Volume 55, Number 9 · May
29, 2008
Iraq:
Will We Ever Get Out?
By Thomas Powers
There is a working
assumption among the American people that a new president enters the White House
free of responsibility for the errors of the past, free to set a new course in
any program or policy, and therefore free—at the very least in constitutional
theory, and perhaps even really and truly free—to call off a war begun by a
predecessor. No one would expect something so dramatic on the first day of a new
administration but it remains a fact that the president is the commander in
chief of the armed forces, and the power that allowed one president to invade
Iraq would allow another to bring the troops home.
Thunder
from Tibet
By Robert Barnett
Every so often, between the
time a book leaves its publisher and the time it reaches its readers, events
occur that change the ways it can be read. Such is the case with Pico Iyer's
account of the fourteenth Dalai Lama, the exiled leader of Tibet. The eruption
of major protests in March in the former mountain kingdom has rendered Iyer's
gentle study of spirituality in the global age one that is less likely now to be
seen as an inquiring portrait of a major thinker of our times than to be scanned
for any sign of political prescience or treasured for the recollection of an
innocence since lost. Few predicted the intensity of recent events inside Tibet,
nor can anyone now be certain of their outcome.
The
Rise of the Muslim Terrorists
By Malise Ruthven
What are
the forces that drive young suicide bombers to commit mass murder? The question
is addressed from different perspectives in nine books under review.
Giddy
& Malevolent
By Francine Prose
With their intense,
and intensely mixed, sympathies for the men and women who haunted the pubs and
walked the streets of London's tawdrier districts just before, during, and after
World War II, Patrick Hamilton's novels are dark tunnels of misery, loneliness,
deceit, and sexual obsession, illuminated by scenes so funny that it takes a
while to register the sheer awfulness of what we have just read.
Women
Artists Win!
By Ingrid D. Rowland
On Bathers, Bodies,
Beauty: The Visceral Eye by Linda Nochlin and WACK! Art and the Feminist
Revolution, an exhibition at the P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center.
Churchill
and His Myths
By Geoffrey Wheatcroft
On Blood, Toil,
Tears and Sweat: The Dire Warning by John Lukacs and three other books about
Winston Churchill.
How
to Cover an Election
By Frank Rich
When, in the summer of
1968, Norman Mailer covered the Republican and Democratic conventions on
assignment for Harper's magazine, he was forty-five, an aging rebel
looking for a new cause. He had started to drift restlessly from his
single-minded pursuit of the Great American Novel into filmmaking and
journalism, two callings that were also in the throes of seismic generational
change.
Plus: Joseph Lelyveld on V.S. Naipaul, Larry McMurtry on the
Comanches, Joyce Carol Oates on boxing, poems by Robin Robertson and Brad
Leithauser, and more.
Table
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