Originally appeared in The Daily.
No one can be sure how long Anwar Sadat, president of Egypt from 1970 to 1981, remained conscious after the bullets tore through his body. If he lived a minute or two, he might have heard the triumphant words of his assassin, who, after running out of bullets, screamed: “I am Khaled Islambouli. I have killed the pharaoh, and I do not fear death!”
A series of blog posts investigating fugitive Nazis in Paraguay is up at The Atlantic.
Originally appeared in The Barnes & Noble Review.
To stumble into Afghanistan is to stumble into history — or at least to stumble into a trap laid by historians, whereby any foreign occupier of the country is compared, all too tediously, to his failed predecessors. Notice the hierarchy of these comparisons. If the historian draws parallels to the armies of Alexander the Great, he does you an honor: Alexander’s empire had at least conquered the known world before Afghanistan undid it. Analogies to the Anglo-Afghan Wars and Elphinstone’s army in 1842 are less flattering, and more menacing. And if the historian remarks that your unit is “just like the 154th Spetsnaz Detachment,” he is saying not only that you’re doomed to ignominious defeat but also that you’re too historically ignorant to realize when you’re being insulted.
Excerpts from Sherry Jones’s The Jewel of Medina do not make it sound like fiction worthy of the novel’s latest defender, Salman Rushdie. Denise Spellberg, an Islamic historian who reviewed the manuscript, called it “soft-core pornography,” and “ugly” porn at that. Consider a first-person passage from Aisha, who, according to some traditions, married Muhammad at age 6 and had sex with him at 9:
This was the beginning of something new, something terrible. Soon I would be lying on my bed beneath him, squashed like a scarab beetle, flailing and sobbing while he slammed himself against me. He would not want to hurt me, but how could he help it? It’s always painful the first time.
Yeesh. But do these sentences sound grotesque because of the author’s prose, or because of her subject?
If the phrase “Soviet commissar” has a vaguely old-fashioned ring — like “icebox,” “suffragette,” or “antimacassar” — then “Ottoman foot-soldier” has a near-ancient one. The two deaths this week consign both categories to history, and give an occasion for reflection on the passing of two eras.
The Purpose of the Past: Reflections on the Uses of History
By Gordon S. Wood
The Penguin Press; 323 pages; $25.95
The past century has been thrilling for those interested in history but perhaps even more thrilling for those interested in historians. The profession in this country developed its first big fissures in 1913, when Charles Beard encouraged the Progressive School to jettison Founding Father fairy tales in favor of more disabused views of early America.
The American (online)
Gomorrah: A Personal Journey into the Violent International Empire of Naples’ Organized Crime System
By Roberto Saviano (translated from the Italian by Virginia Jewiss)
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 320 pp., $25
On his Vespa outside Naples, Robert Saviano once blew a tire by riding over a splintered human thighbone. The setting of Gomorrah, his gripping new account of the city’s vast criminal business empire, is so unrelentingly brutal that this grisly inconvenience takes up just a couple sentences. And by comparison with the ends of other players in Naples’s mob drama during the last decade, the lonely roadside killing of the thighbone’s owner seems hardly grisly at all. If slow deaths by shooting, stabbing, gouging, poisoning, burning, strangling, garroting, choking, kneecapping, and slicing happen with anything like the frequency suggested in Saviano’s book, then every Neapolitan gangster should carry a suicide-pill hidden in a false tooth. There are fates worse than death, and many of their colleagues seem to have met them.
Review of Day of Empire by Amy Chua.
Finding a kind word for Genghis Khan, the Mongol warlord who built towering stacks of the heads of his enemies’ children, is the sort of comically revisionist exercise that can nevertheless make old history fresh again.
For Genghis — and for all world-class empires, from Persia to the present — the unhelpfully kind word Amy Chua finds, in her new “Day of Empire: How Hyperpowers Rise to Global Dominance — And Why They Fall” (Doubleday, 432 pages, $29.95), is “tolerant.” Received tales of Genghis’s pitiless subjugation of the known world obscure what was, she says, a willingness to tolerate the practices of many local groups within his dominion — broadmindedness remarkable at the time, even if the bloodshed and brutality are all we remember today. Accept vassal status, Genghis said, and you can keep not only your indigenous ways and leaders, but your children’s heads, too.
Graeme Wood