Thursday, November 16, 2023

the last book I ever read (The Netanyahus: An Account of a Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family, excerpt four)

from The Netanyahus: An Account of a Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family by Joshua Cohen, the 2022 Pulitzer Prize winner for Fiction:

Netanyahu is just such a man, afflicted with the hubris of the wounded intelligentsia. His temperament, which might have qualified him for history, disqualifies him from teaching it. Unfortunately, I know of no position in the history field without its share of teaching and bureaucratic duties, both of which Netanyahu feels are trivial and beneath him.

Instead, what his mind and mood are best-suited to is individual scholarship, research without the burden of advisorships and paperwork, without even the burden of publication. Regrettably, that is not the sort of sinecure that academia often provides, except to the engineers and physicists who develop weapons. And it is surely something that should not be expected by an obscure quarrelsome foreigner in the humanities.



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