Reviews and Comments

I suppose, that in one sense, one has to be really interested in T.E. Lawrence to enjoy all 915 pages of this massive biography; I am, and I did. For those interested in a contemporary history of the Revolt in the Desert, I would recommend Scott Anderson's excellent Lawrence in Arabia. This biography is devoted to Chapman/Lawrence/Ross/Shaw the man, from beginning to end, and is particularly interesting for its treatment of his later life and work during his post-war stints in the R.A.F. and the tank corps, a part of his life that is typically scanted. It was enough to make me decide to pick up copies of Lawrence's account of the his years in training at the R.A.F.-- the Mint -- and his translation of the Odyssey, generally acclaimed at the time, something to look forward to as the epic is a personal favorite (although I know know not a word of Greek -- perhaps in another life). One gets a sense not only of Lawrence's intellectual brilliance, but also of the profound trauma of the war -- from which he never really recovered -- and its deformation of his later life. Turning the last page leaves one with a sense of Aristotelian tragedy -- purgation through pity and terror.

John Brown's raid struck a nerve on the eve of the Civil War because it evoked the white South's deepest fear: that having been the masters they would become the slaves, and that the cruelties they had visited on their "property" would be visited upon them in their turn. This has been the deepest fear of "white" America since both before and after the Civil War, and it explains a great deal about the violence of American policy domestic and foreign. It is reflected to this day in the virulent racism of the white underclass that flocks to the banner of Donald Trump.

To keep our privileged position in the world, we must suppress those of whom we have taken advantage, generally defined as "non-white": whether African American, Asian, African, or Arab. We live with the comment misattributed to George Orwell that "We sleep safely in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would harm us." And in doing so, we project our own violence onto them. If we live in fear of Muslim Arab terror, it is nothing to the hundredfold terror we have visited upon the Muslims and the Arabs. A friend of mine likes to say that people in the Middle East have no respect for human life, and yet the minimum count of the civilians murdered in the Iraq War is 120,000. It shows itself in the internment of Japanese Americans and the ruthlessness and racism of the War in the Pacific. It is manifested in the winning of the West and the ethic cleansing of the Native American. Of course, the phenomenon is not limited to America, witness the German genocide of the Jews. This insight, although expressed in slightly different terms, lies at the heart of Ta-Nehisi Coates' Between the World and Me.

The fragility of the "black body" permeates Coates' work; he posits that African Americans have a unique appreciation of the violence that is visited upon them, whether by Baltimore gangs or the Prince George's County's police. This is the violence that preserves untroubled white America's dream of peaceful suburbs and two cars in the garage, built on the suffering of the people it excludes. It is reflected in our gated communities, the fear of my neighbours in suburban Detroit even to enter the city, inhabited by alien beings quite forthrightly described as n*s. It is reflected in our reflexive attribution of criminality to African Americans, the readiness of the police to shoot and the ease with which we excuse the shootings. It is reflected in our segregated neighbourhoods and our segregated schools. Coates talks about how from the days of his childhood to his present life in New York as a well-known writer, a third of his brain has always been devoted to self-preservation, whether in be fear of violence in the 'hood or fear of arrest in upscale New York.

Abraham Lincoln famously said, "As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master." Like it or not, the ruthless pace of demographics is eroding the privileged position of "white America," no longer a majority in "their country." There will not be peace at home or abroad until people who consider themselves white are willing to renounce their Dream of supremacy and the violence that attends it. And yet the reality is that white America simply lives in denial of the fragility of their own bodies, a denial that is enabled by the violence out of sight at the margins of their society, for our houses are built on sand, and we can only hope that the violence we have meted out to others will not be repaid upon us. We are not ready for Lincoln's prophecy that the war shall continue "until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword." It has not been paid yet.

There is a certain questionable premise to any self-help book, best encapsulated by Garrison Keillor when he talked about Lake Wobegon as a place where "all the children are above average." The premise here that anyone can earn a lot of money if they simply follow the steps outlined in this book is perhaps, as usual, a little too good to be true.

Nevertheless, I enjoy the occasional self-help book, and this one stands out for a couple of reasons because it is a book explicitly directed at women. It is reasonable to believe that as they recover from centuries of discrimination, women generally have greater untapped earning power than men. Moreover, particularly as an employment lawyer, I found it very interesting how this author suggested that women manage what is still a very challenging workplace environment; it nothing else, it is a strong rallying cry for women to take their fortunes into their own hands and assert their power and independence.

Finally, however, it is probably unfair to characterize this book as simply another get-rich-quick manual. The expectations -- a six-figure income -- are high but not outrageous. More importantly, however, the book encourages what might be called prudent risk-taking, good stewardship, and personal responsibility. While the emphasis is on encouraging women to seize control of their destiny and live to their full potential, the precepts in this little book are good advice for anybody.

Ari Shavit's history of Israel is more like chatty, long-form journalism than a traditional history, but it is thoughtful and well-informed. Shavit is both a devoted patriot and a thoughtful critic, an exponent of a middle ground -- albeit from a distinctly Israeli point of view -- which is quite refreshing after the usual shrill rhetoric on both sides of the Arab/Israeli conflict. Shavit is mindful of how the dispossessed became the dispossessors, how Israel's fragile military superiority potentially fuels a regional arms race, and how Israel's origins and its occupation have corroded the Zionist enterprise both practically and morally. At the same time, he paints a vivid picture of a dynamic society with a rich culture that has succeed in creating an improbable nation against implacable odds. Shavit's subtitle is "triumph and tragedy," and he seems keenly aware that Israel's triumph may yet turn to another Jewish tragedy if it cannot resolve contradictions both internal and external. Shavit sees Israel as surrounded by concentric circles of threats -- external, primarily in the form of Iran; closer to home in the brutal struggle to maintain an unjust occupation among a population uprooted for more than half a century, and internal as the political scene is fractured among a multiplicity of parties of diverse ethnic and economic backgrounds. Devoted as he is to his country, Shavit projects an agonized concern over its future. The book is a nuanced perspective on an Israeli point of view too often caricatured by both the right wing hawks and religious fundamentalists in America on the one hand and the left wing critics who see the country only through the lens of the occupation to the exclusion of the country's desperate struggle to survive in a hostile environment. In the end, however, Shavit seems deeply pessimistic about the ability of his country to wean itself from the self-destructive occupation and come to terms with the dark side of its success.

One of the more delightful aspects of Brian Edwards’ writing, both in his latest book After the American Century and his previous work Morocco Bound is the open ended play of multiple meanings in both his language and his analysis.  In a book that discusses the interaction between globalized American culture and local reimagination and appropriation of that culture, this is perhaps most evident in Edwards’ invocation of the phrase “the ends of circulation.”  The multiple meanings of this phrase certainly include dual senses of “ends” as purpose or intention and “ends” as a stopping point at which circulation ceases. Perhaps this is not surprising in a writer who seems to be as deeply grounded in post-structuralist critical analysis as he is in Middle Eastern language and culture. It is apparent from the beginning that Edwards’ slim volume is a distillation of years of field work in the Middle East and North Africa – beginning and ending in Morocco – filtered through a fabric densely woven from an intimate knowledge of literature, cinema, and critical theory over years of study.   Like Edwards’ previous work, the book is self-consciously academic from the beginning and yet accessible to an intelligent and attentive layman.<br/><br/> One premise of the book is that American culture’s ever accelerated distribution with the advent of digital technology has permeated global culture, but concomitantly with the waning of American political and economic hegemony, American culture abroad has become increasingly deracinated.  As Americans, we think we know what American culture stands for, and we tend to interpret it in generally positive ways for its association with freedom and prosperity, without reflecting on the ways in which America’s standing abroad has soured since September 11, 2001. We fail to see the ways in which other cultures reinterpret it on their own terms, whether by dubbing the donkey in Shrek with subversive songs in Moroccan darija (dialect), subtly transposing meanings in Persian translations of American cinema, or reinventing the graphic novel in Egypt on the eve of the uprising in Tahrir Square in Egypt.  In each of the instances, Americans looking in from the outside naively assume that they can explain events in these cultures from the perspective of the export of American values, when a more thoughtful, insightful, and experienced analysis would suggest that the manipulation of American forms and symbols is turned to local purposes in a manner that is often completely opaque to Americans unfamiliar with the country’s cultural nuances.  Thus we naively congratulate ourselves on America’s export of Facebook to purportedly exotic and chaotic foreign lands as though it conveyed American sensibilities; this is a convenient narrative into which we can shoehorn the politics of other cultures.  In doing so, we fail to see the ways in which these countries have developed their own narratives under the impact of globalization in ways quite apart from our easy assumptions about how the world is constituted. By seizing on the facile and accessible “Facebook narrative,” we overlook the complex literary culture in Egypt that had a far more central role in building opposition to the brutal Mubarak regime so enthusiastically supported by the United States foreign policy establishment.  Ironically, the very centrality of that tradition to Egyptian culture – the fact that American forms have been steeped in Egyptian culture and reinterpreted in ways easily apparent only to Egyptians – tends to wall off an understanding of such cultural end products from reverse assimilation by Americans.<br/><br/> In perhaps the same sense of Magritte’s famous painting of a pipe “This is not a pipe” or the Iranian film maker Jafar Panahi’s film “This is not a film,” which Edwards discusses, After the American Century could have been aptly subtitled “This is not a book about American culture.”  Certainly, the center of gravity of the book is the ways in which the cultures of Egypt, Iran, and Morocco have assimilated artifacts of American culture for their own ends (that word again!). Perhaps most surprisingly in his description of the complexities of contemporary Iranian culture – where he observes that everything is forbidden and everything is permitted – Edwards strips bare the facile assumptions of American Orientalism. This is not to suggest that the Revolutionary government is not harsh or repressive, but it is to suggest that there is more to Iran than political conflict with the United States, and that even that conflict is not one-sided. Quite apart from the political history of American intervention in Iranian affairs, Edwards illustrates this complexity in his analysis of Iran’s ambivalence over the reception in Europe toward the sophisticated Iranian cinematic tradition – simultaneous pride in the acclaim and suspicion of the politicization of films that – in part by necessity – are not intrinsically political. <br/><br/> American understanding of a region in which it has become increasingly and ever more brutally involved will never mature so long as the circulation and consumption of cultural production is largely unidirectional. This cultural sclerosis has multiple consequences: it blinds us to how the world understands us, and it inhibits us from coming to a better understanding of the world.  As we move beyond the “American century” into an increasingly fractured world, our dependence on outdated cultural assumptions and our unwillingness or inability to come to grips with the originality of other cultures can only work to our detriment.  Edwards’ work – thoughtfully considered – is perhaps the beginning of a corrective.<br/>

One might compare Brian Edwards’ Morocco Bound to a Moroccan bisteeya (pigeon pie) – crisp, piquant, and sweet on the outside, rich and savory on the inside; burning to the touch and yet delicious to the taste; layered throughout, and deeply satisfying.  It should be required reading for Americans interested in Morocco, and for Moroccans interested in how Americans think about Morocco.  The prose is light and fluid and yet deeply informative; think of the basic text for a compelling university course on Moroccan culture through the lens of contemporary American literature and history; rewarding to the scholar and the layman alike. <br/><br/>   Informed but not overwhelmed by Edward Said’s post-structuralist analysis of orientalism – fictions through which Western culture seeks to understand the Arab world – the book is intensely conscious of its own textual nature as it seeks to interpret literary texts that seek to “read” Moroccan culture.  Its central theme is one of disruption and difference – the gap between the signifier and the signified if one will – which is perhaps most sensitively explored in an explication of Jane Bowles’ writer’s block as she struggled to occupy the space between things and one’s knowledge of them.<br/><br/>    And yet to suggest that this is an esoteric, academic text would be to do it a grave injustice, since overlaying the technical literary analysis is a lively description of American popular culture – the dispatches of Ernie Pyle, Casablanca, Hitchcock’s The Man Who Knew Too Much, the abyss of William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch, and the music of Crosby, Stills, and Nash and the Master Musicians of Jajouka, not to mention the novels of Paul Bowles (one of which became a “major motion picture”) that are de rigeur for American visitors.<br/><br/> Edwards has a distinct sense of how American  popular culture stereotypes and marginalizes Morocco and Moroccans – whether it is Patton’s romanticization of the country as a scene from the “Arabian Nights,” Casablanca and Hitchcock’s account filtered through the French protectorate, Burroughs’ heroin-induced nightmare at the fringes of Moroccan society in Tangier’s International Zone, hippie self-absorption, or the more recent anthropological scholarship that generalizes from a nostalgic view of traditional, rural Moroccan society without coming to grips with the regime’s pervasive authoritarianism (particularly during the “Years of Lead” under King Hassan II), the romanticization of poverty in Morocco, and the reality of modern, urban politics  among Moroccan youth, which are perhaps much closer to our own understanding than our mythologized view of Moroccan culture might suggest.  The book implies that in order to have a more genuine understanding of Morocco, we must put Moroccans at the center of our understanding rather marginalizing them through fantasies of the frontier and the exotic orient.<br/><br/>   If we are ever to see clearly, we must first confront our own blinders; Edwards’ important book is an excellent first step.<br/>

There is a strain in American popular thought and foreign policy which can perhaps best be paraphrased by a t-shirt I remember from the seventies. Purporting to quote the Airborne, it said, "Kill them all: let God sort them out." This is the same attitude that has justified successive wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, drone killings, and the infamous use of torture by U.S. intelligence services. Not only is such an approach morally repellent, but even the most hardened advocate of Realpolitik should be able to see by now that it is ineffective. Thinking that we have removed the cancer of Saddam Hussein, we have created the constantly metastasising Islamic State. Our cynical reflex is either to prop up brutal dictators like Abdel Fatteh El Sisi or the brutal Saudi regime when they serve us, or to obliterate their countries when they don't.

Karima Bennoune's insightful book suggests that there is a third approach, superficially less attractive and certainly more difficult, but morally appropriate and more conducive to long-term success. Bennoune is the daughter of an Algerian university professor and intellectual who survived the nineties in Algeria under constant threat from fundamentalist death squads and yet maintained a principled support for civil society. Inspired in part by her father's example, Bennoune has woven together the stories of courageous dissidents in the Muslim (mostly Arab) world who despite the neglect of Western media and human rights organizations, have continued to attempt to navigate the Scylla and Charibdys (her metaphor) of fundamentalist terror and state oppression.

Bennoune boldly, and I think correctly, asserts that the first bulwark and the last refuge against these twin evils is assertion of the rights of women in civil society. Women's rights are consistently among the first targets of fundamentalist violence, and state sponsorship of religion quickly curtails the rights of everyone who does not conform to the ethos of the prevailing regime. Thus it is no surprise that many of Bennoune's heroes are women who have opposed fundamentalist terror, both those who have risked or lost their lives and those who bear witness to the slaughter of their family and friends. In this sense, this is not an easy book to read, in light of the scale of suffering and the gruesome tactics employed against anyone who dares stand for simple human values.

One more point that Bennoune makes quite tellingly, however, is that however neglected they may be, the courageous champions of civil society, democracy, women's rights, and the rule of law whose struggles she memorializes are largely Muslims or at least citizens of Muslim states. Bennoune is at pains to shatter the perception that the Muslim world is no more than a seething cauldron of radical Islamism, and she issues a cri de coeur on behalf of the people in Muslim societies seeking to build — and rebuild — civil society.

The fall of the tiny Moorish kingdom of Granada in 1492, marking the consummation of the Spanish reconquest and the division of the Iberian peninsula under Spanish and Portuguese rule, generated a ripple whose shock wave ultimately resounded throughout the world, not least in Spain's neighbor the Sultanate of Morocco.  As the last remnants of the glittering kingdoms of El Andalus fled across the straits to North Africa, Ferdinand and Isabella were able to employ the fruits of victory in financing an obscure Genoan adventurer on a desperate voyage to the Indies.  In one of history's greatest accidents, Christopher Columbus landed in the Americas, setting off a chain reaction of disease, conquest, and exploitation that swiftly overturned the established order in the New World to the unimaginable enrichment of the Spanish empire.  The dazzling success of Cortes in Mexico spurred the Spanish nobleman Panfilo de Narvaez to mount an expedition to la Florida in the buoyant expectation of outdoing his predecessor on the shores of the vast unexplored North American continent.  After all, there was every reason to believe that the untold riches of the New World had barely been tapped, and the unmatched superiority of the Spanish fleet at sea and the Spanish cavalry on land had allowed relatively small forces to melt all resistance from the Native Americans like wax in a blast furnace.<br/><br/> It is a commonplace of classical tragedy that the hero is brought low by hubris born of overconfidence in his great strength – whether it be Achilles rushing forward into battle, Odysseus taunting the Cyclops, or Oedipus slaying the king his father and marrying the queen his mother.  This story of the Narvaez expedition melds a fast-paced adventure story with the arc of a Sophoclean drama.  Abandoning its ships and plunging headlong into the swamps of Florida, the Narvaez expedition drives all resistance before it only to find itself stranded without either gold or food, and its dwindling number of survivors – ultimately only four – find themselves at the mercy of the very Indians they had hitherto so cavalierly murdered and tortured in their monomaniacal– but futile – search for gold.  In the end, the only four survivors were three Spanish noblemen – one of whom, Cabeza de Vaca, wrote the definitive account of the ill-fated voyage – and a Moroccan slave known only by his Spanish diminutive – “Estebanico.”<br/><br/> In her richly imagined novel, Laila Lalami recreates the disastrous expedition from Estebanico's perspective, interspersing flashbacks to his upbringing in the Portuguese-dominated Moroccan city of Azzemour with a fast-paced narrative of hardship and danger as the desperate Spanish seek to cut their way out of the trap of their own making in what is now the Southeastern United States.  Told from the perspective of a man gradually emerging from slavery in reliance upon the good will of the native tribes, the novel simultaneously offers an empathetic view both of the disastrous impact on native culture of the Spanish incursion and of the ruthless invaders undone by their lust for gold.<br/><br/>  Lalami's deft narrative not only conveys a sense of the sixteenth century down to the very diction of the narrator but also creates an impression of scrupulous historical accuracy.  In so doing, it provides a kaleidoscopic insight into the intersection of Arab, Spanish, and Native American cultures in the age of exploration from a refreshingly different point of view.  Quite apart from being a page-turner, this novel offers a fascinating insight into the devastation of old civilizations and the birth of the modern age.

Paul Barrett’s Law of the Jungle is a fast-paced and compelling account of legal corruption and corporate wrongdoing, in which a passionate advocate is undone through his own hubris and unscrupulous pursuit of what began as a noble crusade to rescue the Amazon rainforest and its indigenous inhabitants from massive pollution by Big Oil. Although the dominant theme is the tragedy of single lawyer undone by his loss of a moral compass, the story could equally well be read as a giant corporation’s escape from deserved liability as a result of the fecklessness of the legal system and the failings of the victims’ advocates. In the end, the Indians of the Amazon are faced with ongoing, unchecked pollution, and the oil company’s victory serves as a cautionary tale to any lawyer who dares to attempt to hold Big Oil accountable for its actions.

The signal failure of the American legal system from the outset of the case was to delay adjudication on the merits for nine and half years while it noodled over the question of forum non conveniens, i.e. where the case could best be tried, and in the end turned over the case at Big Oil’s request to a weak and corrupt third-world judiciary that was wholly unequipped to handle it. Much to the surprise of the oil company’s battalion of high-priced lawyers, in the corrupt world of Ecuadorian politics they were outmaneuvered at every turn by a no-holds-barred advocate whose dirty tricks more than matched their own. It is clear that the oil company was no more principled in its conduct of litigation in Ecuador than plaintiff’s attorney Steven Donziger; its clumsy Armada was simply far less agile and maneuverable than Donziger’s slick fleet of native activists, paid off experts, and corrupt judges and politicians, who deployed a devastating public relations campaign complete with rock stars, investigations on Sixty Minutes, and a canned documentary film, resulting in a $19 billion judgment against Chevron.

Donziger’s dishonest tactics ultimately proved his undoing when Chevron initiated a ruthless campaign against him under the racketeering laws in the American court system after 19 years of litigation – with virtually no cleanup.
Barrett offers a trenchant final chapter of conclusions at the end of the book, which it would be tempting to read first, but one question that lingers is whether the Donziger debacle and subsequent Supreme Court rulings gutting the Alien Tort Statute leave any hope that the rights of indigenous people trampled by American multinationals can be vindicated by legitimate means. Donziger only prevailed in Ecuador because he was more proficient at dirty tricks than Big Oil, but the book leaves open the question whether in light of its refusal to hear the case on the merits in a fair forum, the American legal system has the will or capacity to hold its corporate citizens accountable for their irresponsible actions abroad. In the end, the abiding impression this book leaves is one of deep pessimism.