The blessings and burdens of being chosen The Chosen Peoples: America, Israel, and the Ordeals of Divine Election, by Todd Gitlin and Liel Leibovitz. Simon & Schuster, 2010. $26.00, 250 pp. In a speech marking the 60th anniversary of Israel’s statehood, President Bush said that Israelis are a “chosen people” who can forever count on … Read more
A history of the world’s most dangerous weapon The Twilight of the Bombs: Recent Challenges, New Dangers, and the Prospects for a World Without Nuclear Weapons, by Richard Rhodes. Knopf Doubleday, 2010. $27.95, 384 pp. With The Making of the Atom Bomb, Richard Rhodes became America’s foremost nuclear historian, winning the 1988 Pulitzer Prize, the … Read more
A candid look at a brutal war The Korean War: A History, by Bruce Cumings. Modern Library, 2010. $24.00, 320 pp. In June, as American troops struggled through the deadliest year yet in Afghanistan, the 60th anniversary of the start of the Korean War came and went with little fanfare. This might have been inevitable; … Read more
A Harvard law professor explores Gates-gate The Presumption of Guilt: The Arrest of Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Race, Class and Crime in America, by Charles Ogletree. Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. $25.00, 256 pp. One hundred and forty seven years after President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, four decades after Martin Luther King Jr. delivered … Read more
Nowhere has the clash between the Tea Party movement and the “GOP establishment” been more apparent than Arizona, where former Rep. J.D. Hayworth has been a constant thorn in McCain’s side (his suddenly shrunken left side, to be precise). For a while, it looked like McCain might get tripped up enough in his clumsy race to the right … Read more
Two sci-fi allegories provoke unjust criticism Avatar, directed by James Cameron, 20th Century Fox, 2009. District 9, directed by Neill Blomkamp, TriStar Pictures, 2009. In a nationally televised speech in October 2002, President George W. Bush argued that toppling Saddam Hussein’s regime would bolster American security and win the hearts and minds of the Iraqi … Read more
Green Zone’s conspiratorial world Nighttime. Baghdad. March 19, 2003. The city bursts into light as “Shock and Awe” sweeps across the desert. Director Paul Greengrass (United 93, The Bourne Ultimatum) begins his latest release, Green Zone, with a black screen as the sounds of air-raid warnings and the crescendo of American bombs slowly fills the … Read more
A global examination of church and state Taming the gods: religion and democracy on three continents, by Ian Buruma, Princeton University Press, 2010. $19.95, 132 pp. In his new book Taming the Gods, British-Dutch writer Ian Buruma recalls the outrage and death threats that greeted the publication of Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses. The incident … Read more
Big Brother and double-think on the peninsula The Hidden People of North Korea, by Ralph Hassig and Kongdan Oh, Rowman & Littlefield, 2009. $39.95, 296 pp. The haunting portrait of everyday life under modern dictatorship offered in The Hidden People of North Korea should be vaguely familiar to most Americans, but the level of detail … Read more
Should we heed his word? The Predictioneer’s Game: Using the Logic of Brazen Self-Interest to See and Shape the Future, by Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, Random House, 2009. $27, 248 pp. Is life a game-and nations, corporations, and individuals merely players? Bruce Bueno de Mesquita thinks so. In The Predictioneer’s Game, the applied game theorist … Read more