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29 of 32 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
A Very Big Book on a Bit Player, May 22, 2001
By A Customer
Francis Parker Yockey's IMPERIUM is a fascinating and highly readable book. It combines a Nietzschean-Spengerian vitalist philosophy of history and culture, fascist political philosophy, and a very realistic assessment of the prospects for fascism after the second world war. It is not really an original book, but it is a brilliant synthesis. It is a big book, but easy and exciting to read. It gives even the most skeptical reader a sense of how plausibly the world can be viewed from Yockey's perspective, thus it is a particularly valuable tool for understanding fascism "from the inside." Yockey also had an interesting life. That said, however, Yockey is not a particularly important or influential figure. Like Ayn Rand, he can have a profound impact on young readers, but if they are lucky they grow beyond him. Coogan's book is even longer than IMPERIUM. It is readable, and I learned a lot from it. His discussion of Yockey's life was quite fascinating. But there is something deeply inane and kooky about this book. Coogan tries to write a virtually complete history of post-war fascism around Yockey. But this just does not work. One can, of course, find many people in the post-war right who have read Yockey's work. Some of them knew him personally. But very few were decisively influenced by Yockey, and most of those who were found him useful for leading them to the more subsantive thinkers Yockey himself depended upon. At best, Yockey should receive a footnote or a couple of paragraphs in the history of the post-war right. Anything beyond that is leaning on a bruised reed. Coogan evidently does not read French, German, Italian, or Spanish. His discussions of books available only in these languages appear to depend entirely upon English-language literature. This is a serious handicap for any scholar of the post-war right and further diminishes the value of the book. As I slogged through Coogan's book, an image from Camille Paglia came to mind. Coogan's discussion of Yockey is like a tiny marshmallow rolling around the floor collecting lint and dog hair. DREAMER OF THE DAY is a five star biography of about 250 pages buried under 400 pages of extraneous material. Nobody should read more than 600 pages ABOUT Yockey until they read 600 pages BY Yockey: IMPERIUM.
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33 of 37 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Dreamer of the Day, August 5, 2002
This is a huge 600 plus page book, a very well written book about American Aryanism and uses Yockey as a focusing point. There is a lot of great history and most of it is correct from the author's worldview point. About 70 or more of the people in the book I know or have known. Every one from the little old lady who got Rockwell into National Socialism and her husband, who use to talk about their days in the Silver Shirts, to Keith Stimely who about force fed me Yockey, and Boyd Rice who played a part in my wedding. It's like reading a high reunion letter.
This is an interesting book for anyone who wants to understand Yockeyism. The only problem I had with the book is that Yockey is like Deva. Only a tiny sect of movement people have ever read Yockey. Only the elite, not the rank and file, most have never heard of Yockey. So any influence he has is through a trickle down effect.
Also, I think Yockeyism is basically an American concept. Few European Nationalists, even the leaders I've talk to know little about Yockey.
It's a very good book on a very limited subject.
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16 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Overwhelming detail about a fringe player, July 7, 2004
Yockey's admittedly intriguing, but this account grows tiresome. As other reviewers have noted, this book's a third Y., a third his influences (Evola, Spengler, occult and geopolitik tomes), and a third relationships or hunches with realms as varied as S&M, ADL informants, a supposed Auschwitz survivor, pan-European fascists, occult and Indo-European adepts, and more Communists and anti-semites with Jewish spouses than you'd assume. His research is exhaustive, his footnotes beyond the most diligent striver for tenure, and his style starts out journalistically charged but descends for most of the 600 pages into turgid analysis and energetically formulated but often thematically dull reporting. After preparing the reader halfway through for a breakthrough into the New Fascist Order of which Yockey was a harbinger, the rest of the work's anti-climactic. Hard to believe such ideas, expressed so opaquely by their innovators and popularizers, gained any audience at all. Still, I learned about Spengler, Evola, and the Ahnenerbe investigations under Himmler which labored to find pre-Christian foundations for Aryan and European culture. The letters extracted from Yockey's Belgian lover, Elsa Dewette and the antics of Mana Truhill make entertaining reading, and the appendices exploring how Yockey's influence may have echoed into many other niches all record worthwhile information. But Coogan's thoroughness makes for a daunting read, and I fought sleep more than once. It's a useful reference for the very few needing such a work, but I wish the popular biography had been scaled down and more left to the footnotes. I applaud Coogan's skill in managing to summarize so much recondite and often mind-numbing material for a wider audience, and recognize that much of the difficulty with his book comes from the sheer impenetrability of much of this primary material for us dolts.
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by F. Yockey
