Ambrose: Let's Call The Whole Thing Off

Civil Rights Heroes to Teach Your Kids About

Martin Luther King Jr. wasn’t the only one. So tell your family about the dreams of these other, perhaps lesser-known, leaders.


Martin Luther King Jr. wasn’t the only one. So tell your family about the dreams of these other, perhaps lesser-known, leaders.

It’s shocking how little the youth of today know about the civil-rights movement. A few years ago, the National Assessment of Educational Progress found that only 2 percent of high school seniors knew what social issue was addressed in Brown v. Board of Education. The Teaching Tolerance Project of the Southern Poverty Law Center noted in 2014 that 12 states don’t require that schools teach anything about civil-rights history, and also found that most states’ content standards, to put it mildly, suck. Teaching Tolerance gave the majority of states a D or below on their curricula; 20 states got an F. (You can see Teaching Tolerance’s methodology here.)

Furthermore, the way the movement does get taught tends to pump up the roles of Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks at the expense of almost everyone else. Parks didn’t spontaneously decide not to give up her seat on a bus because she was tired, and she didn’t act in a vacuum: She was working strategically with other social-justice leaders. As Teaching Tolerance puts it, “The reduction of the movement into simple fables obscures the broad social, institutional and personal sacrifices of the people who engaged in the struggle.” If we treat King and Parks as singular, we fail to teach kids that they, too—as individuals and as members of communities—have the power to effect change. And we should be wary of presenting kids with too-pat, too-happy conclusions, turning King into a toothless advocate of the colorblind society we’ve now achieved (or at least come close to achieving, on a legal level) and turning Parks into a woman who ended institutionalized racism (yay!) because, as historian Michael Kammen put it, “amnesia is more likely to be induced by the desire for reconciliation.” There’s a reason right-wing leaders invoke King’s words as often as lefties do: If you bat your eyelashes and speak loftily about judging someone by the content of their character, you can avoid wrestling with current issues of inequity and systemic prejudice.

So, as a small corrective, here’s a quick primer on seven African-American civil-rights leaders whose personal stories will entice kids, with a list of books you can give your kids to learn more about heroes other than King. It’s up to you to continue those stories by adding, “We still have work to do.” And then, of course, to engage your family in helping to do that work.

(And, hey, here’s a radical proposition: Let’s not overemphasize the role of Jews in the civil-rights movement. I think for some white Jews, the fact that we were active participants in the 1960s serves as justification and excuse for not being great allies today. It’s more important for us to listen to black people’s current stories, respect their experiences, and sit with their anger than it is for us to trumpet our own involvement in those stories. Therefore, this column will not mention Abraham Joshua Heschel. I know.)

1. Ida B. Wells (1862-1930) was born to slaves and became an educator, journalist, and co-founder of the NAACP. When she was a teenager, her parents died of yellow fever, and she fought to keep her younger siblings together and care for them. She became a teacher in a segregated school at 16, and spread the word about terrible conditions and inadequate resources for black students. In 1891, three of her friends in Memphis who’d opened a grocery store that took black customers away from the established white grocery were lynched. (Their shop had been attacked by white vandals, and they fought back and shot several … but they were murdered in jail before they had a trial.) That sparked her desire to research lynchings; she found that contrary to what white newspapers said, lynchings weren’t prompted by the rapes of white women. They were more commonly a response to public drunkenness, economic competition with whites, and displaying attitudes and behavior that whites perceived as uppity. Also, Wells found, lynchings were more common in years of financial hardship, when cotton was less profitable. White newspaper editors were furious at her for her reporting. One wrote, “The fact that a black scoundrel is allowed to live … is a volume of evidence as to the wonderful patience of Southern whites. But we have had enough of it.” In the face of such threats to her life, Wells said, “I felt that one had better die fighting against injustice than to die like a dog or a rat in a trap.” A book about her to share with kids from 8 to 12: Ida B. Wells: Let the Truth Be Told by Walter Dean Myers (the winner of two Newbery Medals and five Coretta Scott King Awards), illustrated by Bonnie Christenson. The book uses lots of quotes from Wells herself, and the watercolor illustrations are powerful.

• Ida B. Wells: Let the Truth Be Told Paperback – January 27, 2015 by Walter Dean Myers  (Author), Bonnie Christensen  (Illustrator), Amistad

2. John Lewis (1940-) is a legend, the last living keynote speaker at the 1963 March on Washington. He grew up in rural Alabama, met Martin Luther King Jr., became involved in student activism, and was the youngest speaker at the March on Washington. In 1965, at 25, he was beaten into unconsciousness by white cops and state troopers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge during the march from Selma to Montgomery. “I gave a little blood on that bridge,” he said. “I thought I saw death.” But as white Americans watched police gassing and smashing the skulls of nonviolent protestors, the arc of history began to bend toward justice. You can talk to kids about how Lewis is still fighting today—he represents Georgia in the House of Representatives, and last year he led a sit-in on the House floor after Sen. Chris Murphy spearheaded a 15-hour filibuster in favor of common-sense gun control. Currently Lewis is in the vanguard of the fight against the confirmation of Jeff Sessions—who has been charged with racism for much of his career—as attorney general. In a piece last year for MLK Day, I mentioned the first volume of March, the comic book trilogy Lewis co-authored (along with Andrew Aydin and Eisner Award-winning graphic novelist Nate Powell); now all three books are out, and they’re spectacular … as well as older-kid-friendly. (I’d say they’re good for kids 11 and up.) You can buy them individually or in a slipcased collection. The comics offer nuance, showing that not all the participants in history agreed with each other about strategy or the use of violence in response to violence. Nuance is good. Especially now.

• March (Trilogy Slipcase Set) Paperback – September 6, 2016 by John Lewis  (Author), Andrew Aydin  (Author), Nate Powell  (Artist),Top Shelf Productions

3. Claudette Colvin (1939-) was a 15-year-old girl in 1955 when she refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery, Alabama, bus to a white passenger … nine months before Rosa Parks did the same thing. But civil-rights leaders felt that Colvin, a kid who’d been in trouble in school and had been called “mouthy” and “emotional,” wasn’t a good face for the movement. Rosa Parks, a respectable older married lady, was better. Colvin wound up with a police record (after being physically yanked off the bus, manhandled, handcuffed, and jailed). To make matters worse, she soon got pregnant by an older man and was expelled from school. She never got the support she should have from grown civil-rights leaders. Still, she eventually testified in the case that ended segregated buses. Philip Hoose’s Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice is a spectacularly reported book (Hoose pursued Colvin, who had an unlisted phone number and was living in obscurity, for four years before she agreed to tell her story) that won the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature in 2009 and a Newbery Honor in 2010. Teenagers—who often want to stand up to injustice but feel that adults don’t have their backs—will relate.  

• Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice Paperback – December 21, 2010 by Phillip Hoose (Author), Square Fish

4. Ruby Bridges (1954-) was the first black child to desegregate the New Orleans public schools. The very youngest children will understand how scary this must have been for a 6-year-old, and how brave she was. Her book, Through My Eyes will resonate with kids 7 and up, and beginning readers (5 and up) will appreciate The Story of Ruby Bridges by Robert Coles, with gentle watercolor illustrations by George Ford. Because white parents wouldn’t let their kids learn with Ruby, she had one-on-one lessons with a young teacher. Parents can talk about why most schools (including their own kids,’ probably) are still so segregated, and what Americans can do to change that.

• Through My Eyes Hardcover – September 1, 1999 by Ruby Bridges  (Author), Margo Lundell (Compiler, Editor), Scholastic Press,
• The Story Of Ruby Bridges: Special Anniversary Edition Paperback – September 1, 2010 by Robert Coles  (Author), George Ford (Illustrator), Scholastic Press

5. Ella Baker (1903-1986) was like many women: an active player behind the scenes of history who never got the credit she deserved. She grew up in North Carolina and moved to New York City to work in social justice. She knew that economic parity was essential for equality, and once said, “People cannot be free until there is enough work in this land to give everybody a job.” In the 1940s she worked for the NAACP, and in the 1950s she moved to Atlanta to help King establish the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. She was most interested in working with young activists, and was one of the people who helped organize the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, which helped create Freedom Summer. She said of herself: “You didn’t see me on television; you didn’t see news stories about me. The kind of role that I tried to play was to pick up pieces or put together pieces out of which I hoped organization might come.” That perspective was how she got the nickname “Fundi,” a Swahili word for someone who teaches a craft to the next generation. Alas, another reason she was perhaps less publicly lauded than she should have been was that the civil-rights movement was largely modeled on the black church, with its male leadership and female congregants. (In fact, no woman was a featured speaker at the March on Washington—Gloria Richardson, a Maryland activist, was told she’d get to give a two-minute speech but her chair was taken offstage and her microphone was whisked away when she got to the podium; even Rosa Parks and Lena Horne were escorted offstage before Martin Luther King Jr. spoke.) Today, New York City has a well-regarded, diverse, progressive public school named after her, but if there’s a great children’s book about her, I can’t find it! Someone write one!

• Freedom Cannot Rest: Ella Baker and the Civil Rights Movement (Portraits of Black Americans) Library Binding – September 12, 2005,Morgan Reynolds Publishing 
• Ella Baker: A Leader Behind the Scenes (The History of the Civil Rights Movement)Sep 1990 by Shyrlee Dallard,Paperback, Silver Burdett,
• Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision (Gender and American Culture) New edition Edition by Barbara Ransby  (Author),The University of North Carolina Press

6. Fannie Lou Hamer (1917-1977) was born on a Mississippi plantation, the last of 20 children of a poor sharecropper. In 1961, when she was in the hospital to have a small tumor removed, she was sterilized without her knowledge or consent. Doctors could legally do that to poor black women then. (The procedure was colloquially known as a “Mississippi appendectomy.”) In 1962, after learning that she had the right to vote, she went to try to register, along with a small group of her neighbors. After being made to jump through hoops, they were turned away. On the way home, the group’s bus was pulled over by police for being “the wrong color.” The passengers were terrified…until Hamer began to sing. She sang hymns like “This Little Light of Mine,” and civil-rights songs, and she made her fellow activists feel better. But upon her return to the plantation where she lived and worked as a bookkeeper, she was fired and kicked out of her house. Still, she kept up her activism, despite being brutally beaten, assaulted, and threatened. In 1964, she spoke to the credentials committee at the Democratic National Convention, asking, “Is this America, the land of the free and the home of the brave, where we have to sleep with our telephones off of the hooks because our lives be threatened daily, because we want to live as decent human beings?” Hamer’s story is showcased in the poetic, lyrical Voice of Freedom: Fannie Lou Hamer, a 2016 Caldecott Honor Book (the publisher recommends it for kids 9-12) by Carole Boston Weatherford, illustrated with potent multimedia collages by Ekua Holmes. You might also sing “This Little Light of Mine” with kids, and talk about the song’s association with Hamer.

• Voice of Freedom: Fannie Lou Hamer: The Spirit of the Civil Rights Movement (Robert F. Sibert Informational Book Honor (Awards)) Hardcover – August 4, 2015,by Carole Boston Weatherford  (Author), Ekua Holmes (Illustrator,Candlewick
• For Freedom's Sake: The Life of Fannie Lou Hamer (Women in American History)May 25, 2000 by Chana Kai Lee, University of Illinois Press,
• Fannie Lou Hamer: Fighting for the Right to Vote (African-American Biographies (Enslow)) Hardcover – October, 2002 by Laura Baskes Litwin ,Enslow Publisher

7. Bayard Rustin (1912-1987) was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest award an American citizen can attain, in 2013. Here’s what President Obama’s citation said: “Bayard Rustin was an unyielding activist for civil rights, dignity, and equality for all. An adviser to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., he promoted nonviolent resistance, participated in one of the first Freedom Rides, organized the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, and fought tirelessly for marginalized communities at home and abroad. As an openly gay African-American, Mr. Rustin stood at the intersection of several of the fights for equal rights.” During his lifetime, Rustin didn’t get the honor he was due, probably because he was gay. (He was also a former Communist, and in the late ’60s, he became more of a hawk, aligning with the American right’s perspective on Israel. Oh, and he was also a big supporter of imperiled and oppressed Soviet Jewry. Look, I found a Jewish connection in this story after all!) There’s a 2007 children’s book about him that I haven’t read: We Are One: The Story of Bayard Rustin by Larry Dane Brinmer, aimed at reader age 9-11. Booklist’s review noted that Rustin’s gay identity is relegated to a small mention in the afterword, so hey, someone else please tell Rustin’s story in all its complexity. Kids can handle it.

• Time on Two Crosses: The Collected Writings of Bayard RustinMar 24, 2015,by Devon W. Carbado and Don Weise,Paperback, Cleis Press
• Lost Prophet: The Life and Times of Bayard RustinOct 1, 2004,by John D'Emilio,Paperback, University of Chicago Press,
• We Are One: The Story of Bayard Rustin Hardcover – October 1, 2007 by Larry Dane Brimner  Calkins Creek
• Bayard Rustin: Behind the Scenes of the Civil Rights Movement Hardcover – February 2, 1997by Jim Haskins (Author),Disney-Hyperion 

  

Nicotine By Gregor Hens Translated by Jen Calleja Illustrated. 176 pages. Other Press. $16.95.

‘Nicotine,’ the Stuff of Burning Desire

CreditSonny Figueroa/The New York Times

The best cigarette you will ever smoke, Gregor Hens writes in his new memoir, “Nicotine,” is the relapse cigarette. It tastes better, he adds, “the longer the prior abstinence.”

This is dangerous knowledge. More than a few smokers relapsed after Sept. 11. Others did after the recent presidential election, as if heeding the poet James Dickey’s dictum that “guilt is magical.” Some of us barely keep the urge at bay. There’s a dark sliver in a former smoker’s mind that half-longs for dire events, so as to justify lighting up again. But it’s not as if we need large cues, Mr. Hens writes, when small ones will do.

“Every form of cigarette ad gives me a pang of longing, every scrunched-up, carelessly thrown-away cigarette packet at a bus stop, every trod-on cigarette butt, every beautiful woman holding a cigarette between her fingers or just looking like she could be holding one,” he writes. “My reading chair in Columbus gives me a pang, and M.’s balcony in Berlin, and my old Jeep because I’ve smoked some of the best cigarettes while driving.”

Mr. Hens is a German writer and translator who has lived and taught in the United States. “Nicotine” is the first of his own books to be issued in English. It’s a hybrid volume: part memoir, part philosophical lament.Continue reading the main story



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It doesn’t always click. There are passages (“I saw myself as a part of a field of tension”) that, in this translation by Jen Calleja, veer close to psychobabble. But when “Nicotine” stays dry, earthy and combustible, like a Virginia tobacco blend, it has a lot to say and says it well.Photo

Gregor Hens CreditPeter von Felbert

The author does not resemble your idea of a former serious smoker. There Mr. Hens is, blue-eyed and dimpled, in his author photo on the back flap. He looks as if he were ready to bag organic carrots during his weekend stint at the food co-op.

Indeed, he writes, he is a serious cyclist, a participant in triathlons and a member of the German Alpine Association. He’s been a health nut all along, at least in between long bouts of smoking. I can’t decide if this is suspicious or insane, like that famous photograph of the Kansas City Chiefs quarterback Len Dawson, taking a deep drag on a cigarette in the locker room during halftime of Super Bowl I in 1967.

“I’ve smoked well over a hundred thousand cigarettes in my life, and each one of those cigarettes meant something to me,” Mr. Hens writes. He goes on: “I’ve smoked cold cigarette butts, cigars, cigarillos, bidis, kreteks, spliffs and straw. I’ve missed flights because of cigarettes and burnt holes in trousers and car seats. I’ve singed my eyelashes and eyebrows, fallen asleep while smoking and dreamt of cigarettes — of relapses and fires and bitter withdrawal.”

He sees this book as a chance finally to put the urge behind him, to comprehend it, seal it and bury it. He writes about his childhood. His father smoked so much that the author thought smoking was the older man’s job. His mother, a stylish woman who drove a steel-blue Range Rover, smoked more when she was depressed.

There’s a faded romance in the European brand names of the cigarettes he or his family members smoked: Finas Kyriazi Frères; Kims; Murattis; filterless Senior Services; Erntes; Van Nelle Halfzwares.

This book takes us to unusual and evocative locations, too, such as the Frisian island of Borkum. Mr. Hens recounts a drive to the German city of Balderschwang, which sounds like a word an American politician would utter when something livelier than “poppycock” was required.

He is especially good on how those who quit become vicarious smokers. “Sometimes I walk around the city and imagine that others are smoking on my behalf,” he writes. “I silently thank the smokers in front of the cafes and office buildings and in smoking areas, imagining that they do it for me, for my inner contentment. I have people smoke for me.”

Like any author worth reading, Mr. Hens is sometimes best when he goes off-topic, dispatching obiter dicta. He is brutal about the Midwest. (“The most insignificant city in the United States is Columbus, Ohio.”)

He’s interesting about aphorisms and our need to attach them, usually erroneously, to famous people. He considers how often we utter the phrase “no worries” when, in fact, we are murderously aggrieved. He charts the passing of time by noting how the white tennis balls of his youth have become neon green.

This book is not a deep dive into smoking and literature, or into smoking and films. He doesn’t go out of his way to conjure the romance of two lit cigarettes and a corner table. “Nicotine” mostly omits the social pleasures of smoking. Mr. Hens is, with a metaphorical carton of American Spirits under his arm, a smoking section of one.

His lapidary prose will sometimes put you in mind of the chain-smoking Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgaard’s, though Mr. Knausgaard is generally more penetrating. The small black-and-white photographs in “Nicotine” recall the images in some of W. G. Sebald’s books.

This edition of “Nicotine” includes an introduction by the English writer Will Self that belongs in the hall of fame of bad introductions. Mr. Self (never has his name seemed so apt) tries to one-up Mr. Hens by bragging at length about his own peerless nicotine addiction. This introduction is profitably torn out, the way smokers of unfiltered cigarettes tear the filters from Marlboros.

This seems like the place to mention that Mr. Hens compares the cottony insides of a cigarette filter, perfectly, to “artichoke hair.”

Someday, surely, smoking will be outlawed. Who will smoke the last unfiltered Camel? Some of us who quit years ago like to imagine that we will start again at the end of our lives. We agree with the English writer Charles Lamb, who hoped that “the last breath I draw in this world will be through a pipe, and exhaled in a pun.”

• The Architecture of Neoliberalism: How Contemporary Architecture Became an Instrument of Control and Compliance by Douglas Spencer , Bloomsbury Academic

Revels in sensuous freedoms … Zaha Hadid’s Heydar Aliyev centre in Azerbaijan. Photograph: Alamy

Architects seldom make the front pages of newspapers. Patrik Schumacher recently managed it, though, getting himself on to the cover of the Evening Standard after a speech in which he advocated privatising all social housing and all public space – including Hyde Park – and espoused intensified gentrification of inner city areas. His advocacy on behalf of plutocrats reached hilariously villainous levels when he said of second home owners in London: “even if they’re only here for a few weeks and throw some key parties, these are amazing multiplying events”.

This is “neoliberal” rhetoric at its purest. Neoliberalism – a form of free market fundamentalism that effectively came to power at the turn of the 1980s with the election of such enthusiasts for Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman as Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan – is an unusual concept, largely because it extends out of economics and into philosophy and the way people see the world. As Thatcher once said, “economics is the method, the aim is to change the soul”. According to Douglas Spencer, one of the best places to see this is architecture.

Schumacher now heads Zaha Hadid Architects, after the early death of his long-term creative partner in 2016. He is a figurehead of a digital architecture described as “parametricism”, which he has tried to popularise through a series of densely theoretical, admirably pugnacious texts in the architectural press over the last 10 years. The speech that got him into the national news is a somewhat blunter expression of the political ideas that go with the seemingly apolitical language he used to describe parametricism, an architecture which, in his words, “interarticulates, morphs, deterritorialises, deforms, iterates, uses splines, nurbs, generative components, scripts rather than models”. This is a little bit more complex than “build on Hyde Park”.

For Spencer, this is only the vulgar statement of something that has previously been expressed in architectural-philosophical jargon. For him, Schumacher’s buildings with Zaha Hadid, characterised by “pliant envelopes and organic contours”, carefully hide the structures of support, not to mention the human labour and political power that actually builds; their “workings are beyond our ken”. The buildings described in this book include a college in Greenwich, a BMW factory in Leipzig, the China Central Television headquarters in Beijing, New Street station in Birmingham and a John Lewis store in Leicester. The “neoliberal eye”, Spencer argues, “does not apprehend, calculate or gauge”. Instead, it “surfs the field of vision, revelling in the sensuous freedoms offered up to it”.
FacebookTwitterPinterest An artist’s impression of the design for Rem Koolhaas’s CCTV building in Beijing, China. Photograph: OMA/Corbis

Architects such as Schumacher, Greg Lynn and the team of Alejandro Zaera-Polo and Farshid Moussavi (formerly Foreign Office Architects, designers of New Street station and the Leicester John Lewis) arrived at this point via a circuitous route through continental philosophy and architectural theory, only later coming to the neoliberal classics (by Hayek and Friedman). Resistance is

not only futile, it’s misunderstanding; there is no alternative. Hayek argued that in the social democratic era human systems were so complex that to try and manage or plan them could only lead to totalitarianism. With Schumacher, this idea is translated into a “radical free-market urbanism”, where all controls on flows must be removed, and “the market will discover the most productive mix and arrangement of land uses, a distribution that garners synergies and maximises overall value” (an excitable jargon is a constant in these circles). This belief in “the market” left to its own devices, despite the evidence of the 2008 financial crisis that an unregulated, complex, computerised financial system leads both to endemic corruption and to disastrous economic collapses, has a touching, eschatological certainty to it. It is no surprise to learn that Schumacher is a former member of a Marxist sect.


Like many architectural theorists, Spencer is better on buildings as theorems than as things

But what does it mean for design? Zaera-Polo’s new facade and station hall for Birmingham New Street was downgraded so relentlessly in its construction – via impeccably neoliberal methods such as design and build contracts, public-private partnerships and “value engineering”, which take power out of the hands of architects and leave it with businesses – that the smooth surfaces and seamless flows are constantly interrupted by cheesy adverts and cheap materials. Schumacher and Hadid’s Riverside Transport Museum in Glasgow, or their Guangzhou Opera House, went through a similar process of cost-cutting vulgarisation. Like many architectural theorists, Spencer is better on buildings as theorems than as things, which runs contrary to his laudable emphasis on politics and labour. In the process, he inadvertently presents this architecture as seductively as it exists in the computer visuals, rather than in its usually tawdry reality

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FacebookTwitterPinterest Nottingham Contemporary art gallery, designed by Caruso St John. Photograph: David Sillitoe for the Guardian

These buildings are beginning to date. In architecture today, Schumacher often resembles a futurist relic, keeping the pure flame of pre-crisis “irrational exuberance” burning in a chastened era. The architecture that wins awards and contracts after the financial crisis is different. It is exemplified at its best in the discipline and craftsmanship of the art galleries Caruso St John architects have designed in Nottingham and Vauxhall, south London – and at its worst in the brick grids of luxury flats that increasingly dominate the skylines of London and Manchester. The social processes these latter buildings enforce – displacement of the poor, privatisation of public space, the decimation of social housing – are exactly those which Schumacher argues for in wilfully offensive terms.

Certainly, there are neoliberal architects, and their vertiginous designs represent their attempt to embody the dominant political and economic ideas of our time. But neoliberalism can easily do without them, and structures of power may prefer to cover their ongoing project in much more homely, reassuring architectural forms. This book is about the architecture of Tony Blair’s vision of society – ruthless for those who can’t go with the flow, rewarding for those who “aim high”. Theresa May’s architecture will be dull and disciplinarian.

 is published by Bloomsbury Academic

Margaret Thatcher eclipses Churchill in Dictionary of National Biography:The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography , Oxford university Press

What is the Oxford DNB? The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography is the national record of men and women who have shaped British history and culture, worldwide, from the Romans to the 21st century. The Dictionary offers concise, up-to-date biographies written by named, specialist authors. It is overseen by academic editors at Oxford University, UK, and published by Oxford University Press. The ODNB's General Editor is Professor Sir David Cannadine.

The Oxford DNB was first published in 2004 in print (60 vols.) and online. Since 2005 online updates have extended the Dictionary’s coverage in three annual updates, published every January, May, and September. The Oxford DNB now includes biographies of 60,061 men and women who died in or before the year 2012—plus 536 ‘Theme’ articles for reference and research.

New biography added to authoritative reference work gives the UK’s first female prime minister more space than anybody but Shakespeare and Elizabeth I
 

Big presence … Margaret Thatcher


Margaret Thatcher has been added to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, commanding more space in the venerable reference work than any other Briton apart from Shakespeare and Elizabeth I. Eclipsing records for Queen Victoria, Winston Churchill and Henry VIII, historian David Cannadine’s biography of Britain’s first female PM is the third longest of the 60,000-plus entries in the 72m-word work.

Thatcher’s listing details her rise to power, from Lincolnshire grocer’s daughter to global political force during the cold war. Cannadine is robust in his 30,000-word assessment of Thatcher’s career, noting that as well as being one of the few politicians to lend their name to a political doctrine – Thatcherism – her blunt approach to leadership led to ferocious clashes from the miners’ strike to the poll tax riots. Her front and backbenchers in parliament knew a leader who it was punishing to cross.

Cannadine, who is the ODNB’s general editor, concludes his assessment: “There are times when nations may need rough treatment. For good and for ill, Thatcher gave Britain plenty of it.”

As with the other 214 lives recorded in the latest additions to the ODNB, Thatcher died in 2013. Entries are always posthumous and feature persons of note from Roman Britain to the 21st century. Editors wait four years after the death of a notable figure to assess whether they are worthy of a place in what is effectively the canon of British public life, whose first edition was in 1885.

Among other new entries to the ODNM, which is available free online through public libraries, are six Nobel laureates. As well as the poet Seamus Heaney and novelist Doris Lessing, they are chemists Frederick Sanger and Sir John Cornforth, economist Ronald Coase and Robert Edwards, who received the honour in 2010 for pioneering work on in vitro fertilisation.

Among notables from the arts and entertainment world to have found their place in the dictionary are writers Tom Sharpe and Iain Banks, TV personalities David Frost, Alan Whicker and Good Life star Richard Briers. Comedians Mike and Bernie Winters and writer Eddie Braben, famous for writing the scripts for Morecambe and Wise.

Notoriety, as well as repute, can be qualification for inclusion in the dictionary. Two of the Great Train Robbers have been added. Though Ronnie Biggs played only a minor role in the 1963 robbery, his name has been added because his subsequent escape to Brazil as a fugitive from justice turned him into a “money-making celebrity”. His partner in crime Bruce Reynolds, who was the mastermind of the heist, has also been added to the collected lives.

The dictionary moved online in 2004 and has since become available to library users throughout the UK. Published by the Oxford University Press, it is a research tool for Oxford University and makes no commercial return on the £25m investment in its creation.

The Power Triangle: Military, Security and Politics in Regime Change. Hazem Kandil. Oxford University Press. 2016

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The recent uprisings in the Middle East revived three main approaches to studying political regimes. The first propagates the possibility of revolution, citing such examples as Tunisia and Egypt. Another is concerned with its impossibility: in other words, with the resilience of authoritarianism, drawing on cases of revolutionary failure in Iran, Syria and Bahrain among others. A middle ground was also put forth by students of ‘reform’, following on from George Lawson’s cutting-edge Negotiated Revolutions (2004), utilising cases like Morocco, Jordan and, of course, Turkey.

These three streams, however, often change positions. Taking Egypt as an example, from 2005-10 it was considered a case of negotiated reform. In January 2011, Egypt became a celebrated case of revolution. Two years later, a brutal coup put an end to those ambitions, and the country instead became a case of authoritarian resistance. The future is uncertain: literature on the Egyptian regime might keep going in circles between revolution, reform and resilience forever. The result is a library of swinging accounts, each describing the volatile situation of the regime in momentous snapshot but none comprehensively interrogating the power dynamics that construct such a ‘seesaw’.

Hazem Kandil’s book, The Power Triangle: Military, Security and Politics in Regime Change, fills this void, at least with regards to three of the aforementioned cases: Egypt, Turkey and Iran. This review will conclude by briefly highlighting his findings relating to each. But the main concern is the book’s theoretical contribution: that is, exposing regime dynamics through which the interchange between revolution, reform and resilience is made possible and plausible.

Utilising Bourdieusian social analysis to deconstruct the state, Kandil re-emphasises Jack Goldstone’s assertion that stability is as problematic a phenomenon as revolution. The variety of competing institutions within any regime makes it more of a contestation field than a unified front. Of course, common interests hold competing institutions together but there will always remain divided interests. Therefore, as Pierre Bourdieu succinctly puts it: ‘[state agents are] both accomplices and opponents – accomplices in the use of power, and opponents in competition’ (Bourdieu 2014 in Kandil 6). Thus, institutions ‘scramble to dominate the regime’ while making sure that the ‘regime itself is not destroyed in the process’. ‘Of course, sometimes they fail […] these are the mistakes that make radical change possible’ (6). Very rarely do they succeed in keeping the regime intact without manipulating and reorganising standing power arrangements.

Image Credit: (Ho-Teng Chang CC BY 2.0)

In normal situations, regimes reform and reshuffle. In failure situations, revolutions occur. In the unusual cases in which internal contestations are absolutely absent, the regime is truly resilient. The latter, however, is hardly possible, for even if contestation is not there, the possibility of it suggests continuous reform and reshuffling. A volcano remains a volcano even when dormant, and a (possible) coup remains a coup even if inactive. Both require cautionary measures or may have drastic repercussions. In this sense, regime resilience is in practice a lowkey regime change. Regime change is the norm.

In the upper echelon of institutions lie the three major regime powers – the military, the security and the politicians. The first holds the armed power; the second intelligence power; and the third administrative power (in Weberian terms). Other powers, like the economic and the popular, manifest themselves forcefully within those institutions, but do not have the capacity to foster regime change except through one of the three. Ripped to its bones, the state is an apparatus of coercion and administration, and those two functions can be executed solely (albeit not most efficiently) through the three main institutions. By extension, they hold the power to bring the state to a standstill, thus enforcing regime change.

It is through the study of the struggle between these institutions that regime change in its variant forms can be illustrated. This struggle, however, is not always as obvious as a revolutionary moment. This explains why revolution grasps the majority of attention in regime change literature: it is particularly instrumental in fleshing out how power balances are crystallised within a given regime. Yet the study of this crystallisation moment is not sufficient to demystify how a particular power distribution is made possible at a specific point in time. More importantly, it is not sufficient for speculating as to how this power balance will develop and its future implications. Only a longitudinal study of the regime’s genesis can do this.

Kandil’s genesis of the regimes in Egypt, Turkey and Iran achieves those two goals successfully: first, it demonstrates why Egypt ended up as a police state, Turkey as a militarily ‘protected’ (and limited) democracy and Iran as a popular theocracy. There is not a particular causation that can be singled out in any of the three cases, but an amalgamation of collisions, collusions and historical contingencies played in favour of a particular balance of power between the three main power institutions leading to one form of state or another. Nonetheless, ‘the domination of one or more forms of power (politics, military, etc.) is always temporary because any crystallization produces conflict’ (5). Scratching beneath the surface of the regime type is therefore essential to understand what might follow next. This is the second empirical contribution of Kandil’s genesis.

If there is one main thing that Kandil should be praised for, it would be his ability to brilliantly speculate on future events. In Soldiers, Spies and Statesmen: Egypt’s Road to Revolt, Kandil suggested a possible military coup in Egypt if the military could not manage to find a ‘tamed’ ruling partner. The coup happened before the release of the book reviewed here. Here, he makes a more impressive speculation, this time concerning Turkey. Not only does he anticipate a military coup against Erdogan, but even the possibility that the security forces can help Erdogan overcome this (220) – exactly what we witnessed several months after the book’s publication. As for Iran, Kandil points at the ‘Revolutionary Guard’ as the ‘meta-institution, which […] could override all other regime institutions and transform Iran from a popular theocracy to a military dictatorship, or worse, a police state’ (130). There are no signs of this yet, but it remains a conceivable possibility.

Admittedly, chance plays a big role in demonstrating Kandil’s prudence just as it plays a key role in bringing one sort of political possibility to bear over others. Yet beyond this contingency, which is incorporated into Kandil’s model, his illustrative powers also lie in his detail-driven account. Unlike models that dealt with revolution, reform or resilience as the singular norm, Kandil approaches the three as different sides of the same triangle. This triangle is ‘regime change’: a continuous phenomenon that defines both turbulent and stable status quos. Dissecting the ‘power triangle’ and studying each angle as both an autonomous institution and part of the wider regime constellation, Kandil identifies the complicated struggles beneath the surface unity of the regime. As such, he can see the vulnerability even within the strongest regimes (Turkey) and, inversely, the potential for contingent consolidation in the most trembling (Egypt).

The book is an extension and a constellation of the works of an exemplary scholar. Like his previous studies, it is a key reference for a historical sociology of Middle Eastern politics. But this book thereotically exceeds Kandil’s others in placing the three Middle Eastern cases within a wider context, suggesting the ‘power triangle’ as a generalisable analytic apparatus through which revolution, reform and resilience can be illustrated.

However, this aspiration for generalisation, although implicit, is also one of the few problematic aspects of the book. It is indeed a possibility – but asserting this requires further empirical interrogation, perhaps into more established democracies and countries with less militarised histories (such as in Scandinavia) and regimes where the economic dimension has been more definitive than the political in their genesis (Switzerland). Nonetheless, there is no doubt that Kandil’s model, as it stands, can be fruitfully applied to a plethora of nondemocratic states throughout the world. To expand it further, more work is required, which I hope Kandil will pursue.

Aspirational Power: Brazil on the Long Road to Global Influence. David R. Mares and Harold A. Trinkunas. The Brookings Institution Press. 2016.

Brazil’s road to global influence provides the compound metres for David R. Mares and Harold A. Trinkunas’ Aspirational Power: Brazil on the Long Road to Global Influence. Aspirational Power is a systematic treatment of the global order and an explanation of why Brazil remains a ‘rule taker’. The book reads like Heitor Villa Lobos’s symphony O Trenzino do Caipira, rumbling through the melodic contours of repeated national efforts to scale the heights of development and international leadership only to plunge into the valley of misfortune.

Mares and Trinkunas offer a comparable framework for studying emerging powers, the obstacles they face and decisions they take to climb the ladder of global power. They apply the founding principles and myths associated with the so-called liberal international order to their case study, but add a compelling analytical twist to suggest that ‘Brazil is […] a poster child for learning about soft power’ (17).

For Mares and Trinkunas, soft power is the expression of the international ‘attraction of a state’s domestic model’; such magnetism is dependent upon a stable set of political, economic and social institutions and policies that can reproduce and expand national power over time. The authors catalogue Brazil’s repeated failures to establish a stable domestic order that can project soft power through global governance. The challenge for Mares and Trinkunas is to explain how the interaction between international opportunities and national leadership decisions account for Brazil’s episodic moments of emergence followed by crisis.

Image Credit: Sugar Loaf Cable Car – Bondinho Pão de Açúcar (Laszlo Ilyes CC BY 2.0)

International security poses a distinct set of challenges for an emerging power to become a ‘rule maker’. For Brazil, these are complicated by the foreign ministry’s unwillingness to brandish the swords of coercive diplomacy to shape the global order. Brazilian diplomacy requires national economic and social development that inspires others, while also generating the resources necessary for upgrading ‘hard power’ assets to deepen the country’s role in collective security initiatives. Mares and Trinkunas argue that the exercise of soft power is contingent on military force capabilities, but Brazil has not yet achieved a level of economic and military power that could serve as the basis of expanding its contributions to the international security domain without ‘eroding domestic support for its policy of ‘‘grandeza’’ [realising the enormous potential for development given the country’s remarkable natural resources] by assuming excessive costs or undermining its claims to speak for the abused South in the international order’ (106).

Brazil’s increasing participation in peacekeeping efforts, including the United Nations Stabilisation Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH) and the maritime deployment of the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL), demonstrates its constructive, albeit limited, contributions to collective security efforts and authenticates the country’s increasing stake in global governance. Despite these contributions, Mares and Trinkunas contend that ‘persuading other states to give soft power a chance has been a persistent difficulty for Brazil in the international security domain’ (87).

The authors may be right, but they do not put their proposition to the test by assessing Brazil’s most ambitious initiative to contribute to international security. On 17 May 2010, the Brazilian government teamed with Turkey to broker the nuclear fuel exchange accord with the Iranian government. The US government immediately rejected this trilateral initiative, but it did prompt Washington to renew efforts to double down on sanctions against Tehran. Both Brazilian diplomacy and the sanctions shared the same goal of preventing the weaponisation of Iran’s nuclear fuel cycle activities. Unfortunately, the authors do not provide a rigorous assessment of this case to validate their conclusion that Brazil’s soft power diplomacy falls short of contributing to game-changing international security initiatives. Despite Washington’s rebuff, Brazilian diplomacy and the trilateral accord demonstrated that there was a road to reaching agreement with Tehran to curb the weaponisation of Iran’s uranium enrichment programme. This experience raises a critical question for Mares and Trinkunas, but one they do not answer: did Brazil’s non-proliferation diplomacy contribute to bringing about the necessary conditions for framing the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) negotiated by the P5+1 and Iran in 2015?

Aspirational Power does provide a well-argued appraisal of Brazil’s economic development diplomacy during recent decades. The authors describe the Brazilian government’s critical leadership related to the Declaration on the Agreement of Trade-Related Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) and Public Health in 2001 to confront the HIV/AIDs epidemic by pressuring multinational pharmaceutical firms with compulsory licensing to lower prices for treatment. Brazil partnered with South Africa, India and Thailand to make the case for patient rights under the TRIPS agreement. These collective diplomatic efforts eventually flipped the US position to adopt national security and public health-related exceptions to the TRIPS intellectual property protections.

Yet, while the authors present this case as emblematic of the possibilities of Brazilian international trade diplomacy and soft power, they do not apply the same logic to an analysis of the ‘Cotton Dispute’ at the World Trade Organisation (WTO), which shattered the foundational myth underlying the US global leadership of trade liberalisation. Mares and Trinkunas explore Brazil’s strategies for creating a fair international trading system by establishing the Common Market of South America (Mercosul) and exercising leadership in the WTO, including electing its ambassador, Roberto Azevedo, as Director-General. Evaluation of these strategies requires analysis of Brazil’s struggle to lessen the world market distortions caused by US and European Union agricultural policies and programmes. Mares and Trinkunas examine Brazilian leadership of the G20 member-states at the WTO Cancun Ministerial negotiations in 2003, but they do not offer a synthesised interpretation anchored to the country’s pivotal role in the TRIPS negotiations over public health exceptions and the country’s decision to openly confront the EU’s sugar programme and the US cotton production subsidies and agricultural commodity export credit guarantees in the months leading up to the Cancun meeting. They highlight Brazil’s representation of both commodity exporting and subsistence agriculture member-states at the WTO, but do not weigh the extent to which Brazil’s trade diplomacy shaped the global political economy through its leadership at the WTO.

What Mares and Trinkunas do offer is an indispensable evaluation of Brazil’s rocky road to global influence. The authors effectively explain why Brazil has not yet consolidated a domestic economic and political foundation for gaining influence, paying the costs and creating the opportunities associated with a successful path toward global leadership. Their book provides a careful, even sympathetic, account of Brazil’s national faults and inability to consolidate a sustainable process of economic development under democracy to finance and inspire the national struggle to make the rules of the global order. The authors even offer up a menu of national policy options that Brazilian foreign policymakers and scholars should consider and debate (177-79).

Aspirational Power raises fundamental questions about the global order and Brazil’s place in it. It offers a comprehensive and comparable analytical framework for soft power that deserves expanded scholarly application and debate. Mares and Trinkunas may underestimate the analytical importance of the cases of the trilateral nuclear fuel exchange accord and the ‘Cotton Dispute’ at the WTO, but their book is a study of soft power in the global order that will likely become a central work of Brazilian foreign policy scholarship for decades to come.