Previewed Reviews January 29, 2006
Previewed Reviews foreshadows what’s coming up on Public Readings. The complete reviews appear at odd intervals, so keep checking back if you see something intriguing.
How the “war like no other” is also a war for many times, including ours. Some 2500 years ago, Athens was the first imperial democracy, and Sparta feared its former ally because the Athenians were “too powerful”. What started out as a limited, thirty days or so war turned into a 27 year bloodbath, complete with terrorism, the abandonment of the rules of war, secretly fomented insurrections, asymmetric warfare…in short, much that we are familiar with and some horrors we may yet see.
The Comedians. Graham Greene, Viking House, 1967.
Haiti, just before and after the fateful election of Papa Doc Duvalier, one of the least mourned dictators of the last century, is another outpost of Greeneland, the place Mr. Greene creates through art and character
His Excellency, George Washington. Joseph J. Ellis, Alfred A. Knopf, 2004.
Despite the recent and welcomed spate of enthusiasm for the 18th century and for the founding fathers, George Washington is still the most remote and least well-understood. On every dollar bill, Washington is to most of us, in Ellis’ words, still very much like the “man in the moon”: cold, distant, overarching. Ellis, a Pulitzer Prize winner, attempts to bring George back to earth so we can meet him for the first time.
A Pretext for War: 9/11, Iraq, and the Abuse of America’s Intelligence Agencies. James Bamford, Doubleday, 2005.
Bamford is the author of The Puzzle Palace and Body of Secrets, two bestsellers about the National Security Agency, likely to be called the NSA on the front page of your recent New York Times or Washington Post. Bamford’s journalistic style, his access to sources, and his sense of what could have been make this one an essential read for those determined to understand how we got into the war on terror, Iraq, and our current predicament.
Wrath of Angels: The American Abortion War: James L. Risen and Judy Thomas. Basic Books, 1998.
Risen and Thomas chronicle the role of the abortion conflict as culture war and as a point of entry of the religious right into American political life. They see the anti-abortion movement as the “largest social protest movement since the 1960’s”, according to the cover blurb. Armed with a large salt grain, Public Readings approaches…
