The Best Books of 2003

American Expressionism

Art and Social Change 1920-1950

Bram Dijkstra

Harry N. Abrams/Columbus Museum of Art: 272 pp., $60

This is a marvelous, passionate and irritating book that proposes to retrieve a once-powerful movement in American painting from the rubbish heap of art history. That lost Depression-era movement has been sloppily labeled Social Realism by the clerks of academic art criticism, with their iron need for categories. The label is unfortunate, as cultural historian Bram Dijkstra states, because it suggests affinities with the “socialist realism” of Stalin’s Soviet Union. Each was, of course, political, but they were utterly different. “The socially concerned artists of the thirties,” Dijkstra writes, “quickly recognized that these modern stylistic means could serve to add emotional depth to their documentation of the plight of the dispossessed. They used the stylistic innovations of the ‘art-for-art’s-sake’ movement to enhance the visual impact of their political statements. In the process, they developed a uniquely American variant on expressionism.”

The 100 or so young artists Dijkstra prefers to call American Expressionists began to emerge in the 1920s. He gives us another look at some artists whose accomplishments have not been fully recognized or celebrated. The volume (which has been produced in collaboration with the Columbus Museum of Art) also shows us work by many artists who have been honored in the years since their critical heyday. The text is lavishly illustrated with 182 full color plates and dozens of black-and-white representations.

-- Pete Hamill

*

Art

A New History

Paul Johnson

HarperCollins: 778 pp., $39.95

For newcomers to the voluminous and highly popular writings of Paul Johnson, the English historian, journalist and polymath, the first thing to be said about his latest outsize production is: Don’t be dismayed by the immense length of “Art: A New History.” Johnson is one of the most accomplished writers of nonfiction English prose on the current transatlantic literary scene, and art is a subject he knows and cares deeply about.

Johnson’s new history does not refrain from sporting some distinctly reactionary opinions. It has to be understood, too, that he is uncowed by the received judgments of the art bureaucracies in the academy, the museums, the commercial galleries and the news media. Johnson’s talents and outlook are of a very different order. He is a master of narrative history, and his gift for vivid storytelling is matched by an astounding command of large, complex subjects and an unflagging capacity for rendering them intelligible and compelling. We are never in any danger of confronting a dry or boring page in even the longest of Johnson’s books, and very long books -- among them “A History of the American People,” “A History of the English People,” “A History of Christianity” and “Modern Times” -- are his forte.

As for his reactionary opinions, especially in regard to Modernist art, they need not dismay the reader either. Reactionary artists and the views of their critical champions also belong to the history of art, and Johnson is by no means alone in his disobliging censure of Modernism. It is not for Johnson’s animadversions on the art of the modern era, however, that “Art: A New History” is likely to enjoy a large and enthusiastic readership. About many of the greatest painters in the history of Western art he writes with such an engaging combination of passion and instruction that the reader longs to hurry off to the nearest museum to renew his acquaintance with the works under discussion. About how many writers on art can that nowadays be said?

-- Hilton Kramer

*

Bathsheba’s Breast

Women, Cancer & History

James S. Olson

Johns Hopkins University Press: 302 pp, $24.95

Look at Rembrandt’s 1654 painting, “Bathsheba at Her Bath,” and you quickly understand why the Dutch painter was a master of light and shadow. King David’s concubine, in all her ample, naked glory, sits in a warm, coppery light. All else, including the servant who carefully wipes between her toes, is lost in murk and darkness. Of course that must have been the painter’s intent: It is impossible, as it was for David, to keep one’s eyes off the voluptuous body of this woman. But T.C. Greco, an Italian doctor on a visit to the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam in 1967, could not help but use his physician’s eye, not an art lover’s, to notice something peculiar. Bathsheba’s left armpit seems swollen, and the left breast seems grainy, presenting, in the parlance of breast cancer, peau d’orange -- the skin of an orange. Greco researched and found that the model for the painting, Hendrickje Stoffels, the painter’s mistress, died not long after its completion, and in an Italian journal, Greco argued that what killed Stoffels was breast cancer.

James S. Olson uses this interesting anecdote to highlight an important message of his book “Bathsheba’s Breast” -- that breast cancer, perhaps more than any other cancer, has been an intrusive, visible scourge to women for a long time. It’s a little too easy to lose perspective if one only reads the newspapers and magazines. There one finds headlines about great strides being made ever since maps of the genome were produced in 2000, ever since Herceptin was touted in 1999 as a cutting-edge therapy that attacked some forms of breast cancer at the genetic level. Though these breakthroughs are considerable, Olson’s book shows that, in reality, humanity has made a long, slow crawl toward understanding and treating breast cancer. “Bathsheba’s Breast” is an important book whose most promising chapters have yet to be written.

-- Nick Owchar

*

Bearing Right

How Conservatives Won the Abortion War

William Saletan

University of California Press: 278 pp., $29.95

With the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1973 decision in Roe vs. Wade to legalize abortion on a national scale in the United States, conflict has metastasized far beyond the boundaries of abortion and with profound consequences affecting our political and cultural discourse. And there’s no treaty in sight. Periodic Supreme Court decisions since 1973 have only inflamed the conflict. They resolved many of the subsidiary issues, such as parental consent, while narrowly retaining Roe’s basic holding. Abortion remains legal, but it also remains contentious and controversial. It has become, in its purest extremes -- whether of absolute prohibition or of access to abortion on demand -- a litmus test for two contending forces, competing captains in the larger cultural war and its attendant skirmishes. Neither side will abide compromise, and neither grapples well with setbacks or reality.

William Saletan’s “Bearing Right” demonstrates, however, that abortion is an enormously complicated, complex issue; the simplistic, rigid stances of the two major players only trivialize the subject and obscure other problems. The abortion rights forces apparently command a majority that believes abortion is a personal and family choice. But it is a fragile coalition, easily fragmented by subsidiary issues of public financing or parental consent. Abortion remains legal, but “pro-choice conservatives,” as Saletan describes them, have largely won the struggle. They have shut down most public financing of anything relating to abortion or family planning, and they have joined with abortion opponents to support parental consent legislation. Roe stands, but significantly eroded and certainly qualified.

Saletan skillfully dissects the politics of abortion to offer fascinating insights into the larger question of our public debates and life. “Politics is the art of the possible,” once an article of faith of public life, has, over the last three decades, been eclipsed by the politics of extremism. The fringes of the debate dominate the political landscape. Advocates of either side often are happy to lose and maintain their passion for ongoing agitation. They command the public microphone. For them, there is no pause, no repose and certainly no retreat. The tentative, pragmatic positions of voters offer the only effective restraint on the apostles of extremism. Meanwhile, we are in Saletan’s debt for providing an understanding of this divisive, complex and corrosive issue.

-- Stanley I. Kutler

*

Beautiful Shadow

A Life of Patricia Highsmith

Andrew Wilson

Bloomsbury: 534 pp., $32.50

Among the myriad appalling high points of Andrew Wilson’s “Beautiful Shadow: A Life of Patricia Highsmith” is the news that its subject regularly smuggled her pet snails back and forth between England and France by attaching them to her breasts. It is somehow a perfect image of Highsmith, who even in her rather stunning youth nurtured a dark and slimy view of the human condition, and especially of herself, yet managed to give this perspective a twist of Nietzschean triumph -- akin, one could say, to getting the snails through customs.

Wilson’s book is a tour de force, an account so generous and prescient that Highsmith seems to step from its pages like a hologram, in all her contradictory glory. The element of nasty surprise so typical of Highsmith’s novels and stories is abundant in her life: We learn, for example, that her mother, who divorced her father shortly before her birth, tried to abort her by swallowing turpentine. Years later, Mary Highsmith would often tell her Sunday-painter daughter, “Isn’t it funny that you adore the smell of turpentine?”

Wilson has drawn on several decades’ worth of intimate journals Highsmith kept throughout her life, her cahiers, which contained very close descriptions of friends and lovers as well as outlines of her fiction, produced at an astonishing rate even in the most psychologically horrible and physically peripatetic circumstances. He has also tracked down nearly everyone who ever breathed on Highsmith and come away with a stupendous trove of anecdotal material. The result is a rich tapestry of interwoven social worlds and an astute chronological explication of how a life was transformed into art.

Wilson’s book is staggeringly well researched, and his account of Highsmith’s literary and philosophical influences (from the obvious Poe to the far less obvious Karl Mannheim and the French American novelist Julian Green), the random sights and encounters that inspired various plots and characters, as well as his discussion of her individual works, their weaknesses and strengths, are marvelously insightful and beautifully worked into one another. This is the best kind of literary biography, doing honor to its subject and all her warts, exactly as Highsmith would have wished.

-- Gary Indiana

*

Castles of Steel

Britain, Germany, and the Winning of the Great War at Sea

Robert K. Massie

Random House: 880 pp., $35

Robert K. Massie is a nonfiction writer of a rare and perhaps vanishing sort. He is an independent author; that is, he pays his way in the world by his scribblings, and he lacks the institutional and financial protection that is afforded to university professors of history. This means that Massie has had to choose his book topics carefully, balancing his passionate interest in details of the past (personal, cultural, anecdotal) with the need to draw out the reader’s empathy and distill complex events for a general readership. This implies, too, a commitment to craftsmanship, the creation of historical atmospherics and the vivid description of characters and events. In all of this, Massie is a master storyteller, and “Castles of Steel” is no exception.

In this sort of history writing, I doubt if Massie has an equal -- perhaps John Keegan in his accounts of the chaos of land warfare in “The Face of Battle.” (As the Christmas season approaches, “Castles of Steel” is a fine recommendation for a gift.) But it is more than that. It is a testimony to the sole, determined scholar who has a tale to tell and the wherewithal to tell it. It is a labor of love, in an age of sound bites. It is a fine display of the English language, unpolluted by quasi-scientific babble and unnecessary theorizing. And it tells a story. When history ceases to do that, it will have little purpose left.

-- Paul Kennedy

*

Curzon

Imperial Statesman

David Gilmour

Farrar, Straus & Giroux: 728 pp., $45

David Gilmour has written a masterly, if slightly patrician and old-fashioned biography. “Curzon” appears as timely as it is scholarly, well-researched and comprehensive. For South and Central Asia and the Middle East, the very areas that Curzon lorded over, worried about and attempted to control, are now countries critical to U.S. foreign policy. With the U.S.-led occupation of Iraq, the issues and concerns that animated Curzon are now suddenly back at the top of the agenda.

When, for example, one reads Curzon’s opinion, during a visit to Persia, that “our system may be good for us; but it is neither equally nor altogether good for them ... the normal Asiatic would sooner be misgoverned by Asiatics than well-governed by Europeans,” the words have a resonance to the reader that they could not have had when Gilmour first wrote them. Ultimately, however, Gilmour’s book should be read more as an elegant work of history than as some manual for contemporary American neo-Imperialism.

“Curzon” stands as a remarkable portrait of a brilliant, complex and tragic genius. Gilmour demolishes the two-dimensional caricature of the British imperialist incarnate and reveals the man in full, while also placing him firmly in his social, historical and political contexts. Curzon, he demonstrates in this book, was a man whose many talents were undermined by the Achilles’ heel of his own arrogance. It is extremely unlikely that a better portrait of either a British viceroy or the climax of the Raj will be written in the foreseeable future.

William Dalrymple

*

A Dangerous Place

California’s Unsettling Fate

Marc Reisner

Pantheon: 192 pp., $22

“Cadillac Desert” by the late Marc Reisner is one of a handful of books that are essential to understanding California and the American West. Along with Carey McWilliams’ “California: The Great Exception,” Mike Davis’ “City of Quartz” and Kevin Starr’s magisterial series of California histories that started with “Americans and the California Dream,” Reisner’s work is both challenging and consciousness-raising.

Critics who regard Reisner as an alarmist and a doomsayer may argue with him, but they cannot ignore him. Now, remarkably, we have a new and important book from Reisner, who died of colon cancer three years ago at 51. “A Dangerous Place: California’s Unsettling Fate” is a slender and tightly constructed book, far less ambitious than “Cadillac Desert,” but it is not merely cobbled together out of a dead writer’s unpublished scraps -- rather, it is the work of a critic, historian and stylist at the height of his powers, an environmental prophet in full and commanding voice.

Reisner’s posthumously published book begins with two simple but alarming facts, one demographic and the other geologic. First, he points out that one of every two Americans living west of the 100th meridian lives in California, and most of California’s huge and ever-growing population is crammed into the Los Angeles Basin and the San Francisco Bay Area. And second, he points out that these two megalopolises -- “chaotic, crawling hives,” as he puts it -- sit astride “one of the most violently active seismic zones in the world.”

Reisner is no longer here to raise the alarm, but there could be no more fitting reminder of his role in the debate over the future of California, and no greater tribute to the vision and intelligence that he brought to bear on that debate, than the book he left behind.

-- Jonathan Kirsch

*

Deforesting the Earth

From Prehistory to Global Crisis

Michael Williams

University of Chicago Press: 690 pp., $70

The myth of the dark, primordial forest still exercises a strong hold on the Western psyche. So does the notion that the forests were part of a harmonious, God-given backdrop, a passive spectator of history. Geographer Michael Williams’ authoritative history of deforestation draws on a broad range of sources to debunk these myths. He shows how forests were always dynamic entities, affected by short- and long-term environmental and climatic changes and even by quite minor human disturbances. The ax and the fire stick are inseparable from forests and make a mockery of the myth of the divinely provided backdrop. Yet the fiction persists: that the Earth was pristine, unaltered by humanity, before the Industrial Age.

“Deforesting the Earth” is not a book you read from cover to cover at one sitting but a definitive study to which one returns again and again, to browse, to marvel at the expert synthesis of myriad sources and the daunting statistics on virtually every page. Anyone who doubts the power of history to inform the present should read this closely argued and sweeping survey. This is rich, timely and sobering historical fare written in a measured, non-sensationalist style by a master of his craft. One only hopes (almost certainly vainly) that today’s policymakers take its lessons to heart.

-- Brian Fagan

*

The Dust of Empire

The Race for Mastery in the Asian Heartland

Karl E. Meyer

PublicAffairs: 256 pp., $26

I had the good fortune to be finishing Karl E. Meyer’s “The Dust of Empire” the day the bombs began falling on Baghdad. “History is not a blueprint but a cautionary tale,” he writes in his concluding chapter. “It is replete with warnings to those who believe that they can outguess the future, or that their country has a mandate from providence, or that alliances are a nuisance, or that a brusque arrogance is preferable to simulated humility.” As a volume of history about the dangers ahead, in Iraq and elsewhere, “The Dust of Empire” deserves to be read in the White House.

Iraq is Meyer’s subtext, not his primary subject. A swaggering America is his major worry, not his only focus. And so he deftly traces the lines of the past into the present as he documents the imperialist ambitions of outside powers -- mainly Britain and Russia -- in the vast region that stretches from the carelessly partitioned Indian subcontinent through the unconquerable mountains of Afghanistan, across Iran to the eastern edge of Iraq, up into the feuding Caucasus, and among the peaks and plains and deserts of the Central Asian countries that had sovereignty thrust upon them by the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Scholarly and eloquently told, the stories of empire in the Asian heartland have an edge of urgency. They teach a lesson about the durability of error: Mistakes made by colonial powers can last for many generations. “Over and over again,” Meyer writes, “proconsuls who believe themselves instruments of Enlightenment or selfless servants of church, throne or history, end up burying explosive caches, like so many land mines, that blow up ruinously in their descendants’ faces.” Meyer is a rare combination: a holder of a doctorate in political science who writes beautifully, a journalist who understands that history begins long before the day he arrives in a country. He is a former correspondent for the Washington Post, a former member of the New York Times editorial board, the author of nine books and now editor of the World Policy Journal. With a sense of easy mastery, he gazes broadly at the longest view, then zooms in to inspect the finest detail of a telling fact that someone has pulled from a forgotten archive.

-- David K. Shipler

*

The Ethics of Memory

Avishai Margalit

Harvard University Press: 228 pp., $24.95

This stimulating, profoundly humane little book about the ethical dimension of memory could not have appeared at a more appropriate moment. Just about everywhere one turns, memories are driving events. The memory of an olive grove destroyed or of a village razed incites violence in the Middle East; Koreans feel the Japanese do not sufficiently remember Japan’s crimes against Korea during World War II; many Jews accuse Catholics of forgetting papal indifference to Nazi atrocities; many Christians accuse Jews of not adequately remembering Christians who rescued Jews from the Nazis; President Bush recalls his father’s Gulf War; the Arabs, who still brood over the Crusades, will never forget our adventures in Iraq. Though Sept. 11 is long past, a debate now rages in America over how best to remember that violent day. It sometimes seems as though the present were being dreamed by the past, a past that cannot rest until all historical injuries have been exposed, punished or healed.

“The Ethics of Memory” comprises six lectures that Avishai Margalit, an Israeli political philosopher, has somewhat forced into book form in an effort to examine the role of memory in living a good life. The result is less a coherent argument than a set of brilliant, challenging interrogations and propositions. Margalit pursues a bracing, deeply satisfying intellectual odyssey through chapters on voluntary and involuntary remembering and forgetting, on the moral testimony of witnesses, on the ability to forgive and the capacity to forget. His book is a novel illumination of memory’s moral implications.

-- Lee Siegel

*

From Chivalry to Terrorism

War and the Changing Nature of Masculinity

Leo Braudy

Alfred A. Knopf: 614 pp., $30

“From Chivalry to Terrorism” is history at its most powerful. It is impossible to do justice to the range of fascinating material in this book. If you want to know about things as diverse as pornography or pacifism, male domesticity or military training, novels or machines, nationalism or athletics, romance or religion, pirates or highwaymen, you can look here. This series of interpretive essays is empathetic, analytical history at its best and most lively. It is also deeply personal. Leo Braudy, a professor of English and American literature at USC and author of “The Frenzy of Renown,” an influential study of the history of fame, among other works, is not afraid to put himself on the page. With bemusing modesty, he says he is writing “as an ordinary man and citizen, steeped in a neverending barrage of stories about men and war.”

Braudy’s book is much more ambitious than its title suggests. With encyclopedic thoroughness, Braudy sets out to tell us what it has meant to be a man, from the Norman Conquest of England to present-day America. Men are made, not born. And although Braudy believes that combat is the “crucible of masculinity,” war is really only the armor within which Braudy encases his themes. Manliness is too complex to be reduced to the warrior ethos, he says.

Braudy is one of the most exciting chroniclers of war’s history. In this, he follows in the tradition of scholars Paul Fussell, Eric J. Leed, George L. Mosse and Jay Winter. And like these fine writers, he fundamentally alters military history, by acknowledging that the border between “military” and “civilian” is constantly in flux.

-- Joanna Bourke

*

The Gate

Francois Bizot

Alfred A. Knopf: 320 pp., $24

When Francois Bizot was a jungle prisoner of the Khmer Rouge guerrilla army, which had never before or afterward freed a foreign captive, there came a time when -- by dint of Bizot’s command of the Khmer language and the sui generis relationship he developed with his jailer -- freedom was suddenly granted him. Before releasing him, the jailer, a man known by his pseudonym Douch, gave Bizot a kind of campfire party where revolutionary songs were sung, led by one of the young prison-camp soldiers. Bizot describes the boy soldier-singer and the moment:

“He sat down shyly, opposite us, wearing an oversized Chinese cap

This mesmeric book is much more than a survivor’s story. It is an agonizing effort to understand what produced such horror and to get inside the Khmer mind that, before these events, Bizot thought he had come to understand rather well. More than a decade after the fall of Phnom Penh, Bizot made a pilgrimage to his prison camp, to the embassy and to other venues of his worst dreams. He writes at the very end of his book that with this journey into his past, he finally has purged himself of his ghosts and his dark memories. I have to say that as someone else who has watched friends marched toward their almost certain doom, that was the one sentence in his beautiful book that, for me, did not ring true.

-- Sydney H. Schanberg

*

Gettysburg

Stephen W. Sears

Houghton Mifflin: 624 pp., $30

The bloodiest battle of the American Civil War took place 140 years ago. The killing at Gettysburg, Pa., began early on the morning of July 1, 1863, and reached its climax on the afternoon of July 3. About 170,000 American soldiers fought there. And the Civil War was certainly not one of these newfangled virtual wars with a death count lingering in the low hundreds. At Gettysburg, what newspapermen of the time called the “butcher’s bill” amounted to 51,000 killed, wounded, missing or captured. The equivalent, using today’s population figures, would be 450,000 casualties in a single engagement. The popular notion that the battle was the Civil War’s one decisive turning point is off the mark. Still, the Battle of Gettysburg is the deadliest encounter in American history and the biggest military engagement fought in the Western Hemisphere. It is our Waterloo, our Stalingrad.

In “Gettysburg,” Sears offers the first definitive overview of the campaign in 35 years. “Gettysburg” is his fourth book on one of the major clashes of the eastern theater: Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia versus the Union’s Army of the Potomac. His first installment came in 1983 with “Landscape Turned Red: The Battle of Antietam,” a bestseller that was immediately recognized as one of the best accounts ever written of a Civil War battle. “Gettysburg” confirms his reputation as a master storyteller and a historian smart enough to keep the specialists happy. He gives us the sweep of the campaign -- from the early strategizing of the Confederate high command through the delivery of the Gettysburg Address.

-- John Rhodehamel

*

Governor Reagan

His Rise to Power

Lou Cannon

PublicAffairs: 580 pp., $30

Lou Cannon likes to quote Winston Churchill’s cliche about Russia as “a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.” Ronald Reagan, he says, “is my Russia.” But Cannon, who began covering Reagan before he became California’s governor in 1966, manages to unwrap the riddle-cum-enigma as well as anybody ever has.

Even some of Reagan’s staunchest critics recognized his power to charm, and Cannon, during his long journalist’s career covering Reagan as governor and later as president, has hardly been immune. But this book, Cannon’s fifth on his riddle, is also his most serious and searching, not just about Reagan but also about a watershed era in California and national politics. “What made Reagan different was the power of his ideas and his stubborn adherence to them,” Cannon says. His central argument about the Reagan governorship in the years 1967 to 1975 -- and indeed much of Reagan’s political career -- is that his conservatism was always tempered by a common-sense pragmatism that, in the context of today’s hyper-partisanship, seems, if not moderate, at least reasonable by comparison. The Reagan riddle may never permit anything like a definitive biography, but this is likely to be the one that, for the crucial period it covers, is authoritative and thoughtful enough to be worth the argument.

-- Peter Schrag

*

Goya

Robert Hughes

Alfred A. Knopf: 448 pp., $40

Goya is not an artist to tackle lightly; he demands not simply insightful scholarship but some more profound sense of empathy. This is where Robert Hughes has triumphed with his superb new biography, “Goya” -- arguably its author’s masterpiece. With his earlier books “Shock of the New,” “American Visions” and “Culture of Complaint,” Hughes has defined himself as one of the great critics and cultural commentators of the postwar period. His brilliance lies not just in his erudition -- “Goya” is an astonishing example of his intellectual vigor -- but also in his rugged, keen style and eye for historical and thematic detail that can lead him to gorgeous sweeps of overarching observation.

Hughes is above all impatient with the rhetoric and perspectives of much postmodern art and theory, and this book is in many ways a defense and reclamation of the principle of artistic genius -- a concept that has been out of fashion over the last two decades of cultural debate. This reclamation, in turn, becomes a greater statement about the inviolability of subjective truth; for as Goya’s art describes at times a periodic table of suffering, in which the capacity for human cruelty (as evidenced by his “Disasters”) seems drawn from some dark Freudian underbelly of consciousness, so Hughes reveals the artist’s almost unbearable lucidity as a witness to the age.

-- Michael Bracewell

*

Gulag

A History

Anne Applebaum

Doubleday: 680 pp., $35

There can hardly be a greater task in 20th century world history than to understand the Holocaust and the Gulag. Why did these related extermination projects happen, and how did similar phenomena occur in other parts of communist Europe in the early 1950s and in Cambodia in the 1970s? We need to realize how the shock of the inhuman has probably had a more detrimental effect on Western culture and thought than any of the more common accounts of postmodernism. At the same time, if we are to resist using the word “evil” carelessly, we must differentiate between the Nazi horror and what happened to Russia under Joseph Stalin. To understand the lower depths of the Russian experience is partly to understand the power and attraction of communism over 75 years. Every culture has its own ideals and its own way with depravity. Anne Applebaum has spent the last several years researching and writing this first comprehensive history. “Gulag: A History” is a model of patient, readable scholarship. Lucid, painstakingly detailed, never sensational, it should have a place on every educated reader’s shelves.

-- Lesley Chamberlain

*

How the Idea of Religious Toleration Came to the West

Perez Zagorin

Princeton University Press: 372 pp., $29.95

When I once gave a lecture in England on religious freedom in the West, a Muslim scholar asked why anyone should care. The answer, I thought, was that the material and cultural progress of a nation depends on the creation and maintenance of human freedom, and that in turn depends on religious freedom. If you think the state should enforce on others your views about God and his demands, it is most unlikely that you will allow the state to recognize freedom of speech or the press or an unfettered right to scientific inquiry.

The primacy of religious freedom is made evident by the fact that in the West, the struggle over religious freedom predated by about three centuries any discussion of free speech or a free press. Until the first issue was settled, the second would have little meaning. How can people argue over who is to rule if they must first grant the right to rule to people of a chosen faith? In much of the Muslim world, religious freedom has not emerged, or the tumult caused by the rivalry between sects -- for example, Shiites and Sunnis -- has paved the way for totalitarian regimes to grab power. Any of these outcomes, whether it is religious intolerance, state-linked religious struggle or military dictatorship, holds back human and scientific development.

In the West, religious freedom did not arise until more than 1,500 years after Christ’s death. Christianity in the New Testament makes scarcely any claims for enforced religious orthodoxy, but once the religion had been embraced in the 4th century by the Emperor Constantine, its leaders and their political allies began to demand it. Some people were converted to the faith by the sword, and alleged heretics were burned at the stake. To achieve religious freedom without abandoning religious belief became in time the most difficult task the West faced.

Perez Zagorin, an emeritus professor of history at the University of Rochester in New York, has provided an explanation for this change in his new book, “How the Idea of Religious Toleration Came to the West.” This book is never dull and often exciting. It offers a gripping account of the struggle over religious freedom, and is the best introduction to the ideas of religious freedom

-- James Q. Wilson

*

Interesting Times

A Twentieth Century Life

Eric Hobsbawm

Pantheon Books: 464 pp., $30

In the late 1950s, English poet Stephen Spender visited Warsaw under the aegis of the British Council tour. Stalin was dead, but the ruling Polish Communist Party was still operating very much along Stalinist lines. Still, even in these savagely repressive conditions, Spender made a huge success of his visit. Shortly before he was due to return home, a reception was given in his honor. At it, the head of the Polish Writers’ Union rose to thank Spender and to make what was at the time a daring offer. “Tell us whom you want to meet, no matter how controversial, and we’ll arrange it,” he said. “And don’t worry; we won’t say the person’s ill or out of the country.” Spender thought for a moment and replied, “I want to meet a communist.” But no sooner were the words out of his mouth than he heard a voice from somewhere in the crowd -- he never found out who it was, he later told me -- retort in French: “Alas, sir, you’ve come too late.”

I found myself thinking of this story more than once as I read Eric Hobsbawm’s simultaneously brilliantly lucid and perversely obscurantist memoir, “Interesting Times.” Instead of titling the book “Interesting Times,” with its reference to the Chinese saying that to live in such epochs is a curse, Hobsbawm might as well have borrowed a title from English writer Christopher Sykes and called it “a study in loyalty” -- in this case, his own. And anyone in any doubt about the truth of the cliche that communism was a secular religion for people of Hobsbawm’s generation need only read his book to have those doubts assuaged.

His memoir of childhood in Vienna, with which the book opens, manages the rare literary feat of being both moving and judicious. His extraordinary, aphoristic talents as a narrator -- gifts that make his great synoptic histories of modern Europe, like “The Age of Empire” and “The Age of Capital,” such joys to read, such books for the ages -- are everywhere in evidence.

Hobsbawm writes that “if you want to know what [the past] was like, only we can tell you. If you think you can go back, we can tell you, it can’t be done.” This is vintage Hobsbawm: the historian as dispassionate observer, refusing to let his own preferences cloud his judgments but, at the same time, not fearing the generalization and not settling for the contemporary version of history writing in which the profession is largely dominated by miniaturists rather than generalists of Hobsbawm’s sweep and ambition. To be sure, he does not show these gifts to best effect in his memoir, and the book is at once too subjective and not subjective enough. But Hobsbawm, even at his most inconsistent and even (as in the unconvincing and tortured justifications of his continued allegiance to the communist international) at his most objectionable, is never less than instructive. Whether the book will really “help readers as they go into the new century” is an open question. What is unquestionable is that “Interesting Times” will help readers think about the age we have just passed through, whether they are convinced by Hobsbawm’s account of it or not. And that, surely, is a very considerable achievement.

-- David Rieff

*

In the Land of Magic Soldiers

A Story of White and Black in West Africa

Daniel Bergner

Farrar, Straus & Giroux: 216 pp., $22

“Lord, give me a heart that breaks,” wrote the young American missionary in a book of prayers issued by his Calvinist church in Grand Rapids, Mich. The Lord responded by sending him to Sierra Leone, in West Africa, which for a few years in the last decade was considered by many people to be the worst place on Earth. In the United Nations ranking based on such factors as education and public health, Sierra Leone came in last.

Daniel Bergner, a deeply accomplished young writer, went to this wrecked, lost little country to write about the effects of the long civil war whose thugs in the Revolutionary United Front, often fed on drugs, made history by hacking off hands, arms, features or legs to terrify, not kill, the population. Children were not exempt.

Bergner has undertaken a huge, ghastly task, and his book is a remarkable achievement, so beautifully written, and written with such intelligence, that you will not pull away from it. To take us with him through his months in Sierra Leone, he concentrates on the lives of a few people: the white missionary and his family, an African whose hands were chopped off while he screamed and pleaded, a child in the RUF who mutilated people and ate human flesh, a white mercenary with helicopter and Gatling gun who nevertheless had hugely generous impulses, and a Westernized medical student (subsidized by the mercenary) who searched for a cure for AIDS and much else so that the multitudes could come to his country and be healed. A great novelist would be hard pressed to invent such a cast of characters. Bergner describes what is magical and what is malign in Africa as well as anyone ever has, sometimes with the skill of a poet and sometimes in icy detail.

-- Gloria Emerson

*

Isaac Newton

James Gleick

Pantheon: 272 pp., $22.95

“Isaac Newton” is an elegantly written, insightful work that brings Newton to life and does him justice. Its brevity, which may or may not have been premeditated, seems to have resulted from a rare and relentless insistence on saying solely what can be said confidently and afresh. Apt omission is key to any art, from throwing a party to writing a poem. As James Salter put it, “The secret of making [art] is simple: Discard everything that is good enough.” Easier said than done, but “Newton” is exemplary for what Gleick omits. He makes no pretense of psychoanalyzing Newton or otherwise capturing some imagined essence of him, avoids getting bogged down in scholarly controversies.

Gleick proves to be not only a sound explicator of Newton’s science but also a capable literary stylist, whose understated empathy with his subject lets us almost see through Newton’s eyes. So it goes, through 14 gracefully composed chapters that manage simultaneously to hew to a roughly chronological sequence while gathering Newton’s main interests into distinct and intelligible sections. Had Gleick stopped there, he would have produced an exemplary nontechnical biography. But he adds a 15th chapter, stepping back to examine Newton’s place in history, and it is a small masterpiece.

-- Timothy Ferris

*

Jarhead

A Marine’s Chronicle of the Gulf War and Other Battles

Anthony Swofford

Scribner: 260 pp., $24

In “Dispatches,” the Vietnam memoir praised as one of the best books ever written about war, Michael Herr writes of the Marines under siege at Khe Sanh: “And they were killers. Of course they were; what would anyone expect them to be? It absorbed them, inhabited them, made them strong in the way that victims are strong, filled them with the twin obsessions of Death and Peace, fixed them so that they would never, never again speak lightly about the Worst Thing in the World.”

Now a remarkable new young writer appears with his own war memoir, “Jarhead: A Marine’s Chronicle of the Gulf War and Other Battles,” following in Herr’s footsteps. He is a younger literary cousin to the author of “Dispatches”: Both men write in the mad, poetic, sometimes spooky voice, descriptive, mocking and often tender. That Anthony Swofford wrote a book about the Gulf War astonished me: It lasted only 100 days; there were no fierce firefights for him and he never had the chance to shoot an Iraqi, which he was primed to do. Marines are supposed to want to kill all the time, really long for it, and it shows. Swofford’s book is about the man who feels cheated because the Gulf War was over so quickly, and he was, perhaps, both relieved and horrified. He may be ashamed, he may be bitter at the waste of his own training and the suffering it provoked. In this rich and jolting book, both ugly and beautiful, Swofford teaches us almost everything about what lonely and despondent children seek to do and what a crime it is that our exhausted and silly culture offers them so little.

-- Gloria Emerson

*

The King of California

J.G. Boswell and the Making of a Secret American Empire

Mark Arax and Rick Wartzman

PublicAffairs: 560 pp., $30

The relationship between agricultural wealth and the degradation of culture and environment is a central theme in “The King of California: J.G. Boswell and the Making of a Secret American Empire,” a passionate, fair-minded, thought-provoking and groundbreaking book by Times reporter Mark Arax and The Times’ business editor, Rick Wartzman. At its center is James “Jim” Boswell, the biggest farmer in America, owner of more than 200,000 acres of America’s richest farmland. Boswell, the world’s biggest cotton farmer, also grows more irrigated wheat, safflower and seed alfalfa than anyone else in the country. Among his investments was the conversion, in partnership with Del Webb, of a failing cattle ranch near Phoenix into the wildly successful Sun Valley retirement community.

Jim who? If the Boswell name doesn’t ring a bell, this is no accident. The company has no public relations department and secrecy is a family obsession. “As long as the whale never surfaces, it is never harpooned” is how one family member put it. And yet, the authors somehow managed to win the trust of Boswell, who grudgingly agreed to be interviewed. In a manner richly anecdotal, the authors plunge headlong into the history of how Tulare Lake was drained and converted to farmland. “The King of California” is a thoroughly moving, deeply rendered and utterly trustworthy book. Perhaps because of the authors’ backgrounds as reporters, one feels that this multilayered account is rooted not in ideology or advocacy but in anecdote, history and a sense of dispassionate investigative reporting. Its implied conclusion is thus all the more powerful: that however arguable the case for bigness, its consequences have been and continue to be hugely and reprehensively destructive.

-- Malcolm Margolin

*

Khrushchev

The Man and the Era

William Taubman

W.W. Norton: 876 pp., $35

Khrushchev has been the subject of a long shelf full of books but never, until now, a comprehensive and authoritative biography. William Taubman, a professor of political science at Amherst College, has filled that gap with a masterpiece of scholarship, investigation and narrative. He has, as his subtitle promises, brought alive Khrushchev and his era. He has also established the salient connections between that momentous story and the drama underway in Russia today.

Khrushchev has been dead more than 30 years, and Taubman’s book has been in progress for more than a dozen years. The result is worth waiting for. Every chapter reflects the author’s deep knowledge of the Soviet Union. It was an education that began in the ‘60s, when he was an exchange student at Moscow State University, and it incorporates his numerous trips to the places Khrushchev lived and worked; his cultivation of sources among Khrushchev’s family and colleagues; his judicious sifting of the vast literature, Russian and foreign, on those murky years; and, most important, his determination to answer the core question of Khrushchev’s career: How was it that a creature of one of the most corrupt and murderous political cultures of all time would attempt a change for the better when he had a chance?

To answer that question, Taubman marshals the resources of the art of biography at its best. In reconstructing a single paradoxical life, he helps us understand better the complexity of the human condition, with its mixture of frailty, ambition, resilience and capacity for growth. Thanks to Taubman, one of the most important figures of the 20th century finally has the biography he deserves.

-- Strobe Talbott

*

The Language Police

How Pressure Groups Restrict What Students Learn

Diane Ravitch

Alfred A. Knopf: 272 pp., $24

What do dinosaurs, mountains, deserts, brave boys, shy girls, men fixing roofs, women baking cookies, elderly people in wheelchairs, athletic African Americans, God, heathens, witches, owls, birthday cake and religious fanatics all have in common? Trick question? Not really. As we learn from Diane Ravitch’s eye-opening book “The Language Police,” all of the above share the common fate of having been banned from the textbooks or test questions (or both) being used in today’s schools. Also forbidden: owls (the animals are taboo for Navajos), Mt. Rushmore (offensive to Lakotas), dinosaurs (suggestive of evolution, hence offensive to creationists), dolphins (regionally offensive because they live in the sea) and Mary McLeod Bethune (this early 20th century civil rights pioneer had the lack of foresight to use the no-longer-fashionable word “Negro” in the school she founded).

The author of such notable books on education as “The Schools We Deserve” and “Left Back: A Century of Battles Over School Reform,” Ravitch made it her business to investigate “the Language Police.” What she discovered about the roots and ramifications of this eerily Orwellian system is the story told in this book. As the subtitle suggests, it is a story of how pressure groups -- left-wing and right-wing, large and small -- have managed to control not only the language, but even the very subject matter and ideas that appear in the textbooks being used in our schools. Lucid, forceful, written with insight, passion, compassion and conviction, “The Language Police” is not only hair-raisingly readable but deeply reasonable. It should be required reading not only for parents, teachers and educators, but for everyone who cares about history, literature, science, culture and indeed the civilization in which we live.

-- Merle Rubin

*

The Meaning of Everything

The Story of the Oxford English Dictionary

Simon Winchester

Oxford University Press: 260 pp., $25

There’s something in the English lexicographical tradition that brings out the madness in the English blood. Simon Winchester, formerly a journalist, has already explored the peculiar byways of dictionary-making in “The Professor and the Madman,” a popular study of a previously overlooked eccentric American contributor to the Oxford English Dictionary.

Plainly, Winchester found the loopiness of lexicography to his taste. In “The Meaning of Everything,” a catchy title that does not quite describe the book he has written, he sets out to describe how, in the aftermath of Johnson’s Dictionary, the imperial Victorians, having conquered and colonized much of the known world, set out to categorize and define the language of that empire on which the sun would never set. The extraordinary story of the making of the Oxford English Dictionary is a subject perfectly suited to Winchester’s magpie mind.

Winchester’s book is not just an entertaining crib for a certain kind of trivial pursuit. It can be recommended in all seriousness to committed Scrabble players. Here, for instance, you will learn that the first edition closed with the definition of “zyxt,” a Kentish dialect word for the past participle of the verb “to see.” Here, too, you will find words like “aa,” an obsolete term for a stream or watercourse. Winchester’s account is an affectionate and frankly partisan study of the making of a great dictionary. It is also an offbeat portrait of an extraordinary society.

-- Robert McCrum

*

Native State

A Memoir

Tony Cohan

Broadway Books: 320 pp., $24.95

In all the stories, California is the point of arrival, the place to which everyone aspires -- the end of the line, as more sardonic souls might put it, or, in Don Henley’s agile pun, the “last resort.” It is the place where dreams and dreamers culminate (which is another way of saying that it is the place where reality kicks in); in our inner topography, it’s the destination of hope.

One of the disarming graces of Tony Cohan’s limpid and beautifully elegiac memoir, clear and sad as an old song playing on a radio down the street, is that it takes that hoary myth and sees it from the other side, through the eyes of one raised inside those dreams. Cohan grew up in Hollywood in its glory days, Bing Crosby and Johnny Mercer singing around the family piano downstairs, various Sinatras and Mitchums his schoolmates, and his father summoned from back East to produce and direct Jimmy Durante’s weekly radio show; and so, in a sense, Sunset Boulevard and Dotty Lamour’s house (in which he grew up), the Garden of Allah and Schwab’s drugstore down the street, were what he longed to put behind him. L.A. was the place where his father suddenly lost his job and his glamorous lifestyle, as radio was eclipsed by television.

The central question of any memoir, of course, is how much its writer comes to an understanding with the past; how well, that is, he gets on with forgiveness. The strongest writers of memory are the ones who can afford to be unsparingly honest about the world because they are no less unsparing with themselves. The suspicion that attaches to the form these days derives in part from our sense that too often the writer will use the page as a courtroom in which he can advance his own cause by indicting all the crimes of Mommy or Daddy dearest.

Cohan does none of this, working his way slowly and honestly toward a loving acceptance of his aging father, which amounts, no less, to a clear-eyed reckoning with his own past as an angry young man. This delicate task is helped by a prose that is never unaware of its own music and, more than that, finds a way in music to talk about transcendence. In “Native State” he has given us a small classic of California retrospection that begins, in its wistful clarity, to explain us to ourselves.

-- Pico Iyer

*

No Excuses

Closing the Racial Gap in Learning

Abigail and Stephan Thernstrom

Simon & Schuster: 334 pp., $26

The single most devastating statistic in American life is this: The average black high school senior reads at the level of the average white eighth-grader. This, more than anything else, explains why race remains such an overwhelmingly salient fact in American life. It explains why affirmative action is, or at least appears to be, necessary. It explains to a very large degree why blacks continue to lag so far behind whites in income and socioeconomic status. And, as Abigail and Stephan Thernstrom demonstrate with remorseless lucidity in “No Excuses,” the gap cannot be explained away by racism, testing bias, inequitable resources or even by poverty itself. The gap is not only an incontrovertible fact but a fact rooted in black experience and behavior. The Thernstroms do not believe that school is the cause of black failure, but they insist that, given the right innovations, school can offer a solution. “No Excuses” is the most closely argued and deeply considered version of a claim that has become increasingly common among conservatives -- that school choice is the best cure for persistent black poverty. The Thernstroms have done an enormous service by tracing the great problem of our time to its root and, at the same time, by clearing out of the way so much of the cant that clutters discussion of school reform.

-- James Traub

*

Order and Exclusion

Cluny and Christendom Face Heresy, Judaism, and Islam, (1000-1150)

Dominique Iogna-Prat

Translated from the French by Robert Edwards

Cornell University Press: 392 pp., $45

A renowned French medieval historian, Dominique Iogna-Prat in “Order and Exclusion” has written two books: one on monastic history and the other on the history of intolerance. The history of the Cluniac monks, which takes up roughly half the volume, is the most concise and insightful survey yet written of the place of monasticism in medieval society from the 6th to the 12th centuries. Anyone who wishes to understand how monasticism took shape in Western Europe and how it was, exactly, that monks and monasteries fit into the whole of medieval society will find here a superb introduction to the subject that is not only anchored in an impressive array of primary sources but also in constant conversation with other historians through footnotes as dense as the forests of medieval Europe. Though this is a book aimed at scholars, nonspecialists should not fear getting lost. When it comes to clarity of expression and insights into often puzzling complexities, “Order and Exclusion” complements and even rivals Georges Duby’s magnificent “The Three Orders: Feudal Society Imagined.” “Order and Exclusion” is indispensable reading, especially for anyone trying to understand the deep roots of the religiously inspired fanaticisms that still bedevil us in the 21st century.

-- Carlos Eire

*

The Pinochet File

A Declassified Dossier on Atrocity and Accountability

Edited by Peter Kornbluh

The New Press: 552 pp., $29.95

Exactly 30 years ago, on that other Tuesday, Sept. 11, as Chilean Air Force jets bombed the government palace where I worked as a young translator to elected socialist President Salvador Allende, as Chilean troops trampled a century of democratic rule (and the dark night of a dictatorship that would last 17 years descended), we understood that the U.S. played some role in the coup.

A year before, Jack Anderson made public some of the anti-Allende machinations concocted by the Nixon administration in cahoots with the ITT corporation. In the ensuing years, kick-started by the 1976 Senate Church Committee investigations, much more about American covert action has come to light in dribs and drabs.

Now, thanks to Peter Kornbluh, we have the first complete, almost day-to-day and fully documented record of this sordid chapter in Cold War American history. Much in the way Stephen Kinzer’s “Bitter Fruit” fully chronicled the CIA intromission into Guatemala, “The Pinochet File” should be considered the long-awaited book of record on U.S. intervention in Chile. Here is a veritable catalog of all the smoking guns used by Washington to obliterate Chilean democracy. But anyone hoping to find documentary evidence only of an arrogant imperial power blithely manipulating its pliant Latin American ally for its geopolitical gain is in for some surprises.

As a senior researcher at the nonprofit National Security Archives, Kornbluh was instrumental in securing almost 25,000 new Chile-related documents released after the 1998 London arrest of former dictator Augusto Pinochet. Kornbluh has done much more than assemble a clump of dense photocopied files full of bureaucratese. Instead, he’s written a crisp, compelling narrative, almost a political thriller, wisely including scores of government documents as only secondary documentation. “The Pinochet File” reads as the definitive and damning indictment of Pinochet and his regime as well as his enablers, protectors and apologists in Washington. It’s also a cautionary tale of the consequences incurred when a great power squanders its prestige and principles in defense of dictators and despots.

-- Marc Cooper

*

Pushkin

A Biography

T.J. Binyon

Alfred A. Knopf: 732 pp., $35

T.J. Binyon’s “Pushkin,” winner of the Samuel Johnson Prize for biography in England, has arrived in America. In this handsome volume of more than 700 pages, the reader is greeted by a typical page from one of Pushkin’s working notebooks. Caricatured male profiles, stylized female profiles with upswept hairdos, figures in expressive motion, fetishistic legs and feet, historical personages, friends, lovers, enemies and the occasional sword or pistol bloom crazily along the margins and between lines of poetry. If it were possible to photograph an imagination at work and creatively “idling,” this would be it. Clearly, this poet lived in a social world that was very much with him when he sat down to write; he thought in visual images and perhaps used these to trigger verbal inspiration; and his poetry’s effortless, inventive, mot juste quality was achieved by drafting and revision, solitary daydreaming and hard work. The world in which Binyon’s Pushkin moves sparkles with concrete historical detail and vividly realized personalities, testimony not only to Binyon’s much more assiduous culling of Soviet sources and contemporary documents but also to his admirable memory and ability to swirl detail into a lively, novelistic tapestry. A delightful touch is the scattering of Pushkin’s sketches of the dramatis personae throughout the book.

-- Monika Greenleaf

*

Reagan

A Life in Letters

Ronald Reagan, edited by Kiron K. Skinner, Annelise Anderson and Martin Anderson

The Free Press: 936 pp., $35

“Reagan: A Life in Letters” is a compilation of more than 1,000 letters personally written or dictated by the Great Communicator. The three editors -- Kiron K. Skinner, an assistant professor of political science at Carnegie Mellon; Annelise Anderson, a senior research fellow at the Hoover Institution, and Martin Anderson, a senior policy advisor to Reagan’s 1976 and 1980 presidential campaigns -- do a meticulous job of organizing and annotating this hefty volume, which covers more than 50 years, from his acting days through his governorship of California, before and after his presidency. Reading them is proof positive that Reagan was not a cue-card reader or empty suit. He was -- dare we say it -- an intellectual of sorts. “Ronald Reagan loved to negotiate and he enjoyed talking about the process,” former Secretary of State George P. Shultz writes in an introduction. The prose is always clear and direct. He is no Thomas Jefferson when it comes to displaying his intellect on paper. His writing is a wholesome combination of Ann Landers’ well-meaning advice and Ayn Rand’s fierce individualism. At times he is as sentimental as a Hallmark card. He treats an Alaskan third-grader’s question about Girl Scout cookies with the same gravitas as a stranger’s opinion on the death penalty. A democratic spirit comes through that is old-fashioned, quaint and likable.

What makes this book so endearing is that Reagan personally responded to regular folks. “You specified you wanted to hear from me personally,” Reagan wrote to one correspondent in 1981, “so here I am.” He called the people “Uncommon Americans,” the great middle class. Grenada aside, and Star Wars notwithstanding, the man who emerges from these pages is an egalitarian conservative eager for world peace, and it wasn’t by accident that Reagan reduced nuclear weapon inventories on his watch.

-- Douglas Brinkley

*

Regarding the Pain of Others

Susan Sontag

Farrar, Straus & Giroux: 132 pp., $20

Susan Sontag’s “On Photography” was published in 1977. It became, almost instantly, a bible. To this day, it remains a prescribed textbook in almost every serious photography course in the world, and a venerated reference work for media students and all who try to understand the force of imagery. She wrote that book when the images of Vietnam were still fresh. Now, as the photographers line up for accreditation to yet another war (“embedding” journalists is the military word for the attempt to control what the world will be allowed to read and see of it), she has returned to the subject in “Regarding the Pain of Others.”

In the quarter-century that separates Sontag’s two books about photography, public sensibility to images of suffering has developed strikingly. One new concern, which influences most photographers today, is about the supposed gap between art and authenticity. If the images of horror are too “beautiful,” how can they at the same time be “real”? Some photographs of the World Trade Center ruins were indeed beautiful, but “the most people dared say was that the photographs were ‘surreal,’ a hectic euphemism behind which the disgraced notion of beauty cowered.” How could a picture be a document, if its maker looked on an awful scene aesthetically? The dilemma is fallacious, but all newspaper readers can recognize the trend among gifted and professional camera-people to make their images of war and misery seem “rough” and amateurish.

A second concern is anxiety about voyeurism. Should we be looking at this? (For photographers, the question is how one human being can flash on another’s agony and then race off to the next scene, a guilt that dates back to the moment when the Leica and its technical progeny allowed men and women with cameras to snatch images in seconds). How do we distinguish the presumably noble wish to face the world’s calamities from the presumably ignoble prurience which gets off on pictures of carnage and bodies in pain?

Here Sontag is in top form: firing devastating questions and providing no answers for shelter. She hands us no morality meter, designed to scan a picture and flash up “necessary experience” in green or “atrocity-porn” in red. Instead, she quotes Plato -- the tale of Leontius reluctantly feasting his eyes on executed criminals -- to show that “the attraction of mutilated bodies” has always been recognized, not least in the obsession of Christian art with naked bodies in pain. Only in the 17th century are depictions of atrocity hitched to the notion that war is cruel and should be prevented. But “most depictions of tormented, mutilated bodies do arouse a prurient interest. ... All images that display the violation of an attractive body are, to a certain degree, pornographic.” (Sontag exonerates Goya, whose brutalized victims are, like their torturers and violators, “heavy, and thickly clothed”).

Sontag’s closing words acknowledge that there are realities which no picture can convey. “We can’t imagine how dreadful, how terrifying war is; and how normal it becomes. Can’t understand, can’t imagine. That’s what every soldier, and every journalist and aid worker and independent observer who has put in time under fire and has had the luck to elude the death that struck down others nearby, stubbornly feels. And they are right.”

-- Neal Ascherson

*

River of Shadows

Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West

Rebecca Solnit

Viking: 306 pp., $25.95

Rebecca Solnit’s “River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West” is a perfect example of a subject waiting -- in this case for almost a century and a half -- for the appropriate writer to come along to unlock its concealed meaning and unexpected relevance. The subject is Eadweard Muybridge the photographer and Eadweard Muybridge the phenomenon, and together they have brought out in Solnit a book that is so spirited and free-ranging, so Western in its unfettered questing curiosity, that its genre is not easy to define. This portrait of a man, a place, a time, a technology, an art and various other matters that elude encapsulation shines on nearly every page with rigor and gusto and is consistently a delight to read.

“Delight” is probably a word that was never applied to Muybridge, an obstinate, gloomy, solitary figure who, by photographing a horse in motion in California in 1872, “helped launch,” Solnit contends, “the world we live in.” Instead the delight belongs to the writer and has a good deal to do with her methodology, which might be summarized as a persistent search for the surprise connection or reverberation between past and present, photograph and reality, a man and his time.

Although Solnit considers Muybridge biographically, she has not written a pure biography. She analyzes his photographs but has not delive