“The Myth of Heterosexual AIDS: How a Tragedy Has Been Distorted by the Media and Partisan Politics”, by Michael Fumento

 

463 pages, Gateway Books, ISBN-13: 978-0895267290

Back in the 90s I used to subscribe to The American Spectator, a conservative magazine (still going in an online format) that is a kind of punk kid-brother to National Review. Anyway, when I signed on I was given a choice of a free book as a kind of welcome to the club and I chose Michael Fumento’s The Myth of Heterosexual AIDS: How a Tragedy Has Been Distorted by the Media and Partisan Politics, published in 1993…and THAT may be its most convincing argument, for here it is, going on 30-years after publication, and AIDS has not become the 21^st Century’s equivalent to the bubonic plague that AIDS activists warned incessantly that it would. In the early days of the epidemic, it was rational to worry that AIDS might explode through the general population, but once the HIV virus was isolated and more was learned on how it spread, it became obvious that it just wasn’t possible. AIDS is primarily a lifestyle disease more than anything else – like lung cancer and emphysema – and its spread could have been easily prevented had people been more willing to wear a condom and not share drug needles…and before you start shrieking “homophobe”, just remember that Fumento himself states, on the back cover no less, that “[t]he ‘myth’ of heterosexual AIDS consists of a series of myths, one of which is not that heterosexuals get AIDS. They certainly do get it…” just not in the inflated numbers AIDS activists claimed.

Rather, Fumento’s argument is that white middle-class heterosexuals were the target of AIDS propaganda because the media catered to its primarily white, heterosexual middle-class audience and homosexuals and their sympathizers who believed the disease needed to be “democratized” in order to spur research funding (as he further states, “on the opposite side of the spectrum Christian fundamentalists deploy it in order to underline their vision of morality”. So there). Lots of people wanted EVERYONE to be at risk or, at the very least, to believe that they was at risk, regardless of whether or not it was true. Fumento was denounced, harassed and lied about for stating that most AIDS victims would continue to be male homosexuals, IV drug users, women in a long term relationship with men in the first two groups and children of women with HIV…which was and still is the sad, sad case. The terrible thing is, that, by saying “Everyone is equally at risk!” those who were, in fact, highest risk didn’t get the information they needed to protect themselves. Thousands died in the U.S. alone because they were deliberately misinformed about AIDS by those with political agendas to push – agendas they weren’t willing to argue for honestly.

What’s that you say? “What about Africa!” Okay. Anyone who doubts any significant heterosexual AIDS prevalence in America is asked why we hear of a large heterosexual AIDS prevalence in Africa. As Fumento explains: Part of the African AIDS prevalence actually is from lied-about male homosexual behaviors; there are rampant malaria, STDs and other diseases which have already weakened immune systems, increasing AIDS vulnerability; there is severe limitation on the availability of health care and medications; during the early phases of the epidemic there was no money to pay for the testing of donated blood or for eliminating re-use of needles in hospitals; prostitutes with STDs can’t get medical treatment; Africa has a few high-prevalence AIDS regions just as the USA does, but the media has tended to report a high prevalence over broad regions of Africa. Better? Good.

The Myth of Heterosexual AIDS continues to infuriate a lot of people, particularly because after almost 3+ decades...it has proven to be true. This is the most politicized disease ever to afflict mankind, one in which the activists place their politics before the lives of the very people they claim to want to help. They are monsters, the lot of them.

“The Suez Crisis (Routledge Sources in History)”, by Anthony Gorst and Lewis Johnman

 

186 pages, Routledge, ISBN-13: 978-0415114509

The Suez Crisis by Anthony Gorst and Lewis Johnman – which is part of a larger series called Routledge Sources in History – is a succinct book that describes and documents a turning point in British history. Controversy still surrounds the Anglo-French invasion of Egypt in 1956 and the role of senior British politicians, such as the Prime Minister Anthony Eden, especially since the Suez Canal crisis is thought to have been a radical catalyst by which Britain, racked by postwar rebuilding and the loss of Empire, finally lost her status as a world power. This volume traces the history of Anglo-Egyptian relations since the opening of the canal and Britain’s wider interests in the region; the crisis itself, from its development to the invasion and the aftermath, is fully explored, as are the wider implications of the episode, both for Britain and on a global scale. A wide range of documentary evidence is carefully woven into textual analysis, including: key British and American government sources, photographs, cartoons, diary entries, interviews and extracts from newspapers. The significance of individual sources (and their usefulness for historians) is highlighted, as one might expect from a textbook.

The main focus of this book is the “post-war decline from great power status” and the economics behind the crisis. The authors write, “Suez highlights the central fact of post-war British history that it no longer possessed an economy that was capable of sustaining a great power role…” The views expressed in this book describe the reasons behind the economic decline in Britain, decline that is closely linked to decolonization in Africa, post-war economies, and the Suez crisis. The authors, however, do not present the Suez crisis as the turning point that changed the course of Britain's history; instead they discuss the domestic and external policies of Britain to address the decline of the great world power. With that in mind, I still wish that the book focused on other players in the conflict, such as the French, Americans, Egyptians and even the Italians. For all that, I found this book helpful in understanding how the crisis unfolded and British reactions to the many events that were taking place.

“The Oxford Dictionary of Classical Myth and Religion”, edited by Simon Price and Emily Kearns

 

640 pages, Oxford University Press, ISBN-13: 978-0192802880

The Oxford Dictionary of Classical Myth and Religion is…a dictionary of classical (read: Greco-Roman) myths and religions, sooooo…no mystery there, right? The editors of this work are also what you would expect: Simon Rowland Francis Price (who died in 2011) was an English classical scholar who specialized in the imperial cult of ancient Rome; he was the son of the Anglican bishop Hetley Price and studied at Manchester Grammar School, Queen’s College, Oxford, University College London and Christ’s College Cambridge, as well as teaching at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford; Emily Kearns, meanwhile, is still with us and teaches Greek literature and language at St Hilda’s, Oxford, where her main area of research is Greek religion, but she has also written on Homer, Greek tragedy and Renaissance Latin and is currently preparing a sourcebook on religion in archaic and classical Greece. So a couple of eminent Brit scholars went and wrote…er, Edited, a reference work in which a bunch of old gods ‘n stuff are given their days in the sun anew. But more than that, this particular Dictionary is unique in that in addition to Greek and Roman myths and festivals, it covers Greek and Roman religious places, monuments, religious personnel, divination, astrology and magic, as well as containing several entries on Judaism and Christianity in Greek and Roman times. Not a page-turner (I would think), but a handy reference work for anyone who just can’t remember their Edith Hamilton’s Mythology.

“The Idea of Decline in Western History”, by Arthur Herman

 

528 pages, Free Press, ISBN-13: 978-1416576334

I’ll be honest: my idea of a good time does not involve spending several weeks reading a book about how the West is going to hell in a handbasket with bells on but, pay heed dear reader, for that is not what Arthur Herman’s The Idea of Decline in Western History is; rather, this book is a first-rate discussion on some deep and penetrating themes in intellectual history, his central thesis being that the idea of decline is perennial and always has been, which means that either the pessimist or the progressivist is wrong…but then, one of them must be wrong about the general trend of history, right? For every impoverished locale a person sees, hears about or happens to live in, it is only proper to remind oneself that such depressive things need not characterize society in general (a good antidote for intellectuals who tread in Franco-German philosophical waters, or who think America is the worst in the world because it describes itself as the best and so must fall short…looking at you, Liberals). Herman expresses a refreshing skepticism toward habitual skepticism…I’ll elaborate: deep thinkers like Oswald Spengler and Paul-Michel Foucault provided important milestones for the viewpoint of pessimism: Spengler’s era, what with the fall of the Old World and the rise of Nazism, really was disintegrating, and Foucault was pessimistic in part because he was an intellectual at a time when both were undergoing violent assaults.

But Herman provides a bit of sanity to counteract the misery one witnesses in everyday life and continually points out that life has always been pretty rough for most people, but such a fact ought not to negate the great achievements of liberal society. He represents a classical view of conservatism – that is, Classical Liberalism – rather than the popular political representation that has persisted since the days of Goldwater, for good and for ill. While an excellent primer into the downers who have infected society for eons, I would have liked to have seen Herman distinguish between the short-term versus the long-term declines of history, and the distinction between the Fall of nations versus the Fall of Civilizations: the Greek nation(s) did fall, but their contributions to Western Civilization survived; Rome likewise fell, and yet their institutions likewise provide inspiration to the modern world. My fear is that America will fall and, if it does, can future generations take much comfort in the fact that the West may continue? The humanitarian principles of liberty and equal opportunity may be here to stay (at least in a few nations), but if those golden precepts are extinguished in all but a few isolated places, then those pessimistic purveyors of gloom and doom will eventually be proven right.

“Marie Curie: A Life”, by Françoise Giroud

 

291 pages, Holmes & Meier, ISBN-13: 978-0841909779

Einstein said she was “the only person to be uncorrupted by fame”, which in and of itself would make Marie Curie – born Maria Salomea Skłodowska in Warsaw in 1867 – unique, indeed. But it is her work as a physicist and chemist for which she is known for, as well as:

• conducted pioneering research on radioactivity
• being the first woman to win a Nobel Prize
• being the first person (and only woman) to win the Nobel prize twice
• being the only person to win the Nobel Prize in two different scientific fields
• being the first woman to become a professor at the University of Paris
• and, in 1995, being the first woman to be entombed on her own merits in the Panthéon in Paris

You came a long way, baby.

We learn all of this and more in Françoise Giroud’s Marie Curie: A Life, a brief and little-known work that is an inspirational biography on the significant accomplishments made by this remarkable woman. The book addresses aspects ranging from her influences, her fame, her scandals and the impression she left on society, while focusing on her complex character in a fascinating, highly personal study. It explains in great detail the resistance and hardships that Curie had to go through to finally distinguish herself as a woman scientist; the private hardship when young Marie Skłodowska left Poland (where the university was closed to women) to continue her education in France; her life as a wife and mother while establishing, with the greatest difficulty, her famous laboratory; and her perseverance in carrying-on their research following the tragic death of her husband, Pierre, aged only 46. In addition, there is much information about how she influenced the many people in her presence, as well as the societal price she paid for her renown when, for example, she was subject to merciless public scrutiny and criticism in the aftermath of her liaison with Paul Langevin.

This story should be read because it is inspiring to see how a young, middle-class Polish woman made her way to the top – in a foreign country in during a time when a woman scientist was a fluke, no less. While grounding her work in historical context, Giroud thus provides a fresh human perspective on the life of the renowned yet enigmatic precursor of today’s atomic scientists.

“The Phantom of the Opera”, by Gaston Leroux

 

264 pages, Barnes & Noble Classics, ISBN-13: 978-0880299053

There must be, oh, let’s say…10,000 different versions of Gaston Leroux’s Le Fantôme de l’Opéra…er, let’s make that The Phantom of the Opera…in print, so as to which particular volume I select to review is more-or-less irrelevant; unless they have bastardized the story, they should all be pretty much the same, content-wise. So I have chosen the first one I got, off of the Barnes & Noble remnants table sometime during the 80s (my parents bought me another version one year for Christmas, bearing the Andrew Lloyd Webber imprint, but I bought this version first). I first got into PTO when Andrew Lloyd Webber’s – and Charles Hart’s and Richard Stilgoe’s, too – musical came out in 1986…actually, that’s not quite right, as I first heard of this character from the 1962 Hammer Horror version of the story, featuring Herbert Lom and Heather Sears, that I saw repeatedly on Detroit’s WMYD Channel 20 growing up. But it was in ’86 that I really became enraptured, and so after memorizing (practically) the Webber musical, I thought I’d give the book a whirl.

Leroux’s The Phantom of the Opera is almost universally acclaimed as a classic of its kind, a gothic horror story rivaling Dracula and Frankenstein in its breadth and realization as a kind of perfect storm of gothic nightmares: the ancient, labyrinthine Théâtre National de l’Opéra in Paris (now called the Palais Garnier); the host of colorful characters that make this beautiful but mysterious setting the hub of their lives; the love triangle in which one of the lovers is not merely an outcast but a veritable monster; the echoes of the Persephone myth, with our eponymous Phantom filling in for Hades...what more could a gothic aficionado want? In short, there is no denying the book’s far-reaching influence, and Leroux absolutely deserves a great deal of credit for conjuring up an incredible plot.

The conceit at the center of the book – that the narrator is reconstructing these events from diaries, reports, journals, etc. – was, I thought, rather interesting, even after I had encountered the like in both Dracula and Frankenstein (I guess reading other people’s mail was some sorta Gothic thing?). The characters, meanwhile, are…problematic. The hero and heroine are both such ninnies that I really couldn’t root for either of them: Christine is meant to be angelic, but the way she leads the Phantom on was quite contemptible; oh, I know that she does it to save her life, of course, but it still seemed heartless and cruel. Raoul, meanwhile, often described as a lad or boy or child, was hard to like also: his mercurial shifts from belief in Christine’s innocence to accusing her of every possible betrayal were exhausting to read…and I have a hard time dealing with a hero who, within the same scene, bursts into a mad laughter only to follow it by bursting into tears. Not that he’s the only one who bursts into laughter or tears at every turn…ALL of the characters do it from time-to-time, as the Victorians really did use to LOL, evidently. I was really hoping someone would just react by nodding occasionally but, alas, every scene involved extremes of some sort.

The second half of the book is, I think, better than the first, in that it is when the story begins fleshing out (so to speak) the character of the Phantom and when the Persian’s narrative takes over. We find out who and what he is and understand how his “horrible, unparalleled and repulsive ugliness put him without the pale of humanity”. It’s easy to sympathize with the ghost, but it’s hard to match the Erik of the story with the romanticized phantom of the stage production (as much of a fan as I still am). That Erik wants to be loved for himself makes him human, but most of his actions are those of a monster. It’s a heartbreaking contradiction, especially when contrasted with the vapid Christine and Raoul (really, babe, what did you see in that vapid pretty-boy? His looks? His money? His title? Jeez). It is also in this second half that this becomes a fantastical story with many “cliff-hanging” moments throughout; I can visualize it as serialized in Le Gaulois from September 23^rd, 1909, to January 8^th, 1910, before being published in book form in late March 1910 by Pierre Lafitte. And the epilogue brings a satisfying conclusion to the story, as it is here that many loose ends are tied up and things about Erik are explained: where he came from; where and how he acquired his many unusual and extraordinary talents; his connection to the Persian; how he came to live in the Opera; on what grounds he blackmailed the managers of the Opera; how he “invisibly” moved and spoke all over the Opera (I, for one, like my mysteries explained at the end).

This is not high-quality literature by any means; in fact, I suspect that if not for the scores of adaptations – and, of course, Webber’s popular musical – Gaston Leroux’s The Phantom of the Opera would have been forgotten by now. However, it is an entertaining story and one that I will probably read again…while the musical will stay with me always.

“Hitler: A Study in Tyranny”, by Alan Bullock

 

848 pages, Konecky & Konecky, ISBN-13: 978-1568520360

Alan Bullock’s – and that’s Alan Louis Charles Bullock, Baron Bullock, Fellow of the British Academy to you, bucko – Hitler: A Study in Tyranny was, at the time of its publication in 1952, quite the imposing achievement: a lengthy, scholarly tome appraising Hitler, warts and all and, for a while at least, the best Hitler biography out there, at least in the English language. And that’s not just me talkin’ either, bud: The New York Times said it was “the standard biography of the dictator and a widely respected work on the Nazi movement in general”; the historian Ian Kershaw described it as a “masterpiece”; while critic and gadfly Clive James said that “after more than 60 years, the first [book about Hitler] to read is still Alan Bullock’s Hitler: A Study in Tyranny”. So…yeah. And now for a little negativity: this book is badly dated, especially in its remarkably unsatisfactory portrait of the psychology of Hitler himself. To say, as Bullock does in this history, that Hitler was basically without an ideology is to make a mockery of his disturbing worldview and to commit an enormous gaffe in appreciating his basic character. That’s just one of the most noticeable issues, but there are many lesser ones involving sourcing issues, mixed-up chronologies, and a simple lack of information (to be fair, when Bullock wrote his history, the Nazi archives were still only just being sifted through).

Other, better biographies have been published since A Study in Tyranny: the above-mentioned Kershaw published a one-two punch called Hitler 1889-1936: Hubris (reviewed on March 5^th, 2014) and Hitler 1936-1945: Nemesis (reviewed on March 6^th, 2014), while Hitler by Joachim C. Fest (reviewed on March 30^th, 2017) is, I believe, the best-ever biography of the son-of-a-bitch ever written. And so time has rather passed Bullock’s magnum opus by. With that said, it’s still a hell of a piece of scholarship, one which Fest and Kershaw made use of when they wrote their own biographies. Bullock offered a very balanced and plausible account of Hitler’s life, attempting to understand the dictator not as a demon, but as a (horrible) human being. Anyone interested in tantalizing controversies or messed-up theories will be disappointed with this book, as Bullock chose not to assess blame for such things as the Reichstag fire. Bullock dismissed the popular claim that Hitler changed his name from Schicklgruber and the myth that Hitler resorted to astrology in decision-making. Oh, and as for Geli Raubal, Bullock finds her best to be left as a mystery. Bullock took a conservative stance in his analysis focusing only on the known facts about Hitler’s life, not seedy speculation.

Bullock offered a thorough study of Hitler’s days in Vienna before the First World War and the ways in which this experience formed his political views, presenting him, accurately, not as the originator of future Nazi principles, but as a product of the anti-rational, anti-intellectual and anti-Semitic ideas that had been circulating in Europe for…well, for as long as Jews have been in Europe. His understanding of propaganda, oratory skills and practical exposure to street politics helped Hitler gain a following; ultimately, it was Hitler’s determination that prompted him to turn down enticing offers of a political position by Franz von Papen and Heinrich Brüning that were less than what he sought: the Chancellorship. During the Second World War, Hitler’s “warlord” image was transformed: “the human being disappears, absorbed into the historical figure of Der Führer”. Bullock also pointed out that this devotion to power led eventually to Hitler’s downfall.

Hitler: A Study in Tyranny can be a burdensome for pleasure reading; I doubt I will read it again, seeing as there are now other, more up-to-date biographies now available. But it is still a very enlightening biography for anyone who wants to honor a master of the biographical arts.