Benny Morris, the Israeli historian, has recently written a new book about Israel and Palestine, but this one’s about the future, not the past. In the New York Times, Jeffrey Goldberg reviews One State, Two States

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and summarizes:

Morris…argues that Arab rejectionism is so profound a force that only the terminally obtuse could believe that Palestinians will ever acquiesce to a state complrised solely of the West Bank and Gaza.

Morris is a fascinating case: he’s a historian of conflict that hasn’t ended, and one he’s lived through his entire life. He’s considered the first of Israel’s “new historians,” who emerged in the late 1980’s in the midst of the first intifada to challenge the myths of Israel’s founding. But failure of the peace process and the second intifada that followed in 2000 led Morris to a radical about face – to a morbid view of the future of his country and a black view of its Palestinian counterparts.

You can actually see the change in the last chapter he tacked onto Righteous Victims when it came out in paperback in 2001, while the second intifada raged. Righteous Victims is still the best overall history of the conflict, but that last chapter should be read as the work of a different man. Editorializing also creeps into 1948, his excellent and mostly straightforward history of the first Arab-Israeli war, which I reviewed last year. Now he writes without the constraints of a historical perspective, and Goldberg rightly dismantles Morris’ new book and his “almost irretrievably dark vision of Israel’s future as a Jewish-majority state.”

Israel has just elected the right-wing Benjamin Netanyahu as Prime Minister, and he’s appointed the militant Avigdor Lieberman as his foreign minister. The terrorist group Hamas controls Gaza while the weak and corrupt Palestinian Authority dithers in the West Bank. Morris might be too close to the conflict to judge soundly, but his cynicism is understandable.

-Greg Waldmann

If only more people read book reviews! It’s not just self-interest talking here; if everyone read the New York Review of Books, or say, Open Letters Monthly, they might avoid the chaff and spend their valuable time on something…valuable. Suppose you wanted to read about the most successful people in the world. What are the factors that make them so? Millions who want an answer to this question turn to Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell, who seems to think that scientists are wasting their time with things like sample size and error control. As Sue M. Halpern of the NYRB Sicko dvdrip puts it

any statistician will tell you, you can’t learn anything about populations from an n of 1. It’s not a sample, it’s an amusement.

OLM’s Peter A. Coclanis has a middle initial too, and he comes to a similar conclusion:

Auden was on to something with his admonition in “Under Which Lyre” that “Thou shalt not sit with statisticians nor commit a social science,” but he never had to deal with Malcolm Gladwell. And even Auden, I think, would have appreciated the general concept of representativeness and understood that data is not the plural of anecdote.

Now, let’s say you want to learn about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. If you wanted an overall history, and you happened to be asking, my vote would be for Benny Morris’ Righteous Victims. But maybe you want something more specific. It just so happens that Professor Morris has a more recent book about the first Arab-Israeli war, called, appropriately enough, 1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War. Gershom Gorenberg reviews it in the NYRB Evan Almighty move :

The conflagration of 1948 was the war that began all Arab–Israeli wars. This will not be the last history of it, and not only because new papers will come to light, perhaps from still-sealed Arab archives. If the story is retold after peace—by Benny Morris or someone else—the facts and the motives will necessarily look different. It might be easier to see both Jews and Arabs with greater sympathy, as human beings caught in a storm. In the meantime, Morris has Karas: The Prophecy full movie indeed served the purpose of reconciliation, by making a fuller picture of what happened in 1948 part of Israeli memory. For that he deserves gratitude.

I wrote much the same thing last year:

Eden Log film Benny Morris’ greatest success in this book is in challenging the conventional mythology of both sides and laying out a mostly even-handed account of the first Arab-Israeli war, but a definitive history of Israel’s founding has still not been written. Such a history would include documents that are presumably still locked up somewhere in the capitals of Israel’s neighbors. That history’s narrative would give equal attention to both sides of the story. But that history hasn’t been written yet because the conflict is still ongoing, and the feelings are still are too intense. In the meantime, Morris’ books, including this one, are among the best we have.

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Most people who read don’t read book reviews, or they get them from (shudder) the Amazon.com comments field. They shouldn’t! I don’t mean to say that we critics are infallible, but we are here to help. We read books and we write about them. In fact, we don’t do much else with our time. So take advantage! Or, to take a cue from Mr. Gladwell, NYRB + OLM = good book recommendation.

-Greg Waldmann Hobgoblins 2

It must be enheartening to Open Letters readers: month after month, they’re served live ammunition! Every month, across a wide variety of subjects, they’re given long, involved, highly detailed (and, of course, highly readable) reviews that can then stand them in good stead later on, should they encounter less felicitous (and inevitably shorter) reviews of those same books elsewhere. Read a shoddy, lazy review of some noteworthy new release in, say, The New Republic or Harper’s? Wait for the Open Letters review to get the full story and some refreshingly reasoned discourse!

A variation on the phenomenon holds true even in literary publications that are top-notch. In such venues (The New York Review of Books, The Atlantic, the good folks over at Quarterly Conversation), where book reviews are given space and time to unfold and dig deep, Open Letters still comes in handy, as counter-ballast, as an expert second opinion.

Take the issue of the mighty TLS for 20 June 2008, for example: in no less than four separate places, that issue weighs in on titles already covered at Open Letters, and in each case, the contrasts are striking.

First is Lidija Haas’ delightful overview of several contemporary romance novels, “Vagaries of Love.” This piece is a bravura performance whose opening deserves to be quoted in full:

Publishers are often seen as venal; desperate for sales, indifferent to art, puffing their fiction lists with substandard titles of proven mass appeal. And yet, it is not easy to sell books. A willingness to peddle repetitive rubbish isn’t enough; our vain, trash-loving, elitist souls also want to be fed; we need to feel that we are discerning readers. So the publishers must delicately exploit the middle ground between high and low. Elements of genre writing are often introduced to spice up the “literary” kind – Martin Amis does it in Night Train, Ian McEwan in Saturday, John Banville in The Book of Evidence – and some genres are given credence, their merits discussed. They are reclaimed for seriousness; seriousness is arguably the better for it. Yet one staple of genre fiction, the sentimental, soft-focus romance novel, remains apparently beyond rescue – it is too embarrassing, too silly, too feminine to be salvageable. The comic book becomes the graphic novel, science fiction becomes dystopia, thrillers become political satires, but the love story can be nothing but itself.

This is hilarious and entirely debatable stuff, and one of the books Haas uses in her piece is The Air We Breathe by Andrea Barrett, about which Haas writes:

Barrett’s novel is uneasy in tone; it cannot decide what it is aiming for, at some moments moodily imagining time “clotted like blood in a bowl”. at others uncomfortably entangled by the mechanics of the plot…

Back in November of 2007, stalwart Open Letters writer Karen Vanushka tackled Barrett’s novel (at considerably greater length than Haas’ broad survey piece would allow). Take a look to see how she found The Air We Breathe!

A few pages later in the TLS there’s Colin Shindler’s brief review of 1948 by Benny Morris – only what follows Shindler’s by-line isn’t really much of a review. Shindler has a bad case of reviewer-itis: he writes about what Morris writes about, but he virtually never writes about Morris’ writing. The most he risks doing, somewhat lamely, is to suggest that 1948 might have been a more complete book if Morris had had access to sealed Arabic sources. Since this would be true of any book on the subject (and since it’s the abiding pity of all sealed sources), it’s not a very helpful verdict.

Fortunately, in this very month, June of 2008, Open Letters‘ own Greg Waldmann also reviews Morris’ book, in minute detail and with lots of emotion broiling right there on the surface. It’s a good example of what Shindler shies away from doing.

Turn the page in the TLS and you encounter Peter Pesic’s review of Mark Penn’s Microtrends, in which he writes: “Penn’s book is a collection of seventy-five such microtrends, presented as brief “sound bites” which, despite attempts to make them lively, become tedious through accumulation.”

To learn the full, horrific extent of that tedium, look no further than October 2007 of Open Letters, where Penn’s book by turns baffles and outrages Nonfiction Editor Steve Donoghue.

And lastly there’s Saswato R. Das’ short review of George Johnson’s The Ten Most Beautiful Experiements, which he characterizes as “a very personal odyssey through the annals of science, touching on a few eclectic milestones.”

Once again, the June 2008 Open Letters issue will come in handy: the redoubtable Lianne Habinek gives Johnson’s book a long and thorough examination, one that will particularly satisfy TLS readers who came away from Das’ piece wanting more.

That more is what Open Letters strives to provide its readers each month. The thrill of being part of the same conversation as legendary publications like the TLS is a big part of the reward.