{"id":1813,"date":"2004-02-21T13:52:30","date_gmt":"2004-02-21T18:52:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/vardibidian\/2004\/02\/21\/1813.html"},"modified":"2018-03-12T16:45:22","modified_gmt":"2018-03-12T21:45:22","slug":"book-report-knockdown","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/2004\/02\/21\/book-report-knockdown\/","title":{"rendered":"Book Report: Knockdown"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Your Humble Blogger owns some dozen or more Dick Francis novels in paperback, but by no means all of them. I took Knockdown<\/a><\/I> (NY: Fawcett 1974) out of the library, since I hadn’t read it in years. It’s the one where a stalwart but modest hero is put under tremendous pressure, but stubbornly refuses to give in to wealthy, ruthless villains, and ultimately triumphs through a combination of guile and fortitude.\n

No, seriously, it’s a good one, and I enjoyed it quite a bit.\n

Dick Francis may be the most obviously Conservative of my favorite writers. Well, J.R.R. Tolkien is Conservative in his own way, of course, but its an apolitical way. Dick Francis frequently puts the poor-people-are-lazy-and-morally-inferior speech into his hero’s mouth; it puts me off only briefly. Tom Stoppard, of course, is an old Cold Warrior; I wonder if he is still publicly a Tory, or if New Labor appeals to him. Most likely, I suppose, is that he likes the Neocons.\n

I don’t think any of my favorite American writers are Conservatives (or for that matter, Republicans). In fact, now that I think about it, almost all my favorite American writers are pretty obviously leftists of one stripe or another: Terence McNally, Tony Kushner, and Lanford Wilson in the theatre, Dashiell Hammett, Connie Willis, Tom Robbins for novels, Robert Benchley, James Thurber, Dorothy Parker, Heywood Broun and that gang for essays and such. I don’t know if Lois McMaster Bujold is on the left or not; it isn’t clear to me from her books. She certainly isn’t obviously a conservative. Robert Silverberg? Is he a Republican these days?\n

I’m not sure whether there’s cause and effect there, or if there is which way it goes. It may just be a coincidence.\n

Redintegro Iraq,
-Vardibidian.\n<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Your Humble Blogger owns some dozen or more Dick Francis novels in paperback, but by no means all of them. I took Knockdown (NY: Fawcett 1974) out of the library, since I hadn\u2019t read it in years. It\u2019s the one…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[194],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1813","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-report"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1813","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1813"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1813\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16927,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1813\/revisions\/16927"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1813"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1813"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1813"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}