Evil Minds and Thrilling Lines

I've finished my last thriller of the summer (perhaps . . . it is summer, and I can read what I damn well please) and this one is malevolent and compelling: Laura Lippman's Every Secret Thing . . . I won't say much about it except that it's about race and baby-killing in Baltimore, it was written in 2003 and-- as seems to be par for the course in the high-quality suspense genre-- it is very evocative of place (if you're a fan of Serial Season 1, then you'll enjoy the fact that Leakin Park is a significant character in the novel) and now I'm back into intellectual non-fiction, the kind of books that make you fall asleep, not finish in three days . . . if you want to get a grip on the Charlottesville tragedy, I highly recommend Eric Hoffer's The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements . . . Hoffer, the dock-worker philosopher, has a unique understanding of populism and zealotry, and his book is chock full of lines like this:

1) faith in a holy cause is to a considerable extent a substitute for the lost faith in ourselves;

2) the less justified a man is in claiming excellence for his own self, the more ready is he to claim all excellence for his nation, his religion, his race, or his holy cause;

3) the present-day workingman in the Western world feels unemployment as a degradation . . . he sees himself disinherited and injured by an unjust order of things, and is willing to listen to those who call for a new deal;

4) the fanatic is perpetually incomplete and insecure;

5) though they seem to be at opposite poles, fanatics of all kinds are actually crowded together at one end . . . it is the fanatic and the moderate who are poles apart and never meet;

6) it is doubtful whether the fanatic who deserts his holy cause or is suddenly left without one can ever adjust himself to autonomous individual existence;

7) hatred is the most accessible and comprehensive of all the unifying agents.