The Secret Hours by Mick Herron is a sort of spy story, but it’s not James Bond. No loveable Moneypenny or Q here. No clever devices that look ordinary but have magical abilities to save an agent in dire straits. In fact, half of the characters are not even spies, but their story begins when the Berlin Wall falls and an actual spy comes out of the East and meets a grieving wealthy man who lost his sister and who knows what happened to her and who did it. Who is Max and why is he being chased down the Green Lanes as the book begins by people who seem intent on killing him?
You will have to spend some time in the Regent Park Office in London where a group has been set up to find what kinds of unethical business the hired hands in the spy business have been up to. The committee’s remit is called Monochrome, which perfectly describes how Griselda Fleet and Malcolm feel about being assigned to this investigation. Both thought they were headed up the ladder to plum assignments and both are unhappy and worried to have been shunted sideways. They did not even have access to documents from Regent’s Park where actual scandals might have been expected to lurk. If you happened to read any bits from David Foster Wallace’s unfinished book, The Pale King, which takes place in the IRS, then you feel right at home in the home office.
Don’t get too bored because you are going to have all the action you can handle in Berlin (the spook’s zoo). They are a depraved bunch who have seen it all and are jaded and deep in the aftereffects of WWII. Myles has been embedded in East Berlin and has experienced the peak moments of postwar Soviet spying, the dossiers, the imagined crimes, the real crimes, the Stassi, the paranoia, the tattling, and the terrible repercussions of the tattling. Into this foreign office enters Allison, a young intelligent innocent who had expected to work at a desk and now finds herself pretending to complete assigned paperwork. At the same time, she does the real work assigned her which is to spy out what is going on in Berlin. However, the crux of this matter is personal, not professional. So, not about true spying at all, although it feels exactly the same. It’s about people, people who will surprise you. I can’t tell you; it’s a spy story, sort of.
Clearly wars do not end when treaties are signed, when spoils are divided, when horrendous war crimes are turned up, when revenge is planned and eventually taken. Names change, years pass, people age and disguise themselves and become unrecognizable. Justice gets done but not in a court. First Desk proves to be not all talk and no action. The author knows how to set a scene. Don’t you just love a good spy story. This one is very good while you are reading and great after contemplation. Don’t just move on to your next book until you have sat with this one for a bit.
You know the story. Boy meets girl. Girl and boy spend time together, grow up together. It’s a love story – no, not Romeo and Juliet, not that kind of love story, It’s complicated.
In Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin, Sam Mazur and Sadie Green meet at a hospital. Sam has already experienced two traumas that would mess up anyone’s mind. Sadie has a family member in the hospital so has a fair bit of trauma in her life also. Her sister had cancer, but it has responded to treatment and Alice is there for more routine reasons. Sadie is getting ready for her Bat Mitzvah. Sam is tuned into his own grief. He lost his mother in a car accident and crushed a foot in the same car accident. Sam and his mother had moved from New York City to Los Angeles after a bizarre accident in that city seemed like a warning of danger. Moving obviously didn’t work. Sadie only spends time with Sam reluctantly at first, but they become close friends for a while. When Sam learns that Sadie is counting her time with him as community service for her Bat Mitzvah he is hurt and angry. They lead separate lives until Sam runs into Sadie at a train station.
What Sam and Sadie have in common is gaming. Sam’s Korean grandfather owns a pizza shop with a Donkey Kong machine he hoped would attract customers. Sam had permission to play as much as he wished. Since Sadie kept getting kicked out of her sister’s hospital room, Sam and Sadie played computer games, passing Sam’s laptop back and forth.
This may not be a conventional love story and it is not, despite the title, a literary novel. It is however a great gamer story and there is love and betrayal, and anger, and possibly undeserved blame. There are relationships, there is the passage of time, and there is more trauma.
My own gaming experiences are limited to the maligned “shooters” which Sadie and Sam find unartistic and antisocial. The games I played were Pac Man, Snood, and Space Invaders, shooters all. Sadie’s favorite game was Oregon Trail. In college she had as her professor Dov, a young Israeli game designer who had created and successfully marketed a popular game.
Sadie and Sam eventually create a game called Ichigo – a game with a child lost at sea who must be rescued. The game has beautiful graphics and becomes iconic. Sam’s college roommate Marx Wantanabe, is a wealthy guy with amazing social skills. Marx provides upfront money and resources for Sadie and Sam while they code and look for an engine that will drive the graphic results Sadie pictures in her mind. Marx and Sadie share a love of art and literature, especially Asian art and Shakespeare. These gamers are all very young, they drop out of college for a semester to create Ichigo. By the time they are out of their twenties, they are financially successful which seems to affect their lives very little. Love and friendship are far more difficult to maneuver through though.
You can enjoy this novel as a story. The characters are immersive. Or you can enjoy this book as a blueprint to reach gamer stardom. It’s a coming-of-age-story with a twist. It’s also a success story. I am still waiting for eye surgery, so I am still reading on Audible which I am getting used to. It doesn’t put me to sleep anymore. Although I am too old to be the intended audience for this book, I still enjoyed it. We all have a bit of the entrepreneur in us along with a taste for romance. For me the relationships seemed more like they were mapped out by a game creator than offering the personal involvement with love that readers can sometimes experience. There was always a distance between even the characters who did get intimately involved. Not my favorite book ever, but I looked forward to listening each time I got the chance.
After reading Alex Jones’s book, The Great Reset, which takes readers down the “New World Order” rabbit hole it seemed important to read someone who might get readers out of that endless antisemitic rabbit hole and back on the solid ground of more reasonable levels of paranoia. Mike Rothschild’s book Jewish Space Lasers: The Rothschilds and 200 Years of Conspiracy Theories was published in 2023. Mike Rothschild tells us that his family is not genetically connected to the wealthy and famous (infamous) Rothschilds.
This well-researched nonfiction book is packed with details and is practically a textbook about the Rothschilds. Mike Rothschild explains that he did try to interview people who are descendants of Mayer Amschel Rothschild. M. Rothschild had a problem though. He was trying to prove a negative, that there was no Rothschild conspiracy to take over the world through control over its financial institutions, that the Rothschilds did not finance both sides of every war, that they did not back both sides in the Civil War, or plot to divide America between Britain and France – that while some Jewish people may have prodigious talents in understanding and profiting from economics and finance, and although they may head many world banking institutions, there is no plot to bring about a “New World Order”. (introduction)
His chapter headings show his journey through the evidence he unearthed. Although Mayer Amschel Rothschild and his very successful son, Nathan, left behind very few records, there were many other primary resources to study. Ch. 1 talks about Greedy, Cheap and Blessed: The History of Jewish Money Tropes, Ch.2 covers A Brief History of the Rothschilds, Part 1, 1565-1868. In Ch. 3 we learn about the Waterloo Canard: the Rothschild myth to end all myths, Ch. 4 tells us about The Satan Pamphlet, and Ch. 5 A Brief History, Part 2, 1868-1933. Ch. 6 summarizes Rothschild myths in America and Ch. 7 talks about the Rothschilds during World War II. Ch. 8 is titled Calling all Crackpots: Rothschild Conspiracy Theories in the Postwar World, Ch. 9 covers the “Disinformation Superhighway”, Ch. 10 is about the Rothschilds in popular culture, Ch.11 talks about Jewish conspiracy theories around the World, Ch. 12 immerses readers in the most recent sections of the “rabbit hole”, Rothschild Conspiracy Theories in the Age of Trump, and Ch. 13 suggests how George Soros became the Rothschilds of the 21st Century.
Sources covered by Mike Rothschild are varied and he tells us that he is not creating a bibliography to guide our reading. He also tells us that the contents of some of these materials are distasteful and often almost incomprehensible. He is saving us the effort of reading hate-filled ranting. He discusses a 1947 film called Gentlemen’s Agreement which he describes as a blunt examination of the banal nature of antisemitism in upper-class America. But this source is mild compared to others. He tells us in some detail about the activities of the poet Ezra Pound. Then we learn about Pound’s acolyte, Eustace Mullins (born in 1923) Mullins wrote “The Secrets of the Federal Reserve” which was finally published with that title in 1983. He wrote a pamphlet entitled, “Adolf Hitler: An Appreciation”, and another called “The Biological Jew, Murder by Injection: The Medical Conspiracy Against America. “Mullins,” says the author, “bridged the gap between Pound and Alex Jones.”
In fact, Alex Jones called Mullins “the great-grandfather of the movement against the Federal Reserve and the New World Order.” (p. 145) Mullins did not die until 2010. Glenn Beck promoted the “Secrets of the Federal Reserve” in 2010 “to attack the Fed, George Soros, and Obama-era monetary policy.”
M. Rothschild cites Willis Carto who published a newsletter called The Liberty Letter. He was a Holocaust denier. He attacked “all manner of Rothschilds, Rockefellers, and Communists and Carter, and Bankers, and Rich People and the Trilateral Commission.” (p. 146) Mike cites Conde McGinley in 1947 – 1972 writing a publication titled “Common Sense“. In a 1970 issue, Mike tells us, McGinley wrote about “Rothschild Bank Syndrome” as “the cause of all modern woes” – “Rothschild banks have financed both sides of every war.” McGinley’s publications were made possible through the Christian Education Association. All modern sources harken back to “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” which came out of the antisemitism of Tsarist Russia in 1900.
“To understand Kanye West ranting on Alex Jones’s show about how great Hitler was requires understanding the influence of that John Birch Society speechwriter Gary Allen’s 1971 book, None Dare Call It Conspiracy, had on Jones, an effect which he has spoken of many times. Allen’s book, which sold millions of copies by attacking Jewish ‘insiders’ like the Rothschilds, was inspired in part by Secrets of the Federal Reserve (xv) which can be traced back to The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.”
Of course, the most titillating bits of the book are in the last chapters. In chapter 12 Donald Trump enters the arena. M. Rothschild tells the story like this. “The Tea Party movement exploded in the US during Obama’s first term, fueled by conservative terror over imaginary wealth confiscation and the looming specter of Marxist control and/or martial law.”… “Patriotism-tinged allegations of Jewish/New World Order/Communist/Leftist domination were nothing new,” the author goes on to say. (p. 223) … “But one American celebrity, mulling over the idea of throwing his considerable cultural and financial weight into politics was paying attention… He noticed the power and appeal of the movement’s unhinged conspiracy theories, vague accusations of a global super-government, and ‘us versus them’ rhetoric when they were unleashed by radio talkers and blogs on disaffected Republicans angry about the Black president with a foreign-sounding name. And Donald Trump wanted in.” (p. 226) Next chapter, George Soros.
Here is the reason the Rothschilds gave for not agreeing to be interviewed by Mr. Mike (who is not from ‘those’ Rothschilds). The Rothschilds declined because they would be forced “to do something that essentially can’t be done, which is prove a negative. They would have to prove that they don’t have $500 trillion, that they didn’t conspire to use the Civil War to divide the United States between Britain and France, or that they didn’t sell their Austrian hunting lodge in a rush because QAnon found out they hunted humans for sport there.” They go on to say that “[t]he accusers won’t believe them anyway.” (p. xvii)
Will the accusers believe Mike Rothschild? Although he makes a strong case that these theories are “unhinged,” and he uses sarcasm and innuendo to embarrass those who at least pretend to be convinced by the persistence of the conspiracy theories and by their admiration for their fellow believers (perhaps a mutual admiration society), this detailed discussion may not change the minds of the convinced or of those who have become wealthy through keeping these conspiracy theories and the antisemitism they give credence to alive.
“For many Jews,” says Mike Rothschild, “the Rothschilds have been a beacon of hope in dark times, a reminder that anything is possible with unity and a steadfast devotion to family and tradition.”
“Any minority with its own language, customs, clothing, and culture is bound to be resented by the majority. But historically only Jews have found outsized professional success through that majority – loaning it money, managing its finances, settling its legal disputes, entertaining it, and the like. And they’ve suffered outsized resentment because of that success. Antisemitism and Jewish wealth are bound up in each other, and Jewish success is at the core of the conspiracy theories about them.”
Good job, Mike Rothschild in collecting all this information in one book, for making us think about where we stand on a set of conspiracy theories that has lasted for centuries. We do think it is quite possible that the wealthy tip the global scales towards policies they favor, but we do not all necessarily think that this is a strictly Jewish endeavor. Sometimes people who are trying to commit an unethical cultural act project the blame onto others to detract from what they are trying to do. Perhaps in our times, the right-wing in American politics wants to become the New World Order and the world’s central bankers and they think that blaming the Jewish people is convenient because of the long history of this particularly paranoid antisemitic conspiracy trope. If the Jewish people were/are so talented it seems that they would have taken over everything long ago. If they already have taken over, we might expect the world to be running a bit more smoothly than it is.
Disclaimer: I had just finished this book when Hamas attacked Israel and it is perhaps not the best time to discuss the materials covered in this book. However, the conspiracy theories about the Rothschilds are not directly connected to the current atrocities. This discussion has far more relevance to the diaspora than it does to the existence of a Jewish state or a Palestinian state except to say that for people who were exiled and who belonged to new nations only temporarily, the talents of Jews seem even more amazing and perhaps resulted from their dispossession, their lack of aggression, and their steadfast cohesion as a group.
So Many Books, Choose Wisely 