French Connection: What the Dreyfus affair does -- and doesn't -- tell us about Guantanamo
A review by Michael O'Donnell
The most remarkable moment of the Dreyfus affair, which noisily consumed France for over a decade at the turn of the twentieth century, occurred quietly in May 1895. Alfred Dreyfus, a Jew and a captain in the French army, had been wrongly convicted by court-martial of treason, largely on the strength of secret and forged evidence. He was publicly humiliated in a ceremony of degradation before 20,000 people, his epaulets ripped from his shoulders and his sword broken in two as the crowd called for Judas's blood. Then he was shipped off without notice to his family to serve a life sentence of solitary confinement on Devil's Island, a craggy little slice of hell off the coast of French Guiana in South America. A month after he arrived, as he began to comprehend the isolation, heat, malnutrition, and disease, he received a letter from his brother, Mathieu Dreyfus. This is what the letter said: Banal consolations are not what I want to offer; there are none in your...
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Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace by David Lipsky
 One struggles to find a concise, representative anecdote about the late David Foster Wallace for an audience of politically minded readers. Wallace, who committed suicide in 2008 at age forty-six, was the most promising and accomplished writer of his generation. An athlete of prolixity, he...
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