Written by admin on 11 January 2011
“From the start — even before a young man I can now hardly comprehend started writing ‘The Long Walk’ in his college dormitory room — I felt that the best fiction was both propulsive and assaultive,” Stephen King writes in a chatty afterword to “Full Dark, No Stars,” his new collection of longish stories. “It gets in your face.” As if we didn’t know.
“Full Dark, No Stars” contains, as King’s earlier “Different Seasons” and “Four Past Midnight” did, a quartet of previously unpublished tales that more than satisfy their prolific author’s stated criteria for good fiction. Propulsive? Check. Assaultive? Don’t ask. The stories in “Full Dark, No Stars,” whose lengths range from 30-some pages to well over 100, are for the most part only lightly supernatural and deal, instead, with the unlovelier aspects of merely human behavior. Serial rape and murder figure prominently in two of these stories; in another, a man kills his wife and forces his teenage son to help him; and in the only fully fantastic tale here, a man purchases — from the Devil, of course — health and happiness at the too-affordable price of the ruin of his best friend’s family. It’s grim stuff, but that’s what readers expect of Stephen King. After all, he’s been in our faces for 40 years.
What’s amazing, and maybe a little unsettling, about King is the consistency of his purpose and his manner over that long stretch of time. He’s essentially the same grab-you-by-the-lapels literary showman he was in the pulpy, punchy horror stories he used to peddle to men’s magazines and, a bit later, in his early novels “Carrie” and “ Salem’s Lot.” Unlike most writers, he seems never to have become bored with his own peculiar gifts — to have tired of the wonderful toys left under the tree for him when he was a kid. He might, as he claims, have a tough time imagining himself as an 18-year-old composing his first novel, but it’s no problem for us, his readers, because King at 63 still writes with the verve and glee and heedless ease of a very young man. He has not mellowed perceptibly. He has not put aside childish things. When you’re reading the grisly tales in “Full Dark, No Stars,” carried along by his rollicking, vivid prose, you think (if you’re thinking at all): “God help him, this man is having fun.”
A writer who takes such unabashed joy in the act of storytelling is a rarity. This naked pleasure is King’s secret ingredient: it makes his work — good or bad — weirdly irresistible, even addictive. And it disarms criticism, as boyish enthusiasm often does. You might feel, as I do, that “Fair Extension,” the deal-with-the-Devil story in “Full Dark, No Stars,” is too glib and casual to bear the moral weight it aspires to, but it seems almost rude to say so. You might also think (as I do) that the long suspense story “Big Driver,” about a woman who suffers and then violently avenges a roadside rape, is a bit too easy for King: there were a couple of similar escape-and-revenge yarns in his 2008 collection “Just After Sunset.” You could think that. But you wouldn’t really feel good about it.
King’s compulsion to entertain — both himself and the enormous public whom he now, kind of archly, addresses as “Constant Reader” — is, however helpless, a form of generosity, a gift horse not to be looked in the mouth. (His readers should know by now that it’s unwise to look into anything dark and moist. Especially if there are teeth.) The sheer volume of his output protects him some, too. In the vast ocean of King fiction, the weaker stuff just sinks from memory without a trace, and without much damage to the reader’s confidence in him: a sturdier vessel is always heaving into view on the horizon. And that’s the case with “Full Dark, No Stars,” which starts with a good story called “1922,” loses its way for a while — in “Big Driver” and “Fair Extension” — and then winds up with another pretty strong one, “A Good Marriage.”
Terrence Rafferty is a frequent contributor to the Book Review.
Tags: Lurks
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Written by admin on 10 January 2011
Michael Korda’s long, sometimes secondhand but finally satisfying book about T. E. Lawrence starts in a strange way. He opens “Hero” in 1917, when Lawrence, an Englishman leading an Arab guerrilla force and using military tactics that proved to have enduring impact, devises the bold strategic move of attacking the port city of Aqaba, on the Red Sea, by approaching it from an unexpected direction. In the monumental film biography of Lawrence that Mr. Korda does his best not to mention, this is the very famous “Aqaba — from the land!” moment.
T. E. Lawrence in 1918, wearing a dagger he bought in Mecca.
Michael Korda
The success of this strategic Aqaba coup would establish Lawrence’s legend. It was a pivotal part of his story, and for that reason may seem like a logical starting point. But it is also an oft-described, hashed-over and heavily analyzed event in military history, to the point where Mr. Korda relies transparently and heavily on the work of Lawrence’s many other biographers. And he too often simply quotes or paraphrases Lawrence’s own classic book about his desert military experiences, “Seven Pillars of Wisdom.”
Why start “Hero” with what will turn out to be Mr. Korda’s least original contributions to a latter-day understanding of Lawrence and his reputation? Perhaps because of the title conceit. Although the sensible raison d’être for “Hero” is that there has not been a major Lawrence biography in years (there have been Lawrence-related books but no full-fledged portrait), Mr. Korda seems to want a catchier hook. So he repeatedly stamps this biography with the idea of Lawrence as a classically heroic figure.
Calling Lawrence a hero means trotting out the Joseph Campbell archetypes, bringing up Napoleon, Ajax, Ulysses and Achilles, and using the word “hero” as often as possible. It means finding heroic implications in Lawrence’s reading of William Morris’s “Sigurd the Volsung,” a “Victorian-Icelandic-Anglo-Saxon-German epic poem.” But as “Hero” later acknowledges, Lawrence was much too complicated and self-contradictory to fit any one-word label. And if he has to be given one, in light of his ambivalent yet attention-seeking attitudes about being famous, it makes almost as much sense to simply call him a star.
After the Aqaba opening, “Hero” goes back to the history of the Lawrence family, which Mr. Korda, in one of his more assured and comfortable moments, says gives the lie to Tolstoy’s famous pronouncement about happy families being all alike. (“The Lawrences constituted a very happy family,” he writes, “but one that hardly resembled anyone else’s.”) It then follows the young T. E. Lawrence, called Ned, to Carchemish, the Hittite dig where he spent several happy years, made himself conversant with Arab life and culture, and had the closest thing to a love affair that he would ever experience. Even in this part of the book the familiar voices of biographers like John E. Mack (who took a psychiatric look at Lawrence), Richard Aldington (who took a nastily debunking one) and those seeking a covert homosexual subtext in Lawrence’s story are echoed in Mr. Korda’s prose.
But the strength of “Hero” lies in its ability to analyze Lawrence’s accomplishments and to add something meaningful to the larger body of Lawrence lore. It is here that Mr. Korda’s full affinity for his subject shows. Like seemingly everyone with an attachment to Lawrence, he formed an intense one and formed it early. Mr. Korda joined the Royal Air Force in the 1950s (as Lawrence had joined it under an assumed name after he became world famous) and rode a motorcycle for 50 years, seduced by the allure of Lawrence’s dashing example.
Mr. Korda writes with authority about the disputes among the various camps of Lawrence biographers and scholars; about the lasting impact of Lawrence’s ideas for creating post-World War I borders in the Middle East (not perfect, but respectful of religious, ethnic and cultural differences in ways that the actual creation of Iraq, Syria and other parts of the region were not); and especially about the merits of Lawrence’s writing and the bizarrely complicated publishing history that Lawrence created for his magnum opus. In all these areas, his commentary is sagacious and valuable.
As an illustrious editor in his own right, Mr. Korda is in a fine position to assess Lawrence’s savvy instincts about keeping “Seven Pillars of Wisdom” scarce; about publishing the abridged, “boy-scout” version that was “Revolt in the Desert” (Mr. Korda deems it the more readable of the two); about dicier literary projects like “The Mint”; and about soliciting advice from literary friends like George Bernard Shaw, who was more than happy to dish it out. “Confound you and the book: you are no more to be trusted with a pen than a child with a torpedo,” Shaw once wrote to Lawrence, who was not only a Shaw protégé but, Korda says, also a model for his “Saint Joan.”
Most important, Mr. Korda makes himself a credible authority on some of the most egregious misconceptions that surround Lawrence’s story. He is particularly dismissive of the idea that postwar Lawrence, variously known as T. E. Ross and T. E. Shaw, lived a monastic and friendless life. If anything, he sees Lawrence as an adroit networker with many powerful friends and a remarkable ability to gain access to world leaders. He thinks the romantic allure of Lawrence’s accomplishments should not obscure the great foresight, planning abilities and meticulousness for which he should be equally famous.
As for Lawrence’s military importance in the Arab Revolt and his direct communication lines to Edmund Allenby, the British commander in the Middle East, Mr. Korda ably puts that in perspective too. It is as if, he writes, “an acting major commanding a small force of guerrillas behind enemy lines had direct access to Eisenhower whenever he pleased in the second half of 1944.” And yet, to a man with Lawrence’s heroic aspirations, such access never seemed overreaching or abnormal.
Tags: Books, Desert, Fresh, Lawrence, Times, Warrior
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Written by admin on 10 January 2011
LIFE by Keith Richards with James Fox. Written with uncommon candor, eloquence and humor, this electrifying memoir channels its author’s love of music, even as it creates an indelible portrait of the era when rock ’n’ roll came of age. It’s a book that does a high-def, high-velocity job of conjuring the past, be it the author’s small-town childhood or the madness that was life on the road with the Rolling Stones — a book in which Mr. Richards has magically translated the fierce emotion of his guitar playing to the page. (Little, Brown & Company, $29.99)
CLEOPATRA: A LIFE by Stacy Schiff. In her captivating new biography Ms. Schiff adroitly strips away the accretions of myth that have built up around the Egyptian queen and plucks off the imaginative embroiderings of Shakespeare, Shaw and Elizabeth Taylor. In place of history’s sex kitten Cleopatra stands revealed as a charismatic and capable politician — a historical figure way more complex and compelling than any fictional creation. (Little, Brown & Company, $29.99)
LETTERS by Saul Bellow. Edited by Benjamin Taylor. By turns cranky and charming, ruminative and cocky, Saul Bellow was a gifted and emotionally voluble letter writer. And this absorbing collection of his correspondence creates a sharp-edged self-portrait of the artist as a close spiritual relative of his heroes: a seeker and searcher, vacillating between the emotional poles of exuberance and depression; a self-made writer, adept at spinning his philosophical ideas and romantic ups and downs into fiction. (Viking, $35)
SUPER SAD TRUE LOVE STORY by Gary Shteyngart. This super-sad, super-funny novel not only showcases its author’s super-caffeinated comic gifts, but also uncovers his abilities to write movingly about love and heartbreak. Set in the near future in a toxic New York City, this is a novel that manages to mash up an apocalyptic satire with a tragic romance and make the whole thing wondrously work. (Random House, $26)
FREEDOM by Jonathan Franzen. The author’s most deeply felt novel yet, “Freedom” is both a gripping portrait of a dysfunctional family and a telling, wide-angled snapshot of our troubled times. The book showcases its author’s impressive literary tool kit — all the essential storytelling skills, along with lots of bells and whistles — and his ability to throw open a big, Updikean window on American middle-class life.(Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $28)
FRANK: THE VOICE by James Kaplan. This is a biography that reads like a novel, a portrait of Frank Sinatra that captures his gifts and contradictions: the tough guy known for his tender love songs; the ring-a-ding-ding Vegas sophisticate with an existential outlook on life; the jaunty heartthrob who turned his own heartache over Ava Gardner into classic torch songs. Mr. Kaplan does a nimble, brightly evocative job of tracing the development of Sinatra’s art, and his remarkable rise and fall and rise again before the age of 40. (Doubleday, $35)
CRISIS ECONOMICS: A CRASH COURSE IN THE FUTURE OF FINANCE by Nouriel Roubini and Stephen Mihm. Although Mr. Roubini’s pessimistic forecasts once earned him the sobriquet Dr. Doom, his predictions of fiscal disaster came frighteningly true in 2008, when the global financial system teetered on the edge of the abyss. In “Crisis Economics,” he uses his gifts as a teacher to give the lay reader a lucid and engrossing account of the causes and consequences of that great meltdown.(Penguin Press, $27.95)
THE LOST BOOKS OF THE ODYSSEY by Zachary Mason. This ingenious debut novel performs a series of jazzy, postmodernist variations on “The Odyssey,” imagining alternate fates for Homer’s characters and reinventing his hero’s relationships with his wife, his mistress and his comrades in arms. The book addresses Homer’s original themes — the dangers of pride, the protean nature of identity — while at the same time raising new questions about art and originality and the nature of storytelling. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $24)
YOU ARE NOT A GADGET: A MANIFESTO by Jaron Lanier. A pioneer in the development of virtual reality and a Silicon Valley veteran, Mr. Lanier is a digital-world insider concerned with the effect that online collectivism and the current enshrinement of “the wisdom of the crowd” is having on artists, intellectual property rights and the larger social and cultural landscape. In taking on such issues, he’s written an illuminating book that is as provocative as it is impassioned. (Alfred A. Knopf, $24.95)
THE THOUSAND AUTUMNS OF JACOB DE ZOET by David Mitchell. Best known in the past for his experimental, puzzlelike fiction, Mr. Mitchell has turned his hand, this time, to creating a historical novel set in Edo-era Japan. His suspenseful and meticulously observed story of forbidden love — between a young Dutchman and a Japanese midwife, who is abducted by a mysterious group of monks — unfurls, musically, to become a meditation on East and West, superstition and science, tradition and change. (Random House, $26)
Tags: Books, Guide, Holiday, Kakutanis, Michiko
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Written by admin on 09 January 2011
In “Bloodlands,” Snyder concentrates on the area between Germany and Russia (Poland, Ukraine, the Baltic region and Belarus) that became the site of horrific experiments to create competing utopias based on class or race war. For Stalin, this meant controlling “the largest social group in the Soviet Union, the peasantry.” They needed to be driven off small plots of land into more efficient collective farms; many were forced to move to factory zones to sustain rapid industrialization.
Ukraine became ground zero for the resulting artificial famine. The regime confiscated grain for the cities, while sealing the borders to prevent people from escaping, or bearing witness. The Holodomor, as Ukrainians call it, destroyed over three million men, women and children. More than 2,500 were sentenced for cannibalism in 1932 and 1933. By 1937, “the Soviet census found eight million fewer people than projected,” largely in Ukraine. Stalin refused to circulate the information and, consistent with his usual practice, “had the responsible demographers executed.”
But Stalin was not done. Within a few years, the Great Terror, as it was called, engulfed party officials and the Red Army, leading to the execution of tens of thousands of officers and officials. The Terror also involved the killing of hundreds of thousands of peasants and members of national minorities, most notably Soviet Poles, and again more Ukrainians. Stalin felt the need to explain the casualties of collectivization by blaming enemies who had sabotaged his plans. Poles inside the Soviet Union, who numbered over 600,000 at that time, fit the bill. Ordered to make large-scale arrests, the state police looked for Polish names in the telephone book. In Leningrad, nearly 7,000 people were rounded up; a vast majority were executed within 10 days.
With the start of World War II in September 1939, Hitler soon occupied a large part of Poland. But he did not immediately engage in genocide against the Jews. It’s true that ghettos were constructed in Warsaw and Lodz, and that tens of thousands of Polish Jews perished from random shootings, exposure and disease. Still, this was not yet the Holocaust. At the time, Hitler had in mind the extermination of a good many Poles: “the educated, the clergy, the politically active.” Such a plan would probably have killed more than the three million Polish Jews that the Nazis eventually murdered. And there was an even broader goal — Generalplan Ost — that was designed to eliminate somewhere between 31 million and 45 million Slavs to give the Germans living space in the East. Snyder cannot help concluding that “the Germans intended worse than they achieved.” But once Hitler invaded the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941 — “the beginning of a calamity that defies description,” Snyder writes — he turned his full attention to the Jews.
Snyder recounts an aspect of the Holocaust that remains unfamiliar to many Americans. Even today, the prevailing image is the fate of Jewish families like Anne Frank’s, who were rounded up and transported to killing centers in Poland. But it was in German-controlled Soviet territory that the Nazis carried out the full logic of their murderous intentions. Within a half-year, the Wehrmacht succeeded in occupying all of Ukraine, Belarus and the Baltic States. And it was here, with the murder first of Jewish men and then of the entire Jewish populations of small towns, that the Germans began the systematic open-air massacres that resulted in the slaughter of two and a half million Jews in German-occupied Soviet territory, a proportion of the six million that remains hard to grasp. Babi Yar was a ravine outside Kiev where the Germans killed more than 33,000 Jews in two days of continuous shooting; this atrocity was matched by thousands of similar massacres, large and small, until 1944, when the Red Army succeeded in driving the Wehr-macht out of Soviet territory.
Drawing on material in several European languages, including memoirs and scholarly literature, Snyder recounts this sequence of mass murder — by Stalin and then by Hitler — which accounted for 14 million civilian deaths in little more than a dozen years. Every nationality in the region and many other categories — Poles, Ukrainians, Belarussians, Soviet P.O.W.’s and Jews — were victimized.
Snyder punctuates his comprehensive and eloquent account with brief glimpses of individual victims, perpetrators and witnesses, among them the Welsh journalist Gareth Jones, who wrote about Soviet Ukraine and Nazi Germany in the 1930s; Vsevolod Balytskyi, Stalin’s security chief for Ukraine, who invented the “Polish Military Organization” to explain the famine and justify a roundup of Soviet Poles; and the frightful Vasily Blokhin, one of Stalin’s most reliable executioners, who wore “a leather cap, apron and long gloves to keep the blood and gore from himself and his uniform.” Blokhin is reported to have personally shot more than 7,000 Polish prisoners in 28 days as part of the notorious Katyn massacre in 1940.
But “Bloodlands” falters when Snyder comes to deal with the aftermath of the war in the Soviet Union. Stalin became obsessed with the Jews. Members of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, which had conducted an effective propaganda campaign on behalf of the wartime alliance between the Kremlin and the Western democracies, were arrested and convicted in a secret trial in 1952. Snyder fails to grasp the significance of the case. Claiming there were 14 defendants (in fact there were 15), he refers to them as “more or less unknown Soviet Jews.” But the 15 included five renowned Yiddish writers and poets, men like Peretz Markish and David Bergelson, who had international reputations. And the leading defendant, Solomon Abramovich Lozovsky, was an old Bolshevik who had been mentioned by John Reed in “Ten Days That Shook the World” for his role in revolutionary Petrograd. He is even referred to in the diaries of Joseph Goebbels; it was Lozovsky, as deputy Soviet foreign minister, who responded to Goebbels’s demagogic attacks on the Soviet government.
Not long after the Red Army had liberated Auschwitz, the remnants of Soviet Yiddish culture found themselves subjected to secret trials and executions. This sent a disheartening signal to the surviving Soviet Jews, leading them to believe that they had no place in Soviet society and spurring them to try to leave the country. Within two decades, the Jewish emigration movement, together with the broader Soviet human rights campaign, contributed to the collapse of the Soviet Union itself.
Joshua Rubenstein is the Northeast regional director of Amnesty International USA and a co-editor of “The Unknown Black Book: The Holocaust in the German-Occupied Soviet Territories.”
Tags: Devils, Playground
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Written by admin on 08 January 2011
The science-fiction novelist Philip K. Dick was standing with his hands in the back pockets of his jeans, rocking on his heels, and gazing at the floor of his house. In his flannel shirt and heavy army boots, he looked, she writes in a new book about him, “graceful and attractive — like someone wearing a disguise.”
She had gone that day in 1958 to introduce herself to Dick, her neighbor, who had moved to west Marin with his second wife, Kleo. Less than a year later, he and his wife split. And Anne Rubenstein, as she was then called, a skinny blond widow, and Dick, a struggling writer, were married. Five years later, they too divorced. In the meantime they had a daughter, and Ms. Dick ran a jewelry business; Dick grew a beard and wrote some of the novels that would eventually get him hailed as a West Coast Calvino or Borges. (The Library of America began issuing his novels in 2007.) Ms. Dick, now 83, would spend the ensuing years seeking the man behind the disguise.
That inquiry is the subject of “The Search for Philip K. Dick,” a biography dressed like a memoir, which was published this month by the San Francisco press Tachyon.
“I think he’s what you might call a psychomorph,” Ms. Dick said recently, sitting in the boxy, modernist home she once shared with him. “He was quite different with each person. He had this enormous gift of empathy, and he used it to woo and please and control. I’m not saying he wasn’t a very nice person too; he was. He just had a very dark shadow.”
The book, while refraining from literary analysis, is invaluable for Dick fans and scholars because it’s told by the one person he was close to at an important turning point in his career. He wrote or developed roughly a dozen novels during his time in west Marin, including “The Man in the High Castle” (1962), his only novel to win the Hugo Award, science fiction’s biggest prize. While there were stretches of Dick’s life in which he had roommates, a series of girlfriends or a tight group of male friends, the Point Reyes years were his most domestic.
David Gill, who wrote the book’s introduction and runs an obsessive blog, calls this “Dick’s family man period.”
The writer Jonathan Lethem, who included five novels from this period in the Library of America anthologies he edited of Dick’s essential works, calls it Dick’s most fruitful time.
“The river of his literary ambitions — his interest in ‘respectable’ literature — joins the river of his guilty, disreputable, explosively imaginative pulp writing,” Mr. Lethem said in a phone interview. “It’s the most important passage of his career — more masterpieces in a shorter period of time.”
This was a remarkably placid interval for Dick — a writer associated with paranoia, political extremism, various kinds of madness and heavy drug use — at least outwardly.
Ms. Dick, who does not suffer fools, recalls Point Reyes Station as a cow town, literally. She remembers the years with Phil, as she calls him, as mostly idyllic. He helped her bring up her three girls from her marriage to Richard Rubenstein, a San Francisco poet who had died suddenly. The couple raised fowl and black-faced sheep. Each morning Dick would walk through a barbed-wire-and-wooden-post fence and across a grassy meadow to a cabin he called the Hovel, where he did much of his writing.
Ms. Dick recalls wide-ranging, universe-spanning conversations, and lending books to her autodidact husband. In 1961, in the heyday of Freudian and Jungian theory, she gave him several books with introductions by Carl Jung. One, the I Ching, the ancient Chinese Book of Changes, would show up as a plot point in “High Castle” and guide its composition.
Ms. Dick says that while Dick was both agoraphobic and shy, he was a man of enormous personal magnetism. “He knew how to talk to people, to move their emotions and thoughts,” she said. “But he was too shy to go out into public. He could have been a great F.B.I. agent and a great actor.”
After the breakup of their marriage, Ms. Dick said she endured seeing herself reflected in several evil-wife characters in his later novels. Yet when he died in 1982, after a series of strokes, “everything changed,” she said.
“You see a person in the round,” she continued. “I started writing this after he died, because I was still so confused by what had happened.”
“The Search for Philip K. Dick” — which begins with the couple’s meeting, continues through Dick’s death, and then drops back to cover his birth and early life — was published obscurely in the 1990s and self-published earlier this year. The Tachyon publication, a more thoroughly edited and fact-checked version, provides an invaluable record of Dick’s Marin County years.
Much of what is revealed in the book is already known to scholars and is part of the biographical record. But by putting Dick’s life into human terms, Ms. Dick offers a window through which the curious — from the general reader to the fan boy — can approach this often inscrutable author, whose audience and critical standing have increased significantly in recent years.
Living in isolation, with fewer people than in urban Berkeley, Dick began to care about character for the first time, said Mr. Gill, a lecturer at San Francisco State University.
“He was no longer writing about things that could only take place in the future or after traveling to other worlds,” Mr. Gill said.
“He’s talking about the mundane things of the future — all very local and real and immediate” in novels like “Martian Time-Slip” and “Dr. Bloodmoney.” Mr. Gill added: “He’s writing about the Everyman, midlevel people who are almost powerless. His interest in the pedestrian sent science fiction in brave new directions.”
Dick, though, remains an enigma, even to his ex-wife. “Did Phil change identities,” her book wonders, “the way some people change their clothes?”
The marriage began to crumble as Dick’s self-doubt and paranoia increased. “Anne and I were having dreadful violent fights,” he wrote to a friend, “slamming each other around, smashing every object in the house — the kids were running in terror.”
The couple’s once idyllic domestic life ended quite unambiguously in 1963: Dick told neighbors his wife was trying to kill him, and, at a time when the rights of wives were less advanced, had her committed to a psychiatric institution for two weeks.
The memoir, for stretches a softly lighted Disney film with cavorting farm animals, takes a Samuel Fulleresque turn when Ms. Dick writes about being put in the care of duplicitous doctors and repeatedly spitting out a pill given to subdue her.
After she returned home, and Dick left to live with his mother in Berkeley, Ms. Dick found a large bill from the local pharmacist, listing drugs she did not know her husband was taking.
Strange turns like this, as painful as they were, helped her understand Dick’s painful fit with domestic life. “He gave a lot,” she said, 52 years after an innocent neighborly visit changed her life. “Maybe too much. He tied himself in knots, and then exploded, like a balloon.”
Tags: Dicks, Masterpiece, Philip, Years
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Written by admin on 08 January 2011
That kind of illogical disconnect, James Zogby argues in “Arab Voices: What They Are Saying to Us and Why It Matters,” dooms much of what the United States is undertaking in the Middle East. The book can make for dry reading. It consists of poll numbers harvested mostly in the Middle East since 9/11 by Zogby International, a polling company run by the author’s brother. But as Zogby suggests, demonizing the very people, culture and religion that the United States hopes to influence and change — rather than really studying what the Arab world says and thinks — is not a terribly smart approach.
“Simply put,” he writes, “years of neglect combined with efforts to actively suppress teaching Arab history and culture left the United States ill prepared for an ever deepening engagement in the region.” And while it’s true “that many in the Arab world admire aspects of American life, U.S. policy in the region has increasingly undermined Arab attitudes toward America as a global model.”
In the last few months, of course, the United States was gripped by the twin news stories of a marginal Florida preacher threatening to put a torch to Korans and of the fight over whether Muslims should be allowed to construct a cultural center, including a mosque, near ground zero in Lower Manhattan. Calmer heads made the point that American soldiers serving abroad in Afghanistan and Iraq, not to mention other Americans with interests across the Muslim world, suffer the fallout from incidents like these.
The problem, which “Arab Voices” persuasively illustrates, is that Americans tend to project their fears and desires onto Arabs and Muslims rather than searching for common ground. Zogby opinion polls point to important contributions that Americans could make in winning Arab support. Finding a fair solution to the Israeli-Palestinian dispute invariably tops the list, but improving education, employment and health care in the Arab world also matter. Yet instead of analyzing its policy failures, Zogby says, Washington ignores them or just shouts louder.
A particularly worrisome gap concerns the Arabic language. As a longtime correspondent in the Middle East, I was often struck by the fact that ambassadors from China and Russia, as well as Britain, often spoke beautiful, classical Arabic. American envoys rarely could.
Although the number of American students studying Arabic has doubled since 9/11 and now totals 23,000, only 2,400 have reached an advanced level. Zogby points out that there are as many undergraduates studying ancient Greek as there are studying Arabic, and a recent Government Accountability Office study reported that more than 33 percent of federal employees who were supposed to use Arabic in their diplomatic work were unable to speak the language at the required level.
Beyond communication, the larger problem, as Zogby sees it, is that Americans are mired in five sometimes contradictory myths about the Arab world: that all Arabs are the same; that there is no Arab world; that all Arabs are angry; that the prism of Islam dominates their world view; and that they are imprisoned between past and present. Each of these myths gets a chapter in the book.
Born in upstate New York to Lebanese Christian immigrant parents, Zogby has long been part of the Washington firmament. He is the founder of several Arab American organizations, including the Arab American Institute, which battles discrimination and lobbies for a less Israel-centric Middle East policy. Many of the so-called experts on Islam who churn out negative stereotypes do so, he argues, to promote support for Israel; Arab Americans with real knowledge of the subject aren’t interviewed, or they are labeled as biased. Yet among the more interesting poll results he cites are that Americans overall want to steer a middle course in the Arab-Israeli dispute and that Jewish and Arab Americans view a negotiated peace along similar lines.
It’s evident that Zogby is frustrated by American failings, but it must also be said that he glosses over the faults of Arab leaders. The widening reach of the secret police in Jordan does not help the image of King Abdullah as a friend of the United States. And the tradition of Saudi princes throwing open their doors to receive petitions from the public — which Zogby calls part of the “social contract” — might have been an effective governing technique in the days when King Abdul-Aziz kept the treasury in a trunk, but it now smacks of a continuing desire to treat the people as subjects rather than citizens.
What’s more, Zogby occasionally finds superficial examples amid the welter of his polling data to make his points. The fact that he interviewed two Tunisian students with affiliations to the Muslim Brotherhood while they watched a bawdy Italian television game show is rather facile evidence that religious fundamentalists can be open minded.
Still, it’s hard to deny the validity of Zogby’s larger argument. To succeed in the Middle East, the United States needs to listen more to actual Arab voices, and not let preconceived myths about the Muslim world dictate policy.
Neil MacFarquhar is the United Nations bureau chief for The Times. His latest book is “The Media Relations Department of Hizbollah Wishes You a Happy Birthday.”
Tags: Communicate, Failure
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Written by admin on 07 January 2011
In “Shadow Knights: The Secret War Against Hitler,” one of two books in the series that Simon & Schuster released last month, a British spy named Harry Rée wrestles with a Gestapo agent: “He gouged at one of the man’s eyes, but it wouldn’t come out. He tried to bite off his nose, but it was too tough. Then Ree shoved his forefinger into the German’s mouth, between his teeth and cheeks, and pulled up hard. The man squealed in pain and sent Ree flying over his head.”
Mr. Talbot explained: “We definitely did not want to make history like spinach, good for you but boring. We wanted to do the stuff that wasn’t good for you, with good guys, bad guys, blood, guts and sex.”
Yet the Talbots emphasized that their books strike a more complicated tone than the relentlessly heroic illustrated and cartoon histories written for children during the 1950s. Their photograph-rich volumes, a mix of text, boxed features and cartoons, are scrupulously researched and do not shrink from the corrupt political dealings, imperialist aims and ugly racism that frequently operated behind the highfalutin verbiage. “They have social significance,” Ms. Talbot said. “It’s not just about the lurid detail.”
Mr. Talbot was an avid collector of illustrated history books and magazines as a child. When he and his sister sat down a couple of years ago to brainstorm projects for collaboration, Ms. Talbot remembered the vivid book covers that her brother had tacked up on his bedroom wall. With sons of their own, the two felt the genre was a great way to bring history to life.
Both siblings are well-known figures in the publishing world. David Talbot, 59, was the online pioneer who created Salon magazine in 1995. He stepped down as chief executive a decade later, and in 2007 wrote “Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years,” which argues there are compelling reasons to believe in one of the conspiracy theories swirling around the assassinations of the president and his brother. Margaret Talbot, 49, is a staff writer at The New Yorker and a former contributing writer at The New York Times magazine.
A third partner is their brother, Stephen Talbot, an award-winning documentary editor who joined them to create a media production company, the Talbot Players, in 2008. (Another sister is a doctor.)
“Pulp History” works on a friends-and-family plan. “Shadow Knights” was written by Gary Kamiya, a founding editor of Salon, and illustrated by Jeffrey Smith. Mr. Talbot wrote the other volume in the series himself and hired the illustrator Spain Rodriguez, another Salon collaborator who created the underground comics superhero Trashman.
Their 160-page book, “Devil Dog: The Amazing True Story of the Man Who Saved America,” follows the exploits of the most decorated Marine of his day, Smedley Darlington Butler — a name too good to be false. Mr. Talbot first came across this forgotten hero in another book’s footnote.
The cover, drawn in bold colors, depicts Butler with a gun in one hand while in his other he holds up the Statue of Liberty — depicted as a bosomy redhead — who has fainted. Other illustrations reflect the same bawdy sensibility. In one, a voluptuous naked black Haitian woman dances in a voodoo ritual in front of a roaring bonfire and a beheaded dog. The style matches the pulp novels that were popular with American readers during the Marines’ long occupation of Haiti that began in 1915. The back cover promises, “Unbelievable and ALL TRUE!,” and “Devil Dog Will Knock You Out!”
The illustrator, Mr. Rodriguez, who lives around the corner from David Talbot in the Bernal Heights section of San Francisco, said he always loved pulp-style drawings and was himself drawn to history by reading war stories in serialized comic anthologies like “Two-Fisted Tales” and “Frontline Combat,” published by EC Comics in the 1950s. “That’s my style,” he said from his home. “It’s just a natural for the series.”
As for the lustily drawn women, Ms. Talbot said, “Maybe it’s a cheap way to lure them in, but you have to compete with what’s out there.” “Shadow Knights,” about British intelligence operatives during World War II, also includes the stories of female secret agents, she noted.
They are pictures even his mother could love, Mr. Talbot added. Paula Talbot was an 18-year-old starlet when she met their father, Lyle Talbot, then 44, a veteran Hollywood actor who starred mostly in B-movies and appeared on the TV series “The Adventure of Ozzie and Harriet.” They ran off to Tijuana to get married.
“She was his fourth or fifth wife,” Ms. Talbot said. “We’re not sure.” Ms. Talbot is writing a book about their father and the entertainment world of the 1920s that he inhabited. When she finishes, she plans to write a volume for “Pulp History,” possibly focusing on efforts to fight the Ku Klux Klan in Indiana in the 1920s.
The series is as much of a commercial enterprise as a literary one. Mr. Talbot said he has already sold the movie rights to “Devil Dog” and written a screenplay. “It’s Lawrence of Arabia meets John Doe,” he said. This trip to New York included discussions about turning “Shadow Knights” into a television series. Can action figures be far behind?
The books are cinematic, he pointed out, and the stories are, as the title promises, amazing. Smedley Butler fought in wars around the globe, battled Chicago’s gangsters and political machine, championed veterans’ rights and revealed a plot to overthrow President Franklin D. Roosevelt.
As Mr. Talbot said, “You can’t make this stuff up.”
Tags: History, Punch, Selling
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Written by admin on 06 January 2011
“We come to books,” David L. Ulin writes in “The Lost Art of Reading,” “to be challenged and confounded, made to question our assumptions.” With this principle in mind, here is the news that Ulin brings in this slim, meandering book: that reading is “an act of contemplation”; that such an act becomes more difficult in “our overnetworked society, where every buzz and rumor is instantly blogged and tweeted, and it is not contemplation we desire but an odd sort of distraction”; that the analphabetic anger of anonymous Internet comment threads is emblematic of a “degraded cultural conversation” in which “the ability to carry out a logical argument” has been lost; that technology brings a boon but also a burden: “We are never disconnected, never out of touch”; and lastly, coming full circle, that in this “landscape of distraction,” reading becomes not just an act of contemplation but one of “resistance.”
All of which is true enough, but that’s precisely the problem. While I occasionally disagreed with Ulin’s book, I wasn’t once challenged or confounded or even surprised by it. In fairness to Ulin, one could object that I’m not the book’s intended audience, convinced as I already am of “why books matter in a distracted time.” But this objection deepens the problem. If a friend who has fallen away from the habit of reading for pleasure (or else never acquired it) should ask me what to read, I can choose from a nearly endless shelf, tailoring my recommendation to her particular interests and tastes. If — less likely — she should ask me how to read, my options are fewer but still plenty. James Wood’s “How Fiction Works” is as good a primer on engaging with literary fiction as one could want; Zadie Smith’s recent “Changing My Mind” and similar collections of essays and reviews by Cynthia Ozick and Daniel Mendelsohn offer the opportunity to listen in while a great reader goes about the task. But if my friend should ask me why to read — whether to read — it would only beg the question to respond by handing her a book. If those of us who already take most of Ulin’s conclusions as articles of faith are not his intended audience, who exactly is?
Ulin is a critic for The Los Angeles Times and formerly the newspaper’s book editor, and “The Lost Art of Reading” began life last year as a brief essay in that paper. The essay was widely circulated and discussed, mostly by way of e-mail and blog referrals — a fact that might have made Ulin question his assumptions (though apparently it did not). Now Ulin has spun his essay out to book length, mostly by way of autobiographical material about his life as a reader and his relationship with his reading-resistant son, Noah. There are also political observations, largely of a piece with the rest of the book. Thus, we are told that the primary battle between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama — “without a white man in sight” — was “truly revolutionary.” During the general election that followed, we are told, Sarah Palin rather than John McCain “came to represent the anti-Barack Obama.” We are told that politicians now regurgitate talking points on “The View” and “The Oprah Winfrey Show.” And Ulin suggests this might all be otherwise if only more people practiced the lost art.
I can easily imagine forwarding Ulin’s original article to my hypothetical friend seeking a reason to take reading seriously. Likewise, I can imagine her stumbling on it herself, impulsively clicking a link while in search of entertainment news or the latest box office take. But it’s difficult to picture such a person buying and reading this feathered-out version of the essay in book form. One might ask why Ulin expanded the essay at all, except that the uninspiring answer — because an editor offered to publish it — is presented up front, in Ulin’s acknowledgments.
There is no pleasure to be had in dealing roughly with a work as well meaning as Ulin’s; it feels almost perverse to criticize a book for being too agreeable. And yet. As a reviewer, Ulin must know that books themselves make up a healthy tributary of this river of information in which we’re all drowning. The publishing industry, like every industry, needs product to push, notwithstanding the fact that a truly necessary book is a rare thing. Here is a challenging and confounding truth you won’t find anywhere in Ulin’s pages: There are too many books, and this is part of the problem. David Ulin’s intentions are beyond reproach, but his book is another distraction.
Christopher R. Beha is an editor at Harper’s Magazine and the author of “The Whole Five Feet: What the Great Books Taught Me About Life, Death, and Pretty Much Everything Else.”
Tags: Landscape, Unlettered
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Written by admin on 06 January 2011
For a squeamish, atheistic, arachnophobic Easterner — one who, as a child, slept guarded by a stuffed owl to scare away all the pythons and black widows of Washington, D.C. — reading Leslie Marmon Silko’s memoir, “The Turquoise Ledge,” was a disconcerting experience. Silko’s book is less an autobiography than an exploration of her relationship with the natural and spiritual worlds — and it’s a very close relationship. In her house in the Tucson Mountains, pack rats make a home in the copy machine, a rattlesnake hides under the chaise longue, spiders are welcome and the appearance of a grasshopper is seen as a sign from Lord Chapulin, the Grasshopper Being.
Silko’s menagerie includes mastiffs, parrots, macaws, bees, hummingbirds and various other creatures. None of them are really pets: she gives them respect, not coddling. In fact, much of the book describes how she tends to the animals that live in and around her home, as well as how she attempts to help them ward off predators. While she can’t do much to protect them from the biggest menace, man, Silko’s understanding of nature’s balance brings her comfort. When she sees evidence of fresh destruction by a neighbor, she calms herself by imagining him being smashed under a boulder.
Silko’s anger against “men in bulldozers who crush the desert” isn’t the subject of this book, but her fury is part of its occasion. It’s easy to see why she holds some humans in low regard, and not just because they destroy the environment. Her very ancestry — Laguna Pueblo, Cherokee, white and Mexican — describes a history of colonization, subjugation, racism and violence. Silko’s great-great-grandmother was nicknamed Grandma Whip for her habit of beating her grandchildren, a practice continued by successive generations. Silko’s mother, however loving, was also an alcoholic. Silko’s grandfather was in the Ku Klux Klan. Against that heritage stand her other legacies: ancestral traditions of storytelling and a deep reverence for nature.
For the most part, Silko’s “self-portrait” is less a reflection of her relationships with other people than of her relationships with the land and the sky. She refers only glancingly to marriage and children, and a mention of friends tends merely to lead her to the outdoors. This is in line with Silko’s stated intention not to write much about other people, but the absence of human interaction is regrettable, especially considering the gift for exploring the tension between man and the environment displayed in her fiction, notably her much-praised novel “Ceremony,” and in passages describing her parents and ancestors.
“The Turquoise Ledge” has the loose feel of a journal. Though sometimes evocative, Silko’s writing can also be repetitive and flat, as if she’s giving us notes instead of a narrative. Many of the short sections recount her walks on old trails, during which she looks for nubs of turquoise and streaks of chrysocolla in the rocks. They are gifts from the earth, and sightings are signs she’s paying attention.
In addition to animals and the weather, Silko also discusses her paintings, which are inspired by petroglyphs and indigenous ancestral stories. The figures in these stories, known as the Star Beings, speak to her, as do the clouds. But there’s nothing soft about her spiritualism or her environmentalism. She knows better than most that the strong kill the weak, and sometimes devour them. In the desert, the ground can become so hot the soil ignites, and a plant can shoot out a root to siphon water from another in only a few hours.
Then again, to a plant a few hours can be a lifetime. Reading Silko one senses she has a different relationship with time. Distinctions between “is” and “was” seem unimportant to her; a vigilant presence is what matters the most.
Louisa Thomas’s “Conscience: Two Soldiers, Two Pacifists, One Family — A Test of Will and Faith in World War I” will be published next year.
Tags: Desert
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Written by admin on 05 January 2011
His new novel, “The Accident,” is not one of his major achievements, and readers looking for Mr. Kadare (pronounced kah-dah-RAY) at the top of his form should probably start with “Chronicle in Stone,” which came out in English in 1987, or “The Three-Arched Bridge,” from 1997. But “The Accident,” fluidly translated by John Hodgson, is provocative nonetheless, not least because of the way it starts out as one kind of book and turns into something else entirely. This, you feel, is how Mr. Kadare sees the world: as a place always shifting and remaking itself.
“The Accident” begins like a thriller, or an update of an Alan Furst novel. A taxi flips over on a Viennese autobahn, ejecting its two passengers through the back doors. By the time help arrives, they’re both dead. The driver, apparently traumatized, can’t account for what happened except to say that he chanced to look in the rearview mirror and saw the passengers, a man and a woman, “trying to kiss.”
The victims, it turns out, were Albanians and longtime lovers: Besfort Y., an analyst working for the Council of Europe on Balkan affairs, and Rovena St., an intern at the Archaeological Institute of Vienna. Because Besfort may have been involved in the bombing of Yugoslavia during the Balkan War, the Serbian government begins to investigate, and pretty soon the Albanian secret service does too. Could the accident have been a political murder? A double suicide?
When these inquiries fail to turn up anything substantial, a character called the researcher — a stand-in for the novelist — takes over and begins obsessively trying to put together the pieces. He pores over the evidence, such as it is — “dark surmises, grave suspicions, ambiguous phrases, obscure scraps of dialogue drawn from half-remembered phone conversations” — and he also gives vent to his own imaginings. His account of the couple’s relationship, which consists mostly of meetings in four-star hotel bedrooms, jumps back and forth in time and alternates between Besfort’s point of view and Rovena’s.
Seen one way, their story seems to be that of a fairly ordinary, hot-and-cold relationship, intensified, perhaps, by Balkan politics and by the long periods they spend apart, brooding. The bitterness of their quarrels is often redeemed by the sweetness of their reconciliations; actually breaking up, though they talk about it a lot, appears to be out of the question. They may not be in love, exactly, but they’re not done with each other.
There is also a kinky side, though. The researcher creepily records — or imagines — the way Rovena’s breasts swell and shrink, depending on how the relationship is going, and describes in soft-porn detail the couple’s visit to an Albanian swingers’ club. Or maybe the researcher is getting off on making all this up. We never know for sure. We do know that Besfort encourages Rovena to take other lovers, or at least tolerates them, and then consumes himself with jealousy and treats her like a call girl. And inevitably struggles in the relationship take on the dimensions of a political power struggle. The researcher suggests in a few places that the whole story can be read as an allegory of the Hoxha regime, with first Rovena and then Besfort in the role of the tyrant.
“I’m abdicating,” Besfort says. “Nobody will ever topple me.”
Rovena responds: “Do what you want, take power or reject it. There is no way I can escape from you.”
In the end the researcher’s frustration — the impossibility of knowing anything for certain — drives him over the edge, and he takes the novel with him, entertaining wilder and wilder speculations before coming up with a solution. Maybe one or the other passenger in the back seat was a simulacrum? Maybe simulacra are more real than what they represent? Maybe the clue to what happened is preserved, like a riddle from “Through the Looking-Glass,” within the rearview mirror itself and will be revealed a thousand years from now?
What gets left behind in all this metaphysical guesswork is Rovena and Besfort, who instead of developing and becoming more interesting as the book goes on, are, if anything, pared down and reduced. They become so unknowable they’re barely characters at all. Presumably this is deliberate on Mr. Kadare’s part, but it means that the reader has to give up some of the traditional pleasures of the novel — the illusion of getting to know flesh-and-blood people — for the more head-spinning sensation of looking at them through a fun-house mirror. For all we know, this is really what it felt like in Hoxha’s Albania, and “The Accident” may be less a parable than a kind of topsy-turvy realism. In either case, it takes you to the sort of place novels don’t routinely visit these days, and also leaves you grateful you don’t have to dwell there.
Tags: Books, Intrigue, Political, Power, Riddles, Romance, Struggles, Times
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