History · · C.B. Greenberg
Putin Drear to “ Love and Mr. Lewisham”
A Library of authors such as these, H.G. Wells and Timothy Snyder, both of whom can be read at once, perhaps for fuller effect, in respect to humanity and inhumanity.
Recently, I was reading Timothy Snyder’s historical account, “The Road to Unfreedom” (2018), about Vladimir Putin’s malignant career and likely future bad behavior, now come true. Snyder’s words started to take on more and more prescience every day with the real-time nightly news about Putin’s growing aggressiveness towards Ukraine. This drumbeat news of the day and my bedtime reading of Snyder ran together as end-to-end accounts of what seems to be one story, even dating back to events of a thousand years ago by Putin’s telling. I needed a break. My bedtime reading switched temporarily to H.G. Wells, one of England’s and my favorite writers of fiction, because of his exceptionally and vividly creative imagination. I interrupted Snyder with “Love and Mr. Lewisham” (1900), a lesser known…