A brilliantly inspired study of the power of propaganda to influence geopolitical narratives.
A striking account of a German-speaking Australian working for the British secret service during the era of Nazi aggression.
Pomerantsev, a disinformation expert, is the author of Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible and This Is Not Propaganda. In his latest book, he introduces us to Sefton Delmer (1904-1979), an Australian born in Berlin whose anti-Nazi radio programs in dozens of languages across Europe helped undermine the Nazi war effort. Growing up in Germany’s Weimar Republic (his father was a professor of English literature in Berlin) and often mocked for his British ways, young Delmer desperately wanted to fit in. After a stint in Britain, he returned to Berlin—now on the cusp of Nazi control—as a journalist for the Daily Express, where he witnessed and understood viscerally the power of political propaganda to promote belonging. Hence, in advising the British—who at first did not trust him, as he had interviewed Goebbels, Hitler, and others—Delmer could convey the psychological power of the Nazi message. It wasn’t enough, he argued, to simply “defend democracy,” a slogan that failed to resonate strongly; you had to “appeal to the groups vulnerable to the propaganda that plays into the desire to submit to strongmen.” Delmer became the head of Special Operations for the Political Warfare Executive, returned to journalism, and published his memoirs in the 1960s, but they have been largely forgotten or discounted. Historians continue to debate the extent to which anti-Nazi propaganda helped win the war. Delmer believed that it aided in the “corrosion” of German will, and the author demonstrates how crucial Delmer’s work was then—and still is, as Pomerantsev has advised Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in his efforts to counter Russian propaganda and aggression.
A brilliantly inspired study of the power of propaganda to influence geopolitical narratives.Pub Date: March 5, 2024
ISBN: 9781541774728
Page Count: 304
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Dec. 26, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.
A decidedly warts-and-all portrait of the man many consider to be America’s greatest writer.
It makes sense that distinguished biographer Chernow (Washington: A Life and Alexander Hamilton) has followed up his life of Ulysses S. Grant with one of Mark Twain: Twain, after all, pulled Grant out of near bankruptcy by publishing the ex-president’s Civil War memoir under extremely favorable royalty terms. The act reflected Twain’s inborn generosity and his near pathological fear of poverty, the prime mover for the constant activity that characterized the author’s life. As Chernow writes, Twain was “a protean figure who played the role of printer, pilot, miner, journalist, novelist, platform artist, toastmaster, publisher, art patron, pundit, polemicist, inventor, crusader, investor, and maverick.” He was also slippery: Twain left his beloved Mississippi River for the Nevada gold fields as a deserter from the Confederate militia, moved farther west to California to avoid being jailed for feuding, took up his pseudonym to stay a step ahead of anyone looking for Samuel Clemens, especially creditors. Twain’s flaws were many in his own day. Problematic in our own time is a casual racism that faded as he grew older (charting that “evolution in matters of racial tolerance” is one of the great strengths of Chernow’s book). Harder to explain away is Twain’s well-known but discomfiting attraction to adolescent and even preadolescent girls, recruiting “angel-fish” to keep him company and angrily declaring when asked, “It isn’t the public’s affair.” While Twain emerges from Chernow’s pages as the masterful—if sometimes wrathful and vengeful—writer that he is now widely recognized to be, he had other complexities, among them a certain gullibility as a businessman that kept that much-feared poverty often close to his door, as well as an overarchingly gloomy view of the human condition that seemed incongruous with his reputation, then and now, as a humanist.
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.Pub Date: May 13, 2025
ISBN: 9780525561729
Page Count: 1200
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
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