Category: Book Review

GoodReads meta-data is 402 pages, rated 3.9 by 827 raters.
Genre: Non-fiction

Verdict: Could not put it down.
The book reads like one of Harris’s historical novels with a cast of characters and skulduggery galore, but it is too incredible to be fiction. Only reality could combine such colossal stupidity, egotistical incompetence, and venomous hypocrisy. In short, it seems like a typical episode of Fox News.
The basics, for those born yesterday, are these. In 1983 there came to light the personal diaries kept for thirty years by one Adolf Hitler. Look him up. It was a sensation and a flock of carrion eaters landed on it to exploit the find.
It all started with an inveterate liar and forger who had eked out a living selling Nazi relics on the black market, since trade in such things was illegal in West Germany. When he could not get the real thing he learned to make replicas. His clients did not seem to notice, or mind if they did notice, so he kept at it. Since trading and possessing such items was illegal the clients did not seek expert opinion or dare to compare notes. Forger also discovered that the objects that commanded the highest prices were those connected personally to Hitler.
He followed the marks, and forged Hitler signatures, early letters, and paintings, a lot of paintings, hundreds. When asked he always said he got the goods from a contact in East Germany, whose name he had to protect because there the penalty for trading in Nazi relics in the DDR was capital.
One day a lowly reporter from the Stern magazine came along. He was a Nazi obsessive, and he bought a few items. Note, though Stern was at the time aligned with the Socialist Party, this reporter was a dreamy fantasist way down the pecking order.
He kept buying from Forger, no questions asked. Then Forger, on the look out for new ways to add value to his small business, broached the prospect of diaries. This was perfect for Fantasist. He tried to interest the editors of Stern in buying the diaries but they rejected them as preposterous and irrelevant. There were many previous examples of forged material from that era, and to their minds this was another pathetic example of that. They knew Fantastist for what he was and left it at that.
Fantastist did not give up easily. In time he by-passed the editors and made contact with the management of Stern. Stern was owned by a holding company which in turn was a subsidiary of the leviathan Bertelsmann corporation. Fantastist convinced Herr Decisivie, the chairman of the board, that this was the scoop of the century. To make it a scoop everything had to be kept secret. So Decisive consulted no one and gave Fantastist a blank cheque to get the diaries: No questions asked.
Fantastist went back to Forger and created a demand for diaries. Forger set to work at his usual standard. He bought ruled A4 school books and used the public records of Hitler’s day-to-day activities to add jottings in Gothic script as diary entries. Over two years he produced 50,000 words spread over fifty A4 booklets. Fantastist spent the blank cheque on them, though he skimmed off as much as 75% for himself of millions. (When Forger later learned of this surtax he readily spilled beans on Fantastist.)
At Stern secrecy remained the watchword. To get some verification very limited graphology tests were done but they were so constrained as to prove nothing, or everything to those who wanted to believe. The Fantastist believed. Herr Decisive was sure of this own genius.
Negotiations with international buyers like News Limited in the UK and Newsweek in the USA brought more people into the secret and doubts were expressed, but dismissed by Fantastist and Decisive as petty jealousies. Decisive had no interest in disproof.
Then Decisive ordered the Stern editors, who had to this point known nothing about this matter, to prepare a special issue. They objected, asking for checks to be made (which would perforce reveal the secret), but were overruled. The international buyers wanted verification but were stalled. They, too, were blinded by the scoop and did not press the matter. At each stage everyone seems to have assumed someone else had verified the diaries. Or so they said in hindsight.
Even as the presses rolled out 75,000 copies of a special, large issue of Stern, a press conference announced the find to the world. It was a fiasco. Faced with a roomful of skeptical journalists some of whom brought along historians from all over the world, the house of cards collapsed. Hugh Trevor-Roper who had authenticated the diaries made a fool of himself, and spent years afterward trying to rewrite this history at least to his own satisfaction. The utterly cynical David Irving played both sides against his bank overdraft and won the lottery that night.
News Limited and Newsweek sold unprecedented numbers of their publications and counted that a commercial success, even while switching to reporting on the hoax that they had generated.
In West Germany there was a police investigation that laid it all bare, sending the little fry: Forger and Fantastist to the slammer – they were held for a time in the same prison specially built for members of the murdering Red Army Faction.
Stern, the Sunday Times, and Newsweek had to show that they took it seriously and scapegoats had to be sacrificed to maintain public confidence in the integrity of the mastheads. [Pause to smell the hypocrisy.]
In each case management, circling the wagons, agreed the scapegoats had to come from down the food chain. Where better than the editors who at each publication had resisted the story until ordered by management to run it. Yet they were the ones fired. ‘They had not resisted enough,’ declared management!
Herr Decisive went on to become the CEO of Dornier Aircraft Corporation. Never ride in a Dornier product is one conclusion to reach from this story. Rupert Murdoch who gave the order to the editor of Sunday Times of London to publish it, over the editor’s objections, was only too happy to fire the editor and blame him for everything while basking in his own genius for the brief circulation increase. The longterm damage to the integrity of journalism bothered no one.
Not even Scott Adams in Dilbert could have concocted a better example of McKinsey management. Credit flows up the corporate chain, and blame flows down.
Harris’s telling is absolutely deadpan. The story is so unbelievable it does not need embellishment.

Good Reads meta-data is 269 pages rated 3.9 by 16 litizens.
Genre: Non-fiction.

Verdict: A golden oldie.
A charming memoir of meetings with the lions of the British academic establishment at a time when the BBC gave them air time, parliamentarians asked them for audiences, and newspapers welcomed their words. The charm is in Mehta and not his interlocutors.
The subtitle is ‘Encounters with British Intellectuals,’ however all but two of his respondents were ensconced in academia. Few seemed troubled by teaching duties.
The book divides, more or less, into two parts. The first is a series of interviews with British philosophers like A. J. Ayer, Peter Strawson, and their ilk. The second is a parallel series of interviews with British historians, like Arnold Toynbee, A. J. P. Taylor, and the egregious Hugh Trevor-Roper (who went from strength to strength on ever so little), though he is rivalled by E.H. Carr for hubris.
It was indeed a small world since three-quarters of the beasts were in the Oxford zoo, with the remainder, bar a couple, in its Cambridge annex. Small, yes, and all the more venomous for it. The back-biting, the undermining swim beneath surface of the scathing public reviews of each others’ works and days. The pages of ‘Encounter,’ the ‘Listener,’ and the ‘Times’ positively bristled with their poisoned barbs.
It was all so monumentally unimportant that today it is all but forgotten, and a good thing, too. Yet the Platonic dialogues that they despised are still studied.
I loved the story of Hughie writing a long and venomous review of one of Taylor’s books and publishing it with much fanfare in ‘Encounter,’ and then sitting back in the expectation of a rejoinder from Taylor that he could reply to in another vituperative essay in ‘Encounter.’ Taylor did not bother to reply. What a deflation that much have been, like not making Richard Nixon’s Enemies List, despite all efforts!
Among the philosophers the major issue of interest to the laity is the conundrum of free will versus determinism, or in social sciencese: structure versus agency. Among the historians the parallel divide is between meaningful and accidental events.
Amid the nonsense and petty bickering made out to be something much more, there are many telling shafts. I liked historian Herbert Butterfield’s conviction that in teaching history (and political science) one is teaching future officials, diplomats, traders, tariff managers, entrepreneurs, bureaucrats, and so one must equip them to respond to the challenges they will face outside the classroom. Predictably when he uttered this view of academic responsibility in a public lecture he called down the wraith of the gowned gods upon his head who went on about their art for their art’s sake. As if. Few were troubled by teaching duties since they had very few.
Mehta’s ever so oblique and sly digs at his prestigious prey are desiccated. While much of their posturing is, well, posturing, it is well to remember that R. M. Hare’s arid ‘The Language of Morals’ (1951) was drafted while he was in a Japanese Prisoner of War camp in Malaya. However, few of his contemporaries can lay claim to such courageous conviction.
The title is one of the bon mots Ludwig Wittgenstein tossed off, namely, that the task of philosophy was to lead the fly (us) out of the fly bottle (?). Every remark by this sage is totemic to acolytes, so there are many disputed interpretations of this aside, which Ludi no doubt forgot as soon as he said it.
Here is a sampler of the dross and the ore.
Richard Hare dismissed Continental philosophy holus-bolus opining that philosophy can only be taught by the tutorial method (51). Since that method was only used at Oxford and Cambridge it followed only graduates of those universities can be philosophers. He seemed to accept that conclusion when Mehta put it back to him. Since it has only been used there for a short time, there were no philosophers before that. Got it? Ergo Plato, Hegel, Sartre, Schlick, Rawls, and so on are not philosophers.
Wittgenstein thought of himself as a living philosophical problem (82). Amen. Wittgenstein thought only of himself full stop.
J. L. Austin’s linguistic philosophy spread throughout the dominions and America, but not in England because Austin admitted too students from those places (85) [not on its merits], said one don in a huff. It is certainly true that it dominated the curriculum in my undergraduate and graduate education.
Mehta asked E. H. Carr to name historians he admired. ‘None’ was his reply (133). Well, one might suppose there was one, ‘E. H. Carr’ by name.
Taylor wrote, with prescience, of a world where emotions have replaced reason and hysteria has become meritorious (177). He foretold Fox News and President Tiny.
Another bon mot from Taylor: Perfection is always sterile (184). That might be the motto of utopia.
This traipsing through the groves comes to an abrupt stop. But then how could it end. Mehta adds a page and half at the end, drawing no conclusions. These essays were commissioned by the New Yorker and do not quite make a book. What Mehta does not tell the reader is that he became blind in India at four years old. There are a dozen or so of his titles on Amazon.
I read this on paper in the Forgotten Books reprint as picture above. That edition is not recommended because of missing text and omitted pages. I think I may have read some of it in graduate school as relief from analytic and linguistic philosophy.
By coincidence I started to read Robert Harris’s ‘Selling Hitler: The Story of the Hitler Diaries’ where Hugh Trevor-Roper again figures. Egregious to the last. The excuses are many and the facts are immutable.

Good Reads meta-data is 432 pages, rated 4.2 by 430 litizens.

Verdict: All hail.
Gaius Petreuis Ruso, Roman legionnaire retired, and his wife Tilla, tribal Britain, are at it again. No, not that. They uproot themselves from the farm in the North of Britain, where Ruso is trying to fit in with the Britains, though he draws the line at tree hugging and singing to carrots, when his old army buddy sends for help. Ruso is only too glad to have an excuse to leave the farm.
Tilla, as usual surprises him, by declaring that she will go along, too, with their infant daughter, nursemaid, hapless slave Eisco, and the exhausted messenger Albanus. This troupe sets off down river, over hill, pass dale, and through mud, through more mud — this is after all England — to arrive at Bath, well it must be but it is not named in the book. Instead of the heroic mercy dash Ruso had imagined, it is a slow plod.
Someone has murdered Serena, buddy Valens’s estranged wife, and he is about to be tried for the crime. He says he is innocent, but Valens has had so little experience in the telling the truth that Ruso is not quite sure whether to believe him. Serena’s father demands justice, and he has lots of large friends who also once served in the legions to back up his call. By the time Ruso and company arrive, Valens is pretty well convicted.
But Ruso never knows when to quit and he asks questions to find that the local priests at the baths squirm this way and that. A trial they do not want. Too public. Too open. But why are they so worried? What are they hiding? How can they hide anything when bathing?
As usual those who know do not say, and those who do not know will not shut up. Sounds like a committee of PhDs at it.
Ruso stumbles around irritating everyone, and exhausting himself. Tilla adds her efforts with little success. There is a large cast of red herrings for each of them to consider. During the consideration we learn a lot about life in Roman Britain, and how holy baths work, including some water engineering. Too bad the British lost the knowledge of bathing when the Romans left.
This is the eighth title in the series and it maintains the standard of excellence. Ruso is so ordinary and Tilla tries so hard. Together they are charming and refreshing compared to the leads in many historical krimis.

Good Reads meta-data is 224 pages, rated 4.1 by 58201 litizens.

Verdict: all trip, no arrival. Life’s like that.
An edifying zip around the universe and back. It consists of a series of essays originally published in popular magazines tied together. It works well. The exposition is direct and simple with everyday imagery. I particularly liked the picture of two meltingly hot marshmallows colliding at near light speed. SPLAT, and there we have another star system.
Having no background in the subject, and I would not count the physics I did in college and neither would my teachers, Messers Throckmorton and Bonar, but then I may remember them better than they remember me.* I could not assimilate much of it with no framework or vocabulary in mind.
The single most important thing I can retain from the book is the continuity of matter in the universe. Start dust takes many forms but there is nothing new under any sun.

Tyson finds this continuity and the scale of the universe(s) exhilarating while other might find it intimidating or belittling. He communicates the wonder of it all very well, as do the pictures from the Hubble telescope as above.
The chapters are short, the technical jargon is absent, the explanations are concrete. For a few minutes the reader understands quarks (without Richard Benjamin), pulsars, Big Bangs, black holes, quantum mechanics, string theory, and the carbon in a hamburger. Beat that. But easy come, easy go.
The man can turn a phrase, as in:
‘The good thing about science is that it’s true whether or not you believe in it.’ A truth that anti-vaxxers, flat earthers, climate change deniers, and others will rediscover in time.
There are more than 7000 reviews on Good Reads. Have a look there. Does Tyson keep a scrapbook of such reviews? Do it, Neil!
I was not in a hurry but a short book was the order of the day.
When a conclave of science deniers gets together, Tyson can sometimes be found across the street in another hotel at a podium daring them to bring out their dead arguments. That’s how I came across him the first time, in just such a situation in Baltimore. Some mob of anti-science flat earthers were in one hotel and he pitched up across the street in another to spruik science at them.
Yes, I know he calls himself Neil de Grasse Tyson, but I generally only allow two names to a customer.
* [Censored.]

Like millions of others, Hadley Cantril tuned into CBS radio and listened to the Mercury Theatre of the Air’s ‘War of the Worlds’ on Halloween 1938. The next morning he was surprised to read of the panic that the broadcast had precipitated.

He went to work to analyse this natural experiment. There must be quite a backstory about how he pulled it together so quickly but he did. He started the Princeton Radio Research Project with this initial study.

Because of the reaction on the night, others were also mobilised, and Cantril identified them and cooperated. Because of the public reaction the CBS had committed Roper and Gallup to do surveys. In addition, at least one government agency also did a study. To this mix, Cantril added about 150 interviews with listeners, and a national mail survey of about 1000. He also mailed a questionnaire to the managers of radio station to ask about local reaction. From this combination of data, the book offers some quantitative analysis leavened with case studies.

Cantril’s hope was to explain why the panic occurred. (Many a PhD since has disputed the definition of panic.)

That is, why did some people react in panic to the broadcast, while others did not. What distinguished the former from the latter. He tried demographic explanations, i.e., gender, age, education, social status. He tried geographic explanations. Were those closest to the fictitious New Jersey site more likely to flee their homes? He also looked for psychological factors in the readiness to believe.

The analysis is detailed but the exposition is clear. He found several types who were ready to believe the worst. It was this ‘readiness to believe’ that interested him as a psychologist.

For this reader the social and political contexts have much purchase. After the Spanish Flu epidemic, after the Great Depression, after the Dust Bowl, after the Munich crisis of the previous month, the times were apocalyptic. Bulletins on the radio, newsreels at movies, newspapers, all speculated on a new and terrible war with ever more incredible weapons. They were full of Nazi air armadas, the Italian use of poison gas in Ethiopia, and Japanese atrocities in China. What next?

With all this background someone who tuned into this broadcast and heard of strange weapons and poison gas in New Jersey might fill in the rest.

And all of those who were disturbed by the broadcast were invariably those who missed the introduction and also missed the station break in the middle. They either tuned in late or were not listening to the introduction. By the station break they were already alarmed and again missed it or misunderstood its comforting normality. These listeners received more than was transmitted.

For Cantril the most interesting group were those who tuned in late and heard of the catastrophe and did not panic, but rather did reality checks and concluded there was nothing to fear. They checked by reading the newspaper radio listings, by looking out the window, by going next door to speak to a neighbour, by telephoning the fire service, and so on. Of course, some who spoke to others in person or on the telephone found them in a panic and that contagion had an effect.

But then again, was an invasion of New Jersey anymore far fetched than a Japanese attack on Hawaii, which already in the planning in Tokyo to be followed by balloons released at sea to drift over the northwestern states and explode. Might not the meteor have been a disguised German missile? What became the V-rockets were already a gleam in the eye of some.

Older, more educated, and higher socio-economic status individuals were associated with reality checking but not decisively so. Some older, educated, and wealthy people were millenarians who believed it was god’s judgment on the evil ways of New Jersey. Well I did have a disastrous stay in a hotel — a Hilton at that — in New Jersey once, proving the unexpected happens there.
By the way, Cantril said reality checking was widespread among people who had ‘survived advanced schooling’ (location 1753 on the Kindle edition). Loved the phrasing.

Aside, a few listeners were Sy Fyians and they had no trouble either in recognising the genre or even the specific title. Reading does broaden the mind.

Later Cantril worked for the Nelson Rockefeller’s Office of Inter-America Affairs to gauge public opinion in Latin America during the early years of World War II and to combat Nazi propaganda there. He also conducted a small, clandestine project interviewing Vichy officials in Morocco in 1942. The conclusions of that latter study influenced Allied tactics in Operation Torch.

It has also been published as ‘Planet Plane’ and ‘The Space Machine’ under the name John Beynon.
Genre: Sy Fy
GoodReads meta-data is 189 pages rated 3.23 by 525 litizens.

Verdict: What a relief, it has punctuation.
In far distant 1981 there have been Moon orbits but no landings. Why bother, there is nothing there but moon rocks. George Soros has put up millions as a prize for the first flight to and from Mars. Some have tried and failed. Pundits are sure spaceflight is impossible, and publish their opinions as facts on Faux News where Soros is likened to satan since both words start with ’S.’ It was ever thus.
Dale Curtance of the Boeing family builds a rocket in his backyard to win the prize. He is motivated by glory since he already has enough money to build as many rockets as he would like.
Dale is every director’s leading man, fearless, chiseled chin, handsome, genial, sexist, and quick with a shooting iron. He assembles a crew. There is an ageing doctor, an annoying journalist, a navigator who has never been out in space before, and an engineer who is permanently angry, and a stowaway they soon learn. What a carefully picked crew! The doctor will study the flora and fauna. The journalist will keep a factual log. (Fiction to be sure.) The navigator does nothing. The engineer sulks. Dale is fully occupied with chin maintenance. Then the Gloria Mundi blasts off for three-month trip to Mars where they will land and from which they hope to return.
The stowaway is Joan who has come to help. Help? How? By translating Martian. Huh? It seems is a six-legged machine showed up at her father’s farm and she learned Martian from it. Well, so she asserts since no else but Joan and Dad saw the contraption. Those two were sure it was not of this world. That it was intelligent. That….. It did not communicate and yet it did. So goes the circle. Then it vaporised itself. (If only Faux News would do that.) They were convinced it is/was an ambassador from Mars. Having studied the markings on the machine, Joan now feels qualified to translate from Martian. She qualifies for President Tiny’s cabinet with that grasp of facts.
The 1930s sexism is piled on without remorse. Joan is belittled, assaulted, patronised, insulted, and still expected to clean the coffee cups. In fact, this oppression is so detailed, a reader might begin to suspect Wyndham of irony. Or is that too long a reach? Hmmm. See below.
Mid-flight there is a seminar on the relationship between man and machine, and that is man, not woman. It is superficial, vague, and unfocussed enough to be one of those panel discussions on the ABC. They never once refer to the spaceship in which they ride as a machine. Indeed, there is no reason for them to blast off if this is all they have to talk about. Though it becomes relevant, sorta when they get to Mars.
Mars is almost entirely populated by AI machines because the human-like Martians are dying off. There is a declining birth rate, no doubt due to Hillary Clinton, and ever lower resistance to disease, thanks to the anti-vaxxers among them. The remaining Martians see the continuation of the machines as the natural order of evolution and accept it. One tries to explain this attitude to an Earthling, who goes all Luddite and chews an Opal card. This is the most interesting part of the book, but Wyndham had not yet hit his stride and it is talky, talky, and talky. In it, however, Joan is proven right about much for which earlier she was ridiculed by the blokes. That is why I wondered if there was irony in the way the misogyny was laid on. (Albeit there are loose ends, i.e., I never did figure out who sent the machine to Joan’s farm.)
John Wyndham Parkes Lucas Beynon Harris

was the son of a barrister. After trying a number of careers, including farming, lawyering, and advertising, he started writing short stories in 1925. This book was fifteen years before ‘Day of the Triffads’ (1951) and nearly twenty years before ‘The Midwich Cuckoos’ (1957), which became the film ‘The Village of the Damned’ (1960). In these he certainly hit his stride. Each is unique and unforgettable.

GoodReads meta-data is 292 pages, rated 3.7 by a paltry 9 litizens.
Genre: Non-Fiction

Verdict: All hail, Nerdboy!
The title says it all. Thomas Miller has compiled, annotated, watched, summarised, and commented on every movie (in the English-speaking world and more) that features Mars and some that do not and others that should. He includes cartoons, animations, documentaries, shorts, serials, and features. Did I say comprehensive? Comprehensive.
Miller’s telling is personal and there are asides and tangents but they, too, add to the overall impression of our fascination with Mars and the way it is manifested in art and life, including his own life. He climbed trees as a boy, looked at the stars, marvelled at stories of spaceflight, and became determined to work for NASA, and did. However, on with the show….
I was surprised at the long list of movies included. Many of the feature length fictions were familiar, but there were surprises even so. There is a chronological list at the end. The chapters are thematic: voyages to Mars, invasions from Mars, life and living on Mars…… But strangely nothing on Mars Bars.

It was a shock to find out how many versions there have been of H. G. Wells’s ‘War of the Worlds’ after the 1953 inaugural. I have lost count but typing that title in the IMDb will yield quite a harvest of literal remakes, and then there are those with slightly altered titles, and still others with different titles but the same storyline.
Just as B movies used to be turned out in ten days or less to capitalise on the success of A movies, so today made for television, steaming, or DVD movies are produced as clones. And just as some B movies are far better for being simpler and more direct than the bloated A movies they imitate so some of the straight to DVD movies are better than the big ego productions of Hollywood.
Consciously the author’s scope seems mainly the USA. There are few references to England, apart from H. G. Wells as above, and less still to films originating in other parts of the world. There is no mention of the Mars mission portrayed in ‘Murder in Space’ (1985) from Canada. It may be that the paucity represents reality and if so, that itself might have borne comment. Why are Americans more fascinated with Mars than others.
Miller ridicules many critics who pan movies. His suspicion is that many critics have to earn their spurs by being negative, and so will deride a movie on flimsy ground. And once a major critic does this, the herd follows in the tracks of the bigger beast. Really? Would self-respecting professional film critics for such prestigious mastheads as the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Cleveland Plain Dealer, Colliers, and so on be that lazy, arrogant, and stupid. Really!
Can there be evidence for such cartels? Miller lists in chronological order nearly word-for-word repetitions in reviews from dozens of critics, one repeating the other, it would seem, unless there is a mighty busy god of serendipity. He even shows how mistakes in the first major review, say a typo in a character name, are reiterated in the flock that follows. Amen, Brother Thomas, lay on the wood.
What is surprising are the times – two are documented in these pages – when a producer dams his own film as it goes on release. This damnation may be explicit or implicit, and perhaps represents some corporate pathology being played out in public. Yes, dear viewer, even the snow white Disney Corporation has been known to denigrate its own product.
Less informative is Miller’s fascination with the opening credits of movies. He cannot fathom why critics do not comment on the scene-setting effect of opening credits, citing some examples of very effective opening credits, like those of the 1953 ‘War of the Worlds’ and some very ineffective ones. Point taken. He then repeats the exercise. He then refers to it again, and again. And reverts to it at the end. I believe him when he says he sometimes puts in a DVD and watches only the opening credits before moving on to something else. I also believe him when he says his wife finds that annoying.

Did I say Nerdboy above, or what.
Another of his pet peeves which gets ground into the eyeballs by repetition is the lag in communication back and forth between Mars and Earth. He nails this of course, but then pounds it in and in and in. Yet at the same time he waxes lyrical about a completely inaccurate and anti-scientific account of Mars, including sunbathing, of ‘Robinson Crusoe on Mars’ (1964), discussed elsewhere on this blog. Instantaneous interplanetary communication will condemn a movie to the sin bin in his eyes, but sunbathing on Mars with a monkey will not. Go figure.

GoodReads meta-data is 480 pages, rated 4.17 by 107 litizens.
Genre: Non-Fiction.

Verdict: Only for the cognoscenti.
The Wiener Kreis was one of the engines of Twentieth Century science, including philosophy and mathematics. It began as a loose discussion group and evolved into a more tightly knit and organised group with satellites. The Kreis – Circle – waxed and waned with the circumstances and fortunes of its members until reality kicked in the door in 1938.
Those associated with it comprised a Who’s Who of intellect, e.g., Albert Einstein, Kurt Gödel, Hans Reichenbach, Carl Hempel, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Otto Neurath, Rudolf Carnap, Richard von Mises, Karl Menger, Moritz Schlick, Ernst Mach, and more. Chaps all if it has to be said. Bertrand Russell and other English-speaking intellectuals beat a path to its door. As a whole the Kreis published monographs and the journal ‘Erkenntnis’ (Knowledge). Springer continues to publish it to this day.
Its members together offered logical empiricism though many preferred to say logical positivism, because the empiricism was made of air. It was the big bang that created analytic philosophy that dominated English-speaking philosophy in the Twentieth Century. Its exemplars include A. J. Ayer, Hans Kelsen, Karl Popper, Willard Quine, Frank Ramsay, and Lord Russell himself and all who followed his star.
They were united in a holus bolus rejection of metaphysics and often suspected one another of just that tendency. Some of the descriptions of seminars sound rather like Communist Party cell self-criticism sessions. Of course, there were many intellectual differences among the members. This book also gives weight to their personal and social similarities and differences. Many were Jewish and that made life increasing difficult for them and those around them in Mitteleuropa.
Many of these folk were oddballs, indeed, but the Emperor of Strange had to be Ludwig Wittgenstein who has sometimes been worshipped as a saint in philosophy and at other time derogated as the selfish malcontent that he was. Whoops, my objectivity slipped on that one.

Heir to a vast fortune, he lived like a vagrant. Some find that admirable. He was perhaps born to be a stylite. (Look it up.) He did not use the fortune to any good purpose and in time much of it was seized by the Naziis for their purposes. Even so he always had money available though he seldom spent it.
When acolytes appealed to him for financial help, he dismissed them on the ground that poverty was ennobling. Thanks, Ludi, they all said with a smile. Some of these appeals came from very desperate people, sometimes Jews who had been his students, in the 1930s. There is no record that he ever did anything to help another person. This saint attended only his own soul. He also managed to ruin the careers of more than one acolyte, but that is too complicated to explain here.
The times were indeed demented as illustrated in the case of one of the more sober and sane members, Moritz Schlick, who ran the show for years. A disaffected student blamed Schlick for all his woes and festered on this belief for years, sending him threatening letters, stalking him, accosting him on the street. The forbearing Schlick endured this burden for some time until finally he reported it to the police. Once the police became involved the student blamed Schlick even more for his troubles.
Now get this. The student got a gun and tried to shoot Schlick. He bungled it and was arrested, founded insane, and locked up….for eighteen months when he was released. Got another gun, and tried again. Another bungle. Arrested again. Locked up again. Released again. Got another gun, and third time successful. If that reads like a bad plot, sit down, because it gets worse.
The murderer was tried and sentenced but by this time time no one cared. He served a few years in a prison and then was released whereupon he became an ardent Nazi and later served as a guard in a death camp for Jews. After the war he was whitewashed, as were so many Austrians. In Germany a German with that record would have been barred from public service. Not so in Austria. (Indeed some Germans relocated to Austria because of that difference.)
He became a post-war bureaucrat, prospered, and retired on a state pension. When a biographer of Schlick wrote that he had been murdered by a deranged student without giving his name, the murderer sued for libel and won. It sound like something that Fox News would do today. The dead victim became of the villain and the villain became the victim!
One of the most attractive figures in the constellation of the Vienna Circle was Otto Neurath, and we pay tribute to him most days. Go to a public men’s room and on the door is a pictograph representing a man. Pointing the way to the train station is a picture of a train engine, not a letter T. A sign indicating a traffic turning-lane shows a car over a curved arrow. Look at the pictorial icons on the smartphone screen. These are downwind traces of Big Otto. Having given up on Esperanto, he tried to create a pictograph language with 800 words and a grammar of isotypes. Big Otto worked closely with his wife Marie on this. She was one of the few woman around the Circle. His personal and often repeated motto was ‘We must improvise.’ The more so they did when on the run from the Naziis.
While these thinkers argued to the death over protocol sentences and other esoteria, the world around them caught fire and took some of them completely by surprise, while others had seen it coming and fled. They spread the seed of logical positivism far and wide in the English-speaking world, though at the end of the war Austria did not want them back. Rather it preferred to appoint and promote people like Schlick’s murderer. The example is the effort made to block Kurt Gödel’s return to Vienna. Grotesque but true. Austrian university authorities went to great lengths to insure he did not return to Vienna. Yet every mathematician in the world — apart from those in Austria — regarded him as THE Genius of the ages.
Karl Sigmund near the building where the circlers circled.
I went to Grad School because I wanted to study Plato and Aristotle and their kind. Instead, I got ‘Language, Truth, and Logic’ and other such tomes. Through five years of graduate work I never did read Plato for a seminar. But Ayer, Russell, Popper, Hemple, Quine, and [see above]. Looking back on it, it was a form of discipline, rather like learning a dead language (Latin or Greek), in which form triumphed over content, process over product. It was a time when philosophers and hence we cousins in political theory were trying to be scientific.
The PhD was the hardest thing I have ever done. The coursework was hard. The oral exams were hard. Writing the dissertation was hard. The defence was hard. It was all hard. It’s been downhill since!
I listened to this book on Audible and found it entertaining though some of the expositions were hard to follow. The reading is most accomplished. The difficulty was following the abstract and abstruse thoughts without seeing the words.

Good Reads meta-data is 352 pages, rated 3.71 by 51 litizens.

A tale of corporate ambition set against Montoneros terrorism in Buenos Aires Argentina. Our hero Ernesto Marroné is determined to rise to the top. He studies self-help books, listens to motivational tapes, memorises the nostrums of career guides, has read every book on management there is, always smiles on the outside, and gets to work before anyone else. The only way is up!
Then….the Montoneros kidnap the head of his firm, and they send one of the victim’s fingers to the firm as proof, with their first demand: that a bust of Eva Perón be displayed in each of the firm’s ninety-two offices within ten days! The task of complying with this demand is assigned to the ever-ready, corporate yes-man Marroné.
As he places the order at a plaster works, it is seized by striking workers and he is made captive. He tries to use his ‘How to Win Friends and Influence People’ wisdom to cope. He has a veritable bibliography of such books in his mind and he takes pages from many of them to apply to his situation. The chief title is ‘Don Quixote: The Executive-Errant,’ fitting for this picturesque novel of adventures down the rabbit hole. Some of that is downright hilarious. Some of it is downright depressing. Most of it is just boring.
Even more amusing is his effort to abstract from the titular lady herself insights that can be used in this situation. He mentally composes an ‘Eva Perón on Management’ book starting with how to manage striking workers. The clean-cut, über bourgeoise Ernesto becomes a leader of the strike, and in so doing learns a great deal about Argentina and Argentines that he did not know before. He comes to identify himself with Eva.
As a leader the workers he goes hither and thither in the slums, barrios, and suburbs, and finds his way to Evita City. Yes, in 1947 President Juan Perón had a suburb named for her and its borders drawn to resemble her profile. Illustrated below.

It still exists, though over the years the name has come and gone and profile has been lost. In it all of social services and amenities that Eva campaigned for were to be available to those fortunate enough to live there. Not so any more.
In its way the book is another tribute to the hold that Eva Perón retains over the imagination in Argentina.

GoodReads meta-data is 334 pages, rated 3.7 by 52 litizens
Homework for a proposed trip to Vienna next year.
This is part of series of concise histories.
History is just one thing after another, and in the case of Austria, the things occur here, there, and everywhere.
The book concludes with an outstanding summary of the paradoxes that comprise Austria today. In brief, the greatest Austrian is Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart who was born and raised in Salzburg when it was not part of anything Austrian and he never thought of himself as Austrian. See David Weiss’s ‘The Assassination of Mozart’ (1971) for melodramatic account of just how un-Austrian Mozart was. I read this title long ago.
Austria came to exist as lines on a map at the end of World War I, then it disappeared in the Anschluss (which despite ‘The Sound of Music’ was much desired by most living within those lines), and then reappeared as another set of dotted lines in 1945.
The Austro-Hungarian Empire (AHE hereinafter) developed from the vestigial Holy Roman Empire and the Hapsburg dynasty. The latter at one time included Spain, the Netherlands, and much of central Europe in today’s Austria and Hungary and as far south as Bosnia. The Holy Roman Empire is even harder to pin down. Its emperor was selected by German princelings, though Prussia – the most significant German-speaking land – was not included. Got it so far?
The AHE was polyglot, multi-lingual, scattered, variegated, poly-national, and changeable.

Yet in its core it was German with a considerable and influential cosmopolitan Jewish population in Vienna. When it stumbled into the Great War, it was in fact trying to avoid war, but being inept, instead it precipitated it. Most of the dozen ethnic nationalities in the AHE wanted no part of Vienna’s war and withheld men, material, and food. By 1916 Germany had taken over the AHE in all but name, managing its finances, commanding its armies (in Italy, Romania, and Russia), running the trains, distributing food, and directing the home front. The war was a chemical bath that dissolved the AHE long before the Treaty of Versailles made it official.
The move for German-speaking Austrians to join Germany, even after the latter’s humiliating defeating of 1918, was so widespread and strong that the League of Nations forbade plebiscites on the question of Anschluss. Uniting Austria with Germany would have enlarged and strengthened Germany at a time when the League, i.e., is France, wanted to weaken it. Instead the League fostered the creation of something that have never before existed: Austria, a nation-state.
It consisted of a hinterland and Vienna, and the two had little in common. While Vienna had long depended on Hungarian grain, Czech manufactured goods, and Slovene timber, it had little truck with the new hinterlands attached to it. Some like Salzburg were altogether new additions.
The Depression hit Austria like a hurricane. As Hitler’s Germany rose from the ashes it was the light on the hill for Austrians, and now more than ever they wanted Anschluss, partly to escape the penury of the times, but also to reclaim its own Germanic essence, and to reject the cosmopolitanism of Red Vienna (where communists, socialists, social democrats, Jews, and liberals busily undermined each other).
When the producers of ‘The Sound of Music’ asked Austrian authorities for permission to stage a parade simulating the Nazi German entry into Austria, they were refused. Why? Because Austrians hate Naziism so much that even today the sight of such a parade would ignite a terrible reaction which the authorities might be unable to control. Oh, replied the producers, in that case they would use the ample newsreel footage of the rapturous welcome Austrian gave Nazis in 1938. Ah, replied the authorities, here is the permit for the staging.

It makes depressing reading to see how eagerly Austrians joined Naziism in all of its worst deeds. The enthusiastic enlistments in the SS. The ready subservience to the Gestapo. The quick denunciation of Jews. The vigorous competition to host and staff death camps.
Figure it out.
Before 1938 there were more than 100,000 Jews in Vienna, perhaps 1000 survived by 1945.
Austria and Austrians were willing allies of Germany. Whereas Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, and others were bullied and cowed into the Axis camp, Austria entered to the sound of music.
Yet in the 1943 Moscow statement, sometimes called the Treaty of Moscow, the Allies said Austria was the first victim of Naziism. Huh? That has never made sense to me, and even less so as I read the litany of its crimes with Naziism in these pages. But now I see the point.
It was one instance of a broader Allied strategy to prise Germany’s partners away for it by implying they would be treated differently. In this spirit when Italy changed government in 1943, it was readily accepted by the Western Allies. Likewise for years FDR kept lines open to Vichy France to dampen its enthusiasm for Naziism. Abraham Lincoln tried the some thing throughout the Civil War, trying to woo individual southern states, like North Carolina, away from the Confederacy with some success.
Stalin went along with this terminology for his own reasons, namely, if it didn’t suit him later, he would renounce it as fake news.
Abracadabra! In 1945 Austria left its Nazi past behind. It was occupied by the Allies until 1955 but the de-Nazification process there was perfunctory from the beginning. See ‘The Third Man’ (1949) by Graham Greene. In fact, it became a route for Naziis to get to the Adriatic and escape. Schools, hospitals, railways, manufacturers and others were ordered to destroy the records for the period 1938-1945. Others did so on their own initiative. The Brown Years were erased and blurred and a national amnesia settled over the new lines on the map.
During the post-war Occupation, the Marshall Plan poured money into the western part of Austria, while Russia stripped the Eastern part of everything from heavy machinery, to concrete blocks from buildings, to clothing, and dried food. The wire from concentration camps was taken down, baled, and transported to the Soviet Union where it was used in the Gulag. So effective was this scraping of the earth that by 1955 there was nothing left to take. Then the dotted lines became solid as a new Austria emerged from the cocoon of occupation.
But by 1955 a neutral Austria suited both the Western and Eastern blocs. There came the Austria we know today. For all of its superficial worldliness manifested in Vienna in particular, it is inward looking, reluctant to change, intolerant, industrious, frugal, and insecure, says the author.
I saw Kurt Waldheim speak in 1986 and he denounced foreigners, insofar as I understood the German. That was in Salzburg, a place that became Austrian by drawing lines on a map, whose major claim to fame is a festival which originated in the desire to reject modernity. The lederhosen of tourism in Austria was a way to cling to its (fictional) past and avoid modern life with trade unions, urban life, women’s liberation, unruly students, the interaction of nationalities (Jews), international influences, protestants, and so on.
When the Berlin Wall fell, Austria shrank from engagement with its historic affiliations in the East, and only diplomatic pressure – greased by German marks – and deft handling by some Austrian leaders overcame that reluctance to admit reality. Yes, Austria had taken in 150,000 fleeing the Hungarian Revolution in 1956, but only on the understanding that they would move on further west. Ditto another 100,000 after the Prague Spring in 1968. These were experiences few Austrians wanted to repeated in the 1990s.
Steven Beller has many other titles.
While in Salzburg I heard an Austrian politician talk about the Brown Years of Hitler. One thing he said made perfect sense. We were disunited among ourselves, that is, even that minority who opposed Anschluss mostly argued against each other. After the war, the new Austrians of the new Austria closed ranks against all outsiders, and for these new people everyone else was an outsider, including even Austrian expatriates, Austrian Jews, and Austrians who were not German by language or Catholics by religion.
My next reading assignment is ‘Exact Thinking in Demented Times: The Vienna Circle and the Epic Quest for the Foundations of Science’ (2017) by Karl Sigmund.
When I went to Salzburg in 1986 I read Carl Schorske’s ‘Fin de Siecle Vienna’ (1980) and William Johnston, ‘The Austrian Mind: An Intellectual and Social History, 1848-1938’ (1972). I tried and failed to read Robert Musil’s ‘The Man without Qualities’ (1930). Not inclined to try again.