MixedThe Arts Fuse\"Based on Jackson Lears’s new book, Animal Spirits, two things about the author are clear: he’s a master of both the arcane and the segue ... The second enables him to pirouette so gracefully from one reference to another that it’s almost as if they all add up to a coherent whole, even though they don’t ... it can mean nearly anything and the opposite. So what do all the sightings that Lears assembles add up? The answer is unclear. Not that he’s lazy or unenergetic. Quite the contrary, Lears takes us on a vigorous tour ... But what does it all have to do with animal spirits? Again, no one knows. Animal Spirits does marshal an argument of sorts, but it’s exceedingly muddy ... Instead of dancing from one obscure animal-spirits reference to another, Lears would be better off focusing on the specific philosophical and political issues that his survey raises but fails to adequately address.\
Timothy Snyder
PanJacobinRather than analytical, the prose is white hot. He bombards the reader with phrases and concepts that are highly provocative yet do not stand up under scrutiny ... The numbers are horrific, the language incandescent, and the logic murky. Snyder does not explain why this particular piece of terrain deserves the title \'bloodlands\' while others do not ... The murk has its uses, evading the question of causation by surrounding it with a kind of rhetorical smokescreen. And so Snyder can have Hitler and Stalin collaborating in one another’s crimes at a time when they were at each other’s throat without pausing to explain how that could possibly be. The effect is to suggest that the two regimes were morally equivalent while avoiding an overt engagement with the more unsavory implications associated with the concept of moral equivalence that arose during the famous Historikerstreit of the 1980s ... Bloodlands is important because it is less an effort to understand what happened in 1933–45 than a milestone in the process of engagement with local revanchist forces.
