The War Behind Me reviewed in the NY Times

The War Behind Me, by Deborah Nelson
9780465005277 | $28.95 hc | in stock
Basic Books / Publishers Group Canada (Raincoast)

The New York Times reviewed Deborah Nelson’s The War Behind Me on December 14:

Many My Lais

By TARA MCKELVEY

Villagers, acting as human minesweepers, walked ahead of troops in dangerous areas to keep Americans from being blown up. Prisoners were subjected to a variation on waterboarding and jolted with electricity. Teenage boys fishing on a lake, as well as children tending flocks of ducks, were killed. “There are hundreds of such reports in the war-crime archive, each one dutifully recorded, sometimes with no more than a passing sentence or two, as if the killing were as routine as the activity it interrupted,” Deborah Nelson writes in “The War Behind Me.”

The archive, housed at the University of Michigan, holds documents from Col. Henry Tufts, former chief of the Army’s investigative unit, that reveal widespread killing and abuse by American troops in Vietnam. Most of these actions are not known to the public, even though the military investigated them. The crimes are similar to those committed at My Lai in 1968. Yet, as Nelson contends, most Ameri­cans still think the violence was the work of “a few rogue units,” when in fact “every major division that served in Vietnam was represented.” Precisely how many soldiers were involved, and to what extent, is not known, but she shows that the abuse was far more common than is generally believed. Her book helps explain how this misunderstanding came about.

After the My Lai story broke, officials acted quickly. They looked into other crimes — for example, studying anonymous letters sent to superiors by “Concerned Sgt.,” which described the deaths of hundreds of civilians, or “a My Lai each month for over a year.” Serious offenses were indeed investigated, and 23 men were found guilty, though most got off easy. The harshest sentence was 20 years’ hard labor, for the rape of a 13-year-old girl by an interrogator in a prisoner-of-war compound. The rapist served seven months and 16 days.

“Get the Army off the front page,” President Richard Nixon reportedly said. Investigations were a good way to do that. A cover-up attracts attention; a crime that is being looked into does not. The military investigations, Nelson argues, were designed not to hold rapists and murderers accountable, but to deflect publicity. When reporters heard about a war crime, they’d call the Army to see if it would provide information. If they suspected a cover-up, they’d pursue the story. If a military spokesman said an investigation was under way, the story was usually dropped.

Nelson, who wrote a series on war crimes with a military historian when she was at The Los Angeles Times, is a diligent, passionate reporter. Her zeal, though, sometimes leads to awkward moments. In Vietnam, villagers tell her about killings that took place in a ravine, giving her “hope” that she has discovered a hamlet where a massacre occurred in 1968. It is a different massacre, as it turns out; she seems vaguely disappointed.

Still, this is an important book. Nelson demonstrates that cover-ups happen in plain sight and that looking for an exclusive can blind reporters to the real story. She also points out that these crimes are endemic to counterinsurgency operations. When troops fight among a civilian population, in conflicts that extend for years, atrocities are almost bound to happen. “If we rationalize it as isolated acts, as we did in Vietnam and as we’re doing with Abu Ghraib,” a retired brigadier general tells her, “we’ll never correct the problem. Counterinsurgency operations involving foreign military forces will inevitably result in such acts, and we will pay the costs in terms of moral legitimacy.” Whether it’s Vietnam or Iraq, the truth is disturbing. “After such knowledge,” T. S. Eliot wrote, “what forgiveness?”

Tara McKelvey, a senior editor at The American Prospect, is a frequent contributor to the Book Review and the author of “Monstering: Inside America’s Policy of Secret Interrogations and Torture in the Terror War.”

Look! Drawing the Line in Art reviewed in SLJ

Look! Drawing the Line in Art, by Gillian Wolfe
9781845078249 | $23.50 hc | in stock
Frances Lincoln / Publishers Group Canada (Raincoast)

Gillian Wolfe’s Look!: Drawing the Line in Art will be reviewed in January’s School Library Journal:

Look! lies somewhere in between Bob Raczka’s No One Saw (Millbrook, 2002) and Antony Mason’s A History of Western Art (Abrams, 2007). Each spread introduces a different technique, such as “strong lines” and “leafy lines” and shows a work of fine art demonstrating it, reproduced with clarity and in full color. Occasionally, the text defines artistic techniques, such as perspective and shading. Each spread has kid-friendly ideas for making one’s own creations; the suggestions range from simple (breathing on a windowpane and drawing a line with your finger) to intricate (designing a bridge). There is a wide range of dates for the art featured, beginning in the 1600s and ending in 2003. The text describes how each piece was created and includes some anecdotal stories about the artist and the work. However, it can be puzzling: for instance, in a scene depicting Jesus praying while Judas and his soldiers advance to arrest him, the first line of text reads, “What an astonishing landscape!” Ultimately, however, this is an accessible introduction to art history. A concluding section gives a bit more information about the artist next to a small reproduction of the featured art.–Laura Lutz, Queens Borough Public Library, NY

NYTBR review of Taschen’s Hiroshige

Hiroshige: 100 Views of Edo, by Melanie Trede and Lorenz Bichler
978-3822848272 | $170 hc | in stock
Taschen (Ingram Publisher Services)

Taschen’s Hiroshige was reviewed in the December 7 edition of The New York Times Book Review:

Japan

By ALIDA BECKER 

Paging through two luxurious new books filled with the work of Hiroshige, one of the great figures of 19th-century Japanese art, it’s hard to believe that his woodblock prints once sold for the price of a bowl of rice, and that their initial success depended largely on their appeal to souvenir-hungry tourists — as well as advertisers who understood the concept of product placement long before Hollywood studios began putting Coke cans into close-ups.

But Western artists like Whistler, Pissarro and Van Gogh, who championed these ukiyo-e, or “pictures of the floating world,” didn’t care about that and neither should we. Instead, we can admire the elegant wintry stillness of a scene like “Bikuni Bridge in Snow” in Melanie Trede and Lorenz Bichler’s HIROSHIGE: One Hundred Famous Views of Edo (Taschen, $150), and only later be amused to discover that its most prominent piece of calligraphy is a restaurant billboard offering “mountain whale,” a euphemism for wild game in a rapidly changing society where Buddhist dietary strictures hadn’t entirely faded. Bichler and Trede’s book is filled with this kind of striking detail, but its main appeal is its brilliant reproduction of one of the rare complete sets of Hiroshige’s original views of Japan’s bustling commercial capital, owned by the Ota Memorial Museum of Art in Tokyo, the city of Edo’s modern-day successor. Bound from the first run, it illuminates the subtle, painterly effects that were often lost as individual images were reprinted over and over, with less attentiveness and skill, as many as 15,000 times.

Arranged by the seasons and containing some of his most popular works, “One Hundred Famous Views of Edo” was Hiroshige’s final masterpiece, not quite finished when he died, probably in a cholera epidemic, in 1858. He had come to prominence in the 1830s with a series of prints of “The Fifty-Three Stations of the Tokaido,” the great highway between the shogun’s seat of power in Edo and the old imperial city of Kyoto.

This led to another project, completed in the early 1840s, documenting an important route through the central highlands,which he was asked to finish after a fellow samurai artist, the talented but feckless Keisai Eisen, left after contributing 24 prints. As Sebastian Izzard points out in his introduction and commentary in hiroshige/eisen: The Sixty-Nine Stations of the Kisokaido (Braziller, $80), Hiroshige seems to have become less interested in documenting particular places than in capturing their atmosphere, using graphic elements and blocks of color to suggest elusive emotions. Especially in his haunting night scenes, bathed in moonlight, he can be seen developing the innovative impressionistic techniques that would make him, as the critic Mary Fenollosa put it, “the master of mist, snow and rain.”

Circus reviewed in the NYTBR

The Circus: 1870-1950, by Noel Daniel
978-3822851531 | $225.00 hc | in stock
Taschen (Ingram Publisher Services)

The New York Times Book Review ran a review of Taschen’s Circus on December 7:

Circus

By GREGORY COWLES

Before she was a book editor, Noel Daniel was a gallery director and a Fulbright scholar, and in her new book she gestures gamely toward academic dispassion. The book’s title is simply The Circus (Taschen, $200), and its subtitle, equally plain, is “1870-1950.” Open the covers, though, and all pretense of humble objectivity falls away.

This is a gee-whiz spectacle of a book, a three-ring extravaganza as bright as a pinball machine and almost as big. Of course, its subject matter has something to do with that. Daniel has combed archives and private collections for posters, handbills and behind-the-scenes photos of the American circus in its heyday, and the results are stunning. A 1916 Barnum & Bailey lithograph features an all-female cast of acrobats, aerialists and showgirls, boasting “A World’s Congress of Famous Performing Beauties.” A 1950 snapshot captures a trapeze artist from the Dailey Bros. circus, sitting on the back lot before her act with a playful lion cub gnawing at her wrist. A 1940s photograph by Lisette Model, reproduced here on a full page, shows the Wallendas forming their human pyramid — balanced on bicycles! on a high wire! — while far, far below, a dozen or so people grip a pitifully small net in case they fall. Then as now, the circus tried to be a little bit of everything, and it succeeded admirably: part museum, part zoo, part athletic exhibition, part vaudeville routine, all adding up to the greatest show on earth. In a useful introduction (yes, it’s scholarly), the writer Linda Granfield accounts for the range of years covered in the book. By 1870, the railroad made it possible for circuses to visit even the smallest cities, eventually turning the shows into the nation’s dominant form of mass entertainment. But 80 years later, a new diversion had arrived in the form of television, and circuses gradually dwindled in audience and prestige, becoming more cult than culture. Looking through this book, one can’t help feeling that’s a shame.

Daniel has turned to expert collaborators — the circus historian Fred Dahlinger Jr. and the former associate artistic director of the Big Apple Circus, Dominique Jando, both lend big hands — but she is no remote curator; she’s a ringmaster with a megaphone, and like all the best barkers she’s shamelessly in love with the spectacle she’s selling. “The circus was the Super Bowl, the Olympics and the Hollywood blockbuster all in one, brought right to your backyard,” she writes in her foreword, a “yearly coast-to-coast circuit of bombast and flair.” In hindsight, cable TV seems a dim substitution.