Also interesting. It’s hard to imagine how someone could’ve written a thesis at Harvard in the early ’00s on Graham Greene’s Quiet American without bumping into Burdick and Lederer’s Ugly American and the figure of Ed Lansdale. Maybe a decade or two earlier, but not by the ’00s: lit crit had become very historicist, the books’ connections were widely noted, and there was a lot of easily accessible material on Lansdale. And if you know about Lansdale, you’d be pretty hard-pressed to make Buttigieg’s warm-fuzzy thesis.