Despite extensive research, this book is mainly for aficionados of the weird.
An offbeat investigation of how the source code for conspiracy theories was written long ago.
Charles Fort (1874-1932) is not a household name today, but his influence reaches deep into American life. In the early years of the 20th century, Fort began to collect newspaper articles about odd things or “anomalous reports”—e.g., rains of fish or stones, strange lights in the sky, contact with the dead, etc. Buhs, author of Bigfoot and The Fire Ant Wars, examines how Fort knitted these into a series of books about inexplicable occurrences and their possible meanings. Fort believed that they could explain the real nature of the universe, and he eventually expanded the theory into investigations of how power was really wielded in society. Things are never as they seem, he wrote, and there are worlds behind the world. His work and theories attracted a variety of followers; after his death, an organization called the Fortean Society sought to spread his ideas. For decades, sci-fi writers have drawn on Fortean thinking, and Buhs tracks the many paths of influence, especially involving groups obsessed with UFOs and vanished civilizations. Much of this was harmless quackery, but the rise of malevolent conspiracy theories was more pernicious. The result has been the infiltration of the bizarre and the extreme into civil discourse at every level (see: QAnon.) “Fort and Forteans played their part in the creation of this world,” says Buhs. “They eroded the distinctions between truth and falsity. They launched a thousand conspiracies into the national consciousness.” Unfortunately, the author often breaks the primary narrative with unnecessary detours, making it difficult to follow. Some will enjoy the arcane material, but many will find it too eccentric to keep the pages turning.
Despite extensive research, this book is mainly for aficionados of the weird.Pub Date: June 24, 2024
ISBN: 978-0226831480
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Univ. of Chicago
Review Posted Online: March 15, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2024
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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