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We are all capable of being incredibly moral and incredibly monstrous, given the right circumstances. It does us no service to try and hide from our shadow selves." Stalin gets pulled down, and the chapter looks at his efforts to rewrite everything about himself from his name to his relationship with Lenin. Robert E. Lee's statues weren't about celebrating his military prowess (he lost the Civil War) but were put up decades after he died in an attempt to assert white supremacy. Lenin didn't even want statues of himself but the apparatus around him did. Woahhh, another amazing High School bully Romance!! Norms and idols are now my new obsession and there is no way I am ever forgetting these. Daisy and her boys have one hell of a tale and the whole series is pretty awesome.
Tunzelmann, Alex von (2022). Fallen Idols: History is not erased when statues are pulled down. It is made. London: Headline. ISBN 9781472281913. Idol by Louise O'Neill is a fast and addictive read that I found really intriguing. Well written and filled with darkness. I've lived in this city long enough to know that the only thing these people can't forgive is poverty. If you have enough money, they'll forget everything." There's quite a lot of range in the 12 "idols" she chose. Stalin and Lenin are included, of course, but so are Edward Colston and Rafael Trujillo. Von Tunzelmann cleverly devotes her first and last chapters to the demise of two Georges-- statues of America's last king and its first president.
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The author states, Statues are not really about history but are about how we see ourselves reflected in history....historical memory. She goes on to support this statement with the story of 12 statues that were erected at various times in history and in various countries which have since been destroyed or moved to less prominent locations, due to the realization that "historical memory" and "history" are very different, although sometimes subjective. People tend to defend statues that in some way reflect their identities and values which at times may seem controversial.
I write this review with a pounding heart, this book has managed to deliver so much tension and power. I could not stop reading it!
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A strange book to review and although am giving it lower marks they are good lower marks if makes sense, an unsettlingly unable to pigeon hole book that would recommend you read if you want to shake up your mind a bit! A gripping read from start to finish. People are going to be talking about this book for a long time to come! Thank you to NetGalley and to Random House UK for the ARC in exchange for my honest review. Idol will be out on May 12th - guaranteed to be a hit! A great example of how to do popular history well, Fallen Idols is at once briskly and accessibly written while also drawing on a great deal of historiography and contemporary cultural debate. Alex von Tunzelmann traces the rise and fall (and occasionally the rise again) of a dozen statues over the past 250 years, from a statue of George III in 1770s New York to one of Saddam Hussein in Iraq in 2003 to the 2020 toppling of the statue of the slaver Edward Colston, and uses them to think through issues of history, memory, memorialisation, myth-making and politics. And we also see in Idol the truth of the adage that if you tell a lie enough times, you start to believe it yourself. I thought this was a timely story and although the characters weren’t likeable they were highly interesting. A highly entertaining read!
The problem for me is the violence inherent in a mob pulling down a statue, whether that mob is BLM protesters in Portland or the U.S. Army in Iraq.Rafael Trujillo (1891–1961): statue in front of the Monumento de Santiago, Santiago de los Caballeros, Dominican Republic, erected 1949, pulled down following Trujillo's assassination, 1961 But as the past three hundred years have shown, history is not erased when statues are removed. If anything, Alex von Tunzelmann reminds us, it is made. I hate giving off the storyline of a book (what’s the point in reading the book then, right?) so I will just leave some breadcrumbs. I love how this novel explores the many versions of truth as well as trauma and memory. It starts uncomfortable but important conversations about consent, sexual assault and the #MeToo movement. It's also an acute deep dive into the influencer lifestyle and image, social media toxicity, performative wokeness and cancel culture. Idol - like all of Louise's books - is a timely and incisive take on important socio-cultural issues. As always, her commentary is searing and her writing scalpel-sharp. Essentially this is a story about the subjectivity of memory and the curation and manipulation of the past to spin a suitable narrative. This is also a book about friendship and envy, and although this book is set in New York and Connecticut, the story throbs with the bitterness of Irish begrudgery.
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