"At The Dark End of the Street" and "Luka and the Fire of Life"

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Washington Post Book Reviews For You Tuesday November 30, 2010 AT THE DARK END OF THE STREET: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance -- A New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power Danielle L. McGuire Knopf ISBN 978-0307269065 324 pages $27.95 Reviewed by Sheri Parks In the segregated American South, a white man could rape a black woman with little fear of legal or social recourse, and black women lived in a persistent state of apprehension. Rape was used as a weapon of terror in the subjugation of black women, their families and whole communities. In "At the Dark End of the Street," Danielle L. McGuire writes that white men raped black women and girls "with alarming regularity and stunning uniformity," with some victims as young as 7. While some readers will rightly be stunned by that assertion, many African-American women will recognize a commonly acknowledged danger. As young black girls in 1960s and '70s North Carolina, my sister and I were made to speak to white men who came to our house through a locked screen door and to never, ever, let them know if we were alone. Some of our friends were not allowed to answer the door at all. Women and girls who worked as domestics were most vulnerable, and McGuire includes one woman's estimate that three-quarters of the girls who worked as domestics in her area had been raped by white men. Affluence was no protection when women were kidnapped off the street and from their own homes. Cases included civil rights workers and a college coed still in her prom dress. The crimes took on an awful sameness: abduction at gun- or knifepoint. Gang rapes and severe beatings were common. Afterward, the rapists often dumped their victims out of cars in remote areas and threatened their lives if they told. But "At the Dark End of the Street" is a story of courage. The women did tell, again and again. Many went to police before they went to the hospital and were supported by families and friends who corroborated their stories, at great risk. White control of the justice system meant that relatively few men were ever arrested and many fewer were ever convicted. McGuire reports that between 1940 and 1965, only 10 Mississippi white men were convicted of raping black women and girls. Although rape was a capital offense in many Southern states, no white man was ever executed for raping a black woman. Yet black women's resistance grew into a social movement. Years before the Montgomery bus boycott, a coalition of poor and middle-class black women raised money; formed organizations; wrote, mimeographed and distributed flyers; attended trials; and successfully boycotted the businesses of rapists. These actions created the strategies and alliances that the same women would use again later to extend their rights. In fact, the civil rights movement was a continuation of the anti-rape movement; the early college sit-ins, largely by women, came in response to sexual violence, and Rosa Parks was a central figure well before she refused to give up her seat on the bus. Black women rallied outside rape trials and faced retaliation by policemen. There are moments in this book that will make readers cheer. During one Montgomery trial, scores of black domestics arrived to support the victim. When a skittish policeman reached for his gun, one woman told him, "If you hit one of us, you'll not leave here alive." He backed down. The Achilles heel of the South has always been its concern for public image. The rapes were reported in the black press, and the cases that went to trial became matters of public record. In the 1950s, the national and international press began to pick up the stories of the rapes, trials and rallies, turning them into an international Cold War embarrassment. The Southern justice system responded with more indictments and even a few convictions, mostly of poor, uneducated men. They were the first convictions of white rapists since Reconstruction. McGuire, an assistant professor of history at Wayne State University, combines her own research and interviews with a rich store of black women's academic scholarship. She stays close to her sources, sometimes at the expense of larger trends. For example, she describes one family who sent their daughter to college to keep her out of white kitchens and away from the increased danger of rape. But the author does not note that the practice was so widespread as to be a central reason that historically many more black females graduated from college than did black males. Still, "At the Dark End of the Street" is an important step to finally facing the terrible legacies of race and gender in this country. Sheri Parks is an associate professor of American Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park, Md., and author of "Fierce Angels: The Strong Black Woman in American Life and Culture." Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group Comment on this Story | Printer Friendly | Share | Top LUKA AND THE FIRE OF LIFE Salman Rushdie Random House ISBN 978-0679463368 218 pages $25 Reviewed by Elizabeth Ward "Playful" could be Salman Rushdie's middle name, he's been called it so often. But in his second book for kids of all ages, he takes his fondness for play up a few levels with a quest fable that mimics a video game, complete with special effects. It's nonstop fun. It's about big things: love, imagination, death, life. And like many a video game, it's a tad frenetic. "Luka and the Fire of Life" has its origins in "Haroun and the Sea of Stories," the moving tale Rushdie wrote in 1989, in the dark early days of the fatwa, after his older son, then 9, asked for something more readable than "The Satanic Verses." In that book, Haroun's storyteller father, Rashid Khalifa, aka the Shah of Blah, falls silent after being cut off from the "sea of stories," so the boy faces down a flurry of dangers to reconnect him with his source of inspiration. Given Rushdie's enforced silence, it was not just a celebration of fathers and sons, but also a surprisingly exuberant plea for freedom of expression. Scroll forward two decades, and Rushdie's younger son wants a book, too. Hence "Luka." There are major continuities. Luka is Haroun's little brother -- "It's your turn for an adventure," Haroun assures him -- and, again, a son must save a father. But Rushdie's preoccupations have evolved. This time, the aging Rashid's problem is not silence, but mortality. One night, the legendary storyteller falls asleep, and no one can wake him. It's Luka who noses out the truth after he stumbles, Alice-like, across "an invisible boundary" into the World of Magic and encounters the creepy Nobodaddy -- Death, who is taking on more and more of his father's reality. Only the virtually unattainable Fire of Life can save Rashid. Well, no sweat. If there's one place Luka knows, it's the World of Magic. Not only had he grown up hearing about it from the Shah of Blah, he "possessed a wide assortment of pocket-sized alternate-reality boxes, and spent much of his spare time leaving his own world to enter the rich, colorful, musical, challenging universes inside these boxes, universes in which death was temporary (until you made too many mistakes and it became permanent) and a life was a thing you could win." Nobodaddy's realm, in short. Fire of Life, here we come! There are elements here that 12-year-olds may miss, including the strand of melancholy that tempers the narrative frenzy and the numerous allusions and groan-worthy jokes (kids might pick up on Aladdin or even Blake, but probably not A.E. Housman or Bollywood, and they certainly won't know why the Eddies in the River of Time are called Nelson, Duane and Fisher). As Rushdie sees it, though, such pleasures will keep. It's merely a matter of what level you're on. Elizabeth Ward is an editor at The Washington Post. Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group Comment on this Story | Printer Friendly | Share | Top Advertisement DeClutter FAST! How To Get Your Home In Order Almost Immediately * Does your clutter keep you from having company? * Do unannounced guests get turned away? Not anymore... Click here to bring order to your home! Recent Stories    KINGDOM UNDER GLASS: A Tale of Obsession, Adventure, and One Man's Quest to Preserve the World's Great Animals    THREE BOOKS ON PHOTOGRAPHY    PAUL SIMON: A Life    LEND ME YOUR EARS: Oxford Dictionary of Political Quotations    WHEN THEY COME FOR US, WE'LL BE GONE: The Epic Struggle to Save Soviet Jewry	Quick Clicks Free Rachael Ray 14-Piece Cookware Set 100 Recipes for Diabetics - No More Boring Meals! Click & download yours. Can Anyone Win The Lottery? They may with "The Lottery Black Book"
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"Kingdom Under Glass," more

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Washington Post Book Reviews For You Monday November 29, 2010 KINGDOM UNDER GLASS: A Tale of Obsession, Adventure, and One Man's Quest to Preserve the World's Great Animals KINGDOM UNDER GLASS: A Tale of Obsession, Adventure, and One Man's Quest to Preserve the World's Great Animals, Jay Kirk Henry Holt ISBN 978-0805092820 387 pages $27.50 THE SPECIES SEEKERS: Heroes, Fools, and the Mad Pursuit of Life on Earth, Richard Conniff Norton ISBN 978-0393068542 464 pages $26.95 Reviewed by Dennis Drabelle Until reading "Kingdom Under Glass," I didn't think it was possible to use the words "fascinating" and "taxidermy" in the same sentence (at least not with a straight face). Granted, Carl Akeley (1864-1926), the subject of "Kingdom Under Glass," was also an explorer and inventor, and this biography is spiced with accounts of his African expeditions and his offbeat marriage to a woman who came to prefer a monkey's companionship to his. But much of the book is about preserving dead animals, and fascinating it certainly is. This is thanks to gonzo narration by Jay Kirk, who has also written on travel and true crime. His prose is daring -- sometimes even a bit wild -- and he worms his way convincingly into the minds of his subjects. That both Carl Akeley and his first wife, Mickie, were odd ducks plays into Kirk's restless hands. In the book's early going, Akeley is a figure out of a Horatio Alger novel: a promising young taxidermist who is let go from Ward's Natural Science Establishment in Rochester, N.Y., after being caught sleeping on the job. But just as Akeley is about to give up and slink back to his parents' farm, his former employer rehires him. Jumbo the elephant has died after being struck by a train; his owner, P.T. Barnum, wants him preserved; and Professor Ward has belatedly recognized Ackley's exceptional artistry. Akeley re-launches his career by bringing the world's most famous pachyderm back to a semblance of life. Over the next few years he moves from job to job and town and town, and his reputation grows: His stuffed animals and birds are more lifelike than anyone else's, and soon he's in New York City, freelancing for the Museum of Natural History. There he goes through one substance after another in search of the perfect filler for his creations: sawdust and rags (tends to sag), clay (tends to rot), plaster (just right). He takes up with, lives with and finally marries Mickie, a game young woman who does not hang back when animals need to be killed or gutted. He dreams big, imagining the dioramas that will eventually make the Museum of Natural History a world-class attraction. Ever the perfectionist, he realizes that he must lead collecting expeditions to Africa and that Mickie must come along. Not only that, but when the movie camera he uses proves too cumbersome to record the vagaries of wild animals, he invents a new one; it's so handy that Robert Flaherty uses it to film the granddaddy of all documentaries, "Nanook of the North." Akeley suffered from mood swings -- which seem to have been exacerbated by a growing distaste for all the slaughtering he did -- and so did Mickie. The story of their gradual estrangement is both sad and hilarious, especially after she becomes infatuated with that monkey, J.T. Not only is she so protective that she excludes Carl from the tent she shares with J.T. in Africa, but she brings the creature back to Manhattan, where it proceeds to rip everything in their apartment to shreds, including the wallpaper. Kirk tells all this with gusto, although sometimes he reminds me of a fastball pitcher with control problems. He can craft delightfully original descriptions, such as the sight of Teddy Roosevelt (who met up with the Akeleys on safari) grinning with his "terrific biscuit box of flashing teeth." But then a few pages later, Kirk throws wild: "The honey on the table (was) entombed ... with dead bees." Sorry, but it's the bees that were entombed, not the honey. He should also fact-check more carefully. He claims that Roosevelt helped create enough national parks, forests and wildlife refuges to salt away "an entire fifth of the nation." But the United States encompasses 2.3 billion acres, of which Roosevelt was instrumental in saving about 200 million -- a prodigious amount, but less than 10 percent of the whole. Kirk's talent may need some disciplining, but there's a lot of it, and I look forward to his next book, even if it's on nothing more intrinsically exciting than taxidermy. Richard Conniff's "The Species Seekers," by contrast, is rather bland. The problem may be that in covering the scientists and explorers who roamed the world trying to understand what a species is and how various ones might be related, the author took on too much. Here are all the main players -- from Carl Linnaeus to Charles Darwin to Mary Kingsley -- each given 20 or 30 intelligent pages. But the book reads like a compendium, and it might have been wiser to zero in on four or five principals, rather than the dozens we have here. One of Conniff's mini-portraits is unforgettable, however: The pious 19th-century British naturalist Philip Henry Gosse felt so threatened by evolutionary theory that he wrote a whole, crazed book to refute it. His basic argument was that God had planted fossils to give the Earth a past it didn't really have (by the same token, Adam and Eve would have had navels). Everybody and everything, the idea seemed to be, needs a background. I think it's fair to say that under no circumstances would Gosse have let his wife room with a monkey. Dennis Drabelle can be reached at drabelled(at symbol)washpost.com He is a contributing editor of The Washington Post Book World. Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group Comment on this Story | Printer Friendly | Share | Top THREE BOOKS ON PHOTOGRAPHY NA NA ISBN NA NA pages $NA Reviewed by Stephen Loman Beginning with a survey of war images, moving on to a study of a single snapshot and finishing with a look at a few family photographs, these three new books examine photography from every angle. 1. "The Cruel Radiance: Photography and Political Violence," by Susie Linfield (Univ. of Chicago, $30). If we look at a photo of a Holocaust victim taken by a Nazi, are we degrading the dead all over again? "Rejectionists," as Linfield calls the critics, would argue that when we look at the vulnerable from our position of safety, it is akin to placing ourselves in the physical and moral position of the Nazi photographer. Linfield disagrees. In her unnerving examination of violent images (from limbless children in Sierra Leone to abused prisoners at Abu Ghraib), she explores how viewers respond to such images and reminds us of "photography's role in revealing injustice, fighting exploitation, and furthering human rights." 2. "The Boy: A Holocaust Story," by Dan Porat (Hill and Wang , $26). Porat's starting point is an iconic photo taken of a young boy raising his arms as Nazis confront him in the Warsaw Ghetto. Porat investigates the events surrounding the photo, separates truth from fiction, and tells the tragic story of five lives that intersected at that moment on a spring day in 1943. While the book is an examination of a particular photo, it's also a wide-angle reflection on "the kind of mythmaking perpetuated by photographs." 3. "Framing Innocence: A Mother's Photographs, a Prosecutor's Zeal, and a Small Town's Response," by Lynn Powell (New Press, $25.95). If you photograph your naked child, is the picture pornography? Cynthia Stewart thought she was taking pictures of her 8-year-old daughter "goofing in the bathtub." To the lab technician who developed the film, however, they looked like child porn. The author, who lived down the street from Stewart, details the shocking story of an Ohio mom who, 10 years ago, was arrested, put on trial and faced a 16-year prison sentence because of two family photos. Stephen Lowman can be reached at lowmans(at symbol)washpost.com. Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group Comment on this Story | Printer Friendly | Share | Top Recent Stories    PAUL SIMON: A Life    LEND ME YOUR EARS: Oxford Dictionary of Political Quotations    WHEN THEY COME FOR US, WE'LL BE GONE: The Epic Struggle to Save Soviet Jewry    OUR PATCHWORK NATION: The Surprising Truth About the "Real" America    TRESPASS	Quick Clicks Free Rachael Ray 14-Piece Cookware Set Stay Safe - Keep Your Family Safe: 7-Day Free Trial - Unlimited Background Checks Why pay over $90 a month for Cable or Sat.TV services? Download A TV!
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"Lend Me Your Ears," more

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Washington Post Book Reviews For You Sunday November 28, 2010 PAUL SIMON: A Life Marc Eliot Wiley ISBN NA 313 pages $30 Reviewed by Justin Moyer Were Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel lovers? No, but Marc Eliot's serviceable biography of the duo's more prolific, more successful, shorter half gets kudos for raising that question about two folk superstars who loved the sound of bickering more than the sound of silence. "Several of the songs on (the album "Bridge Over Troubled Water") explicitly point the accusatory finger of abandonment at Artie," writes Eliot, who has also published books about the Eagles and Bruce Springsteen. "To some, the finished album had a whiff of homoeroticism about it, as much of it seemed to be about the romantic breakup of a couple." But if Garfunkel spent too much time away from music dabbling in film, perhaps it was only because Simon had been trying to go solo since at least 1957, when as teenagers the pair scored the hit "Hey Schoolgirl" under the pseudonyms "Tom & Jerry." Simon, of course, got the last laugh, composing and writing the quintuple-platinum masterpiece "Graceland" (1986) not long after Garfunkel's acting career had gone from "Catch-22" to B-movies like "Bad Timing: A Sensual Obsession." Eliot is less than convincing when he criticizes "the sociopolitically correct media lions forever waiting for celebrities at the arrival gates of every politically incorrect airport" who dared question Simon's decision to write "Graceland" in apartheid South Africa. But the author does pin down the source of his subject's notorious crankiness: "Paul was, and always would be, self-conscious about his height." Maybe all it takes to sell 5 million records is a robust Napoleon complex and a tall partner. Justin Moyer can be reached at moyerj(at symbol)washpost.com. Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group Comment on this Story | Printer Friendly | Share | Top LEND ME YOUR EARS: Oxford Dictionary of Political Quotations Anthony Jay Oxford Univ ISBN 978-0199572670 446 pages $24.95 Reviewed by Steven Levingston In the aftermath of our recent apocalypse at the polls, it's handy to have a new, easy-to-browse political quotations book to remind us that, thank God, the world isn't ending: Politics has pretty much always been this way. Flip through editor Anthony Jay's "Lend Me Your Ears: Oxford Dictionary of Political Quotations," and you'll find endless comfort in words of wisdom from, say, Henry Adams, the grandson and great-grandson of U.S. presidents, who offers this heartening revelation: "Politics, as a practice, whatever its professions, has always been the systematic organizations of hatreds." Whew! That's a relief. And shouldn't we feel reassured in a special way that Mao Zedong , poster boy of the heinous, nails our national discourse right on the head? "Politics," he said, "is war without bloodshed." Let's lift our glasses to that! "Lend Me Your Ears" burbles with political bon mots from across the continents and the centuries. Though it favors the wit of the British, it is packed with American voices, too: from Spiro Agnew ("If you've seen one city slum, you've seen them all.") to Tom Wolfe ("A liberal is a conservative who's been arrested"). There's a nearly 100-page keyword index at the back followed by a somewhat less useful and far more selective subject index. In his introduction to the first edition, included in this updated, fourth one, Jay notes: "New ideas in politics are always suspect, but recourse to quotation can show that your ideas, far from being new and tender shoots, are rooted deep in the history of political society." And so we turn to the words of Samuel Johnson, English poet, critic and lexicographer, to show through an 18th-century lens why ill-fortuned politicians never seem to go away but rather write books for big advances, appear on late night talk shows and star on reality TV. As Johnson so aptly put it: "Politics are ... nothing more than means of rising in the world." Ah yes, but there's that other matter: When you fall, as so many did in our latest electoral armageddon, what then? For those who felt the boot in the backside, H.L. Mencken has words of consolation: "Nothing is so abject and pathetic as a politician who has lost his job, save only a retired stud-horse." Steven Levingston can be reached at levingstons(at symbol)washpost.com. Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group Comment on this Story | Printer Friendly | Share | Top Advertisement Congratulations...You've Won: Free* $1,000 Sam's Gift Card   * Use at any Sam's Club location   * Works the same as cash - never expires   * Get the latest Toys and Gifts   * Groceries, Furniture, Tools...   * HDTV Or A New Computer... *Participation required...Click And Claim Yours! p.s. - Also includes a Full Sam's Club 1 Year Membership. Recent Stories    WHEN THEY COME FOR US, WE'LL BE GONE: The Epic Struggle to Save Soviet Jewry    OUR PATCHWORK NATION: The Surprising Truth About the "Real" America    TRESPASS    I HOTEL    DECISION POINTS	Quick Clicks Free Rachael Ray 14-Piece Cookware Set 100 Recipes for Diabetics - No More Boring Meals! Click & download yours. Can Anyone Win The Lottery? They may with "The Lottery Black Book"
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Jonathan Swift

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New Books Newsletter For You Sunday November 28, 2010 Jonathan Swift (Nov. 30, 1667 - Oct. 19, 1745) Jonathan Swift served as an accountant early in his adulthood; however, when he grew tired of this, he became an ordained minister, and later served at St. Patrick's Cathedral in Dublin. His writing often betrays a severe dislike of humanity, visible in the final book of "Gulliver's Travels" and culminating in his satirical "A Modest Proposal." Late in his life, he suffered paralysis, followed by aphasia, and finally died in 1745. The bulk of his money was left to a psychiatric hospital after his death. Featured Book and Quizzes Featured book by Jonathan Swift: Gulliver's Travels This week's quizzes: The Wizard of Oz Famous Pseudonyms Arthurian Legends This Week's Birthdays Mark Twain -- November 30, 1835 Missouri novelist and short story writer considered by many to be the first truly great American writer. Read more about Mark Twain. Read The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain at BookDaily. Joseph Conrad -- December 3, 1857 Seaman turned novelist whose stories combine reflections on his career with political commentary. Read more about Joseph Conrad. Read The Several Lives of Joseph Conrad at BookDaily. Samuel Butler -- December 4, 1835 Satirist and literary historian known best for his book Erewhon. Read more about Samuel Butler. Advertisement Congratulations...You've Won: Free* $1,000 Sam's Gift Card   * Use at any Sam's Club location   * Works the same as cash - never expires   * Get the latest Toys and Gifts   * Groceries, Furniture, Tools...   * HDTV Or A New Computer... *Participation required...Click And Claim Yours! p.s. - Also includes a Full Sam's Club 1 Year Membership.	Quick Clicks Free Rachael Ray 14-Piece Cookware Set 100 Recipes for Diabetics - No More Boring Meals! Click & download yours. Can Anyone Win The Lottery? They may with "The Lottery Black Book"
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"When They Come for Us, We'll Be Gone" and "Our Patchwork Nation"

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Washington Post Book Reviews For You Saturday November 27, 2010 WHEN THEY COME FOR US, WE'LL BE GONE: The Epic Struggle to Save Soviet Jewry Gal Beckerman Houghton Mifflin Harcourt ISBN 978-0618573097 598 pages $30 Reviewed by Anne Applebaum For American students such as myself, 1985 was a good year to be in Leningrad. The Soviet Union was in an odd moment of transition. Some people still wouldn't talk to strangers on the street, while others were desperate to meet foreigners. One encountered Soviet pop musicians who said things like "Do you know David Bowie? I met him last year," as well as artists who gave raucous parties and intellectuals who served tea in book-lined apartments. Most eager of all, though, were the Soviet Jews. I knew a group of them, most of whom had applied to emigrate to Israel and had been turned down: They were "refuseniks," some of the would-be emigres who had by then become a cause celebre in superpower diplomacy. I went to a refusenik wedding at the Palace of Marriages and to a secret Jewish ceremony afterward, where there was a chuppah and Hebrew songs were sung. At the time, this was highly radical dissident activity. In the years that followed, the Soviet Union collapsed; the refuseniks left the U.S.S.R. and were forgotten. In "When They Come for Us, We'll Be Gone," a fresh, surprising and exceedingly well-researched book, Gal Beckerman has retold their story. Or rather, he has retold two stories: that of the Soviet Jews who made their religion and their desire to emigrate to Israel into a protest movement, and that of the American Jews who championed their cause. Alternating chapters between Russia and the United States, Beckerman shows how the two groups developed in a strange symbiosis, even while knowing very little about each other. Their relationship changed both groups profoundly. Beckerman believes, in fact, that advocacy for Soviet Jewry "taught American Jews how to lobby." Before the American Jewish community coalesced around the emigration issue, its leaders had been wary of transforming their money and numbers into political clout. The need to save Soviet Jews, he argues -- not the need to support Israel -- taught American Jews how to use the tools that are so familiar today, from "targeting local congresspeople to asserting influence on the Hill." It's an unexpected thesis, and completely convincing. Beckerman shows that the movement did not arise out of the blue but was rather the product of the events of the 1960s: Jewish participation in civil rights marches, the Adolf Eichmann war crimes trial, the Broadway debut of "Fiddler on the Roof" and the Six Day War among them. In the early days, there was Israeli input, too. A special department of the Mossad offered seed money to the first lobbying groups and even had a couple of paid agents. But the groundswell of American popular opinion, fueled by thousands of ordinary synagogues and a few fanatical activists -- among them the repugnant Meir Kahane -- eventually left the Israelis behind. The growing self-consciousness of the Soviet Jews also had its roots in this particular historical moment: the political thaw that followed Stalin's death, the growth of the Soviet human rights movement, the institutionalization of Soviet anti-Semitism. Beckerman tells the stories of several Soviet Jewish activists, more than one of whom were radicalized by the public denunciations of Israel that followed the Six Day War. Having not thought of themselves as particularly Jewish before, they were offended by the language used about Israel and Jews who had, to the delight of many, successfully repelled the Soviet-backed Arab states once again. Over time, both groups taught themselves to help each other. Like the rest of the dissident movement, activist Soviet Jews learned how to document the repression used against them and to get their reports out of the country. American Jews learned, in turn, how to beam these facts back into the U.S.S.R. on Radio Liberty, as well as how to present them to Congress, the news media and the White House. For years they pounded away at the advocates of realpolitik -- Nixon and Kissinger among them -- who wanted U.S.-Soviet relations to focus on arms and trade, not human rights. In 1974, they won. That was the year that saw the passage of the Jackson-Vanik amendment, legislation that linked Soviet trade deals to Jewish emigration. Sponsored by Sen. Henry "Scoop" Jackson, a non-Jewish politician who had made this issue his own, it forced the White House to establish links between human rights violations and wider diplomatic issues. After the amendment passed, U.S.-Soviet relations were never the same. Both Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan embraced human rights debates as a central part of the superpower relationship, something no previous presidents had done. After the collapse of the U.S.S.R. in 1991, the movement disappeared, a happy victim of its own success. In the subsequent decade, some 1 million Jews emigrated from the Soviet Union to Israel. Beckerman wants to ensure that the story of this epic struggle isn't forgotten, and I hope that, with this excellent book, he succeeds. Anne Applebaum is a columnist for The Washington Post. Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group Comment on this Story | Printer Friendly | Share | Top OUR PATCHWORK NATION: The Surprising Truth About the "Real" America Dante Chinni and James Gimpel Gotham ISBN 978-1592405732 322 pages $26 Reviewed by Alec MacGillis We Americans take pride in our varied nation, but also seem to take inordinate pleasure in carving it up. Every election, we watch as the cable suits slice and dice the country on their digital maps. And every few years bring another book promising to chart the country's divisions by splitting it into categories more telling than the 50 states. Former Washington Post writer Joel Garreau offered his "Nine Nations of North America" in 1981; two decades later came Richard Florida with "The Rise of the Creative Class," followed by Bill Bishop's "The Big Sort," which sought to explain why so many of us are clustering in enclaves of the like-minded. The latest aspiring Linnaeuses are Dante Chinni, a journalist, and James Gimpel, a University of Maryland government professor, who use socioeconomic data to break the country's 3,141 counties into 12 categories. Unlike Garreau's categories, which consisted of broad regional blocs, Chinni and Gimpel's kin communities are scattered across the map: boom towns, evangelical epicenters, military bastions, service worker centers, campus and careers, immigration nation, minority central, tractor community, Mormon outposts, emptying nests, industrial metropolises and monied burbs. The result falls short of "revolutionary," as the publisher's blurb has it, but is nonetheless a useful entry in the genre. The country is a more complicated place than the view from Washington, New York or Hollywood holds, and there's value in every effort to remind readers of that. The authors are motivated by their frustration with the oversimplified red state/blue state construct: "We hate that map. In so many ways, it represents a lie." This is something of a straw man: The red/blue concept took root because, for several cycles, the electoral-college map broke down in strikingly consistent ways, before the sharp pendulum swings of 2008 and 2010. And even glib pundits acknowledge differences between, say, Chicago and downstate Illinois or Northern and Southern Virginia. But Chinni and Gimpel's typology still highlights nuances too often overlooked. For instance, they are insightful in differentiating between two types of conservative rural areas: the Great Plains, where traditional Protestantism predominates and small-government sentiment does not preclude local civic investment; and the Bible Belt running from Appalachia across the upper South to Texas, where evangelical Christianity elevates church and family above all else. Some of the authors' categorizations are curious. Their "emptying nests" lump together Florida retirement towns and graying Upper Midwest communities. Their "service workers centers" are defined as tourism-dependent places with little historic economic base of their own -- say, coastal communities in Oregon or Maryland's Eastern Shore -- but they also count among them a huge swath of mining and manufacturing towns in the Rust Belt and Appalachia that have little in common with vacation getaways. The authors make some odd choices to represent their types: Their model "monied burb" is the sui generis atomic-research hub of Los Alamos, N.M. And using counties as their organizing unit gives the endeavor a rural bias: "Mormon outposts," with only 1.7 million residents, get their own category, while disparate big cities are crowded into the "industrial metropolis" group -- everywhere from Buffalo to Los Angeles to Jacksonville. But such quibbles can be offered against any list. More problematic is Chinni and Gimpel's attempt to read meaning into their map. Their reporting, like their prose, comes across as a bit slapdash -- they rely heavily on local Chamber of Commerce types and make some factual mistakes, such as placing the AIG bailout before the September 2008 financial collapse and describing Tim Geithner as a "Wall Street man" (he's a career civil servant). Their political analysis of the map based on the 2008 election is somewhat dated in light of the 2010 results, a forgivable flaw in this volatile era. But even in the context of 2008, some of the analysis is off the mark. In describing wealthy suburbs as a pure swing-vote area, the authors understate their steady shift to the Democratic column over the past two decades, which even this month's election did not fully reverse. They discount the notion of a red-blue religious divide by citing high rates of religious participation in big cities, without addressing the fact that much of this can be attributed to churchgoing racial minorities. They gloss over the racial factor in John McCain's strong showing in "evangelical epicenters" (where McCain, even in defeat, outperformed George W. Bush's 2004 tally). And they refer to Orange County, Calif., as a conservative bastion without noting the shift underway there: The increasingly diverse county voted 48 percent for Obama. The authors' analysis is closer to the mark on regional economics, with acute predictions about how the 2009 stimulus package and the recession generally are affecting their various areas. They venture closest to lasting insight when they suggest that economic policies should be tailored more to the different community types -- say, by targeting mortgage-assistance and unemployment relief more narrowly at the hardest-hit areas. This runs counter to the argument put forward by Richard Florida and others that policies should focus on people, not places, even if it means leaving certain parts of the country further behind. But Chinni and Gimpel stop short of engaging fully on this point. That debate may have to wait for the next geographer seeking to make sense of this fractured national landscape of ours. Alec MacGillis covers domestic policy for The Washington Post. His e-mail address is macgillisa(at symbol)washpost.com. Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group Comment on this Story | Printer Friendly | Share | Top Recent Stories    TRESPASS    I HOTEL    DECISION POINTS    I REMEMBER NOTHING: And Other Reflections    THE FALSE FRIEND	Quick Clicks Dice, Chop & Mince in Seconds - Quick Chop Free KitchenAid Appliance Set In Your Choice of Colors Discover Why the Every Other Day Diet's Weird Tips are Changing Lives!
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"Trespass" and "I Hotel"

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Washington Post Book Reviews For You Friday November 26, 2010 TRESPASS Rose Tremain Norton ISBN 978 0 393 07956 2 253 pages $24.95 Reviewed by Jane Smiley, the author, most recently, of "Private Life" The ambitious and productive English novelist Rose Tremain sometimes writes about music (most notably in her 1999 Whitbread Award winner, "Music and Silence"), and, in fact, she reminds me of a classical composer in both her meticulousness and her scope. When I read a Tremain novel, whether it's set in Denmark, New Zealand, England or France, whether it's set in the present day or the 17th century, I simply do not disbelieve her details. Her research is so seamlessly woven into both the plot and the psychology of the story that I am convinced that, yes, this is the way it must have been, or must be. Though somewhat better known for historical novels (such as "Restoration") than contemporary ones, Tremain won the Orange Broadband prize for her last work, "The Road Home," an upbeat tale of an Eastern European job-seeker who travels to England on a bus once the lumber mill where he has been working in his own country is shut down. As usual, "The Road Home" is nearly a guide to its milieu, and one of its pleasures is Tremain's witty portrait of the United Kingdom as seen through the often uncomprehending eyes of Lev, her protagonist. Lev's tale has a happy ending -- he takes what he learns in England back to his country and builds something hopeful there. Maybe "Trespass," also a contemporary work, ends happily, too, but that would depend on your definition of happy. For "Trespass" is a Gothic novel, dark and eerie, set in the South of France -- not the sunny south around Nice, but the dour and secretive district of the Cevennes, mountainous and wild. "Fire and flood could come (and often did come) to sweep everything away," she writes. "But still the rain fell and the wind blew." The mood is established in the first chapter, through the eyes of a schoolgirl from Paris who cannot comprehend why her parents would trade the 9th Arrondissement of Paris for this. The region is beset by the end of agriculture, including such specialties as silkworm farming. Even vine-growing has become an iffy proposition, and this has resulted in the sale of many of the old farmhouses to tourists from abroad. "Trespass" is a less expansive novel than "The Road Home," a string quartet rather than a symphony, but it excels in mood. After reading this novel, you will not be scouring the Web for your house in France. It can't really be said that "Trespass" has a protagonist, but it does have several compelling and vividly drawn characters. Veronica Verey, an Englishwoman who has settled in the area with her lesbian lover, Kitty, is writing a book titled "Gardening Without Rain." Veronica's brother, Anthony, a famous and wealthy antiques dealer from London whose career is collapsing, comes for a visit, and by the way disdains Kitty's attempts at watercolor. On the other side, a secretive French farmer, Aramon, happens to have inherited the lovely farmhouse that he and his sister, Audrun, grew up in. Audrun has built herself an ugly modern shack nearby -- close enough to wreck the view, in the opinion of the fastidious Englishman. The ensuing revelations move forward and backward. They are remarkable not so much in themselves as in how deliberately, carefully and suspensefully Tremain contemplates them. At one point, Aramon goes to the local graveyard ("almost full up") to confide in his father. He discovers that "the dead never responded to any living plea. They could, it seemed, arrange a confidential hour, but then when you whispered your longings to them and asked them to help you, they fell back to being inert and useless: just brittle branches, bare twigs, dust." All of Tremain's characters are in late middle age; that they know they are coming to the end of their aspirations and, indeed, of their lives, presents them with dramatic dilemmas, but it does not mean that they have found either wisdom or peace. The sinister mood of "Trespass" is considerably different from the social realist one of "The Road Home," showing once again that Tremain is as ambitious as her better known male compatriots. She seems ready to try any form, any style, even any worldview, but she is more controlled and more subtle than they are, a Haydn rather than a Beethoven. She disappears into the work, not readily revealing herself, except through her insights into characters, events and settings, and through her subtle wit (every time Anthony notices a beautiful object, he reflexively estimates its market value). Her happy ending is a realistic one for older characters -- a correcting of accounts, a modicum of mercy. With luck, "Trespass" will entice American readers to experience the riches and wisdom of Rose Tremain's large and varied body of work. She is a maestro. Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group Comment on this Story | Printer Friendly | Share | Top I HOTEL Karen Tei Yamashita Coffee House ISBN 978 156689 2391 612 pages $19.95 Reviewed by Marcela Valdes, who recently received the Roger Shattuck Prize for Criticism from the Center for Fiction The building at the center of Karen Tei Yamashita's colossal new work of fiction, "I Hotel," is a creaky hotel that once stood on the edge of Chinatown in San Francisco. Built after the great quake that nearly destroyed the city in 1906, it had rusting plumbing, dangerous wiring and rats the size of cats in the basement. But for the aging workers and young radicals who found shelter within its deteriorating walls, the International Hotel was both "a fortress and a beacon." For Yamashita it is also the girder in a tremendous feat of creative engineering, because "I Hotel" is no ordinary work of fiction. As original as it is political, as hilarious as it is heartbreaking, "I Hotel" is the result of a decade of research and writing that included more than 150 personal interviews. It's also a finalist for this year's National Book Award in fiction, which will be announced on Nov. 17. Whether or not "I Hotel" wins the prize, it will be dog-eared and underlined and assigned to college reading lists for generations. Oddly enough, the novel began with a request from Wisconsin. Provoked by a questionnaire for Asian American writers that she received from a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Yamashita decided to write a book about the Asian American movement in California during the 1960s and '70s, of which she herself had been a part. Diving into archives and tracking down first-person participants, Yamashita put as much fact-collecting into her "Yellow Power" research as any historian. When it came to dramatizing her facts, however, Yamashita may well have channeled I.M. Pei. "I Hotel's" table of contents includes a series of drawings that lay out its narrative architecture: 10 linked novellas, each exploring a different narrative technique (pastiche, social realism, cinema verite, etc.) and each focusing on three different main characters. (Yes, Hollywood, that makes for 30 star roles!) One novella presents the story of a Japanese American criminology professor through a series of FBI-like surveillance reports. Another juxtaposes the marriage of two Third World Liberation Front activists against Ferdinand Marcos' declaration of martial law in the Philippines. My favorite novella features a roast pig contest directed by a Filipino migrant-worker-turned-chef with a taste for tall tales. All the novellas, in turn, are cantilevered off a larger story about how the International Hotel inspired and protected its inhabitants. The radical intellectuals of the Asian Community Center, the veterans of the International Hotel Tenants Association, the artists of the Kearny Street Workshop and the Maoists of the Chinese Progressive Association: All of them found work space, think space, love space in the crumbling hotel. And all of them fought fiercely against the developers who wanted it demolished. The term "Asian American" blurs together wildly different linguistic and religious cultures. As one narrator says, "Maybe we all look alike, and maybe the laws lump us all together so we got to stick together, even though we're really different and can't understand each other and our folks back in the old countries hated each other's guts." "I Hotel" resists this lumping. Its wild narrative architecture springs from a need to delineate separate Chinese, Japanese and Filipino histories, as well as separate aesthetic, political and intellectual positions. It's as if Yamashita wanted to capture the diversity of an entire cultural ecosystem, displaying each distinct species -- idealistic gay Chinese poet, wisecracking Filipino Marxist, Japanese Black Panther strategist -- in all its particular glory, and its particular pain. "I Hotel" may be a political book, but it's no ideological tract. Yamashita obviously admires the fervor and idealism of the activists in her novel, whether they're demanding more Third World professors at U.C. Berkeley or making charcoal drawings in a Japanese internment camp. But her activists are often as problematic as they are inspiring. Chen, a dashing professor of Chinese literature, for example, teaches his proteges about Mao's cultural revolution but neglects to mention that "everything that Chen loved about art and literature had to be destroyed or changed" to fit the revolutionary ideal. Other radicals commit greater and lesser crimes: stealing cars, abusing women, stockpiling guns, sabotaging colleagues they consider too capitalist. Even the most generous characters, like Ria Ishii, who organizes a garment workers' collective in 1973, are forced to confront the limitations of their Marxist aspirations. "I know what you think," one of the old garment workers tells Ria, "but I am not the revolution." "Yes, you are," Ria replies. The older woman shakes her head. And three decades later we know she's right. Such scenes of intellectual and physical humbling come faster as "I Hotel" marches through the 1970s. Collectives fall apart. Important battles are lost. Protest chants ("The people united will never be defeated!") begin to sound more and more like wishful thinking. The disappointments might have been overwhelming if it weren't for the zing of Yamashita's prose, which is full of waggish jokes and saucy mash-ups. The sliest of them may be a series of line drawings spoofing the long-standing rivalry between the playwright Frank Chin and the novelist Maxine Hong Kingston. In the end, the way "I Hotel" accounts for the Asian American movement is both sweet and sour. And for all the losses Yamashita records, there are, we know, great achievements as well. High among them is this beautiful book. Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group Comment on this Story | Printer Friendly | Share | Top Advertisement Get Paid To Test WebSites - Immediate Help Needed Would you be interested in earning $25-50/hour? Major companies are looking for home webesite testers right now. All you need is you internet connection and computer. No experience is needed. Click to see samples opportunities. In fact, testers are in such need right now that you can get a $20 SIGNUP bonus right now. You'll get a free newsletter and you'll have access to hundreds of job offers at companies like Microsoft™, Google™ or Yahoo™. Get $5-$20 for looking at websites and giving your opinion. Go Here now for details. Recent Stories    DECISION POINTS    I REMEMBER NOTHING: And Other Reflections    THE FALSE FRIEND    WORLD AND TOWN    THREE BOOKS ON RELIGION	Quick Clicks Bark Off! Stop your dog from barking anytime, anywhere with this UltraSonic Training Aid! 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