READ HIS BOOKS IF YOU HAVE NOT, THEY WILL MOSTLY BE AVAILABLE AT YOUR LOCAL PUBLIC LIBRARY
Posted on 01/15/2023 10:18:09 AM PST by SeekAndFind
There's no thinker more valuable than a good historian and nothing reminds us more of that than the passing of the great historian, Paul Johnson, who did so much to define history as we know it and love it.
Oh, that's so grand sounding, though -- Paul Johnson's histories were utterly delicious to read, better than movies or other things billed as entertainment. You read one and just wanted to go buy another. I read nearly all of them, and still want to read them again. I never met him but I never wanted him to die, not ever, I always wanted him to live forever, so he could still keep writing books.
Johnson's histories of western civilization, of art, of Judaism and Christianity, of wars and revolutions, of intellectuals, fed the mind and kept created a sense of place and belonging in a bewildering world. This is why my finding his histories as a student, effectively promoted through the pages of National Review and the American Spectator back in the 1980s, was so very valuable. Paul Johnson was just so wonderful to read.
I loved his incisive observations, so many and so memorable. I don't have his books in front of me, but I recall so many passage so vividly, perhaps because I read them again and again.
His characterization of the greatness of France, for instance, that its contributions were uniquely broad but curiously never at pinnacles -- was amazing. France, he wrote, could be ranked at second place by all measures of national greatness, but in pretty much every field there is -- in art, literature, music, sculpture, et al, made its national greatness uniquely broad among nations. (First place, however, in interior design, Johnson noted at the end of his list.)
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
In his more direct histories, Paul Johnson characterized Augusto Pinochet as "the most misunderstood man of the 20th century." Pinochet is one of the left's biggest boogiemen, the evil right-wing dicatator. But I spent time studying him and his Chicago Boys' revolution, which transformed Chile from a typical third world socialist hellhole to a sleek, modern, capitalist, prosperous, corruption-free democracy, reading the seminal history of Chile during that era, Out of the Ashes by James Whelan, reading the actual memoirs of Pinochet himself, reading even leftist histories and making friends with Chileans left and right, and that's the only summary that can be made about the man who did so much good for Chile and wasn't nearly the tyrant going after the innocent he was portrayed as on the left.
Pinochet in fact was a victim of the Castroite propaganda machine's "black legend," demonized outside the context of his time, history and geography into a monster while all of his transformations of the country into a free market democracy went ignored. The Pinochet haters out there hated Pinochet in fact, for that, because they always hated the prosperity of the West. Johnson grasped this sorry distortion of history to perfection.
Leftist relative of mine mentioned Pinochet after the date 11 September became infamous for another reason. Insanity...
The late, great Robert Conquest, (who died in 2015 ) bookends with Johnson.
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I read “Intellectuals”. It was good, but not particularly brilliant.
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A great writer!
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