Archive for April, 2008
James Howard Kunstler on Colbert Report
World Made by Hand, by James Howard Kunstler
9780871139788 | $26.50 cl | reprinting
Atlantic Monthly Press / Publishers Group Canada (Raincoast)
James Howard Kunstler, author of World Made By Hand, will be on The Colbert Report this Thursday, May 1st.
Kunstler has received a enormous amount of attention for World Made by Hand from newspaper reviews, radio interviews and the blogosphere. Here is just a bit of what the reviewers are saying:
“The verisimilitude of Kunstler’s world leads me to think the future is Union Grove. Thirty years from now, it will be interesting to see if that little town seems excessively sad, richly luxurious or spot on. But for now, I’m hedging my bets. Where I live, one block east of ground zero, I’ve started keeping a compost bin and am thinking about adding a micro wind generator. Two blocks south, the damaged former Deutsche Bank building comes down floor by floor. To the north, the Freedom Tower has just emerged aboveground and may one day be full of investment bankers. Recently, though, I’ve started looking at that plot through Kunstler’s eyes. It gets good sunlight, and it occurs to me it would make a hell of a bean field.” —Paul Greenberg, The New York Times Book Review
“What’s after Armageddon? No government, no laws, no infrastructure, no oil, no industry….and sometimes a sense of relief. In James Howard Kunstler’s richly imagined World Made by Hand, the bone-weary denizens of Union Grove (with its echo of Our Town’s Grover’s Corners) cope with everything from mercenary thugs to religious extremists, yet manage to plant a few seeds of human decency that bear fruit.” —Cathleen Medwick, O: Oprah’s Magazine
Add comment April 30, 2008
A Splendid Exchange in the NY Times
A Splendid Exchange, by William Bernstein
978-0-87113-979-5 | $33.00 hc | in stock
Atlantic Monthly Press / Publishers Group Canada (Raincoast)
The New York Times will review William Bernstein’s A Splendid Exchange: How Trade Shaped the World on April 30:
Silk, Spices, Gold and Destiny: Global History Is Part of the Bargain
In 2006 the world’s countries exported $11.8 trillion in goods and services, far above the gross domestic product of any single country except the United States, which itself exported over $1 trillion worth. World trade has nearly doubled in less than a decade, and its increase since World War II is simply staggering.
The world is knit together as never before with a cat’s cradle of trade, which has already had immense consequences and will have many more. But while global trade has been much in the news lately, especially during this election year, it has an extremely long history. As William J. Bernstein makes clear in his entertaining and greatly enlightening book “A Splendid Exchange,” it has been a major force in driving the whole history of humankind.
Adam Smith explained in “The Wealth of Nations” that humans, and humans alone, are endowed with “a propensity to truck, barter and exchange one thing for another.” Equally important, skills and talents are not evenly distributed across the human landscape, nor are the world’s resources equally distributed across the natural one. Since humans also have a propensity to bash in one another’s skulls, we have always traded for what we wanted or raided for it. Mr. Bernstein’s book is a history of the first option, a refreshing view, to say the least.
Ancient Mesopotamia was richly endowed with fertile soils and water from the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, but it lacked stone and wood for building, and metals like copper for tools and weapons. The Sumerians, however, had surplus food to trade, so they could bargain for stone from near the headwaters of the rivers, wood from what is now Lebanon and metal from Sinai, Cyprus and elsewhere.
The scope of ancient trade was immense. A single Bronze Age shipwreck around 1350 B.C. near Bodrum, a Turkish coastal town, yielded no less than 10 tons of copper and a ton of tin ingots along with other merchandise like ivory. (The ideal ratio of copper to tin for making bronze is 10 to 1.)
By Roman times vast armadas ferried Egyptian grain, Greek wine, Spanish copper and silver, and a hundred other commodities around the Mediterranean. India has yielded rich troves of Roman coins that reached that subcontinent to pay for spices the Romans coveted, especially pepper. Chinese silk — literally worth its weight in gold — traveled through the heart of Asia on the Silk Road to reach markets in the West.
As the West collapsed at the end of antiquity, so did its long-distance trade. Few Roman coins dating later than A.D. 180 are found in India, as the Roman economy began to run out of gold and silver. The Arabs came to dominate the major trade routes of the Indian Ocean after the rise of Islam. And as Western Europe revived economically, a lively trade developed between rising powers in Venice and the Middle East. (Venice supplied slaves from the Crimea and Caucasus in exchange for spices and sugar.)
When the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople slammed shut the sea route to the Crimea, Europe began seeking other routes to reach the resources of the East and eliminate the middleman. Columbus sailed west in 1492 and stumbled onto the New World. Vasco da Gama reached India in 1498, having rounded the southern tip of Africa. The modern world began, thanks to trade.
The history of global trade is so long and so vast that Mr. Bernstein could have easily produced a toe-breaker of a book. Happily he has not. By treating many aspects thematically rather than strictly chronologically, he shows in fewer than 400 pages of readable type how people and nations have faced the same problems over and over and often solved them the same way.
The poor soil and scant rain of ancient Greece, for instance, meant that the terrain’s ability to grow grain was limited, but grape vines and olive trees grew in abundance. To export its wine and olive oil, Athens developed a pottery industry to supply the jars in which those products were transported. As Greek trade, and colonies, flourished across the length and breadth of the Mediterranean and the Black Sea, naval power was needed to suppress piracy. To control choke points like the Dardanelles and Bosporus, which led to the rich grain lands of what is now Ukraine, the Athenian empire developed.
This succession of trade, colonies, naval power and empire repeated itself with the Venetians and Genoese, the Portuguese, the Dutch and the British. Even the strategic bottlenecks have stayed the same: Suez; the Strait of Hormuz leading to the Persian Gulf; the Strait of Malacca leading to East Asia; the Bosporus and Dardanelles. Only now, instead of slaves and spices flowing through them, it is oil.
Mr. Bernstein is a fine writer and knows how to tell a great story well. And he has many in this book, from Francis Drake’s voyage around the world (which repaid its backers, including Queen Elizabeth I, £50 for every one invested) to the Black Death that remorselessly followed the trade routes as it worked its devastating way through Europe and the Middle East. But he never loses sight of his overall goal: to show how trade shaped the world in the past and will shape the world in the future, whether we like it or not.
“A Splendid Exchange” is a splendid book.
Add comment April 30, 2008
Mark Bowden’s The Best Game Ever gets entire cover of Sports Illustrated
The Best Game Ever, by Mark Bowden
978-0-87113-988-7 | $24.95 hc | in stock
Grove Atlantic / Publishers Group Canada (Raincoast)
Grove Press knew Sports Illustrated would excerpt this title sometime in the spring, but SI decided to make it the cover story. This is huge: Sports Illustrated has a circulation of over 3 million and their readers are the perfect audience for this book.
For football fans this is a major book. Also, Mark Bowden’s Black Hawk Down sold amazingly well so you will already have a strong track record for this author. Plus there seems to be a lot of football history interest right now, with that new movie starring George Clooney and Renee Zellweger (Leatherheads).
Add comment April 28, 2008
Michael Eric Dyson in Time Magazine
April 4, 1968, by Michael Eric Dyson
9780465002122 | $26.95 hc | in stock
Basic Civitas Books / Publishers Group Canada (Raincoast)
Michael Eric Dyson, after an fantastic appearance in Toronto, is ramping up publicity in the US again. The April 25th issue of Time will feature an article by Dyson on black leadership and will include mention of the book.
Understanding Black Patriotism
Mainstream America has shown little understanding lately of the patriotism that a lot of black people practice. Black love of country is often far more robust and complicated than the lapel-pin nationalism some citizens swear by. Barack Obama hinted at this when he declared in Montana a few weeks ago, “I love this country not because it’s perfect but because we’ve always been able to move it closer to perfection. Because through revolution and slavery … generations of Americans have shown their love of country by struggling and sacrificing and risking their lives to bring us that much closer to our founding promise.”
That’s a far cry from the “My country, right or wrong” credo, which confuses blind boosterism with a more authentic, if sometimes questioning, loyalty. At their best, black folk offer critical patriotism, an exacting devotion that carries on a lover’s quarrel with America while they shed blood in its defense.
It is easy to see why the words of black critics and leaders, taken out of context, can be read as cynical renunciations of country. Abolitionist and runaway slave Frederick Douglass gave a famous oration on the meaning of Independence Day, asking “What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July? I answer, a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim.” But instead of joining the chorus of black voices swelling with nostalgia to return to their African roots, Douglass stayed put. Poet Langston Hughes grieved in verse that “(America never was America to me) … (There’s never been equality for me,/ Nor freedom in this ‘homeland of the free’).” But his lament is couched in a poem whose title, like its author, yearns for acceptance: Let America Be America Again.
Even Martin Luther King Jr. was branded a traitor to his country because he opposed the war in Vietnam. When King announced his opposition in 1967, journalist Kenneth Crawford attacked him for his “demagoguery,” while black writer Carl Rowan bitterly concluded that King’s speech had created “the impression that the Negro is disloyal.” Black dissent over war has historically brought charges of disloyalty despite the eagerness among blacks to defend on foreign soil a democracy they couldn’t enjoy back home. Since the time of slavery, blacks have actively defended the U.S. in every war it has waged, from the Civil War down to the war on terrorism, a loyalty to the Federal Government conceived by black leaders as a critical force in gaining freedom. W.E.B. DuBois argued in World War I that blacks should “forget our special grievances and close our ranks … with our white fellow citizens.” Some 380,000 soldiers answered the call even as they failed to reap the benefits of their sacrifice when they came home.
Even the angry comments of Jeremiah Wright have to be read as the bitter complaint of a spurned lover. Like millions of other blacks, Wright was willing to serve the country while suffering rejection. He surrendered his student deferment in 1961, voluntarily joined the Marines and, after a two-year stint, volunteered to become a Navy corpsman. He excelled and became valedictorian, later a cardiopulmonary technician and eventually a member of the President’s medical team. Wright cared for Lyndon B. Johnson after his 1966 surgery, earning three White House letters of commendation.
Dick Cheney, born in the same year as Wright, received five deferments–four while an undergraduate or graduate student and one as a prospective father. Both Bill Clinton and George W. Bush used their student deferments to remain in college until 1968. Clinton did not serve, and Bush was on active duty in the National Guard for two years. If time in uniform is any measure, Wright, much more than Cheney, Clinton or Bush, embodies Obama’s ideal of “Americans [who] have shown their love of country by struggling and sacrificing and risking their lives to bring us that much closer to our founding promise.”
Wright’s critics have confused nationalism with patriotism. Nationalism is the uncritical support of one’s country regardless of its moral or political bearing. Patriotism is the affirmation of one’s country in light of its best values, including the attempt to correct it when it’s in error. Wright’s words are the tough love of a war-tested patriot speaking his mind–one of the great virtues of our democracy. The most patriotic thing his nation can do now is extend to him the same right for which he was willing to die.
Dyson is a sociology professor at Georgetown University and author of April 4, 1968: Martin Luther King Jr.’s Death and How It Changed America
Add comment April 28, 2008
Anne Enright wins Irish Novel of the Year
The Gathering, by Anne Enright
9780802170392 | $14.95 pb | in stock
Black Cat / Publishers Group Canada (Raincoast)
Anne Enright’s The Gathering was just announced the winner of Hughes & Hughes Irish Novel of the Year at the Irish Book Awards.
The Hughes & Hughes Irish Novel of the Year is both the senior award and the foundation stone of the new Irish Book Awards. Inaugurated in 2000, it counts among it’s distinguished Irish winners the late John McGaherm, Colum McCann, Ronan Bennett, and John Banville. The worthy 2007 winner was Patrick McCabe for Winterwood.
Add comment April 28, 2008
Richard Lewis on The View, Letterman
The Other Great Depression, by Richard Lewis
9781586486044 | $16.00 pb | in stock
PublicAffairs / Publishers Group Canada (Raincoast)
Richard Lewis was just on The View (April 25) and Late Night with David Letterman (April 28) promoting his memoir.
1 comment April 28, 2008
The Man Who Pushed America to War in the NY Times
The Man Who Pushed America to War, by Aram Roston
9781568583532 | $29.50 hc | in stock
Nation Books / Publishers Group Canada (Raincoast)
The NYTBR reviewed Aram Roston’s new book on April 27th, calling it “a solid foundation to analyze what t his brilliant, charming rogue led us to do to ourselves.” Full review below.
Neoconner
There’s never been anyone like Ahmad Chalabi in American history, never a foreigner without official status so crucially involved in a decision by the United States to go to war. Of course, Winston Churchill helped engineer America’s entry into World War II, but he was, after all, prime minister of the United Kingdom. And Chalabi — a University of Chicago Ph.D. in mathematics, wealthy banker forever going bankrupt, and creator and sole proprietor of a Potemkin Iraqi freedom front financed entirely by United States taxpayers — is no Winston Churchill.
In many ways, Chalabi resembles William Randolph Hearst, a master at ramping up Spain as a mortal threat to America at the end of the 19th century. Hearst’s power, however, exploded from the barrel of his ubiquitous newspapers, while Chalabi had only his own wits.
With those wits, this improbable chunky, merry-eyed dynamo tirelessly connived and schemed on behalf of two dreams: for American military might to drive Saddam Hussein from power and to install himself in the dictator’s place. His Washington allies needed little motivation to oust Hussein; Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz and many others already regarded him as Public Enemy No. 1. But they welcomed Chalabi’s ammunition, his “information,” in the fight against war skeptics — though they didn’t welcome him enough to implant him as Baghdad’s new boss.
This general story line is familiar, and Chalabi has earned a lot of ink in recent books. But more is needed. His successes should occasion great soul-searching among Americans interested in how and why we decide to fight and die and spend our national treasure. Chalabi, an occasional resident in our country whom I’ve been acquainted with for almost 20 years, knew us well and played us like the proverbial violin.
In “The Man Who Pushed America to War,” Aram Roston, a television reporter and producer, tells about every Chalabi machination in 53 staccato chapters — beginning with his childhood. Only rarely does he slip into analysis or commentary, as when he invites readers to imagine Chalabi as an amalgam of Don Quixote, Captain Ahab and Elmer Gantry.
The Don Quixote analogy eludes me. Chalabi never tilted at windmills; his lance pointed unerringly at Hussein’s heart. He did pursue that brutal dictator with all the ferocity and single-mindedness of an Ahab. Unfortunately for us, his vessel for the chase was not the Pequod, but the United States. And Chalabi manipulated our dreams with all the intuitive force Elmer Gantry conjured up to woo the souls of Middle Americans.
Roston bases his account on interviews with Chalabi’s family, friends, intimates and enemies, and on a range of books and articles. Chalabi did not give Roston an interview. The overall result is a book with some new details on key events, but no headlines. Its main contribution is to consolidate all the Chalabi anecdotes into one coherent and fair-minded account. Roston does very little speculating or searching for larger meanings, but he provides a solid foundation to analyze what this brilliant, charming rogue led us to do to ourselves.
In at least one sense, Chalabi is as American as a Washington apple pie. He courted and accumulated power players through a wicked sense of humor and a collection of indiscreet tales featuring human foibles, all conveyed with the bite and delight of a Mark Twain. His conversation is irresistible. His mind can open vistas previously unseen by the more conventional denizens of our capital city.
Roston’s narrative shows that the United States, revealingly, was the country of Chalabi’s greatest success by far. He never made anywhere near as big a splash in England, where he lived for years. And while his personal and political circles in Iraq incredibly span every religion, culture and ideology, he never rose to the top of political power there. Europeans and Middle Easterners had a feel for Chalabi that Americans lacked, a better sense of a man who always skated close to the edge in business and politics, close to danger.
Chalabi grasped our strengths — our ideals, our open political system and our self-confidence (or hubris) — and he knew how to flip these strengths into vulnerabilities. Roston relates how Chalabi unfurled the banners of freedom and democracy because he knew well that few Americans would dare argue against bringing these blessings to the oppressed. He also knew that many Americans, including a great number in the Washington crowd, didn’t see the difference between the readiness for democracy of a postwar Japan and Germany or of a South Korea — all free from internal warfare and with a good economic base — and a country like Iraq, which had experienced only tyranny.
At the same time, he saw that Americans were terribly impressed with apparent facts. He offered up many, most notably the fable of Hussein’s biological weapons labs. He noticed that no matter how many times false assertions were exposed, politicians and pundits never stopped purveying them. He observed that the news media might correct misinformation once, but after that didn’t consider the correction to be news and simply regurgitated garbage ad nauseam.
Chalabi saw beyond the research institutes and policy makers in Washington’s national security power structure. He spent little time on liberals, whose influence on foreign affairs is by and large limited to Democratic Party presidential primaries. If he needed a Democratic senator, and he always did, he went to hard heads like Bob Kerrey of Nebraska or Joe Lieberman of Connecticut. He devoted most of his time to Republican conservatives like Senator Sam Brownback of Kansas, to influential journalists and, above all, to neoconservatives like Richard Perle. They were the ones who had mastered the art of public debate, of skywriting threats and diminishing opponents as wimps. Accordingly, they commanded the most attention from reporters, Congress and Washington whisperers of “what was really going on.”
Roston deals especially well with the passage of the Iraq Liberation Act of 1998, which committed the United States to overthrowing Hussein. It was bipartisan and embraced by the Clinton administration. Chalabi pushed bipartisanship hard, understanding that liberal foreign-policy types (who no longer referred to themselves as liberals) never wanted to be out-Saddamed by the conservatives.
Chalabi did what he did for personal and patriotic reasons. And who is to say that from the point of view of an Iraqi, he was not justified in using whatever means, fair or foul, were available to remove the beast of Baghdad? The problem — and it is an immense one — is not that Chalabi did what he thought was necessary; it is that we fell for it all without serious examination, without Congress or the administration looking into what we would do the day after victory, without anyone in the White House ever asking what the effects would be on Islamic terrorism or the regional influence of Iran.
The problem is not that Chalabi was so smart, but that we were so careless and so vulnerable to manipulation. As Roston thoroughly demonstrates, Chalabi understood us better than we understood ourselves.h
Add comment April 28, 2008
Rogue Ecomonics gets starred PW review
Rogue Economics, by Loretta Napoleoni
9781583228241 | $27.50 hc | in stock
Seven Stories Press / Publishers Group Canada (Raincoast)
From the starred review in Publishers Weekly:
After looking into how terrorism gets paid for (Terror Incorporated: Tracing the Money Behind Global Terrorism), Napoleoni tackles the whole of capitalism’s dark side: the economics of illegal, criminal and terrorist activities worldwide. There’s no shortage of material, including the sex trade of Eastern Europe, internet fraud, piracy (both nautical and intellectual), human slavery, drugs and even the subprime mortgage lending scandal. Unsettling, eye-opening statistics abound—one third of all fish eaten in the UK is illegally poached; today, 27 million slaves worldwide generate annual profits of $31 billion; up until 9/11, 80 percent of the $1.5 trillion underworld economy was laundered through the US (the Patriot Act moved much of this business to Europe)—and Napoleoni’s bold analysis begs controversy. From page one, she ties the illegal business boom directly to the spread of democracy, pointing to the fall of the Berlin Wall as the moment when “rogue economics” were unleashed in their current, globe-enveloping iteration. Timely and fascinating, Napoleoni’s top-notch reporting, in which her attention turns from Viagra to blood diamonds to the banana price wars in a few pages, works in the vein of Freakonomics and Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation, but much grimmer. Like those, this volume doesn’t provide many answers, but the questions it raises are profound. (Apr.)
Add comment April 28, 2008
Louise Penny wins Agatha Award
Dead Cold, by Louise Penny
978-0755328932 | $10.99 mm | in stock
McArthur & Co. (HarperCollins)
Louise Penny has won the Agatha Award for Dead Cold, the second book in her mystery trilogy set in rural Quebec (published as A Fatal Grace in the U.S.). She was presented with the award in Washington, D.C.
Add comment April 28, 2008
G&M reviews Traces
Traces, by Paula Fox
9781932425437 | $18.50 hc | in stock
Front Street / Publishers Group Canada (Raincoast)
Paula Fox’s Traces was reviewed in the Globe & Mail this past weekend:
Apr. 19, 2008
Reviewed by Susan Perron
Novelist Paula Fox (her excellent novel The Slave Dancer won the Newbery Medal in 1974) and the prolific children’s book author and illustrator Karla Kuskin join forces in this gossamer-light, but not insubstantial, disquisition on traces: the hints of a presence of “something, someone [that/who] was just there.”
Kuskin’s bright collages are clever, moving sinuously from page to page, in a sense mimicking the action of the creatures they illustrate. On the book’s first page, the only traces in the pond of a bullfrog – “plump, wattled, warty, croaking” – are bubbles. The reader “leaps” from page to page, from lily pad to lily pad, and by the fourth page the source of those bubbles is revealed in all its emerald-green splendour.
Turtle, airplane, even dinosaur leave their traces, too; each “was just here. Now there’s barely a trace of it.” In the case of the fox, there’s nothing left “except for the flash of its brush,” a reddish-brown flash that sits at the very edge of the page, urging the reader to the next page to see the fox, “sleek, quick, furry, sharp-nosed” that has “left its trace in a glade in the woods.”
Add comment April 22, 2008
