Reviews and News:
Hong Kong’s kung fu crisis.
* *
“Intrigue abounds in Missing Man, New York Times reporter Barry Meier’s account of the bizarre case of Robert Levinson, a sometime CIA contractor stranded in Iran without any official American recognition of his true whereabouts—or any pending hope of a Stateside return. But the convoluted espionage surrounding Levinson is puzzling on another level as well: It exposes the storied workings of global spycraft as run by a largely improvised, and oddly random, ensemble of bit players, striving to project some larger meaning onto what are, at bottom, all-too-mundane transactions.”
* *
John Williams reviews Sebastian Smee’s The Art of Rivalry: “It’s the Matisse-Picasso chapter that fully delivers the adrenaline expected from rivalries. The rest of this engrossing book reads like high-end art history; this section also reads like sports. Mr. Smee calls the pair’s period of intense influence on each other ‘a drama unlike any in the story of modern art,’ even if ‘it was a fight that Matisse, for a surprisingly long time, doesn’t seem to have quite registered he was even in.'”
* *
The secret life of James Barry: “Michael du Preez tells the curious story of the dedicated British army surgeon who had to conceal her gender for over 50 years in order to pursue her vocation.”
* *
Daniel Johnson reviews Amos Oz’s new novel, Judas: “Judas is a great novel that only Oz could have written — not just because parts of it are so obviously autobiographical. (Doubtless others are not so obvious to this reader.) The period to which he has returned in his late seventies is also the one when he met and married his wife Nily. He is about the same age as his protagonist, the asthmatic, maddeningly passive yet highly intelligent Shmuel Ash. And it is easy to imagine the young Oz, who spent two decades living on a kibbutz, belonging to a far-left groupuscule such as Shmuel’s Socialist Renewal Group, which falls apart over allegiance to the young Marx versus the old Marx.”
* *
A new Penn Station?
* *
Essay of the Day:
In Politico, Josh Zeitz revisits some of the most surprising presidential comebacks:
“In early 1948, the New Republic published a front page editorial entitled ‘AS A CANDIDATE FOR PRESIDENT, HARRY TRUMAN SHOULD QUIT.’ The venerable old liberal organ only echoed what most political insiders were quietly whispering among themselves. Besieged from the left by the breakaway Progressive Party, and later from the right by Strom Thurmond’s Dixiecrats, the president never managed to match the popularity of his late predecessor, Franklin Roosevelt, and struggled in his management of complicated economic and diplomatic challenges in the aftermath of World War II. As one leading columnist observed, ‘Mr. Truman’s place in history may be written in Mike Gonzales’ ageless remark about a rookie ballplayer: good field, no hit.’
“Public opinion surveys, which were still in their infancy, had Truman down consistently in a four-way field. Immediately after Labor Day, the Elmo Roper poll showed that 44.3 percent of respondents favored Republican nominee Thomas Dewey to 31.4 percent for the president (Former Vice President Henry Wallace, the Progressive nominee, registered at 3.6 percent; Thurmond, 4.4 percent).
“But the president enjoyed three advantages not entirely perceptible to most observers. First, there was Thomas Dewey, a stiff, dour former prosecutor entirely lacking in common touch. Alice Roosevelt Longworth, Teddy Roosevelt’s acid-tongued daughter, famously dismissed the GOP candidate as ‘the little man on the wedding cake.’ A journalist quipped that his speeches could be ‘boiled down to these four historic sentences: Agriculture is important. Our rivers are full of fish. You cannot have freedom without liberty. The future lies ahead. (We might add a fifth: the TVA is a fine thing, and we must make certain that nothing like it happens again.)’
“Second, Truman worked from an uncommonly strong playbook. In November 1947, advisers Clark Clifford and Jim Rowe furnished the president with a 47-page memo that broke down the dynamic of FDR’s New Deal coalition. It was, they counseled, a coalition comprised of different ethnic and interest group blocs: Jews, African Americans, white ethnic union members, farmers. Rather than run for the vast center, the incumbent should stridently appeal to each of these groups on issues directly of interest to them. For African Americans, strong support for civil rights. For Jews, recognition of Israel. For urban workers and residents of the farm belt, an expansion of New Deal programs.
“In this approach, Truman enjoyed a third advantage: the GOP-controlled Congress…”
* *
Image of the Day: Milky Way over the Namib Desert
* *
Poem: Pat D’Amico, “It’s Elemental”
Get Prufrock in your inbox every weekday morning. Subscribe here.
