Book Recommendations for September 2011

	Azar Nafisi’s Memoirs. - A book I’m looking forward to reading. Read more of this book review in the Washington Post. Also read an excerpt from Chapter 1. Nafisi’s sensory descriptions of Tehran life — the “enticing cacophony” of its streets, the daily forays her mother makes to the market, where she appears to be “so much at home in this world of chocolates, leather, and spices” — are as vivid as the portraits of her exotically dysfunctional family. My one grievance concerning Things I’ve Been Silent About is that, like many a Near Eastern family reunion, the book is excessively crowded. Chatty cousin after chatty cousin, friend after friend, ponderous wise man after ponderous wise man barge into Nafisi’s pages, too briefly described to warrant our interest, crowding and often muddling her narrative. But this is a modest complaint to make about an utterly memorable (pardon the alliteration) memoir.

	Book: The Forever War (Iraq) listen to this book review. On this page you will also find an interview with the author and you can read an excerpt. To classify The Forever War as a work of literature instead of, say, as a piece of “war correspondence,” is not to denigrate its journalistic integrity. Dexter Filkins’ reporting is as rigorous in this book’s informal vignettes and essays as it was when he delivered the daily news from Afghanistan and Iraq for The New York Times.

	THE FLORENTINE I read Machiavelli’s The Prince in graduate school and found it quite fascinating. Here’s a great article written by Claudia Roth Pierpont from today’s New Yorker on the man behind one of the most famous books ever written. The Prince,” Machiavelli’s how-to guide for sovereigns, turned out to be “a scandal that Western political thought and practice has been gazing at in horror and in fascination since its first publication,” to quote from Albert Russell Ascoli’s introduction to Peter Constantine’s new translation. Circulated in manuscript for years, the book was not published until 1532—nearly five years after Machiavelli’s death—and received its first significant critique within the decade, from an English cardinal who pronounced the author “an enemy of the human race.”

To classify The Forever War as a work of literature instead of, say, as a piece of "war correspondence," is not to denigrate its journalistic integrity. Dexter Filkins' reporting is as rigorous in this book's informal vignettes and essays as it was when he delivered the daily news from Afghanistan and Iraq for The New York Times.

The Forever War, though, deserves to be considered alongside long-praised and similarly structured modern literary classics such as Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried and Sandra Cisneros' The House on Mango Street — books that achieved their raw force and nightmarish beauty by mixing elements of fiction and creative nonfiction. That The Forever War is, front to back, a true story, is a testament to Filkins' literary talent and extraordinary accomplishment.

Don't look here for an explanation of "How the war was lost" or even of "How the war reporter's innocence was lost." Filkins, as he notes in his epilogue, writes from the impossibly limiting perspective of one who's Been There. For those who haven't Been There, then, The Forever War's narrator can sometimes come across as inhumanly cold and unlikable. That's because Filkins is incapable of placing himself into a fake, pre-war personality in order to persuade his readers that he's not the Iceman but is, in fact, as outraged with things as they are.

The Forever War - By Dexter Filkins
Hardcover, 384 pages Alfred A. Knopf List Price: $25

Azar Nafisi’s Memoirs. - A book I’m looking forward to reading. Read more of this book review in the Washington Post. Also read an excerpt from Chapter 1.

Book: The Forever War (Iraq)

THE FLORENTINE