Category: On the Web

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Barnes & Noble Review

Bob the Destroyer

The Fear

By PETER GODWIN
Reviewed by Graeme Wood

The word “autogenocide” came to English from a French coinage in the 1970s, meant to convey the self-slaughter of Cambodia in the 1970s by the Khmer Rouge. The category has been a rather lonely one since then, with just a few instances of mass death that were truly self-inflicted, and could not plausibly be explained away as collateral damage in a fight against an outside enemy. The pre-eminent current example of autogenocide is Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe, and Peter Godwin’s new book The Fear is the most enraging account of what has happened there yet published.

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Daily

Portrait of a Pope

Carl Franzen and I produced a file on Karol Józef Wojtyła (Pope John Paul II) for The Daily.  Check it out here.

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Daily

Tale of a Lost City

Originally appeared in The Daily.

Bashar Assad’s father Hafez destroys Hama and kills thousands

Up until Friday, it was possible to imagine that Syrian dictator Bashar Assad had a softer touch than his brutal father Hafez. One hint: His American biographer, the former minor-league baseball pitcher David W. Lesch, reported in 2006 that Bashar likes the soothing tones of Phil Collins music. But over the last few days, Bashar has responded to protests by killing at least 120, including dozens at funerals in cities all over Syria. If Hafez Assad is gazing up at his son from Hades, he can be certain that the family business of brutality is still going strong.

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Daily

The Bay of Pigs

The cartoonish Bay of Pigs plot falls short in every way

Originally appeared in The Daily.

When Fidel Castro kicked the capitalists out of Cuba in 1959, he created an embittered exiled class only too eager to help his main enemy, the United States of America, oust him as soon as possible. If you want to topple a government, its exiles can be a tempting tool: They have money, spies on the inside and a level of rage so incandescent, you could read a map by it on a moonless night. Unfortunately, as President John F. Kennedy learned 50 years ago today, all that and a few hundred million dollars in military training won’t buy regime change.

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Daily

Holy Treasure

Originally appeared in The Daily.

In December 1945, an Egyptian peasant named Muhammad Ali Samman and his brother wandered away from their village in central Egypt, hoping to scoop up a few buckets of soft dirt to fertilize his crops. Digging next to a large boulder, Muhammad Ali found a mysterious earthenware jar about 3 feet tall. He and his brother backed away from it, worrying that it might contain a genie. Then, on further reflection, they considered that it might contain gold, and they smashed it apart, thereby releasing a force in some ways more disruptive to traditional Christianity than any genie could have been.

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Daily

A Libyan Misadventure

Originally appeared in The Daily.

Last week, two American aviators crashed their F-15E fighter jet outside Benghazi, leaving it a smoking wreck on the ground.  When the airmen parachuted unharmed to safety, they may have wondered about a historic precursor, a lanky 24-year-old Norwegian-Englishman who crashed in eastern Libya more than 60 years earlier and was not so lucky. That pilot nearly died. And if he had, the world would be a poorer place because that pilot was Roald Dahl, among the world’s most beloved children’s authors. Dahl’s books (including “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” and “James and the Giant Peach”) make children and adults squeal with delight and shudder with horror, in part because his own life had its share of delight and horror both. On the night of Sept. 19, 1940, Dahl nearly burned to death under the stars in the Libyan desert.

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Daily

Tragedy at a Nuclear “Playground”

Originally appeared in The Daily.

The Idaho Falls meltdown killed three, but American nuclear experiments continued

 

According to the United Nations, the plume of radiation from Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi reactors has already started hitting the United States, starting with Alaska and reaching California this weekend. The doses of radiation will be minute, scientists say — ranging from completely undetectable to detectable but harmless, similar to the amount one gets from eating a few healthy supermarket bananas. In other words, when it comes to radiation exposure, the American West has had worse.

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Barnes & Noble Review

I am the Market

I Am the Market

By LUCA RASTELLO, Translated by Jonathan Hunt
Reviewed by Graeme Wood

What kind of craziness are they teaching in Italian journalism schools these days? The new generation of Italian nonfiction crime writers has gone rogue, forsaking the ancient gods of clarity and journalistic remove, and instead going so deep into criminal netherworlds that the criminals’ voices and the writers’ have become indistinguishable. Writers like Roberto Saviano have embraced the nonfiction version of what some are calling “the New Italian Epic”—a sprawling, undisciplined form whose goal is not to explain the netherworld but to become, in a way, part of it. (This undertaking can be as dangerous as it sounds, as in the case of Saviano, whose 2006 exposé Gomorrah so angered the criminal syndicates of southern Italy that they put a contract on his life.)

 

At 192 pages, Luca Rastello’s I am the Market is the shortest of these epics, and probably the one that tries hardest to get into the minds of its subjects. Told in the voice of a convicted Italian cocaine smuggler, the book is structured as five cautionary “lessons.” The smuggler imparts many practical tips for the would-be narcotrafficker (mask your shipments with coffee or mustard—dogs will sniff right past ketchup), but is strongest when giving a glimpse of the life of those living a few steps ahead of the law and the competition, and of the death of those to whom the competition and the law have caught up.

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