NONFICTION - Dec. 8, 2002
American Ground
Unbuilding the World Trade Center
William Langewiesche
North Point Press: 206 pp., $22
Several weeks ago, taking advantage of the recently restored service on the No. 1 subway line, I rode past the World Trade Center stop on my way down to Rector Street. Imposing metallic barriers have been erected at the edge of the platforms to block the passenger’s vista. I was reminded of the zombie-like quality of the abandoned East Berlin U-Bahn stations en route to the checkpoint at Friedrichstrasse before the Berlin Wall’s fall. An eerie calm prevails in the dry, empty subway tunnel, and, were it not for the thunder of memory, one would pay no attention to the shuttered station platform under what William Langewiesche poignantly calls “American Ground.” The moral and technical challenge of getting down to that ground in the wake of the attacks is the subject of Langewiesche’s remarkable account. Langewiesche sets himself the task of recounting in sober prose how engineers and workers set about the overwhelming labor of clearing 1.5 million tons of debris from the devastated site. Teeming with paradoxes and ironies, “American Ground” accomplishes the rare feat of restoring the unimaginable trauma to the events of Sept. 11 and of presenting the everyday heroism of those who cleared the site of its rubble.
-- Adam Bresnick
*
American Law
in the 20th Century
Lawrence M. Friedman
Yale University Press: 722 pp., $35
It took guts plain and simple for Lawrence M. Friedman to write “American Law in the 20th Century.” This is a topic of monumental scope, encompassing revolutionary changes in every aspect of law, from the rules regulating marriage to the basic structure of the U.S. government. Fortunately for those who seek an enlightening guide to this country’s modern legal history, Friedman, a professor at Stanford Law School, has erudition and style as well as guts. His achievement is stunning and definitive. Each of Friedman’s chapters is jampacked with information and perspective. Other keys to Friedman’s success are his abilities to identify the seminal case, the vital personae, the meaningful statistic and the watershed moment and to accompany these choices with a lively and insightful narrative description. Admirably, Friedman never forgets that the characters and stories that color our legal history -- the giants like Oliver Wendell Holmes, who dominated legal thinking for a generation, or a tragedy like the Birmingham church bombing, which shamed a nation -- are part of a larger social context. Indeed, Friedman’s greatest accomplishment may well be that, despite his obvious passion for the law, he repeatedly instructs (and illustrates) that the power of law to change society is dwarfed by the power of society to change the law.
-- Edward Lazarus
*
American Studies
Louis Menand
Farrar, Straus & Giroux: 306 pp., $25
Last year, Louis Menand won a Pulitzer for his history of American pragmatism, “The Metaphysical Club.” Now Menand has published “American Studies,” a collection of essays written over the last decade, covering everything from America’s founding modernist, William James, to America’s favorite smut magnate, Larry Flynt. For all the success of its predecessor, “American Studies” should not be mistaken for an afterthought: It represents the heart of Menand’s work (he is essentially an essayist) and demonstrates his status as his generation’s premier critical talent. It is easily among the finest collections of essays by an American critic since Lionel Trilling’s “The Liberal Imagination.”
-- Stephen Metcalf
*
The Anthropology of Turquoise
Meditations on Landscape, Art, and Spirit
Ellen Meloy
Pantheon: 326 pp., $24
“The craving for turquoise is universal,” suggests Ellen Meloy. “Turquoise is capricious, it is alluring, no one leaves the Southwest without it, although its life seems to flee from it when it is removed from the bare, blood-red sandstone of its native land.” In “The Anthropology of Turquoise,” her exquisitely rendered meditation, Meloy considers all that might be linked to the spirit of turquoise: the gem-like mineral itself, the myriad stops on the spectrum that comprise the color’s amplitude and the metaphors she finds in this blue-green color -- metaphors of place, of peace, of the restfulness of the ocean, the silence of the desert, the life-giving waters of the rivers, even the respite of suburban swimming pools.
In this compilation of 15 densely written, highly poetic essays, Meloy takes readers on a sensual travel narrative. On the Colorado Plateau, exploring light and color, she tries to recapture, through crayons and watercolors, a sense of her deceased brother’s existence. In Sequoia, she ponders family ties to a piece of land. The Bahamas serve as backdrop for her investigation into the landscape and slave history of the islands. Throughout, her writing is steeped in color, nearly squawking with life.
-- Bernadette Murphy
*
Aquariums of Pyongyang
Ten Years in the North Korean Gulag
Kang Chol-hwan and Pierre Rigoulot
Translated from the Korean by Yair Reiner
Basic Books: 238 pp., $24
“Aquariums of Pyongyang” is the first book to appear in the West describing firsthand the hard-labor concentration camps in North Korea, where 150,000 to 200,000 people are imprisoned. When Kang Chol-hwan was 10, in 1978, he and his family were sent to a camp to be “reeducated.” His grandparents were wealthy North Korean Communists living in Japan, who returned with their children to North Korea because Chol-hwan’s grandmother was especially committed to its communist future. Instead, she was brought, after her husband’s mysterious disappearance, to Yodok, North Korea’s largest camp. This is where Chol-hwan and his sister, father, grandmother and uncle spent 10 years (other family members were “excused” for various reasons). When his family was released in 1987, Chol-hwan found himself in danger of being arrested again for listening to “banned radio.” In 1992, he escaped to South Korea via China, one of few who managed to escape before the famine in North Korea reached its peak. He is now a journalist in Seoul. “All during my childhood,” Kang writes, “Kim Il Sung [North Korea’s leader] had been like a god to me. A few years in the camp cured me of my faith.”
-- Susan Salter Reynolds
*
Bad Blood
A Memoir
Lorna Sage
William Morrow: 288 pp., $24.95
An influential literary critic, professor at the University of East Anglia and biographer of novelist Angela Carter, Lorna Sage had an active career cut short by an untimely demise. The 57-year-old Sage died of emphysema and related infections in January 2001. But she did live long enough to complete the book that won her the 2000 Whitbread Biography Award: “Bad Blood,” a scintillating memoir of three generations, now published in the United States. Few otherwise lamentable situations are richer in comic potential than a truly rotten marriage -- to outsiders, anyway, if not to the participants. The adolescent Lorna must have been a difficult customer: obstinate, self-willed, hard to reach. (She claims that for years she was actually unable to tell time.) As befits a future literary critic, she had an insatiable appetite for all kinds of books. Afflicted with insomnia, she would stay up all night reading and much preferred imaginary worlds to the one in which she lived. At the same time, she was entranced with the emerging teenage pop culture, desperately seeking Elvis-like traits in the boys she met. Her first romance, so to speak, is quite an unusual one that might well be used to make a case for mandatory sex education courses. Written with shrewd insight and enormous verve, Sage’s evocative, enthralling, often hilarious memoir accomplishes the two goals of its particular genre, summoning up the general spirit of a time and place while conveying a keen sense of uniqueness.
-- Merle Rubin
*
Banking On Death
Or, Investing in Life: The History and Future of Pensions
Robin Blackburn
Verso: 550 pp., $30
One can hardly pick up a newspaper without reading about some company terminating, reshaping or skimming its pension fund. Or, for that matter, about some state or municipal retirement system losing hundreds of millions of dollars from the collapse of Enron and WorldCom stocks and bonds. Washington is not pushing major new pension safeguards. In part, that’s because administration policymakers are still caught up in the 1990s bubble illusion that Social Security should be partly privatized, putting some of its revenues into the eager hands of America’s financial services industry.
Given their recent record, this no longer makes sense, and some new thinking is in order. Maybe a lot of new thinking. These facts make “Banking on Death,” Robin Blackburn’s book on the history and future of pensions, more timely and important reading than we could have guessed a year ago. No one interested in pension finance or pension rights can afford to miss it.
-- Kevin Phillips
*
A Bed for the Night
Humanitarianism in Crisis
David Rieff
Simon & Schuster: 384 pp., $26
David Rieff, a journalist and author of four previous books, including “Slaughterhouse: Bosnia and the Failure of the West,” has become a category of critic unto himself. He spent the last decade roaming the world’s conflict zones and refugee camps, often with the aid of the aid givers themselves, making himself the most forceful and, in the nongovernmental aid world, influential exposer of the institutional contradictions, hidden agendas and confusion of roles among those who have enlisted in what fellow critic Alex de Waal has called the “Humanitarian International.”
Rieff is an outsider’s insider, one who can identify the perverse consequences of and the dangerous hubris behind humanitarian intrusions in needy societies but who doesn’t bring the defensiveness of a stakeholder. In his provocative polemic, “A Bed for the Night: Humanitarianism in Crisis,” Rieff offers us the big picture -- and oh, what a dispiriting picture it is. Rieff writes that the apparent “triumph” of humanitarianism in the 1990s -- the decision by frustrated aid workers to urge governmental intervention and of governments to dabble in humanitarian work -- has proved, “both morally and operationally, to be a poisoned chalice.” The meaning and mandate of humanitarian relief work has been so distorted by mission creep that the aid industry stands “verging on cognitive and moral meltdown.” The rescuers, Rieff suggests, are in dire need of rescue, less from the world’s evil-doers than from themselves.
-- Samantha Power
*
Benjamin Franklin
Edmund S. Morgan
Yale University Press: 340 pp., $24.95
“Benjamin Franklin” reflects its origins, relying almost entirely on Franklin’s letters and printed works. It also reflects Edmund S. Morgan’s scholarly interests. Morgan, a professor emeritus of history at Yale, has authored several distinguished volumes on the American Colonial experience and the social and intellectual construction of an American identity therein. Franklin provides Morgan with a revealing case study; by examining Franklin’s changing views on citizenship, obligation, empire and authority, Morgan goes far toward explaining America’s decision for independence from Britain. For an introduction to the mind of Franklin -- one of the most inquisitive, productive and engaging minds of his or any other day -- readers can’t do better than this incisive volume.
-- H.W. Brands
*
The Birds of Heaven
Travels With Cranes
Peter Matthiessen
North Point Press: 350 pp., $27.50
At the end of “The Birds of Heaven,” the author stands in a savanna, “staring at the first wild whooping crane born in the United States in sixty years....” The moment represents the culmination of five years of travel across four continents in pursuit of “the greatest of the earth’s flying birds,” but it is a curiously subdued, even ironic, triumph. The “wild” whooper chick is, in fact, the offspring of pen-raised birds that are part of a nonmigratory flock artificially and arduously established on the Florida peninsula, which was never part of their natural range. Three weeks after the sighting of this precarious symbol of ecological restoration, the chick’s decapitated and mangled body was found, the victim of a bobcat. This scene encapsulates many of the sensibilities that inform this latest book from Peter Matthiessen. “The Birds of Heaven” is essentially a travel journal, chronicling his encounters with the ever-shrinking remnants of Earth’s wild places and pre-industrial societies. His aim here was to see all 15 of the world’s crane species in the wild, birds that Matthiessen considers to be “umbrella species,” whose status is indicative of broad environmental health and whose fate is thus linked to ours. Writing polemic and poetry at once is not an easy task, and Matthiessen is at his best when writing about the cranes themselves. His treatment of Japan’s famous red-crowned cranes, for instance, contains superb, luminous description that both demonstrates his considerable literary powers and helps us understand why indigenous cultures worldwide have made cranes symbols and heralds of the more transcendent aspects of the human spirit.
-- Robert Finch
*
The Blank Slate
The Modern Denial of Human Nature
Steven Pinker
Viking: 510 pp., $27.95
Steven Pinker, best-selling author of “The Language Instinct” and “How the Mind Works,” has written a big book, “The Blank Slate,” that is built like a bouncer, and it needs to be. “Human nature is human nature” is not the kind of tautology some people are willing to take lying down. For ideological reasons, clever people can still deny that their brains -- but not their eventual contents or use -- are shaped by their parents’ genes. The unreasonable fear is that to concede unwanted truths will leave mankind with no logical resistance to fascism, capitalism, racism, religious obscurantism, male dominance and the rest. If Locke’s theory generated democracy, how can rejecting it not rehabilitate tyranny? Part of Pinker’s mission is to repeat that there is no inescapable correlation between facts and human value systems, good or bad. Pinker presents an unanswerable case for accepting that man can be, as he is, both wired and free. Genes do not determine how we use our minds, only the kinds of minds we have. No one has to propagate fairy tales in order to justify a better world. Ashley Montagu’s UNESCO resolution, stating that biology supports an ethic of “universal brotherhood” is as baseless as Rousseau’s myth of the noble savage. Man is good and bad; man is loving and savage; man is thoughtful and impulsive. The ingredients vary with genetic inheritance. Too bad if that doesn’t suit left- or right-wing utopians, but the good news is that man is unrivaled in ingenuity and in ability to learn and adapt. An individual mind can be closed (or held shut); the book of knowledge, and hence society itself, can never be. What we certainly need are critics -- as Pinker himself is -- of reckless conclusions drawn from statistics or from anything else. Such characters used to be the fruit of what was known as the humanities. And “The Blank Slate” -- at once tolerant and polemic, uncompromising and open-minded -- offers a notable and instructive contribution to them. As a brightly lighted path between what we would like to believe and what we need to know, it is required reading.
-- Frederic Raphael
*
Brown
The Last Discovery of America
Richard Rodriguez
Viking: 234 pp., $24.95
“Brown” is a meditation on America’s family secrets. It is a lyrical hymn on the tenebrous side of history, one not marked by triumphs or defeats but by entanglements born of eroticism and, sometimes, love. It is at once a homily on the dangers of puritanism in an impure world and the confession of an aging baby boomer who has given up trying to reconcile the contradictory elements of his American soul. Richard Rodriguez calls this long-awaited collection of essays the third of a trilogy on “American public life and my private life.” Though “Hunger of Memory” (1982) and “Days of Obligation” (1992) were, respectively, about class and ethnicity, “Brown” presumes to be about race. But race is only the book’s point of departure. Rodriguez’s meditation on the meanings of brown -- a color whose essential beauty and mystery, he says, derive from the fact that it is a mixture of other colors -- is also an exploration of American culture in an era of trampled borders.
Over the years, Rodriguez’s sense of self has grown broad enough to accommodate -- but not to resolve -- his own contradictions. This is precisely what he wishes for America. But before we can embrace the many sides of our collective lives, we must cultivate a stronger faith in life itself.
-- Gregory Rodriguez
*
The Bureau
The Secret History of the FBI
Ronald Kessler
St. Martin’s: 488 pp., $27.95
Ronald Kessler opens “The Bureau,” his comprehensive history of the FBI, with Sept. 11 imagery: Barry Mawn, chief of the New York FBI office, races to the World Trade Center as the twin towers flame. He sees a female leg on the street severed at the knee, a pink sock and white sneaker still on. The image haunts Mawn months later. Kessler’s book could not be more timely. Sept. 11 was a monumental counterintelligence failure, and Kessler wonders if the bureau can be counted upon to disrupt terrorist cells before they again wreak havoc. It’s a life-and-death issue for the agency that is charged with averting domestic terrorist attacks, an issue that perforce looms over every page of this volume. Kessler, a Washington Post reporter during the Watergate era who gained unprecedented access to a normally cloistered agency, deftly lays out its checkered history. The bureau’s problem dates from the days of J. Edgar Hoover, when the FBI’s mystique sheltered it from congressional oversight, allowing for a fit of jurisdictional expansion that took it into fields unsuited for its gangbuster mentality. The book stands as a compelling and timely exposition of the real FBI. Kessler should be the first witness before any congressional body dedicated, in the interest of public safety, to overhauling the FBI.
-- William W. Turner
*
The Butcher’s Tale
Murder and Anti-Semitism
in a German Town
Helmut Walser Smith
W.W. Norton: 288 pp., $25.95
In the spring of 1900, in a small town called Konitz, then part of Germany, now part of Poland, an 18-year-old youth was murdered and chopped into pieces. Before long, a story began going around that the victim had been ritually slaughtered by Konitz’s Jews in order to obtain Christian blood for the making of matzos. When the German authorities (who knew better) did not pursue this line of investigation but started questioning a local Christian butcher whose daughter might have been having an affair with the deceased youth, there were increasing outbreaks of violence against the town’s Jews. This culminated in a series of anti-Semitic riots so fierce that the Prussian army had to be called in to restore order and protect the Jews. “Forty years after the rioters of Konitz shouted, ‘Beat the Jews to death,’ ” reflects Helmut Walser Smith, “a modern government, supported by a cast of willing executioners and ordinary men, did precisely that.” But Smithdraws conclusions somewhat different from those in Daniel Goldhagen’s “Hitler’s Willing Executioners.”
Piecing together evidence culled from newspapers, police and court records, and other documents, he not only creates a painfully detailed portrait of a backward, economically depressed small town but also adopts the role of latter-day detective, reopening an unsolved case and coming up with a plausible solution. Smith’s crisp writing, his analytical mind and his skill as a storyteller make his book as absorbing as a mystery novel.
-- Merle Rubin
*
Charles Darwin
The Power of Place
Janet Browne
Alfred A. Knopf: 594 pp., $37.50
In the concluding second volume of her brilliant, landmark biography, “Charles Darwin: The Power of Place,” English science historian Janet Browne has chronicled the public birthing of an idea long incubated in the womb of Darwin’s mind. The paradox of Darwin’s personality is the crux of the story. He was both a recluse and the most influential public intellect of his century; jealous and generous; an ocean voyager who hated to travel; a scientist prone to quackery; an unfettered thinker who chained himself to rigid domestic routine; the privileged son of the well-to-do elite, trained for the clergy, whose ideas struck at the heart of Anglican doctrine; the secularist whose life’s work sapped the power of the established church who yet was buried with honor in the nave of Westminster Abbey. What emerges from Browne’s book is the most insightful portrait in a generation of this puzzling and provocative mind.
What elevates Browne’s account of Darwin’s life is her insight into the liberating power of domesticity for a contemplative mind. She also well understands how, as an invalid, Darwin used his migraines and digestive disorders to control those around him. She is on equally intimate terms with Darwin’s inner family circle and the imperial scientific world in which he flourished.
In all, Darwin left behind 14,000 letters, perhaps half of his lifetime correspondence, and kept meticulous journals that documented the daily misgivings and eureka moments of his researches. More is known about the moment-to-moment development of Darwin’s theory of evolution than of any other scientific idea in history. Browne brings to life this vast archive to show how this radical theory became conventional wisdom and how, in the process, science supplanted established religion as the final authority on the origins of life and the natural order.
-- Robert Lee Hotz
*
Class Action
The Story of Lois Jenson and the Landmark Case
That Changed Sexual Harassment Law
Clara Bingham and Laura Leedy Gansler
Doubleday: 390 pp., $27.50
“Class Action” is the tightly written, extensively researched and well-plotted account of the first sexual harassment class-action suit, started by Lois Jenson, who walked naively into Minnesota’s Eveleth Mines and one of the ugliest job environments imaginable, an environment the mining company refused to clean up until it was forced to take action nearly 25 years later. By then, Jenson had been joined by a handful of other female miners, making up the class that sued and eventually settled the case, and in the process, established crucial legal precedent. But the ordeal also cost her: Jenson’s physical and mental health deteriorated to an alarming degree.
Written by Clara Bingham, a journalist, and Laura Leedy Gansler, a lawyer versed in dispute resolution, “Class Action” combines potent narrative tension with copious research and legal information. Piecing together the ordeal with the pacing of a novel, they engage the reader from the outset; we are outraged by the behavior of particular men and incredulous that the mining company could consistently turn a blind eye, certain that a resolution must be on the horizon and then unbelieving that something so evident could take so long to rectify. Finally, reader and miners are beaten down by a legal system that allows victims to be re-victimized in court. The writing is never didactic. The human interest element keeps readers fascinated and turning pages to see how, when -- and sometimes if -- the abuse would end.
-- Bernadette Murphy
*
The Conversations
Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film
Michael Ondaatje
Alfred A. Knopf: 384 pp., $35
The poet and novelist Michael Ondaatje, a man steeped in film history, became absorbed by Walter Murch’s views and methods during the filming of his acclaimed book “The English Patient.” “The Conversations” is made up of a series of conversations they conducted over a long period of time. Ondaatje writes of Murch: “He is a true oddity in the world of film. A genuine Renaissance man who appears wise and private at the centre of various temporary storms to do with filmmaking.... He has worked on the sound and/or picture editing of such films as ‘American Graffiti,’ ‘The Conversation,’ ‘The Godfather’ (Parts I, II and III), ‘Julia,’ ‘Apocalypse Now,’ ‘The Unbearable Lightness of Being,’ ‘Ghost’ and ‘The English Patient.’ Four years ago he recut ‘Touch of Evil,’ following Orson Welles’s ignored fifty-eight page memo to Universal.” Starting out as the guru of the soundtrack, Murch has become one of the great film editors. This book should be required reading for anyone working in film and a pleasurable option for moviegoers who wish to deepen and enrich the experience.
-- John Boorman
*
The Country Under My Skin
A Memoir of Love and War
Gioconda Belli
Translated from the Spanish by Kristina Cordero
Alfred A. Knopf: 386 pp., $25
There are a few countries in the world that, through some seeming magic beyond our normal senses, are able to enchant us despite their utter misery and propensity to violence. For me -- and I suspect many others who have been there -- Nicaragua is such a place. Dirty, sweaty, seemingly cursed and wounded in many ways, this little land is at the same time physically stunning and inhabited by people with a strength of character, passion and humanity that washes over you like a wave, engulfs you and, for those unable to resist that seductive current, carries you away. I have spent some of the saddest times of my life in the mountains and steaming coasts of Nicaragua and some of the most beautiful.
Reading Gioconda Belli’s affecting memoir, “The Country Under My Skin,” brought all this back and more. In a way that is utterly Nicaraguan, she recounts a true tale of passion, poetry, insurrection, death and seeming liberation, followed by an ugly ending mediated by a personal coda that is both salving and humane. It is a hell of a story, recounting the fate of her country and her self, told with tenderness, honesty and humor.
Belli writes that she and others like her “held a fervent belief in the inherent nobleness of the human species.... [W]e were never afraid to dream and we had little respect for cynicism.... A cause is not hopeless just because its objectives aren’t reached in one’s lifetime.” Many of those she recalls here who believed these things died for them. Today in another, colder age, few seem ready to hold or express such sentiments. And maybe the world is not a better place as a result.
-- James LeMoyne
*
Crossroads of Freedom
Antietam
James M. McPherson
Oxford University Press: 208 pp., $26
James M. McPherson is America’s preeminent Civil War historian. His new book tells the story of one violent day when the whole American future was up for grabs. Had that day ended differently, had the Confederate Army prevailed at the Battle of Antietam, the history that we know would never have come to be. Another future, one we can only imagine, would have followed. McPherson describes the fighting itself in no more than 20 pages, but few who read those pages are likely to forget them. The most harrowing passages force us to confront the physical reality of war. Antietam furnished scenes of such horror that veteran officers were reduced to mute, incontinent children. About 6,500 American soldiers died at Antietam. An additional 15,000 were wounded. Sept. 17, 1862, remains the bloodiest single day in the nation’s history. Those killed at Antietam outnumber the dead of Pearl Harbor and D-day combined. McPherson has demonstrated that he needs only 150 pages of narrative to describe the war’s most critical turning point and, in so doing, to illuminate the true meaning of the vast struggle between freedom and slavery.
-- John Rhodehamel
*
Cuba Confidential
Love and Vengeance in Miami and Havana
Ann Louise Bardach
Random House: 384 pp., $25.95
Ann Louise Bardach’s “Cuba Confidential” bears a resemblance to works such as Claude Levi-Strauss’ “The Savage Mind,” Clifford Geertz’s “The Religion of Java” and Victor Turner’s “Forest of Symbols,” for “Cuba Confidential” is a book that seeks to unveil to civilized eyes the seemingly cryptic meaning hidden deep within the behavior of primitive aliens. In this case it’s not the islanders of some faraway archipelago who are analyzed but Cubans, both in their native habitat and in their diaspora. Few American journalists are better poised to do this than Bardach, who knows Miami and Cuba from the inside out. Her contacts are wide-ranging in both places, her research is thorough and meticulous, her access to key figures is impressive. In many ways, this highly engrossing collection of narratives is perhaps as close to an inside view of the Cuban mess as one can hope for from an outsider.
-- Carlos Eire
*
Emperor of Japan
Meiji and His World, 1852-1912
Donald Keene
Columbia University Press: 922 pp., $39.50
Donald Keene’s biography of Meiji is as much, if not more, about Meiji’s times as about the man himself, and it is here that the volume’s greatest strengths are to be found. Keene provides an utterly brilliant exposition of Japanese history from about 1850 until Meiji’s death in 1912. The broad strokes of this narrative have long been well known, but it is Keene’s day-by-day detail that makes this the best history in English of the emergence of modern Japan and that will happily require the rewriting of many a university lecture. All the key events are here in striking detail. Keene is well known as the world’s foremost authority on Japanese literature, although it is less well known that his first scholarly monograph was a superb look at the 18th and 19th century study of Europe by Japanese scholars who were themselves forbidden from traveling abroad. Keene, in turn, has done the reverse, dedicating his life to the introduction of Japan to those who live elsewhere. With his study of Meiji, Keene has come full circle: He has returned to his first love, the writing of history, and he has done so brilliantly and with all the dignity befitting his subject.
-- Peter Nosco
*
The Forgetting
Alzheimer’s: Portrait of an Epidemic
David Shenk
Doubleday: 290 pp., $24.95
At age 76, Ralph Waldo Emerson, that serene titan of 19th century American letters, was invited by a friend at the Harvard Divinity School to lecture at his home. To the gathered admirers, Emerson delivered an essay on memory he had written some 22 years before. “As gravity holds matter from flying into space, so memory gives stability to knowledge,” Emerson read aloud. “Memory performs the impossible for man by the strength of his divine arms; holds together past and present, beholding both, existing in both, abides in the flowing, and gives continuity and dignity to human life. It holds us to our family, to our friends. Hereby home is possible; hereby only a new fact has value.” How poignant then that, as Emerson spoke those words, his own memory was failing. He could no longer recognize his own text. In his dotage, he had lost his place in time and was no longer able to form new memories or to retrieve the old. He was pinned to the moment, like a place in the essay text that he marked with his moving finger as he read. Almost certainly, Emerson had Alzheimer’s disease, and it robbed him of the asset he prized most: an organized mind.
For David Shenk, Emerson’s descent into oblivion perfectly embodies the horror of a disease that destroys memory and self-awareness. In “The Forgetting,” Shenk has drawn together threads of neurobiology, art history and psychology into a literary portrait of Alzheimer’s disease perfectly balanced between sorrow and wonder, devastation and awe. “The Forgetting” is a remarkable addition to the literature of the science of the mind.
-- Robert Lee Hotz
*
A Fury for God
The Islamist Attack on America
Malise Ruthven
Granta Books: 324 pp., $16.95 paper
Imagine if you will the delicious and absurd fantasy of the Beverly Hillbillies taking over the Vatican and proselytizing worldwide after striking crude oil. Stranger than fiction but closer to truth is the case of the House of Saud. Unlike the nouveaux riches of the television fable, the House of Saud has for many decades used its wealth to spread the most extreme and fundamentalist interpretations of Islam, intolerant toward all those who do not share its narrow sectarian Wahhabi creed. Malise Ruthven, in his book “A Fury for God: The Islamist Attack on America,” suggests that Saudi Arabia is the leading exporter not only of petroleum products but also of fundamentalist Islam. He argues that the Saudis are able to proselytize effectively not just because of their oil wealth but also because of their role as “Custodians of the Two Sanctuaries” (Mecca and Medina), which conveys upon them religious legitimacy. Ruthven’s exegesis is a chilling indictment of Saudi Wahhabism and Saudi-supported fundamentalism worldwide. It is a serious refutation of the fundamentalist assault against secular values and a brilliant probing of the psychosocial motivations of its bloody foot soldiers. It is grim but essential reading.
-- Emran Qureshi
*
In Ruins
Christopher Woodward
Pantheon Books: 280 pp., $24
“When we contemplate ruins, we contemplate our own future,” writes Christopher Woodward in “In Ruins.” “To statesmen, ruins predict the fall of Empires, and to philosophers the futility of man’s aspirations. To a poet, the decay of a monument represents the dissolution of the individual ego in the flow of Time; to a painter or architect, the fragments of a stupendous antiquity call into question the purpose of their art.” The concept of ruins captures in ironic suspension the struggle between human striving, nature and the hand of time. Ruins, Woodward persuasively argues, are momentous and romantic in essence, with scant relation to naturalism, rationalism or populism. Demystified, denatured and destatured, denuded of time’s eroding verdure and antiseptically preserved by the rescue mission of men of science for the greater elucidation of the past, for the benefit and instruction of the greatest number -- they remain relics of civilization but they cease to be ruins: those ineffable inspirators of rumination and rapture in Western art. Woodward’s meditations oscillate between bright fragments of insight and anecdote -- they shimmer in fugitive attitudes, then slide into freshly provocative patterns, scattered over the tides of time by this seasoned tourist to history’s shoreline. “In Ruins” is a picturesque hybrid of travelogue, personal memoir, lyric rhapsody, art history and cultural criticism.
-- Cristina Monet
*
In the Devil’s Snare
The Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692
Mary Beth Norton
Alfred A. Knopf: 432 pp., $30
Every history has its touchstone moments, events that seem to define something essential about the broader narrative and that writers return to every generation or so, seeking to create a “history for our time.” For Americans, the trials for witchcraft that took place in Salem, Mass., in 1692 and resulted in 20 people being executed are one such moment. Mary Beth Norton’s “In the Devil’s Snare: The Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692” gives us the freshest and most detailed account of that compelling crisis that we have had in a decade. The Salem story she tells is not a cautionary tale of hysterical lynch justice, as a simplistic and ideologically driven account might be. Instead, she recaptures a world in which the interactions, conflicts, fears, frictions of whites and Indians and blacks, of men and women, of young people in their teens and the adult leaders of New England produced the outcome of the witch trials. The key to Puritan Salem lies in the history of the Wabanacki people. America, the mixed and intermixed, is also as much a story of 1692 as it is of 2002. It is this second insight that makes her book a landmark achievement. It may well herald a new golden age of American history, in which the many strands of separate history that academics have eagerly researched can be recombined to give us new ways to understand the central moments in our past and thus the nature of our present.
-- Marc Aronson
*
The Last Days of the Jerusalem of Lithuania
Chronicles From the Vilna Ghetto and the Camps, 1939-1944
Herman Kruk
Edited by Benjamin Harshav
Translated from the Yiddish by Barbara Harshav
Yale University Press: 732 pp., $45
Real treasures, as we all know, lie buried. Herman Kruk’s diary is a case in point. This seminal document of Holocaust literature, chronicling life in the ghetto of Vilna and in a labor camp in Estonia, was first published in Yiddish in 1961 and has, until now, not been published in English. Its belated publication is a powerful addition to the literature of the Shoah. Vilna, the Yiddish name for the Lithuanian capital of Vilnius, was a thriving center of Jewish learning and Zionist activity. At the start of World War II, nearly 60,000 Jews lived there. The city had nearly 100 synagogues and six daily Jewish newspapers as well as the first Yiddish academic institute, known as YIVO. All of this, however, was dismantled and destroyed when the Germans invaded the city in 1941, and by the time Russian troops entered the city in July 1944, only a few thousand of Vilna’s Jews who had been subject to Nazi rule were still alive. Poet, diarist, librarian Kruk did not survive, but his words did.
-- Jan T. Gross
*
The Lunar Men
Five Friends Whose Curiosity Changed the World
Jenny Uglow
Farrar, Straus & Giroux: 596 pp., $30
As a celebration of a local milieu as well as a world culture that emerged both within it and around it, “The Lunar Men: Five Friends Whose Curiosity Changed the World” is a compelling exploration of the Enlightenment, an age of ambition and change -- and of crowds. Dozens of individuals roam the pages of this teeming campus of a book, and we watch as they meet, talk, ally themselves, argue, collaborate, drift apart, grow old and die, and at times it is as if we meet them too, as if Jenny Uglow takes us gently by the arm and walks us through the streets of Birmingham and Derby to introduce us to her cast of characters and to let us in on their conversations as they scheme and laugh and talk their way through the world that they helped to shape. Uglow is at her best, both as a historian and a biographer, in tracing the complex networks of ideas and alliances that conspired to put inventions and, more specifically, patents into one pair of hands and not another. Friendship and rivalry stalk these pages like the figures of virtues from a tapestry, while questions of priority -- who was the first to discover or invent, whose name will go on to be remembered or forgotten? -- fueled the anxieties over money and reputation that smoldered away in the backgrounds of these lives. Admirers of Uglow’s previous book, “Hogarth,” will be familiar with her skill in illuminating ideas and artifacts from the past -- in this case, 18th century science and technology -- by picturing them in their cultural, social and personal contexts. This approach, evident on every page and in the work of a generation of like-minded historians, is particularly well-suited to the history of an activity as social as science.
-- Richard Hamblyn
*
Meyebela
My Bengali Girlhood, A Memoir of Growing Up Female
in a Muslim World
Taslima Nasrin
Translated from the Bengali by Gopa Majumdar
Steerforth Press: 308 pp., $26
Less than a decade ago, Muslim clerics in Bangladesh issued a series of fatwas against a 31-year-old woman who had written a novel they found offensive. The woman, Taslima Nasrin, was a physician from a small town in the northern part of the country. “Meyebela” is the story of a young girl born into a middle-class Muslim family in what in 1962 was still East Pakistan. Nasrin grows up watching her mother, aunts and female neighbors being beaten and humiliated by their men. She lives in a permanent state of terror at her father’s ever-increasing violence. She is so alienated by him that she forgets how to speak in his presence. She understands quickly that her mother has no refuge or escape: The laws of the country, based on Islamic principles, recognize no rights for women, and their upbringing -- little or no education, no job training and very limited contact with the world outside the house -- has virtually ensured that they will starve to death without help from a man. If the Koran contains such principles, 14-year-old Nasrin concludes, then it isn’t a single man or mullah one can blame for the injustice committed against women; it is Islam itself, the rule of blind faith at the expense of reason, of religion instead of logic. “Meyebela” ends at the threshold of this realization. It will be many years until the quiet young girl will find the voice and the heart to commit blasphemy and earn a fatwa or two. Her courage is all the more stunning to those who have lived under the reign of silence that pervades the Muslim world, who have seen how not only men but also very often women join in the effort to perpetuate fear and violence against other females, how a dissenting voice, a rebel mind, is quickly reformed or purged.
-- Gina B. Nahai
*
The Mind of Egypt
History and Meaning in the Time of the Pharaohs
Jan Assmann
Metropolitan Books: 514 pp., $35
Ancient Egypt exercises a powerful fascination. We live in close familiarity with the ancient Egyptians, with the best-known pharaohs, Cheops, Akhenaten and Ramesses II. Theirs is the face of ancient Egypt, which is turned toward us, recovered from inscription and papyrus and with the archeologist’s spade. But there is a hidden face, too, that of the infinitesimal changes, unnoticed by those who experience them and visible only to the analytical gaze of the historian. In his magnificent “The Mind of Egypt,” Jan Assmann likens humans to spiders, who act within the invisible webs they have woven: webs of interaction among themselves and worlds of meaning whose horizons define action, experience and remembrance. He asks what meaning Egyptians obtained from their own constructions of their history. How did they incorporate the legacy of the past into the present? Assmann examines patterns of continuity and disruption; he writes: “The old remained present; it never became alien in the sense of representing something left definitively behind.” Assmann has looked closely into the mirror of the ancient intangible with telling effect. Every student of early civilization has something to learn from these pages, which will help cure us of intellectual myopia.
-- Brian Fagan
*
A Moral Reckoning
The Role of the Catholic Church in the Holocaust
and Its Unfulfilled Duty of Repair
Daniel Jonah Goldhagen
Alfred A. Knopf: 346 pp., $25
When Daniel Goldhagen’s first book, “Hitler’s Willing Executioners,” was published in 1996, it ignited controversy for arguing that ordinary Germans, not just the SS and Nazi party members, chose to implement the Final Solution. Goldhagen was widely criticized for views that seemed oversimplified, empirically questionable and arrogantly argued, but as time passed -- and especially owing to the book’s favorable reception in Germany -- his work withstood much of the criticism. Such a reaction undoubtedly awaits “A Moral Reckoning,” a book that vigorously challenges the Roman Catholic Church to take responsibility for its role in the Holocaust. He calls for a radical reformation to remove from Christianity the anti-Semitism that implicated it in the Holocaust and still leaves the Christian tradition immorally mired in deception and hypocrisy. He has written a post-Holocaust moral reckoning with Christianity, and the Roman Catholic Church in particular, that pulls few punches and guarantees a hard-hitting bout over history, ethics and theology.
-- John K. Roth
*
Nonrequired Reading
Prose Pieces
Wislawa Szymborska
Translated from the Polish by Clare Cavanagh
Harcourt: 236 pp., $24
For the last 3 1/2 decades, Wislawa Szymborska, the Polish poet awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1996, has been writing a newspaper column called “Nonrequired Reading.” Occasioned by a motley array of books that have come her way -- everything and anything from an encyclopedia of assassination to a do-it-yourself guide to wallpapering -- these short pieces (around 500 words each) are not book reviews, she declares, but “sketches.” Some, as it happens, contain astute criticism of the books in question, but in the main, Szymborska simply uses the books as jumping-off points. Informal, unpretentious, full of common sense, shrewd insight and wry humor (all ably captured in Clare Cavanagh’s fine translation), Szymborska’s sketches have a matter-of-fact ease and simplicity that will win the hearts of readers and the envy of other writers who know how hard it can be to achieve such grace. As one reads this chronologically arranged selection, which begins in 1968, one is struck by the unwavering humanity and compassion of this woman’s voice. Whether she is considering books on birds, Neanderthals, fossils, tyrants or extraterrestrial life, Szymborska’s great gift is her ability to see straight through to the essentials.
-- Merle Rubin
*
Our Posthuman Future
Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution
Francis Fukuyama
Farrar, Straus & Giroux: 272 pp., $25
Francis Fukuyama is convinced that only a powerful new government agency can safely channel what he considers an assault on the biological foundations of human nature. “We appear to be poised at the cusp of one of the most momentous periods of technological advance in history,” Fukuyama writes. “These developments will be hugely controversial because they will challenge dearly held notions of human equality and the capacity for moral choice; they will give societies new techniques for controlling the behavior of their citizens; they will change our understanding of human personality and identity; they will upend existing social hierarchies and affect the rate of intellectual, material and political progress; and they will affect the nature of global politics.” For those who would look before they leap, Fukuyama has written an invaluable prescription for government regulation. Rarely has someone entering the policy arena so eloquently and precisely laid out the case for political control of emerging technology.
-- Robert Lee Hotz
*
“A Problem From Hell”
America and the Age of Genocide
Samantha Power
A New Republic Book/Basic Books: 610 pp., $30
The Savage Wars of Peace
Small Wars and the Rise of American Power
Max Boot
Basic Books: 384 pp., $30
Anyone who wants to understand why America has permanently entered a new era in international relations must read “ ‘A Problem From Hell’ ” and “The Savage Wars of Peace.” Both are vividly written and thoroughly researched. Samantha Power, a former Balkans correspondent, and Max Boot, the editorial features editor of the Wall Street Journal, are at opposite ends of the ideological spectrum, but they show the extent to which the humanitarian left and the interventionist right converged to embrace Wilsonian ends and means before Sept. 11, even as U.S. administrations remained wary of becoming entangled in ethnic conflict. Power demands that the United States intervene militarily whenever and wherever genocidal acts are taking place; Boot demands that it don the 21st century equivalent of jodhpurs and pith helmets to bring the rest of the world to heel.
-- Jacob Heilbrunn
*
Rereading Sex
Battles Over Sexual Knowledge
and Suppression in
Nineteenth-Century America
Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz
Alfred A. Knopf: 528 pp., $30
Reading about sex, seeing it in movies, talking about it on television and other public milieus have become commonplace. Even the once-verboten topics of prostitution, sexually transmitted diseases, rape, incest and child abuse have become objects of talk-show chatter. But mention a harmless activity practiced by most girls and women and almost every man and boy, and you just might suffer the fate of former U.S. Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders, fired from her job by a president who might himself have benefited from her sage advice. Indeed, apart from the yeoman service performed on its behalf by “Portnoy’s Complaint,” masturbation has been the proverbial orphan child. It has been condemned as wicked and sinful by the anti-sex crowd but with none of the risque glamour associated with fornication, adultery or homosexuality. Strangely, too, it has fared almost as badly among the pro-sex crowd who are inclined to view it as the sorry fate of sexual wallflowers. Understanding why a country, so awash in pornography and so tolerant of sexual freedom, could react so hysterically to Elders’ mild comment was one of the motives animating Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz’s research into sexual attitudes in 19th century America. “Rereading Sex” is a splendid work of scholarship: crisply written, meticulously documented, full of fresh material, shrewd analysis and sound judgment. But one need not be a historian to enjoy this book. Horowitz’s enthusiasm and sense of fun are infectious. A superb storyteller, she is a great elucidator, always on hand to explain knotty matters such as the history of obscenity law, the motives of censors or the thinking of reform physiologists. Her book is an unmitigated pleasure to read yet is so informative that those who read it will feel not only good but downright virtuous.
-- Merle Rubin
*
Rosalind Franklin
The Dark Lady of DNA
Brenda Maddox
HarperCollins: 400 pp., $29.95
Philosopher of science Evelyn Fox Keller once remarked that if a woman scientist hopes to win a Nobel Prize, she had better plan on living a very long time. Rosalind Franklin, unwisely, died at 37, putting her out of the running when, four years later, her colleague Maurice Wilkins, along with James Watson and Francis Crick, was awarded a Nobel for discovering the structure of DNA. Franklin’s impeccable X-ray photographs provided the data on which Watson and Crick built their ideas, and Franklin herself was already on track to deciphering DNA. Few experts today doubt that her name also should be on the Nobel roster. Without Franklin’s data, as Watson himself has admitted, they would not have been able to get there. But a question lingers: Why didn’t Franklin take the theoretical initiative? Why didn’t she discern the double helix model herself? Brenda Maddox’s poignant and pithy biography might be seen as an attempt to get to the heart of this conundrum, and here she does justice to her subject as only the best biographers can. Maddox’s book, though ostensibly a biography of an individual, is an exploration of the changing nature of science itself and, above all, of what is required for success in the field. At the peak of her career, having already made significant contributions to three separate fields of science, Franklin died of ovarian cancer, very likely induced by overexposure to X-rays in the course of her research. The true tragedy here, as Maddox notes in her final pages, is not the absence of a Nobel but the premature termination of a brilliant career: “The lost prize was life.”
-- Margaret Wertheim
*
Secrets
A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers
Daniel Ellsberg
Viking: 498 pp., $29.95
The publication of Daniel Ellsberg’s memoir, “Secrets,” at this particular moment is undoubtedly coincidental, but there is an eerie timeliness about it. Rumors of war abound, this time perhaps for a unilateral preemptive full-scale attack unprecedented in American history. Decisions are being made on the basis of secret information that will be divulged, in Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld’s words, “only if and when the president decides that he thinks it’s appropriate.” It is this arrogance and secretiveness that are at the heart of the events in Ellsberg’s book and that, he believes, pose a grave threat to the democratic process.
“Isn’t it after all only history? Does it really matter?” With these dismissive words, Ellsberg recalls, Sen. J. William Fulbright (D-Ark.) in 1970 refused to make public the Pentagon Papers, the top-secret internal history of America’s early involvement in Vietnam commissioned by Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara in 1967. It was only history, perhaps, but it was this history that finally persuaded an already deeply skeptical Ellsberg that the war in Vietnam had no basis in legitimacy and that led him to do something he believed would land him in jail. He purloined the report from the Rand Corp. in Santa Monica, where he worked, and released it to the New York Times, an action that caused a furor in the country and in the White House and set into motion events that led to Watergate, the fall of Richard Nixon’s presidency and the end of the Vietnam War.
“Secrets” is an often gripping account by a controversial figure of a tumultuous era that still troubles and divides us. It underscores the need to understand history in areas of the world whose destinies we presume to shape. It provides important insights into the national security bureaucracy that produced the Vietnam War, the system that helped sustain it and the ethos and code of loyalty among officials that held it together. If we’re looking for a warning signal as we teeter on the brink of yet another war waged on the basis of information considered too important to share with the public, we should look no further than in these pages.
-- George C. Herring
*
Selected Essays
John Berger
Edited by Geoff Dyer
Pantheon: 588 pp., $35
We live in a time of fuzzy thinking: Attitude substitutes for politics, newness is conflated with modernity, precision itself is suspect and mistaken, oddly, for constraint. John Berger’s work reestablishes crucial distinctions: between skepticism and cynicism, flexibility and moral relativism, conviction and rigidity, humility and despair. He is very angry about the ways in which we defile one another and the world: He is one of those rare people who hears the screams. But he hears the music too. Tenderness, and an unflagging interest in the experience of being human, infuse his work. He once described Goya as honest “in the full sense of the word meaning facing the facts and preserving one’s ideals.” What is true for the artist is true for the critic too.
-- Susie Linfield
*
Selected Writings
Jose Marti
Edited and translated from the Spanish by Esther Allen
Penguin: 462 pp., $15 paper
Jose Marti is the most remarkable figure in the history of Cuba, though he spent almost all of his adult life outside his homeland. His importance can’t be overestimated. Most of what Marti wrote, whether personal letters, verse, public tracts or journalistic essays, has been saved and published. The collected works, some 27 volumes, were brought out most recently in Havana in the mid-1970s. Some of it has been translated, but no English-language collection is as comprehensive as “Selected Writings,” the handsome new addition to the Penguin Classics series edited and translated by Esther Allen, a book that follows Marti’s thinking, his activities and his pen, starting with his thoughtful teenage letters to his mother right up to the day before he died. It also includes the never-before-translated-into-English “War Diaries.” The broad sweep of his humanist and optimistic outlook is available in this new volume, intelligently selected and in a translation neither obsessed with late-19th century formality nor condescending to contemporary idioms. There’s not one off-key note.
-- Tom Miller
*
Snobbery
The American Version
Joseph Epstein
Houghton Mifflin: 274 pp., $25
Some books are necessary, some are wonderful, few are both. In that select group belongs Joseph Epstein’s “Snobbery: The American Version.” I would rank it with works by Alexis de Tocqueville and Thorstein Veblen, except that it is more timely than the former’s and infinitely more amusing than the latter’s. It is one of the rare books that entertain as much as they teach. With “Snobbery,” Epstein undertakes a book-length essay in a series of chapters that each address a different type of snobbery. The amazingly alert and perceptive author pursues snobbishness from its spotlighted stages to its hidden breeding grounds and discovers striking varieties in crannies the rest of us would have overlooked. “Snobbery: The American Version” cannot, any more than anything else can, put a stop to snobbery, but it may, by making us conscious of its ridiculousness, help us control its worst excesses. Ironically, though, it may create a new, albeit minor, form of snobbery: pride in how many times you are mentioned, however unfavorably (Bill Buckley and Donald Trump twice), in this most treasurable of books.
-- John Simon
*
Souls Grown Deep
African American Vernacular Art
Edited by Paul Arnett and William Arnett
Tinwood Books, Volume I: 544 pp., $100;
Volume II: 600 pp., $100
What the father-and-son team of John and Alan Lomax -- white guys -- did for American music in the 1930s when the two went around the backwoods of the South recording black musicians and authentic blues, another father-and-son team of white guys, William and Paul Arnett, has done for contemporary American art, identifying and collecting since the 1970s vernacular art made by black artists in the South. Vernacular art is sometimes called folk or outsider art, because it is the work of people who have no formal training and, until 20 years or so ago, was not usually a part of gallery or museum culture. It was art made and exhibited in backyards, alleys, sheds and in modest homes, sometimes the houses themselves being objects of decoration. Its styles suggest that Zora Neale Hurston was not entirely wrong when she claimed that “the will to adorn” was an important feature of the visual culture of many black people in the U.S.
After an odyssey of discovery spanning three decades, the Arnetts have produced two enormous volumes (with nearly 1,800 full-color reproductions) about this indigenous art, with a promise of more. In his introduction, Paul Arnett allows that “Souls Grown Deep” is “the first comprehensive overview of the recent history” of vernacular art.
“Souls Grown Deep” serves to remind the anxious, hyped glut of the current cultural scene that art has no real reward outside of itself.
-- Darryl Pinckney
*
Special Providence
American Foreign Policy and How It Changed the World
Walter Russell Mead
Alfred A. Knopf: 378 pp., $30
The title of Walter Russell Mead’s long-awaited reinterpretation of the entire course of American foreign policy since the founding of the Republic is derived from the sarcastic observation usually attributed to Otto von Bismarck: “God has a special providence for fools, drunks, and the United States of America.” It is not that Mead agrees with the 19th century German chancellor. To the contrary, “Special Providence” derives much of its intellectual force and originality from Mead’s indignation over the fact that not only have foreign observers -- from Bismarck to Charles de Gaulle -- wrongly concluded that the United States has never had a foreign policy worthy of the name but that, even more important, many if not most Americans have joined in what he calls this “wholesale dismissal of the country’s foreign policy traditions.” Mead is keen to set the record straight. His book is an impassioned effort to debunk the view of such American Bismarckians as Henry Kissinger, who once wrote that “America’s journey through international relations has been a triumph of faith over experience.” Mead is equally dismissive of the assumptions of an American liberal establishment that has tended to reduce the country’s foreign policy debate to a straightforward quarrel pitting idealists like themselves, isolationists and realists like Kissinger against one another. For Mead, the reality has been both more complex and more interesting. Mead is a brilliant scholar, and he has produced a book of enduring value as both a work of intellectual genealogy and a stimulating reevaluation of some of the roots of America’s rise.
-- David Rieff
*
A Third Face
My Tale of Writing, Fighting, and Filmmaking
Samuel Fuller
Alfred A. Knopf: 594 pp., $35
Sam Fuller’s gloriously robust memoir is the inspirational book of the year, if not decade, for anyone even remotely connected to the film business. His life story, told in the punchy tabloid prose he learned as a 16-year-old crime reporter covering suicides and executions for the New York Graphic, a lurid sex-and-scandal sheet, seizes you by the scruff and flings you headlong into his harsh, funny, violent universe of independent filmmaking on the far edge of a bygone Hollywood where deals were consummated by a handshake, not a studio lawyer’s 1,000-page small-print contract. This posthumously published autobiography -- Fuller died five years ago and it took nearly that long for the manuscript and the tapes he left behind to be edited and transcribed -- is not a how-to, yet somehow you learn more from it about how to make good movies than in almost all the technical cinema texts I have read. Sam Fuller -- his father’s birth name was Rabinovitch -- is a good teacher because he had guts, passion, anarchic emotions under the strict control of tough deadlines and a true lover’s addiction to film. Holy cow! -- to use one of his favorite expressions -- what a read, what a ride.
There’s hardly a false or self-pitying or retributive note in his book. The man was in love with life, with movies and with telling the gutter truth as he saw it. Fuller died in 1997, shortly after dictating this memoir with the help of his wife, Christa Lang, and Jerome Henry Rudes, founder of the Avignon Film Festival. His last words are, again, for young film lovers. “Okay, all you new voices, let yourself be heard!”
-- Clancy Sigal
*
Tonight At Noon
A Love Story
Sue Graham Mingus
Pantheon: 288 pp., $24
I remember seeing Charlie Mingus one night at Birdland during the 1960s. He stood with his bass to the left on a bandstand that included reeds, horns and a rhythm section, and though his players had scores, Mingus would spontaneously call on soloists or indicate whole sections for particular emphasis or unrehearsed interludes. It was as if he was playing his bass and his orchestra simultaneously. His body of work is among the most emotionally protean with one of the most varied and informed musical pedigrees in American history. His compositions embrace gospel, blues, R&B;, salsa and Afro-Cuban strains -- often in boldly articulated “movements.” Works such as “Fables of Faubus,” “Self Portrait in Three Colors,” “Reincarnation of a Lovebird” and “Sue’s Changes” are American classics. To listen to the music of Charles Mingus is to hear darkness and light, pain and jubilation, beauty and beast in an enchanted musical continuum. Sue Mingus survives and perpetuates her husband with a loving, exacting portrait: “Tonight at Noon,” titled after one of her husband’s compositions, has the emotional fluency and power of Mingus’ own music.
-- Aram Saroyan
*
Trains of Thought
Memories of a Stateless Youth
Victor Brombert
W.W. Norton: 336 pp., $25.95
“At the beginning was the train,” is how Victor Brombert opens his striking memoir, “Trains of Thought: Memories of a Stateless Youth.” Proust, too, saw the idea of travel as a way to unlock memory, as a voyage in reverse, going over the routes that have been covered before. Like Proust, Brombert takes imaginary journeys. He watches a train leave a station and reads the signs that spell out it