Considération
coup de plume

What Befits a Leader in Hard Times?
An Intimate Knowledge of Insanity
a review of Dr. Nassirg Hamer's A First-Rate Madness

SHAKY TASTE
a review of William Gibson's Distrust That Particular Flavor

RELIGEOUS DEBUNKER: An Equal Opportunities
Debunker of Religeos Cant
a review of Cristopher Hitchens' ARGUABLY

DIALOG WITH A GUN TO ITS HEAD
a review of Elmore Leonard's RAYLAND

A FIRST-RATE MADNESS
Uncovering the Links Between Leadership and Mental Illness

Author, Dr. Nassir Ghaemi

Yousef Karsh, via Moriah Films

Library of Congress

John F. Kennedy Library/National
Archives, via Reuters
























































 



DISTRUST THAT PARTICULAR
FLAVOR

























AUTHOR, WILLIAM GIBSON
Photograph: Photo: Louie Psihoyos/Corbis


































ARGUABLY
Essays












































AUTHOR, CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
Photograph: Eamonn McCabe








































































































































































RAYLAN

   
           

                AUTHOR, ELMORE LEONARD

INTIMATE INSANITY

The premise of Dr. Nassir Ghaemi’s book about leadership and mental illness is simple. It need not be reiterated as frequently as Dr. Ghaemi repeats it. But he begins “A First-Rate Madness” by writing, “This book argues that in at least one vitally important circumstance insanity produces good results and sanity is a problem.” To put it only a shade differently: “When our world is in tumult, mentally ill leaders function best.” Or: “In the storm of crisis, complete sanity can steer us astray, while some insanity brings us to port.” 

Mr. Ghaemi writes: “The best crisis leaders are either mentally ill or mentally abnormal; the worst crisis leaders are mentally healthy.” Winston Churchill is used as an example of the former.

Abraham Lincoln is cited as an example of a leader who may have been mentally abnormal, allowing him to feel the pain of others.

Mr. Ghaemi discusses John F. Kennedy’s dangerous, potentially mind-altering Addison’s disease.

“A First-Rate Madness” hammers hard to make its one big point. Sometimes Dr. Ghaemi uses textbook-style italics: “The best crisis leaders are either mentally ill or mentally abnormal; the worst crisis leaders are mentally healthy.” At other times he captures the textbook experience via pedantic tone. “What made Churchill see the truth where Chamberlain saw only illusion?” he asks rhetorically. “A key difference was that Chamberlain was mentally healthy (which we’ll discuss more in Chapter 14), while Churchill was clearly not.”

Dr. Ghaemi, director of the Mood Disorders Program at Tufts Medical Center in Boston, also favors an overeager, textbook-type weakness for generalizations that are glib but easy to remember. “Gandhi was depressed,” he writes at one such moment. “India’s populace was normal. That distinction may explain it all.” And he does his utmost to provoke controversy, as when he gives President John F. Kennedy “an unlikely bedfellow” in Adolf Hitler.

In articulating the flip side of a premise that is essentially flattering to the gloomy and even the unhinged, Dr. Ghaemi demonstrates remarkable powers of condescension toward his designated dullards. Dismissing the part of Tony Blair's memoir at deals with 9/11, Dr. Ghaemi writes: “To his credit, Blair maintains a somewhat open mind.” Writing about President George W. Bush, his thinking is similarly patronizing and also vague. “Bush’s rise was not easy, but it was not very hard either,” he notes.

Dr. Ghaemi does not intend this as an addition to the much-debunked field of psychohistory; rather, he sees it as something more sophisticated. He covers a broad swath of important-sounding material and uses a greatest-hits lineup of famous leaders, affecting a therapist’s intimacy with them all. He arranges them more or less chronologically, although an early section on Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman, who fulfilled Dr. Ghaemi’s criteria for interesting mental aberration by burning Atlanta, somehow leads to a passage on Ted Turner, who started CNN there.

Sourcing is a serious problem throughout “A First-Rate Madness.” Sometimes he delves into psychiatric records. But he also relies on Jane Fonda’s memoir for information about Mr. Turner’s manic sexual excesses and on secondary sources, like Chris Matthews’s “Kennedy and Nixon,” for anecdotal evidence. The endnotes to “A First-Rate Madness” can be downright maddening.

In discussing Kennedy’s dangerous, potentially mind-altering Addison’s disease, Dr. Ghaemi refers to an old movie (presumably Nicholas Ray’s “Bigger Than Life”) in which a patient, treated with cortisone as Kennedy was, becomes psychotic and commits murder. He reveals the name of the Kennedy biography from which this anecdote comes but not the name of the movie.

“A First-Rate Madness” moves from big target to big target at a fast, perfunctory clip. The section on Lincoln demonstrates the book’s method: Look for family history of mental illness. Look for suicide attempts or other evidence of despondency. Look for manic episodes as well, and then explore the implications of any medicines that the subject may have been given. (For Lincoln treatment may have involved cold showers, bleeding and mercury tablets.)

Then, depending on the degree of sanity on display, either conclude that the man rose above tremendous obstacles to become a great leader or was too ordinary to be anything but flummoxed by his life’s challenges. All the book’s subjects are men.

Some of these formulations are conveniently tidy: Dr. Ghaemi is able to call Gandhi and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. “the bookends of depressive activism.” And sometimes they are based on truly tenuous evidence; both the Gandhi and King families were able to maintain enough privacy to thwart Dr. Ghaemi’s research. Based on Gandhi’s depression and the self-destructive behavior of his son, Harilal, Dr. Ghaemi can go no further than this specious thought: “It is quite possible that others in the family have suffered the same illness.”

About the Kings: “Regarding genetics, King’s family is private, and the presence or absence of psychiatric diagnoses among family members is not publicly available knowledge.” That remark is more notable for redundancy than revelation. When Dr. Ghaemi does come up with anything remotely new, he is quick to congratulate himself for defying conventional wisdom.

This book would be shorter had its author ruled out ambiguous cases. But he is willing to speculate about those too. He states that although Richard M. Nixon was not a homoclite (or totally normal person), “he was not highly abnormal either.” He even navigates entirely around figures who do not fit any of his theories. Ronald Reagan is branded a homoclite, but “Reagan never faced a Cuban Missile Crisis.” Dr. Ghaemi drops his name, but can’t pigeonhole him at all.

As for Hitler and Kennedy, their pathologies actually are made to seem similar by “A First-Rate Madness.” Both were heavily medicated for illnesses that were kept from the public; both were fueled by combinations of steroids, amphetamines and barbiturates; both may have demonstrated great behavioral changes as a result of those drugs. But Kennedy, in the book’s estimation, rose to the challenges he faced. And Hitler — well, Dr. Ghaemi treads tenderly around him, because “the memory of those who perished is justifiably cherished,” as he puts it. Suffice it to say that Dr. Ghaemi thinks he has come up with important insights. He may, like some of our best-known leaders, be unrealistic in his beliefs. 

    ~ Janet Maslin, 2020

SHAKY TASTE

Nestled in the middle of Distrust That Particular Flavor, the first collection of non-fiction essays and magazine pieces from cyber-fiction dean William Gibson, is a curious little nugget published in 2003 in the rock ’n’ roll fanzine Ugly Things. “Skip Spence’s Jeans” recounts a visit in the early 1970s to the Bay Area, where a twentysomething Gibson met the titular musician, who played in the psychedelic band Moby Grape before recording his own uniquely troubled, instantly mythologized solo album, Oar. After three pages of painstaking description about Spence’s striking cowboy wardrobe—twill riding jacket, Western-style business shirt, meticulously reconstructed Levi’s—Gibson wraps up the piece with a single, startling line. He never forgot that brief encounter, he recalls, “and it was only a year or so ago that I heard ‘Oar’ for the first time.” 

He makes no effort whatsoever to describe the music or his own belated introduction to it, or, say, how Spence might have represented the disillusionment of the post-hippie era. Yet it’s a testament to Gibson’s clinical skills as a writer (and first-class observer) that he can make a fleeting, long-ago first impression sound like a revelation, albeit one on a very deliberately small scale.

Gibson’s highly regarded shelf of speculative fiction, beginning with the 1984 benchmark novel Neuromancer and up through, most recently, the trilogy that ended with 2010’s Zero History, has earned him a hefty utility belt of all-purpose accolades—coiner of the term “cyberspace,” early prophet of the Internet/reality TV/videogames, etc. Yet he has always downplayed his capacity for predictions: “I look for bits of the future that are already here,” he said ina 1999 interview, “and I make note of it.”

He often seems a little uneasy with the visionary mantle that’s been placed on him, and even more so when asked to write outside Interzone. Asked to contribute a preface to a republished anthology by one of his heroes, Jorge Luis Borges, Gibson, in an addendum, calls the assignment “a ridiculously unearned honor.” 

“I have never felt entirely comfortable with the pieces collected here,” he readily admits in the introduction to Distrust That Particular Flavor. Despite his misgivings, the book culls some insightfully fussy essays from the back pages of Time, Wired, Rolling Stone, and other outlets on subjects as diverse as Hollywood, 9/11, and his infatuation with fine watches. As with his fiction—the realm in which he’s clearly more comfortable—these pieces return repeatedly to Gibson’s obsession with the uncertainties of what’s next, and our collective, never-ending efforts to figure it out. (Several of the pieces here involve Gibson’s travels in the East; routinely asked why his fiction is so often set in Japan, he explains, “Because Japan is the global imagination’s default setting for the future.”)

That sense of being perpetually unsettled by the near future is what defines Gibson’s writing. He’s always been up front about his own paradoxical aversion to technological advances in the real world. In the 1999 piece about his eBay obsession with vintage watches, he comically skewers his own ironic lack of computer savvy: When he had his first website designed, “I kept having to go into my kids’ bedrooms and beg for Web access to look at it, which bugged them.”

Yet for all Gibson’s self-effacement, he has highly evolved powers of observation. Distrust That Particular Flavor includes a key example of his occasional journalism, “Disneyland With The Death Penalty,” a 1993 piece that got the assigning magazine, Wired, banned from Singapore. At the otherwise immaculate Singapore airport, Gibson nearly got himself detained for snapping photos of a wayward scrap of crumpled paper. Though he’s often lauded as a big-picture man, these pieces make one thing clear: He’s even better with the little details.

                           ~ James Sullivan, 2020

RELIGEOUS DEBUNKER

There are, at a rough count, 36 references to George Orwell in this voluminous collection of Christopher Hitchen's  journalism from the past decade. Hitchens has good claims to be Orwell's successor, and he would certainly agree with his hero's argument, in "Politics and the English Language", that bad politics leads to bad language, that a writer adhering to "the worst follies of orthodoxy" will end up writing badly.

By Orwell's laws, therefore, this book ought to contain the sad evidence of the decrepitude of Hitchens's once-magnificent prose. Unhappily for the Orwellian, but happily for the reader, it mostly does not. There are many sad moments when thought has withered into vacuity or bombast, moments in which we can see what Hitchens might have become – just another purveyor of American super-patriotic orthodoxies. But they serve in the end to define a fate that, somehow, he eludes.

Which raises, of course, the case of Hitchens himself. The period in which these articles and essays were written (mostly for Vanity Fair, theAtlantic and Slate) is pre-eminently that in which Hitchens, one of anglophone journalism's great sceptics, aligned himself with arguably the most mendacious government to hold power in a democracy, the neoconservative clique around George W Bush. Hitchens warns in one of them against oversimplifying the political trajectory of another of his heroes, Saul Bellow, as "that from quasi-Trotskyist to full-blown 'neocon'". The plea is entered, one suspects, equally on his own behalf. Without resorting to caricature, however, it is clear that Hitchens embraced the neocon project of defining the world through the "war on terror". It is also clear to all but the true believers that that project was saturated in deceit, self-delusion and a language whose aim, as Orwell would have put it, was not to express, but rather to prevent and conceal, thought.

The pleasures the reader feels at this escape are in proportion to the horrors of Hitchens at his worst. Let us consider just two of the fatuities. In a piece from 2007, when one might have expected post-9/11 rage to have been tempered by the experience of the war in Iraq, Hitchens writes of how Anglo-American co-operation defeated three great threats: "German Wilhelmine imperialism in 1918, the Nazi-Fascist Axis in 1945, and international communism in 1989." Then comes a sentence so shocking it is hard to believe that a man of Hitchens's intellect not only wrote it but agreed to republish it between hard covers: "The world now faces a barbarism that is no less menacing than its three predecessors – and may even be more so." This fourth threat is "bin-Ladenism". The claim that al‑Qaida "may even be more" menacing to humanity than the Nazis or Stalin shows what Hitchens elsewhere calls "the way in which mania feeds upon itself and becomes hysterical".

Worse, because it is less obviously bonkers, is a passage in the same essay in which Hitchens makes a shameful concession to Enoch Powell's fulminations against immigration: "If he had stressed religion rather than race, he might have been seen as prescient." In other words, Powell's apocalyptic visions of the consequences of immigration might have been accurate had he identified Islam as the enemy. Hitchens must know that this is the line now taken by the English Defence League and most of the European far right: we don't hate blacks, we're just trying to stop the Muslims taking over. He has chosen to republish it anyway.

In each of these cases, the deterioration of style that Orwell would recognise is all too evident. The combination of creepily evasive syntax ("may even be", "might have been seen") with huge but unargued claims makes for bad writing as well as bad politics. And these examples, though extreme, are not mere lapses of concentration attributable to the frantic pace of Hitchens's Stakhanovite production. Much of the overstatement can be explained by the way in which Hitchens uses an apparently simple word: "our". Whenever it appears, the collectivity to which it refers is the US. This involves an inherent overstretch, that of a quintessentially English writer insisting on his new American identity. Hitchens writes, as he mentions in a fine essay on Harry Potter, as "one who actually did once go to boarding school by steam train". With his head full of Wodehouse, Orwell, Kipling and Conan Doyle, his insistence on being American is thus bound to become shrill. He found in the "war on terror" a context in which he could dress himself in the stars and stripes and insist that they are his swaddling robes.

But this need, in turn, is rooted in something bigger – an odd, and utterly English, nostalgia for the sweep and scale of empire. Hitchens is (like Orwell) in many ways a late-blooming liberal imperial intellectual – critical of empire, of course, but grateful, nonetheless, for its breadth and drama. He thus embraces the idea of the "Anglosphere", a nostalgic conflation in which the old empire is reconfigured as an imagined community of anglophones, among whom the Americans are merely the new top dogs. It is a profoundly silly notion: when Hitchens writes of Britain as "the motherland of the English-speaking peoples", he forgets those of us (a mere few hundred million, admittedly) who speak English but have no ancestral connection to Britain.

Yet, for all these follies, Hitchens has not turned into a superior version of a Fox News blusterer. He mentions in one essay that he has a very rare blood type. It must be one that produces the most extraordinary of literary antibodies, able to fight off the germs of political hyperbole. Three saving graces combine to rescue Hitchens's status as the most readable journalist of his times.

The first is that Hitchens is a reporter as well as an opinion-monger, and a brave, supremely evocative reporter at that. He can recall what he has seen with coruscating vividness and urgency, fusing precise detail with polemical passion, as in a brilliant and terrible essay on the continuing effects of the use of Agent Orange in Vietnam. Crucially, he is too good a reporter to suppress realities that hurt his own case. Thus an optimistic report on Afghanistan from 2004 has a coda in a devastating critique of the farcical 2009 elections which admits the possibility that the western intervention may become "a humiliating debacle". Instead of arguing the niceties of what constitutes torture, he has himself subjected to water-boarding and names it for what it is: torture.

Hitchens's second guardian angel is his disdain for all guardian angels. A good neocon is supposed to attack Islamic fundamentalism while keeping quiet about the Christian variety. Hitchens has too much pride to play this game. He is an equal opportunities debunker of religious cant, who won't shut up about the deism of the Founding Fathers and can't banish the thought that naked proselytism in the US army might mean a holy war "where we will not be able to say that only the other side is dogmatic and fanatical".

Finally, there is the style. Orwell suggested that just as bad politics produces bad language, things might also work the other way around – good English might be proof against the follies of orthodoxy. Hitchens may have imbibed some of the old follies of imperial England, but he received as compensation the tough, pure classical prose honed by its best public intellectuals. Reading, for example, his elegant debunking of John Updike is like watching a nerveless surgeon perform a complete disemboweling by means of keyhole surgery. And whatever pretensions to majesty that Prince Charles may have had are left in shreds by Hitchens's description of his tendency to surround himself with "every moon-faced spoon-bender, shrub-flatterer and water diviner within range". His astringent wit, deftly wielded erudition and allergy to dullness make Hitchens mercifully unfit for some of the political company he has kept. He emerges here not as a soul lost to linguistic sin, but as a great journalist fallen, for a while, among neocons.

~ A




      DIALOG WITH A GUN TO                        ITS HEAD

After writing novels for more than 50 years, it might seem like Elmore Leonard would run out of steam or lose the spark that gave him a unique voice, but if his latest, “Raylan,” proves anything, it’s that Leonard can still defy expectations. Featuring Raylan Givens, a federal marshal antihero from other Leonard novels, as well as the FX TV show “Justified,” the novel is another modern western crime thriller full of noir-ish double crosses and sudden shoot-outs.

With his knack for writing sharp dialogue, biting humor and characters who only look out for themselves, Leonard remains one of the great writers of the can’t-put-it-down crime genre, featuring stories about criminals who you’d never want to run into in real life, but love to meet on the written page.

Givens is no exception, and although past experiences of his are alluded to, “Raylan” isn’t so much a sequel to “Riding the Rap” or “Pronto” as it is another adventure featuring the same character. Those who aren’t familiar with the other books won’t find themselves lost at all.

In this novel Givens goes looking for a criminal to arrest, but finds him naked in a bathtub full of ice with both his kidneys gone, instead of running from the law. If this sounds like straightforward mystery fare, where the novel is spent searching for the kidney thief, it’s not. Indeed, among the novel’s flaws is how aimless it is. The mystery is cleared up a few chapters into the book and by the halfway point, the narrative has already gone down a completely different pathway with new characters and new trouble for Givens to get in.

Givens is known in the Leonard universe for his catch phrase, which he’ll share with anybody who’ll listen: “If I have to pull my gun, I’ll shoot to kill.” And by the end of this book, he gives the reader no reason to question his commitment to the mantra. The body count is very high, which is a tad disappointing, since the bad guys — featuring an assortment of dumb criminals, femme fatales and exploitative millionaires — are often as compelling as the hero (and also have the best lines).

And though the story wanders and the characters are standard issue, the writing is confident and fun enough so that those seem like minor issues. The dialogue is a joy to read, with the characters really playing off of each other’s words and exchanging dry witticisms while contemplating whom to shoot next.

Perhaps also to ride on the coattails of the success of “Justified,” William Morrow Paperbacks released “Fire in the Hole,” a collection of Leonard’s short stories, earlier this month. For longtime Leonard fans, this collection is unnecessary since it’s a reprint, as opposed to “Raylan,” which is a new adventure.

“Fire in the Hole” was previously published under the title of “When the Women Come Out to Dance,” and is a fantastic collection that includes an exciting story featuring Givens that was adapted into the pilot of “Justified.” For those unfamiliar with Leonard’s work, it’s a perfect opportunity to discover an author who can do more in a few pages than most writers can do in a full-length novel, regardless of the title it’s published under.

“Raylan” is not Leonard’s best novel, nor is there one that is universally considered to be his “best.” Each new book features the same ingredients, but the chef cooks them together with such joy and imagination that the meal still feels fresh. And while one could criticize Leonard for not reinventing the wheels on the buggy that he first built several decades ago, it’s better to sit back and enjoy the ride.

~ Robert Starr, 2020