News and Reviews Books

I have bought the Tarot Reader every year for the past three years. It is a great resource for anyone working with the tarot. I found this year's articles particularly interesting.

Re-connecting with the world of Tarot has brought me some wonderful surprises, this guide and almanac being one of them. I was was very pleased with the quality of the articles, not just tired old re-hashing of the same old stuff, but lively and insightful thought provoking insights that are serving to jump start my connections to and with this marvelous tool known as the Tarot.

The almanac part not only has moon phases, it has the moon through the signs, so I'll get my garden planted in a propitious passage as well! Clearly, a fair amount of focus and care goes into the many themed annual almanacs that Llewellyn puts out, another surprise since the days when I got their Moon Sign book every year.

Lastly, a happy inclusion in this year's under Deck Reviews: The Fairy Oracle by Anna Franklin and Paul Mason was reviewed, to my pleasure, as it is an oracle deck I am very fond of. Needless to say, I'll plan on being back for more next year.

Now in its third year, Llewellyn's 2007 edition of the Tarot Reader features a colorful menagerie of instructional articles, reading tips, deck reviews, and spreads. The Almanac calendar section provides phases and signs of the Moon, major holidays, and a place to record daily card readings, special events, and appointments. (I've been meaning to use the calendar section for daily card reading since the Llewellyn Tarot Reader debuted in 2005, and I've finally got around to doing it consistently since New Year's Day! What a great tool for keeping track of personal readings and patterns; I only wish the spaces were larger to accommodate more writing!)

I found the articles in the 2007 Tarot Reader especially engaging this year, and here are a few of my favorites:

* Bless this Deck by Geraldine Amaral - Ms. Amaral outlines ways to clear and consecrate your Tarot deck. She shares an *excellent* Tarot Mission Spread for focusing intention, as well as asking revealing question of the cards such as "What is my greatest personal strength that helps me in my use of the Tarot?" and "What areas in my life are still being developed that would not be helpful in my work with the Tarot?"

* When Good Cards Go Bad by James Ricklef - One of my favorite Tarot authors, Mr. Ricklef details excellent exercises for gaining a more balanced perspective of the cards, including brainstorming tools for finding the negative aspects of "good" cards and beneficial traits of "bad" cards. Because we often see people in the same black and white terms that we apply to certain Tarot cards, Mr. Ricklef also shares a healing process he created for dealing with emotional hurts and wounded relationships. Using the cards, we can gain insight and compassion for "flaws" and viewpoints of others.

* Legal Readings: Playing the Justice Card by Corrine Kenner - Not long ago, Ms. Kenner found herself in an unusual and horrifying reading dilemma: a man came to her for a legal reading, and it wasn't until the cards were shuffled and spread that he disclosed that he had been a accused of molesting a teen girl in a public library. Ms. Kenner shares how she dealt with this unexpected situation, and takes readers on a guided tour through the Tarot--examining which cards often come up in legal readings and what they tend to indicate in terms of the law, major players such as lawyers and judges, emotional ramifications of lawsuits, and potential outcomes.

* Regal Ladies: Living the Queens by Elizabeth Hazel - Even if you're like me and don't use Significators, this utterly fascinating article about the psychology of the Queens highlights why we tend to have a "wrong-shoe-size" Queen in hiding in the closet of the unconscious. Using Jung's model of personality types, Ms. Hazel explains that three Queenly traits are accessible to us, while the fourth stays submerged in the unconscious. Ms Hazel invites us to gaze into this gaping hole in the personality, showing readers how to make a conscious attempt to access this neglected component of the psyche. She astutely observes, "...the unconscious Queen is stored in the same place as things best forgotten. Her specific traits have been displayed by someone else in life--probably someone the individual doesn't like very much because her behavior created discomforts. Women are particularly sensitive to this phenomenon, as their unconscious Queens may be the very image of their mothers." I suspected this was one reason I've had a stormy relationship with my Taurus mother, but now I know why I tend to avoid Earth-ruled women--especially since we seem to clash so terribly. Why, it's because I have a Queen of Pentacles in my closet!

Other fine articles imparting penetrating wisdom and practical advice in Llewellyn's 2007 Tarot Reader include:

* The Mindfulness Spread by Mary K. Greer
* A Journal Meditation by Arnell Ando
* Responsible Reading by Cerridwen Iris Shea
* Teaching Tarot: The Practical Path by Errol McLendon
* Questions We Love to Hate by Teresa Michelsen
* The Fool's Safari by Thalassa
* The Hanged Man by Elizabeth Genco

This year's installment displays only five spreads in "The World" section beyond the dusty Celtic Cross, a far cry from the fourteen in the premiere edition. I was eager to try Corrine Kenner's Secrets, Lies and Promises Spread, but unfortunately, my results were clear as mud. However, I had much better success with Mary K. Greer's Will/Fortune/Fate/Destiny Spread. (Honestly, can this woman write or create anything that is NOT helpful or insightful? I sincerely doubt it!)

A major faux pas I discovered in the 2007 Tarot Reader concerns The Llewellyn Tarot, a deck celebrating Llewellyn George, the adventurous, Welsh founder of Llewellyn Publications. Page 40 dedicates one of the "A Closer Look At" sections to the Llewellyn Tarot, but the descriptions are a far cry from the actual deck (which doesn't resonate at all with me). It says the Llewellyn Tarot uses "bold, contemporary art to jumpstart the brainstorming process...designed to generate ideas, expand creative expression, and stimulate thought processes."

What?! No way could this be describing the Llewellyn Tarot! It took me all of 30 seconds to access my well-honed Scorpionic data banks before I realized "Wait a minute...I bet they're talking about Mark McElroy's Bright Idea Deck!" (Incidentally, the most underestimated, unappreciated, under-exposed, and poorly marketed deck in all of Tarot, in my opinion). So I grab my 2006 edition of the Tarot Reader, and guess what I find on the exact same page? A word-for-word description of the Bright Idea Deck (this time, with the correct deck attribution and card images). See, this is one reason I rarely review Llewellyn books anymore: oh so sloppy editing that overlooks important details or omits them entirely. Gosh, the Llewellyn Tarot is their signature deck for crying out loud...and no one spotted this glaring error? Sheesh...

Two out of the five deck reviews aren't Tarot deck reviews at all, but *oracle* decks. Now why is this? Zach Wong's wonderful Revelations Tarot hasn't even gotten a mention yet, never mind that the Deck Reviews section now reads like an advertisement for Llewellyn or Lo Scarabeo decks. (That's right, no decks from U.S. Games or baba studio in the 2007 edition...not even card images from other publications!)

Sticking points aside, Llewellyn's 2007 Tarot Reader is an insanely affordable tribute to (mostly) Tarot and there is truly something for everyone in this book. Having a handy built-in calendar for daily card readings is a great feature and there's always some new way of looking at the cards, readings, and even yourself offered by the contributors. (However, I will admit to missing the voices of Ruth Ann and Wald Amberstone in this edition, as well as those of Mark McElroy and Nina Lee Braden. Maybe next year...)

Janet Boyer, author of The Back in Time Tarot Book: Picture the Past, Experience the Cards, Understand the Present (coming Fall 2008 from Hampton Roads Publishing)

I'll just add a little to Daniel Myers's review. These stories have long been classics of modernist literature, and they should be read by everyone interested in the history of Symbolism, the heritage of Poe, the history of fantasy fiction, and the development of what Robert Musil called "daylight mysticism" (that's in his "Posthumous Papers of a Living Author," also on Amazon).

What I'd like to add to Myers is that "The Lord Chandos Letter" is a very important text in the history of modernist mistrust of words. It plays a central role in Enrique Vila-Matas's "Bartleby & Co." (also on Amazon), a novel about people who have given up writing. George Steiner has written about "The Lord Chandos Letter" in "Real Presences."

"The Lord Chandos Letter" describes the author's mistrust of all words -- he is given to personal, incommunicable, "sublime" experiences, which can be set off by all kinds of small events: a water beetle rowing across the dark surface of water in a rain barrel; rats dying on the floor of a dairy barn, writhing in the lethal atmosphere of the "sharp, sweetish-smelling" poison; "a moss-covered stone," and "all the shabby and crude objects of a rogh life." In other words, he is no longer moved by the grand, beautiful, pompous, public displays of ordinary life, but only the forgtten, mislaid, overlooked, trivial, "meaningless" things that other people fail to notice. The story is fundamentally about what might still have religious meaning -- although he calls the effect "sublime," not religious. And whatever is genuinely religious must also surpass language.

In the supreme example of High Modernist irony, Hofmannsthal eloquently explains why he can no longer communicate. He is an exemplar for Kafka, Borges, Joyce, everyone.

This little book is rather difficult to review, for any number of reasons, not the least of which being that what are called the "stories" herein are not really stories at all in the common sense of the word but rather haunting, oneiric vignettes which end as abruptly as they begin - To call them impressionistic would be not only an understatement, but not quite right. - All the characters limned here live in a sort of dreamworld always accompanied by that indefinable, unlocalised sense of dread and foreboding one has in a dream. Thus, sometimes it seems to come from a well, or a barrel, or a golden apple or, in two instances, an encounter with a sort of doppelganger. It's as if the author had discovered some subaqueous realm lying just under normal sense experience and described it with the acute realism of Chekhov (of whom the intense detail in the stories reminded me) combined with the inner horror that Poe expresses at his best...except Hoffmannstahl expresses it better, but he couldn't bring himself (apparently) to complete a story of the kind that Poe wrote. Rather, we have these numinous dream-sequences filled with unnamable dread. It's as if, as Gerard De Nerval wrote of himself shortly before he committed suicide, the dream world was taking over "reality" in the author's mind, or, rather, has taken over.

The "letter", tacked on to the end of these stories, supposedly explaining them, is interesting, but really doesn't tell us anything we can't glean from the stories. It's a manifesto of sorts, basically stating (and I simplify here) that language is incapable of explaining the numinous.

Hoffmannstahl was something of an expert on light, and some of his best descriptions involve the effect of the lighting that lends a scene its all-encompassing "aura". In this, he very much reminds me of Emily Dickinson. I was constantly reminded while reading of her lines:

A certain slant of light-
Winter afternoons-
Oppresses with the heft
Of cathedral tunes.

Well, I shan't go on. I'll leave the prospective reader with a quote from the narrator of "Tale of Two Couples" to give him/her and idea of what to expect:

"I walked along like someone in a dream who is being touched by the atmosphere of his life and by the suspicion that he is dreaming." P.112

This is the effect throughout the book on the reader.

Only four stars because it seems to me that Hoffmannstahl fails to give us anything but a dreamy patchwork of vignettes that lack any sort of meaning or continuity save in these oneiric, numinous flashes of dread and insight.....But, what blinding flashes they are!

This book was recommended to me by a first-year medical student. Now that I'm about to start medical school, I realized how helpful it is; it answers questions about the subjects covered from first to fourth years, about the USMLE and the Boards, what students need for the lab, and extracurricular activities. Most excellent are two appendices: one of them covers good textbooks on every subject and the other covers the possibilities for residency after the medical school is finished. There is also some advice on financial matters and personal life, all written in a no-nonsense, "calm down, everything is going to be all right" tone.

It's not just for medical students, it's also for premeds who can find advice here on choosing a college, MCAT, and prerequisites.

The reason why I give it 4 stars instead of 5 is because some of the advice given here is really just common sense. For example, who would not want to choose the least expensive and most convenient housing while being at school? Nevertheless, I am already planning on keeping this book close at hand throughout my years of studying.

I am a premed student hoping to not only get into a good medical school, but to suceed in medical school. I wasn't sure what medical school really was, and reading this book helped me get an idea of what I could expect. Chapter One is the Premed chapter . . . it tells you "How to Get There". The book also has one chapter for each year in medical school. It includes the general curriculum and study tips. Of course, the book also spends a couple of chapters talking about preparing for the post-medical school years. After reading through this guide, I feel that I can now better plan my premed years so I can maximize my chance of success in med school. (Of course, reading a book does not tell me about all facets of medical school life. To really know, ask people who are med students or doctors!!) Good luck to all!

Much time went into researching this book. There are statistics collected from a large number of medical students at different medical schools. There is a preface that is aimed at those students who are contemplating a career as a doctor of medicine. After the first chapter the book focuses on the day to day challenges of the traditional US medical school. There is information aimed at the average students track through the first four years and also the residency match process. A good read for both pre-med and med students alike.

Trillings sole novel is an adequate telling of the delusion of Communist leaning intellectuals in the light of Stalin's excesses. While "Darkness at Noon" hit home with those in the midst of Stalinism, "The Middle of the Journey" resonates more closely with those on the outside, looking in.
This book may not be quite on par with classics of the Stalinist era, but is worth a read.

A novel with a political point that is a good read, and that avoids being didactic or preachy. That many liberal intellectuals, writers, and artists in the 1930s allowed themselves to be beguiled by the profoundly illiberal Great Experiment of Communism is well known. Lionel Trilling was a prominent literary critic based at Columbia University who was a liberal, but who also managed to remain skeptical about Stalin's paradise. That stance put him out of step (to use Sidney Hook's phrase) with very many of his colleagues and fellow members of the New York intellectual and artistic communities. This novel is built around the political, intellectual, and moral conflicts of those times, with one of the main characters based on Whittaker Chambers. Trilling's own views are pretty well represented by these three quotes from the book:

"Nancy's feeling was not about conforming or not conforming, not about freedom or submission. It was a feeling about human nature, a profound dissatisfaction with the way human beings had ever been..."

"And never has there been so much talk of liberty while the chains are being forged. Democracy and freedom And in the the most secret heart of every intellectual, where he scarcely knows of it himself, there lies hidden the real hope that these words hide. It is the hope of power, the desire to bring his ideas to reality by imposing them on his fellow man."

"You believed me when I brought you good news of it. Now that I bring you bad news of it, you not only will not listen to me, but you fear me and call me names. I am sure you will say that I have no proof. But I had no proof before. You believe as you want to believe."

Nicely done, with a good deal of subtlety, and without spitefulness or malice in any direction. Everybody had their reasons and ideals, after all, misplaced as some of those turned out to be.

The Middle of the Journey (published 1947) is a NYRB classic which I finished reading some time ago but have only gotten around to reviewing now for reasons which will probably become evident. I have long been aware of Trilling's essays on literature, particularly his take on Henry James, and was not surprised to find out that Trilling's novel is very Jamesian in its psychological detail and fine probing of character, motivation, and action. I suspect that this sort of narrative complexity may be enough to kill the pleasure for a reader wanting something to take to the beach.

Having said that there is one sex scene and one scene of violence in the book, but Trilling's carefully marinated prose shows that sex and violence take place in a person's mind long before the acts happen. Trilling shows us what happens when four East Coast intellectuals--who espouse communist, socialist, or progressive and liberal ideas--meet for a summer month in the Connecticut countryside. (Note that at the time of publication in 1947, Trilling claimed that none of his characters drew upon any living person; later, Trilling confessed otherwise.)

The Middle of the Journey shows the development of the lives of people we ought to care about: sensitive, intelligent "knowledge workers" who have the power and ability to use their brains toward the good of the nation and to benefit marginalized people. But these literati and intelligentsia are human, and they have typical weaknesses: difficulties recognizing their own emotions, particularly when they are vulnerable to fear and delusion, and they have difficulties communicating with working-class, provincial people (the very ones they intend to help).

The central consciousness through which the reader perceives events is John Laskell, a 33-year old economics professor (if I recall), who is in the process of recovering from a near-fatal case of scarlet fever. Regarding the craft of writing, Trilling created Laskell to be the best moral compass for this novel for many reasons: Laskell is a liberal thinker who wants his life work to benefit the working poor at the same time he has a conflicted relationship to the United States Communist Party, which was still believed to be the best hope for the oppressed. The book opens while Laskell is boarding a train for the countryside, to the home of his friends, the Crooms, to recover from his near-death illness. After a close brush with the complex Maxim Gifford, Laskell waits in the destination train station for the Crooms to pick him up. Laskell begins to ponder why his friends are late to meet him, and thus begin the reader's suspicions as well. Laskell is also trying to find out what "recovery" means, recovery from his brush with death: "The vertigo of fear began in his stomach and rose in a spiral to his brain. He did not know what he was afraid of. He was not terrified by anything, he was just in terror" (10). Trilling continues, "Laskell sat there, sweating and trembling, but able now to find a difference between his mind and his terror. Then he was able to look at the fear with a curiosity that was horrified but nevertheless an act of intelligence, and then able to think about the incongruity of this happening to him, a man so much in control of his life" (11). Clearly, Trilling's protagonist is a man who, though thrown off his feet by life, will eventually right himself.

Laskell's bout with scarlet fever, and the recent, tragic death of the woman he loved and expected to marry (before the novel begins), have brought him to a point in his life where he must re-construct his future. The hope the Crooms have for their future is characterized by their young son, Micky, and their remodeling of an old country house, but all is not well in the countryside. Eventually, these friends--and the intriguing Communist Party insider Max Gifford--will come to see each other as potentially dangerous. When the summer is over, nothing will ever be as it was.

I should draw this review to a close, but let me say that Trilling's way of writing is haunting: exact word choices describe the interior consciousness of complex people while also describing the 1940s: "The picture of the world that presented itself to his mind was of a great sea of misery, actual or to come," Laskell mused, "He did not think of it as forces in struggle" (40). Trilling's insights--which can come only from a habit of getting to the bottom of things--give texture and sensory palpability to his characters' lives.

If The Middle of the Journey were made into a film, it should be as spare and elegant as _Good Night, and Good Luck_. While Edward R. Murrow butted heads with McCarthy, the academic class was waging a much quieter but no less crucial battle. The cover of the NYRB edition is a detail from a painting by Milton Avery, and is just as subtle as Trilling's prose: a sand dune running up against a dark green line of trees against a cloudless cobalt blue sky.

The title is somewhat misleading. This is a general, introductory "text" about a generous collection of films, with summaries, commentary and questions for discussion. It's the sort of book not for the organizer but for all of the members of a film discussion group, offering opportunities for each member to ponder choices among the films proposed by the author along with the most interesting questions concerning individual films.

The book has a somewhat randomly arbitrary quality. Some films selected by the author are popular favorites ("It Happened One Night"); others are art house cinema classics ("8 1/2"); most are titles likely to be unfamiliar to the average filmgoer. The author, moreover, loosely bunches them in categories that appear to be based on archetypal, thematic considerations.

It might be helpful for the author to provide more upfront exposition about the purpose and power of film, about what to look for in a film and how to "read" practically any film and, finally, what a member's goals, or hoped-for outcomes, might be. I've noticed that in my wife's book club (highly successful and long-lived), there's not much close reading of the text. Most of the discussion, in fact, occurs "away" from the text (by contrast I always tell students to stop looking up from their books, which is where the "real" action is). The author seems to assume likewise that a film club will not thrive if overly much is expected of it. Close, frame-by-frame readings of the "mis en scene" of a scene would probably do more damage than good, in effect "killing" the pleasure for the group, which admittedly has numerous "extra-cinematic" purposes and activities.

Unfortunately, most popular film criticism and talk is less about the meanings of the film than the content of the script. As a result, the public absorbs only indirectly, if at all, cinematic language--the meanings that are specific to the film rather than its script or story. Some of the author's questions will likely encourage discussants to touch on such cinematic meanings; others are space-wasters ("How does 'Gosford Park' relate to 'Nashville'?" As a life-long admirer of the latter film, I'm afraid I've experienced far too often the unawareness of most filmgoers regarding "Nashville" with its 27 characters and seemingly incoherent story-line. General questions, or questions assuming too much of the participant, will be responded to in kind.

The book contains a useful glossary and list of resources. It should be accessible to members of the group in terms of price, content, and writing style without threatening the all-important intermission or post-movie socialization (from my own discussions with the aforementioned participant in the book club, I must admit that I learn far more about the people attending the book club than I do about the book under discussion).

We hardly ever talk about movies anymore in public. We go to the theater and watch films in silence and then go home; if we do talk about movies it tends to be in the form of either wild approval or disappointed disapproval -- we talk about movies in the way we have learned to talk about movies from the critics whose job is to tell us how to spend our $10 on movie night. We hardly ever have occasion to use movies any more as an occasion for getting together and thinking about who we are as revealed by movies or about the issues raised by films.

What Cathleen Rountree has done in this very well organized and easy to read book is provide a model for how conversations about films can be intelligent, articulate and can build community. She sets her remarks about how to ask intelligent questions about the films we love in the context of a how-to guide to starting a film group. The idea, of course, is just like a book group except with the advantage that the participants will see the film together and so there is no excuse for the usual lame excuses about only getting halfway through the book and still having strong opinions about it. Her practical advice for such events is quite helpful -- drawn both from personal experience running such a club and from her background in teaching writing and film -- and gave me several helpful ideas for organizing film discussions in the classroom and as part of a regular film series that I run. Her suggestions for films to watch in such a club are quite strong, and could be used as a nice list of films to start with for someone who is interested in beginning to expand his or her film literacy. My only concern is that while most of the films she suggests are either classics or of a quality to have a timeless appeal, her "Contemporary Movie" sections will soon be out of date. It would be great if she had a website or blog that could keep these suggestions up to date, and supplement her own thinking with the responses from film groups around the world. Still, the basic ideas and examples for talking about films, as well as the advice in forming a film group will remain current even when some of the specific films she discusses are largely forgotten.

UPDATE: As it turned out, when I wrote the above I was not aware that Cathleen Rountree DOES have a website that brings her suggestions for important films up to date. It is called "www.themovieloversclub.com" and it appears to be regularly updated and includes the author's reflections on recent films, reports from festivals, and other information. An excellent book made even better!

The Movie Lovers' Club: How To Start Your Own Film Group by best-selling author and writing consultant Cathleen Rountree is a handy guide to building a sustainable community group based upon love of movies and discussion. Recommending a classic movie for one's club for each week of the year, from "About Schmidt" to "Finding Neverland", and offering detailed information about each suggested movie as well as numerous discussion questions, The Movie Lovers' Club is a superb "starter kit" for launching a new social circle.

Though it is only one man's view, the book provides a good explanation for why communism never took off in popularity in Poland like it did in Russia. An interesting account of the political currents in independent Poland between the world wars. Also an interesting account of life in the gulags and the places people scattered to, like Khazikstan, when World War II broke out. There must be countless stories like this one, that will never be heard about. I also very much liked Milosz's Legends of Modernity, and Wat's experience truly augmented that read.

Aleksander Wat created this exceptional memoir solely by talking to Czeslaw Milosz during one year in Berkeley in the sixties. The memories of Wat (at that time already ill and very depressed) together with questions put to him by Milosz, a Nobel Prize winning poet and novelist, formed a unique book (in Poland circulated illegally for a long time and extremely popular).

Both Wat and Milosz went through the communist system and opposed it at the end, but Milosz early on chose emigration, leaving Poland initially for France and then for the US, while Wat, initially believing in The Party and the power of the working class, suffered the full impact of the machine. He tells the story of his enthusiastic youth, describes his fellow poets and writers, then moves on to his arrest and moving through Soviet prisons, without a trial for a long time, recalling other inmates and their stories, the methods for survival, the thoughts and torments. Then, finally moved to the work camp, he depicts in acute detail the life of the families and their struggle for sanity.

The New York Review of Books edition contains also the memoir of Ola (Paulina) Wat, Aleksander's wife, who supported him throughout his ordeal.

Although there are many books of experiences of the communist camps and especially the tortures of the intellectuals, who were torn between the idea of communism and its soon obvious wrong, every witness has eyes of their own and Wat, with his Jewish background and the soul of a Polish artist, makes his own, original statement.

Andre Malraux wrote that only three books -- Robinson Crusoe, Don Quixote and The Idiot--retained their truth for those who had seen prisons and concentration camps (see: Les Noys de l'Altenburg (Paris 1948)). It's an odd remark--what did he mean, "seen"? Suffered in? Or watched newsreel footage on the History Channel? One cannot escape the conviction that Malraux is trying to hype the aroma of glamour around his own life.

But this is a distraction. The question is: I wonder what he thinks of the extraordinary array of "witness literature" from Europe beginning, perhaps, with Dostoevsky's "House of the Dead" and ending (one may hope?) with Solzhenitsyn's "Gulag Archipelago."

In this chorus, Aleksander Wat's "My Century" stands as a luminous example. Wat was a Pole: Jewish by background but at last a convert to Christianity. He was a poet and a "literary person" before and after World War II. Along the way, he spent time in 13 (or was it 14?) different prisons, all simply for being who he was."

His "memoir" is not precisely something he "wrote." Wat spent the year 1964-5 in Berkeley. There he fell in with Czeslaw Milosz, a great poet in his own right. Largely with the encouragement of Milosz, he "dictated" his story in a series of interviews which have been somewhat recast for this book. It's just as harrowing as you would expect it to be it has its uplifting side, driven by Wat's amazing inner resouurces: one thing about a good education, it gives you stuff to think about in Prison. And even at the worst, his sense of humor does not fail him. He recounts the story of the citizens of Bukhara, who surrendered to Ghengis Khan--only to have Ghengis Khan order their massacre. As Ghengis Khan explained to the elders:

"You must have sinned greatly against God if he sent Ghengis Khan down on you!"

Aside from Wat's own story, the NYRB edition includes an astonishing narrative by his wife, recounting a particularly dreadful chapter in her own prison years.

There is a promising-looking biography by Tomas Venclova, but I haven't read it. Wat died in 1967, I believe (though I can't seem to pin this down) a suicide.

The title of Michael Massing's slim collection of essays, "Now They Tell Us" refers to the idea that American journalists failed to adequately present the facts about Iraq's alleged possession of the now-legendary Weapons of Mass Destruction. These facts, Massing argues, were available prior to the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 3/03, but the facts were obfuscated, ignored, downplayed or buried.

The first essay, "The Unseen War" sets the stage for understanding exactly how most information about the war is delivered to the press. The essay begins with a description of the Coalition Media Centre in Qatar, and it's here that General Brooks delivers his press announcements. When "Now They Tell Us" was written, Jim Wilkinson ran the Coalition Media Centre. Wilkinson was also a spokesman for Rumsfeld during the 2000 elections, and he is currently Bush's deputy national security advisor for communications reporting to C. Rice. Massing describes how many reporters are reluctant to ask piercing questions (about civilian casualties, for example), as they are well aware that their names can be--as Wilkinson delicately phrased it--"put on a list." In other words, tough questions may result in not being called to ask questions at all. Massing also details some facts about al-Jazeera's coverage of the war and its emphasis on the civilian victims, and explains that even "live feed was being put on five-second delay" in order to allow MSNBC to edit out "disturbing" footage.

The second essay, "Now They Tell Us" focuses on intelligence used before the war to justify the invasion of Iraq. Massing discusses the controversy over the notorious centrifuge tubes, the debates within the intelligence community, and the conflicting reports regarding the flimsy al-Qaeda-Iraq connection. Massing particularly skewers the journalist, Judith Miller and the reliability of her sources. Ms Miller's gallant protestations that it's "not my job to assess the government's information" just doesn't hold much weight. That excuse might work for a gossip columnist, but after all, she is supposed to be an investigative reporter, and one would assume that means checking out one's sources. In the instance of the centrifuge tubes, Miller was contacted directly with doubts and concerns.

In the final essay, "Unfit to Print" Massing details the storm in a teacup occurring in the journalistic community as they examine, explain and justify their lack of accurate reporting prior to 3/03. I particularly enjoyed Massing's timeline illustrating the delay before some major U.S papers picked up the story about the Abu Ghraib scandal. Finally, Massing questions the notion that even embedded reporters are capable of reporting accurately about the war, and he illustrates this with a poignant example of a reporter who thinks she hears "the indecipherable chanting of muezzins, filling the air with a soft cacophony of Koranic verse." What the reporter heard and lyrically interpreted was actually cries "for ambulances and calls on the local population to rise up and fight the Americans."

Massing raises some vital questions regarding journalistic ethics, but at the same time, journalists are under tremendous pressure to keep their jobs, and get a story. As John Walcott from Knight Ridder explains, Bush's "management of information is far greater than that of any administration." According to Walcott, information management takes two forms (1) positive--"rewarding sympathetic reporters with leaks, background interviews and seats on official flights" and (2) negative--"freezing out reporters who didn't play along." Do journalists serve as mouthpieces for government policy or do they possess the ethics to stand apart and present fair, informative stories? Ultimately, with the internet available, everyone should seek out the news from multiple, international sources. Anyone interested in the subject of journalistic ethics should find this volume of essays a dry, but thought provoking, read--displacedhuman

This collection of updated clips running in the New York Times Book Review 2003-2004 offers a detailed log of the American press and their coverage of the days leading up to and during the Iraqi war. Massing sharply points out significant miscues, misinterpretations, and just plain ignorance on behalf of news organizations' editors that have played a key role in promoting and supporting the Bush administration into a war. The silencing of dissenting voices in the administration, the news organizations, and even the democratic opposition only exaggerated the political climate in our nation deferential to the Bush administration. Fresh off the pains of 9/11, Bush had the support and patriotism of the American people and no one was going to challenge that. No reporter was going to run articles critical of the administration. Massing shows how significant a role NY Times reporters Judith Miller and Michael Gordon played in the days leading up to the war. It goes to show how much power the media can flex when the atmosphere is ripe. Read this for yourself and you decide.

This is an excellent read detailing the failure of the US media to truly report the situation in Iraq. Mr Massing details many stories from independent reporters who have seen first hand the devastation that is happening daily which is never reported in the US.

Although I enjoyed this book, I am curious as to who it is aimed at... those who are truly interested in world news never watch mainstream US media anyway. They know that if you want to know what is happening in the world, any US news media is the last place to go... Those people who do watch the US news media, probably do not care to know any more than what is already reported.

Yesterday I received this book from Amazon, and already today I have finished reading it, it so fascinated me.- I am sure that I will read it again, more leisurely, many times.- In the first place it is necessary to state that of the 30 essays the first 27 are all book reviews i.e. commentaries on several books -- but all these reviews are so enormously perceptive and add so many facts and so many insights to our knowledge that they make reading these mere book reviews certainly very rewarding and instructive and tell us much about the erudition and intelligence of Joseph Kerman.- They contain not only a wide range of unknown or little-known facts but also illuminating comments.- The four book reviews about Mozart, the four about Beethoven, the one about Berlioz, the two about Verdi and especially the three about Wagner are truly remarkable.- Only the last three essays (The Art of the Program Note, Maria Callas, Carlos Kleiber) are not book reviews but independent chapters written by the author himself, and all three of them are,again, not only astonishingly well informed, containing a wealth of new facts, but also superbly argumented, convincing, witty, original and inspiring.- Highly recommended for every music lover, but also for the general public.-

In spite of the title of this retrospective collection of essays, Opera and the Morbidity of Music by Joseph Kerman, the author presents a forceful and eloquent argument that opera and classical music in general is neither morbid nor moribund. He is successful through nuanced and informed writing and the use of a structure in which a group of musical themes is highlighted much like those of a Bach fugue. Kerman quotes Charles Rosen, " It is never the theme that is the central interest but the way the theme is embedded in the polyphonic structure" (p. 81). Thus the essays take on this aspect of music and in doing so become more than their individual essayistic parts. There is an ebb and flow to the collection that charmed this reader with references to musical memories and suggestions for future listening and reading. The breadth of the essays spans centuries of music and multiplicities of musical form while frequently narrowing the focus to specific composers. Over the course of thirty essays covering both the familiar (Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Wagner) and the unfamiliar (Byrd, Monteverdi and program notes), the life of music is reviewed from baroque to the present. The whole is lively and intelligent, both informative and accessible for the general reader.

I had read many of these essays before, but reading the whole thing last week blew me away. Kerman makes me open up my ears to music and open up my mind to thinking about music and its relationship with society. I found the essays on Wagner and Beethoven particularly revelatory.

Reading poetry in translation is always a dubious activity, but what recourse do we have since obviously we can't learn every language ? When two languages as unlike as Chinese and English are concerned, there's a very real question. Are you reading the translator's poetry or the original poet's ? Back in the 1960s, when I bought this book as a graduate student, A.C. Graham did an excellent job explaining just what translating centuries-old Chinese poetry involved. For anyone interested in the translation process, the first part of this book would be well-worth reading. As for the translated material, no doubt the Chinese poetry of the eighth and ninth centuries A.D. is one of Mankind's great treasures. Readers cannot fail to be struck at the common emotions we have, shared with people of such distant time and place. How you finally estimate the book depends on whether you like the translations, for such efforts produce widely varied results. After reading this book, you might try some of Arthur Waley's work. You'll definitely feel a difference. It seemed to me that Graham tries to be more faithful to the original; Waley tries to make you feel the "poetry" of the poems. Both are successful in their own way. The nature of China dominates the imagery---mountains, rivers, clouds, seasons; human emotion sways in time to nature's beat. What will modern Chinese poetry look like amongst the forests of skyscrapers, the industries, the superhighways ? I think it must become more personal. I have no idea if it has.

Paul Twitchell says, "Thinking power must be identical in kind with Divine [Spirit]." He points out that at times we "are using [our] power invertedly. One usually takes the starting point of thought from external facts and consequently creates a repetition of facts of a similar nature." But this will have us "repeating the old circle of limitation." (Paul Twitchell. The Flute of God.)
In this book by Graham, we find fresh language that gets us out of the old round of thought, the "external facts."
Every line is charged language: "Keep away from sharp swords...." Sometehing about it! Graham is astute, fascinating on the lives of the poets, and his translations feel natural--somehow.
Highly recommended for poets and lovers of wonderful wordstrings!

POEMS OF THE LATE T'ANG : Translated with an Introduction by A. C. Graham. 176 pp. (Penguin Classics). Harmondsworth : Penguin, 1970 (1965) and Reissued.

Translators of Chinese poetry tend to be of various kinds. On the one hand we have important poets such as Ezra Pound, Gary Snyder and Kenneth Rexroth, men who though perhaps not expert in Chinese were certainly conversant with it in various degrees and who have given us some truly striking and memorable translations.

There are also brilliant scholar-translators such as Arthur Waley, Burton Watson, and the author of the present book, A. C. Graham, men both expert in Chinese and artists in words whose versions can be equally impressive.

A. C. Graham, author of the present book and of such major works of scholarship as 'Chuang-Tzu : The Inner Chapters' (1981) and 'Disputers of the Tao' (1989) is generally reckoned, not without justice, to be one of the modern West's three greatest translators of Chinese poetry.

His book, after an extremely interesting 23-page essay on 'The Translation of Chinese Poetry,' offers us selections from seven major poets : Tu Fu, Meng Chiao, Han Yu, Lu T'ung, Li Ho, Tu Mu, and Li Shang-yin. Each of the poets is given a brief introduction, and the book ends with a useful list of references to the pages on which the original texts of the poems will be found in the 'Ch'uan T'ang shih' [Complete T'ang Poems] Peking, 1960.

'Poems of the Late T'ang' is one of my favorite books and I've often returned to it. All of Graham's versions read and work like original poems - their lines remain in the mind and become part of you - lines such as Meng Chiao's :

"Who will say that the inch of grass in his heart / Is gratitude enough for all the sunshine of spring ? " (p.63)

Personally I think that A. C. Graham deserves considerably more than an 'inch of grass in our hearts' for having instilled new life into the words of these ancient poets and given us such a superb book, a book that is deservedly considered a modern classic and one that belongs in the collection of anyone who is at all interested in Chinese poetry.

It is 1911. After thousands of years, the rule of the Chinese emperors is about to come to an end. It is the Beijing of Bernardo Bertolucci's THE LAST EMPEROR. The 5-year-old Pu-Yi is emperor; and political power is in the hands of a Regent.

A character named Victor Segalen engages two tutors in the Chinese language. One is Chinese; the other is a 17-year-old Belgian by the name of René Leys who has a certain facility for languages. The narrator, Victor, wishes to penetrate into the heart of the Forbidden City at the heart of the capital. He wishes to "know" China in every way, including the Biblical sense of the world.

The very first words of Segalen's disturbing novel are, "I shall know no more, then. Well, I shall not insist; I shall retire from the field ... respectfully, let it be said, and of course backwards, since court etiquette will have it so, and since it is a question of the Imperial Palace, and of an audience that was never granted, and that never will be granted..."

After this initial admission of failure, the book goes back earlier in the same year, as Victor falls more and more under the spell of René. It seems that the Belgian youth has achieved everything that Victor wants. He is a member of the palace's Secret Police; the Regent grants him a young concubine in the palace; he has even won to the heart and bed of the Dowager Empress (not the same one that contributed to the Boxer Rebellion, who was by now dead). The novel grows ever more feverish as young René appears to be more tightly wrapped up in the life of the Forbidden City even as Victor grows more dispirited about his own efforts.

Or is he? This question is at the heart of Segalen's novel. The story grows ever more feverish as Victor's desires to be admitted to the Celestial Presence are foiled, even as René ascends ever higher in the Imperial hierarchy.

I am reminded of a scene in Franz Kafka's THE TRIAL, in which a young man awaits his whole life to be admitted to the law, but the gatekeepers ever refuse him admission. Finally, as he is about to die, the man asks the gatekeeper why no one else in all the years had sought admission at that gate, whereupon the answer is, "No one but you could gain admittance through this door, since this door was intended for you. I am now going to shut it."

Many readers of this book will end up puzzled or frustrated, because Segalen does not choose to wrap the story up neatly. The desire he has to become part of what seems so patently unknowable gives rise to a nightmarish atmosphere and a growing sense of unreality that reaches a climax at the end of the novel.

I for one was enthralled the whole way through. So what if RENE LEYS is a mystery wrapped inside an enigma (which also pretty much describes its author's life). This little-known novel is just another excellent offering of the fledgeling NYRB imprint whose offerings are occupying ever so much more of my reading time.

A young man succeeds in what he always dreamed of: slip into China's forbidden city and participate in the power plots inside it. He becomes head of the emperor's secret service and lover of the empress. A thriller with a surprising end.
A fascinating novel about the mysterious Chinese power circle around the reigning emperor.
A masterpiece.
I also recommend a French novel with the same themes: 'La Vallée des Roses' by Lucien Bodard.

Victor Segalen had one of the most mysterious life stories of any writer in the last one hundred and fifty years, and would make the fine subject for a biography someday (especially considering his still unexplained death in the forest of Brittany). The novel for which he is best remembered, RENE LEYS, admirably anticipates the sophistication of such modernist novels as Ford's THE GOOD SOLDIER and such "nouvelles romans" as Robbe-Grillet's JEALOUSY in its narrative uncertainty and epistemological uncertainties. Unfortunately, its not a terribly interesting novel, especially given that the multiple forewords to this beuaitful NYRB edition give us so little background as top the history and gossip behind the events of the novel: I have even taken coursework in college on the final days of the Manchu Dynasty and barely could follow the novel's course of events. This is a work that requires much more detailed editorial apparatus in future editions if it is to be more fully enjoyed.