Washington Post Book Reviews
For You
Tuesday August 17, 2010
|
EVERY MAN IN THIS VILLAGE IS A LIAR: An Education In War
Megan K. Stack
Doubleday
ISBN 978-0-385-52716-3
255 pages
$26.95
Reviewed by Susie Linfield
The title of Megan K. Stack's book of dispatches from the war zones of the Muslim world is deliberately provocative. It also illustrates the bracing forthrightness of her approach -- along with its equally real shortcomings.
In the post 9/11 period, Stack, a foreign correspondent for the Los Angeles Times, was stationed in the world's most contentious lands. If there was a war, she was there -- in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Lebanon and Yemen. She stopped off, too, in Saudi Arabia and Libya, both of which she found repellent. She is clearly, refreshingly intent on conveying unsentimentalized observations about these dysfunctional countries. (The secular-religious rhetoric of martyrdom that pervades the Mideast is, she observes, "the cave art of political discourse.") Yet Stack is equally critical of the U.S. interventions under the "war on terror" rubric, and of the political repressions that characterize our presumed allies.
In a supposedly rehabilitated Libya, she finds a dictatorship both ruthless and ridiculous; the people appear "locked in the basement of an asylum" and "even the waves seemed exhausted." In Egypt, she attends an energetic Muslim Brotherhood demonstration -- far larger, her interpreter glumly notes, than anything the secular democrats could pull off -- and watches the government blatantly steal an election. Her description of our comrades in Afghanistan will offer scant comfort to American readers: "The mujahideen prowled the mountains underfed and shivering, clad in tattered tennis shoes and old sweaters. ... They didn't know how to read. ... The mujahideen mooned around, stroking one another lovingly and dreaming of their next meal." She loves living in Israel -- except for the fact that it is "rotten underneath." She is deeply, presciently suspicious of Lebanon's supposed revival and reconciliation after the assassination of former prime minister Rafik Hariri, noting that the regeneration seems based on a repression of, rather than a realistic reckoning with, the country's sectarian, murderous past. And all over the region, she observes the grotesque marginalization of women, which transforms them into non-citizens, non-actors, non-people.
Stack can be an astute observer of political complications; indeed, I wish she had paused longer to flesh them out, rather than construct her book as a series of short, staccato chapters that cater to a kind of attention-deficit disorder. In Iraq, for instance, she notices the Iraqis' delicate, convoluted sense of shame and self-hatred for having colluded in Saddam's brutal dictatorship. Her book's most moving section is an homage to a young, female Iraqi journalist named Atwar Bahjat, who passionately insisted on a democratic, nonsectarian Iraq; for this, she was assassinated by a death squad. "Her aspirations were the finest hopes of a broken country. ... She lived as a symbol of mad hope for an impossible, alternative Iraq," Stark mourns.
But when it comes to Stark's own "education in war," she comes up short. She learns two main things. One is existential: that war is "dark and dangerous, that you could survive and not survive, both at the same time." The other is political: that America's war on terror is "hollow, it was essentially nothing but a unifying myth. ... Mostly, I think, it was fear." These insights don't stretch very far, nor are they original or profound. And they are radically incomplete. For Stark must know that even if the United States withdrew all its forces from the Mideast, the vicious war within the Muslim world -- the attacks on secularists, women, democrats, dissidents, writers, teachers, mosques, movie theaters, hospitals, schools, marketplaces, Shias and Sunnis -- would continue. Forget about democracy, pluralism and human rights: This is a war that -- as Atwar Bahjat and so many others have learned -- has negated the very concept of civilian.
But the biggest flaw here is Stark's writing style, which repeatedly undermines her substance. She is addicted to ornate -- indeed, often incomprehensible -- metaphors; they are irritating, confusing and strikingly inappropriate given the soberness of her subject. What are "carbonated eyes"? How can death get "stuck in the glue of itself"? What does it mean for farms to be "convulsed with catharsis"? In the midst of the 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah, Stark comes to this: "The smell (of death) is perverted and cold, like a creeping creature of mist, clamping clammy hands over the flowering shrubs." These phrases and sentences -- and many more like them -- bespeak a terrible evasiveness; Stark is hiding behind words rather than using them to illuminate or explain. (She should have read George Orwell on the function of metaphor -- and, for that matter, should have read his less-is-more war reportage.) In the book's epilogue, she promises that she has "given up on pulling poetry out of war." But by then it is too late.
As for that title: Stark never tells us who actually made the statement about liars, which makes it difficult to assess. And her book is peopled both by those who dissemble and those who offer us unsettling truths.
Susie Linfield directs the Cultural Reporting and Criticism program at New York University. Her book "The Cruel Radiance: Photography and Political Violence" will be published this fall.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
|
| Comment on this Story | Printer Friendly | Share | Top |
DEEP BLUE HOME: An Intimate Ecology of Our Wild Ocean
DEEP BLUE HOME: An Intimate Ecology of Our Wild OceanJulia Whitty
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN 978-0618119813
246 pages
$24
FOUR FISH: The Future of the Last Wild FoodPaul Greenberg
Penguin Press
ISBN 978-1594202568
284 pages
$25.95
Reviewed by Thomas Hayden
Two-thirds of the planet's surface; depths not sounded till well into the 19th century; home to the blue whale, history's largest animal; poetic touchstone for that which is not easily crossed over: The ocean is vastness defined. And it was once thought, by everyone from Jules Verne to biologist Thomas Huxley, to be inexhaustible.
Alas, this wishful thinking has long since gone the way of free lunches, final frontiers and easy oil. Most of the fish stocks we rely on for seafood have been pushed to or beyond their ability to replenish themselves, and dilution, as the old saw had it, is no longer the solution to pollution -- from sewage to plastic debris to bubbling crude, the seas are full up.
The oceanic domain can still inspire hopes and fantasies, however, as it always has. Fittingly, Julia Whitty's "Deep Blue Home" is a dream of a book, vivid yet languorous, rich in detail, richer still in emotional impact. By anchoring her wide-ranging meditation to personal memories of a decades-distant season of ornithological research in the Gulf of California, Whitty distills the oceanic vastness into something bright, enticing and just manageable enough to be captured in a bottle. She also crystallizes the particular frustration of scientists who, while striving to understand the complex webs of marine life, have watched them torn asunder faster than they can be cataloged, let alone conserved.
In 1980, Whitty writes, when she first visited tiny Isla Rasa in the finger of inland sea that Steinbeck knew as the Sea of Cortez, 30,000 female leatherback turtles nested along Mexico's western shores. She recalls one "in the last pulse of light before darkness ... form(ing) a perfect mirror-image twin with the surface: a two-headed turtle, jellyfish tentacles streaming from the corners of her mouths, like cellophane noodles in a silver broth." But then, as Whitty writes, "everything changed." By 1996, fewer than 900 leatherbacks remained anywhere in the Central and South American Pacific, the rest done in by pollution and choking garbage, indiscriminately lethal fishing gear, coastal development and the wholesale collection of eggs.
"Deep Blue Home" can be trancelike. Whitty, an accomplished documentary filmmaker, unspools scores of vignettes of life in remote biological research camps and on film shoots throughout the world's oceans, and intersperses these with allegorical references to Hindu mythology and some of the finest scientific descriptions of sea life and ocean dynamics that this former oceanographer has ever read. But the surprise is that an author who is still young can narrate from firsthand observation the passage of the ocean from vast and inexhaustible to something still wonderful but diminished, like a penned bison or an ailing King Lear.
The truth is, we all can tell this story -- our world has changed more in the last five decades than in the previous period of human history, and it has been changed at our hands. Nor has this been for the most part because of extraordinary events such as the ongoing Gulf of Mexico catastrophe, but instead as a result of a million mundane decisions we have all made, unknowingly or uncaringly, to treat the ocean -- the planet -- as inexhaustible when it is not. Global warming. Ocean acidification. Ecosystem changes including the extirpation of large predator fish and mass die-offs of tropical corals. In the course of a single human lifespan, we have altered the ocean in ways usually seen only over geological time.
As a diver and filmmaker, Whitty examines the changing ocean from within its embrace. Paul Greenberg probes the salty depth from above, hand firmly grasping the working end of a fishing rod. An angler who has written about fish for almost as long as he has pursued them, Greenberg focuses, intently, on what he rightly calls our last truly wild food source.
The story of overfishing has often been told, though seldom this well. Greenberg considers four iconic creatures -- salmon, bass, cod and tuna -- to lay bare the cycle of discovery, exploitation and collapse that has touched or threatens practically every important food fish in the seas. He seamlessly integrates the decline of wild fish with the rise of fish-farming, noting rightly that humanity is in the process of domesticating the oceans, as we long ago tamed the land, and that eliminating all but a few primary food species is a natural consequence. In writing clearly and engagingly about the place of fish in global food markets, he manages also to convey the often-missed reality that fish are not just food, or even animals, but wildlife.
"Four Fish" and "Deep Blue Home" are as different in pacing and approach as two such twinned books could be, but they share more than a watery muse. Refreshingly, they are reminders that science and nature writing can be accurate as well as engaging, accessible and true, that a strong narrative and strong science can coexist, and that both are buoyed when they do.
Together, Whitty and Greenberg tell a profound story of loss, and also point to a few sparks of hope peeking dawn-like across the storm-tossed horizon. In both books the sea itself, with its many wondrous forms of life, is the true and very sympathetic protagonist. The stories told are grim, but the conclusion of this saga has not yet been written. As the chief agents of doom, we have a unique opportunity to help a happier ending emerge. If these two books, read in the context of the disastrous Deepwater Horizon oil spill, can't help us muster the collective will to do so, it's hard to imagine what could.
Thomas Hayden teaches environmental writing and journalism at Stanford.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
|
| Comment on this Story | Printer Friendly | Share | Top |
|
|
 |
|
| Recent Stories |
 THE LONG ROAD TO ANNAPOLIS: The Founding of the Naval Academy and The Emerging American Republic
BEING WRONG: Adventures in the Margin of Error
THE OBAMA DIARIES
THE WILD VINE: A Forgotten Grape and the Untold Story of American Wine
THE WEATHER OF THE FUTURE: Heat Wave, Extreme Storms, and Other Scenes from a Climate-Changed Planet |
|
|
|
|
|
| |
