#books and authors ill never fn read again

[megamindsecretlair]

Most disliked popular books??

Cuz I gotta be messy lol

I love being messy on this app 🤣🤣🤣🤣

Most disliked 🤔🤔 idk if these are popular books, but I'll never read a single word from these books/authors because fuck em 🤣 and ik you aint ask for all this but here ya go 💀

1. Uglies by Scott Westerfield. The main character was SO annoying. And inconsistent asf. I can handle annoying, I can't handle inconsistent. Like it completely turned me off of anything he'll ever write.

2. Lightlark by Alex Aster. The book itself was a smash up of every better YA book to come about, which, whatever ppl can write what they want. But the author? Trash. All up and down tiktok, she makes it seem like she got popular because of her writing. When her family is Uber rich and paid to publish the book, and is paying to produce the movie version. It's an entire no from me. Like be honest about it. Plus the main character made a lot of dumbass moves that had nothing to do with the main concept. Im convinced it was AI tbh.

3. Guilty Pleasures by Laurell K Hamilton. Its an old vampire series, though I think she's still writing books 🤔 started in the 90s. I was with the series up until...book 7. The series followed a really cool necromancer who got into urban fantasy shenanigans, she wasn't oversexed. A little self insert (no shame in the game for that) In fact, she had a lot of hangups about sex, much to the annoyance of the guys who were interested in her. And it was very much a mature series dealing with relationships that I appreciated. But im huge on consent. And in book 7, she does a lot of shady shit to like..."force" the main character to completely abandon all her hangups and blames it on a version of mating bullshit and a mix of magic. Im like naw, fuck that. You can't cheat your way to changing a character and she fn lost me. Im never reading that shit again.

4. Twisted Love by Ana Huang. That shit was boooooring. And 200 pages too long. (I think it was like 440 pages altogether). Enemies to lovers is always hit and miss for me chuz its never really enemies. They're juss two ppl who bicker a lot until they have sex. Fine. Whatever. But gawdt this was boring. Maybe I'm juss not into the bad boy being an asshole in order to win someone's affections 🤔 like...he's gotta have something to redeem him. All the twists were obvious asf, the sex wasn't even that great. Turned me off the author completely.

5. Spanish Love Deception by Elena Armas. See number 4 lol. 200 pages too long, the main characters had 0 chemistry. The main character served entirely no purpose. And there was shit that came up at the end that was never introduced and yet became a major plot point. Idk how they can turn enemies to lovers and fake dating into a terrible time, but they did 😪 never reading anything from that author again 💀

I could go on, fr. I'm picky dammit 🤣🤣🤣

[avanneman]

Ronald Radosh, last seen turning his back on Ethel Rosenberg

No one appointed me as Ronald Radosh’s nemesis/conscience. So I appointed myself.

I have assumed this burden out of a mixture of admiration, sympathy, and disappointment. In 1983, Radosh and Joyce Milton produced one of the classic works of Cold War scholarship, The Rosenberg File, demonstrating, as clearly as anything can be demonstrated that

—Julius Rosenberg was the leader of a substantial and active Soviet spy ring;

—that Ethel Rosenberg was indicted, not because there was meaningful evidence of her involvement in the ring, but rather as a “lever” to force Julius to talk;

—that the information on the design of the atomic bomb supplied to the Soviets by Julius Rosenberg, while relevant, was much less significant than the information the Soviets had already received from Klaus Fuchs and other scientists;

—that trial judge Irving Kaufman colluded with the FBI, both during and after the trial, and was determined to see both Rosenbergs executed;

—that Kaufman’s unscrupulous behavior was both a product of the anti-communist hysteria of the times and a function of his determination to exploit that hysteria to further his career, aiming ultimately, of course, for a seat on the Supreme Court;

—that the highest government officials, including FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, President Eisenhower, and U.S. Chief Justice Fred Vinson all colluded in the fiction that the death sentences imposed on the Rosenbergs were just and necessary and pushed to ensure that the executions would be carried out as quickly as possible.

A neutral observer, should one exist, might conclude that the scrupulous energy with which Radosh and Milton labored to establish these six points was worthy of the highest praise and achieved the difficult task of placing the fates of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg in proper historical perspective. But for the liberal academic establishment, points two through six meant nothing, while the first was unforgivable. The glittering academic careers that their work should have won were denied them. Speaking truth to power is sometimes okay; speaking it to academics is more problematic.

One could hardly blame Radosh for being a little sour. Write a great book, end your career.1 But why does he have to take it out on the Rosenbergs? Back in 2016, in a book review for the Weekly Standard no longer available on the web, Radosh called their execution “ill-advised”, prompting the following outburst from me:

Pray, Mr. Radosh, who was “ill-advised” and who did the “ill-advising”? According to your own book, Judge Irving Kaufman was determined to sentence both Julius and Ethel to death and carefully manipulated the public record to prevent the prosecution from recommending that only Julius receive the death penalty. Your book also tells us that President Eisenhower rejected J. Edgar Hoover’s suggestion that Ethel’s sentence be reduced. It wasn’t a question of bad advice, but rather brutal and even vengeful decisions.

Well, now Ron is at again, this time writing in the New York Times in an otherwise unexceptionable review of Howard Blum’s In the Enemy’s House, the story of how two men, Robert Lamphere and Meredith Gardner, broke the Soviet’s “Verona” code, which ultimately led to the arrest of the Rosenbergs:

Blum says that Lamphere and Gardner both “knew beyond any doubt the wrongness of Ethel Rosenberg’s death sentence,” and he concludes his book by describing a reunion years later when the two men supposedly expressed regret that Ethel’s execution could not have been stopped. Today, students of the case all agree that her involvement was only peripheral, and that her execution was unwarranted. Nonetheless, various Soviet archives do show that she urged her sister-in-law Ruth to recruit her husband, David Greenglass, into Julius’s circle and that she also provided names to the Russians of those she thought were potential recruits. She was, then, guilty of being part of the conspiracy.

Okay, Ron, maybe that’s all true, but in your book, updated in 1995 in light of the Verona files, you insisted that both death sentences were wrong, and that, on the basis of the evidence that existed at the time (and that was presented in court), Ethel Rosenberg should not have been indicted, much less convicted. The fact that we can pronounce her “guilty” decades after her death does not make her execution anything less than judicial murder, one engineered at the very highest levels of American government.

Most bewildering is that, while the banality of the left seems to put Radosh’s conscience to sleep, the banality of the right can awaken it to passion, as evidenced by his brilliant review back in 2013 of a stunningly bad book, hitherto unknown to me, Diana West’s American Betrayal: The Secret Assault on Our Nation’s Character, a book intended to “prove” that the Soviet Union was secretly in complete control of American foreign policy during the Roosevelt and Truman administrations. As Radosh explains,

Ms. West writes without an understanding of historical context and lacks awareness of much of the scholarly literature on the subjects she writes about. Moreover, she disregards the findings of the sources she does rely on when they contradict her yellow journalism conspiracy theories. Consequently she arrives at judgment after judgment that is not only bizarre on its face, but also unwarranted by the evidence and refuted by the very authorities she draws on. As a historian I normally would not have agreed to review a book such as this one. But I changed my mind after seeing the reckless endorsements of its unhinged theories by a number of conservative individuals and organizations. These included the Heritage Foundation, which has hosted her for book promotions at a lunchtime speech and a dinner; Breitbart.com, which is serializing America Betrayed; PJ Media, which has already run three favorable features on West; Amity Shlaes, who writes unnervingly that West’s book, “masterfully reminds us what history is for: to suggest action for the present”; and by conservative political scientist and media commentator Monica Crowley, who called West’s book “A monumental achievement.”

You have to read Radosh’s review both to appreciate his intelligence and learning and the utter stupidity of West’s book. I read one follow-up from a “conservative” site more or less saying that, well, maybe Diana got all her facts wrong, but at least she has, you know, spirit! As a guess—and only a guess—if one is fed the “progressive” line that all that spy stuff was invented by McCarthy and that the Cold War was a product of capitalist imperialism, and then discovers that that is bullshit, there is a tendency to flip the myth: McCarthy wasn’t all wrong! He was totally right! You guys lied to me!

I wrote about this phenomenon, also back in 2013, in a little post titled “Don’t Know Much About Communist Spies”, jumping off a piece in the American Conservative by Ron Unz, which apparently was entirely unrelated to West’s book, though he came to similar conclusions. Want the truth? Read The Rosenberg File. Read it and weep.

I really have no idea how Milton fits into this at all. She is author of a number of books, including a very excellent biography of Charlie Chaplin, which I relied on endlessly in my series of essays on Chaplin’s films and which touches frequently on the issue of communism in America, but otherwise she seems to have avoided the issue. There is very little about her on the web and I have never seen anything she wrote about the Rosenbergs subsequent to The Rosenberg File itself. I have previously puzzled, a little, over this partnership, which I have never seen explained in print, here, (In the last footnote, the one with the “double dagger” or “diesis”.) ↩︎