Washington Post Book Reviews
For You
Monday March 21, 2011
|
ODESSA: Genius and Death in a City of Dreams
Charles King
Norton
ISBN 978-0393070842
336 pages
$27.95
Reviewed by Alex Remington
Odessa has always been a study in anomalies: A multilingual port in what is now Ukraine, long dominated by Russia, it occupies the old site of a Tatar village that was conquered by a Spaniard and administrated by a Frenchman in service to Catherine the Great. During World War II, the city was largely populated by Jews and controlled by Nazi-allied Romania.
After a Holocaust-era ethnic cleansing, in which most of Odessa's 180,000 prewar Jews were either slaughtered or forced to leave, the Soviet Union retook Odessa. Soviet leaders recast it as the birthplace of revolution, the site of the mutiny of the Battleship Potemkin, as crystallized in the famous Sergei Eisenstein film, which was barely grounded in reality. By that time, according to Charles King, the author of this new portrait of Odessa, it was a denuded city, too weak to assert its real identity behind the powerful state-sanctioned myth. With the city having lost much of its historic importance as a commercial port and a gateway to the Middle East, King believes that Odessa is now mostly in the business of nostalgia.
In the West, we mainly know Odessa as the birthplace of people who left it -- mostly Jews, from the writer Isaac Babel to the Zionist Ze'ev Jabotinsky to the denizens of Brighton Beach. As the violinist Isaac Stern once pithily described the Soviet-American cultural exchange, "They send us their Jews from Odessa, and we send them our Jews from Odessa."
The original Odessa, the old-world metropolis whose economic power served to protect its unusual ethnic melange, did not last long. The particulars of the city's founding and early history, as conveyed here, are dry. King occasionally brings his story to life with famous visitors and residents, such as Alexander Pushkin and Babel, but he would have served his tale better by giving a fuller sense of the life of average Odessans.
As it is, the book comes alive only when the city is engaged in myth-making, particularly when King writes about the filming of "Battleship Potemkin," or in general suffering, as in a horrifying section on the little-known fate of the Jews. After World War II, Odessa's Jewish identity lived on in legend, but no longer in fact.
Alex Remington can be reached at bookworld(at symbol)washpost.com.
Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
|
| Comment on this Story | Printer Friendly | Share | Top |
THREE BOOKS ABOUT THE FUTURE
NA
NA
ISBN NA
NA pages
$NA
Reviewed by Stephen Lowman
Jet packs! Robot maids! Underwater cities! Where's the future we were promised? Blessedly, none of the following books about the future predicts meals in the form of a pill. That's not a future any of us wants to live in.
1. "PHYSICS OF THE FUTURE: How Science Will Shape Human Destiny and Our Daily Lives by the Year 2100," by Michio Kaku (Doubleday, $28.95). Alas, people will still be suffering from hangovers a century from now, according to physics professor Michio Kaku.
Consider his example of John, a 72-year-old bachelor who is as healthy and good-looking as a 30-year-old. He wakes up on Jan. 1, 2100, with a painful reminder of the New Year's Eve party the night before. But don't feel bad for him. In the kitchen, his robotic cook is brewing strong coffee and frying eggs just the way he likes them. At breakfast John scans the headlines (Mars colonists are running out of supplies; the zoo brought an extinct animal back to life) by putting in contact lenses that project the Internet onto his retinas. Later, he goes to work in a flying car. Many of his co-workers are 3-D holograms of real people who live elsewhere. On the weekend, he has a date with a looker named Karen. She's in her 60s but, like John, is still relatively young thanks to medical advances. Most of John's furniture is made out of programmable matter that he can dissolve and remake into something clean and trendy -- just in case Karen wants to come back to his place. But still, before the date John is pretty nervous. Hangovers evidently aren't the only things you can't escape in the future.
2. "DEEP FUTURE: The Next 100,000 Years of Life on Earth," by Curt Stager (Thomas Dunne/St. Martin's, $25.99). "In these early days of human-driven climate change, global warming is on center stage," writes Stager, a paleo-ecologist. "But that is only the foreword to an immensely long tale in which climate change will mostly come to mean global cooling." He explains the scientific models showing that our rising temperatures will eventually peak, then drop and perhaps lead to a new ice age. Stager is essentially saying that what goes up must come down -- and there will be winners and losers in the process. Happily, he thinks humans will survive.
3. "FUTURE BABBLE: Why Expert Predictions Are Next to Worthless, and You Can Do Better," by Dan Gardner (Dutton, $26.95). OK, so these first two books might be bunk. Journalist Dan Gardner doesn't single them out by name, but his basic message -- Don't believe a word of the so-called experts! -- seems to include them. He shakes his head in disbelief at experts who continually get it wrong and the rest of us who listen to them anyway. (Our credulity is "in our hardwired aversion to uncertainty," he writes.) The book is packed with examples, such as the failure of demographic forecasts and the futility of predicting oil prices. Gardner presents the results of a 20-year study that involved 284 experts.
On average, their predictions were no more accurate than random guesses. The future, he predicts, will remain uncertain.
Stephen Lowman can be reached at lowmans(at symbol)washpost.com.
Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
|
| Comment on this Story | Printer Friendly | Share | Top |
|
|
 |
| Recent Stories |
 LIBERTY'S EXILES: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World
FALLING SIDEWAYS
AN IMPROVISED LIFE: A Memoir
HISTORY OF A SUICIDE: My Sister's Unfinished Life
MR. CHARTWELL |
|
|
|
|
|
| |
