10 February

Book Review: “Wise Men.” A Great Novel Of Love, Race, Family, Identity.

by Jon Katz
Great Book
Great Book

Note: If you can and wish, please by this book from Battenkill Books (518 677-2515 or [email protected]) or your local independent bookstore. Battenkill Books my local bookstore, takes Paypal and ships anywhere in the world. This review comes as part of my work as the store’s Recommender-In-Chief, where I can be found on Saturdays from 11 to 2 p.m., working the phones, e-mail and the store.

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I loved Stuart Nadler’s  “Wise Men,” a novel published Little Brown. It is one of the best books I’ve read in years. It hooked me, engrossed me, surprised and engaged me.

This is a story about love, family, race and identity.  It begins in Cape Cod in the 1950’s and moves up through the present day, giving the story a bit of a saga feeling, spanning different times and realities.

Hilton Wise, the protagonist, goes to Cape Cod to spend a summer at the family’s new home in fictional Bluepoint when he is 17. He befriends the black “handyman” – Lem Dawson is really an artist – who works at the family’s Cape Cod home for his angry, domineering and bigoted father Arthur, soon to become famous and unspeakably wealthy for his work suing airlines over plane crashes.  Arthur becomes as successful as he is arrogant and unfeeling. Young Hilton – they call him “Hilly” befriends Lem, the handyman and falls in love with his outspoken niece Savannah. The results of this flirtation are tragic, even on Cape Cod in pre-civil rights America. It causes a life-long rift between father and son.

Even though Arthur puts millions of dollars in a trust fund for his son, Hilly won’t take a penny of it, working instead as a poorly paid reporter for an obscure Boston newspaper. Hilly covers race in America, scouring the country for racial incidents he can cover and write about. All the while he is looking for Savannah, who has vanished. Hilton wants  to find her and explain himself and erase the enormous guilt he feels for what happened to her uncle. He is also haunted by his erotic memories of her.

Hilly is a powerful fictional creation, likeable, idealistic and caught up in a family drama that seems so much bigger than him. He believes his father to be a monster, yet monsters are never entirely what they seem in the hands of good writers,  and he never stops loving Arthur, even while fleeing him for most of his life.  He eventually tracks Savannah down in a small town in Iowa where he once again has to confront the power of race in America, and the long and powerful reach of his family. Race is a much covered subject in American writing and Nadler brings nothing new to the subject. He does remind us that bigotry wasn’t just about rednecks in the Deep South, but was woven into the fabric of American culture and society. even on snooty Cape Cod. Late in life, Arthur is seriously injured in a plane crash, and Hilton is thrown together with his family in the closest and most intense way. By now, he is married with his own children, still obsessed with Savannah, still looking for her, encountering her in fleeting, sometimes dreamy ways. He is also still trying to come to terms with his famous, cruel and fearsome father.

This isn’t really a story about race. It is a story about family, about love and understanding, about secrets and mysteries. I read it in less than a day, really could not put it down. It’s a wonderful book, elegantly written, beautifully plotted and disturbing without ever being preachy or heavy-handed. And I have to credit Nadler with another thing. I was completely taken by surprise by the ending, it was never given away or foreshadowed in any way. And it made me gasp and tear up. This is a book with great heart. Don’t even try and guess it, you just won’t.

I’m happy to recommend “Wise Men.” It is a masterful work by a writer you will be hearing from again and again.

22 July

Book Review: “Thank You For Your Servitude” By Mark Leibovich. Funny, Sad, Scary, Timely, A Great Read, An Important Book.

by Jon Katz

I can’t imagine a funnier, more heartbreaking, insightful, and frightening book to read at this point in our country’s history than this book. I recommend it highly. I don’t have a nit to pick; I was glued to it from the minute I picked it up and finished it.

This is one of the most timely books you can read as the congressional and legal investigations into Trump’s treason and corruption continue. I read very few political books, but I’m glad I didn’t skip this one.

For several years, I’ve been dumbfounded, unable to understand how the  Republican Party’s most powerful leaders- people like Lindsey Graham, Ted Cruz, and Marcio Rubio,  Mitch McConnel, to mention just a few – all filled with scorn and contempt for Donald Trump’s candidacy – almost instantly became his greatest fans, ass kissers, excuses, and enablers after he won.

This is the greatest story of moral cowardice in American history that I know of. Benedict Arnold was a piker.

Lebovich knows all these “leaders” and asked them face-to-face about what was looking more and more like treason, a vicious President gone mad,  the Capitol riots, the lies about the election, and the answers he got were as chilling as the politician’s cowardice.

I can’t believe they talked to him so openly; I imagine they will regret it.

Lindsey Graham just wanted to be “relevant.” He has fun playing golf with the president.  Kevin McCarthy wants to be Speaker of the House; nobody knows what Mitch McConnell wants beyond stuffing the Supreme Court with political extremists; Marco Rubio just wanted to be important. Ted Cruz just wanted to be a snake with ambition, as everyone around him already knows he is.

Most of the others were just cowards terrified of drawing Trump’s wrath, an almost certain death sentence in today’s Republican Party, where vengeance against dissent or independent thinking is ruthless and quick.

This matters. This, says Lebovich,  is why Vladimir Putin and the Chinese no longer fear us and feel free to ignore us.

Since Trump was elected, our enemies, write Lebovich,  see us as a weaker and weaker country with no moral compass or strong leaders, divided and more vulnerable. I know now that they are right.

This book, combined with the January 6 super-sharp hearings on Capitol Hill, helped me understand the hearings much better and the role the Republican Party played in the tragedy and horror of January 6. Lebovich knows all the players and they almost all spoke with him or met with him or had lunch with him.

I may not want to hear what he says, but I know I need to. And he really seems to know what he is talking about.

I am surprised to say I must have laughed 100 times reading this book, sometimes so hard I had to read the passage to Maria. Lebovich has mastered the art of satire and absurdity while offering powerful and disturbing insights. He rarely forgets to keep us laughing.

I covered politics for a long time as a journalist, and politicians are famous for equivocating and ducking trouble. I have never heard of or met or read about any politician as dangerous and without any kind of ethical ground or restraint or morality than the Donald Trump in this book.  His taking over of a major political scandal is a tragedy for our country, as this book makes clear.

People who support him still will have to look in their own mirrors and answer to their own Gods. They are threatening something precious, and all that really stands between them and our democracy at the moment is a weak 80 old man with a good heart and a political party crammed with cowards.

Lebovich doesn’t write as one might expect a New York Times National Political Correspondent to write. He writes just like we all talk, making the book accessible and easy to read. I found myself laughing and gnashing my teeth at the same time. You have to take your medicine; my grandmother would tell me when I was sick.

When I stopped laughing – Lebovich is witty and clever – I started brooding. It’s not only not over yet; it could quickly get much worse if this sick and amoral man ever gets near the White House again.

Lebovich found that Republicans refer knowingly – and silently to “the Joke.” The Joke is that Donald Trump is a dangerous and mentally disturbed fool. They all admit it in private and to one another, he says, but no one left in the party except for a handful of doomed representatives and Mitt Romney – will say it out loud.

One of the great twists for me in this story is Lynn Cheney, a politician I’m not sure I ever agreed with about anything, who has become a hero to me, a shining star of courage, honesty, and patriotism.

She will almost certainly lose her seat in Congress (her party in Wyoming has convicted her for criticizing Trump.)

But she is one of those storied and genuine American heroes, willing to sacrifice herself to do the right thing. She may be the last one in Washington.

Those people stand in the way of evil because it is the right thing to do; damn the consequences. She shames the lackies and cowards in her party whenever she opens her mouth. She says this committee work is the most important thing she has ever done.

Lebovich reports that Cheney is admired by the same Republicans who accuse her of betraying her party and are running her out of politics. The hypocrisy and cowardice detailed in this story are stomach-churning. How did we fall this far?

It’s clear that Trump is a strong personality, but I couldn’t grasp how weak many influential people in his party are.

Lebovich has written an honest book – no, he-said-she-said stuff in Washington speak – and I would say an unflinching account of what he calls the moral rout of the Republican Party. I now know what happened and how it happened; I don’t have to wonder anymore, which is why the book is so important.

We never imagined the horror of Donald Trump could occur; we never imagined how he would survive two impeachments, so much bumbling, so many lies, so much corruption, and too much cruelty and too many crises, insults even to count – and now, in 2022, be planning to run for President again and be an almost certain nominee of his party.

You would think he would be too embarrassed to go out onto a golf course, let alone run for president. But there is no shame in the man, which is, it seems, what makes him so dangerous and effective. He is the leader of a whole political party that is the same way. No shame, not for him, not for them.

So many things that we could not imagine have become real, and I admit I was one of those squishy-headed writers who kept trying to explain Trumpism rather than just condemn it. I wanted to be better than him.

I love this book because Lebovich (who now works at the Atlantic Magazine) speaks in plain English and pulls none of the usual academic or journalistic punches.

He isn’t trying to explain or forgive Trump and his followers; as someone who traveled the country for a decade and followed Trump’s campaign closely, he tells us what he thinks, in straight, unsparing English,  and the book sure got me to sit up.

Trumpism is all about laziness, arrogance, and bigotry. It’s really. He says, as simple as that, something many people suspected but could not bring themselves to believe. Liberals and progressives are always wishy-washy this way. They never see it coming.

Trump is not. I’m convinced. He and his followers and slobbering acolytes are just as bad as I thought, except much worse.

Lebovich persuasively, thoroughly, and convincingly tracks the transformation of Rubio, Graham,  Kevin McCarthy, Mitch McConnell, and the 123 House Republicans who voted to overturn the election.

As a highly respected National Political Correspondent for the New York Times, Mark Leibovich had a great view of Washington and politics in the Trump years, from his shocking victory in 2016 to his disastrous presidency to his lies and cruelty and incompetence, and finally, to the moral collapse of the Republican Party that enabled and led directly and excused the horrific attack on the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021.

It was one of the worst and most shameful days in American history. It woke us all up to the damage Donald Trump has done to our democracy and is determined to do again, with the hypocritical and cowardly collaboration of the most influential people in the Republican Party.

I decided to read this book because I am watching each of the hearings the April 6 Congressional committee has been producing on the attack and Donald Trump’s role in it. I needed to understand it.

This book is the very definition of a book I could not put down.

I read it in 24-hour hours (blessedly, it’s only 309 pages). It’s a credit to Leibovich’s skills as a humorist and a gifted journalist that I laughed a score of times while reading the book – he is stomach-achingly funny – until I wanted to cry. And suddenly, I wasn’t laughing at all.

The story of the cowardly and immoral collapse of the Republican Party – which had several opportunities to stop Trump – is at the heart of the book.

Leibovich focused much of the book on the Trump Hotel, the President and his family’s money laundering, and insurrectionists’ plotting center. The butt-kissers, dictators, lobbyists, and oddballs attracted to our President used it as their headquarters, from Rudy Guiliani to the Proud Boys and various Ukrainian crooks.

It was also one of the focal points for the bootlickers of the Republican Party to be seen and noticed by Trump and for him to preen away from all those elitists and RINOs who hated him. One of the world’s most hateful men, he was desperate to be loved.

According to Lebovich, Trump had a steak dinner at the hotel nearly 40 times during his presidency (he also charged the Proud Boys $1,600 a night to stay and plot to kill Vice President Pence, who wasn’t going along with Trump’s plan to overturn the 2020 election. There is no record of him eating anywhere else in Washington or Mar-a-Largo in those four years.

Leibovich has a genius for humor (his bestseller This Town, about Washington in the Obama era, was hilarious and telling).

But one warning: he doesn’t leave us with much to feel good about.

A former Republican congressman told me recently that the party’s only real plan for dealing with Trump in 2024 involved darkly divine intervention. “We’re just waiting for him to die,” he said. That was it; that was the plan. He was 100 percent serious. But soon enough, 2004 won’t be a long way off. Trump will likely be alive. He’s running again will no longer be hypothetical. The crowds will return to the arenas and to the next Trump Hotel or wherever the lights go on next. So will the original owner, primed for a return engagement as the Republican standard-bearer-because what could go wrong?

And who would stop him?”

I am somewhat more optimistic than he is, Liz Cheney has put some big holes in the Trump fever, and she’s not finished yet. Her sacrifice will not, I think, be for nothing, even if that takes a while. She won’t have to wait for history to praise her, she is admired right now all over the world.

This is a very special book that will not leave you happy but will make you a lot wiser. If you are like me, you just first need to understand how this could have happened. The future is not knowable, our country’s recent past needs to be understood.

23 May

Book Review: The Palace Papers – Inside The House Of Windsor. Can This Monarchy Survive?

by Jon Katz

A couple of weeks ago, I was having dinner with a good friend and telling her about Tina Brown’s new book, “the Palace Papers,” that I was eager to read. She was, too; she talked about how much the Royal family meant to her, growing up in a strict Yankee household in Vermont.

She said she hoped to grow up and marry Prince Charles, and she told me she recently wrote a touching letter to Queen Elizabeth at Buckingham Palace expressing her sorrow to the Queen, who she called “her Majesty,” upon the death of her consort, Prince Phillip.

She preserved the very polite response in plastic.

“I have the feeling your childhood might have been a little dark and dreary, “I said, and she nodded; yes, that was true. I was surprised by her love and interest in the royal family decades after her childhood.

And this was the most interesting thing to me about reading this book. It is full of juicy gossip, revelation, and barbed insights; hardly anyone escapes Tina Brown’s sharp observations – not the Queen, the media, the family.

But the most exciting thing about the Royal Family in England is that they still exist.

The members of the family seem like the rest of us to me; they say and do stupid things, want things they can’t have, struggle with obligations that are suffocating,  sometimes cheat and lie, are snared in scandals,  and make apparent blunders and work with life under a brutal telescope.

The attacks and cruelty and scrutiny their royalty bring them are sobering.

Yet here we are, a thousand years into the reign of Windsor, and me and many others  – and my very sophisticated and intelligent friend – can’t wait to read about this family and the lives they lead.

Why is that?

In a way, Brown struggles with this question all through her book.

People seem to desperately need Kings and Queens and Princes and Princesses in their lives, distant and seemingly glamorous people leading glamorous lives, which very few of us get to do.

Who among us, after all, would mind being a Prince Or Princess and waving to cheering crowds from beautiful horse-drawn carriages while wearing medals and jewels on the way to Westminster Cathedral?

Brown has a  sharp and unforgiving journalist’s eye.

She reminds us that these are flawed and ordinary people living lives about as glamorous most of the time as fish in restaurant aquariums. It looks beautiful outside but is an almost impossible mess inside the fishbowl.

My friend loves the Royal  Family because it gave her a fantasy and dream in life that she couldn’t find as a child. And the pull has lasted her whole life.

I guess this must also be true of me, although I am not consciously aware of ever wishing to be a royal or marry one.

I know my childhood was harsh and grim and full of fantasies. I am susceptible to this one in my own guarded and skeptical way. Lots of romance and fantasy are born and bred in the minds of unhappy children.

In either case, it’s a challenging book to put down, revealing as much about all of us as it does about the family itself. Here in America, we are aching for a revered leader who is trusted, consistent, and committed unwaveringly to public service.

There, in England, they are struggling to live with one. But it is clear that Elizabeth is loved and admired more than any public figure in America for decades, if ever

At least, England has Queen Elizabeth, who has devoted every day of her life to being a perfect Queen in the service of her people. They will miss her.

She is something her people want and badly need, and whose equivalent America does not have. Fantasies about people struggle to survive in the modern era of intrusive, pervasive, and often cruel media and the collapse of anything resembling privacy.

Elizabeth has managed to pull it off, primarily by never showing a public emotion in nearly a century of reigning over a fractious and quarrelsome people. That is quite an accomplishment, all the more so given her dysfunctional and disaster-prone family. She is the Queen of self-control. Nobody ever really knows what she is thinking.

The book is long, 600 pages, and I was choking on the details, but I savored it and will miss reading it. It touches things in me as well.

For those who love every detail of life in the Royal Family, this is the book you are waiting for.

Tina Brown, one of the best-qualified people on earth to write it, writes about the inner workings of Buckingham Palace and the inner lives of the Royal Family and their lives, scandals, loves, and disappointments. She focuses on four royals, Diana, Camilla, Megan, Elizabeth, and Kate.

Brown is no gossip-monger.

She is a distinguished English journalist, magazine editor, columnist, talk show host, and author of the best-selling Diana Chronicles in 2007, by far the best book written on Diana, according to the critics.

She is a serious, organized, and unbelievably well-connected journalist who has worked in England and the United States.

Brown was born a British citizen and received her United States citizenship in 2005. She was editor-in-chief of Britain’s biting Tatler magazine at 25 in London. Before founding The Daily Beast, she edited Vanity Fair and the New Yorker Magazine in America.

She is a writer I trust and pay attention to.  This is her turf and she knows every inch of it or somebody who does.

She cares about truth and fairness, and her research is far beyond what almost any publisher would ask for. The acknowledgments alone could make a small book and read like a who’s in American and British journalism, culture, and high brow society.

Her new book, The Palace Paper, Inside the House of Windsorthe Truth and the Turmoil, is entertaining and fascinating.

It more than delivers on its promise to detail the inner workings of the Windsors.

At 600 pages, it’s more detail about “The Firm,” as the Royal Family is called in England, than I cared to read, but the reporting is astonishing. When Meghan arrives, the book takes off.

Brown manages to skewer every family member except Camilla, Prince Charle’s long-suffering soon-to-be Queen Consort. If Elizabeth ever does die, Prince will be King, and Camilla, after years of difficulty, a Queen.

This tells me that Camilla, as well placed a person as one could find, was a valuable source. The Bob Woodward rule always applies in tell-all books – if you are left alone,  you were a source.

The book begins with a review of the tragic life and death of Princess Diana and of the role Britain’s vicious and relentless tabloid press played in it. She writes about the powerful impact on the Royal Family, especially on her two sons, Princes William and Harry. I feel like I’ve been over this ground too many times. Brown adds a lot of new details to it, for those who care.

Diana’s death was the first time the world got to look deeply into the family and its secrets.

They didn’t come out looking good.  They were revealed as the pompous and calcifying fuddy-duddies that they are. They got the shake-up they needed.

Diana was much more beloved even than the Queen. But Elizabeth had no context for understanding her.

A couple of hundred years ago, Elizabeth would have chopped off her head and been done with it, but Diana wielded the media like a sword and humiliated the family.

For me, the book really began to move halfway through when Megan Markle, an ambitious young B-level Hollywood TV, and film star, shows up in England looking for work, and a boyfriend who could help elevate her fame and rise above a mediocre film career.

A friend set her up to meet Harry. It was love at first sight, on both sides.

Like Diana, Markle was to shake up the Firm and change it.

Young feminist outsiders from America don’t play by the Firm’s rules; they give nasty interviews to British TV celebrities or their friend and neighbor in California, Oprah Winfrey. Their sword is media, not the Tower of London.

The details of this struggle in the book are surprising, shocking, and irresistible.

In many ways, the book is about women, and the different ways in which they seek and yield power, from Diana to Meghan to Camilla to Kate, the Queen to be, and Queen Elizabeth.

Meghan hit the Royal Family like a guided missile, as did Diana before her.

Troubled and perennially angry Harry, struggling to deal with the awful death of his mother, abruptly returned from dangerous combat duty in Afghanistan after his presence was outed by the press, and he was angry at just about everyone.

Their household staff hated both of them for their rudeness, bossiness, and demands.

Harry despised the journalists who stalked and dogged him and resented the increasingly good and middle-class life of his older brother William, the future king.

He seethed at the rules and restrictions of the stiff bureaucrats in the Palace Guard first in line to the throne after Charles, and he was lonely and unhappy.

Brown is somewhat sympathetic to Harry – his mother was killed in a devastating way –  but not Meghan, who is depicted as a spoiled, demanding, rude, and ruthless brat. She sees him as wounded and vulnerable.

She was just what Harry was looking for, and vice versa. The two of them merged their anger and resentment and began almost immediately plotting against the family and for their celebrity and gobs of money.

For Meghan, it was her lifelong fantasy to be rich and powerful. For Harry, it was revenge.

To do that, they had to get away from the Queen and the restrictions she and a thousand years of precedence placed upon them.

They got away, but at a high cost to their reputations, dignity, and relationships within their families.

Like Brown, I left feeling poorly for Harry and disliking him and his wife. They set about doing what America does in America and began raking in millions and millions of money from deals and contracts.

In the book, the couple seemed calculating, greedy, endlessly spoiled and dramatic, whiny and surprising. They were brazenly manipulative, according to Brown.

Brown was much kinder to brother Kate and William, apart from suggesting they were wilfully dull.

Harry and Megan were pleased with their 100 million dollar Netflix production deal, their carefully planned interview with Oprah, and their 13 million dollar Mediterranean Mansion in Montecito, Calif., near their new pal Oprah Winfrey. Welcome to America.

The Royal Family’s focus on  a life of community service does not seem high on the couple’s list.

One of the exciting things about the book to me was Brown’s writing about how Britain and America share little but a common language.

Megan’s strategy was an instant success in America; it fell flat in England.  She could never adapt to the British way of doing things and didn’t want to. She won’t be going back too often.

The two countries are radically different from one another.

Brown’s book is thoughtful and insightful about more than the Royal Family, whose lives are exciting but which are almost uniformly dull. The job seems to d demand it, at least in public.

Because all the kids in the Royal Family are messed up living their ridiculously arcane and scripted lives, they are sitting targets for the tabloid press in England, tormenting and ridiculing them with skill and glee.

That doesn’t make their lives attractive or glamorous, not to them. The Queen has had some difficult years.

Camilla, the presumed future queen consort, is a divorcee with two children. Prince Harry left the family to protect his new wife, Meghan; his uncle Prince Andrew was stripped of his royal titles after his shockingly creepy involvement with an international sex-trafficking scandal. (I loved when Brown referred to Andrew as a “coroneted sleaze machine.)

Beyond that, all hovers the ghost of Diana, next to the Queen, the most famous and loved royal in modern history. The ripples of her life and death continue to roil the very idea of a monarchy, and the lives of her two sons, until recently thought to be the family’s future.

Brown goes well beyond palace intrigue. She takes a thorough and critical look at the media’s role in the successes and failures of Elizabeth’s reign. She portrays the Queen as faithful to her work and duty but a remote, cold, and bumbling parent.

As a grandmother, she tries hard to be loving and often caves in to her rebellious children and grandchildren when they ask for things they shouldn’t have – like the money they didn’t earn.

In her role as a Queen, she is ruthless and unyielding.

After trying to shield him, she did not hesitate to toss her favored son Andrew under the bus when he got caught playing with Jeffrey Epstein. She ordered him to get lost and never be seen in public again.

I also found Brown fascinating in detailing women’s challenges in being famous in a world still dominated by white men and judged by many different double standards.

When men are tough, they are heroes. When women are tough, they are scheming bitches. It’s one of the oldest stories in the world.

Donald Trump, as foolish and dishonest a public figure as ever lived, gets elected President of the United States. In England, Meghan is roasted alive and chased out of the country (as Diana was at times) for wanting to be too powerful.

Brown writes in great and riveting detail about the different choices women have to make to be loved and successful.

She contrasts Meghan and Harry with Harry and Kate, the future King and Queen.

Meghan is the new American woman, on the make, hungry for fame and money, unrelenting and demanding, and skilled in using social media to get famous by promoting her beauty, sexuality, and glamorous life.

When she got to London, she was insistent on openly looking for and finding a husband who could elevate her to global celebrity.

Meghan is biracial in a white world, here and there, and is angry about how the wider world treats her.  Race played a significant role, says Brown, in her troubles.

Harry is mad about the same thing she is – her treatment –  and has devoted much of his new life to protect her from what we call the media. Their estate in California is a fortress against the outside world. There are no happy pictures of their children, no happy photos outside of hospitals.

Kate, equally ambitious, chose a different path. She comes from upper-class stock and follows the conventions of upper-class England and The Firm. She does what she is expected to do, is beautiful and polite, and presents herself first and foremost as a mother and good wife.

She is, of course, more than that, as Brown reports. She is calculating in her own way, the British way.

William is quiet, shy, steady, and dutiful in the way of the Queen, who he is expected to succeed one day. Kate is beautiful, never controversial, never outspoken, and moves with a protected circle of socialite friends.

Kate uses Instagram differently than Megan; she takes photos of her children, they are always happy and beautiful, and she lives a spotless and traditional middle-class life as a mother and supporter of her husband.

The book reminds me that we follow these people’s lives all the time, but Brown reminds us that we have no idea what is going on behind those closed doors for all the chatter about social media and otherwise. Reading the book, I thought once more that I ought never to covet another person’s life.

Besides her penetrating writing about the media and women celebrities, Brown asks a question all of England and much of the world is asking?

Can the monarchy survive beyond the ailing Elizabeth?

She is the only monarch most Brits have known all of their lives. She is the rock of Gibraltar there, consistent, predictable, controlled, a very fixed point in an insanely turbulent universe.

Brown surprised me by guessing that things will be okay.

Prince Charles, the least popular royal, is set to become King at what is a good time for him. A lifelong environmentalist who was often ridiculed as being a wanker and a nut now looks prescient and wise.

He has studied climate change for decades and talks about it knowingly and well. It may be that this unhappy man, now happy for the first time since marrying Camilla, will become King at the right time.

He is a new and different Charles, with new and different ideas, says Brown.

His faithful parenting of Harry and William won him a lot of supporters, although now, he only communicates with Harry through their private secretaries and aides.

As portrayed by Brown, William seems much like Queen Elizabeth in many ways: quiet, reserved, and devoted to duty.

People have asked me why I am interested in reading this book at all?

Because it tells me so much about people, not just Kings and Queens, we seem to need a King or Queen in our lives, someone who is dependable and who shows up and isn’t tarred by political fanatics or partisans.

In America, the fact that there is no such grounding figure seems to leave a big hole in our public lives and discourse. We can only follow people on our left or our right. We can’t seem to find anyone to hold the middle ground.

Queen Elizabeth has little actual power anymore, yet she is one of the most loved and influential people on the earth, not just in England.

I think that’s really what Tina  Brown’s juicy and revealing book is about. It tells me, at least, as much about me and us as it does about these tortured celebrities trying, like the rest of us, to get by.

I’d skip the book if you don’t care about the Royals.

If you do, this may be one of the best books you’ll ever get to read about the subject.

13 March

Movie Review: An Oscar Nominated Feature From Norway Asks Us To Follow The Journey Of A Woman Deciding Who To Be

by Jon Katz

The Worst Person In The World, a Joachim Trier movie filmed in Oslo, Norway (and nominated for Best International Feature Film), is a movie I think every woman concerned with finding their identity in the new world would love and appreciate and, every man who cares about women ought to see.

First off, some housekeeping. For some reason, the movie claims to be a romantic comedy, but a few funny scenes do not make a comedy. It is not a comedy, and it is not funny. It is provocative, thoughtful, sad at times, and innovative. It is a movie well worth seeing.

The film asks the question almost every woman in the Western world asks herself again and again: who do I want to be, and do I want to be it without depending on a man or partner? 

Julie (Renate Reinsve) struggles with just who she thinks she is.

Unlike most women and men in the world, she is drop-dead gorgeous with the expected perfect Hollywood body. It’s not for me to say as a man, but I wonder how most people – few of us are drop-dead gorgeous – relate to that presentation of women struggling with ordinary life and their relationships with men.

She looks nothing like any woman I’ve ever met. It bothered me, and I am neither female nor gorgeous. Her acting in the film was great.

The title is meant to grab our attention, but it’s a bit of a scam. It doesn’t refer to Julie at all, but to someone else in the film (and no one else is drop-dead gorgeous) who is the nicest person in the movie.

The film is broken into 12 chapters – it is both creatively constructed and is perhaps the best movie character study I’ve ever seen. We get to know Julie in a way no Hollywood movie star is ever known in a film. Trier takes his time and fills in the blanks. We see her grow up.

The evolution of Julie from an obnoxious, sex-obsessed, brazenly indifferent to norms and conventional morality person to a wise and grounded human is fascinating and wonderfully done. She isn’t the nicest person in the world, and she doesn’t seem to have any female friends.

I cared about her, but it took a while to like her and respect her. Trier did a great job with that.

In American movies, the female stars are always talking to their friends. Julie only really talks to herself.

But she is honest and fiercely independent. She awakens slowly but steadily to her truth and faces up to it.

One of the fundamental questions women in our culture seem to be asking, in addition to who they are and want to be, is how much they need men and children to be happy and fulfilled.

That is the issue at the core of this movie, and it could hardly be presented in a more honest and thought-provoking way. This is another of those intellectual thinking movies the great European filmmakers are known for, and the great directors (Jane Campion excepted, and she is from New Zealand) are rarely permitted to make.

It was fascinating to see The Batman and The Worst Person In The World within three days of one another, and they are the literal opposites of one another. There isn’t a single car chase, explosion, or murder in the movie. God bless the Europeans.

This story is a feminist romance, not a comedy; I don’t remember laughing once.

Julie is an outlier at first. She abandons medical school to study psychology, ditches that to become a photographer, sleeps with a sleazy professor, takes a job in a bookstore.

She changes her hair color several times, casts off a sweet boyfriend, has a brief fling with a hunky bald model, and moves on to two very significant relationships, the first with Aksel, a graphic novelist in his 40’s, the second with Elvind, a kind and loving barista closer to her age, something she thinks she needs.

Julie has a sense of humor, but it is often cruel, a source of laughter, perhaps, but not from me.

Trier made Oslo a constant backdrop in the film – he loves the city. Oslo in the movie is clean-cut, well-lit, safe, and middle class.

Trier has a keen satirical eye for the pretensions of the Norwegian middle class as they struggle with parenthood, fitness, culture, and climate change.

In the tradition of European directors, the film is cerebral, not emotional.

A lot is happening,  touching, revealing, and inspiring. There is no drama or America-style theatrics or hysteria. Everybody keeps their cool, even in a crisis.

Someone is always about to cry, and real-life, real families and real mortality are in the air.

I recommend the movie enthusiastically for people who love to see creative and innovative films and for women and men seeking to comprehend the new realities of women and their lives and choices.

Julie is interesting for many reasons; one of them is that she is faced with choices most women in the world still do not have, and many others have only recently had to make. We get to follow her thought processes every step of the way.

I can’t think of a more topical movie, and Trier is brave and honest in presenting it. The film is gripping; it hangs on for every minute of its two hours.

Julie grows up before our lives as she faces life and her flaws, and she ends up figuring out who she is and who she wants to be, which was, to me, a happy ending tinged with sorrow.

2 January

Movie Review: Jane Campion’s “The Power Of The Dog.” One Of The Best Movies I’ve Ever Seen

by Jon Katz

This movie is so beautiful it hurts. The acting is terrific, the story is brilliant, and the music is exquisite.

The Power Of The Dog is the rarest of things, the perfect movie. There is nothing about it that didn’t knock my socks off.

Everything about this movie – all of the parts – comes together in a dazzling whole.

The acting, the story, the cinematography, the music, the ending all work beautifully.

Ambitious and expensive creative enterprises are complicated because there are so many elements that must come together in perfect sync for the film to work.

Jane Campion (who wrote the script)  seems to have a genius for pulling gifted people together and letting them go. I also appreciate her directness and respect for the moviegoer. The music and story never manipulate or trick us.

Everything is out in the open, just like the frontier itself. She isn’t afraid to let us figure things out by ourselves, and she tells us everything we need to know to do that.

There are no tricks, little is hidden. It’s an incredibly honest movie.

I wasn’t sure I wanted to see this movie when I first heard about it. There’s enough cruelty and darkness in our world at the moment that I didn’t think I needed more.

I was wrong. I’m so glad I saw it.

I will see this movie two or three times because there is way too much brilliant work to catch and absorb in one sitting.

The western frontier foundation myth is one of America’s most important stories, setting the stage for generations of men who aspired to the domination, brutality, and violence practiced by the so-called heroes of the American frontier.

From Davy Crockett to Clint Eastwood, this is the myth that has defined American visions of manhood and toughness and rejected or ridiculed empathy and compassion – this is Donald Trump’s personal myth in many ways.

The ghosts of these stories haunt us every day; just look at the news.

Campion takes direct aim at this foundational myth – the macho man, the John Wayne, and Gary Coopers of our mythology.

Campion painted a bullseye on the story of the Macho Man and blew it all to bits. In Jane Campion’s West, her first movie in more than a decade, a vicious cowboy meets his surprising match.

This was a bold and very ambitious undertaking for  Campion, one of the most respected directors in the world. She admits in interviews that taking on the Alpha Male was essential to her; they have caused so many women so much harm.

They are difficult to work with.

They aren’t doing the world much good either.

Her target isn’t so much about history as it is the American idea of masculinity if you can separate the two.

These are the forerunners of the men who torment and harass women and turn on every kind of sensitive man. They are the bullies, the ones who definite masculinity. They are often cruel and uncaring, dismissing or demeaning those who are different.

I think their long and brutal reign is ending. I’m not sure this movie could or would have been made even 20 years ago. We are ready for it.

The movie is far more timely than I imagined. The Alpha Male – the film’s actual subject –  is what Donald Trump so urgently wants to be but can never be. He isn’t strong or brave, he could never sleep on a blanket in the desert; he talks tough, but he never lives tough.

He hid from his war callup.  The Macho Men never ran from a fight.

The Alpha Male has been in trouble in our country for some years now; women can’t stand him any longer and are fighting back with ferocity. Campion picked the right time to tell this story.

I don’t know what was in Jane Campion’s mind when she decided to make this movie, but The Story Of A Dog made me think long and hard about what courage really is, and what cruelty really is, and how it is long past time for us to re-consider both.

I guess we already are.

The movie centers on Phil Burbank (Benedict Cumberbatch), a rancher from Montana and a Yale Graduate (majored in classics, says his brother proudly), and who is now a tortured, repressed, and cruel cowboy and Alpha Man.

Since graduating college, Phil has been playing cowboy, memorializing a dead friend named Bronco who he says taught him everything he knows and saved his life. He talks about him all the time to his adoring cowhands.

At one point, he confesses to Peter that Bronco saved f his life by sleeping next to him, body to body,  during a bitter storm.

“Naked?” asks Peter. Phil doesn’t reply.

Phil refuses to bathe, castrates bull calves with his teeth, plays the banjo on dark and lonely nights. He lives and works with his brother George (Jesse Plemons).

For 25 years, Phil and George have kept the macho ethic of the cowboy alive on their remote Montana farm (the movie was filmed in New Zealand.) They break horses, corral cattle, wander the plains, frolic naked in ponds,  and live in the macho and mythical world of the American cowboy.

Phil and George retreat to their dark wood-paneled mansion; they sleep next to one another in adjoining beds. It is Campion’s way of shocking us and getting our attention. It doesn’t seem to mean much.

Campion captures the myth of the unspoiled West more skillfully than any movie I’ve ever seen: the swirling dust, thundering cattle, beautiful mountain ranges, every shot in the film is breathtakingly beautiful.

The gorgeous filmmaking never stops, neither does the haunting and lonely score, which seems to have been written with each character in the film in mind. The music changes with each scene and sets a beautiful and haunting tone.

Every shot made me stop and say, wow, and ask how anyone takes so many beautiful pictures. In this film, nature and the landscape are stars, not backgrounds.

Phil, who calls his gentler brother “Fatso” throughout the movie, finds his life upended when George suddenly marries Rose (Kirsten Dunst), a widow with an effeminate and brooding son Peter (Kodi-Smit-McPhee).

Phil sees Rose as a threat and an opportunist and tries to stop the marriage. He fails and tortures Rose into drinking heavily and falling apart. He tags Peter as a sissy, or worse.

Weak brother George can’t or won’t stop him. Rose is very much alone.

Phil has a painful secret, one he has lived with all of his life and will go to almost any length to protect. He seems to be driving himself mad with his new family structure. The presence of Rose is beginning to undo him and shatter the life he has so obsessively preserved and protected. We begin to see the cracks in the wall.

At this point, the movie zeroes in on Campion’s real target. We are heading into liberation territory, a not unfamiliar theme these days, but no one has done it nearly as gracefully or skillfully as Campion.

Campion forces us to think, perhaps for the first time, about the courage and masculinity of the men who set out to conquer the American plains and about what masculinity is. In her view, the soft and the shy can be quite strong and very tough. And the strong can be weak.

When George marries Rose, he brings her into the home lair of Phil, who calls her a thief and a schemer the first time they talk. Phil will now have to live with Rose and her quiet, creepy, but oddly confident teenage son Peter, or get rid of both of them.

Kodi Smit-McPhee does a beautiful job of portraying this shy and effeminate young man, a magnet for the cruel teasing of Phil and the ranch hands, yet someone who surprises with his strength and dignity –  it silences them and reminds Phil of his late friend Bronco.

Campion’s characters are complex, I had to work some to figure them out, and I loved having to do that. It engaged me with the movie in a very rare and powerful way. I’ve never had to think that much about Captain America.

One literary critic pointed out that with the arrival of Rose and Peter, the story almost becomes a female Gothic, one of those bone-chilling English stories about women in suffocating domestic spaces haunted by ghosts. In  Jane Eyre, the heroine enters a home with a madwoman whose husband has locked her in the attic.

Rose seems headed for this fate.

Phil stalks Rose in the cruelest ways and she soon begins to fall apart, drinking herself nearly to death. The stakes for both of them are high. If Rose survives him, she would most likely be more powerful than he was.  The whole closely guarded structure of his life would fall apart. Phil is very smart, he knows how to undo and undermine her, mostly through threatening her son.

He befriends the boy, thinking to unravel Rose, but the boy is more than he bargained for. Phil begins to think of him as his beloved  Bronco. Peter knows what he is doing.

When Rose defies Peter’s orders and gives some Native-Americas the cowhides that he was about to burn, (he left strict orders that they never be given to the Indians, even though he has no use for them), he exploded with rage and fury. This was a critical moment for her, the first time she had challenged him so directly. The Native Americans gave her some clothes in return and when her husband tried to take them off of her hands (she had collapsed), she refused to let him.

Both she and Phil understood this was only the beginning of her challenge to his primacy and authority. George would never be able to take his brother on. He starts to lose control of himself.

I should say that the movie opens with the voice of Peter saying any son must protect his mother. That one line kept me on my toes; Campion quite clearly wanted me to remember it. Peter doesn’t say much in the film.

I should also say that the movie is not violent or (apart from a bull castration) gory in any way. The Power Of The Dog is not, In my mind, even a dark movie, although some critics thought otherwise.

The beauty and acting and intensity of the actors and story kept me deeply engrossed.

It is simply a fantastic movie, as good a movie in every way as people who love movies are ever likely to see or have seen. And it moves like a bullet train. It’s two hours long, but I would have loved two hours more.

If you like movies at all, you might want to see or stream this one more than once. I sense it is already a cult movie, one of the world’s ten best films for many years.

I should also add that The Power Of The Dog is based on a 1967 novel by Thomas Savage, a closeted gay man whose fiction was inspired by his early years living and working on a Montana ranch.

The book is a fictional story of the West and was mostly ignored when it was published.

In an afterword to the book written for a reprint by the writer Annie Proulx, she observes that “something aching and lonely and terrible of the west is caught forever” in Savage’s novel. (The book predates by a generation Proulx’s tragic love story “Brokeback Mountain,” about two hired cowboys, Jack and Ennis, who discover each other in 1963 while herding sheep, have sex and fall in love while convincing themselves they are safe and “invisible.”)

Perhaps nothing the western Alpha Male feared and hated more than anything was any sign or whiff of homosexuality. Phil goes into a rage at the very sight of Peter, who he declares with contempt is a “nancy,” or a “pansy,” in cowboy language.

Phil is unspeakably cruel; his brother  George is unrelentingly shy and weak.

Those who pay attention must know by now that almost every American woman alive has been demeaned, molested, abused, or patronized by one or more men in her life. We’ve paid less attention to the fact that many men and boys were and are beaten and demeaned by the very same Alpha Males.

The guys don’t have a MeToo movement yet. When they do, it will turn the world upside down. The Alpha Males are vulnerable, after all.

Phil had Peter crying the first time they met, setting fire to one of his paper table flowers.

Campion helps to change the narrative.

The movie is lovely, and I won’t tip off the ending, which surprised me on several levels. Although there are many clues towards the end. Campion plays it fairly; she’s not looking to trick or fool anybody.

I’ve just never seen anything like this movie before.

She challenges us to think about strength and masculinity once we get close to it and break through the walls. Maria and I talked about this movie for much of the night and into the morning.

One of the many things I appreciated about The Story Of The Dog is that it builds tremendous force as it moves along.

The music and the landscapes reinforce and define and support the story at every turn.

The story is a tragedy, liberation, and penetrating exploration of masculinity and feminity. Campion has taken on the great American myth and blown it right out of the prairie.

In the era of the Superhero, sometimes entertaining but never ever moving, this movie will grab you by the heart and refuse to let go.

Bedlam Farm