Author: Charles

On Francisco Franco

Published by Charles

Few Americans know much about Francisco Franco, leader of the winning side in the Spanish Civil War and subsequently dictator of Spain. Yet from 1936 until 1975, he was a famous world figure. Now he is forgotten—but not by all. Franco is, and has been for decades, a cause célèbre among the global Left, seen as the devil incarnate for his successful war against Communist domination of Spain. To successfully delay, or worse, block, any Left attempt to establish their permanent rule, thereby revealing that history lacks a progressive direction, is the unforgivable sin. Naturally, therefore, my own impression of Franco was generally favorable. But after reading up on him, my impression of him has changed. Now it is positively glowing.

Franco : A Biography (Paul Preston)

Published by Charles

I am trying something new—analysis of a topic through multiple simultaneous book reviews. The topic is Francisco Franco, and this, Paul Preston’s Franco: A Biography, is one of the books. My purpose is to analyze Franco’s career and what lessons it tells us today by contrasting and comparing multiple books on the same subject. The completed analysis can be found here.

Franco: Anatomy of a Dictator (Enrique Moradiellos)

Published by Charles

I am trying something new—analysis of a topic through multiple simultaneous book reviews. The topic is Francisco Franco, and this, Enrique Moradiellos’s Franco: Anatomy of a Dictator, is one of the books. My purpose is to analyze Franco’s career and what lessons it tells us today by contrasting and comparing multiple books on the same subject. The completed analysis can be found here.

Franco: A Personal and Political Biography (Stanley G. Payne and Jesús Palacios)

Published by Charles

I am trying something new—analysis of a topic through multiple simultaneous book reviews. The topic is Francisco Franco, and this, Stanley Payne’s Franco: A Personal and Political Biography, is one of the books. My purpose is to analyze Franco’s career and what lessons it tells us today by contrasting and comparing multiple books on the same subject. The completed analysis can be found here.

From Fire, by Water: My Journey to the Catholic Faith (Sohrab Ahmari)

Published by Charles

This is not a Muslim conversion memoir. Yes, Islam shows up quite a bit in the discussion, as it must in any book that discusses cultures in the Middle East. But Sohrab Ahmari’s conversion was from atheist materialism, the religion of Marx, Nietzsche, and Foucault, to Christianity. True, he had converted to that new religion as a teenager, earlier abandoning formal observance of an inculcated Shiite Islam. So Islam, the politics of Islam, and politics in general do show up here. Mostly, though, this book is an simply a well-written and compelling personal narrative of the author’s search for, and finding of, the triune God, and adopting His worship in the form embodied in the Roman Catholic Church.

Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past (David Reich)

Published by Charles

We have all heard of the fad for DNA ancestry testing. Being a paranoid, I haven’t joined the crowd, because all testing companies are happy to hand over the results to the police, and what if I need to keep quiet some heinous crime I commit where I leave my DNA behind? Not to mention, what those tests claim to reveal about you is limited, in many cases, by inadequate comparison data, which the companies fill in with lies. But that lack of comparison data is swiftly being remedied, both in the present, and in the past, which is the topic of this book.

Life in a Medieval City (Frances Gies and Joseph Gies)

Published by Charles

The modern mind is very susceptible to viewing the past as wholly different, and worse, from the present. We have all absorbed narratives of supposed progress that rely on painting the past in the grimmest light possible. But the daily lives of most people were not that different, and not less happy, at any given point in the human past, than they are now. Every person in every age faces challenges and burdens; some change as the ages pass, but challenges and burdens remain. This is not to deny that the material world has, for many, improved greatly, but as is well known, happiness is only very tangentially related to material benefits, and medieval man was, most likely, usually more happy and content than modern man, bound as he was in a sacramental world of meaning.

The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements (Eric Hoffer)

Published by Charles

Eric Hoffer was, Dwight Eisenhower said in 1952, his favorite philosopher. This endorsement made Hoffer, a self-educated San Francisco stevedore, famous. The True Believer is the book that Eisenhower gave all his friends. Read today, however, this book is mediocre, at best. It is the type of book that congratulates the reader while pretending to challenge him; it is a mirror that reflects to the reader what he wants to hear—especially for self-proclaimed “moderates” of flexible principle like Eisenhower. The True Believer is the Cream of Wheat of political books—you can taste anything you want in it, and if you add the right toppings yourself, you can be sure that you will be pleased.

After the Flight 93 Election: The Vote that Saved America and What We Still Have to Lose (Michael Anton)

Published by Charles

Michael Anton is the man who today best communicates the fractures among the Right. He identifies, and exemplifies, growing incompatibilities among conservatives, both on the issues of the day and in beliefs about desirable political structures. Anton first came to public notice under a pseudonym, Publius Decius Mus, writing in 2016 during the brief life of a pro-Trump blog, the Journal of American Greatness. In September of that year, Anton published a famous essay, “The Flight 93 Election.” His first point was that, like the passengers of Flight 93, Americans opposed to the permanent boot-stamping dominance of the Left had an existential choice. They could, as it were, charge the cockpit by taking a chance on Trump. Or they could passively accept Hillary, and face certain political death. His second point was that their behavior when faced with this choice showed that the conservative movement, as it exists now, was wholly worthless. These claims were, no surprise, controversial.

Liquid Rules: The Delightful and Dangerous Substances That Flow Through Our Lives (Mark Miodownik)

Published by Charles

Liquid Rules, like most good books in its genre, explains in an interesting way why certain things are the way they are. This is popularized science, and such books tend to fall into one of two categories, straight science or politicized science. I could have, if I had wanted to read the latter on vacation, picked instead The Uninhabitable Earth, a recent screed on global warming by David Wallace-Wells. Fortunately, however, I chose wisely, and therefore learned a few things while enjoying myself, instead of choking on the dry and boring leftovers of global warming alarmism.