Category Archive: Non-Fiction
Mein Kampf is Back
(photo by Heinrich Hoffmann, 1927)
Hitler’s 1927 double-volume book of hate is back. Out of copyright, the feeling is that it should be out there, to stand as an example of the dangers of messianic self-belief [as H.R. Trevor-Roper put it], excessive unification movements (e.g. the pan German movement and lebensraum to the east) and racial purity (and vilification). William Shirer noted “it might be argued that had more non-Nazi Germans read it before 1933 and had the foreign statesmen of the world perused it carefully while there was still time, both Germany and the world might have been saved from catastrophe. For whatever other accusations…
Continue Reading →The Uses of Enchantment
By Hans Thoma
(Bruno Bettelheim) (1976) Bruno’s book meticulously deconstructs the beauty and the terror of the fairy tale, with its bullying utility (a boon for childish education) and wonderful rogues’ gallery of archetypes. It’s a great book on the power of myth that goes beyond J.G.Frazer to focus on the utter magic of childish understanding and imagination. Bruno, a Professor of Psychology, and holocaust survivor (for awhile – he, sadly, stifled himself in 1990), understood both the power of fable and its tendency towards brutal indoctrination. He knew from life and in his finely-chiselled mind that we are all bullies – we are all bullied, and that…
Continue Reading →Big Blue Sky
"oh the temper of the time..." (photo Gympie Times)
(by Peter Garrett) (2015) A famous singer in a leading Australian rock band, environmental activist and all-round bien pensant, it was Peter Garrett’s stint as Federal Arts Minister that impelled The Varnished Culture’s perusal of his book. A lot of the time it is a happy memoir – from middle-class childhood in suburban Sydney, with warm milk and bush cricket, trains into the city and boarding school, discovering girls and rock and roll. Garrett’s early account is written with flair and humour. When as a kid he signed up to Australian Record Club, receiving a record in the mail every few months, it “was the only…
Continue Reading →Coup D’etat
(by Edward Luttwak) (1968) The only good thing about the film Casino Royale (1967) is the moment when David Niven recalls Lenin as a ‘first-class organiser…second rate mind.’ This cool, matter-of-fact, revolutionary, cookbook for a coup is rather the reverse of that characterisation. It’s a impressive assembly of material, from necessary pre-conditions, to the strategic and tactical aspects of coups d’état, sprinkled with apt historical instances. A masterpiece of concision, yet where the book meets it margins, we see what Luttwak recognises as the “difficulty of predicting human behaviour.” So whilst the book is a worthy Machiavellian guide to the overthrow of…
Continue Reading →Landscape and Memory
(by Simon Schama) (1995) This is an art history, but written from the psychiatrist’s couch. It is a cultural – that is to say, a psychological – sociology of the product of human minds under stimulus from our ‘natural’ environment – wood, water, stone – primarily judged from the perspective of the visual arts. Schama observes that even landscapes we consider unspoilt bear our imprint, largely due to our own awareness, but maintains that the natural environment can be both celebrated and cosseted through the machinery of our cultural memory. It is a perverse argument, Freudian almost, but what makes the book worthwhile is the extraordinary magpie-mind of…
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