GANGSTERS vs. NAZIS: HOW JEWISH MOBSTERS BATTLED NAZIS in WARTIME AMERICA (audiobook) by Michael Benson

 

Highly Recommended

Published in 2022 by Tantor Audio.
Read by Gabriel Vaughan.
Duration: 8 hours, 53 minutes.
Unabridged.

Flag of the German American Bund

In the United States in the 1930's there was a small, loud, enthusiastic, and growing group of Americans that were great fans of Hitler and the Nazi party. They were largely ethnic Germans and formed organizations that sported Nazi symbols and mimicked the big rallies that Hitler had in Germany. They also mimicked the overt antisemitic speech exhibited by the Nazis. The most successful of these was the German American Bund (German American Federation).

There were a lot of small groups but there were two larger organizations with a different take than the Bund. The Silver Legion of America (Silver Shirts) had a spiritualist take on hate. Father Coughlin was a literal Catholic priest who brought a "Catholic" view on antisemitic hate and anti-interventionism from Detroit. He had a massive radio audience that was so enthusiastic that his church superiors were afraid to muzzle him.

Officially, Nazi Germany did not support these groups, but there were plenty of unofficial connections.

The national government could officially do nothing to stop them quickly (although the age-old tactic of looking for things like tax violations did work to slow some of them down over time.)

There was also very little that local governments could do to stop these meetings. Some localities, like New York City, outlawed wearing some of their Nazi-style outfits (dubious legality). Others just buckled down and over-scrutinized all of their rental applications for meeting halls, applications for parades, and so on. If there was a misspelling, or any similar type of mistake it was denied. 

But, that kind of thing only lasts so long. Eventually these American Nazis learned to double check their paperwork and take advantage of America's wide open freedom of speech rules to advocate for actions that would kill those very same freedoms.

A judge from New York City named Nathan Perlman decided that if the American antisemites were going to have paramilitary organizations, American Jews needed one to literally punch back. Turns out he knew a whole bunch of tough Jewish guys that paraded through his court room on a regular basis - Jewish mafia gangsters. People like Mickey Cohen, Meyer Lansky, Davie "the Jew" Berman*, and Bugsy Siegel were talked to in an unofficial way. 

The deal was simple - no killing, lots of roughing up (but not too rough), try to disappear afterwards, no overt help from the judge, avoid the press. In return, there would be lots of backroom maneuvers to get them out of jail if needed. The judge appealed to their sense of ethnic loyalty and it worked. These men were not good Jews in any kind of moral way. Most had long since stopped going to temple. However, most had had enough of a connection to the larger Jewish community to have had a Bar Mitzvah and they all understood that if people were going after harmless rabbis and little old ladies that go to temple, they would certainly go after Jewish mobsters.

Mugshots of Meyer Lansky (1902-1983)

Meyer Lansky said this about their involvement: "The stage was decorated with a swastika and a picture of Adolf Hitler. The speakers started ranting. There were only fifteen of us, but we went into action. We threw some of them out the windows. Most of the Nazis panicked and ran out. We chased them and beat them up. We wanted to show them that Jews would not always sit back and accept insults"

This Nazi-Gangster fight did not go on for too long - a couple of years at longest. The German American Bund began to fizzle out during 1939 when everyone was starting to get a real sense of what Nazi Germany was all about. Pearl Harbor pretty much brought an end to the pro-fascist meetings thanks to Italy and Germany declaring war on the United States to express their solidarity with Imperial Japan. 

Are there thorny free speech issues in this scenario? Well, it looks bad when a judge is recruiting a crew of guys to beat people up for expressing their political thoughts. But, when you consider the record of Nazis before and during the war it's pretty hard not to enjoy hearing about the mobsters beating the crap out of a bunch of loud-mouthed racist bullies.

I recommend the audiobook version because of the reading of Gabriel Vaughan. The book is written is written in a lively and engaging manner and uses words or phrases from movies or newsreels from the time period, using slang like "heaters" (guns) and "whacked" (mafia ordered murder). Vaughan doubles down on this theme by reading with a mild accent reminiscent of newsreel narrators of the time.

I rate this audiobook 5 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: GANGSTERS vs. NAZIS: HOW JEWISH MOBSTERS BATTLED NAZIS in WARTIME AMERICA (audiobook) by Michael Benson

*Note on Davie "the Jew" Berman. Mobster nicknames are almost always colorful. Berman has to have the least imaginative nickname of all the mobsters of this era. That's most likely due to the fact that he was operating out of Minneapolis and Iowa City - places not known for large Jewish populations.

THE HERITAGE: BLACK ATHLETES, a DIVIDED AMERICA and the POLITICS of PATRIOTISM (audiobook) by Howard Bryant

Published by Beacon Press in May of 2018.
Read by Ron Butler.
Duration: 11 hours, 17 minutes.
Unabridged.

Howard Bryant's The Heritage: Black Athletes, a Divided America and the Politics of Patriotism takes a hard look at athletes, particularly African-American athletes, using their position to make commentary of social issues. Bryant brings a wealth of experience as a sports writer for ESPN.com, ESPN the Magazine and NPR. 

Tommie Smith and John Carlos in the 1968 Olympics 

Bryant does not come at this topic as a person critical of athletes taking political stances. Rather, he is very much in favor of it since athletes have a very large soapbox that they can climb upon and shout from, if they chose to do so. Some have. Bryant speaks in great detail about Jackie Robinson, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Tommie Smith, John Carlos and especially Muhammad Ali.

Bryant starts, oddly in my mind, with someone who was an athlete (played 15 games in the NFL in the 1920's for teams that no longer exist) but is almost entirely remembered for his singing and acting - Paul Robeson. Robeson was very outspoken (he spoke out so often that he was blacklisted by Hollywood and was investigated by the House Un-American Activities Committee), which fits the model of person that this book profiles, but he hardly fits the model of a professional athlete that the book is focusing on.

Nonetheless, this is an interesting and thought-provoking book. Bryant's thesis is that the norm has been for Black athletes to stand up for other African Americans, either symbolically like early boxers who literally fought against white men, or by speaking up. This is what Bryant calls "The Heritage".

Colin Kaepernick

For about 25 years, more or less, "The Heritage" went away - from roughly the 1970's through the early 2000's. Bryant insists that it starts with O.J. Simpson and follows right through Michael Jordan. The model is "go along and get rich". Keep the controversies quiet and make as much money as possible. I am sure it is more complicated than that. For example, the large legislative pieces were already passed by the time Simpson made it to the NFL so there were few "official" government policies to protest any longer - at least not like before when there were a smorgasbord of racist policies to protest. But, he makes his point well - where was Michael Jordan, the most famous African American of all (except for Michael Jackson) when the Rodney King beating, for example, took place? Or when a host of other similar racial incidents happened? Nowhere.

This brings us up to Colin Kaepernick. This is, without a doubt, the strongest part of the book. Bryant takes us back through the trauma of 9/11 and reminds the readers that lived through it how shocking it was for all of us and how so many police officers and firefighters died in that attack. He reminds us how sporting events became a way for everyone to share in the loss and honor those that died on that day through flag ceremonies and special songs (Yankee Stadium performs "God Bless America" during the 7th Inning Stretch, for example).

But, soon enough, those special healing moments became part of the routine - a routine paid for by the U.S. military. Those honor guards that present the flag? Paid for by the military with taxpayer money (they pay the teams to let them do it). Those special, tearjerker reunion moments where a soldier comes home and his or her child is surprised on the field? Paid for by the military with taxpayer money. Those "shout outs" on the Jumbotron from soldiers in the field that are rooting for the home team? Paid for by the military with taxpayer money. Special "honor the troops" days where dozens of soldiers have seats together at the game and the camera focuses on them a few times and they all wave and say, "Hi Mom!"? Paid for by the military with taxpayer money (it costs more for more camera shots).

These combined to give sporting events a hyper-patriotic, even nationalistic feel that was not there before.

Personal note: I have attended every Indy 500 since 1986. The hyper-patriotic feel has been there throughout that time because the Indy 500 has always been scheduled on Memorial Day Weekend. They have incorporated a playing of Taps, a flyover (they were one of the first to feature a flyover) at least two patriotic songs and had a group of soldiers there representing all of the branches of the military every year. But, when I went to the August 2017 NASCAR Bristol "night" race, it was just as patriotic, including going so far as to feature a recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance. Now, the NFL games are just as reverent as the Indy 500, so much so that the Indy 500 pre-race activities are not nearly as distinctive as they used to be.

So, when Colin Kaepernick decided to protest - in a much less divisive way than Ali (who talked non-stop and even went to jail when he refused to serve in Vietnam, but was publicly mourned when he died) he was excoriated.

Specific criticisms: Bryant strays from sports into popular entertainment from time to time - but not consistent enough to make it a comparison of how African American athletes, musicians and actors approached race-related controversies, with the exception of Paul Robeson (noted above) but enough to muddy the waters. He even brought up the movie Rocky as being racist because it features a white boxer as the protagonist and a black boxer as the bad guy. There are two problems with this: 1) Apollo Creed is not really a bad guy in any meaningful sense. He is overconfident and symbolizes the establishment, while Rocky symbolizes the "little guy". But, he is remarkable for even giving Rocky the chance to fight in the first place and 2) Rocky was inspired by real-life the story of Chuck Wepner, a journeyman boxer who fought for the title Ali in 1975. When you hear Apollo Creed talk about himself he is clearly imitating Ali's style. Stallone saw the fight and then wrote the screenplay (he even settled a lawsuit with Wepner over using his story).

But, despite those criticisms, this was a remarkable book. Not always a fun book, but remarkable nonetheless and certainly an excellent ending to a solid year of reading.

The book was read by Ron Butler. His voice had a sense of authority and his pacing was excellent. He did a great job, even if he could not pronounce the name of the former baseball Commissioner Bud Selig's name correctly.

I rate this audiobook 5 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: THE HERITAGE: BLACK ATHLETES, a DIVIDED AMERICA and the POLITICS of PATRIOTISM by Howard Bryant.

JOSEPH ANTON: A MEMOIR (audiobook) by Salman Rushdie

Published in 2012 by Random House Audio
Duration: 26 hours, 59 minutes
Read by Sam Dastor
Unabridged

For most people, Salman Rushdie is, and will always be, that author that the Iranians tried to have killed all of those years ago. I freely admit that this is an accurate description of me. Although I am an avid reader, this is the first Salman Rushdie book that I have even contemplated reading. 

Rushdie narrates this autobiography in the third person, which is a little weird and gave me the impression that he is trying to distance himself a bit from his own story.

The biggest chunk of Joseph Anton: A Memoir tells about how Rushdie dealt with the fatwa, or ruling against him and his book The Satanic Verses by the leader of the Iranian Revolution himself, the Ayatollah Khomeini. Khomeini ruled that the author, the publishers and the editors of the book should die for blasphemy and that anyone who died in an attempt to kill them would be considered a martyr. This caused Rushdie to go into hiding and be officially under police protection provided by the British government. Joseph Anton became his code name.

Rushdie the "icon" - the man who came to symbolize the intolerance of government-sponsored religion and offered a real-life preview to the dangers of radical Islam - and Rushdie the actual man are quite different people. I admire iconic Rushdie, but everyday life Rushdie is hard to like sometimes. Rushdie is often brutally honest about his friends and colleagues and their shortcomings - as he saw them. I can only imagine that many of his friends read this book and were horrified at how they were portrayed.

The book ends with a moving account of the 9/11 attacks on New York City, his adopted hometown. It makes a elegant bookend to a book that basically is about Islamic terror aimed at one person that morphs into terror aimed at an entire city.

The reader, Sam Dastor, was excellent. Interestingly, he is also the reader of the audiobook version of The Satanic Verses.

I rate this audiobook 3 stars out of 5. Way too long and too many uncomfortable comments about the author's supposed friends.

This audiobook can be found on Amazon.com here: Joseph Anton: A Memoir by Salman Rushdie. 

A THOUSAND MILES to FREEDOM: MY ESCAPE from NORTH KOREA by Eunsun Kim with Sebastien Falleti. Translated by David Tian

A Remarkable Tale

To be published in the United States on July 21, 2015. 
I received an "Advance Reading Copy" 

Eunsun Kim's tale of her escape from North Korea, along with her mother and her older sister is remarkably easy to read, remarkable engrossing and just a remarkable tale in general.

When Eunsun Kim was 11 years old her mother determined that they could no longer live in North Korea. Eunsun's grandparents were dead, her father was dead, almost everything in the house was sold for money to buy food but there was almost no food to be had because North Korea was in the middle of its Great Famine (1994-1998). Depending on whose statistics you use, the estimates range anywhere from 250,000 to 3,500,000 people starved to death or died from starvation-related causes. Of course, it is hard to say for sure because North Korea is such a closed off society.

Eunsun Kim and her family lived in the northernmost part of North Korea and they decided to cross the Tumen River into China and live as illegal aliens. They would have no promise of safety, no guarantee of work and risked being shot by the border guards on both sides of the border. But, at least they would have chance to eat.

She details several botched attempts at escape and I was pleased to see that at least one border guard was a decent human being. He could see they were starving and desperate and he took pity on them and let them go with a warning - twice! But, he couldn't feed them because there was no food to be had so this small family eventually makes it to China. The family tries to stay together but when Eunsun Kim's mother is sold into sexual slavery (she calls it an unofficial marriage, but the entire purpose of the marriage was to produce a son for her "husband" and no one recognized the marriage as legitimate) the family splits up. The daughters have a better time of it, but it is not easy.

As you can tell by the title, eventually Eunsun Kim makes it to freedom. Their last push to make it to South Korea is tension-filled and her story of how she adjusts to life in South Korea is interesting in and of itself. Now, she lives in South Korea and has lived and travelled all over the world studying (making up for lost years when she had to work to collect wood rather than go to school so they could get food) and promoting her book.

Ironically, A Thousand Miles to Freedom is late to be translated into English (it was published in French in 2012). I say ironically because the United States has had so much involvement with North and South Korea over the last 60+ years. This translation is very good (I teach Spanish and I know how hard it can be to make foreign text sound smooth in a different language). The text flows easily and makes it sound like Eunsun Kim is sitting with you telling her story in everyday, conversational language over a cup of tea.

Last two lines of the book: "The Kim dynasty has so successfully isolated my country that it would be easy for the rest of the world to forget about us. If my memoir can even play a small part in raising global awareness about our suffering and about the tragedies taking place at the hands of this regime, then all that I have endured will not have been in vain."

It can be purchased at Amazon here:  A Thousand Miles to Freedom: My Escape from North Korea

I rate this book 5 stars out of 5.

Rights at Risk: The Limits of Liberty in America by David K. Shipler

Highly Recommended

Published by Alfred A. Knopf in 2012

Last summer I read David K.Shipler's first book on this topic, The Rights of the People: How Our Search for Safety Invades Our Liberties (see my review by clicking here) and I found it to be the most profound book I read that summer and maybe all year. I began my review of that book with this thought:

"I always tell people that the traditional left-right continuum used to describe someone's politics is so inaccurate as to be useless. Really, what is the difference between an aging hippie living on a hill somewhere  raising some dope for personal use and telling the government to get out of his business and a Barry Goldwater-type conservative (like me) living by himself on a hill somewhere that tells the government to get its nose out of his business? Some dope. Otherwise, they are both determined advocates of civil liberties - keep out of my business if it is not hurting anyone else."

When I read the first book I was expecting to get a snoot full of political commentary that I disagreed with from a New York Times reporter with a left-wing agenda. To be blunt, I was expecting one of those political attack books that Al Franken, Michael Moore, Ann Coulter and David Limbaugh produce with regularity (Well, Al Franken is busy being a Senator now so I suppose he has stopped). Instead, I found the book to be politically balanced and quite remarkable. This book is just as remarkable, if a little less balanced by the inclusion of a half-dozen snide comments that should have been edited out, in my opinion.

Rights at Risk focuses on multiple topics but here are the chapter titles (with descriptions): Torture and Torment (being abused while being investigated), Confessing Falsely (how some people, especially young people and the mentally impaired, are tricked into confessions), The Assistance of Counsel (the defense side of the trial), The Tilted Playing Field (the prosecution side of the trial), Below the Law (the lack of rights of immigrants, legal and illegal), Silence and Its Opposite (freedom of speech in turbulent times), A Redress of Grievances (spying on protesters, "free speech zones") and Inside the Schoolhouse Gate (freedoms of students and teachers).

Torture and Torment includes a discussion of jailhouse torture such as physically abusing suspects and CIA torture. It demonstrates that the famed water-boarding sessions have poisoned several other cases. The good news in the cases of the police abuse is that the system, in the cases Shipler cited, mostly worked to flush out the bad cops. Mostly, but not always. A weaker part of Shipler's argument comes from the discussion of people wanted for trial in America but arrested in foreign countries. He argues, correctly, that many countries do not offer any protection for defendants. But, his arguments are not as tight here and led me to the inevitable conclusion that anyone who confesses to a crime in a foreign country can just claim that they were tortured into confessing and the confession should be dropped. Arrested in Luxembourg? Claim torture and post-traumatic stress disorder. The chapter entitled Confessing Falsely is quite interesting. Shipler discusses the various training methods police learn on how to question suspects and how those very methods can lead to false arrest and false trials and leave the real criminals out on the streets. He also writes about instances in which the rights of the accused were short-circuited in order to facilitate a confession. He includes a recommendations for how to address these problems, including the videotaping of all interrogations and prohibiting the questioning of children without the presence of his or lawyer or a parent.

You know the old adage, "You get what you pay for?" Well, the chapter The Assistance of Counsel was disturbing because it proves it. Public defenders in areas that have professional public defender offices are overwhelmed. In states and locales that have court-appointed public defenders from the general ranks of area defense attorneys there are serious issues of quality. Shipler encountered judges that admit to appointing certain defense attorneys over and over because they don't fuss much in court. Others appoint lots and lots of cases to their political contributors. Those attorneys make a good living on the sheer volume of these cases. But, appointing cases based on these criteria is not a solid foundation for justice. On top of that, court-appointed defenders have almost no budget for experts and in most cases, there are no funds available for appeals. It really is stacked against poor defendants.

The Tilted Playing Field looks at all of the tools the government has to coerce cooperation, including threats of deportation, violation of probation, plea bargaining and asset forfeiture. I was disturbed by the practice of sentencing based on parts of the case that were dismissed. For example, if you have a gun illegally and are brought up on charges of trafficking drugs and are found not guilty of the drug charge, some courts will still sentence you more severely for the gun charge because of the drug charge, that you were acquitted of.

Below the Law discusses the status of legal and illegal immigrants in the justice system. To be blunt, they don't have much status. I was especially disturbed to discover that a great number of immigration judges have no particular experience in immigration law except for a single short class with an online quiz taken the next day (page 144). This makes for poor justice when the judge is not an expert. Would you go to probate court with a judge who know next to nothing about wills? The case of the political refugee who was arrested for not having his papers and was on the deportation list is especially disturbing. Luckily, the refugee learned from other detainees that he did not need papers as a refugee. He told his attorney who educated both the prosecutor and the judge on this legal point. They were directed to a page on their own website that explained the law. (pages 184-5)

The chapter Redress of Grievances demonstrates that we spend an awful lot of time spying on groups that exercise their right to protest. While most of these groups would be silly to spy on, Shipler seems that there would never be a need to look at any of these groups at all. I don't know where the line is, but it is clear that some law enforcement groups are over-zealous and act spitefully towards protesters. For example, the Maryland State Police surveilled an anti-death penalty group and listed some of its members in an anti-terrorism database despite having no evidence of a crime. (page 229) In at least one case, Shipler does hurt his own argument. He notes the famed WTO riots in Seattle in 1999 (nicknamed the "Battle in Seattle" by some) one page and argues that the Washington, D.C, police had no reason to be worried about planned demonstrations against World Bank and the IMF meetings six months later. (pages 234-236) Shipler ends the chapter with a long discussion on flag-burning, which has been ruled legal for a long time and is still news to some and the Westboro Baptist Church protesters.

Inside the Schoolhouse Gate was the most interesting chapter for me because I am a teacher. It is a maxim that students have the right to express political opinions. But, since attendance at school is compulsory, it is also a maxim that you have the right to attend school and not be harassed. For example, is a Malcolm X t-shirt a threat to white students? Is a Hank Williams, Jr. t-shirt with a Confederate flag on it a threat to black students? Are both, or neither, disruptive to school so that teaching becomes difficult? Can high school newspapers be censored by their schools? (page 274, 278-9) Even worse, in my mind are the speech codes  at universities and designated "free speech zones," especially on public university campuses. Silly me, I thought the entire country was a free speech zone. I suppose we don't want students to discover new and different thoughts while being educated...

Shipler concludes with this thought: "If every American school taught the Bill of Rights in a clear and compelling way, if every child knew the fundamental rules that guide the relationships between the individual and the state, then every citizen would eventually feel the reflexive need to resist every violation. We had better begin now, for rights that are not invoked are eventually abandoned."

As a social studies teacher, I wholeheartedly agree and I worry because we are cutting those very classes across the country in order to make sure we pass the math and English standardized tests. The school I taught in last year cut 20% of the social studies classes in the third 9 weeks in order to provide more time for  English practice (language arts stuff, not English for non-English speakers) with a prescribed, decidedly non-social studies curriculum. I wonder what was cut?

I rate this book 5 stars out of 5.

This book can be found on Amazon.com here: Rights at Risk.

Reviewed on July 13, 2012.

Marked for Death: Islam's War Against the West and Me by Geert Wilders

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Published in May of 2012 by Regnery Publishing

Geert Wilders is a member of the Dutch Parliament and the the leader of the third largest political party in the Netherlands, but he is forced to live his life under protection. Since 2004 he has to have armed protection every day, everywhere he goes because of multiple death threats from extremist Muslims. His crime? He dared to take the threats to Western freedom seriously when, in 2004, Muslims killed Theo Van Gogh (a filmmaker whose film Submission criticized the treatment of Muslim women. Van Gogh was stabbed multiple times and a note was stuck to his body with a knife explaining why Van Gogh was murdered) Muslims rioted over the famed Muhammad cartoons in 2005, when they threatened to kill politicians who question why there are "no-go" zones that have basically been ceded to Muslims.

Wilders believes that Islam is more than a religion, it is a totalitarian political ideology that has no tolerance of dissent and is more than willing to use the West's multicultural/pluralistic ways to infiltrate European countries, gain control of the instruments of government and then use those tools to silence critics of Islam.

Wilders tells his personal story and how he arrived at his conclusions. He is especially afraid of a "Trojan Horse" plan to spread Islam - the very plan that Muhammad used in the city of Medina. Move in as friendly immigrants and then, over time, take control of the government and enforce your vision on everyone else.

Geert Wilders

Marked for Death is an extremely well-written book - as a foreign language teacher I was impressed by Wilders' knowledge of English and his repertoire of quotes from English language speakers to make his arguments. Quotes abound from Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, John Kennedy and Ronald Reagan - all making the point that a struggle with Islam has not been a recent thing and, more importantly, free speech is not something you give up because someone might be offended.

In the end, that is Wilders' most important point - free speech is the basis of all of our other rights and it cannot be limited by political correctness or by genuine outrage. Marked for Death was written to be a poke in the eye to those who have forced him to live under constant protection and as a warning. As he writes on page 3:

"For asserting our rights to say what we really think...we have been hounded by Muslims seeking to make an example of us. Offend us, they are saying to the world, and you will end up in hiding like Wilders, attacked like Westergaard, or dead like Van Gogh."

No matter whether you agree with Wilders or not (and I do not on some things), the man should certainly be free to speak his mind without fear - otherwise what's the point, really?

I rate this book 5 stars out of 5.

This book can be found on Amazon.com here: Marked for Death: Islam's War Against the West and Me by Geert Wilders.

Reviewed on June 8, 2012.

Toward the Light of Liberty: The Struggles for Freedom and Rights That Made the Modern Western World by A.C. Grayling

Strong, flawed, important work with a valuable, urgent message

Published in 2007 by Walker and Company
288 pages.

 I had to pick up this book as soon as I stumbled upon it. One of the themes in my history classes is the expansion of freedom in the West following the same general timeline that Grayling follows. Who doesn't like to have his own thoughts echoed by a major English philosopher?

Strengths:

I do recommend this book - it is a readable, admirable attempt at covering a vast, important topic. Grayling covers John Locke especially well (although he disposes with the views of Hobbes rather quickly by asserting that people are not necessarily nasty and brutal with one another).

Grayling's most important message is quite simple: the rights that we have are the product of a lot of time and a lot of struggles and they should be cherished and well-guarded. When the reader has completed this book it should be quite clear that this inheritance is too valuable to be squandered.

To his credit, Grayling does not treat Marx and Engels as if they were true prophets. Rather, he successfully counters their arguments and, unlike many academics, expresses no sympathy with their devotees in the USSR - tyranny is tyranny, no matter its political leanings with Mr. Grayling.

Weaknesses:

Grayling has intended this book to be an answer to 19th century English historian Lord Acton's incomplete "History of Liberty" - a work that is friendly to the role of religion in Liberty and Freedom in the West. Grayling is most definitely not agreeable to that point. It is too bad that this bias runs throughout the book. This work is strong in so many ways, but this attitude is over-emphasized

John Locke (1632-1704)

Grayling begins with Martin Luther and the Reformation. The longest argument that Grayling makes is against the uniform power of the Catholic church during those dangerous times, especially the Inquisition. Grayling overplays his hand by painting all religions with the taint of the Inquisition over and over throughout the book. At one point (p. 234) he even argues that religious people are not good citizens because their loyalties are divided between the "secular state" and their religion. Too my mind, his argument comes dangerously close to swinging to becoming zealous opposite of the Inquisition - an anti-religious inquisition, if you will.

The book gets bogged down for about 20 pages in a detailed look at the labor movement in England in the 1800s. I am not quite sure why he focused this intently on reciting this story because it stands in stark contrast to the philosophical and idea-centered writing that fills the rest of the book. My advice - skim and move on to the meatier portions that follow.

Grayling includes photos in the center of the book. Oddly they include photos of Martin Luther King, anti-segregation protestors in both America and South Africa and Algerians being hassled by French troops in the 1950s - these topics are not actually addressed in the book.

A pet peeve - Grayling has lots of end notes - many of them with comments. Why not make them footnotes so the reader does not have to flip to the back so often?

I rate this book 4 stars out of 5.

This book can be found on Amazon.com here: Toward the Light of Liberty: The Struggles for Freedom and Rights that Made the Modern Western World.

Reviewed on January 30, 2008.

Lights Out: Islam, Free Speech and the Twilight of the West by Mark Steyn

Fascinating, entertaining and important

Published in 2009 by Stockade Books.

For those of you who are not aware, Mark Steyn was brought before three courts of Canada's Human Rights Commission for violating the human rights of some Muslim students and the Canadian Islamic Congress. You see, in Canada, your right not to be offended is more important than your right to speak your mind (except in the hypocritical cases Steyn has fun with throughout the book).

What was Steyn's crime? Maclean's magazine printed excerpts from his book America Alone: The End of the World As We Know It. This was a bestseller in America and Canada but if he was found guilty the books would be pulled from all Canadian bookstores and Maclean's would have to be minded by politically correct nanny censors. Steyn is continually amazed that "large numbers of Canadians apparently think there's nothing wrong in subjecting the contents of political magazines to the approval of agents of the state." (p. 4)

Mark Steyn

Steyn details the fight against these three cases. Along the way he generates lots of memorable quotes such as, "I don't want to get off the hook. I want to take the hook and stick it up the collective butt of these thought police." (p. 5)

So, Steyn includes offending comments from the excerpts that brought him to court. He also includes columns that were included as supporting evidence. As a bonus he includes commentary from the complaints and then writes rebuttals. Steyn gleefully quotes author Martin Amis who noted that Steyn's "thoughts and themes are sane and serious - but he writes like a maniac." (p. 106). How very true - Steyn whipsaws back and forth - sometimes darkly sarcastic, sometimes sad, sometimes like a little boy who is glad to point and call names. But, throughout all of it Steyn is right - dead on 100% right. We cannot let the freedom of speech to be compromised, especially not in the name of offending the religious sensibilities of a determined few (my own religious beliefs are assaulted almost daily on sites I visit on the internet, TV and even in my classroom but I hardly am interested in shutting up those who offend me). To quote Steyn again, "What's so bad about disagreement that it needs to be turned into a crime?" (p. 182)

One of the most important books of our troubled times - as a bonus it's a joy to read!

I rate this book 5 stars out of 5.

This book can be found on Amazon.com here: Lights Out: Islam, Free Speech And The Twilight Of The West

Reviewed on January 30, 2010.