Table of Contents
Click here to read a slide-show essay about Antonio López García.
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Nonfiction
The Bin Ladens: An Arabian Family in the American Century, by Steve Coll. In the past four years, New Yorker writer Steve Coll has published two amazing books about America's misadventures in the Islamic (and Islamist) world—first Ghost Wars and now The Bin Ladens, which is one of the most enthralling family stories ever written.
Coll had the insight to recognize that the Bin Ladens embody the most important conflicts of our age. Tribalism, nationhood, Islam, Islamism, secularism, modernity, and technology—the Saudi family struggles with all of them. He begins with Mohamed Bin Laden, who rose from tribal poverty in Yemen to the right hand of the King of Saudi Arabia. After his death in 1967, Mohamed's dozens of children spread the family fortune around the world, struck deals with American elites, and also gave us the world's most notorious terrorist. Coll paints vivid portraits of many of Mohamed's 29 sons but two in particular: Salem, who led the family after his father's death, a party-hopping, nocturnal daredevil who longed to marry a French woman, a German, a Brit, and an American—all at once; and Osama, the overlooked, soft-spoken, glory-seeking troublemaker.
Coll gets inside Saudi Arabia like no reporter before him, uncovering facts about Osama's finances and family relationships that even the CIA missed. There's a wonderful interlude about the brothers investing in a satellite phone company at the very moment Osama realizes sat phones are the perfect tool to run his global terror network. Particularly rich in detail is Coll's explanation of Osama's radicalization, from the Muslim Brotherhood teacher who promised to play soccer with Osama and his schoolmates but taught them the Koran instead to the way in which Osama's increasing fundamentalism at first helped the family by reinforcing its Islamic bona fides with conservative Saudi royals, then caused huge trouble when Osama started blowing things up. —David Plotz
The Future of the Internet—And How to Stop It, by Jonathan Zittrain. The Internet blossoms into something more powerful and fantastic every couple of months because it's a generative technology, writes legal scholar and activist Jonathan Zittrain, open to modifications from a wide group of people. Like other generative technologies—the PC, Windows, the Firefox browser—the Internet unleashes unexpected innovations from unanticipated corners, thereby enriching us all. Example: When Jobs and Wozniak invented the Apple II, nobody had any idea that somebody would come along and create a killer application like the spreadsheet. (On the downside, generativity makes spam, viruses, and spyware possible, too.)
Zittrain worries about a growing countertrend: Nongenerative devices, such as the iPhone and the Xbox, which are born locked down. Because a nongenerative device can be adapted or improved only by its creators, it dead-ends the processes of discovery and invention that have typified the last three decades of computing. Zittrain fears that the freedom to create that we take for granted will vanish and be replaced by a world of "sterile appliances tethered to a network of control." Unless we resist.—Jack Shafer
Ghost: Confessions of a Counterterrorism Agent, by Fred Burton, and A Case of Exploding Mangoes, by Mohammed Hanif. Spy memoirs, like pornography, appeal to readers who crave novelty rather than originality. Connoisseurs of both genres will tell you that sticking to the well-worn formula is a virtue, and, in that sense, Ghost: Confessions of a Counterterrorism Agent is very virtuous indeed. Fred Burton tells the story of his years in the Diplomatic Security Service with a mélange of brand names (three in the book's second sentence alone), clichéd emotions, and studiously displayed stoicism. (Protecting the homeland impinges on family life, but so it goes.) Still, he supplies just enough scoop on his role chasing terrorists to keep things interesting.
One of the cases Burton describes is his investigation into the 1988 downing of Pakistani President Gen. Zia-ul-Haq's plane. As far as he's concerned, the KGB did it. Mohammed Hanif's first novel, A Case of Exploding Mangoes, explores the death of Gen. Zia in a far more entertaining and original way and offers a very different culprit. The main protagonist, Pakistani Air Force Junior Under Officer Ali Shigri, seems too obsessed with his silent drill squad to be responsible for the assassination, but other suspects abound: Shigri's perfume-wearing bunkmate Obaid, resourceful laundry man Uncle Starchy, pot-smoking American Lt. Bannen, perhaps even a mango-loving crow. Or did a higher power intervene? Hanif's book is sexy, subversive, and magical, a soaring counterpoint to Burton's earth-bound realm of facts.—June Thomas
God in the White House: How Faith Shaped the Presidency From John F. Kennedy to George W. Bush, by Randall Balmer. I am surely the sort of reader the author had in mind: a left-leaning believer tired of the assumption that those two words don't go together. Yet the book didn't work for me because it seemed so biased against believers on the right. And if Balmer lost me, I'm not sure what choir he is preaching to.
He begins promisingly, with a sprightly refresher course on the anti-Catholic bigotry JFK faced as a presidential candidate. ("I think it's so unfair of people to be against Jack because he's Catholic," Jacqueline Kennedy said of her husband during the 1960 campaign. "He's such a poor Catholic.") Yet Balmer's assumption that the religious right is not motivated by faith at all but only by politics is exactly the sort of bullying claim on the moral high ground that I'm so weary of. And his narrative is highly selective. For instance, he argues that Roe v. Wade "was not the precipitating cause for the rise of Religious Right" and instead traces it to another court case, Green v. Connally, which found that church (and other) schools with discriminatory policies are not entitled to tax-exempt status. Interesting, but why cite as supporting evidence the fact that the Southern Baptist Convention initially shrugged over Roe—only to leave out the fact that abortion was one of the major reasons for a subsequent revolution within that church? After a while, all the gratuitous little digs begin to grate: "Beverly LaHaye started a new organization, Concerned Women For America, in 1979,'' he writes, "claiming that she resented the assumption on the part of feminist leaders that they spoke for all women." Claiming? Here's my claim: Balmer's credibility seems compromised, even to a true believer like me. —Melinda Henneberger
A Pocket Full of History: Four Hundred Years of America—One State Quarter at a Time, by Jim Noles. It was nearly a decade ago that Caesar Rodney first galloped across a Delaware quarter; later this year, when King Kamehameha takes his rightful place on Hawaii's, the U.S. Mint's State Quarters program will be complete. By all accounts, it's been a great success. A Mint survey cited recently by the Times claims that nearly half of Americans collect the coins "in casual accumulations or as a serious numismatic pursuit." As a not-entirely-casual accumulator—I got a little worked up when I finally found the strangely elusive Indiana—I figured I'd be an easy mark for Jim Noles' new study of the series.
Noles divides the book into 50 chapters, decoding each coin's iconography in a short historical essay. For some states, this approach makes good sense. I've always admired the understated beauty of the Connecticut quarter, but it wasn't until Noles filled me in on the rollicking tale of the state's Charter Oak that I fully appreciated its pluck as well. More often, however, Noles' essays do little to illuminate the coin at hand. Nebraska's quarter, which depicts Chimney Rock, inspires a detailed account of that geological formation, complete with a meditation on its Native-American name—Elk Penis.
Noles only hints at the far more interesting stories of how the states arrived at their varied designs. In Michigan, a 25-member gubernatorial commission reviewed more than 4,300 proposals … then chose a map of Michigan. Other states, though forced to fight through just as much red tape, came up with elegant, often surprising symbols: Iowa selected a Grant Wood schoolhouse; Alabama chose Helen Keller. Noles tantalizingly mentions, in passing, that before deciding on a bridge as its emblem, West Virginia entertained the idea of honoring Anna Jarvis, the woman who invented Mother's Day. There's a fascinating case study in federalism in these quarters—and a window into the dreams and insecurities of the 50 states—but Noles, sadly, is too distracted by arboreal and geological history to notice. —John Swansburg
The Post-American World, by Fareed Zakaria. Despite the somewhat alarming title, this is a book, as Zakaria states at the outset, "not about the decline of America but rather about the rise of everyone else." With that caveat, Zakaria launches into a far-reaching analysis of how globalization has resulted in a fundamental shift of power—political and economic but not military—away from American dominance and toward the rising powers of China and India, the first- and second-fastest growing economies in the world. And while much of the data in the book has been cataloged and discussed at length in a number of recent publications (I prefer Parag Khanna's The Second World), Zakaria's strength lies not in striking new ground but in offering a lens through which to understand America's role in a globalized world.
It is time for America to abandon its hyperpower ambitions and instead learn to act as an "honest broker"—a referee of sorts—between the powers that may one day overtake it (much as Britain has done). In the future, Zakaria argues, America's most vital export will be the universal ideals upon which the country is founded—ideals that can form a kind of hub around which the rest of the world can gather—but only if we ourselves are committed to live by those very same ideals, regardless of whatever threats we may face. So far, we've had a pretty lousy start on the future Zakaria imagines. —Reza Aslan
Fiction
Last Last Chance, by Fiona Maazel. This debut novel is several books at once: a wacked-out farce about families, a critique of contemporary culture, and a welcome addition to a heretofore male-dominated streak of apocalypse narratives (Cormac McCarthy's The Road, Jim Crace's Pesthouse, Matthew Sharpe's Jamestowne, and so on). The story is told by Lucy Clark, the eldest daughter of a Centers for Disease Control doctor who kills himself after a batch of so-called "superplague" disappears from a lab on his watch. Suddenly the focus of national scrutiny, the Clark women—Lucy; her mother, Isifrid; her 12-year-old half-sister, Hannah; and her grandma, Agneth—must learn to cope with negative attention while preparing for the (possibly) impending pandemic. Each woman seeks comfort where she can: Hannah chooses Christian Identity (read "white power") summer camp, Grandma gets into reincarnation theory, and Lucy and her mother both choose drugs.
It's a fast-moving book full of insight and surprise, and Maazel's prose is at least as compelling as the story itself. She writes with a kind of ecstatic swagger—freewheeling and cocksure, intelligent and loopy and funny as hell. "[I]t's not that I'll be at a funeral and laugh because it's funny. I'll just laugh. And maybe, from strain of withholding laughter, I will get aroused. And maybe, from horror of arousal, I will get a headache that hurts so bad, I'll end up crying anyway." I relished every page.—Justin Taylor
The Story of Forgetting, by Stefan Merrill Block. When the mother of 15-year-old aspiring scientist Seth Waller is diagnosed with a rare strain of Alzheimer's disease, he devotes his summer to "empirical investigation" of the illness. Bumbling and intellectually overconfident, he tries to make sense of his mother's genetics by researching her family, which she refused to discuss. Block interweaves Seth's efforts with two other stories: a C.S. Lewis-type fable about a fantastical, amnesic land called Isidora and a memoir by a hunchbacked Luddite who (in a plot twist never wholly explained) lures his brother's wife to bed by masturbating outside her window in a tree. The hunchback and his unlikely paramour conceive a girl; his brother, back from Cold War Army service, raises the girl as his own. Seth struggles with his mother's oblivion and the boilerplate anxieties of high school; the elderly hunchback struggles with his secret paternity—and so on toward a satisfying, not-so-unexpected denouement that draws the three stories together.
The province of ailing-parent literature is hardly underpopulated, but The Story of Forgetting earns its claim to the territory. It's fast-moving and raw without being emotionally heavy-handed: Block's characters share despair through apathy and awkwardness, not fireworks. Granted, less-fraught passages often stall into cliché (on New York: "four miserable years of temp work in the strange city of sneers and dirt and car horns") or else an unfortunate third-drink brand of philosophizing. ("Was science, in fact, advancing toward anything? Or was it giving more intricate form to a hopelessness as old as human history?") But the novel's energy outweighs its familiarity and fuzziness; Block tells an emotionally demanding tale with honesty and charm.—Nathan Heller
Poetry
The One-Strand River: Poems, 1994-2007, by Richard Kenney. Richard Kenney's big new book of short poems took him 14 years to write, and the best poems make the wait worthwhile. They are encyclopedically informed (especially in the sciences) yet warmly personable and richly worked (even ornamented) despite their small scale. A sonnet called "Hydrology: Lachrymation" begins, "The river meanders because it can't think" and then investigates "lesser weather systems ... troubling the benthos where the ice caps shrink." Kenney (who won a MacArthur "genius" grant 20 years ago) makes the concerns of a comfortable middle-aged West Coast writer—married love, parental love, parental fears, ecocatastrophe—not only vivid but quirky, even bizarre, in part by drawing on the pleasures of rhyme. Addressing his infant daughter in lines that mimic her unrest, Kenney is cute but not cutesy, a genuine charm: "You are nothing if not a little otter./ You are a murmurous moon-miss of a wriggle./ You are one burped girl/ and no other." Not all the poems are so much fun; the first and the last quarters of this capacious collection, though, show good-humored depths no other poet now has.—Stephen Burt
Essays
Everyday Drinking, by Kingsley Amis. An editor's note to this omnium-gatherum of Amis' notes on potation observes that the author was not just a drinker but "a drink-ist," making this volume a dipsographical classic. Amis teases the brain with a 30-part quiz ("How did the bubbles get into the champagne in the first place?") and relays such seductive recipes as Evelyn Waugh's Noonday Reviver (big shot of gin, half-pint of Guinness, ginger beer) with a drollery that even a teetotaler will savor. He further offers the overindulger practical knowledge in a chapter on having been drunk, which includes instructions on treating both the physical and metaphysical hangover. For the P.H., Amis prescribes vigorous sex, copious water, and unsweetened grapefruit; for the M.H., a special regimen of literature or music. "A good cry is the initial aim," he writes, recommending Sibelius' incidental music for Pelléas and Mélisande, which "carries the ever-so-slightly phoney and overdone pathos that is exactly what you want in your present state." —Troy Patterson
The Modern Element: Essays on Contemporary Poetry, by Adam Kirsch. What makes a poem modern, and what makes a modern poem a work of art? These are the questions that animate The Modern Element, a critical survey of contemporary poets—from John Ashbery to Jorie Graham, Philip Larkin to Richard Wilbur—by Adam Kirsch. With this volume, Kirsch, whose smart, muscular, and at times acerbic criticism has been dazzling and infuriating readers for a decade, steps into a distinguished line of literary essayists. He derives his title from a Lionel Trilling essay; he writes in the accessible, generalist vein of Edmund Wilson; and he builds his own definition of modern poetry on the one advanced by T.S. Eliot in "The Metaphysical Poets." Eliot defined the modern poet, Kirsch writes, "not as his age's interpreter but as its exemplary specimen or willing victim." For Kirsch, "a good modern poem," which is to say a meaningful or significant poem, can be written only by "poets who put themselves generally at risk in their work"—technically, emotionally, intellectually—and who avoid the "fraudulent self-exposure" and "otiose experimentalism" too many writers fall back on.
Kirsch employs these criteria—sometimes implicitly, sometimes explicitly—in evaluating the poets in this collection. His approach seems especially relevant now, when so much poetry reads (and is read) as journaling or therapy. Poets who, in Kirsch's estimation, merely transcribe raw perceptions get the gloves-off treatment: "[Sharon] Olds has no interest in abstracting from the contingent details of her life to a larger, more universally valid idea or symbol." Kirsch values discipline and rigorous craft; he abhors "mental laziness." Yet he also objects to the deliberate obscurity that has become so fashionable in poetry. (Kenneth Koch is "close to [John] Ashbery in his ability to sound like sense without always making it.") But even at his most astringent, Kirsch, a poet himself, exhibits an understanding of the emotional demands of writing: "It means hollowing out one's self, in order to allow all the bitterness and joy of life to take up residence there and find expression." —Amanda Fortini
Poets talk about the attention brought by National Poetry Month the way kids talk about food at summer camp—it's terrible, and there's not enough of it. For the rest of the reading world, the initiative has all the appeal of a charity drive. While there's plenty of good poetry being written today, there's at least six times as much of the not-so-good variety. Take heart: Slate has winnowed the stack down to a manageable few.
Mark Doty, Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems
Mark Doty is one of the premier elegists of the AIDS crisis, and his best poems seldom have time for mere description. In early pieces such as "Days of 1981," the speaker hovers, bewildered, on the border between spectator and active participant, the poem moving in and out of rhyme:
The smokestacks
and office towers loomed, a half-lit backdrop
beyond the baseball diamond. I didn't want him ever to stop,
and he left me breathless and unsatisfied.
He was a sculptor, and for weeks afterward I told myself
I loved him, because I'd met a man and wasn't sure
I could meet another—I'd never tried—
and because the next morning, starting
off to work, the last I saw of him, he gave me a heart,
ceramic, the marvel of a museum school show
his class had mounted. No one could guess
how he'd fired hollow clay entirely seamless
and kept it from exploding.
In later poems like "My Tattoo" or "Theory of Marriage," Doty displays a gift for interweaving arresting image with tender narrative. A selection of 80 of Doty's best pages along these lines would be a pleasure; Fire to Fire, however, is four times that length.
Doty is on record defending his right to make verbal art out of something other than plain (straight) speech, but this principled refusal to pin meanings down isn't the only obstacle the reader encounters. In his less successful poems, nothing ever is; it always seems. Doty habitually conflates yearning with minimizing—a little, nearly, almost, and not exactly are his go-to qualifiers. And he asks a lot of questions, mainly unanswerable ones ("how could they/ compete with sunset's burnished/ oratorio?"). These are quibbles, though. Doty's new work is getting clearer without giving up its hard-won beauty.
Sidney Wade, Stroke
Sidney Wade's imagination is as powerful as any American poet's since Wallace Stevens. The poems in her fifth collection, Stroke, are apocalyptically cheerful elegies for the body politic. They sometimes sound like an arts section taking back material (and a mood) long abandoned to the science or front pages:
The imperatives of the dominant glib prevail
and there's no hope for the culture.
It's monopoloid and tick-rich,
filled with words that will kill you.
(from "Nothing but the Truth")
Wade studs her poems with $10 words—say, manumission and necrosis—some of which she turns into portmanteaus worthy of George W. Bush's "misunderestimate": protruberant, hystericalectomy, immargination. She rhymes in an equally confident manner, matching barges with largesse, ruthless with toothless, and corrosive with explosive.
Though they are often transporting, Wade's poems always yield to paraphrase, pointing to something recognizable in the real world or the news. Her project—to remain sane despite the gloom these words point to—requires that she reassure herself and the reader that while we really are seeing what we're seeing, the consolations of light and love still exist:
I didn't have a forever grant,
but we dealt with that as masterful adults.
We approached the ultimate adding machine
and grabbed us a statue bereft of sin
and some mausoleum gear.
There's not enough shriek and swagger
in our utterly transgressive faith, he confessed,
but he looked down on the others
in their cold, crawling context.
Those people are injured by the time of day,
he sniffed. As we entered a carnelian cloud,
I suggested we leave early and often.(from "The Visionary from Apopka")
The poet-critic Richard Howard has referred to the Parnassian quality of Wade's poems, to their insistence on beauty, glory, and exalted feeling, and he is exactly right: She believes that "A planetful of pure desire/ Is all a poet should require/ To set the commonplace afire." She persists in this belief even as she diagnoses irreversible national damage. Having enlarged her scope with each collection, she's becoming something of an oracle of the outlook for intelligence and happiness. Here's hoping more and more readers come to consult her.
Darcie Dennigan, Corinna, A-Maying the Apocalypse
Prizewinning books sometimes resemble the work of the judges who choose them. Fordham Poets Out Loud winner Darcie Dennigan and judge (and MacArthur winner) Alice Fulton both favor cleareyed lyricism and overboard neo-metaphysical conceits. Dennigan is as comfortable intercutting the legend of St. Ursula with a girls'-night-out birthday party at a bar in Boston as she is imagining a foundling hospital where the nurses simulate maternal heartbeats by putting swaddled clocks in the cribs:
And the papers covered it—a new invention from orphans' nurses—a babybalm device, a mother apparatus—but really it was just meter, after all, just a pattern of beats—but the papers liked that too—that meter was portable—they thought it was cute that we were teaching the babies to say meter instead of mother.
(from "The New Mothers")
There is little chance of mistaking the cadences of Dennigan's long lines and paragraphs for ordinary prose. Her rhythmic phrasings come in consistently pleasing variation, not in lock-step imitation of the ones coming before and after. She also makes music when signaling her themes. Taking literally Pound's poetic command to "make it new," she includes the word new in the titles of four poems; every poem in the first half of the book includes the word mother.
New poets, when they are very good, can transmute confusion into excitement. Dennigan is excellent. "I didn't know exactly what I was doing there, so I was going/ to do it harder," she writes. It should not take another contest to bring Dennigan's next book to print.
Eavan Boland, New Collected Poems
Director of the creative writing program at Stanford University, Eavan Boland is a commanding poet, capable of great intimacies and public gestures: Her 1998 collection, The Lost Land, is dedicated to Mary Robinson, the former president of Ireland and the U.N. high commissioner of human rights. In the narrative of her collected work so far, the turning point from Irish national treasure to international ambassador of letters comes about halfway through, with the 1987 poem "The Glass King":
If we could see ourselves, not as we do—
in mirrors, self-deceptions, self-regardings—
but as we ought to be and as we have been:
poets, lute-stringers, makyres and abettors
of our necessary art, soothsayers of the ailment
and disease of our times, sweet singers,
truth tellers, intercessors for self-knowledge—
what would we think of these fin-de-siecle
half-hearted penitents we have become
at the sick-bed of the century: hand-wringing
elegists with an ill-concealed greed
for the inheritance?
There are passages in her work up to this point that attain similar intensity, some metrical sentences six or seven lines long, but nothing like this verse paragraph, a moving dragon of fiery righteousness.
After Boland catches onto the power of packing an extended speech in a compressed space, her phrasings get clearer and stranger: A water bucket makes "zinc-music," a neighbor's stream makes a "fluid sunset," bad luck might see "an unexplained/ fever speckle heifers." In her more recent collections, she aims to soar from a standing start. She interrupts her fable "Embers" to pierce the reader with a look:
When he woke in the morning she was young and beautiful.
And she was his, forever, but on one condition.
He could not say that she had once been old and haggard.
He could not say that she had ever … here I look up.
You are turned away. You have no interest in this.
Among her near-contemporary countrymen, two have already become last names: Heaney, Muldoon. Boland is due to join them, and New Collected Poems is, for the moment, the book to find and read.
You don't have to be an international-affairs expert to know that, nowadays, civil wars, terrorism, insurgencies, ethnic conflicts, separatist movements, guerrillas, and other forms of intranational strife are more common than the traditional wars that pit the army of one nation-state against that of another. But the greatest toll of all is exacted by the wars that governments are waging against the illegal commerce of people, drugs, weapons, counterfeits, timber, human organs, diamonds, and myriad other goods. Civil wars are geographically concentrated, and few international wars last longer than a decade; smuggling is not bound by time or space, and it is now growing faster than ever. This boom is occurring despite (and in some cases because of) the "wars"—as they have been labeled—that governments everywhere are fighting against international traffickers.
Richard Nixon launched the United States' "war on drugs" in 1969, and in the last two decades, new technologies have spawned new wars. Police officers no longer raid college dorms looking just for stashes of marijuana; now they also go looking for the heavy users and distributors of illegally downloaded music. Relatively recent medical innovations that dramatically lowered the risk of organ transplants have created an unprecedented demand for kidneys, livers, and corneas. The supply has not kept pace, and, inevitably, the new international black market in human organs is also soaring. Brazilian kidneys are sold in Europe, and Chinese corneas are transplanted in India.
But the dramatic transformations in smuggling and international crime that the world has witnessed since the late 1980s have been driven by more than revolutions in technology. The political revolutions of the last two decades have also created needs and business opportunities that smugglers and criminals have been quick to exploit. The collapse of the former Soviet bloc flooded world markets with weapons and mercenaries that were once under the control of governments but that are now available to whoever can afford them. China's economic liberalization has transformed it into the world's largest manufacturer and exporter of illegally copied products. Everywhere, economic reforms aimed at stimulating international trade and investment helped make national borders even more porous than they already were. And sustained economic growth in the United States and other wealthy countries created an insatiable demand for foreign workers, legal and illegal, and for everything else, including drugs for weekends, special wood for fancy kitchen floors, coltan for cell phones, and money-laundering services for the wealthy and unscrupulous.
Misha Glenny's McMafia: A Journey Through the Global Criminal Underworld offers many examples of this altered landscape. Glenny is a British journalist whose coverage of the Balkan wars in the 1990s gave him a front seat from which to watch how the mayhem created by war continued after the conflict ended. Glenny increasingly found himself reporting on the ways in which criminals and traffickers filled the economic and political vacuums left by the wars. In trying to understand the new insecurity of the former Yugoslavia, Glenny quickly discovered what all writers who try to make sense of how criminals can overrun a society have discovered: The phenomenon may look very local, but it is fundamentally influenced by powerful foreign players and shaped by new global forces.
So Glenny branched out from the Balkans and traveled to Colombia and British Columbia, Nigeria and Japan, South Africa, China, Israel, India, and many other places, particularly in Eastern Europe. His account of what he found in his travels confirms what a few writers have been stressing, and what most international-affairs analysts acknowledge but largely ignore when discussing world politics and economics: Global crime is one of the most potent forces at work in today's world. It is impossible to make sense of what is going on—politically, economically, or even geopolitically—in countries like Russia, China, or Mexico—or even in entire regions in Africa, Eastern Europe, Asia, or Latin America—without taking into consideration the economic weight of illicit trade and the political power wielded by the criminal networks that control these trades.
As Glenny reports, in many countries crime not only pays but is often the most lucrative game in town, and its players are some of the most influential members of society. He also documents how the profits involved stimulate creativity, innovation, and risk-taking to an extent that is rarely, if ever, matched by the government agents who battle the traffickers. The Bulgarian Ilya Pavlov, one of many characters profiled by Glenny, epitomizes the intertwining of crime, government, and business that threatens democracy, economic progress, and security in a growing number of countries.
A former wrestler who married the daughter of a high-ranking secret police officer, Pavlov began his career as a small-time thug. In the 1990s, the combination of a collapsing state, unregulated markets, and lawlessness created enormous opportunities, which he exploited with entrepreneurial zest and murderous violence. Glenny explains that in less than a decade, Pavlov had created a conglomerate that spanned many sectors (extortion, prostitution, smuggling, drug trafficking, car theft, and money laundering) and many countries, including the United States, where his subsidiary Multigroup U.S. owned two casinos in Paraguay, then the Latin American epicenter of the illicit trades (since displaced by Venezuela). By describing the thousands of mourners who attended Pavlov's funeral in 2003, Glenny conveys how deeply entangled his criminal enterprise was with Bulgaria's power elite. Everyone who mattered in business, politics, government, trade unions, sports, religion, the media, or the military seemed to be there.
The world is slowly beginning to realize that global crime in the 21st century is not merely more of the same. Continuing to call crime-fighting a "war" is not unlike employing the term "war on terror": It is a misnomer that leads to wrongheaded efforts and failed strategies that add to the problems instead of alleviating them. The governmental emphasis on prohibition, criminalization, and interdiction very often serves to boost prices and criminal incentives. Of course, the most dangerous and intolerable illicit trades—for example, in children, nuclear materials, or lethal fake medicines—demand comprehensive attention. But burdened as struggling governments currently are with enforcing a plethora of prohibitions, it's hardly surprising that their efforts are diluted and largely ineffective.
Thanks to their global reach, immense financial muscle, and ruthless inclination to rely on harrowing violence to advance their business interests, international criminals have acquired new political potency, which creates unique dangers and poses a new challenge. This threat cannot be tackled by traditional, nationally based law-enforcement techniques. In some instances, for example, the more realistic goal is not to build a jury-proof criminal case against a few kingpins but to disrupt the far-flung networks on which criminals depend for their international operations—no small undertaking. Deregulating and decriminalizing some of these trades is another obvious move that most governments still don't recognize as necessary and, in some instances, even inevitable. In general, the supply of fresh ideas on how to deal more effectively with this new global scourge is not surging.
McMafia will disappoint readers interested in solutions or original analytic insights, but it is a welcome addition to a growing genre. A spate of books (Roberto Saviano's Gomorrah, Loretta Napoleone's Rogue's Capitalism, Kevin Phillips' Knockoff, Douglas Farah and Stephen Braun's Merchant of Death, Peter Andreas and Ethan Nadelman's Policing the Globe, Peter Reuter and Edward Truman's Chasing Dirty Money) and many films (Traffic, Blood Diamond, Eastern Promises, Maria Full of Grace) are heightening our awareness of the unprecedented threats posed by the new forms of global crime. As we all know, no problem was ever solved before it was recognized as such—and this hydra-headed danger can't receive too much attention.
"We want people owning their home—we want people owning a businesses."—Washington, D.C., April 18, 2008
Click here to see video of Bush's comments. The Bushism is at 21:49.
Got a Bushism? Send it to bushisms@slate.com. For more, see "The Complete Bushisms.".
When I think about all the hoops Barack Obama is being made to jump through in order to prove he's a patriotic American, I feel nostalgic for the days when the press thought Obama's biggest negative was his supposed inexperience relative to Hillary Clinton (see "Hillary's Experience Lie").
First Obama had to distance himself from some bizarre comments made by his former pastor. Then he had to explain why he doesn't wear a flag lapel pin often enough to suit Charlie Gibson of ABC News. Then he had to distance himself from a former member of the Weather Underground to whom he was introduced when he decided to run for the Illinois Senate but with whom he has since had scant contact. Then he had to distance himself from Hamas, a terrorist organization he has repeatedly condemned, simply because its chief political adviser, Ahmed Yousefat, expressed admiration for him. Now Peggy Noonan of the Wall Street Journal demands that Obama demonstrate he carries sufficient love within his breast for … Sutter's Mill.
I'm not making this up. Here is what Noonan wrote:
Hillary Clinton is not Barack Obama's problem. America is Mr. Obama's problem. He has been tagged as a snooty lefty, as the glamorous, ambivalent candidate from Men's Vogue, the candidate who loves America because of the great progress it has made in terms of racial fairness. Fine, good. But has he ever gotten misty-eyed over … the Wright Brothers and what kind of country allowed them to go off on their own and change everything? How about D-Day, or George Washington, or Henry Ford, or the losers and brigands who flocked to Sutter's Mill, who pushed their way west because there was gold in them thar hills? There's gold in that history.
Let me pause here to point out that if Barack Obama were ever to refer to the '49ers of the California gold rush—even with affection—as "losers and brigands," then Sean Hannity would demand his immediate impeachment from the Senate, Bill Kristol would cite it as evidence that Obama was a member of the Communist Party, and Noonan herself would grieve over this condescension toward the starry-eyed dreamers who constitute the heart, soul, and viscera of this proud land.
I'm sure Obama is as sentimental as the next guy about the Wright brothers and D-Day and George Washington (to whom he is distantly related). Henry Ford is a harder case. On the one hand, he is the father of mass production and the inventor of the Model T. On the other hand, he was a raving anti-Semite. Between 1920 and 1922, Ford published in the Dearborn Independent, which he owned, no fewer than 81 articles on what he called "The Jewish Problem in America." These screeds were so odious that they prompted the resignation of the Dearborn Independent's editor, who refused to print them. Ford's rants about the international Jewish conspiracy, published in book form, were a formative influence on Baldur von Schirach*, leader of the Hitler Youth, according to von Schirach's testimony at the Nuremberg Trials. One of these books—The International Jew: The World's Foremost Problem—has been posted online by the American Nazi Party. At the very least, such affinities make it a challenge to love both Ford and D-Day, the Allied invasion that ultimately landed Ford's most influential disciple in Spandau prison for 20 years.
But I digress. Of this golden history, Noonan continues:
John McCain carries it in his bones. Mr. McCain learned it in school, in the Naval Academy, and, literally, at grandpa's knee. Mrs. Clinton learned at least its importance in her long slog through Arkansas, circa 1977-92.
Please note the presumption that it is impossible to acquire affection for the history of the United States in the states of Illinois, Massachusetts, or Connecticut, where Hillary Clinton lived before she lived in Arkansas. Conservatives long ago managed to establish as unchallengeable fact that the real America cannot be found in the places where a majority of its population resides. Exceptions are made for the greater Washington, D.C., area only when the persons involved belong to the U.S. military. No, America's authentic heart beats only in the states where people are scarce, for the simple reason that the few people you do find there tend to be Republicans. One would think this widely accepted (if faulty) proposition would benefit Obama, since he hails from the sparsely populated state of Hawaii. But conservatives don't recognize Hawaii as the real America (Vermont has this problem, too) because its inhabitants tend to vote Democratic. Never mind that it was a foreign power's deadly attack on Hawaii that brought the U.S. into World War II.*
Noonan continues:
Mr. Obama? What does he think about all that history? Which is another way of saying: What does he think of America? That's why people talk about the flag pin absent from the lapel. They wonder if it means something. Not that the presence of the pin proves love of country—any cynic can wear a pin, and many cynics do. But what about Obama and America? Who would have taught him to love it, and what did he learn was loveable, and what does he think about it all?
Noonan is beating about the bush here. When people complain that a flag pin is too often absent from Obama's lapel—and I am not convinced very many people do—it's for the same reason that Henry Ford complained that a yarmulke was too often present on Bernard Baruch's head. It's because they don't believe such people are one of us. Baruch was the Other because he was Jewish. Obama is the Other because his (largely absent) father was a foreigner from Kenya, because he spent part of his childhood in Indonesia and the rest of it in Hawaii, and because his mother was, in the New York Times' words, "a free-spirited wanderer."
Noonan is ready for this line of attack:
Another challenge. Snooty lefties get angry when you ask them to talk about these things. They get resentful. Who are you to question my patriotism? But no one is questioning his patriotism, they're questioning its content, its fullness.
If you object to having your patriotism questioned on the basis of your religion, or your foreign parentage, or your having lived in a foreign country, or your having lived in Hawaii, or your harboring "lefty" beliefs, then according to Noonan you are "snooty." Calm down, Noonan says. I'm not questioning whether you're patriotic. I'm questioning whether you're patriotic enough. This is a distinction without a difference.
Then, of course, there's race. Is Noonan characterizing Obama as the Other because he's black? I'd find this interpretation hard to dismiss if Noonan hadn't already assured me, in her Journal column of Feb. 8, that
No consultant, no matter how opportunistic and hungry, will think it easy—or professionally desirable—to take [Obama] down in a low manner. If anything, they've learned from the Clintons in South Carolina what that gets you. (I add that yes, there are always freelance mental cases, who exist on both sides and are empowered by modern technology. They'll make their YouTubes. But the mad are ever with us, and this year their work will likely stay subterranean.)
With Mr. Obama the campaign will be about issues. "He'll raise your taxes." He will, and I suspect Americans may vote for him anyway. But the race won't go low.
It seems to me that with this column the race has already gone "low," even if Noonan didn't mean to suggest that an African-American must be assumed unpatriotic until proven otherwise. Do you know what I love about America? I love that one isn't pestered on an hourly basis about one's presumed failure to be patriotic, or patriotic enough, or patriotic in the right way. We are a tolerant people who tend to judge all, including presidential candidates, as individuals. For the most part, anyway. An exception must be made for conservative pundits like Noonan who make their living by imagining the United States to be overrun with xenophobic, bigoted morons; who pretty up that misapprehension by calling it patriotism; and who then try to foment culture war in the name of these make-believe "real Americans." As to this latest litmus test, I doubt Obama has strong feelings one way or another about the prospectors who overran Sutter's Mill in 1849, though he may now be forced to pretend that he does. Why a grown woman, much less a member of the working press, should pose such an idiotic question is not easy to understand.
Correction, May 1, 2008: An earlier version of this column misspelled von Schirach's name. (Return to the corrected sentence.) Also, an earlier version of this column stated that Hawaii was "the most recent place in the United States to be attacked by a foreign power." In fact, that distinction belongs to Alaska's Aleutian Islands, which Japan invaded six months after it bombed Pearl Harbor. (Return to the corrected sentence.)
In the April 30 "Art," Christopher Benfey originally and incorrectly referred to the film The Spirit of the Beehive as Secrets of the Beehive.
In the April 30 "Press Box," Jack Shafer mistakenly included Jennifer Dunn in the Special Committee. Dunn was appointed to the committee but died. She was replaced by Susan M. Phillips.
In the April 29 "Music Box," Jody Rosen incorrectly stated that Leona Lewis won Britain's Pop Idol show. It was X Factor.
In the April 28 "Chatterbox," Timothy Noah described Hawaii as "the most recent place in the United States to be attacked by a foreign power." That distinction belongs to Alaska's Aleutian Islands, which Japan invaded six months after it bombed Pearl Harbor. In addition, Noah misspelled the name of the man who led Nazi German's Hitler Youth. It was Baldur von Schirach, notBalder von "Shirach."
Due to an editing error, Ottawa was misspelled in the April 28 "Hot Document."
If you believe you have found an inaccuracy in a Slate story, please send an e-mail to corrections@slate.com, and we will investigate. General comments should be posted in "The Fray," our reader discussion forum.
The next time you drive down a street in suburban or exurban America, pay careful attention to the yards. Lurking somewhere, either peeping out from the back or nakedly displayed right in front, some form of children's play equipment, typically in plastic and typically in some bright primary color, will probably be splayed on the grass.
I'd like to raise just one question about this picture of domestic bliss: How often do you actually see a child playing on, or near, one of these devices?
On a recent weekend trip through a posh Connecticut suburb, the kind with moss-covered stone walls and dense canopies of mature trees, I was dismayed to find the sylvan harmony of the scene constantly disrupted by garish blights, from wavy slides to inflatable contraptions of the kind once relegated to seasonal carnivals. It was as if a McDonald's PlayPlace—some alien, mother-ship PlayPlace—was spawning its miniaturized brood across the landscape (and simultaneously vaporizing the kids).
The Web site of Little Tikes—which boasts an American flag banner noting that some of its polycarbonate products are "Made in the USA" and then, just below, slightly less triumphantly, "or Made in the USA with US and Imported Parts"—offers a representative field guide to this kiddie sprawl, listing such injection-molded contraptions as the "Endless Adventures Slide & Hide Tower" and the "6-in-1 Town Center."
The phrase "fun that lasts" pops up often on the Little Tikes Web site, as if the manufacturer were trying to allay the suspicion of the purchasing parent that the giant red, yellow, and blue elephant he or she is buying will soon be nothing more than a mowing obstacle. For parents were once children, and they know the iron law: The more time spent in assembling a toy, the less it will actually be used. (A corollary: The packaging is inevitably more interesting than what's inside.) My sister-in-law reports that each year, her upstate New York town's annual "cleanup" day produces a massive haul of slides, swings, tubes, and tunnels, all of which seemingly have half-lives of one weekend and swiftly find themselves headed for the landfill.
The environmental implications alone—each piece of equipment must represent a lifetime's worth of plastic shopping bags—are reason enough to eschew this stuff. Then there are the aesthetics. On this, I'm hardly alone in my displeasure. In her account of the perils of suburban gardening, Paths of Desire, Dominique Browning recounts how a new neighbor installed an enormous swing-set with a plastic slide facing her house: "Obviously, I had developed an exaggerated aversion to the plastic; I'm the first to admit it. But brightly colored plastic (and who decided kids enjoy these colors anyway?) in the garden is one of my peeves." Or, as one blogger more bluntly put it, "The only thing worse than a neighbor with fifteen different pieces of play junk in his front yard is a neighbor with fifteen different pieces of insanely brightly colored play junk in his front yard."
Before you dismiss such complaints as mere aesthetic snobbery, consider another of Browning's pet peeves: "Why [does] every yard have to replicate the same debris, swing after swing, marching down the backs of the houses?" Her question highlights a few larger problems with this seemingly benign landscape element. The first is the decline of the playground. In her book American Playgrounds, Susan Solomon notes how the fear of injuries and their litigious consequences forced the closing, or banal "post-and-platform" retrofitting, of many playgrounds. Gone are the kinds of things that defined my own childhood: terrifying metal "monkey bars" pitched over a pit of hard gravel or the towering, twisting, all-metal "tornado slide," as we called it, which was at once the most exhilarating and the most dangerous thing in my young life.
But, injuries aside, a larger specter began to haunt playgrounds, Solomon notes: "Told incessantly to be mindful of lurking dangers and the people who might inhabit the outdoors, [paranoid] parents often defer trips to public spaces. Going to a playground becomes too exhausting for a parent to contemplate." And so instead of a communal play space, each yard becomes a (rarely used) playground unto itself.
It's not just fear that underlies the American tendency toward elaborate play furniture. One parent-blogger recounted how his wife had purchased a massive water slide from Sam's Club. This led him to reflect that, once upon a time, only one house on each block had "the cool thing." "Today," he writes, "I live in a neighborhood where, if one kid gets a toy, everybody else eventually ends up with the same thing, albeit bigger and more ghastly looking."
Yes, it's the aspirational spending race brought to the lawn. Of course, it was already there, in the execrable outrages committed in the name of "outdoor living," the kind routinely chronicled in the pre-recessionary Weekend section of the Wall Street Journal (the Masters and Johnson of bourgeois anxiety): the grotesque waterfalls coursing over volcanic rock from Hawaii, the waterproof plasma televisions hovering over the pool, the backyard pizza ovens. But this impulse has spread to the short-pants set. How else to explain the ridiculous ensembles found at the higher end of the children's play equipment market? At Posh Tots, for example, one can purchase, for $122,000, a "Tumble Outpost" filled with ropes and swings and ladders, the kind that would sustain an entire playground but is meant for private consumption. Or feast your eyes on the capacious "luxury playhouses," like the "pint-sized plantation" known as "Oakmont Manor."
I have come to think of all these things, in both their lack of use and aesthetic alien-ness, as being symptomatic of the decline of the American lawn. I don't mean grass per se but, rather, the whole relationship of the house to its exterior; the meaning of the outdoor space as a pastoral enclave in a larger natural setting; the civility and beauty brought by the carefully considered arrangement of plants, trees, and shrubs—the sort of things one used to see in the so-called "garden suburbs."
U.S. Census Bureau data tell us that as American house sizes have grown (despite shrinking family sizes), the size of lots has actually shrunk. It is now not uncommon to see massive houses crowding to the very edge of their property line. Whatever lot is left is typically barren grass with a few random shrubs installed by landscapers (the lawn version of a bad hair-plug job). The scalped appearance of these lots is usually not accidental—developers often find it easier to cut down mature trees than to work around them.
And so then one sees it: the asymmetrical, triple-garage-fronted, architecturally confused house, towering over a lawn that's utterly stark—as if surrounding a prison so escapees can be seen—except for the assemblage of plastic junk and recreation equipment scattered here and there. Which is not being used, of course, because the entire family is inside the giant house, where the sounds of Nintendo echo off the high walls of the great room. The bright plastic begins to look like a memorial to the noble, dated idea of children playing outdoors. As historian Kenneth Jackson notes in his book Crabgrass Frontier, the shift to largely indoor living, accompanied by the much-reported decline of gardening and encouraged by everything from air conditioning (often now needed because houses seem to lack shade cover from trees) to front porches being replaced by garages, has left yards—when they even exist—curiously empty. "There are few places as desolate and lonely as a suburban street on a hot afternoon," he writes.
The unused plastic playthings and private playgrounds scattered in the barren yard speak not only to vanishing outdoor play but to a larger cultural disconnect from nature, from one's own environment. But there is a simple solution for this. Instead of buying cheap, potentially toxic plastic water slides and the like, plant a garden. Plant a tree. Plant something. It may not impress your neighbor, but it will last longer, it will look better, and it will have a better effect on the environment than plastic slides. And there is another benefit. In his book Second Nature, Michael Pollan writes touchingly about a hedge of lilac and forsythia at his childhood home on Long Island, N.Y. To the adult eye, the hedges were simply flush against the fence. But he had his own secret garden, a space between the hedge and the fence. "To a four-year-old, though, the space made by the vaulting branches of a forsythia is as grand as the inside of a cathedral, and there is room enough for a world between a lilac and a wall." He didn't need a plastic playhouse or an obscene mini-McMansion to find space to play. The natural world, when it is embraced, not only provides the opportunity for play—I imagine many of you, like me, have fond childhood memories of a swing hanging from a tree, or a tree house, or jumping in leaves, or running through the sprinkler as it watered the tomatoes—but connects us all to something larger and more lasting.
"Capitalism is based on self-interest and self-esteem; it holds integrity and trustworthiness as cardinal virtues and makes them pay off in the marketplace, thus demanding that men survive by means of virtue, not vices. It is this superlatively moral system that the welfare statists propose to improve upon by means of preventative law, snooping bureaucrats, and the chronic goad of fear."—Alan Greenspan
It's not quite as catchy as Spider-Man's "With great power comes great responsibility," or Superman's "Truth, justice, and the American way," but in 1963, Stan Lee decided that the world needed a superhero for whom the tenets of capitalism would be a solemn vow, and thus was born Tony Stark, aka Iron Man. Partially based on Howard Hughes, Tony Stark was no self-doubting teenager dressing in spidery fetish gear, no family unit of four with fantastic powers, no hulking monster who just wanted to be left alone. Stark was a millionaire, an inventor, a ladies' man, a defense contractor, and a card-carrying member of the military-industrial complex. "I'm gonna make him the kind of guy that normally young people hate," Lee gloated.
Further alienating his young-people demographic, Lee set Iron Man's creation story in Vietnam: 1963 saw the United States send 16,000 American military advisers to South Vietnam, and Tony Stark went with them. Hobnobbing with American soldiers while they tried out his new flashlight-size mortars on the Vietcong, Stark is captured by a warlord named Wong-Chu in an ambush that leaves a piece of shrapnel lodged near his heart. With only a week to live, Stark is forced to manufacture weapons for Wong-Chu but instead builds the Iron Man armor, basically a giant pacemaker that just happens to be super strong and can fly. Stark uses the suit to best Wong-Chu in a wrestling match (Wong-Chu fights back by throwing a filing cabinet full of rocks at him) and then escapes to civilization.
To the world, Tony Stark was the head of Stark Enterprises, a company that made high-tech weaponry, like rocket-powered roller skates, for the United States Army. Iron Man ostensibly served as his bodyguard and corporate mascot. But readers knew that Stark was secretly Iron Man and that in this identity he could take care of business—literally. Assuming that what was bad for Stark Enterprises was bad for America, Iron Man destroyed his competitors (who all turned out to be insane, anyway) and battled anyone who endangered his ability to land fat defense contracts. Lazy employees were fired and usually went on to become supervillains, retroactively validating Stark's human-resources acumen. Plus, he hated Commies.
Iron Man's early enemies were Communist evildoers such as the Red Barbarian, the Crimson Dynamo, the Black Widow, the Titanium Man, Boris Bullski, the Red Ghost and his Super Apes, and even Nikita Khrushchev himself. They were all a cowardly, weak, homicidal lot, defective and deviant products of the Communist state. Iron Man was also continually menaced by Asians. His nemesis is still the merciless Mandarin, constantly revived by tone-deaf writers who try, and fail, to drag him out of Fu Manchu's shadow—with his 10 fashionable power rings and his Chinese supremacist agenda, the Mandarin will always be an embarrassing Yellow Peril cliché. In one thrilling story, the anti-Asian and pro-business agendas of Iron Man collided when the Mandarin tried to destroy Stark Enterprises by unionizing its employees.
Throughout the series's history, Oriental enemies have reared their evil heads: the Yellow Claw, China's Radioactive Man, Fu Manchu himself. Japan fielded Samurai Steel, as well as the right-wing nationalist Monster Man, and even when the nation came up with its own superhero, Sunfire, he was really just a front to expand Japanese corporate interests in Vietnam. In a display of good taste, Marvel Comics published a very special Vietnam issue of Iron Man in 1975 dedicated to "peace" and featuring bright-yellow-skinned, bucktoothed Vietnamese soldiers.
If Iron Man sounds like your embarrassing uncle who drinks too much at Christmas and then rails against "Commies" and "coloreds," why is he still around? Perhaps because 1963 wasn't just the year we escalated our involvement in Vietnam but the year when Kennedy was assassinated. Comic-book readers found a father figure in Tony Stark. He was responsible but not stodgy. He could keep them safe, but he was hip to new technology. Also, within the Marvel comics universe, Iron Man has been treated with respect, unlike his peer Captain America. Over the past few years in the pages of Iron Man, the shielded hero has been appointed the secretary of defense and become the director of the comic-book-world version of the U.N. Captain America, on the other hand, has been arrested, shot, and, in a truly humiliating moment, forced to admit not only that he didn't know what MySpace was but that he didn't watch American Idol.
Even now, Iron Man represents Stan Lee's adolescent dog-eat-dog version of capitalism, the version that appeals to our "might makes right" monkey brains: Innovation is good; monopolies rock when we run them, suck when we don't; big corporations need CEOs rich enough to own space jets; and regulations should be a result of the CEOs' benevolence and wisdom, not imposed by outsiders. Tony Stark is a self-made man who believes that we can build ourselves out of trouble. He's one of America's romanticized lone inventors who, like Steve Jobs, solve problems by locking themselves away in secret workshops to emerge later with their paradigm-shifting inventions.
These days, the Iron Man comic book sells worse than not only the Hulk, Daredevil, Captain America, and Thor but the six different titles featuring Wolverine. So why an Iron Man movie? In a maneuver worthy of Tony Stark himself, Marvel Comics is producing Iron Man on its own after getting burned on licensing deals for the lucrative Spider-Man and X-Men franchises. Who's left in the stable? Captain America and Daredevil have already bombed on film, and the Hulk and Thor are in movies coming later this year, and so Iron Man it is. The Iron Man movie is a decision born of greed and pragmatism, a decision based on Marvel's best corporate interests. It's a purely capitalist decision, and according to Iron Man ethics, that makes it practically heroic.
Some years ago, I dated a French economics student named Ariane, a woman of many charms and qualities, among them a flawless and effortlessly elegant sense of taste. Not so much in men, perhaps, since I was somewhat callous and louche at that age, but in furniture, clothing, jewelry: things like that. What's more, she wore a fragrance so gorgeous—rich, worldly, slightly concupiscent—that I can still call it clearly to mind. It was my first intimate experience of the art of perfume, more specifically, of the supreme magic and high style of Chanel. We all have a catalog of ineffaceable memories: Mine includes the scent of Coco on a black cashmere scarf, encountered on the wintry streets of the Upper West Side. I would wear the stuff myself if I thought I could get away with it.
There are thousands of perfumes on the market. They're as manifold and distinct as wines but far more important to get right. Which, after all, is more likely to spoil your meal: a bad cabernet in your own glass, or a bad perfume or cologne on anyone in the room? Besides, the mystery of wine is mitigated by an enormous wing of writing: histories, guidebooks, magazines, Web sites. Not so with scent; there's almost nothing to steer the novice. At least, there hasn't been until now.
Now there's a book called Perfumes: The Guide, by the husband and wife team of Luca Turin and Tania Sanchez, which is not just enlightening, but beautifully written, brilliant, often very funny, and occasionally profound. In fact, it's as vivid as any criticism I've come across in the last few years, and what's more a revelation: part history, part swoon, part plaint. All of the other reading I was supposed to do was put aside while I went through it, and it took me some time to finish, in part because I was savoring it and in part because I kept stopping to copy out passages to e-mail off to friends. In the library of books both useful and delightful, it deserves a place on the shelves somewhere between Pauline Kael's 5001 Nights at the Movies and Brillat-Savarin's incomparable Physiology of Taste. It's not the first book on scent as an industry and an aesthetic, and it's not the most obvious, but it's a real original and almost equal in epicurean pleasure to the substance that inspired it.
Consider, for example, a fragrance by Robert Piguet called Fracas, another scent I love, though I couldn't begin to explain what it smells like or why it appeals to me. The professional vocabulary of perfumers tilts in two directions: the generic (amber, citrus, floral), and the technical (beta-santalol, aldehydes). One is vague and the other is opaque; both are insufficient. By contrast, here is how Luca Turin begins his review of Fracas: "A friend once explained to me how Ferrari achieves that gorgeous red: first paint the car silver, then six coats of red, then a coat of transparent pink varnish…"
That is perfect. It's casual and indirect but uncannily precise: a little poem about a glossy scent. There are hundreds of equally inspired passages in Perfumes: The Guide, though not all of them are quite so terse. Here is Turin's full review of a perfume called Sacrebleu: "If you travel at night on Europe's railways, near big stations you can sometimes see lights the size a teacup nestled between the rails, shining the deepest mystical blue-purple light through a filthy Fresnel glass. They appear to be permanently on, suggesting that the message they convey the train driver is an eternal truth. Since childhood I have fancied the notion that it may not be a trivial one like 'Buffers ahead' but something numinous and unrelated to duty, perhaps 'Life is beautiful' or some such. Sacrebleu has the exact feel of those lights, a low hum that may be eclipsed by diurnal clamor but rules supreme when, at 3 a.m., you know you're looking into your true love's eyes even though you can't see them." I don't know what Sacrebleu smells like, but I'll bet he's right.
Those are some of the raves. The denunciations tend to be quick and deadly, like a serpent's bite. One perfume is described as "a shrill little floral that feels like music heard through someone else's headphones," and another begins, "The bathrooms in hell smell like this." And sometimes the authors seem to drift a little, and so much the better. Here is the entirety of Tania Sanchez's notes on Dior Addict—one of my very favorite short reviews ever written about anything: "I liked it very much in Macy's when I went there drunk one day, and told everyone afterward I found the perfect bourbon vanilla with orange blossom, as if it'd been a life quest. Sadly the bourbon was all me."
As with wine, again, perfume worship is wide open to snobbery and pretense. And, yes, it's all a matter of taste, but then, so are many things that matter. I should report that Turin and Sanchez have a preference for Chanel and Guerlain, but that strikes me as a reasonable call; and they decry most celebrity fragrances, but they're not against the idea altogether. Sarah Jessica Parker's Lovely earns some real praise, even David Beckham's Intimately gets a few compliments, and Britney Spears' Believe gets a higher rating than Lalique's Le Perfum. (Of the latter: "Vile, cheap, obnoxiously chemical, it sits somewhere between Allure and Amarige. I hope to live long enough to see this sort of faceless dreck wiped off the face of the earth. Nice bottle.") And they hold Stetson, of all things, in especially high regard. ("It's gorgeous," Sanchez writes, "as rugged and masculine as the lingerie level at Saks Fifth Avenue, and about ten bucks per ounce.")
It's hard not to keep quoting from Perfume, but I'll stop here. It's hard, too, to keep from complimenting it, so I'll include one small complaint. The book is organized somewhat haphazardly: Perfumes are listed in alphabetical order, but there's no index to speak of, and if you're looking for an easy way to find, say, all the perfumes by Bulgari, or all the florals, or even to distinguish the men's fragrances from the women's, you're out of luck. I hope this will be corrected in the next edition. I hope there will be a next edition. There are hundreds of new fragrances introduced every year. I have no interest in smelling them all, but I'm looking forward to reading about them.
The May issue of Vanity Fair hits newsstands tomorrow, but it's already made the cover of the New York Post. The issue features a photograph of Miley Cyrus, star of the Disney Channel's mega-hit Hannah Montana, clutching a satin sheet to her otherwise naked torso. Cyrus quickly disavowed the photograph, which was taken by Annie Liebovitz: "I took part in a photo shoot that was supposed to be 'artistic' and now, seeing the photographs and reading the story, I feel so embarrassed," she said in a statement. "I never intended for any of this to happen, and I apologize to my fans who I care so deeply about." Disney, for its part, shared Cyrus' outrage. Disney spokeswoman Patti McTeague told the New York Times that "a situation was created to deliberately manipulate a 15-year-old in order to sell magazines."
Reading McTeague's comment over coffee yesterday morning, I couldn't help but think of an advertisement I'd seen a few months ago while on a reporting trip to China. I was walking from my Beijing bed-and-breakfast to a nearby subway station when I was stopped in my tracks by a billboard that made the controversial 1990s Calvin Klein underwear ads look artistic by comparison. Staring down at the throngs of shoppers on Beijing's Xinjiekou Nandajie Avenue, a busy commercial thoroughfare about a mile west of the Forbidden City, was a white girl who looked all of 12, reclining in a matching bra-and-panties set adorned with Disney's signature mouse-ear design. In a particularly creepy detail, the pigtailed child was playing with a pair of Minnie Mouse hand puppets. In the upper left-hand corner was the familiar script of the Disney logo.
Not believing my eyes, and on an assignment that touched on images of Westerners in the Chinese consumer's imagination, I snapped a photo:
After reading of the Cyrus flap, I e-mailed my photo to Disney's McTeague. I was curious: How did the company square its position on the Liebowitz photo with its risqué billboard in China?
McTeague passed on commenting and forwarded the image to Gary Foster, a spokesman for Disney's consumer-products division. He called me from a business trip (to China) to disavow the ad. "It has caught us totally by surprise," Foster told me by phone from Guangzhou. He explained that Disney contracts with a host of licensees, who produce and market products for the Disney brand. Foster said that licensees are contractually bound to clear all advertising with Disney's corporate offices. "We have literally hundreds of licensees making our products. They are supposed to submit any kind of imagery to us before it is used, but it's hard to enforce that sometimes," he said.
Foster said he didn't know which ad agency prepared the ad, how old the model was, or where the photo shoot took place. But he was sure it was the work of a Disney licensee: Shanghai Zhenxin Garments Co. Ltd., which makes underwear for girls and teens. China is notorious for its intellectual-property pirates, and Disney is a frequent victim, with people illegally slapping the Disney name and logo on items all the time. Could this have been the case with the billboard, I asked Foster. "No. Unfortunately not this time," he replied. He assured me the billboard would be removed immediately.
It is legitimately difficult for a company as big as Disney to keep track of all its subcontractors. Then again, Disney has learned the hard way the importance of keeping track: Disney's response to the billboard recalls its response to exposés of labor conditions in the factories of its Chinese licensees', where subcontractors were actually breaking local wage, health, and safety laws. Here, of course, it's rules of taste and propriety that are involved, and the ad may play differently to a local audience than it did to me and Foster. The age of consent in China is 14, compared with 18 in Disney's home state of California. "I don't want to make excuses for them at all because it is not anything that we would ever approve, but in other parts of the world this is not unusual at all," Foster said. "In fact, in Europe, they have similar type of taste, if you will. Here in China that's not unusual at all, but it's not usual for the Disney brand."
It may be a small world, after all, but not everyone shares Burbank's mores, and you can't be too careful protecting your brand: You never know when a Chinese licensee, or an American glossy, will deviate from the Disney way.
Get "Dear Prudence" delivered to your inbox each week; click here to sign up. Please send your questions for publication to prudence@slate.com. (Questions may be edited.)
Dear Prudence,
Last summer I reconnected with the first love of my life—my boyfriend during my high-school sophomore year. He is at the tail end of his divorce (to be with me), and I have been divorced for two years. He is sweet, sensitive, attractive, healthy, fit, successful, smart—everything I ever wanted in a man. He loves and cares for me deeply, does not want me to do anything that might put me in danger, takes great care of me, and is fantastic to my young kids. He wants to marry me and raise our kids together. What is wrong, then? He is obsessed with my sexual and emotional history. He wants and expects me to remember everything I said and did with every man and boy I was ever with. Not only do I not remember everything in the detailed way he wants it told to him, I have told him repeatedly that I don't think it is healthy to go into that kind of detail. Once, he interrogated me for over two hours and would not let me leave the house until I told him the number of people I had slept with. No amount of talking, threatening, or begging will make him stop. Now I've begun hanging up on him, something we both agree is disrespectful, but I don't know how else to end the interrogating! He says he just "needs to know," but I think there is an underlying issue or insecurity that no amount of answers will resolve for him. What should I do?
—Talked Out
Dear Talked,
Rent There's Something About Mary and pay special attention to the character Dom "Woogie" Woganowski. He starts out as a smart, successful guy, but you discover he is actually an unhinged stalker, Mary's former high-school boyfriend whose "love" forced her to move and change her name. But There's Something About Mary is a comedy; you may end up having to change your name because you find you're in a horror movie. You say your beau is everything you've ever wanted, but surely "disturbed psychosexual bully" was not in your Match.com profile's description of your ideal man. You think he's, ah, overbearing now? If you marry him, I suggest you have a good lawyer on retainer and know the addresses of all the local battered women's shelters. Besides the fact that he spends hours torturing you over things that are none of his business, there are other little bombs in your letter showing that you are losing sight of normal behavior. You praise him because he doesn't want you to do anything that might put you in danger. What's that mean? He's talked you out of your habit of running into traffic, or he's shown you that being friendly to other men might be misinterpreted and end up with you getting hurt (by him, presumably)? Then you say you that when you stop his phone interrogations by hanging up on him, you're being "disrespectful." I assume this acknowledgment of your "bad" behavior is the result of more badgering by him (and it's healthy to hang up the phone on someone who's subjecting you to an abusive tirade). I suggest you demonstrate your self-respect by terminating not only his phone calls, but all contact with him—immediately. And since you and he agree about your need to stay out of danger, be prepared to get a restraining order.
—Prudie
Dear Prudence Video: Quaint Clichés Run Amok
Dear Prudence,
I'm a sophomore in high school, my boyfriend is a senior, and we have been together for six months. Recently, we were out to dinner and discussed him going to college in the fall. I am very excited for him and proud of him, too. On the drive home, however, he noticed I had grown quiet and asked what was wrong. I said, "Everyone at school is asking what we're going to do when you go to college, and I don't know. So what are we going to do?" He said, "To be honest, I've seen people try to make it work when one of them goes to college and it's really hard, and I don't want to put you through that, so I think I'm just going to let you go at the end of the summer." To say the least, I was completely stunned. I was ready to drive there on weekends, since it's only about an hour away, and survive on phone calls, e-mails, and text messages. It seems like the most logical thing to do is to have a one- or two-month trial period at the beginning of next year and see how things go. What is your advice?
—Teen Love
Dear Teen,
Sure, you could maintain your relationship through weekend visits, calls, e-mails, and text messages. The problem with your plan is that your boyfriend just broke up with you. At least he's given you notice that he's willing to stay together for the next few months, but once he's off at college, he wants to be free to ask out that cute girl in history class. There's nothing wrong with that; what is wrong is that he told you in a cloddish and hurtful way. However, there isn't a really great way to break up with someone you are enjoying because you hope someone you'll enjoy a lot more will show up in the fall. Instead of hanging around in this lame-duck relationship, let your (ex)boyfriend know that you understand so well his desire to go to college unencumbered that you're letting him finish high school that way, too. And maybe you will find there's a cute guy you've overlooked in history class. (Please, just make sure his name isn't Woogie.)
—Prudie
Dear Prudie,
My husband has been serving a 15-month tour in Iraq and has an 18-day R&R break in September, when we will celebrate our first anniversary, as well as take the GMAT exam and fill out applications for graduate school. His combat tour will be complete in February 2009. We had already discussed his R&R, and he said he just wanted to see me and was fine with not seeing family. But now his parents want to visit while he's here. His father talks incessantly and can be abrasive. He's a Vietnam vet and likes to express his reservations about the Iraq war. I just don't think that's what my husband needs, and others who have already had their R&R recommend spending all of it together and not trying to see others. What's the best plan here? Can I suggest they wait until February when he is (hopefully!) back for good, and we'll go visit them for a long weekend? Can I limit them to a four-day visit here? Or am I out of line for thinking a new wife has a say-so about familial guests at a sensitive time?
—Out-law
Dear Out-law,
You're not out of line to decide with your husband what to do with this precious time. But as annoying as your father-in-law may be, and as much as you and your husband may just want to drink in being with each other, it would be cruel not to let his parents get the comfort of spending some time with their son. All three of you are doing your best to get through the days until he is safely home. Do not deprive your in-laws of the relief of seeing for themselves that their soldier is all right. But there is nothing wrong with limiting them to a long weekend. When you tell them, don't say how little time you're giving them. Instead, explain that despite the leave being so short, and with the two of you squeezing into it both a second honeymoon and preparations for graduate school, you are really happy that you will be able to devote four days to their visit. If you're working during part of your husband's leave, it might be best if they came during the week—that way they could maximize their time with their son, and you could minimize your time with his father. And please express my gratitude to your husband for his service.
—Prudie
Dear Prudence,
I work in an office with a "business casual" dress code. The other day, I decided to wear a skirt and found, as often happens when I've worn skirts to work in other offices, that I'm constantly asked, "Wow, why are you all dressed up?" or "So, are you going to a party after work or something?" I find these questions very awkward, considering I have no special plans for the evening, and I can't simply answer with a "Thank you." Why should I be made to feel overdressed just because I happen to have chosen a skirt instead of slacks that morning? It's such constant commentary that despite the implied compliment, I almost feel hassled about it, as if I'm dressed inappropriately. Are women expected to wear pants in public at all times unless there is a formal event? And what would be an appropriate response to my co-workers' questions?
—Not Formal
Dear Not Formal,
At least no one has said to you, "Wow, a skirt. This must mean you've ended your presidential bid, Hillary!" Your co-workers are making small talk. Yes, you'd prefer they say, "Nice outfit." (You wouldn't construe that as sexual harassment, would you?) But since you don't want to answer their rhetorical questions, just act as if they are compliments. Smile and say, "Thanks, glad you like it."
—Prudie
Obama woos a superdelegate away from Clinton, Hillary's own supporters dislike her gas-tax holiday, and new polls suggest the Obama-Clinton split is getting deeper but that Democrats are still likely to win the White House. Clinton dives half a point to 12.1 percent.
Former DNC chair Joe Andrew sounded a clarion call for superdelegates by endorsing Barack Obama today. Andrew is an impressive get because he's the kind of establishment Democrat that Obama could win over only by brute political and mathematical force. (Not to mention he has two first names.) In an interview with the Associated Press, Andrew said that Obama wisely rejected the gas-tax holiday and deftly handled the Rev. Wright imbroglio and that it was time to heal the rift in the Democratic Party.
Any time a superdelegate publicly shifts from one candidate to another, it's major news. But Andrew's endorsement is especially important for Obama at this juncture. According to polls, Clinton is closing in on him in North Carolina, and she's the tentative front-runner in Indiana. On balance, superdelegates have continued to trickle toward him at a quicker rate. But equipped with a high-profile flip, Obama can show—rather than tell—superdelegates that it's time to move on from Rev. Wright and Obama's "bitter" comments.
Meanwhile, the gas-tax issue still leads this week's news—policy alert!—and experts are roundly panning Clinton's and McCain's stances on the issue. Making matters worse for Clinton, the Obama campaign is pointing out that staunch Clinton supporter New York Gov. David Paterson agrees with Obama on this one. Candidates are bound to have disagreements with their supporters, but even minor dissention can remind superdelegates of other Clinton infighting.
Back to the polls, Democrats are growing increasingly partisan within their own party. An NBC/Wall Street Journal poll reports that 30 percent of Clinton supporters won't vote for Obama in the general election if he's the nominee and 22 percent of Obama folks won't swing Clinton's way. On its face, this is a potentially ripe datum for Hillary—more Democrats won't vote for the Democratic nominee if Obama is the chosen one.
But once you explore the poll further, you realize that those numbers may not mean much. Fifty-three percent of surveyed voters want a Democrat to become president; 33 percent say they'd prefer a Republican. Based on that metric, it seems that regardless of who the nominee is, the Democrats will win. But that, of course, is also hogwash, especially considering McCain's neck-and-neck polls with both Democrats. The moral of the story, as always, is that polling only makes us more confused.
For a full list of our Deathwatches, click here. For a primer on Hillary's sinking ship, visit our first Deathwatch entry. Send your own prognostications to hillarydeathwatch@gmail.com.
Barack Obama slams the Rev. Wright, Clinton's gas-tax plan receives jeers, and Indiana is still a tossup, all of which brings Clinton down 0.3 points to 12.6 percent.
Obama's decision to cut Wright loose Tuesday was an investment in the future: Let the story dominate news for one more day, then hope it tapers off. In a press conference, Obama said he's "outraged" at Wright's recent remarks about Louis Farrakhan, the government inventing AIDS, and U.S. military efforts being equivalent to terrorism. These comments "should be denounced," Obama said, adding, "I do not see the relationship being the same after this."
It's too early to say whether this move diffuses the Wright issue. Now that Wright got a taste of the spotlight, he probably doesn't want to go away. (Obama had better hope Wright's book tour happens after Nov. 5.) But at least Obama can dissociate himself fully from his pastor, as opposed to upholding the earlier wishy-washy (some would say nuanced) disown-the-words-but-not-the-man stance he articulated in his Philadelphia speech last month.
Meanwhile, Clinton is making her "gas-tax holiday" the centerpiece of a new ad campaign, condemning Obama for failing to address high prices at the pump. But among pundits, her proposal (and McCain's similar plan) is getting laughed out of the room. The normally sympathetic Paul Krugman calls Clinton's plan "pointless" and McCain's "evil," while his colleague Thomas Friedman denounces the plan as "money laundering: we borrow money from China and ship it to Saudi Arabia and take a little cut for ourselves as it goes through our gas tanks." Still, it's the kind of pander that could work, no matter how transparent or absurd. If voters associate Clinton with cheap gas, mission accomplished.
The superdelegate scene is something of a wash today. Obama snags Iowa Rep. Bruce Braley and Indiana Rep. Baron Hill, while Clinton picks up Pennsylvania AFL-CIO president Bill George, narrowing Clinton's lead to 21 supers. Some people think more are on the way. The trickle of supers is telling, though: It shows that the worst Wright week ever has not yet been enough to drive superdelegates away from Obama.
In the polls, Indiana hasn't shed its tossup status. A new Howey-Gauge survey shows the two candidates statistically tied, with Obama at 47 percent and Clinton at 45 percent. But the last few Indiana polls show Clinton leading. The fate of the race hangs in the balance! Indiana is all-powerful! Except, not really. If, like us, you believe that superdelegates are going to be very squeamish about voting against the pledged delegate count, then Indiana merely determines whether Clinton drops out in May or June.
For a full list of our Deathwatches, click here. For a primer on Hillary's sinking ship, visit our first Deathwatch entry. Send your own prognostications to hillarydeathwatch@gmail.com.
A media frenzy over the Rev. Wright, a bump in matchup polls, and a key North Carolina endorsement buoy Clinton's chances 0.5 points to 12.9 percent.
The response to the Rev. Wright's speech at the National Press Club was so negative, some papers must be prepping Barack Obama's obituary. "PASTOR DISASTER," screamed the New York Post. The Washington Post's Dana Milbank, under the headline "Could Rev. Wright Spell Doom for Obama?," argues that Wright "added lighter fuel" to the controversy by repeating some of his most inflammatory ideas. Indeed, Wright criticized America's foreign policy, praised Louis Farrakhan, and reiterated his conviction that the government created AIDS as a method of population control. In Bob Herbert's words, Wright went to Washington "not to praise Barack Obama, but to bury him."
Think back, though, to when Wright's remarks first emerged. The sky was falling, the horse race was over, and Obama was getting shipped off to the glue factory. Yet his national poll numbers hardly moved. In Pennsylvania, he continued to close the gap with Clinton. It's impossible to isolate cause and effect in flaps like this, but in retrospect the Wright flap (at least version 1.0) looked much more media-driven than voter-driven. There's little to indicate that Wright's "revenge tour" will be any different. It doesn't bode well that Wright enjoys the spotlight. But in the long run, Obama is lucky that Wright came out of hiding now rather than in October. There's no doubt that ties to Wright would hurt Obama in the g