![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Winston Churchill, Their Finest Hour: This is the second volume of Churchill’s massive 6-volume history of World War II. Composed almost entirely of Churchill’s narration connecting memoranda and telegrams he wrote during the war, it provides a detailed and yet patchy account. It’s quite obvious from the tireless micromanaging he offers – itself only a tiny sample of his actual output – that everyone he worked with would want to strangle him. Churchill was the worst boss imaginable, except for all the others that had been tried. His massive ego, redeemed of course by his massive abilities, maps perfectly onto his unrelenting confidence in the British people to survive, almost alone, Hitler’s assault in the Battle of Britain. There are snatches of the rhetoric we all know and love, mostly quoted from things he said in radio addresses or in Parliament. Churchill says nothing bad about any Englishman, choosing instead to emphasize how war united all and how each man (there are about two women mentioned, one of whom is Churchill’s wife) did all he could for the defense of the nation. It’s not a good history, and it’s not a candid account, but I learned a lot about Churchill – even though, it appears, he was heavily assisted in writing these books.
Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bronx: LeBlanc follows two friends through a decade of poverty, hope, prison, and other disasters, showing how their choices are so constrained that even survival is something of a miracle. The two make different bad choices, mainly about men; there aren’t many good ones. It’s impossible to hang on to money, because if you don’t spend it you’ll be pressured to give it to other people who need it now. You can deny all claims of friends and family to provision yourself, but then you’re isolated – and if anything goes wrong, you’re worse off than before. Love is the only good, sweet thing, and men leave while babies stay – which is why most of the women in the neighborhood are mothers in their teens and often grandmothers in their thirties. LeBlanc’s thick description is a sobering and depressing portrait of poverty in 1980s New York, and it doesn’t end, just stops, with plenty of risk and only a dash of hope for some.
Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door: 1 in 25 Americans has no functioning conscience. (Check your friends list – if 24 of them seem okay, it’s probably you.) Most of them, however, lack the intelligence and motivation to do as much damage as the famous ones; they just inflict misery on the few people they can affect. All they care about is winning. Because they lack the ability to empathize – though they are often skilled at evoking pity – they get no enjoyment from human connection, only from domination and manipulation, but even that is fleeting. The stories, which are supposed to be composites from Stout’s years of psychotherapy practice, are interesting and the guidelines for protecting yourself from ordinary sociopaths seem useful, but the book is padded with Stout’s philosophical musings on good and evil. I was intrigued by her suggestion that American culture, unlike other historical and present cultures, validates rather than constrains the individualistic, hedonistic traits that sociopaths possess in spades. Though cross-cultural studies reveal sociopaths in every group, the prevalence is lower some places than others, and highest in the US.
Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bronx: LeBlanc follows two friends through a decade of poverty, hope, prison, and other disasters, showing how their choices are so constrained that even survival is something of a miracle. The two make different bad choices, mainly about men; there aren’t many good ones. It’s impossible to hang on to money, because if you don’t spend it you’ll be pressured to give it to other people who need it now. You can deny all claims of friends and family to provision yourself, but then you’re isolated – and if anything goes wrong, you’re worse off than before. Love is the only good, sweet thing, and men leave while babies stay – which is why most of the women in the neighborhood are mothers in their teens and often grandmothers in their thirties. LeBlanc’s thick description is a sobering and depressing portrait of poverty in 1980s New York, and it doesn’t end, just stops, with plenty of risk and only a dash of hope for some.
Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door: 1 in 25 Americans has no functioning conscience. (Check your friends list – if 24 of them seem okay, it’s probably you.) Most of them, however, lack the intelligence and motivation to do as much damage as the famous ones; they just inflict misery on the few people they can affect. All they care about is winning. Because they lack the ability to empathize – though they are often skilled at evoking pity – they get no enjoyment from human connection, only from domination and manipulation, but even that is fleeting. The stories, which are supposed to be composites from Stout’s years of psychotherapy practice, are interesting and the guidelines for protecting yourself from ordinary sociopaths seem useful, but the book is padded with Stout’s philosophical musings on good and evil. I was intrigued by her suggestion that American culture, unlike other historical and present cultures, validates rather than constrains the individualistic, hedonistic traits that sociopaths possess in spades. Though cross-cultural studies reveal sociopaths in every group, the prevalence is lower some places than others, and highest in the US.
Tags:
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
From:
no subject
From: (Anonymous)
Churchill