notanotherbookreview

"... the precedent set by the Founders demands that we examine history to understand the deep sources of tyranny, and to consider the proper responses to it. Americans today are no wiser than the Europeans who saw democracy yield to facism, Nazism, or communism in the twentieth century. Our one advantage is that we might learn from their experience. Now is a good time to do so." --Tim Snyder "Mr. Snyder is a rising public intellectual unafraid to make bold connections between past and present." --The New York Times This little book of 126 pages succeeds in connecting our time with what went before. In short essays astute, wry and instructive, it lets you know what has happened, where we are and what one person of conscience can do. Here are snippets from Topics.  1. DO NOT OBEY IN ADVANCE Anticipatory obedience is a political tragedy. 2. DEFEND INSTITUTIONS Do not speak of "our institutions" unless you make them yours by action on their beha...

How 3 wealthy American patriots financed a 16 million dollar loan for the War of 1812 , initiating investment banking. Then came a whistleblower... "Parish, Girard and Astor jointly pledged to take more than ten million, but not at the 6% Gallatin (U.S. Treasury) had offered. Rather, they agreed to pay in 88.00 a share and in return to receive an annuity that would yield them 13 years of annual payments that would eventually total the full one hundred dollars per share. The pledged amounts were more than the trio's current combined private fortunes, a considerable risk. Nonetheless, they put up 10 million dollars' worth of the certificates apiece, and resold the rest. The big purchasers were insurers in Philadelphia, and banks and brokers in new York, and merchants in Baltimore, who all resold the certificates in smaller batches to hundreds, perhaps thousands of individuals. A list of the occupations of some of the individuals to whom Girard's bank sold the b...

"When you're an artist you're searching for freedom; you never find it,'cause there ain't any freedom. But at least you search for it. In fact, art could be called the search." "Art is two things: a search for a road and a search for freedom. You know all these things in life keep crawling over you all the time, so it's very hard to feel free." -- Alice Neel I met Alice Neel at her Whitney retrospective in 1974. A year out of art school, I was working for a  San Francisco paper actually called Art News. She offered to take me through the exhibition and made the point she wanted NO review about her work that ignored the life that made it. ( At this time, art criticism "deconstructed" art as separate from the artist). Alice pointed to a portrait of a guitar player and explained how she ran off with him to Spanish Harlem. He left her but she stayed because it was cheap and she had kids.  Alice liked  painting neighbors, who worke...