Like my 1900 Toyota and my cardio-vascular system, my website is due for a check-up and probably a tune-up. I launched johnvfleming.com a few years ago at the urging of my “trade” publisher, the W. W. Norton Company, whose marketing experts suggested it as an appropriate way to disseminate information about my book The Anti-Communist Manifestos. It did serve that purpose admirably, before sliding into its retirement role as a redundant if convenient portal to my weekly blog Gladly Lerne, Gladly Teche
But I now have new Norton book in an advancing stage of production. Its title is The Dark Side of the Enlightenment--a title chosen partly for its provocative potential. Books are chiefly interesting for their content, of course, but the actual process of making a book has its own fascinations. Giving a brief summary of a wide-ranging book is not easy, but when challenged by the people who make up the Norton catalogue to say what the book is about in no more than 250 words, I came up with this. Over the coming weeks and months I shall periodically be posting a series of mini-essays that (1) introduce you to some of the book’s major ideas and characters—and I do mean characters—and (2) give some account both of the intellectual and the industrial stages of the book’s production.