ARTICLES
The Deficit: Congress Fiddles as America Loses Ground
The recent news from Germany is encouraging for Europe—and sobering for the U.S. Beating all forecasts, unemployment has plunged to its lowest level in nearly 20 years. Business and consumer confidence is hitting records. It is getting hard to flinch…
Goldman-and-Facebook-Insiders-Trade-Others-Keep-Out
Have you received your invitation to invest in Facebook, the not-yet-listed social-networking phenom that has burst onto Wall Street with the excitement of a dot.com company a dozen years ago? I haven’t got mine, either. They must be in the…
A Near Perfect Spy Novelist
ABSOLUTE FRIENDS. By John le Carré. Little, Brown. 455 pp. $26.95. A year ago now, when the Bush Administration was preparing the world for an American invasion of Iraq, John le Carré wrote a column of scathing, sharp-toothed commentary for…
A Kiss in Java
INDONESIAN DESTINIES. By Theodore Friend. Belknap/Harvard. 628 pp. $35. INDONESIA: Peoples and Histories. By Jean Gelman Taylor. Yale. 420 pp. $39.50. In a broad square not far from the center of Jakarta, a large obelisk of concrete soars into the sky….
A Stone Unturned
Someone once described Graham Greene as the novelist of decolonizing Britain. England during and after the war and the imperial fall was his true subject, the uncut stone from which he chiseled his themes. Think of knob-kneed, lonely-hearted Wilson, the…
Excursions in the Real World
THE STORY OF LUCY GAULT. By William Trevor. Viking. 227 pp. $24.95. Why is so much fiction written in our language and why is so much of what is written of so little consequence? The novels come and go as…
JAPAN: AN INTERPRETATION
THE DONALD RICHIE READER: 50 Years of Writing on Japan. By Donald Richie. Compiled and edited by Arturo Silva. Stone Bridge. 238 pp. $29.95 with case. Paper $19.95. Those inscrutable Japanese. They’ve inspired more trash between hard covers over the…
Memory without history: Who owns Guatemala’s past?
In the light and not in the light, in the darkness and not in the darkness, … motionless and in movement —Miguel Angel Asturias, Men of Maize’ On the edge of the Plaza Mayor, Guatemala City’s vast central square, a small…
`Manifest Duplicity’
BLOWBACK: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire. By Chalmers Johnson. Metropolitan. 268 pp. $26. Some Sundays back, the New York Times fronted a story from its Paris correspondent, Suzanne Daley, about the fear and loathing Americans induce among Europeans…
The Indigenous and the Imported: Khatami’s Iran
Culture is what remains when one no longer believes in Utopia. —Farhad Khosrokhavar and Oliver Roy Comment sortir d’une revolution religieuse1 At the bar of my hotel in Tehran—or what used to be the bar in officially dry, postrevolutionary Iran—I sip…
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