Best of 2007 Bookshelf
Michele’s “Best of 2007″ Books and Film List
David Andelman
A Shattered Peace: Versailles 1919 and the Price We Pay Today
Veteran correspondent David Andelman offers a compelling new perspective on the origin of many of today’s most critical international issues. He turns the spotlight on the many errors committed by World War I peacemakers that ultimately led to crises from Iraq to Kosovo and wars from the Middle East to Vietnam. He focuses, too, on the small nations and minor players at Versailles, including figures such as Ho Chi Minh and Charles de Gaulle, who would later become boldfaced names. With a cautionary message for us today, he shows how world leaders dismissed repeated warnings from their experts and laid the groundwork for a host of catastrophic events.
Ben Barber
Consumed: How Markets Corrupt Children, Infantilize Adults, and Swallow Citizens Whole From Publishers Weekly: “Barber returns to the clashing models of civilization of his earlier Jihad vs. McWorld, focusing this time on the expanding global culture of market forces he claims will destory not only democracy but even capitalism, if left unchecked. He warns of a totalitarian ‘ethos of induced childishness’ that not only seeks to turn the young into aggressive consumers but to arrest the psychological development of adults as well, ‘freeing’ them to indulge in puerile and narcissistic purchases based on ’stupid’ brand loyalties.”
Louise Bernikow
Dreaming in Libro: How a Good Dog Tamed a Bad Woman
The sequel to “Bark If You Love Me,” this is the story of a Boxer rescued in Riverside Park and his owner. Shadow and I met Louise and Libro on Riverside Drive not long after Shadow came into my life, and Louise and I think that Libro had a crush on Shadow. Unfortunately, Shadow preferred the real alpha boys, but at least she was polite to Libro.
Ian Bremmer
The J Curve: A New Way to Understand Why Nations Rise and Fall. (now in paperback) Publishers Weekly says: “With this timely book, political risk consultant Bremmer aims to ‘describe the political and economic forces that revitalize some states and push others toward collapse.’ His simple premise is that if one were to graph a nation’s stability as a function of its openness, the result would be a ‘J curve,’ suggesting that as nations become more open, they become less stable until they eventually surpass their initial levels of stability.”
Pamela Druckerman
Lust in Translation
An irreverent and hilarious journey around the world to examine how and why people cheat on their spouses; this global look at infidelity reveals that Americans are uniquely mixed up about being faithful. Russian husbands and wives don’t believe that beach-resort flings violate their marital vows. Japanese businessmen, armed with the aphorism “If you pay, it’s not cheating,” flock to sex clubs where the extramarital services on offer include “getting oral sex without showering first.” In South Africa, pollsters had to create separate categories for men who cheat, and men who only cheat while drunk.
Sharon Epperson
The Big Payoff: 8 Steps Couples Can Take to Make the Most of Their Money–and Live Richly Ever After
Middle-class couples are working harder than ever. So why are they finding it more difficult to finance their homes, send their kids to college, and save toward retirement? Couples who are strapped for time and weighed down by costly fixed expenses need more than a personal finance pep talk: They need a plan. In The Big Payoff, CNBC correspondent Sharon Epperson lays out a nuts-and-bolts program that couples of all ages can use to realize their financial dreams.
April Lamm (Author), Stephan Heidenreich (Author), Eckhart Nickel
Anonym, In The Future No One Will Be Famous
This exhibition catalog asks: What happens at an exhibition when none of the participating artists are named? Or the curator remains anonymous? Or the artworks liberate themselves from the question of authorship? Readers can sharpen their wits and ponder ideas about copyright, authorship, selection of works for institutions, the art market and the financial well-being of artists themselves.
Paul Hockenos
Joschka Fischer and the Making of the Berlin Republic: An Alternative History of Postwar Germany
Throughout his controversial career in German politics, Joschka Fischer gained a reputation as a shrewd and visionary politician. In the 1980s he was one of the first elected Greens and went on to become Germany’s foreign minister from 1998 to 2005. His famous challenge to Donald Rumsfeld’s case for invading Iraq–”Excuse me, I am not convinced”–won him worldwide recognition, and the Bush administration’s contempt. Here is both a lively biography of Joschka Fischer and a gripping history ‘from below’ of postwar Germany.
Aziz Huq and Frederick Schwartz
Unchecked and Unbalanced: Presidential Power in a Time of Terror puts today’s abuses of presidential power in historical perspective and delivers the definite rebuke to the idea of a “monarchical executive.” Drawing on Fritz Schwarz’s experience with the Church Committee, it argues that restoring the Checks and Balances of American government will make us both safer and freer, and tells us how we can do that. Check out Bob Herbert’s glowing op-ed column in the NY Times about this important book.
Mira Kamdar
Planet India: How the Fastest Growing Democracy Is Transforming America and the World Interviewing a wide range of people, from Bollywood movie producers to indebted farmers committing suicide to tea merchants and U.S. software engineers working in India, Mira gives the flavor of India today, tells how it got there, and gives a sense of where it is going along with what its decisions will mean for the entire planet. Mira is not afraid to break taboos, and she addresses both the tremendous optimism and potential in India as well as the Herculean challenges that the country faces. (to be released in paperback in 2008, with a new introduction, as Planet India: The Turbulent Rise of the World’s Largest Democracy and the Future of Our World.)
Zachary Karabell
Peace Be upon You: The Story of Muslim, Christian, and Jewish Coexistence Booklist starred review: “Historians have so often focused on religious conflict–crusades, jihads, pogroms–that Karabell fears many readers have forgotten how often the devout have lived in peace with those of different faiths. To dispel this unfortunate forgetfulness, he develops a wide-ranging narrative highlighting epochs of interfaith toleration and cooperation.”
Nina Khruscheva
Imagining Nabokov: Russia Between Art and Politics
Vladimir Nabokov’s “Western choice”—his exile to the West after the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution—allowed him to take a crucial literary journey, leaving the closed nineteenth-century Russian culture behind and arriving in the extreme openness of twentieth-century America. In Imagining Nabokov: Russia Between Art and Politics, Nina L. Khrushcheva offers the novel hypothesis that because of this journey, the works of Russian-turned-American Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977) are highly relevant to the political transformation under way in Russia today. Khrushcheva, a Russian living in America, finds in Nabokov’s novels a useful guide for Russia’s integration into the globalized world. Now one of Nabokov’s “Western” characters herself, she discusses the cultural and social realities of contemporary Russia that he foresaw a half-century earlier.
Andrew Nagorski
The Greatest Battle: Stalin, Hitler, and the Desperate Struggle for Moscow That Changed the Course of World War II
A gripping account of the deadliest battle ever and of the struggle between Hitler and Stalin that left long-lasting psychological scars. The battle for Moscow marked the first turning point in World War II.
Silvana Paternostro
My Colombian War: A Journey Through the Country I Left Behind
A timely, evocative account of a reporter’s reckoning with her homeland’s volatile past Growing up in the coastal city of Barranquilla, Colombia, Silvana Paternostro indulged in the typical concerns of a privileged young girl: friendships and parties, school and family. But soon it became apparent that life in Colombia would not go on as usual. Strange planes appeared overhead, the harbingers of the marijuana drug trade that would explode into cocaine wars over the next decade, and soon after, a disputed election would lead to demonstrations and kidnappings targeting the affluent landed elite-including Paternostro’s family. A revolution was brewing, and the social inequalities reflected in her life would boil over into the most violent, most protracted, and most misunderstood civil war of our time. In My Colombian War, Paternostro journeys back to the place where her family and her closest friends still live, weaving authentic experience into a history of this ongoing conflict. Through interviews she allows us to witness the treacherous war zone that Colombia has become, projected on the daily lives of its citizens. Paternostro’s book is a stunning, comprehensive narrative of Colombia’s past and present.
Yaroslav Trofimov
The Siege of Mecca: The Forgotten Uprising in Islam’s Holiest Shrine and the Birth of al-Qaeda
A real-life thriller, this book tells the story of a long-covered-up event that had wide-ranging impacts on the relationship between Islam and the West. “Yaroslav Trofimov has written a spellbinding thriller. Packed with vivid, previously undisclosed details, it illuminates a little-known hostage crisis in the closed-off heart of the Muslim world that helped give rise to Al Qaeda. Once I started reading, I couldn’t put the book down.”
—Rajiv Chandrasekaran, author of Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq’s Green Zone
Nicolas Vadot
The George W Bush Years: Colorful Cartoons of a Black-and-White Thinker
George W Bush mistook Slovakia for Slovenia, thought the inhabitants of Greece were called Greekians and didn’t know the name of Pakistan’s Prime Minister. And to him Bin Laden was probably an East-German car brand. Nevertheless, as months went by, he made a lot of progress in geopolitics, realising for instance that the Afghan mountains were packed with people like him, therefore he wasn’t the only religious fundamentalist on Earth. Of course, after eight years in power, he still has trouble distinguishing a Shiite from a Sunni, a Kurd or even a European. However, what he does now know is that on other side of the Atlantic Ocean, on the right hand side of Britain, lies an Old Continent, full of pacifist beatniks who speak several languages and who have all abolished the death penalty. In other words: true savages. He can still hardly tell the difference between a nice little morning breeze and a devastating hurricane and doesn’t know what a weapon of mass destruction really looks like, but he’s eager to fill the gaps in his general knowledge during his third term. What?? He can’t run for a third term?? What a pity.. In the George W Bush Years cartoonist Nicholas Vadot has drawn his take on George Dubbya in a series of hilarious cartoons that track the years of one of the most controversial American presidents ever.
David Wallis
Killed Cartoons: Casualties from the War on Free Expression The collection, heralded by Gahan Wilson of the New Yorker as “amazing in its range,” features nearly 100 editorial cartoons and illustrations that were spiked by newspapers and magazines because of the potential for controversy. Works by celebrated contemporary artists such as Garry Trudeau, Steve Brodner, Edward Sorel, Ted Rall, Paul Conrad, Mike Luckovich and Anita Kunz are displayed alongside unearthed gems by legends like Al Hirschfeld, Herblock and Norman Rockwell. Here’s an article from the Pasadena Weekly.
“Best of 2007″ Films
The Price of Sugar
A charismatic Spanish priest, Father Christopher Hartley –whom I had the honor to meet in New York City through some of his former Bronx parishioners– organizes some of this hemisphere’s poorest people, challenging powerful interests profiting from their work. When he arrives in the Dominican Republic, he’s warned against entering the sugar plantations where most of his parishioners live. Breaking a centuries old taboo, he discovers shocking examples of modern-day slavery intrinsic to the global sugar trade. On an island known for tropical beauty, tourists flock to escape winter and relax with little knowledge that just a few miles away thousands of dispossessed Haitians are toiling away in unseen plantations harvesting sugarcane most of which ends up in the United States. Cutting cane by machete, they work 12 hour days, 7 days a week frequently without access to decent housing, electricity, clean water, education, healthcare and adequate nutrition. Often they are stateless, with neither Dominican nor Haitian identity and virtually invisible in the eyes of the law. “The Price of Sugar” raises key questions about where the products we consume originate, at what cost they are produced and ultimately, where our responsibility lies. www.thepriceofsugar.com
Beyond Borders: The Debate Over Human Migration
Check out the trailer at www.beyondbordersfilm.com for a quote from yours truly…
Beyond Borders moves past the headlines and takes an in-depth look at the hot-button issues of legal and illegal immigration. Beyond Borders explores the psychological forces driving the immigration controversy from both sides of the debate. Anti-immigration activists demand we stop this “illegal alien invasion,” while some pro-immigration forces speak of a Reconquista, a reclaiming of the American Southwest by Mexico. In search of a middle ground, Beyond Borders travels across the U.S. and beyond to give voices to those on the front-line of this issue, including candid interviews with Border Patrol agents, radio celebrities, demographers, the Minute Men, potential migrants, and a host of experts including Noam Chomsky (Distorted Morality) and Gustavo Arellano (Ask A Mexican). Beyond Borders is an entertaining and enlightening film that asks: Is migration a basic human right?
¡Salud!
A timely examination of human values and the health issues that affect us all, ¡Salud! looks at the curious case of Cuba, a cash-strapped country with what the BBC calls ‘one of the world’s best health systems.’ From the shores of Africa to the Americas, !Salud! hits the road with some of the 28,000 Cuban health professionals serving in 68 countries, and explores the hearts and minds of international medical students in Cuba — now numbering 30,000, including nearly 100 from the USA. Their stories plus testimony from experts around the world bring home the competing agendas that mark the battle for global health—and the complex realities confronting the movement to make healthcare everyone’s birth right. www.saludthefilm.net
