The Voice

FROM : The New York Review of Book
PHOTO : www.nybooks.com

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

February 10, 2011

Geoffrey O’Brien

Frank: The Voice
by James Kaplan
Doubleday, 786 pp., $35.00



James Kaplan’s Frank: The Voice is authentically a page-turner, a strident tabloid epic constructed out of facts—or more precisely out of the disparate and sometimes contradictory testimony of scores of participants in Frank Sinatra’s early life. There is certainly enough testimony to choose from; pieces of Sinatra, variously skewed and distorted, are scattered all over the latter part of the twentieth century. But they hardly converge into a unified portrait: confronted with the multitude of Sinatras that one must attempt to resolve into a single plausible person, there is a gathering sense of unsettling dissonance quite at odds with the perfected harmonies of his greatest recordings.


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CLASSES, CITIZENSHIP AND INEQUALITY

FROM : THE HINDU
PHOTO : www.hindu.com

Emergence of a global working class

K. C. SIVARAMAKRISHNAN

CLASSES, CITIZENSHIP AND INEQUALITY — Emerging Perspectives: Edited by T.K. Oommen; Pearson Education, 7th Floor, Knowledge Boulevard, A-8(A) Sector 62, Noida-201309. Rs. 595.

This is a collection of scholarly essays presented at the 2006 Frankfurt Book Fair, ably edited by one of India's leading sociologists. They are grouped under four heads: working class; peasantry; middle class; and citizenship.

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Cleopatra: A Life

FROM : Guardian
PHOTO : www.guardian.co.uk

Cleopatra: A Life by Stacy Schiff

Miranda Seymour enjoys a dramatic biography of the last and most dazzling of the Ptolemys

How, wondered Pascal, could he best sum up the causes and effects – the bliss and then, the bondage – of love? He found the answer in a single word – a woman's name: Cleopatr

It's 20 years since a fine book by Lucy Hughes-Hallett undertook to disentangle the last and most resourceful of the Ptolemys from those myths which have masked her as an eastern whore (Boccaccio); a lustful sinner (Dante); an avaricious nymphomaniac (Cassius Dio); and – even further from the mark – a "silly little girl" (Shaw). Hughes-Hallett's work has now spawned a worthy successor. Ideally, as Stacy Schiff observes in her magnificent re-creation of both an extraordinary woman, and her times, our sense of Cleopatra would be heightened by her dramatic appearance as the doomed heroine of a sumptuous opera (Puccini, preferably).

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Diary of a Dean

From : Standard
Photo : www.weeklystandard.com

Learning Curve

The view from the front row of the academic follies.

Diary of a Dean

by Herbert I. London
Hamilton, 60 pp., $14.99

When I attended New York University during the late 1980s, reading about the school’s internal politics in the Washington Square News, Gallatin Division Dean Herbert London registered in my undergraduate imagination as a real “no”-it-all: He was against everything​—​at least, judging by the headlines. Whenever the WSN reported on a university senate vote, it trumpeted the tally as 77-1, with him the lone dissenter. In Diary of a Dean, an episodic collection of autobiographical essays, London tells how he became a voice crying in the wilderness of liberal academia. At the same time, he depicts the larger story of “the dramatic shift that has occurred in this society over the last four decades,” particularly how “political considerations have entered the Academy as an ideological tsunami

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5. 5. Makar's a muckle of an honour

From : Dissent
Photo : http://dissentmagazine.org

Real Men Find Real Utopias

By Russell Jacoby

Envisioning Real Utopias
by Erik Olin Wright
Verso, 2010, 394 pp.


A BOOK on utopias by a Marxist sociologist seems promising, perhaps even courageous. In Envisioning Real Utopias, Erik Olin Wright seeks to counter widespread cynicism about radical social transformation. To do this he offers what he calls “real utopias,” which might appear a contradiction or oxymoron. For Wright, however, utopias are not fantasies, or not only fantasies. In the current period we need “hard-nosed proposals for pragmatically improving our lives” or utopian ideals grounded in reality. Wright not only provides examples of “real utopias,” but situates them within the broader framework of an “emancipatory social science,” a task that involves understanding how capitalism can be transformed.



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The Man Who Recorded the World

From : The Wall Street Journal
Photo : http://online.wsj.com

The Catcher of Songs

Alan Lomax proved that the poorest places held some of the richest cultural treasures

As Washington geared up for war in late summer of 1940, Alan Lomax fired off a round of heated memos to his boss in the music division at the Library of Congress. As assistant in charge of the Archive of American Folk Song, the 25-year-old Lomax had ambitious plans for serving the cause, such as publishing songbooks for draftees at military camps and arranging antifascist war ballads for marching bands and pop singers, even recording conscripts with musical talent

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By David Sedaris. Little, Brown.

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By Jonathan Franzen. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

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By Stieg Larsson. Knopf.

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By Kathryn Stockett. Putnam.

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By Dennis Lehane. William Morrow.

Private Patient

From : The Guardian
Photo : www.guardianbookshop.co.uk













When notorious investigative journalist Rhoda Gradwyn booked into an exclusive clinic in Dorset for the removal of a disfiguring facial scar, she had every prospect of a successful operation by a distinguished surgeon, followed by a week's peaceful convalescence in one of Dorset's most beautiful manor houses and the beginning of a new life.


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Why The West Rules

From : Foreign Affairs
Photo : www.foreignaffairs.com




In the 1940s, Joseph Needham, a British academic, began cataloging China's achievements in science and technology in an effort to understand why they were inferior to the West's. In his 40 years of study, he found that even though .

China may have seemed behind in such achievements at the moment, it had led the world in science a millennium before. He concluded that Confucianism and Taoism made a Chinese scientific revolution less likely because they allowed for only slow, incremental innovation, rather than overnight breakthroughs. Still, he recognized that this was only a partial explanation. Religions are not fixed, and if China's loss of scientific leadership stemmed from its religious attitudes, then what could account for the emergence and persistence of those attitudes?

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Hardcover fiction

1. Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk
By David Sedaris. Little, Brown.

2. Freedom
By Jonathan Franzen. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

3. The Girl who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest
By Stieg Larsson. Knopf.

4. The Help
By Kathryn Stockett. Putnam.

5. Moonlight Mile
By Dennis Lehane. William Morrow.

What the Night Knows

From : L.A. Time
Photo : www.latimes.com

Book review: 'What the Night Knows' by Dean Koontz

The author fails to explore the possibilities of a serial killer who may have returned from the grave.

Midway through Dean Koontz's new novel, "What the Night Knows," there's a scene that epitomizes everything the book could have been. Eight-year-old Minnie and her 11-year-old sister detect a recurrent shadow in the mirror mounted on their closet door. When they take down the mirror to examine it, Minnie grabs a handful of grapes and drops them one by one on the mirror's surface. And one by one they plunge straight through, leaving behind only a slow-expanding set of spectral rings on the mirror's glass. It's a quiet, chilling moment.

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Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy

FROM : The New Republic
Photo : www.tnr.com

Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy
By Eric Metaxas
(Thomas Nelson, 591 pp., $29.99)

Early in January 1939, the precocious German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, age thirty-two, learned that all males in his age cohort had been ordered to register with the military. A dedicated opponent of the Nazi regime, he might have responded by declaring himself a conscientious objector, but there were two problems with such a course of action. The first was that Bonhoeffer, although pacifist by inclination, was not opposed to violence under all conditions; and he would later play an active role in the conspiracy led by German generals to assassinate Hitler. The second was that his fame in the Confessing Church (more on this below) might encourage other religious leaders critical of the regime to do the same, thereby bringing them under greater suspicion and undermining their efforts to prove that Nazi policies, and especially their rapidly intensifying Jew-hatred, were contrary to the teachings of Jesus Christ.

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Enigma

From : The Guardian
Photo : www.guardianbookshop.co.uk




March 1943. The war hangs in the balance, and at Bletchley Park a brilliant young codebreaker is facing a double nightmare.










The Germans have changed their U-boat Enigma code, threatening a massive Allied defeat. And as suspicion grows that there may be a spy inside Bletchley, Jericho's girlfriend, the mysterious Claire Romilly suddenly disappears.


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Voice of America

From : The Guardian
Photo : www.guardian.co.uk

Voice of America by EC Osondu – review

Helon Habila applauds a collection that examines the Nigerian immigrant experience in the US

In "Welcome to America" a family patriarch who has struck it big in Lagos builds a four-storey mansion and designates it the family house. Relatives from the village are to wake up one day, pack their bags and move to Lagos to stay in this house, where there will always be room for them. Most of them don't know each other even by sight, but they all eat from the same big bowl. This anecdote works very well as a metaphor for Caine prizewinner EC Osondu's first collection of short stories, Voice of America. There is room here for every style of storytelling, from folktale to crime tale to satire, to the very sombre and sad – and just when you think the writer has surely exhausted his bag of uproariously funny observations of street life in Lagos, or of immigrant experience in America, he unpacks more.

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West Meets East

From : World Affairs
Photo : www.worldaffairsjournal.org





The Cambridge History of the Cold War
Melvyn P. Leffler and Odd Arne Westad, eds. (New York: Cambridge UP, 2010)

Istoriia Rossii [The History of Russia], vol. 2, XX vek [The 20th Century]1939–2007
A. B. Zubov, ed. (Moscow: Astrel, 2009)


The Cold War—is it finally over? It shaped world history during the second half of the last century and its consequences are felt even now, especially in Europe and in U.S.-Russian relations, more then twenty years after it ended. For decades the causes of the Cold War have been discussed and disputed: how did it start, whose (to put it somewhat crudely) fault was it, could it have been prevented, were opportunities missed in the decades after Stalin’s death, and when and how and why did it end? As long as Soviet rule existed, Russian historians and commentators were not in doubt with regard to the answers to these questions. The fault was with the “cold warrior”—a Western (mostly American) hard-liner distrustful of Soviet peaceful intentions, probably with a vested interest in the maintenance of tensions and conflict, a hopelessly prejudiced individual, an obstacle to world peace, and quite likely a warmonger. In some Western circles there was agreement with this Soviet stereotype

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George Washington’s First War

From : Christian Science Monitor
Photo : www.csmonitor.com

George Washington’s First War: His Early Military Adventures

The father of our country was once a scrappy boy colonel.

The nascent career of George Washington is nothing to wax sentimental about. The boy colonel of the Virginia militia learned his trade on the job, slogging through battles along the Colonial frontier against the French and Indian nations. His one minor victory was marred when an Indian ally murdered a wounded French officer who had surrendered and was under Washington’s protection – an incident that would escalate the undeclared war over who controlled the Ohio territory.


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‘War and Peace’ in 24 Hours

From : The New York Times
Photo : www.nytimes.com


Andy Richardson

THINK of it as an antidote to the electronic era. For 12 continuous hours last spring, 60 students and teachers at Hamilton College in upstate New York read aloud from John Milton’s “Paradise Lost,” which spans a dozen volumes.

“Most of us became interested in reading because of being read to,” says Margaret Thickstun, a professor of English at Hamilton, who will orchestrate another “Milton Marathon” in February. She hopes to condense this one to 10 uninterrupted hours. “These readings revive the notion that poetry is not a private, silent thing you do in a room with a piece of paper,” she says, “but something you actually speak.”

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Blair has a story for Indians

From : The Hindu
Photo : www.hindu.com

Blair has a story for Indians

M. K. BHADRAKUMAR

It is by no means a confessional memoir but a brave attempt, with only patchy success, at self-justification

A JOURNEY: Tony Blair;Pub. by Hutchinson, 20, Vauxhall Bridge Road, London SWIV 2SA. œ 25

Among the many pleasures of reading an autobiography, three ought to be mentioned. It is a good way to learn history. A biography may help you rediscover someone you thought you knew well enough. Of course, it often satiates that infinite hunger within all of us for “dirt”. Tony Blair's A Journey is a mixed bag. The 700-page tome contains a lot of contemporary history. Blair ruled Britain at an extraordinary point when the Soviet Union was no more and the United States' decline was still invisible to the naked eye and the shift in the locus of power in world politics was yet to gain traction.

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Caught in the net

From : The Economist
Photo : www.economist.com

Caught in the net

Why dictators are going digital

Politics and the internet

Jan 6th 2011 | from PRINT EDITION

• 
  
• 
  

The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom. By Evgeny Morozov. PublicAffairs; 408 pages; $27.95. Published in Britain by Allen Lane as “The Net Delusion: How Not to Liberate the World”; £14.99


WHEN thousands of young Iranians took to the streets in June 2009 to protest against the apparent rigging of the presidential election, much of the coverage in the Western media focused on the protesters’ use of Twitter, a microblogging service. “This would not happen without Twitter,” declared the Wall Street Journal. Andrew Sullivan, a prominent American-based blogger, also proclaimed Twitter to be “the critical tool for organising the resistance in Iran”. The New York Times said the demonstrations pitted “thugs firing bullets” against “protesters firing tweets”.

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No Thanks for the Memories

From : New York Review of Book
Photo : www.nybooks.com


The Whites of Their Eyes: The Tea Party’s Revolution and the Battle Over American History
by Jill Lepore
Princeton University Press, 207 pp., $19.95

Luke Sharrett/The New York Times/Redux

Demonstrators at a rally against health care reform, Washington, D.C., March 16, 2010

America’s Founding Fathers have a special significance for the American public. People want to know what Thomas Jefferson would think of affirmative action, or how George Washington would regard the invasion of Iraq. No other major nation honors its historical characters in quite the way we do. The British don’t have to check in periodically with, say, either of the two William Pitts to find out what a historical figure of two centuries ago might think of David Cameron’s government in the way we seem to have to check in with Jefferson or Washington about our current policies and predicaments. Americans seem to have a special need for these authentic historical figures in the here and now.

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From : Tablet
Photo : www.tabletmag.com

Nowhere Man

The poet Joseph Brodsky, kicked out of the USSR and never fully at ease writing in English, was a man of many residences and few homes, as a new biography shows

With most writers, the passage of time helps to consolidate their achievement and fix their reputation. Fifteen years after a poet’s death would seem like ample time for this posthumous process to be completed—especially in the case of a poet as famous as Joseph Brodsky, who became internationally known in his twenties and won the Nobel Prize in 1987. Certainly there is no mystery about the standing of poets like Seamus Heaney or Derek Walcott, Brodsky’s friends, contemporaries, and fellow-laureates. Whether you enjoy reading Heaney or not, the shape of his achievement is clear; his name stands for a certain kind of writing and thinking.


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'Begin Again

From : L.A. Times
Photo : www.latimes.com

Book review: 'Begin Again: A Biography of John Cage' by Kenneth Silverman

The biography of the avant-garde composer fails to do justice to his complexities.

Alfred A. Knopf: 496 pp., $40

Type the name "John Cage" into YouTube, and you'll find several fascinating clips. First is a 1991 interview with the experimental composer, in which, above the squawks of a Manhattan street, he discusses silence and his appreciation of noise. "When I hear what we call music, it seems to me that someone is talking," Cage tells the camera, "… but when I hear traffic, the sound of traffic … I don't have the feeling that anyone is talking. I have the feeling that sound is acting, and I love the activity of sound." To catch a glimpse of this idea in action, look next at a January 1960 clip from the game show "I've Got a Secret," during which Cage performs "Water Walk," an oddly beautiful sound collage played on, among other objects, a water pitcher, an iron pipe, a sprinkling can, a bathtub and five radio.

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The first war on terror

From : Pantheon Books
Photo : www.amazon.com

The First War on Terror

What the fight against anarchism tells us about the fight against radical Islam

The World That Never Was: A True Story of Dreamers, Schemers, Anarchists, and Secret Agents, by Alex Butterworth, Pantheon Books, 482 pages, $30

In the late 19th century, as today, a terrorist cabal detonated bombs in the heart of the Western world. Judged by the number of successful attacks on politicians and royalty, that force was more directly threatening to the inner circles of power than today’s radical Islam.

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BALLISTIC MISSILE DEFENCE

From : The Hindu
Photo : www.hindu.com

In tandem, the two books identify the complex policy continuum for the Indian strategic community

LIMITED WARS IN SOUTH ASIA: Maj. Gen GD Bakshi (Retd); Centre for Land Warfare Studies

BALLISTIC MISSILE DEFENCE - Frontier of the 21st Century: Wg. Cdr Anand Sharma; Both the books are pub. by KW Publishers Pvt. Ltd., 4676/21, I Floor, Ansari Road, Daryaganj, New Delhi-110002. Rs. 780 each.

The security and ethical dilemmas that weapons of mass destruction (WMD) pose became an intractable reality after the Hiroshima holocaust of August 1945. The apocalyptic nuclear age had dawned and the advent of the inter-continental ballistic missile during the early Cold War decades completed the global trapeze of ‘terror-induced coercion' as a tool of national policy. Security became MAD — or to clarify — the foundation of global security was based on ‘mutually assured destruction.' This, in turn, was predicated on the U.S.-Soviet 1972 ABM (anti-ballistic missile) treaty, which forbade the development of credible missile defence. Asia, site of the only two nuclear explosions (Hiroshima and Nagasaki), was WMD-ized in October 1964 when China became a nuclear weapon power. Over the uneasy, intervening decades, southern Asia — the Indian subcontinent in particular — became turbulent in the nuclear domain in an opaque manner, till the May 1998 nuclear explosions which saw India, and then Pakistan, becoming states with nuclear weapons.

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Forgotten Witness to the Gulag

From : Forward
Photo : http://forward.com

Forgotten Witness to the Gulag

Yuli Margolin and His Russian Memoirs

If a writer’s message is unwelcome, it may not be heeded for many years. January 21 marks the 40th anniversary of the death of the Polish Jewish author Yuli Borisovich Margolin at age 70. Margolin — whose first name is also transliterated as Julius or Yuly, and was also known as Yehudah in Israel — should be as familiar a name as Solzhenitsyn for bearing witness to the Soviet gulag system. Yet the first-ever complete edition of Margolin’s almost 800-page-long gulag memoir in any language only appeared last November from the small Paris literary press Les éditions Le Bruit du temps.


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The Memory Chalet

From : Washington Monthly
Photo : www.washingtonmonthly.com



The Memory Chalet
by Tony Judt
Penguin Press HC, 240 pp.


Tony Judt disliked the grand title “public intellectual,” even though he embodied it to the last day of his life. Judt (pronounced “Jutt”) was a professor of European history at New York University who died of Lou Gehrig’s disease at age sixty-two in August 2010. Before his death he rose to great prominence on two fronts. First, he published in 2005 the magnificent, comprehensive Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945, a book encyclopedic in its learning yet engagingly written and argued. The pinnacle of his career, it quickly became one of the most celebrated works of history in recent years. Second, Judt contributed dozens of bracing, relentlessly clear, and frequently provocative essays to the New York Review of Books, his intellectual home. His audience was more receptive to some of his arguments than others. Judt’s harsh critiques of unrepentant communist thinkers like Eric Hobsbawn and Louis Althusser, and his championing of European-style social democracy, put Marxism firmly in its place while articulating a strong, practicable vision for the left. Yet his equally withering assessment of the Middle East crisi

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Man & Woman: An Inside Story

From : The Economist
Photo : www.economist.com

How men and women are less different than you think

The making of the sexes

Man & Woman: An Inside Story. By Donald Pfaff. Oxford University Press USA; 232 pages; $27.95 and £15.99. Buy from

THE trouble with books about the differences between men and women is that the authors are all too often partisan, or perceived to be. Any writer brave enough to take on this subject needs to be meticulous and unflaggingly sceptical in his or her approach. Rebecca Jordan-Young, a sociomedical scientist at Barnard College, pulled this off last year with “Brain Storm” (Harvard), in which she showed up the flaws in research that attributes sex differences in behaviour to prenatal exposure to hormones. Out of the rubble of the edifice she destroyed, or at least left wobbling dangerously, Donald Pfaff has constructed a far more complex structure, that more closely resembles what scientists know about this subject.

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The truth about tolerance

From : spiked
Photo : www.spiked-online.com





The truth about tolerance
Frank Furedi, author of the forthcoming On Tolerance: A Defence of Moral Independence, takes to task Tariq Ramadan, who wants to bury the Enlightenment virtue of toleration and replace it with recognition.
by Frank Furedi

Tariq Ramadan’s The Quest for Meaning is very much a ‘spirit of the age’ book. One of the most influential intellectual trends today is to seek refuge in nature, to search for meaning not in the human-made world but in the natural or biological world. This can be seen in the current fashion for evolutionary psychology, neuroscience, behavioural economics and environmentalism. Another powerful intellectual trend is what we might call a twenty-first-century version of perspectivism, which one-sidedly emphasises the intuitive and contingent aspects of human experience. And The Quest for Meaning tightly embraces both of these fashionable approaches to the world.

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HARDCOVER FICTION

1. DEAD OR ALIVE, by Tom Clancy with Grant Blackwood
2. THE CONFESSION, by John Grisham
3. CROSS FIRE, by James Patterson
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Made in America

From : Boston Review

Photo :www.bostonreview.net/

A Question of Character

Made in America: A Social History of American Culture and Character
Claude S. Fischer
University of Chicago Press, $35.00 (cloth) David M. Kennedy

On May 11, 1831, a diminutive 25-year-old Frenchman, Alexis de Tocqueville, stepped onto a New York City wharf and began his fateful encounter with America.

Over the subsequent nine months, Tocqueville and his traveling companion, Gustave de Beaumont, ostensibly on a fact-finding mission about American prisons, ranged from the cities of the eastern seaboard to the unaxed wilderness west of Detroit. They were, Tocqueville rhapsodized, “overcome with joy,” to see “a place that the torrent of European civilization had not yet reached.” Through crippling cold they descended the great valley of the Mississippi to New Orleans, crossing paths with Choctaw Indians shivering westward on the Trail of Tears. They sipped Madeira in the White House with President Andrew Jackson (“not a man of genius,” Beaumont drolly noted). Everywhere they keenly observed the American scene.

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Bush on Bush

From : The New York Times
Photo : www.nytimes.com

DECISION POINTS

By George W. Bush

Illustrated. 497 pp. Crown Publishers. $35

They call themselves, smugly, “41” and “43,” meaning the 41st and 43rd presidents of the United States. You’re supposed to prefer the father, all graciousness and handwritten little notes, over the son, who — even in memoirs written at age 64 after two terms as president — seems callow. But I would take George W. Bush’s schoolboy petulance and solipsism, which at least seem authentic and human, over George H. W.’s grandee-with-a-switchblade any day. There is something very modern, almost New Agey, and endearingly insecure, about the tone and posture the son adopts in “Decision Points.” Even as he’s bombing Baghdad back to the Stone Age, he’s very much in touch with his feelings. In college, he says, he was appalled to learn how the French Revolution betrayed its ideals

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