book reviews
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Stranger Than Fiction Review of Xiaoda Xiao's novel "The Cave Man." This work echoes the absurdity of the unseen, powerful bureaucracy found in Franz Kafka's "The Trial" and the feelings of helpless alienation to be found in "The Metamorphosis", except the agonies of these tales are not played out in Prague and what is now the Czech Republic; rather, the miseries unfold in Shanghai and along Chinese frontiers. |
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Combat "War" would be more honest if it were titled, Combat. Junger, who journeyed to Afghanistan five times between 2007-08 reports on fighting in the wickedly hostile Korengal Valley, “the Afghanistan of Afghanistan.” The scenes are harrowing. Thrilling, even. "War", as I reported at PEN World Voices Festival recently, where Junger anchored a panel on war-reporting, makes for good writing. There is, as Junger said during the panel discussion, something appealing about war that attracts the male psyche. Junger, too, was drawn to Afghanistan, for some reason. Some, after all, consider war the ultimate test of “manhood.” |
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Learning from Quagmire? It is peculiar that a book on the lessons to be gleaned from our foreign policy misadventure in Iraq was published while the conflict still raged. Even now the fighting and dying continues, albeit on a lesser scale. The Iraq War is "the subject of volumes of instant history," notes Arthur Schlesinger Jr. What sets "Lessons from Iraq" (Pemberton and Hartung, eds) apart from contemporaneous Iraq War books, however, is its attempt not at commentary on the fiasco, but its intention to help avoid getting into this mess ... again. |