Carl Wells Books

This one had been on my bookshelf for a while. I got to it finally, and am glad I did. The book is Conquests and Cultures: An International History (1998), by Thomas Sowell.

Thomas Sowell is a black economist/scholar/thinker who has stood bravely for the free market and personal responsibility, for about 60 years. He was born June 30, 1930, and is still living at age 90 as I write. He has published around 30 books. Here is a link to his website: https://www.tsowell.com/.

Dr. Sowell was born in the South, and for a long time had little interaction with white people. Eventually as a child he was taken to Harlem. As late as about age 30 he still considered himself a Marxist. Then the light bulb gradually went on, and he was soon a champion of free market economics. He has been fighting the good fight ever since, for his people and against the race hustlers. His book A Man of Letters (still my favorite among the eight or so of his books I have read) will be very enlightening to anyone who thinks race hustling is a recent phenomenon. Dr. Sowell has been fighting that battle for a long time. He wants to help his own black people, but he knows the way to do that is to tell the truth and to have high standards of scholarship and behavior. A Man of Letters was published in 2007. I have a blog post dedicated to it on November 23, 2017. It will also be featured in my forthcoming book, Books I Have Loved (dv).

Conquests and Cultures is the concluding volume of a trilogy. which also comprises Race and Culture (1994) and Migrations and Cultures (1996). I have read Race and Culture, but not yet Migrations and Cultures.

Conquests and Cultures was not squeezed out in a day. This is the work of many years of research. The footnotes make clear that Dr. Sowell has read very widely before he has written. Anyone wanting further to pursue the topics he covers will have countless sources to examine, simply by looking at the footnotes.

Conquests and Cultures did at least one thing for me: it helped me see that there is a big picture. Sometimes there have been enormous injustices one group of people enforce upon another. But Dr. Sowell helps us see that with the injustices there very often come benefits to the people originally injured. This is in no way to excuse the injustices! But we can take heart from the fact that along with the injustices, quite often in the long run the conquered people also receive benefits.

That is encouraging. Also, we see that a people can be down, but not necessarily out. A people known for their backwardness, can over the course of time become a people known for their large contributions to world history. Scotland stands out in that regard (pp. 52-63).

The role of geography in how world history unfolds, is another point which I had not considered. The presence or absence of navigable rivers, or of natural ports, can make a huge difference in the economic prospects of a people.

What Dr. Sowell calls human capital is perhaps the most important form of capital there is. A people willing to learn, to work hard, to save and invest rather than to live for the moment, has an enormous advantage over people who do not have that self-discipline. Natural resources are of course a great blessing, but human capital is the greatest resource of all. Here is a small snippet on human capital:

“Human capital must not be confused with formal education, which is just one facet of it, and still less with the growth of an intelligentsia, which may be either a positive or a negative influence on economic development and political stability” (p. 349)

Dr. Sowell goes on to show how the intelligentsia, educated but not productive, can be a serious problem to any people. I would ask, is this the situation we have now in the U.S.? Our intelligentsia for the most part is comprised of people who have earned a few university degrees, and who consider themselves an intellectual and spiritual elite, but who contribute far more problems than they do value. The artificial (government) support for higher education has helped raise up an intellectual “elite” of people who would be better off working at jobs that produced something we really need.

Susceptibility to disease has been a large factor in world history. Here, the experience of the Americas and Africa have been exactly opposite to one another. In North and South America, the white man brought diseases that largely wiped out the indigenous people. Africa was completely different. There the white man ran into diseases which he could not handle; the white man was the one to die from disease rather than the African.

Another point which is very important, but which we often don’t consider, is the great value of just laws. When England became known for the fairness of its laws and its courts, that encouraged European countries to risk investing in England. This is logical. Just laws are of benefit to everyone. That starts with the people living under them, but the benefits do not end there.

In his concluding chapter, An Overview, Dr. Sowell has this to say about racism:

‘”Racism” as a blanket explanation of intergroup differences is not simply an over-rated explanation. It is itself a positive hindrance to a focus on the acquisition of the human capital or cultural capital needed to rise economically and socially. If there is any central theme that emerges from the histories examined in these three volumes, it is that the cultural capital of a people is crucial to their economic and social advancement, whether that people is a racial minority, a nation-state, or a whole civilization. In some cases, the factors inhibiting the development of this human capital have been geographical or historical. But they need not include self-inflicted ideologies or ideologies congenial to sympathetic outsiders, whose sympathies may prove to be more of a handicap than the hostility of others.’ (p.368)

Black race hustlers and their white fellow-travelers would do well to consider the implications of that paragraph. They won’t, of course. Truth is hard, virtue-signalling easy.

The above review barely scratches the surface of the many things to be learned from this book. It is thought-provoking and informative.

Unhappily, the book is not easy to find at a reasonable price. The best I could come up with today was $18.80 (free shipping, but sales tax will be extra) at AbeBooks. Inter-library loan would allow one to read the book for free–but with the painful caveat that one could not underline the many passages that cry out for such action.

I have been wanting to read The Phoney Victory: The World War II Illusion, by Peter Hitchens, but the price for a used one (a used book, not a used war) has not yet come down from the stratosphere. So a few months ago I purchased Hitchens’ The Abolition of Britain: From Winston Churchill to Princess Diana, as something to give me a feel for Hitchens’ opinions, and to tide me over until I can read The Phoney Victory.

Now I have read The Abolition of Britain, and am glad that I did. It was published two full decades ago, in 1999 (second edition in 2000), and is indeed about Britain rather than about the United States. (Who could have guessed?) But it is a book which any American of conservative or Christian leanings will find very helpful in thinking about how the world is put together.

Peter Hitchens is the younger brother of the famous and late Christopher Hitchens. C. Hitchens is famous for being an atheist, and for his leftist leanings. Peter, by contrast, came out of a youthful atheism into a Christian faith which has him in the Anglican Church–and speaking up for the faith frequently.

Peter also had youthful leftist leanings–and once again has come in out of the cold, to become what has been described as a Burkean conservative. Burkean conservatives are not, despite what you might think, conservatives who advocate the wearing of burkas. No, a Burkean conservative is one who has been profoundly influenced by the conservative thought of England’s Edmund Burke. It is an honorable brand of conservatism. (Or an honourable brand, in England.) Burke, for one example of his practical wisdom, was opposed to seeing his British people go to war to challenge the American move to independence. Had he been listened to, much blood and treasure could have been saved on both sides. Peter Hitchens follows in Burke’s footsteps, in not being a sucker for any war which comes along.

Peter Hitchens, along with writing books on the side, is basically a journalist. In recent months he has gained increasing fame as one who has challenged the panic-stricken response of the British government to the coronavirus situation. The way I have phrased the proceeding sentence shows where I stand on the issue, so needless to say I have hugely appreciated Mr. Hitchens’ weekly blog posts at the “Daily Mail” in London, and I read them faithfully after they appear each Sunday.

Peter Hitchens wrote The Abolition of Britain because he could see vast changes going on in the way his British people thought and acted. And the changes were not for the better.

In his preface to the second edition Mr. Hitchens says

“that the publication of this book has strengthened my belief that a great civilization, whose greatest possession is liberty, is on the verge of extinction and that we have very little time to save it.” (p. xi)

We in the U.S. understand the feeling. To many of us, our Christian civilization seems so dramatically threatened that we too wonder if it can be salvaged.

Mr. Hitchens devotes his sixteen chapters to specific ways Britain has changed. He begins by contrasting the British response to the death of Winston Churchill, to the British response to the death of Princess Diana.

One thing he points out is that by the mid 1960s, “the old security and safety were passing.” (p. 32) 20,000 London homes had been broken into in 1964, as opposed to 5,500 in 1938. Obviously even by 1964 things were changing for the worse. But contrast either number with the approximate figure for 2000: 165,000 break-ins per year!

He warns,

“children in this country have changed completely. Many cannot read, write, or count. Many more can only do these things badly. Standards of behaviour, of self-control, of ability to respond to authority or concentrate on any task, have sunk. Other forces, such as television or the decline of the family, can also be blamed for this. However, the schools, which could have put a brake on the decline, have speeded it up.” (p. 73)

In Chapter Five he speaks of the deterioration of the church. We find,

“the Church, like the railways or the government, was more and more being run for the benefit of its own employees rather than for the mere churchgoers or the the nation itself.” (p. 111)

Television has “become, along with schools, a kind of national childminding service.” (p. 130) Sound familiar?

He writes of the sad state of marriage (or non-marriage) which has resulted in a rich harvest of fatherless children. The ellipsis is mine.

“marriage has collapsed in Britain in the past thirty years, while illegitimacy–the very thing marriage is supposed to prevent–has become so common as to be the norm. . . . more and more women are married to the state.” (p. 163)

Sound familiar?

He points out the barbarian attack on language and culture.

“But on almost all fronts there has been no coherent, organized resistance to the cultural revolution. The other side has lost its nerve, and no longer really believes in itself.” (p.189)

The latter sentence of the above quote raises a crucial point. Is all this degeneracy necessary and inevitable? Why have we refused to fight back? Perhaps, taken as a whole, we have indeed lost our nerve, and no longer believe in our beliefs. Our beliefs are vague, apologetically held hopings, rather than beliefs for which we will stand and fight. Similarly, moral opinions

“were now being attacked by the voice of authority. As time passed, the private beliefs of the majority would hardly ever be reflected on the broadcast media, so convincing them that they were in fact a minority and had somehow been left behind. As time went by, they lost confidence in a morality they had once been proud to support, and became ashamed of it. Enfeebled, isolated and pushed to the margins, the majority were not merely silent, but dumbstruck and powerless, afraid to defend themselves.” (p. 206)

I will conclude my quotes of Peter Hitchens’ book with an insightful passage on sexual morality.

“Our British Protestant sexual morality, which once required marriage as the price of pleasure, now treats any sexual activity as a recreation. This allegedly liberates women from the slavery of the home, and men from the slavery of supporting a family. But in truth it imprisons children in a world where they always come second to adult pleasures, it imprisons women in endless competition with their sisters for fun–a competition in which the rich and beautiful are the only winners for as long as their wealth and beauty last and not a moment longer–and it imprisons men in an ultimately sterile quest for passing pleasure. But it is ‘judgemental’ to point any of this out.” (p. 298)

The Abolition of Britain by Peter Hitchens is a thoughtful book well worth reading. The Christian civilization of England is very like the Christian civilization of the United States. Both are under very serious attack, and right now we are losing a lot of battles. We can fight back with truth and with obedience to our God. We are grateful to Mr. Hitchens for giving us some intellectual ammunition with which to fight.

A used copy of The Abolition of Britain can be obtained on the Internet for a reasonable cost. Today I found a price of $10.50 (shipping included, but sales tax will be additional) at Amazon. Inter-library loan is an even less expensive option.

Last week we began a discussion of the book Dream Lovers: The Magnificent Shattered Lives of Bobby Darin and Sandra Dee. The book was written by their son Dodd Darin with the help of professional writer Maxine Paetro, and published many moons ago in 1994.

Bobby Darin (mostly a singer, but also an actor) and Sandra Dee (mostly a movie star, but also a singer) did find ways to shatter their lives. The marriage of the two dream lovers was pretty quickly on the rocks. There was fault on both sides. They found ways to annoy one another successfully. Eventually Bobby Darin took the initiative in ending their marriage–to the surprise of Sandra Dee. He would do the same in his second marriage, when he took the initiative in ending a marriage his wife thought was going okay.

Sandra never married again. She fought anorexia, a failed career, and alcoholism. They were largely losing battles. However, she may well have stayed sober the last years of her life. As the book ends in 1994, she was doing well.

You will be shocked, shocked, to learn that she made much less money as a movie star than one might have expected given the very positive degree of her stardom. The studio made most of the money. So part of her problems later in life included a lack of money. At one point we are told that she was better paid as a model than she was as a movie star.

Bobby Darin left a significant estate to his son, with an unusual provision that the money come to him only very late in life. This was done apparently for two reasons: to encourage him to stand on his own two feet and earn a living, and to protect him from people who might have taken advantage of him when he was young.

For me there were several things that especially struck me about this book. One was the honesty of the people looking back on Bobby Darin and Sandra Dee. Bobby Darin especially attracted love and hatred. His friends and his family loved him–and were often furiously angry with him. But to read their comments is to listen to people trying to tell the truth. These are not wise Christian people coming at us from biblical solid ground. But they are trying to tell the truth. If they are furious with Bobby, they tell us, but they always seem able to maintain an objectivity even when they know Bobby was in the wrong.

Dodd Darin did not speak to people who only hated Bobby. But the honesty of Dodd Darin is remarkable as well. He sees when his father has been a jerk. He doesn’t try to sugar coat it. He loved his father and still loves him, but Dodd is trying to tell us the truth. He tells us the truth about his relationship with his mother. It was not always smooth. Here is just a brief snippet, reporting on a time when Dodd was about 25 or 26. I have censored one word.

“Needless to say, becoming my mother’s keeper created a weird dynamic between us. I resented her because she was the parent. I was going through my own problems and wanted to look to her and lean on her for support and love and comfort. But that was impossible. Our roles were almost reversed. I became the parent. I love her, but she was a pain in the a–.” (p. 346)

(This reminds me of one incident I had with a boy who was in about the fourth or fifth grade. I was tutoring him at the elementary school. He was smart and well-behaved, extremely mature for his age. Once we talked briefly about his mother. He said, quietly, something like, “Yeah, I’m having a lot of trouble with my mother.” It was clear to me that he, at age 10 or 11 or 12, was raising his mother, rather than his mother raising him. Dodd Darin would understand.)

Sandra Dee, despite her enormous faults, is also admirable for her honesty. She had another eight years to live when the book was published. But she gave the go ahead on a project which she knew would reveal many painful truths about her.

Life is complex. Thank God that God is the judge rather then we flawed people are the judges.

Dodd Darin, channeling Huck Finn, told us at the end,

“Writing this book was quite simply the most difficult thing I have ever done. To be honest, if I had known how difficult it was going to be, I would not have undertaken it. Many times during the year of working on it, I was ready to give it up. Not only did I have to unearth and acknowledge painful aspects of my parents’ lives and of my own, but I had to do so without the insights of my grandmothers and my father, who were no longer with us to tell us their side of the story.” (p. 369)

Dodd Darin seems still to be married to his wife after over 25 years, and has two daughters. He, unlike his parents, has apparently managed to stay married.

A wise doctor dealing with Bobby Darin and Sandra Dee would have said something like this: “Take two doses of Christianity and call me in the morning.”

That is the key takeaway I get from the book. It is impossible to live life sensibly without Christian principles to guide one. Neither Bobby Darin nor Sandra Dee had the solid foundation of Christ and His truth. Incredibly gifted people–and both Bobby and Sandra were gifted in their art–need Christ as much as the ordinary person. Fame, money, artistic accomplishment, beauty–they all can be handled wisely only by those who anchor themselves in Jesus Christ and His truth. I hope it is clear that I don’t mean that as an insult. There is much to respect in the lives of Bobby Darin and Sandra Dee–as well as much over which to weep.

Dream Lovers is a fascinating book. It is not for everyone. Be warned that the f-word and other vulgar language are frequent. But for those of us able to scrape away such things, and willing to look at a great many depressing incidents in the lives of two famous people, it is a book of great interest. Since it is 26 years old and apparently has not been republished, it is not an easy book to find. The best price I could find today for a used copy was $18.15 total (prior to sales tax, however) at AbeBooks. It is probably available for free through inter-library loan.

There are at least two other biographies of Bobby Darin, of which I have read neither. I probably will try to find them, if only to read more about Sandra Dee. She is still one of the most beautiful girls every to appear on screen. I wish her life could have been more like that of Tammy Tyree, whom she portrayed so well.

Kevin Spacey starred as Bobby Darin in the biopic “Beyond the Sea” (2004). I will probably try to see that eventually. Kevin Spacey we have learned in recent years has had his own problems with sexual self-control, as did Bobby Darin. Perhaps Mr. Spacey was the perfect guy to make a movie about Bobby Darin.

Yesterday I finished reading Dream Lovers: The Magnificent Shattered Lives of Bobby Darin and Sandra Dee, written by their son Dodd Darin with the help of professional writer Maxine Paetro. This book was published long ago in 1994. Even then Bobby Darin was long dead (b. 1936–d. 1973) and Sandra Dee had been out of the spotlight since the early 70s. She too has since died, at the relatively young age of 62 (b. 1942–d. 2005). More on her age in a minute.

The main title Dream Lovers is a play on the title of a song written and sung by Bobby Darin, “Dream Lover,” a hit in 1959. Here is a link, which features pictures of Bobby and Sandra together:

Those of us of a certain age will remember Bobby Darin and Sandra Dee. Darin was a very successful singer of pop hits (he wrote some himself, including “Dream Lover” above), a promising actor (nominated for an Academy Award in 1963), and legendary as an in-person entertainer. “Mack the Knife” was one of his greatest hits. Due to heart damage from illness as a child, he expected to die young, and was from early on a young man in a hurry to outrace death and have a great career before his time was over. He succeeded in having a huge career, and did indeed die at the young age of 37. He was posthumously elected to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Not too shabby a career.

Sandra Dee became a movie star at a very young age. She was a featured performer in a number of movie successes, and was popular at the box office. My own introduction to Sandra Dee probably came in 1961, when I saw her in “Tammy Tell Me True.” Tammy was an unsophisticated but pure young lady, able to read very well despite zero formal education, raised in the Christian faith by her grandparents, who lived on a shanty boat on the Mississippi river. The grandfather is still living when we first meet Tammy in “Tammy and the Bachelor.” I missed that movie when young, but “Tammy Tell Me True” always stuck with me, partly because of the astonishing beauty of Tammy (Sandra Dee). In my declining years I have read the books which inspired the four Tammy movies. The books are by Cid Ricketts Sumner. For more on Tammy, see my blog posts for April 19 and 26, 2018. The books are much better than the movies, and will interest Christian readers, as well as possibly non-Christian libertarians. Sumner is an author who deserves to be rediscovered.

Sandra Dee, besides being a movie star, also had some brief success as a singer. I was going to link to her one song in “Tammy Tell Me True,” which is a superb song and was a hit, but the song has recently been blocked from appearing on YouTube. Instead I will link to her song “When I Fall in Love.”

To see Tammy singing in “Tammy Tell Me True,” you will have to watch the movie. The song segment is, in my opinion, artfully filmed, and the song is lovely, well deserving of the hit status it obtained.

As fate would have it, Bobby Darin met Sandra Dee on a movie set. The rest, as the saying goes, is history. The dream lovers were together. Pretty quickly he swept her off her feet, and the two were married within a few months. He was in his mid-twenties, while she was 19. Or maybe she was exactly two years younger. There is uncertainty about the date of birth of Sandra Dee. While officially she was born April 23, 1942, the strong possibility was that she was born April 23, 1944. Sandra said that she and her mother advanced her age by two years when Sandra was beginning life as a very successful model. This was intended to help her get more jobs more quickly. So she may have been about 17 when she married Bobby Darin, rather than 19. What is certain is that neither one was ready for married life.

Bobby Darin, as he married, was your typical sexually active predatory male. He had even fathered a child out of wedlock in 1957. (A fact which Dodd Darin may not have known as he wrote about his father.) Sandra Dee, by contrast, was as sexually active as Tammy–that is, not sexually active at all. The two did not live together before marriage; their love was consummated only after marriage. But there is a vast complication. Sandra Dee had been sexually molested by her step-father, Eugene Douvan, beginning when Sandra was age five. Later, ‘I was eight, and now, when my mother wasn’t there, “Daddy” started having sexual intercourse with me.’ (p. 36) This sexual abuse was constant–although surely even once is enough to scar a person for life. Eugene Douvan died before Sandra became a movie star. We’ll leave him to God. I can stand it if he can, to borrow from Huck Finn.

Sandra’s mother Mary Douvan was a very strange person. Almost certainly she knew about the sexual abuse. But for Mary Douvan, if you don’t acknowledge something, it didn’t happen. She lived her entire life in that way, as the book makes clear. So Mary never honestly faced up to what was happening to her daughter. Decades later, Sandra finally told her mother in words what had happened.

‘Thirty years after Gene’s death, I told my mother what had happened at last. She was ranting into the night about what a saint Gene was, and I finally couldn’t stand it. I said, “He wasn’t a saint. He had sex with me.”

‘She said, “You’re crazy and you’re drunk. Go to bed.”

‘I went to bed, and the next day I said to her, “Now I’m sober. And it happened.” She didn’t say anything. She had nothing to come back with.”‘ (P.39)

Sandra Dee was a person of immense faults. She could be selfish and foolish. She was anorexic. She became an alcoholic. But she was not the type of person to blacken a dead man’s character by lies. Far otherwise, in fact. Looking back as a 50-year old, she could even say, “With all of the many painful episodes, I loved Gene.” (p. 38) We can be certain the abuse happened.

If Sandra Dee’s early days were certain to cause emotional problems as her life unfolded, Bobby Darin’s life was perhaps even more weird. From birth until about age 31 or 32, he thought his grandmother was his mother! His real life mother Nina, he thought was his older sister. Really. You can’t make this stuff up.

What happened was, Nina became pregnant with Bobby. Nina and her mother (Polly) concocted a plan that worked. They went away for a few months, and came back with young Bobby, who was supposedly the child of Polly (and thus considered by everyone to be a legitimate child rather than illegitimate). But he was really the child of his older “sister” Nina. He found out about this only very late in life. His true mother told him, because he was planning to go into politics, and she thought he should know the truth. (p. 234 and following) However, there were almost certainly other motives for Nina finally revealing the truth. “Bobby could be brutal at times and had often hurt Nina. Now he was paid back in full.” (p. 239)

Nina never would reveal who was the father of Bobby. To this day, no one knows who his father was.

I plan to continue the story of Bobby Darin and Sandra Dee next week.