Our quintet of quality reviews this week includes Joseph O’Neill on Jared Weisberg’s Profiles in Cowardice, Hua Hsu on Brian Dillon’s Ambivalence, Felipe De La Hoz on Mahmoud Khalil’s No Land to Stand On, Edna Bonhomme on Imani Thompson’s Honey, and Jeremy Gordon on Jon Ronson’s The Castle. Brought to you by Book Marks, Lit Hub’s home for book reviews. A nation long perceived, not least by its own nationals, as resilient and courageous—a people of gallant pioneers, fearless entrepreneurs, irresistible war heroes, nerveless astronauts, brave civil rights activists—is now forced to contemplate an entirely new set of data.
It seems that, when placed under mild authoritarian pressure, an extraordinary number of powerful Americans, ostensibly honorable and right-thinking, quickly revealed themselves to be cowardly and unprincipled and made of the wrong stuff. The journalist Jacob Weisberg is one of the first to attempt to chronicle this new landscape. In a dismal inversion of the John F.
Kennedy classic Profiles in Courage, Weisberg’s Profiles in Cowardice offers case studies of eight representative men and women ‘who recognized the danger Trump posed to American values, who had the ability to say no to him and who at earlier moments showed flickers of integrity—but who, when a more serious test came, failed to act courageously, in ways that reveal both their moral weakness and the fragility of the institutions they represented.’ “Weisberg’s intention isn’t simply to lambaste these individuals, even as he hopes that shaming them will serve a useful purpose. Because cowardice ‘wears disguises: pragmatism, realism, caution, institutional loyalty,’ he investigates the specific situational and psychological forces at play in the moral downfall of each of his subjects, taking care, it must be said, to acknowledge that it isn’t straightforward to resist lawless state power. Standing your ground can be frightening; it can negatively affect one’s career and net worth; it can leave one socially isolated; and, when you’re trying to discharge institutional responsibilities, it can feel ethically complicated.
But in the final analysis, Weisberg suggests, the rights and wrongs were pretty clear. His subjects are voluntary members of the American elite who were at no risk of imprisonment or impoverishment. Their example upholds what’s left of this country’s reputation for courage.” –Joseph O’Neill on Jared Weisberg’s Profiles in Cowardice: A Study of Collaboration in the Trump Era (The New York Times Book Review) “The overheated circuits of teen-age life are well-worn ground for a coming-of-age story, yet Dillon’s approach is anything but.
The writer and editor has become known for a kind of memoir-inflected approach to criticism, publishing a series of entrancing books that are as much about questions of form and technique as they are about art’s power to move and transform . . . Dillon wanders through his shelves, scrutinizing works by Walter Benjamin, Joan Didion, or James Baldwin and seeing, at a granular level, how writing achieves such profound effects. Ambivalence isn’t a how-I-did-it prehistory of his career, as it ends well before he published anything of note.
Rather, he writes about this formative span of his late teens and early twenties in the third person, investigating the passions and neuroses of young ‘B’ from a distance. Few people intervene on B’s trajectory, if you can call it that; he spends most of his days dreaming and turning newly discovered ideas over in his mind until they feel like his own. Trauma and tragedies—such as the death of his parents, or periods of estrangement from his siblings—receive less scrutiny than the emotions unlocked by Virginia Woolf or Roland Barthes.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
