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.

• The Alamo buy Fat Albert full

Jumanji trailer

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

Gotti download

Guilt can be a powerful motivator and in Europe’s 1940s, may have intensified an already brutal war. In this May’s Atlantic Monthly, now on shelves, Benjamin Schwarz ascribes the Nazi’s particular ferociousness to their collective knowledge of the death camps — and to their fear of retribution. In reviewing a batch of new books about the Nazis at home and at war, the always engaging Shwarz summarizes:

• Who Killed the Electric Car? hd

Surely, one factor—one whose power cannot ultimately be determined—was the Germans’ fear of the terrible reckoning that must follow from their open secret, a secret Goebbels obliquely but unmistakably shared with the nation in a grim 1943 exhortation to fight to the bitter end: “As for us, we’ve burned our bridges behind us … We will either go down in history as the greatest statesmen of all time, or the greatest criminals.” The Final Solution had given the Germans no way forward but Armageddon.

Here at Open Letters, our own managing editor, Steve Donoghue, has been addressing these books one by one. In a microreview of Peter Fritzsche’s Life and Death in the Thrid Reich

, Donoghue praises the author’s steel stomach and lifelong scholarly strength. In our current issue, Steve reads and responds to Richard Evan’s The Third Reich at War The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers movie download . In that essay, “Before Nightfall,” Donoghue suggests a different motivation for German ferociousness — fear, yes, but fear generated by their own leaders:

Second in Command movie full The Thirty Nine Steps ipod German courts martial ruled for the execution of 48 soldiers. In the Second World War, there were 21,000 such rulings (the charges could be as vague as Wehrkraftzersetzung, sapping the military will) – and God knows how many connected civilian killings, and maybe even God doesn’t know the corresponding number in the Soviet Union. In both armies, the men fought under threat of death, and when there was no fighting to be done, the Germans officers and enlisted men spent their time murdering Jews, and the Russian officers and men spent their time raping girls, women, and old ladies. There is no naïve national chauvinism in pointing this out, and there is no legitimate historical purpose served in trying to ameliorate it.

The Fugitive release

Few of us have the time or the will to read all of these histories, but that’s why Donoghue and Schwarz are there. Such essays are second- or third-hand accounts, its true, but soon, as Donoghue writes, that kind of account will the only kind about World War II that anyone can make:

With every passing year, more and more of the men and women who fought for and against the Nazis, more and more of the men and women whose lives were touched by the war, are gone. Oral history has long since given place to the sifting of records, but there’s a kind of touchstone comfort in knowing the oral histories are out there. It isn’t rational: we know that Grandpa is just as capable of error and falsification as written records are. But it nevertheless feels like Grandpa offers an important separate accountability, and soon he won’t be there anymore.

• Raiders of the Lost Ark the movie

Cougar Club rip The Last Unicorn movie Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens movie John Wray’s Lowboy The Violent Kind psp has been garnering heaps of praise, and in this week’s New Yorker, James Wood piles on:

Candyman: Farewell to the Flesh move

John Wray is less interested in Lowboy’s picaresque circuits than in his mental circuits, whose damaged condition is brilliantly, compassionately evoked in the novel…Great tact is required to pull off this kind of thing in fiction, since hallucination can be as boring as someone recounting a very long dream at breakfast, or it can slide too easily, like any horror story, into a bloody and relentless vitality. Wray is never boring, largely because he has an uncanny talent for ventriloquism, and he seems to know, with unerring authority, how to select and make eloquent the details of Lowboy’s illness.

Open Letters Amongst Friends download ’ Steve Donoghue concurs:

Wray has a weakness for bagatelle plotting, but he takes a care with words that borders on the obsessive, and his imagery is surgically precise. He’s a slow, meticulous writer, and it shows in the work…Lowboy is told in a series of impressionistic flashes, most not more than a few paragraphs long, and it moves with extremely confident speed to its heart-wrenching conclusion. The book’s occasional tendencies toward predictable Hollywood formulae…are more than offset by the understated brilliance of its narrative.

For a look at Wood’s view of fiction and criticism in general, check out Daniel Green’s review of How Fiction Works, from our August 2008 issue. And in his review of Lark & Termite, from our February 2009 issue Dragonball: Evolution movie full , Sam Sacks tackles the difficulty of rendering a mentally damaged person’s mind in prose.

Showdown in Little Tokyo dvd The New Republic has a quartet of articles on what may be the death knell of print newspapers and journalism as we know it. A page 1 editorial blames a coarsening national attitude towards the press for accelerating the decline:

Just as the press has been slammed by the tides of technology, it has been hit hard by the political culture. The master narratives of both the right and left have come to include the same villan: the hypocritical biased elite media. And their combined grouching has helped foment the anti-media backlash.

Elsewhere, Joe Mathews laments the decline of investigative journalism in his old paper, the Los Angeles Times:

You can count up the journalists who have left the profession and are out of work, but much of the carnage of the ongoing media industry can’t be measured or seen: corruption undiscovered, events not witnessed, tips about problems that never reach anyone’s ears because those ears have left the newsroom…Today’s Times carries plenty of fine news stories…But there are few stories that show deep digging, that took more than a few days to put together.

This new paradigm, the shearing off of investigative reporters and editorial staff, may be glimpsed in microcosm in Gabriel Sherman’s piece on Politico

• Slip divx

• A Home at the End of the World movie

, the upstart website that got several of last year’s biggest scoops:

Black Cloud ipod Dadnapped film [Politico CEO Robert] Allbritton is dismissive of one of the things print papers did well – long-term, long form investigative journalism – and tells me Politico is unlikely to field an investigative reporting squad. I think we have to acknowledge that the money is spent for reputational benefits and a public service play,” he says of the Times

Blood on the Sun trailer

Son of the Mask trailer

’ and the Post’s investment in enterprise journalism. “Why does someone have to go off and write their thesis paper while they do it?”

Finally, and most depressingly, Paul Starr turns in a huge essay Closing the Ring hd on the death of the newspapers, and what he sees as the coming era of corruption. The problems are manifold:

[Warren] Buffett’s law of the newspaper jungle, the “survival of the fattest,” favored a broad conceptin of the purview of the newspaper, attentive to a wide variety of human interests. Now the incentives are working in the opposite direction, pushing newspapers toward a more constricted view of their role…

The Crucible movie download

Greedy move

The predominant response in the industry to rising financial pressures has been to concentrate editorial resources close to home…the number of American newspaper correspondents abroad dropped 30 percent between 2002 and 2006…it cannot be a good thing that at a time when America’s economic and security interests are so entangled with the rest of the world, America’s news media are withdrawing from it.

So far the internet hasn’t generated the revenue to make up for the discrepancy abroad, or locally, where government at the federal, state and local level has seen a decline in assigned reporters across the country. For some background on the internet era turn to Greg Waldmann’s review of Andrew Keen’s sloppy The Cult of the Amateur, from our September 2007 issue. Then read our latest issue, where we continue our efforts to attend “to a wide variety of human interests.”

Steve Coll, perhaps the best-sourced American reporter on foreign affairs, has an excellent primer on the simmering conflict over Kashmir in the New Yorker. The situation in Pakistan is less stable than most in the West realize. In stepping down last year, Pervez Musharraf handed Pakistan’s new civilian President Asif Zardari (widower of slain opposition leader Benazir Bhutto) not only the sixty-year Kashmiri conflict in the northeast, but internal unrest that threatens to topple the government.

The violent contest for power and legitimacy between Taliban militants and Pakistan’s government is in many ways a struggle over Pakistan’s national identity – and, particularly, over whether the present government is righteously Islamic enough.

Failure here will torpedo gains anywhere else. India and Pakistan have been conducting quiet negotiations over Kashmir for much of the last decade, but “in the midst of such [an internal] contest, any agreement that made concessions to India would be harder to than ever to sell to the Pakistani public.” The Indian leadership likewise faces pressure from more militant factions to act with force. The struggle for peace reflects

a competition between two schools of radical thought: the millenarian terrorism of jihadi groups and their other supporters; and the less well-known search by sections of the Indian and Pakistani elites for a transformational peace. For both groups, Kashmir is symbolically and ideologically important. It is also, still, a territory of grinding, unfinished war.

And it is a conflict tied intimately to America’s presence in Afghanistan. Pakistan’s intelligence service, the ISI, built up the Taliban in Afghanistan as a bulwark against Indian influence, just as they supported jihadi forces in Kashmir as proxies in their fight for territory. Weaning them off of their reliance on Islamic militants will take a combination of American pressure (the US gives billions every year in military aid to Pakistan) and a workable solution to the question of Kashmir.

For an idea of the precariousness of Pakistan’s government, see this video from the The New York Times, about the fight between the government and the Taliban for the valley of Swat, a mere 100 miles from the nation’s capitol. For more on related subjects, turn to Zac Marconi’s review of The Great Gamble, about the Soviet war in Afghanistan, from our February 2009 issue. On the wider subject of the so-called “war on terror”: Greg Waldmann’s review of Lee Harris’ The Suicide of Reason, from our October 2007 issue and his review of Michael Scheuer’s Marching Toward Hell, from our April 2008 issue.

Downloading Nancy rip

Jane Mayer’s reportage on the Bush administration’s detention policies has won her praise in many quarters. Greg Waldmann reviewed The Dark Side The Leon (Professional) download The Magdalene Sisters movie download

, her disturbing book on the subject, back in our December 2008 issue. Her coverage continues into the Obama Administration in the New Yorker Dolls psp .

Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri has been held at the U.S. Naval Consolidated Brig in Charleston, South Carolina since June of 2003, when he was on the brink of standing trial for “credit-card fraud, bank fraud, identity theft, and lying to a federal agent.” The charges stemmed from al-Marri’s 2001 arrest as a material witness in an investigation of the September 11th attacks. Al-Marri intended to plead innocent, and the F.B.I couldn’t coax any information out of him, so the Bush Administration put him in the care of the Department of Defense, hoping they would have more luck. Before agreeing to release him to the government,

the presiding judge in the case ruled that the White House would be barred from charging Marri again with the same crimes. In legal jargon, the original charges were “dismissed with prejudice,” to protect Marri’s right not to be place in “double jeopardy.” As a result, if the Obama Administration decides to charge him in the criminal system now, it has to bring a different set of charges, unless Marri’s lawyers offer a deal.

Crime Fiction film

Years of wrangling later, Al-Marri’s lawyers, hoping to secure a trial, have brought the issue all the way to the Supreme Court, and the Obama Administration must file a response by March 23rd. This response will have to address the folly of eight years of George Bush’s detention policy as much as it does the particulars of the case. Aside from wasting what federal prosecutors thought would be an easy conviction, Bush held Al-Marri without trial partly on the basis of statements made by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed – statements made under torture. And al-Marri seems to have been abused during his stay there:

For the first six months, Marri was kept in an eight-foot-by-ten-foot cell with one blacked-out window, no social interaction, and nothing to do or to read…the Department of Defense ordered the removal of the mattress, pillow, and Koran…He was denied hot food, and consistently felt cold…At other points, Marri started feeling “tingles” all over, and began hallucinating…

After months of non-compliance, interrogators “chained [him] in a fetal position… [wrapped] duct tape around his mouth…tried to gag him. But as they started to tape a sock in his mouth he began to choke, causing the agents to panic and stop.” These facts are not in dispute; all of this is on tape somewhere. After a few years, the efforts of al-Marri’s lawyers secured him better treatment.

Open Season ipod

Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrel told Mayer that “The Department of Defense treats all detainees humanely, and this is particularly true in the case of al-Marri, for whom we have taken extraordinary measures to insure his physical and mental well-being.” The first assertion is a blatant lie, the second a probable one, but what’s important is that it’s the first instance of such duplicity under Barack Obama’s Presidency. The incongruity in Morrel’s statement pertained to the policies of the last President. The upcoming Supreme Court case will show what the current President plans to do with them.

Pianist Alfred Brendel gave his final recital on December 18 in Vienna, and he has given Gramophone’s Stephen Plaistow what the magazine calls his “one final interview.” Aside from giving no concerts and interviews, Brendel has also decided to abandon recording, and so all we’ll have from now on (aside from his massive discography) are a few unreleased live performances. But he has no regrets:

I wanted to stop when I am maybe still in pretty good shape – the difference with my colleagues being that I’m not addicted to giving concerts…It shouldn’t be drawn out until some of my faculties might deteriorate, or until I become a glorification of arthritis…As to the public, I am most grateful to it, in spite of all those obnoxious coughers and the mobile telephones and hearing aids going off…I would have preferred not to announce my retirement but it was technically impossible…On the whole, these farewell concerts have turned out to be enlightening. When I have been told “you are leaving a big hole in the lives of so many people”, I felt glad that I could leave something behind, even if it’s a hole.

OLM’s Greg Waldmann attended Brendel’s final Carnegie Hall appearance last February, and reviewed both the concert and the pianist’s legacy in our March 2008 issue.

Pandemonium

• In Bruges movie

By Daryl Gregory
Ballantine Books, 2008

An alternate reality is a great premise for a novel—taking the familiar boundaries of our world, and twisting it into something all the more gripping for its similarities to what we know. Consider Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? or Orwell’s 1984, novels that take us into a bleak future, where technology and power-hungry leaders have gone unchecked. Del Pierce, the narrator and protagonist of Daryl Gregory’s stunning debut novel Pandemonium, has a rather more medieval problem to deal with: demons.

His world is riddled with these mysterious entities, which, far from having satanic purposes, exist within rigid archetypes. The Little Angel is always a young girl whose kiss is deadly. The Truth, a vigilante dressed in fedora and trench coat, mercilessly hunts down liars. The Painter, a mute artist, produces the same rural landscape every time he manifests. These demons and others possess at random, using their host until their goal is fulfilled, and depart with as little ceremony as they arrived. Del himself was a victim as a young child:

The demon that had possessed me was called the Hellion. It was a Dennis the Menace, a Spanky, a Katzenjammer Kid….the eternal prankster. He booby-trapped doorways with paint buckets, threw baseballs through windows, slipped snakes into beds. Whipped out his homemade slingshot and knocked those glasses right off your head.

In this world, as in ours, experts attempt to rationalize these odd phenomena. They cite the Jungian collective unconscious, the Freudian id running wild, or simply individuals trying to get attention—anything but the supernatural. Gregory’s integration of the theories of famous psychologists is smoothly done, and stays relevant to the plot. With this tactic, he deepens the novel into something more meaningful. Pandemonium could have come off as a literary version of a cheap horror flick—instead, it’s an engrossing psychological thriller.

In any case, Del is sure those theories don’t explain away demons. After the trauma of a car accident, something is in his head, and he has a terrifying suspicion that the Hellion never left.

They weren’t exactly sounds. I didn’t hear voices, or humming, or music, or screams. It was more physical than that. I felt movement, vibration, like the scrape of a chair across the floor, a fist pounding against a table. It felt like someone rattling a cage in my mind.

Psychology and barbiturates failing him, he sets out to find help exorcising the demon, before the lines between them permanently blur together.

Pandemonium quickly becomes a deep, twisting search for identity and answers, taking us through a world where the possibilities locked inside the human mind are sent forth into waking life. And yet, despite the darkness of the material, the author has a playful knack for surprising us, for making the supernatural seem natural.

But where Gregory truly excels is in taking the fantasy premise of demon possession, and diving beneath that surface to explore human nature and the unconscious. “There are some humans who have a gift for seeing the seams that stitch the world,” explains Valis, an AI entity who, rather fittingly, possesses the body of Philip K. Dick. This novel shows you those seams—and the demons walking both among us, and in us.

-Kristen Borg

Crime Fiction trailer

Crusader full movie

Reefer Madness: The Movie Musical ipod

Sam Tanenhaus, senior editor of The New York Times Book Review, claims that the conservative movement is dead Pathology hd

Naughty Stewardesses movie download

in the current issue of The New Republic. And he thinks it’s time they abandon their movement politics and return to their Burkean roots:

• In Bruges buy

In the end, movement conservatives got the war they wanted–both at home and abroad. It ended, at last, with the 2008 election, and the emergence of a president who seems more thoroughly steeped in the principles of Burkean conservatism than any significant thinker or political figure on the right. What our politics has consistently demanded of its leaders, if they are to ascend to the status of disinterested statesmen, is not the assertion but rather the renunciation of ideology. And the only ideology one can meaningfully renounce is one’s own. Liberals did this a generation ago when they shed the programmatic “New Politics” of the left and embraced instead a broad majoritarianism. Now it is time for conservatives to repudiate movement politics and recover their honorable intellectual and political tradition.

Seed psp Decades ago, the ubiquitously quoted Richard Hofstadter noted that “In our politics, each major party has become a compound, a hodgepodge, of various and conflicting interests; and the imperatives of party struggle, the quest for victory and for offices, have forced the parties to undertake the business of conciliation and compromise among such interests.”

Like Mike dvd Last year Ronald Brownstein claimed that with the ascendence of the “ideological vanguard” in both parties “that definition is obsolete.” Greg Waldmann reviewed Brownstein’s The Second Civil War only a year ago in our February 2008 issue, but considering the recently fragmented Republican party and the loose coalition the Democrats must keep together, Hofstadter might not be as outdated as we thought.

El Greco dvd

download Ghostbusters II

Jerry A. Coyne has a long and interesting essay in the New Republic that takes up the question of whether or not science and religion can be reconciled (he says they can not). He certainly throws down the gauntlet:

There are religious scientists and Darwinian churchgoers. But this does not mean that faith and science are compatible, except in the trivial sense that both attitudes can be simultaneously embraced by a single human mind. (It is like saying that marriage and adultery are compatible because some married people are adulterers.) It is also true that some of the tensions disappear when the literal reading of the Bible is renounced, as it is by all but the most primitive of Judeo-Christian sensibilities. But tension remains.

Addressing not perpetuity but the present, he says that “the cultural polarization of America has been aggravated by attacks on religion from the ‘new atheists,’” and you can read about one of them right here, in Amanda Bragg’s review of god is not Great buy Flow: For Love of Water

, from our June 2007 issue.

Also in the New Republic, Isaac Chotiner writes the unthinkable: an in-depth (!) look at Outliers, Malcom Gladwell’s latest piece of fluff. After briefly summing up the career or the NBA’s Hakeem Olajuwon, he does a hilarious lampoon of Gladwell’s style:

Olajuwon is just over 6′10.” He perfectly exemplifies what might be called the Height Trumps Experience Rule, which I have just coined. This rule stipulates that people who are at least a foot taller than the average height will excel at a chosen sport, especially when height is an advantage in that sport. The rule also obtains when the individual in question discovered the game relatively late in life, and spent little time practicing during his or her youth. It sheds light on a variety of hitherto unexplained phenomena. I hope to be recognized for it.

Sex Drive hd

• A Stitch in Time movie

Chotiner explains: “I have done my best to tell Olajuwon’s story in a Gladwellian manner, because it is an axiom of Malcolm Gladwell’s method that a perfect anecdote proves a fatuous rule.” Open Letters Monthly’s own Swiss Army knife The Air I Breathe movies , Steve Donoghue, pilloried Gladwell’s latest on our blog a few month’s ago:

In a world growing rapidly smaller through advances in technology, it’s the encouraging of that knee-jerk American bigotry that’s Outliers’s chief sin. On every page, business-class idiots are reassured that the disadvantages they experience on the global stage aren’t really their fault, or their country’s fault. Like the noted deficiency of average Americans in math and the sciences: Gladwell explains that it’s all about Asian culture. Asian languages, you see, denote numbers in a way that makes them quicker to see and say in the “two-second memory loop” Gladwell claims rules everybody’s memory; likewise the way Asian children are taught to think about fractions makes it easier for them to do calculations…See? It’s not your fault that you’re trapped in that virtuous circle!

Dirty Harry ipod A Slight Case of Murder ipod