Selected Books: Nonfiction
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Proust Among the Stars
by Malcolm Bowie
Ward Just, a former war correspondent, uses his intimate knowledge of Vietnam to advantage in this exploration of America's tangled relations with that small Southeast Asian country. Set in 1965, the last year that civilians were in control of foreign intervention, A Dangerous Friend chronicles the lives of a small band of aid workers who purport to administer financial and technical assistance to the Vietnamese; unknown to most, however, the Llewellyn Group is actually covertly linked to the Pentagon. Though told by a nameless narrator, the protagonist of this story is Sydney Parade, an idealistic American who abandons wife and child in order to help bring democracy to the third world:Stella Adler on Ibsen, Strindberg, and Chekhov
by Stella Adler, Barry Paris (Editor)
One regrets never having seen her perform, but reading her on these writers, especially Chekhov, is the next best thing.... This book offers a sampling of the brilliance of her teaching.The book is not for actors only but for anyone interested in theater. No critic has written or talked about theater, as well as these playwrights, with more insight and passion.
Cofounder in the 1930s of the Group Theater and best known later as the formidable force behind the Stella Adler Conservatory of Acting, Adler was an articulate, opinionated, intellectually gifted member of the profession, as these talks on Ibsen, Strindberg, and Chekhov attest. Culled from a lifetime of lectures and edited into rough essay form by Barry Paris, they exhaustively examine the major works of those three seminal modern playwrights. They are not academic exercises, for Adler's goal was to show her acting students how to break down those intimidating plays into easily digestible parts, the better to bring them ...
The Information Age : Economy, Society and Culture
by Manuel Gastells, Manuel Castells
...a truly stunning achievement. Castells comes as close to being our owl of Minerva (Hegel's canny philosophical spectator who "takes flight only at dusk") as we are likely to have--a scholar who, with remarkable mastery, has brought his experience over a lifetime to bear on astonishingly diversified data sets, pulling them together into a compelling account of the complex relationship between the progressive and reactionary, the globalizing and particularizing forces that are transforming our perplexing world.The Great Disruption: Human Nature and the Reconstitution of Social Order
by Francis Fukuyama
Francis Fukuyama cements his reputation as a wide-ranging public intellectual with this big-think book on social order and human nature. Following his earlier successes (The End of History and the Last Man and Trust), Fukuyama argues that civilization is in the midst of a revolution on a par with hunter-gatherers learning how to farm or agricultural societies turning industrial. He finds much to celebrate in this cultural, economic, and technological transformation, but "with all the blessings that flow from a more complex, information-based economy, certain bad things also happened to our social and moral life." Individualism, for example, fuels innovation and prosperity, but has also "corroded virtually all forms of authority and weakened the bonds holding families, neighborhoods, and nations together." Yet this is not a pessimistic book: "Social order, once disrupted, tends to get remade again" because humans are built for life in a civil society governed by moral rules.
Odd Man in: Norton Simon and the Pursuit of Culture
by Suzanne Muchnic
Odd Man In is the story of one man's obsessive and astonishingly successful drive to amass the greatest art collection money could buy in the second half of the 20th century, long after the robber barons had scoured Europe for the best it had to offer... And from a broader perspective, it's the story of the cultural birth pangs of Los Angeles in its catch-up struggle to become a cosmopolitan city as the author, Los Angeles Times art writer Suzanne Muchnic turns the raw stuff of art world lore and scandal into history by thorough documentation and careful narration.Adultery and Other Diversions
by Tim Parks
In his essay "Maturity," Tim Parks, reflecting on that notoriously indecisive prince of Denmark, suggests that Hamlet's problem was "not cowardice, or even thinking too much, but rather that thought is his chief pleasure." Indeed, Parks continues, "It is perhaps this that our culture will have no truck with, the idea that the greatest pleasure might come, not from consumption, or action, or doing good or passion, but merely, wonderfully, from the mind's play with itself." Our culture may not appreciate the mind at play, but Tim Parks most definitely does. In Adultery and Other Diversions, he gives his own intellect free rein to cartwheel and skylark among a variety of subjects from the dangerous allure of adultery to the creative power of rancor.Another Life: A Memoir of Other People
by Michael Korda
Michael Korda has spent 41 years at Simon & Schuster--most of them as editor in chief--and it proves to be a front-row seat for observing book publishing's transition from a gentlemanly trade to a hard-nosed business. He chronicles that evolution with impressive perceptiveness and tearing good spirits in this juicy memoir. Korda has a novelist's gift for capturing people's personalities in a few paragraphs, and he nails everyone from bestselling fantasy mongers Jacqueline Susann and Harold Robbins to his boss and good friend, S&S's notoriously dictatorial publisher, Richard Snyder. But he also seems to be incapable of bearing a grudge or truly disliking anyone, so his smart, razor-sharp portraits never appear nasty, just good fun. The key to Korda's appeal is his zest for all manner of books and people, from the highest to the lowest brow, so long as they sincerely believe in what they're doing. (He's amused rather than outraged, for example, by Ronald Reagan's ability to recount with total conviction events that never occurred.) Korda gives a brief, frank account of his personal life, including a failed first marriage, but--luckily for his readers--it's clear that he spent most of his time at the office. --Wendy SmithThe Life and Times of Pancho Villa
by Friedrich Katz
The historical figure known as Pancho Villa, hero of the Mexican Revolution, is shrouded in considerable mystery. His enemies presented him as a bandit and murderer, one who thought nothing of slaughtering innocent civilians and looting their villages. His followers considered him to be something of a Robin Hood forced to take action against the government only after stoically enduring its oppression for years. And hagiographers have assigned to Villa an important role in shaping the Mexican Revolution--an uprising that he joined somewhat late. That he was a bandit Villa never denied, but he protested being called a murderer: he killed only when attacked or betrayed, he said. Elements of many other stories made their way into American government reports, however, and went on to color the historical record. (That government, under the administration of Woodrow Wilson, took a considerable interest in Villa after he led an armed raid on the little New Mexico town of Columbus, making off with weapons and supplies.) University of Chicago historian Friedrich Katz carefully separates what can be reliably said about Villa's life from the tidbits of legend and celebration, and the extensive picture of Villa that he gives us (his book weighs in at nearly 1,000 pages) is no less interesting for all his debunking. Students of Mexican history will find much of value in Katz's researches. --Gregory McNamee
Morgan: American Financier
by Jean Strouse
As Americans cope with the social and industrial changes wrought by the computer age, we seem ready to view with more sympathy the men who shaped the similarly disruptive economic revolution at the turn of the last century. Less than a year after Titan, Ron Chernow's sweeping biography of capitalist par excellence John D. Rockefeller, comes Jean Strouse's searching analysis of J.P. Morgan (1837-1913), the merchant banker whose financial prowess enabled the great American businesses to grow and thrive. Like Chernow, Strouse takes a nuanced view of a man reviled by his contemporaries as a sinister monopolist. Morgan sought to stabilize the volatile American economy and raise the cash needed to fuel its meteoric expansion. His methods were controversial, particularly his fondness for industrial "combinations" that dampened competition, but Strouse's lucid résumé of the historical backdrop illuminates the thinking behind Morgan's actions. As in her groundbreaking biography Alice James, the author never settles for received wisdom, instead reading previously neglected documents with a sharp eye to offer a fresh interpretation. She vividly limns Morgan's imperious personality and such extracurricular interests as his superb art collection. But it's Strouse's ability to clearly convey complex financial material that distinguishes this book. Her chapter on the panic of 1907, which Morgan was instrumental in halting, is as exciting as a good thriller and far more instructive. --Wendy SmithFarewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism
by T. J. Clark
[This] book is exhilarating to read because, like everything of Clark's, it is clearly, almost seductively, written. What is more, it is shot through with his passion for the pictures he has chosen to consider.In this intense and far-reaching book, acclaimed art historian T. J. Clark offers a new vision of the social history of modern art, focusing on specific moments during the last 200 years when art came under attack from the outside world. As he shifts between broad historic discussion and penetrating analysis of specific paintings, Clark transfigures modern art and launches a new set of proposals about modernity itself.
Childhood
by Patrick Chamoiseau, Carol Volk (Translator)
A prequel to Chamoiseaus School Days (1997), this slim, sometimes rambling, sometimes stirringly poignant account covers the novelists (Texaco, 1997, etc.) early childhood between first cognition and education. Writing about himself in the third person as ``the boy,'' Chamoiseau savors the smallest recollected details of Martiniques rich Creole culture. From the limber patois and its incantatory intonations to irrefrangible smells and savory tastes, the island holds a spell over him that is more about the man than the boy. Yet Chamoiseau is too clear-eyed to revel in childhoods lost sensual word. The man knows it is inextricably limned in by amorality, heedless cruelty, and intimations of mortality. There is the annual family pig, much beloved, carefully fed, honored with a name, and which still makes its way to the Christmas table. There is the constant struggle of his mother, Ma Ninotte, to stay out of debt. And when shes deeply in debt to a particular merchant, it is the boy who is sent in her stead to do the shopping. There is the boys holy war, fed by rocks and matches, against insects and rats, which ends when he realizes he cannot kill an aging rat, which he calls the Old Man: ``They [the rats] transformed the little boys nature. Beneath the killer lay the makings of someone who is incapable of doing the slightest harm to the most despicable of the green flies.'' This account does suffer from the problem inherent in most recollections of earliest childhood: once youre past the luxurious tapestry of details and burgeoning awareness, there isnt much else beyond disparate anecdotes. It can and does get boring fast. Chamoiseaus style is an unusual and effective blend of high and low French and Creole, but despite translator Volks best efforts, it doesnt quite come across in English, seeming more precious and affected than original. This autobiographical fragment may not dim Chamoiseaus growing reputation but it wont illuminate it either. -- This text refers to the hardcover edition of this titleThe Diary of Vaslav Nijinsky: Unexpurgated Edition
by Waslaw Nijinsky, Joan Acocella (Editor)
Vaslav Nijinsky spent the final six weeks before his permanent consignment to an insane asylum as something a madman in the attic. With his family--wife, young daughters and occasionally, mother-in-law--and household staff downstairs, the legendary dancer retreated to his room in a remote Swiss villa to tangle with his burgeoning psychosis. Fearful that his wife would (as she ultimately did) commit him, and highly suspicious of the physician-cum-amateur psychiatrist who daily came by to examine him, Nijinsky perceived the diary as the only safe haven for the rambling thoughts that were overtaking him. Throughout, the anxiety and anguish are palpable, as Nijinsky writes about his disillusionment with his mentor and lover, Ballets Russes director Serge Diaghilev; his alienation from and distrust of his closest family members; and his fear of insanity and its consequential confinement. His writing becomes more obscure as the weeks progress and he examines his relationship to God, writing "I am God" at one point, and later: "God said to me, 'Go home and tell your wife that you are mad.'" As his schizophrenia evolves, the pace and style of Nijinsky's prose changes radically--toward the end he writes in abstract verse--but he remains, with a dancer's sensibility, attuned to the cadences of his environment. The noises of the household, the ringing of the phone, footsteps down the hall, smatterings of conversations overheard are all registered as a sort of accompaniment to his dance with madness and function perhaps as a final tether to reality.Pushkin's Button
by Serena Vitale
In telling the story of the duel that killed Aleksandr Pushkin, Russia's great poet, writer Serena Vitale does something more exciting than simply putting together a biographical chronology of the man's life. In place of the usual plod through life and works, Vitale focuses on the extraordinary events of the end of Pushkin's life, and works backwards and sideways, as it were, to provide a quirkily rich portrait of the man. She is successful in part because she writes like a novelist instead of an ordinary biographer and she makes connections and assessments worthy of the lively mind of Pushkin himself. Take, for instance, the book's title: an anecdote about Pushkin's clothing noted by a contemporary ("Pushkin's bekesh was missing a button at the back, at waist height ... clearly they were not looking after him") leads Vitale not into contemplation of the adequacy of the many servants who attended the poet, but rather into the way the missing button "resembles the stress accent that suddenly breaks loose from the iamb and vanishes into the void" in a typical Pushkinian line of verse. Pushkin's Button is bursting at the seams with surprising and illuminating perspectives such as this. --Adam Roberts --This text refers to the hardcover edition of this title
Lost at Sea: An American Tragedy
by Patrick Dillon
In February 1983, two crabbing vessels set out from port in Alaskan waters at the peak of crabbing season. Filled to the brim with crab pots, both ships, the Americus and the Altair, were considered state-of-the-art for the industry: each only a few years old, equipped with thousands of dollars' worth of lifesaving equipment. Neither ship returned to port, and none of their 14 crew members was ever seen again. It was the worst commercial fishing accident in America's history.Byron: Child of Passion, Fool of Fame
by Benita Eisler
"Obscured by the freedom fighter, fashion leader, fallen angel, and literary bad boy, Byron the great poet has tended to be forgotten," writes Benita Eisler in the closing chapter of her monumental biography, which goes a long way toward depicting George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788-1824) in a more balanced fashion. Even in his own era, when the first edition of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage sold out in three days, whispers of incest, homosexuality, and--far worse in Tory England--political radicalism grew so insistent that they drove Byron out of his homeland. Eisler's comprehensive narrative does ample justice to the impassioned love affairs that made him notorious, from his voluptuous half-sister, Augusta Leigh, to the erratic and vengeful Lady Caroline Lamb, who famously described him as "mad, bad, and dangerous to know." Let's face it, those juicy stories are half the reason we want to read about Byron, but Eisler gives us the other half, too, reminding her readers with lengthy quotes and intelligent exegesis that Don Juan is one of the greatest poems in English, and Byron one of the most influential and important poets. Her impeccably researched text is lucid about Byron's beliefs, candid about his faults, and persuasively ardent about his genius. --Wendy SmithThe Things We Used to Say
by Natalia Ginzburg, Judith Woolf (Translator)
The Trust: The Private and Powerful Family Behind the New York Times
by Susan E. Tifft, Alex S. Jones
This mammoth history of the dynasty that created and controls The New York Times is as epic in its scope as is the role of the newspaper in America. Like any good epic, this story is filled with its fair share of personal ambition, disappointment, competing heirs to the throne, fierce loyalties, and powerful intrigue. The story of The Times starts in 1896, when Adolph Ochs, a young German Jew, buys the undistinguished and nearly bankrupt The New-York Times (the dash was later dropped). He worked hard to distinguish its style from the florid journalism that marked rival papers, and soon Ochs's paper, with its straightforward reporting, became the favorite of the Wall Street and Uptown sets. He toiled, too, to ensure that The Times never earned the moniker "too Jewish." Ochs assiduously declined to promote Jewish editors and was an outspoken opponent of the free state of Israel. And writers Susan Tifft and Alex Jones argue persuasively that in its drive to appear absolutely objective about Jewish issues, the paper (under the leadership at this point of Ochs's son-in-law Arthur Hays Sulzberger) underreported the Holocaust--keeping stories of Hitler's early maneuvers off the front page, failing to name concentration-camp victims as Jews. Though significant, World War II was just one moment in the hundred-year-long history of the paper thus far. The Trust vividly chronicles some of the The Times's most famous moments--the controversial publication of the Pentagon Papers and its transition to a publicly held company in the late '60s are just two--along with the personal histories of four generations of Ochses and Sulzbergers. With its strong foundation of well-researched facts, thoughtful analysis, and excellent narration, The Trust is itself a great work of journalism that does its storied subject proud. --Anna BaldwinAndre Gide: A Life in the Present
by Alan Sheridan
Paradoxically, it was left to an Englishman, Alan Sheridan, to write the first full-scale life of Gide. Sheridan has the credentials for the job--the mastery of two languages; the grasp of political and cultural as well as literary history; the patience; the sympathy; the sheer industry. He has assimilated all this material and handles it with easy familiarity, taste, and wit...He writes with insight about the life, the works, and their interconnections, and he can suddenly cut straight to the marrow...Sheridan has no ax to grind, no theory to impose; he allows us to share the pleasure he takes in Gide's company.Leave None to Tell the Story: Genocide in Rwanda
by Alison Liebhafsky Des Forges, Alison Des Forges
This is the most extensive and authoritative account of the Rwandan genocide yet published. Drawing from Rwandan government documents and other official and unofficial sources, the principal author, Alison Des Forges, and her collaborators, have done a remarkable job pulling together the complex and disparate strands of this story. For interpretation and discussion of the meaning of the Rwandan genocide - which this volume largely eschews - interested readers are referred to the works of such expert scholars as Rene Lemarchand, Gerard Prunier, Catharine Newbury, and Jean-Pierre Chretien.What the Twilight Says: Essays
by Derek Walcott
Derek Walcott's identity as a poet is evident even in his literary criticism. Who else would produce a sentence such as "Let the shaggy, long horde of spiky letters and the dark rumbling of hexametrical phalanxes rise over the outback towards the capital of the English language" to describe the work of a fellow poet--in this case, Australian Les Murray? Indeed, each of the essays in What the Twilight Says is at least as rich in language as it is in ideas; so much so, in fact, that at times the view is obscured by the verbiage. Nevertheless, beneath the loco rococo turns of phrase Walcott has some serious points to make. In his discussion of V.S. Naipaul, for example, he offers some telling insights into the effects of colonialism on his subject's psyche: "What is the cost to his Indianness of loving England?" Walcott asks; "To whom does he owe any fealty? Ancestors? The surroundings that history placed them in, the cane fields of Trinidad, were contemptible, as they themselves would have to be, having lost both shame and pride. Therefore, the only dignity is to be neither master nor servant, to choose a nobler servitude: writing. The punishment for the choice is the astonishment of gratitude; to be grateful to the vegetation of an English shire. Not to India or the West Indies, but to the sweet itch of an old wound." Walcott praises Naipaul's genius while calling him on his racism, selfishness, and disdain for his roots--in effect loving the sinner while hating the sin. His essay on Joseph Brodsky is an intelligent meditation on the art of translation while "The Muse of History" looks at the influence of history in New World literature. From a discussion of the poetry of Ted Hughes to an open love letter to Martiniquan writer Patrick Chamoiseau, Derek Walcott provides plenty of provocative food for thought wrapped in poetical prose. --Alix Wilber
The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory
by Brian Greene
There is an ill-concealed skeleton in the closet of physics: "As they are currently formulated, general relativity and quantum mechanics cannot both be right." Each is exceedingly accurate in its field: general relativity explains the behavior of the universe at large scales, while quantum mechanics describes the behavior of subatomic particles. Yet the theories collide horribly under extreme conditions such as black holes or times close to the big bang. Brian Greene, a specialist in quantum field theory, believes that the two pillars of physics can be reconciled in superstring theory, a theory of everything.Superstring theory has been called "a part of 21st-century physics that fell by chance into the 20th century." In other words, it isn't all worked out yet. Despite the uncertainties--"string theorists work to find approximate solutions to approximate equations"--Greene gives a tour of string theory solid enough to satisfy the scientifically literate.
Though Ed Witten of the Institute for Advanced Study is in many ways the human hero of The Elegant Universe, it is not a human-side-of-physics story. Greene's focus throughout is the science, and he gives the nonspecialist at least an illusion of understanding--or the sense of knowing what it is that you don't know. And that is traditionally the first step on the road to knowledge. --Mary Ellen Curtin
Mean Justice
by Edward Humes
Bakersfield, California, has earned a reputation for being tough on crime. District Attorney Ed Jagels took much of the credit for the incredible conviction rates in Bakersfield courtrooms, from high-profile child molestation ring busts to cases like that of Pat Dunn, a retired high school principal who was found guilty of murdering his wife--despite a disturbing lack of evidence linking him to the crime. Mean Justice tells Dunn's story compellingly, from his childhood in Bakersfield to the trial that would put him away for life. It chronicles his solid belief in justice and authority and his gradual disenfranchisement with the system that railroaded him for reasons that could only be political.Humes's exhaustive account also covers prosecuting attorney Ed Jagels's rise to political power and influence and the juggernaut of prosecutorial misconduct that caught many others, along with Dunn, in its fury. But it is at its core the horrifying story of an innocent man who had faith in a system that would eventually destroy him. It's not an easy story to digest, and it is apparently not an isolated incident: Humes brings up case after case where seemingly innocent people were arrested, prosecuted, ostracized, and jailed for crimes that may or may not have even occurred. Mean Justice is a gripping and fascinating book that deserves to be read on many counts. --Lisa Higgins --This text refers to the hardcover edition of this title.
The Coming of Post-Industrial Society: A Venture in Social Forecasting
by Daniel Bell
Bell's prophetic 1976 forecast of the Information Age and how it would radically alter the social structure. With a new introduction by Bell.In 1976, when Daniel Bell first published The Coming of Post-Industrial Society, he predicted a vastly different world-one that would rely upon an economics of information, as opposed to the economics of goods that had existed up to then. Bell argued that the new society would not displace the old one but rather overlay it in profound ways, much as industrialization continues to coexist with the agrarian sectors of our society.
In Bell's prescient vision, the post-industrial society would include the birth and growth of a knowledge class, a change from goods to services, and changes in the role of women. All of these would be based upon an increasing dependence on science as a means of innovation; as a means of technical and social change.
The Coming of Post-Industrial Society remains an important book for a whole new generation of politicians, economists, intellectuals, and students.
Elegy for Iris
by John Bayley
In one of literary history's ghastlier ironies, Iris Murdoch, the author of such highly intellectual and philosophical novels as A Severed Head and Under the Net, was diagnosed in 1994 with Alzheimer's disease, which slowly destroys reasoning powers, memory, even the ability to speak coherently. Her husband, English literary critic John Bayley, unsparingly depicts his wife's affliction in prose as elegant and accessible as hers always was. Readers may wince at the spectacle of Murdoch glued to the TV watching the Teletubbies program, unable to perform tasks as simple as dressing herself and prey to devastating anxiety as the world becomes less and less comprehensible to her. We understand Bayley's occasional fits of rage when his caretaking chores overwhelm him. Yet in the end his memoir is touching, even inspiring. As he recalls their first meetings and marriage in the 1950s, it becomes clear that theirs was always an unconventional union, in which solitude was as important to each of them as togetherness and Bayley was content to let Murdoch keep her inner life to herself. He loves Iris, the woman, not the intellect, and he conveys an essential sweetness about his wife that endures even as her mental faculties deteriorate. This totally unsentimental account of their life and her illness is nonetheless a heartbreaker. --Wendy Smith
Woman: An Intimate Geography
by Natalie Angier
Despite scientific evidence to the contrary, as far as the health care profession is concerned the standard operating design of the human body is male. So when a book comes along as beautifully written and endlessly informative as Natalie Angier's Woman: An Intimate Geography, it's a cause for major celebration. Written with whimsy and eloquence, her investigation into female physiology draws its inspiration not only from scientific and medical sources but also from mythology, history, art, and literature, layering biological factoids with her own personal encounters and arcane anecdotes from the history of science. Who knew, for example, that the clitoris--with 8,000 nerve fibers--packs double the pleasure of the penis; that the gene controlling cellular sensitivity to male androgens, ironically enough, resides on the X-chromosome; or that stress hormones like cortisol and corticosterone are the true precursors of friendship?Saint Augustine (Penguin Lives)
by Garry Wills
Saint Augustine, by Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and cultural critic Garry Wills, is a 145-page biography of a saint whose collected works total 13 volumes. Despite its brevity, the book offers a complex and compelling interpretation of Augustine's life and work. Much of Wills's task is demythologizing: Augustine was not a central figure in 4th-century Christianity but was "peripheral in his day, a provincial on the margins of classical culture," who did not know Greek, the intellectual lingua franca of his time. Although Augustine has been portrayed by artists as a bishop "wearing all the episcopal finery of the late Middle Ages," he actually "dressed in the gray clothes of a monk." And far from being a self-righteous pontificator, Augustine was "impatient with all preceding formulations, even his own." He wrote, "Since it is God we are speaking of, you do not understand it. If you could understand it, it would not be God." Wills also argues that Augustine's Confessions (which, Wills persuades the reader, is an anachronistic, egoistic translation of the original Latin title, a word Wills more accurately renders as "Testimony") has been misread in a way that suggests Augustine led a debauched sexual life before his conversion. In the Shocking Revelation department, Wills does, however, find more detailed (if elaborately coded) information about Augustine's mistress and about the son they raised together than other biographers have found. Like Wills's masterful Lincoln at Gettysburg, Saint Augustine accomplishes its revisionist aims completely and yet lightly. Wills makes his arguments without ever forgetting his first job: telling the story of a life. --Michael Joseph Gross
The Color of Truth: McGeorge Bundy and William Bundy: Brothers in Arms
by Kai Bird
This dual biography of the brothers who were top aides to Presidents Kennedy and Johnson is an outstanding study of the mindset that allowed the United States to become slowly ensnared in the Vietnam War. Both McGeorge Bundy, a national security advisor, and William Bundy, a senior official at the Pentagon and State Department, were liberal anti-Communists trying to balance American interests in Southeast Asia between what they considered the dangerous extremes of both Left and Right. They came under enormous criticism for their roles, but author Kai Bird argues that newly declassified documents "show that the Bundys and other decision-makers registered deep doubts about the American enterprise in Vietnam and did so far earlier than most historians had thought." This hardly exonerates them, in Bird's view: "They knew how badly the war was going as early as 1964-65, yet they found a way to persist in folly." Their tale didn't end in the 1960s. McGeorge Bundy, for instance, went on to head the Ford Foundation for 13 years, where he played an enormously important role in shaping modern liberalism. Bird, a Guggenheim Fellow and contributing editor to The Nation, tells the Bundys' story with great clarity and sound judgment; The Color of Truth is a surprisingly absorbing book. --John MillerWalking Since Daybreak: A Story of Eastern Europe, World War Ii, and the Heart of Our Century
by Modris Eksteins
For thousands of years, the windswept plains of the eastern Baltic attracted migrant tribes from all over Eurasia. These peoples lived together, sometimes uneasily, sometimes at peace, forging the multiethnic cultures of Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania. The last two centuries have brought one army after another to the Baltic, led by Napoleon, Kaiser Wilhelm, Tsar Nicholas, Hitler's generals, and Stalin's field marshals. In the wake of World War II, the multiethnic cultures of the Baltic splintered, and millions of citizens, including Canadian historian Modris Eksteins, born in Latvia in 1943, were sent into flight.Eksteins's narrative, haunted by ghosts and unconventional in structure, embraces many stories. At one level, he offers a requiem for the Baltic past. At another, he composes a personal history of his family, driven so far from its homeland. At yet another, he ponders the nature of history itself in a tale that "must reflect the loss of authority, of history as ideal and of the author-historian as agent of that ideal. What we are left with is the intimacy not of truth but of experience." The terrible experience of war and conflagration propels his beautifully rendered, eyes-wide-open narrative. During his childhood, Eksteins concludes, "for regret and tears there was no time, no point." Half a century later, he is able to mourn the loss of the old Baltic world--and readers of contemporary history will find much to think about as he does. --Gregory McNamee
No One Left to Lie To: The Triangulations of William Jefferson Clinton
by Christopher Hitchens
The most vocal critics of Bill Clinton's presidency tend to be conservatives--think, for example, of William J. Bennett's The Death of Outrage--but there are those on the Left who are fed up with Clinton as well. Among them is journalist Christopher Hitchens (most prominently associated with The Nation and Vanity Fair), who has produced a slim but vehement volume outlining how "Clinton's private vileness meshes exactly with his brutal and opportunistic public style." No One Left to Lie To is the story of a man who took the Democratic presidential nomination and, having achieved office, began enacting welfare reform and anticrime legislation that surpassed the ambitions of all but the most ideologically loyal Republicans--and routinely plundered the GOP platform for other policy ideas as well.Hitchens is particularly damning on Clinton's tendency to resort to divisive racial politics when it suits his purposes, as when, in the course of the 1992 presidential campaign, he refused to lift a finger to save a mentally retarded African American from state execution so he could appear tough on crime, then shortly afterwards hijacked a Rainbow Coalition conference to criticize rap artist Sister Souljah for the benefit of the attendant press. When he needs the black vote, though, Clinton will allow himself to be trumpeted as the most racially sensitive president in American history--if not, in Toni Morrison's memorably ludicrous phrase, "our first black president." Furthermore, the man who once connived his way out of the draft has become a chief executive so willing to use military air strikes as a means of foreign policy that, in the author's view, the United States is now a "potential banana republic."
Crazy Horse (Penguin Lives)
by Larry McMurtry
In writing his superb life of Crazy Horse, Larry McMurtry faced the same obstacle as every previous biographer of the Oglala Sioux icon: a notable paucity of facts. This didn't inhibit such chroniclers as Mari Sandoz or Stephen Ambrose (whose dual portrait of Crazy Horse and George Custer featured a certain amount of authorial ventriloquism). In this case, however, the shortage of documentation actually works to the reader's advantage. Unencumbered by reams of scholarly detail, McMurtry's book has the shapeliness and inevitability of a fine novella. The author may describe it as an "exercise in assumption, conjecture, and surmise"--but his phrase does scant justice to this elegant, admirably scrupulous portrait.The Pianist
by Wadysaw Szpilman, Wilm Hosenfeld, Anthea Bell (Translator)
Written immediately after the end of World War II, this morally complex Holocaust memoir is notable for its exact depiction of the grim details of life in Warsaw under the Nazi occupation. "Things you hardly noticed before took on enormous significance: a comfortable, solid armchair, the soothing look of a white-tiled stove," writes Wladyslaw Szpilman, a pianist for Polish radio when the Germans invaded. His mother's insistence on laying the table with clean linen for their midday meal, even as conditions for Jews worsened daily, makes palpable the Holocaust's abstract horror. Arbitrarily removed from the transport that took his family to certain death, Szpilman does not deny the "animal fear" that led him to seize this chance for escape, nor does he cheapen his emotions by belaboring them. Yet his cool prose contains plenty of biting rage, mostly buried in scathing asides (a Jewish doctor spared consignment to "the most wonderful of all gas chambers," for example). Szpilman found compassion in unlikely people, including a German officer who brought food and warm clothing to his hiding place during the war's last days. Extracts from the officer's wartime diary (added to this new edition), with their expressions of outrage at his fellow soldiers' behavior, remind us to be wary of general condemnation of any group. --Wendy Smith
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