Read a Book, Why Don't You?

Weekend report on what you should read

First with the best book I’ve read in a long time. Mattias Desmet has written a slim, conversational, engaging book with the ominous title, The Psychology of Totalitarianism. Reading this book is like going out with a super-smart person for coffee and listening to him talk about a million different subjects in ways you’ve never heard before and then link things together in ways you’ve never heard. Desmet is a European academic with degrees in statistics and psychology and he writes about academic fraud, a mechanical universe devoid of spirituality, anxiety and the search for meaning, politics, and mass formation, a sort of low-grade hypnotism that has a lot in common with American advertising. This is an easy read and it’s short, but I predict you’ll wind up reading it twice. Fabulous book.

If you like investigative journalism that takes it time, you have to check out Whitney Webb’s two-volume book on Jeffrey Epstein called One Nation Under Blackmail. Webb accepted the job of writing an investigative report on Epstein, but it turns out that she writes the way I make soup—you start out small and with a specific plan but the project soon gets out of hand and you have barrels of soup. Webb set her sites on Epstein only to find concentric circles emanating around him that drew in organized crime, 1940s racketeering, virtually all major political figures of the 21st century, and Epstein himself. Interesting, Epstein is almost a minor figure in this thousand-page work about him, but that’s true to the subject matter. Epstein wasn’t the cause of the chaos around him, he was a symptom of it. Definitely worth a read, but it’s a daunting challenge. I read the book over many months in chunks.

Finally, there is the timely and interesting book by Robert F. Kennedy called The Real Anthony Fauci. I don’t know why the title targets Fauci, since about half the book seems to be about Bill Gates, but it involves the “global war” on public health. Since neither Gates nor Fauci has seen fit to sue Kennedy for libel, I’m inclined to think that Kennedy’s heavily referenced book has some real teeth. It’s an infuriating read because of the powerful accusations that are levied, but his allegations are well worth knowing. My only complain with this book is its production; the book is laid out with microscopic margins. Text runs almost from gutter to edge without room for your thumb to hold the book, but that’s a minor issue.

Books may seem anachronistic in our digital era, but they offer some of the best and most fully documented information, particularly on complex issues.