MIDNIGHT IN WASHINGTON (How we almost lost our democracy and still could), by ADAM SCHIFF
I had to wait a long time on the hold request list for one of the library's several copies to get to me. By which time it was almost old news. The truly scary part of the book, about 45's coup attempt, 1/6, and Second Impeachment, are almost an afterthought, scrambled into the final chapter in time for the book to go to press. Schiff had started out to write a different book about First Impeachment, and history took place in real time as he wrote it.
Reading Schiff is like watching a train wreck happen from a distance, seeing everything coming and being absolutely helpless to stop it. A few introductory autobiographical chapters about who Adam Schiff is and how he came to run for Congress and be the right person chosen to lead the investigation against the most corrupt, incompetent and dangerously unhinged President in US history. A few more chapters about how the United States let America go without a fight and turned the White House over to an enemy of the united States who had lost the election, and how the House for two years enabled the terrorist because he was of their own party. At one point, Kevin McCarthy tells the press a bald lie right in front of Schiff, attributing a statement to Schiff that Schiff did not make. Afterwards, Schiff privately asks McCarthy what was up with that, he completely lied. McCarthy smirks and says "You know how it works." This is who Republicans are.
As it turns out, the bulk of the book, uncovering the former President's attempt to withhold military aid from the Ukraine unless Zelenskyy makes up shit to be used against Joe Biden, and Schiff's House investigations thereof, is suddenly very relevant in light of 45's friend Putin's invasion. Putin clearly expected to cheat his ally into the White House (again), in which case the Republican President would have pulled out of NATO and given Ukraine to Russia, as planned. Putin did not expect an actual American President who would unite the world against him, nor did he expect Ukraine to be armed and ready.
THE LAST SEPTEMBER, by ELIZABETH BOWEN
A character and atmosphere story, in which the typical English Country Estate romance with teas and balls and dinners takes place on an estate colonized in County cork, and it's 1920 and the Irish are taking Ireland back. The upper middle class English occupants consider it "their" land, and they tut-tut and wot-wot about those silly peasants and how something must be done, as if it was happening thousands of miles away instead of just outside their gates. They don't know they're the bad guys; they don't even consider that Ireland might ever not be English (at this point in history, India is still considered part of England, and they're hoping to civilize the Chinese), and all the offstage violence is made delicate, with petrol bombs blooming like red flowers in the night, unreal.
The closest parallel I can think of is the early chapters of GONE WITH THE WIND. There is no war coming, and if war does come, it will be fun and over in time for the summer ball.
AMERIKA, by FRANZ KAFKA
The United States, as seen by a satirical European. Very highly recommended. I have no idea why this book is not more popular in the United States, unless it's because it is glaringly unfinished. I found it a lot more biting than the more esoteric, allegorical THE TRIAL, THE CASTLE and THE METAMORPHOSIS.
A penniless immigrant, outcast by his family, lands on the shores of New York, and American things happen to him. All-powerful rich people treat him as a cute plaything, abuse him, and cast him off. Scoundrels take advantage of his polite naivete to rob him. he gets a job, devotes himself to doing it masterfully and at great sacrifice to himself, and his reward is to be summarily dismissed for a minor transgression he didn't commit, while his mentor bitterly blames herself for having trusted him. Kafka nails it. Apparently, later chapters were to have taken the protagonist to the frontier wilderness of Oklahoma for the required Amenricans as Cowboys section, but that part was never completed.
MANHATTAN TRANSFER, by JOHN DOS PASSOS
Mostly a series of interlocking vignettes centered around New York City before and after WWI. Dos Passos did the same thing with the entire country in the more popular and longer USA trilogy. This one was maybe a dress rehearsal.
LADY CHATTERLEY'S LOVER, by DH LAWRENCE
The heroine, ironically named Constance, married a titled young Englishman for his wealth; he went off to war and came back "in pieces", paralyzed from the waist down, and so she has an affair with the gamekeeper. His Lordship will look the other way because he wants an heir to the manor more than he wants said heir to be actually his; but if he learns that the father will be a servant rather than someone close to his own station, then Bad Things will happen.
This book was considered scandalous when published, and was banned in several countries when it first came out. So were dozens of other, very tame books of the age and prior ages. I was surprised to find that LADY CHATTERLEY'S LOVER really IS a book of erotica, with steamy sex scenes and possibly the first uses in "great literature" of words like "fucking" and "bitch goddess". it was also one of the few DH Lawrence books that managed to really hold my attention. Highly recommended.
LES ENFANTS TERRIBLES, by JEAN COCTEAU
I became familiar with Cocteau though his plays, which were favorites among the student directors where I went to college. the plays, like this short novel, were savage.
The young brother and sister in LES ENFANTS TERRIBLES are not explicitly incestuous, but their affection for one another crosses the line into weirdness. The father is long gone, the mother is bedridden and insane, and the children are barely supervised. early in the story, the boy becomes bedridden for a long period, just from being hit by a snowball, and his sister becomes primary caregiver to both mother and son. The children's room becomes a special space where the siblings play "The Game"...."The Game" continues into their teenage years, continuing as brother and sister have relations with other people, and then Bad Things ensue.
THE DECLINE OF THE WEST, by OSWALD SPENGLER
One would think such a title would be written in modern times, or at the very least after WWII when Europe seems to be yielding to cultures from surrounding continents, but no. Spengler wrote immediately after WWI. Or--not really--he wrote about half of it before the war, even, and had to hold off publication of Volume I until after the armistice.
Spengler's title is, in fact, clickbait. He is not writing the history of how "the west" has declined in his day, so much as predicting that it WILL decline at some point (you know, the way death is inevitable for us all), following the pattern he has detected in other great cultures.
Spengler says there have been seven or eight "great cultures" in recorded history, all of which follow the pattern from barbarism to civilization to decadence and decline: Egypt, Babylon, "Classical" (Greece and Rome), Chinese, Indian, Arabic (Persia-Arabia-Turkish), "Mexican" (meaning everything in pre-colonial America from Incan to Mayan to Iriquois and Sioux, with Spengler's regret that nothing will ever be known about this one culture), and "Faustian", meaning the modern western hemisphere. Like Hegel, Spengler extrapolates from Tacitus to the assertion that all of Europe since the Roman empire's conquest, as well as the colonies/nations established in north America and Australia, are ultimately German.
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