Jon Wiener: From The Nation magazine, this is Start Making Sense. I’m Jon Wiener.  Later in the show: It’s August — and that means it’s time for summer beach reading.  We asked John Powers, critic at large for “Fresh Air” with Terry Gross, for suggestions.  His pick is a 750 page novel — about the rise of Mussolini.  But first: Katha Pollitt on our vice presidential candidates–that’s coming up, in a minute.

[BREAK]

Now that Kamala has picked Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as her running mate, we want to compare and contrast him with Trump’s pick, J.D. Vance. For comment and analysis, we turn to Katha Pollitt. Of course, she’s a poet, essayist, and award-winning columnist for The Nation. Katha, welcome back.

Katha Pollitt: Thanks so much for having me, Jon.

JW: This is your Minnesota moment – news from my hometown of St. Paul. Tim Walz was the most progressive choice Kamala could have made. He’d been endorsed by Bernie and AOC. But most of us didn’t know much about Walz. I assume you were in the same boat. What have you learned about the governor of Minnesota since Tuesday morning?

KP: Well, I’ve learned that he had something to do with football. He had something to do with teaching high school. He likes guns. I mean, he is just Mr. All-American. And I’ve also learned he’s just a really nice person and everybody loves him. There’s a picture that’s all over the internet now of him and he’s cuddling a sleeping piglet, and this piglet looks so sweet and happy. I’m thinking, “Oh pig, you don’t know what’s in store for you.” But for now, it’s good. But you can’t imagine J.D. Vance doing that — or for that matter, Josh Shapir –o or for that matter, Kamala. I mean, not many people would be convincing, hugging a piglet.

JW: I assume this is from the Minnesota State Fair, where politicians regularly appear for photo opportunities. Walz is notable to us Minnesotans as the governor who presided over a trifecta for the last couple of years. Minnesota then became the first state after the fall of Roe to enact new protections for abortion. He then went on to sign legislation for universal school meals, legalizing marijuana, and paid family and sick leave. Probably better than any other state in the nation except maybe for California. So he really has pointed the way towards how to win by being a Progressive.

KP: Yes. And that is so important because Kamala has to know how to do that.

JW: Trump’s first response was Tim Walz would “unleash hell on earth.” Would you say that sounds kind of “weird”?

KP: It does sound kind of weird. And Vance said something quite similar, and you wondered, do they believe any of this at this point? Hell on earth? I mean, is Minnesota hell on earth? I mean, really.

JW: I don’t think so.

KP: I don’t think so.

JW: You pointed out that Kamala did not pick who was regarded as the leader, the favorite, Josh Shapiro governor of Pennsylvania. I take this as evidence that Kamala thinks she’ll be able to carry Pennsylvania anyway.

KP: Yes, and I’m relieved actually. I think that this is a better choice. I didn’t even know how anxious I was about this until she chose Walz. And then I thought –

JW: And why were you anxious about Josh Shapiro?

KP: Well, I felt he was less tested. He’s kind of a younger, ambitious person. There’s some kind of big scandal with sexual harassment going on. What’s interesting is they all have the same, all the candidates, have basically the same position about Israel, but Shapiro was attacked for it more, maybe because he’s Jewish, and maybe also because he just seemed to have his heart into it more. But I just think we can’t have the whole presidential election turning on these tiny degrees of difference–if there are differences–about Israel.

JW: And yet it seems as if, or my progressive friends tell me anyway, that will be easier for Kamala to carry Michigan where there are 300,000 Muslim voters, with Walz than she would have with Josh Shapiro.

One last thing about Tim Walz. As a young high school teacher, his duties included supervising the high school lunchroom in Mankato, Minnesota. If he could handle a high school lunchroom, I think he could handle anything.

KP: Yeah, he sounds like a great guy.

JW: Tim Walz will be debating J.D Vance, who’s remark about ‘childless cat ladies’ continues to reverberate in the news. It’s undoubtedly the best-known single quote of the campaign. If you Google the phrase “childless cat ladies” you right now get 12 million results. So we turn to you for your comment. But first, let’s start with your qualifications. Are you a cat lady?

KP: Well, I am married, and I have a child, but in my heart, I am a cat lady and I love cats. And Patsy is – you should have her on the show to prove it. I love cats and I think this was insane. It just shows how unprepared J.D. Vance is for prime time, because that was a completely unnecessary thing to say, that has of course, pissed-off everyone who’s childless, everyone who’s not married, everyone who loves cats – and the cats themselves, a very important demographic. Did you know that there are forty-six and a half million households with cats?

JW: I did not.

KP: Yeah, that’s a lot.

JW: Yeah, it definitely could swing the vote in Pennsylvania.

KP: Yeah.

JW: I just should say, journalistic ethics require that I disclose my own interest here. I also am a childless cat person. I used to have a Maine coon cat called Ratso, and my wife had a cat that she named Blossom Dearie.

KP: Oh, how sweet. Yeah. Maine Coon cats are really great. And they’re particularly annoyed at J.D. Vance about this. I have it on good authority.

JW: As evidence of how pervasive and important the ‘childless cat ladies’ quote is in the campaign, J.D. Vance’s wife, Usha, Yale Law School, top of her class, clerk to John Roberts, who is Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, you may have heard. Usha defended the ‘childless cat ladies’ statement on Monday this week when CNN interviewed her. What do you know about Usha?

KP: Well, I feel sorry for her, but I’ve made the mistake of telling this to my daughter who is ferocious, and she says, “Oh, mom, don’t feel sorry for her. Don’t feel sorry for any of these wives. They know what they got into.” And I always want to believe that that’s not quite true.

JW: Usha’s duties included going on CNN this week to defend her husband. What she said was he was “making a point that he wanted to make that was substantive.” She said people should “spend a lot less time just sort of going through this three-word phrase”, which of course is what we’ve been doing. So let’s look at the full quote. Here it is. J.D. Vance said in an interview with Fox News in 2021, “We are effectively run in this country by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices they’ve made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable too.” And then he suggested that maybe parents should get extra votes based on the number of children they have. And he asked, “How does it make any sense that we’ve turned our country over to people who don’t really have a direct stake in it?” Now, I know that you’ve done some research on the role of childless people in running this country. What did you find?

KP: Yeah. George Washington, the Father, note Father of our Country.

JW: Yes.

KP: And he was a devoted stepparent like Vice President Kamala Harris. But according to J.D., that doesn’t count. You have to, I guess, biologically produce these children to really care about the future of the country. And then other patriotic Americans who weren’t parents include James Madison, who was the Father of the Constitution, James Monroe, Andrew Jackson, James K. Polk, James Buchanan, who wasn’t even married, um, and William McKinley, who had two children who died in infancy. I don’t know if they count according to J.D. But that’s more than one in seven presidents. That’s a lot.

JW: Here’s the big question. Did any of those childless presidents have cats?

KP: There is no overlap I’m sorry to say. But Abraham Lincoln was the first president to have pet cats in the White House. And that should tell you that there’s an overlap between men who love cats and men who are secure in their masculinity.

JW: Thank you for that. I have to say, I have a career as a professional historian of the United States, and I never knew that Lincoln was the first president to have cats. So special thanks for that.

KP: Okay.

JW: So Vance’s remark was about childless cat ladies. And remind us how many American women do not have children?

KP: It’s 20%.

JW: Yeah, that’s like more than 20 million women.

KP: That’s a lot of votes to alienate.

JW: Yeah. And it seems like Trump and Vance have really vastly different positions on women voters, motherhood and on gender politics in general.

KP: Yeah, that’s the way it seems at first, but actually it isn’t. I mean, they’re like two sides of the same coin. Trump is the macho bully and playboy with the three wives, had the porn star sex and lots of other women he wasn’t married to sex, and he’s an adjudicated rapist. He invaded pageant contestants’ dressing rooms, and he’s a former good friend of Jeffrey Epstein. Now J.D. looks like the good guy. He came from this chaotic Appalachian family who got himself out into the professional managerial class, converted to Catholicism and he can talk authentically as Trump cannot, about being a family man and the evils of divorce, remember, even when, as in his grandparents’ case, there’s abuse. So for Trump women are sex objects, for Vance they’re reproductive objects. It’s not that different, is it?

JW: Getting back to Usha Vance. In that first solo interview she did for the campaign, she said that when her husband was talking about childless cat ladies, “What he was really saying is that it can be really hard to be a parent in this country.” Is that what he was really saying?

KP: No!  No. He was saying exactly what he seemed to say — which is that people who don’t have children have less of a stake in the future, and the Democratic Party is run by the miserable cat ladies, including Pete Buttigieg, who has two children. She is desperately trying to paper over what he said, not very successfully.

JW: And what was the thing that J.D. Vance said about George Soros “sending a 747 to Columbus, Ohio”?

KP: Yes, this is in a recently unearthed clip from 2022. He predicted that should Roe v. Wade be overturned, “Ohio bans abortion in 2022 or let’s say 2024. And then, you know, everyday George Soros sends a 747 to Columbus to load up disproportionately Black women to get them to go have abortions in California.” Now, what Usha will have a hard time explaining away is that George Soros is a frequent target of antisemitic conspiracy theories involving Jewish control of Black people. And then Vance went on to say that he would support bans on women traveling for abortions. So in other words, he’s saying he would like a national ban on abortion, which Trump claims to oppose. So he’s really not helping the Trump case and the antisemitism of the Soros reference has, I think, alienated a whole bunch of other people.

JW: Yes. Well, Vance did apologize for his comment about childless cat ladies – sort of. What he said was “Obviously it was a sarcastic comment. I’ve got nothing against cats.” Your response?

KP: Yeah, cats, they’re not very forgiving. But actually, the problem is with women, whether they have kids or not, or cats or not. And I think that he’s using “sarcastic” – what is that famous quote from The Princess Bride? “I don’t think that word means what you think it means.” So I would say that every time that man opens his mouth, he digs his grave a little bit deeper. I know that’s a mixed metaphor, but –

JW: Do you want to say anything more about Usha?

KP: Well, I still feel sorry for Usha. I just think, you know, she’s got three kids. Even if she wanted to leave her husband, it’s not so easy to do. But not that I have any reason to think she does, but I think that, although I feel sorry for her, she too is responsible for her own soul – and she’s selling it as fast as she can.

JW: Katha Pollitt wrote about childless cat ladies for thenation.com. Katha, special thanks for this one.

KP: Thanks for having me.
[BREAK]

JW: It’s August, and that means it’s time for summer beach reading. With longer days and warmer weather, we wanted to find a book that is long and captivating. So we asked John Powers. Of course, he’s critic at large on NPR’s Fresh Air with Terry Gross, where he has millions of listeners. John, welcome back.

John Powers: I’m glad to be here, Jon.

JW: What has been your beach reading so far this summer?

JP: Well, actually, the big, exciting book that I read, and it is a beach classic, is called “M: Son of the Century,” by Antonio Scurati. And it is the first volume of a massive series of novels about the career of Benito Mussolini.

JW: I looked this up. In fact, I read it myself after you recommended it. It’s a bestseller and award winner in Italy. It’s been translated into 40 languages. The English translation by Anne Milano Appel is terrifically vivid and compelling.

But what struck me was that the rise of Mussolini is so different from the rise of Trump. Mussolini started out as the leader of a small group of bitter war veterans in the wake of World War I, when half a million Italians had been killed, and hundreds of thousands of returning soldiers were facing unemployment and a lack of food. That was nothing like America in 2015, where you will recall, the Obama years were coming to a conclusion, and Trump first appeared in the Republican Primary.

And then Mussolini’s own background is the opposite of Trump’s. Mussolini started out an unknown and impoverished journalist and socialist. Trump, I don’t need to tell you, was a billionaire real estate developer and popular TV personality. So different.

JP: Well, they are very different. It would be impossible not to concede that point, and to add that it’s always dangerous to find historical analogues.

Yet what was peculiar was as I was reading the Scurati novel, I kept being struck by how things resonated with the present moment. For example, in the discussion of Mussolini, whose background isn’t at all Trump’s, what is common to Trump’s, is there’s a kind of anti-establishment fervor in both of them, that plays into the sense that the elites are running things, and not in the way that ordinary people like.

At the time of Mussolini, there were both the socialists, who were exceedingly popular at the time, and a small group of fascists. Mussolini, who started as a socialist, had moved to the fascists. And yet, he caught some things that I think that Trump caught. One of the key moments at the beginning, is when one of his people is trying to explain what the ideology of fascism should be. And Mussolini’s thought is, we don’t really need an official ideology. We need to have the sense of excitement, that we’re moving forward, that we’re for Italy, that it’s kind of a show, that we want people caught up in the emotion of the event, rather than a series of policies, which are after all dreary.

And then when you mention the disaffected soldiers, they were a group called the Arditi, who were the great warrior Navy SEAL types of World War I for the Italians. They came back, they didn’t have jobs, they’re disaffected. But they liked doing lots of the violent stuff that soldiers like that do.

JW: What struck me the hardest in Scurati’s book was the violence. And not just the rhetoric, not just the aura of Mussolini, but the way his followers actually terrorized and killed socialist leaders and activists in horrifying ways, killing a socialist peasant organizer in front of his family and children. Mussolini’s method, as Scurati describes it, was to “stir up violence and disorder to show that only he could remedy it, unleash the squadristi with one hand, and rein them in with the other.”

JP: Yes, and you can actually see that that is part of what’s going on. So the Trump argument that we are in a chaotic situation, so much of the violence and chaos is produced by his people. On Election Day, I think there is almost no risk that a polling place would be taken over by crazed leftists. Yet I can easily imagine, as in the succession scenario, that you could imagine in Wisconsin, a group of Trump followers would take over a polling place, or where votes are being counted, and burn it to the ground, if necessary, if they thought he was going to lose.

Mussolini does see violence as a tool. It’s a tool both for cowing the left, which then gets cowed, but also, it’s useful to the people who are in power. The classic mistake, I think that businesspeople and conservative government people make, is they always think, “Oh, we’re going to be able to control the fascist impulse in people.” It was also true in Germany, of course. You think, “Oh, this guy isn’t that great. He will do what we need to get done. He will stop the socialists, then we will control him and take him over,” not realizing that, of course, that’s not going to work.

JW: And Scurati, in his novel about the rise of Mussolini, M, also paints a vivid, really unforgettable picture of who the fascist followers were. Could you read to us from the first meeting of what Mussolini called the Grand Council of Fascism, in 1923, when the party leaders posed for a photograph and Scurati tells us about it?

JP: Okay: “They’re all fascists. A toxic cloud of disappointed ambitions, revolutionary frustrations, confirmed biases, a fetid miasma of familiar rivalries, local constituencies, tribal vendettas, village squabbles, a suffocating spray of factions, dissidences, extremisms. For the most part, they’re mediocre, greedy, petty men, raised to their rank by the updrafts stirred up in Italy’s sky by the Mussolini cyclone, and appointed directly by him, the supreme leader.  Yet, instead of gratitude, the beveled glass mirrors of the Grand Hotel reflect devious, scowling, gloomy looks of discontent.”
What I like about this is, one of the great things is, that just as, let’s say centrist politicians in Italy, who think they’re using Mussolini, Mussolini has his own collection of mediocrities, and thugs, and climbers who work for him, that he’s struggling to control.

And one of the great themes of the last third of this first part of the book, which ends with him becoming the dictator of Italy, is him trying to control the thugs, whose threat he has used to take power. The problem is, even after he takes power, they still want to go around killing leftists, burning buildings down, and doing all the stuff he doesn’t want. Because his whole point was that he could control them. And in fact, he can’t control them, so he actually hates, and in a way that I suspect that Trump hates, a lot of his followers. You’re using them, but in fact you don’t connect to them, or identify, but you think they’re stupid people.

JW: Yes. Another key theme of Scurati’s novel, M, that we shouldn’t forget about, is that Mussolini’s party won elections. The 1919 elections in Italy were the first elections there in which all adult males had the right to vote. And at first the fascists got no representatives in the parliament, but then he formed an alliance with the liberal parties. And eventually, was named Prime Minister. And it was only then that he ended what democracy there had been.

JP: Yes, but I think the sadder part of that story, Jon, is that in these elections, the winners, hugely in the North especially, were socialists. Sometimes they were getting 80% of the vote. And as you read, you see how, partly because they’re eager to govern, partly because they’re not drawn to violence in the same way as the fascists, that people who have 80% of the vote find their province being taken over by someone who might’ve gotten 5% of the vote, because that 5% was prepared to go into the countryside, as you’ve mentioned earlier, and kill people in front of their families, to burn down working men’s associations, to get in the way of the legal swearing in of the people.

And that, it’s a sad thing to say, but I think it’s been true a lot of the times, is that the left isn’t as strong when it comes to fighting as the right has been.

It’s interesting that Mussolini, at one point in this book, is expressing his admiration for Lenin, because Lenin did what you have to do. And Mussolini is contemptuous of the eloquent socialists, like Turati, or even the hero of Giacomo Matteotti, who was the great socialist hero of that era, because he was constantly talking up against Mussolini. But what they aren’t prepared to do is do the ruthless stuff.

In Bologna, in 1920, they’d won 80% of the vote. They’re going to swear in ex-railroad man as the mayor of the city. A group of fascists come create a riot. And what happens is, there’s enough violence and death, that it discredits the socialist because it proves they can’t keep order. And in fact, they never get to take power in the city they won 80% of the vote of.

As we, people who think of ourselves as being on the left, think this is something you have to remember.  We look at various revolutions we’ve had, and you think, when you hear discussions, should Allende have purged more people along the way? And you think, history indicates that probably he should have. We don’t like to do it. We like to think we’re rational, sensible people.

Also, the point about fascism is it was about tearing down something. And the thing about socialism was it was about building something up. And it’s easy when you’re building something up, to not want to get involved in all the violence, because it is destructive. You’re trying not to destroy; you’re trying to build. But people who want to destroy have the edge because they don’t care whether they destroy. Whereas, if you’re trying to build, you do.

JW: So as you say, in Scurati’s account of the rise of Mussolini, the socialist leader Giacomo Matteotti is the hero of the book, the single voice of determined resistance in a kind of spineless parliament. And his assassination creates a crisis for Italy.

Really the most upsetting thing in the book is Scurati’s evidence that Mussolini probably could have been stopped at that point. After the assassination of Matteotti, he says the majority of Italians horrified by the crime wanted to see the fall of fascism, and that Mussolini himself sank into an apathetic inertia and wasn’t sure what to do. And then what happened?

JP: What happens is that the people who could stop him, including the socialists, don’t propose the things that you could do. They fritter away, I think, a lot of the outrage in eloquent speeches, in newspaper columns. They don’t actually push the votes in the parliament that would’ve gotten him out.

The strength of fascism was always that Mussolini was going to send his Blackshirts to take over Rome. One of the reasons he got appointed Prime Minister was because he could stop the Blackshirts from coming and descending on Rome and trashing it. And that this is the first case where it happens, where Mussolini knows that if the army had tried to stop them then, the Blackshirts would’ve run off in fear, because whenever the Army faced the Blackshirts, the army would win. But they wouldn’t do that.

In this particular case, once again, Mussolini keeps waiting in these final pages, for them to do the thing that would just throw him out. And no one ever rises to the occasion, because the people in the center think, “Oh, we can work our way around him and we hate the socialists.”

The people on the left weren’t great at fighting, in truth, and they didn’t want the conflict. And I think they thought reason would prevail. And the strongest of them, Matteotti’s been murdered. Even in the way he’s murdered, which is interesting, as it’s presented by Scurati, and I’m not sure it’s true, but because nobody could actually know the truth, because it was all private stuff, Mussolini’s arranged for Matteotti’s death, maybe in the way that the Gangland boss arranges for it. He makes it clear it would be great if Matteotti was dead.

But in the book, he’s genuinely shocked and horrified when they actually murder him, because he didn’t order it. Because he knows that if the murder is bad, it could cost him everything. But he has these overenthusiastic, violence-loving people, who are more than happy to kill the socialist leader. And the problem is, Matteotti was the brave and heroic one. And you realize there was a kind of cowardice, that if they would kill him, then maybe they would kill you.

Since we’re extrapolating to the modern world.

JW: Yes.

JP: I always wonder why it is, that say Mitch McConnell, who’d gotten what he wanted, wouldn’t have pursued just finishing Trump off? I think with some of these people, there is a genuine fear of unleashing violence from the hardcore Trump people. I think there’s actually physical fear that a lot of these people have. It would be a scary thing, if you are identified as the person who got Trump, the hero, impeached so he could never run again.

JW: “Hang Mike Pence.”

JP: “Hang Mike Pence.” There is that side of it. And the thing is, you think some of his followers would do it.

JW: So pulling the lens back here for a minute, the book has dozens of characters, and luckily for us readers, it has a cast of characters at the end, it’s about five pages long. The most fascinating to me was Mussolini’s lover and mentor, Margherita Sarfatti, an art critic from an elite Jewish family in Venice. What the heck was she doing with Mussolini?

JP: She was drawn, as many intellectuals are, to power. She was drawn to – he obviously had a charisma, a sexual charisma, and I think she too felt she could control him. He will go to art galleries, and she’s connected him up with artists. Because the thing about Mussolini, as a distinct from some of the other thug dictators we’ve seen, is that he was actually a smart and more intellectual person than most of the rest of the society.

One of my favorite moments in this thing, and this is how Sarfatti enters, is that Mussolini is going to address a group of his thugs. And at one point he says something like, “If I can shift to a quotation from Goethe,” and then does it. And you thought, he would be quoting Goethe to his Blackshirts, that says something.

And in fact, what was interesting when I was reading around this, I was reading Luigi Barzini’s book on The Italians, which has a great chapter on Mussolini, and one of the things that he says is that Mussolini was a brilliant journalist. When he ran Avanti!, the socialist paper, he was worshiped as the great writer for that paper, and was a great journalist. And then he started, Il Popolo d’Italia, which is the right-wing paper, and he was a great writer. And there are examples of his writing in this book. And you think, he’s a good vivid writer.

And so, Sarfatti, with this charismatic kind of animalistic guy who wants power, you think you can control him, but you’re surrounded by what is obviously energy. He is charismatic. I think when you look at him now, it’s kind of comically charismatic. But he must have had something, because he was plowing through women in those years, like nobody’s business.

One of the recurring themes, is like every 40 pages there’s some new young woman that he’s drawn to.  His wife and Sarfatti are the two continuing ones, at least in this first part of the book. And even by the end, she has the problem that she’s now into her forties, so it’s going to be pretty much all over for her soon.

JW: Why does Antonio Scurati call this a novel? The history, as far as I know, is completely accurate. I’m told the book was vetted by real historians, to make sure the places, and the dates, and the quotes were all correct. All the events really happened, all the characters were real people. He has real documentary sources at the end of every chapter. Why is this a novel?

JP: Well, it’s a novel because he actually is telling you what Mussolini is thinking. And that’s the thing you can’t know. You can infer what Mussolini is thinking. And you’re dramatizing scenes you didn’t actually see. These days, if you think of a Norman Mailer reported thing, when I think, for example, of a full novelistic version might be The Autumn of the Patriarch by García Márquez, or El Señor Presidente. Those are the ones where you’re making up a dictator.
And then there would be things like Solzhenitsyn doing Stalin, where you’re kind of doing it satirically. Whereas, what’s interesting about this is, I think he’s trying, insofar as he can, given that he doesn’t like Mussolini, to more or less give Mussolini his due, in terms of how he thinks about things.

He’s not a completely unsympathetic character in this book, because he actually has normal thoughts along the way. His politics are monstrous, but he does seem like he comes off as a human being, even in the places where he’s – because he’s constantly being weak, which I think is one of the other interesting things.

JW: Yeah.

JP: Because his whole point is to rise to the top. So he’s constantly caught in the way, that I think sometimes that all politicians are. But even Trump, like Trump, he wants to seem tough all the time. But he realized, if I seem tough here, that’s going to hurt me. And I want to be loved, also. I want the country to think I should be in charge of everything, so I can’t do it, and then they get caught up in this bind.
And Mussolini’s having what happens to him all the time. And you’re stuck with the fact that you have thugs you don’t like, who are your base. And what do you do with it? That can be paralyzing too. And then once again, the other Trump analogy is that in the end, he made it because rich and powerful people supported him. They could have stopped him, and they didn’t. And you think of the rich and powerful people that you keep reading about, who are for Trump, even though they should probably think, “He’s going to mess up the economy with those tariffs.” Nevertheless, they don’t think that.

JW: This book, M: Son of the Century, was published in Italy in 2018. And it was followed in 2022 by the next book in the series, titled M: The Man of Providence. That was published to coincide with the hundredth anniversary of Mussolini’s march on Rome, and it was a very big deal in Italy. The third book in the series has also been published in Italian, M: The Last Days of Europe, which focuses on Mussolini from 1938 to 1940. That was published last year in Italy.  All three were hugely successful bestsellers. The fourth and final volume is in the works.
We have heard that Harper, the publisher here, is considering publishing an abridged translation of the next two. Are you ready to go to work on that one?

JP: I think maybe I could live with the abridgment. I’m not sure how much of my life I want to give to Mussolini. And I think maybe these are the most interesting years. I think one of the interesting things that emerges from the book, that probably people kind of knew but maybe didn’t know, is that he’s not antisemitic. That not only does he have the Jewish lover who he really likes, he was hiring Jewish architects. He liked Jewish writers. It’s only because, basically to placate Hitler, that he turns antisemitic. But it’s not a gut feeling for him. It’s not a driving principle. I wouldn’t mind reading about that period.

JW: The part I want to get to, is where he’s hanging from his heels in 1945.

JP: Oh yeah, that’s a good part. I was recently in Milan, and unfortunately, the gas station where they did that is no longer there. It’s either next door to or has been replaced by a McDonald’s, which I think is somehow some sort of wonderful historical thing.

JW: The book is Antonio Scurati’s mammoth novel about the rise of Mussolini, M: Son of the Century, 773 pages, translated by Anne Milano Appel. It’s scarier than Stephen King.

JP: It is scary. And even though you quite rightly began this by saying that there’s so many ways that our America is not like 1919 Italy, as you read it, every few pages, you’ll get something that will give you a shiver of recognition, of realizing how these things play out a hundred years later.

JW: “A shiver of recognition.” John Powers, thanks for our summer reading beach pick.

JP: It is always my pleasure, Jon.