The LATEST REVIEW

Matthew Shaer, who is a staff writer at the Christian Science Monitor, just gave me a nice boost in the Sunday [October 18] Washington Post. He compliments me on "a spectaculary nuanced portrait of a pivotal period in world history"--heady stuff for a literary historian. The whole review is here. In anticipation of the review the editor of the paper's book review interviewed me by phone. I was in the Paris apartment with its slightly dodgy internet phone set up, and the interview was cut off three times in mid-sentence. It makes it all sound terribly urgent, like radio communications from a battlefield. But you can hear it for yourself.

....FOLLOWED BY THE OLDER ONES IN VAGUELY CHRONOLOGICAL ORDER

Well, The Anti-Communist Manifestos didn't make it to the front page of the printed New York Times Book Review Section--but then, again, it wasn't on the back page either. It noneless wormed its way into the paper's ArtsBeatBlog [12 September], where Mr. Dwight Garner, a man of letters unknown to me til now, reviews it. I think it is a positive review, though one hardly designed to win the full approbation of old codgers, and especially the old codger who is the book's author. Mr. Garner would appear to be baffled by intellectual complexity and threatened by trisyllables. At times he seems to share a delusion common among young whippersnappers that ignorance of literary tradition is a badge of moral virtue. Still, with a sharp eye for the marginal and the tangential he moves unerringly to the book's periphery, from which vantage point he offers his not ungenerous summary in an alimentary image that leaves us hungering for more: "If this unusual book isn't quite a coherent meal it is certainly, if you are willing to hunt around a bit, quite an excellent platter of tapas." I think this probably translates to B+. I am willing to make an even trade. The whole review is here.

On publication day (Monday, August 17) I was delighted to see The Anti-Communist Manifestos greeted by a very handsome review in The Wall Street Journal (p. A9) by Geoffrey Wheatcroft, the well-known British journalist and historian.  He entitles his review “The View from the Inside”—of course alluding to the fact that the four figures with whom I deal most extensively had all been members of the Communist Party against which they rebelled.  The review is of the type that summarizes rather than analyzes or criticizes, but there are still a couple of juicy phrases that the publicity people at Norton ought to be able to seize: “…Fleming had the excellent idea of telling the story…and the result is the readable and fascinating The Anti-Communist Manifestos.”

It would be ungenerous of me to cavil at a review that exposes my book, and in a most positive light, to a readership of some millions of the best educated and best informed readers in America, but vanity requires that I point out that the one factual peccadillo for which Mr. Wheatcroft indicts me is not actually in the published book.  It was, I confess in the uncorrected proofs—but of course the cover of the proofs does come with a plea: “Please do not quote for publication without checking against the finished book.”  But not to worry!  There are plenty of real errors in the finished book that Mr. Wheatcroft refrained from pointing out! 
See the whole review http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203863204574348481017384484.html

Meanwhile in the Editor's Choice section of the Denver Post, my book had the honor of being featured alongside the latest from Philippa Gregory and a novel called American Adulterer, "a riveting imagining of the inner life of a satyrlike John F. Kennedy". My own book is called a "lively bookish tale", and that's a whole lot better than a deadly bookish tale I suppose.

The book is one of the current featured selections of the Conservative Book Club, though if anti-Communism is limited to Conservatives, may the Lord help us.  In Russia the first victims of Bolshevism were the left Socialists.  In Germany the Communists liked to call the Social Democrats "Social Fascists. Stalin’s chief concern in the Spanish Civil War, ranking far ahead of any desire for international socialist solidarity, would seem to have been the eradication of as many Trotskyites and Anarchists as possible.  But I am delighted to have been adopted by this popular club, especially as the reviewer has the following to say about the book: “Revealing, scholarly, and compulsively readable, The Anti-Communist Manifestos offers brilliant observations on the nature of Stalinism, on the Spanish Civil War, and on the whole period of the Cold War.”  “Compulsively readable” is especially nice.  My prose has sometimes been described as soporific but never before as narcotic.

THERE has just appeared (8.26) a very intelligent presentation of my book at the website of Zócalo Public Square, a public interest group in southern California that describes its mission as follows: "Zócalo Public Square is a non-profit organization that builds community by broadening access to civic discourse. Zócalo presents lectures, panels, screenings, and conferences, and offers original reviews, interviews, and other online features to spur conversation on and action around the most important and compelling ideas of our time. All Zócalo events are presented in open, welcoming, non-partisan, and multi-ethnic spaces. Our online work strives to strike the same broad, generous and balanced tone as our live events." I am particularly pleased to have a liberal-leaning group engage with my history of literary anti-communism, as it was a cause dear to the hearts of dozens of liberal giants of earlier generations, including Arthur Koestler, George Orwell, Sidney Hook, George Kennan, and Roger Baldwin of the ACLU.

I just [September 3rd] more or less successfully negotiated another left turn here in the A.V. Club, the sober culture supplement of the Onion. The reviewer is Vadim Rizov. The name sounds vaguely familiar, but I am probably thinking of a Gogol character. In any event Vadim Rizov is highly intelligent--at times to my disadvantage, since he has not the slightest difficulty in noting a certain organizational negligence apparent in my book from time to time. But his judgment is on the whole very positive and therefore, naturaslly, sound. "Writing for the first time in his career for a non-academic audience, Fleming proves more than up to the task....{O]verall, this is popular history at its best, blending literary analysis, excavations of yesterday's most fascinating news, and measured political judgments." That is a more-or-less honest summary of the review, but you have perhaps had enought experience with artful ellipsis to be suspicious. It is possible to achieve almost anything with the old dot, dot, dot. "This vapid, pretentious, deeply irrelevant book deserves the obloquy it will no doubt harvest. Serious readers need pay it no further attention.." can be transformed into "This...deeply...relevant book...deserves...no doubt...serious...further attention." I am hoping that the on-line "discussion" that follows the review actually has nothing at all to do with the book, as indeed does appear to be the case, because it is a particularly mindless debate about whether "liberalism" is or is not the same thing as "communism". The political iniquity of Stalinist Communism really ought to be one of those things, however few in number, upon which soi-disant Liberals and Conservatives might agree.