Great television is taking over the space occupied by many novels, and taking with them many excellent writers. And by and large, it’s delivering the same rewards to its audience. But what about novels that exploit the opportunities that are available only to the form of the novel, such as novels that explore interiority, or rely on the novel’s versatile treatment of time and causation? Who will speak for such novels?
Month: January 2018
Photographer Captures Enchanting Photos of Finland’s Forest Animals in the Wild
Helsinki-based photographer and explorer Joachim Munter takes fairytale photos of forest animals in his native Finland. The picturesque landscapes of Finnish forests provide a home for many wild animals and birds, including foxes, red squirrels, reindeers, and even bears. Munter manages to capture up-close and intimate portraits of these forest creatures in their natural habitat, even though most of them are known to be incredibly timid when it comes to interacting with humans.
All of his subjects, be they curious foxes or scurrying squirrels, appear to look perfectly comfortable in front of his camera. In order to earn the animals’ trust, Munter explains, “The most important thing—in my opinion—is not to chase the animals. You just need time and patience; let the animal become comfortable around you.” With one particular fox, it took Munter two months to gain his trust, and reveals that he then “started giving him some nuts when taking pictures.”
Foxes stare curiously into the lens, squirrels happily munch on foraged nuts, and occasionally, woodland birds perch on Munter’s hand (with the promise of delicious seeds). In one case, the talented photographer even managed to capture an intimate moment between a mother and baby fox, framed by a red berry bush. Throughout Munter’s growing collection, the use of striking depth of field invites the viewer to focus on the beauty and charm of each animal. All of the images have their own enchanting quality, not only highlighting the personalities of these amazing animals, but they also showcase Finland’s fairytale landscape, in all its gorgeous forest hues.
Follow Munter on Instagram to see more of his charming wildlife photography. You can also purchase prints from his portfolio on Printler.
Helsinki-based photographer Joachim captures intimate photos of Finland’s fairytale forest animals in the wild.
His subjects include curious foxes, foraging squirrels and mice, woodland birds, and even forest cattle.
The post Photographer Captures Enchanting Photos of Finland’s Forest Animals in the Wild appeared first on My Modern Met.
Photographer Captures Enchanting Photos of Finland’s Forest Animals in the Wild
Here’s an amazing pic of the first supermoon of 2018 from Hawaii…
Here’s an amazing pic of the first supermoon of 2018 from Hawaii Volcanoes National Park. This photo of the full moon over Mauna Loa was taken 400mm telephoto lens from Volcano House shortly after sunrise. Did you see the supermoon? Photo by Volunteer Janice Wei, National Park Service.
Why You Should Include Nuts In Your Weight Loss Regimen
Nuts are healthy as they are packed with nutrients and antioxidants. However, a majority of people on a weight loss regimen avoid including them in their diet because they fear their fats and calories.
That is a mere misconception. In reality, nuts can help you lose weight.
How?
We’ll share with you the best nuts for weight loss but first, let’s unravel the truth first.
Studies on How Nuts Aid in Weight Loss
Nuts are rich in calories. A large part of them contains fat which is a concentrated source of energy. 1 gram of fat has up to 9 calories while a gram of protein contains only 4 calories.
This high concentration of fats and calories makes many people on a weight loss diet assume that adding nuts can make them gain weight. To bust this idea, a lot of studies have been conducted over the years.
One particular study involving 8865 men and women over a 28-month period found that those who ate two or more portions of nuts every week increased their chances of losing weight by 31% compared to the placebo group. Another review involving 36 studies reported that taking nuts is not associated with increased body weight, waist size or BMI.
In a controlled study, where the participants adhered to a strict diet, the inclusion of different types of nuts to their diet did not lead to changes in body weight. More importantly, where the nuts were included in a diet of people on an unrestricted diet, nut consumption did not cause weight gain.
A study involving 65 obese patients compared a low-calorie diet which has complex carbs to a low-calorie diet enhanced with nuts. They took equal amounts of cholesterol, calories, protein, and saturated fats.
After a 24-week period, the people on the almond diet had reduced weight by 62%, fat mass by 56% and waist circumference by 50%. The groups also experienced improved cholesterol, including reduced LDL and triglycerides. The other group did not encounter such benefits.
How Nuts Aid in Weight Loss
Nuts have a complex structure, which means that unless they are chewed up completely or ground up, a large proportion only passes the gut without digestion. As such, they are not absorbed and are lost in fecal matter. It explains why nuts are weight loss friendly.
Here are some of the best nuts for weight loss you can add to your diet:
Walnuts
Apart from being heart-healthy, walnuts contain unsaturated fats which help reduce abdominal fat. They come in handy for people on a weight loss regimen as they also improve insulin metabolism. They are unique as they are rich in polyunsaturated fats, unlike other kinds of nuts that have high levels of monounsaturated fats.
Walnuts have Alpha-Linolenic Acid (ALA). It helps reduce the risk of developing cardiovascular and other chronic diseases. Walnuts have 183 calories and 18 grams of fat of which 2.5 grams of fat contain ALA. It makes walnuts a rich source of the essential fatty acid.
A research on 245 women showed that a diet rich in walnuts helped them lose weight, reduced the levels of bad cholesterol (LDL), and improved the levels of good cholesterol (HDL).
You can add these nuts to your salad or mix them with your breakfast oats.
Cashew Nuts
A serving of cashew nuts contains five grams of protein and thirteen grams of fat. Cashew nuts are also an excellent source of magnesium. In fact, a 100-gram serving of cashew nuts provides up to 73% of the daily value of magnesium.
This mineral is essential for regulating the amount of carbohydrates in the body and metabolism of fat, which helps you lose weight.
Apart from taking raw cashew nuts, you can also try spreading cashew butter on whole-wheat toast to up your intake of these healthy nuts.
Pistachios
Their unique color and flavor make them a favorite ingredient in morning green smoothies, morning snacks, and baked recipes.
A serving of pistachios has three grams of dietary fiber which is 12% of the recommended daily intake. Dietary fiber helps the body feel satiated for long, which helps rid of intense food craving. This helps you lose weight fast and burn more calories.
A study involving participants who included an afternoon snack of pistachios achieved lower triglycerides and body weight.
See Also: How to Boost Metabolism: 8 Foods That Can Skyrocket Your Weight Loss
Nut Recipes You Should Try Out
Banana Bread
If you want to avoid gluten products, then this banana bread is the right snack for you. You can eat it for breakfast, dessert or snack.
A snack of gluten-free banana bread made of walnuts allows you to enjoy the benefits of ALA while enjoying the satiety of protein. Plus, walnuts can add a delicious crunch to this snack.
Ingredients
For this recipe you will need:
- A couple of overripe bananas
- Brown rice flour
- Walnuts
- Applesauce
- Baking powder
- Baking soda
- Honey
- Vanilla extract
- Almond milk
- Gluten-free rolled oats
- Coconut flour
Instructions
- Preheat the oven to 350 F.
- Apply oil and flour on the baking pan and set it aside.
- Whisk the wet ingredients (two eggs, coconut oil, bananas, honey, almond milk, applesauce) in a mixing bowl.
- Then, fold in the dry ingredients (baking soda, brown rice flour, baking powder, walnuts, gluten-free oats, coconut flour, salt) and combine until the mixture is smooth and thick.
- Pour the mixture into the baking pan.
- You can sprinkle some oats over the butter.
- Allow the batter to bake for 55 minutes until the tester comes out clean.
- Remove it from the oven and let it sit for twenty minutes in the baking pan.
- Allow it to cool on a wire rack and cut it into slices for breakfast.
See Also: 5 Healthy and Delicious Juice Recipes for Easier Weight Loss
Conclusion
Clearly, nuts are essential for people who want to shed off a few pounds. The right proportion of the best nuts for weight loss also provide numerous other health benefits.
The post Why You Should Include Nuts In Your Weight Loss Regimen appeared first on Dumb Little Man.
Your Guide To Better Sleep Habits
You’re reading Your Guide To Better Sleep Habits, originally posted on Pick the Brain | Motivation and Self Improvement. If you’re enjoying this, please visit our site for more inspirational articles.
Nothing can be more frustrating than laying on bed at night and waiting for sleep that won’t come. There are many reasons why you’re having a hard time dozing off. You may be suffering from insomnia, experiencing immense stress or practicing unhealthy lifestyle habits. It’s also possible that you have an underlying medical condition that affects your ability to get good sleep.
According to the sleep experts at National Sleep Foundation, an adult aged 18 to 64 should be sleeping for 7 to 9 hours each night. Older adults, aged 65 and older, are advised to get 7 to 8 hours of nightly sleep. If you’re not meeting these sleep recommendations, you’re jeopardizing your health. Studies suggest that sleep deprivation can cause “increased blood pressure, impaired control of blood glucose and increased inflammation.” It’s linked to a higher risk of cardiovascular disease. People suffering from insomnia and other sleep disorders are also likely to develop anxiety and depression.
Here’s a guide to a healthy daily routine for better sleep.
#1: Have a gadget-free sleeping area
The blue light emitted by your laptop, tablet, and smartphone is interfering with your circadian rhythm. It suppresses the sleep hormone melatonin, stimulating the brain at any time of the day/night. This is why you could watch movies ’til dawn without feeling drowsy.
Tip: Turn off your gadgets at least 1 hour before bedtime. Better yet, turn your bedroom into a gadget-free zone to help you fight the temptation of browsing social media at 11 p.m.
#2: Make exercise a part of your daily lifestyle
Fitness activities are good for your physical and mental health. Harvard Medical School considers exercise as one of the three pillars of health, together with nutrition and sleep. A healthy adult should get at least 150 minutes of moderate aerobic activity or 75 minutes of vigorous aerobic activity per week. A study published in The Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine revealed that exercising has positive impact on attaining proper sleep even among people diagnosed of insomnia. In the study, the participants, mostly in their 60s, were sleeping at least 45 minutes more a night after four months of active lifestyle.
Tip: Don’t have time to hit the gym everyday? Check out free fitness videos on Youtube on routines you can do at home. You can learn 15-minute exercises that don’t require any gym equipment. Schedule 15 minutes of exercise in the morning and 15 more at night on weekdays, and 30 to 60 minutes of vigorous routines in the gym on weekends.
#3: Schedule your coffee time
Is coffee affecting your ability to sleep at night? It depends. You may have read a number of studies supporting the positive points of consuming caffeine. These include lowering cholesterol levels, boosting liver health, and reducing depression risk. It helps boost one’s mental performance and memory. But you should know that the effect of coffee can last anywhere from 4 to 6 hours. So if you drink a cup of black brew late in the afternoon, you’d likely stay up past your bedtime.
Tip: Enjoy a cup of coffee, not during breakfast when you’re energy is up, but at around 10 a.m. Your energy levels typically drops mid-day and again at around 3 p.m. Avoid caffeine after 4 p.m.
#4: Practice mindfulness meditation
Stress is a major cause of poor sleep. According to the Anxiety and Depression Association of America, 70 percent of those experiencing high levels of stress and anxiety have trouble sleeping. Their sleep problem, conversely, increased their anxiety. The solutions seem straightforward: reduce your stressors. But this is easier said than done especially when you’re living in urban areas where you’re exposed to congestion and various forms of pollution.
Tip: The root cause of stress is one’s obsession with thinking about the non-existent past and future. The core of meditation, probably the most effective stress-busting activity, is to be present. Take a 3-minute break from working or studying every 2 hours. You can stay still on your chair or walk toward the window, then clear your mind. Think about nothing, just feel your surroundings.
#5: Declutter your room
Does your mind keep on running even during bedtime? This is a manifestation of stress. “Our bodies and brains evolved to relax and cool down after dark and to spring back into action come morning,” the American Psychological Association noted. But stress causes hyperarousal, wreaking havoc on your sleep-wake cycle. If not managed, stress can lead to high blood pressure, obesity, heart diseases, and cancers.
Tip: Identify your stressors. If your desk reminds you of an unfinished task, you better find a new place for your work area. You can also clean up your desk and put away your laptop and journal. Declutter your room. The visual chaos can be a stressor that interferes with your sleep.
#6: Eat light at night
Your diet has a lot to do with your ability to attain proper sleep. Spicy and acidic foods for dinner can cause heartburn and acid reflux that might disrupt your sleep. Eating a lot before bedtime has the same impact. Is a carbohydrate-heavy meal bad for your sleep health? It depends on the time and volume of your meal. Carbs or not, if taken in large quantities and near bedtime, may keep you up all night.
Tip: Eat a heavy breakfast and light lunch and dinner. For dinner, you can have sleep-inducing foods such as turkey, tuna, lettuce, and brown rice. Have a cup of hot chamomile tea before bedtime.
#7: Create a conducive sleeping environment
If you’re having a hard time dozing off at night, you should take a look around your own bedroom. Do you have a lot of stuff in your room? Is your bed mattress still comfortable or is it starting to cause muscle pain? Does your room have ample air ventilation? Is it cool throughout the night? The overall atmosphere in your bedroom can make a lot of difference to the quality of your sleep.
Tip: Move your work desk into another room in your house, as well as your entertainment system. Keep the television and stereo in the living area. Keep all clothes in the closet and other items in storage. You may want to replace your old mattress with memory foam for optimal sleep quality. Keep your room dark and cool at night.
#8: Decide to improve your sleep
You need to change your mindset about sleep. It’s not an interruption of your daily activities. It’s an essential part of your life. Sleep is as important as healthy diet and regular exercise. It’s more important than accumulating wealth or earning fame.
A healthy night sleep, sadly, is widely neglected in our fast-paced society. “The combination of a deeply misguided definition of what it means to be successful in today’s world—that it can come only through burnout and stress—along with the distractions and temptations of a 24/7 wired world, has imperiled our sleep as never before,” Arianna Huffington, business leader and author, wrote in her bestseller “The Sleep Revolution.” Make a real change in your life. Aspire to achieve healthy sleep habits.
You’ve read Your Guide To Better Sleep Habits, originally posted on Pick the Brain | Motivation and Self Improvement. If you’ve enjoyed this, please visit our site for more inspirational articles.
>
Your Guide To Better Sleep Habits
You’re reading Your Guide To Better Sleep Habits, originally posted on Pick the Brain | Motivation and Self Improvement. If you’re enjoying this, please visit our site for more inspirational articles.
Nothing can be more frustrating than laying on bed at night and waiting for sleep that won’t come. There are many reasons why you’re having a hard time dozing off. You may be suffering from insomnia, experiencing immense stress or practicing unhealthy lifestyle habits. It’s also possible that you have an underlying medical condition that affects your ability to get good sleep.
According to the sleep experts at National Sleep Foundation, an adult aged 18 to 64 should be sleeping for 7 to 9 hours each night. Older adults, aged 65 and older, are advised to get 7 to 8 hours of nightly sleep. If you’re not meeting these sleep recommendations, you’re jeopardizing your health. Studies suggest that sleep deprivation can cause “increased blood pressure, impaired control of blood glucose and increased inflammation.” It’s linked to a higher risk of cardiovascular disease. People suffering from insomnia and other sleep disorders are also likely to develop anxiety and depression.
Here’s a guide to a healthy daily routine for better sleep.
#1: Have a gadget-free sleeping area
The blue light emitted by your laptop, tablet, and smartphone is interfering with your circadian rhythm. It suppresses the sleep hormone melatonin, stimulating the brain at any time of the day/night. This is why you could watch movies ’til dawn without feeling drowsy.
Tip: Turn off your gadgets at least 1 hour before bedtime. Better yet, turn your bedroom into a gadget-free zone to help you fight the temptation of browsing social media at 11 p.m.
#2: Make exercise a part of your daily lifestyle
Fitness activities are good for your physical and mental health. Harvard Medical School considers exercise as one of the three pillars of health, together with nutrition and sleep. A healthy adult should get at least 150 minutes of moderate aerobic activity or 75 minutes of vigorous aerobic activity per week. A study published in The Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine revealed that exercising has positive impact on attaining proper sleep even among people diagnosed of insomnia. In the study, the participants, mostly in their 60s, were sleeping at least 45 minutes more a night after four months of active lifestyle.
Tip: Don’t have time to hit the gym everyday? Check out free fitness videos on Youtube on routines you can do at home. You can learn 15-minute exercises that don’t require any gym equipment. Schedule 15 minutes of exercise in the morning and 15 more at night on weekdays, and 30 to 60 minutes of vigorous routines in the gym on weekends.
#3: Schedule your coffee time
Is coffee affecting your ability to sleep at night? It depends. You may have read a number of studies supporting the positive points of consuming caffeine. These include lowering cholesterol levels, boosting liver health, and reducing depression risk. It helps boost one’s mental performance and memory. But you should know that the effect of coffee can last anywhere from 4 to 6 hours. So if you drink a cup of black brew late in the afternoon, you’d likely stay up past your bedtime.
Tip: Enjoy a cup of coffee, not during breakfast when you’re energy is up, but at around 10 a.m. Your energy levels typically drops mid-day and again at around 3 p.m. Avoid caffeine after 4 p.m.
#4: Practice mindfulness meditation
Stress is a major cause of poor sleep. According to the Anxiety and Depression Association of America, 70 percent of those experiencing high levels of stress and anxiety have trouble sleeping. Their sleep problem, conversely, increased their anxiety. The solutions seem straightforward: reduce your stressors. But this is easier said than done especially when you’re living in urban areas where you’re exposed to congestion and various forms of pollution.
Tip: The root cause of stress is one’s obsession with thinking about the non-existent past and future. The core of meditation, probably the most effective stress-busting activity, is to be present. Take a 3-minute break from working or studying every 2 hours. You can stay still on your chair or walk toward the window, then clear your mind. Think about nothing, just feel your surroundings.
#5: Declutter your room
Does your mind keep on running even during bedtime? This is a manifestation of stress. “Our bodies and brains evolved to relax and cool down after dark and to spring back into action come morning,” the American Psychological Association noted. But stress causes hyperarousal, wreaking havoc on your sleep-wake cycle. If not managed, stress can lead to high blood pressure, obesity, heart diseases, and cancers.
Tip: Identify your stressors. If your desk reminds you of an unfinished task, you better find a new place for your work area. You can also clean up your desk and put away your laptop and journal. Declutter your room. The visual chaos can be a stressor that interferes with your sleep.
#6: Eat light at night
Your diet has a lot to do with your ability to attain proper sleep. Spicy and acidic foods for dinner can cause heartburn and acid reflux that might disrupt your sleep. Eating a lot before bedtime has the same impact. Is a carbohydrate-heavy meal bad for your sleep health? It depends on the time and volume of your meal. Carbs or not, if taken in large quantities and near bedtime, may keep you up all night.
Tip: Eat a heavy breakfast and light lunch and dinner. For dinner, you can have sleep-inducing foods such as turkey, tuna, lettuce, and brown rice. Have a cup of hot chamomile tea before bedtime.
#7: Create a conducive sleeping environment
If you’re having a hard time dozing off at night, you should take a look around your own bedroom. Do you have a lot of stuff in your room? Is your bed mattress still comfortable or is it starting to cause muscle pain? Does your room have ample air ventilation? Is it cool throughout the night? The overall atmosphere in your bedroom can make a lot of difference to the quality of your sleep.
Tip: Move your work desk into another room in your house, as well as your entertainment system. Keep the television and stereo in the living area. Keep all clothes in the closet and other items in storage. You may want to replace your old mattress with memory foam for optimal sleep quality. Keep your room dark and cool at night.
#8: Decide to improve your sleep
You need to change your mindset about sleep. It’s not an interruption of your daily activities. It’s an essential part of your life. Sleep is as important as healthy diet and regular exercise. It’s more important than accumulating wealth or earning fame.
A healthy night sleep, sadly, is widely neglected in our fast-paced society. “The combination of a deeply misguided definition of what it means to be successful in today’s world—that it can come only through burnout and stress—along with the distractions and temptations of a 24/7 wired world, has imperiled our sleep as never before,” Arianna Huffington, business leader and author, wrote in her bestseller “The Sleep Revolution.” Make a real change in your life. Aspire to achieve healthy sleep habits.
You’ve read Your Guide To Better Sleep Habits, originally posted on Pick the Brain | Motivation and Self Improvement. If you’ve enjoyed this, please visit our site for more inspirational articles.
>
Fred Bass, Maestro of the Strand
The news this week of the death, at age eighty-nine, of Fred Bass, the legendary bookseller who made the Strand into the cultural landmark it is, put me in mind of an afternoon I spent with him more than a decade ago. I had gone to the Strand to learn something about the store’s highly-trafficked used-book buying counter, and the people who worked there. It was a place with which I had a more than passing familiarity. Like any number of young literary-minded New Yorkers with more ambition than money (or storage space), I had long made the trek to 12th Street and Broadway, my satchel laden with review copies. There was something ignoble in this, but it was an authentic part of a hoary, if not frequently discussed, literary tradition.
1917: Lenin, Wilson, and the Birth of the New World Disorder
Until the calamities of 1939−45 prompted a name change, what we now call World War I was known as either the Great War or, wishfully, the War to End All Wars. A century later, it looks more like the true Mother of All Wars, including how its Ottoman Empire sideshow — a.k.a. Lawrence of Arabia and all that — created the modern Middle East. This may explain why the big cataclysm’s centennial commemorations from 2014 on have been so short on zest.
We don’t much mind honoring gory history so long as its upheavals feel safely remote from civilization’s settled, confident present. That’s hardly the situation here, though — not with the prospect of another showdown as mindless as the one set off by Archduke Ferdinand’s assassination in 1914 crisping the air everywhere from Donald Trump’s Washington to Pyongyang and Tehran. No longer a quaint business featuring spike-helmeted kaisers, khaki puttees, herky-jerky silent films, and “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary,” World War I looks increasingly like our own anxious era’s origin story.
Welcome to the overarching premise of Arthur Herman’s 1917: Lenin, Wilson, and the Birth of the New World Disorder. It stands out in the glut of revisionist histories timed to World War I’s 100th anniversary, not least because it’s a terrific read. Even when you want to quarrel with Herman’s interpretations, he’s a whiz at organizing his complicated materials for maximum narrative clarity and dramatic effect. His provocative pairing of Lenin, the Soviet Union’s inventor, with Woodrow Wilson, the most intransigently high-minded of U.S. presidents, as the joint architects of the chaotic planet we know today is never boring, no matter how irritated you may be by his ambition to turn “Tommy and Volodya” (one of his breezier chapter titles) into unwitting kindred spirits.
The way they’re portrayed here, it’s only a slight exaggeration to say there are moments when only Lenin’s goatee and Wilson’s silk topper will keep you able to tell them apart. Lenin struggled to turn post-Romanov Russia into the unlikely starter wife for his fantasy of worldwide proletarian revolution, while Wilson, maybe even more imaginatively, tried to repurpose the Western Front’s barbaric slaughter into an abolition movement against the wickedness that had led to it in the first place. Both were, in Herman’s view, radical zealots, equally determined “to transform events . . . in ways that would make those events consistent with their larger vision.” Even though neither man’s vision prevailed in the long run — that’s how it goes with visions — 1917 amounts to a prosecutor’s brief against both on a charge of shared messianic absolutism.
Except, perhaps, among a few diehard Communist dotards, the deleterious effects of Lenin’s ideas aren’t in much dispute. Once the Bolsheviks secured power, an outcome far from guaranteed when the famous German-sponsored train transporting Lenin from Swiss exile chugged into Petrograd’s Finland Station in April 1917, his ruthless conflation of patriotism and party loyalty laid “the essential foundation of the totalitarian state.” Not only Mussolini and Hitler, but Mao Zedong and, in our time, Kim Jong-un, owe Lenin’s example for making their variants on it possible.
Dispelling any lingering sentimentality about where the Marxist dream went wrong, Herman does a first-rate job of demonstrating that Stalin’s USSR — gulag, show trials, vulpine secret police, and all — was by no means a travesty of Lenin’s blueprint but its fulfillment. (“Yes, we are oppressors,” Lenin once bluntly said, because revolutions with no real popular backing can’t work any other way.) However, Wilson doesn’t really come off much better, at least aside from Herman’s acknowledgment that Lenin’s embrace of murderous violence would have horrified him.
You don’t have to be much of an admirer of our twenty-eighth president — and who is anymore, except a few diehard Princetonian dotards? — to think there were plenty of other significant differences. One of them is that, even at its most vainglorious, Wilson’s project — unlike Lenin’s — didn’t include the destruction of representative democracy to help realize his goals. He merely had a temperament amazingly ill suited to democracy’s give-and-take, which comes under the heading of personality flaws and not crimes against humanity.
That’s why there’s a certain underhanded brilliance in comparing Wilson to Lenin so relentlessly. No liberal himself — his current home base is the right-wing think tank the Hudson Institute, and he’s a regular contributor to the likes of Commentary and National Review — Herman is a man on a mission he plainly delights in: doing his bit to discredit the liberal tradition by giving one of the Democratic Party’s bygone paragons feet of clay that reach, in Wilson’s case, right up to his pince-nez. It doesn’t even matter that Wilson is hardly a hero to the Woke Generation, as white supremacists with a virtuous hankering to impose America’s will abroad aren’t popular campus figures these days. Linking twentieth-century American liberalism to twentieth-century totalitarianism is an old game among conservative intellectuals, but Herman’s originality is all in personalizing things by rooting his case in the similarity of Lenin’s and Wilson’s psychological makeup and depicting both as fanatics.
If that requires playing fast-and-loose with ideological categories on occasion, Herman certainly goes about it nimbly. Among other ploys, he habitually identifies Wilson as a capital-P “Progressive,” not merely a Democrat; while Wilson himself wouldn’t have objected to the label, Herman rather scurries past the fact that it was a catchall term for reformists back then, with prominent proponents in both parties. The effect is to make unwary modern readers see Wilson as much more of a left-winger than he was, setting up broad-brush claims on the order of Herman’s sweeping assertion that Wilson saw the war as an opportunity “to realize his Progressive dream of a nation that responded to the agenda and needs of government — as opposed to the other way around.” (Really? How very Leninist of him.) On the flip side, Herman breezily equates the Bolsheviks’ creation of a state security apparatus to enforce ideological conformity with “what would come to be called ‘political correctness,’ ” which is really pretty disgraceful as drive-by calumnies go.
In other words, you’d do well to take his more extreme elaborations of his schema with roughly a pound of salt. That frees you up to enjoy his book’s considerable virtues, from its lively storytelling — lots of quasi-cinematic cross-cutting between capitals — and zesty plunges into the intricate political maneuverings that Lenin ruthlessly mastered and Wilson obstinately held himself above, to Herman’s frequently acute insights into how both men’s minds worked. If he’s at his weakest, not to say shoddiest, when he’s trying to turn his leading actors into funhouse-mirror soul mates — their diametrically opposed understanding of the machinery of power is enough all by itself to demolish that notion — he’s much more convincing when he’s plumbing them separately as individuals and giving the manufactured parallels a rest.
Herman’s portraits of the other key players in 1917‘s vast canvas are often stimulating as well. Alexander Kerensky, the head of the Provisional Government the Bolsheviks overthrew, emerges here as a more impressive, less feckless figure than the sad sack of caricature — a man, in fact, with the gifts to have emerged as “the George Washington of the new Russia” if Lenin’s greater wiliness hadn’t thwarted him. (Charmingly, Herman mentions that he once met Kerensky, who didn’t die until 1970, in the latter’s old age.) A good deal less persuasively, Herman blames Wilson for dooming Kerensky’s government by not pressuring his new European allies to end the war before Russia collapsed, a scenario that evaporates in the face of Britain’s and France’s likely reaction to the proposal.
He’s on surer ground assessing how Wilson’s hauteur checkmated him politically at home. Clearly a much bigger fan of Theodore Roosevelt’s boisterous conception of the United States as an emerging world power than he is of Wilson’s maddeningly lofty version, Herman argues that Wilson’s rejection of Roosevelt’s eager offer to raise a division of volunteers to fight on the Western Front — which most historians treat as a well-deserved rebuke to the former president’s bellicose vanity — was actually one of his key mistakes, making an enemy out of not only T.R. but his Senate ally Henry Cabot Lodge. Lodge, of course, ended up as the man chiefly responsible for torpedoing American participation in the League of Nations, Wilson’s ultimate dream.
Nonetheless, by ultimately bringing the United States into the war, Wilson did launch us on the road to becoming a world hegemon, even if that status wasn’t certified until the end of World War II. From Herman’s perspective, this was a more or less unqualified “Good Thing,” putting him in the odd position of giving Wilson credit for letting the genie out of the bottle, after spending several hundred pages castigating him for confusing genies with the Holy Ghost. Trying to reconcile the public relations value of Wilsonian idealism with the Kissinger-style Realpolitik he obviously prefers in practice makes his concluding pages fairly convoluted, but most readers will have caught on well before then that the pleasures of 1917 are in its energy and detail, not its ambitious but bungled aspirations to big-picture profundity.
The post 1917: Lenin, Wilson, and the Birth of the New World Disorder appeared first on The Barnes & Noble Review.
The Barnes & Noble Review http://ift.tt/2CSiwn6
The natural amphitheater of Bryce Canyon National Park in Utah…
The natural amphitheater of Bryce Canyon National Park in Utah provides the perfect venue for enjoying fascinating landscapes and stunning skies. In winter, snow decorates the bright cliffs and hoodoos. Make sure to take a walk along the Rim Trail for all the best views. Photo by Jim Su (http://ift.tt/18oFfjl).
The natural amphitheater of Bryce Canyon National Park in Utah…
The natural amphitheater of Bryce Canyon National Park in Utah provides the perfect venue for enjoying fascinating landscapes and stunning skies. In winter, snow decorates the bright cliffs and hoodoos. Make sure to take a walk along the Rim Trail for all the best views. Photo by Jim Su (http://ift.tt/18oFfjl).
Sig Nordal 