christian

At home I have a pile of books stacked on my coffee table, and this was the last one I read; Grey Wolf: The Escape of Adolf Hitler. Its authors, Simon Dunstan and Gerrard Williams, are accomplished in their respective fields of journalism, military history, and documentary film making, so they've gone out on a limb to risk their professional credibility with this book. Mainstream historical scholarship has long accepted as an undeniable fact that Adolf Hitler committed suicide in April 1945. As the allied powers closed in on the ruins of Berlin, Hitler took refuge in his Fuhrerbunker.

There he hastily married his long time mistress Eva Braun, dictated his last will and testament, said farewell to a remnant of his closest acolytes, and then retreated to an adjoining room. He placed a cyanide capsule in his mouth and shot himself. Eva Braun sat beside him and poisoned herself. Afterwards their bodies were removed and burned outside. A few days later, Nazi Germany surrendered and the war in Europe ended.

Nazism was crushed, but thousands of Nazis, aided and abetted by sympathetic governments, and even elements of the Vatican, used forged travel documents to escape justice and flee overseas, to Australia, the United States, and most notably South America. The truth is that a body double masquerading as Hitler was the one who died in Berlin, so Dunstan and Williams claim that Hitler himself escaped Germany and lived out the remainder of his days in a remote German enclave in Argentina, dying in 1962, fathering two daughters who are alive today.

Anticipating the coming Cold War with the Soviet Union, the United States government covertly instituted Operation Paperclip, a secret program that allowed them to access German military technology by recruiting German scientists and engineers, who were granted the right to immigrate to the United States in return for their expertise. Dunstan and Williams claim that allowing Hitler to escape was a secret part of this deal.

To back up these sensational claims, the authors produce reams of previously classified documents, and interviews with purported eyewitnesses who claim to have seen Hitler alive in Argentina. For the reader to accept their claims, Dunstan and Williams need to explain why the eyewitness accounts of Hitler's suicide, given by those occupants of the Fuhrerbunker who survived the war, including Erna Flegel, Traudl Junge, and Rochus Misch, and those who testified under oath that they saw his dead body, are unreliable. In his book Selling Hitler, Robert Harris refers to the well known report into Hitler's death by Hugh Trevor-Roper, which contained statements from Erich Kempa, who provided the gasoline to burn Hitler's body, and the guard Hermann Karnau, who witnessed the funeral pyre.  Dunstan and Williams fail to do this in their book, or even mention them in passing. I cannot accept that all of these people lied or were duped.

If Hitler and Eva Braun had two daughters, why didn't Dunstan and Williams attempt to track them down, or provide some documentary evidence of their existence? They also neglect to mention that Hitler did have nephews living in the United States, some of whom are alive today, and may or may not have made a pact to never marry so that the family line will die out with them.

They also claim that Martin Bormann was the one who organized Hitler's escape and refuge in Argentina. Bormann was also the main liaison between Hitler and the Argentinian government, even closely associating with President Juan Peron. Again, while it is true that Bormann was missing and unaccounted for at the end of the war, his remains were found at a Berlin building site and positively identified in 1998.    

Operation Paperclip is a fact of history, as is the fact that Nazi war criminals escaped to South America and other parts of the world after the war, and some of them evaded justice for the rest of their lives. On the basis of this book, I do not believe that Hitler was amongst them. He died by his own hand as a sickly, paranoid and thoroughly evil man in Berlin in 1945, with the blood of millions of people on his hands.

Ben Folds

It's good to see that there's a market for books that don't involve fad diets, global conspiracies or teenage vampire romances. Author Christian Lander has taken it upon himself to satirize the pretensions inherent in the cultural values of urban, professional Caucasians, and about time too. While many of his references will be lost on non-American readers, what he says just as easily applies elsewhere. Among the items listed in his book are recycling and driving hybrid cars, expensive gourmet sandwiches, irony, organic groceries, having ethnic friends, drinking fair trade coffee, supporting worthy causes, world cinema, arts degrees (touche) and spirituality without commitment (ie any belief system that is not monotheistic and dogmatic is fashionable), and liking Barack Obama, because it's racist not to, to name but a few. Given that I partially fit this demographic, I recognise a lot of myself in this book. Very funny and incisive.

The truth hurts

Time for a book review. Beneath their psychobabble and fluffy sounding spiritual language, authors of self-help books are on the take. That's the subtext of Jim Gerard's darkly humourous parody of the self-help multimedia phenomenon The Secret, and its obscene blending of spirituality and Western consumer culture. Gerard litters the book with quotes from various historic figures who used the Law of Attraction. Apparently it never works for altruistic purposes. If you're coveting a HD plasma screen and Blu-Ray DVD player, it works, but if you wanted a peaceful resolution to the Iran crisis, freedom for Aung San Suu Kyi, or an end to the Australian drought, dream on. The reader, who is assumed to be gullible and desperate for spiritual fulfillment, is frequently exhorted to order various spin off products in order to obtain further supposedly life transforming information. My review copy was read in store in an hour on a Saturday night at Borders in Carlton, and I was tired and had some time to fill in before a social engagement. It seemed to me to be a missed opportunity. The self help movement is ripe for satirization. While amusing, it stopped short of being laugh out loud funny.