DISCOVERIES

ANOTHER CENTURY OF WAR?

By Gabriel Kolko

The New Press:

176 pp., $15.95 paper

Gabriel Kolko, the author of “Century of War,” and “Anatomy of a War,” does not mince words. “September 11 confirmed, if any confirmation was needed, that the United States has abysmally failed to bring peace and security to the world.” “Cease meddling,” he warns our politicians. Cease “buttressing tyrants,” “protecting American corporate interests” and “selling or giving arms to nations that have rebellious populations or grievances against neighboring states.” Put an end to our 50-year role of destabilizing the Middle East. Stop trying to make distinctions between freedom fighters and terrorists. In short, mind our own business and look to our own domestic problems. While we tell the rest of the world to stop building its arsenals, our military budget has increased by $3.1 billion in the last year.

But Kolko is not optimistic: “Neither the American population nor its political leaders are likely to agree to such far-reaching changes in foreign policy, and there is not the slightest sign at this point that voters will call their politicians to account.”

Kolko builds to a shrill level in this short volume, which reads like a very long op-ed piece: Realpolitik doesn’t work. Our pursuit of oil has created alliances that are the forebears of organizations like Al Qaeda. Competition for oil will increase, particularly from China. Our policies have endangered our people. The world hates us.

Our “irrational ambition to run the world,” writes Kolko in his last, stinging sentence, “will inflict wars and turmoil on many nations as well as on its own people.”

*

WHEN THE EMPEROR WAS DIVINE

By Julie Otsuka

Alfred A. Knopf: 144 pp., $18

This gentle, understated novel takes on one of the most embarrassing episodes in American history: the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II. Seen through the eyes of one family, step-by-step as they descend into the hell created for them, it is a story that has more power than any other I have read about this time.

First come the anonymous signs posted, in this case, in Berkeley in the spring of 1942. The mother, whose husband has been taken weeks earlier, buys some duffle bags, packs their things, shoots the family dog, frees the parrot and dutifully takes her boy, age 7, and girl, 10, to the Civil Control Station.

From there they are sent to live in barracks in a camp in Utah, where they live for three years and five months. The children receive letters from their father, who has been taken from his home in his bathrobe and slippers and sent to another camp, but the letters are heavily censored.

When the family returns home to Berkeley, their house has been ransacked, the children are ignored or harassed at school, and the mother cannot find a job--no one will hire her. When the father returns, they can barely recognize him, so stripped is he of vitality and dignity.

Otsuka permits herself one outburst, in the very end of the novel, a chapter that she calls confession (referring to the confession her father was forced to make) and that seems like a separate essay: “I’m the slant-eyed sniper in the trees ... the traitor in your own backyard ... your houseboy ... your cook ... your gardener .... I’m sorry. There. I’ve said it. Now can I go?”

*

LADY GREGORY’S TOOTHBRUSH

By Colm Toibin

University of Wisconsin Press:

128 pp., $19.95

This is a biographical essay Toibin has written about a figure in Irish history who he feels has been largely misunderstood or overlooked.

Born in 1852, Augusta Persse became Lady Gregory when she married Sir William Gregory in 1880. Sir William was the unfortunate creator of something known as the Gregory clause, a portion of a bill that contributed a great deal to the number of deaths in the Irish Famine by insisting that small farmers could not apply to a workhouse without losing their leases, even if their land was unproductive.

Lady Gregory, a mixture of “high ideals and natural haughtiness,” was a conservative with a conscience. She supported her husband, but when he died in 1892, her political and creative self emerged. She became very close with poet W.B. Yeats, began research on the folklore and early literature of Ireland and began writing plays.

She wholeheartedly took up the cause of the Irish peasantry (what was left of it), developed a very public disdain for England and was founder and director of the Abbey Theatre, which featured the plays of Yeats and Synge and O’Casey. Toibin’s essay is a sort of resurrection; she may have been a hypocrite, he writes, but so were a lot of other people in Ireland in those times. Toibin’s bleak fiction is full of judgment and reprisal; his view of history, for better or worse, seems kinder and gentler.