Reviews and News:
On November 24, 1971, Dan Cooper, or a man calling himself that, parachuted out of a hijacked Northwest Orient Airlines plane with $200,000 in cash. He was never heard from again. Yesterday, the FBI closed the Cooper file because of lack of evidence.
* *
The weekend Pokémon Go took over America.
* *
Saddam Hussein’s novella to be published in December: “Previously published in other languages with titles including Begone Devils and Get Out, You Damned One, the novella focuses on a tribe living by the Euphrates river 1,500 years ago which ousts an invading force. In 2005, the New York Times described it as ‘a forgettable piece of pulp’.”
* *
Thomas Sowell reviews Heather Mac Donald’s The War on Cops: “Even in this age of runaway emotions, there are still some people who want to know the facts. Nowhere are facts more important, or more lacking, than in what has been aptly called ‘The War on Cops,’ the title of a devastating new book by Heather Mac Donald. Few, if any, of the most fashionable notions about the police, minorities, and the criminal-justice system can withstand an examination of hard facts. Yet those fashionable notions continue to dominate discussions in the media, in politics, and in academia. But Ms. Mac Donald’s book of documented facts demolishes many fashionable notions.”
* *
Edwin M. Yoder, Jr. reviews James Axtell’s Wisdom’s Workshop: The Rise of the Modern University: “The middle name of American higher education today isn’t wisdom but money: the pursuit of alumni, foundation, and federal ‘research’ dollars. The cup-rattling and hat-passing are as beneficial, but as perilous, to academic integrity as the ‘bear hug’ of Oxford and Cambridge by Henry VIII in Tudor times. Federal funding is the heroin of super-academe.”
* *
A.S. Byatt’s slack, lavishly illustrated essay: “There is a moment at the start of most authors’ careers when it is hard to get anything published, and there is a moment towards the latter stage of some authors’ careers when it is hard to stop everything being published. A.S. Byatt is in the latter stage of her career, and however great the claims for her back (and future) catalogue may be, it hard to see why Peacock and Vine came to be here.”
* *
Essay of the Day:
In Bloomberg, James Tarmy and Vernon Silver tell the story of how the Wildenstein art empire found itself fighting a $500 million tax bill:
“Over recent weeks in hushed New York dining rooms and private Parisian salons, Guy Wildenstein has been a walking object lesson in how billionaire dynasties decline: surrounded by lawyers, pitied, selling off paintings—yet still fabulously rich. This is how it goes when you’re facing a trial in an inheritance-tax case that could cost your clan half a billion dollars. Or at least, what’s left of the clan: His brother, father, and stepmother are dead. It falls to Wildenstein, 70, to ensure the family’s fifth-generation art-dealing fortune makes it to the sixth. Coming up with €448 million ($496 million) in cash—the amount the French government claims his family owes in unpaid taxes and fees—would be enough to bring even the world’s richest to the brink of catastrophe.
“Still, life must be lived. Wildenstein parted with $1.2 million worth of old masters at a Christie’s auction in New York earlier this year, and he still has the Manhattan town house he bought for $32.5 million at the end of 2008, though, according to recent press reports, that’s on the block, too. In Paris, where the tax trial will be held, he has the family apartment, though for now it’s been legally seized and the furnishings are under seal. He still goes out in his double-breasted suits to mix with the godfathers of French finance, drawing admiration for keeping up appearances. They know it’s but for the grace of the feared fisc—France’s equivalent of the U.S. Internal Revenue Service—that they themselves aren’t explaining offshore trusts and Picassos in vaults to the taxman. After all, Wildenstein is still one of them: the one who sold his Gulfstream IV to then-Lazard Chairman Michel David-Weill back in 2003; who banks with Rothschild, as his family has for decades; who sustains the Wildenstein Institute, a temple to art history whose catalogues raisonnés for the most important artists of the 19th and 20th centuries are so exhaustive that a work by Monet would be worthless without a so-called Wildenstein index number.
“‘Nobody’s done as well as the Wildensteins in terms of cash and power and, in a way most important of all, respectability,’ says art historian John Richardson. ‘Nobody.’
“The family’s business runs on secrets—so fiercely kept that Wildenstein has said he didn’t learn about the family’s financial machinations himself until the death in 2001 of his father, Daniel. When it came time to settle the estate, Guy and his brother, Alec, claimed their father had a net worth of €40.9 million, or about $45 million. To cover the resulting estate tax bill of €17.7 million, they gave the French Republic—Nicolas Sarkozy, then president of France, was a close friend of the family—a set of bas-reliefs by Marie Antoinette’s favorite sculptor. Lovely as the reliefs were, this turned out to be a true let-them-eat-cake moment, tossing crumbs to the French public while, French prosecutors claimed, the Wildensteins were keeping a towering confection of property, art, cash, and investments for themselves. In the month of Daniel’s death alone, the government uncovered a veritable airlift of art, with $188 million worth of paintings moved from the U.S. to Switzerland.”
* *
Image of the Day: Drone photography
* *
Poem: Christopher J. Scalia, “Fashion Statements”
Get Prufrock in your inbox every weekday morning. Subscribe here.
