Despite extensive research, this book is mainly for aficionados of the weird.
An offbeat investigation of how the source code for conspiracy theories was written long ago.
Charles Fort (1874-1932) is not a household name today, but his influence reaches deep into American life. In the early years of the 20th century, Fort began to collect newspaper articles about odd things or “anomalous reports”—e.g., rains of fish or stones, strange lights in the sky, contact with the dead, etc. Buhs, author of Bigfoot and The Fire Ant Wars, examines how Fort knitted these into a series of books about inexplicable occurrences and their possible meanings. Fort believed that they could explain the real nature of the universe, and he eventually expanded the theory into investigations of how power was really wielded in society. Things are never as they seem, he wrote, and there are worlds behind the world. His work and theories attracted a variety of followers; after his death, an organization called the Fortean Society sought to spread his ideas. For decades, sci-fi writers have drawn on Fortean thinking, and Buhs tracks the many paths of influence, especially involving groups obsessed with UFOs and vanished civilizations. Much of this was harmless quackery, but the rise of malevolent conspiracy theories was more pernicious. The result has been the infiltration of the bizarre and the extreme into civil discourse at every level (see: QAnon.) “Fort and Forteans played their part in the creation of this world,” says Buhs. “They eroded the distinctions between truth and falsity. They launched a thousand conspiracies into the national consciousness.” Unfortunately, the author often breaks the primary narrative with unnecessary detours, making it difficult to follow. Some will enjoy the arcane material, but many will find it too eccentric to keep the pages turning.
Despite extensive research, this book is mainly for aficionados of the weird.Pub Date: June 24, 2024
ISBN: 978-0226831480
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Univ. of Chicago
Review Posted Online: March 15, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2024
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.
A decidedly warts-and-all portrait of the man many consider to be America’s greatest writer.
It makes sense that distinguished biographer Chernow (Washington: A Life and Alexander Hamilton) has followed up his life of Ulysses S. Grant with one of Mark Twain: Twain, after all, pulled Grant out of near bankruptcy by publishing the ex-president’s Civil War memoir under extremely favorable royalty terms. The act reflected Twain’s inborn generosity and his near pathological fear of poverty, the prime mover for the constant activity that characterized the author’s life. As Chernow writes, Twain was “a protean figure who played the role of printer, pilot, miner, journalist, novelist, platform artist, toastmaster, publisher, art patron, pundit, polemicist, inventor, crusader, investor, and maverick.” He was also slippery: Twain left his beloved Mississippi River for the Nevada gold fields as a deserter from the Confederate militia, moved farther west to California to avoid being jailed for feuding, took up his pseudonym to stay a step ahead of anyone looking for Samuel Clemens, especially creditors. Twain’s flaws were many in his own day. Problematic in our own time is a casual racism that faded as he grew older (charting that “evolution in matters of racial tolerance” is one of the great strengths of Chernow’s book). Harder to explain away is Twain’s well-known but discomfiting attraction to adolescent and even preadolescent girls, recruiting “angel-fish” to keep him company and angrily declaring when asked, “It isn’t the public’s affair.” While Twain emerges from Chernow’s pages as the masterful—if sometimes wrathful and vengeful—writer that he is now widely recognized to be, he had other complexities, among them a certain gullibility as a businessman that kept that much-feared poverty often close to his door, as well as an overarchingly gloomy view of the human condition that seemed incongruous with his reputation, then and now, as a humanist.
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.Pub Date: May 13, 2025
ISBN: 9780525561729
Page Count: 1174
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
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