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The cover of Prince Harry’s new best-selling book, “Spare” (Random House). *Jacket design by Christopher Brand. Front cover photograph by Ramona Rosales.*

Prince Harry's 'Spare' view of himself

January 31, 2023

Having written about Prince Harry’s “Spare” (Random House, 407 pages, $36) elsewhere – and written about him many times for a variety of publications — I wasn’t going to weigh in on this blog about the book. I thought it might be passé. But what I’ve learned is that with politically divisive figures — and make no mistake, the prince and his wife, Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex, are politically divisive figures — there is no such thing as passé. Witness this New York Times opinion piece, which plays right into the hands of everyone who defines liberals as “woke.”

I’m not going to reargue the article, except to say that while some members of the British press and posters have made scurrilous, racist remarks, the Sussexes must also be held accountable for their lack of professionalism in leaving the monarchy and the contradictory narrative they have since put forth. A similar contradictory quality dominates “Spare,” which purports to be an authentic account of Prince Harry’s life in his own words but is certainly not written in his own voice.

John Singleton Copley’s “John Quincy Adams” (1796(), oil on canvas, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. The son of Founding Father John Adams, second president of the United States, John Quincy Adams would become the nation’s sixth president, serving, like his father, only one term. An esteemed diplomat and secretary of state, he had a long third act as a member of the House of Representatives, opposing slavery and proving that there’s life beyond being at the top of the power game.

Our failure to respond to 'the literature of rejection'

January 29, 2023

What do the Black cops who murdered Tyre Nichols have in common with the mass shooters in California — and indeed all the cops who murder and the mass killers?

They are all men with a disproportionate sense of entitlement and grievance and thus rage at some kind of rejection. They are part of what I call “the literature of rejection,” one with everyone from assassins like John Wilkes Booth and Lee Harvey Oswald to dictators like Adolf Hitler to terrorists like Osama bin Laden to mass murderers like Timothy McVeigh. And they share a great deal as well with such fictional antiheroes as Achilles in Homer’s “The Iliad,” Iago in Shakespeare’s “Othello,” Lucifer in John Milton’s “Paradise Lost” and Heathcliff in Emily Brontë’a “Wuthering Heights.”

What they all have in common is that they are men with an overweening, overwhelming pride that seeks the destruction of everything, and everyone, in its wake.

In 1976, President Gerald R. Ford presented the Congressional Medal of Honor to Rear Admiral James B. Stockdale for his leadership as a prisoner during the Vietnam War. Stockdale, whom I interviewed when he was a vice presidential candidate on Ross Perot’s 1992 independent ticket, said that the writings of Epictetus helped him get through his ordeal. U.S. Navy photograph by Dave Wilson.

A guide to living through the chaos

January 14, 2023

I no sooner arrived in Washington, D.C., for Christmas than the sister I was traveling with came down with Covid and the sister we were visiting developed a non-Covid virus. Other family members became sick as well. (Miracle of miracles, I never got Covid.) On my return, I had a sinus attack that has left me tired, which is why this New Year’s post is so tardy. Apologies, dear readers.

As I sat alone at breakfast in the hotel, shuttling between drop-offs for the Covid sister in the room next to mine and visits to the non-Covid sister, I had an opportunity to read a book that has had a profound effect on my life and that I believe can help you navigate the world as well.

Jacob Anderson speaking about “Game of Thrones” at the 2019 San Diego Comic Con International. *Photograph by Gage Skidmore.*

'Interview With the Vampire' and cultural appropriation

November 4, 2022

Some authors are proprietary about their characters; some readers even more so, which is partly why Stephen King’s novel “Misery” and the subsequent film were such successes.

When the casting for the 1994 film “Interview With the Vampire” was announced, author Anne Rice balked at the idea of Tom Cruise as the Vampire Lestat, the antihero of the novel who becomes the main character in the subsequent books in the “Vampire Chronicles” series.

When the AMC series “Interview With the Vampire” bowed Oct. 2, some fans balked at the casting of Jacob Anderson, a Black actor, as Louis, “Interview’s” main character, and the updating of the setting to the Black Storyville section of New Orleans in the 1910s, instead of an 18th-century Louisiana plantation. Louis, they argued, wasn’t Black but white. How could the series change the essence of the character? (We should note that Rice, who died in 2021, was slated to be a producer of the series.) I would argue the new series didn’t fundamentally change the character, but it’s complicated.

Eugène Delacroix’s “Medea About to Murder Her Children” (1862), oil painting. Musée du Louvre. The ancient Greek myth — the subject of Luigi Cherubini’s “Medea” at The Metropolitan Opera — has also been misinterpreted, most recently in Maureen Dowd’s column on Vladimir Putin.

Our crisis of critical thinking and leadership

October 6, 2022

In his perceptive eulogy for Queen Elizabeth II, Justin Welby, archbishop of Canterbury, observed: “People of loving service are rare in any walk of life. Leaders of loving service are still rarer.”

Ain’t that the truth. At the risk of sounding like the hammer always in search of a nail, I must nonetheless note once again that we are in an increasing crisis of leadership, from Vladimir Putin’s bungling attempts to conquer Ukraine, which would be laughable if they weren’t so horrific and dangerous, to the ham-fisted handling of Miami Dolphins’ quarterback Tua Tagovailoa’s concussion. (The doctor/consultant who cleared him to play was fired. Really? The team’s front office and ownership should all be fired.

What does it mean to be a leader? it means you are a steward of everything and everyone in your care, a servant of others. It means you take responsibility, even when you are not directly involved in the action. Say what you want about QEII, put she saw herself as a steward, one who remained on the job till her dying day.

For most, however, it’s me, me, me all the time, and it doesn’t help that people don’t really understand this, because they have a limited understanding of culture.

The latest novel in my series “The Games Men Play,” a romantic historical thriller built around the opera “Turandot,” is due out from JMS Books Sept. 17.

Riddling the readers with my new book

September 9, 2022

A number of tough deadlines have prevented me recently from blogging and ashamed of it I am, too, as there have been so many juicy storylines on which to comment — the ridiculous ruling on former President Donald J. Trump’s request for a special master, which will undoubtedly be appealed by the Justice Department;

The less than Churchillian new British prime minister, Liz Truss;

The new nonbinary Joan of Arc play, which asks the question, Does it matter that Joan of Arc was a woman? (Of course it does, since it’s one of the reasons she was executed);

And the zigzag rise of Nick Kyrgios, one of a long line of idiosyncratic players (John McEnroe, having another moment, still; Andre Agassi and Novak Djokovic, who should just get the damn jab and be done with it already) in an idiosyncratic sport.

But I want to beg my readers indulgence for a moment as I announce the Sept. 17 publication of my latest novel, “Riddle Me This.”“Riddle Me This” (JMS Books, Sept. 17)….

First responders on the scene of the mass shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas. Courtesy Voice of America.

The Uvalde shooter, the literature of rejection and the death of American exceptionalism

May 29, 2022

If you’re a reader of this blog, then you know that I’ve developed a theory I call the “literature of rejection,” in which men both historical (John Wilkes Booth, Adolf Hitler, Lee Harvey Oswald, Timothy McVeigh, Osama bin Laden) and fictional (Achilles, Milton’s Lucifer, Heathcliff) display a disproportionate rage at rejection, an overbearing sense of entitlement and grievance.

To this we can now add — as if we didn’t know this before — the Uvalde shooter, whom I refuse to name, just as I will not name the Buffalo shooter. Part of the M.O. of these malignant, nihilistic narcissists is their “notice me” moments of manifestos and livestreaming. I’m not going to add to their 15 minutes of infamy.