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Academic Freedom After September 11 by Beshara Doumani
The War on Terror in the Halls of Academe
A review by Jen Besemer
In a nation whose administration dedicates vast human and economic resources to uphold the popular fiction that its foreign policy is concerned mainly with protecting freedom "both here and abroad," it is surprising that the actual practice of such protection collapses when it runs afoul of the less photogenic bits of foreign policy. Much space has already been given to the more obvious areas -- such as the USA PATRIOT Act -- in which personal freedom has been made to bow beneath the weight of national interests as defined within the White House. Public outcry is rightly generated by...
The Big Con: The Story of the Confidence Man by David W. Maurer
A review by Steve Fidel
The first truly entertaining book I read about men putting the bite on one another was Donald E. Westlake's God Save the Mark. I was 12, and have never lost my love for a good swindle tale. My young adult years were filled with stories of amiable riff-raff in the form of books like Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, lots of Westlake and Elmore Leonard. Hollywood, to my great delight, produced scores of wonderful fraud flicks. The Lady Eve, Double Indemnity (novel by James M. Cain), Paper Moon (also a wonderful book), The Usual Suspects, The Last Seduction, Jackie Brown (a Leonard story), and The...
Caspian Rain by Gina Nahai
Acid Precipitation
A review by Nasrin Rahimieh
Like drops of acid, Gina Nahai's words burn the pages of this moving novel about the fate of women in prerevolutionary Iran. This Iranian American writer, a transplant from Tehran to California in the wake of the 1979 revolution, conjures up resilient women contending with a society in transition. We see women from all walks of life struggling to carve out a space for themselves in a cosmopolitan environment, captivated by the trappings of modernity, yet held back by tradition. Caspian Rain is the story of Yaas, the only child of an unlikely couple. Her mother, Bahar, whose name means...
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Amigoland by Oscar Casares
Amigoland
A review by Benjamin Moser
A brambly Latin-American patriarch is the hero of Oscar Casares's Amigoland (Little, Brown $23.99). The ninety-one-year-old Don Fidencio is holed up, miserably, in a nursing home of the book's name in a Texas border town, furiously protesting his confinement -- "He had more trouble with just the idea of being here with these old men and women. He knew he wasn't old like some of them" -- though Casares shows, of course, Don Fidencio needs to be where he is, chronicling in excruciating detail the humiliations that await those who outlive their time. Don Fidencio is not a very pleasant...
I Tatti Renaissance Library #08: Momus by Leon Battista Alberti
The History of Laughter
A review by James Wood
I. Momus, who appears in Hesiod and Lucian, is the ancient personification of fault-finding, reprehension, and correction. Not necessarily funny himself, he roots out absurdity and foolishness. He sees through you; he truffles for folly. Poor Coleridge, the tormented opium-addict who had much to fear from being seen through, shudders, in the Biographia Literaria, at the horror of Momus's fabled desire to put a glass window in the breast of man, so that his heart could be seen. Momus, you might say, is the patron saint of critics; or at least of religious critics. There are many...
Incredible Change-Bots by Jeffrey Brown
Chee-Choo-Chuk-Chee-Choo!
A review by Chris Bolton
In our modern world, there are at least two ways to revisit one's cartoon-watching childhood: rent the DVD collection of the actual shows, which often leads to heartbreak and the inevitable realization that, as children, we liked a lot of truly stupid crap; or read an affectionate parody that captures the spirit of the original work, without all the truly stupid crappy parts, and adds a whole lot of funny. The latter is what Jeffrey Brown's graphic novella Incredible Change-Bots offers onetime fans of the Transformers cartoon series, toys, and comic books, which were pretty much...
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