Tour de France 2014: Suggested Reading

Three books on the iconic sporting event that has this year claimed its first victim on the first day.

Forgetting Tiananmen Square

It's been 25 years, and three new books consider how it has been suppressed.  If you're in a hurry, you can jot down the titles of the books and take a look later:

• The People’s Republic of Amnesia: Tiananmen Revisited, by Louisa Lim, OUP USA
• Tiananmen Exiles: Voices of the Struggle for Democracy in China, by Rowena Xiaoqing He, Palgrave Macmillan
• Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth and Faith in the New China, by Evan Osnos, Bodley Head

Well, here we're not forgetting!  Please take a look at:

• NatGeo's story of two photographers (twin brothers!) who were there
• (still imprisoned Nobel Peace Prize winner) Liu Xiaobo's poem from his collection June 4 Elegies
• Another poem inspired by those events
• How a gangster became a savior: the story of the Triad who helped smuggle 100+ dissidents to safety after the massacre
• Footage of Tiananmen survivors telling their stories at the House Foreign Affairs subcommittee; one is Chai Ling, founder of All Girls Allowed, an organization combatting gendercide in China.
• The world's first Tiananmen museum that has opened in Hong Kong
• Demonstrations in Hong Kong and Taiwan

25 years ago I was only a child watching the news on TV, and from that year I remember two overwhelming feelings that were so intense that they probably shaped my adult take on foreign relations more than I realize: 1989 was defined by the joy of the fall of the Berlin Wall with all its jubilant crowds ... and the absolute, stomach-churning horror of Tiananmen Square.  God, what kind of monstrous, despicable, (what the hell, let's use the word and call a spade a spade) evil government sends its tanks and troops to mow down unarmed students?  And you wonder why I practically have an allergic reaction to people saying that Taiwan should be part of China. 

UPDATE: The Onion nails it again.

Gee, What Do You Think?

Here's the question being undertaken by two recent scholarly books:

Modern anthropological research may be settling the great debate between the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes and the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Was the state of nature a “war of every man against every man” in which life was “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short,” as Hobbes wrote? Or did “savages” live in utopian bliss, thanks to “the tranquility of their passions and their ignorance of vice,” as Rousseau believed?

Chinese Architecture and Competitive Mimicry

Interesting. Here's a thought: "copycatting as a way to assert their status to both their subjects and rivals."

Book Review: "The Coup: 1953, the CIA, and the Roots of Modern U.S.-Iranian Relations"

Here's an overview of the latest book by Ervand Abrahamian, history professor at the City University of New York and specialist in Iranian history. It dovetails quite nicely with recent interest in the (excellent) film Argo.

BiblioFiles: Mario Vargas Llosa's "The Dream of the Celt"

It's the Peruvian author's first novel to appear in the US since he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2010.  Here's more about it.  I previously posted about (and praised) the freedom-loving Mario Vargas Llosa here.  Here's his website. In fact, I'm going to pluck the Quote of the Day from an archived interview with him (the lines are from his 2000 novel "The Feast of the Goat"):

 "It must be nice. Your cup of coffee or glass of rum must taste better, the smoke of your cigar, a swim in the ocean on a hot day, the movie you see on Saturday, the merengue on the radio, everything must leave a more pleasurable sensation in your body and spirit when you had what Trujillo had taken away from Dominicans 31 years ago: free will."

Book Review: "The Least of All Possible Evils: Humanitarian Violence from Arendt to Gaza" by Eyal Weizman (2012)

The book (or at least its intent) sounds interesting, and this review even more so since it actually uses the delightful and grossly underappreciated word "defenestrated" a few paragraphs in. Anyway, here's a blurb:

For Weizman, instead of regulating or limiting violence, international humanitarian law (that is, the laws of war) actually legitimates certain manifestations of it. This is due to the utilitarian logic that pervades our thinking about violence caused by states and their agents, reasoning that sees “the sphere of morality as a set of calculations aimed to approximate the optimum proportion between common goods and necessary evils.” According to Weizman, deeming certain evils “necessary” provides the conceptual cover for further acts of cruelty. What begins as a “pragmatic compromise” between two terrible choices becomes an acceptable logic in less than exceptional circumstances. The logic of the exception is widened; the infliction of suffering is made civilized and inevitable. Weizman focuses largely on the concept of proportionality.

Book Review: New Biography of Mao

This one focuses on Mao's ties with Stalin. The bloodiest bromance of the 20th century?

Book Review: "Eating Aliens" by Jackson Landers

Hey, this is right up the Insta-Prof's alley: the suggestion that we get rid of invasive animal species by hunting and literally eating them out of existence. Take a look at this nice review of a book by a guy who did just that.

Book Review: The Now-Infamous Petraeus Biography

Well, looky here!  Someone actually bothered to read the biography instead of / in addition to getting sucked into the melodramatic quagmire of l'Affaire Petraeus.  Here's an actual book review.  Unfortunately for the author, the reviewer zeroes in on a certain obvious ... ah ... bias in favor of the subject.  I can't help quoting a bit:

This book could have been titled The Agony and the Ecstasy of David Petraeus; it’s tricky to write a hagiography of someone who isn’t dead yet, but Broadwell manages. ... Broadwell’s book — noted for featuring intimate access to its subject — introduces readers to what might as well be the love child of Achilles and Billy Graham. 

Ouch.

Two Journalists on the Middle East and Foreign Policy

The always-interesting Michael Totten has a new article on the persistence of the Islamist threat, while Canadian journalist Terry Glavin in his piece "On the Front Line of a Global Struggle" surveys a number of good books.  He also notes this portion of an interview chronicled in one of those books:

“S.D.”, in Iran, writes directly to those of us who live in the West: “While you are fighting for the rights of pandas over there, people are still being stoned to death here in my country.”

That's more perspective than you'll get in many a classroom or thinktank these days.  RELATED: Lara Logan on Al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan.

Book Review: Robert Caro's Epic Biography of LBJ

Put this on your reading list, gentle reader!  I admit that I had never thought about reading this, but a Nerd Lord recommended it, and then I saw this review right afterwards, along with this other, more critical take on it.

Book Review: Daniel Hannan's "A Doomed Marriage"

The always-thoughtful Theodore Dalrymple reviews Daniel Hannan's new book on the relationship between the UK and the EU.

Book Review: "Stylish Academic Writing"

The effort to make the phrase "stylish academic writing" not an oxymoron!

Reading Recommendations From An Econ Prof

Usually this sort of thing would have me rushing for the doors, but econ professor Art Carden (Samford University) has some interesting-looking choices.  Carden also links to some cool TED talks and free online lectures.  Ain't technology grand!

The Hungry Dragon: China and Raw Materials

Zambia-born, Oxford-trained economist Dambisa Moyo has a new book out on the subject, and her conclusion is sobering.

Professor Bernard Lewis's Memoir and Valediction

Do read this and this.  Lewis is a giant.  Here's a bit of it:

Bernard Lewis beckons to us as if from the mists of legend. A poet-scholar, linguist, observer and sometime participant in the great events of the Middle East for seven decades, the London-born scholar belongs more to the world of T.E. Lawrence than to ours. At 95, his prose is translucent and his recollection luminous. 

But Notes on a Century—his personal and professional memoir—makes for sad reading, for two reasons. The first is that we will not find another like Bernard Lewis; it is a valedictory essay not just for a remarkable man but for an epoch. No university today could train a poet capable of extracting the red thread of history from the obscure orthography of official archives, or a historian-diplomat who knows the songs of a dozen peoples in their own dialects. ... The second, even sadder reason is the disappointment of Lewis’ hope for what he calls the “heirs of an old and great civilization.” 

Book Reviews: Corporate Conquerors

Let's take some business lessons from some of history's most effective conquerors, shall we?  In two different books, Hannibal and Julius Caesar invade the corporate boardroom.

Book Reviews: 5 Excellent War Memoirs

Read up, my fellow history buffs!

Book Review: New Biography of Eva Braun

British historian Andrew Roberts takes a look at Eva Braun: Life with Hitler by Heike B. Görtemaker (Knopf, 2011).  Here is a bit of Roberts' own assessment of the mysterious mistress:

Eva spent the Second World War skiing, swimming, gossiping about petty scandals, taking a visit to Italy, reading celebrity magazines, and enjoying the rest of her utterly trivial existence as her lover set civilization aflame.

Unkind but not inaccurate, perhaps.